My buddy Tom Watson posts on anonymous sources, Deep Throat, and the daily grind of journalism. I had the pleasure of working with Tom on journalistic endeavors at @NY back in the day, and I’d have to say my thoughts on the subject are completely in sync with his. So in the interest of saving time while I continue to trudge through house buying, baby gestating, and the ClickZ biz, I’m just linking to him. Thanks, Tom, for putting it so well.
Will Ads on HDTV Lose Their Power?
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of the :30 spot, but might there be yet another factor hastening its precipitous decline? Since getting an HDTV monitor, Douglas Rushkoff thinks so.
Community News Jumps Offline
The Rocky Mountain News is taking its YourHub.com community journalism project to the streets (aka print distribution).
“What is significant about this launch is the fact that the online, community-based product is driving the printed version of the newspaper,” said John Temple, Editor, President and Publisher of the Rocky Mountain News. “YourHub.com represents a significant shift in the way we think about modern newsgathering.”
RSS Seed Feed
We spent some of the long weekend making plans for the garden at the house we are still trying to buy. May I just say that Sunset’s Western Garden Book is the bible here in my adopted home state of California?
Anyway… in trolling the Web for seeds (the el-cheapo method of garden-starting), I came across the
Burpee RSS Feed. Here’s a company, W. Atlee Burpee & Co., that was founded in 1876 as a seed catalog. Impressively, it’s really embracing the new technology. So far, feed content is mostly product specials and recycled newsletter content, but I’ve already seen one item I’m interested in purchasing.
Yahoo! Explores Searchers Mindsets
The Yahoo! Search Blog features a post by research director Bernard Mangold introducing Yahoo! Mindset. It’s a really interesting little project aimed at helping the company sort search results by commercial or informational content, depending on the user’s intent (or Mindset). This sort of gets to the whole issue of being able to target ads depending on where people are in the buying cycle — research mode or impulse buying mode. I need to check it out more, but it’s good to know this kind of experimentation is going on.
Driving me Crazy
It’s really getting on my nerves that, since I switched back to Google AdSense, every ad seems to be targeted on the word “blog.” Sure, I mention blogging — and this is a blog, after all — but goodness knows I write about other things, too. Get it together, Google, and crawl these pages, please.