Who is Farhan Lalji?

It’s here and it rocks. I heart Flickr a little more today.

More information on the Flickr blog and there’s a video group that has some great content already.
Personally I think this will be different to the other video sites already online (thinking YouTube and Facebook) because the community on Flickr is pretty strong and puts up solid content. People on Flickr are passionate about photos and getting the same people to put up videos will lead to great video content.

Loving Dunstan’s beach close ups for example.

I was flipping channels while on the bike this morning and caught a bit of GMTV’s interview with Madonna. They discussed her collaboration with Justin Timberlake – really digging that song by the way – and her career and other stuff. Just after the interview they mentioned that GMTV had the UK exclusive of the new video and would be playing it in its entirety on Monday. The interview’s on the GMTV site, but since you can’t embed it here’s the link.

Later this morning I’m checking through my feeds and Jason C has a post with the video embedded. This post has the video too after the cut.

What the hell is the point of having a “regional exclusive”? Some people still don’t get the fact that the web is international and that releasing something in one market and then waiting months if not years to release the product in another market is pointless.

Companies need to get better at global releases. Customers are already consuming internationally organisations need to catch up.

Anyway, it’s still a cool song and video, can’t believe Madonna’s nearly 50?!

Great story on Azcentral.com about Shaq dedicating a reading centre to a Boys and Girls club.

Shaq has to be one of my favourite athletes! The guy went back to school, got an MBA and is - according to the video - now working on his doctorate. More young men and athletes should take Shaq’s example.

Donnie Walsh is the new president of the New York Knicks. Hallelujah. Finally. For the past two years I’ve had a draft blog post saying that until Isiah Thomas was history I wasn’t going to be able to say “I’m a Knicks fan” with a straight face. We’re half way there.

I like Walsh, think he did good things with Indiana over the past 25 years – till he brought in Larry Legend and then things kind of went downhill. Still, it’s an upgrade over Isiah who basically took a sinking ship and made it sink a heckofalot faster.

It’s turnaround strategy time. How should Walsh turn the ship around?

This is a tough one. If I was Walsh, I would do 4 things, change the leadership, clean the house out, find and promote the talent, and improve relationships.

Changing leadership; I would fire Isiah, take the GM role for a while and bring Herb Williams in an interim head coach role ASAP. Bring in strong leadership at the top, Herb isn’t the long term guy but he shows promise and has the players respect. Let Herb have a go next season if he succeeds it turns out like the Raptors and Mitchell, if he fails he’s likely not to fail as dramatically as Isiah.

Clean the house out; buy out Steph Marbury, trade Eddy curry for a bag of peanuts to whoever will take him, get rid of Zach Randolph, and stop and breathe. Try and clean up some significant cap room so when players like Lebron, CB4, Wade, Melo come on the market in a couple of years the Knicks are an attractive situation.

Find and promote the talent, the Knicks have some good players, some good personnel, Nate Robinson and Crawford are decent, I would package one or both of them if it gets Curry/Randolph out the door, otherwise no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Renaldo Balkman, David Lee, and their draft pick, plus Nate - if he keeps him – are a decent foundation. Add to it a strong pick in the draft – again if he keeps it – and we have a decent core with the Knicks.

Improving relationships; keep it authentic. Be real, be true, speak to the other GMs in the league and let them know there will be no more sucker trades, but the Knicks have got some assets and some needs.

This is a sweet situation, there’s absolutely no worse it could get. Walsh has a chance to be the King of NY. Or could it get worse? F***, I hope not.

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on Walmart and good companies and bad companies, which includes my favourite analogy about making a bad product or company look better superficially rather then addressing the core problem; “putting lipstick on a pig”.

What’s good? What’s bad? Good questions. To me, good companies spend as much time thinking about their social impact and the impact of their mission and vision on society as they do on the bottom line. Bad companies only focus on maximising the bottom line.

If only investors spent as much time valuing companies social bottom line, if only the social bottom line had a more direct impact on the market value of the company. Might be easier to convince companies to be more socially aware in the way they operate but on the other hand some companies are just authentically good and evil. I’m not sure, whatever we change in the market to evaluate companies “goodness”, would help Walmart operate in a way that’s beneficial to its communities and society as a whole.