Savor

I wrote a blog entry over at beerdinners.com about Savor, a craft beer and food “experience”. It’s a pretty cool even, happening in Washington D.C. in May. I’m attending with a few other members of our brewery and will be taking photos, shooting HD video, twittering and all of that. Liveblogging, if you will. It looks to be a pretty amazing event. And I also took a look at the location, the Mellon Auditorium, nestled right in the middle of everything.

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Plus I wanted to test out an embedded Google map.

Guinness falls 725,000 signatures short

Guinness launched a funny ad campaign recently about trying to make St. Patrick’s Day an “official” US Holiday. They also have put up website about it at proposition317.com. The aim of the site was to get 1 million digital signatures from people supporting their proposition by midnight last night. Guinness only ended up with about 271,000 signatures, falling 700,000+ signatures short. 271k people represents a huge amount of traffic to your site, and I’d guess that not even half of the people who went to the site actually followed through and signed the petition (maybe even 15%?).

My question is this: was this multi-milllion dillar ad buy successful even though they only got about 25% of their hopeful signatures? If Flying Dog got 271k signatures like this, we’d be terribly excited. There has been a lot of positive reaction to the ads, everyone I know really thinks they’re hilarious. But given how enormous the Guinness brand is, is 271k people enough?

Steven Levitt is smart and I don’t know why I don’t read his shit

Steven Levitt is maybe someone you’ve read. I haven’t and I’m going to start. He writes blog entries for the New York Times and is also famous for his book called Freakonomics. An economist by trade, Levitt is more like a cultural economist.

Watching him on the Colbert Report from a few months back, he mentioned that people named Stephen tend to come from wealthier, more educated families than people named Steven. Which instantly interested me, as Stephen is my middle name. I wonder if I should start going by Steve. Maybe when i meet people I’m not really interested in, I’ll go by Steve just to protect myself. It’ll be my alter-ego.

Here’s Part 1 of Levitt on the Colbert Report, and here’s part 2. And Spike.com actually has some decent streaming television snippets.

Going Viral (in an STD sort of a way)

Undoubtedly, you know about how the Governor of New York fucked a prostitute like 10 times and it cost him his job. The woman who whored herself out to the Guvn’r, it turns out, has a MySpace profile! OK, it’s not really that surprising. I just looked again, and it was taken down so I can’t tell you the number of hits she got. But when I looked this morning, this chick had more than 4 million views. And I can’t believe that it was to hear her sheisty music single.

But that’s truly a viral thing. Of course her name and reference to her myspace page was in every news article about it, but that’s how viral marketing works.

But she is pretty fucking hot, I wonder what the ratio of really attractive prostitutes to nasty ones is.

[update: Turns out she got over 5 million hits in less than a day. I have a feeling this is going to be the feel-good story of the 2008 election. Anyone want to bet that she makes it onto Oprah? To get hits like that for my company would put us through the roof. Now all we need is for a politician to sleep with us.]

What’s next, Fire Hippopotamus*?

First let me tell you that I spelled Hippopotamus correctly on the first try. And I think that’s nice.

So there’s this web browser that everyone in the world uses called Firefox. And it’s a pretty good browser, there are lots of cool plug-ins, like the Greasemonkey script that adds “in bed” to the end of the main cnn.com headline. And by the way, ironicsans.com is one of my all-time favorite blogs to read, I’d recommend that it’s your favorite blog to read from now on, too. Anyhow, Firefox is pretty decent.

Enter Fire Eagle, a new Yahoo! enterprise that’s being run by Tom Coates, who incedentally once linked to a flickr photo of mine. It’s some sort of secure location sharing type site and sounds cool.

My gripe is this, why is it called Fire Eagle? Maybe that’s the new trend in developing applications and websites, much as flickr started the whole “get rid of an e if it’s followed by an r” thing (and other sites have followed such as tumblr.com). I should just start registering websites that have the word “fire” and an animal afterwards.

• fireant.com (probably taken)
• firehawk.com (my “replica” Fire Eagle site – maybe I can sell the domain to Google, Yahoo’s competitor)
• firemarmot.com (my Big Lebowski fan site)
• fireseal.com (also already taken, most likely)
• fireteledu.com (the teledu, of course, is a stink badger from the island of Java – and also the name of my ski team that raises money to fight MS)
• firefish.com (the first fully-aquatic web browser, perhaps?)

There are plenty of great names out there ready to be discovered, with plenty of meaning and wit. Fire Eagle probably isn’t one of them. I’d think that Yahoo could pay some smart people to develop some better names. I volunteer for this.

*Fire Hippopotamus ©2008 Josh Mishell – Don’t you go on stealing my name, now, developers.