Post by Evan Williams on the off the shelf or rather on the web apps he is using to help run ODEO (via Susan Mernit) also from Susan a link to alarm:clock a site I'm glad to know about with the scoop on John Battelle's next venture which could be a publisher services platform for bloggers.
Teen Mags blamed for rise in girls' suicides.
Series of articles on Media Futures by Seth Goldstein (via Fred Wilson)
Article in the Detroit news on Craig Newmark and the future of newspapers.
On the train in this morning I began Manhattan '45 by Jan Morris. The book begins with the arrival of the Queen Mary as she brings back over 14,000 service men and woman and it will go on to describe a time which she describes as a special moment of grace, a period between times pre-war and post-war that "... lasted no more than a few years, and by the mid-1950s was fast becoming hardly more than a regretful memory. New York was never to lose its excitement, its power to move, its limitless energy; but never again, perhaps, would it possess the particular mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and self-amazement, which seems to have characterized it in those moments of triumph." As my train went over the Manhattan Bridge her joyous description of the city on the verge made me incredibly sad, not because of a longing for a time past but, I think, for my inability to embrace the changes in character that the city has had since 9/11 when we have been embraced and, somehow smothered in the bosom of the rest of the country. I'm not sure whether my feeling is based on my family's leaving the city; the invasion of chain stores; the quest for the Olympics masking real estate grabs; the police actions during the RNC; the way money has created a new sort of classism; or the monstrous SUV's that now crowd the streets making walking, biking, and even driving feel much more precarious than they did in the past. Or perhaps it is Bob Herbert's edtorial in the NYT about Roosevelt this morning. I'm going to keep reading and look forward to the section on the great hotels that are now being turned into condos.
