(Image via Softonic.com)

Tumblr has a problem. And it looks like it’s about to be Yahoo’s job to fix it.

Over the weekend, the Web 1.0 company that made its fortunes in display advertising was rumored to purchase the upstart media company, which has only recently gotten into the advertising game. Yahoo’s board is meeting tonight; there’s an impromptu Yahoo product announcement in NYC tomorrow. Yahoo to buy Tumblr for a billion American dollars. Crazy.

(UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Yahoo board has approved a deal to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the blogging site Tumblr.)

Well, maybe not so much if you’re Tumblr. The company’s problem has always been revenue. (And porn. And missing letters.) After dumping in $125 million, Tumblr investors have to be anxious. The company pulled in $13 million in revenue last year. This year, its new sales head Lee Brown told Bloomberg Tumblr will cross the $100 million mark. Now would be a good time to sell, especially when you see Instagram get sold for $1 billion last year and Twitter scheduled to go public next year.

The problem, however, is a long term one. Brands and agencies I speak with don’t care about Tumblr. At least not in the same way they care about Twitter or Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are must buys and must haves. Tumblr not so much.

One, Twitter and Facebook, at this point, are easy for brands and agencies to understand. There’s protocol. There’s strong hand holding from Twitter and Facebook. And it’s easy to buy Twitter and Facebook. You know your target audiences and how to reach them on Twitter Facebook. Tumblr’s working on that, for sure, but it’s still in its adolescent stage.

Two, it’s hard to maintain and manicure a brand Tumblr. Unlike Twitter with its 140-character limit or Facebook with its thumbs-up likes, populating a brand Tumblr page takes time, money and resources brands either don’t have or see the point in parting with. While not a zero-sum game, brands need a reason to be on Tumblr other than it’s cool. Brands are on Twitter for variety of reasons, but mainly it’s a first line of communication defense. Customer service and PR work well on Twitter. So a brand is going to do what on Tumblr, exactly? GIFs?

That’s the challenge for Tumblr. Any brand can pony up cash for a promoted Tweet or sponsored post on Facebook. But to wade through Tumblr’s advertising morass, a brand has to already be there, creating content. This, they’re not doing in droves.

A Yahoo purchase can alleviate these pressure points. For starters, Yahoo sales team is a well-oiled machine. Yes, it’s currently undergoing some restructuring, shifting its model to lean more towards Google’s advertiser categories approach, but agencies and brands know and understand how Yahoo operates. That’s a big step for Tumblr. And there may be some moves between content deals and sponsorships, much like Yahoo has with ABC News.

But. Questions still remain. Will Yahoo continue its anti-Midas touch with Tumblr? Yahoo’s track record for major purchases — Flickr, Geocities are the shining examples — is less than stellar. Or, as Ian Schafer, Ceo of Deep Focus asked, “Can Yahoo help Tumblr make more than $100m in revenue without resorting to display ads?” And finally, will Tumblr users flee once the Tumblr blue morphs into Yahoo purple?

Soundcheck at The Stone Pony

I recently met with a CEO of a Denver start-up. He was in Manhattan pitching one of the largest media agencies in the world. We crossed paths at a mutual friend’s apartment, where said CEO was crashing. We got to talking about the trials and tribulations of being a start-up; that world is not unknown to me, as I counseled and represented many a start-up when I was in public relations. As the CEO talked about what he was going through, I realized there are many parallels between start-ups and bands.

I was once in a promising local band. In fact, I have a T-shirt that says just that. A friend bought it for me when my dream of being a professional musician was at its apex. My band was touring East coast bars, clubs and fraternities; we were recording an album. The sky looked blue and wide open. We were talented musicians. We just couldn’t sing. Singing, believe it or not, is an important aspect of a band. The singing was passable. Average at best. People didn’t come to see us because of our singing, that’s for sure. They came because the music was good. Really, it was. But when you’re missing a key ingredient to a cake, you can’t be surprised when people don’t eat your cake.

For a couple of years, we all lived together and played non-stop. We had regimented band practices at rehearsal studios, parents’ basements and garages, starting with a 10-15 minute jam and then go over song after song after song for hours on end. Some songs were easier to learn than others. Some songs were stronger than others. But we practiced. And we practiced. Then we’d practice some more. When we’d play out of state, we’d crash at friends’ places. On the floor, on a couch, it didn’t matter. Our motto: have band, will travel.

Many startups also live together, practicing. Though their practicing can be anything from creating the perfect algorithm to developing the perfect pitch. I once represented an artificial intelligence startup where five or six guys lived together in a huge NYC apartment. Some would be coding all day and night in one wing of the apartment and in the other wing, others would be working on a business plan, honing their presentation skills. We’ve all seen “The Social Network” and can remember the fraternity house-like environment David Fincher created for Zuckerberg and team. Apple, Amazon and Google each were founded out of a garage. You learn a lot about a person when you live with them. That seems like an obvious sentence, but when you’re a 19 or 20 year-old, you’re still learning life lessons like that. It’s no surprise that many bands and start ups have both succeeded and failed after living together.

The pressure to perform under Klieg lights is intense. As a startup, you’re pitching venture capitalists who can, with the stroke of a signature on a check, transform your life. You close that round and the world seems within your grasp. Of course, you give up a little piece of yourself to make your dream come true, but it’s within reach. Bands, too, know what it’s like to grasp at that carrot that’s being held up by an A&R rep or management company. The band will showcase their material to music execs, hoping that a record deal, a touring contract, something, comes their way. Just like a start up, when a band gets that first record contract, hope moves closer to a reality. For both start ups and bands, the dog and pony show could be life-changing. But it’s only a step.

Start ups work long hours, often with little to no reward, hoping their product takes off. For every Facebook, there are thousands that don’t make it, for whatever reason. It could be the idea; it could be the founders; it could be the timing; it could be anything. Same with a band. Musicians put their soul into their music, often for peanuts and beer. For every artist or band that makes it, there are thousands that struggle to reach the next level.

With the advent of social media, start ups and local bands have ways of building an audience without VCs or record deals. There are also TV reality shows that can push a band or artist or start up into the limelight. But even with these new avenues of distribution, the basics still apply: without a good product, bands and start ups can’t get off the ground. Yet the dreams of many start ups and band still push creativity, even it means crashing on the couch at a buddy’s place to get some attention from potential backers.

I’m sure there are other parallels between bands and start ups. What did I miss?

The next year, I learned a little bit more about Death when my father took me to visit my ailing 90-year-old great-grandfather in the hospital. He was frail and weak, but I remembered he still had a sharp wit and a full-head of hair. Things you remember when you’re ten, I guess.

But it wasn’t until February 17, 1989 that I fully comprehended what Death actually meant. But before I get to that, it’s important to understand the events leading up to that cold, wintery Friday.

Two weeks prior, on February 3, my family moved from Long Island to New Jersey. It’s not far, over a bridge or two, beyond Expressways of the Long Island variety and onto Parkways and Turnpikes of the New Jersey kind. But for a 10-yar-old, with a life, with friends, with structure, these were the worst possible roads to travel.

I didn’t like New Jersey…at first. I didn’t understand jughandles. I didn’t understand taking a school bus to school. In Long Island, I walked to school each morning with friends. I couldn’t do that in New Jersey.

It was a confusing time, to say the least, being the new kid at school. You’re treated as an oddity as the kids try to figure you out. And since I did not make the transition easily — I hated my parents for uprooting me — I didn’t have the easiest of times making friends. Over the course of the next two weeks, however, flashes of friendship occurred and, I’m proud to say, that these friends are still my closest friends. But it was still tough-going. Not only are you being tested in the classroom by teachers, but on the playground by the kids. Races, games, sports, whatever. I was an above-average athlete, so that served me well, until it didn’t. I raced two of the fastest kids, got beat and made up some excuse that a nervous 10-year-old makes. And that was that. Each night I came home upset, lashing out at my parents for moving. Then I got invited to a girl’s birthday party.

You know that warm sensation you get when something unexpectedly good happens? Multiply that by a million and that’s how good I felt. I wasn’t friends with this girl, but she had a party and invited me. I was ecstatic. Her party was February 17, her birthday.

When I rang her doorbell, I was nervous, naturally. But it quickly eroded after we kids just became kids; we made sundaes, watched TV, and maybe even a game of spin-the-bottle. Maybe. It was time to go and I felt like I was starting to feel comfortable in these new surroundings.

When it was time to go, my dad picked me up. He knew this party was important to me. He asked how it was and I’m sure I replied with some smartass 10-year-old quip. But when we got out of the car at the house, he said there was something we needed to discuss. His tone was terse and I thought I was in trouble for doing something. Boxes were still over the house; maybe I didn’t unpack properly? He guided me upstairs to where my mom was sitting on the edge of their bed, quietly sobbing looking down to the ugly green carpet of their bedroom. He said for me to sit down next to her.

As he started talking, I looked down at the green carpet, eyes filling up with water. My uncle, my dad’s brother, had died earlier that day at the age of 36. They didn’t know what happened, other than that he was at work — Grumman — and collapsed face-first into his lunch. Through tears and snot bubbles, I asked why didn’t he tell me earlier? How could he let me go to the party while he and my mom were at home with this heavy secret? He told me that he knew how important this birthday party was to me and that he and my mom decided to let me go, have fun, and then have “the talk.” This was when I truly understood Death.

The following few days were intense. From the funeral parlor to the cemetery to sitting Shiva, I was formally introduced to the Jewish death process. For a 10-year-old in a new home, it was, some might say, a defining moment for my life. So much so, that of all the deaths that have occurred since then, this one is the one that always sticks out. When my grandmother and grandfather — my dad’s parents — died, and we had the service at the same funeral parlor and at the same cemetery, I kept having flashbacks to my uncle. Maybe because he was the first, or maybe because he was so young — just a year older than I am now — it was hard to escape those visions of being a sad 10-year-old.

Interestingly, my grandmother, my dad and uncle’s mother, died on February 18, 2008 — 19-years and a day after her son.

24-years later, February 17 still plays in mind with a clarity that I wish other days had. I’m forever grateful to the girl who invited me to her birthday party (she knows this story quite well) and to my parents, who let me be a 10-year-old kid for an entire day before introducing me to Death.

One last pic of Big O before it’s shipped to the Department Store in the Sky

We all have talismans, good luck items we carry throughout life. One of mine was Big O, a bright orange winter EMS jacket I bought in 2004 that simultaneously keeps me warm in cold New York City weather and makes me the most easily spotted person on an island awash in black and grey coats. The jacket became a part of my identity. It was different; it was unique. Just like me! Or so I’d imagine.

However, the time has come to rid this good luck charm. For the last two winters, my infinitely wiser and smarter better half has pushed and prodded me to place Big O in the department store in the sky. I’ve put it off but now, after two consecutive nights of being the target of drive-by beer spillings at concerts, I face something I’ve never faced before: buying clothes online.

I know what you’re thinking. How could someone not shop online, like, ever? The thing is, I like trying things on; I like talking to sales associates and get their opinions. Blame my parents or my communications background or my job as a reporter. But I needed a coat and my wife finally convinced me that I should just go to Zappos and get a coat. “It’s just easier,” she said.

My anxiety rose when I went to Zappos: what type of jacket; what brand; what color; what size? Typical “where to start” questions. From there, the thoughts became a bit more philosophical, as I thought about the efficacy of advertising. We all say advertising doesn’t work on us, that we’re too smart to be manipulated to think of a product or brand while we’re shopping. That’s just not true, and research — both qualitative and quantitative — has proven that advertising works. But when I’m staring at a screen, looking for a piece of clothing, how do I know the years of messages, from both online and off, are penetrating my consciousness. Naturally, I had to step away from the computer for a few minutes and hug Big O.

I wound up defaulting to one key shopping metric: price. I didn’t look for any particular brand (because I don’t really know any) and, perhaps foolishly, I didn’t ask my social networks — again, both online and off. My wife gave me a suggestion or two, and after spending all of 10 minutes looking at a few different brands, I ended up on one she recommended, a brand called Mountain Hardwear.

Another reason why I don’t shop online is that I don’t want ads following me around. I’m the kind of shopper that a) rarely buys anything unless it’s necessary and b) when I do buy something, it’s typically an item that will last a while, like a TV or a computer or a winter coat. So now that I bought a winter coat online, naturally, I’m being followed by other winter coats. Because, hey, why not advertise to someone who just bought the thing you’re trying to sell? Perhaps because I don’t buy items online or click on ads or that I’m not seen as a high-value target, I don’t get the benefit of what online advertising can do. Of course, I would be A-OK if I started to get served ads for gloves, hats, sweaters, those tangential products that go nicely with a warm winter coat. But I guess that would mean actually buying stuff online.

Now I have a brand new winter coat, one that lets me blend in with everyone else. I am no longer unique, but that’s OK, because I’m warm. And while Big O was a totem for the past 9 years, it wasn’t the only one. And thankfully, if beer spilled on the other ones, they wouldn’t get ceremonially discarded.

Earlier this week, Facebook launched a pilot program to do just that. Why did it take so long? We’ve been charging to deliver mail and communications for centuries. You want to send something via pony express? Postal service? UPS? FedEx? Put a stamp on it and send it on the way. You wanted to send a telegram, back when the telegraph was the first iteration of the Internet? You had to pay per word, and it cost considerably more money to send a telegram outside of your city. From Retro-gram.com:

A ten-word telegram sent within a city cost as little as twenty cents in the 1920s. The same telegram sent from Chicago to New York City, for example, cost 60 cents. Most telegraph companies charged by the word, so customers had good reason to be as brief as possible. This gave telegram prose a snappy, brisk style, and the frequent omission of pronouns and articles often became almost poetically ambiguous. Telegrams were almost always brief, pointed, and momentous in a way unmatched by any other form of communication.

Even making phone calls cost money. While we pay a carrier fee, before cell phones, you could pay for a single call by using a pay phone. Or what some New Yorkers call a public toilet. And even thinking about text/SMS features: we still pay per text or in some kind of broader plan.

So if previous communications modes — telegraph, telephone, snail mail — all had some kind of pecuniary system, why didn’t we develop one for email? What made email different? What would the digital landscape look like if we were charged per email sent? For one, we probably wouldn’t be sending out stupid chain letters, nor would companies (and friends!) send us superfluous, spammy email.

I wonder if it’s rooted in how the Internet came to be; that it was developed by the government and academia without a business plan. Other communications modes were developed by non-government folk who were able to capitalize on patents and what not. If anyone has any ideas why we don’t get charged for sending email, leave a response in the comment section.

Image via Shutterstock

The realities of professional sports don’t even come close to the realities of reality. Really.

Melky Cabrera, who up until this past season was a marginal player at best, got caught — and admitted to — taking steroids. He was served up a 50-game suspension and was kept off the World Series champion San Francisco Giants post-season roster. Cabrera went so far as to create a fake website to try to convince people that instead of taking steroids on purpose, he bought this magic cream off the Internet and that’s what showed up in his drug test. He made $6 million last year. You’d think his career, let alone his reputation would be over. But this is baseball, and anything can happen in baseball.

The Toronto Blue Jays, days after negotiating a star-studded deal in which they all of a sudden become a contender in the A.L. East, signed Cabrera to a two-year contract at $16 million. Instead of being a forgotten name in baseball, Cabrera was awarded a second chance at $8 million per season.

Second chances are necessary in life; we all make boneheaded mistakes. But why do we give such leniency in sport? What makes sports more valuable to our society than other professions? If you got caught cheating and/or lying and/or making stuff up at your workplace, would you be rewarded with a second chance — and make more money from someone willing to hire you? I think we all know the answer to that.

Let’s say I decided to lift a whole passage from another writer into one of my articles and got caught, what do you think would happen to me? First, I’d get fired. Then, I’d have people scouring the Web looking for content that I stole and called my own. And I wish me luck finding a journalism job after all this, because that’s not going to happen.

Better writers — and famous ones, to boot — have been caught plagiarizing and have had their journalism/writing careers ended. They got caught trying to enhance their performance. While it’s not injecting hormones in their bodies to write better, they used a little nudge from someone else to make their articles better — or just invented things out of thin air.  Jonah Lehrer, Jayson Blair are the poster boys for this. And while others have been caught lifting isolated paragraphs and sentences here and there — Maureen Dowd, Fareed Zakeria — if you’re a journalist and plagiarize, your career is pretty much over.

But not in baseball. You cheat, you get rewarded with a multi-million dollar contract. It would seem the only thing that gets you banned from baseball is an off-the field error: gambling. Baseball’s reality takes weird twists and turns, particularly on the steroid issue. Testifying in front of Congress? Have an investigation headed up by a former Senate Majority Leader? Pretty sure no plagiarizer has had to deal with that. (And clearly, none of the finger pointing and testifying eradicated the use of steroids in baseball.)

From an unstable home environment (as athletes are on the road all the time) to the enormous salaries, most of us can’t fathom what it’s like to be a ball player. Baseball — and other sports — is its own reality, a non-standard way of life where consequences don’t really exist. Must be nice.

Sterling Place and 7th Ave

Lincoln, between 7th and 8th. Pretty much every side street in Park Slope has at least one tree down.

Awning down on 7th Ave.

Horizontal tree.

Park Slope kids climbing a tree that destroyed a car. Sterling and 7th Ave.

I’ve gotten to the point in my one-way relationship with the Yankees that I am just grateful to see them playing in the Fall. Sure, I’d love for them to win the World Series every year. If not for the gratification of watching 162 games (plus playoffs), then at least to stand among the thousands as the team parades down Broadway.

But the thing is, I grew up in an era where the team I rooted for had the best record in baseball for a decade yet didn’t make the playoffs. Not once, not never, or so it seemed to a little kid who watched his friends’ team, the Mets, make the playoffs and win the World Series. I grew up in an era where No. 2 was Dale Berra. I grew up in an era where the owner of the club paid someone to dig dirt on a future Hall of Fame player.

Since 1996, the Yankees, we all know, have made the post season all but one year. They’ve won 5 rings. This magical turn of events was unfathomable to a 10-year-old in 1988. And this is important: Baseball is a child’s game, played by adults that make an obscene amount of money. Which is where the pressure and expectations come in. I get that. But at the same time, we should take a step back and appreciate that team we root for makes it to the playoffs and each year, for the last 16 years have had a shot at bringing home the gold. We watched future Hall of Famers start as kids and grow into New York City institutions. Watch the Yankees through the eyes of your childhood self and then get upset for them not winning the World Series. You can’t. (And if you’re a Yankee fan post-1996 and you don’t know what post-season futility is like, well, I’ve got nothing for you. Sorry.)

This season, the better team won. And Yankees fans, let’s face it, as the team gets older and other teams get better and more teams make the playoffs, there is a strong chance that the Yankees will hit a dry spell. Who knows how long it will last? No one predicted, in 1981 after a nice 6-year-run, that the Yanks wouldn’t make the playoffs for another 14 years. So appreciate what we have. I do, and the appreciation only runs deeper when October rolls into November and all I get to root for is the Jets.

Spring training starts in about four months.

Trey Anastasio, Phish. Photo by Josh Sternberg

Yesterday, a bunch of friends got together to celebrate Day of Man. Each summer, we go away — whether camping in upstate New York or bachelor parties around the country — however, this year, due to several new and coming babies, we decided to truncate our Weekend of Man into Day of Man. In fact, one of the guys we were celebrating had his baby yesterday morning. Like a trooper, new dad joined us for a celebratory dinner at Fette Sau. Anyhow.

There was one conversation that sparked several side conversations throughout the day, typically a good sign of a great topic. A buddy posed this question: You can only listen to five artists for the rest of your life. You get all the work they did. So for example, if you chose John Lennon, you’d get Lennon plus the Beatles. You couldn’t do the reverse, choose the Beatles and get all the solo work by each of the Fab Four.

I thought about my answer and the first two came rather easily, as those who know me wouldn’t expect anything less: Jerry and Trey. So I get Jerry Garcia Band and all his side projects, along with the Dead. With Trey, I get obviously Phish, but also Oysterhead and the different iterations of TAB.

My third choice surprised the table, but all deemed it acceptable: Eric Clapton. I get some of the most influential rock and roll, and some nifty guitar work — his solo stuff, Cream, Blind Faith, Yardbirds.

The fourth choice, in hindsight, is another no-brainer for me. Bob Dylan. Beyond his ever-growing and eclectic music catalogue, I also get his work with The Band and the Traveling Wilburys.

My last choice, however, is difficult. I could not imagine not listening to the Beatles ever again (remember, this thought experiment’s parameter is that your choices are the only music you can listen to for the rest of your life). But I thoroughly enjoy Lennon, McCartney and Harrison’s solo work. We can toss out Ringo; sorry Richard. Musically, I think Harrison’s is the most elegant and sonically/tonally pleasing to the ear. McCartney’s is solid, but a little too Beatlesque for my taste sometimes. And Lennon’s music can range from the beautiful to the jarring. So I’m still thinking about which of the three to make my fifth artist. Right now I am leaning towards Lennon for no particular reason. Maybe because he wore glasses and I wear glasses and growing up, that was something I could relate to.

The fifth one is tough; they’re all tough. How could I not listen to the Stones or Floyd or The Doors or Miles or Wes or even my own (defunct) band ever again? How could I not hear the genius of Zappa or the dexterity of the Allman Brothers or the humor of Steely Dan?

Some people’s responses: Sam Cooke, Peter Tosh, Paul Simon, Roger Waters, Ryan Adams, Howlin’ Wolf, Levon Helm, Miles Davis, Jack White, Peter Townshend, Jimi Hendrix.

But we’ve all done played this sort of game before, with different variations: top five movies; top five books; top five albums. I liked this question because it makes me think beyond the artist and to the kind of music I could listen to until my heart beat hits its final rest note. I noticed that my choices have deep catalogues, both as solo artists and as the member of a band. Colin Jones, via his girlfriend, asked a terrifying question: would you rather never listen to music again or listen to just one song? If one song, which one?

Just read this NYT piece about the Thiel Fellowship. Some loose, early Saturday morning thoughts:

Peter Thiel misses the point of college. It’s not a pathway to jobs or to riches. It’s a place where young people — not quite kids any more, and not quite yet adults — go to learn, and not just within the four walls of a classroom.

When I was a professor (oh, so long ago), I would explain two things on the first day of class: one, that the course my students were currently sitting in was bullshit; two, the person sitting next to you may help you at some point in your life.

I taught a variety of communications — theory and practical — courses. The knowledge they learned in the class could be learned, as Matt Damon pointed out, in a library for $1.50. What was taught in the classroom was taking the knowledge they were learning from the texts we were reading and try to apply it to life, to try to understand situations before they happened, to try to recognize the wonder and beauty of human interaction and how we communicate.

College is also about the people you meet, the relationships you cultivate.

If you went to college, I’m pretty sure you learned more about psychology, sociology, communications, anthropology living with a complete stranger or having your first serious relationship, learning how to deal with conflict, adjusting to the patterns of someone else’s life. When you take what was applied in the classroom, you become a student of life which can and should help you understand, even just a little bit, how the world around you works.

Professors try to lift the veil of ignorance; especially in the social sciences where we study the most predictably unpredictable thing: humans. Of course, many don’t approach college this way. College is seen as a means to an end: a career. Or college is just an excuse — albeit, a pretty tempting one — to remain for just a few more years, someone without the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Peter Thiel and James O’Neill, the founder of the Thiel Foundation, which provides $100,000 to persuade kids to not go to college and instead focus on building things, ignores all this with talk of, “Not only does college track you into a career with a big company,” he (O’Neill) said, “but for many people, it piles on a huge amount of debt that limits people starting a company or quitting your job to tinker in your garage.”

I cannot talk to the ‘hard’ sciences, which is what the Thiel Fellowship plays to. But I would argue that scientists (maybe even more so because they need money from people to do their research or to build the next great tech company) need to understand how people behave, communicate. Angel investors and venture capitalists have told me that when they look for companies to invest in, they pays more attention to the team than to the actual technology or idea. As one said, “There are tons of great ideas., but great companies are built by great people”. But that’s getting a bit ahead of myself.

Thiel and O’Neill are correct, though, that not everyone should go to college; there are many who would be better off doing something else with their time. I’ve taught these kids — some were just not mature enough to handle the pressures of a college life; others had talents and skills that could, if not change the world, bring something positive into it. But the short of it is, not everyone is a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, all college dropouts. Or Kobe Bryant, LeBron James or Quentin Tarantino, each who did not go to college.

Higher Ed needs to change, there’s no denying that. But asking students to not go in return for the opportunity to build something that may or not happen is shortsighted. An education — whether that of within the four walls of a classroom or a dorm room — is needed for people to not just broaden their horizons, but to make those connections that can help them lead the lives they want to lead outside of the four walls of an office. You make lifelong friends in college, and that’s more important, at least for me.