Paisley Does Dallas Dance Music

Credit Esca for setting sushi-loving Manhattanites straight—the Japanese do not have a monopoly on the expert preparation or innovative presentation of raw fish. Esca means “bait” in Italian, and chef David Pasternack has been reeling ’em in, hook, line, and sinker, with his astounding crudo (“raw”) and equally enticing cooked creations.

Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl told Sylvia Carter of Newsday, “I think it’s the freshest fish you can get in New York right now…[Pasternack] wins your trust.”

In his New York Times review, William Grimes concurred: “The crudo appetizers at Esca are the freshest, most exciting thing to happen to Italian food in recent memory…Pasternack works thrilling variations on a very simple theme.”

Why Blog?
By Steve Plunkett

A business blog is a valuable, multi-function tool for communicating with customers and employees. Blogs are the newsletters that never go away. They are a great way to post the latest information on the Web about your newest product or service. They provide a platform from which your employees, customers, partners and prospects can share information, data and opinions. And once these moderated discussions are posted, they can be “set in digital stone” for the world to read in perpetuity.

Oftentimes, I hear the question, “Why do I need a blog? I already have a website.”

For starters, a blog complements your website. It does not replace it. A corporate blog is a great way to direct traffic to your company’s site. This helps you to get sales leads from informed customers, provided, of course, that you have posted compelling information on your company’s blog.

Also, a blog lets you communicate faster, more flexibly and less formally than you would through other media. On your website, if you are sounding your own horn about your neatest, latest, greatest product, it’s called a press release. But if you’re blogging, you’re telling a story, complete with personal observations and pictures. You are guiding potential customers along the path of why you think your product is so neat, how it surpasses others in the market and, through a “comments” function, answering questions about your company and its products.

Of course, your readers will understand that your blogs are not completely objective – after all, it’s your company you’re blogging about. On the other hand, your readers also understand that your blog is a personal message to them, not an expensive, varnished piece of communications produced painstakingly over several months by your ad agency. In other words, your readers perceive a measure of earnest communications that just can’t be achieved through traditional media.

To create a successful blog, you need to start with a strategy. You need to plan. And you need to commit to updating your blog at least twice a week. That may seem like a lot, but don’t you have enough going on at your company to write about twice a week? Even if it’s a project that is going to take six months to complete, talk about it. Explain how you do “X” better than your competitors.

Simply put, tell your story. Keep your brand in mind. Plug your key selling points. Direct readers to your website. Be active and responsive. And start selling more.

Selling more. Is there a better reason to blog?

Google This.
by Steve Plunkett

In June of this year Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, then to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July. Here is the definition:

“to search for information on the Internet, esp. using the Google search engine”

Before this, General Motors ran a commercial during the Super Bowl for its

Pontiac

brand. The TV spot showed the letters p-o-n-t-i-a-c being typed into a Google search field instead of giving the Web address www.Pontiac.com. The voiceover said, "Don’t take our word for it. Google ‘Pontiac’ to find out!"

You might think “Gee, that’s clever and hip!” Well, someone else obviously did – and sold the idea to

Pontiac

. It may be clever and hip, but

Pontiac

is sending people to a place where it has no control over the content.

The agency representing Mazda, on the other hand, knew a little bit more about search engines. It bought ads on Google because Mazda had information that compared its models to

Pontiac

models. When car shoppers Googled “Pontiac,” like the

Pontiac

commercial told them to do, the search results included a webpage that sold Mazda as a better choice than

Pontiac

. In essence, Mazda used

Pontiac

’s investment to “piggyback” some of its own advertising. Pretty shrewd move by Mazda. And

Pontiac

didn’t learn anything from the experience.

Which brings me to, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.”

Pontiac

now runs similar spots in local markets. While watching television the other night, I saw a

Pontiac

ad that said, “Just Google ‘

Pontiac

dealers dallas-ft.worth,’” so I did. The results were pay-per-click ads for a few local

Pontiac

dealers. Problem is, studies show that quite a few people never click on pay-per-click ads. (Think about it; do you?) So, out of the predictably tiny percentage of viewers who actually did go to their computers and Google “

Pontiac

dealers dallas-ft.worth,” perhaps a fraction actually clicked the pay-per-click links to learn more. What a waste.

And for

Pontiac

, the story gets even worse.

When publishers announced that they would include the verb “Google” in their dictionaries, I blogged about the story. And because I used the phrase “Just Google Pontiac” in my post, guess what came up first in Google’s search results for “

Pontiac

dealers dallas-ft.worth.” Yep, my blog beat out the actual

Pontiac

website and the local

Pontiac

dealers’ websites.

Being the SEO specialist that I am, I decided to experiment and try some of my Internet magic. Today, when you Google “

Pontiac

dealers dallas-ft.worth,” the first result will be the article you’re reading right now. Still not

Pontiac

or

Pontiac

dealer websites. I can’t tell you how I did it. It’s a trade secret. But go ahead and try it.

The point is

Pontiac

has given up entirely too much control over its own advertising. A competitor or a prankster with the right Internet skills could hijack all of the company’s hard work, actually using

Pontiac

’s investment to take business away from

Pontiac

.

Pontiac

spent millions producing TV spots, buying airtime and reserving pay-per-click ads. To put it mildly, someone is spending a lot of money poorly.

Pontiac

should have hired an organic SEO specialist simply to optimize the websites for individual dealers and, in place of pay-per-click ads, the website of the North Texas Pontiac Dealers. If they had done that, the company would’ve saved itself a lot of money – and they’d be number one in Google instead of me, an SEO specialist with a blog.

At a time when GM needs a happier ending, “the rest of the story” could’ve been far more profitable.

Link: YouTube serves up 100 million videos a day | CNET News.com.

YouTube, the leader in Internet video search, said Sunday viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site, marking the surge in demand for its "snack-size" video fare.

Since springing from out of nowhere late last year, YouTube has come to hold the leading position in online video with 29 percent of the U.S. multimedia entertainment market, according to the latest weekly data from Web measurement site Hitwise.

YouTube videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online, the company said. Videos are delivered free on YouTube and the company is still working on developing advertising and other means of generating revenue to support the business.

Spammers are increasingly turning to mobile text-messaging, Web-based instant messaging, blogs and social-networking communities such as MySpace.com, according to mail services company MessageLabs.

The company, which sells a Web-filtering and instant messaging service, said in a report Thursday that spammers are increasingly targeting new means of communication to "bypass e-mail-based antispam measures and more effectively target recipients based on their age, location and other characteristics."

Social-networking sites offer spammers a "new level of convergence and capability to profile people," said Mark Sunner, chief technical officer at MessageLabs.

Link: Spim, splog on the rise | CNET News.com.

Link: MAXIM Road Trip.

At this point, we met a Dallas DJ named Paisley and he took a beautiful blonde and Erran on a side adventure while the rest of the team drank at Reno’s. They quickly moved through a side door, across the street, in one side of a bar and out the other, across another street and into a hip-hop club for a quick stage appearance where the host MCs blessed our road trip and almost torched Erran’s throat with some rather aggressive shots. They broke out back to Reno’s where they gathered the Atlanta boys and a couple girls and headed out the front. Rain then chased us into our friend Elizabeth’s SUV. Elizabeth goes by the affectionate moniker The Antichrist. We took a quick trip to yet another bar named Republic.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment wants to give bloggers free music and video–sort of.

The music conglomerate is promoting a new site, called Musicbox Video, that showcases videos, artist interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and other material from a broad portfolio of its artists. Want to see a film clip of Bruce Springsteen singing "The River" from the 1980 movie "No Nukes" or some clips from Franz Ferdinand? The site has it.

But Sony will also actively encourage fan sites and bloggers–who are mostly used to receiving cease-and-desist letters from studios–to link to the material. Links for adding Musicbox content are displayed on the site. Individuals thus could create sites focused around certain artists by linking to video channels on the Musicbox site dedicated to them, or link to several channels which, in the aggregate, comprise the most mawkish artists (in the view of the blogger) that Sony has to offer.

Link: Sony Music wants bloggers to promo videos, music | CNET News.com.

Two New York teenagers have been arrested and charged with attempting to extort $150,000 from MySpace, the popular community Web site.

Shaun Harrison, 18, and Saverio Mondelli, 19, both of whom are from Suffolk County, N.Y., were arrested in a sting operation last week, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said Wednesday. The pair had traveled to Los Angeles to meet people they allegedly believed were MySpace employees, but who were in fact undercover investigators, according to the district attorney’s statement.

The alleged crimes began late last year when the two young men took advantage of a flaw they had discovered in the MySpace Web site in order to obtain personal information on MySpace users, the district attorney said. MySpace discovered the intrusion earlier this year and blocked it. The Los Angeles-based company also reported the incident to authorities. During the course of the investigation, threats were made that unless $150,000 was paid, new exploit code would be released, according to the statement.

Link: Teens arrested in alleged MySpace extortion scam | CNET News.com.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have lashed out at a music pirate who leaked the funk-rock band’s upcoming album onto the Internet, and urged fans not to download it illegally.

The band’s spokeswoman said on Wednesday the offender was being tracked down. The group’s first studio album in four years, "Stadium Arcadium," is still on track to go on sale on Tuesday via Warner Music Group’s Warner Bros. Records, she said.

In a rambling open letter, the band’s bass player, Michael "Flea" Balzary, said he and his colleagues would be heartbroken if fans downloaded the album beforehand.

"For people to just steal a poor sound quality version of it for free because some a–hole stole it and put it on the internet is sad to me," he said.

Link: Red Hot Chili Peppers angered by Net leak | CNET News.com.

Second only to watching a company achieve great technological and business success, there is nothing Silicon Valley enjoys more than figuring out how, once attained, that company’s success might be outdone. A great deal of this scheming is currently directed at MySpace, the social-networking site that has become the online equivalent of the local mall, a place for teens and twentysomethings to spend lots of time — lots! — hanging out.

Because the MySpace business story couldn’t be simpler or more spectacular — two friends start it in 2003 and 24 months later it’s bought by News Corp. for $580 million — there are now dozens of start-ups trying to do to MySpace what MySpace did to the first big social-networking site, Friendster. (Buyouts are being made all the time, like the $102 million Viacom said it will spend for Xfire, a gaming site.)

Hundreds of business books and untold thousands of hours of consultants’ time have been devoted to advice on how to make these sorts of industry "disruptions" happen. Many are a combination of deft strategizing, shameless copying, wishful thinking — and some grasping at straws.

Always curious about how entrepreneurs approach the chessboard of competition, I found four MySpace pretenders and asked each the same question: If there is going to be the next MySpace, why is it going to be you? The question is necessary because to the casual observer, most of these sites look the same.

Link: WSJ.com - Portals.