We Are What We Choose

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I didn’t post this last year but it has stayed with me.  It’s a great speech by CEO/Founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.  It’s the commencement speech to Princeton’s Class of 2010, delivered on May 30, 2010.   Choices are incredibly important and now, at the beginning of 2011, it’s good to step back and think about what choices we’ll make this upcoming year.  Here’s to you and me, building a great story also.  Read on….

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

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Long-Form Content is Coming Back

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I’ve noticed over the past year or so that the number of friends of mine who blog is decreasing.  I’m seeing less posts.  To me this is because Twitter and Facebook have taken all their thoughts.  The “I love Tron!” thoughts are now going into status messages and not into blog posts.  Which, to me, is fine.

But there’s actually been an increase in long-form posts i’m seeing.  The blogs i’m reading are full of actual articles of great stuff.  It’s great to get the “I love Tron” type comments on to Facebook and Twitter so the blog can hold longer form of actual thoughts and analysis.

I recently read a great article by Clive Thompson about just this topic.  His theory is that something more complex and interesting is actually happening.  He says, “The torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation.”  He states, “We talk a lot, then we dive deep.”

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Quora is About to Explode

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I’ve seen it before.  It happened with Twitter and with MySpace.  Sometimes there’s a confluence of media attention and star power that makes a website just explode – and that is about to happen to Quora.

If you haven’t heard of this website, enjoy this moment in time. It’s probably the last moment you won’t hear or read someone talk about this great new Q&A site that’s emerged.   By the end of 2011, Quora will be seen as one of the breakout hits.

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A Genius Ad

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When you click on the Movies app on your iPhone, you get this popup advertisement:

The only way to get past it without being taken to the Living Social site is to click “I Hate Cupcakes”

Sure, it’s cheating and misleading, but I’m guessing the click-through rates for this one is off the charts.  Who doesn’t loves cupcakes?

Next Three Days is a Throwback Suspense Film

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Next Three Days is a new film with Russel Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. It’s also written and directed by Paul Haggis who won Oscars for Crash (writer/director) and Million Dollar Baby (writer).

I really liked this film. Imagine your wife is wrongly imprisoned and your life just falls apart. That’s what happens here. Russell Crowe can’t handle it and decides he’s going to bust his wife out. He doesn’t know how but he’s going to do it. The movie does a good job of showing how he plots the job as well as how he has to change psychologically. Mentally, he has to do things he never thought possible. The film is a good look at how how a man can change given the right motivation.

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The Film Unstoppable is Bad

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Denzel makes a predictable train movie – again. Chris Pine seems like he’s on the train trying to think of the best story he can say about his wife that we’d find even remotely interesting. He does’t succeed.

Honestly, instead of seeing this film, you should just watch the SNL parody (below). It’s the same thing but funny. Movie 4 out of 10. Parody: 9 / 10.

Burlesque is not good but not bad either

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I’ve seen a slew of movies over the past 2 weeks (read: 6). Instead of one monster post of all of them, i’ll do a short review of one each day.

Today’s movie Burlesque. This film has a really strong beginning. The scene where Christina Aguilera’s character earns a spot in the show was well done. We really care about her and then when starts singing, it really hits home. I was sitting there thinking that this might be a modern day A Chorus Line. But no, it’s not. Around 35 minutes in, Burlesque slips into a mediocre movie, and it doesn’t really tell us anything about any of the characters. We know where Aguilera comes from but not how she learned to sing or dance or got her motivation to be a performer. Similarly, the other characters couldn’t even be called 1-demensional. I would say maybe 1/2 demensional. We got no background on any of them – even the guy Aguilera falls in love with. Apparently she likes him because he works at the same place, he had a couch she could sleep on and is good looking. That’s about all we know of him and of her criteria.

As the movie continued, I was waiting for the True Hollywood Story death spiral that always occurs to a newly crowned star – see Ray, The Runaways, and Walk the Line for film examples. That doesn’t happen here. In fact, nothing happens. While it’s refreshing that Aguilera stays the same grounded person throughout the film, it’s also boring. Also, the Cher solo needed to be cut. She didn’t hold my attention at all. I know she’s had a #1 hit in every decade since the 50’s but this isn’t her song for this decade. It sucked

All that nastiness aside, this movie isn’t as bad as you think it could be. 6 out of 10.

Learnings from Gawker

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Nick Denton who has been on the forefront of blogging and online publishing for the past decade is shaking things up again. He’s redesigning the Gawker websites (Gizmodo, Deadspin, Gawker, Defamer, etc.) to be able to better showcase top stories, making video more prominent, and making articles easier to scan. It’s also interesting to hear what he’s learned over the years. His main point – scoops and exclusives dictate the winners. He writes in a statement he released on Gawker:

One law of media competition applies as strongly to web properties as it did to their predecessors: scoops drive audience growth. Gawker Media experienced that rule, painfully, as Harvey Levin’s TMZ eclipsed our overly bloggy Hollywood site, Defamer. TMZ’s growth was built upon three gigantic stories: Mel Gibson’s meltdown; Michael Richards’ racist outburst; and Michael Jackson’s death.

He goes on to argue that simply reposting stories that are elsewhere on the web is a broken strategy:

For that, let’s look at the biggest exclusive of all — early shots of the iPhone 4 — which made Gizmodo into a household name. That episode more than any other demonstrated the bankruptcy of the classic blog column. In order to keep video of the iPhone prototype at the top of the reverse chronological flow, Gizmodo actually stopped publishing for several hours. How ridiculous!

Another interesting move they are making is moving to more video. In the past, he explained, is that video is twice as hard to produce without twice the payoff. Also, they felt that this was the differentiated skill of TV networks/ However, it’s now changed for them as making videos are easier and they are finding that TV companies are just as entrenched in legacy formats and methods with video as they have been for text. As he says, “Gawker bloggers, once they’re as familiar with iMovie as with cut-and-paste, can beat them.”

The new site looks more like ESPN Sportscenter and PTI than a typical blog like Techcrunch.  And that’s the point.  Put the big story front and center and the rest to the side.  It remains to be seen though that whether catering to the scoop and the new non-familiar user will alienate the daily reader, which is their bread and butter.   Personally, I like the move.  Even if it doesn’t work, I admire companies that are trying new tactics and innovating.  Denton’s been right in the past and if anyone knows online publishing and readership behaviors it’s him – so I’d guess that this is the correct move.

Leslie Nielsen: making unfunny funny

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Yesterday, Leslie Nielson died at the age of 84. He was a very unique comedian. He’s undoubtably best remembered for his Airplane! and Naked Guns roles. He used that fame to do a bunch of other films but nothing beat Lt. Frank Drebin from Police Squad.  His performance in the first Naked Gun was probably my earliest memory of laughing uncontrollably in a movie theater.  I was unable to contain myself.

There’s a good story of when Leslie hosted SNL back in 1989. I’ll quote NPR who wrote about it:

In the monologue, Leslie explained that he didn’t understand why he had been asked to host a comedy show, because he was neither a comedian nor a comic. A comedian, he explained, was someone who says funny things. A comic was someone who says things in a funny way.

Nielsen, on the other hand, was someone who said unfunny things in an unfunny way, and for some reason, people laughed. To demonstrate this, he delivered an innocuous line – something along the lines of “Mr. Jones, sit down, I’d like to talk to you about your son” – twice. The first time, he said it as though he were in a drama, and the response was muted.

Then he told us that he was going to say the exact same unfunny line as Lt. Frank Drebin, in an unfunny way, and he did exactly that, and the audience exploded. It wasn’t just indulging him as prompted, either. Without actually tilting his delivery in that direction, Nielsen made it genuinely funny.

I couldn’t find the YouTube clip for this but it shows exactly why he’s a master at what he does and it makes you appreciate his craft. Saying unfunny things in an unfunny manner and magically having the result be funny is an incredibly hard trick. And nobody ever did it better.

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