I had to sit through a 15 second AT&T commercial before I could watch the video clip. I don’t like commercials too much but can understand why they have them in there.
15 seconds seems a bit long for a 3 to 5 minute music video clip though. I’d like a 10 second clip; or maybe a way to build up watching of longer commercials to not have to sit through a commercial for each video.

The picture quality looks pretty good. Not sure what the native resolution is for it. In my quick readings the early sentiment said there wasn’t an HD version of the videos, but video quality was good.

I watched the 50 Cent – Do You Think About Me Premier Video. You can take a look at a couple of the screen captures that I have added below:

50 Cent Premier Do You Think About Me Video on Vevo navigation

One interesting thing is that there’s a logo for Amazon on the right hand bar, but the link redirects to iTunes to purchase 50 Cent’s new Album “Before I Self Destruct (Deluxe Version)”

50 Cent - Before I Self Destruct in iTunes

50 Cent on Vevo with Lyrics Enabled

I like the lyrics function. I’m not sure if that is part of google / youtube’s new captioning effort see NY Times article Google to Add Captions, Improving YouTube Videos that involved transcribing.

You can read more news about Vevo at:

Mashable shows Vevo Details
PC Mag’s Hands On: YouTube’s Vevo Music Video Site

From this article it seems that Universal Music Group has been in talks for awhile and working on this for some time. Since April 2009 at least…
Vevo Lives: YouTube, Universal Announce New Music Video JV

There’s also the VEVO channel on youtube itself:
YouTuve’s VEVO Channel

I’m not sure how this will affect mashups of videos on youtube, but it probably means the end of the wild wild west of videos on youtube. We’ll have to see how things go as YouTube rolls this out and it gets some more traction.

I definitely like the quality of the videos, and being able to link to a video without having to update or change links for violating TOS of youtube or copyright infringement.

Let me know what you think about Vevo

And you’re you. Lots of people have access to these tools. We can all start from somewhere, build into something, make relationships, and express ourselves in a way that suits our interests.

You can read the full article by Chris Borgan Chris Brogan Behind the Scenes.

Then I was checking out some pics on twitpic from Robin Collins (follow her on twitter @RobinCollins ) and came across this image

About 30 minutes later I read this article by Randy Gage Your Unique Power to be You! @Randy_Gage on Twitter.

No one person in the world is the same as another. Not even “identical” twins are really identical.

I did a couple of searches in google and found
Wikipedia’s version of Know Thyself

In the true theological sense, “Know Thyself” is a fundamental tenet of the question of life’s meaning. To truly ‘know oneself’ in this sense involves a deeply personal, spiritual transformation whereby a person would seek to orient themselves towards understanding their own phenomenological perceptions of reality, so as to gain earnest insight into aspects of one’s own existence.

and Shakespeare’s version

“And this above all unto thine own self be true and it shall follow as the day the night – thou can’st not then be false to any man.”
- William Shakespeare.

It’s like they were ALL telling me the same message.

Stop

…

…

Think

…

…

Reflect

…

…

And be the best darn YOU that You can!

Are you being the best you that you can be?

Next time you see me ask me if I’m being the best that I can be, and I’ll challenge you to as well.

About 20 minutes ago I checked again to see what’s been happening in the twittersphere or is it twitterverse and saw the same messages.

I went to checkout the status update from twitter to see if there were any updates. It still shows we are dealing with “Ongoing denial-of-service attack”. That’s what they said 17 hours ago and it seems to be continuing; at least for me.

When I logged into Hootsuite just now I still see the same message. And when I clicked on Twitter Login I saw a connection was reset error. =(

So I hopped over to google news and was skimming through some of the news.

According to the Wall Street Journal article Twitter, Facebook Sites Disrupted by Web Attack There was an attack this morning at 9 am EDT on both twitter and facebook.

Facebook seems to be up and running for me. But Twitter is still down.

Side Note About Google News
It was interesting to me that it made the front page of google news.

The other thing that I noticed, and maybe it’s because I haven’t really been paying much attention to this in news. But there was a plus sign to click on that allowed me to watch a video about the Twitter DOS attacks in google news directly without having to be redirected to youtube or google video.

It looks like google is adding the universal search or universal component to other things besides just google search.

Here’s the link directly to the twitter dos video.

It’s interesting to see how we react to withdrawal of being able to use twitter when it’s not available anymore. It’s a little like losing the electricity or internet connection. You forget what it’s like without it and how much it’s become a part of your life.

I remember that twitter would go up and down due to heavy traffic loads about a year ago. But it has been fairly consistent for me. This is the first time that I’ve heard of a Denial of Service Attack targeted towards social networking and microblogging sites.

Is twitter working for you NOW?

You can follow me by going to http://twitter.com/tedchan or send me a reply @tedchan. I typically tweet about technology, marketing, internet marketing, social media, entrepreneurialism, productivity and business.

Than had said, and I’m paraphrasing a little here that “Tony was the only coach that got everyone’s attention without swearing or cursing”. And he was calm and composed. If you’ve watched much football and been around it much on TV or in person many of the coaches swear, get mad and have quite the temper.

If you don’t know who Tony Dungy is he was the Head Coach for the Indianapolis Colts. And coached them to a Super Bowl win in 2006. You can read more about Coach Dungy at Wikipedia here.

Tony Dungy is one of the coaches that everyone respected and listened to. In the artricle that I read here today, it said:

Yet to Dungy, life was never solely about championship rings or division titles.

His top priorities were faith and family, and he never wavered.

In a profession where spare hours are scarce, Dungy made time for the prison ministry, All-Pro Dads and Family First although he always wanted to do more. He urged players and coaches to get involved in community work, too.

He had his priorities in order and spent time giving back. And he still had the time and energy to be a kick butt coach. His record speaks for itself

Dungy went 148-79, won six division titles and appeared in three conference championship games—one in the NFC and two in the AFC.

It is sad to see Tony Dungy leave coaching football, but I think he has done a splendid job in his career as a coach. Also, he coached with integrity, and without compromising his values. This is something that I believe we should all aspire to; being able to pursue or goals with integrity and without compromise. He kept his priorities in order and earned a lot of respect from the people that he coached and the people on his coaching staff.

It is also a testament to his leadership the kind of coaches that came out of his organization such as …

Kansas City coach Herm Edwards
Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin
Chicago’s Lovie Smith
former Detroit coach Rod Marinelli
Indianapolis’ Jim Caldwell

Over the past several weeks I have had some time to do some reflecting and one of the biggest things that I’ve found being an entrepreneur and business owner is how vital it is the people you surround yourself with.

As an employee you really don’t have too much say or control of who you work with and interact with, but as a business owner and entrepreneur you can choose who you work with, who you interact with on a daily and regular basis.

I feel it is important to surround yourself with the best people that you can, who can support you, be a good sounding board, as well as bring you down to earth when you need to pop the big head of yours.

Having a great leader or coach such as Tony Dungy in your life might not be a person that you currently have in your life right now; but it’s someone that you should look to find. I’ll be looking for a coach and mentor such as Tony.

Also, on the flip side of that is who can I mentor and coach who is in a place that I was not too long ago. How can I invest back into someone else’s life and help them grow?

I didn’t pay too much attention to it until I was searching for a video and came across this video from Google about Google WikiSearch today:

Google WikiSearch Intro

Here’s a quick and dirty test that I just ran:

Google WikiSearch Disabled

Google WikiSearch Enabled

Confirm enabling Google WikiSearch for the first time

It definitely looks pretty cool that you can add notes and get rid of sites that you don’t like too much. My thoughts are, if I’m going to be repeating a search, why do I need to rearrange things and put notes. That means that I already know what I’m looking for. And isn’t that why we have bookmarks and sites such as delicious, digg, furl etc. to hold and organize our bookmarks and share them with others…?

The other ramifications might be that Google will start using human edited rankings to influence their SERP’s (search engine results page). I’m not sure how much weight Google would give to the wikisearch if any at this time. But I’m sure people out there who are doing SEO will be testing some things out with this.

I’m not sure if I like the added “new feature” or not yet as I haven’t tested it extensively; however it seems that there isn’t a way to turn off the feature as noted by this article from the Washington Post and PC World Google SearchWiki Addition Fails to Wow.

You can get more info about it directly from google at SearchWiki.

If you have used Google WikiSearch or have some thoughts please leave your comments.

I just finished watching the following video interview with Jerry Yang and John Battelle :

It was interesting to listen to Jerry Yang discuss some of his trials and how he perceived things versus what us outsiders thought. Many thought that he didn’t want to do a merger with Microsoft, but he seemed fairly open to it and was quite candid.

One of the things that caught my attention near the end was someone asking about being follower’s / copying google and microsoft and Jerry says that they continue to innovate and try to be the best at what they do. Also we have seen some changes and innovation come from yahoo since he has taken over. But it seems that it wasn’t enough.

I really thought he’d be able to shake things up and make some changes, but it seems that he has run out of time and shareholder’s and other investors want to see the results quickly. We will see who will be selected to take over as CEO and how the deal with Microsoft buying them out or merging plays out; if it does at all.

Here are a couple of my thoughts from the notes that I took while watching the videos. But you should definitely take a watch if you’re interested in social media, business start up or just a fan of Gary.

you’ve got to hustle – and just start building from wherever you are at now.

Social Media – is one of the biggest opportunities in our space.

Newcomer Kicks Old Timer’s Butt - Yelp is kicking Zagat’s butt online.

Costs of time – Cost to building business in social media is time; not dollars.

Watch those Teenagers -
look at early adopters and see what they’re doing and how they’re using things.
-> watch 14-18 year olds and see what they do
Case in point, I found out about facebook from a friend’s younger brother back in early 2005 when it had just opened up from requiring invitations to join.

Fanatical users – build happy and passionate users, they’ll do all the Word of Mouth for you if you make sure they are very happy with you, your products, and services; take care of them

Incremental Changes Cause Monumental Shifts – things change when platforms change

I really got fired up from listening to Gary. He had a ton of energy and the big take away for me was to hustle. Just get things going with whatever I’ve got.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
- Theodore Roosevelt

A close second was the idea of paying attention how things change when platforms change (new technologies and media distributions become available).

Myspace is still king of the hill, but has seen slow growth at only 1% year over year to 59.3 million users; while Facebook has grown 116% year over year to 39 million users.

You can read more about it at cnet. So if you’re doing internet marketing or just interested you should probably have at least a myspace, and facebook account if you’re interested in leveraging social networks. And if you’re more adventerous you might want to try out twitter, linkedin as well as some of the other services that are listed in the press release.

Babe Ruth hit the first ball on opening day and Derek Jeter hit the last on closing day.

It also reminded me of the closing of Comiskey Park. That was closed in 1990 and moved to a new stadium. I think it’s called US Cellular field, but everyone that I know still refers to the “new” Comiskey Park as Comiskey Park. It definitely feels different attending a game at an older field where you feel a part of the history and can imagine the hundreds of players and thousands of fans who have come before you and the ones that will come after you. Comiskey Park had been around from 1910 to 1990 about 80 years. That’s probably more than 2 or 3 lifetimes for some people.

You can check out a video about the Comiskey Demoltion Below:

Thanks Yankee Stadium for many great games and memories that I watched on TV, heard about or listened in on. I definitely feel for the fans. On the upside they’ll be getting a brand new stadium next year!

Details still coming in about pricing but it seems it’ll be around $199 to $140 price range with a two year contract. They’re calling it the HTC Kila. I liked how Tmo News had it …

Patient TmoNews readers, may we present to you, the HTC Kila, errr we mean HTC Dream, or the G1, aka the first android handset ever!

I’m glad T-Mobile is getting some great new phones. I was with them for a long time and even remember my first “smart phone” the Nokia 3650 (darn rounded dialpad was so annoying, had to look down to dial when driving…). According to wikipedia it was apparently the

the first Symbian Series 60 smartphone to appear in American markets. It was also the first phone with an integrated camera delivered to North America.

Hmm… I didn’t even know that back then. The camera was alright, but remember the phone locking up at times. Doh, sorry for the trip down memory lane. The HTC Kila looks very interesting. I’ll have to wait as I still have a few months on contract with verizon. For all of you contractless or T-Mobile users I’d go and check it out. Let me know what you think about it, as I’ll be in the market in a few months.