Thursday, Aug. 6 will be my last day at Waggener Edstrom. I’ve two weeks off, then start at Microsoft. Since my post about making the change, one of the questions I’ve gotten consistently has been what would happen with this blog. The agency has generously said they would keep the archives live and online, and that I could keep blogging using the Glass House title on another service. So, I’ll keep blogging, covering some of the same topics that I’ve touched on in the past – the changing nature of communication, the value of long form journalism, the difference between transparency and translucency, how to bake sourdough bread, make a perfect martini and my sometimes thoughts on running. You can find my new blog here. Hope to see you there!

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The WSJ is clearly in full summer doldrums, as can by seen by the blinding flash of the obvious story about texting that appears in the personal journal today. Just for starters, the story about texting acronyms opens with…wait for it…an email anecdote, with the enormous leap then to the idea that “NSFW” was a texting term that has migrated to email. Uh, no.

There are some truly awesome quotes in here that just have to have been taken wildly out of context. Here is one:

“If a CEO does not appear to be tech-savvy, people may start to wonder, ‘Is the company not plugged into today’s technologies also?’” says Stephanie Grayson, a corporate speech and media trainer based in New York.

And the answer to that, of course is to have the CEO use texting language in emails? Or maybe ROTFL on stage?

Bonus points for the link to urban dictionary, which, IMHO, is way more about innuendo loaded language that is massively NSFW than anything to do with texting.

Another awesome quote:

Bert Martinez Communications LLC, a Houston-based consulting firm, hired a 20-year-old and two teenagers last fall to help teach texting vernacular to its staff of six. “It gave us the confidence that we could use the lingo and connect with the younger clientele on their level,” says Bert Martinez, president of the firm, which now conducts about 20% of its communication with clients via texting.

Note to all: if you find yourself saying “use the lingo” just stop.

email digg delicious live it!

The NFL, an entity that takes secrecy and paranoia to levels that make almost anyone else looks sane, has found twitter, which they liked when they thought they could control it, but now have declared it to be the enemy of the moment.

I have zero sympathy for the NFL, and encourage them to keep tilting at this particular windmill. After all, a league that is dependent on people who play the game, and which is so callous that it encourages coaches to lie about player injuries day in and day out in an attempt to get a competitive edge, well, this is a group that deeply deserves just a bit more transparency.

email digg delicious live it!

In the ad column for the NYT Today, Stephanie Clifford looks at a prediction for spending/growth in the communications industry. As expected, it’s overall bleak, but a few things jumped out at me as being especially interesting. First, talk about burying the lead…near the very end of the story was this nugget:

An interesting shift occurred in 2008, the report said. For the first time, consumers spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable television, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines.

“It’s not that people aren’t willing to pay for content, because they are paying for video games, fantasy sports information, music downloads,” Mr. Rutherfurd said. “There’s just some content they’re not willing to pay for.”

Holy paid content Batman! What a great and interesting way of viewing things. Here we are, all focused on newspapers and magazine and music as the best examples of what people will pay for, but if you broaden the view a bit it becomes clear that people will pay for things….just not the things we were looking at.

The other key nugget was a voice of realism on the business of media. Yes, it may be in decline, but it will be in decline for quite some time (bold mine):

Even assuming an economic recovery over the next five years, “newspapers, consumer magazines, TV and radio are shrinking and will not, in that period of time, get back to what they saw before,” he said.

John S. Suhler, the firm’s co-founder, president and general partner, said that while the declines for print media were severe, it was not a death sentence.

“Will there arguably be, maybe, fewer of them? Possibly,” he said. “Will some markets only be served by an online news service? Possibly. But these businesses are going to be around for many, many years to come, if not decades or multiple decades. It’s just their growth prospects are diminished.”

In this day and age, the above qualifies as optimism. Color me glass half full!

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Paul Krugman today takes a shot (again) at the bonus culture of the finance sector, noting that very little of value, real or social, is realized by what people are doing to generate massive amounts of money/bonuses.

Unknowingly, he pretty much writes chapter two for a column written by Tom Friedman at the end of last year, where he wrote:

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

At the time, this spawned from me one of my favorite lines about the bonus culture:

We grew to value those who somehow created wealth out of nothing, and created nothing of value with that wealth, instead of celebrating those who created products and companies that truly improved the lives of those around the world.

For sure there is value in the virtual – but this is not new. Books, whatever their form, are really owned as much by the virtual worlds they create as by the physical world they inhabit. Ditto for great writing and great creative work of any kind – movies, music, plays, poems, comedy and so on. The balance though has shifted in a way that is not tenable – we are valuing (at least with money) more and more that ability to “leverage” work that others have done or to seize an ephemeral advantage via technology to tilt the deck in our favor. And by so doing we devalue the original virtual work, and thus potentially put it at risk.

My sense is there is a shift happening, and that we are seeing in these massive bonuses and payouts is the last gasp blooming and flowering of a system in collapse. Hey, a guy can hope…

email digg delicious live it!