Don't Beat Yourself
This weekend, I was reminded about not beating yourself.
Saturday night, I watched Steve Trachsel make a mess out of a pivotal playoff start by not throwing strikes. Granted, the Mets offense was nowhere to be found, but Trachsel couldn't make it out of the second inning because he walked five batters. When you walk that many batters, your fielders fall back on their heels and when you do actually let the other team put the ball in play, they wind up missing a lot of balls by just a half step, which is what happened.
Then, tonight, my Zog team played a fall softball game. We couldn't field our way out of a hat. It was awful. We're normally a very good fielding team, but we threw the ball around and bobbled a lot of easy plays. We found ourselves down 20-6. We even managed to score 10 runs with two outs in the last inning, but it wasn't enough. It was a game that got away because we beat ourselves.
So back to the Mets. Enter Oliver Perez... a guy who has been beating himself for two seasons by not throwing strikes. The Mets needed to stay in this game badly. The bats were cold and Perez was a wildcard. Well, he wasn't perfect, but he didn't beat himself. He threw strikes... and kept them close until the Mets offense exploded. Up by seven runs, he kept throwing strikes even when the Cards started hitting home runs... three home runs.. all solo shots, because he wasn't walking batters ahead of those hits. He left in the sixth inning with a big lead, and for a guy who went 3-13 this season, that's about all you could have asked from him. Unlike the guy who pitched the night before who rang up 15 wins this season, he didn't beat himself.
That makes such a huge difference in any aspect of your life. Make the other guy beat you. I manufactured a run in my Zog game tonight by lining to right and not stopping when I saw the right fielder bobble the ball. Let him throw me out. If me makes the play, I'd get up, say, "Nice throw" and walk off... but I was forcing him to be better to get the better of me. Then, on a bloop single to right again, I ran through a stop sign on the way home.
Let them throw you out at the plate.... don't hand them your opportunity to shine.
Internet didn't kill the radio star
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 uses the example of the music industry to show why content needs to be controlled to be monetized and I just wanted to share something I learned a while ago.
"As for ceding control of your content, look at what happened to the music industry. Illegal file sharing crippled music sales, and the only saving grace has been the iTune platform, which functions by rigidly controlling distribution."
This actually isn’t true. I thought it was for a long time, being a college student when Napster was big, but I worked on a co-investment in the buyout of Warner Music and studied this hard. There were two much larger factors at play. First, you have a supply issue. Big box retail started killing off mom and pop record shops and music-only stores to a much greater degree than the web. Even the demographics that weren’t web savvy and into downloading music weren’t buying music anymore, because people shopped at Walmart and Best Buy and they hardly carried any of the catalogue that the music only stores did. More focus was put on DVDs and video games which were a much higher profit margin per inch of shelf space compared to CDs. So, if my dad wanted to go buy the Moody Blues first album, he simply wasn't going to find it... but he could find lots of copies of Madden Football or maybe even a DVD of a live concert.
Then, you have competition for finite entertainment dollars. Mobile revenues went up… $5-7 a month in text messaging and another $5-7 a month in ring tones… that’s a CD a month when you consider the limited budget of teens. Mobile revenues and gaming revenues skyrocketed during this time, not because music was free, but because they offered a much more compeling product. Eight songs for $16 simply wasn't going to cut it when, for ten bucks more, you could get a movie, and for the price of three CDs, you could get a video game to play with your friends for hundreds and hundreds of hours. Interaction. Socializing. Music, at that price, just didn't seem so interesting anymore. Napster didn't tank the industry... it just proved there was demand for the CD format to get broken up and for music to be obtained over the web. Apple is taking advantage of that, and they would take better advantage of it if they offered more pricing schemes and less DRM.
Tom Terrific 2
Glavine's performance last night was wonderfully boring, as usual. Nice to see Beltran hitting at home, too. Wagner? He's John Franco with a 100 MPH fastball... always out of the strike zone, always makes it interesting.
So I'm totally jumping ahead here, but I hope they sweep, just because it would enable us to pitch Glavine twice against Detroit.
Is this really the best way to arrange these letters?
If I was an old subway car, I'd be nervous.
After Facebook, what will be the web's next billion dollar exit? Let's build a virtual stock market for startups.
Assuming Yahoo! gets some kind of a deal done with Facebook (can you say motivated buyer?), we will have had three billion-plus acquisitions on the web (Skype, YouTube, Facebook) in the last year.
So what's next? Who has the best shot of creating a billion dollars of value?
At first I'd say Craigslist, but I don't really see Craig ever selling. Perhaps he wakes up one morning and decides it needs a safe home just in case any pissed off New York real estate scammer vows revenge, but, regulatory albatross aside, I think its much more likely he'll "give it to the people" and maybe go public or something.
LinkedIn? I'm not sure they engage users along enough dimensions... it is too much of a business tool rather than the go to social network for adult professionals.
What about Revver or Spotrunner? YouTube got sold because they dominated the medium and Google thought they could figure out how to monetize it. What if these two figure out the monetization first and attract publishers and advertisers.... might be a necessary add-on... but maybe not for a cool billion?
Feedburner is dominating and monetizing a medium, with little competition... if and when RSS takes off, they could start making bank in a hurry.
You know what would be interesting... and something I would definately monitarily contribute to the production of? A virtual stock market for startups. I need something to do in the fantasy baseball offseason. I'd love to be able to buy and sell "shares" based on the predictive expectations of the crowd. That might be a very cool experiment.
Any other ideas for the next billion dollar acquisition on the web? I don't think it will be us. Our number is only $750 million. :)
links for 2006-10-13
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Where else can you find a blog post that speaks the current time and Central Park weather? :)
Former Mets, Current Yanks Pitcher Corey Lidle Dies in Plane Crash into NYC Apartment
Very sad story... Turns out the pilot of the small plane in NYC was Yanks' pitcher Corey Lidle, who got his started in the majors with Mets. Lidle died in the crash.
If it were me, I'd want them to play tonight's game, but out of respect for the family and for Lidle, I agree with Brooklyn Met Fan, they should probably cancel.
Small Plane Crashes into Upper East Side Apartment Building
Well, this is just bizzare... A small "general aviation" plane flew into a building on 72nd and York.
A few apartments in the building are on fire... details coming out. Hope no one was home.
YouTubers Reaction to Purchase
Pretty reasonable I'd say... We're not all raving lunatics in the consumer world, you know. Thanks to Jeremy for the heads up.
links for 2006-10-10
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Yay! Check out the address. That's us! We have a name! :)
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I say trade the both of 'em...
Dear Mr. Moritz...
Please bottle some water from your house and send it to me.
Hair clippings for me to wear as a good luck charm will also do.
Some people just have the magic touch...Google, Paypal, Yahoo!, and now YouTube, which just got acquired by Google.
We don't really need more money, but if you want to throw a token investment our way, I'm sure we could make some room for you in the cap table somewhere.
I don't really know what to make out of this deal. Google has the money to spend, and I think this is a better investment than putting up municipal wifi towers up. What else could they spend it on?
The upside is that this is a foothold into our video/tv viewing experience and the associated ad revenue.
The downside is that they haven't proven that they quite understand how to do community yet.
What's fascinating to me is that, at the time of the del.icio.us acquisition, they were "split internally" on whether to make an offer. How they managed to spend a billion six on such a big question mark is beyond me, just from a decision making point of view, whether or not its a good idea.
Nice quote about instant messaging/e-mail
It’s as if your id had a typewriter. In a world where everything is
instant, the delaying and censoring mechanisms that contributed to a
civilized life are gone." - Maureen Dowd, NY Times, Oct. 7, 2006
(I don't subscribe to Times Select... or get the actual paper copy, God forbid... my friend Alicia sent this to me.)
