Bruner Blog
All Bruner, All the Time
Gone Fishing
Out of town till next Wednesday at a kick-ass reunion of old college friends in a forest somewhere in Montana. Blogging in the next few days doubtful, but who knows, you may get a little update...
- 8/15/2002
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Good God!
I don't know whether this photo is legit, but it looks so to me. WARNING: The site this photo links to, Rotten.com, is in extremely poor taste and may be offensive to most everybody. Please click photo at your own risk.
- 8/15/2002
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I Miss My Wife!
My wonderful wife has been away in her native Budapest, partying her brains out at the Pepsi Island music festival, haning out with many friends, her twin brother, her mom, my dad (who moved back to Bp recently, oddly enough; a story for another time), and generally having lots of fun while I blog in solitude in insufferably hot Harlem. I miss her terribly. But that's really good.
I shall share with you one secret of our happy marriage: we spend a lot of time apart from each other. Over the last seven years we've lived back in America, she's spent perhaps an entire year's worth of time back in Hungary all told, and I've done my share of two-three-week trips here and there myself in that time. Nothing makes you as happy to see your spouse as several weeks apart.
That's just one of the secrets, but then if I let you in all of them, they wouldn't be secrets anymore, would they?
- 8/14/2002
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Rah Underdogs!
SkySports: "United Humbled By Late Goal in Hungary
Manchester United's lucrative annual Champions League campaign is in danger after Hungarian minnows Zalaegerszeg grabbed an injury time winner in their qualifying round first leg."
Newsday: "Comeback Kids Win a Wild One
Harlem triumphs in extra innings after trailing 4-0: Harlem's boys of summer are going to The Show.Displaying the tenacity that has marked their run to the Little League World Series, the Harlem Little League barreled their way to Williamsport, Pa., by eking out a 5-4 extra-inning win over the Lehigh, Pa., team in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Championship game last night."
- 8/14/2002
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Zimbabwe, Facing Famine, Evicting Farmers
Man, stories like this frustrate me so much. Six million people starving in Zimbabwe, and the government is encouraging citizen mobs to evict white farmers who, among the 2,700 or so of them, employ more than 1 million Zimbabweans. No plan in place, of course, for managing the lost food-producing capacity when the farmers are evicted. You sort of have to know how to run a farm, I would think.
- 8/14/2002
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Davezilla Update
Buckle up, Tokyo!
- 8/14/2002
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Introducing Gizmodo, The First E-Commerce Blog
Congratulations and good luck to blogtrepreneur Nick Denton and tech writer Pete Rojas on their new commercial blog venture, Gizmodo.com, a site dedicated to cool technology stuff. Rojas will update the site daily with links and short commentary about product reviews on other sites, recall notices, new product releases, and so on. Roughly one out of every four posts features a "buy" link where readers can purchase the products on Amazon or elsewhere. Gizmodo, in those cases, earns affiliate network commissions if people make a purchase as a result of the link.
Nick, who's a good friend, claims for himself the ridiculous title as the blog's "publisher," in as much as he did well enough during the boom that he can afford to finance Rojas on salary for a while (hope they've got taxes sorted out, as it's out there in the public domain) in order to satisfy his curiousity about whether commercial blogs like this can be viable.
The blogirati are already debating the hell out of this, with Dave Winer predictably against it and Nick predictably fanning the flames of the discussion. The best comment I read on the subject came from a blogger I've never heard of, Jenny Berger, writing on Blogroots, who wrote:
Asking why blogging should be profitable is about as productive as asking why shouldn't it be profitable. Have we not yet figured out that on the Web, there is no "should," only "can?"
I totally agree. The market will answer Nick's question soon enough, and I wish him the best. I've been watching the site in beta for a few weeks, and I give it the thumbs up. I expect believe the site will succeed. I certainly hope so, as it would be a great precedent, if it worked. Who among us wouldn't love to know the secret of getting paid to blog all day.
I'm a bit worried about relying too much on the affiliate model, as its problems are widely known. Basically, you just have to have a lot of traffic to make it work, even if you have high conversion rates (which I think this site will do more so than most). Frankly, I think blogging represents a huge opportunity for affiliate networks themselves (e.g,. LinkShare, Commission Junction, ReferIt) all of whose businesses have stagnated in the last couple of years since the bloom is off that rose. But I doubt they're hip enough to have heard of blogs yet. The real opportunity is for the likes of Blogger or Userland. Sounds like Winer's a non-believer. Ev, are you reading?
If you haven't you read the Tipping Point you must (via my affiliate link here). One of the author's key theses is that it takes three types of personalities to make phenomena go epidemic: "connectors," who know lots of people and love putting them together; "mavins," who know every last detail about their subjects of interest and love sharing information, and "salespeople," who have a knack for gaining people's trust and pursuading behaviors. Could you possibly come up with a better definition of the blogger personality? (Interestingly, while the book was a must-read among the interlectual set a couple of years ago, it doesn't feature a single Internet story among its umteen case studies.)
Obviously, a lot of bloggers are already using affiliate links, myself included as I pointed out above. If you haven't noticed that I use them when I link to Amazon or Register, fine. If you do, I expect it won't much impugn my credibility, as I genuinely like the stuff I recommend. I'm not trying to make a living off my links, but if I get a check once a quarter for beer money, it's worth the extra 30 seconds I spend preparing the affiliate links. If I were Nick, I'd give Tony Pierce a call, as he's got the best affilate links woven into his site of any blogger I've seen.
But it's a pain in the ass presently to run affiliate links as a blogger. My link in the bottom of my left-hand margin for my beloved Samsung i300 PDA/phone, for example, has been dead for a couple of months since Amazon stopped carrying the product (just as I hit my blogging stride). I've spent a couple of hours searching for another e-com site in an affiliate program that carries the product without success. Having to join multiple networks is a real hurdle.
But imagine if the affiliate network were built seamlessly into Blogger Pro (either through a partnership with LinkShare or whoever, or through reinventing the wheel). When you as a blogger write a movie review, you could search for the film on a ticket system like Fandango right through Blogger and get paid for readers who buy tickets. Or when you rave about your new digital camera or whatever, a quick search in Blogger and you can create an affiliate link in under a minute. That, my friends, could be the killer app of the blogosphere.
But as for running a profitable affiliate blog, I don't know. You would need massive traffic to make it work. I know some affiliate sites can perform quite well, but it's a lot of work. At least Nick seems prepared to give it a good run for his money, and I applaud that. But I still think that's got to be only one leg of the stool from a revenue perspective. I hope (and believe) Nick has other ideas in mind.
As a bit of public feedback, I'd say the blog, while already compelling in its single-mindedness, could afford to ratchet up the personality a bit more, which is required to assure the blog a loyal following. Also, it could stand to be a bit more blog-like, if that's how the site is to position itself. I notice, for example, there are no links to other blogs on the site, which isn't really in the spirit of the whole blog thang (link to me! link to me!).
BTW, in case your'e wondering, this is not the big blog-related venture Nick has been hinting about for a while now. That goodness, b/c it would be rather lame if it were. This, I think, is more of a hopeful hobby on Nick's part. He is still going to pull another rabbit out of a hat to guarantee a position on DayPop sometime later this year.
As if I hadn't already solved the economic problems of this new medium already, here's another pearl of wisdom I just came up with. Pete, if you can swing me a sample Canon A40 digital camera, I'd be more than happy to write a review you could link to. But here's the rub: Get Gizmodo on the gravy train for review product samples. Then farm out the product reviews to quality bloggers, whose reviews the site can link to. If the reviewer doesn't like the product, she can give it back to Gizmodo. If she wants to keep it, Gizmodo will sell it to her for 25% of retail value. Everyone's happy. The manufacturer gets PR (of the really prestigeous blog variety). The reader gets an honest review. Gizmodo gets a revenue stream. Bloggers get cool shit at massive discounts for doing what they'd do anyway.
But for being so brilliant as to think that up, I want my Canon A40 for free.
- 8/14/2002
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'Permission' Guru Doesn't Get Blogging
I just decided to remove Seth Godin's blog from my recommended links. I put him in when I first came across his site, because he's a big name in my e-marketing sector (founder of early online promotions company Yoyodyne, later Yahoo! marketing wiz, author of the popular "Permission Marketing" among several other other knock-off books, frequent keynote speaker, etc.), and I thought it was cool that he blogged. I saw that it wasn't a very good blog, but I put it in any way.
Stopping back at it again, though, I see it's undeniably a bad blog. One that I shouldn't be recommending. He has no links to any other bloggers, he rarely updates it (once so far in August and twice in all of July), and all the posts are about him and his consulting stuff. Who wants to read that?
- 8/14/2002
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More Apple Switch Parodies
I wonder if Apple takes all the parody's of its Switch ad campaign as a complement. I've seen so many of these parodies, I would expect someone else has already gone ot the trouble of putting together a list of them, but not finding one, I did so myself:
- Ellen Feiss - this is actually one of the real commercials from Apple, but her performance is so funny, mainly because she's obviously completely stoned, that it's inspired all sorts of fan sites.
- Will Ferrell - was this actually on SNL? Slick, but given that it was shown at MacWorld (as you can see from the last couple of seconds) it's a bit too PR-friendly for real parody. Also, makes Mozilla 1.0 crash.
- DrunkerGamers.com - this is my favorite, after Ellen Feiss.
- LBStone.com's Big Macs - raw and amateurish, but funny.
- Move to Iceland - I blogged this once already, but this is a round-up, and it's the best of the animated ones I saw.
- Bill Gates - this one has gotten lots of exposure. Eh. Typical pro-maccie, anti-MS humor.
- Big Brother - another from MacBoy (author of the Bill Gates one). I'm not sure I get this. It's obviously a spoof on the famous Apple 1984 commercial, but I don't understand whether the point is that the Mac OS X is somehow supposed to be the new IBM (wishful thinking) or whether it's still saying Macs are the best, or what.
- Dude - yet another from MacBoy, and just not really funny to my mind, but then this is supposed to be a round-up, not a review. I gather he's also spoofing a Dell commercial I haven't seen, but I can't see that making it funnier.
What am I missing?
And a bonus animation. After all my trashing of MacBoy, he redeems himself with this really funny parody of his father, titled "Dad vs. AOL."
- 8/14/2002
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Mozilla 1.0
To further my support for the Zilla Liberation Front and my new copyleft )c( stance and my general dislike of Microsoft on principal, I decided to download the new Mozilla 1.0 open-source browser. So far, so good. Although I notice that certain Blogger.com functions (such as the HTML helpers like the hyperlink and bold buttons) dont' work...
- 8/14/2002
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SaveKaryn.com
Oh, what the hell, I gave her a buck. She's already raised more than $4,000 in Internet contributions to pay off her credit card debt. I do feel dubious about this beg-blogging trend (who actually gave money to that fat slob asking for a hooker?), but when I saw she just moved to Brooklyn and is afraid of roaches, I broke down. What the hell, it's only a buck and it's not like she's pan-handling on the subways. I found her on DayPop.
Moxie's sounding a bit desperate, too, these days, but at least she posts photos of herself in her underwear. A bit more self-obsessed, but then she lives in LA...
- 8/14/2002
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Zilla Liberation Front!
 Help defend Dave's right to be a Zilla.
- 8/14/2002
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A Very Unpleasant Mental Image
Don't know why I thought of it just now, but there is a tiny fish in the Amazon that might swim up your penis if you're not careful.
- 8/14/2002
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CEO Salary Calculator
How much would you be earning today if your 1996 salary had grown at the same rate as the average CEO's? This handy calculator from the AFL-CIO graphs it a nice chart.
- 8/14/2002
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Doggles.com
"Unlike ordinary sunglasses for dogs, Doggles actually protect dog's eyes from foreign objects, wind, and UV light."
There are "ordinary sunglasses for dogs"? Yet another reason why I'm a cat guy.
(Link from BoingBoing.)
- 8/13/2002
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Hagiography
My favorite new word, which Websters defines:
1 : biography of saints or venerated persons
2 : idealizing or idolizing biography
From Olivier, RE:
- 8/11/2002
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Can We Please Stop Calling It "9/11"?
As the anniversary of that dreadful day grows close (which I'm not looking forward to; I found myself weeping the other night at a tribute to the heroic passengers of Flight 93 on a rebroadcast of the damn ESPY Awards), I want to point out something that has been really annoying me for many months now: the use of the phrase "nine-eleven" or, even worse, "nine-one-one." What's up with that?
This is not a normal way to talk about a date. My birth date is June 11. When someone asks my birth date, I don't say "six eleven" much less "six one-one." That would sound retarded.
What it is, is shorthand. In this post-MTV culture of ours, we waited only a matter of weeks or even days before we gave this horrific event a media nickname, a handle, jargon.
Why is this necessary? It's quicker and easier to say? "Nine eleven" is two syllables shorter than "September eleven." We're all in that big of a hurry?
Or is "nine eleven" catchier than "September eleven?" Yes, I think it is. "September eleven" or "September eleventh" has a somber sound to it. It's unavoidable to feel a bit of the agony of that day in those words. But "nine eleven" sounds lighter. It's a bit further removed from the recollection of the actual day itself; it's more of a "meme" for bigger "thing" that date represents. It's got a bit of marketing buzz to it. It sounds almost hip, or fun. And yes, it's a weird coincidence that the date numerically is the same as the telephone number for emergency services, but that was worth observing once, as a nod to numerology freaks, but it's hardly worth remembering every time we mention the event. It's like saying "dubya dubya two" or "'Nam" -- it just sounds hoaky and insincere.
I don't know if it's just my imagination or inflated sense of self-importance, but it seems to me that New Yorkers use the cute handle "9-11" less often than friends and commentators I hear from other parts of the country.
More than annoying, I find it offensive. September 11th was something profoundly sobering, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. It deserves much better than a cutsie nickname.
- 8/11/2002
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Happy Birthday, Mall of America
I suspect my mom will kill me for using this same headline (even though she's from Minneapolis). The fact remains, August 11 is the 10-year aniversary of the opening of The Mall of America, the country's largest shopping emporium. Whoopie!
I heard this factoid on an NPR interview with writer Ian Frazier, who wrote a piece in The Atlantic cleverly titled "Mall of America." I normally like Frazier's writing (though I was surprised to see him in The Atlantic as I thought he was a New Yorker man), but I was actually disappointed by the piece (maybe it read better in print), which I found long on self-indulgent reminiscence of his youth and so-what observations of everyday people at the mall and short on some perspective about the mall as a metaphor, an obscene cathedral to America's worship of consumerism. One of the few points along those lines he does make is to find that virtually nothing sold at The Mall of America was actually manufactured in the U.S.A., including not a single item at post-September-11 "USA America Pride" store.
The point that really caught my attention about this piece (hear on the NPR interview; the same stat was never mentioned in the article; I guess NPR turned it up themselves) was this: The Mall of America, with its 42.5 million annual visitors, is the single biggest attraction in America, bigger than Graceland, The Grand Canyon and Disneyland combined. What does that mean about our culture? On the other hand, would it be "better" to see more people at Graceland or Dinseyland? I don't know, but I wished the author had pondered that for me.
Incredibly, MOA is not even the biggest mall in the world. That dubious distinction goes to the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada. The article does point out, however, that The Mall of America does more business than the Edmonton Mall and, more importantly, is set to expand soon, so it will once again reclaim its rightful title as the largest mall in the world.
Thank God. In fact, God Bless the Mall of America!
- 8/11/2002
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Link From TonyPierce.com: $1
TonyPierce.com is still just about my favorite blog. As such, I've just elevated him to the top position of my "Blogs of Interest" links on the left (the best I can do, as I've never met the man). I do this largely out of respect for his blog mastery (which I was reminded of by Copeland), but also because I noticed reading over his recent postings that he's offering advice on how to get him to link to you, which it seems to me he's selling pretty cheap: you can either have a "kick-ass" or even just "well-designed" site, or, barring that, just move him to the top of your recommended links, or donate as little as $1 to his site. One measily dollar for a link back from a bloggod. Tony, you're way underselling yourelf. In fact, I would have happily donated $5 or even more, but I couldnt' figure out how to reset the amount on your PayPal link. We shall see whether it really works. (I wonder if his friend Moxie ever saw my whole Moxie rant.)
- 8/11/2002
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Suicide Army
Henry Copeland pointed out this really scary photo of the Iraqi Army at ease.
- 8/11/2002
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