I’ve had a pretty fun week. I recently turned one of my laptops into a media server, and am ditching my Cable service from Time-Warner Cable. I realized something after I hooked it all up: Why would I bother to bittorrent TV if I could get it from available online sources? I don’t think commercials are all that bad, and since most of the shows I watch are available online streaming, it’s much easier for me to watch the shows via the websites of the TV networks rather than pirate.
If the music industry would have caught on like the TV industry is, they wouldn’t be in the sorry state they’re in now, relying on Ringtone revenue.
So now that I’ve actually had a few minutes to sit down and rest (don’t get it twisted, I’m still working on the weekend) I’ve had a chance to read up on some of the press that the site has been getting.
Thx to everyone who’s written something about our new site, especially Dan Frommer who wrote us up on launch day. [Brian has a good summary of all the other buzz.]
I’m very happy with our launch thus far. We’re attracting the right users to the site, and we’re putting up some great content. We’ve launched with enough features to give readers a hint of where we’re going, and so far the response has been positive.
One of the points that’s an obvious one for pundits to make, especially given our pedigree, is that we’re going to somehow takeout industry heavyweights. In my mind, we’re not aiming to be a “company killer.” We’re friends with people from around the industry, especially CNET, Engadget and Gizmodo, and don’t look at ourselves as a killer of any one of them. Realistically, we’d love it if you came to hear our news and views, and we’re trying to create another alternative voice for tech news that can provide consumers more than what’s currently out there, but we think there’s definitely room for everyone.
One of the ways we’re hoping to add substance to the conversation is our guide tab. Right now, we’ve got some great buying guides and features, along with our ever expanding glossary of terms, but we’re also working to create some killer comparators. I know people were kind of excited about our G1 vs the pack comparator, in particular. (Side note, that floating header thing looks amazing, and Rosco, one of our devs, worked his butt off to make sure it was cross browser compatible. Shout out to him, for sure.)
While we haven’t been able to launch with all the elements of the site at full strength, I hope it’s more than obvious we’ve worked really hard to create compelling content that is informative for a variety of audiences. Our news voice is very straight-laced, a more “just the facts” approach rather than the current crop of ‘post-Rojas’ voiced sites out there. We hope our posts can give you all the critical information you need to understand the day’s developments, and then you can head to the product pages or the rest of our database to keep exploring further.
Right now, we’re focusing our timely content primarily on news only, so readers won’t see the DIY and interesting links they’re accustomed to just yet. We want to be the place for readers to expect news, but we also don’t want to neglect the other fun and interesting reads around the web. Expect our coverage to grow, naturally, as our staff grows in size.
Speaking of staff, despite its meager size, I couldn’t ask for a better one. I’m quite excited about the Crowd Fusion team on both sides of me. From the management side, ever since Brian and I started talking about creating a new personal technology site, I’ve been lucky enough to meld his foresight and vision with my own ideas to breathe life into Obsessable and the Crowd Fusion concept. I’m constantly astounded by Craig’s ability to visualize how modular the platform needs to be, along with his entire dev team. Judith has been a great help and mentor, in tandem with Barb and Vero, to help me buoy up Obsessable from the nuts and bolts.
On the Obsesasble side, I’m equally as lucky. Evan Blass is Obsessable’s #2, and I couldn’t be more happy with the way he has helped mold the site. He’s largely responsible for helping shape the site voice into something that we’re proud of, and likewise I couldn’t be more proud to work with such a talented individual. All of our writing and curation people are killer and with such diversity that our base of knowledge is continuously expanding. (Side note: Check out Greg’s killer iPhone app if you’re into jailbroken apps, btw!)
The main thing I’ve learned from this launch? Having a competent team around you helps you make the best decisions. You simply listen to the feedback everyone is giving and pick the next hurdle to jump over.
Still stuck in the airport for more than 8 hours at this point. Here’s the complaint I sent JetBlue:
While I don’t feel courteous, I’ll be courteous so you can understand my concern. Right now, my flight is delayed at a minimum of eight hours. That, however, is only part of the issue. Sure, I understand weather related things happen, and it’s out of JetBlue’s control, but at some point your operational departments probably should have had a better way of dealing with the situation.
Apparently, our aircraft was delayed out of JFK five hours due to weather (and JFK’s incompetence, which is massive.) At that point, someone back at JetBlue HQ should have been doing the crewmember math and saying “in a worst case scenario, if our crew members are delayed five or more hours, they won’t be legal to fly on the way back due to the FAA’s rest rules.” Instead, I get the feeling the JetBlue people weren’t looking at the worst case scenario. Instead, I’m stuck here at the airport for AT LEAST three additional hours waiting for in-flight crews to take their positions.
If that wasn’t bad enough, I found out there’s a flight out of Burbank taking off in 20 minutes from now, that I might have had a chance of getting on board had someone at JetBlue properly planned for the crew member scenario. I feel like this gross negligence is unacceptable, and calls in to question JetBlue’s reliability as an airline. I’ve always been a big proponent of JetBlue, and frequently recommended the company to friends, but recently it seems the airline is experiencing major growing pains and is incapable of handling flight contingencies. I’m no legacy carrier fan, but I’ve never had this negative of an experience, even with JFK’s moronic / overbooked handling of their tarmac.
If JetBlue had a tagline, it’d be “Awesome, but only in the best case scenario.”
If any JetBlue representative would like to contact me, I’d be more than willing to post a follow up response here on my blog. We’ll see if they really do care about customer service.
Update: Yeah, so still here and it’s 8:45. I called JetBlue, and had a really helpful and empathetic person say “Yeah, a 10+ hour airport stay is awful.” Felt really empathetic. Then she mentioned, “We should be able to get you a voucher or something,” because she understood my side of the “five hour lead time to find a crew should be enough” dillema. She mentioned I should talk to the desk, which i thought was weird, and as I went to hand over the phone, the person was gone. I called back, and, unsurprisingly, the next person on the phone was a lot less empathetic and thought i was batshit insane for even proposing that I’d get a voucher.
To be clear, it’s less about a voucher for me at this point and more for someone just letting me know they care about the situation. JetBlue claims to be different, but stringing me along and then having (apparently less than trained) employees dangle compensation just to have another one rip it away isn’t a very fun scenario.
10 hours of awful. 5 hours by weather, 5 by jetblue.
I have a total crush on slow motion videography, and typically I’d leave a post like this to my tumblr (where I post my twitter feed and other random videos / photos) but this is too awesome not to share with everyone I know.
I’m no web designer, but feel like one of the most key concepts to any website, print ad or medium, is the amount of messages thrown at a viewer / user with each eye-load. Not sure if anyone’s done any research about this, but I really feel like there’s something to the idea of defining design messages, scientifically. For example, If something is large with text only, it’s sending the “this is important editorial” message, but if it’s rectangular shaped, it sends the “this is an advertisement” message.
While watching Good Will Hunting yesterday, I started to cry. Not because Matt Damon and Robin Williams are great actors (they are) but because there’s one scene in there that is so true to life, I can’t handle it. It reflected my emotions from two years ago perfectly, and that’s the scary part. There’s a scene when Matt Damon finally comes to grips with his abuse as a child, and Robin Williams encourages him, and then Damon just starts bawling as loud and as hard as he can. I’ve done that three times in my life that I can remember, and one of them was two years ago.
Two years ago, I lived in NYC, worked for AOL and was getting ready for my site to launch on June 15th. I didn’t have much to do with the launch, and to be honest, I didn’t really understand business or anything of the sort so I felt more than underqualified. I was moving headstrong toward that awesome goal of getting our site going, when, bam… it changed.
I was talking to my parents on the phone beneath my ikea loft bed, where I spent most of my time. I had a bunch of computers and the like set up there, and it worked as sort of a home office. My parents were expecting my brother, Ryan, to go to their house. They were an hour or two late, which is totally normal for a family with kids whose bladders aren’t the largest, and who’s stomachs beg for food frequently. Then, my parents had a ring at the door, and said “Oh, there’s Ryan, I’ll talk to you later.”
Five minutes later, they called back. It wasn’t Ryan at the door. It was the Police. Ryan died in a rollover car accident on the way to come see them.
I was devistated. I immediately started crying. I went out of my apartment on 89th street and started running west. I walked to 5th right next to central park and stopped. I couldn’t believe it. How could he be gone? We hadn’t talked in a month, and I looked to him for guidence on most “adult” topics. How could this be over?
My sister died in 1998, which may have helped me prepare for such a hard time. She had Cancer, so it wasn’t the same situation at all, but I was used to grieving. I felt like I had just gotten over Sherilynn’s death, why the hell did I need to start dealing with another family member’s death, and worrying about their family, etc.?
I immediately started making plans to get back to Utah. I called C.K., my boss at the time, and told him I wasn’t going to be able to work. I called him in tears, and I felt like a total tool, but I knew he’d understand. The team at Netscape really helped me out, a lot. I didn’t want to deal with any of the crap I was going through, but they helped pick up my workload.
Now, two years later, I find myself in NYC again, but I think I’m done grieving (or as done as anyone can be.) I still cry. I still miss him. I still have dreams about him. There are times (especially when my career is changing) I want to call him and ask what he thinks. Those are the hard times. The anniversaries? Those are the easy times, at least to remember him. I’m not going through what his wife / kids are going through, and those guys are the ones who need the most support.
(as an aside, I just imported all of my old blog posts here so you can see the archive stretching all the way back to 2003. My writing skills are immeasurably better than they were five or two years ago. Please, keep that in mind.)
For years, pundits and readers alike have been saying, “the magazine industry is doomed.” I’ve heartily agreed with them, seeing as how I’ve spent my time blogging and the like. Instead of turning over and simply dying, could magazines turn it around by making the magazine supplement a website, instead of the website supplementing the magazine?
The magazine to internet process is tried and true. Magazines like Newsweek, Time or even tech bellwether Wired simply re-purposed the print mag into an online form, often delayed from the original print publication. The natural response of a web-savvy crowd? “Why would we want to read what we’ve already read a month later?”
What if, instead, the often untimely magazine became the repository for the website? I’m not saying simply repurpose blog posts for print, but rather author original in-depth pieces from original blog content.
Say, for instance, a writer is interviewing three or four “experts” about HD-DVD vs BluRay saga. One of them is particularly noteworthy, maybe works at a market research firm and can talk on behalf of the company. If that person says something interesting, instead of holding on to the quote till the whole story is written, the writer excerpts the interview on a blog with some explanation that it’s being worked up for a future blowout story on BluRay’s big victory. The site then might get viral traffic and original content, with an expectation that the full story is yet to be explained. Then, the writer rinses and repeats the process, talking to execs, etc, till finally one day the full story is written.
Finally, after the print mag goes to press, the writer sculpts a blog post that sums up the article, gives links to the background interviews and the post goes live when the magazine hits newsstands. The site also offers an online version of the magazine (PDF and kindle, flavors, etc.) that includes the print ads.
I think you could sell the site at a certain CPM and then the PDF would become a calculated value-add to the print publication’s CPM.
Granted, I realize this idea needs to be baked a little better before it could be implemented, and there are still some user expectations that aren’t met (ie, WHAT?! I have to download a PDF?!) but it seems like a step toward the right direction. Granted, some magazine publisher would have to really take a chance and share revs on the PDF and print versions (or some online publisher needs to add magazine infrastructure, which seems less likely,) but to me it seems worth a shot, especially if the publisher is in the “uh oh, our business is changing” camp.
I’d love to hear some feedback, if you’ve got any. Leave a comment or email contact[at]randallcbennett(dot)com.
Just had the fifth visit from the illustrious Time Warner Cable. The difference between the prior four visits and this visit? A TWC foreman. This guy was on point. He wasn’t leaving till the problem was definitively solved. His solution? Swapped the “new model” Scientific atlanta Explorer 8300HDC with the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD. The lack of cablecard and bad Java-based OS means our cable works for longer than 50 minutes. Hooray! AAAAnnnddd… we got another month free of HBO and Cinemax.
My new tip? If you have two problems with cable people, escalate and make it happen. I called and said “I’ve had four people and the problem still isn’t fixed. I want to talk to a supervisor.” The supervisor put the Foreman on the job, and it’s awesome.
Now, I have HD, faster cable box / guide, and my cable has been working longer than 50 minutes. Hooray!
