Jumptheshark.com went live this week; it's a spanking new facelift for a site run by Jon Hein that discusses TV shows that--yep--plunge downward from former greatness (or at least decent entertainment value)--and it's got a slew of new community and interactive features for users to play with.

What's interesting here is that it's Gemstar owner TV Guide that's done the redesign and powered the service--and they've done an amazing job. Just like a big distillery that decides to launch some micro-brews for a new market, or a cosmetics company that acquires a smaller brand to extend its audiences, TV Guide's bought jumptheshark, improved the tools, and liberally lauded it with TV Guide applications and ads, ensuring every TV watcher using the site has every chance on the planet to click on TV Guide apps.

Damn clever, eh?

Even better than Johnson & Johnson buying BabyCenter back in the day.

Lessons to be learned from this one (for big companies like the one I work for and for all of us):

• If you build applications and services, embed them in your own or others niche services to extend your audience/brand reach
• Building platform tools is cool, but this kind of integration gets you to audiences faster if you don't have a huge network to drive your audience growth really quickly
• Micro brands have their own followings--cooler than the big guys ( Yahoo is tackling this with Brand Universe--site that will play off great brands)and get get you lots of long tail--and maybe something that gets big, fast
• If you are willing to integrate into diverse properties and you have tools and services, you too can play this game.

What's particularly interesting about TV Guide's play, however, is that they aren't even the tool creators--unlike Yahoo or Google, they're working with a third party to power the service--and yet while the initial investment may be greater, the strategy is going to work just as well--perhaps even better since one presumes maintaining the tools will be a big focus.

"We lived at the station through which the trains to the death camp passed. My parents helped Jews in their escapes, they hid themselves at our home. One of them left a photograph. It had been hanging for 50 years in my room and recently has fallen off, the glass has broken. I decided to part with it. I am an old woman and I realize that when I cross the barrier of life, this picture will end up in the trash."

--Statement from one of the contributors to the online and real world exhibit And I still see their faces, an exhibit of 455 old photographs belonging to Jews shipped off to their deaths in Nazi Poland, their pictures found passed along to their neighbors and left hidden in their houses., written up today in the NY Times.

Susan sez: This is an amazing photo collection, with captions for many of the pictures that are interesting and provoke great thought. These pictures offer a glimpse of a people--and a world--now gone, but once as real and vibrant as anywhere today.

So Jason Calcanis has started fatblogging--his name for writing about fitness, weight loss, motivation, sweat, focus--you know, all the things you can apply to health and diet once you're no longer working in a start up and giving that 250%.

I applaud Jason's catchy effort to be healthy and fit --just like quitting drinking-- (for some) is something well worth applauding.

(And admire how Jason's effortless showmanship makes him assume his own struggles with all this will interest others--and hey, seems like they do.)

Thanks for the posts and emails asking how I felt, post car rear-ending.
I am just fine, thanks.
Took Monday off and got shoulder checked out, took a nap, had a steam and soak that fixed things right up.
Stopped for coffee with a friend afterwards and ran into some people I know...Now feel ready to hear back to the office tomorrow feeling way better than I did on Sunday night.

"Once upon a time, if you had some video content that you wanted to distribute, you could do it on three television stations in the days of the networks, then 100 in the days of cable. Now, thanks to this program, you can do it on literally millions of channels on the Internet."

--Kim Malone, AdSense director, Google, quoted in the NYTimes, in a story about media companies distributing their content within video ad packages across the web.

"There are no exclusives in web video. And even if there were, a web video is just one embed code away from being available everywhere."

--Fred Wilson, A VC, commenting on a NYTimes story on web video sites spawning celebs

No, really. It's not a metaphor, it's what happened--yesterday afternoon, driving in San Francisco, a woman rear-ended my car.
Now I know what amazingly strong back bumpers Mazdas have, but I wasn't as lucky..I have a mean case of whiplash and what the medics called'"soft tissue"injury to the neck and shoulder, which I am translating to mean "Go get some x-rays" and "Book a massage."
The drive of the other car, amazingly, had no ID with her--no license, no passport, no nothin'.
And it wasn't her vehicle.
And the insurance might have been expired.
She kept offering to give me her rent money so we could "forget it right then and there."
And when I explained I needed to go get x-rays (cause my shoulder hurt like a you know what), she said she'd accompany me right then and there, or I should come to her house so she could give me more money.
"I don't want your money, I want to make sure I know how to reach you and your insurance company in case I need some treatment," was my retort.
We went around and around that one for a while, and then she left the scene of the accident. And then the cops arrived. And then she kept calling my phone--and the police said she'd need to come back to the accident with the car, or else she's might have a warrant for her arrest...
And....ugh.
Two hours after her VW created a bad feeling in my shoulder, I was finally on my way; this morning it's X-rays, and hopefully, a nice soothing massage that makes the sore spots go ahhh.

"Impersonating someone online is a kind of identity theft, and on a site where you're leaving traces of yourself, a kind of digital "Kilroy was here", using the names and identities of other community members to make a point goes fairly powerfully against the intentions of their product.
(snip)
....(But) I've seen the most egregious trolls clean up their acts and play nice, and I don't think social software should have a death penalty. (No Rez for You My Friend!)"

--the fabulous Caterina Fake, on the mybloglog pishing snafu

Julie Leung's got an inspiring post on diets and health, with links to other bloggers fighting the good fight on fitness and weight.
Julie's list:

• Liz Lawley
• Susan Mernit
• Jeremy Zawodny
• Chris Pirillo
• Fatblasters
• Jen Zug
• Maryam
• Jenny Lauck
• Lisa Williams
• Beth Grigg
• Jenny on the Spot

(Susan sez: This is really an excuse to tell everyone reading my blog that dieting is a bitch...but that I have lost 20 pounds since December 1st, mostly due to relentless brainwashing...but that it doesn't get easier, it just becomes more of a habit.)

"We all build ourselves from the feedback of others. "

--Developer Shannon Clark, in a long post commenting on life, love and the who-ha kerfuffle about women, conferences and being heard that a couple of people have going on.

Hearst Corporation's announced their committment to saving the print paradigm and bringing it warm and kicking into the digital world--a downloadable application that allows readers to view data both with and without a live connection.

Based on Windows Vista technology, the applet offers a fairly seamless push/pull technology for reading content and getting updates.

The press release says: "Hearst is identifying opportunities across its brands – including within its other newspapers and magazines – to leverage this innovative new platform for publishing and distributing content and advertising."

(Susan's translation of the above quote: We don't know what else to do with this thing yet, but our advertisers are so hot for space on our web pages, we hope we can sell them the reader as well.)

On one hand, the idea of a tool that lets you download and store content offline is all good; on the other, the care this branch of the Hearst team is taking to preserve a print experience is, well, irritating--and most likely based on a fairly narrow idea of what kinds of advertisers they can attract and what kinds of ads they'll pay to place.

The Vista developer is quoted saying: "The most compelling piece for publishers is this notion of displaying paginated content on-screen. Consumers can read that content like a print newspaper or a magazine, from section to section and from story to story, and navigate using a simple user interface."

To me, this is such a publisher-controlled, top down approach to packaging and delivering content that it seems positively 1998-ish.

How about the ability to splice feeds a la pipes, package up content, and splice everything together?

Why does it not surprise me that a big print publisher would not try to lead by signing up to support that?

Can't they just get over the print paradigm and the fat ad money and margins it represents and move on to digital advertising?

It's Zinnio--and CueCat--all over again. Yikes.

Spent a little time this week surfing for people who'd met and fallen in love on Yahoo! Personals, where I lead the product development team , and thought the diversity of blogging voices that turned up was worth sharing as an example of how pervasive sharing, uh, everything has become.

I started with a search on Yahoo! Personals and clicked through on some of the snips that turned up--including these--

Jan, MySpaceBlog: Bryan is truly a great guy with a big heart!! I am very blessed to have him in my life, I am so glad that I took that chance & e-mailed him through yahoo personals, I never thought those kind of things work but guess what? They really do!!

One3y3 open: It's hard to fathom where I would be, who I would be with, and at what stage of my life I would be in if you hadn't responded to my Yahoo! Personals ad.

Third Offence: It's like EBay for People!

Bella's bold, brilliant blog: Back in early December, I met someone on Yahoo Personals that I was sure Could Be The One.

And the links went on and on. Lotsa people telling their stories, most with no one linking to them--an interesting demonstration of just how many people are using blogs and personal spaces to share experiences and communicate about everything.

Any time you doubt it just do a search for " we met online" or " my cat is so cute!" or " I need a new job" and see all the links that turn up.

Yep.

We've inside a universe of always accessible comunicators, one click away from both the ridiculous and the sublime.

"I don't use the term "Web 2.0" either. When asked a long time ago to define what it meant to me, I said it's the name we'll give to the next crash."

--Doc Searles, commenting on social media and how that's another phrase to avoid.

(via photodude)

Interesting post on talks at Noah Kagan's CommunityNext (which I missed) and the discussions of both forming communities and of community as a business practice. Lee's observations ring true:

• The most successful communities were started by people with a ton of devotion and passion about the community project. This can't be created in a board room or assigned as a project.
• Successful communities require a community manager to balance the needs of the community and the organization. Like I wrote recently, the manager is the protector of the community.
• In-reach vs. outreach. Instead of focusing on bringing people in (outreach), be more focused on making people feel welcome after they arrive.
• Authenticity, transparency, genuineness are absolutely required in the community setting. Do not deceive.
• Listen to the community, listen to the community, listen to the community.

Susan sez: The interesting thing here is that we need to remember these lessons over and over again--every time the platform tools change, the process notes become i mportant again.

Lee's now on my blogroll (thanks, Boris.)

keith teare: edegio launches selfserve classifieds board for bloggers and small biz

stowe boyd: traffic and flow--the platform is the medium for the message
doc searls: NPR hosts bloggers, thinks visionary about public radio 3.0
start up review: jumpcut--acquisition case study (via Chad)

"A 2005 study conducted by Opinion Research Corporation for Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer, found that 55 percent of 700 office workers surveyed took 31 minutes for lunch, down from 36 minutes in 1996.--But that precious half-hour was not devoted to dining. Instead, workers ran errands, read or made personal calls."

--NYTimes article on the demise of the lunch hour (and gobbling at your desk).

Bonus quote from the same article:
"When I'm interviewing someone and I see their bones protruding, I know it's a good hire. They're extremely disciplined."

--NYC-based design industry recruiter Stephen Viscusi, a man with alot of pet peeves, including employees who eat at their desks.

"The hardest thing I have to do every day is to decide what to ignore."

--Jeremy Zawodny, fellow Yahoo!, writing on his blog on focus and sorting out what matters.

"The bottom line is this: You can't continue to approach the news in the same way as you always have, in a world where everyone is equipped to capture some of that news. In the days when only the professionals were equipped to do that, then you had one approach. In a world where people have the tools at their disposal to contribute on a regular basis you'd be foolish not to tap into that. The potential here is that you have someone on the scene of almost everything, and as a news wire that's a really rich resource to tap into."

-- AP strategy chief Jim Kennedy, discussing the AP alliance with NowPublic, quoted by Mark Glaser.

Susan sez: The values of this deal are the following:
1) News sites get a vetted distribution channel for participatory media, rather than having to deal with individual contributors (this is a cost and accountability issue)
2) The AP gets one partner to work with who can shape to their needs--and the business opportunity.
3) NowPublic--and by extension its contributors--get the credibility of associating with traditional media that probabably only a third of them crave--and a great story fior potential funders.
The issues, however, are the following:
1) The world has moved on during the 20 months or so since the AP started exploring what to do in this realm--while big, slow moving companies wait patiently for the ink on the contracts to dry, us wired folks move onto new platforms, like YouTube and Digg to grok the news.
2) The deal doesn't address local news and in my opinion, local is the last frontier, the hardest place to commoditize.
3) How much will it really matter? Next time we have some terrible tragedy, it is really going to matter to the AP whether the emblematic image comes from flickr, YouTube or NowPublic?

Grousing aside, this is a good thing..and a final public outcome of work Jim started at least 2 years ago.

"Simultaneously, watching your company continue as a cash cow can be painful. It was for us, at least. Sure, it was continuing to make a lot of money for Jim and I, but it was stagnant and boring. The downside of running a cashcow is that you don't want to do anything substantially different to make it better. The idea is that you milk the cow until it is dead, and hopefully invest that money into new things. Changing anything could screw the money machine up, so you tend not to take any risks. But it almost physically hurts to see the thing you worked so hard on be put into this mode, because you know that in this mode, death is inevitable."

--Jason Hong, writing On Having Balls, Part II: Staying Hungry, explaining how the HotOrNot team turned their previous management model upside down to tear down and rebuild(they hope).

"People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I'm already part of a network, it's called the Internet."

-- Gary McGraw, quoted by Jon Udell in a post on social network fatigue r eferenced by Matt McAlister as he explores why participation in a community is an essential pre-requisite to wanting to create content for it.

"...the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book -- which kicked off this whole business -- have largely failed."

--Rich Skrenta, Topix CEO, writing in his blog about what he describes as the * failure* of the We Media conference in Miami this past week on the basis that the *new* online news paradigms have not succeeded in the business world--and that, in fact, participatory media is, by very definition, uncommercial.

Rich also says (in that admirably blunt, Skrenta way): "The dog's breakfast of new media startups includes Gather, Backfence, Newstrust, Daylife, TailRank, Associated Content, Pegasus News, Tinfinger, Findory, Inform, Newsvine, Memeorandum, NowPublic. ....And yes, I would include Topix here as well. ....But, we can face it, even we haven't yet burned down the world, or upended the news industry."

Susan says: I don't personally believe that participatory journalism is, by definition, non-commercial--I just think the business rules will continue to shift, in ways we can't yet see (where are those great micropayments systems everyone wanted for bloggers a few years ago--are publishing networks the 2007 equivalent?)

But Rich's comments always capture my attention--as does this bonus quote from Mark Glaser:
"Thanks to the audience taking control of their media experience and creating their own media in blogs, podcasts, video and social networks, the people who are losing control have decided to meet — and meet, and meet again — until they figure out how they can take back some control of this uncontrollable situation. "

If I could have taken the time off from work, I would have gone to this conference--and formed my own opinion--but meanwhile, am still digesting what looks like a lot of blogosphere negative comments--and wondering how many layers and levels of Old Guard/New Guard came into play at this event.

Polite disclosure: I was a fellow of an earlier version of ifocus, and know lots of the people in this discussion...and am fascinated both by the criticisms of the conference and Rich's higher-order observations (and wondering how they fit together.)

So I did that have a life thing and was offline for 48 hours. Even with a Treo, it can feel like withdrawal to stop reading blogs, checking all my email accounts, posting links and so on...but hey, it felt really good--and I had a chance to explore a part of California I've never really visited, though I have passed through it--El Dorado County.
What can I say about an area so far from urban sprawl that there are no shopping malls, no ex-plexes with big box stores, no shiny new restaurants with hand made goat cheese? El Dorado would have been dusty if it wasn't pouring, and most of the restaurants we came too were of the BBQ pork and melted cheese on your omlet persuasion (a refreshing change from the close-in Bay area).
Seriously, sitting in the diner drinking coffee Sunday morning, after 36 hours of tooling around the backroads, I thought alot about what it would be like to live in such a small town, the kind of place where everybody was likely to know your business and if you were different--well, they all knew it, but you'd still stand out.
I remembered back to the old days, pre my life online, where I wanted to be a poet and live in the country and have a big garden and write poems and essays. My inspiration was Gary Snyder and his life in Grass Valley and Nevada City (his postal address was Star Route), and Marge Piercy, who lived on Cape Cod year round (or so I imagined). Driving through the little towns this weekend, I faced that fact that even with a high speed internet connection, I was far too urban (or maybe even suburban) a person to ever be happy in such a quiet region.
And yet, it was a wonderful weekend...for me, getting away is always a chance to not only see new things and have new experiences, it's a way to compare what I have with what I've imagined--and to learn from it.

Baseline Mag: the (fairly interesting) technology powering MySpace
TechCrunch: Jobster gets a boost
GigaOm (and others): Facebook testing virtual gifts.

Financial Times:NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker tells YouTube to grow up and behave.

"We understand that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was 10 years ago. Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information. But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world."

-- NYTimes Chairman Arthurs Sulzberger, Jr, quoted at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, in Israeli newspaper site Haaretz.com, explaining how the Times sees themselves as "curators of news."

Rafat Ali's got notes on Paid Content from IAC's Barry Diller speaking at the @media Summit. When asked about social networks, Diller talked about Match.com, one of the big three in the online dating space.
As someone currently deep inside this vertical, and a social networking observer, his comments seem interesting because they are so, well, off.
Here's what Ali quotes:
" Match.com is our play in social networking...a pure social network site--not that they are of value--no one has yet proved it is the easiest advertising medium. Pure social network is an upgrade from the princess telephone teenagers used to talk on for hours and hours. I do think, however, it is a great promotional vehicle. Match.com got into trouble because it added social networking, that flirting element and that friend thing. We put all these bells and whistles on the service, and confused our audience...now we have had a turn around."

Given that Match is a paid subscription service, it seems odd that Diller is tasking them for the difficulties of delivering targeted advertising at the ROI he'd like--and equally curious that he thinks adding communications tools to the product was a mistake. (IMHO, adding Dr. Phil would be more off base than anything he describes, but hey, that's just me.)

The other cool quote Rafat offers--Diller saying "We will buy anything that walks."

"The future of TV is not on TV. It's the Internet."

--RJ Cutler, describing the new half-hour series he will be producing that will be based on user-generated content created by Facebook users.

BizWeek's got a story about how Facebook and Comcast are teaming up with a skilled video producer to create and package a series called Facebook Diaries. Basically, it will be a series of user-created videos that are then edited, packaged and probably enhanced by producr RJ Cutler, the Emmy-award winning documentaryproducer who created American High.
This little story captures some tremendously shrewd ideas:

• Let the audience use the new tools to make the content
• Hire an expert to organize, package and enhance what they create
• Use the means of distribution (the social network) as the marketing tool to build a viewing base
• Market to the audience (who are also the creators) on the front end as they make and upload the content, and on the backend, as they watch the finished shows
• Create groups and social networks based on the content they create and market through those too.

Voila, the ecosystem of targeted, viral marketing, recreated--with a per user acquisition cost waaay lower, bet, than most.
And it's focused on that 18-24 demographic.
And anyone can play, assuming they have a critical mass.

flickr travelogues anyone?
Yahoo Personals date documentaries?

You get the drill.

"Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests. "

--New York Times report William Broad, writing about how China's test on Jan. 11 of an antisatellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large fragments dramatically increased the number of shattered bits of junk floating in space.

"I'm even more interested in the spaces in between blogs and old media and new media and social networks and marketplaces and so on. I'm interested in how we are living and working and hyper-commuting across the web, and in the ways we are relating to and touching one another as we go, and what our travels do to our DNA, and what strands we pick up as we travel. How it changes us. What kind of organisms we are waking up as we move. What wakes up inside of us.'
s a big thing, that."

--Jeaneane Sessums, Allied, writing about what lies between social media, blogging, and real world ties.

Trying to figure out what areas folks who live in the Mission, Bernal Heights or the Avenues might feel at home in if they moved to NYC?

The man to check in with is Cameron Marlow,who's delivered a Curbed-worthy deconstruction of the two burgs and their b-comps (that would be burrito comparatives).

Some examples:

North Beach= Little Italy
Noe Valley= Upper East Side
Potrero= Brooklyn Heights
and so on...

The comments are also worth a read, as in this one by Beth:

"Park Slope is SO Noe Valley. I remember thinking that when I first laid eyes on Noe Valley ten years ago. I haven't been to SF in some time, so maybe Russian Hill has changed, but from what I remember about Noe Valley was white lesbians (the people who inspired the neighborhood's affectionate nickname, “Snowy Vulva”) and/or sensitive yuppie couples, pushing sport utility strollers, and lots of overpriced but delicious and cozy places to eat and drink coffee and buy organic food."
Amen, sister.

“If you drink a bottle of a '61 Bordeaux every five years and somebody swipes it, you're not going to be happy. You can't replace it. Wine is a very personal thing.”

--Ken Chalmers, assistant manager at local SV Valley wine shop Beltramo's, explaining why a Atherton, Ca robbery of a private house where the haul was $100,000 of premium wine,mostly Bordeaux, has locals, uh, quaking (would this be a good reason to drink up those cellars faster?)

and

"An 18-year-old girl was shot point-blank in the head and I received no calls about it.The wine theft? A gazillion. It kind of shows you where people's values lie.”

--Local police sergeant, quoted in the same story.

(Via a story in the NYTimes)

Susan sez: Anyone at Valleywag checking this story out? Yep--right here.

For anyone who doesn't believe that tools--and communication--are getting easier and easier--completely disrupting one vertical after another (think entertainment, media, commerce, etc.) the news that Jason Calcanis and Mike Arrington are going to do a free DEMO-style conference called "The TechCrunch 20" just shows--along with BarCamp, Bloggercon and other events and the supporting tools of upcoming, confabb, etc.--shows that the conference business is just as open to disruption.

Jason says:
"Getting a presentation slot at a demo conference can really help launch a company, but the fact is that demo-style conferences have turned into cash cows for big conference companies and the small entrepreneur is now being forced to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to buy their space."

Mike writes:
"The startups will be invited based on the recommendation of a committee of expert analysts, entrepreneurs and journalists. Twenty companies will be invited, plus a couple of alternates. If a selected startup isn't ready to launch ten days or so before the event, they'll be bumped and one of the alternates will take its place."

And finally (Jason again):
"How will we make money off the event? Well, frankly we don't need to make too much money, and we think the ticket sales and a couple of top level sponsors (i.e. one law firm, one tech firm, one VC firm, and one accounting firm) will cover things."

One of the interesting points to note here is how this event is another way to leverage the techcrunch brand--but another is that these guys don't need to make mucho dollars from the event--they can do it for the pleasure of doing it right (and disrupting the current world order).

In my ideal world, the fellas would:

• Make sure there were a good cross section of women helping to select the companies
• Let the audience select a couple of presenters via the web
• Provide real time live event streaming for those remote viewers
• Franchise it as the next American Idol (okay, kidding on that one.)