When people are sharing more and more with each other and strangers, when audiences are splintering, when the relationship between a company and it’s customers is far more measurable, spending millions of dollars on “brand awareness” would seem hilarious – if it wasn’t sad. In other words: “You don’t want the kind of high-production stories …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
First Crack 48. Pontooning on the Wisconsin River
Jen and I go pontooning on the Wisconsin River and discuss river etiquette, a floating bar, and do a little fishing. Listen to Pontooning on the Wisconsin River [17 min]
Solving PowerBook Trackpad Dead Zones
For about a week, the half inch on the far left and far right of my Powerbook’s trackpad were completely dead. Basically, it turned my 17″ Powerbook trackpad down to a 12″ Powerbook trackpad. These dead zones caused extremely flakey and erratic cursor behavior not to mention my mental image of the trackpad’s size was …
How can Podcasting Help an Art Museum?
One of the exciting podcasting-related conversations I mentioned in an earlier post was with Brent Gustafson over at the Walker Art Center. We grabbed a coffee at the newly renovated Loring Park Dunn Bros and discussed some podcast-related services the Walker Art Center could offer. As expected, some interesting projects came out of our time …
Theres Always More Than One Way
“Don’t ever allow yourself to believe that there is only one way to make ideas real.” – Scott Berkun Stated more traditionally, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” The great thing about roadblocks is they force an evaluation of goals. For example, you’d like to publish a book and are continually rejected …
Exactly the Same Thing as a Treo from Earthlink
The reception on my T610 has been awful lately. A month or so back the signal was so clear people could hear the birds in my backyard. Last week, I’d be lucky to make out words under the tidal waves of static. On road trips, the T610 lost it’s signal the moment the “Wisconsin Welcomes …
Continue reading “Exactly the Same Thing as a Treo from Earthlink”
Is Closed a Cultural Benefit?
This weekend, I caught up with a college friend in central Wisconsin. Starbucks recently opened their first storefront in Wausau. Given Starbucks’ consistency and my lack of knowledge of other options, I suggested we meet there. “How about something local, like Jeannie’s Cafe?”, Tom asked. I’m always up for tasting the local flavor and we …
P&G Cuts Network TV Ad Spending 5 Percent
In response to unconfirmed rumors Procter & Gamble Co is cutting TV ad buys, Mark Ramsey asks, “What do you think this says about advertising from the perspective of a company that knows as much about it as anybody?” Exactly. When a company with a 130 year history of advertising says something isn’t working, it’s …
Continue reading “P&G Cuts Network TV Ad Spending 5 Percent”
A Better Dircaster for the FastCast
In my quest to make podcasting as easy as possible, I’ve hacked the dircast (turns a directory of mp3s into a podcast) to support getID3() (reads the ID3 tags; artist, album, comments, from an mp3 file). I’ve also cleaned up the code a little, making it easier to customize. Download BetDirCaster from here The first …
First Crack 47. Documenting Push the Future 2005
Push the Future 2005 was held this week at the newly renovated Walker Art Center. This episodes of the First Crack podcast are bits of my conversations with Loretta Hidalgo, Push Singha, Ethan Zuckerman, Leif Utne, Tom Mandel, and Push the Future founder Cecily Sommers. Listen to Documenting Push the Future 2005 [17 min] Let’s …
Continue reading “First Crack 47. Documenting Push the Future 2005”