Reflections on Northern Exposure

“Football’s a good enough sport, but can you die playing it?”

More than a decade ago, while flipping channels, I was first exposed to Northern Exposure. Maggie asked Joel to have dinner with her football-loving father under the pretense Joel was her extreme sports-loving boyfriend. (Not sure I got the above quote right, and google wasn’t helping. Found it.). As soon as Joel spoke that line, I was hooked.

In an effort to actually track down that scene, Jen and I are watching the series via Netflix. About a disc and half into Season 1, and I’m impressed how all the characters (except Joel) are so fully formed even from the pilot. Unlike other shows where all the characters are developed as you watch, the citizens of Cicely, AK are already mature – like old growth timber.

It’s Joel that is formed and molded, epsisode by episode, by his interactions with the other characters.

Also, feels like the exchanges between Joel and Maggie – especially in “Dreams, Schemes and Putting Greens” – seems unnecessarily antagonistic. Hopefully that’ll turn down just a notch or two as the season progresses.

Worst We Can Do is Go Bankrupt in the Morning.

I’ve mentioned this before in Job Security is the Ability to Get a Job, there’s a line in the Princess Bride that I think accurately describes the modern day employer-employee relationship:

“Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” – Dread Pirate Roberts

Today, Seth Godin said the same thing while channeling Tom Peters:

“Almost all organizations spend their time and energy looking for security and stability. This is nonsense. The only security you have is in your personal brand and the projects you’ve done so far.”

Fix the Employee Cafeteria and You’ll Fix the Customer Relationship

Rob over at Business Pundit posts on How Broken Windows Can Kill a Business. As always, insightful.

I’m a big fan of fixing the small things. Not only does it make a change easier to implement, all big things are made of small things, so the big things start to take care of themselves.

The first comment, from David Lorenzo offers insight as compelling as Rob’s original post:

“When I was in the hotel industry and I was faced with a troubled property I would always clean up the ‘back of the house’ first. I would scrub and paint all the areas that the guests wouldn’t see. I would upgrade the meals in the employee cafeteria and I would re-stripe the employee parking lot….I would explain that we were going to improve every detail of our hotel guests’ experience and we were going to start from the inside out.”

Podcasting Rewards Good Conversation, Not Celebrity

Greg Lindsay over at Business 2.0 linked to the Working Pathways’ economics of podcasting post in his Podcasting’s Nonstar System article.


“An unknown number of those Apple-made microstars will convince themselves that they hold a first-mover advantage in an untapped medium…Eventually they’ll fail, and they’ll fail faster than ever before…For the first time in the history of the Net, big media showed up early to play.”

The big media podcasts on iTunes main page are in direct competition with your best friend’s podcast, the podcast on your favorite avocation, and your own. In that list, who’s the star?

This weekend, I discussed podcasting with someone in the public radio business. As much of a win podcasting is for public radio to maintain the relationship with members (it’s the only way I can listen to On the Media) it very directly pits WNYC against KCRW against WBEZ against KNOW against the local NPR affiliate in your neighborhood. Now when I’m driving through Wisconsin, I can get my public radio fix without listening to Calling All Pets.

I’m excited for public radio to podcast more, their experience in donation collection could be extremely helpful to podcasters interested in covering their costs. I also think it’ll be a great way for some of the smaller affiliates, like Wisconsin Public Radio to attract members outside the reach of their broadcast antenna.

There’s very little preventing listeners rewarding all the public radio stations I listed above with membership. Though, the rewarding will be in response to a specific program that resonates with a specific listener, not just because the station exists.

The playing field is level, so this is true for all podcasts – big media, public radio, and 8,000+ others.

What I Read in the Sunday Paper

Jen and I have subscribed to a Sunday paper as long as I can remember. In Chicago, it was the Chicago Tribune, here in Minnesota on the west side of Highway 280, it’s the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Leisurely reading the paper over doughnuts and coffee is a tradition I’m quite fond of.

In an effort to determine what I’m getting in return for my $1.25 per week, I offer the following list of what I paid attention to this Sunday, July 31, 2005:

  • Money & Business; paged through, nothing interesting. Ironically, I’ve found it less compelling since they added Wall Street Journal articles.
  • Variety; Only read horoscope – predicts a decent day. For sure, I’m having powered doughnuts for breakfast.
  • Arts & Entertainment; Fringe Festival starts this week. Right, I added the Fringe Fest podcast to PodcastMN
  • Metro; paged through, nothing interesting
  • Comics; Opus, Get Fuzzy, Doonesbury. Looks like all the comics are larger this week. They probably pulled a couple and didn’t replace them.
  • Opinion; The headline said it was going to compare Minneapolis and Vancouver, cool. It didn’t (double checked to make sure I wasn’t in the Travel section). Paged through, nothing else seemed competent.
  • Best Buy weekly ad; Nice price on a 300GB hard drive
  • Circuit City weekly ad; Nice price on a 1GB SD card.
  • CompUSA weekly ad; Nice prices on USB flash drives
  • Office Depot weekly ad; Color laser printers are falling in price nicely.

I actually feel pretty good about the time paging through the weekly flyers. The newsprint, on the other hand, left me unfulfilled (could also be the doughnuts). Nearly all the newspaper articles I’ve read in the past year left me wondering a) where’s the story? or b) where’s the editor?

Did I get $1.25 worth. For sure, and I’ve easily ignored 50% of the paper – and most of the locally written articles. I’m even cool advertisers subsidizing the remaining costs. I make a commitment each Sunday morning to this local paper, it’d be nice if I got more out of it than hitting refresh on my RSS reader.

First Crack 54. On the Set of A Prairie Home Companion Filming

This summer, student filmmaker and long-time friend, Jon Steinhorst worked on the set of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion movie in St. Paul. I sat down with him the day filming ended to talk about how he got the job, what he did, and what he learned about filmmaking, directing, and fans.

You may remember Jon from First Crack #28 The Movie Episode and First Crack #29 Jon Shares his Geo

Listen to Jon Steinhorst on the Set of A Prairie Home Companion [46 min]

The Power of Podcasting 2: Feeling Bad for the Dead Guy

Dan Klass shares some fantastic stories on his podcast the Bitterest Pill. My all time favorite is #41 So, You Don’t Even Live Around Here.

If you’ve listened to #39 CSI:Naked Man Body or #38 CSI:Private School or checked out the little cartoon image of him. You know he’s not as svelt as he once was. In both those episodes Dan describes his audition and subsequent landing of a part in a CSI promo. How he auditioned for both parts, how his head got wacked and wacked and wacked as the dead guy. How it still stung as he was retelling.

Last night as I was watching CSI (Vegas, though I prefer Miami), Dan’s promo came on.

My first thought: “He’s much better looking than his cartoon.”

My second thought: “I feel bad for the dead guy.”

Without the Bitterest Pill, I would have assumed the dead guy was some synthetic person-like mass, not a part to audition for, let alone feel empathy for.

The New Phonebooks are Here, Please Recycle

The Jerk

Growing up, I always looked forward to the new phonebooks. Visiting my grandparents, I spent hours exploring the big city via their encyclopedic yellow pages. Steve Martin’s classic Jerk only amplified my enthusiasm and provided a chorus.

“The new phonebooks are here! The new phonebooks are here!”

Today, unexpected as always, a new phone book lay on my front step. As I look to Google and a company’s own website for phone numbers the massive yellow tome wasn’t welcome. It went straight from the front steps to the recycling bin at the back of the house.

Steve Borsch seconds.

A Case for Attention.xml

A couple months back, I was shopping for a new car, Jen and I spent hours combing automakers websites looking at their models, the model’s specs, comparing it against the car we wanted to buy.

Ford knows I went to their site. Honda knows I went to their site. Both know which models I looked at, which pages I loaded, and where I left. If they don’t…well…that’s a different post. They don’t know what of their competitors’ offering I studied. I’m happy to share that with them and anyone else interested. Ford might just glean I’m intrigued with the Honda Element but feel its mph is irresponsible. Honda might just glean that Ford still doesn’t have anything interesting. You might glean I’m looking for a stylish 4-door wagon-type vehicle with decent mileage – and might be able to make a recommendation.

At the transaction level, all I’d let Ford and Honda know about me is: in Minnesota, on a Mac, currently owns a Dodge Neon. No other personally identifiable information – unless they gave me a reason to offer it. You on the other hand, may know more about me. You might even have my email address, phone number, and some other bit of information both unique to me and integral to my car buying.

Notice the difference between in the information you, my friend and loyal reader, have and the information I’ve given the automakers.

What would the automakers have to offer me for the same level of information I’ve offered you?

Welcome to the Attention Economy.

Steve Gillmor’s Not Kidding about it. He’s started the non-profit AttentionTrust to prove it. Seth Goldstein is on board, and concisely states the need for an Attention marketplace,

“Our attention establishes intention; and our intention establishes economic value. Once one recognizes the value of one’s attention, it is shocking to see how cheaply most people offer theirs to companies looking for their business.”

Attention.xml, or something like it has huge implications for measuring the success of a conversation. It has the potential to solve the problems of Nielsen ratings, web metrics, and counting a podcasts listeners.