Technically Speaking

Why? Usually movies like this planned one – “Facebook The Movie” – are something that will end up on television and than have a cult following like that one pirates movie that they made back in 1999. Interesting for a moment in time perhaps, but I don’t see anything great coming out of this supposed Facebook the Movie.

Since it appears they are rolling along into pre-production and casting of this from what is being said online, I do agree that Micheal Cera should be playing the role of Mark Zuckerberg. It probably wouldn’t be a far stretch for him to play that role.

The question though is still “Why?”. I mean why not make a movie about TechCrunch? Or GigaOM? Or ReadWriteWeb Or VentureBeat? – heck, why not just title the movie “Blogs Of the New World Order“. You could slap all four in there, and have Allen Stern of CenterNetworks play the raving video maniac from NYC calling out all those wrapped up in the silliness of Valley madness. Allen, you know you have always dreamed of playing the heel, and here would be your chance.

Seriously, why don’t we just create another movie about the little ad data network that could. Yeah, my company Lookery. I already know who our CTO wants playing him, quite obvious by his twitter icon. As far as the rest of us, our CEO would be an interesting casting call, and our VP of Marketing would probably be pretty easy to cast. What about me? What about who freakin’ cares!

The point being, a movie about anything online will hold the interest of so few that live every day lives, that you’d be lucky to make any kind of money from it. Do you really think that most of the world really cares that Zuckerberg prefers Mt. Dew over Coke or that he picks his nose with his middle finger? No. And that is the kind of stupid personal stuff they are going to write into this.

Back to my example of “Lookery: The little ad data network that could” movie. The movie about us would be so trivial and interesting to so few that no one in their right mind is going to want to watch what we do or how we did it.

Same goes for Facebook the Movie, the interesting stuff is right here online; there isn’t a need to put it on screen anywhere. I mean social networking is cool – online. Social networking translated to a movie is kind of dumb. Same goes for the blog movie idea above, as well as the Lookery Movie. Just not right for movie or television movie.

If you want to meet with the real live people and in person – team Lookery, than you have to hook up with the entire crew in Boulder, Colorado next week. Now that is real life, and if you think that a movie deal should be in the works for every online company or social network, we’ll entertain you in person and entertain your offer. I think Lookery in the real will be more interesting than any movie version could translate.

Technically Speaking, yes – team Lookery is in Boulder, Colorado next week – we hope to see you not in a movie but in reality!

Lookery, yes – the entire group known as team Lookery is heading to Boulder, Colorado next week. Since we are all going to be in one place at the same time – we decided to host a party called Lookery Boulder Publisher Meetup on the evening of Thursday September 4th. We’d love to see you there if you are in the Boulder, Colorado area that evening. More details can be had with a Facebook event invite.

Hello to all that read this blog. According to my Lookery stats – it appears it’s mostly a male audience, which is fine, as most of the things I talk about here don’t really have any interest for females. Not a problem, but with Lookery’s latest release, we now have search engine referrals which is cool. Another interesting thing – a good majority of my readers happen to be in California; probably where I should really be living! The nice thing about blogging – your fans/readers can come to you. So have a seat and read…

Hell froze over this week! Mike of Microspaces who I met at a STL startup meeting a few months back, well quite a long time ago actually, as right after I was able to make it to one of them – Lookery took off like a rocket – ie – too damn busy keeping things smooth if you get my drift.

Not to digress into other things – just wanted to congratulate Mike and his persistence to make his startup Microspaces framework something useful. Useful enough that TechCrunch thought so. Great job, and yes, a real TechCrunch’d startup right here in the STL. There is hope after all for those entrepreneurs who are living in the 21st century right here where I live – the STL.

Surprising, as most in the STL are going downtown to the city today for the Cardinals, Rams, Springsteen and Black expo! That’s my point - most of the interest here in the STL are Sports, followed by concerts and some event that has nothing to do with technology or startups.

Or better yet, here is a comment from that linked story about the happenings today in downtown STL:

JBoyd024 August 22, 2008 8:13PM CST
You can also come to the insideSTL.com 3 year anniversary @ Lumen tomorrow night. Live broadcast of “The Morning After” with guests like Todd Wellemeyer, Kyle Lohse, Joe Mather, Kelly Chase, Felipe Lopez, Penthouse Pet Cali Taylor, WSOP chip leader Dennis Anderson and MORE. Alos, there is a Girls Next Door lingerie contest after the broadcast. Dont miss out!

Interesting. Now this is more of the point on why my bud Trashy had to make the move to the land of subways and brick as he called it. Chicago, sweet home Chicago as he calls it.

Well earlier this past week, I found out that social networking on MySpace really does work. My old guitarist from a band many moons ago finally found me on MySpace. Crazy! We haven’t spoken to each other in probably 12-14 years, and yet when we did get on the phone that afternoon, it seemed like yesterday was only just a few minutes away. The point is that MySpace is still the biggest social network on the planet, as I don’t think he would have found me on Hi5, Bebo, or even Facebook. Don’t let the press out hype the reality; now if they can get their sh*t together, maybe their numbers will matter!

Technically Speaking that is enough rambling for the moment. One last thing I forgot to mention – didn’t get a ton of fanfare was our Lookery feed looks even cooler now! Go stare at it, you’ll see what I mean and want to sign up for your own JS Code to put on your web site.

And oh yeah:

Full Disclosure: Rex Dixon works for Lookery in Publisher Relations – if you don’t have a Lookery account – sign up today!.

Early this week, I said I was going to try to just stay off of twitter entirely. See if I could do it. With business the way it currently is at Lookery and all the cool data that is being shown for free – it was simply impossible! Now many people don’t believe that twitter’s way of communicating is effective business, but we seem to thrive on it with a tweet or three a week.

As you look at my stats, you can clearly see who my audience is and where they are coming from. But since this blog doesn’t get a whole ton of traffic, you should really check out some cool high traffic sites in our network.

Anyone running a site can benefit from statistics like this, and it’s simply signing up and registering your site. Than another 10 seconds to copy and paste the code into your site(s) page(s). Pretty simple. Almost like Google Analytics code, yes, that simple! Not only that, if you are not running ads on your site but rather do that on your own – you now have compelling data to show potential advertisers of your site(s) demographics.

Enough about work, it’s time to hit the buffet! Not literally of course, too many pushy people that like to do the unthinkable – backing up in the buffet line. Actually though, I did hit the buffet for real this week.

Seriously now, one item of interest I saw this morning was about AOL buying SocialThing. Is this a good deal or bad deal? Considering I was reading recently of how AOL is hanging on to a thread of life. Or do they still call that reorganization? My thought was that AOL was going to be bought, but apparently it’s just a shuffle the deck move once again. At least the guys over at SocialThing have now confirmed the deal.

The other item of interest it seems is all the Olympic coverage or lack thereof. I have actually watched like 10 minutes of coverage, beach volleyball. You can get pretty good coverage of what is happening on the major sites such as SI.

I’m glad to see that it appears a cease fire has been signed between Russia and Georgia. I was actually keeping up with that news over any Olympic coverage this past week. It seems like no matter what, there is always someone at the games being accused of cheating, or better yet – a war breaks out somewhere that just shows how barbaric humans really are.

One item to keep watching is how Glam is surging almost quietly online. They seem to be the leader these days, and I have read stories in the past few weeks about how they are overtaking the marketplace. When I had other writers on this blog, I was more in tune with such sites as Geek Sugar. I even did some video back in the day. Quite funny that there are still links to the videos. Out of all of them, I think the banana episode was pretty funny.

Technically Speaking, it’s all about the data and wish I had the time to do more videos again! Unfortunately how do you think Lookery serves billions of ads monthly? Well it’s time for me to get to work, that’s how!!

This has nothing (very little) to do with technology, well wait a minute, I guess I need to start this off and first plug a post that I wrote and published a bit ago on the Lookery blog. For those of you that don’t know, yes – I work for Lookery, so that’s your full disclosure. If you don’t know what we do, than you really need to visit us and sign up!

Now on to the casual observations. I like to eat and I like to hit the buffets. My 40-50lb overweight body probably doesn’t need it, but I do like the all you can eat for one price. You can call it basic cheap to eat economics. Now there are times I prefer a more formal dining experience, but when you are dining with your kid, a buffet is the perfect option.

Tonight, I’m in line in the salad bar, and this old lady decides to back up. Now why does she think she has the right to back up in a line moving in one direction? That really irks me to this day, how older or old people think they have the right to do whatever they think is right, no matter how wrong it is. I tend to observe the older than me generation, and vow to not be like them. Hey, we are all getting older every second; you too will be old(er) than a few seconds ago when you started to read this post!

The funny thing is that a lot of times you actually end up being your father (or mother), no matter how much you try not too. Optionally you want to learn and try to avoid the mistakes they made, and learn the good habits, but chances are you end up picking most of if not all of their bad habits. That is life in a nutshell, a vicious circle.

Another observation I made this week is that I really am not a very good drummer. Stringed instruments always came easier for me, and even have dabbled in the keyboard world which makes more sense. Something about only counting to four but moving your body parts in different directions is only starting to click. So yes, the drum set in the last video with my son playing them, is in fact mine. I have improved, just nowhere the monster drummer he is. I do however like to be challenged as most people should.

If you aren’t up for a challenge every now and again, you just got really old. Something that doesn’t come easy is the exact thing you should try next. For me – drums – always had an interest, but never took the time to give it a try. Am I ready to jam with Joe phenom guitarist yet? Hell NO! Am I ready to even jam with my hack guitarist/bassist self yet? Not even in the same league yet as far as drums are concerned. I do feel safer trying this than something where my out of shape and overweight body would convulse into a heart attack or something.

While looking at the older (old) generation, one thing that most people tend to forget is observing the younger generation. I like to look at both, as you can learn just as much from the old lady backing up at the salad bar, as you can from the kicka$$ drummer my son is becoming.

A real case in point that actually made it a feel good experience was when I went to the Mayhem Festival a couple of weeks ago. There were more older (old) people actually taking more active interest in their kids than when I was younger. That actually made me feel good, for one – I wasn’t the oldest person there – and another thing, it showed me how much our generation learned from the mistakes of the generation(s) before. In my day, when I went to a concert it was with my buds and there wasn’t a parent in sight. Most parents did the drop off thing back in the day. After the show, there were very few (like two that I saw) parents picking up their kids from the show.

I really hate e-mail newsletters. I think they are a big waste of time. Pardon the interruption, but I have to change that and say – I hate most e-mail newsletters. One that I recently subscribed too is the new one that Jason Calacanis is putting out. That newsletter simply rocks. I’m a person that doesn’t have the time to read everything I see online, nor do I have the time to jostle through personal e-mail since I deal with a ton in my daily work, but his latest was a beaut. It was something I can state honestly, I read every single word of it. Great job there Jason in writing something worthwhile. You can now read it here.

Here is some old work related news that Allen, who is my favorite and hardest working professional blogger I know, reported on this week. I say old work related as it was some interesting news about my old company that I did consult for up until March of this year, Lending Club. No idea what it all means, as Lending Club is in a silent period so no one from the company can talk to anyone outside of the company in a formal interview or comment/quote. I really can’t wait to see how they ramp up and take off after the whole SEC silence they must observe. I am proud to say that I did leave the blog in good shape and turned over the keys to a great crew there; still rocking posts out daily. If you don’t have them in your reader, you should!

Now I’m starting to roam over to the more tech world again. So let’s just venture over to VentureBeat’s latest news about the non-compete being null and void. Well illegal is the exact term. This could be very interesting to see how the latest government decision impacts the start up world as a whole.

California’s highest court has ruled unanimously that a common feature of employment contracts called a noncompete clause is illegal under state law and has been since 1872.

Quite interesting to say the least. Think of people that are high paid engineers at say a video startup with new emerging technology, that bankrolls their own version of what they are building. Not only that, but also pitching the same idea to a VC firm. Now on one hand, the VC knows that this is one of the dirty guys who came from company “xyz video” but also was the key developer on that project. Which one would you invest in if you were the VC? Could make for some interesting discussions and maybe some even more interesting startups will actually take root. Or than again, it could be a thorn in the side for the valley business world as a whole.

One more thing, if you are a fan of twitter, and have not seen this yet today – you must take a view of it. Pretty funny stuff if you are into Hitler, twitter, and a good joke parody video. Did I just say that? If you are into Hitler, – Let’s rephrase that and say if you are into TV/Movie adaptations about the person’s life with a twitter twist. Something like that; hey – it was a fun way to kick off this morning.

Technically Speaking, at the risk of offending someone else by last observation – I’ve observed enough for now.

I have been off the radar for a few days, just finally got caught up with everything work wise. My kids went back to the FLA, and here is the last video my son and I did.

If you need a drummer and live on the east coast of the FLA – contact him via his MySpace page or his e-mail.

Technically Speaking, work done for now – time to go do something else!