| July 6, 2005 | It's Allyson's Birthday. Pay Her a Visit! |
|
It's Allyson's birthday today. Pay her a visit and leave your birthday wishes as comments.
posted by Jess Barron @ 2:39 PM 
|
| March 2, 2005 | Lend Me Some Sugar (Ray). I Am Your Neighbor. |
|
After all that smack I talked about Sugar Ray the other day, I hafta admit I had a good time, in spite of myself. The band had a sense of humor about the whole thing, and they put on a fun show. As you can see, Bethany was *thrilled* to be in the front row. Melanie was pulled up onstage. Allyson and Rachana rocked out. We were swooning like tipsy dot-commers from 1999. Eric even rapped onstage with Mark McGrath. I was this close to Mark, but I fell for the bassist. The guitarist gave Melanie his guitar pick, and then we also got the bassist's shoe. (We returned it to him later.) Dear poprocks fans, I'm really sorry if I let you down. I just sometimes can't resist having a really cheesy, silly good time. Your pal, Jess. Labels: band, birthday, photos, sugarray, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 10:42 PM
|
| Go Yahoo!. It's Your Birthday. |
|
Last night to celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th birthday, we launched an interactive "Netrospective" documenting the 100 most important moments on the web in the last 10 years. Go check it out. Lucky you -- you get free ice cream and I get.. Sugar Ray. ;) Speaking of which, I heard some gossip today at the office, that the entertainment planners were initially trying to book Pearl Jam to play at the birthday party. Now, that would've been interesting. Finally, check out the online content blog Does Online Journalism Have a Future?, and post your comments. Labels: birthday, sugar ray, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 7:41 AM
|
| February 28, 2005 | Today is tomorrow. It happened. |
|
"In some ways, it feels like we have been doing this for as long as we can remember, but in other ways, it feels like we are still at the beginning." --Yahoo! founder David Filo on Yahoo!'s upcoming 10th birthday This Wednesday the company I work for is turning ten years old, and they are throwing a big party for everyone. You are invited too. Well, sort of. Yahoo! will be giving everyone who visits yahoo.com on Wednesday a special free treat. Hint: it's edible, creamy and deelicious. And also hopefully you are not vegan or lactose intolerant. That is the good part. The less good part is that the band they have hired to play for us is Sugar Ray. You may remember Sugar Ray from mid-1990s songs with ear-wormy choruses such as (for the love of God, now is the time to divert your eyes from this web page before these malicious songs get caught in your head!) as "I just wanna fly" and "Every morning there's a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend's four-post bed." (And to think that I thought their singer Mark McGrath had retired from the band to become the co-host of "extra". Apparently no such luck!) Before you go thinking that I'm un ungrateful bee-otch, please take note that I am very excited for my company's birthday party. For one thing, there will almost certainly be lots of free beer. For another thing, I am also celebrating my own 10 years of working on the web. While it's true that I don't have very much love stored away for Sugar Ray, perhaps it is just because Yahoo! has set the bar so high with some of their past band choices, such as hiring the flaming lips to play at our holiday party in 2003. This is what yahoo.com looked like in 1995. Even before that (as Esther posted in her blog back in 2002) you might remember visiting Yahoo! circa 1994 before the site was actually located at yahoo.com, back when you got to Yahoo! by typing in "http://www.stanford.edu/~someguysname/html/personal/webdirectory/yahoo or something like that." This is what yahoo.com looked like in 1996. The past 10 years working on the web have kept me experiencing a continuous deja vu. Anyone who has been a web writer, editor or producer since 1995 or 1996 certainly must feel somewhat akin to Bill Murray's character in the 1993 movie "Groundhog Day." For instance, when reading this Christian Science monitor article about Yahoo!'s new media plans in Santa Monica last week, I was struck by the initial thrill about these exciting plans and these exciting times, but a few moments later I had a strong sense of deja vu. Hadn't I already lived in this exciting time? Hadn't I already heard *these* exciting plans? Ah yes, I had. Reading this article brought me back to the spring of 2000, when I worked at Scour.com in Beverly Hills and we had partners like AtomFilms and iFilm and Stephen Spielberg's Dreamworks-backed pop.com was set to launch with an offering of Internet-only programming. This time (five years later) we have seen that the world (well, the U.S. at least) is finally ready for consuming entertainment content on their computers. This time, I am convinced that this stuff can actually be successful. My conviction is so strong that I am leaving San Francisco to move down to Los Angeles again to give it another try. One of my blog posts from March 2000 -- five years ago -- contains links to some of the sites that were virally hot at that time --from JesusDance to Radiskull and Devil Doll and "Superfriends, Whassup." (As an aside, I still say "whassap!" way too much, and my boyfriend has accused my diction of being overly influenced of the internet circa 2000.) Yes, all of your favorites are probably listed, but, be warned, that many of them have *gasp* disappeared from the internet and haven't left a forwarding address. I'm reminded of a sign I saw at Burning Man in 1999. It said "Warning: You are temporary." And you know, if you are an internet website, you are even extra temporary. Before being sued out of existence by the RIAA in late 2000, Scour had planned to morph into a legal for-pay music download service very similar to what Apple is doing quite successfully today with iTunes. JibJab -- whose animated shorts we used to feature on Scour -- now has a promotion deal with Yahoo! and has gotten mentioned on national TV for their "This Land" political short. Speaking of TV, it used to be only short weekly special-interest TV shows (such as CBS-Eyemark's "Wild Wild Web" which Allyson and I worked for in 1998) focused on web-stuff. Now on CNN, and MSNBC, every other word out of many reporters mouths seem to be "blogs" and "the blogsphere." Yeah, the time is right for branded media content on the web. We just really need to get things right this time. I, for one, know that I have learned so much about what works and what doesn't on the web over the past 10 years. And there is a lot that doesn't work. "Convergence" (between the web and TV) was the hot buzz word in 1998 and it's still the hot buzz word. "Blog" was the hot buzz word in 2000 and it's still the hot buzz word. I'm just thankful that no one uses the phrase "Internet Superhighway" anymore. That one was annoying. In February 2002, just before I started working at Yahoo, I wrote to Allyson on our She, Said, She Said blog:
Monthly 'zines? Yeah, done it. In 1996 I was publishing a monthly e-zine, ROAR, for Monster.com in addition to building corporate recruiting sites and hand-coding them in HTML. Community websites? Done that too. In 1997 I was hiring and managing a staff of writers and building CollegeBeat a daily community website for college students (of course, the site's URL is now a porn directory). Luckily, thanks to the Internet Way-Back machine, you can still see the site in all of its former glory and unique web design by moi. For instance, check this out. The design was quite wacky. But alas, that was where I learned all about .ASPs and how to manage writers. Broadband convergence sites? Check. In 1998, as you recall, we were at WildWeb err Getwild.com which looked like this and later like this and they were sending you on tour with John Mellencamp and me to Burning Man 1999 to write articles. Bleeding-edge technology? I was swimming in it. In 1999, I was at Scour (which looked like this minus the broken graphics and then like this) working on peer-to-peer music sharing technology and launching a "technology freedom center" after we got sued by the RIAA and the MPAA. It's like in the past five years, everything's gone so far, so fast that now nothing in the online world even looks remotely interesting to me. What has Poprocks.com looked like over the past 10 years: posted by Jess Barron @ 2:02 PM
|
| January 14, 2004 | Not a Day Older Than Dorothy Parker |
|
"Alright Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up." -Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in 'Sunset Boulevard' (1950) I have the best friends in the world. Jeff flew from New York to spend Saturday night partying in San Francisco with me and my crew. With feathers, champagne, and karaoke -- my celebration was most decidedly the opposite of his low-key style. "It's weird having our 30th birthdays so close together," Jeff said, as I marched through the Piedmont Boutique on Haight Street snatching up ostrich boas, flower hair clips, and sparkly tiaras. "It's so interesting to see how differently we celebrate." Picture us like Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis. I'm wildly gesticulating and prancing around the store, and Jeff is calmly appraising my choices in tiaras. "You do have a tendency to be theatrical," a new friend told me recently. I, of course, was like, "Whatever, do you mean, darling?!" Birthday party pictures will be available shortly if anyone's interested in gawking at someone who is no longer in her twenties. (Luckily I've been drinking plenty of anti-aging beer, so I've retained my youthful visage.) In the meantime, you can just accept that the evening began something like this. Daniel has completely kicked my ass at the novel writing contest. Today, on deadline, he sent me his completed 189-page manuscript, as a birthday gift along with the message: "Very best on your thirtieth...you don't look a day older than Dorothy Parker." (And I immediately thought, wait a second -- are you talking about the early 30-something Dorothy Parker who presided over the Algonguin round Table in the 1920s OR the 50-year-old Dorothy Parker who George Platt Lynes photographed in 1943 when she lived in Hollywood? Of course, the woman did marry a man 11 years her junior...) And before you ask -- no, I'm not finished with my novel; I'm barely on page 60. I find it impossible to wean myself from my Outer Mission socialite lifestyle. I vow to find more time in the days (and nights) ahead. I will finish -- I have a decent track record for accomplishing everything I set out to do. Seriously. Labels: age, birthday, jeff, writing posted by Jess Barron @ 9:58 AM
|
| December 22, 2003 | Jeff's 30th Birthday in LA |
|
"I wanna be your Thurston Moore wrestle on the bedroom floor." -- Sleater-Kinney "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"  I just got back to SF from Los Angeles around 1a.m. this morning, completely drained. Earlier that afternoon I had dropped Jeff off on his flight from LAX back to JFK, and then hopped back onto the 405 heading north. If you subtract the total 14 hours spent driving up and down California -- I spent 19 hours this weekend in Los Angeles, and somehow 15 of those were spent awake. I think Jeff enjoyed the celebration. He kept trying to keep it low-key, and then I would announce loudly, "It's Jeff's 30th birthday -- aren't we gonna kick it 'till dawn? Who's in on this?!?" Doesn't he understand that "low-key" isn't even a remote possibility when I'm around? After dinner with Paul, Anne, and Raj at The Galley in Santa Monica, I kidnapped Jeff and Andy and fed them Sparks and other stimulants and drove them up on Mulholland Drive at 4a.m in my rented convertible with the top down and heat on full-blast. Sleater Kinney's "Call the Doctor" was blaring from the speakers as Jeff and I screamed along with the lyrics. As we drove down Beverly Glen, we came down the hill to Belle & Sebastian. Then I drove east on Sunset Blvd through Beverly Hills and into Hollywood so that Andy could take a photo of the neon Yahoo sign. Jeff, Andy and me (and Bocce!) slept on one inflatable mattress on Hillary's living room floor. We slept across the mattress the wrong way so we could all fit, but our heads and feet were hanging off. They're both over 6 feet tall, so I don't think it was very comfortable for them. I went into the fetal position in the middle, so I was perfectly fine. I had a dream that night that we were sleeping in a rowboat out in the middle of a lake. Labels: andy, birthday, bocce, dream, jeff, la posted by Jess Barron @ 5:52 PM
|