The River

Here I was wondering if the Bay Area had anything Gothamist-like, and Gothamist goes and launches a SF blog. The name, SFist, is a bit unfortunate. “Ess-fist” just doesn’t sound very… pleasant. Anyway, here’s hoping the new site can keep up the standards Gothamist has set. Looks pretty good, thus far. Ok, I guess there’s no excuse to avoid moving over there, now.

UPDATE: SFist’s editor comments (in the comments) on the naming issue:

Jackson, SFist editor here. We’ve caught a lot of the crap for the name. Not to name names, but the naming decision was made by a non-local. It’s pronounced “Esseff.” People and their dirty, dirty minds.

Anyway, look for relevant changes shortly.

Cheers,

Jackson

Fascinating stuff sparked by the eBay/Craigslist deal from Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray in his Silk Road Newsletter:

We note that the large metropolitan areas such as New York or San Francisco have most likely just as much variety of merchants and offerings as you can find online. Searching and finding these merchants, however, is extremely inefficient and nearly impossible (the yellow pages is only efficient for broad categories, while consumers tend to search on a product basis). Thus, a consumer looking for a treadmill may well find the best offering right in his or her neighborhood, if such local business can have the same access to the web as the online business have had so far. In short, we believe we could be seeing an eBay-like phenomenon in the local listings, allowing consumers to easily find and transact with the local business (or other consumers, as Craig’s List provides) through an efficient online platform. How much could this impact Amazon, eBay, or other online merchant’s sales is not clear to us but we will be watching this trend carefully in the coming quarters.

A colleague passed along this tidbit from a discussion list:

Has anyone else noticed a significant drop in the SPAM
volume over the last couple of hours?

Maybe the old saying “some good can be found in everything”
is true. Despite all the flooding and physical damage these
hurricanes’ cause, they tend to stem the flow of SPAM from
Florida.

Thanks “Charley”.

Today we announced the winners of the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards.

As I spend my last few months in New York City, I’m thrilled to be able to help out with an amazing project: NYWiki. I’ve added entries for some stuff in my current ‘hood, and for my old Gramercy haunts. It seems to be pretty early in the process, yet, so there’s plenty for all you New Yorkers to contribute. Check it out.

Battelle has a nice roundup of recent blogosphere discussion about the role of advertising in RSS feeds. My feeling: it’s inevitable. RSS feeds represent a cost to publishers (in terms of server load) and I don’t think headline-only type feeds (so structured to elicit a click and thus an ad served on the Web site) are what users are looking for. People generally understand that content costs money to produce, and they’re willing to be exposed to ads — and relevant ads can be a bonus — to access that content. I think users will eventually accept advertising in RSS in exchange for getting their content in this efficient, convenient format.