Nov. 3, 2009

NOW… AT LAST…THE NEW AMAZING

Gem of genius slowly blazing.

The one man who, without a doubt

Knows what this business is about.

The man who screams, when words are changed,

That all the changers are deranged.

Still, were he quieter or politer,

He wouldn’t be a copywriter.

— Draper Daniels (yes, Mad Men borrowed the name, but not the character).
Aug. 31, 2009
Bloomberg is advertising his Twitter on Gmail. Three of the ten most popular technology products of the last few decades!

Bloomberg is advertising his Twitter on Gmail. Three of the ten most popular technology products of the last few decades!

Aug. 31, 2009
Scoble dupes Google.

Scoble dupes Google.

Aug. 22, 2009
Shoemoney, eat your heart out: page created by Google employees has nothing but spam, and a Pagerank of 8.

Shoemoney, eat your heart out: page created by Google employees has nothing but spam, and a Pagerank of 8.

Aug. 18, 2009
Now, straight from the “you couldn’t make this up if you tried” department comes news that David McCusker has — you guessed it — swine flu.
— 

Get it straight! Is it something I couldn’t imagine or is it what I would have guessed?

(via)

Jul. 6, 2009
Born the son of Baptist Preacher in Virginia, he briefly attended The University of Virginia until he was expelled for drunkenly crashing a friends motor car during the prohibition era. Luckily he had just won 100 hundred dollars as a prize for a state wide chemistry contest that served as his final exam for first year Chem 101. While other students wrote novel chemical fourmulae as their submission,Reeves , not knowing anything about chemistry having spent the semester drinking, dancing and gambling, submitted an essay titled ” Better Living Through Chemistry” He would later use this title for DuPont campaign. The 100 Dollars was enough money to move to Richmond where he was hired at a new bank that was hiring young contest winners. Finding that he was horrible at accounting but verbally gifted he began writing advertisements. He soon moved to New York City to found Ted Bates & Co with Ted Bates.
— Wikipedia: Rosser Reaves
Jun. 25, 2009

Blogs I Read

Copyblogger: Presenting three rehashed tips from The Elements of Style, plus a couple polished turds from our private collection.

Mashable: Check out our top 10 reasons to retweet our list of the top 70 most retweeted Mashable articles of all time! (Please RT!)

Seth Godin: Find your passion. My passion is raiding Dan Rather’s secret collection of weird analogies.It might be a virgin squirrel, but it works for me. Now, find your virgin squirrel.

TechCrunch: You know what would be cool? @ev and @biz monetizing Twitter by using FCC loopholes to market cigarettes to minors. You know what would be cooler? Dropping the “You know what would be cool” part, and posting the story.

Kottke: I’ve been blogging in my pajamas since you were in your underoos.

The Business Insider: Ingredients for a successful blog network: a dozen great writers, and maybe three stock photos. (If I see that picture of Eliza Dushku sucking on whatever that thing is one more time, the Business Insider Headquarters is going to look like that generic “housing collapse” graphic.

Paul Graham: In the end, success boils down to being the 25-year-old me, taking advice from the 40-year-old me.

Jun. 18, 2009

Icons Plus Nuance

Election violence in Iran is a symptom of democracy in Iran. I’m not sure there’s a good Twitter icon to represent that thought, though.

Jun. 11, 2009

$134 Billion: The Worst Thing in the World to Actually Own

So, two Japanese nationals got caught with $134 billion in US Treasury bonds, and nobody knows if they’re real or not. Imagine, for a second, that you own the bonds, and they’re real.

  • If you sell them at face value, that’s a massive bet on your own honesty.
  • If you try to sell them at less than face value, you’re admitting you could be a crook. Who wants to bet billions of dollars on an admitted potential criminal?
  • You could try to prove that they’re real, but you might end up spending millions of dollars — and you might spend that money only to find out that they’re fake.
  • You could just wait for them to mature, and see if anybody else cashes in bonds with the same serial numbers. But then you’re acting like they’re really worth $134 billion, so anyone willing to risk anything less than that to get them is getting a good deal. Suddenly, your job is as hard as the secret services’, but your budget is zero.

So what would you do? Going to some remote mountain pass and trying to ditch those bonds as fast as possible sounds pretty good to me.

Jun. 8, 2009

So, a couple minutes ago, I had a great idea. I read HARO religiously, and forward pitches that friends might find interesting. Lots of people know what HARO is, but don’t have the time to read fifty “People who have had spoken to the ghost of a beloved pet” requests to get at one that’s relevant to what they do.

There’s an opportunity! I could just create a site that helps people automatically search HARO, and only send them the relevant pitches. Pretty easy to create, pretty cheap to maintain, and it would pay for itself with ads.

So I checked the obvious domain, and — at www.harohelper.com, somebody is doing exactly what I thought of, in exactly the same way.

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A tiny tumblr blog. Send me comments via Twitter: @byrneseyeview. Oh, the bio: I work at a web design company. I read blog entries from the last few minutes, and musty books from the last few decades.
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