With Nick Denton's backing, 22-year-old Nick Douglas chronicles the not necessarily glamorous lives of Silicon Valley's prometheans in his Valleywag blog. The LA Times reports (requires registration): Some techsters hope the site will undercut the image of Silicon Valley as a place filled with pocket protectors and taped-up eyeglasses, where it's all work and no play for the people creating the next generation of …
Your Moment Of Zen
OMG!!! Franz Ferdinand! OMG!!
The latest MySpace "secret show" features Franz Ferdinand playing the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City today. To get tickets, MySpace users--okay, me--have to make the profile "SecretShow" one of our coveted "top 8" friends. Secret shows began in January and have included performers such as NOFX and the Watson Twins. Publicity for the concerts is generated solely by word-of-mouth, an example of which comes to us …
I’ll Be Home By 11! Gosh!
Sprint will sell phones that can rat out your kids' whereabouts. It's the first service of its kind in the US. CNNMoney reports: The service lets parents look at maps on their cellphones or computers to locate their children who also carry mobile phones. Parents can also program the service to automatically send them text messages at specific times each day to confirm that their children have arrived at home or in …
Farley Returns To Drive Traffic To Lame Website
An ad campaign for Prometa, a medical treatment program for addicts, features deceased comedian Chris Farley as a silent spokesperson. A few days ago, Farley’s face appeared on a billboard on the Sunset Strip with the caption “It wasn’t his fault.” Here’s the banner ad version: My only disconnect is the Prometa website. It is timid, antiseptic and eerily like every other pharmaceutical-type site ever made. (It’s …
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You Could Be The Next “Creative Idol”
The New York Times today reports that Steven Spielberg will join forces with Mark Burnett to find the "American Idol" of unknown movie directors. According to Burnett, the FOX reality TV show, “In the Lot,” will “take advantage of the enormous number of self-made video and film shorts all over the Internet.” Here’s an idea. We—and by “we” I mean Wieden + Kennedy—should do the same for the ad biz. They’ve already got …
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Wildcats Soccer Scores Own Network
North America’s top women's soccer team, the New Jersey Wildcats, is launching its own global broadcast network starting in May. From Online Spin: This summer every Wildcats game will be available on demand by anyone in the world who has a broadband connection by simply going to www.NJWildcats.com or Google Video. Within hours of the game finishing, a 35-minute version complete with pre-game show, first half …
Who Would Win: NYT or GOOG?
In this week’s New York Magazine, James J. Cramer proposes that the New York Times disband as we know it and go online to challenge Google. There’s one way out of this mess for the Times. It is a bold, gutsy, and, some would say, foolish way, at least initially: The Times—here’s the irony—should go all-digital. That’s right. It should abandon newsprint and force everyone to the Web. It should make a stand against …