Fiat Lux
The ‘silly season,’ as Atrios likes to call it, has begun in earnest. One of my favorite bloggers, Shakespeare’s Sister, has been hired by the John Edwards campaign, and she’s not the only one. Undoubtedly other campaigns will start lining up to recruit other bloggers in the near future.
Although I’m pleased that Shakes got the gig, my happiness is not unalloyed with a little sadness. Although things are very nice and collegial around the left blogosphere so far, a day will inevitably come when the picture won’t be so pretty.
My crystal ball is too cloudy for me to see who will be involved or exactly what will cause it, but the time will come when loud accusations of backstabbing, lying, and bad faith will start to fly. People will choose sides, write long, passionate denouncements, pick fights in comment threads, bring out the sock puppets, and rearrange their blogrolls, all because they’re backing different candidates.
It will happen, and it will suck. Mark my words. I hope I’m proved wrong, but somehow, I doubt I will be.
As for me, it is way, way too early in the race for me to pick a horse. For one thing, so far, there doesn’t seem to be any significant difference between the various Democratic candidates in the field. Six months from now, maybe, the distinctions will be more obvious and I will be ready to make a choice.
I ran across the “Ask a Ninja” podcasts on iTunes sometime this past fall and thought it was a hoot. In fact, I showed one of the videos to my teammates in my Strategic Management class, and it was such a hit we took ‘Ninja’ as our theme for the final paper and presentation for the class. I an not sure our instructor liked it as much as we did, but at least we had fun putting the thing together.
If you’re curious, this was the �NINJA� strategy we developed:
Narrative � Is our strategy compelling and easy to communicate? If not, something is wrong.
Innovative � How will we keep being better than our competition?
Nimble � Anticipate and embrace change. Be where the competition is not.
Journey � The journey will not be the same at each point along the way.
Assess � Always be asking: How does this help reach our strategic objectives?
At any rate, it was nice to see that the AaN team is getting a nice payday for their efforts:
The folks at Ask a Ninja are pretty excited. I spoke with Kent Nichols today and he says that he and Douglas Sarine, the other madmen behind the year-old video blog, just signed a deal with blog network Federated Media that guarantees them a contract for sales in the low seven figures this year.
Basically, the two have agreed to work together in wooing advertisers. In exchange for the right to sell ads for Ask a Ninja, FM promised the video blog it would bring in a certain amount of revenue. Whatever FM sells, the two split, with Ask a Ninja taking the majority, Kent says. And if FM doesn’t sell that much? Well, Ask a Ninja then simply can walk out of the contract.
My favorite is still the “Pop!Tech” episode.
That’s either insane … or brilliant.
That cup of coffee just not getting it done anymore? How about a Buzz Donut or a Buzzed Bagel? That’s what Doctor Robert Bohannon, a Durham, North Carolina, molecular scientist, has come up with. Bohannon says he’s developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods, without the bitter taste of caffeine. Each piece of pastry is the equivalent of about two cups of coffee.
Thinking about it, I’m leaning towards insane. But I’ve been wrong before.
Click through to Flickr for the full-sized screenshot.
I was poking through my Sitemeter results tonight and came across yet another person who found my blog via a Google keyword search that included the words “evil” and “Jews”. As I’ve mentioned before, this happens with depressing frequency; several times a week is the normal rate.
What was a little unusual tonight is that the person who did the search was doing it from the domain allentowndiocese.org, which just happens to belong to the Catholic diocese of Allentown, PA.
Nice.
