Brad Marley's Blog

Brad's Weekly Grab Bag of Links - May 22, 2009

Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet: your weekly grab bag of links.

Enjoy.

• How to Save Your Newspaper (Time Magazine): The title is a bit misleading as a solution to save the newspaper is nowhere to be found in the body of this article.  But there is a striking yet obvious piece of information brought to the readers attention: newspapers have more readers than ever. It's too bad a majority of them are online, a place the publications have not learned to profit from.



• US fights Taliban on another front: public relations (Yahoo! News): Not only is there stil a war in the traditional sense being waged in Afghanistan, but now officials are forced to battle the Taliban in the communications arena.



• Wired Struggles to Find Niche in Magazine World (New York Times): Wired Magazine is one of the least popular print magazine at Conde Nast (print circ: 704,000), but it's Web site is the most popular with 11 million unique visitors a month. Editor Chris Anderson, who has led Wired to a number of National Magazine Awards, is the man in charge of coming up with a solution to solve Wired's print problem.



• Props to Eminem for Local Promotions (Chris Brogan): Eminem placed pairs of tickets to his free Detroit show throughout Metro Detroit, then tweeted locations and directions to his followers on Twitter.  This is such a great way for artists to harness the power of sites like Twitter.



• Red Wings keep city of Detroit humming (Yahoo! Sports): What is the most efficient organization in Detroit? If you guessed the Detroit Red Wings, you would be correct. Their combination of smarts and business savvy make them one of the most admired companies in the city. 

You can find these and other links on my Delicious page.

Why We Go

When 20,000 people come together as one sweaty, screaming entity, it's a beautiful thing.

When the noise emitted from the collective jowl of this beast reaches a crescendo so loud you can't hear yourself think, well, that's just gorgeous.

And when the final horn sounds, and the entity erupts in a sound reminiscent of a planned demolition, well, I'm not sure there are words to describe it.

Slapping high-fives with strangers, chanting into the wee hours of the night ...well, maybe that's all we need. 

For a handful of hours, you sit next to people who you've never met, but you leave feeling like you've been through something nobody on the outside can relate to.

It's why we spend hard earned money to watch grown men play a game; it's why we don't even try to explain to people who don't get it why we go.

It's the shared experience.  

That's what it's all about.

And it certainly helps when the home team wins.