publishing trends Archives - The Grassy Road

Michael Arrington and the price of Fame

Success - and subsequent fame - always comes at a price. Little children are taught this through fairy tales, we see it in our society's craving for celebrities and how they are hounded and stalked, and we even see it in our business leaders who fly private jets and get vilified for it.Very successful business people sometimes learn it the hard way. Like my friend who ran a multi-billion dollar telecom company and had his house ransacked by a disgruntled shareholder, or my girlfriend who was a dot com CEO [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:19:48-08:00January 30, 2009|Career Advice|0 Comments

Employee blogging (and politics in the workplace)

Writing a blog (almost) every day can be challenging and great fun at the same time. There are days when I have several ideas and no time to capture them all, and then other days when I have a brain cramp and can't think of anything to write.But we are in the business of the Web, and blogs, and so I work at it. I am discovering that so do some of my employees. I learned a few weeks ago that one of our senior sales reps writes a blog [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:23:50-08:00September 4, 2008|Career Advice|0 Comments

The dangers of a CEO blogging

Two fascinating examples of the advantages, and pitfalls of CEOs going online in internet forums.First Jonathan Schwartz - the CEO of Sun Microsystems. His blog is famous and voraciously read by our users. Meaty, good content, and giving insight to how he sees his industry.Now - cut to his blog posting on Nov 8, 2007 - 3 days after Sun's earnings call. Jon comments on the quarter and how he feels about it and, for the most part the data is the same. However, it is not identical - and [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:50:22-08:00November 12, 2007|Leadership|0 Comments

Tech blogs: The Canary in the Coalmine

The pending demise of Red Herring (hinted at in Forbes earlier this week) is hot gossip in silicon valley these days as - not surprisingly – tech blogs eat away at tech pubs revenues. It’s simple and fast to develop a blog and in a world where everyone is connected 24/7 and cocktail party conversation is about technology it’s very comfortable for pundits and journalists alike to turn to blogs as a way to publish content and opine.However we see such strong growth in blog content across all markets that [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:54:18-08:00July 19, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments

Why Investment Research is a Long Tail problem

Since the term “Long Tail” was first coined by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine three years ago, many articles have been written about new businesses developing using technology to solve the problem. Examples abound in internet companies, the movie industry, simulation systems, network traffic to name just a few. In the case of the internet companies Amazon, eBay, Google, Netflix - these businesses release value in their markets by giving consumers access to products (in these cases books, auction products, general information or movies) that live in the long tail [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:54:28-08:00July 15, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments