I ordered some rubber boots from Gempler's. Now I'm on their mailing list. What's not to like about their ad?

Been getting more spam than usual lately that slips through, but this one caught my eye:

Women will bake you pies because of your mega size. The whole galaxy will be yours with the size like that.

I do like pie.

Surfing the NY Times on a ridiculously gorgeous July 5th - don't worry I'm on my way out. There is an interesting piece about how Twitter has turned up as something useful. Turns out the savvy brands are watching their names on Twitter. Have a look for yourself:

PRACTICAL TRAVEL

Twitter Comes to the Rescue

By MICHELLE HIGGINS, Published: July 5, 2009
From bad airplane seats to poor room service, customers are getting surprisingly fast responses to their tweets.

I've been meaning to change it up a bit for quite a while. I added an ad unit on the right. This involved getting rid of the categories list and moving down the links to my friends' blogs (sorry guys).

I was watching Cool in Your Code, Woodside: Queens; Little Melting Pot -11377 today which I had PVR'd from the broadcast on WNYC. I think they'll let you watch the whole episode online. It's a great show for getting a micro look at the good stuff around NYC. I do have to warn you the hosts are a touch over the top, I don't think you can call it schmacting if it's hosting a show, but it's close.

Cool in Your Code is actually how I found Arnold Hatters, perhaps one of the best hatters in the world, ( 535 Eighth Avenue, Between 36th & 37th Street ). I have purchased a brown fedora, and two straw hats (for the summer obviously) from them. Their customer service and commitment to quality is unmatched. My wife has a coconut tele (as you see on the right) and noticed a slight problem with one of the stitches, she stopped by and they replaced her hat before she could completely tell them there was a problem. They take care of you with an almost saintly patience and nearly insist you try on half a dozen hats before you buy. The gentleman I usually speak to also taught me the secret of how to wear a hat properly.

The two things you should know about hats are:
First, A proper hat is worn with a slight angle to one side, left or right, you choose. Wearing it square on your head makes you look like a rube. Seriously, check the old movies. Once you put a hat on properly, it's the most obvious thing inthe world.
Second, a bit of etiquette, a man does not touch another man's hat without permission - let me re-phrase because some people don't understand this - a man DOES NOT touch another man's hat without permission.

Oh yeah, and what I started blogging about, a Pontiac commercial. Don't own a car so doesn't much sell me on anything, but I do love the treatment of Spy Hunter. Brilliant.

For the last few weeks I've been running an AdWords campaign to advertise my wife's online store selling her knit goods, www.bernicesutherland.com. It's been really interesting and has lead to sales. I am running three campaigns, one targeting just the US, one targeting just Canada and one targeting both US and Canada but is a display campaign. If you want to see the creative for the display ad head over to my home page.

At any rate, I'm killing it with impressions in Canada but am getting better performance in the US (based on Click Through Rate, CTR). I am debating what to do next, I am getting most of my clicks from Canada and while the US ad is performing better, fewer clicks mean fewer opportunities for conversion. Have a look for yourself

I was surfing forgetfoo.com while waiting for a build to complete. This video caught my attention and I just thought it was seriously cool.

Here is the resulting commercial

and now you just watched a 2:45 ad for Sony... you hear that Sony... send me a check.

Tonight I attended a vloggers meet-up at the rocketboom studio here in NYC where my friend Kathleen and her producing partner Tom of Dinosaur Diorama productions spoke about the realities of producing video for the web.  It was a good time, and Kathleen and Tom did a good job of laying out there both their understanding of what it takes to get video on the web and the enormous economic and logistical challenges that they wrestle with to get their bumble bee to fly.

And then the night got interesting.  We went over to a bar called Two Eighteen and happened into what appeared to be a wise-guy convention complete with a fellow standing just outside an alcove opposite to the bar SINGING the tunes (with a microphone) over the bar's speakers.  Some serious "fly me to the moon" going on.  Kathleen remarked how fantastic this was to have what looked like a wise guy singing rat pack for us while we drank.

And then it got better.  Vinnie Vella walks up to us (yes, THE Vinnie Vella) and tells us he's the emcee for the night and that there is quite a show coming up.  He then proceeds to got on the microphone and tell the whole bar not to worry about the dozen or so dudes who look like wise-guys, they're just actors.  He then proceeds to introduce a Barbara Streisand look alike who sings a Streisand song in a full length sequined evening gown.

Well as it turns out from what I can tell the actor Vinny Vella has made living playing mob types for some pretty high powered mob movies.  He played "Artie Piscano" in Martin Scorsese's Casino.  There is a video link on his site of him talking with Martin about a scene he did with Scorsese's mother.

To circle back around it was really interesting talking to people in the independent content generation scene, i.e. vloggers, try and reason out how to monetize through the various avenues of distribution and streamlining content to keep costs down.

Finally, because I pay attention to what Kathleen says and I am unendingly willing to plug my friends work, I offer you the following thought:  Respect your independent web video content creator.  They are likely working on a shoe string trying to squeeze just a little more blood from a stone to raise the money to keep going.  So go watch theburg.tv the allfornots.com and give them your eyeballs and tell your friends.

Thanks go to Kathleen for letting me be part of her entourage.  By the way my entourage name is "Cheetah" - just so we're clear.

Ari represent, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Ari's demo was great, cut through the bullshit and straight to the code, run it, break point and show the money.

I am currently over Kearney, Nebraska ( I would throw in a link for you but I'm not connected to the inter-webs right now).  Two seats to my left is Noam of Blog.a.lish and right behind me is Jason of soon to be some blog somewhere.  We're on our way to Mix 08 in Las Vegas - Microsoft's Big web development conference.  The next few days will be dominated by posts about happenings at the conference.  Under a cloud of Wi-Fi, armed with a Wi-Fi enabled phone with and a post by email setup through Flickr I'm going to be a buzz with conference posts.

Last year at Mix07 the buzz was Silverlight followed by the Google-DoubleClick acquisition.  This year is certain to be Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo (is it safe to call it hostile yet? or just post bear-hug?).

This year has a few sessions about online advertising, an obvious subject of interest for anyone who knows why the web is "free" and/or want's a slice of the pie.  I'm also hoping to get some more insight into LINQ, Silverlight and the MS MVC. And, while it will be tempting to rant, I'm probably going to refrain from sharing my well earned opinion that WebParts are junk.

Actually, on a more non-specific front I'm going to quiz my MS friends about testability.  The project I am currently working on is using Sprint .NET as an IOC tool and N-Mock as a mocking tool. I'm curious what the MS boys have up their sleeve in this vein.  As I start to feel the effects of the TDD Kool-Aid these things have become more important to me as part of my daily work.

Sorry about the absence of links to the various subjects here-in.  I really am at 38,000 feet.  If only there were really Internet access on planes.  Then again, where else would I get to feel cut-off from the world in a cocoon of I-can't-affect-anything - oh wait, I ride the subway to work.  Thank you MTA for keeping me relaxed when I'm powerless.

Thanks for holding the line. Now that that's taken care of. Over the last little bit I've been watching the percentage of my modest traffic from search inch up to a higher and higher percentage. As of this writing, It looks as if I'm holding steady at the top of the Google search results for "Dave and Busters Phoenix". This is a fairly interesting little trip into SEO. I'm starting to wonder if I should be detecting when people arrive here by search (dasBlog has some hooks for that) and show ads to those people. I'm not really interested in disrupting you-all, my loyal readers, with that kind of thing, but I can't help but smell the potential of essentially passive revenue at some point in the future.

For those of you catching up it all got started by the following blog posts (in chronological order)

• December 12, 2007 - Dave & Busters - Did I miss something?
• January 12, 2008 - Search: Dave & Busters Phoenix
• January 24, 2008 - Well Dave and Busters Phoenix appears to have worked

Let me preface this by saying I have absolutely NO DATA support this idea, nor do I have any means to really acquire any. Let me just go further and say I have NO DATA WHATSOEVER on any subject besides what I had for breakfast. This is not an analytical piece, this is a hypothetical piece

Here is theory:
As the writer's strike continues (started November 5, 2007) the "compelling" programming available for television diminishes. This means two things about the TV watching public, there is less to watch on television and there are less people watching television because of the former. The fact that there are less people watching television is probably a bit of a farce, truly the American people will watch any crap on TV, but drip drip drip somebody is frustrated they don't have their new season of shows and may eventually turn off the television. Now, I would posit that a drop in television would very likely equal an increase in internet usage. What else is there to do but update your Facebook account, see what's going up on your favorite blog, or mindlessly surf? Since internet advertising is largely a numbers game. In display advertising more page loads = more impressions = more delivery of inventory and in text / CPC space more page loads = more opportunities to find the right ad you're going to click and when you do more $ for the site using adSense, more $ spent by the advertiser. Either way as volume increases on the internet more revenue pours into online advertising. So at what point do the advertisers and the agencies (let's call them the ad buyers) realize that television isn't reaching their demographic.

Let's talk specifically about men 18-34. Some time ago Wired magazine had an article entitled The Lost Boys (August 2004) where they looked at the difficulty in reaching males in the 18-34 range. Most telling is this quote from a Coke exec

"It's not that men 18 to 34 have stopped watching TV," explains David Raines, the Coke VP in charge of divvying up ad money. "But they're doing a lot of other stuff, too" - going online, watching DVDs, playing videogames. "The bottom line is, ad dollars will follow the consumer."

Network executives freaked at the Nielsen news, but not everyone was surprised. In the five years that Jeffrey Cole has been running the UCLA Internet Project, he's found that Net users consistently watch less TV than other people - in 2003, more than five hours less per week. This pattern has held for every age group, for both sexes, and in every country he's studied, from Hungary to South Korea. Young men are simply the advance guard. "Broadcasters used to say, Internet users are different," says Cole. "But we show that as you go online, you watch less television." Last year, when Cole did a quick survey of people who do watch TV, he found that only 5 percent of them actually paid attention to the ads anyway. "The business model of television, which is to deliver viewers to advertisers," he declares, "is as troubled as that of the music industry."

Okay, okay, so what this is an article from 2004 and some what tangential to my point. Yes, the my point is more or less a correllary to the point of the article that people are moving from TV to the web. I guess my point is, if I'm taking notice then people who are spending ad dollars and are getting Nielsen numbers for viewership on re-runs have probably long since concluded they need to find a way to reach the consumer, and my guess is online is where they are. They get the bit about the dollars following the consumers

Obviously, if this is any substance to this we're talking about fractions of a percent at this point if it's even measurable. Still, as the strike goes on fractions add up and while I'm sure we're not near the tipping point but will the reinstatement of TV really put the genie back in the bottle? While its too soon to tell what happened in Q4 and natural growth in the industry puts growth in display advertising industry in Q1-Q3 2007 up 15% against 2006 with network television down (Network TV -2.5%).

So, anyone have any numbers or research to make this unsubstantiated theory a substantiated one?