This, the first of our regional blogs, is authored by the technology and financial journalist Dominic Basulto. Dominic is a New York native, has been a senior editor at Corante since day one and has written for a number of online and offline media companies. Send tips or story ideas to: basulto@gmail.com.
About this weblog
Here we'll report daily on the latest tech and business developments in New York City. Impossible we concede: comprehensive coverage of the city's every story. What we hope you'll find: tips, tidbits and perspectives you won't find elsewhere. As well as unique insights, original interviews and more that should be of interest to New York's vibrant community of technologists and those who track, invest in and report on them.
"Join local venture capitalists, government officials, and business leaders on Tuesday, November 29, for the launch of the NYSIA Incubator @ 55 Broad Street, New York City’s first incubator facility dedicated to software and IT companies.
Located in the heart of the Wall Street financial district, the NYSIA Incubator will unite technology businesses and induce economic development and growth in New York's software/information technology industry. The Incubator comprises two floors of space for events, training, and offices."
About two months ago, I had a chance to meet the head of the NYSIA, Bruce Bernstein, and take a tour of the facilities. There's a lot of good stuff happening down there. In the coming days, I'll try to highlight some of the exciting companies getting their start at the NYSIA Incubator. For now, here's a link to a feature piece in American Venture magazine: NYSIA Opens Incubator on Wall Street.
Over at Tech Central Station, Johan Wennström argues that a congestion pricing scheme for traffic in New York City would become an unwelcome burden for New Yorkers. Pointing to examples from London and Stockholm, where congestion pricing schemes are already a fact of life, Wennström makes the case against congestion pricing:
"Is this really something for the Capital of the World? Manhattan is still recovering from 9/11. This is perhaps the worst time to carry through a system that would be a burden to New Yorkers...
On the eve of Bloomberg's re-election, he proclaimed that New York is back in business after the World Trade Center attacks. Why make it harder for the city to recover by imposing a toll system which, if following the international pattern, will only hurt merchants and consumers alike?"
If you enjoyed the post-Thanksgiving sales at Century 21 over the past few days, good for you. As Felix Salmon of MemeFirst discovered from a recent rendering of the new World Trade Center development plans, it's quite possible that Century 21 will no longer be part of Lower Manhattan a few years from now:
"We know the Deutsche Bank building is slowly coming down. But will the same fate befall New York's very own Century 21? The Port Authority has sent up a trial balloon regarding its plans for retail at the WTC site, and according to the rendering (above), Century 21 (which is located on Church Street between Cortlandt and Dey) has simply ceased to exist! All that is left in its place is a patch of brown – one might almost say scorched – earth. It's not clear what's happened to 1 Liberty Plaza, either."
Already, the post on MemeFirst has generated about 25 comments, so it's obviously a topic of interest to New Yorkers. Or, at least, a topic of interest for New Yorkers concerned about high-quality discount shopping options.
In an article over at Digital Lifestyles ("A Wi-Fi'd Welshman In New York"), the UK's Mike Slocombe rhapsodizes about the ease and efficiency of finding Wi-Fi spots all over New York City:
"Unlike the UK, where the provision of Wi-Fi is often only seen as a revenue earner for landlords, café owners and telecoms companies, we had no problem hooking up for free all over New York. Maybe it's the fact that the apartments are so small in New York - or that the coffee keeps on getting refilled for free - but we were surprised by the popularity of cafes and bars serving up free Wi-Fi to their customers.
Wherever we went, a quick boot up of our laptop (or i-Mate JAMM smartphone/SanDisk wi-fi card) would inevitably produce a mile long list of networks available. We successfully logged in for free all over New York - in the East Village, Williamsburg, Lower East Side, Central Park, SoHo, you name it! - and were able to fire off emails and download tunes while enjoying coffee and bagels in several fine hostelries."
The New York Post had a brief mention of "teenage video game whiz" Sal "Volcano" Garozzo of Manhattan College, who recently won his second straight world gaming gold medal. The total prize money was $50,000, which he will split with his four other Team 3D teammates. The five teens won the title at last week's World Cyber Games in Singapore, where they defeated teams from Pakistan and Kazakhstan playing "Counter Strike."
Anyway, it's interesting to see that the next generation of kids in Pakistan and Kazakhstan are growing up playing a counter-terrorism videogame. One can only imagine Osama & the Gang, gathered around their cave in the mountainous regions of Pakistan, playing Counter-Strike on a bootleg Xbox to pass the time.
A New York start-up company, Instant Information, recently released a screen-based information & analytics tool (TouchPoint) for Wall Street traders and other financial markets professionals that acts in many ways like a Bloomberg terminal, but apparenly runs on any PC with off-the-shelf software (including Microsoft Office). There's a bit of a pedigree here, too: the company's founders include a number of principals from MULTEX.com. Not surprisingly, the company has already raised a round of early-stage venture capital from interested investors.
Instant Information is calling TouchPoint "an innovative approach to connecting financial professionals to the ideas, information, analytics, and individuals they depend on to do their jobs effectively and efficiently." Here's a quick blurb about TouchPoint from the company's Web site:
"TouchPoint supports the informal, dynamic and organic way ideas are created and shared without introducing artificial and time consuming workflows. TouchPoint is the single place where you can bring together relevant, specific items of content that are delivered from multiple sources (web, Outlook, IM, internal and vendor applications). As you find content on the web, in e-mail, or from other applications, it can be added to any of your TouchPoint folders with one click. When content is delivered via subscription, it can be added to folders automatically using detailed filtering. You decide how the content should be organized and shared.
TouchPoint enables you to discuss ideas and have the people, content and tools used in a discussion tightly bound in a shared “Workbook” that is automatically updated for all existing and new participants. The Workbook becomes the dynamic, historical view into all of the informal content sources that support a formal investment process.
TouchPoint works with the information sources you use today (including the Microsoft Office suite) allowing you to leverage your existing technology investment. TouchPoint is open and extensible. New data sources can be added on-the-fly without any additional development work."
The official Web site of the city of Toronto brazenly includes a list of productions (both film and TV) shot in Toronto, while supposedly representing New York. There's a whole archive of films, from 1979-2004. In just the past three years, for example, The Cinderella Man, Dark Water, Ice Princess, 111 Gramercy Park (a TV pilot), Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle were all filmed in Toronto.
Here's a link to "Great Locations to Shoot in Toronto" from the Toronto Film & Television Office -- see if any of these locations can possibly recreate the ambience and feel of New York City. The image to the left, for example, is Union Station Hall - a poor man's version of Grand Central Terminal.
Here's a feel-good story for the holiday season: Brooklyn High School of the Arts is one of only 13 high schools around the nation that is participating in Generation Link, a six-week program co-sponsored by EarthLink and AARP New York, in which Net-savvy teenagers teach seniors how to use the Internet. Since 77% of teens use the Internet and only 22% of seniors use the Internet, why not bring the two age groups together in an attempt to narrow the generational gap? During the course of the program, the teens teach the older adults how to surf the Net, while the seniors impart their wisdom and knowledge to the kids.
The Brooklyn program officially launched on October 20, according to the press release.
The Whitney Museum of American Art has created ARTPORT, an online portal for net art and digital arts, as well as an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects. One of the commissioned projects is called {Software} Structures, which explores the relevance of conceptual art to the idea of software as art. The artist Casey Reas explains:
"The catalyst for this project is the work of Sol LeWitt, specifically his wall drawings. I had a simple question: "Is the history of conceptual art relevant to the idea of software as art?" I began to answer the question by implementing three of Lewitt's drawings in software and then making modifications.
After working with the LeWitt plans, I created three structures unique to software. These software structures are text descriptions outlining dynamic relations between elements. They develop in the vague domain of image and then mature in the more defined structures of natural language before any thought is given to a specific machine implementation.
Twenty-six pieces of software derived from these structures were written to isolate different components of software structures including interpretation, material, and process. For each, you may view the software, source code, and comments."
In search of the perfect "Black Friday" shopping nightmare story, the New York Daily News is playing this one for all it's worth: a story about shopper rage at a Circuit City store in Rego Park, Queens, where cops had to be brought in to calm down a furious mob desperate for $200 Toshiba laptops. The problem is that Circuit City only had a limited number of these laptops available for purchase, a fact that led to frustration and anger for a crowd of 500 deal-crazed shoppers. (Apparently, shoppers came from as far away as Jersey City to wait in line for more than four hours, all in the hopes of scooping up a bargain-priced laptop) An NYPD officer who commented on the incident put the blame squarely on Circuit City's shoulders: "It's irresponsible for the stores to advertise sales, get people all riled up and angry when they've only got like 30 computers in stock."
According to the New York Post, Gawker Media is shutting down Oddjack, a gambling blog that failed to gain the type of audience and reach that other blogs, like the ever-popular Gawker, achieved. Oddjack is the first Gawker-owned site that "blog tycoon" Nick Denton has shuttered since the formation of Gawker Media in 2002. Still, the site attracted 180,000 visitors a month, or about 6,000 daily, far more than most blogs in the blogosphere.
"Hello, dear, seldom readers. As you may(or may not) have heard, this plucky little gambling site which rarely reported gambling news or serviceable insights will be no more. Thank yous across the board to those who cared enough to stop by and say nice things. Thank yous across the board to those who took the time to be negative as well. It was an honor to be such a blemish. Over the next couple days, we’ll do our best to post stuff that’s interesting to four or five people. I hope you enjoy it...
[dead panda photo]
On a personal note, I am thrilled to be constructing a resume. I am looking forward to entering the office life again with its ashen cubicles and casual Fridays. I am ecstatic to have a job that will require I wear pants. My parents will be delighted to talk about my unemployment with friends and relatives over Thanksgiving dinner. I look forward to seeing them awash with pride.
[dead panda photo, again, for emphasis]
It is a glorious day. It’s raining and there are six bottles of wine with my name on it. I shall commence wallowing for three hours and then try to find my shoes..."
Over the past few days, the local New York tabloids have been building momentum for the annual multi-billion-dollar post-Thanksgiving spending orgy known as the holiday shopping season. Forget Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), now there's Black Monday (the first Monday after Thanksgiving), when online shoppers really shift into buy mode. With that in mind, the New York Daily News included a handy guide to comparison shopping sites for Internet-savvy New York shoppers. Among the sites mentioned: Yahoo's shopping site, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Become.com, FatLens.com, Dulance, ConsumerClub, Dealio, and SquareTrade.
Interestingly, the folks at Yahoo prefer to use the term "Cyber Monday" when discussing Monday, November 28. Which term do you prefer, Black Monday or Cyber Monday?
According to the New York Post, Apple iTunes is now the seventh-largest music retailer in the U.S., trailing only Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Amazon.com, FYE and Circuit City. A year earlier, iTunes pulled in at #14 according to the survey conducted by NPD Group, so it's easy to see how Apple's online music store could break into the Top 5 by 2006. The writing is on the wall, obviously, for traditional music retailers like Tower Records, Coconuts, and Sam Goody.
Yesterday, the print edition of the New York Daily News reported on the MTA's new plan for the creation of a "pocket-size E-ZPass." Essentially, this would be a smart card that would work on MTA subways, buses and commuter railroads; the Port Authority's PATH network and NJ Transit. Best of all, there wouldn't be a need to swipe the cards - in theory, passengers would just need to wave the smart card in front of a sensor, thanks to a tiny microchip embedded in the card. It certainly sounds good. It would finally give New York area commuters a "unified, seamless fare card" and end some of the annoying hassles of using MetroCards (i.e. magnetic strips that seem to get damaged within 24 hours of using a new card).
"Even the most straight-edged New Yorker will always find something to fetishize. In fact, as a city, we’re pretty good at turning ordinary objects and pastimes into downright obsessions... The first thing that comes to mind whenever I think of a strange, non-sexual fetish is the iPod. These little plastic cases that cost hundreds of dollars have become a necessary accessory. Nowadays almost everyone has one slung around his or her neck. Apple has found a way to make people not just want their products, but need their products. Sure, you could listen to your tunes on a CD player, but then you won’t have the little white player, nestled in your coat pocket, giving even the most grizzled old man instant street cred...
Heck, even the blog has achieved its own cult status. What was just the hobby of a few bored and possibly unemployed hipsters a few years ago has become its own big business. Weblogs. Inc was sold to AOL a month or so ago, and Gawker also agreed to a development deal with Yahoo! to feed some if its content to the popular search engine."
Rachel Sklar of FishbowlNY was positively ga-ga about the latest Huffington Post party in Los Angeles that featured a spectacular commingling of Old Media and New Media. A number of boldfaced names were in attendance - including literary stars from both Left and Right Coasts, a raft of New York bloggers flown in special for the event, big-time media names like Bill Maher, assorted glitterati friends of Arianna, and execs from Yahoo. At Fishbowl NY, that potent combination of media stars (new and old) translated into two days of full-color pictures on the blog and two days of breathless recounting of who said what, to whom, over what kind of cocktail:
"As any reader of December's Vanity Fair can surmise, [Arianna Huffington's] house is gorgeous, spacious and lovely and warm and unpretentious, and the perfect venue for a glittering and convivial party for all sorts of glamorous media/entertainment types. Which was fortunate, because hundreds of them were about to arrive for her party for Defamer's Mark Lisanti and Gawker Media, her happy reciprocation of Nick Denton's party for her in September, co-hosted by Gawker's new business associate Scott Moore of Yahoo! We're not sure how to end that sentence with anything other than an exclamation point, but really the night was so exciting and fun that we didn't need to try."
If you can get past all the party details above, one thing is clear: we have just witnessed a mad mating of Old Media and New Media, brokered by companies like Yahoo and individuals like Arianna Huffington. Companies like Gawker Media (built on an amalgam of low-cost blogging tools and celebrity-fueled scandal chatter), it seems, are now just as mainstream as the highbrow, up-market New York Times or Washington Post. Check out the FishbowlNY photos one more time (like this lovely pic of Arianna) and then write down the date: November 17. That's the day that the distinction between Old Media and New Media officially blurred away. While Internet gearheads were worried about blog widgets and RSS doodads, media-savvy folks from Yahoo were figuring it all out.
If you're desperate to win a chance at a green card as part of the upcoming "Green Card Lottery," the New York Daily News has a warning for you - don't believe everything you see or hear. Scams are proliferating all over the Internet to draw in the unwary and naive:
"Immigration scams linked to the approaching December 4 deadline for green card lottery applications are flooding the Internet. The sites are charging from $30 to $500 to help fill out the electronic entry forms, work that actually takes less than a minute. 'People are desperate to get the cards, grabbing at anything, paying anything, and others are preying on that desperation... It's a lottery and nobody can help you win.'"
Oh - and if you're from Mexico, Canada, China or the Dominican Republic, fuh-get about it... Citizens from those countries are excluded from participating in this year's Green Card lottery.
In a blog post that references the "media elite" and last week's alcohol-fueled Open Source Media party in Manhattan, blogger Scott Sala of SlantPoint makes an impassioned case for blogging about local - not national - politics:
"...I have no interest in hobnobbing with the blog elite - though free top shelf liquor is always welcome. I've been heartily engaged in local politics because I see that the true citizen journalism frontier, where change can be made and stardom is not a primary goal...
Somewhere post-Bush43-squared I lost the mission. National political blogging was saturated and amounted to a lot of blathering and repetition, and a whole load of the top tier hunkering down and elbowing out the rest. It got predictable. I began to cite the source of 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier bloggers simply on content - that's from Drudge, that's from Malkin, that's from Glenn...
The local stuff is so much more the Wild West of blogging with a mission that is in your face. The people you write about meet you. The feedback is greater. The field is WIDE WIDE open. And frankly, in my position, the battle is very uphill (a Republican in NYC) - and I like it like that...
This isn't a hobby. This is a fight. I'm not an objective journalist, but an online activist. I ride the phantom line between journalism and advocacy, not quite an op-ed writer, but a digital evangelist in a strange land."
There are some places in the city - like Zabar's or Katz's - that seem to have been made specifically for the global cosmopolitanism that is New York. According to Newsday, camera store B&H Photo-Video is also one of those places. Run and managed by ultra-Orthodox Jews from the metropolitan area, the store has become a "New York institution" and "perhaps the most famous camera store in the world":
"Affectionately known as "Beard and Hats" because of the dress and customs of the employees, B&H has become a singular New York experience, akin to ordering a pastrami on rye at Katz's Delicatessen... It's a frenetic and loud scene that involves fast-moving lines of customers, all pushing and elbowing to get to the finish line, or in this case, a row of stern-looking cashiers with beards."
Interestingly, the store derives nearly 70% of its profits from a booming online business:
"One indication of B&H's success that cannot be concealed sits in the Brooklyn Naval Yard: a nearly 200,000-square-foot warehouse that feeds its online division, which represents about 70 percent of B&H's business."
As an aside, the store's radio commercials are unbelievably annoying, but I guess that's part of the charm. Here's a review of B&H from PhotographyReview.com:
"If the price is significantly lower than B & H Photo, it is probably a scam... I've dealt with B & H for many years and they are reliable and the merchandise is as advertised. I've only bought new equipment from them. I'm from NY, but the rest of you don't have to listen to their god-awful radio advertisements. Their radio ads are an embarrassment; get past that and they are a solid company."
Eurekalert, the news service available via the New York Academy of Sciences, posted an interesting item the other day about three New York high school students who will be attending the Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm, Sweden during the first week of December. For winning the "Laureates of Tomorrow" Nobel Essay Contest, the three students received a week-long, all-expense paid trip to attend the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony, the world-famous Nobel Banquet and related activities in Sweden. The Bronx (Horace Mann), Brooklyn (Midwood H.S.) and Staten Island (Staten Island Technical H.S.) will be represented in Stockholm - but Manhattan and Queens will not.
The competition, launched in 2004 and open to all juniors in New York City high schools, required students to write essays examining the impact on science and society of major scientific achievements by Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry or physiology & medicine. The finalists had to defend their essays before a panel of scientists and journalists, among them Nobel Laureates.
You're looking at the raw space that's about to become Google's new Chelsea Googleplex. Curbed provides the photo and details about the "mad square footage" of the new digs:
"The space stretches the entire square block from 15th St to 16th St, from 8th Ave. to 9th. It used to be occupied by Prudential Financial Services. You could probably host quite a sizeable party in there. Looks like they have a lot of work to do! I actually saw someone walking around in there today, so I think they are starting to build it out. I actually had to run out of there so I wouldn't get questioned. They take security pretty seriously in this building. Several weeks ago I was snooping around as well and there wasn't a soul to be seen."
The folks over at Dow Jones must have been drinking the Blog Kool-Aid this weekend -- today's WSJ has a two-page spread on the favorite blogs read by insiders in a number of different industries - ranging from real estate (Curbed) to digital content (Paid Content) to venture capital (Jeff Nolan's Venture Chronicles). In between, there's a description of tax blogs, M&A blogs, economics blogs and insurance blogs. Good stuff. There's even a question of the day meant to draw in even more would-be bloggers: How many blogs do you read weekly?
After conferring via e-mail with Marshall Brown, the CEO of Wi-Fi Salon, NewYorkology reports that the plan to install a Wi-Fi network in Central Park has been delayed indefinitely:
"The free wi-fi plan isn't in jeopardy, just deferred. Put simply, we are in continued negotiations with a lead sponsor and several other sponsors. Their product launch delays affected their marketing spends, and in turn changed our timetable. A U.S. product launch for late October was scratched until Q1, a marketing spend was put off till then as well. We continue to talk. There are a half dozen other conversations besides, at least."
Over at Gelf Magazine, David Goldenberg interviews David Hauslaib of Jossip, who discusses his blog's coverage of the Peter Braunstein ("the Chelsea rapist") story and adds his insights about the difference between bloggers and journalists. As we pointed out yesterday on Corante New York, Jossip and Gawker were two of the blogs raked over the media coals by David Carr of The New York Times for their obsessive speculation and light-hearted treatment of the Chelsea Rapist over the past ten days or so. Hauslaib responds to his detractors at the Times:
"I'm glad Jossip is on David's radar, as I'm a big fan of his and respect his work intransigently. But sure, it's a little hypocritical for such a respected reporter to harp on a blog's journalistic credibility (of which Jossip claims to have in very limited capacities), when he doesn't so much as fire off an email asking for explanation. That said, he made some great points, but Jossip's editorial isn't about placating his ego, so of course we're going to go on the offensive, if only to pretend to feel hurt."
"Rather than trying to read the tea leaves of public records to figure out voters' tastes and leanings, they [the Bloomberg campaign staffers] had the money to simply call and ask about them directly. They called hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in what top strategists in both the Republican and Democratic Parties said was one of the most ambitious pollings of an electorate ever undertaken.
They stored the answers in a vast computerized database to develop sophisticated psychological portraits of city voters - identifying eight never-before-identified voting blocs based on people's shared everyday interests and concerns, not on their broader racial, cultural or ideological differences... The extensive polling gave Mr. Bloomberg's campaign a deep understanding of the city's voters, and allowed it to tailor mailings, electronic messages and prerecorded telephone calls to voters' specific interests as never before."
Among the groups identified: FANS (Fearful and Anxious New Yorkers), MIDDLE AGES (middle class moderates) and CULTURAL LIBERALS. Surely, it didn't take millions of dollars to identify FANS and CULTURAL LIBERALS, did it? Nevertheless, we'd be interested to know what the other five groupings were... Maybe the JET SETTERS (really wealthy Manhattan folk who love the Jets)?
Adam Balkin of NY1 reports on a new Emmy Award category for content made specifically for handheld devices like cell phones, PlayStation portables or the iPod video. Michael Learmonth of Variety says it's a move that's been long expected:
"I think the digital Emmy thing was bound to happen. The TV community is producing so much content for the web now and there's so much money funding it so I think it was a matter of time. If you go out and talk to TV production houses they really consider this a legitimate line of business. They're producing content for Yahoo and AOL, which have sort of fashioned themselves as TV networks."
There are, of course, a few guidelines for content creators hopeful of snagging an Emmy: "[The content] has to be created just for a portable device, and it can't be something that was on TV or the big screen and just moved over to the smaller devices. Also, it has to be less than 20 minutes in length..."
David Carr of The New York Times takes the blogosphere to task - and especially the celebrity scandal blog Gawker - for its embrace of sleazy and disturbing news stories in an article called "When Bloggers Joke About the Unfunny." Consider the case of Peter Braunstein [aka "The Chelsea Rapist"], a story that has captivated the daily tabloids as well as the gossip blogs for nearly 10 days:
"[Peter Braunstein's] real moment in the sun has come in the Manhattan-based media blogs, which have given him the Paris Hilton treatment. Gawker, the snarky annotator of life in New York's publishing circles, has run almost daily items, making fun of his eyebrows, his alleged fetishes for pantyhose, shoes, and Kate Moss, and his one try at playwriting. Jossip, another blog, suggested in a headline that "Rape isn't funny, but Peter Braunstein sure is." Do tell.
In a way, Mr. Braunstein represents the very sweet spot of Gawker: he is a media writer, he worked at a division of Condé Nast, his publication covered the fashion world and he was convicted of stalking someone else from the same company. The fact that Mr. Braunstein is likely reading over the shoulder of the blogs adds a significant tingle-factor."
Apparently, that's not all. Carr accuses Gawker and other blogs of its ilk of "a peculiar tone-deafness around death and its collateral damage." Traffic deaths, suicides, murders and other grisly crimes should not be the fodder for blog postings, writes Carr: "The great thing about the Web is that people can say almost anything they please. But it will only mature as a medium if people see that as less of a license than as a burden."
As reported in the New York Post, popular blogger Andrew Sullivan will move his blog ("The Daily Dish") to the Time.com site sometime in 2006. According to a Time executive quoted for the piece, Sullivan's blog will become "the first of a blog neighborhood on Time.com, offering readers opinions from all points of view."
For those worried about a sell-out by Andrew Sullivan: Time made clear from the get-go that Sullivan (a Time contributor since 2003) will maintain "full control over the content of his postings." On his blog, Andrew explained the move, reiterating his ability to maintain full editorial control over the blog:
"As for the deal, I can simply assure you that I have retained exactly the same editorial control as I have had since the beginning. This is a blog. I won't be running posts before any editors before they appear. I will continue to write simply what I believe or think, however misguided I may be. I will continue to correct any errors in the full light of day and change my mind if new events demand it or new facts compel it. I will try and air counter-arguments as often as possible. In other words: the essence of the blog won't change. You will still like it for the same reasons or hate it for the same reasons; or, as many of you keep telling me, both."
As one might imagine, the blogosphere has been abuzz over the news. Blog Network Watch has started to piece together commentary about the move from notables such as BuzzMachine and Jason Calacanis.
The folks at Gawker Media amused themselves this weekend by typing "Why are there bad people in the world" into Google. The top two results turned out to be Gawker and Wonkette, both parts of the sprawling Gawker Media empire.
Tongue-in-cheek, Gawker called the Google results "the culmination of all our efforts." What's scary, perhaps, is that a handful of other blogs are apparently part of the blog axis of evil: The Volokh Conspiracy (#3), the Mother Jones blog (#4), Eschaton (#8), Gizmodo (#9), and BuzzMachine (#10).
If you haven't seen the cover of this week's New York Magazine, be forewarned... The front cover is a soft-porn orgy of grabbing and groping. Not a single piece of clothing on any of the fifteen or so naked individuals participating in what can only be described as no-holds-barred group sex. As if to emphasize the point, there's the word "SEX" in about 30-point font in the middle of the cover. Turn to page 40 - there's a 2-page anime-style spread of characters having sex in every possible position in every possible place on a New York City street (on top of taxicabs, against the side of limos, next to subway stations, on the ground, in the back seats of cars...). There's boy-on-girl, girl-on-girl, boy-on-boy and girl-on-boy-on-girl.
It's a sad day for New York Magazine. Sex sells, and now New York Magazine is using sex to sell magazines. Supermodels in skimpy outfits on the cover are cool, but orgies of naked flesh? While we appreciate lascivious behavior as much as the next person (perhaps even more...), isn't New York Magazine supposed to be some kind of issues-oriented city magazine that you're not embarrassed to read on the subway? Not only are the back 10-to-15 pages of the magazine usually stuffed to the gills with call girl ads and escort (i.e. prostitution) offers, now the front of the magazine has copied a page from Larry Flynt's Hustler playbook.
New York Magazine - Oh, I only read it for the articles (snicker)... What do you think? Am I overreacting?
UPDATE: I've included the graphic of this week's New York Magazine in place of the Larry Flynt "Hustler" graphic
Now that Michael Bloomberg has been re-elected as mayor of the city, where will political junkies in the Big Apple look for their next fix? Gotham Gazette suggests taking a look at the race for City Council Speaker, via the web site Backroom Deal Breaker:
"With the mayoral election over, a group of "outsiders with a unique view of the inside" have set up this blog of the next big race: the contest for City Council Speaker. It follows the ideas and actions of those running, and directs readers towards other things being written about it."
There are a few interesting items on the Backroom Deal Breaker site, like the "Net of Wrath" scorecard, which provides a handy summary of "praise" and "wrath" editorial mentions on the site. By this metric, it looks like Lewis Fidler, Christine Quinn and Bill de Blasio are in for a long, hard campaign slog. Until we come up with a more clever nickname, we'll refer to this City Council Speaker scorecard with the Steinbeck-ian moniker of "Big Apples of Wrath."
Imagine this scenario: you're just settling down for a nice champagne (or mimosa) brunch at an outdoor cafe on the Upper West Side and you put your bag down - just for an instant - on the chair next to you. Unfortunately, the "chair next to you" also happened to be facing the street and a thief has been keeping a wary eye on that very seat for the past 30 minutes. Faster than you can say, "Waiter, check please," the thief has snatched and grabbed your bag, and you're left looking like a fool. Here's a way to prevent that type of scenario: BoingBoing (via Flickr) has a picture of a chair at MOMA that "keeps your bag safe."
"I think anyone who has lost a son, a daughter, or a loved one in the war in Iraq should sue The New York Times for Judith Miller's false reporting about the so-called "weapons of mass destruction" as a premise for that war. It's one thing to get a bad review, it's another to lose more than 2,000 lives because of false or inaccurate reporting. Imagine having the Judith Millers of the world working for you and getting away with things that are inconceivable to a journalist. We have to draw the line somewhere, and that's where I draw the line. All the news that's fit to print seems to have evolved into "whatever we decide to print is the news, whether it is correct or not!"
[... brief digression about stock market portfolio...]
In addition, the current mess with Judith Miller has made me wonder what is going on there. What kind of reporting is The New York Times doing? Who are they really working for? Can we afford to believe anything they print? Do they have a conscience? Do they know that power includes responsibility? Do they even know what they are doing? I think The New York Times has some big-time cleaning up to do, but I wonder if it's too late."
Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion has been linking to five-minute video clips available at AdAge.com from the recent Ad:Tech event which took place November 7-9 in New York. Here's a video clip, for example, featuring (among others) Steve Rubel, Nick Denton of Gawker Media, and Shawn Gold of Weblogs, Inc. Nick, as one might imagine, gets the final word. He describes the love-hate relationship between the editorial side and the advertising side of the blogging business, pointing out how Gawker posts a weekly "thank you" to advertisers that often includes some well-natured jibs and jabs: "...It's like we're all friends and enemies in this together..."
"What's happening on Wall Street? What's happening at the Stock Exchange? I wanna kno-ow! Now, thanks to BusinessWeek, CNBC Money Honey Maria Bartiromo will tell us on a bi-weekly basis in her new column in the magazine and at BusinessWeek.com... The column is called "Face Time with Maria Bartiromo," because oy, look at that punum. We saw her at a breakfast sponsored by The Week magazine a few months back and she's objectively still adorable."
The New York Daily News is dragging eBay's name through the mud in its continued investigation of the depravities surrounding suspected Chelsea rapist Peter Braunstein. Turns out Mr. Braunstein went shopping on eBay just days before his "sadistic Halloween sex attack," in order to pick up a legitimate-looking firefighter outfit.
If you don't know the story, it goes something like this... A crazed journalist-type gets the crazy idea of stalking a woman in her Chelsea apartment building. He then proceeds to buy firefighter gear on eBay and play dress-up for Halloween. On that same night, he starts a mini-blaze in the stalked woman's apartment building and impersonates a firefighter in order to gain unobstructed access to the woman's apartment. Then he drugged her and tied her up before engaging on a 13-hour orgy of raping and pillaging, some of it caught on videotape.
So, who's next on the New York Daily News' hitlist??? First, it was Internet chatrooms. Then, it was blogs. (Don't you know - all criminals keep sinister blogs with their devilish plots outlined on them?) Then, it was eBay. Maybe the suspected rapist Googled the woman's name on the Internet and then searched for photos of her on Flickr?
Tired of getting patted down during routine "subway searches" by the NYPD? Embarrassed by what's lurking at the bottom of that briefcase? There's help on the way - the New York Daily News is reporting that the NYPD has imported the latest and greatest in bomb-detection equipment that will be much less intrusive for subway search victims:
"The portable devices - ranging in size from a hand vacuum to a large computer printer - are programmed to detect traces of homemade peroxide bombs as well as military-grade explosives... Officials say the devices are less intrusive, yet more thorough, than a hand search. Cops pass a cloth swab over the handles or zippers of a bag, insert the swab into the device and get a reading within eight seconds."
It looks like the New York Times' TimesSelect program, in which readers have to shell out cash to read the opinions of venerable op-ed pundits, is resulting in the slow disappearance of Paul Krugman from the blogosphere. It's a natural cycle, really - once you put Krugman's prized opinions behind a paid content wall, fewer bloggers will read his stories and even fewer bloggers will link to Krugman. Over time, bloggers will simply gravitate to other pundits. Wasn't it Def Leppard who proclaimed "It's better to burn out than fade away?"
"Ever since the New York Times placed its opinion columnists behind the $49.95 / year TimesSelect wall in mid-September, Krugman has been the topic of fewer blog posts. Blogpulse’s trend tools show how often the phrase “Paul Krugman” was mentioned in blogs over the last six months... It looks like there is a clear dropoff after mid-September. Krugman hasn’t had a “hit” since the wall went up almost two months ago. He had a dry spell in early summer, but it only lasted a month."
UPDATE: If you check the comments, I've been exposed as a metalhead, glam-rock-loving Def Leppard fan. Turns out the words "It's better to burn out than fade away" should be properly attributed to Neil Young, NOT to Def Leppard. OK, I stand corrected. But can we at least give Def Leppard credit for: "Gunter glieben glauchen globen"?
To celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Time Out New York recently created a number of Top 10 lists, including a list of the Top 10 trends that flamed out. Unfortunately, it looks like Internet culture took one on the chin, with Time Out New York throwing trends like day trading, Razor scooters, Segways, “Silicon Alley” and Kozmo into the trend dumpster.
New York Magazine probably doesn't want you to hit the panic button or anything, but they've included a nifty little how-to-survive-the-apocalypse guide in this week's issue. We're talking plagues of locusts and the Four Horsemen here. Check out the teaser for the article:
"Avian flu, hurricane, chemical spill, terrorist bomb, earthquake: Whatever the next apocalypse is, New York—and New Yorkers—are getting ready for it. But have we done enough? The strategies and tactics of survival."
Of course, there's the now-obligatory quotes from Dr. Irwin Redlener, who is bracing for the mother-of-all-doomsday scenarios: "Four years after 9/11, we are, as a nation, extraordinarily, inexplicably unprepared to deal with a major catastrophic event."
Oh, how times have changed. Six months ago, the arrival of the Huffington Post super-blog was greeted with scorn, derision, even laughter. Now, it looks like the skeptics have been proven wrong. Not convinced? Even the snark-prone FishbowlNY has written a resoundingly positive review of the Huffington Post on the blog's six-month anniversary:
"Congratulations, Huffington Post! Today is your six-month anniversary since your much-heralded and skeptically-greeted debut on May 9, 2005... Pretty decent six months, no? [Huffington's] bloggers have only gotten stronger, too; shrewdly [Arianna] has invited all sorts of good people to join her ranks, understanding that the next blog star can come from anywhere... and that new content is like crack. The breaking news, the links, the unapologetically constant taking the Bush administration task -- they're all working to engage the audience (the comments section on the blog are always overflowing).
No one could have fully predicted the rise of HuffPo, and Arianna (nice Vanity Fair profile this month, by the way!), mostly because it's resulted from nimbly responding to stories and shrewdly capitalizing on opportunity. At this rate, who knows where the h*** they'll be at a year."
In addition, a $2.9 billion bond act that will finance transportation projects statewide - including part of the Second Avenue subway and a link between the Long Island Rail Road and Grand Central Terminal - was approved by New York State voters yesterday. $450 million of the money will be used by the MTA to finance construction of the first segment of the Second Avenue subway (East 63rd Street to East 96th Street).
'Tis the season of the popup retail store in SoHo. Yesterday, we mentioned the opening of the first-ever Wired Store in New York. Well, Kodak also plans to operate a popup retail store/gallery during the holiday season - the Kodak One Gallery opened last week in SoHo at the 102 Wooster Street space. During the month of November only, visitors will have the chance to sample a variety of Kodak digital products (e.g. the new Kodak Wi-Fi camera) as well as take hands-on classes or participate in master classes on digital photography.
There's even a bonus for computer users too lazy (or too preoccupied with their iPods) to digitize their own photos: "Visitors are invited to bring in up to 250 printed photos, and Kodak One Gallery representatives will digitize the photos in a matter of minutes. Participants will receive a Kodak PictureDVD (containing all of their pictures), and Kodak will also upload the pictures to a personalized Kodak EasyShare Gallery Premier account."
It's election day, and while there's not any real drama about the outcome of the New York City mayoral race, there are a few interesting political tidbits floating around about the race between Bloomberg and Ferrer:
The first-ever Wired Store is opening in SoHo (160 Wooster) for the holiday shopping season. It's a pop-up retail store that will only be open from November 18 - December 24. (plus, it looks like the store will not be open on Mondays or Tuesdays) Anyway, the site's tagline says it all: "Geek Out in Style." To lure in buyers of expensive tech gear, the store is hosting all kinds of promotions - DJ parties hosted by Flavorpill, Nokia phone promotions and sponsorship tie-ins with VW and American Express.
"WIRED Magazine announced that it will open its first-ever, retail store in Manhattan and bring to life its unique brand of hip gadget advice just in time for the holiday season. With the feel of a gallery located at the corner of Wooster and Houston in Soho... the WIRED Store is designed as a destination that moves e-commerce into a brick and mortar space and allows shoppers to test drive the latest consumer gadgets and gear... The WIRED Store will allow customers to sample more than 65 products ranging from the hot new Motorola PEBL phone to the Ultimate Gaming chair to an once-in-a-lifetime suborbital space adventure."
Last week, Micah Sifry, the eCampaign Director for Andrew Rasiej, posted an exhaustive and honest analysis of Andrew Rasiej's unsuccessful bid for NYC Public Advocate. There's a lot to chew on in Micah's analysis, including a realistic appraisal of how the Internet helped - and didn't help - in advancing the campaign of Andrew Rasiej. Going forward, there's still hope for a new era of "open source politics" -- but only if the local tech community does a better job of pitching in:
"Another one of the unconventional premises of our campaign was the idea that young, “wired” individuals who work and play in the new technology economy would rally to support one of their own, a candidate who “gets it”—that is, who demonstrably understands the power and potential of networks and transparency in politics. Indeed, we started with lots of support and good will from key Internet organizers from the Dean, Clark, Kerry and Kucinich 2004 presidential campaigns along with “A-list” technology opinion-shapers like Doc Searls and David Weinberger...
But the fabled tech community turned out to be mostly a fable when it came to actually embracing Andrew’s campaign and setting aside time to spread its message. Yes, about 100 local and national bloggers linked to the campaign. But few made an extended commitment to pitch in..."
Thanks, Micah - you fought the good fight in pushing along the public debate about the role of Public Advocate in New York City and in explaining the link between technology and participatory democracy!
If you picked up a copy of the Sunday New York Daily News, you're probably more than a bit concerned about the worst-case scenario of a bird flu outbreak in New York City. According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, "New York is woefully ill-prepared to deal with a catastrophic bird flu epidemic." The losses would be devastating:
"If the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu becomes easily transmittable among humans, as many experts fear it will, it could kill more than 200 a day in the city and waves of sick patients would overwhelm hospitals... If the virus infects a quarter of us in the city and kills just 2% of those infected, some 40,000 New Yorkers - including 10,000 children - would die in a six- to nine-month epidemic... Although it is unclear exactly how contagious or lethal a pandemic flu virus would be, those casualty estimates are in line with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people."
Based on as yet unreleased poll numbers, The Politicker is predicting a huge landslide victory for Michael Bloomberg in this week's mayoral election: 60% to 28% over Fernando Ferrer. The comments to the post on The Politicker are especially illuminating - the question is not whether Ferrer will win or lose - it's whether Freddy will keep it respectable and hit the 40% mark.
In Westchester County, it could soon be illegal - repeat, illegal - to have an unsecured Wi-Fi signal. According to a new proposal being considered by Westchester politicians, any business or home office with an open wireless connection but no separate server to fend off Internet attacks would be violating the law. It's easy to see how this could become a nightmare scenario for the casual Wi-Fi user - driving around downtown White Plains, city officials detected 248 wireless connections in less than 30 minutes. ZDNet has more details:
"Politicians in Westchester County are urging adoption of the law--which appears to be the first such legislation in the U.S.--because without it, "somebody parked in the street or sitting in a neighboring building could hack into the network and steal your most confidential data," County Executive Andy Spano said in a statement.
The draft proposal offered this week would compel all "commercial businesses" with an open wireless access point to have a "network gateway server" outfitted with a software or hardware firewall. Such a firewall, used to block intrusions from outside the local network, would be required even for a coffee shop that used an old-fashioned cash register instead of an Internet-linked credit card system that could be vulnerable to intrusions..."
According to one Westchester official interviewed for the article, the law would apply to home offices as well.
National Geographic has a fantastic cut-away look at what happens 800 feet below the surface of a typical New York City street:
"New Yorkers go about unaware of what is happening just beneath their feet: Power pulses, information flies, and steam flows. The city’s infrastructure starts just below street level, but it doesn’t stop there..."
Apparently not - subway trains rumble about 30 feet below the surface, and below that, there's sewage and water pipes.
Check out Sushi NYC: a neighborhood-by-neighborhood list of all the sushi restaurants in New York City. It's even user-friendly for mobile devices like the Palm. If you're counting, there are 27 sushi restaurants in Midtown East and another 26 in the East Village. The site also has a handy Sushi glossary.
In a publicity stunt worthy of an Apprentice, the Learning Annex is inviting all Donald Trump look-alikes to converge at the Real Estate Wealth Expo in Chicago on November 5:
"Do you have what it takes to be Donald Trump? Come to the Stephens Convention Center on Saturday, November 5th fully dressed in your Donald get up. At 3:00 pm, all Donald contenders will assemble on the main stage and will audition by strutting their stuff "Donald Style," and reciting Mr. Trump's favorite line -- "YOU'RE FIRED!" Expo attendees will rate each Donald's performance and determine the best "The Donald."
The winner takes home quite a bit: a role in an upcoming Learning Annex commercial, $5,000 in cash, a backstage photo with the real Donald Trump and 10 VIP Expo tickets. Sadly, the winner does not receive a date with The Melania.
Speaking at a breakfast conference sponsored by the New Yorker magazine and the Newhouse School, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons predicted a wave of consolidation in the Internet sector that could result in smaller wireless, gaming or content companies being snapped up by larger Internet/media conglomerates like Time Warner:
"It's inevitable," Parsons said of the recent Internet buying frenzy of its peers. "The little guys will ultimately be consolidated. Rupert (Murdoch, CEO of News Corp) and Viacom are making the right moves. We're making the same moves."
Venture capitalist Pip Coburn has an interesting post on the Always On Network, where he writes that "watching traffic patterns at Starbucks can reveal all we need to know about the future pace of adoption of the ubiquitous wireless broadband cloud." Working off three major assumptions, Pip makes a link between seat density patterns at New York-area Starbucks and the future development of ubiquitous broadband Internet access.
In the first major stage, people learn to work in large numbers at "third places" like Starbucks. Then, these people start to demand broadband network access [i.e. T-Mobile] while working there. Finally, when these behavioral patterns become more established, they begin to demand broadband network access everywhere. In New York, we're definitely at stage 2.5 and maybe even stage 3.
Pip puts on his cultural anthropologist hat while digesting information about traffic patterns at local Starbucks stores:
"So a few weeks ago, my partner Dave Bujnowski was shut out at his local Starbucks in Greenwich Village—frequented by Mike Myers and Malcolm Gladwell he claims—at 11 in the morning when he went over to diddle on his Dell. No seats at Starbucks at 11 am... The next day, I wandered over to the Starbucks at 48th and Park and the same thing happened at about the same time of day. No seats at Starbucks... Then last Wednesday, Arnie Berman—our great friend and newly appointed central figure in tech research at Cowen—and I were forced to sit outside of that same 48th and Park Starbucks around 3 pm in the afternoon. No seats at Starbucks."
Clearly, there's something happening as more and more workers find ways to get their work done at "third places" like Starbucks.
According to the New York Post, an Estonian investment bank made close to $8 million by hacking into market-moving press releases before they became public. As part of the scam, two traders at Lohmus Haavel & Viisemann used a program that accessed information from press releases at Business Wire's Web site prior to their distribution. With use of a computer "spider," the two traders could hunt for specific keywords in hot-off-the-wires press releases, effectively giving the Estonian crooks a few critical minutes in which they knew more than the market. In total, the Estonian traders manipulated data from more than 200 U.S. firms.
The New York Post has all the details on the high-tech gadgets and gizmos that you'll be seeing this weekend at the ING NYC Marathon:
"Gearing up for a marathon means more than making sure your shoes are tied these days. Runners in this Sunday's New York City Marathon will wear tinted contact lenses and space-age clothes, check their heart rate on a GPS watch and maybe even inject collagenlike substances into their feet. "
The article has some brief product reviews of some of the more useful items - like the Nike Triax Speed 100 watch, the computer-enabled Adidas-1 shoe, and Nike's MaxSight contact lenses.
