Lisa is such a sneaky devil. She organized a fabulous 40th brithday surprise party last weekend for my childhood friend Jan. The weekend before, a small group of us had gathered for an outing at her fave Atlanta restaurant – Savage Pizza (margherita on whole wheat, ‘natch) – as an excellent decoy to the *real* big event. While Jan may have been slightly suspicious with all the cleaning going on in the house, she was blown away by the assembled crowd of 40+ friends and family when she walked in. Enjoy the gallery here. But no, I have not posted the photo of Jan and I at our senior prom. Putting that on the web just doesn’t seem like a good idea….
Category Archives: asides
Workin’ Through New Years
Instead of spending New Year’s with my family to welcome in 2006, I’ve joined my other extended family in the Time Warner Center in NYC as we launch CNN.com on our very own ad server, DoubleClick’s Dart Enterprise system. We’ve been busting our butts on this for several months, and today’s efforts have gone amazingly smoothly, with teams in both Atlanta and here in NYC making everything work out. Follow this link to the gallery.
technorati tags: new years, nyc, doubleclick, advertising, adops
Sweeet
PC Magazine has just published a review of CNN Pipeline – the closing sentence has a really nice ring to it:
CNN Pipeline isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly the most impressive video offering the Web has ever seen.
technorati tags: cnn, pipeline, broadband, paidcontent, pcmagazine
Pipeline Comments and Content
Two quick links for the morning re: the CNN Pipeline launch on Monday.
- Digg.com coverage of Pipeline’s launch. The comments are a great read.
- A liveblogging of Pipeline’s first day of programming.
Most of the discussion is dismissive of this as a pay product. Others try to balance the trolling with reasonable questions about the acceptance of users if the conent was interspersed with ads. A good discussion overall. I especially like the comments from Digg users pointing out that there is really no other source for day-in, day-out live streamed news on the web other than Pipeline. A few requests for BBC Pipeline, Digg.com Pipeline, and ESPN Pipeline. One user predicts CNNSi Pipeline for $5/month by the end of next year. Nice idea, but they’d have to resurrect my old network to do that ;-). Here’s a great comment from blueice03:
I beta-tested this and I was overwhelmingly impressed. Why? Because few other outlets, sites, news organizations or what have you, have done what CNN is attempting to do with this. All these comments about how absurd it is to pay for a service like this are, not to be a troll, the types of comments I’d expect from the slashdot crowd. I guess I don’t get it. Why is there this expectation that services offered over the internet should be cheap or free? If you want a premium service then you should expect to have to pay for that premium service and this, my friends, is a premium service. Hell, it is even cheap. It is just a little over $2 a month. And whoever complained earlier about having to download CNN’s own special player, you don’t have to. They do have a web version that is download free. It is a great looking service and the kind of offering I have always expected news outlets to have but don’t.