October 27, 2008
Old Friends
It's always interesting to see what long-unseen friends are up to nowadays. And thanks to Web 2.0, you don't actually have to sully yourself with social contact to find out. Mike's been puttering around on an old Treo for quite a while, so his acquisition of the first Android smartphone was accompanied by an understandable outburst of Twitter updates. But the patter of gadget man-lust just doesn't have that personal touch. So it was heartwarming to see him let us know that he also picked up some UNDERPANTS along with his new personal communication device. Would've been nice to have known the size, too, but one assumes that with Mike it would be X-, or even multiple-Xs, L.
October 06, 2008
Emergence Of A New Medium
No sports-talk radio in Taiwan to speak of, since there isn't much sports to speak of. Hard to keep up with the games in the States from Taiwan due to the time difference. Thankfully, ESPN has provided a way to solve both problems with their slate of radio podcasts, offering their radio shows as daily downloads which iTunes can slurp up and sync to the iPod automagically. The Baseball Today podcast plus the ESPN Radio Daily digest podcast almost perfectly occupies my morning commute offering sports tidbits during what otherwise would be blank downtime.
The downloads are offered for free, but you knew The Sports Leader was going to find a way to monetize the podcasts somehow. The obvious method was advertising, and this year the ESPN Radio podcast started including interstitial clips selling Progressive Insurance. The ads were mostly tolerable, but the repetitive bombardment does get old. Finally, there was a new advertiser added to the roster, just in time for the baseball playoffs: Geico, of all people.
There could be no better evidence for the effectiveness of podcast advertising than the fact that Progressive's spots drew a direct competitor into the fray. Unfortunately, it means that I gave to put up with twice as much ad noise. Oh well, it's not as if I have anything better to do on the subway ride to work.