In a down advertising market, a game maker has decided to absolutely flood the available online ad space with the image shown to the right. For some reason, my ad block software seems to fail on this particular set of ads, so I see it all the time and I’m sick of them. So my plea is, please don’t play the game, or better yet, do play the game and kill Evony!
It’s interesting, yesterday I sat in a marketing meeting and there was a discussion about advertising and one of the key execs in charge relayed a story that when he goes to parties and people ask what he does. He replies advertising and they move away to talk to other people. His view is that this is the opposite of what he’d like to see happen (he’s one of these forward thinking, advocacy-based authentic voice advertisers based upon tangible benefits communicated by others on behalf of the company.)
My view is that the most scarce resource we deal with is attention. Since the attention span is shrinking dramatically and since there is much more competition for that scarce resource, advertisers are taking a more brute force approach as a general rule to “take” attention rather than the more effective and subtle approach advocated by the advertising exec in the meeting yesterday. The question is, how can an organization effectively communicate its message without alienating the population? That’s a question worth answering.
If you purchased $1000 of Bank of America stock one year ago, it would now be worth $204.
With Citigroup, you would have $147 left of the original $1,000.
With General Motors, you would have $0 left of your investment.
But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of BEER one year ago, consumed all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling price, you would have $80.52 and a bad hangover.
Based on the above, current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.
It’s called the 401-Keg Plan.
OK – it’s not that funny, but a little gallows humor can’t really hurt, right?
State as of June 1, 2009
For those of you who do not live on the San Mateo Coastside, you may not be tracking the $300M project that has been underway for a few years now to dig two tunnels through San Pedro Mountain between Montara and Pacifica by passing the always treacherous Devil’s Slide portion of Highway 1. This project was contemplated for decades with many options presented, finally, in 1995 the residents of San Mateo voted on Measure T giving the project a kick start. Active construction got under way in fall of 2007 and should be completed by 2011.
Thus far, two, 1,000 foot bridges and the tunnel maintenance facility have been completed and as you can see from the image above (courtesy of
Caltrans) the tunneling is now at the halfway point. Rather than using one of the large tunnel boring machines, the team opted for the New Austrian tunneling method which consists of removing material (scraping, digging, and blasting as conditions dictate) and then immediately erecting a set of steel arches which are covered in concrete so that only the active digging area is the only spot unsupported at any given time.
I’ve posted some photos of the project below, enjoy!
Tunnel Entrances at the south side of San Pedro Mountain
A view of the tunnel interior
Another view of the tunnel interior
A view out of the tunnel looking south toward Montara
Array of equipment being used close to the working face
Continuous digging machine, the head breaks up the rock at the working face and arms collect the scree onto a conveyor belt which loads into a truck to send to the fill pit
Working on the arch, drainage, and concrete cover used in the New Austrian tunnel method
Digging with an excavator at the working face
I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time. Recommend a Microsoft product: Bing.com search engine. It’s actually good, the results are reasonable and I love the added information it brings to me when searching rather than having extra clicks to dig for it. Now, is it a Google killer? Hardly. But it is the first viable alternative to Google the industry has seen in some time.
I recommend you give it a whirl (don’t forget to tweak the search options in the top-left corner for optimal results…) Try bing.com.
While we’re at it, I also quite like Wolfram Alpha, not a search engine, more of a science and reference engine – it’s also quite good at what it does (hype from a few weeks ago notwithstanding.)
