Daily Webdork

It’s 1AM. Pretty damn late. My brain isn’t capable of coherent thought, but I’m still too agitated to sleep.

Here are some things I’m fairly sure about:

• 8.2% is a big number, even to Rupert
  
  I work for Rupert Murdoch. He’s my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.
  
  I don’t want to be too forward here, because I like my job, but this chart might be something for him to ponder. If you think about how much Google is worth, and how valuable their acreage on the ‘net has become, knowing that MySpace.com is responsible for over 8% of their traffic. Well, um, wow.
  
  That’s all I’ll say. Wow.
  
  
  
• I need to get some help on the OBR.
  
  One of the great things about this site when it started was that it was a team of people working together. Lots of guys made real contributions on a daily basis. We’ve got a great group of moderators on the forums… folks who try to keep things running just because they like hanging with their fellow fans and creating a cool place to be. Outside the forums, though, everything you see started getting routed through one solitary webdork back in 2001.
  
  I think I need to reverse that, not only to do the things that need to be done around here, but to start doing some things that we’ve never really done well. Promoting the site and magazine, for example. Reaching out to Browns Backers groups. Producing the radio show.
  
  With my work at Fox and with the way we’ve expanded by adding the magazine and the radio show, it’s obvious I’m spread too thin. We may add other things to this mix soon. I need to find some folks who, like Mike Desmond has done with the magazine, can take things that need to be done, organize them, and make them happen. If I don’t, the quality of what we do will slip because too much will be threaded through me and I won’t have time to do any of it right.
  
  If anyone reading this has worked a company through similar challenges, I’d love to hear from you. I could use some sage advice.
  
  
  
• I want one of these things.
  
  I’ve got a Treo 600 I got three years ago, and it might be time to upgrade when enough cash has accumulated to do so. The new one has higher screen resolution but the same form factor I like and there wouldn’t be a learning curve. My Treo is so beat-on now that all the finish has been worn off a lot of the keys. I got my money’s worth out of the thing.
  
  Broadband on one of these deals would rock. I’ve done site updates via my Treo and being able to hit the forums or do a training camp update at broadband speeds would be a lot more effective.
  
  It might be time to get a Windows Media version rather than a Palm OS version. Frankly, Solitaire is the most useful Palm OS app that I have, so it wouldn’t be that painful to switch.
  
  
  
• Comedy takes time
  
  YBD said on the forums not too long ago, dogging me, “remember when Barry used to be funny?”. Ouch. I flipped him off in response, but he’s got a point. There’s a real time investment required to do something funny well. Brian Tarcy works pretty hard on his “What’s Gonna Happen” articles, for example. At least that’s what he tells me.
  
  I think I used to be able to write funnier stuff back when I was doing the Ravens Suckzone not only because the Ravens were such a great target, but also because I had more time. I could take an idea, work it around in my brain over and over, and just take it to sillier and sillier extremes. Right now, I can’t do that. I have to go from concept to finish too quickly. Writing once every two weeks like I did back in 1997 doesn’t fly in the days of around-the-clock updates.
  
  You can’t rush humor. I tried something different on the radio show tonight and it failed miserably. When you’re trying to be funny and it fails, there’s no worse feeling… I remember once in High School I tried to improvise a humorous monologue in speech class once and it just died. That memory is still painful when it bubbles to the surface. No wonder comedians are such a mal-adjusted lot. There’s a lot of work and challenge in refining a stand-up routine and no harder audience to please.
  
  I don’t think I have time to do humor effectively right now. Some people can be funny instinctively (and I hate them for it). Regular people like myself have to work at it. Moohead tried to tell me this, gently, a few months back. I think he was right. Until you have the time to do it right, perhaps it’s best to focus on communicating directly.