A Peek Inside the Allegheny Conference Branding Initiative

I got asked to submit a testimonial for inclusion in a website under development by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. The solicitation started off:

The Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD) is requesting the help of Pittsburghers, past and present, to tell us why they love their hometown. On so many levels, Pittsburgh and the surrounding communities are a great place to live, work, and play. We simply want to get the word out. That’s where you come in.

You can be part of the Pittsburgh story! All you have to do is submit your photo (in electronic format) and a brief testimonial, and it will be posted on our Web site so we can showcase the real Pittsburgh through real Pittsburghers. The testimonials will go live this fall.

And the details:

We are looking for people who can showcase Pittsburgh in the following categories:

 Doing Business Here – If you are a local entrepreneur or instrumental in running a business based in Pittsburgh, tell us why it’s a great place to launch and build a company. Your personal story will make it real.
 Quality of Life – As a safe, affordable, and vibrant city, Pittsburgh is a wonderful place to live. The “Burgh” provides a work/life balance not found just anywhere and we want your story.
 World-Class Talent – With world-renowned universities and colleges, Pittsburgh is bursting with top-notch talent. If you are a hiring manager – tell us about the success you’ve had recruiting talent here. If you are a student or a recent hire – tell us why you are looking forward to staying in Pittsburgh.
 Peak Experiences – Pittsburgh is a magnificent tourism destination. Tell us your favorite local attractions and why you recommend them to others.
 Innovation & Technology –We’re looking for people who are on the cutting-edge, doing research, solving problems and innovating. If you are (or know someone) who is a thought-leader in science and technology and want to showcase that work – this is a great way to do it.
 Historical Perspective – Pittsburgh has a storied past and rich heritage. Give us your unique and personal take on Pittsburgh’s history.
 Return & Reunite – We are encouraging people to come back to Pittsburgh to reunite with family and friends. Family and class reunions, as well as other group get-togethers and conventions abound in Pittsburgh. Tell us your recent reunion stories – or how you plan to come back!

Interesting, no? Lists like this always invite deconstruction: The assumptions and presumptions that leap out at you (Pittsburgh is a magnificent tourist destination? I'm a real Pittsburgher?); the things that are missing (hey, did anyone remember that Pittsburgh has a pretty decent arts community?); the things that, hmmm, maybe are best left unaddressed (how about that tiny Latino population, anyway, or those high business and school taxes?). Gives you a little insight into the upcoming cheerleading campaign. What are we selling? "Pittburgh" When are we selling it? "Now."

The image is Ethel "Everything's Coming Up Roses" Merman, from the original production of "Gypsy."

Zagat-less burgh

I promised the infamous Amos-the-poker-cat that I would blog about one of the (supposed) great shortcomings of Pittsburgh, the lack of a Zagat-listed restaurant here. Amos has harped on this and implies it is indicative of some great failing in the local restaurant scene. Is that what it means?

Zagats is indeed a de facto standard for restaurant reviews around the country. It began in 1979 as the compiled review of a lawyer couple in New York. Since then they have expanded to 41 cities in the US and more internationally. The question is: why no restaurants in Pittsburgh? Do people think local restaurants are so far below par as to deserve being snubbed by Mr. And Mrs. Zagat (esquire et al by the way).

I am pretty sure that the lack of a Pittsburgh restaurant is not a sign of inferior restaurants. Many cities are not covered by Zagat’s and at this time Pittsburgh is one of those places. While it has recently closed, I doubt anyone would disagree that a local restaurant like Baum Vivant compared favorably with the 441 restaurants listed in just the city of Philadelphia. Why Pittsburgh is yet to be covered by Zagats may be a valid question, but it is certainly a different question.

So maybe we can start a letter writing campaign to prod Zagats into producing a Pittsburgh guide. If next year there is a Pittsburgh guide put out by Zagats, the inference would be that all of a sudden the local dining scene got better.. right? Lets all contact them!.

Are You Ready for Some Football?

I don't know how long this will be a stable link, but Sports Illustrated Online has this magnificent photo of Joey Porter -- the #1 most feared player in the NFL:

I'm glad he's on our side.

The Bridges of Pittsburgh

We don't have Clint Eastwood, and we don't have Meryl Streep, but we have some impressive bridges. Bob Regan, who brought us The Steps of Pittsburgh, has a new book: Bridges of Pittsburgh. WIth photography by Tim Fabian.

[Via Pop City and the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune]

Life Sciences Greenhouse Review

I have a post about yesterday's hearing on the Life Sciences Greenhouse, but I put it up at my other blog, since the post has as much to do with intellectual property law and policy as it does with local development politics.

Which is to say, as I much as I've long been intrigued by the politics implicit in the Greenhouse being set up in a way that channels state tobacco money back to Oakland (this, of course, isn't news to anyone who's been paying attention), I'm more interested by the debate over the best place to put investment dollars. Research, or products?

And thus I try to link back to this post about Sybase in the Bay Area: What's the best way to grow a tech economy? Pump it with products, or subsidize the local research institution? In the best of all worlds, the answer is "both," but we don't live in the best of all worlds. Or in the words of Buzz Lightyear, we're not on my planet, are we?

Blogfest Coming

Wednesdays are busy days at my house, so if I show up, I'll be on the late side.

Once again, Pittsburgh Bloggers and Friends of Pittsburgh Bloggers, an opportunity to hang out with charming people and eat excellent french fries made out of sweet potatoes:

WHAT: Pittsburgh BlogFest 7
WHEN: Wednesday, August 30th, 2006, 5:30 PM to 9:30 PM and beyond!
WHERE: Finnegan's Wake (near PNC Park, 20 General Robinson St., North Shore, 412-325-2601), in the Pub Room
WHO: All of you bloggers
AND: Creating Text(iles), Inner Bitch, Grabass (in absentia), and My Brilliant Mistakes.

As always, if you plan to attend, please RSVP by e-mailing
blogfest AT closkey.com
You get to show up even if you don't RSVP, but it's easier on all of us if we've got a headcount of sorts.

[Via Creating Text(iles), Inner Bitch, Grabass, and My Brilliant Mistakes]

What's the News

I post; you react. And I never know exactly what the reaction will be. Case in point: Yesterday's note about Sybase, the California database company, relocating its HQ in the Bay Area. That post quickly prompted a couple of yawns. What's the news if an established tech company moves out of its urban-center location to a suburban location?

Well, I don't take credit for reporting the news; I just observe things that interest me. And here's what interests me about Sybase:

First, it's odd to me that Sybase stayed in Emeryville as long as it did. E'ville isn't really part of the SF urban scene, and it isn't really part of anything in the East Bay, either. It just sits there at the east end of the Bay Bridge, home to a growing big box retail economy, some legacy industrial businesses, and some biotech. I suspect that Sybase just had a good deal on its space and stayed until that deal ran out.

Second, and much more interesting, is the fact that when Sybase moved, it moved to Dublin. My interest has little to do with startup or entrepreneurship dynamics, at least from Sybase's point of view. For Sybase itself, the move has to do with real estate costs (it's expensive in Dublin/Livermore/Pleasanton, but less so out there than in/around San Francisco or Palo Alto), and housing patterns. That area of the East Bay has grown like gangbusters as a commuter haven over the last 20 years, but Class A corporate development hasn't quite kept pace. SV development has been squeezed into the San Jose/San Francisco corridor. Sybase is one of the few companies to break out of that mold -- PeopleSoft, now owned by Oracle, was another. Dublin means not just a place where the CEO has a convenient drive to Milpitas and Menlo Park. (And a note on traffic: It's much, much easier today to drive from Emeryville to Palo Alto than it was 10 or 15 years ago.) Dublin means that a large number of its employees have an easier commute. If you're a software engineer and live in Milpitas, and you're weighing Sybase v. Oracle/Redwood Shores, Sybase just got a lot more attractive.

The last and probably most interesting thing here, at least to me, has little to do with Sybase itself. It has to do with what happens next. PeopleSoft in Pleasanton didn't create a lot of local weather. Will smaller tech companies follow Sybase, either by relocating outside of the Silicon Valley or by setting up shop next door? For some time, entrepreneurship groups have been trying to build a local tech economy around Lawrence Livermore Lab spin-offs. That's been a struggle. With Sybase nearby, will those efforts start to bear fruit?

Of course, why bother with all of this in a weblog ostensibly focused on Pittsburgh? Stay tuned.

Dependency Ratios

Malcolm Gladwell has a typically concise popular summary of a complicated problem. This time, it's dependency ratios, which measure the extent to which a working population has to support a nonworking population. A company that has a lot of retirees receiving pensions relative to its active working population, is likely to struggle. Gladwell is particularly interested in Ireland, where the ratio has been falling. And Ireland's economy is booming.

As the Irish example demonstrates, dependency ratios get measured geographically as well as institutionally. I looked around briefly for a quick summary or analysis of dependency ratios in Pittsburgh, but I couldn't put my hands on anything. You guys with the data -- Chris? Amos? -- if Malcolm Gladwell looked at the past and future of dependency ratios in Pittsburgh, would they tell him, or you, anything interesting?

Update: Per Amos's suggestion, I linked to the Celter Tiger image from Wikipedia (after looking at the copyright info linked to the image!).

Pittsburgh Central Keystone Innovation Zone

From Cori Shropshire this AM:

Duquesne University biotech economic development chief Dr. Alan Seadler has big plans for the planned Pittsburgh Central Keystone Innovation Zone, should it be approved by the Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority in October.

One of the 15 board seats for the planned economic development zone that will encompass Downtown, Uptown, parts of the Hill District, the North Side and the South Side will be occupied by PNC Bank.

The bank will manage a small loan guarantee fund of about $100,000 a year, Dr. Seadler said, for companies settled in the KIZ that are good risks. The fund will help the firms build credit histories and have cash for equipment and other capital intensive needs.

PNC will join other board members, including the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, in providing a $225,000 matching grant in the first year to get the KIZ up and running -- tackling projects such as launching a mixed-use technology company incubator. Dr. Seadler said he hopes to "have the site nailed" by October or November.

"We can take some of the things that Oakland has already started -- and add some more muscle to it -- move it faster," Dr. Seadler said.

He doesn't explain exactly how two KIZ's will be more muscular than one. (Pause here to reflect on the ironies involved in the fact that a biotech-oriented economic development proposal emphasizes "better, faster, stronger.") But more money is nice, I like the fact that Duquesne University wants to be a public player in the region's tech development landscape, and involving the Hill -- the PG story doesn't mention the fact that the Hill House Economic Development Corporation is part of the proposal -- is a good thing. GO KIZ, meet PCKIZ.

Related coverage:
Duquesne press release
Pgh Business Times
Tribune Review

The Benefits of Knowing Your Product

A chocolate factory worker in Kenosha accidentally fell into a vat of hot dark chocolate and was stuck there for 2 1/2 hours. His co-workers thinned the chocolate by adding cocoa butter, allowing firefighters to scoop some of it out. The worker took off his pants and escaped.

Link: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=485223; spotted via the NYT, which is just full of interesting stuff today.

For a Tech Company: Location, Location, Location

Sybase CEO John Chen on moving the company from Emeryville, just across the Bay from San Francisco, south and east to Dublin, California -- a suburb on the other side of a small range of hills and right next door to Livermore and Pleasanton:

Q. You recently moved your offices to Dublin, Calif., east of the Bay Area. Is it a plus or a minus to be farther away from Silicon Valley?

A. We’re closer! When we were in Emeryville it would take me a lot longer to get to Palo Alto than Dublin. There are better traffic patterns. Distance was a wash. I decided a few years back that we needed a corporate identity that looks like a billion-dollar company.

I needed to get everyone together and give them a Class A environment. That’s one of the key drivers to really keep our employees happy, with state-of-the art features. We have exercise facilities and we have a great cafeteria, we have child care and an onsite preschool. We’re a different kind of Silicon Valley company. We don’t serve beer.

Quote of the Day

From the PG's coverage of Me First & the Gimme Gimmes at PNC Park:

[Singer Spike]Slawson said despite the bad experience with the hometown crowd, it hasn't soured his impression of Pittsburgh.

"I don't know why I miss [Pittsburgh] so much," he said, "but I dream about it all the time. It was like an extension of my youth in Pittsburgh -- getting booed in Little League, getting booed when my band played the Electric Banana. But at least I didn't get punched in the stomach."

Western PA Travelogue

Here's the New York Times's Western PA "Road Trip" from yesterday's paper:

In the Land of Fallingwater and Flight 93

Pittsburgh Film and Media Alliance

Does the Pittsburgh Film and Media Alliance have a website? Because what the group wants to do sounds like a template for a lot of sectors of the Pittsburgh economy:

"This region needs more: more diversity, more inclusion, more hard work. And the best part about that is, it's being done, but it's being done piecemeal. Adrienne does a movie; when someone else wants to do a 'Bread, My Sweet,' they have to reinvent the wheel, rather than having a knowledge base or a resource base to foster production."

Link: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06237/716169-42.stm

Just one thought about the group's agenda: In addition to talking to the Allegheny Conference, organize a meeting with Innovation Works and some of the other leaders of the local technology entrepreneurship and investment community. Not only is that community working on those same issues, but there are synergies waiting to be explored with the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon.

Just What We Needed

As if Pittsburgh sports fans needed another reason to get rabid about high school football, along comes Sports Illustrated and rates Central Catholic the #11 team in the country.

For an instant, I was diverted from musing on the phrase "athletic intent" in WPIAL investigations of student transfers. But only for an instant. For starters, if we have to live with that bizarre phrase, is it possible to change both a presumption and a burden of proof? If a student plays a varsity sport at school A and then moves to school B, let's assume (presume, in legal jargon) that athletics are at least a big part of the decision. Then put the burden on the student (that is, on the student's family) to demonstrate that the move was made for some *other* reason. "Athletic intent," whatever that is, becomes a given.

Snakebit (Pitt?) on a Plane

This just in: Snakes on a Plane, with original story credited to Pittsburgher David Dalessandro, takes itself seriously, which is a shame. I saw Airplane! recently and realized that it's a little out of date. Why not do something with the kick boxer? And the lead flight attendant was in a famous TV show for a while, wasn't she? Couldn't George Kennedy do a cameo? Aren't the guys in the tower at LAX suspiciously straight-laced?

There were several Snakes lines that had us laughing, but the one that had us just about out of our chairs was this one:

"Sporks?"

XL Redux

Worth a read is this article sourced from the Seattle Times: In Pittsburgh, Seattle reminder produces collective yawn about one of its reporters visiting Pittsburgh 6 months after the Superbowl. The fellow seems to have survived coming into town recently decked out in Seahawks gear. That's not so surprising I suppose. My one complaint about XL is just that the Seattle-Pittsburgh rivalry just isn't going to ever spark the same raw emotion that the Pittsburgh-Dallas games did... So in that sense, it was more like Superbowl XIV... remember? that was against the Rams, then from LA.

Warning: Branding Coming Back to Pittsburgh

I almost missed this: As part of the upcoming "Pittsburgh 250" celebration, plans are afoot (again!) to "rebrand" the city. The Pgh Business Times, earlier this month, quoted a number of local ad agency folks who were skeptical of earlier branding efforts -- not because the concept was off, but because there were too many people involved. Ever heard of that problem in Pittsburgh? Maybe they're on to something.

Curiously, though, no one quoted in the piece mentioned the fact that the message was mush. Lyndon Johnson had a credibility gap; Pittsburgh does not have an "image gap." A growth gap, a jobs gap, a clean air gap -- there are lots of gaps to go around. Is image really the worst of the region's problems?

I can't imagine that the powers that be really want to *change* Pittsburgh's image. The smokestack and ash-filled air thing -- does that "image" really survive any more? It's been a long, long time since I encountered anyone who thought that Pittsburgh is still literally choked with soot. The honest, earnest, hard-working, "run first, throw second" ethos -- that's the image that most Pittsburghers like, isn't it? I think that it rings true, and I suspect that it's part of Pittsburgh's appeal. So that shouldn't go away, should it? If you're going to set out to deal in image, make sure that you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. If they're approaching this the right way, the imagemakers should be talking about *adding* things.

What should be added? In other words, what about itself has Pittsburgh failed to sell over the years? If a branding campaign is inevitable, and it seems to be, "innovation" may not be a bad theme. Pittsburgh has a grand history of industrial innovation. But that hardly distinguishes Pittsburgh from a lot of similarly-situated cities. What city is going to stand up today and say, "Always Complacent, Ever Proud"? (Anyone caught muttering "Washington, DC" may consider their comment already on record.)

More to the point, is there any *evidence* to support the proposition that marketing a city can help it grow? Is a city a product that can be moved -- like, say, ketchup? Beanz Means Heinz worked for a long time. Heinz could count the cans. Fill in the blank: XXXXX Means Pittsburgh. How does anyone know if that's working?

Baseball in Pittsburgh: Is it Worse than We Thought?

From today's New York Times, an analysis of university-led economic development that compares building a new Silicon Valley to building a competitive major league baseball team.

The one thing the study does find to be consistently associated with high-tech start-ups is the presence of star scientists — not the ideas, which can be copied, but the scientists themselves. This seems to be the one way in which a university can be used as an engine of business growth.

Landing the best scientists in the world can start a place on the way to economic superstardom. The catch is, there are not many superstars and they mainly want to be near one another.

The study covered 1981-2004 but identified only 1,838 scientific superstars. That is about the same number of people who played in Major League Baseball over that period.

Framed that way, trying to make some town into the next Silicon Valley by attracting the best scientists is rather like trying to start a new baseball team and turn it into the New York Yankees.

Ouch.

Web 2.0 -- Sort of

Some entrepreneurs building networking platforms on top of the Web like the Web 2.0 label; others do not. Some time back, I asked about Web 2.0 companies in and around Pittsburgh. Here are three candidates.

First up, Zigron, which (from what I can tell scrolling through the site) is located in Glenshaw and develops Web 2.0 services and tools. In the comments, Z. is welcome to make a more elaborate pitch. And to explain the meaning of the name.

Second is ClearSpring Technologies, which (since I waited a little while to post this) may have moved from Pittsburgh (Dormont, actually) to Northern Virginia. Founder Hooman Radfar is still active in the blogosphere. Hooman -- chime in, if you can, with details on what ClearSpring is up to.

Third is a company that's just coming out from behind the screen: TalkShoe, based in Wexford. To get the company's name, imagine yourself as Ed Sullivan, and say "talk show." (As in, "It's a rilly big shew!) Founder Dave Nelsen gave me a demo last week. TalkShoe has a very cool technology platform -- integrated voice and text chat, suitable for a one-to-many "talk show" format and for many-to-many conversations, with recording/streaming/downloading functionality -- and it's free. Anyone can sign up, login, and run a "talkshoe" (or talkcast, as the company calls them). The company also offers services for the business market. eWeek had a recent piece, and the PG ran this feature. TS doesn't strike me as having the potential for massive local job creation (rats!), but if it finds the right market -- and I don't know what that is, and TS may not, yet, either -- it could really take off. What if you plugged TalkShoe into MySpace?

Is there room on the Web for a talkcast about technology-based entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh?

Hofbrau in Pittsburgh

I spent two weeks in Munich this summer, so I'm all for bringing a German biergarten to Pittburgh.

Heinz and the Soul of Pittsburgh

The New York Times paints the fight for control of Heinz's board as another battle for the soul of Pittsburgh. How much of the affection for Heinz is a product of the company's contemporary significance, and how much of it is nostalgia and affiliation? From the Times:

Residents say they have reason to be jittery. Since 1970, the city and surrounding area have lost more than half of their manufacturing jobs and 14 percent of their population.

Many are also skeptical about the Trian Group’s director, Nelson Peltz, who is known as a “quick flipper,” an expert at buying companies, whipping them into shape and then selling them at sizable profits. That is good news for some investors. But it has the 1,200 Heinz employees here and the 10,000 Heinz pensioners in the city and surrounding area wondering whether promises made now by Trian will matter if the investment group sells its shares.

“If that corporation gets all mixed up and moves, Pittsburgh is going be lost,” said Irene Sample, a retired nurse who lives in Mount Lebanon, just outside the city.

And what, exactly, will Pittsburgh lose? From the Trian Group's Heinz site:

[D]espite the Company’s iconic namesake brand, portfolio of power brands and robust cash flow characteristics, Heinz’s total shareholder returns have almost uniformly underperformed those of both the broader market and the consumer packaged food universe since the current management team began leading the Company in April 1998. In fact, total shareholder returns at Heinz have been negative over this timeframe (-10.8%) while other packaged food companies with leading brands such as The Hershey Company, PepsiCo, Inc. and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, the three companies specifically referred to by management as the most focused in the industry,(ii) have generated total shareholder returns of 60.4%, 60.4% and 65.3%, respectively, during this timeframe.

I don't have a dog (or a vote) in this fight, but is this really a legitimate case of industrial insecurity? Is it the return of Gordon Gekko, in the early 21st century? Or is it Pittsburgh-as-Popeye, saying "I've had all I can stand, and I can't stand no more." Put "symbolism" at one far end of a spectrum, and "long v. short term returns" at the other end. Where does the Heinz case lie?

Pittsburgh Business Calendar

I'm not sure who runs this service, but there is a very helpful-looking calendar of Pittsburgh business events at

http://businesscalendar.org/

The website includes an address for an email list, so that you can get your updates in your InBox rather than on the Web. If I could make one suggestion? Add an RSS feed.

Pittsburgh Gets Trendy?

Not everyone will be happy about the coverage, the label, or the underlying phenomenon, but today's New York Times covers real estate development on (in?) Pittsburgh's South Side Slopes -- and uses the dreaded "T" word.

A Neighborhood on the Brink (of Trendy)

Unshakeable Faith

That Lycos post really has legs, owing, no doubt, to the fact that both I and some of the commenters have unshakeable faith in our intuitions about what's right and wrong about Pittsburgh, and about what's changing, or going to change, or never will change about the city and the region. Some people believe that Pittsburgh has all the raw materials needed to make the city great again; those materials just need to be connected and blended and led in just the right proportions. And no number of failed plans, ineffective collaboratives, and broken funding promises will demonstrate otherwise. Other people believe that Pittsburgh is on an irreversible slide into industrial oblivion, and no accounting of innovation, university-led technology deals, real estate renaissance, or neighborhood initiative can shake them from that path.

What are the other unshakeable -- if sometimes contradictory -- articles of Pittsburgh faith?

An example: I thought I was on to one with my recent post provoking comparisons between fans of the Pirates and Steelers, but no one took the bait. I have a hard time accepting the premise that fourteen losing seasons explain why support for the Pirates is weaker than support for the Steelers. That explanation tends to make out fans of both teams as fair weather friends. Maybe that's true for the Pirates (I really don't know, since I'm not a true baseball fan in any weather), but I have a hard time accepting it for the Steelers. Steelers fans just don't strike me as the bandwagon types. Meaning: Is it an article of faith that we stand by the Steelers at all times? Or might I put it more strongly: In any weather, any season, and any time of year, the Steelers exemplify what Pittsburghers regard as the best of the region.

That's unprovable, of course, which is what would make it an article of faith. Do Pittsburghers believe it? And what else do Pittsburghers believe about Pittsburgh?

Regional Rebuilding in . . . Cleveland

Take a look at this website for "Voices and Choices," a regional collective addressing economic development in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio and comment -- is this a model worth emulating?

Dilbert pulls a Johnson... or does he?

Via CmdrSue in a comment on the Angry Drunk Bureaucrat's Blog I learned that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, appears to pull a Johnson.. by that I mean he completely disses the Burgh before visiting. Read his blog post on a visit to Pittsburgh here. Adams sums us up this way:

"And if you love seeing thousands of grey birds lining telephone poles waiting for a dropped French fry, you’ll love Pittsburgh."

Huh?

Pulling a Johnson being the operative term for insulting the Burgh a priori, i.e. based entirely on preconceived notions. Pittsblog called out the progenitor of the phrase, Denver Columnist Bill Johnson who described Pittsburgh as "butt ugly" in a column the week before the Pittsburgh-Denver AFC Championship game last January. In the poor guy's defense, what was he supposed to do. It was the playoffs and for a week Pittsburgh was the enemy. Editors don't send columnists off to their opponents' hometowns looking for fluff travelogues.. they were looking for chalkboard material.

the problem is Adams is not alone. The Pittsburgh international marketing machine needs a little help these days. Also yesterday, a column in the Australian, Australia's largest daily newspaper, gratuitously described us solely as the "cold, steel city of Pittsburgh"... They must not have gotten the memo about this officially being knowledge-city.

but just as ol Bill was won over by our hospitality, plus a few beers at Jack's... Adams is not so negative after actually visiting. He updates his blog simply: "Okay, it turns out that Pittsburgh is a very nice place. Now I feel bad".

Lycos Trivia

Good comments below on the Lycos/Florida post; thanks everyone. But no one tried to answer the trivia question: Where is Lycos today?

It's still in Waltham, Massachusetts, with offices (according to its site) in New York and San Francisco. Lycos is, after all, the self-proclaimed "most exciting online service in existence." But the money that owns Lycos is elsewhere.

In 2000, Lycos was purchased by a Spanish firm, Terra Networks.

In 2004, Terra sold Lycos to a South Korean firm, Daum Communications.

Do the Pirates Matter?

Chatting today with Jake over at Bucco Blog, I wondered about the reasons for the region's different reactions to our local professional sports teams. I take for granted that today, at least, and extending back for at least a decade, the kind of passion that Steelers football inspires just doesn't extend to Pirates baseball.

Is this just a matter of winning and losing? I suspect not, but it's hard for me otherwise to figure out why. Were things different 20 years ago? 30 years ago? Thoughts, please.

Busting the Lycos Myth

Richard Florida built an academic career and then a lucrative consulting career on the observation distilled in the lead of this recent Business Week profile:

In 1994, Carnegie Mellon University professor Richard Florida was paging through a newspaper when a headline triggered what he calls a "holy moly" moment. Lycos, a search-engine company spun out of CMU, announced it was moving from Pittsburgh to Boston. When Florida asked why, colleagues told him that "Boston offered the lifestyle options that made it easier for Lycos to attract top creative and entrepreneurial talent," he recalls.

Holy moly indeed, Batman! More than a decade later, Professor Florida is still enjoying the sunshine. But shouldn't the anecdote get some critical examination? I've heard this from lots of people in Pittsburgh with connections to CMU and the tech sector: Lycos didn't leave Pittsburgh because it lacked access to talent (in fact, initially, Lycos even left a presence here). Lycos went where the money was -- and is. (Trivia question: Where is Lycos today?) Lycos's leaving wasn't a bad thing for Pittsburgh. In fact, the Lycos deal was a big success for CMU and for Pittsburgh, as well as for its founders. That case has been made publicly before, but it doesn't stick, and when I hear it in conversations, most people are reluctant to talk about it publicly. Why is that?

It seems to me that the research that the observation generated is interesting -- but hardly conclusive. What Rich Florida found was a correlation between his defintion of the "creative class" and certain indicators of economic success. What's hard to pin down is the direction of the causal arrow -- if there's any causal arrow at work at all.

Here's an example of what I mean: The best-known concentration of technology companies in the United States is in the Silicon Valley, which stretches (roughly) from Menlo Park to Morgan Hill. How does that region do, anecdotally, on measures of "creativity"? For technological creativity, it may have no peer. For other "cultural" creativity, until very recently, and until long after the Valley became "the Valley," it was a wasteland. (I'd be happy to swap stories of downtown San Jose in the mid-1980s.) The Valley took off, IMHO, because Stanford aggressively pushed its research into the private sector; because the Santa Clara Valley (as Silicon Valley was once known) had a decades-long tradition of Defense Department-sponsored industrial R&D that spun engineers outward as the DoD gravy train dried up; and because the longtime San Francisco banking community realized that the mid-Peninsula is a pleasant place to work as well as to live. The tech community flourished because the money was there, in Menlo Park, to finance the revolution. It didn't hurt that Menlo Park was the original home of the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey's experiments with LSD, but the "creative class" element was always highly marginalized. There was one head shop in Menlo Park in the late 1960s and into the 1970s; in all other respects, the Valley of that era would make modern Mt. Lebanon look like a den of iniquity. The other relevant anecdote, it seems to me, is that Boston -- which allegedly stole Lycos from Pittsburgh based on superior access to "creativity" -- was seen in the 1990s as hopelessly out of it in battles for technology-based economic development. Silicon Valley was the model, not Boston.

That's an anecdote, not research. I hypothesize that the Silicon Valley lacked a deep "creative class," yet that region did okay for itself. If that area is better known today on "creativity" metrics, as I suspect it is, then that "creativity" may have followed economic growth.

There are lots of people with opinions about the Valley. Have a conversation -- at my expense, if you like -- about whether my hypothesis is right. Can Pittsburgh have a similarly honest discussion about whether Lycos matters, and if so, how?

Pittsblog in Wikipedia

Once in a while I check referrer logs, and that's how I learned that my "y*nzer" posts from last Spring have taken on renewed life in Wikipedia -- here (in an entry on "yinz") and here (in a discussion about the "right" categories to include in an entry on Pittsburgh).

I'm not planning to edit either of the entries, though I'm a little disappointed that someone thought that I originally used the word "y*nzer" "carelessly." Way back when, I used the word intentionally, though from a non-native point of view and therefore without regard to what turn out to be important social and economic subtleties among some natives. Moreover, much of the ensuring conversation pointed out, on this blog and elsewhere, that there are many more important things to talk about in Pittsburgh than whether "y*nz" is the local linguistic equivalent of plutonium. The n-word it's not. The word means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it doesn't mean much to many others, which goes to show the irony of those posts popping up as relatively durable contributions to public discourse. By the way, welcome back to The New Yinzer!

Anyway, for an example of someone who *really* doesn't get the meaning of "plays well with others" when it comes to local mores, read today's op-ed about the shortcomings of Steeler Nation. The piece reminds me of a friend who took a different route. She moved to Pittsburgh several years ago and decided to acquire a single line of of Steeler (or should that be Steelers?) trivia to share at cocktail parties and the like -- the point being that this person cared not at all for football but didn't want to seem out of things. The year in question was 1998. The line this person mastered, with a great deal of pride and no irony at all, was: "How about that immaculate reception?"

Not that there was anything wrong with that.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

There's a nifty new documentary film floating around the United States this summer, called "Who Killed the Electric Car?" It's the story of the General Motors electric car, the EV-1, framed as a murder mystery. A few years ago, GM reclaimed EV-1s from people who had leased them, and then GM literally destroyed the vehicles. It's an Alice in Wonderland version of the usual American innovation narrative, as one of the nation's largest industrial enterprises went out of its way not merely to suspend work in an apparently unprofitable area, but literally to bury it. Why? One of those leaseholders had a motion picture camera and the nerve to try to answer this question.

I blog about this for two reasons.

First, so far as I know and despite wide critical praise, the film isn't being shown in Pittsburgh. Does anyone know whether there are plans to bring it here?

Second, the filmmaker, Chris Paine, is (or I should say, was) a schoolmate of mine; we were pals from kindergarten through our senior year in high school. We went to different colleges and gradually floated off into different fields. But Chris has always been someone with a lot of integrity and a lot of passion for whatever he's done. It's fabulous that he's completed a film that's gradually getting the attention of much of the country, and I'm happy for his success. Also, of course, I think that it's cool that he was on The Daily Show.

See Chris's appearance on The Daily Show (Part 1, Part 2).

Read production notes blogged by Chris (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and by the film's producer (Part 1, Part 2).

Another Scary Hair Day

If I didn't scare you with the "soccer mullet," then maybe the photos accompanying this post will do the trick. The PG's Cori Shropshire explains:

A tradition began when Promethean LifeSciences Chief Operating Officer Christian Manders morphed from driven biotech executive into wig-wearing 1970s superstar. He and a group of buddies recently returned from two weeks in Germany where they participated in the revelry of the World Cup dressed as American legends, including Mr. Manders as motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.

The outfits piqued the attention of photographers, bloggers, reporters and fans and earned Mr. Manders mentions in Slate.com and the blog of Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter Charles F. Gardner. Mr. Gardner, who was covering the event, wrote what could become Mr. Manders' epitaph: "I'm Evel Knievel, first time at the World Cup, longtime adventure seeker."

Cori's Post-Gazette blurb did not include photos. I'm happy to remedy that oversight. To the right, Evel K. and Captain America let some Munich police in on the joke.

Strange Hair Day

I saw this poster in the door of a hair salon in Italy last month. Is the "Soccer Mullet" the key to unlocking pro soccer's popularity in Pittsburgh? Is bad hair the key to Italy's success at the World Cup? Is this the evin twin of Keanu Reeves? Are there other silly questions lurking here?

Looking for Good News

From what I can tell so far, not a lot happened in Pittsburgh during July, except that the Pirates (again) sank into the ooze at the bottom of the National League, and City politics are (again) stinking up the joint.

Good news?

Today I came across the Pennsylvania Governor's Conference for Women, which is coming to Pittsburgh next month.

Wireless Boston

Just to let Mike know I will stick around. Here is a blurb related to the ongoing work to get community wireless in place in parts of Pittsburgh. From the AP and via wired.com is this article how Boston is contemplating setting up a non-profit to huild and maintain a city-wide wireless network. Here we are funneling mostly foundation money via a non-profit to a commerical company to build and run a limited version of the same. Is this a variation on a theme or something radically different? However we are doing it: What is the current plan for something online covering downtown? September?