everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • Girl’s Day

    Girl’s Day

    As we drove through Chinatown this past weekend, we saw preparations for the Chinese New Year’s celebrations. Many were carrying sprigs of cut plum blossoms which are just starting to bloom so we bought some to go with the Girl’s Day display which we set up each year around this time and keep up until the beginning of March.

    Tyler took a small plum blossom branch to school today to explain to his class about the festival and his Japanese background. Taking him to school this morning, he said he was worried that the boys in the class would make fun of a kid carrying pink flowers to show-and-tell. Later, in line waiting to go into the class, he noticed that the girls liked he flowers so he warmed up to the idea.

  • That’s one way to get your company’s name out there. . .

    godaddy.jpg

    The advertising world is buzzing with godaddy.com’s debut on the television advertising scene with their parody of the Janet Jackson wardrobe mishap from last year. Forrester’s Advertising analyst Jim Nail gives it the “Load the Cannon with Gerbils” award:

    This ad confirms it: the dotcom bubble is back. An unknown internet company selling a service that 99.9% of the audience doesn’t need spends megabucks to run an ad that has nothing whatsoever to do with the aforementioned service. At least Cyberian Outpost (whose 1998 spot firing gerbils out of a cannon can be credited with much of the dotcom advertising mania) sold computer gear people were buying at the time.

    So offended (and afraid of further FCC lawsuits one might add) were the grand pooh-bahs at the NFL and Fox that they pulled the second airing of the commercial that was supposed to run during the two minute warning. The jury’s still out on this but it appears that the media buzz alone surrounding the pulling of the second ad has kicked the media coverage of the ad campaign into high gear and paid off in brand awareness dollars alone.

    Bob Garfield of USA Today (which ranks all the Super Bowl ads in its annual Ad Meter story) calls the ad a success,

    It branded a business never before branded. It flipped the bird at the FCC and the NFL and it self-mockingly used blatant sexism to get its message across. Plus the lady had a big bosom.

    So the message hit home and branded the company but will it bring godaddy.com business? Only time will tell but my guess is yes. Maybe not $2.4 million yes but the bump will be significant. Sport fans are a huge audience that is only starting to be recognized. Ask anyone at mlb.com, DirecTV, XM or Sirius. Sports fans have money to spend on technology.

    You can read more about the pre-game media coverage (and view the ad) here.

  • Alameda Antique Fair

    On Sunday we went to see the Alameda Antique Fair which must be seen to be believed. There must be over 400 vendors spread out over the tarmac of the old naval airfield in Alamdeda. All sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, interesting people too.

    Pictures here.

  • The Mind of a Link Spammer

    The Register interviews a link spammer and we see just what we expected; a selfish brat who has no regard or sympathy for the community that allows him to thrive.

    Link spamming, with its abuse of common
    resources, turns out the most efficient, just as cutting down virgin
    Indonesian and Amazonian rain forest is the most efficient way for
    loggers there to get wood. If it raises the global temperature of the
    blogging community, well, that’s life on planet internet, isn’t it?

  • Nisenholtz counterpoint to Dan Gillmor

    The Online Journalism Review inteviews Martin Nisenholtz of NY Times Digital who is a ready counter-argument to Dan Gillmor’s call for a freeing of the archives. Until banner ad revenues outstrip the royalties they curently earn from subscription databases such as Factiva and Lexis-Nexis, there is no way they’re opening up the barn door.

    “We’re not about to give away something that the marketplace is paying a huge premium for already,” Nisenholtz told me, “unless you could get a lot more than that premium in some other way, which you can’t, believe me, there’s no way. There’s no analysis to show that Google AdWords gets you anything close to what we make on archives on the Web — never mind all the money we make on the after-market sales. It’s so ridiculous as to be laughable.

    It’s a marketplace of a few vendors serving up proprietary content on closed systems vs. a more sustainable marketplace of any and every website around the world looking to link to and reference New York’s paper of record. And what about The Long Tail?

  • Ask Jeeves launches blog on TypePad

    Ask Jeeves moved to a shiny new office tower in Oakland and launched a shiny new blog to boot!

    UPDATE: and buys online RSS reader, Bloglines.

  • Six Apart Global Headquarters

    Six Apart Global Headquarters

    Thanks to Niall, you can have a look-see around our new offices. Always nice to have blogger friends to document your life for you. I think this era has got to be the most documented age in human history. Too bad it’s all in bits though, 3,000 years from now no one will have a copy of IE or Firefox with which to read all this stuff!

    For those that want to preserve their blogs in print, try BlogBinders.com

  • Pictures of the office

    Thanks to another Kennedy (not related) you can see where Mie & I work.

  • BBC on blogs at school

    BBC Online writes about the use of blogs in the classroom. Thanks to Tom Watanabe over at techfutures.org for the tip.