Wisdom of Colin Cowherd

I've said this before, but I'm constantly amazed at how much marketing and business insight I get from listening to ESPN's Colin Cowherd on the way to work.

His most recent gem came in discussing how the National Spelling Bee attracted TV ratings that rivaled prime-time Major League Baseball. It was a topic on his show because hardcore baseball fans had complained that the spelling bee was a dog and not equal to baseball in interest or importance.

"Don't listen to the diehards and the purists," Cowherd said. "Do not let them drive the bus."

His point was that diehard fans and baseball purists are blind to new possibilities.

I heard Cowherd's take at the same time we're tackling a dramatic redesign of our newspaper that could take us in bold new directions and question many of the strategies that have served newspapers so well over the years.

Consistently throughout this redesign process the voice in my head has been saying, "Don't listen to the diehards and purists."

Getting back on the grid

I've been off the Twitter-Facebook grid for about two weeks. Just been buried at work and home; lots going on, in a good way.

But living without key social networks when I'm in the business of creating social networks has been an interesting experiment. That "digital silence" has crystalized some things for me in terms of how and when social media can be effective.

But tomorrow, plan is to dive back into Twitter, catch up on Facebook and immerse myself into finishing a PRD (product requirement document) for a cool new site we're building that'll stretch our social commenting efforts in new ways.

Getting closer ...

OK, getting closer. Screwed up a few things, accidentally deleted stuff, my html is rusty, etc. And the color scheme is not there (that blue on black needs some tweaking, if not trashing). And I put some placeholder sections as incentive for me to build them out, such as being way overdue in selling my Mom's book online.

And not sure about the Guestbook option, which seems so analog. My last experience with a Guestbook ended with me killing it on bakersfield.com!

But gotta experiment to get anywhere, right?