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Chris Baskind dot com

Green Web Publishing & Other Stuff

Why the New Microsoft Ad Is Actually BrilliantSeptember 5

Silicon Valley insiders and the early adopter crowd seem to hate the new Microsoft ad. That’s a sign the software giant may actually be on target this time.

How Cuil Is It to Misspell Your Brand Name?July 29

The search game got a little more interesting Monday with the launch of Cuil, the next Google wannabe. But it was a rough first day for the Menlo Park startup.

Everybody loves a giant killer, so there was no shortage of online ink today over the public debut of Cuil, a new engine which claims to search “more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”

Cuil couldn’t fail to whistle up a tempest of launch coverage. Staffed by former Google employees with $33 million worth of investment capital at their backs, the secretive startup hinted at a new kind of search based on content, rather than link popularity (an oversimplification of Google’s methodology). All very exciting stuff.

Cuil’s big launch

The site’s rollout on Sunday night was met with hosannas from the Usual Suspects. Techcrunch,

Why Twitter Must DieJuly 24

Whether Twitter’s most recent technical failures prove fatal isn’t the question. The point is that they should be fatal, or we can expect more of the same elsewhere.

It’s hard to get too angry at a free service — particularly one which has been so enjoyed by its users. Which is why, when my frustration levels with Twitter passed the redline, I signed-off in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner.

For those who don’t labor in the dark seam of geekdom, Twitter is a microblogging service. Part instant messaging system, part bulletin board, Twitter has elevated the simple question “What are you doing?” to a bustling community of users and software developers. And unlike many small tech startups, Twitter has managed to carry its 140-character gospel well beyond the early adopter crowd. This week’s 1,400 word feature writeup in USA Today is ample evidence of Twitter’s breakout appeal.

Too big, too fast

Unfo

It’s Time to Can the Green Gloating over Fuel PricesJune 29

Some environmentalists continue to cheer on rising oil prices even as people feel pain at the pump. But green gloating is the fast track to popular irrelevance.

I spend most of my day writing and editing Green websites: EcoTech Daily, ecoTumble, and our soon-to-be-relaunched Lighter Footstep.

So I tend to bump into a lot of folks from the environmental crowd. Inevitably, these days, the topic of conversation turns to fuel prices. The last few months have turned us all into armchair energy analysts. We can tell you the daily closing price of light, sweet crude; we notice every hiccup in the production line; and there’s endless speculation about what instability in Nigeria or a hurricane strike on Gulf oil platforms might do to summer prices.

We told you so

There’s a certain amount of gloating, too. I suppose this is to be expected: environmentalists have known for years that nothing would be done to prepare our energy

Do You Make Content Or Noise?June 19

There are those who create content and those who help content find its audience. But the skills needed to excel at one or the other aren’t necessarily the same.

The noise you can’t ignore. That was the more-or-less official slogan of Jacor Broadcasting, one of the hot companies from back in my radio days.

Noise is good. It’s how people discover content, and is what drives the growth of the web. Social media guru Robert Scoble is fond of saying how “noisy” he is, and the same holds true for the top tier of SM personalities on services such as Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and FriendFeed. Together, they’re the Jacor of New Media.

Bring da Noise

Someone asked me the other day when I became one of “those social media guys.” I haven’t: I’m a web publisher. Content producers and the Noise are joined at the hip, but to excel at one or the other requires its own skill set and an exclusive commitment in time and energy. This is one of the reasons I’m becoming more selective in the services I utilize. Th