ACC Won’t Make Final Four

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Okay, I had to put my most general NCAA tournament prediction somewhere so I can either gloat in three weeks or take my punishment.  Please note that I’m making this at least six hours before the selection show, but I don’t think it matters.  Here goes:

The ACC will not get a team into the Final Four.  The prudent thing to say, and what the logical part of my brain is saying, is that only one ACC team will get there.  But I have a gut feeling that none will get there.  And if one does?  It won’t be Wake, UNC or Duke.  My money would be on Georgia Tech.

Okay it’s official.

Women Are WAY Too Much Trouble

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I’ve always told my wife that she never has to worry about my fidelity because I’m preternaturaly lazy and dealing with more than one woman is way too much trouble.  To support my case I enter this story from iol into evidence:

Bucharest – A Romanian man lost his wife and mistress in one night
after buying both a personalised gold necklace and mixing up the gifts.

Petru Cioaba, from Focsany, bought identical necklaces for his wife and
his mistress and had their initials and a personal message engraved
onto each one.

But he mixed up the necklaces, and after he left his wife the necklace
one morning as a surprise present for her and went to work, he got a
message from a lawyer saying she was filing for divorce.

And now you know why I’m very glad my wife doesn’t read this thing.

 

Community Relations, Wal-Mart Style

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Wal-Mart is rewriting the book on corporate community relations with their innovative business practices.  To support this statement I enter into evidence this item from Dunkirk, Maryland (courtesy WMDT):

DUNKIRK, Md. (AP) – Wal-Mart is trying a new tactic to skirt
local ordinances limiting the size of its stores.

The company now plans to build two stores side-by-side at a site
in Calvert County where plans for a single big store were thwarted
by a size limit adopted last year.

Wal-Mart officials are calling it one of the first arrangements
of its kind in the country. The store and garden center in Dunkirk
will have separate entrances, utilities, and restrooms. And the
combined size of the stores will be 30 percent larger than the
75-thousand square-foot limit for a single store.

The community affairs manager for Wal-Mart’s eastern region, Mia
Masten, believes it’s the first time Wal-Mart will build two
adjacent stores in response to size restrictions. And she says it’s
a strategy the company is likely to consider in other areas.
Dunkirk residents who object to the potential traffic are urging
county planners not to allow Wal-Mart to skirt the rules.

And they wonder why some folks in Winston-Salem are getting their panties in a bunch over the proposed site on the W-S/Forsyth County line.

Blogs Don’t Do Diddly Squat

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MarketingSherpa just published this week’s issue of their B-to-C marketing newsletter, and here’s the teaser:

SUMMARY: Call us cynics. Blogs may be hip and trendy, but
they don’t do diddly-squat for most people’s businesses.

After four years of research, MarketingSherpa reporters
estimate only .03% of the 34.5 million existing blogs are
driving sales or prospective customers to their bloggers. 
(That’s less than 1,000 that we’ve been able to find.)

Want your blog to be the one that works? Discover seven
practical secrets from a real estate blog that gets
prospects to raise their hands and beg to be contacted:

Here’s the link to the full case study, which will be put behind their paid-subscribers only wall on March 18, 2005.

If you’re at all interested in making money with a blog you should read the case study.  It’s about a realtor in Tampa using his blog to generate qualified leads for his high-end real-estate venture.

Full disclosure: MarketingSherpa was a client of mine and I’m a huge fan of Anne Holland, the genius behind the whole MarketingSherpa online publishing machine. 

BTW, I think Anne & Company right some of the most compelling ad/marketing copy you’ll find.

I’m Number 3!

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So yesterday I’m procrastinating on my real work and looking at the referral stats for this blog.  I notice that I’m getting some click throughs from Google to my "Drink More Ovaltine" post.  So I check it out and sure enough at some point yesterday my blog, specifically that page of my blog, ranked number three on Google for the term "Ovaltine."

I’ve heard that blogs do incredibly well with natural search, but I truly find this amazing, and in a way troubling.

Here’s why it’s troubling to me:

  1. I don’t drink Ovaltine, and I don’t know anyone who does.  Now there are several Ovaltine drinkers out there who have found me, and I’m afraid of what they might do if they find out I drink two pots of coffee a day.
  2. I don’t currently have AdSense running on this site.  If I did I might have generated a couple of clicks worth at least four or five cents.  I’m always troubled when I miss opportunities for great wealth.
  3. Considering some of the other headlines I’ve written I’m kind of worried about what else I might be ranking high for, and consequently the kind of folks I might be attracting to this blog.  In particular I’m worried about the terms "doodle" (slight pornographic connotation), "courting" (same reason, at least for the fundamentalists out there), "litigious idiots" (way too many lawyers know how to read, and at least two have heard of the internet), and finally "State of the Union" (need I explain?).

Well, all told I’m probably not half as troubled as the poor director of marketing at Ovaltine who’s getting spanked on Google by a semi-literate blogger who doesn’t even want the ranking. 

Drink more Ovaltine indeed!

Update: Fred Wilson at AVC points out the "underwhelming" performance of Google AdSense.  I definitely agree with his point.

Wake Does the Right Thing

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As I mentioned in a comment on Patrick Eakes’ post about Chris Paul’s low blow to Julius Hodge in the Wake-NC State game last night, I thought that Mr. Paul deserved a one game suspension from the coach regardless of what the ACC decided to do.

According to the W-S Journal that’s just what he got.  (Here’s the statement on Wake’s website).

My compliments to the folks at Wake, and my sincere hope that Mr. Paul learns a valuable lesson from this.  By all accounts he’s the kind of kid that will, and from what I’ve heard about his family the suspension is probably the gentlest lesson he’s going to get from the people that matter to him!

ACC Football in March

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Thanks to the miracle of Tivo I’m in the middle of watching Wake Forest play NC State about two hours after the live action.  This after watching the North Carolina-Duke game thanks to the same Tivo miracle.

Sidebar: Life is definitely good when you can take your wife out for your 13th anniversary and still get to satisfy your basketball jones.  My eternal gratitude to whoever invented the DVR.  And I got to play an 1 1/2 hours of my own b-ball at the Y earlier today!

My keen analysis of these games?  All of the ACC basketball refs had to have come down with the flu and had the football officials sub for them.  I swear I haven’t seen so many bodies on the deck in years.

To make matters worse the whistles are very inconsistent.  Guys are mugging each other with no call and then their blown for a hand check.

Still with all that the Duke-NC game was fantastic. I don’t know if Duke choked or Carolina choked them.

I’m at about 13:00 left in the NC State-Wake game and ugly doesn’t even begin to describe it.  More on that later.

Update:  4:16 left in the game.  Wake is playing like crap, but I’m telling you that State is getting some home cooking from the refs.  It isn’t deciding the game because State is shooting less than 50% from the free throw line. Ugly.

Of course I think Chris Paul brought it on the Deacs when he gave Julius Hodge a pop in his Julius early in the game.  Also, Wake got its fair share of home cooking more than a few times this season in Winston-Salem.

Update #2: 26 seconds left.  Refs just fell for the oldest trick in the book.  State’s Evtimov pulled a flop and pulled Wake’s Williams with him, and they call it a charge.  Geez.

Update #3: Holy cow!  Justin Gray hits a 3-pointer from somewhere in downtown Raleigh with a hand in his face and with 12.8 seconds left to tie the game at 53, then gets back to defend the three point attempt by Ansur to cause an air ball.  (Okay he fouled the guy and the refs reviewed the replay and gave the Deacs an extra .4 seconds; so much for home cooking). 

Wake gets the ball with 4.2 seconds left, and Chris Paul goes the length of the court and hits a running one hander from 12 feet to the right of the lane.  The kid played and pretty horrible game, but man did he come through.

Wow!

Last note:  Check out Patrick Eakes’ post about Wake Forest and Chris Paul.  I commented and generally agree with him.

Greensboro N&R’s Letters to the Editor Blog: The Triad’s National Enquirer

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Alot of bloggers have commented on the rowdy Greensboro News & Record’s "Letters to the Editor" blog.  Many are lamenting the lack of civility, the nasty posts made by people hiding behind their pseudonyms, etc. 

Me?  I love watching people with firmly held beliefs trying to convince someone else with equally firmly held, yet opposite beliefs that they are in fact wrong about their firmly held beliefs.  This debate about torture is a prime example.

I’m sure this isn’t what John Robinson and company were striving for, but I feel the same guilty pleasure reading this blog as I do when I read the National Enquirer in the grocery store check out.  Of course I’m sure John & company would love the Enquirer’s circulation!

Drink More Ovaltine

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Remember in the movie "A Christmas Story" when Ralphie gets his secret decoder ring from his favorite radio show (I think it was the Green Hornet), excitedly runs to the bathroom and decodes the message only to find out that it says "Drink More Ovaltine"? 

That’s what first came to mind when I read this article about network TV shows using websites to further hook fans to the show.  But after reading the article I’m kind of impressed by their creativity. Here’s a bit about what the editors of NBC’s crime drama Crossing Jordan are doing:

The network has found a way to keep super-fans like Washburn engaged
with the crime drama: an online diary created by the show’s writers
that asks viewers to help the character Nigel Townsend of the Boston
medical examiner’s office solve the murders.

It’s a drama that
mostly plays out on the Web. Nigel will mention the unsolved murders
occasionally on the air and drop clues for cyber-sleuths, but he will
solve the case only at Nigelblog.com — with the help of Washburn and
other fans.

"It’s not enough to just watch the show," said
Washburn, 47, who works on the case from her Houston home when not
tending to her ailing mother. She’s among 13,000 fans of "Crossing
Jordan" who visited the site within eight days after Nigel mentioned it
in conversation with another character during the Feb. 13 episode.

I wish I had a crystal ball and could tell you what TV will look like in 10 or 20 years.  I don’t, but I can make a prediction that our various home entertainment vehicles are going to consolidate and morph into one big blob.

My hope is my TV and PC will be replaced by a centralized piece of hardware (server?) that feeds various high-quality screens (dumb terminal?) that are networked wirelessly.  My hardware will be linked to my info-entertainment feeds by high speed connections, and my content will be served by networks/publishers on a program-by-program (item-by-item?) basis.

In such a world the creative folks like those working on Crossing Jordan will win. Here’s to hoping.