It’s the eve of the 2010 NCAA Men’s basketball tournament and for the first time since I can remember my beloved Arizona Wildcats will not be playing. After 25 straight years of being invited to the Big Dance the Wildcats consecutive tourney appearances came to a crashing halt.
The future of the program looks to be in good hands with Coach Sean Miller but with the Wildcats season ending so soon it seems natural to reflect on the tremendous success of years past and how much the Wildcats were ingrained on a kid from Tucson.
The earliest I can recall being a Wildcat come from attending Arizona football games with family friends. We’d eat Eegees on the lawn before the game then during the game we’d have our own pickup football games on the field just North of the stadium. I remember the buzz of the people, the lights, the grass and ice cream headaches from drinking my Eegees too fast.
It wasn’t until 1988 my Freshman year of high school that I truly became an Arizona basketball fan. The team was experiencing its greatest success and the threesome of Steve Kerr, Kenny Lofton and local boy Sean Elliott could do no wrong. It’s that year when I realized what the Final Four was all about and I was torn up when they lost to Oklahoma.
Following years delivered huge highs as Arizona swept through the regular season but early round defeats to Alabama, UNLV and Santa Clara are what stick with me most.
I still remember the players from those teams and reveling in the 3-pointers from Steve Kerr, scrappiness of Jud Buechler, excitement of Khalid Reeves and pure speed of Damon Stoudamire. Lute could recruit from across the country and seeing Khalid Reeves first play really made me fall in love with the game. He and Jason Kidd (from Cal) showed me the beauty and excitement in basketball.
Of course 1997 was a banner year for the program and I had just graduated from Arizona the previous semester but nothing was going to stop me from joining the masses on West 4th. Thank you Mike Bibby and Miles Simon.
Much has been written about the trials and tribulations of the program since Lute Olson left but the program has never been the same since they lost in the Elite 8 to Illinois in overtime in 2005. That loss was crushing and I think Lute never recovered.
Moving on without the Wildcats in the tournament has been strange as I typically fill in a heart and head bracket but this year I really have no favorite. Maybe I just don’t like college basketball that much unless the Wildcats are playing? Maybe it’s just time for me to grow up.
Thanks Wildcats past and present for all the great memories. You mean more to the city and people of Tucson than you will ever know.
As magazines continue to fold, editors can continue to lament the downfall of print media as they hold onto their jobs for dear life or take charge of their careers and do what’s necessary to make them invaluable to their employers.
Hopefully magazines and newspapers will learn to monetize their content on the web or rebuild their business models so they aren’t solely based on ad dollars which are based on inflated base-rates. I’ll gladly spend a little more to keep my favorite magazines from faltering and I’m saddened when I seen a subscription offer of “two years for $6″ as I know the writings on the wall for that magazine to shutter.
After spending a few years working for two of the largest print media companies in the world (Time Inc. and Hachette Filipacchi Media), I understand why they don’t get the online business. Each of these publishers has been putting ink to paper for at least 100 years. That’s why they’ve been successful because they’ve been doing this better than anyone for a tremendous amount of time. The same goes for long-time employees, many of who remain stubborn and arrogant about their roles editing a magazine. For many of them it’s been their only job since graduating from college.
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It’s time I finally recap my experience at Blogworld 2009 in Las Vegas.
In one word “Awesome”.
Since I’ve been working for myself consulting and building Charles & Hudson I spend a huge amount of time alone and behind the computer screen and not nearly enough time building face-to-face relationships and hearing from folks who have something to share about blogging and the business of blogging.
The conference started out with a keynote from Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati. I’ve been a Technorati user for years and often referred to it to see who linked to me and to measure the reach of my blog. In the past year or two I’ve become much less reliant on Technorati as Google started indexing blogs and I started pulling in real-time referral data from my RSS reader, Google Alerts and Sitemeter. Jalichandra is convinced that Technorati has changed with the market and will again be a leader in the blogosphere. Time will tell but if I no longer reference Technorati since my authority fell back to 1 and never updates.
The greatest bit of serendipity from the show started from the keynote when I happened to be seated behind Rebecca Orlov. Rebecca and I had emailed briefly through her Blog Out Loud organization in Los Angeles and at the keynote she was furiously tweeting the event. I couldn’t help but notice her laptop screen was opened to her Blog Out Loud Twitter account so I made an introduction. As nice as she was online she was even sweeter in person and we’ve since struck up a great friendship which was enough to make Blogworld a success for me. Fortunately there were many more people to meet and things to learn. [continue reading]
Currently 15% of the referral traffic to Charles & Hudson is originating from Google image searches and is only second in referrals to Google organic search. It jumps to 18% when I add in Bing and Yahoo! image search. That’s a significant amount of traffic that many blogs and corporate websites are leaving on the table.
Often ignored by enterprise level content management systems, image naming on corporate websites leave much to be desired. Vogue.com launched last week and the website looks great (except for the pop-up that won’t go away). But the main image slug on the homepage is named “http://www.style.com/images/vogue/homepage/hp_primary.jpg”. It’s a photo rich with imagery including a handbag, shoes, skirt, and a model. Is it the fault of the CMS that CondeNast employs which makes it difficult to name images with keyword rich names? In this situation I’d say no since someone did name this image “hp-primary.jpg” and it’s not just a random image name generator such as “in38sfeafe.jpg” which often times is the case. [continue reading]
