On hot days like this who can blame them? The NYT has an article about men 30-55 dropping out of the workforce to sit on their porches.
On the other hand those choosing to work could always go to a job at the NY Observer which has been bought by a 25 year old real estate heir. For whatever reason the paper wasn't sold to Robert De Niro and his partners, who are NY loving people responsible for reviving Tribeca, media savvy etc. Instead it has been sold to someone, whose “... 25-ness is a huge asset. He is not weighed down by the debris of conventional wisdom.” according to Peter Kaplan, the Editor of the Observer.
""What a monthly magazine can do is serve as a sweet spot between the Web and a book," Anderson said. "It has the relevance of the moment of the Web but the depth . . . of a book." Chris Anderson being quoted in a very nice article on magazines and the rise of niche titles. (via Iwantmedia.com)
I'm interested in why LilaGuides only got 2 million from the Knot but perhaps there is more too it. They are a very interesting property to think about building out better online than off. Hard to break into selling into local markets. Zagat's, which they aspire to be for parents, has a model that is also supported by custom publishing which LilaGuides couldn't really pull off. (via PaidContent.org)
Lipstick.com - A condenet/rediff celebrity social bookmark site. Simon Dumoneco on the whole idea.
Fred Wilson has a very good post called The Bad Script Trip about recent problems on his site and the increased vulnerability of pages as a person/site embraces services from other sites. This is true of blogs that pull in YouTube Video, reblogs that rely on feeds that in turn rely on photoservices etc. Over the weekend I met an engineer with AMD who works on scalability and 100% uptime issues. This is a very complex and difficult thing to achieve and I doubt that many of the services we are beginning to use on our blogs and sites have it nailed down. Scalability is a very difficult thing to accomplish and I doubt that there are enough CTO's really thinking about this. There are over 150 funded video sharing sites right now - do they all have great tech? I doubt it. Issues even pop-up in surprising places, last week on Six Apart's pronet there was a really interesting thread about 37 signals issues with MT, since many of their issues seem to have been caused by sloppiness, and they are really smart, it makes one wonder.
Offline - Great article in July 31st issue of New Yorker about the Wikipedia.
