Okay, I’m not trying to be a total jerk by skipping the awesomeness of this post from Anil Dash – you’ve really got to read the whole thing – but I wanted to share this excellent video that I’ve watched a couple of times, but forgot to share it here.
Check out how someone who’s never seen “Star Wars” before relates the story of the film and those that followed it, just by putting together what they’ve “heard” from others.
I just had to share the crazy skills of my former colleague at MTV, AJ Sarcione, singing the national anthem at a Lakers-Thunder game back in December with all of you… Check it out.
Over the last few years, Coca-Cola has had some fun with the concept of what went on inside a Coke machine after someone dropped some coins into it to make a purchase. This past week, they’ve shared something a little different, focused on the concept of the “happiness machine.” It’s created a bit of buzz around the Web, and shows no signs of slowing down. Check it out.
On Saturday morning, I headed out to Seattle’s Mobile Chowdown II, a gathering of some of the city’s best food of the mobile variety, which I stumbled upon via my Yelp addiction here in the Emerald City. I’d heard that the last event was crazy, with some of the vendors running out of food, the lines being ridiculous, and the facilities and things being a bit lacking, so I headed out to get there as it started up. As you’ll see in the first shot I took of the event in the Whrrl slideshow here, even that wasn’t enough to stay away from a long line for Marination, a merger of Korean and Hawaiian cuisines – but it was worth it.
I started it off with Marination’s shredded kalua pork sliders, on great buns with their super slaw (there’s a photo in the slideshow above). Let’s just say that two was most certainly not enough for this particular slider addict. Having not had breakfast beforehand (and really, why eat before this type of extravaganza), I headed over to Top Pot’s streamlined silver trailer and got my apple fritter on. I’d heard quite a bit of people rave about Top Pot, and after one item, I’d have to say I agree. Very good stuff.
What, you expected me to wash it all down with a little something? Well, of course I did it with local favorite Jones Soda, you know. I had the Jones Zilch Vanilla Bean (more on the sodas here), along with a Pomegranate a little later, and I’m most certainly happy that they’re very available now that I’m here in Seattle.
At that point, I kind of wandered a bit and took it in, wishing I was hungrier, heh. I closed out my “lunch” with a slice of Veraci’s pizza – pepperoni, natch. The crust was actually super tender – I’d heard a few people in the crowd talking about not really liking the crust, but I liked it as a nice mix between the foldable Brooklyn-style that I’m used to with my East Coast pizza mentality, and a more upscale, fire-cooked pizza. Not overdone at all, and not really needing the complement of seasonings that you have to add to some slices at your local pizza shop.
While I didn’t get to try out everyone’s stuff, now I have a pretty good idea on which trucks I need to be tracking down – if the lines were at all indicative of what people are into in this city for their street food, then I’ll be going “out” for lunch a little more often.
On the first day of 2010, Cablevision television subscribers in the NY area might have been surprised to see that they no longer had HGTV and Food Network as part of their available cable lineups, something they might have missed, given the coverage that the News Corporation / Time Warner contract negotiations had been getting. Those organizations managed to work things out, keeping the News Corporation networks on the air for Time Warner subscribers.
The same can’t be said for those other two networks, however. On Monday afternoon, I caught this tweet by marketing consultant / blogger Katja Presnal, who had just found out about the channels going “missing” from her lineup, and saw her subsequentposts on the subject, which pointed to the I Love HGTV and I Love Food Network microsites that Scripps Networks, owners of those networks, had created to distribute information and activate affected customers. Scripps has also continued its media campaign on the issue, with Food Network President Brooke Johnson going on CNBC’s Power Lunch on Monday to discuss its position.
Both of those sites are smartly built, offering easy ways to get involved on Facebook, post directly to Twitter, watch videos, and get Scripps’ POV on the situation. For me, the first thing that jumped out was how fans of shows have made a splash before and whether or not these – again, smart and solid – tools would be enough to further this particular hard-line negotiation. What came to mind was the peanuts protest that fans of CBS’ “Jericho” enacted on the network after the show was cancelled after its first season. That particular protest worked, with some 20 tons of peanuts being sent to the network at a cost of more than $50,000, and the show returning for a second season, before ultimately being cancelled a second time.
You know what, though, people? Let’s take this whole thing to the next level. Vote with your wallets.
Now I’m not going to go down the road of a la carte television subscriptions – there are people far smarter than me that can handle that discussion. Check out what people like Tim Karr or Jeff Jarvis if you’re interested in more on that subject. I don’t want to say anything about who’s right or wrong here as I don’t know the financials involved, and have worked too closely on the network side of this type of standoff, but I’m more than happy to make a suggestion to move the needle.
Where I am going to go is that if you want to move that needle in 2010, you’ve gotta vote with your wallets, purses, PayPal accounts, and so on. Want to tell Cablevision (or Scripps Networks) how you feel about this particular situation? You’ve got a few options – you can cancel or change your service, or find another provider.
Or, you can take my suggestion, and send them a buck. Before people all start sending paint rollers or frying pans to corporate offices or whatever, take that money and make your opinion known to the powers that be, whether they be at Cablevision or Scripps Networks. In fact, I’ll put up $20 of my own singles to the first 20 Cablevision subscribers who email me (tom (at) tombiro (dot) com), and I’ll send a note on their behalf along with the dollar bill to Cablevision HQ.
No, seriously.
Listen – social media tools and campaigns like what Scripps is promoting definitely have a place, but this is going to continue to be a dollars and cents issue, especially as we start loading up on Hulu streams, Netflix instant viewing, and TV-friendly packages like Boxee become more mainstream.
So that’s my challenge – I’ll pony up twenty single dollar bills, plus postage, and the rest of you Cablevision subscribers need to do the rest.
After seeing Ben’s excellent post wrapping up 2009 with some photos and links to some awesome happenings in his life, I’m just going to have to do the same as we chill this afternoon with some bowl games, pre-NYE dinner.
I started off ‘09 by getting (well, until the wedding) out of my “old” debt that had been racked up over the years, and parted ways (well, officially) with what had been my most successful blog to date, The Media Drop. Soon after, I found myself contributing to Google’s bottom line, getting a column with PRWeek online, and complaining about my car getting broken into again.
May and June were frantic months, as I headed out to LA for the MTV Movie Awards (huge shout outs to the MTV crew – miss you all!), which was just amazing, followed by leading the press charge on the launch of MTV’s “It’s On with Alexa Chung,” my first live, daily show that I got to be a part of, and the cause of my addiction to the Overheard in the Control Room Facebook group.
Lara and I got married on June 20, had a great time at Whistler in Canada, and had to come back to a home state that didn’t have pitchers of Kokanee Gold for our beer-drinking pleasure. Oh, and Lara made this impromptu “commercial” for the Fairmont in Seattle before we headed home from the honeymoon. I realized that I had a sports talk radio addiction, one that has carried forth to my time in Seattle, got to see a ton of my favorite artists on “It’s On” over the summer, including the Silversun Pickups. Prepping for the VMAs was a little crazy as we knew that the move to the Emerald City was coming in just a few months, and summer was coming to a close. I got my VMAs on, Phoenix put a great spin on a Cadillac commercial (sorry, I miss writing AdJab), and we shared the news that Seattle was on the horizon at the end of October.
Drinking like “Mad Men” characters was proven impossible, we drove across the country and saw some awesomeness in a lot of states, including South Dakota, and I realized that my brand new iPhone 3Gs was pretty much the same size as the cellphone I had in 1998.
This past month or so, I finished a year of taking a daily photo of myself and started a new one, Nike put some ads on TV that rivaled, at least in my head, those awesome “nothing but net” commercials that McDonald’s did in the early 90’s, and I certainly verified that my musical tastes are a little random.
There’s lots of awesomeness to look forward to in 2010, as my new employer has given me an amazing opportunity to hit the ground running here in Seattle, Lara and I are both getting used to the West Coast, and Molly the Super Puppy Face has decided that she wanted to hang around and torment Riff the Cat, so we’ll see how that goes.
And since I have no shame and just have to follow Ben Wagner’s lead on this – he has, after all, led the crew that’s turned MTV News into a visitor and pageview power in our digital age – here are some of my favorite photos from this past year, for your viewing pleasure.
Mount Rushmore at night
Lara and I meeting Tom Douglas in Seattle
Hanging our first picture in the new place
Riding the Peak 2 Peak in Whistler, BC
Picking up my second VMA
Our wedding in June
Seeing some awesome bands (Snowglobe, pictured) at SXSW in Austin
Working with Craig Brewer on MTV’s $5 Cover and going to Sundance
Going to (almost) the top of Mount Washington
Seeing Kings of Leon rehearse before the Movie Awards
Ruining multiple corkscrews of @jonsel’s parents’ on the 4th of July
It’s almost 2010 (wow!), and here’s my links you need to click for the day. Enjoy!
Congrats to Ben and Abbi Wagner on the news of Abbi’s pregnancy. Of course, Ben writes it up in his news-guy style, keeping you waiting until the end, even if you did look at the photo first.
After Dave busted on me for my top 25-played tracks that were born in the year of our lord 2009, I just had to link to this. Rex points to what last.fm sez are the most unwanted scrobbles – that is, the ones most deleted from last.fm users’ scrobble lists – for 2009. Let’s just say you’re probably not going to be surprised.
For those of you that aren’t so into the cult of the blog, this post from Wil Wheaton is a perfect example of why it’s awesome that they exist in the first place. Just replace Mr. Wheaton (or don’t, if TNG does it for you) with a musician, actor, politician of your choice, and imagine that they were side-commenting their own career or history, and you’ll see what I mean.
A couple of weeks back, Twitter released a list of the Top Twitter Trends of 2009. Those of you who get annoyed at my non-100% support of hashtags for all things on Twitter will note that beyond the hashtag-specific category, only 7 made the charts, overall, with real-text taking the cake for the most part. Again, this isn’t to say that they don’t work, only that the “average” user tends to stick to talking in actual words. Just sayin’.
Did you know that you could use multiple aliases for a given email address on your iPhone? But yes, you can. Here’s the solution for this very request, via Gruber.
Fan of Christmas (or Nike, for that matter) or not, you’ve gotta love the Christmas-themed spots featuring the MVPuppets that Nike’s currently running on TV right now. Check out the series, which kicks off with Blitzen (or Lupe Fiasco) throwing some beef Santa’s way, followed by Santa’s response (via the ever-awesome KRS-One), and finally Kobe and LeBron dunkin’ on some reindeer (dunk…dunk…dunkin’ on some reindeer).
Here’s the whole series:
Some awesome tidbits: “Santa lookin’ shook, Kobe lookin’ shook, LeBron lookin’ shook, I threw your ball on the roof.” Check for Santa’s “NP” jacket and LeBron’s “rap” around 1:30 in the third vid, too.
Here’s today’s batch of links you need to click, including some I’ve sat on for a little bit.
Over at bats:both, I shared some thoughts on the passing of sportscaster George Michael.
Time Out New York published some link bait for the entire universe by publishing their list of top movies of the decade. I’ll save the wrath of pen (or keyboard) for some of my blogger colleagues, but there’s some brutal choices on there. The “Donnie Darko” fan club will not be happy.
If they had Facebook in the “Star Wars” universe, it might look something like this.
