DefinitiveInk

E-mail exchange between someone pretending

E-mail exchange between someone pretending to be the CEO of Starbucks Corp and a new hire in the Starbucks human resources department. (via Stay Free Magazine)

Welcome Drew - "Barrymore, “I went to the one on Bedford and Morton. I went to the one on Bedford and Carmine. I guess I’m headed to Brooklyn!” (via NY Magazine)

What will my sidebars look like if I start adding actual officially approved Typepad widgets? Thank G_d I can add Squidoo, how I've been counting the days. It's good to know what to call all of the swicki, pandora, feeds, etc that I already have.

Links for 3/29/06

NYT article on museum web sites. The article  starts off slowly but gets interesting as it goes on. It led me to the Walker Art Center's great site and to their art on call podcast area. (note: I'm confused by the file extension .wac on their pages - what is it?)

Now that the Wash Post has exposed the fattaxfacts.org site as a hoax I can came clean and claim it as a creation of mine. I built it for Esquire as the supporting part of an April fools joke. My own contribution to the joke is that I modeled it after Grover Norquist's  American's for Tax Reform site.  One of the subtle pleasures of this project has been watching the referrer logs to see some of the blogs that have picked it up and are either incensed or in favor of taxing the overweight among us.

It would be nice if the ui and search tricks used by zwillow and their new competition Real Estate ABC start being incorporated on more niches verticals.

Waterfront media raises six million dollars bringing to them to ten in the last two rounds. (via PaidContent)

Blogged notes from a speech by Alan Rusbridger, the Editor of The Guardian, on the future of newspapers. (via BuzzMachine)

WSJ article about Time Inc.'s web play.

Yesterday's announcement of Verizon superpages and Google teaming up in the local space is a big deal.

Jason Kottke's post "A whole new Internet" from last April. read in the context of the Newsweek article and the links to the debate about whether or not it is a good time to start a company.

Compare this to the pathetic A blogger's progress  in MediaPost. Is this really supposed to be a guide to blogs for traditional media honchos?

OJR's Syndicate this! Linking old media to new (via Susan Mernit)

Birdwatching list for Prospect Park

Shake Shack Chicago dogs are yummy! Too cold for concretes but give it a week or two.

Google experimenting with ads in maps, ZD Net article a screenshot

Links for 3/27/06

Patricia Volk's NYT article about NYC Jews and Chinese Food is genetic revelation for me. I think it explains that my once a week craving for dumplings is not just habit but could in fact be a genetic trait going back thousands of years. It also makes me yearn for a restaurant I never knew, Bernstein-on-Essex which featured kosher chicken liver lo mein served by Jewish waiters wearing skull caps with tassels. Lastly I am just thrilled to learn that in China they actually serve General Tso's chicken.

From the blog of my new friend, Shel Holtz, comes a post "Podcasting: What's in a name?" about the semantic debate currently raging around the term. For Shel and the Wikipedia, the fact that you subscribe to an RSS feed to retrieve the content makes it a podcast, not whether the audio is listened to on a device or not. I actually agree with that, but am also very aware that the term podcast  is being used to describe a kind of episodic show which is sometimes too limiting a factor. This is similar to the issue of blogs and people thinking that a blog, is well like this one, as opposed to other forms of sites using blogging engines. I understand why the promoters of these "new words" do it but ,some days more than others, resent its effect. I do agree with his last point which is to stop worrying about it too much and to just stay focused on the exciting potential of the medium.

Also on podcasting paidcontent reports that NPR is doing a deal with melodeo to make their podcasts available on mobile phones.

IWantMedia's interview with Elizabeth Spier's, the first editor of Gawker, on her new blogging play DealBreaker. I agree with her points about the model being very appealing for traditional media.

Q: Can blogging be a good business?

Spiers: I think it's a good business if you do it correctly. I also think that blogs could be used for testing editorial concepts. For print, broadcast, anything.

I'm surprised that more big media companies don't use the Web for concept testing. Especially in broadcasting. They put millions of dollars in a TV pilot, don't know if it works and waste all that money. Many pilots are thrown away that don't even go into syndication anywhere.

Now that we have iTunes syndicating old CBS shows, I think there's a model there where people could produce really cheap TV pilots and get better user data on what viewers actually think.

Blogs are starting to integrate with social networking apps, which is very interesting. That's the next generation -- the user who thinks of the Web as this necessary kind of way of life and sculpts his entire social world around it.

Lastly - Very important stuff from Daily Kos:

The netroots have won.

Not an election, mind you - though those victories will come - but an official governmental recognition that what you all do is a valuable part of the democratic experiment, and one which should not be thwarted by the incursion of the federal government.

 

Bubble Cover curse

Seeing the Newsweek cover story about the "live web" with all of our favorite Web 2.0 superstars makes me anxious about whether there is a Newsweek cover curse similar to the famous one at Sports Illustrated.

As even the most casual sports fiend knows, there’s a devout superstition that being on the cover of Sports Illustrated is the kiss of death for your favorite team or athlete. Sometimes literally...According to SI’s own researchers, 37 percent of the time bad luck of some sort strikes a person or a team within two weeks of a cover appearance. Almost 12 percent suffered injury or death.... As writer Wolff explains by interviewing a statistics professor, the Jinx merely illustrates a "regression to the mean." In sports talk, that means athletes who get hot eventually get cold.

Perhaps in a timely effort to deflect the cover curse, Caterina opines that it is a bad time to start a company. This is countered by 37 Signals who think it is a great time to start a business. (via - Floozyspeak)

I would bet that SI will have George Mason on the cover this week which is sad as I hoped they might have a shot at Florida but perhaps they will regress to the mean. Normally I don't care that much about the NCAA but I have a friend who teaches at the university and, I also love an underdog. The game yesterday against CT was exciting.

Damned Squirrels

Over the weekend I installed a window mounted bird feeder for my cat to watch birds. So far all we have attracted were some mourning doves, and  two  squirrels. I'm going to try and move it higher but these squirrels are very wily. 

Ah, Spring,- Deja vu continues

Ah, Spring,
- Deja vu continues with Hearst forming a new digital group with some of the same people I worked with at the old one.
- A Coyote is spotted and captured in Central Park.
- I'm installing a bird feeder on the window for my cat to watch  some nut-hatches.
- I've found a blog written by Eurylochus who is campaigning with Odysseus.
- I went on an 80 mile bike ride through NJ on Sunday with the NYCC from which I'm still recovering.
- If the weather is warmer it would be great to create a soundwalk and submit it to this site.  Or  go on a tour using my friend Nick's wonderful PodWalk around the Bowery on Wayfaring.
- Also to sit and spend some time pondering Thoreau and the meaning of  work, helped along by the offline essay The Spirit of Disobedience, An invitation to resistance by Curtis White in this month's Harper's (hopefully this will appear online before to long).

Links for 3/20/05

Lovely little animations on the Habitat site. They play around in small dramas while the flash loads. They remind me of the mosaics on the Prince Street R stop. (The link will take you to an artist guide of most of the great subway station art in the city.)

A friend tells me that the USDA zone map will be redrawn but that it isn't considered climate change just weather patterns.

my.reblog.org beta launches. Hosted reblogs!!! Sign up today.

The Cylinder and Preservation project at UC Santa Barbara. Great to see this mentioned in the NYT on Sunday. Listen to great music from the turn of the 20th century.

Alice Feiring's site has been nominated for a James Beard award.

Alice's site which I wrote about on Friday has been nominated for a James Beard Award in the category of Best Internet Website for Food. So since I built it,  and pushed her blog and add wine recommendations, I suppose I am up for some of this award too. The other nominees are  Epicurious and leitesculinaria. We are the clearly the underdog in this contest since since Epicurious is a multi-million dollar enterprise and leites has a staff. I'm so proud of Alice for blogging when I told her she had to start. If she wins I'll upgrade her to 3.2.

ning is getting very interesting.

ning is getting very interesting. a friend just started a restaurant review site. since so many of my friends are foodies, if enough of them join we will have something great. their profile page has some nice touches. another interesting site is streeteasy. they have some cool things going on with their google maps and also comments on listings. some great and subtle functionality. ilike the way they are taking rss feeds and formatting them. i found them as i was checking in on edgeio who is in turn publishing streeteasy's rss in newly formatted ways.

Great features from the NYT.

Very nice job by the NYT on a new feature called "This Month in Business History with Floyd Norris" - A new monthly multi-media feature about business history. This month's episode about J.P. Morgan and the breakup of Northern Securities in 1904. Video from Floyd Norris, slide show, historic Times front pages, graphics, and related links. I'm a history buff so I just love this kind of thing.

The NYT is also doing a really nice job with their blogs. Eric Asimov's blog The Pour opened earlier in the week. It has a links that list a  site I built a while ago for a wine writer friend named Alice Feiring. I pushed her to a blog and then to post more and add wine recommendations. Yesterday her page views shot up as a result of referrers from the Asimov's blog. It's great to see them linking out like this.

A month ago I started a reblog on GardenWeb called Gardenvoices to find, highlight, and link to great gardening writing from around the world.We are getting nice comments from bloggers  who appreciate the traffic and we are also generating a lot of goodwill and some free marketing resulting in happiness all around.

Wine blogging and referrers

I'm very pleased that my friend Alice Feiring's site/blog is being linked to by Eric Asimov's great new wine blog The Pour. I built the site for Alice last year and pushed her to post often and not just post her published articles.  She still posts long essays on her travels and tastings. She also puts up recommendations. She so far is more game than my other friends who are  hard-working often published food and drink writers who claim they don't understand writing for free or in their spare time.  Her traffic shot up yesterday to about 550 page views many coming from The Pour according to the referrer logs. Go Alice.

Garden Voices, the reblog, I launched on GardenWeb is also driving traffic to smaller blogs. It's a great feeling to spread some traffic to these blogs not to mention the good will (and links) it is engendering for the site.

I was very pleased to read about Six Apart's new funding. Lately, it has been too easy to lose track of the fact the blogging is still in it's infancy.

I don't like rawstory.com's redesign but I do like sautewednesday's.

Links - 3/14/06

Guardian launches commentisfree... <¹>(via paidcontent.org who says it is somewhat like a British version of the HuffingtonPost)

WeSmirch - gossip aggregator (via Susan Mernit)

On the subject of aggregators, it looks like Fox has not (yet) acquired Dogster. Instead the acquired company Newroo a still in alpha company, that according to TechCrunch, has "NewRoo is a real-time news aggregator that allows users to create their own customized news and content pages."

I'm fond of the nav bar on The Independent, and I think it might be SEO friendly as well.

You will see a Pandora widget on the sidebar. I added it yesterday.  I'm listening to Pandora and trying to get it to make a great Elvis Costello station. The song listed as a favorite is a cover of Start Me Up as played by the Folksmen on the "A Mighty Wind" soundtrack. It's very funny as they repeat the last line over and over in harmony. Pandora announced that it can be streamed on a  Squeezbox  so we are also thinking of getting one for home, so we can listen to it on our stereo. What a great name for a product, great Who song.

Lastly, for those of you who may have missed it Sandra Day O'Conner gave a speech recently in which she said that the US risked edging near towards dictatorship.

1. David - not a Typo. That is the way they are spelling it

Jobst Brandt, author of the

Jobst Brandt, author of the Bicycle Wheel.,  Frequently Asked Questions about Bicycles and Bicycling

Links for 3/13/06

CNN has a poll up that says, "Who would you rather see overseeing operations at U.S. Ports?" and the choices are "Arab-based ports company" or "Mafia". Guess who is winning? Both Anil and David have comments. We will find out tomorrow if they scooped the Daily Show.

Nice to see Susan Mernit so happy at Yahoo. (Not that I have any idea if she was unhappy) I love the post about Doing and Not Talking.

Alexaholicism

I'm at risk of spending some time staging "battles" CNET bought Chowhound last week. I'm very interested in seeing how such an opinionated  community responds to being bought by News.com. alexa charts by alexaholic

Meetup gets e-bay investment

So I had the scoop from the NY Tech Meetup that Scott announced that they were getting an investment from a large company. Turns out the large company is ebay. He said "one of the big three" so I immediately thought of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Pierre Omidyar is on their board. Since I'm not trying to actually have any scoops it was nice to hear his good news in person.

Links for 3/9/06 - e-tech, top10sources, cut and paste and calendars

Following the developments at e-tech. I understand that my baby GardenVoices was mentioned by the folks from reblog but haven't seen any coverage yet.

Top10 Sources - is evolving. Many more subjects, they are now excerpting feeds instead of grabbing the whole thing. Interesting reblogging going on here. But overall I'm not that impressed, I  just clicked on one of their Top 10 links that went to Topix which itself is an aggregator of blogs and news. Also on further clicking many of the subjects are "edited" by the same fresh faced group of employees who write long boring introductions to their subjects (see cats) but don't have profile pages. So while I appreciate the human element and will keep my eye on them I think they will end up short on the human side of where about.com could go if they added reblogging and short of where basically every dynamic aggregator/news reader/search engine is right now. I do like the fact that they are helping to define some copyright issues around the area, so wish them success.

Two really smart people on copying and pasting between applications. Anil Dash and Ray Ozzie(via hello.typepad.com)

Another really interesting paper I am reading is Time and Timing from Release 1.0. It is also about the problem of sharing information between applications and people. Sadly it isn't online. It is also expensive but someone gave it to me to read.

 

Woman marries Dolphin in Eliat,

Woman marries Dolphin in Eliat, Isreal after 15 year romance. How did she know he consented? How is she sure he is a he? At least I hope his parents approve, she's a shiksa.