• Billboards that look back | NYTimes.com
  How can you write an article like this an not mention the movie Minority Report?
  (tags: media advertising)

Friday Afternoon Pondering: Minonline.com is the source of the chart above that ranks the top performing publications (as measured by the number of pages of advertising) during the past quarter in the business-to-business vertical of marketing. Minonline.com distributed a link to the chart as a teaser for its subscription-based service in which on Monday, I presume, the chart will be interpreted. At the link above, it merely states: “Crain’s Advertising Age shows its strength as the #1 publication on top of the advertising pages list for the 1st quarter. A less likely occupant is ST Media Group’s Signs of the Times with a first-quarter 2008, year-on-year 10% increase in ad pages and a nearly 40% increase for March 2008.”

Note: This is not the Signs of the Times magazine referred to, rather this publication about the sign industry is.

I’m not sure I trust the B2B media pundits to interpret this chart, however. I think it is a job for the guys at the Freakonomics Blog. How can advertising for advertising be so dramatically up in a quarter when advertising is supposed to be down — especially advertising in, of all media,B2B print publications.

I can guess the theories: (A) Media companies are advertising aggressively because they have so much unsold inventory, (B) media companies are launching new properties and thus are buying more ads to promote them, (C) media companies are aggressively pushing the message that advertising in a recession is the mark of a savvy marketer, (D) none of the above, (E) all of the above.

I’m guessing (doing anything else would require actual research and thought on my part) D & E are both correct answers. But again, I think it will take a skeptical economist to figure this out, not some analyst focusing on a narrow band of data related to the number of advertising pages sold.

• Photos from the Nashville Geek Breakfast, May 29, 2008
  Geeks who wake up early. They’re open to anyone. Info: nashvillegeeks.org
  (tags: nashville geeks community)
• The Power of Interactive Printed Magazines | Mr. Magazine
  Samir Husni quotes Time’s managing editor Richard Stengel - “The future of journalists is “to be more curators and less creators.”
  (tags: curation)

• Zinio puts hundreds of digital magazines a click away | USATODAY.com
  Response: I think digital magazines are great — for people who think PDFs are the best way use the web.
  (tags: ebook digital+magazines printisdead digitalisdead)
• Mac OS X 10.5.3: syncs with Google Contacts | Official Google Mac Blog
  Two observations: 1. This feature alone is cause for me to update. 2. I didn’t know there was an official Google Mac Blog. (Dear Google Mac Bloggers, Tell those Google Earth people to make that new plug-in work w/ the Mac OS.)
  (tags: google apple)
• Google AdWords: A Brief History Of Online Advertising Innovation | Publishing 2.0
  Quote of the day - “The challenge of innovation is that we are all boxed in by what we know, by our assumptions about how things work.”
  (tags: innovation google advertising)
• Somebody Acq-Hires Somebody Else | paidContent.org
  I don’t typically link to transaction stories, but I must say, I always smile when I see my friends at paidcontent.org use the term “acq-hire.” (Background: http://www.rexblog.com/2005/05/11/14055/ )
  (tags: acqhire)

The Important Part: The people at Facebook describe your list of “friends” (contacts) as being your “social-graph.” Others use the term “social network” to describe in broad terms, your network of connections with other people. Chances are, you call that list of connections your “address book.” In the previous century, you may have called it your Rolodex. Your ability to export that list of contacts from your computer out to web services (geek word of the day - “portability”) is one of the building blocks of a future web where you can go onto any new site or service and instantly discover everyone using it who may be a friend of your second-cousin, Herbert. Today, Google announced that the newest update of the Mac operating system includes a preference in the “Address Book” program that will keep the Mac address book synch’d with the contact list on ones Google G-mail account. Why is this significant? There are lots of really smart people and groups working on standards and practices related to how someone “asserts” their online identity and their connections with others — and how web services should respect how individuals utilize such personal data. However, until the day comes when all of those standards and practices are worked out, your personal e-mail address and your phone number are serving as a form of “de-facto” identifier of who you are. Likewise, your list of e-mail contacts are filling the gap on identifying your social network. And until the powers-that-would-like-to-be all agree upon what your portable “social network/graph” is going to be and how it’s going to work, your address book has become a stand-in. That’s why, when you sign onto a new social networking site, they ask if you want to allow them to bounce your e-mail contact list up against their list of registered users. That way, you can discover who among your contacts are already using the service.

Take Away: For Apple Address Book users who used to have to “export” and “upload” your contact list manually, you now have one-click portability (and on-going syncing) to your Google G-mail contacts list of your most important “social graph.” And from your Google contacts, you can blast that social graph to infinity and beyond (or whatever Google Friend Connect is).

Related rambling: About a year ago, I talked about the concept of e-mail address as universal identifyer in a lengthy post.

[Photo credit: jcroach, Flickr.]

• Everywhere, JPG - magazines for the future | SFGate.com
  “Any human interest can become a magazine,” said Halsey Minor, whose Minor Ventures is the parent of 8020 Publishing. (See also, from 3+ years ago, a rexblog post: http://www.rexblog.com/2005/01/13/13477/ )
  (tags: magazines)
• Wired for the Media Transformation | WWD.com
  Fears that full Condé Nast ownership would turn what had been an iconic and utopian magazine into simply another shopping experience have not been borne out, (founder Louis Rossetto) said. “It’s not just about gadgets.”
  (tags: magazines wired)

The Important Part: Since May 14, you can click on the “More” link at the top of a Google Maps location to see photos (via Panoramio.com) and explanations (via Wikipedia) of points of interest. For example, here is a map of Nashville with the “More” features selected.

The Take Away: Users of Google Earth will recognize the “More” feature as a pathway to the “layer-fication” of Google Maps. It is also a great example of a “nonlinear” approach to presenting information (or, as the engineering-types say, “data points”). I predict that before long, the “More” tab will include a check-box that has the word “News” on it. It will provide a geographical mash-up view of stories indexed by Google News. That’s not much of a long-shot prediction, however, as the news-layer feature was added to Google Earth last week.

Update: A mere 24 hours later, and Google has another announcement - that Google Earth can be viewed via a new browser plug-in. This isn’t going to replace Google Maps, just make Google Earth a little more accessible and capable of being integrated with third-party applications. Unfortunately, I can’t give the plug-in a review since currently, it’s only available for Windows users.

The Important Part: Today, the Washington Post’s Peter Carlson says goodbye to his column, "The Magazine Reader." If you haven’t been keeping up with magazines for the past decade, Carlson’s column today is the equivalent of one of those 30-second introductions at the beginning of an episode of a TV drama series that starts, "Recently, on Lost…"

The Take-Away Quote:

"In the magazine business, as in nature, life is a Darwinian struggle that is frequently nasty, brutish and short. Every year, more than 500 magazines are born and nearly as many die. During the past 12 years, Life died. So did Civilization, My Generation, Spy, George, Talk, Brill’s Content, Punk Planet, Doubletake and Mademoiselle, plus Lingua Franca, a smart, funny magazine about academia, Gadfly, a lively pop culture magazine and recently, the music magazines Harp and No Depression. Replacing the dead on newsstands was a crop of newborns — Maxim, Portfolio, Real Simple, the Week, Blender, the American Conservative, Hallmark, Found, Mental Floss and a fine literary mag called the Believer. Meanwhile, the Oxford American, a magazine of Southern culture, died and was reborn. And Radar, a snarky pop culture mag, died, was reborn, died again and was reborn yet again. As of last night, it was still alive, but stay tuned."

Personal observation: Thanks, Peter. Start blogging.

• Mass Mag Exodus Continues as Brands Follow Men Online | Advertising Age
  Quote - A combination of forces led by the broad economic slump is delivering as challenging a year as ever for traditional publishers.
  (tags: magazines)

• PR Secrets for Startups | TechCrunch.com
  Observation: I think these are good “secrets” that will also work for companies that are way past the startup phase.
  (tags: PR marketing blogging socialmedia conversationalmedia)
• PR Secrets? Schmecrets | Loic Le Meur
  Says Loic, “There are no PR secrets!” Get a community and start listening and sharing. Observation: I think there’s more agreement than disagreement. You don’t need a PR firm is the point.
  (tags: PR marketing blogging socialmedia conversationalmedia)
• New York Times Embraces Link Journalism | Publishing 2.0
  Scott praises (as do I) the enlightened approach of the blogger at the NYTimes.com. The value of outbound links hasn’t sunk in for most big-co media or corporate sites. NYT bloggers get it big time.
  (tags: links search blogging media curation)
• Tag Galaxy - A Flickr ‘visualization’ tool
  You gotta see this. ( via Mashable, where it is explained here - http://tinyurl.com/5wgxob )
  (tags: flickr mashup)
• Can We Live In Public? | Fred Wilson
  Quote - “…there is a lot to be gained from living publicly online. As long as you know where to draw the line.”
  (tags: blog blogging culture)

• Web users ‘getting more selfish’ with their time | BBC
  Quote - “Basically search engines rule the web.” Observation: The article doesn’t make it clear, but this is about how users interact with web “content.” I think people linger lots longer with online “community.”
  (tags: technology design web search)

The Important Part: Jason D. O’Grady on ZDNet’s Apple Core blog acknowledges he’s spreading a rumor today:

“A little birdy tells me that Apple will announce a 12 or 13-inch tablet in the fall of this year. Most likely in the September or October time frame. It will run the full Mac OS X and have a slot loading SuperDrive, an “iPhone-type” GPS chip and an Intel Core Duo processor, presumably Intel’s Atom.

Of course, long time readers of RexBlog know that since 2006, that particular rumor is called Rumor #3.

The Take-Away: For over two decades, the concept of a product like this has tickled the fancy of Apple enthusiasts. Observation over the years of Steve Jobs’ obsession with elegant industrial design has led me to assume Apple will never have a “tablet” Mac (it would require too many hinges and buttons, things Jobs hates). However, I’ve long felt there could be a spot in the market for an Apple device the size of an eBook reader but with all the function of a computer in an elegant, button and keyboard-less form. It took 20 years for the technology to catch up with the vision, but we’re closing in on the time where all of the pieces can come together. Evenso, I think some of these rumors are “wishful thinking” on the part of people like me, however, as in: “If we wish hard enough…” One last observation: My use of a MacBook Air leads me to dismiss any rumor that includes a “superdrive” as part of the feature-set of such a device. I purchased the external one when I got my MacBook Air and have used it maybe twice in the past several months.

Sidenote: The Apple Core post includes a mock-up of such a product that appeared last August on the ArtilleryUnit blog (right). If I’d have known about their clever one last November, I would have skipped my five-minute PhotoShop hack (left) of what I called the iPod TouchBook (left).

The Important Part: In the current issue of BusinessWeek (and online), Heather Green and Stephen Baker have written a great overview of where “social media” (not just blogs, but all the conversational media and social networking tools and platforms out there) are today as it relates to business. Not, as over-reported in the technology blogosphere, about the business of social media. And not about the tools and features and investment opportunities and anything else gee-whiz that’s going on. This BusinessWeek story is about how all these activities and connections and conversations that are taking place online are changing the way business is conducted.

The Take-Away: The article may not be eye-opening to a crowd who spends all day reading tech-blogs and camping-out on Twitter, but it’s a great article to forward to a “C-Level” person at your company or organization who you think could benefit from a high level view of what is transpiring — from a “media brand” they know.

The Less Important Rambling: Over the past three years, I’ve gotten to know BusinessWeek writers (and bloggers) Stephen Baker and Heather Green pretty well. I haven’t actually met them face-to-face, but we’ve shared conversations about Heather’s wedding, Stephen’s book and a myriad of other “important” and trivial matters. We’re “friends” on all those online networking things you’ve ever heard of (and many you probably haven’t if you’re not a Web 2.0 wonk). Because of that, it may seem weird, but I actually know more about what Stephen and Heather are up to than many acquaintances — and friends — I know “off line.”

For example, because we follow each other via Twitter and Facebook, I knew they recently worked on updating a story from May, 2005 with information and insight that has emerged during the past three years. In that second link, they’ve literally annotated the first article with contemporary statistics and knowledge. That’s a brilliantly creative reporting technique that I’ve never seen before as it uses visual cues from the Word document “change tracking” feature so readers can easily see where the new information has been inserted.

If it weren’t Saturday morning of a three-day weekend, I might be tempted to keep rambling, but I have much less important things that are beckoning me at the moment.

• Microsoft Closing Live Search Books | Tools of Change for Publishing
  The project was up against Google Book Search. I think this is what “surrender” looks like.
  (tags: publishing, books, search)
• Popular blogger ignites uproar over Twitter harassment | Webware.com
  Quote - Much like its famous outages, which the site finally addressed in full this week, abuse and harassment is something that Twitter can’t simply ignore.
  (tags: twitter)

Today, I’m officially declaring — after eight years of denying it — that this a geek blog. If you read it because I write about magazines and marketing and social media, that’s fine. Those are the topics I write about, but you need to know that this blog is not really about those topics, it’s about technology.

This is a geek blog, okay.

To prove this, I’ve decided to display my "wikio" badge that says this blog is "ranked" #180 among the gazillion technology blogs in the world . I must confess, I was somewhat surprised when Lisa from Wiko e-mailed me to encourage me to display that badge as I’ve never really thought of this blog as being a "technology blog." As I said, I thought it was more of a marketing blog, but it’s only ranked #118 in that department. Heck, in the industry I actually work in (an industry now being called "content marketing"), my blog is only ranked #60 . Actually, that’s a good thing, as it means there are now at least 60 better blogs about a topic no one was blogging about but me for most of the years I’ve been blogging — and I’ve always known I was doing a terrible job "covering" it.

For years, I’ve known that I was confusing people who need to pigeon-hole blogs into a specific topic. That’s why you’ll never find my blog ranked high on services that try to designate a cluster of "top blogs" on a certain topic.

But it’s getting to the point where, if you blog, you have to declare a major .

So, today, I’m declaring a major: technology.

Knowing that technology is the most blogged about topic there is (except, perhaps, knitting), I figure being #180 provides me with enough geek-cred that I can wear my badge proudly.

But I must admit, the real reason I’m displaying the badge is a column in the New York Times today by David Brooks .

Brooks is at his best when he weaves cultural threads into trend tapestries that can be understood by those who may know something is taking place, but can’t quite figure out, "the big picture." (His book Bobos in Paradise is a great example of his skills at this.) Today, in his Times column, he takes on the task of trying to interpret for a general audience why geeks are now cool.

Quote:

"…new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds."

Hey, that’s me.

I’m a geek. This blog is about geeky things. I now have proof.