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The Daily Lark

Welcome to the Daily Lark, the rants, ramblings and musings of Andy Lark - serial opinionator, mover and shaker - currently

Steve has an interesting post on Apple’s mojo steadily eroding. I agree, although I’m not sure any of us could arrive at the same thesis if Steve had done his keynote and Apple had launched some noteworthy products. In particular I agree that some of Apple’s hottest client-side products are loosing their luster to better web-based competitors.

What I would say is that Apple’s mojo has shifted as well, moving to the device. There it is rock solid mojo.

Then there is this from Dan Lyons, who is back positing again… yay!

I’ve been filing a lot out of Macworld and will have more coming later in week from CES. (Groan.) Latest is “Macworld, MacBoring,” describing the sad-ass spectacle that was yesterday’s Macworld keynote by Phil Schiller and wondering, “Is Apple’s golden era over?” Left out of this article (because I filed fast) was the fact that despite the lameness of the keynote, and the lack of anything really exciting, there was no shortage of bootlicking fanboys in the audience, cheering over every little thing and sometimes moaning orgasmically. There’s only one word for this: scary. Even worse were the hardcore Mac hacks who were sitting in the press pool and cheering too. (While most of us were just bored out of our minds.)

Blog Response guideDecember 31 2008

This is actually pretty good. Hat tip to the airforce and globalnerdy…

Pushing The Reset ButtonDecember 28 2008

Good thoughts here on pushing the reset button in 2009. I especially like this one:

Maintain the chain. There are so many fitness goals and programs you can get into. If you live anywhere like I do, the guys from 24 Hour Fitness are on the corner downtown recruiting people like gangbusters. With all these fitness routines and exercises you can find, it’s hard to see through the noise. A simplified resolution is to create an exercise chain and all you need is a calendar. Now for the month of January make a pact to exercise every day. Each day you exercise, you put an X through that day on calendar. Your job is to not break the chain. I’ve personally found this to be an awesome motivator because you can see all the progress you’ve made and it would hurt too much to break the chain.

Media RelationshipsDecember 21 2008

Mark Leibovich asks the question “what kind of relationship will the Obama Whitehouse have with the media?”.

It’s a fascinating read, getting at some of the tenets of Obama’s communications strategy. Some of which runs counter to what many companies are thinking today:

The paradox of this scene was that the Obama campaign’s communications strategy was predicated in part on an aggressive indifference to this insider set. Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”

I’m not sure those of us in the businessworld have this luxury but it’s worth asking the question, should we just ignore blogmedia? I don’t think so…

Communicate through the mediums your audiences care about - don’t pander to convention: “The campaign bragged that Obama never even visited with the

Amazing Facebook GrowthDecember 18 2008

Facebook is growing like crazy… some amazing highlights:

13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
700 million photos are uploaded to the site each month
4 million videos are uploaded each month
15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each month
2 million events created each month
19 million active groups exist on the site