BuzzMachine

Blog shutdown
: So many bloggers are taking time off about now, I think we should declare the official Blog Shutdown every July. France shuts down in August. We shut down in July. All in favor, say “aye” — as soon as you return.

(Actually, this is just me trying to assuage my guilt for taking off a week and then paying too little attention to this, my digital mistress.)

Hey, Queenie
: Brit TV executive gooses the Queen.

F’ing flattery
: A colleague points me to this on F’d company:

Rumor has it FC’s namesake, Fast Company, are totally redesigning their magazine with new layout and a new LOGO, starting with their September issue. I hear from a few people on the inside that their new logo looks almost identical to F…company’s current logo, which, ironically, used to be a ripoff of Fast Company’s logo (which they made me change…) maybe i’ll send them a nasty letter.. har har. UPDATE: Here’s an official mockup of their upcoming December, 2002 issue, with new logo & design.

So F’d Company mocked Fast Company’s logo; Fast Company made them stop and redesign; F’d Company redesigned; now Fast Company is redesigning and copying the F’d Company logo. Got that?

If nothing else, this Internet thing is good for a laugh.

Andy, we hardly knew ye
: I’m not the only one. I confessed to fellow bloggers last night that I’ve pretty much stopped reading Andrew Sullivan and others nodded. Why? He’s just so two-note.

WeBlog, You Blog, We All Blog…
: A free, preview chapter from WeBlog, the much-anticipated book from Meg Hourihan et al, is now online here.

Evil bike riders
: I admit it. I’m prejudiced. I’m a bike bigot. I hate bike riders.

Not kids on bike. Not dumpy guys in shorts on bikes. Not moms on bikes.

I can’t stand the show-off dorks in their too-tight Spiderman outfits and padded codpieces who hog the road as if they think it was built for them.

I live in a hilly area with lots of trees and streets that used to be country roads (but they’re busier now; my town is a suburb in rural drag). Bikers love it there. They invade in packs. They take over the roads. It’s bad enough having to slow down to a crawl behind them, since they refuse to move to the right.

The other day, I was coming up a steep hill and coming my way were bikers taking over both lanes, heading straight for me. And they give me dirty looks as if I am taking up space on their road.

What frigging dorks they are. Dangerous. Deluded. Dorks in Spandex.

When I’m out running (hey, that’s real exercise — no wheels, no gears, no tailwinds, just sweat) I invariably run into bikers. I say, “Good morning,” and give a little wave. They act as if they’re concentrating too hard on setting the land-speed record to be able to be polite and say, “Hi,” in return.

Rude dorks.

Rude impotent dorks in ugly Spiderman Spandex.

Phat
: Will Warren on doctors’ confusion on fat:

Now I

Hmmmm
: So let’s get this straight:

I can start a blog and run it for free from Blogger.

Or I can pay the ever-struggling Salon to host my weblog for $40 a year and hope they stay in business for that long.

Hmmm.

What I would do with AOL
: Well, they are looking for a new president.

The old Pittman strategy was to keep charging customers more and more for cable, the Internet, high-speed, content, services, music, movies, anything that AOL Time Warner owned and that AOL could send over a wire. I heard him add all this up during one of those industry-time-waster convention keynotes and it didn’t take long before he was heading north of $100 and well into the low-three-figures a month. PowerPoint fiction. Fat chance.

The truth is that AOL is under tremendous competitive pressure from cable Internet access providers who give you access to the Internet and speed, which is all that most people want. At the same time, AOL has not given its customers anything new and innovative in its product in how long? And the company is renowned for horrendous customer service. Meanwhile, advertising is flaccid for everybody but especially for AOL, since it did not perform well too many times. And as AOL grows and as it loses customers (“churn” is the euphemism), it only finds that new and replacement customers are harder — and more expensive — to attract.

What to do?

Well here’s what not to do: AOL does not want to find itself primarily in the access business. Access is a commodity. And AOL does not want to find itself primarily in the advertising-supported content business; that’s tough rowing.

But AOL stands in a unique position online to have a billing relationship with more consumers than anyone else. That means that AOL is in the best position to sell people content — whether that’s content from its alleged (read: fictional) synergy in Time Warner or just content from producers who want to sell it.

AOL also stands in a strong position to be able to target advertising to consumers because it knows more about those consumers thanks to that billing relationship (with all due caution about privacy).

So here’s what to do:

1. Add irresistable improvements to its core killer aps. Microsoft now has a better instant messenger product than AOL and, yes, AOL can lose that market (just as it lost the browser war). AOL should invent the best email around (many of us started on its email and abandoned it). Care about your customers; give them new value; innovate still.

2. Make it a strategic goal to develop a billing relationship with as many people as possible. This means you don’t just sell the all-in-one AOL subscription. You sell deluxe email. You sell music, whether or not you subscribe to AOL. You sell others’ premium content. You sell subscriptions not only to Time Inc. magazines but to any magazines. You sell anything you can sell.

3. Develop friendly relations with content producers, especially outside the synergy fence, and sell their content and products.

4. Develop targeted advertising that actually performs for advertisers but don’t count on that soley.

5. Account honestly.

I was against the AOL/Time-Warner merger from the first. With AOL, Time Warner was doing nothing but buying — well, being bought by — the online strategy it was incapable of building itself. That’s the way Time Inc. has acted for years. When I was there, they got scared that Chris Whittle’s waiting-room-magazine company was going to kill their waiting-room audience and so they invested many millions in Whittle — and soon kissed that money good-bye. Then they needed an aggressive entertainment strategy and they offered themselves up to be were bought by Warner; I was there then (launching Entertainment Weekly) and I can attest that they never learned how to spell synergy. Then they failed frequently at finding an online future (remember Pathfinder?) and so they let themselves be eaten by AOL. Anybody could see that AOL was a bubble waiting to be pricked, anybody but Time Warner.

But they’re stuck with AOL now and they need to make the best of this.

So do what Ken Layne suggests, below, and then bring in a new guard with a new strategy.

I want to see this because (1) I still own damned, f’ing, cursed AOL stock (yes, I’m an idiot), (2) because AOL does have a huge number of customers it brings online and I want them to stay online, (3) because AOL can help sell content and I’m a content guy, and (4) because somebody should compete with Microsoft.

What he said
: Ken Layne says: :

Please, Time-Warner, fire Steve Case. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all, but Steve Case is the Internet Bubble in semi-human form.

: Saltire has the essential AOL/TW facts and figures.

A new corporate ethic called work
: Last week, we went on vacation to a wonderful place we visit every year called Skytop — an oasis of class in the otherwise classless Poconos, where vacationing families share the mountain air with business meetings, whose participants are golfing when they’re not meeting and when they’re doing neither are usually heard around the putting green just yelling into their cell phones at somebody back at the office.

Watching them waste time and money in exercises of corporate idiocy is my vacation favorite sport (since I don’t golf).

I like to observe them after they’ve broken into small work groups with ridiculous assignments, usually carrying huge pieces of paper with simplistic buzzwords scrawled on them: the protoPowerPoint. One day, I saw three of these poor corporate shlubs in the parking lot with a clipboard and a huge piece of cardboard they were supposed to make into something, no doubt as a surefire way to bolster their teamwork. They were procrastinating by talking about the “hip-hop names” they’d been assigned at their corporate event the night before. These three slices of walking Wonder Bread knew and cared jack about hip-hop and were being mocked and probably knew it but wouldn’t admit it to each other because they were trying to be company men and women and this stupid hip-hop thing was clearly the boss’ bad idea. Honesty came later. The next day, we heard three people from this group complaining on the elevator that they had to spend another night at this corporate retreat — instead of going home to their families before the weekend — so everyone could finish their skits. Skits? They shook their heads. So did my wife and I. Skits! What a waste of time and money. What useless idiocy.

I wanted to say, “Excuse me, but could you tell me what company you work for so I can go home right now and short its stock? And so I can make sure I never apply for a job there? And so I can chose not to buy its products because I don’t trust you people to make even the most useless widget?”

But there’s an even bigger problem here. What I witnessed in the Poconos is just one symptom of the disease we are suffering on Wall Street.

We have forgotten what business is all about.

Business is about increasing the future value of your company. Business is about profit, stupid.

Too many companies waste time and money going off to retreats to build teamwork or brainstorm or motivate. If you have to do that, it should tell you that something is seriously wrong. You should not have to train the employees of your company to work together to increase the value of the company. But, of course, everyone does.

And that is because I fear we are losing our collective corporate work ethic.

If, as a manager, you waste time and money with stupid games and skits, you’re telling your staff it’s OK to waste time on this crap when, instead, they should be going home every day asking whether they’ve earned their keep that day, whether they’ve contributed to the profits and future value of the enterprise. You are telling them it’s OK not to focus on profit.

If, as a manager, you tolerate or, worse, encourage and enage in politics, then you tell your staff that they can ignore their prime directive — profit — and play with heads instead.

If you do these things, it’s a short hop to the sins of Enron, Worldcom, Anderson, et al: faking profits instead of earning them.

Simplistic? Of course, this is. So is business.

Business is simply about making money.

When we complicate that, when we try to make it more than it is, when we play self-important games, when we weave tangled webs to deceive ourselves or our employees or our stockholders, then business falls apart and eventually, our customers and our shareholders catch up with us. That is what is happening today. That is why America’s economy is losing value at a frightening pace.

So I want to say to all those poor shlubs in the Poconos and their bosses: Go back to work, damnit. Earn money. Ask yourself with every decision you make and every day you work: Is this the way to earn money? If it’s not, you are wasting your time and my money.

It is time to return to that simple work ethic.

Curses
: Nick Denton on the collapse of our economy:

Any honest challenger to Bush — and I’m certainly ruling out Al Gore here — needs to recognize he cannot define the issue of corporate corruption on party lines. Bush administration officials are part of the country club class that took America for a ride in the 1990s; but Democrats were the champions of the discredited new economy, and took its money. A true reformer of corporate America needs to summon the popular rage and bellow: a curse on both your houses.

Baaaa-ck
: I confess: I was extending my vacation by not posting. I had to go back to work. I had to get back to life. But I didn’t want to leave the vacation and so I just acted as if I were still out in the sunlight and unavailable for blogging. But I’m not. I’m back.

: Ken Layne is back, too. Bravo. And don’t bother looking for conspiracies in the fact that we were gone and are back at the same time. There are no conspiracies, only coincidences.

AOL… AOHell… AHole…
: A pretty devastating story in the Washington Post on how AOL boosted its apparent revenue numbers before the I-always-said-it-was-a-big-f’ing-mistake-buying-this-pig-in-a-poke merger with Time Warner:

AOL boosted revenue through a series of unconventional deals from 2000 to 2002, before and after the merger, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of pages of confidential AOL documents and interviews with current and former company officials and their business partners.

AOL converted legal disputes into ad deals. It negotiated a shift in revenue from one division to another, bolstering its online business. It sold ads on behalf of online auction giant eBay Inc., booking the sale of eBay’s ads as AOL’s own revenue. AOL bartered ads for computer equipment in a deal with Sun Microsystems Inc. AOL counted stock rights as ad and commerce revenue in a deal with a Las Vegas firm called PurchasePro.com Inc.

AOL also found ways to turn the dot-com collapse to its advantage, renegotiating long-term ad contracts it risked losing into short-term gains that boosted its quarterly revenue….

Collectively, the deals helped AOL beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations for earnings per share — a crucial profit yardstick for investors — by a penny per share in two quarters in 2000. At the time, investors punished companies whose earnings were off by even a cent….”The bubble had clearly burst, but senior management was under enormous pressure to hit the [financial] numbers and close the Time Warner transaction, which would diversify the revenue base and lower the risk profile of the company,” said James Patti, a senior manager in AOL’s business affairs division at the time.

Patti said he told senior executives he was uncomfortable with some of the transactions pushed by his unit. Shortly after receiving a merit promotion, Patti was laid off in 2001, a move he said he believes was directly related to his refusal to participate.

I own too much of this stock because I used to work there and I stupidly never sold any. I’m in pain. [via Corante]

No wonder they left him behind
: Moussaoui tries to plead himself guilty and into a death penalty. Stupid, insane, or what?

Here is New York… the book
: Here is New York, the amazing gallery of photos of Sept. 11 that sprung up downtown, is turning the exhibit into a book that you can order here.

Sept. 11 Videolog
: The BBC sent me email alerting me to the Sept. 11 Videolog they created. It’s a place where people can share their Sept. 11 thoughts in video or audio. I recorded my story of surviving the attacks and will try to contribute that and I’ll keep watching this site as others contribute theirs.

bin Lay
: Just for the record, let’s note that bin Lay, bin Eggers, bin Anderson et al did just as much damage to the U.S. economy as bin Laden did. The measurement: In its steepest fall, the stock market lost more value than it did after Sept. 11. With friends like these…..