Travel advisory: I will be traveling tomorrow and have no idea whether or not I’ll be passing through wifi during my journey.

Rex, the Bomb Sniffing Dog

Breaking “Rex” news: I had decided to skip watching the State of the Union Address (I was going to catch the blogosphere highlights film) when I learned that “Rex the Bomb Sniffing Dog” will be sitting with the First Lady. I now have decided to watch the speech so I can blog this significant Rex-related event. Developing.

Background stories about Rex, the Bomb-sniffing Dog.

Okay, I’ve been watching this for 40 minutes and still no Rex. What gives?

Surely, we’re heading down the home stretch. Every cause, every issue, every interest has been mentioned. The President is waxing about confidence and blessing America. But still, nothing about Rex, the Bomb-Sniffing Dog. What does this say about the state of the union?

Perhaps Rex wasn’t mentioned by the President because he was busy sniffing Cindy Sheehan?

Did anyone actually see Rex? I guess I wasn’t watching closely enough. According to Mark Memmott who blogged the speech for USA Today, Rex was supposed to be sitting two rows above the First Lady.

Perhaps the governor of Virginia will mention Rex in his response. He starts off by saying he was a missionary, but I can tell this is heading nowhere near a bomb sniffing dog.

Nick Gillespie is also asking: Have they showed the dog yet?

I’m signing off from the dog watch.

Technorati Tags: brandrex

Don’t look up: There are meteors heading straight this way

(via: Dave Winer)

Technorati Tags: humor

Gee, I wonder what they’ll decide: From a press release with the headline ” Newspaper, Magazine and Book Publishers Organizations to Address Search Engine Practices,” we learn the following (in the lede):

The newspaper, magazine and book publishing industries have come together to explore ways to challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.

While the organization is based in Europe, the release claims its membership includes 73 national newspaper associations, newspapers and newspaper executives in 102 countries, 11 news agencies and nine regional and world-wide press groups. (Heck, for all I know I may be a member of a member association.)

I’ve beaten this dead horse too many times to even link back, but I must point out that the “disappointing quarterly earnings” Google announced today included $799 million of advertising revenue generated through the AdSense program on “partner” sites (i.e., not on Google results pages). As most of the biggest names in media (i.e., the folks who own newspapers, magazines and book publishing) are “partners” of Google and pocket a sizable chunk of approximately 78% of that $799 million (and remember, that’s just in ONE quarter), then how can — even before they’ve met — the newspaper, magazine and book publishing industries decide they’re being exploited? Also, if I’m not mistaken, the last time I checked, Time Inc. was a fairly large magazine and book publisher that recently cut a billion dollar deal with Google. Is Time a part of this enraged group of exploited media companies?

The bad idea that won’t die: It’s true what they say about cats having nine lives. Because the dumbest idea of all time, the Cuecat concept keeps coming back in different guises (I’ve blogged about a few of them over the years). Today, the MIT Advertising Lab weblog points to yet another solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. As I’ve pointed out before, no one but Rube Goldberg would come up with a such a process — just because the technology exists.

Do people sit around and say, “Lots of people have camera phones and gee, what if they were turned into a barcode reader?” After the third or fourth beer, someone says, “Wow, if we could get advertisers to run barcodes on their commercials, then you could take a picture of the TV screen and then that would take you to a website. Gee, let’s go find investors.” And amazingly, they do.

Why this is a dumb idea: (And I’ll skip the obvious ones related to TiVo and technologies that allow you to watch TV and surf the web on the same screen at the same time.) How hard is it to type in a URL into a browser - something a person who has a cell phone and camera probably does about a hundred times a day. Every once in a while, I’ll see a clever camera-barcode mashup idea — for example, I at least find the Delicious Library concept fascinating — but the “point the cell phone camera at the TV” idea so it will take you to a website is nuts.

Technorati Tags: advertising, cuecat

Results 1-10 of about 1.29 billion: Strangely, I don’t blog about investing, however, this is the second post in a row regarding plunging shareholder value: Via CNN - “Google earnings miss targets; stock clobbered“.

Spinwatch:

Moments after the earnings were released, the Wall Street Journal Online story had the headline: “Google Profit Soars 82%” and the article’s “lede” was: “Google’s profit climbed 82% and sales surged in the fourth quarter as the Internet search giant continued to benefit from advertisers shifting their spending online from traditional media.” (Here’s a screen grab of the headline from my newsreader.)

Clicking onto the same link (sorry, subscription required), the headline is, “Google Shares Plunge On Disappointing Results,” and the lede is: “Google Inc.’s profit and sales surged in the fourth quarter, but the results disappointed investors, who were expecting another blockbuster quarter from the Web search giant. Shares plunged 19% in volatile after-hours trading.”

Missing completely from the re-written version of the story:

“the Internet search giant continued to benefit from advertisers shifting their spending online from traditional media.”

Technorati Tags: google

Perplexing quote of the day: (From the NYT story about Time Inc. layoffs)

“…we’re moving from being a magazine publishing company to a multiplatform media company, and we have to reallocate our assets. The people you need, the investments you need to make, are different if you’re going to be building Web sites and making TV shows and doing wireless deals and events and partnerships.”

Am I missing something? Is this a quote from a time-warp five-year-old press release? Wasn’t that whole AOL merger that caused a massive write-off of shareholder value about creating a multiplatform media company? Are they still using the “we’re moving from being a magazine company” as an excuse for every time they do something?

Geez. With comments like that, they’re making Carl Ichan sound smarter every day.

(more: PaidContent.org and my earlier post.)

Technorati Tags: magazines, timinc

Do know evil: John Battelle asked the following two questions to Google and in both cases they told him, the answer is “yes”:

“1) “Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?” 2) “Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?”

Gee. I wonder who’d want that kind of information.

Technorati Tags: google

Rextrordinary discovery: Nashville blogger TV on the Fritz has made a startling discovery: He figured out I’m not the Rex that is the funny Middle Tennessee blogger who goes by the name Rex L. Camino. I’m sorry to disappoint him and others. For the record, I also am not the blogger who maintains TV on the Fritz.

Technorati Tags: brandrex

The conversational part of Wikipedia most people don’t see: Until I started hanging out inside Wikipedia to understand the “community” part of it, I didn’t quite “get” it. While this “talk” page on Wikipedia has been linked to by both Digg and /., I still wanted to point to it as an insightful (but extreme) example of the conversation that goes on beneath the surface of Wikipedia (all pages have a “discussion” link attached). Lots of passion and dedication by, granted, some obsessed folks. However, if the topic is not related to politics or technology, you’ll find the discourse a bit more polite and tame. (Sort of like the blogoshere.)

By the way, on Saturday, I posted a short item regarding this issue and gave some advice to those involved.

(Note: Rereading this, I thought I should explain why I “hung out” on Wikipedia: My “evenings and weekend project,” Smallbusiness.com, is running on MediaWiki.).

Technorati Tags: wiki, wikipedia

Time Inc. lays off broken down employees: The following sentence is a direct quote from this MediaWeek article: “Broken down, 40 business-side employees and 26 non-union protected editorial staffers were let go across multiple titles…”

(Note [and pre-apologies]: I saw a bit of humor in the parsing of that sentence, but there is nothing humorous about losing ones job.)

Technorati Tags: magazines

Pulitzer prize countdown: Jim Amoss of ‘Times-Picayune’ is Editor & Publisher’s ‘Editor of the Year’. (rexblog flashback)

Technorati Tags: katrina

A good example of a new Nashville business (and media executive) weblog: The blogosphere-embracing general manager of the Nashville ABC-affiliate, WKRN-TV, Mike Seachrist, has started blogging himself.

Here are a few good things I believe suits (like me) can learn from Mike’s first few days of blogging:

1. He writes in his own voice — you know it’s him.

2. He talks honestly — explaining, for example, how the station has lucked out on ratings of the current “Bachelor,” because of some fortunate Nashville connections…(”a show that I thought was well past its prime,” he admits).

3. He comments on other blogs — like mine — during the weekend and at night, so I know he’s not delegating the conversation.

4. He links out - to other websites (like mine) boosting my blog-ego (blego).

5. Most encouraging: he doesn’t blog with numbers like I’m doing here.

Technorati Tags: blogging, businessblogs, media, nashville

Sarcastro asks: Sarcastro, who is guest-blogging this weekend at Nashville Is Talking, sarcastroiscally asks: “What’s Not To Love About Global Warming?” since it’s the last weekend in January and here in Nashville, it’s sunny and 65 degrees. (This also explains why there will be no more posts on this weblog until well-after sundown.)

Technorati Tags: nashville

The future of ‘media design’: Except for using the word “consumers” (I read, view, listen to, etc. media, I do not consume it), here’s a great quote from an article in MediaPost:

“The biggest mistake the media industry and Madison Avenue make when they think about media design…is looking at the experience through their own eyes, as opposed to consumers.”

(via: MIT Advertising Lab weblog)

Technorati Tags: advertising, design