The River

FEMA’s apparently saying Katrina may be the worst natural disaster the country has ever experienced, and from what I’ve seen and heard in the media, I believe it. What is there to say but that I’m so sorry this is happening?

My brother lived in New Orleans for two years after college, and, growing up in Houston, I had the opportunity to visit quite a bit over the years. When my Scottish husband and I took our first big cross-country trip after buying our car, we made sure to stop into the Big Easy — I had to show off what I consider to be one of America’s great cities. Now I have to wonder how much of it will be left. And, of course, the loss of life and property looks to be immense. It’s stating the obvious, but it will be a long time before things get back to anything resembling normal for a whole lot of people.

Kudos to the folks at the Times Picayune (which, I believe, include two members of my journalism school class) for keeping the world informed, despite the difficulty of doing so.

In what may be an omen for ReplayTV (upon which I am utterly dependant), D&M is discontinuing its Rio line of MP3 players. Rio is the other asset (besides ReplayTV) that D&M acquired when it bought SonicBlue back when. Hmm…

Maybe I’m late to notice this, but ClickZ columnist and consumer-generated media guru Pete Blackshaw just turned me on to his blog. Pete always has fascinating insights and intelligent things to say, and his blog writing is no exception.

Remember back when everyone was speculating about the launch of Google Messenger? Yep. That day is here. I downloaded Google Talk but haven’t installed it yet. I think it’d have the most impact for me personally as part of a multi-service application like Trillian. Unfortunately, it only works with Trillian Pro. Darn.

Whether I splurge for the Pro upgrade will totally depend on how many friends/contacts adopt Talk as a primary IM client. Google is super late to the game and there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to switch, from what I’ve read on various blog reviews. But it’s a mistake to count Google out. We’ll see…

Talk about an eventful day. I’m back on the job at ClickZ after six weeks of maternity leave, and ClickZ is blogging! Yes, we’ve finally, officially taken the plunge. We think it’ll be a great complement to our news reporting, and we look forward to building bloggy relationships with readers. Rebecca Lieb wrote a bit more about ClickZ’s blogging aims here. Yes, I’ll still be blogging here at The-River.net, though things will probably continue to be sporadic until little Callum gets a wee bit more independent.

And now, back to six weeks of accumulated e-mail.

UPDATE: RSS feed is here.

Callum and I made a foray down to San Jose yesterday to visit the big Search Engine Strategies conference and exhibition. Kind of strange mixing maternity leave with search and wheeling a stroller around the conference venue, but it was great getting down there. I met with Rebecca Lieb (my boss, pictured with Callum). Also got to chat with Incisive Media’s CEO and SES’ (not to mention ClickZ’s) new owner Tim Weller (interviewed today in WebProNews). We also ran into Kevin Lee, Gary Stein, and Omar Tawakol of Revenue Science, among others.

We were shooting for a picture of Callum in front of a SES banner, but — despite his being incredibly good and quiet for most of the time — he was getting a little fussy as we passed the convention center entrance. Alas.

For those who have been clamoring for more pictures of Callum, I’m going to be posting new photos most often on my account at Flickr, which you can see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pamelapc/. RSS feed is here.

No, I’m not completely out of the loop. For example, I got the news that Jupitermedia Corp. has sold ClickZ and Search Engine Strategies to a British outfit called Incisive Media. SES’s Danny Sullivan says: “while the owners are changing, the quality content we aim to deliver to you is not.” The ink still isn’t yet dry on the acquisition agreement (involving $43 million cash, btw), so obviously there are many details left to be worked out. Can’t say much more than that at the moment.

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