Two Months of Silence

There’s overload and then there’s overload. I subscribe to a couple dozen newsfeeds, not counting my Facebook feed. It’s too much. I mean, I have 200 Google News Alerts waiting for me in my inbox. Who has time for that?

I’m sure you feel the same way. So in an effort to cut down on information overload I took a break from writing this blog. At first I didn’t miss it, but over time, I’ve been feeling guilty. Kind of like how I feel about not playing the oboe anymore even though my parents paid for me to get a music degree in college. Don’t worry, I won’t be uploading clips of great oboe performances. But I digress.

I’m back to posting.

Switch to Mac? Yeah, Right.

I bought the line… I switched to Mac two months ago. I fell for the commercials (and a bit of tweaking from my husband, who bought his own Mac a few months before I did).

Yesterday my Mac died. It started off innocently – I was waiting for some content to download on the Comcast Web page, when all of a sudden a message appeared on the screen (in four languages, oddly) telling me I needed to restart. I did, and the desktop never quite came back. Then, after four tries the screen went gray and the machine started beeping at me. Never a good sign. Finally, it heaved its last breath and just went dark. Dead, gone.

The verdict from the Genius who shouted at me over the racket of customers in the overcrowded Apple Store? Kernel panic, whatever that is. Complete hard drive and logic board replacement. One-plus weeks w/o my Mac.

Luckily I still have my trusty old Dell and when I got home, I fired it up and I’m off and running. Never once in my 9 years of owning Dells has the machine failed so catastrophically as this Mac did.

A Wonderful Prank

Not much to do with social media, but a prank that a wine expert pulled on Wine Spectator magazine is priceless. Wanting to expose the Spectator’s wine awards as basically paid advertising, he created a bogus restaurant in Milan, complete with fake website, fake menu, fake wine list and — the social media angle — fake reviews on Chowhound. He even named the restaurant Osteria L’Intrepido — Italian for “fearless restaurant.”

After paying a $250 fee and filling out an application, the bogus restaurant received a Wine Spectator excellence award — even though many of the wines on the list had been rated poorly by the magazine.

Much more in this great Chicago Tribune article.

The IAB Has Arrived

Am attending the IAB Ecosystem conference in Phoenix, and what looked a few weeks ago like a sleepy little confab has turned into the event of the spring season. The Tapatio Cliffs Resort is sold out, they tell me.

Given that it’s the IAB’s show I expected to see the Web media heavy hitters here, but what I didn’t expect were all of the agency folks. Even the hotel staffers seem tickled by the “celebrities” here. Twice in the space of 10 minutes people exclaimed to me about all the “big names” here – Yahoo, AOL, Google, etc.

Yes, a decade after I attended one of the first IAB conferences, this industry has arrived. In Phoenix.

 

The Industry Standard. It’s Baaaaack!

Yesterday, when I was looking for a Seahawks cap to wear to the Super Bowl party I was going to, I found my old IndustryStandard.com cap. It’s now nearly 10 years old.

Just in time for that little anniversary, The Industry Standard is back. Here’s part of the email that arrived with the news:

You were one of the first in line to ask to see the brand-new Industry Standard. To show our appreciation for your interest, you are being notified of today’s official launch!

The site is not only designed to give readers insights into technology and the Internet economy, but also provides a unique community feature — a predictive market. Read the links below to understand how the site works, and see today’s selection of news, analysis, and predictions:

A message from General Manager Derek Butcher: The launch of a new Standard
Founded in April of 1998, the original Industry Standard helped define an era. Ten years later, a reborn Industry Standard is here to document the new Internet age. …
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/02/04/launch-new-standard

I wasn’t there until the magazine’s bitter end, so I have little of that baggage, but I still have mixed feelings about this new site. I think it will be next to impossible to recapture the buzz, the excitement and the must-read status that the magazine one held.

With so many places to get news, insider information and commentary, it will be a challenge for this site to stand out.