quid.pro

I think I'll pass

After seeing Pierre's departure from Facebook, I had this great anticipation about a wonderful migration of adults off the social networking site. Honestly, I've never been a huge Facebook fan personally and if it weren't for the Twitter app which cross posts to the site, I probably wouldn't participate at all.

Turns out The New York Times has picked up on the trend. But they did a great of job making the deserters sound like... well, a group I wouldn't want to join.

Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.” Something happened to this drip painting that he won’t discuss. He said, “Postings that seem private can scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”

Charming.

It's about the cheering

"The fans, believe it or not, are a big part of this. They cheer you on and pump you up big time. I hope they understand that."

Bengie Molina via SFGiants.com

Selling newspapers outside the pay wall

With News Corp, the New York Times and others looking at their first serious collective effort to put news content behind pay walls, everyone is searching out success stories to model. PaidContent writes about Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

With courtly southern manners and a broad smile, Hussman outlines his philosophy. He decided, after a short period in the early years of the web, that he would not tolerate online freeloaders.

“I would go to civic club meetings and dinner parties here in Little Rock and people would say, ‘I really appreciate you putting your newspaper on the internet. I used to subscribe to your paper but I don’t need to any more’,” he recalls.

On the other hand, the numbers suggest all the pay wall did was make people want the print version more.

Only 3,400 people pay to read the Democrat-Gazette’s website, generating little more than $200,000 in annual revenue. But on newsstands, its circulation statistics are striking in comparison with its neighbours: in the decade to 2008, the Dallas Morning News suffered a 29% slump in sales; the St Louis Post-Dispatch dropped by 27%; the Houston Chronicle slipped by 19%; and the Kansas City Star declined 15%. But the Democrat-Gazette’s sales rose by 1.7% to 176,275.

When I was at my parents' house a few weeks ago, I did have a chance to do the Sunday morning newspaper read (they get both a local Seattle paper and the New York Times). It was a lot of fun, hadn't done that in awhile. But I can't say I've missed it since.

John Cleese finally accepts his marriage has ceased to be

This is what you get when you marry a woman who has written a book "How To Manage Your Mother."

The scale of his ex-wife's demands has reawoken a streak of savage comedy in Cleese, which had appeared to lie dormant since Monty Python's Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, the 1970s television series that made him famous.

"I got off lightly. Think what I'd have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship," he was quoted as saying of the settlement.

via Times Online

Confusing traction with value

David Pakman explains the sale of iLike.

The aberrations occur when traction looks like value. When Slide was funded at a $500M pre-money valuation, that was an example of traction being confused for value. Sure people posted their pictures using a Slide widget 150M times, but there was no value created. Slide did not have a real relationship with those customers and it was a stretch to believe that an ad model would occur on top of those photo widgets. Similarly, iLike may have had its application installed by 50M users, but those “customers” were simply indicating a band or two that they liked. This is not valuable data and the audience was never monetized in any meaningful way.

via Pakman’s Blog: Disruption

So, How Does It Work on the Bus?

David Byrne talks about the mechanics of being on tour. Great piece, although I couldn't imagine doing that for a living.

I went for a walk in a sheep pasture this afternoon and wondered to myself why it is that friends and acquaintances ALWAYS, without fail, marvel at how we get around by bus, while journalists NEVER ask about such pragmatic or mundane matters. Maybe the journalists already know how such things work, maybe they think their readers don’t care, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s all somewhat the same for many touring groups, so there must be nothing special about us. Maybe our friends are interested because they are completely unaware of how musical acts get around, or they think we all travel by private jets — like their image of rock stars of yore, or bands like U2 and Rolling Stones today.

Anyway, here’s how it works:

via David Byrne Journal

Slow trucks... and stopped cars

Accident on 92.

Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

So where is it now? Unfortunately, in the case of Delicious, nowhere. It’s been stagnant in terms of development and growth for years (at least until recently, when it started launching new features). Delicious has hit a perpetual ceiling, and understandably its founder is not happy about it. So he spoke out.

via Mashable

Giants 2

Behind the Mask: Yes, A New Post!

Jamie went into labor on Friday afternoon. I called Dave Groeschner, the Giant's head athletic trainer, to ask him to tell Boch I had to miss the game. (I had a new phone and didn't have Boch's cell phone number.) After we got Jamie settled in the hospital, we turned on the game. It was in the second inning with Jonathan Sanchez pitching and Eli Whiteside catching. All I was thinking about - at least as far as anything beyond Jamie and the delivery - was pulling for the guys to win. Then along about the seventh inning, I started to think, "Hey, he might throw a no-hitter.''

via Bengie Molina's blog

Baseball players blogging never gets old to me.