Somebody Please Clone Me

This morning, I had two appointments on my calendar. It was supposed to be a relatively light day, and I made arrangements to leave early so that I could kill two birds with one stone - meet with our contractor out in Wading River and simultaneously transport the carnivorous fishies to their new home in the tank I set up in the garage in Wading River.

When I got to the office this morning, the calls started rolling in. We landed a new client (Yay!), then two existing clients wanted to have conference calls, then a partner company wanted to discuss a product development idea I came up with. Now, the rest of my day looks like this...

2:30 PM - Rep meeting
3:00 PM - Client conference call
4:00 PM - Leave the office, go to Petland Discounts and get something to transport my fish in
4:30 PM - Update new client with progress on their media research request
5:00 PM - Product development conference call
6:00 PM - Leave for Wading River with fish
8:00 PM - Arrive in Wading River, acclimate fish, meet with the contractor
10:00 PM - Leave Wading River
12 midnight - Get back to my apartment, tie up any loose ends from today, sleep

How would someone get all of this done without the use of mobile technology? (Or cloning?)

Toys "R" Us Gone? Say It Ain't So

So Toys "R" Us is looking at splitting off Babies "R" Us and selling off the toy business.

When I was a little kid, going to Toys "R" Us was a rare treat - something that happened only a couple times a year. I used to go there in search of the latest Star Wars action figures, Atari 2600 games and whatnot. The place always seemed to be like a fantasy land, with all the latest cool toys around. It was such a treat.

Later in life, I worked on the interactive part of their business, buying online media for the company when they went head-to-head with online toy retailers during the dot com boom when I was working for K2. I remember going to the Union Square store with K2's COO, Rob Burke, and spending around $500 on toys for the office. We bought remote control cars, Nerf weapons, beach balls, a robot and a bunch of other stuff and let staffers spread it around the office. IIRC, then-chairman Matt DeGanon was seen from time to time stalking creatives and programmers with a Nerf bow and arrow, firing plush missiles over the tops of the cubes occasionally, for shits and giggles.

The news about Toys "R" Us is disappointing. What makes it more disappointing is that the mega-retailers are responsible. They sell their toys as a loss leader, making it difficult for a large toy retailer to do business at all.

I constantly tangle with my cousin Al over my point of view on this, but I think the world is a suckier place when a mega-retailer like Wal-Mart can succeed on the breadth of its offering, running other retailers out of business because they can sell things like toys at a loss and make it up on sales of other goods. We're moving toward a world where all stores are Wal-Mart because their stranglehold over the distribution of retail goods forces manufacturers to make crappy deals or risk being locked out of the stores entirely. Call it progress if you will, but will the country be better off when every retailer faces being undercut by Wal-Mart? How can you compete when the guy down the street is selling the same stuff at a loss and making it up from sales of household goods, small appliances, groceries and all sorts of other stuff?

Let's Lose This Crap

There are a lot of issues that merit being a part of the national agenda, but many of them still aren't getting the attention they deserve. North Korea is making strides toward becoming a serious rogue nuclear threat. The U.N. Oil For Food scandal has seemingly been swept under the rug. And what about those Iranians and their nuclear pursuits? Ask your buddies who don't read blogs what they know about this stuff and you're likely to draw blank stares. But ask them what they know about the Laci Peterson case and they'll drone on for hours.

Hey, I'm just as upset as the next guy that innocent people are being kidnapped or killed (or both), but these types of things happen all the time. People are kidnapped every day in this country. And murders happen every day. But for some reason, particularly when the victim is young, attractive and female, the press wants to follow the story from the missing persons report all the way through the sentencing of the perpetrator and beyond.

I want to see kidnappers and murderers brought to justice as much as the next guy, but this in-depth news coverage is distracting us from the real issues. Sure, get the word out if someone is abducted and help is needed from the public at large to track them down, but quit this nonsense about dedicating time every day to covering sensational murders where the victim just happens to be young, female and cute. No more Laci Peterson, no more Lori Hacker. Just drop it.

Yeah, Right. And I Suppose They Don't Comment Spam Either...

A series of blogs used in a cross-linking strategy to boost the Google page ranking of three porn sites run by adult site operator CyberQuest was the unauthorized creation of an affiliate, the company said Wednesday.

Read the rest of the article on Wired News.

It's always convenient for companies that get caught trying to spam or boost their Google juice to blame the affiliates. Plausible deniability indeed...

I dunno about other marketing companies, but in the rare instance that we use affiliate relationships for things like co-reg and CPA, affiliates have to sign a contract that states, among other things, that they won't use any unapproved media to generate leads and sales. Why can't everyone do this? Because they like to be able to blame affiliates when they get busted, that's why.

I really dug the PageRank concept until it spawned this crazy business of creating bogus links and spam with the goal of boosting one's PageRank. Someone should do a study to determine how much detritus is out there on the Internet for this sole purpose. There's comment spam, bulletin board spam, phantom links, phantom redirect pages, guestbook spam - all of this stuff can boost PageRank, and it probably wouldn't exist if Google didn't exist.

Not that I want to slam Google, but isn't there a better way to determine relevance other than measuring inbound links? And shouldn't Google perma-ban folks who get caught doing this?