Mike Industries

Just a quick note that I’ll be appearing live on G4TV’s “Attack of the Show” today at 7pm EDT. The subject is “bloggers as journalists” and I’ll be appearing on behalf of Newsvine — via satellite — with a couple of guests, including Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek who was recently quoted in Forbes magazine as saying:

“Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality.”

Hmm. Intoxicating.

Anybody have anything they want me to say on the air? Feel free to post your thoughts on this subject so I can present them as my own. :)

I don’t post too often about upcoming speaking gigs because I assume most readers don’t care, but since I have a few coming up, here’s a quick combined rundown. If you’re in town for any of these and want to talk a little shop, let me know:

Syndicate Conference - New York City

May 16

Keynote Panel: Grokking the Big Picture: An interview about how syndication is altering the worlds of media, publishing, and marketing.

Speaking with Eric Elia of Brightcove, David Geller of WhatCounts, and Dave Sifry of Technorati.

Interactive Media Conference 2006 - Las Vegas

May 18

Panel: If You Could Build Your Website from Scratch… What Would You Do Differently?

Speaking with Roger Black of Roger Black Studio (OMFG!), Darin Brown of Avenue A/Razorfish, and Lincoln Millstein of Hearst.

WebVisions - Portland

July 21

Session: Designing for Community Interaction.

WebVisions - Portland

July 21

Panel: Design panel.

Speaking with D. Keith Robinson of BlueFlavor, Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits, and Bryan Veloso of FaceBook/Avalonstar.

Many apologies for the self-promotion, but I’m going to be on the KCTS show “Serious Money” tonight talking about Newsvine and the changing landscape of the journalism world. If you have access to KCTS, it’s going to be on at 8pm Pacific Time. Serious Money is in its 17th season and has hosted such CEOs as Jack Welch of GE, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Jonathan Klein of Getty. Economist extraordinaire and Colonial era dead-ringer Louis Rukeyser has also appeared. After the airing, the show should also be available on KCTS’ Streaming Video page, I believe.

I wore make-up too, so let the jokes begin…

March is the greatest month of the year for basketball fans. Not only are there a ton of great NCAA Tournament games to watch, but there are a ton of bracket games to enter as well.

Bracket games, as most college hoops fans know, are designed to test your ability to predict the outcome of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. From a field of 64 teams, you pick the winners of each game, collecting points along the way in each round, and the person with the most points at the end wins. ESPN’s Tournament Challenge is one of the best such bracket games out there and having worked on it for several years at ESPN, I can attest to how popular it is.

So now that we’re building a world-class sports section on Newsvine, we figured we should do an NCAA Tournament game as well. But brackets are a little played out.

We wanted to do something new.

Presenting Newsvine Tournament Pick ‘Em. Newsvine Tournament Pick ‘Em has no bracket. Instead, each entrant is given a budget of 300 “doubloons” with which they can purchase however many teams they’d like. The rub is that each team costs a different amount, with the higher seeds being the most expensive. You can buy three teams or 15 teams… it’s up to you.

Each win is worth one point and the person with the most points wins a 60GB Video iPod from Newsvine.

Entering can take anywhere from 10 seconds to an hour depending on how long you stew over your picks.

So here’s the best part though: You can also invite up to 50 of your friends to enter your Tournament Pick ‘Em “group”.

If anyone you invite ends up winning the Video iPod, you will win one as well.

How’s that for teamwork?

So head on over to Newsvine Tournament Pick ‘Em and fill out your entry today.

… and you thought the iPod Contests were going away. :)

6 months. 64 posts. 2011 comments. One million page views. Mike Industries hit seven digits today, and to celebrate I’m giving away an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse to the person (or people) who submit the best comments, in haiku form, as to why they want either device. An example is as follows:

Oh Bluetooth Keyboard
I Yearn For Your Wireless Touch
Untether Me Now

The best haikus posted by EOD Wednesday, will be shipped the products. Multiple entries are fine.

I want to thank everyone who has been reading and/or participating in this site over the last several months since inception. I feel like this blog is 99% troll-free, and the quality of discussion is top shelf. Never would I have learned that the McLean Deluxe burger is part sea-kelp without the vast pool of savants who visit these pages.

I also want to give a shout out to Dreamhost, my hosting company of choice. I’ve hosted sites with many different ISPs in my life, but Dreamhost just continues to completely blow me away. I have zero complaints and a thousand compliments. In fact, I’m so satisfied that I just gave them placement on my sidebar, which is about the closest thing to an ad you’ll find on this site. If your hosting company doesn’t make you want to run over and hug them, you should check out Dreamhost.

Thanks also to The Wolf who continues to make the world a better (coded) place. Somebody please clone him.

Anyway, I’m off for a vacation in the Mayan Riviera now. The diving is supposed to be great. Will post close-up pictures of sharks when I return.

Well it’s been a good first week here at Mike Industries. Over 50,000 page views, plenty of scathing editorial and healthy discussion in the comment threads, and not a single piece of hate mail! Not that readers might be interested in such things, but I thought I’d share some of the nuggets gleaned from ShortStat during the first week:

• Total Page Views: 50,304
• Top Platforms: Windows - 69%, Mac - 25%, Linux - 2%
• Top Browsers: Firefox - 41% (wow), IE - 23%, Safari - 17%
• Top Three Referrers: Mezzoblue, Zeldman, Kottke
• Most interesting referrer: The “Eater” (what the hell is this?)
• Coolest blog discovered via referrer: Thought Anomalies
• Number of deaths reported from the Invalidator Badge: 0*

Anyway, more ramblings are on the way this weekend. Thanks to everyone who has put up with them so far. Expect updates to this site once or twice a week as excess mental energy allows.

* In case there was any doubt, yes, the Invalidator Badge is clearly hyperbole.