David Berkowitz

Tag: You’re IT — Meet David Berkowitz!

We tagged David Berkowitz this week!

1. David, when did you first discover your love for technology?
One of my earliest memories of really embracing technology was when I wrote my first book report in first grade on Stuart Little. My family had our first PC (my brother already had an Apple IIe), and I learned how to use the thesaurus on Wordperfect. I never turned back. Typing had a great impact on me too, allowing me to get thoughts on paper much faster than I could write them, so even in the early 80s I seemed to be itching to be a blogger.

2. How do you earn a living?
It isn’t by blogging. I’m Director of Emerging Media and Client Strategy at 360i, the digital marketing agency, where I help big brands with their social media and mobile strategies.

3. What keeps you up at night?
I sleep pretty well, thanks. What really keeps me up though is information overload.

4. What do you do when you’re not working?
I’m relatively recently married (still within the first year) and my wife and I love to travel. During the summer it’s fun exploring various parts of New York City, where I live. I like to catch movies, I read a good amount, and thanks to the DVR I manage to watch a lot of TV (my latest ‘discovery’: Californication - can’t wait for the next season).

5. You’ve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?
It’s a big, white, puffly cloud. Not the cumulo nimbus kind. This is a very happy cloud, the cottony kind.

Bonus Question: If Stephen Spielberg was going to make a movie about your life, what would it be called?
Bloggers of the Lost Ark? No… Saving Private Berkowitz… no, that’s not it either. Here it is - I’d actually title the film by the screen name I used on the dating site when I met my wife: “Google This.”

Overheard: Cuil will soon be a verb that nobody knows how to pronounce

The search engine’s launch was such a spectacular flameout that it may well go down as a verb. “What happened to that Eddie Murphy movie that was supposed to win him an Oscar?” “It came and went — it got totally Cuiled.” David Berkowitz, Do We Need Another…

There was tons of buzz this week — both in the media and in the office — about Cuil. The new search engine promised to index more sites than Google and it had some big industry names behind it. Everyone got all excited, hoping that Google finally had a real competitor. So what went wrong after the big reveal?

The engine works — it’s just not Google. And remember, Google is the supreme ruler. We build out sites for Google. We live and die by changes in the Google algorithm. Competing with Google is serious business. Literally.

Here’s how I knew that Cuil had disappointed and was already being dismissed. It hasn’t even been a week and there are already Cuil jokes.

Think about it. Have you ever in your whole entire life heard a Google joke?

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P.S.

David Berkowitz’s quote made me laugh, but the thing I REALLY wondered when I heard about Cuil was this — what the heck were these brilliant people thinking when they named their engine Cuil?

NEW RULE: Never name your product something you need to tell people how to pronounce. For those of you new to the buzz-swarm, the word cuil is gaelic for knowledge and it’s pronounced “cool.”

Overheard: The best way to make $$ from social media is to run a conference on it

I hate to say it, but the best (and likely only) way to get ROI in Social Media is to run Social Media conferences. Steve Baldwin, commenting on David Berkowitz’s article Ten Questions Not To Ask A Social Media Panel

David’s satirical blog post about “what not to ask a social media panel” got a lot of virtual heads nodding.