“I think of the entertainment industry and Detroit similarly,” Mr. Seinfeld said as he dressed down the television executives in the room for not being bolder in their programming. “They don’t have confidence in their instincts. Maybe they don’t have instincts to be confident in?”
Anyone out of high school forced to watch more than an hour of “Laguna Beach” might possibly feel the urge to beat themselves about the head with a large stick.
“This show is about seven kids whose parents consented to their involvement and who themselves consented,” Ms. Black said. “We never represented this show as depicting the town of Laguna Beach.”
Yahoo! even brought in Beck to entertain the crowd on Friday night. (To be honest, I had never heard of Beck-—why, I wondered, would Yahoo! bring in the CEO of a beer company to sing?)
This is the "self-checkout" machine I confronted upon leaving the new, huge Stop n Shop (though a letter already burned out so it's the Stop n hop). What an exercise in ineffciency. No one, myself included, made it through this thing without assistance from an employee. There are three screens, including a signature screen so small and tight against the payment machine that you have to mash your fist against the machine to make your signature legible. Successive actions always require jumping to another screen. You have to specifiy credit or debit twice, in two different places. If you so much as lay a finger on the conveyor belt, the system thinks its an unscanned item and goes into lockdown. So why did I use it? Because there was only one human cashier working. Soon there will be none.
For a one-day roving tool sale. Not necessarily "bad" design, just worthy of discussion. A bit cluttered, to say the least, but where the deals are good enough people will scan through these hundreds of thumbnails. Doing so made me a little dizzy. But a $90 weed wacker for $50? I'm there.
StatementPres. Bush makes a statement on the disruption of a plot to blow up planes from Green Bay, WI.
(AOL spokesman) Weinstein said he knew of no other cases thus far where users had been identified as a result of the search data, but he was not surprised. "“We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry."
Ms. Arnold says she loves online research, but the disclosure of her searches has left her disillusioned. In response, she plans to drop her AOL subscription. "We all have a right to privacy,"” she said. "“Nobody should have found this all out”"
"...after failing to buy a non-iPod FM transmitter (preferably a Belkin TuneCast II like the one I recently lost) at CompUSA, because all they carry now are FM transmitters that jack into the proprietary connections on iPods."iPod's dominance in the mp3 player market is a self-perpetuating phenomenon. All the retailers figure you want the iPod and carry little else in the way of options. The local Circuit City's mp3 player aisle is 90 percent iPod accessories.
With Yahoo! Directory Submit, your request to be listed in the Directory will be reviewed and the Yahoo! editorial team will respond to you within 7 business days, for a review fee of only $299 ($600 for adult sites).I guess that says something about how weary these poor Yahoo! editorial folks must be of looking at this stuff day in, day out.
Google Labs is littered with half baked and half finished products. I see little or no product vision coming out of Google, sitting fat and arrogant on it its Adsense revenues.
just curious, is the Sonos a loaner, did you get it free? Disclosure please…thanks.
"wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe's advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers' — so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become "friends" with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants."Depressing because...well, which will make people feel more pathetic: having Tom or some Speed stick as their only "friend?"
"The value in our case accrues to the enterprise, although it also accrues to individuals who comprise the enterprise."
"The people behind this setup expect it to save just a few seconds on each order. But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through."
PBR on NPR★★★★☆ Slate's editors and writers understand that they shouldn't take themselves too seriously. So the always-entertaining site gives you everything from toaster reviews (they like the DeLonghi) to smart political analysis from John Dickerson.
Sometimes it pays to Ask
Save the CoCo Times!? Anyone?
Office ain't Dead Yet"If people start using this as an alternative to Word, money can easily be made on advertising around the site, with a premium paid version."
"Will things like AjaxWrite have an impact on Microsoft’s Office revenues over time? Yeah, it must. Even so, Bill Gates says that he just doesn’t understand our infatuation with thin client versions of Word. That may be true, but at some point I expect Microsoft to come out with ad supported versions of their own clients…they’ll just wait, of course, until they have to. And Google has pushed the envelope with its recent acquisition of Writely."I'm not that impressed with Google's history of handling acquisitions. Blogger's nice, but Microsoft was the Johnny-come-lately here and Spaces is booming. Picassa is nice, but not a category killer by any means. Keyhole had great results. Dodgeball hasn't really scaled to Google-type numbers, or has it? Orkut's useless. I'm not saying its Writely purchase won't keep the Office team up nights, but the track record is too patchy to assume the magic of Google search will rub off on this latest purchase.
I Want My "Google Finance will have a Groups section where stocks are discussed with paid moderators - that's editors to you and me. And that's a shift, a shift that is worth noting."Indeed. Editors get a bad wrap because the simplistic view of them pits them against the whole notion of the collective wisdom of the social web. "I don't need an editor to tell me what to think," is a legitimate but oversimplified statement. When editors do that in a one-way "Word of God" manor, they provide no real value and shouldn't be trusted. Newspapers, at least the bad ones (and, no, that's not all of them) are partly to blame.
"I hate spam in all of its forms and the people who engage in it are in the same category as murderers and rapists in my book."
"Microsoft is a middle aged company struggling to figure out how to dance with the teenagers, and its body simply can't keep up with its intentions, no matter how correct they may be."
How cool would it be to see a fuck washington campaign funded by a small group of billionaires and millions of ants?! Hell yes. Politics could get fun.Fred chimes in for the "billionaires":
I'll join Mark (not sure which Mark) if there is a "fuck you" campaign for President in 2008.
While I’m all for the revenue sharing with artists, pleeeease, lala, get over yourself and drop the condescending, do-the-right-thing-as-defined-by-the-RIAA messaging.
La La...huh?I ask you to do your part by doing the right thing: remove songs from your iPod or PC if you've agreed to send the CD to another member.
"...If you'’re wondering about why I'’m collecting this information, I want to trace usage patterns and assert how those relate to the design, usability and IA of web applications. This will translate in some of the next blog posts in the "Building web applications" series. Thanks!"
I bet you would. So would the Department of Justice. So would a lot of people. But why on earth should I trust you with this information? What will you use it for? If you can't be bothered to anticipate these questions, who will bother to answer yours?"We would like to know what other local website you visit on a regular or semi-regular basis."
I disagree. Kudos to the papers for finally embracing the things that many of their readers have been well aware of for years. But these are just tools. What the people who run the newspaper business will never get their minds around is that, unlike those multi-million dollar presses whirling away in their printing plants, these tools are available to just about anyone. So, while newspapers may ultimately have a fighting chance at staying relevant and profitable enough to exist (I, for one, hope they do), they will never again command the kind of authority or dominate the market for (especially local) news as they did in the past."Across the industry the message I pick up is, 'Oh my God. It's slipping away. What can I do?' " says Stephen Gray, managing director of the initiative, called Newspaper Next. The answer, he says, will require "a shift of thought from, 'How do we get people to read more newspapers?' to 'What problems are people trying to solve in their lives, and how can we help?'"
I was glad to see this piece (free reg. req'd) Mark Patinkin in the Providence Journal. It begins:
It was a journalistic turning point for me. I went to Newport to interview a man who had just sailed alone across the Atlantic. It was going to be a dramatic story about boldly facing down nature's fury. I asked him to tell me the most spectacular moments of his trip.
He said there weren't any. It was boring and lonely, and half the time, he was sick below deck.
But didn't he feel like a conqueror?
No, he still felt sick.
It didn't stop me. I kept pumping him for details I could turn into drama.
Then it hit me. I didn't have to. There was an even more compelling angle here: A feature about how crossing the ocean alone isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
That's how I wrote it. It made for great reading. And it had the added advantage of being accurate.
Of course reporters, who all tend to fancy themselves the next Hemingway, ate this up (myslef included). Trouble was (and is with too much "narrative journalism") that there followed a willingness to pick one compelling theme/hook and make all the facts serve it.
In this case, we were going over a story I was doing on an old, disabled woman who was being threatened with eviction for having taken in her daughter's family after they themselves lost their home as the result of the son-in-law being injured at work and having no income.
My editor picked his theme, something along the lines of the poor "falling" through the cracks (Zero points for originality, I know). Without asking me how the son-in-law was injured, he started playing with a lead that had the guy falling off a ladder. Trouble was, that's not how it happened.
I'm not saying my editor wanted to deliberately insert errors in the story. But you can see how this mindset could produce dangerous results, particularly in the form of reporters who put the telling of the story first and the facts of the story second, with tacit consent from the powers that be. Did this happen at this paper? You bet. Reporters feared having their stories called boring far more than they worried about being called out for playing fast and loose with the facts.
