Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Twit Whiz
It’s never too early for a cheesesteak reference.
I use Twitter randomly.
A couple of months ago I was listening to the radio online (XM Lucy I think) and Beck came on. I tried twitting “get crazy with the cheez whiz” over IM. No dice. For whatever reason, Twitter did not not want to get crazy with the Cheez Whiz.
So I tried it over the web. Nothing. So I had Tom try it. Nothing.
I actually emailed support too. It was to rank up there as one of the dumber support tickets, but we were just curious as to why it didn’t go through.
Now, two months later, support gave me a response, although it still doesn’t work.
Is it the cheez? The whiz? Only the combo? Or can we just not get crazy with it?
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Sportsline Becomes CBS Sports
CBS Sportsline is now officially CBS Sports. The website had a mini-facelift to go along with the rebranding. It’s slightly more readable than before if nothing else.
CBS decided to rebrand in order to cross-brand between websites and television easier, at least that’s the explanation given on paidContent.org.
Normally it’s a smart move, and it may be here, but Sportsline is an established internet brand. It’s also been CBS Sportsline for a while. Recently, a friend of mine didn’t realize you could use “www.” and not “cbs.”. That says something about the strength of the name and the association between CBS and Sportsline.
However, CBS Sports makes it more of a big media company. Sportsline existed solely on the internet, despite being CBS Sportsline. CBS Sports is on tv. CBS Sports is the NFL, March Madness and the PGA, among other things.
What CBS Sports isn’t is its own channel. In that regard, it’s like NBC Sports on tv, but online CBS is clearly a top player, where NBC is not.
The appearance of having some form of independence was no doubt a plus. It’ll be interesting to see if the rename has any effect on the website’s reputation. paidContent.org cites SportsBusiness Daily (paid subscription required) mentioning that the company is concerned about the rebranding possibly harming fantasy sports operations.
Fox Sports is currently one of the sports website leaders, thanks in part to its contract with MSN, and also a network of local television channels. Fox also has its college stations, Fox Sports Español, Fox Soccer and the Speed Channel.
ABC Sports ceased to exist a few years ago. Instead, the network chose to brand its sports programming “ESPN on ABC”, capitalizing on the popularity of its cable channel’s brand.
The only non-television network sports website that rivals the top players in traffic is Yahoo! Sports. Yahoo! has cleaned up the site over the past year, as well as adding more original content. Yahoo!, like Sportsline, has leveraged its fantasy sports section to drive traffic to its content.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Connection Insurance
A few weeks ago I went a couple of nights without my cable modem (or tv) due to no-reason-given by Time Warner. While it’s not the end of the world by any means, it’s difficult to have unplanned access disruptions when you work on the web.
During the downtime I learned that all available wireless networks were secure. Over twenty of them, all locked down. Pretty impressive considering a few years ago it was easy to hop from one unsecure network to another if your connection was down (although most in the building have the same provider, so it was usually pointless anyway).
Going to an internet cafe or a local Starbucks is always an option, but I don’t find that the easiest way to get work done.
So I’m wondering, why don’t companies offer connection insurance?
More and more people depend on their internet connection for work, entertainment and their home phone connections.
Time Warner is currently the fastest connection I can have from my home right now. If Verizon DSL wants to make any money off of me, they can charge a low fee, something like $30 yearly to have their connection available. If I need to use their connection, which gets triggered by a certain amount of data within a certain amount of time, then I get charged a low per-day fee, something like $5.
This isn’t limited to cable and DSL (or FIOS, if you’re lucky). Broadband wireless could also be a “connection insurer”. They all just need to be prepared for possible network spikes if a competitor has big problems.
Between outages and upgrades, connection insurers could make a decent amount of money on volume.