Useless news

From the local yokel press comes word of a a guy running for the local state senate seat. He's ID'd in the head of both stories as a blogger, yet neither one sees fit to mention what he blogs about, let alone the name of his blog, let alone its URL. (They are Politicalcortex and epluribusmedia). Now I can't believe that it didn't occur to any reporter and/or editor that what someone ID'd as a blogger blogs about might be of interest to readers/voters. So is it ignorance, laziness, or the old "we're the only news source you need" refusal to link out to anyone else at all? Either way, it's absurd. The Poughkeepsie Journal, btw, is Gannett. So much for news you can use.

Let me get this straight...

You have to pay them more to look at porn?:

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.

Ouch!

The truth hurts, but I have to agree with Arrington:

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.

So much for being "local"

One of the most famous people to live in your circulation area passes and you run a Chicago Tribune story without so much as a contribution of a graf or two of quotes from locals remebering him? Where's the added value of being the "local" paper? Nowhere.

Clever idea, but do you really want to associate a product you imbibe with a dirty street (and we all know what steam from the bowels of NYC can smell like)?

Dumb newspaper move #453

$3.5 million to slap your name on an arena? One that doesn't even host a pro sports franchise?

Imagine what that kind of money could do for the newsroom.

Disclosure: Before fleeing newspapers, I applied for a job at the TU and the editor straight out told me that my experience was great but that, unfortunately, it made me too "expensive." So the job went to someone straight out of school with no experience vs. my seven years. In retrospect, I owe them a debt of gratitude since I probably would have taken the job and ended up hating it.

But, my history with the paper aside, how about putting that money into hiring more and better reporters and improving the product? Then people might actually read it more.

Do you think the name Pepsi Arena ever caused someone to walk into a 7-11 planning to buy a Coke to change their mind and walk out with a Pepsi?

Do you think that Times Union Arena will make one single reader change their mind about dumping the paper because they're not happy with what's inside? Yeah, me neither.

Beertubbing heaven! (from the NYTimes)

The "My" generation

Technorati doesn't know I exist

I've was less than impressed with Technorati when I was a blog reader and since I've become a blogger myself I've grown even more dissatisifed. The UI is less than elegant, the pages way too cluttered with text and the results way too junked up with spam blogs.

But it is Technorati, so I went and dutifully "claimed" my blog. It never showed up in search results. After posting on Dan Gillmor's Columbia talk last week, I even went and manually pinged them to let them know of the post. Well, I just went and checked and I'm nowhere to be found in the results.

Ice Rocket found me.

So did Google Blog Search.

And Blogdigger.

This is the blogosphere equivalent of the old-fashioned habit of looking yourself up when the new phone books came. As self-indulgent as it may be, it also speaks more broadly to the quality of the results.

Technorati may have the buzz and DJ Amber's favorite blogs, but that means nothing to me if it's returning lame results.

Welcome back to the '70s

It wasn't quite the ubiquitious "No gas" sign of the embargo days of the '70s, but I when I was greeted with a "Super only" sign at the local Gulf this morning, it was the first time in a long time I'd seen such a hint of supply constraints.

Don't believe the hype

I know it's fashionable to say that any industry that doesn't immediately make its content free on the Web right away just doesn't get it. They're dinosaurs. Doomed. Newspapers? Hopeless. Hollywood? Dead.

The Chartreuse post comes via Fred Wilson who calls it one he wishes he'd written. To Fred's credit, he had a very good post this morning on the global reach of the New York Times, but I disagree about the fate of Hollywood at the hands of You Tube et al.

Certinaly these guys will change the way Hollywood makes and markets movies. But these guys and Hollywood are not mutually exclusive propositions. You Tube and others are about filling out the long tail. That doesn't mean top of the tail disappears.

I don't think Hollywood will be brought low by a couple of Chinese kids lipsynching to boy band songs, as entertaining as they may be. A recent check shows that among the most viewed clips on YouTube right now are trailers/behind-the-scenes-looks for the upcoming Bond, X-men and Spiderman films. Hollywood fare, all.

File under "Headlines you never thought you'd see"

From the Times: "Anna Nicole Smith Wins Supreme Court Case"