Clint Sharp

Amanda’s Leaving Rocketboom. Here’s my response to the Videoblogging list, which I thought would make a decent blog post with my insightful commentary on stardom:

You’re onto it Deirdre. The fact that the offers are pouring in doesn’t have anything to do with talent or beauty. There are tons of talented beautiful people out there.

It’s the same reason Kirsten Dunst or Julia Stiles get movie roles. Celebrity. They aren’t that talented or beautiful, but they have fame. And nothing against those two, I’m just using them as an example. They’re mediocre, but very successful. It just takes that one break.

So when people see this shit happen, they automatically associate it with old media stylings. Videoblogging is TV. And there are plenty of no-talent hacks out there perpetuating this myth. FrenchmaidTV comes to mind. A large portion of the iTunes video podcast “recommended” section actually. It’s all shitty and everyone knows it.

This is why I wretch when I read someone cooing to Amanda about her extraordinary talent and “you don’t deserve this treatment, baby. Come to me, it’ll be alright”. It’s fucking disgusting and embarrassing.

Advice to anyone who is listening: Don’t be a whore. Or if you already are a whore, stop being a whore.

–
Adam Quirk
thepan.org

Eh, I can agree with your sentiment to a certain extent, but celebrity and fame are inevitable. People exalt other peers who may not be more worthy than they are to celebrity and stardom, but they do it because they want to believe they also could be there as well.

I talk a lot about Rock and Roll and how it is the American Dream. Videoblogging, and Amanda’s leap to semi-stardom is a great example of yet another facet of the American Dream. The reason Rock and Roll is still popular, 50+ years later, even though it’s many different stylings and forms, is that anyone can pick up a guitar, get in front of a microphone and, if enough people like their work, become famous. How much more American can an idea get?

Videoblogging, blogging, podcasting, etc, are the Rock and Roll of our time. Anyone can pick up a video camera, and if it’s enjoyable enough, they can become stars. No need to wade through a Hollywood bureaucracy, just stick it up on the Internet. As much as we’d all like to be counter-culture, the culture dictates that we exalt the few as examples of what the many could be.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t all bitch about how the culture is the way it is.

Nice to see Robert and Jason posting on the list. Either one of you is free to hire me, but I’m afraid I’m unwilling to relocate.

This video makes me tear up. “I don’t want to live on the moon” is her favorite song. She smiles everytime you sing it for her.

I live this, every day:

“Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.” – Brian Sooy

I’m making no claims as to our talent (actually, I’ll vouch for the other members of the band, they’re all talented ), however, here is one of our originals. Please try not to be too brutal in your comments, thanks .

Update: I’m having problems embedding the video. You can watch it here

I really like MXC. Don’t ask me why . Anyways, this is a very amusing video. I’m going to try to do a couple more of these little life snippet episodes that don’t require much editing. I’ve always liked these, hopefully I won’t grow tired of them.

Mark Cuban has a great post about finding the right partner for your business and accepting your faults. While I don’t think you should ever stop trying to improve yourself, which in my case is attempting to be more organized, I do think he’s got a very valid point in knowing when to accept your faults and make sure you’re backing yourself up with a good partner. Thankfully, I think I’ve found a good one with Tom, so we’re covered there. The sky is the limit!

For my first video in probably 6 months, this is our daughter, Katherine Elizabeth Sharp, along with appearances from the majority of the Dickens and Sharp families, who most of you have not yet seen in my videos. Expect more to come from little Katie. This is very home movie-esque, I shot it that way, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I’ve given up on caring about quality in my videos, since when I did care, I couldn’t manage to produce one.

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Originally uploaded by Coccyx.

Katherine Elizabeth Sharp was born March 27th, 2006 in Fort Smith, AR. She is 7 pounds, 8 ounces, and beautiful.

Good post from Mark Cuban about the hypocrisy involved in having partially legalized gambling like we have in this country. Why is it legal some places and not others? Beats me. I ask the same question about why marijuana is illegal. More ramifications of a country founded by Puritans, and the case of marijuana, laws passed by racists (yes, I’m serious, look it up).

I can’t post a comment on your blog, so I’m going to post it here on mine and send you a trackback.

A local developer, Benny Westphal, has sold 10 acres of his 75 acre riverfront property to the Keetowah Indians so that he can legally put a casino in downtown Fort Smith. … His name certainly should be closely attached to such a terrible endevour so that no one can doubt in 15 years who brought the destruction of Fort Smith, Arkansas.

This argument is the same argument people make against lotteries. The fact of the matter is, whether you legalize gambling or not, people will find a way to throw away their money. There are plenty of endeavours in which can relieve poor people of the little money they have. If there’s a casino in Pocola and a casino in Roland, how is having one 7 miles closer going to make a difference? However, what it will do is bring a thousand jobs to the area, sponsor the critical Riverfront development all the citizens of Fort Smith have been crying for for the last 15 years, and above all that provide an entertaining place to go. My only hope is that Arkansas adjusts it’s gambling laws to allow poker rooms in Casinos.

On the same note, I’m excited to find someone talking about this on their blog. It’s about time! Local politics matter, no matter what side of the subject you happen to be on. I’d like to see more postings like this from you. What I’d like more is to see you join the group I’m trying to get together, a Fort Smith Bloggers group. We’ve got a Yahoo Group started at http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/fsbloggers, and we’re trying to get enough people interested to have a meetup. I hope to see you there!

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Originally uploaded by Coccyx.

This is Maggie after her bath. Apparantly Maggie picked the wrong skunk to mess with tonight and ended up permeating the entire house with a wonderful aroma. Ah, the pleasures of living in the country.

This is a must read from the NY Times.  If you were unaware, Verizon, AT&T, and others have proposed implementing quality of service on their networks which they would then sell to companies to have preferential treatment in the case of bottlenecks and also I presume express forwarding (lower latency).  What this means is that they would be able to put their own traffic (read IPTV) at higher priorities than say a Google or Yahoo IPTV product.  This concept has been in use on private IP networks for years, however, the idea was that when it was to be implemented on the public Internet, that everyone would have a fair chance at utilitizing higher priority traffic, rather than allowing the large ISPs to put it up for bid and hold it for ransom.  These companies already have the potential to put third party players like Vonage out of business when they’re in direct competition with them by blocking ports or subversively lowering QoS priorities on those packets without telling anyone.  It’s a dangerous time for the open Internet.  Everyone needs to be writing their representatives about this in support of this bill.

I’m organizing a meetup group for bloggers in the Fort Smith, Arkansas area. If you’re interested, contact me or join our Yahoo! Group.

Tom has a good post over on his personal blog about marketing in the Web 2.0 age. Something we’re finding a lot of people are missing, especially in Arkansas, is how to integrate their web presence into their existing marketing strategies.

It’s especially fascinating to be bringing the web to people,especially skipping the last 10 years of the Internet, and trying to bring them up to what people are calling Web 2.0. People, even in Arkansas, are either going to get that the Internet is changing everything about the way they do business, from marketing to customer interaction, or go out of business. Tom’s a leading mind in this area, IMHO, right up with the best of them.

Joel Spolsky points me to a post by Mike Gunderloy about VMWare releasing their GSX Server product for free. This is outstanding news, and I plan to test it out at the office this week. I guess VMWare listened to my advice to Microsoft, which I wrote in May of last year. Virtualization technology is already free with Xen and Linux systems, it’s about time one of the commercial vendors released one of their lower-end products for people to use for free. Way to go VMWare!

I like Steve Rubel. I like Robert Scoble too. Robert’s dead wrong on this one though. For some reason, bloggers seem to think that just because there’s more of us and anyone can contribute the conversation, that somehow everything has to change. Not so.

Perfect example, we just did a major release about 3 weeks ago of FireAnt. We spent a lot of time on the product. The directory was over 4 months in development. There were test sites available to the public about a month prior to release. We seeded the release out to trusted videobloggers and our users groups for the product to get feedback, but we asked all of them to remain quiet. They did. The reason? We wanted to give someone who had traction the exclusive to write about the new release such that we’d get a bit of a bang with our release instead of a gradual dull thud. That exclusive fell to Mike Arrington of TechCruch, and we were not disappointed. He got the exclusive, he was happy, his readers got the scoop the day it was released, and we got extended coverage in the blogosphere echo chamber because we gave a high-profile blogger the exclusive.

Steve groks it. I’m not sure why Chris and Robert seem to think everything has changed. I could have had the exclusive or given it to someone like my good friend Steve Garfield (whose readership/viewership is nothing to sneeze at), but why would I want to release something to my 200 readers and wait for it to maybe disseminate throughout the blogosphere when I can seed it to someone with a much larger and more influential readership? If we had given it to everyone all at once, we would have ended up with that dull thud I was talking about earlier. Somebody has to help control the noise, and a little bit of PR and marketing savvy can go a long way to doing that.

Shareholders approve sale of Beverly Enterprises, Inc.. Kind of scary, since they have a rather large corporate office in town. They employ 600 people in the area, white-collar, office jobs, so their loss would hit the community quite heavily. The reason for the sale? Mostly litigation. Turns out it’s pretty expensive to defend a nursing home operation against lawsuists, with Arkansas, their home state, being one of the worst.

City leaders eye $175 million in tax revenue for city improvements. This isn’t really necessarily a bad idea. Funny, 15 or 20 years ago we had a study done to the tune of a couple million dollars telling us we need to develop the riverfront. Since then we’ve built an ampitheatre. The rest of the area has continue to run down, and we’re wondering why we’re having a hard time competing when the newest major buildings in town are a new police office and county jail. We don’t even have a good City Hall! Luckily, earmarked in this budget is funding for a new City Hall as well as a sports complex down on the riverfront. The majority of the funds are earmarked for fixing the sewer system, which although we always pass water quality tests, is apparantly not up to snuff according to the EPA. I’m all for improvements that don’t require increasing our already exhorbanant sales tax. As a secondary note, this article was written by Adria Lynch, who I went to school with. Strange that I’m starting to see classmates in professional jobs locally. I don’t know why that’s strange, just is.

FBI gives vague time frame for investigation. This is the real gem. Apparantly the Roland, OK and Moffett, OK police departments are being investigated by the FBI. About damn time! Those PDs have been corrupt my entire life, to the tune of confiscating and selling drugs, trapping out of state motorists for transporting alcohol interstate, etc. I hope they fry them.

This came across an email list I’m on recently:

Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen recently said…

Ideally we’ll never meet any of our customers. We actually had to take the sign down from our front door because one of our customers actually stopped in, uninvited, and said, “Hi, I love your service.� And we’re like, “why are you here?� And so down came the sign.

Drop-bys like that should only happen in sitcoms as far as I’m concerned… The consumer internet businesses in a sense are ideal businesses from the standpoint of never meeting your customers.

Only in the technology business would anyone be caught dead uttering such an utterly stupid statement, and even then it doesn’t make it any less of a moronic comment. Your customers are your bread and butter. You should jump up and down if someone takes the time to stop by your office just to tell you how much they like you, and you should be just as excited if someone takes the time to tell you what you’re doing poorly, because it’s a chance to save a customer and make an advocate. This is something I’d expect to see on Rick Segal’s blog, in one of his infamous (at least to me) overheard dumb business conversations. I can’t honestly see anyone with this kind of attitude being successful in any business in the long run, technology or not.

Mike gives the new FireAnt Directory the thumbs up, along with mentions for Blip.tv and MeFeedia.com. As the guy who’s spent the last 3 or 4 months slaving over that directory, I really appreciate the positive feedback. We’ve got so much more in the hopper for the directory that you’ll need to write another article just for all the cool social features we have coming up. Keep your eyes peeled, new stuff is coming every day!

Thanks Mike! A positive review coming from you means a lot.

A while back, I wrote about what I’m calling the Local Web. The Local Web, in my mind, is a group (an infinite number of groups are possible) which arrange their interconnectedness by sharing a geographical point of reference, traditionally Metropolitican Statistical Areas, or MSAs. The Local Web is already built in many of the larger cities, with directories and vertical search engines to allow you to search for stuff in major metropolitan areas, but a good percentage if not the majority of Americans live outside of a major metropolitan area. The connected netizens from those areas are being largely overlooked by current major initiatives to create localized web experiences.

I’m starting an experiment in a town that should be the perfect size. My hometown is Fort Smith, Arkansas, a town of about 80,000 with about a quarter million in the MSA. There are billions of dollars of business done every year here, and many companies here ship worldwide. However, for doing business in town, most people still reach for the phone book. The reason for this, of course, is because you can spend days Googling around for information about Fort Smith businesses without finding much but spam sites. No one in this town has made a concerted effort to make sure things are easily found on the web about businesses they’d like to do business with.

So, I’m starting an experiment. I’m going to organize a blogger meetup to start. I’ve already found several local bloggers and I’m going to find or create more. I’m going to organize them and attempt to get them to write about business and other activities (softball, church, whatever) they that they do locally and where they do them at. I’m going to try to incent people to create links from site to site across town and try to make information more easily indexable by the search engines so that when you search for something in the area you don’t end up at a spam site. We will be holding the meetings at Kirkham Systems of Fort Smith.

Once this is going strongly, I, along with the staff of Kirkham Systems are going to start showing the results to local businesses and convince them they should have a website with a blog and incent them to link to the people they’re doing business with and write about their experiences with it. The goal is to create an interconnected web of links focused on this geographical area, so that if you end up at Kirkham Systems website you’ll find annotated links about the people we do business with, and when you end up there you can find the people they do business with.

If I’m right, by the time I’m done, Google will be a far more interesting resource to find information about businesses, things and places in Fort Smith, Arkansas than any other resource, anywhere. This may seem boring to people who live on the coasts and can find a well designed and well organized website for even local businesses, but for the large portions of the country that have been ignored by businesses attempting to organize information for them on the web, I think this will be a large step forward. No one understands or cares about this because they haven’t been educated as to what it can mean for both their businesses, themselves and their community. My goal is to educate everyone here.

The Local Web is long overdue.