Business

'The Founder' Portrays Ray Kroc as a Hamburglar

I love biopics. I completely believe them when I'm watching, then spend the next few days scouring the web for how much nonsense I accepted as fact. After hearing that The Founder was on Netflix, last night I watched Michael Keaton portray Ray Kroc as he pried McDonald's away from the brothers who founded the original restaurant and invented its fast food techniques. The film portrays Kroc as a villain and the brothers as heroes. Judging strictly by the film itself, and not the actual facts, I ... (read more)

2017/08/23

Tomorrow I Will Experience Congress

I love the smell of democratic governance in the morning. I'm back in Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress and their aides as part of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Long Tail Fly-In. Around 50 web publishers have paid our own way to come to D.C. to explain how Google AdSense and other contextual ad networks power small businesses. This is my third year attending the event. We spend one day talking shop about web publishing and learning about new web privacy legislation, then ... (read more)

2012/06/04

Kim Polese is a Cautionary Tale?

There's a dreadful sexist commentary on Forbes magazine today by Eric Jackson that suggests early Java executive Kim Polese caused herself to be wildly overhyped and the same mistake could be happening today to Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Under a headline that dubs each woman a Silicon Valley "It Girl," Jackson makes comparisons between the two women that all relate to gender, aside from flimsy observations that "they both like(d) magazine covers and editorial spreads" ... (read more)

2012/05/23

Matt Haughey on Running a 'Lifestyle Business'

There's a great interview in Willamette Week about my friend Matt Haughey, who has turned MetaFilter into a successful small business that employs around 3-5 people and gets 25 million hits a month. Haughey, who was one of the founders of Blogger, left Silicon Valley for McMinnville, Ore., several years ago. The interviewer does a nice job of picking up on the phrase "lifestyle business," which is used in the dot-com world to insult startups that make a sustainable amount of money for their ... (read more)

2011/07/15

Tell Me What to Tell Congress

I'm in Washington D.C. as part of the Long Tail Fly-In, a group of around 60 small web publishers assembled by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). As a publisher who uses context-based advertising on the Drudge Retort and other sites, I was invited to meet with members of Congress to talk about why this form of advertising is important to online media. I attended this event last year and met aides for Reps. Diane DeGette (D-Colo.), Michael Castle (R-Del.), Bill Young (D-Fl.), Charlie ... (read more)

2011/05/23

YouTube Founders Save Delicious from Doom

Good news: The social bookmarking site Delicious has been saved from Yahoo's wrecking ball. YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired the site for an undisclosed sum. Delicious was founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter, an entrepreneur I got to know as a contributor to his early group blog Memepool. Delicious is a free service to organize web bookmarks and share them with others. This was briefly a phenomenon before Facebook and Twitter devoured all other forms of link sharing. ... (read more)

2011/04/27

Debt Collector: People Are Mean to Me

I keep comments open forever on Workbench because the old blog entries here occasionally attract some interesting comments in the deluge of spam. A debt collector searching Google on Tuesday for the phrase debt collector sued for doing their job found my story on the $8.1 million judgment against a collector and posted an epic rant. The rant, which I've reprinted in full below, shows that debtor anger and the threat of being sued are getting to these bottom feeders. If you're bothered by calls ... (read more)

2010/12/09

Comics Publisher Has Lousy Rep with Freelancers

The small comic book publisher Bluewater Productions keeps getting an enormous amount of mainstream media attention for publishing cheezy comics about celebrities and other public figures, like its upcoming biographical book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg: Bluewater Productions Inc. is doing a "giant-sized" 48-page bio-comic that will explore the question, "Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?" The company said it had good success with comics like its "Female Force" series featuring women ... (read more)

2010/09/28

Exercising My Right to Petition the Government

On Tuesday I visited five Congressional offices in the Capitol to make the case for small publishers who rely on targeted Internet ads for revenue, an event that rated a story in Politico. The Interactive Advertising Bureau invited web entrepreneurs to come to DC and meet members of Congress and their aides, hoping to make the point that thousands of Americans are running businesses powered by these ads. We're one of the only sectors of the economy that's been growing during this recession. ... (read more)

2010/06/17

Mr. Cadenhead Goes to Washington

I'm in Woodbridge, Va., this morning about to head out to the Long Tail Alliance Fly-In, a gathering of small web publishers organized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google. As a publisher who uses context-based advertising on the Drudge Retort and other sites, I was invited to come to DC and meet with members of Congress to talk about why this form of advertising is important to online media. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has concerns that Congress is working on ... (read more)

2010/06/14

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