BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

June 18, 2004

Esther, Schmesther

: I thought it was odd, self-indulgent, and egotistical enough that Madonna of the one name now wants to be called Esther by her Kabbalah klatch.

It's all the worse when I looked up Jewish girls' names for this post and found that Esther means "star."

Oy.

I think we should pick a different name for Madonna/Esther. My favorites: Hadassah (means ornament, which is true enough) or Leah (means tired, which is even truer).

: Not that the one has anything to do with the other, other than a Yiddish gag or two, but go see Steven I. Weiss' complaint to MediaBistro and Gawker for exclusing Jewish editors from the editor hot-or-not contest.

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Box life

: I have a strange thing for Ikea; have since I first walked into its pine-sawdust-scented space. It's the perfect store for the unhandy handyman, that's me. It's a store that makes a social statement: Poor young people need to sit, too. I bragged for years that I got an entire dining room set in the back of my Honda Civic hatchback; it's a damned engineering marvel. And the meatballs are good.

It's so crazed that my wife and I actually went to vacation in Sweden because we (I) liked Ikea so much: Any country that can create this must be worth visiting, I said. And it was worth visiting: A country with the culture of Europe and the convenience of America with beautiful women (they really) where everyone speaks better English than anyone in America.

When I started Entertainment Weekly, famed adman Donny Deutsch, then a bit of whippersnapper, was our agency and when he got the Ikea account, I sat in my office and showed him my Ikea furniture there and told him all the Ikea furniture we had in our home. "Man," Donny said, "you are seriously disturbed." That's how Donny talked even then. I think there was an F word in there somewhere.

Most of our Ikea furniture is gone, now that we've grown up. Just last week, the kid-tolerant coffee tables went. Some shelves will never die but all in all, our Ikea is fading like the color of my hair.

But it's still in my genes, my Ikea fetish. So when I saw this on Gizmodo, I wanted to get it and sit on the floor and make a chair again, for old time's sake.

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Aw, shucks

: My favorite marketing man, Hugh McLeod, says something too nice.

Now the truth is that Hugh leaves an A-list blog's worth of comments here and I'm lucky that he does; I always enjoy seeing his latest.

Not in recompense but just because it reminds me, I have to tell you that there is something cooler than handing out your blogcards from Hugh: Handing one out to someone only to find that they hand you a blogcard in return. That happened to me a week ago. It should happen more. So go buy blogcards. Don't be caught at your next panel without them.

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Cheeky

: I am one of, I'm sure, many who got an email from one Christian Purdy, "associate director of publicity" (I'm guessing $19.5/year) for a small publisher offering to have Cass Sunstein, prof at the U of Chicago Law School, guest blog: "Need a break from the daily grind of your blog? Why not let Cass Sunstein guest blog for a day?"

Now the fact that I consider Sunstein's Republic.com a brainless piece of drek-think and academic sensationalism devoid of intelligence and experience about its subject and bankrupt in its analysis makes it, well, unlikely that would happen.

What gets me about this is that the guy would be cheeky/snotty enough to have someone send blog spam on his behalf. I'd respect the idea a helluva lot more if he actually sent the email himself (or at least had the technical savvy -- which he certainly doesn't have, as his book proves -- to fake it). Just because Larry Lessig has someone weirdly write about him in third person on his own site doesn't mean every law professor needs his Boswell ghost.

Or why don't you just get a blog yourself, Prof?

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Blah blog

: VC David Hornik has finally had it. All social software panels are the same. And so, as a public service, he transcribes the latest so you don't need to bother attending the next:

"Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah Spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah is this a product or a feature blah blah blah a feature doesn't make a business blah blah blah leveraging relationships blah blah blah decentralized system blah blah blah privacy concerns blah blah blah profiling people blah blah blah social networking is blogging dumbed down for the masses blah blah blah...

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Exploding TV

: More great information for those following the exploding TV thread: Drazen Pantic, a pioneer in bringing the power of video to citizens, has two great pieces on his site:
: This one describes how a peer-to-peer TV network can work.
: This one -- called Anybody Can Be TV -- briefly gives details on such things as open-source video editing and streaming tools.

: More exploding TV: Disney starts its own direct-to-TiVo-like-box service, Moviebeam.

It's every mogul for himself out there. Add it up: Disney goes around cable and DVD distribution channels. Starz teams up with Real, risking the ire of cable. TiVo starts its own direct-to-TiVo service, challenging cable and satellite. CNN starts a broadband channel, which would have enraged cable operators except its parent is a big cable operator. McDonald's starts abandoning TV advertising.

We're witnessing the disruption of the TV business by the Internet. Fuse is lit. Explosion coming.

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