From the e-mail today... despite the fact I'm married. Should I go for it?

Dear Louis ,

ABC Television’s hit reality television show, The Bachelor, is searching for its next star. After viewing your profile on LinkedIn, the casting producer has selected you as a potential candidate.

ABC is using LinkedIn to find its next Bachelor because this time around, they’re looking for an accomplished professional. LinkedIn is about your professional life instead of your personal life, so we don’t know if your marital or relationship status qualifies you for the show. However, your professional profile fits the bill.

If you think you’d make a great “Bachelor,” please let me know by reply, and I will contact you regarding next steps. LinkedIn respects your privacy and will not release your contact information, so you must reply to the email above for us to pass you along as a candidate.

If you know anyone else that would make a great “Bachelor”, feel free to let us know about them – ABC will pay a $5,000 reward for any referral that leads to the next star.

Wishing you continued professional success,

David Sanford
Assistant to the CEO
LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bigsanford

More in an irregularly occurring series...

Unfortunately for me, I'll be away from the computer for most of tomorrow (but of course latched to corporate e-mail like I should be via Blackberry). This means that while every other techno-geek, media reporter, and computer nerd is finding out all they can about Steve Jobs' plan to extend world domination to online video downloads and quite possibly much more, I won't be participating. Sad story, huh?

Well, don't let that ruin your fun. While Mac rumor prognostication used to be carried on by a select, and unwashed, few, it's now a role everyone else is eager to take on. Now even the mainstream bloggers, including TechCrunch and GigaOm are on the Apple rumor bandwagon.

The current expectations for the special event on the 12th include iTunes 7.0 (with movie downloads), updated iPods and iPod Nanos, and what some are calling a "TubePort", which will enable wireless transmission of videos from your computer to the TV. MacRumors weighs in by saying "Movies will be available as either a smaller iPod-format (which will cost $9.99 per movie), or as a larger, streamed movie to be streamed to your TV via TubePort. This cost $14.99 per movie. To purchase an iPod-formatted movie and a streamed version of the same movie, it will cost you $19.99."

As always, I'm more inclined to say it's not something I'll jump to, but we'll see. I usually tend to get fairly suckered in after watching all the glitzy demos.

On a completely other note, you haven't lived until you've consumed the original "Numa, Numa" featuring Gary Brolsma, an overweight teenager from New Jersey who rocketed to Internet fame when his lip-synching and chair-dancing to a little-known Romanian group went viral. After years of hiding out in relative obscurity, he's back with a vengeance, ready to capitalize on his fame, with the "New Numa". The official site is at http://www.newnuma.com, of course, or you can watch on YouTube. I guess if you can't beat them, join them...

If you're still not ready to dance around to some goofy kid, a much more serious video that helped us revisit a darker time from five years ago was unveiled today - as a woman living a few blocks from the World Trade Center for the first time introduced her documentarian chronicling of that day without analysis or soundtrack - just raw video, emotion and genuine fear. You can try and watch it on their site or download the full thing. It's 134 Megabytes and runs for more than 20 minutes. Humbling.

Revver.com: September 11: What We Saw

Listening to ''Live at Aria Montreal (11-06)'', by DJ Tiesto (Play Count: 4)

On the morning of September 11th, 2001 the chaos of that day presented a new challenge in a Web-connected world. As major news media sites, like CNN.com and the New York Times became inundated with user traffic, their domains became overloaded, and either didn't respond to requests, or reverted to text-only and headline pages, rather than their full multi-media. In their wake, those searching for any kind of news unavailable from one of the major news networks had to turn to unheralded news delivery systems.

At the office, we turned to the The Drudge Report, who offered any number of links to real-time data. For others, the earliest blogs rose to prominence, and people who usually focused on technology and the Web tried to take on history as it unfolded in front of their eyes. As covered in Wired's "9/11: Birth of the Blog", "When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it."

Among those Web pioneers chronicling the tragedy was Dave Winer of Scripting News. Lucky for us, his pages, unlike other prominent bloggers, have stayed live for the ensuing five years. You can see (in his bottom to top chronology) how what was supposed to be a very ordinary day was shaken off of its axis.

Years later, personally-authored blogs often break the news before the mass media can take hold of it. For some, blogs carry a higher level of veracity and community virtually impossible from an offshoot of Time Warner. For the next world-changing event (though hopefully of a different nature), we can expect how we obtain news and information to be vastly different. As I displayed with my e-mail to my father in a post from last night, there was always a willingness to share information and express personal feelings, but blogging has offered a new medium to reach more people, more quickly, than ever before.

Rather than try to summarize the day and the ensuing five years, I thought I would slip into the e-mail archives to show my response to that day in a message to my father that evening. That's one benefit of holding onto e-mail like this - a stamp in time. Only names of specific people have been removed.

Today I woke up at 5:30 for the second day in a row (rougher for me than you), so that I could get into the office by 6:45, to prepare for the Web seminar by 7, and hold the two sessions at 8 and 10. By 6:10 I learned of the first jetliner crashing into the World Trade Center, and watched CNN live as the second jet flew into the second tower, much to my bewilderment.

I of course assumed that both planes were empty, outside of a rogue pilot and crew, but could not fathom that they were hijacked commercial liners, full of people. That was unbelievable. As I still intended to get to the office on time, the plethora of news began to billow - two more planes unaccounted for, an explosion at the Pentagon...

I got in the car, and listened to KGO 810 as the news unfolded. Traffic was usual for that time of the morning, but it seemed everyone was doing as I was - listening to the radio, staring blankly ahead. There were fewer lane changes, and our speed seemed steady, more so than normal.

Getting to the office, I set up camp in the conference room and tried to contact this morning's presenters in the UK, to no avail. All lines were blocked. I talked with Global Crossing, our conferencing provider, and learned that our conference calls would not be allowed - that all lines had been allocated for the US government and emergency services' use. I had no choice but to cancel both sessions, and e-mail all 150 registrants of our decision, kissing $35,000 of our eMarketing promotion budget away with the seminars' cancellation.

Following that, I tried to stay focused on work, communicating with (NAME) regarding our product demonstration Flash piece, but little else got done. A TV was set up in one conference room, and executives and peons alike stopped to gander at the horror that was New York. (The Company) was eventually closed by 2, in a surreal day that saw ZERO calls to our front desk, and Web traffic similar to that of a holiday such as July 4.

That day coincided with what was supposed to be a big marketing effort for us, so beyond the horrific human element, I had tried to push forward as a good corporate citizen and do the best I could. Though we recognized the disaster, we didn't recognize the scope of it until the conference provider flat-out denied us use of the conference lines needed for the seminar. Though we were at war with an unknown enemy, we didn't see the full  impact until the towers themselves fell. Even our Web designer, in San Francisco, stopped taking calls from me after he was forced to evacuate the city. It was a day we'll not ever forget, even though were removed 3,000+ miles from the bloodshed.

Listening to ''Another World'', by DJ Shog (Play Count: 5)