rob’s blog

I recently wrote a brief paper on World of Warcraft, a game I’ve never played before, for the Service Strategies course I’m taking at Babson.  My paper discusses what about Blizzard Software’s functionality with the MMORPG of WoW was innovative or offered a bit of service differentiation.  You can read the whole thing here. (pdf)

I had chosen WoW for as my topic for three reasons.  One, it was among the suggested topics Professor Rao offered for the assignment, two, I love sci-fi and I played Magic in high school,  and three, my sister has played some WoW and she’s cool.

After spending a few hours working on that paper I realized that I should really have a crack at the actual gameplay for the good of scholarship.  Not because I have a lot of serious work to do that I’m trying to avoid.  Not that at all.

With a 10 day free trial, I couldn’t go wrong, so I started the download of the game and it was 3.6 gigs of data streaming over some type of resumabale http stream.  Oh well, I thought, I’ll let it go over night and try it out in the morning.

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I just got back from the 5/3/08 RJD2 show at The Paradise on Comm. Ave. I had been looking forward to the show for some time, pulling the on-sale date from an RSS item from tourfilter and within a week or two tickets sold out. It was with great anticipation that I approached the show. I saw RJD2 perform from a distance at Bonnaroo a few years ago, and had seen the crowd get worked. The Third Hand, Randle John Krohn’s latest from March this past year illustrated the major transition from a primarily hip-hop based library of music built on very deliberate sampling.

In his 2006 interview with Pitchfork Media, Krohn gave some important details about the album that would become The Third Hand. Specifically, the album was a huge transitionary work for him, moving from sampling to performance both in instrumentation and his own singing. In addition he moved labels from Definitive Jux to XL Recordings in an outwardly symbolic movement from hip-hop to a destination between electronic and pop music.

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I spent a good portion of the day today refactoring the database used to power the Dave Matthews Band application I’ve been writing for Facebook.

I’ve been interested in writing for Facebook for some time because I believe that companies need to be expanding their online presence into applications built for major social networking platforms. It is easy to say that people should pay attention to things like OpenSocial or Facebook’s API, there have been plenty of articles about it. But nothing can convince you like building and running one yourself.

My application began with only allowing users to choose a photo for their profile. Then I added the ability to select prior Dave Matthews Band shows. The problem came when people said they wanted to show their tour history further back than 2007.

I’ve been sourcing my data from the DMB Almanac, a site that I promote fairly heavily through the Weekly Davespeak’s front page and in the forums. I have a feeling I send them a good portion of traffic. Continue Reading »

Ryan Grim at The Politico wrote an article about the political leaks in Washington D.C. that also offers insight into how and why leaks happen just about everywhere, from bands to business to family secrets.

The article separates the types of leaks into three categories: the malevolent, the benevolent and the accidental.

Grim’s article includes eleven leak sub-categories each with a different intention. If you are plan to communicate with or be a part of the fourth estate, you should probably take a moment to read them each in detail. Instead of touching on each sub-category here, I would like to highlight how fair-weather leaks are used as a method of strategic media control.

Fair-Weather and Bad-Weather Patterns

“When an organization is being run well, people tend not to look at things as leaks, but they tend to look at things as information specifically being put out for some strategic purpose. When things are not well, the information getting out there is perceived as leaks.

-Chris Lehane, of the ‘92 Clinton campaign and later the White House.

This seems like a subjective impression to me, and I wonder how it could be quantified without defining exactly what it means for an organization to be “run well.” And Lehane’s idea seems to create a chicken-or-the-egg scenario: a well run organization incorporates strategy into leaks, while strategic leaks also seem to be the hallmark of a well run organization. Continue Reading »

I’ve been watching Live Nation pretty closely since the company was spun off from Clear Channel Communications Entertainment Division. I believe that it is positioned to do quite well about two years out.

Live Nation currently operates three areas of business, Events, Venues and Digital Distribution. Venues and distribution needs happen to be where musicians and artists will be needing help as they leave or avoid major record labels.

A major rift is scheduled for 2009, where Live Nation will be selling tickets for all of its venues without help from Ticket Master. According to the Wall Street Journal the major breaking point was that Live Nation wanted to be able to sell Ticket Master tickets directly through the Live Nation website. Clearly Ticket Master wasn’t willing to give up the brand identity.

Live Nation Hit a 52 Low Yesterday Thanks to a Bad Market and Slow Quarter As It Works To Expand Operations

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