10 Years Ago...

... I wrote this, which Brad Berens and Josh Messinger helped me track down. Back then, I had my own site called OLAF - The On Line Advertising Forum, and I wrote a semi-regular column there called "The Rant."  I say "semi-regular" because the individual columns had to be hard-coded and it was a big pain to write something and then get it live without the aid of a CMS.  By the time I got a CMS going, I was already writing for other folks.

Back then, I was getting my jollies and keeping my writing chops up by writing "The Rant" and posting long diatribes to mail lists like the O-A Discussion List, I-Advertising and the WWWAC Ad SIG.  Then this guy named Charlie Sayers calls me up and asks me to write for this site called Who's Marketing Online?  I was happy to oblige.

Almost immediately, WMO was scooped up by Andy Bourland and ClickZ.  So I wrote the media buying column for those guys for several years.  After Alan Meckler bought ClickZ, I worked with Nick Friese and Ken Fadner at Mediapost to conceptualize and kick off the Online Spin.  I wrote there for years until I decided to move on and work with the folks at iMediaConnection.

So it's been 10 years since that first column appeared on WMO.com, and it's been a wild ride.  Quite a few people have invested time and effort in me and my column over the years, and I'd like to acknowledge them here.  (Please forgive me if I accidentally leave someone out...)

• Doug Jaeger spent many late nights with me at the offices at K2, designing pages for OLAF, so that I could keep the information resources and The Rant going.
• Rich Birnbaum did a lot of the same, but on the CMS side.  Rich essentially wrote an entire content management system for OLAF from scratch, using PHP.
• Andy Bourland invested in me early on, keeping me aboard at ClickZ when it acquired WMO.
• Ann Handley was really my first editor, keeping me on track at ClickZ and taking care of my development as a writer early on.
• Claudia Bruemmer was also a great editor at ClickZ and helped me out immensely with my columns.  She's also a fantastic writer herself and has written things that have literally moved me to tears.
• Nick Friese has been a friend, occasional bandmate and Mediapost co-conspirator.  We came up with a lot of ideas together for content and community features at Mediapost.
• Ken Fadner always listened to our ideas and gave them a fair hearing.
• Masha Geller has been a great friend and the only person to work with me in two places (Mediapost and iMedia).
• Brad Berens is a fantastic editor who really took a lot of time to tease more interesting pieces out of me.
• Gretchen Hyman is my current editor at iMedia, helping me develop as the "utility infielder" for iMedia.

I feel really lucky that there are enough people in this industry who like my writing enough to subscribe to my various newsletters and feeds , and occasionally pass one of my pieces around to their buddies in the office.  It really helps me and my main business, which is all about strategy and execution behind the things I discuss every week in my columns.  Clients really dig seeing me, my partners and my staff published regularly.  It's very cool and I thank you all.

KitchenAid 100-Quart?

A KitchenAid 6-quart mixer was among the first things I ever bought my wife.  Upon venturing out for lunch today, I saw this monstrosity at one of the stores near our office, waiting to be carted away.

Think of what you could make with this...  Dough for 20 pizzas?  86 Funfetti cakes at the same time?  Maybe the world's biggest pretzel?

The Legend of Big Rock

Growing up in Wading River, there was a huge swath of woods along the back of our development, which provided fun for playing Army, sledding, hiking and exploring when I was a lad of 10. Since then, it's yielded somewhat to development. Our development was extended, someone built a golf course and more developments came in.

When I was a little kid, I used to hear the older kids who had lived in the development longer than me talk about a massive rock that was the size of a house. It was always talked about as if it were a good distance off into the woods, and for a couple years I didn't get the chance to verify the rumor. One day, though, I did follow some of the older boys to the Big Rock. For a young kid, this was terrifying because Big Rock was quite a distance from my house. The terrain was too treacherous to ride bikes there, and on short legs, walking there was a time- and energy-consuming task. Still, I did hike out there a couple times as a young kid and get a glimpse of this huge rock.

If you've grown up on Long Island and learned about its history in the public school system, you know about how Long Island was formed. A byproduct of the process of it being formed by the retreat of the glaciers is the peppering of the island with large boulders known as glacial erratics. Big Rock is one of many of those.

Back to my story. At some point after college, someone decided to buy up the land on which Big Rock stood, and they decided to put a golf course there. The clubhouse and course went in, houses and condos went up around it. They called the course "Great Rock" after the glacial erratic my childhood buddies and I knew as Big Rock.

So now there's Great Rock Golf Club. Right in the middle of this golf course is Big Rock.  Our Big Rock.  There's also a nice restaurant called Blackwell's.  And that's where my group of friends ended up on Friday night.

Of course, we had steaks and wine and beer well into the night.  And when we were done, we thought it might be fun to go visit our Big Rock.

So we did.  In the dark.  In the middle of an unlit golf course.  Late at night.  We climbed the rock just like we were 10 years old again, and that's where the blurry, dark photo above came from.

From the top of Big Rock, you can see lights from several towns over, pretty much all of Wading River and much of the neighboring towns.  I wish I had a nighttime camera, because the view is breathtaking.

Nickelodeon Upfront This Morning

Nickelodeon's upfront was this morning. I left home later than usual and went right from Penn Station to the Hammerstein Ballroom.

There was some interesting content, including something called iCarly, which is a TV show about a girl who achieves fame by launching her own webcast. There were a lot of things my nieces would probably enjoy. My only disappointment? SpongeBob SquarePants was mentioned only once. He's my favorite.

Someone named Natasha Bedingfield closed out the morning by performing two tunes, the second of which I recognized as being played in heavy rotation on my wife's favorite radio station.

Good presentation all around.