CMM June 16th, 2008
There are three reasons why I felt compelled to write about Weezer’s new music video. First, Weezer was one of my favorite bands growing up. To this day, a handful of songs from “The Blue Album” and “Pinkerton” reside on my iPod. Some days, Weezer just makes good soundtrack music for my life.
Second, the lead rythym guitar and backing vocals is Brian Bell, a Knoxville native. I think this is very cool.
Third, the music video for “Pork and Beans” takes advantage of a very fun and promising marketing technique called viral marketing. The point of viral marketing is using word-of-mouth to grow awareness of a product or service. In this case, the goal is to raise awareness of Weezer and the new song. Much like I heard about the video from Silicon Valley Insider, hopefully someone will wander across my blog and keep sharing.
Check out the new video. It stays true to the bands fun-loving sound and spoofs some of the most popular video clips on the web. Its kind of fun to watch and see which ones you can identify, but for those of us that don’t have the time or attention span, here is a video providing a rundown of the 24 original shorts (hat tip Valleywag).
CMM April 20th, 2008
I’ve completed a relatively painless Wordpress update. If you have any problems, please let me know.
I’ve also got a really frustrating error with a plugin called Google Sitemap Generator. I’m not using the plugin, but I can’t delete it because it appears tied into some critical operation. If anyone has a thought or idea, please let me know. It is driving my OCD into overdrive.
CMM April 16th, 2008
I will preface this email by stating two incredibly valuable experiences I had as a result of my online presence.
First, the Knoxville area tweet-up last week was really awesome. It was very cool to put faces with so many names, and I felt enriched by finding so many smart folks in my immediate area. I’m a big fan of “innovate or go home” as a life strategy, and I feel like a central component of innovation is the environment (sometimes through hostility or pain, othertimes through creative friction). After having a great and thought-provoking lunch with the Knoxville twitter audience (on the patio in beautiful weather with a river and mountains for a backdrop), I feel great about the future of this community. On a side, Jack Lail from the Knox News Sentinel was a missed addition… but we can’t have everything. Maybe one day soon I’ll get a chance to meet him face-to-face.
Second, I was invited to participate in a political debate through American Republic Online around a year ago with a local Democratic party official in East TN. The topic was gas prices and profits in the oil industry. I made the argument that we shouldn’t beat up on oil companies for their profit margins (after all, they average between 8-12% margins after covering the extraoridnary overhead and R&D costs). As a staunch free market advocate, I argued that the short-term solution was soncumer side tax-breaks gor gasoline and policy support behind alternative energy. Since then, the Republican presenital nominee John McCain has come out strong in support of both initatives. I’m not so vain as to think that I influenced that decision, but it is nice to have proof that I had similar thoughts over a year ago.
Lastly, my online presence has turned into a swamp and I’m stuck in quicksand. About the only elements getting attention these dates are my email and twitter account. My Google Reader is getting cleaned out around once a week, and my blog has been postless for quite some time. Some of this is due to my life getting a little hectic with some life changes taking place, some of it is getting oriented into my new job (where 90% of the information I hear is proprietary, confidential or requires fact verification). Regardless, I’ve been drowning and want to make things simple (again). I don’t know how to do that… but maybe I’ll figure it out.
CMM January 27th, 2008
There is a new website for Knoxville called KnoxTube. They guys at Knoxify rightly ask, “could this mean more video bloggers in our area?”
While I won’t be rushing out to set-up a video blog, I do enjoy seeing the web trying to focus on communities. I’ve got no idea who they are, but Deviation LLC is listed on the copyright (which still says 2007).
CMM November 6th, 2007
Okay…. I’ve put up a new layout to the blog, but I broke some of the links. I’ll work on it later tonight or tomorrow.
