MWGblog

Nice article, including pictures of my partners in GapeRadio regarding our James Beard Award.

Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine is set to play Coverville 500 August 15th during the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. I’ve been a long time Richard Cheese fan subjecting countless friends to his music as well as dragging many others to his concerts. If you’ve never seen RC, you are in for a treat. He is a lounge singer who performs his “unique” versions of songs such as: Baby Got Back, Hot for Teacher, She Hates Me, 99 Luftballoons and the Britney Spears classic Crazy. If you are curious about his albums, I’d suggest looking at Tuxicty or I’d Like A Virgin as a good starting place.

You can hear some samples on his website or check out this performance on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. If you are going to the New Media Expo, this is a must attend event.

Cable broadcasters have come out with some great original series recently. The Shield, Rescue Me, Damages and many others. One of the surprises was the USA Network show Burn Notice that aired last summer. (New season begins July, 10th)

I like this show. It is smart, funny and you learn some spy tradecraft along the way. The basic premise is that Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is a spy who receives a “burn notice” - effectively he is cut off, no money, no aid, no communication - he is hung out to dry. He decides to figure out who burned him. Meanwhile he is stuck in Miami aided only by his ex IRA/gun runner/special ops girlfriend Fiona and ex shadow warrior Sam. The cherry on top? Bruce Campbell as the hard drinking, kept man, ex-spy Sam Axe. USA has re-runs on right now in anticipation of the new season, and last night I discovered the whole season one on iTunes. An easy $19 purchase. (Also available on DVD.) Check it out.

While one of our partners was off in New York accepting our James Beard Award, the rest of the GrapeRadio crew attended Auction Napa Valley 2008. This is the wine event of the year in Napa and GrapeRadio is pleased to be able to cover it for the 3rd year in a row.

This event is put on by the Napa Valley Vintners and as their website states: 700 Guests, 500 winery owners and winemakers, 250 auction lots, dozens of parties, all to be enjoyed within 68 hours. Once again, it was an amazing event!

As far as working conditions go - this is about as good as it gets! Non-stop parties and some of the best food and wine in the world. We worked hard gathering tons of interviews and the highlight, as always, was the gala auction event on Saturday evening. Jay Leno served as host again this year and it included a moving tribute to Robert Mondavi who passed last May.

We made sure to get interviews with all the movers and shakers attending including even Oprah. I’d like to thank everyone who welcomed us but the list is long, between the group we probably attended over 20 separate events hosted by countless wineries. That said, special thanks goes to Departures Magazine and American Express who allowed us unprecedented access as well as the Tudal Family Winery who graciously hosted us at their enormous vineyard home. (We lived like kings, this place is incredible!)

I’m convinced I’ll be sweating pure Cabernet Sauvignon all week during my workouts. Best of all, $10.3 Million was raised for local Napa charities! Thanks again to all. Can’t wait for next year!

Along with my partners at GrapeRadio, I am excited to annouce that we have won the 2008 James Beard Award in the category of webcasting!

The James Beard Foundation Awards are the nation’s preeminent honors for culinary professionals. Often referred to as the “Oscars of Food and Wine” more than 60 awards are given out each year in the categories of cookbooks, restaurants and chefs, design and graphics, broadcast media, journalism, and achievement. Award winners are selected by their industry peers, with more than 600 culinary professionals involved in the voting process. This year’s award ceremony in New York was hosted by Kim Cattrall and Bobby Flay and other winners include such name as Mario Batali, Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi and Top Chef.

Thank you to all of our fans who have given us such great support over the years.

Click the image below to see our video that won the award: Stewards of the Land

My “stroke of insight” came suddenly yesterday morning: something fishy is going on with a campaign to promote Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey” published by Viking Adult, part of the Penguin Group.

Over the last two weeks four comments have appeared on my post from last March about Dr. Taylor’s fantastic TED 2008 presentation. While individually the comments might not have caught my attention, collectively they seemed a little too perfect, too polished, too promotional - like they have been through the review process for a press release. Yesterday morning I got curious about them when I saw the fourth one arrive. You can see Ellen, Dwight, Tammy and Bridget’s comments here. (Ryan’s comment is genuine.)

None of the commenters left links to their homepages or blogs. Reverse IP lookups were a bust. Their emails are the usual Hotmail stuff, but Dwight’s is from an @fontdrift.com domain. A quick search for that domain turned up all kinds of references to a fakemailgenerator.com. A site that “changes the domain frequently in order to prevent the address from being banned.” No need to explain what their service provides.

I decided to Google some of the key phrases. Mind you, there are some real winners, but I still think the best is Tammy’s, “I laughed. I cried. It was a fantastic book…” Wow - 833 Google hits! Wouldn’t you know the search also revealed that this exact same comment shows up on 100s of blog’s that reference Dr. Taylor. Only trick - different names each time for the comment author. In fact all four comments show up word for word all over the Web under all kinds of different names. The comment using the phrase above was on countless sites; everywhere from The New York Times (commenter Jennifar) to O’Reilly Radar (commenter Joseph) to The Indiana Statesman (commenter Jocosa) to Peterme.com (who got just the four basic comments including this same one from a commenter Bowman.)

Since the original comment on my site had an Amazon link, I first thought it was an Internet Marketing gimmick focused on increasing affiliate sales. However, I realized there was no affiliate ID in the link URL and no links in the future comments. No Internet Marketer would be that subtle or patient. That got me thinking, this is being done by someone who has an interest in the success of the book at a macro level. This narrows the list considerably.

Something like this requires time, resources and money. This is an organized effort to get these comments past moderation queues, spam filters and all the various preventive measures blogs and sites have. Someone has worked hard to give the “appearance” of being genuine, interested and supportive readers of the book all with goal of tricking you. My understanding is that this book has done quite well on its own and is by an author who is well respected. It is sad that someone felt further promotion warranted employing deception.

Make no mistake about it, whoever is behind this made a conscious decision - let’s try to trick those social media/blog types. However, the fact they went through all this trouble to use fake names and phony email addresses to spread their message about the book just betrays their own understanding of the fact that they are up to no good.

So who is doing it? I don’t know but I certainly have my suspicions. What I do know is whoever is behind it feels just fine using my site and the readers I work hard to serve as part of the playground for their deceptive marketing gimmick. As such, I feel just fine calling them out.

Lesson: I know what book I’m not buying.

[Note: I intentionally did not link to the book but did leave the link live in the original comment for context.]