Those of you who use a feed reader to access my content should be seamlessly receiving access to my content which is now being posted at ChipGriffin.com. I will continue to maintain Pardon the Disruption as an archive of my older posts, but everything new will now appear at ChipGriffin.com.
The content will be very similar to what you have come to expect at Pardon the Disruption, though I will occasionally address a wider range of topics.
I published a column reflecting on my memories of my grandfather. He passed away today at 100 years old. Read the full column here.
The vile conversations taking place in social media threaten its growth. That's the subject of my latest commentary at Media Bullseye. Check it out and let me know if I'm full of hot air myself.
Saw this over on CC Chapman's blog. Had to tally up my own list. Basically, it's a list someone put together about 100 foods everyone should try in their lifetime. So far I have tried 73 of them (those in bold).
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake
Today, I stuck the proverbial fork into Cork & Knife. In some ways, it was a difficult decision. In others, it was a no-brainer. Let me explain.
When I started Cork & Knife over a year ago, I did so because I had a passion for fine food and drink and felt there was a void in the online world covering it. I am a big believer in the "new media magazine" concept that blends the best of traditional media with the improvements developed by social media. During the past twelve months, I was blessed with great writers, cooperative subjects, and interesting topics. As important, we generated decent traffic with very little promotional efforts.
I even had some sponsors lined up, but I had been holding them off because this was first and foremost a content project, and I wanted to time sponsorship with some new features I was developing and some marketing that was set to go.
Things were set to go in this regard a few months ago. At the same time, however, there were some personal developments that caused me to take stock and reassess all of the projects I was working on.
And before any alarm bells go off with that last statement, let me clarify what those developments were because they're not anything too startling. Many of my friends and colleagues know that I have a minor heart condition that causes a rapid and sometimes irregular heartbeat. First diagnosed as supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) some 12 years ago, I have been on several medications to slow my heart down so it wouldn't feel like I was on a treadmill when sitting down and reading.
In recent years, the diagnosis changed to atrial fibrillation (AF or A-Fib). It may be that it was A-Fib all along, or perhaps I developed A-Fib subsequently. Doesn't really matter. Neither one of these conditions represent a serious issue as long as they are well-controlled.
In any case, throughout the past decade my medications have been adjusted up and down from time to time. The drugs used have been changed periodically. This is normal for any long-term condition like this because your body may adjust differently to different drugs over time.
A few months ago, the A-Fib went from being an occasional occurrence to one that established itself more regularly. As a result, the drug cocktail changed a bit. Not really a big deal because I no longer notice any symptoms of the irregular heartbeat (I used to feel like I was hyped up on caffeine -- something I haven't had in 12 years!). In fact, the doctors have told me I can stay on these drugs for the next 50 years if it controls the heart rate and it doesn't bother me.
So, you ask, why would this cause me to change things around? Simple. The only unfortunate side effect of the medications I take is that they increase fatigue. When you pop several different pills that all have that as a side effect, it's going to take a toll.
For much of the past 12 years, I have battled this by taking fairly regular naps -- or just powering through for weeks at a time until I just crash for a week or so to regroup. With the new meds, however, the naps were becoming longer and powering through was not an option.
So I decided to combat the fatigue by doing something I had stopped doing when my first son was born 7 years ago -- eating well and working out a lot. Now, I head for my home gym whenever I feel tired instead of napping, and it has done wonders for my energy level. Of course, eating healthy has also helped, as has reducing significantly my obscene travel schedule that typically had me on the road at least 50% of the time (I recently had more than 100 flights a year for two years in a row).
But if I'm not traveling, not eating out much, drinking very little, and working out more, that doesn't put me in a great position to network with chefs, restaurateurs, sommeliers, bartenders, and all of the other folks that helped me track the fine dining industry effectively.
Essentially, I decided I needed to stay away from that old life -- at least for the time being -- to facilitate the changes I'm making.
That left Cork & Knife out in the cold. Though it was doing well, it really needed my active input to push the ball forward effectively. I could have continued to let it eek forward (as it has for the past couple of months) without my input, but that wasn't fair to the audience, to my great Managing Editor Lauren Schulz, the rest of the writers, or the business itself. It just wasn't ready to take wings on its own yet.
I'm glad I had the chance to work on this project for the past year. I had the chance to meet lots of great people and learn many interesting things. I will miss it.
But at the same time, I'm excited to look ahead. I have made changes beyond Cork & Knife, and in fact have suspended many of the projects I was working on in order to take some time off. I'll continue my hyperactive board member role as Chairman of CustomScoop and do a little consulting on the side for fun, but for the most part I'm considering myself "semi-retired" for the moment. That may last weeks, months, years -- who knows.
I'm taking it all one day at a time. And even though I've always considered myself a workaholic, I'm finding I like it more every day. Perhaps the way a friend of mine put it to me the other day is most appropriate: "We work to live, we don't live to work."
I'm a big fan of Pandora. I listen to it on my computer, my Sonos, and my iPhone. It provides a fantastic service.
But ... I can't go along with the whining and moaning Pandora and others are doing about Internet royalty rates for music. Though it is a weekend, this Saturday's article in the Washington Post still touched off another round of griping in the tech blogosphere, including a broadside from TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Some have even suggested that Pandora should be the sacrificial lamb in the battle against royalty fees, arguing that artists should view Internet radio as a favor to them and they should be grateful for the attention.
Rubbish, my friends. Artists deserve to be compensated when you play their works in their entirety. It's not as if Pandora and other Internet radio stations/podcasts simply play a 10-20 second snippet of a song and then link to a purchase option. Then you might be doing the artist a favor.
To suggest, as some have, that the royalty rate should be even lower than it is today -- or even non-existent -- is simply ludicrous.
The bottom line is that companies like Pandora have a revenue problem, not an expense issue. Less than three cents per listener per hour simply shouldn't be a heavy lift. Perhaps online users need to get over their mentality that everything should be free or ridiculously cheap. Someone has to pay for these services, and if advertisers aren't interested in stepping up, then users will have to pay.
People like Internet radio because of the lack or infrequency of commercial advertising. While we would all like to build businesses with minimal expenses, the reality is that it costs money to provide a service of any kind. The media business, in particular, is one that traditionally has fairly high content acquisition costs.
It's time for Pandora to find advertisers to support its cost structure -- or ask listeners to pay more. The $36 I pay each year for Pandora is a small price to pay for highly customized, ad-free radio service. It's just $3 per month. Certainly it would be worth at least $6 per month if it needed to double to come in line with the increased royalty fees.
If users are not willing to pay the three cents per hour in royalty fees, then perhaps there's not a real business here. Stop blaming the artists who seek to be compensated. Blame the Internet business mentality that minimizes the importance of revenue to growing companies.
I was stunned to learn today that the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC blocks employees from viewing videos posted on YouTube. Now, I know that many companies do this sort of thing, but for an important national regulatory agency to block access to potential useful information seems quite counterproductive.
This means that no SEC employee can see Professor Joseph Grundfest attack the recent Wall Street Journal article taking SEC Chairman Christopher Cox to task over the Bear Stearns situation. Certainly that's something of substance that ought to be of interest to someone at the agency.
Or what about being able to check out videos that are alleged to be part of penny-stock-pumping schemes? Surely the professionals at the SEC ought to be able to look at these without begging permission of the IT department.
SEC employees can't even watch video of their own commission meetings posted on YouTube.
To me, this is certainly very troubling. More importantly, it raises important questions:
Government agencies restricting employee access to online information seems to go well beyond the concerns that Shel Holtz has raised about similar activity in the private sector. Regulators and policymakers make decisions every day that directly affect the lives of individual Americans. They should certainly have access to as much information as possible to do their jobs effectively and efficiently.
This also represents a more serious problem than the concerns recently expressed over possible Congressional restrictions on the use of services like Twitter and Qik. Restricting access to information clearly presents a greater concern than regulating how information may be disseminated (though it, too, is an important issue).
If there are employees who are abusing their government computers to access information that is not for professional purposes, by all means deal with those individuals. But do not throw the baby out with the bathwater to do it.
I created a short video for a presentation I did today about the promising future (and productive past) of online advocacy. It is entitled "Digital Advocacy Works" and it covers the history of online advocacy since 1994 (in brief), as well as some of the technologies available today and what this means for companies and organizations looking to influence politics and policy.
Hey, it's my blog so first I get to tell a story, then you get the good news at the end of this post. Of course, if you're lazy, you can just ignore my explanation, but I promise to keep it (somewhat) interesting.
Ever since shortly after I founded CustomScoop back in 2000, we have made it a point to offer a 2 week free trial of our service to all comers. At the time, this wasn't a very common practice in the media monitoring industry -- online or off. Indeed, some of our competitors weren't too pleased, but I have always believed that once you try our service, you will like it. Fortunately, that has been the case for eight years, with most trial users offering positive feedback.
Price-wise, we have always been somewhere in the middle of the pack. We are far from the most expensive, but we certainly aren't the cheapest. Our goal in the marketplace is to deliver a superior product with the data and tools our clients need to be effective. We have consistently attempted to deliver the highest quality and most intensive human customer service in the industry. We believe we have succeeded.
Of course, we know that the price of our service is out of reach of many small businesses, sole practitioners, and yes -- even bloggers. Yet we believe many of these people would benefit from using our services.
Over the years, we have often been asked for a less expensive account that would meet this market need. Typically, we have referred people to Google News Alerts if they don't have the budget or clip traffic to justify paying for our serivce.
(Yep, that's right, we refer people to other companies, including competitors, all the time when we believe our service isn't the right fit. That's because I don't see any point in winning business only to see the customer disappointed with the product. You might score a few bucks in the short term, but the long-term cost, including word of mouth, will far outweigh it.)
We have been reluctant to offer lower-cost accounts for a variety of reasons, but primarily because we have built a business based on extensive human touch, superior service, and significant customization. As a result, we have not been structured to support high-volume, lower-cost accounts.
That has changed. Over the past year or so, we have worked hard to make significant adjustments to our technology to enable us to maximize the level of service we provide all customers. More important, it provides us with greater scalability in terms of customers as well as source coverage.
With those changes, I am pleased to announce that today we are debuting a new kind of CustomScoop account. We call it a "Personal" account but it works just as well for small businesses as it does for an individual. While it doesn't offer all the bells and whistles of our paid accounts, it does offer the same data and many of the key features.
You can see a chart comparing the personal account to our paid offerings here.
Ultimately, this gives communicators a great alternative to Google News Alerts. If you're going to use something free, you might as well use something that offers pro-quality tools. Specifically, here's what CustomScoop can do that Google can't:
Did I miss something? Probably. So check it out for yourself!
You can get your own free CustomScoop Personal account right now, right here.
For those of you interested in history or politics, I encourage you to check out the essay I wrote about the potential loss of "America's story" as author David McCullough calls it.
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