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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Ruby on Rails on Deck

Last night I started a new Lynda.com course, Ruby On Rails Essential Training. I’ve wanted to know more about RoR for a while and it’s so much easier for me to absorb information like this when I can hear and see the lesson happening rather than just reading a book.  If you’ve heard of RoR and want to simply know what it is, you should check out the link and watch the free movies. They offer a good overview of what it is and will walk you through installing it on your computer. If you want the full lesson though, you’ve got to pay lynda.com for it. I’ve had a great experience with the courses from the site. Highly recommended. 

There Goes 6 Hours, Or, My Day with Civilization 4.

I’ve been a fan of Sid Meier’s Civilization games for many years. I’ve played Civ 1, 2, and 3. All have been some of wonderful time sinks. After putting it off for a long time, I finally broke down and bought Civilization 4 when I saw that it was optimized to run on my Intel Mac. My aging copy of Civ 3 was PowerPC only and it was time for the upgrade.

I’m not sure why, but every iteration of this game is literally makes the hours disappear for me. There have been a few games in my life that have been able to do that. The original SimCity was a fascinating game. I also like SimCity 2, but they’ve gone downhill for me since then. Another great game for consuming the hours was Ico, for the Playstation 2. The difference with Ico is that once you played it, it was over. There wasn’t much replay value for me, but it was a beautiful game.

Getting back to my addiction to Civilization though. The only game that has compared to its drug-like draw has been World of Warcraft, aka WoW. I’m going to have a tough even tomorrow because WoW is getting its first expansion released tomorrow, The Burning Crusade. My copy has shipped and should be waiting for me at work tomorrow. I’m not addicted enough to run WoW:TBC on one computer and Civ4 on another tomorrow night, but as you can see, it has crossed my mind.

CBS and YouTube, Sitting in a Tree

I’m not at CES anymore, but just today I read about a deal announced at CES between YouTube and CBS in which CBS is giving permission for people to use CBS content in their own creations. That’s not only cool, it’s really smart on CBS’s part. It’s a great way to encourage CBS content to make its way deeper into the culture. Let your audience promote your shows for you while they’re putting their own spin on them. If someone feels such a connection to one of your brands and uses it to express themselves, sueing them is probably not a great idea. (The following video isn’t necessarily good, but stopping this type of video from going live is pretty pointless.)

CES: Rethinking Advertising, New Video Platforms, New Video Paradigms

On Tuesday, I went to Rethinking Advertising: Broadband, VOD, DVR and Mobile - New Video Platforms, New Video Paradigms. One speaker didn’t attend, Will Griffin. Overall, I didn’t think that this session stayed on the topic that it was supposed to. That doesn’t mean some interesting discussion didn’t happen, but it was an unintentional bait and switch. (That’s what we ad people get accused of sometimes, right?) Here are some of my notes from the session.

Jeff Shultz, of concert.tv, talked about his business. Concert.tv is a video on demand channel. The channel has live concert films served to users on demand. It runs on cable TV systems and is supported by advertising. Initially, Coke was their only sponsor. A year later, there were 12 advertisers. There was some discussion about whether or not local ads run on his service. My impression is that they don’t. When his channel started, there was no existing business model that a cable company expected, so they made their deal that way.

Advertising delivered through a VOD channel is highly trackable. You know exactly how many times your ad was played, and, if the cable company wanted to, you could get some very detailed information. It sounds like cable companies are not very likely to hand over that information, especially if they are not able to sell local ad inventory on the channel.

Having ads delivered through a VOD service lead to a discussion of the validity of the 30 second ad. Mr. Shultz said that Selling ads in 30 second increments is a flawed system. 30 seconds is not necessarily more likely to reach your consumer than a 15 second ad, an 8 second ad, or 2 minute ad. Being able to deliver relevant ad messages is more important than time eyes are watching your ad.

That’s one reason the future of mobile advertising is so interesting. We can pinpoint a location of a person using GPS and serve them ads relevant to their location.

A person from the audience asked the panel why it seemed that every new marketing effort (specifically, mobile) seemed to be targeted at 18-24 year old men. The panel basically said that those were the people who adopted the technology first and they then serve as the test market for exploring new ways to reach people with new technology.

Lori Schwartz, of the IPG Emerging Media Labs, said that in a VOD world, clients are demanding high levels of data on its effectiveness. They are expecting both the traditional Nielsen type viewership data plus the type of data that running ads in broadband delivers.

There was also discussion of being able to track eyeballs across media channels. An example of a company that is doing this already is Ripe TV. Visit their site here.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

The Latest Object of Desire: iPhone.

I have until June to figure out how I get out of my Verizon Wireless contract. That’s 5 months to plan. In case you’re one of the 54 people who didn’t already know about the iPhone, visit the Apple site.

I’ve been at CES all week long where all kinds of amazing technology has been introduced. The only so called “news alert” I received from ABCNews.com about anything technology related was for the iPhone. I noticed people surfing for photos of the iPhone from their own now-ready-to-be-replaced mobile devices during one of the sessions I was attending.