Weekend Weather...Ugh!

This weekend's weather made me want to stay home all day and veg out. Cold, rainy and disgusting with no end in sight. Say all you want about April showers and May flowers, I'd be happy to sacrifice the first crocus of spring just to ensure that we don't have gorgeous summer-like weather during the week while we're all cooped up at the office and then have crummy, disgusting weather over the weekend when we'd all rather be mountain biking or something. Driving around on Sunday was like a giant game of Super Mario Kart. Idiots who insist on traveling at normal speed in record-setting rain invariably become an integral part of retaining walls or go flying off into trees when they hydroplane across flooded areas. Lauren and I saw several bad accidents on Sunrise Highway and the Southern State Parkway. Multi-car pileups and flipped SUVs seem the norm when we get flooding of this magnitude.

Splogs Decreasing Signal to Noise Ratio

One of the things we do when checking out a potential client is plug their brands into Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster and a couple other blog search engines to get an informal gauge on how folks are reacting to the product/client/category. A good number of these searches are valuable in terms of getting unfiltered opinions. But an overwhelming majority are links to splogs and auto-reposted material on valueless blogs. If we don't find a way to self-monitor, it won't be long before splogs make the signal to noise ratio unacceptable and folks abandon blog search engines. A democratic approach to what gets listed in a search database would help.

"Blog" Losing Its Meaning

So the word "blog" is losing its meaning, eh? I agree. The same thing is happening to the word "podcast."

To me, though, the issue is that marketers are really starting to dive headlong into blogs and podcasts without really knowing what the heck they're doing. That's what results in situations where marketers are calling something a blog that has no interactivity whatsoever but looks blog-like because it has a bunch of press releases posted in reverse chronological order. There are a ton of marketers who think that "podcast" is synonymous with "audio downloaded to an iPod" too.

In attempts to understand blogs and podcasts, marketers will try to force it into a mold they understand - the broadcast model. Thus, unless folks are vigilant, "podcast" will unfortunately become synonymous with "downloaded audio" and things that don't have comments enabled will be erroneously called blogs.

An End to the Bleacher Creatures?

Link Good article on the Disneyfication of ballparks.

I can understand the introduction of family sections. That makes sense to me. But eliminating the rowdy fans entirely? Nah. Sometimes we like to be drunken idiots.

Some of us grew up that way. I was used to sitting in the cheap seats until I got my first job in advertising. I often tell a story about when Mark Westlake worked for The Sporting News and gave me and my friends the four best seats in Yankee Stadium. They were so close you could reach out and touch the field. And I forgot just how close I was, to the point that when I heckled Derek Jeter for making a rare error, he shot me the dirtiest of looks.

The truth is, sometimes we like to sit away from the people with young children and the suited business executives taking clients out. We want to drink beer, yell like hell and carry on like neanderthals. Sometimes. That ability should be preserved and occasionally celebrated, not marginalized.