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.
According to the New York Daily News, the owners of the Ace Bar in the East Village have put the place up for sale on eBay. The minimum bid: $670,000. So far, there have been no bidders - but one of the co-owners is still holding out hope that a deal is imminent: "I'm a Web kind of guy. I've never heard of this being done before, especially not a bar at its height of popularity. We figured we'd roll the dice and see what happens."...
So what do you get for a cool $670,000? "In addition to a 10-year lease, the new owners will inherit the bar's accoutrements, including its antique lunchbox collection, authentic circus sideshow banners, giant 3-D werewolf, pinball machines and a couple of Skee-Ball games. Less kitschy is the 30-foot bar itself - a beautiful ornate mahogany piece believed to be from the late 19th century. And, of course, the buyer would get a full stock of beer, liquor, juice and soda."
After Governor Pataki lifted a ban on Internet wine sales to New Yorkers in July, 166 out-of-state wineries have acquired a license to ship wines directly to New York state residents - including one California winery (Foxen Vineyards) that was featured in last year's movie hit "Sideways." Kendall-Jackson, which sells 3.5 million cases annually, was also mentioned as an out-of-state winery that is now able to sell directly to New Yorkers.
MSNBC has the details of the legal wrangling over selling wine via the Internet to New Yorkers, as well as local reaction from New York wine merchants. From the article, it appears that California winemakers are attempting to downplay the impact of the move, saying that the wines now available will only appeal to the "real connoisseur" and other lovers of specialty wines that aren't available anywhere else in New York state.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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).
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."
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?
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"?
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."
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."
Adam Balkin of NY1 takes a behind-the-scenes look at a new technology from Cisco Systems that will make it easier for emergency responders to coordinate their actions: IPICS (Internet Protocol Intercommunication Solution). The new technology was created in response to a common problem faced by police, fire and other emergency responders - some are using cellphones, some are using push-to-talk phones, and nearly everyone is on a different frequency. Balkin explains how Cisco's IPICS technology can solve this problem:
"It’s a solution that allows even the most antiquated walkie-talkies to communicate easily with even the most state-of-the-art cell phones. IPICS essentially connects them all through a private IP network - think of it like a mini-Internet set up just for first responders. Then, certain individuals with security clearance, like a fire chief, can use a laptop to drag and drop different units in and out of the emergency response dialogue."
In a survey of the best NFL fan blogs, Deadspin honors the three best New York Jets sports blogs:
"JetNation.com. You gotta love a football blog that posts nearly every day, keeps tabs on the entire league, uses four writers and says things like: “Herman Edwards is good for handing out Shrek ears.” We’re not sure what that means, but it’s still funny.
The Cockpit. They don’t post as often as we’d like, but they keep a sharp eye out for all things Jets, and exhibit a healthy skepticism that is required to be a Jets fan. Great news site.
The Jets Blog. Worth the trip just for the Fan Confidence Meter alone. The ultimate word in Jets Blogdom, with daily posts, an eye on all Jets media and a green-tinted outlook that may or may not reflect nausea."
JetNation is particularly impressive - just hours after the Jets lost to the Falcons on Monday Night Football, the JetNation blog had a full, position-by-position report card for the Jets. The marks, as might be imagined, were not so good - Coach Herm Edwards, QB Vinny Testaverde and RB Curtis Martin all received F's.
Pointing to the efforts of politicians like Andrew Rasiej and City Councilmember Gale Brewer to bring free- or low-cost Internet access to every corner of New York City, Marcus Banks in the Gotham Gazette makes the case for universal broadband Internet access in New York City:
"Only an estimated 38% of New Yorkers currently have broadband access, but an ever-higher percentage of Internet content (such as video) requires this capability. The “digital divide” between higher and lower income communities may never be closed completely, but municipal broadband and wireless initiatives represent a concerted attempt to narrow this gap..."
According to Banks, there are at least three key reasons why universal broadband Internet access could bridge the "digital divide" and lead to an overall improvement in civic life in New York City:
"More timely access to life-saving information for emergency responders, who could download this information over wireless networks en route to the scene of an accident... Greater involvement of residents in the work of city government... Better ability of children to study at home, and to communicate with their teachers about what they discover online."
All true, no doubt, but Banks sometimes seems to mix "municipal broadband" and "wireless Internet" and "universal Internet access" -- it's one thing to offer low-cost broadband Internet access to low-income communities (e.g. cable or DSL), and it's quite another to build a massive citywide wireless Internet network (i.e. Wi-Fi).
Ever wondered what The New York Times planned to do with About.com? Well, here's an idea: an online travel portal for New England that would aggregate content from The New York Times and About.com (and any other media properties owned by the NYT) and then sell vacation packages to loyal readers. Here's a brief excerpt of a press release from The Boston Globe (which is owned by The New York Times Company):
"The Boston Globe and Boston.com announced today the launch of ExploreNewEngland.com, a one-stop travel guide to the New England states with award-winning content from The Boston Globe, Boston.com, The New York Times and About.com. The site allows readers to get everything they need to plan their next adventure, from lodging to dining to things to do and attractions. And like the region's weather, ExploreNewEngland.com will change for the seasons, with deep packages dedicated to fall foliage, skiing/snow sports and beaches."
Apparently, the site will also include message boards and blogs - for that local, all-knowing touch.
With the $1.85 billion acquisition of Ask Jeeves earlier in the year, speculation started to mount that Barry Diller - the accidental dot-com mogul - was up to something. As New York Magazine's John Heilemann explains, there has always been "the nagging sense that, if anyone was going to figure out this new-media thing, Barry would be the one." Just as Diller took on the Big Three TV networks and won, there's now a chance that Diller (armed with $3 billion in cash at InterActiveCorp) will take on the Big Three Internet giants (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) and win. So what could Diller possibly have planned? Heilemann thinks Diller is cooking up an out-of-the-box strategy to take on Google:
"The point, as Diller understands, is that he can't make headway by trying to out-Google Google- he needs to counterprogram. This was Diller's genius at the Fox network, remember. With The Simpsons, In Living Color, etc., he fashioned an alternative flavor of programming, and with it a distinctive brand. In the realm of search, however, the notion of programming falls outside the idiom. So what Diller says he's seeking, in the lingo, is "differentiation."
Differentiation means many different things to many different people, but there are a few ideas that make sense, given Diller's background in Old Media: a melding together of Old Media and New Media, video search, or the use of Ask Jeeves as a gateway to IAC's other Internet properties.
Verizon Communications is coming under fire by state politicians for its selective roll-out of new, high-speed broadband technology in the greater New York metropolitan area. In fact, State Senator Nicholas Spano accused Verizon Communications of engaging in "technological racism" by avoiding low-income areas when deploying the new broadband capability. Thus far, Verizon has only rolled out FTTP (Fiber to the Premises) in relatively affluent areas, such as northeast Yonkers and similar areas in Westchester, Rockland, Nassau and Suffolk counties. Is this just good business practice (selling a higher-priced, premium product to higher-income communities) - or is it symptomatic of a growing digital divide between the haves and the have-nots? Does Verizon have a moral and social obligation to bring broadband Internet access to households that may not be able to pay for it?
Verizon, as can be imagined, is trying to downplay the issue as quickly as possible: "Frankly, Verizon's outraged and offended about this. Senator Spano doesn't know what he's talking about," In Verizon's defense, the company said that it was trying to deploy FTTP technology in lower-income areas of Yonkers, but that the city issued a stop-work order.
Time Warner's AOL unit is slimming down ahead of a potential deal with an Internet suitor, reports the New York Post. AOL is shedding 700 jobs, most of them from the dial-up Internet business - the same business that companies like Google and Yahoo have expressed little interest in. While the cuts represent only 4% of the company's worldwide workforce, this is AOL's largest corporate downsizing since December 2004 and marks a new seriousness in Time Warner's efforts to find a partner or acquirer for AOL.
For more on Time Warner's strategic options when it comes to AOL, check out the new piece from Knowledge @ Wharton - AOL: In Search of a New Strategy.
In India's Business Standard (not to be confused with America's Industry Standard) Jai Arjun Singh has written a piece on metro-blogging and given major props to the best of all the metro-blogging sites, New York City's very own Gothamist:
"Surfing the New York blog Gothamist a few days ago, stopping every few minutes to marvel at the magnitude of information available, I wondered when we might have something comparable for Indian cities. Not just a static, sporadically updated website but a living, breathing resource on the city run by knowledgeable people... Gothamist is one of the most comprehensive blogs around. Even if you haven’t been to New York, or don’t plan a trip there anytime too soon, you might easily get addicted to it."
Maybe the biggest compliment came at the end of the piece, where Jai Arjun Singh expresses hope that there will soon be an Indian version of Gothamist: "Incidentally, Gothamist has expanded into a network of blogs that cover 11 cities, including London, Shanghai, San Francisco and Paris... We’re awaiting Delhiist.com and Mumbaiist.com."
Last week's edition of New York magazine featured a comprehensive day-by-day, hour-by-hour listing of what five New Yorkers read during every waking hour of the past week. For Internet publishers out there, the story no doubt provided a goldmine of info about what types of web sites the average New Yorker reads. As New York magazine explains:
"They surf Websites, at all hours. Our diaries confirm one piece of conventional media wisdom: The computer screen is the future of reading. Most of our subjects spent more time browsing than turning pages, and they directed their computers to every corner of the Internet, from blogs to foreign newspapers."
The sample skews young and skews educated - but here's a representative rundown of which Websites made it on to the list - it's the weekly web-surfing habits of a 32-year-old producer of TV promos in New York: Okayplayer.com, ESPN.com, NewYorkTimes.com, CNN.com, DrudgeReport.com, IMDB.com, Aetna,com, CBS.com, Playbill.com, RottenTomatoes.com, SternFanNetwork.com, SkyDivetheRanch.com, Turntablelab.com, AllHipHop.com, HipHopSite.com, eBay.com, Yankees.com, Strasberg.com, BET.com, DamienMarleyMusic.com, Amsterdam.info, BackpackingEurope.com, Flycollar.com, VillageVoice.com, Judaism.about.com, Corcoran.com, Nerve.com and TheRedMist.blogspot.com.
At the BlogOn social media summit in New York on Monday, McDonald's took the hamburger wrapping off a new corporate blogging program. ClickZ has more details on the McBlogs:
"Last week, the company began an internal program that introduced corporate blogs, available only on the corporate intranet, behind the firewall. While this is seen as a small first step, it's an important one in a company the size of McDonald's... Using a publishing platform from iUpload, McDonald's has initiated a program for several departments and executives to begin blogging. It kicked off the program last week with a live blogging session by McDonald's President and COO Michael Roberts. Senior executives gathered around to watch as employees were given the chance to ask Roberts questions during the two-hour session."
It's been more than six months now since The New York Times acquired About.com for $140 million. In his MarketWatch "Media Web" column, Jon Friedman weighs in with what the deal means - both for the New York Times, which is attempting to court Internet advertisers, and About.com, which is attempting to become one of the top five destinations on the Web. The other top four sites - Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL - account for 70% of all ads on the Internet, so it's an exclusive club indeed. What's interesting is that Wal-Mart has become a big advertiser on the About.com site, and there are signs that other big advertisers could sign up soon. What's even more interesting, perhaps, is that there's nary a peep about the new TimesSelect premium content offering on the About.com site. What about all the synergies?
Ben Smith of ThePoliticker blog writes in Newsday that the Internet has "yet to come of age" as a real force in local New York City politics. While there's plenty of demand for blogs about real estate, fashion, and celebrity gossip, there's little or no demand for passionate political discourse on a daily basis:
"The number of visits to political sites is a tiny fraction of the traffic that the dominant New York Web logs attain: The media-gossip blog Gawker, for instance, draws hundreds of thousands of readers each day. Curbed, a real estate blog, reigns over a vibrant universe of smaller sites on the same topic. The lesson of New York is that blogs aren't about politics - they're about passion. New Yorkers are passionate about real estate, gossip and fashion. The paucity of political blogs is the online reflection of the city's dismally low voter turnout in city elections: We're not passionate about our politics."
Even politicians who somehow manage to capture the hearts and minds of the blogosphere have a tough time translating that virtual support into real, tangible votes. Consider the recent campaign of Andrew Rasiej for New York City Public Advocate. The Technorati Candidate won only 5% of the vote, despite widespread blogger support. And, as Ben Smith points out, even big-name politicians like Fernando Ferrer haven't figured out how to tap into the power of the blogosphere: "The Ferrer blog's only audience, unfortunately for him, appeared to be Mayor Michael Bloomberg's opposition research team..."
In a deal reached with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, eBay has agreed to block the sale and shipment of stun guns to New York residents. As part of a sting operation that involved 16 eBay sellers, Spitzer's office found the eBay users were easily able to buy stun guns through the online auction site. Over a two-year period, eBay power sellers were able to sell 1,100 stun guns to New Yorkers - including the state-of-the-art $400 "Air Taser" that delivers a 50,000-volt disabling shock. New York is now one of only seven states that bans the sale of electric stun devices.
As seen in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend: former Merrill Lynch equity analyst Henry Blodget has entered the blogosphere with a new blog called InternetOutsider. The blog provides "informal" analysis of Internet companies and technology trends, but steers clear of actually offering personalized investment advice. (You know, the whole SEC "banned for life" deal) In his most recent post, Henry Blodget mulls over the valuation of the Time Warner/Weblogs Inc. deal. Apparently, he's learned a lesson or two from the wild days of the dot-com boom and bust...
If you're interested in what's happening at the New York Times with TimesSelect and About.com, it's worth checking out the profile of New York Times Digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz over at adBUMb. Nisenholtz defends the decision by the New York Times to introduce a premium paid content feature:
"Defending the company’s turn to paid content - which has been the topic of great debate on the web (not all of it positive) - Nisenholtz assures us that the outcry is misplaced. “97% of the Times website remains free after the launch of Times Select. The Times is not putting its website into a pay window. It simply created a tier on top of the free site, and it is a way for us to package more stuff for subscribers to The New York Times.”
"The business model that most Internet publishers have is very simple. It’s the number of unique visitors, times the times they visit you during a given period, times the amount of pages they view per visit, times the rate per page. It’s not rocket science. It’s basically a straightforward formula that all of us live by, whether you’re the New York Times or Weblogs, Inc."
That's cool - the New York Times and Weblogs, Inc. in the same sentence without any touch of irony.
Amanda Fung of Crain's New York notes that Manhattan-based video blog companies like Rocketboom and blip.tv are starting to experiment with subscription fees and paid advertisements, "marking a big step in extending Internet-posting software to a wider audience." Until now, both companies have provided free services and relied on word-of-mouth advertising, but have generated little or no cash flow. By charging subscription fees and experimenting with paid advertising, though, the companies may alienate some vbloggers. According to Rocketboom's Amanda Congdon, "Ads are trickier because visitors don't want to see a bunch of text links on the Rocketboom Web site. Our audience is sensitive to text ads so we are going to be careful."
In Tuesday's New York Post, there was an interesting article about a social networking site for frequent fliers. Apparently, high-powered business execs are buying into the idea of meeting like-minded fellow travelers while airborne. Can't really blame them: "In the Russian roulette world of airplane travel, the person sitting next to you is, too often, a woman looking to discuss her painful divorce, a screaming baby - or a middle-age man with a tenuous grasp on basic hygiene."
AirTroductions, started by a 33-year-old entrepreneur who owns a New York PR agency, is trying to change all that: the networking site attempts to match frequent travelers with people who might have similar business or personal interests. In fact, the New York Post calls it "Air Friendster, or MySpace with oxygen masks and aisle seating."
Oh, and for those of you with dirty minds, AirTroductions is not some kind of online Mile High Club -- although there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that steamy romance can result later, after a grueling four-hour, Coast to Coast flight.
Alicia Colon of The New York Sun looks at what it's like to be conservative and online in New York City. As everyone knows, it's tough being a pro-Bush Republican in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans something like 5:1. (subscription required to access site)
After providing some enthusiastic booster-ism for another new blog added to the Jupitermedia universe, Alan Meckler pauses to reflect on the synergies provided by blogs:
"[The new Datamation blog] is another fine blog added to the stable of Jupitermedia blogs that we have launched in the previous 20 months. I have written about the great response we have had to the JupiterResearch bloggers ---these continue to thrive in terms of readership and feedback. This is blogging at its best in that readers get solid information and thoughts and the company gets greater bonding with pressent and future customers."
Check out the satellite maps on the Central Park Web site. When I first saw the maps, I thought they were part of some kind of GoogleMaps/Central Park mashup (maybe it was the red Google-like balloons on the map), but the credit under the maps specifically mentions Zoomify. Anyway, it's still all good. With the interactive maps, you can zoom in/out and zero in on specific landmarks (Wollman Rink, Belvedere Castle, etc.) around the park.
Anyway, take a moment to check out the Central Park Web site. There seem to be a lot of interactive features on the site, like the ability to rate photos of the park. There's even a big shout-out to the Jaunted travel blog, which mentioned Central Park recently.
An innocent comment by Fernando Ferrer on his mayoral campaign blog ("I was educated in public schools for most of my education") has generated a minor firestorm of controversy in the race for New York City mayor. As it turns out, Ferrer was actually educated in Catholic schools. While Ferrer has dismissed the discrepancy as "minor," the Bloomberg campaign sees it otherwise:
"Bloomberg's people today pounced on this - they said Ferrer is either lying about his resume or lying about who writes his blog. If you ask the Bloomberg team, this latest flap goes to the basic honesty of Freddy Ferrer."
The Ferrer campaign team has apologized, saying that the blog was "inaccurately edited." (Which, of course, leaves open the question of whether Mr. Ferrer actually posted the entry to the blog, or whether it was a low-level campaign staffer who posted it as "Fernando Ferrer.")
In his weekly column for Wired, NYU assistant professor Adam Penenberg asks a question on the minds of many bloggers: Is it possible to strike it rich while blogging? Penenberg digs around several weblog publishers, looking for answers.
At Weblogs, Inc. (the weblog empire run by former New York-based Internet promoter Jason Calacanis), bloggers make anywhere from $200 to $3,000 a month - "about a quarter to half what a mid-level editorial job would pay, without the daily office commute." The standard deal appears to be $500 for about 125 entries a month ($4/entry).
At Gawker Media, the figures are a bit higher: "The amount floating around the internet is $2,500 a month per blogger plus traffic bonuses." Not satisfied with this estimate, Penenberg does the math and comes up with a number of wildly-inflated numbers for the various bloggers at Gawker Media: $5,000 a month (Gawker), $7,000 to $10,000 a month (Defamer), $7,000 to $8,000 (Gizmodo) and $7,000 to $8,000 a month (Fleshbot).
As it turns out, New York Magazine had the final say. In last week's issue on "Who makes what" in New York City, Jessica Coen of Gawker admitted to making $30,000 per year . That works out to about $2,500 a month.
Who's a Rat claims to be nothing more than the "largest online database of informants and agents" that assists lawyers and criminal defendants who may lack more traditional resources, but the Web site's detractors say that the site could lead to reprisals against "stool pigeons," snitches and even undercover cops. Since the site was started by a Boston resident who was busted on marijuana charges, it's quite likely that the "Who's a Rat?" Web site is about more than just truth, justice and the American way -- it's about putting the lives of undercover NYPD cops at risk.
Dawn Eden, who writes the weekly "Blog On!" column for the New York Daily News, has a few pointers to New York City pizza blogs. For example, there's the Brooklyn Pizzeria in New Orleans, which was hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina ("My business was in almost 4 feet of water, everything gone.")
There's also "the city's own pizza blog," SliceNY: "We're Big Apple-based, with a special affinity for New York-style pies, but we're wild about pizza in general. We're even warming up to the idea of deep dish." In a follow-up posting, the editor of SliceNY explains that the site is not a "for-profit enterprise, modeled on corporate-owned blogs like Gothamist," as the New York Daily News implies:
"Well, if we're "clearly a for-profit enterprise," the ad sales team down on seven here at Slice corporate apparently didn't get the memo. I'll have to talk to HR about poaching some of the Gothamist Corporation's sales reps..."
Google is planning to build out its own fiber optic network and become a top-tier player in the Internet telephone and wireless businesses, so it only makes sense that the company is looking to lease space in one of New York's telecom carrier hotels, says the New York Post:
"The company is reportedly in talks to lease a whopping 270,000 square feet in the former Port Authority Commerce Building at 111 Eighth Ave. at W. 15th Street. The massive building is one of New York's most important so-called telecom carrier hotels — home to thousands of Web servers and other critical technology infrastructure."
Google spokespersons offered no comment on the pending deal, but the Post article has plenty of speculation about what Google is planning:
"111 Eighth Ave.'s concentration of interconnected networks would allow Google to offer its new voice-over-Internet service, Google Talk, more efficiently and at lower cost because it would be able to connect directly to the networks of many of the world's leading telecom firms that are also housed there."
Do you have a lot of loose change in your pockets or piles of pennies at home? Well, Amazon.com and Coinstar are linking up with a unique offer to get coin hoarders to spend the money online instead: "Under the new offer announced [last week] with Amazon, Coinstar will now allow users to convert their loose change into Amazon Gift Certificates that can be used online at Amazon.com." Even better, Coinstar won't charge an annoying transaction fee. In other words, $5 in pennies means $5, not $4.50 or $4.25 or anything else.
According to Coinstar, it's a win-win for everyone involved:
"Everybody wins, consumers get a fee-free transaction and Amazon can now offer their customers an easy and convenient way to use cash online. Coinstar attracts new users by providing a no fee transaction and the host retailer (supermarkets) benefits through increased store traffic."
Actually, I guess that's a win-win-win-win for everyone involved.
"The Morgan Stanley stock analyst, who rose to notoriety in the 1990s with her bullish calls on Internet shares, Monday released a 118-plus page report titled "China Internet," and along with fellow analyst Richard Ji launched coverage on seven China-based Internet stocks, six of which are listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market."
One of Meeker's top picks is Netease.com, or as some refer to it, NetTease.com... If Ms. Meeker spoke Mandarin or some other Chinese dialect, we'd be a bit more upbeat about her leap into the deep end of the Chinese Internet sector. But, as it is, it just looks like a lot of hype and false market assumptions. Deja vu all over again...
Consider for a moment that Baidu.com -- billed as the "Google of China" only weeks ago -- has just been given the kiss of death by Goldman analyst Anthony Noto. Shares of the company traded around $114 at the beginning of the week, but Noto thinks "fair value" is somewhere between $27 and $45 a share.
About a week ago, Tom Watson posted an item about the 10-year anniversary of @NY, the first-ever Internet newsletter in New York City that was founded by himself and Jason Chervokas. The newsletter initially went out to a subscriber base of approximately 300 people and was meant to chronicle the Internet subculture as it evolved in the city. Eventually, the @NY newsletter grew to a circulation of 100,000 and was later sold to "empire-builder" Alan Meckler. Watson explains the excitement of those early years:
"As anniversaries go, this one isn't significant to many people besides Jason and me: we founded @NY that summer of 1995 to chronicle what we thought was a great story that needed to be told. The usually under-employed class of writers, designers, artists, photographers, editors - and their pals in sales - had created a tiny but fascinating new class of entrepreneur in New York City, leveraging the commercial dawn of the Internet browser to create a new medium. We came to the story during the preceeding year or so, attracted by art-based Websites, by email lists of interesting young people, and by the parties."
"All along, the idea that user-created content - conversations - was the life's blood of the Internet guided our reportage. And that pose was clearly out best: tested by time, it has proven solid as a rock. @NY's legacy is a tiny one outside of a small circle of people. But it was entirely emblematic of its times, and, in retrospect, part of a the movement of citizens media we're all participating in now..."
While Corante New York may not be as hip, as cool, or as popular as @NY, we like to think that we too are trying to chronicle the same tech culture in New York. Maybe 10 years from now, we'll also have a chance to look back in the same way... Congrats, Tom and Jason, and thanks for blazing the trail as an Internet pioneer in the city!
There's a humorous cartoon in the Wall Street Journal every day (or nearly every day) called "Pepper... and Salt." Anyway, yesterday's cartoon was worth clipping for anyone involved in the dot-com boom of the '90s (unfortunately, couldn't find a link to it on the Web):
Two guys in suits walking down a street, both holding briefcases, one with long hair, one with short hair. The short-haired guy turns to the long-haired guy and says:
"You're the only guy I know who didn't cut off his ponytail after the dot-com bust."
Anyway, if you think this is just a smidge funny, check out Science Cartoons Plus (scroll down the page for examples from the Wall Street Journal).
Yankee slugger Alex ("A-Rod") Rodriguez has launched a new Web site affiliated with MLB.com. Fresh off his AL Player of the Month award for August, he'll host a live chat at 2:30 pm today.
A-Rod explains why he's launching a new Website now -- as the baseball season is nearing to a close, and the Yankees zero in on another World Series championship (wishful thinking?):
"The reason I've created my own Web site is simple. I wanted to create a place where there are exclusive programs, photos and opportunities for you to enjoy. We will be working constantly to bring you new and exciting features that are not available anywhere else. And I wanted to be able to communicate all of this directly to you -- the fans. This Web site is my way of being able to reach out to each of you, and also a way you can communicate with me."
The Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at the competition between a handful of companies - including Technorati, Feedster and BlogPulse - to become the "Google of blogs." Since Google and Yahoo are not always able to track the information appearing in millions of blogs in real-time, these smaller upstarts see a real opportunity. However, says the WSJ, these blog search engines will never displace Google and Yahoo until they can work out a few problems:
"The new services, some of which are less than a year old, aren't without their glitches. The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites."
One telling statistic for anyone overly concerned about Technorati ratings and other new-fangled ways of tracking popularity:
"The new blog-search sites draw only a sliver of the visitors that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN do. Most of them didn't have enough traffic in July to register on the radar of Internet-tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Technorati did, with 642,000 unique visitors. But its traffic still made up less than 1% of Google's visitors that month."
Trying to find gas at under $3 a gallon is becoming close to impossible in New York City. Thanks to NewYorkGasPrices.com, though, it's still possible to track down the handful of stations that are offering gas at $2.99 a gallon. (Hint: you can forget about Manhattan -- these stations are in Brooklyn, the Bronx or Long Island)
OnNYTurf has created an interesting mash-up involving Google Maps and the NYC subway map. For those making their way out to Jersey, the mash-up also includes PATH train routes. Last week, NY1's Adam Balkin had a feature on Google Maps mash-ups.
In this week's issue of New York Magazine, hedge fund manager and Wall Street talking head James J. Cramer says that Google is a steal at $280 a share. Who cares that shares of the Internet search company have more than tripled in just the past 12 months? According to Cramer, shares of Google will be trading at $350 by year's end. In fact, the only thing holding back Google, says Cramer, is the wet blanket that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer stands ready to throw on any kind of Wall Street speculative bubble:
"You can blame Eliot Spitzer if you missed out on the last 200 points of Google. You might even be able to blame the New York State attorney general if you miss out on the next 70 points of the great search-engine stock, which I now expect to soar from $280 to $350 by year’s end. You can point the finger at Spitzer, because Wall Street analysts have become so timid, so downright apologetic and fearful of prosecution, that they have failed to get behind arguably the greatest stock of the young 21st century..."
Reports are coming in that Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp is making a push into the real estate brokerage business. (Didn't he get our housing bubble memo?) Currently, Barry Diller's online real estate empire consists of LendingTree.com and RealEstate.com, which together provide mortgage and property listings for the residential real estate market. For now, it appears that the move into the real estate brokerage business will primarily occur through New York-based RealEstate.com. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has details:
"IAC/InterActiveCorp, the television and Internet-service company that spun off Expedia this month, plans to enter the U.S. real estate brokerage business next year to expand beyond its current Internet offerings of property and mortgage listings. The New York-based company's RealEstate.com business will open brokerage offices in the Pacific Northwest in the first half of 2006. The company has yet to decide how much to invest, whether to buy related businesses or if it will expand the service nationally."
Analysts thus far have been less than impressed with the move, pointing out the pitfalls of entering an over-heated market segment: "IAC may be entering the game late. Growth rates are moderating in the real estate market."
Found via a del.icio.us tag: a list of all Google jobs available in New York City. 35 jobs in engineering, 22 in advertising sales and 12 in product development. Interestingly, there's only 1 opening in "legal." If you're a Google fan, that's probably a good thing, eh?
For his mash-up of Google Maps and SliceNY.com that resulted in the Slice Pizza Map, New York City's own Adam Kuban was interviewed by NY1 reporter Adam Balkin:
"The all–New York-all-the-time channel will air a segment on Google Maps mash-ups in which I appear blabbing about how neat the tool is. Slice, of course, uses the function in our recently released Slice Pizza Map, which plots all the pizzerias that we or our correspondents have reviewed since this site's inception."
Well, it's about time that our suburban neighbors to the north take up the blogging baton... The New York Times reports on the growth of the Westchester blogosphere, complete with a full-color pic of bloggers in Croton-on-Hudson. There are a lot of smart folks joining the blogging bandwagon - like a 28-year-old IBM financial analyst - but most of the chatter thus far has been nothing more than "blog-orrhea," says the Times. In other words, lots of annoying talk about Taco Bell, the local Old Navy and less-than-scintillating family reunions:
"This local universe of unaffiliated blogs, or online journals, touches on everything from local politics, to the economics of Star Wars' Galactic Empire to the Boston Red Sox's habit of losing on Ben Affleck's birthday. The bloggers' postings range from the meaningful to the mundane... But consequential or not, these online ruminations provide a glimpse into the lives of everyday Westchesterites. And taken together, bloggers say, they provide a new digital voice for a county that is often overshadowed by the behemoth to the south."
There's a manhunt on Wall Street tonight. No, it's not a promotion for some reality TV snuff film -- it's a game of urban hide-and-seek taking place at 9pm tonight on Wall Street after all the bankers and traders have gone home. Newmindspace has more on the Wall Street manhunt:
"Manhunt! The totally regressive game of hide and seek with a run-like-mad urban flair. We invite you to join us on Wall Street, to run among cobblestones, winding paths and echoes of the original Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Hide behind pillars and sprint down brick alleyways, evading capitalists among skyscrapers for a night of summer joy."
Voice communication over the Internet -- in all of its various forms -- is hotter than ever, says The Wall Street Journal:
"Just when the rise of email and text-messaging began eroding traditional phoning, voice communication is staging an online comeback -- in a variety of unlikely ways. Facilitated by broadband Internet connections, computer users are talking to each other as they play games, arrange dates and conduct business. All of these activities are available now because advancements in digital technology have made it possible to transfer voice in information packets, just like an email."
Of course, if Google is doing it, it must be hot, right? On Tuesday, Google announced a plan to enable Internet users to make phone calls over personal computers, using only a headset. And, of course, there's Skype and Vonage.
Anyway, one of the companies mentioned in the article is Vonex LLC, a Brooklyn-based company working on a platform to make it easier for online gamers to use voice ("voice over internet gaming"). Yo, a big shout out to Brooklyn.
"An enterprising software engineer has combined the popular "dating" Web site Hot-or-Not with Google's new map program, creating a new Internet "mash-up" of the two services which allows users to search for hotties by ZIP code."
Users can enter any U.S. zipcode to find people who are rated "hot" by the site HotorNot.com. A Google map then appears with a collection of balloons that link to the person's picture, zipcode and links to more information. Caution! This is definitely a time-waster at the office...
Crain's New York profiles a number of new online banking ventures in New York, including new offerings by New York Community Bank and HSBC Bank USA. The increase in competition for online accounts is good news for consumers, who are already benefiting from higher rates on their savings accounts:
"The Internet surge has created a dogfight over savings rates. Last week, MyBankingDirect.com raised its money market interest rate to 3.75%, eclipsing the 3.5% offered by Emigrant Direct and HSBC. All three also far outpace rates offered on traditional accounts."
Moreover, online accounts are a tremendous enabler for smaller banks that are competing with giant banking institutions. In response, larger banks like Citibank are testing new Internet-only accounts that offer high yields to consumers. In fact, says one research analyst, "Ten years down the road, most of the major banks out there will have something like this..."
In case you missed it, Blogebrity recently posted an interview with Jason Kottke, an A-list New York blogger who pioneered the move to "contributor-supported" blogging. According to Kottke, the contribution flow has "trickled down to almost nothing," but he still has no plans to advertise on the site.
In a recent issue of Metro, Darragh Worland, who writes the "PillowTalk" column for New York singles, featured TraderDater.com -- the place to meet the hedge fund manager of your dreams: "The world's first industry-specific online dating site, Trader Dater was built exclusively for women interested in meeting professional traders."
Memo to Osama: we're watching you. Newsday has the details on how the NYPD is widening its efforts to monitor Islamic extremists on the Internet:
"The New York Police Department officers surfed jihadist Web sites and chat rooms in which suicide bombings and beheadings are celebrated and hatred of the West rages. Their assignment: Pose as Islamic extremists, locate and engage real ones, then extract any shred of information about possible terrorist threats against the city."
A big hat tip to the NYPD for tapping into the linguistic expertise of its workforce. The department has more than 450 officers who speak a number of exotic languages, including Farsi and Arabic, and has been putting them on the international terrorist beat when possible. Across the country, other police departments have not made nearly the same effort to recruit Arabic-speaking officers:
"The focus on language expertise separates the NYPD from many other big-city departments. Spokesmen at several Florida law enforcement agencies, including the Miami-Dade Police Department, said they make no special effort to develop Arabic speakers, and the Los Angeles Police Department calls language-services companies when it needs interpreters."
The New York Daily News reports that the city teachers union, UFT, has created a blog to discuss its ongoing contract squabble with the city: Edwize. By entering the blogosphere, the teachers hope to get their message out to a wider audience. One point of contention is the wide salary gap between teachers in New York City and those in the posh suburbs. (Teachers in the suburbs make 16-24% more) Moreover, the blog has been vocal about suggesting that "Mayor Bloomberg was letting election year politics get in the way of negotiating a new contract for the city's 80,000 teachers."
If you're a tourist, trying to get around the New York subway system can be a nightmare. With iPod Subway Maps, though, you can download handy little maps of the NYC subway to your iPod. (Hat tip: New Yorkology)
Debbie Weil recently interviewed Micro Persuasion's Steve Rubel, who divulges some key plays from his "blogging playbook." Rubel is one of the most prolific bloggers in the blogosphere (putting the poor author of this blog to shame), and he provides some inside tips on how he manages to blog up to four hours each day, every day of the week. (Hint: lots of high-tech blog tools and a limited need for sleep)
The Trump blog is providing biweekly updates on offerings at Trump University as well as business tidbits from everybody's favorite billionaire. The hope is that readers will be so impressed with the wit, wisdom and business acumen of The Donald and his Apprentices that they will sign up en masse for e-learning modules at Trump University.
If you've ever watched "The Apprentice," then you know that Mr. Trump has a certain weakness for the ladies. Perhaps no surprise, then, that Trump University is unveiling a new "women-centric" curriculum:
"Trump University is developing a new "women-centric" curriculum, starting with Prof. Karen Kahn Wilson's live course, Success Strategies for Women. This four-session course, scheduled for September and October, will be delivered over the Web. It will focus on the distinct strengths that women bring to the workplace and how they're related to findings in the latest research on female neurology."
Over at Search Engine Journal, Greg Sterling of The Kelsey Group wonders whether Rupert Murdoch is the new Barry Diller. After all, Murdoch has announced his intentions to get more involved in the interactive local media market and has hinted at a possible bid to buy a controlling stake in an Internet search company (think Diller and Ask Jeeves). Not only that, but Murdoch has already assembled the makings of a Diller-esque online conglomerate. Murdoch could face a bit of tough sledding, though, as he tries to make inroads into the online market:
"It only gets more competitive from here as search, portals, directories, newspapers, verticals, cable and local TV affiliates (and let’s not forget consolidated media empires) all compete for eyeballs and advertisers in the Interactive Local Media market."
UPDATE: Forbes says that News Corp. is in talks to buy Blinkx, a privately held Internet search firm.
In the world of online dating, it always pays to do a bit of due diligence... Gothamist points to a story from the New York Post about an online dating scam on JDate, the matchmaking site for Jewish singles:
"A 60-something widow was taken for $100,000 by a match from JDate... The scammer, Alan Sarner of Sheepshead Bay, told the widow he was a banker about invest in a company that was close to finding a cure for leukemia, which just happened to be what the widow's husband died of."
Sarner may be a villain -- but anyone who falls for the "sensitive artist/investment banker" rap must be pretty naive. Sensitive investment banker? C'mon, that's the oldest line in the book. According to the Post, Sarner also told the victim that he was really "into romantic movies" and was in the process of building a luxury hotel on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca that would have a gambling casino, heliport, marina and restaurant.
Expedia is spinning off from its parent company, IAC/InterActiveCorp, today as Barry Diller attempts to restore order to his Internet empire. Instead of running an Internet conglomerate, Diller is trying to combine all of his Internet travel-related assets into one company. Sensing a story in there somewhere, the New York Times tracks down the 34-year-old CEO of Expedia (Dara Khosrowshahi), Barry Diller's right-hand man for the past seven years or so, to find out what changes are afoot in the online travel business.
For starters, the company is consolidating its operations in Seattle, bringing in new management, and hoping to regain market share from the likes of Travelocity and Priceline. There's also a push to go global and to build customer loyalty through new features and options. Don't expect Barry Diller to cede too much control of Expedia, though -- he still owns 6% of the company's shares (but 61% of the voting shares) and talks with Khosrowshahi daily.
The New York Times finally has a feature-length profile of Mimi Feo, the 26-year-old stripper-blogger-Cambridge grad behind the ever-popular Mimi in New York blog. If you're looking for a behind-the-scenes look at the world of midtown strip clubs, or are just interested in what happens in the Champagne Room, it's worth a read.
Last week, Craig Newmark - the founder of Craigslist - warned Internet users everywhere about the appearance of a fake Craigslist site: "Just to let people know in a hurry, the site www.pay-craigslist.org has no relation to us, and we're escalating dramatically now. Please get the word out." On a tip from Curbed, we checked out the fake site, but apparently the site had already been taken down. Given Craig's crackdown on unethical New York real estate brokers, we suspect that the site will remain down for a very long time...
The New York Post had an amusing story on Thursday about a new comedy sketch, "Found on Craigslist," from the Upright Citizens Brigade that features hilarious and politically incorrect absurdist classics like "Chelsea Clinton Ski Trip," "What Crawled Over Me Last Night" and "Gays of our Lives." More details at Gothamist.
For the blog voyeur in all of us, there's a funky five-minute video of "Lockhart Steele, Big Apple blogger" up at Inman Stories Online. For those of you who don't know him, Lockhart Steele is the founder and creative genius behind Curbed, New York's premier real estate blog. Follow Lockhart around the city as he gets into and out of New York City taxi cabs, walks up and down stairs, and adds a blog entry about Chelsea's proposed High Line development. (Hat tip: Fimoculous)
If you're interested in getting inside the head of another A-list blogger, there's also an interview with Elizabeth Spiers of Media Bistro (and before that, Gawker) over at the 92Y blog. On July 26, Elizabeth participated with a number of media experts, including Bill Grueskin of The Wall Street Journal, on a panel discussion about the future of online media.
Many New Yorkers are fanatical when it comes to their FreshDirect online grocery service. However, it looks like the honeymoon period for FreshDirect is drawing to a close -- while many New Yorkers still maintain that the grocery service saves them time and money and helps them eat healthier, a small but vocal minority complains about the packaging, about trucks idling in the streets and the "disconnection FD has created between consumers and their food...."
Apartment Therapy is running a quick survey in an attempt to separate myth from reality. Do you use FreshDirect -- and if you do, how often? (Hat tip: Curbed)
Business Week takes a potshot at Barry Diller, CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, saying that his earlier plans to become "the Internet's first swaggering Hollywood-style mogul" have fallen flat: "Like many Hollywood extravaganzas... Diller's production in the last two years has strayed from its script."
The upshot: while other glamour Internet stocks like Yahoo and Google sizzled, Diller's IAC was a flameout. Now, it's time for Plan B, says Business Week, as Diller bundles together his online travel businesses (Hotels.com, Expedia.com, Hotwire, TripAdvisor.com) into a separately traded company (Expedia Inc.). IAC will remain, holding a "grab bag of companies" like Ticketmaster, LendingTree and Ask Jeeves.
Alan Meckler, the CEO of Jupitermedia, admits that he's not a "big fan of the ultimate commercial value of Social Networks," which means that he's less than impressed with Rupert Murdoch's $580 million acquisition of Intermix:
"So what did News Corp. get? Based on quotes from various sources at News Corp. they seem to be most pleased with increasing their Web traffic. One source stated that they had doubled their page views etc. This statement made me wince. Perhaps News Corp. is back in the 1990s and they think the just bought The Globe and Tripod?
I thought that most people had learned since 2000 that traffic does not mean revenue (and or profits). Contrast this purchase with The New York Times buying About.com or Dow Jones' purchase of Marketwatch.com. Both of these media giants paid huge premiums, but they bought real businesses."
The Empire Journal has an excellent discussion of how blogs and other forms of Internet communication play an important role in guaranteeing the right to free speech. They enable us to voice our dissent with government and the powers-that-be and prevent the "heavy hand of censorship" from "slamming its fist down on people who dare to express their First Amendment right..."
We agree wholeheartedly with all that. It's a bit harder, though, to understand The Empire Journal's support of former New York City cop Edward Polstein, who was recently fired for putting up an overly-chatty Internet chat board about the NYPD. Now he's filing a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that he was the victim of retaliation and reverse discrimination.
Is Polstein a do-good whistleblower who is being unfairly punished for publishing a Web site? Or is he an embittered former employee who was given sufficient warnings by the NYPD, violated the terms of his retirement package and willingly sought to humiliate top brass at the NYPD with a series of rants and politically-motivated cartoons? Sometimes, me thinks, it's all too easy to hide behind First Amendment rights.
Somehow, when Rupert Murdoch promised to unveil a revolutionary new Internet strategy for his global media and entertainment empire, we weren't expecting this: a book blog for the New York Post. Yes, everybody's favorite tabloid newspaper in New York has apparently launched a New York Post Book Blog. Every month, June to November, the paper will recommend two paperbacks: one fiction and one non-fiction. There's also some kind of promotional tie-in, in which books promoted on the blog are also promoted in the paper on Mondays.
For those keeping track, Rupert Murdoch also launched a new Internet unit, Fox Interactive Media, at News Corp. last week. It will be interesting to see how The New York Post, just one link in Murdoch's worldwide media empire, fits into the company's overarching Internet strategy. In June, remember, Murdoch gave a wake-up call to newspaper editors around the world, warning them to embrace the Internet and step forward into the 21st century.
Last summer, a mini-scandal erupted when Mayor Bloomberg appeared to condone wine consumption at opera and classical music events in Central Park, but urged cops to crack down on illegal beer consumption at public beaches in Coney Island. It's a double standard, critics charged: why should upper-income wine drinkers be given a free pass?
Now, Denis Hamill of the New York Daily News is opening up that can of worms once again. This time, he calls into question the MTA's support of alcohol consumption on the LIRR, but its decided lack of support for beer-drinking on the city's subway system:
"If it's okay for a beach lover to have double-Johnnie-rocks on the MTA/LIRR Montauk line, a vodka gimlet should be okay on the F train to Coney. What's good for Bay Shore oughta be good for Bay Ridge. So what gives?"
The bar cars on the LIRR are so popular, writes Hamill, that they have even spawned a Web site, BarCar.com, dedicated to them. The site has a retro-50s feel to it -- as well as features like "Overheard on the Bar Car," a classifieds section, and random photos of commuters.
NOTE: A number of readers have written in, pointing out that BarCar.com is not in any way connected with the LIRR. It's a site for commuters on the New Haven line out of Grand Central. Thanks.
Newsday has the details on the New York Flora Atlas, a new Internet-based resource for tracking all forms of flowers, trees, shrubs, and plants "from Montauk to Niagara Falls." According to the director of the New York Natural Heritage Program, the Web-based reference is "designed to give insights into the landscape of New York - not only what grows where, but how rare certain plants are and how quickly invasive species are spreading... We're constantly finding new things in New York, and sometimes we're discovering species that are native and they just haven't been noticed before because it takes a hard-core botanist to pick them out."
This is something that only the blogosphere could produce: a Carnival of New Jersey bloggers. An Internet 'carnival' is not actually a real-world event, explains the New York Times, it's a collection of Web log entries on a shared topic, such as politics, food or sports. In this case, it's Joisey.
And why New Jersey and not New York City or Long Island?
"New Jersey was made for the blogosphere, right down to the Asbury Park Tillie icon on the carnival logo. The state is small enough that whether you live in Bergen or Hunterdon you still have an opinion on the best pizza or sausage and pepper sandwich at the Jersey Shore, drive on the same turnpike, and both contribute to the Jersey Joke syndrome and bristle at it. The politics are so obviously dysfunctional everyone shares everyone else's pain. Everyone has an attitude. And over the past decades, almost without people realizing it, the pop culture New Jersey of Springsteen/"The Sopranos"/"Garden State," etc., has changed the way people think about their state."
Jossip has the details on how Chris Mohney, the creator of the Gawkerist blog, wound up as the editor of Gawker Media's Gridskipper travel blog. Mohney explains on Mediabistro how he landed the blogging gig:
"The 'stunt' I pulled was writing an anonymous blog called Gawkerist that paid an absurd level of attention to Gawker Media blogs and bloggers. Everything about Gawkerist was meticulously, cynically planned, except the end result—actually working for Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton... Since New York media types were always interested in Gawker Media (albeit sometimes begrudgingly), it seemed like a logical topic to attract their attention."
Mimi New York, who skyrocketed to notoriety with her uninhibited look at the world of New York strippers and the perils of U.S. immigration, explains how to run a sticky blog. Step #1, says Mimi, is to generate some controversy. Then focus on building and cultivating a fan base, link by link: stop by other blogs frequently, respond to fan mail, and self-promote like crazy.
New York-based Catalyst Group Design, which launched its CoFactors blog earlier in the year, has released a Blog usability report that looks at how basic blog features and design are perceived by Internet users. Not surprisingly, most of these users had no clue whatsoever about RSS. Somewhat disturbingly, though, "few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog – and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented." Moreover, "a minority of participants understood how to navigate within the blog itself – with most being confused by areas for recent posts, categories, trackbacks and even the comments and archives functions."
What's interesting is that even a relatively mainstream blog operated by a major media company -- like Business Week's Well Spent -- presented more than its fair share of challenges to users. While blogs may have already reached a critical mass, the results of this Catalyst report highlight that there are a number of user-experience issues that still need to be resolved by blog publishers everywhere before blogs truly become mainstream.
A hat tip to Jen Chung, Jake Dobkin and the rest of the editorial staff at Gothamist: while the rest of the city was slumbering away on the beach or in air-conditioned lofts, this Gotham City-based Internet media empire has been rapidly expanding to every corner of the known world -- or at least the parts of the known world that have broadband Internet connections: Paris (July 12), Philadelphia (July 11) and Shanghai (July 11).
According to the New York Daily News, an Internet bulletin board known as NYPD Rant has landed its creator, police officer Edward Polstein ("Polecat") in big trouble with the city's finest. The problem is that the bulletin board turned into a "forum for disgruntled cops," with controversial postings from other NYPD officers that included potshots at top police brass and the police union. After the bulletin board started attracting as many as 60,000 visitors daily, Polstein was notified that Internal Affairs was taking a closer look at the site; yet, Polstein still persisted in some of his antics and provocative tactics (i.e. posting pictures of Adolf Hitler and unflattering cartoon portraits of his boss).
The New York Times has another of its "bloggers and photobloggers were first on the scene" articles in today's paper as part of its expansive coverage of the London terror attacks. There's also a mention in the article of the new "citizen's journalism" movement and a quote from Dan Gillmor about the growing importance of on-the-ground bloggers to the traditional news gathering process:
"A lot of what's being done by the citizen-journalist will be most useful as people start pulling together the best images and stories. There was a cliché that journalists write the first draft of history. Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."
Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine has been watching the news reports from London with a careful eye and has a lot to say on the symbiosis between grassroots bloggers and Big Media:
"As I also noted yesterday, it is now reflex for the BBC and the venerable Times of London to solicit stories from the public and to publish them. Of course, they didn't have to ask. All they had to do was go reading their local bloggers... I'm also struck by the new definition of news. As I wandered through the London blogs listed by subway station, I found, again and again, bloggers using their new tool just to tell their family and friends, "I'm fine." That is the news that matters most, isn't it? Also: I found Technorati -- its search and its tags -- useful in finding London bombing news and reaction yesterday."
Somewhere, Nick Denton and other blog publishers have to be smiling. A blog portal worth $1 billion in cold, hard American cash? Paid Content points to a story from UCLA's Asia Institute on BlogChina's (a Chinese blog portal) plans to list on Nasdaq by the second half of next year with a total market cap north of $1 billion. The company has already pulled in $500 million in seed capital from a Softbank investment fund and is working on another round of funding from US and Asian VC investors.
Maybe it's just me, but those numbers sound just wrong. $500 million in seed funding (the riskiest kind there is) for a blog media company supported almost entirely by advertising dollars? The article from UCLA's Asia Institute says that BlogChina is adding employees at a rate of 50 per month and already has 10 million blog customers, but that still doesn't justify a valuation of $1 billion.
Anyway, Susan Mernit has put together a nice China Media Watch on the latest developments in the frothy Chinese media/blog market.
"Cameron Marlow (creator of Blogdex and a friend) is running a survey about weblogs. If you're a weblog author, it will take you about 15 minutes to complete and asks some straight-forward questions about when you started blogging, what you link to and why, etc. Don't worry, no essays are involved, you just check some boxes and click some buttons. Please consider taking a moment to participate if you're a blogger."
Call it whatever you want -- grassroots content, user-generated content, a bottom-up creative process -- but Internet content created by and for the masses is all the rage right now. In fact, a senior executive at Yahoo notes that "sharing" (in all of its various forms) is everywhere: "It's the next chapter of the World Wide Web." Yahoo is putting its money where its mouth is, too: the company recently acquired photo-sharing site Flickr and is rolling out a new service called My Web 2.0.
Shares of Google broke through the $300 barrier yesterday. It's been quite a ride at Google -- in the 10 months since the company went public in a blow-out-the-doors IPO, the stock price has skyrocketed, from $85 to $300. With that in mind, The Motley Fool considers a Google stock split to bring the company's stock price "down to more conventional tech stock pricing."
It's hard to get a true handle on Google's valuation, but plenty of Wall Street analysts say that Google is still "cheap" at $300. In fact, James J. Cramer of TheStreet.com says that Google is even "cheap" at $350.
This product announcement sounds like the nexus of three cool technology trends -- blogging, video, and online collaboration. At Gnomedex 2005, New York-based On2 Technologies and Vancouver-based NowPublic.com announced a partnership to create the "world's first collaborative video blogging experience for news."
The founder and CEO of NowPublic.com comments on the importance of partnering with On2: "Teaming up with On2 has enabled us to quickly build on the momentum we've created by extending high quality, collaborative video blogging to our members. We've created a next generation video blogging tool that promises to help bloggers all over the world to work together."
NYWiki is a specialized wikipedia written by and for New Yorkers. NYWiki calls itself a "collaborative community that's writing the ultimate reference of every person, place, and thing in New York City. From Abe Beame to Zeckendorf Towers, this is an encyclopedia of New York and it's all written by New Yorkers like you." After launching last summer, NYWiki has already been profiled on WNYC radio and in Time Out New York.
Search engine Oodle has released a new beta service that allows Internet users to comb through the classified ad listings in the Greater New York area (i.e. New York City, Southern Connecticut, Northern New Jersey, Westchester and Long Island) with a new, easy-to-use interface. The classifieds are not only from the usual suspects like the major New York newspapers -- the listings will also come from Craigslist and eBay.
The CEO of Oodle explains the motivation for rolling out the new geographically-targeted service: "Whether you're looking for a used sofa bed or a new apartment, you want to find exactly what you're looking for and be the first person to jump on great deals when they pop up."
Henry Blodget is at it again with yet another piece on Internet stock bubbles and investment manias, this time in Fortune magazine. Wasn't it just last week that he was comparing the Great Real Estate Bubble of 2005 with the Great Internet Bubble of 1999? He wasn't afraid to put a price target of $400 on Amazon.com when he was a high-priced Wall Street stock analyst, but he's getting kinda nervous now that shares of Google are starting to push past the $300 level.
The founder of Monster.com, Jeff Taylor, is launching a new venture in August that will likely become an integrated part of parent company Monster Worldwide. For now, there has only been high-level discussion of what shape this venture will take. While the new venture will probably not be employment-related, Monster Worldwide will provide the seed capital to get the new venture off the ground. Moreover, Taylor will continue to serve as an outside adviser to Monster on strategic and brand issues.
The 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side recently launched the 92 Y Blog. Could be an interesting way to drive membership and increase participation at events, classes and readings. Recent posts included an interview clip from Eric Bogosian, highlights from BookExpo America and a pointer to an article on music technology in The New Yorker. (Hat tip: Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion)
Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia, says that online gambling in the USA is an inevitability:
"The growth of online gambling is assured. It might take several more years, but legalized online gambling is coming to America. And when it does become legal, one of the great "land rushes" of all times will take place as casino companies and investors fall all over themselves to get a piece of the action."
Unless, of course, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer decides to get more involved in the matter. He's already been aggressive in clamping down on online gambling -- just imagine what he could do if he's elected governor in 2006.
Curbed gives a heads up to New York's unscrupulous real estate brokers to clean up their acts:
"Craigslists's Craig Newmark, vigilante for apartment listings justice, reports on his blog that he's paying surprise visits to NYC brokers on his shit list this week: "I've been 'dropping in' on a coupla apartment brokerages, like 'sure is a nice place here, sure be a shame if something happened to it. The heat is getting to me."
According to AlterNet, there's a new reality TV-style competition in town: Ultimate Blogger. One of the 12 bloggers competing for a $500 prize is Mimi, a 26-year-old Brooklyn resident who writes on her blog about New York's immigrant community and various eXXXtracurricular activities that involve poles and one dollar bills. Apparently, her participation in Ultimate Blogger has already paid off: Mimi already has a literary agent and a column in the Village Voice.
The 2005 Webby Awards were held in New York City for the first time ever last night. A few New York-based Web sites were winners, like the New York Academy of Sciences, the School of Visual Arts and New York Times Digital. As expected, a number of Internet favorites were also honored, like BoingBoing, Google, Flickr and Craigslist. Oh, and as the New York Times points out, Al Gore also picked up a Webby for a lifetime of Internet achievement.
After surveying over 4,000 Americans about their e-mail habits, AOL concluded that, by and large, Americans are addicted to e-mail. However, that might not necessarily be a bad thing, says Arik Hesseldahl of Forbes:
"In general, a connected person is a productive person. On a typical day, most people I know monitor both personal and work-related e-mail accounts, and most of the time one bleeds into the other. To me, a heavy e-mail user is better informed about current events around the world or in the office, and therefore better prepared to respond to changing situations."
According to Tom Zeller Jr. of the New York Times, Internet users are still far too gullible when it comes to evaluating online come-ons. So, if you're still being duped by phishers, scammers and other Internet rip-offs, you have nobody to blame except yourself:
"Most people who use the Web are ignorant of how Web sites are created, URL's rented, e-mail addresses manipulated and the like... Technological ignorance, and not just from newbies, prevents many people from recognizing a well-designed phony mimic. Add to that the usual mix - social life depends on trust, people are greedy and self-deceived about their ability to recognize a con - and you have a very inviting arena for crooks trolling for victims."
At last week's D3 tech conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal, Barry Diller of IAC/InterActiveCorp hinted that Ask Jeeves, the search engine that he acquired for $1.85 billion earlier this year, could be getting a new name sometime soon: "We're thinking about renaming it. It probably won't be called Ask Jeeves... Might be one of those words without the other. The new name has not been decided."
Any suggestions out there on how to re-brand Ask Jeeves?
The folks at Forbes.com have deployed a vertical search engine for IT professionals that will be powered by IT.com. Apparently, a special search box will pop up on certain tech-themed pages at Forbes.com, giving readers the chance to search for info related to IT purchasing decisions.
We applaud Forbes.com for playing around with vertical search engines, but frankly speaking, do IT managers really plan to make "significant enterprise purchases" while browsing the Forbes.com site? Maybe on the CNET site or on some other site like InfoWorld, but Forbes.com? Someone explain this to me.
Internet grocer FreshDirect has named Richard Braddock, the former CEO of Priceline.com and a former top executive at Citicorp, as its new chairman. CNET News.com speculates that the selection of Braddock could be a sign that FreshDirect is getting ready to launch an IPO. (Apparently, the financial markets respond well when Internet firms hire people with Wall Street cred.) In August 1998, Priceline founder Jay Walker called Braddock one of the true superstars of American business.
Grist for the Internet gossip mill: Sarah Boxer of the New York Times scours the Internet for sites that specialize in online confessions. According to Boxer, the Blogger-powered PostSecret is easily the most entertaining of all the online confessional sites. The blog, which encourages readers to mail in their secret confessions anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard, is part confessional, part collaborative art experiment.
Interested in the commentary of local New York bloggers -- but don't have the time or patience to sift through hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs to find a local New Yorker writing on a specific topic? Search Engine Watch points to the launch of a new local search function for Blogdigger, a blog search engine:
"Blogdigger local attempts to locate individual bloggers writing from specific U.S. cities or zip codes. This makes it easier to locate someone writing about beer in Boston or soccer in San Francisco than it would be using a general purpose search engine, or even another blog search service like Daypop or Feedster."
Tom Foremski, a blogger journalist with SiliconValleyWatcher, fresh off a week of events and meetings in New York City (including the Syndicate Conference), discusses some topics that should be front-of-mind for any "successful micro-media mogul." There's talk of the "furious pace of M&A activities in the media sector" -- as well as other topics of lesser importance (how to avoid being mistaken for a humble blogger during a midtown power lunch).
Looks like more people have stopped drinking the Blog Kool-Aid... Ad Rants explains why blogging is no longer cool (was it ever?):
"Following the recent whirlwind of blog hype including Nick Denton's love affair with the New York Times, his pie to the face at the Radar Magazine party, the launch of Blogebrity, Jason Calacanis' three million micro-blogs, a sudden explosion of branded character blogs and "all marketers should blog" blog conferences, it's now official. Rick Bruner and I, today, declare blogging to have gone the way of the trucker hat. In celebration of this sacred event, May 20, 2005, you can pick up your memorial, Nick Denton Trucker Hat over at Cafe Press."
A number of factors -- including the proliferation of bloggers and other Internet pundits -- has resulted in the demise of the newspaper art critic. Nowadays, when art journalists gather, supposedly all they talk about is their declining influence on the masses. There are perhaps only a few "stern, doctrinaire" critics left who can literally make or break a show:
"What happened? Besides the Internet and its rash of blogs, suspected culprits include the culture of celebrity, anti-intellectual populism, stingy newspaper owners and what some critics say is a loss of vitality or visibility in their art forms."
Oh... and the New York Times says that the Internet also killed the narrative joke of the type "Two guys walked into a bar...":
"Whatever tenuous hold the joke had left by the 1990's may have been broken by the Internet. The torrent of e-mail jokes in the late 1990's and joke Web sites made every joke available at once, essentially diluting the effect of what had been an spoken form. While getting up and telling a joke requires courage, forwarding a joke by e-mail takes hardly any effort at all. So everyone did it, until it wasn't funny anymore."
Bloggers are celebrities, right? With that in mind, A-list blogger Jessica Coen points to Blogebrity:
"Hi, everyone, I'd like to introduce you the load of genius behind Blogebrity since, you know, normally venerable folks like Glenn Reynolds are even linking to this odd site. Blogebrity poses as a "blogger gossip" page, which smartly creates a blogger hierarchy and has everyone all pissy and intrigued."
Susan Mernit points to the launch of Daily Gotham:
"Blogdiva Liza Sabater's just launched Daily Gotham, a community journalism site for NYC. This local site uses CivicSpaces' Community Network tool set and comes equipped with wikispace, plus message boards, polls, surveys, blogs and other features that can be turned on as the site evolves."
"As has been reported on a variety of blogs around the net, IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of blogging."
In just the past 18 months, behind-the-scenes efforts to interest IBM employees in blogging has resulted in 9,000 registered users in 65 different countries, 3,097 individual blogs (1,358 of them active) and a total of 26,203 blog entries and comments.
Now that the blogging effort has gone official, the IBM Blogging Community has drafted a number of Corporate Blogging Guidelines that are "designed to guide IBMers as they figure out what they're going to blog about so they don't end up like certain notable ex-employees of certain notable other companies."
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, ruled that consumers in New York state can buy their favorite bottles of wine from out-of-state vineyards. The ruling overturned laws that barred out-of-state wineries from selling directly to consumers within a state. As might be expected, New York winemakers (now free to ship across the country), together with Internet and mail-order wine companies, celebrated the decision.
"The court's divided 5-4 ruling could dramatically expand markets for small wineries that rely on the Internet to boost sales. The victory for small vineyards that challenged state restrictions in New York and Michigan may also be a boon for consumers who have been prevented from buying wine online because their states' laws are aimed at protecting local producers."
Matt Clayfield's Quicktime movie "On Hyperlinkage and the Evolution of the Species" raises an interesting question: "Is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) actually an evolution of our information-infested species?" After all, "we're constantly consuming, filtering, threading and associating" -- doesn't it make sense that our brains would evolve to reflect that reality?
The New York Times has a feature on Citimove, a Web site founded by two Manhattan software engineers that enables New Yorkers to find the best movers available by reading customer reviews. In addition, people who are about to move to the Tri-State area can invite bids from "reliable" moving companies.
The site went live about 18 months ago and already attracts about 3,500 unique visitors a month and has lined up advertising from moving companies like MoveMaster and MiniMoveUSA. In many ways, the site acts as a way to cross-check the "man with a van" ads on Craigslist -- while such ads are useful as a jumping off point, they offer no guarantee that the "man with a van" is not a "man with a scam."
Back in January, Kottke had a great post about the "man with a van" cottage industry that has been made possible by Craigslist.
The Deal LLC has launched a new magazine, Tech Confidential, that will primarily target dealmakers, entrepreneurs and investors who are on the prowl for innovative new ventures. There will also be a companion Tech Confidential blog that will feature postings by Tech Confidential’s writers as well as reader comments.
However, if you've tried to follow any of the above links to Tech Confidential, you'll find that the "blog" is hidden behind a registration wall. Apparently, once a reader fills out a brief registration form, content from the blog will be available for free -- however, it's uncertain how many readers in the blogosphere will actually take the time to register for a blog. (Does anybody else do this?) Plus, if you link to the blog, will readers from elsewhere in the blogosphere actually be able to follow the link?
In contrast to the Tech Confidential blog, consider the Silicon Beat blog, which covers "tech money and innovation" for The Mercury News -- pretty much the same beat as Tech Confidential, but with a Silicon Valley focus. This is a traditional blog powered by TypePad, with trackbacks, permalinks, a blogroll, and daily updates arranged in chronological order. And it's free and easy to access!
When Business Week announced a "VC/start-up blog" in the beginning of the year, Silicon Beat was quick to point out a number of deficiencies -- no RSS feeds, no trackbacks, no reader comments:
"Searching for the RSS feed, comments and trackbacks was my first reaction. Can't find any of these (you have a comment box, but it is not linked to a given post). So it has the presentation and the navigation of a blog, but it is not a blog...yet."
I have many of the same reservations about the Tech Confidential blog. The Deal LLC has a number of informative and timely publications, and I expect that Tech Confidential will be another welcome media addition to the dealmaking community. However, I suspect that traffic at the blog will be minimal unless they open it up to the entire blogosphere. We'll see.
UPDATE: A big apology is due to the folks at Tech Confidential. Turns out there is a Typepad blog after all for Tech Confidential that was launched on May 9. Already, there are postings about the IBM/Gluecode deal, the Google/Dodgeball deal, and news snippets about other deals in the tech sector.
"Unfortunately [the reporter's] experiment led him down wrong paths because he made some bad choices and looked at months-old posts. If you'd like to repeat his test armed with a better list of guides to New York, here are some of the city's best blogs that frequently post info about things going on in New York now..."
MemeFirst points out that a number of bloggers who once called the Lower East Side home are either moving elsewhere or shutting down operations:
"First, Below 14th closed up shop, but we didn't mind, 'cos it was replaced by Curbed. Besides, there were other great Lower East Side blogs. EBway.org, for instance – but this weekend we were told that they're moving to Argentina. Never mind, there's still Tale of Two Cities, right? Wrong. Even felixsalmon.com is planning its move out of the LES, albeit just a couple of blocks north to 3rd and B. Pretty soon, all LES bloggers will be confined to one raucous apartment on the third floor of 203 Rivington Street..."
As seen in Tuesday's Metro newspaper: blogger Kabi Jorgensen has teamed up with a former writer for the Village Voice to petition the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to grant CBGB landmark status. Since March 2005, Jorgensen has been posting to the Project Save CBGB & OMFUG blog. What's cool is that Debbie Harry of Blondie has noticed the blog and is now joining the Save CBGB effort.
Rumors are circulating that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer could be ready to launch an investigation of Ask Jeeves as part of a broader crackdown on spyware and adware:
"Some news reports have suggested that Ask Jeeves might find itself one of the companies Spitzer is investigating. Ask Jeeves' stock, which opened at $29.05 Friday, fell as low as $27.63 before climbing slowly back to close at $28.13, still down 2.83%."
If true, a Spitzer investigation would be a serious blow to Barry Diller, who was counting on search company Ask Jeeves to anchor his sprawling Internet empire. In March, Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp agreed to acquire Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion in stock.
Netflix fans, rejoice! There's yet another reason to love Netflix: the company recently won a Copernican award from Creative Good, a New York-based customer experience consultancy. The Copernicans are awarded to "top companies and organizations that succeed by putting customers at the center of their business universe."
An interesting aside: the New York State DMV - License Express was also a finalist, while JetBlue won a Copernican award in the "large company" category (> $1 billion in revenue).
The Learning Annex is advertising on Craig's List for a real estate blogger:
"The Learning Annex is seeking a writer to create editorial for a real estate blog that must be updated every day with interesting current events both local and national. Writer must be self-directed. Site will be supported by Learning Annex advertising. $100 a day. We can provide work station or work from your location."
If nothing else, it means that blogs like Curbed will soon have some additional competition in the race to cover the movers and shakers of the New York real estate world.
Maybe this is old news, but Major League Baseball now has a $4.95/month blog offering. After watching highlights of last night's Yankees win at Yankees.com, I stumbled across an advertisement for Major League Baseball Blogs:
"Sign up for your own blog. You're following baseball. Now let them follow you. Choose your favorite MLB template with team logo. Blog around the clock with your baseball thoughts and photos -- and then watch your crowd form!"
If Orioles Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson or former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda can be a blogger, so can you...
Mass-market celebrities are experimenting with niche media like never before: Martha Stewart is moving to satellite radio, Britney Spears and Rosie O'Donnell are blogging, Arianna Huffington recently launched her celebrity super-blog and, yes, Paris Hilton has been podcasting. Over at Tech Central Station, The Digital VIP Room is a look at how mass-market celebrities are adapting to the world of micro-market media.
Andy Warhol once famously remarked that "In the future, we will all be famous for 15 minutes." Maybe it's time to update that for the 21st century: "In the future, we will all be famous to 15 people." Within our hyper-niches, we will all be famous.
The Guardian (U.K.) sent travel reporter Mike Hodgkinson to tour New York City for 48 hours. The only catch? Mike could only use tips and advice generated by New York-area bloggers:
"The idea was simple. For 48 hours, I would tour Manhattan using the "blogosphere" as my guide. By tapping the freshly posted thoughts of the city's (perhaps the world's) most opinionated insiders - New York bloggers - I'd leave behind the instantly outdated world of guidebooks, with their inherent obsolescence and excess poundage. What use could I possibly have, in a high-speed world, for knowledge distributed on a crude and bulky medium like paper?"
Among the blogs mentioned: Micro Persuasion, Vittles Vamp, Manhattan Waitress, Tien Mao's Little Read Book, The Food Section news blog, The Gaijin Girl's Guide to Chinatown, Manhattan Transfer, Slice NY, The Ninth Circle of Helen, Le Blog Exuberance, nycbloggers.com, mrbellersneighborhood.com and Gawker.
Looking for that little coffee shop around the corner? Try out the Delocator, a Web site that "helps people find out where Starbucks stores are not." The site was launched by a collective of artists who are "raging against what they say is a compliance-driven, coglike work force slinging coffee in the highly regulated architectural constructs of the chain."
Crain's New York points out that Broadway is trying to attract more international visitors to the Great White Way through a new multilingual Web site: IloveNYTheater.com. Currently, foreign visitors account for approximately 10.5% of all Broadway tickets sold.
Not to be missed: Instapundit on "The Unbearable Rightness of Nick Denton." There's a blog rebellion going on among the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, proof positive that blog publisher Nick Denton (of Gawker fame) may have been right when he wrote about blogs as a form of asymmetric warfare. When management is not responsive to the needs of its workers, things like this tend to happen:
"...We've started to see a switch: Where an earlier generation of articles on employee-blogging warned the employees about the danger of retribution from the employers, a newer version of the story warns employers about the power of the bloggers in their midst."
After analyzing the efforts by weblog publishers Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis to create a profitable, sustainable blog business model, Business 2.0 pokes around John Battelle's new blogging venture (FM Publishing) for a glimpse at the future of blogging:
"Unlike Denton, who publishes only the blogs he finds personally interesting, or Calacanis, who follows the trails of Google AdWords wherever they might lead him, Battelle intends to partner only with bloggers who have decided that their blogs are worth owning and who also already have viable business models."
So how will Battelle conquer the wild and wooly world of blogs? "His plan is to offer himself as a publisher-as-service to blogging entities. He'd aggregate traffic, sell category-specific advertising against the sites in the FM network, and handle the back-end business and tech issues."
"Computer forensic specialists from SUNY at Cortland discovered that Wanamaker was subscribed to 48 different forums and networking communities... They also found that he posted a comment into one forum or another on an average of two per minute every hour of the day for the past seven weeks."
(If you don't believe this one, how about the one about a young Georgia bride-to-be who was abducted by suburban kidnappers?)
The New York Daily News explains that the celebrity blog is more than just another vanity of highly-paid Hollywood starlets. These blogs represent a new way of breaking news and communicating with the fan base, essentially erasing the need for PR handlers, publicists and tabloid editors. According to one New York-based PR expert, "It's an extremely effective way to make certain announcements because it reaches directly to the fan... It's information that is conceived by the public to be coming straight from the celebrity."
Jason Kottke asks an interesting question: Why did online traffic at the NewYorkTimes.com Web site hit record-breaking levels last month? While the New York Times has always been a favorite resource for bloggers and other online news junkies, it looks like the newspaper did little or nothing special to boost traffic. Kottke points to the New York Times press release and wonders aloud how "content" alone could have been responsible for the spike in traffic:
"Having some experience building and running content-based web sites, I'm skeptical the specific content offered by the NY Times is the whole story here. (This is a bit like Amazon saying their sales increased mostly because the quality of the books offered went up.)"
For those keeping track, the New York Times had 555 million page views in March, a nifty little 17% increase compared to the year-earlier period.
NBC executives are bouncing around the idea of giving blogs to the network's top news anchors as a way of retaining their TV audiences. That means Brian Williams and Katie Couric could soon join the blogosphere. NBC Universal Television Group President Jeff Zucker comments on the possible role of blogs at NBC:
"Over the next two years, network news is going to go through a lot more changes. This is one of the biggest issues facing traditional network news divisions. I don't know why Brian Williams isn't blogging right now. We should be looking for a more interactive component ... and be experimenting more."
After a recent New York Times piece about bloggers getting fired for sharing tidbits about their workplaces, BL Ochman's What's Next blog is conducting an interesting experiment about the ability of the blogosphere to propagate ideas throughout the mainstream media:
"I've decided to start an unscientific project tracking how long it takes a story to get from the blogosphere to The New York Times. In the case of bloggers getting fired for what they write on their personal blogs, it's been about five months, according to this BlogPulse conversation tracker."
In its Spring 2005 education supplement, The Village Voice has a special feature on professors and other academics who are embracing blogs and "blog culture." Just think what would have happened, asks Geeta Dayal, "if the great thinkers of the past could have blogged, bouncing ideas off each other in real time, engaging in rapid-fire debates across borders. Would it have led to some kind of intellectual utopia, or total chaos?"
The Voice references a number of boldfaced names -- Jay Rosen of NYU, Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, Cameron Marlow of MIT, and Danah Boyd of UC-Berkeley -- as well as the types of academics you might not ordinarily associate with blogging, like the lecturer in ethnomusicology at Brown or the theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago.
There's a legal battle brewing between a Long Island entrepreneur and Google over the use of the name "Froogle." According to Newsday, it's really a question of "who oogled first":
In December 2000, Long Island's Richard Wolfe registered his Internet shopping site, Froogles.com. Two years later, when Google launched a comparison-shopping site of its own, Froogle.com, the company faced a legal backlash from Wolfe, who argued that the Froogle.com name infringed on the Froogles.com name he'd been using for two years.
The case is now going to federal court, where Google will argue that it is the "senior user of marks that incorporate the formative '--OOGLE' for Internet search services."
New York Web sites landed a total of 43 nominations for this year's Webby Awards, with a particularly strong showing in the financial, lifestyle and youth-oriented categories. Perhaps coincidentally, the Webby Awards will be held in New York this year for the first time ever. Crain's New York has the details:
"Of the more than 300 global Web sites nominated in more than 60 categories for the awards--which honor Web sites for their design and usability--about one in seven are from New York. Local companies were nominated in 25 areas, ranging from fashion to politics."
Spring is the high season for birdwatchers, so the San Francisco Chronicle wonders what's in store this spring for New York City's two most famous hawks - Pale Male and Lola. The good news is that more hawks could be on the way:
"There are one to three eggs in the nest with the posh Manhattan address, and chicks are expected to hatch within the next two weeks, according to avid bird-watchers who monitor the nest daily and report the activity on the Internet."
For those interested, PaleMale.com has constant updates (and photos) of Pale Male and Lola.
The New York Times Magazine profiles the popular Flavorpill, which now has more than 50,000 online subscribers for its e-mail newsletters. So what makes Flavorpill so popular with New Yorkers? Well, for one, Flavorpill contributors provide a value-added service by filtering hundreds -- if not thousands -- of entertainment and culture offerings each week into a workable list of 20 or fewer "things to do" and "places to be seen." In addition, Flavorpill is popular with trendsetters for its "vaguely secretive, in-the-know vibe." Advertising sponsors certainly have noticed -- big names like Sony and Absolut have already ponied up to pitch their products to a young, trendy audience.
Sports Illustrated has the details on a settlement that involves major league baseball's Web site, a sports memorabilia firm and the New York City government. After a "deceptive" e-mail promotion that involved selling autographed baseballs at above-market prices, MLB Advanced Media and Steiner Sports Memorabilia are making amends with the city by funding the full cost of fixing up a Manhattan Little League field, providing money for Little League uniforms and equipment, paying $60,000 in cash and kicking in tens of thousands of dollars worth of autographed baseballs and other memorabilia.
It seems like this story pops up every few months or so... The New York Daily News is running yet another story about Internet bullies and what kids and parents can do to protect themselves from harrassment online. According to the Daily News, the Internet has enabled a new breed of online bullies, the so-called "cyberbullies," to wreak havoc with the city's teenagers:
"Instead of yelling insults across the lunchroom, kids send vicious E-mails and create Web sites that ridicule. Instead of writing something sordid about a classmate on the bathroom wall, kids sneak photo phones into the locker room, take pictures and forward the shots to all their friends."
With that in mind, the New York Daily News provides a few online resources parents & kids can check out, and lists "five things kids can do about cyberbullying."
On Sunday, Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen and Nichelle Stephens of Nichelle Newsletter will kick-off their Brown Blog Series with a discussion on "Color or Content: Does Race Matter When You Blog?" at Lava Gina Lounge on Avenue C. Sabater and Stephens will address "how race affects a bloggers' perspective for an African-American and Latino audience."
At Business Week Online, S&P's Scott Kessler writes that IAC/InterActiveCorp is facing a classic Catch-22 situation: Barry Diller is trying to build an Internet juggernaut, but with two entirely different strategies that are at loggerheads with each other. On one hand, Diller is trying to carve out a strategy to meld together an "alphabet of brands," by taking steps like bundling together all his travel-related assets. On the other hand, he is attempting to accelerate growth through a hodgepodge acquisition strategy in order to fend off "intense competition" in different market segments.
Kessler explains: "Ultimately, at S&P we believe IAC faces a Catch-22: Clarity or growth? Interestingly, we think it has decided on the former, which is completely counter to IAC's corporate history and culture. We're cautious about IAC's apparent new emphasis on synergies and innovation..."
Vertical search company Oodle launched in late March, and that raises the perhaps not-so-obvious question: How many other Internet search-related companies are playing off positive associations of the Google name by also including the "oo" sound in their names?
There's Oodle, of course. And Kanoodle. And Accoona, which launched to great fanfare a few months ago. And ooBdoo, which re-launched on April 6 to include new MP3 and image search functionality. Searchblog lists a handful of other search companies with the "oo" -- Mooter, Sootle, Soople and (if you stretch things) LookSmart. The original, of course, was Yahoo.
What is this "oo" sound called? Doing a quick search on Google turned up a few possibilities -- the "variant vowel oo" and the "digraph oo." Any phonetics or linguistics experts out there who can help?
It reminded me of the Wikipedia entry for the heavy metal umlaut, in which one single sound carried a number of connotations and implied meanings: "A heavy metal umlaut is an umlaut over a letter in the name of a heavy metal band. Umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter style typeface are a form of foreign branding intended to give a band's logo a Germanic or Nordic "toughness". It is a form of marketing that invokes stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples such as the Vikings."
With that in mind, what does the "Internet oo" connote?
FreshDirect has become the online grocery service of choice for New Yorkers, says the New York Times. In 2004, the company posted $100 million in sales and in the past two years, FreshDirect has made more than 2 million deliveries in the New York area. If you're a big Zagat fan, then you'll also appreciate the following: 52% of New Yorkers filling out the annual Zagat Survey reported that they ordered online groceries last year (a big jump from 16% in 2003).
A cool resource for bloggers: The Annotated New York Times, which tracks blog postings that cite articles published by The New York Times. These blog fragments are then grouped by author or by topic "to form virtual, distributed conversations that span multiple sites and that center around the coverage of news events as reported by the Times." (Hat tip: Wizbang)
If you've got a pain in the knee or hip, check out the Knee and Hip Pain Blog, from New York's own Dr. Ronald Grelsamer, MD. He's the chief of hip and knee reconstruction at Maimonides Medical Center, and a noted staff orthopaedic specialist at the NYU's Hospital for Joint Diseases / Orthopaedic Institute.
Vertical search is hot, and vertical travel search is hotter still. Sabre Holdings (the owner of Travelocity and the Sabre Travel Network) has acquired Manhattan-based IgoUgo.com, an online travel community and searchable database of travel reviews, for an undisclosed sum. SearchEngineWatch.com has more on how Sabre plans to enhance the IgoUgo.com property by developing its own proprietary vertical search technology.
CBS MarketWatch explains how Sabre's vertical travel search will work:
"Type in the word "Java," and IgoUgo pulls up only sites with information about the Indonesian island, rather than coffee or computers. Further, IgoUgo also culls Java information from its database of reviews and travel journals written by IgoUgo's 350,000 members..."
The Webby Awards, known as the "Oscars of the Internet," will take place in midtown Manhattan on June 6 at Gotham Hall. This will be the 9th Webby Awards ceremony -- and the first one ever in New York (the first six were in San Francisco and the last two years have been hosted online only). The awards ceremony, to be emceed by a comedian affiliated with "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," will hand out Webbys in 65 different categories.
"Google believes most people will like the convenience of generating a satellite image with a few clicks of a computer mouse. The company envisions people using the service as a way to scout a hotel's proximity to the beach for a possible vacation or size up the neighborhood where an apartment is for rent..."
In this week's "E-Commerce Report,"Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times explains that many online cigarette vendors are winding down operations or closing up shop entirely in the wake of a decision by major credit card companies to no longer accept payment for tobacco products bought online. "Not since the dot-com bust have so many sites gone south so quickly," according to Tedeschi. One back-of-the-envelope estimate predicts that over 2,000 workers from 30 online cigarette businesses could soon find themselves without jobs.
Google's Gmail is full of activity today as it celebrates its first birthday... Gmail is raising each user's storage limit from 1GB to 2GB as part of Google's new "Infinity + 1" storage plan and introducing new fonts, more colors, and additional formatting goodies. Happy birthday, Gmail!
Barry Diller's proposed $1.85 billion acquisition of search engine Ask Jeeves is a significant deal -- but not for the reasons you think. Over at Tech Central Station, "Barry Diller's Search for Meaning" looks at the ways that Barry Diller can use his various Internet properties to squeeze value out of Ask Jeeves. To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what search can do for you... Ask what you can do for search." It's a theme that the Financial Times developed earlier in the week, too. Paid Content teases out a key point that Barry Diller made in the FT interview:
"Many people think one of our considerations [in buying Ask Jeeves] was to help our current business. But they are not traffic starved. We are motivated by being able to help Ask Jeeves grow, using our travel business and all our other businesses."
The Wall Street Journal Online has a fascinating look at persistent search technologies that enable individuals or institutions in need of real-time information (e.g. day traders and hedge funds) to watch the Web on a minute-by-minute basis for market-moving news or a "spike in online chatter."
One of the companies mentioned is New York-based PubSub, which picked up news about the Indonesia earthquakes minutes before the information appeared on the U.S. Geological Service's own Web site. Another is Monitor110, which provides persistent search services to Wall Street investors looking for a competitive advantage.
Before you rush out to buy stocks or make life-changing decisions based on a willowy wisp o' information, keep in mind one important caveat: "Only reckless investors would trade a stock based on information contained in a few blogs or message boards, a domain rife with short-sellers eager to spread rumors."
"Arianna Huffington, the conservative-turned-liberal author, pundit, California gubernatorial candidate, and bona fide blogger, is adding "media entrepreneur" to her list of titles with a new online publishing venture, the Huffington Report."
Business 2.0 speculates that "the Huffington Report appears to be a culture and politics webzine in the classic mold of Salon or Slate. It will have breaking news, a media commentary section called "Eat the Press," and its most interesting innovation, a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite..."
Rafat Ali of Paid Content has already done some behind-the-scenes sleuthing on the matter and came up with the following:
"HuffingtonReport.com is registered by Jonah Peretti, the director of R&D at Eyebeam, an experimental art and technology non-profit based in NYC (and Eyebeam recently granted a fellowship to uber-blogger Jason Kottke). Is Eyebeam funding it, and is Kottke involved in this?"
Speaking at a media conference in New York, Gordon Crovitz, president of electronic publishing at Dow Jones, predicted that more Web sites will start charging subscription fees for online content. Crovtiz implored other publishers to follow the lead of the mighty Wall Street Journal:
"Charging for news that appears in print -- and then giving it away over the Web -- is an unsustainable business model... It would be good for the industry for more publishers to follow suit. Publishers in all mediums have tended to devalue their brands. I am very confident that other publishers will find ways to generate online subscription revenues."
The Wall Street Journal Online reviews WikiCities.com, a for-profit, ad-supported venture from Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia. Using WikiCities.com, "groups of Web users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly anything." There are currently about 200 different Wiki Cities. In the middle of the article, there's an interesting comparison between WikiCities.com and About.com (which features expert-written information on hundreds of topics), recently acquired by the New York Times Company for $410 million.
Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine comments: "It's just starting so it's hard to tell whether this will work as well as Wikipedia. I think that wikis work best when they try to gather the ongoing wisdom of the crowds on lasting topics; they work when they hit a critical mass of interest, people, contributions, and time... WikiCities is a third model: A portal where people can create free, ad-supported special-interest wikis. On the one hand, I wonder whether people won't just do that on their own sites, in their own communities. On the other hand, perhaps special-interest wikis need a portal to gather that critical mass of contributors."
Sarah Boxer of the New York Times finds that many content sites on the Web are simply recycling content from other sites in an effort to get noticed by other, more important sites. Generating original content is not so important -- what's important is only contributing a bare minimum of original observation so as to make it onto the Internet A-list. As a result, there are lists of lists, reviews of reviews, and museums of museums. As if that weren’t enough, there are also reviewers who review the reviews of others.
As a result, “the traditional objects of culture - books, movies, art - are becoming ever more distant,” says Boxer. “In their place are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists… The review is being replaced by a shopping list… The more lists you're on, the more you're wanted… The Web is not really a web after all. It is a list of lists.”
Two stories on blogs in two days for Joe Williams and the New York Daily News... Today's article takes a closer look at blogger rights in the workplace. Obviously, discussing sensitive internal corporate matters, taking potshots at the boss, or posting photos of dubious taste are things to avoid on a personal blog -- any of these actions could get you fired if someone finds out. The bottom line: be cautious and use common sense:
"While blogging can seem like a private diary between the blogger and a few close friends and family, it's important to remember that it is a form of publishing that anyone can stumble upon... You wouldn't say nasty things about your boss to his face, and it's probably not appropriate to do it on your blog either."
Blogs are causing a stir in the New York City public school system, says the New York Daily News. However, it's not the kids, it's the teachers who are taking the first tentative steps into the deep end of the blogpool: "Teachers all over New York are talking out of school - confessing their most shocking and sincere feelings about the city's struggling classrooms on popular Internet blogs." For now, most of the teachers are anonymous, but that could change once teachers start using their blogs for discussing lesson plans rather than "just dishing on co-workers and unruly students."
In the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz was writing about the film Los Angeles -- but his comments could easily be adapted for the blogging world:
"It dawned on me that we're entering a new era. Warhol's dictum is being turned inside out. Soon it will simultaneously be "In the future only 15 people will be famous" and "In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people."
C-list and B-list bloggers of the world, rejoice -- In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.
Online grocery shopping has been a life-altering experience for Jean Chatzky of the New York Daily News:
"There have only been a few times in my life when I've stumbled across a technological innovation (I am, quite often, late to the party) and thought: This is going to change my life... This online grocery stuff is pretty incredible and I'm not the only one who thinks so. FreshDirect has a list of 100,000 active consumers in New York City. Peopod, which works through Stop & Shops and Shop Rites in this area, has another 150,000."
"So, I'm pleased to report that starting sometime later this month, I will be an Eyebeam R&D Senior Fellow for the next year or so. Eyebeam aims to be a center for art and technology and with recent projects like Fundrace, ForwardTrack, and ReBlog, there's quite a bit of overlap in what Eyebeam and I are interested in. They are not supporting me financially and I won't be officially working on any projects for them, but I will be working in their new R&D space in Chelsea..."
Gothamist points to Daylo, a Craigslist-eBay hybrid for buying, selling and exchanging services co-founded by two Brooklyn residents. Daylo tries to incorporate the best features of both services, as well as a few bells-and-whistles -- like the opportunity to search by zip code. Gothamist explains:
“Basically it allows you to create a profile and offer services on a recurring basis. They've combined this with a feedback system, so you know which buyers and sellers are good, and which ones are not. You can browse profiles (if you are looking for services) or requests (if you are a service provider,) and everything is organized by zip-code, so it's pretty easy to find people close to where you live or work.”
The Daylo posting caused a mini tempest in a teacup over at Gothamist, with readers calling the blog post a “shameless plug” and an “advertisement” and a few other terms that perhaps shouldn’t appear in a nice, friendly, “can’t-we-all-get-along” place like Corante New York. (Apparently, there are fewer than six degrees of separation between the editors of Gothamist and the co-founders of Daylo, and that rubbed people the wrong way.) But as Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin explained, “It’s just a cool service run by some very cool New Yorkers.” Nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Commenting on the recent addition of Andrew Krucoff to the FishbowlNY masthead, Susan Mernit names the “NY blogger's trifecta” – Elizabeth Spiers, Jake Dobkin and Nick Denton. (Actually, if I were placing a trifecta bet at the blogging horsetrack, I would bet Denton-Spiers-Dobkin, but that’s another matter entirely. Or, better yet, I would bet Denton-Spiers-Dobkin in a box trifecta.)
In mid-January, Corante interviewed the two co-founders of NYC-based Dodgeball as part of its Future of Wireless series. The Dodgeball service started with a simple premise -- to coordinate social interactions between mobile users -- and has since morphed into a way for cool singles to "flirt and party" using text messages.
Amy Sohn's column on "Mating" in this week's New York Magazine features Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, calling Dodgeball "the hottest social-networking program to emerge in recent months" and an "addictive" technology for New York singles looking to meet up at bars and lounges around the city.
After noting that there are "hundreds of blogospheres" and even more sub-communities of weblog users, Anil Dash of Six Apart looks at "some of the common steps of evolution within a blogging community." The first step, of course, is a long and vociferous debate about "What is blogging?"
"Once you see these trends, it becomes much easier to see how there is no one monolithic weblog medium, and that these trends are likely to repeat themselves forever... The other interesting generality about these issues is that they almost all end up not being a big deal. They seem like huge, all-consuming issues of great importance at the time, but they almost always end up being resolved with no clear answer and a vague sense that maybe it wasn't the end of the world after all."
Gothamist provides a list of the five best "old-school" Internet mailing lists that are essential for any New Yorker trying to stay informed about events happening around the city. The usual suspects -- like Daily Candy and Manhattan User's Guide.
How much is Ask Jeeves really worth? Barry Diller's IAC/Interactive Corp. offered to buy the company in an all-stock bid worth $1.95 billion. Shareholders are grumbling about the amount, while Wall Street analysts think that Diller once again proved his prowess as a big-time dealmaker. (the deal values Ask Jeeves at about $28 a share, well below the company's 52-week high of $44.66) In fact, one analyst issued a report called "IAC's Big Heist," in reference to the low price offered by IAC.
In general, Internet analysts were upbeat about the potential effect of the deal on Mr. Diller's company -- "it gives his company an entry into the rapidly growing market for advertising on search engines and also provides it with a broad Web site that could tie together its disparate parts, which include the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, Match.com, and Citysearch."
Blogger Jason Kottke is winding down his micropatron campaign at 12 noon today. Give what you can. If not out of altrusim, then out of pure self-interest -- kottke.org is awarding gifts to a limited number of donors who give $30 or more.
In an article for Slate, Paul Boutin calls newsmashing "the new technique that will change blogging forever." NYC political bloggers, take note. (Hat tip: FishBowlNY)
"Scenester blogs" (as in "Friendster," not as in "sinister") can tip you off to private after-parties and hard-to-find secret back rooms at New York lounges, according to the New York Post. Blogs are emerging as a way for "bohemians to differentiate themselves from dilettantes, and dilettantes from the herd..." Among the blogs mentioned: Gothamist, ManicMess and GoodTimesRoll.
"Mena Trott, President and co-founder of Six Apart - makers of the MovableType software that runs Gothamist and most of the other blogs in the universe - will be in town and she wanted a chance to say hi to all the New York City bloggers and blog readers."
In a brief post about online job search sites, Jupitermedia CEO Alan Meckler makes the case for niche media:
"I have often talked "vertical" and with good reason. Vertical opportunities on the Internet abound. From paid search to job search - vertical is king."
On March 29, Yahoo will launch a new service called Yahoo 360 that will integrate blogging and social networking features with other Yahoo product offerings:
"The service is designed to enable Yahoo's 165 million registered users to pull content from the Web site's discussion groups, online photo albums and review section to plug into their own Web logs, or blogs... Yahoo also is making it easier for the service's users to connect with others who share common interests and friends — a practice known as social networking."
Micro Persuasion takes a closer look at what the new Yahoo 360 service could mean for Internet users, complete with screen shots of the Yahoo 360 splash page.
Apparently Martha Stewart has found a way to pass the time while she's under house arrest at her estate outside of New York City: she's chatting online with her adoring fans. Typing away from her kitchen, Stewart discussed the chances of writing a tell-all autobiography, debated the merits of her now-infamous ankle bracelet and provided a glimpse of her Easter dinner plans (kielbasa).
MaxDelivery.com generated a fair amount of buzz last week with the news that it was planning to pick up where Kozmo and Urban Fetch left off. (Or, is that "drop off where Kozmo and Urban Fetch picked up"?) According to one New York blogger, it looks like the same folks who brought you Kozmo are back in the game:
"I called a friend from my Kozmo days. Lo and behold - it's not just a bunch of no-name kids trying their hand at the "from the internet to your door in under an hour" game. It's Chris Siragusa - the former CTO at Kozmo."
Alan Meckler revels in the fact that Jupitermedia generated nearly $1 million in revenue, virtually overnight, by creating a new stock photo Web site (Comstock 1700k) that enables users to download royalty-free photos in bulk via paid subscription:
"We launched the site a few weeks ago and sales are moving in on $20,000 per week and building. Our promotion effort was nothing more than running banners on our various image Web sites as well as some of our developer sites in the JupiterWeb network... This is an example of terrific organic growth for virtually no cost. It is also an example of how amazing the Internet is as a distribution channel. No promotion cost, no inventory cost and very little effort."
Adam Balkin of NY1 explores a virtual Chinatown, courtesy of a "Mapping Our Heritage" project at a Chinatown museum. The virtual Chinatown is a "new permanent, high-tech installation designed to give you unique insight into the nation's largest Chinatown" -- complete with a 3-D, interactive map. Visitors can find it at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MoCA), 70 Mulberry Street.
Business Week's Heather Green profiles del.icio.us founder Josh Schachter, a 30-year-old New Yorker who has developed an intuitive, easy-to-use tagging system to organize the Web's information. Tagging is growing so fast, in fact, that Business Week refers to it as a "grassroots alternative to traditional search." Schachter has another way to characterize del.icio.us: "It's a way to augment your memory and a fountain of interesting things."
To see tagging in action, check out Nick Denton's tagging experiment over at Gawker Media's Gridskipper: "If you're using Wists, Delicious or Flickr, and you're posting an item that might be good for Gridskipper, just add a gridskipper tag. I'll be monitoring the feeds. Maybe we can even syndicate them to gridskipper.com..."
As Yogi Berra would have said, "It's deja vu, all over again"... MaxDelivery.com is billing itself as the latest reincarnation of Kozmo or Urban Fetch: "MaxDelivery allows you to buy all of the things you need every day, from food to drug store items to DVD rentals, and get them brought to your door in under an hour! GUARANTEED."
Curbed, though, is less than impressed: "Huh, whatta concept. Beta service starts March 15; free t-shirts, pints of Ben & Jerry's, and cover story in Silicon Alley Reporter, er, Calacanis' blog to follow..."
Newsweek profiles "super-blogger" and "micro-celebrity" Jason Kottke, comparing him favorably to the "Today" show's Matt Lauer. By some estimates, Kottke's site receives 25,000+ visitors a day, so for any blogger hoping to build a large, loyal audience, it's worth finding out Kottke's take on journalism, blogging and micro-advertising.
In his weekly e-commerce report, Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times looks at the new generation of Web-enabled ATMs. Banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America are finally realizing that it's time to give their "painfully low-tech A.T.M.'s a dose of Internet technology aimed at speeding transactions, reducing paperwork and exposing customers to a much wider range of transactions."
Since online banking customers are generally more profitable for a bank than offline-only customers, the technology boost could prove to be a win-win for both banks and customers. A New York-based marketing consultant explains why banks are trying to migrate customers online: "What banks love about it is that people who bank online tend to hit their bank, so to speak, more times per month than people who just go to the branch. So it gives banks more marketing opportunities."
"We believe Yahoo is likely to continue to invest in the blogosphere; we see Yahoo building and buying blog tools and RSS search capabilities to complement MyYahoo's readership/aggregation service."
What's interesting is that the article refers to Yahoo as an "Internet media company" and that the words "blog content" and "advertising" were mentioned in the same breath. No surprise, really, that Yahoo is moving into blogging -- they almost have to, after Google bought Blogger and AskJeeves bought Bloglines. Stay tuned for more about Yahoo's possible blog media empire.
The New York Times previews the new online digital gallery of the New York Public Library, which includes over 275,000 images of manuscripts, dust jackets, menus and sheet-music covers, among other oddities. Beware, though, browsing through the images can be addictive: "If you dive in today without knowing why, you might not surface for a long, long time. The Public Library's digital gallery is lovely, dark and deep. Quite eccentric, too." There's 340 images from the NYPL science collection, for example, which chronicles more than 700 years (!) of science breakthroughs in fields like astronomy, chemistry, geology, mathematics, medicine, and physics.
In its Wednesday "Dining In" section, the New York Times takes an inside look at the world of online food delivery in NYC. Sites like MenuPages.com, for example, now have comprehensive menus available for almost any restaurant you might consider ordering from -- and New Yorkers are responding in huge numbers. After launching in November 2002, MenuPages.com now gets as many as 485,000 visitors a month.
MenuPages.com, started by New Yorker Greg Barton, has a small full-time staff (4 employees) but a staggeringly large database: 4,500 menus and growing. For those keeping track, the nearest competitor is actually Amazon.com, with 2,000 menus. There's some handy Zagat-like functionality at the MenuPages.com site: the ability to search by neighborhood (e.g. "West 40's") or by type of cuisine (e.g. "Brazilian").
The New York Public Library's collaboration with Google must be paying off: on Wednesday, the library announced that a collection of 250,000 digital images (including maps, Civil War photos, illuminated medieval manuscripts and historic menus) will be available online later this week.
It's an exciting period of time at NYPL: "By opening the doors of our acclaimed collections to users over the Internet, we are plunging fully into an exciting new era of library service. These visual materials, many of which are unique to the library, will be available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection at any time, free of charge."
At the Search Engine Strategies conference today, a number of bigwigs from the leading search engine companies -- Google, Yahoo, AOL, AskJeeves, MSN -- talked on the general theme of "Search Convergence," sharing stories and insights about the ways that Internet search is continuing to evolve.
From a blogger's perspective, Yahoo seems to get it. During a 20-minute talk, Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo discussed the different forms of digital media, the Long Tail effect, the blogging ecosystem, the democratization of media, and the need to give equal status to both "mass" media and "micro" media. The final result is something that Yahoo is calling "My media" -- a highly-personalized media experience that can be integrated with a growing number of other Yahoo tools like Yahoo! Search. Good stuff.
A hat tip to Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion, who somehow found time to give a talk at the Search Engine Strategies Conference ("Blogs, Boards and Posts: Capturing Consumer Buzz Online") and still post a few reflections and comments on his blog about the conference.
While most of the sessions and clinics appear to be focused on search engine optimization and search engine marketing, there's also a bit of buzz about blogs and RSS at the conference. In the morning today, a four-person panel discussed "Web Feeds, Blogs & Search" and the various ways that corporations are experimenting with blogs and RSS feeds. A lot of Cluetrain Manifesto-type stuff about the need for corporations to "join the conversation" and understand what people are saying about them. People read blogs about sports, news and travel -- not about corporations -- so companies need to find ways to inject themselves into the conversations that people are actually having.
At the Search Engine Strategies Conference today, Jerry Yang of Yahoo talked about the future of search and the ways that the company is using search to link its various properties and create a cohesive Web-browsing experience for its users.
Internet News has more on Yang's kickoff speech, including details about the Yahoo Search Developer Network and some news about Overture Services (now in the process of being re-branded).
Over at CBS MarketWatch, Jon Friedman admits that bloggers frighten him: "I haven't reached the point where I can completely trust them to be accurate or comprehensive or analytical or, especially, fair. Sometimes, I'm not even sure if they worry about such conventions of journalism." Yes, it's the never-ending question of whether bloggers are indeed journalists, and if they are -- should they matter?
While Friedman admits that some bloggers are increasingly influential, he's quick to dismiss the other 99% of bloggers: "From where I sit, the rants of the vast majority of bloggers have about as much impact on the public's understanding of the daily news as the shrill eccentrics I encounter everyday on the subways in New York City." (Thank you, I'll take that as a compliment.)
Obviously, Friedman has encountered one too many of these journalist-wannabes (or else it's a cry for attention and readers): "Bloggers remind me of people who call into an all-sports talk-radio station and yell out their opinions. They have no new information to present. They aren't witty or clever. They're simply shrill. And that's no longer good enough..."
Newsday has more details about the “Origins of Cyberspace” auction at Christie’s last week that brought in more than $700,000 from the sale of 133 out of 254 lots. Among the top sellers at the auction was a 1946 business plan by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly with designs for the first electronic computers ($72,000). As noted earlier on Corante, the highest-selling item was a sketch of an analytical engine by Charles Babbage from 1843, which sold to a private buyer for $78,000 ($65,000 plus a 20% auction house commission).
In an article about ads embedded within online news stories, the New York Times points out that the New York Post is giving serious consideration to the adoption of the ever-controversial IntelliTXT. The system, developed by Vibrant Media, is the latest (and most intrusive) evolution of keyword advertising: when visitors use a mouse to view words that are underlined in green, a small box labeled "sponsored link" appears with an advertising message and a link to more information.
Forbes.com experimented with the system for about two months before passing on it, "citing unease among its reporters." A spokesperson for the New York Post cautions that plans to use IntelliTXT (already in use by 400 other online publishers) are still in a trial phase: "That was a test of new technology that was not intended to be live. They have not debated or discussed it internally. They are not making any prediction whether they are going to use it."
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. held a meeting of the minds last week in New York to work out a comprehensive Internet strategy for the company's diverse media holdings. As Paid Content points out, though, about the only thing the company's top executives agreed upon was that it was time to bring in some third-party consultants to sort through the muck:
"Rupert Murdoch figured none of his lieutenants were any good at coming up with a Web strategy, and has hired management consultants McKinsey to help come up with a new global strategy... The consultancy firm is advising News Corp on improving co-ordination between its network television, publishing, film and newspaper assets...the firm has initially advised the company should use existing websites to exploit the trend towards internet downloading and online advertising."
How much money can a talented blogger make these days doing nothing but blogging? Jason Kottke of Kottke.org is about to find out -- he's quit his Web design job for a chance to become a full-time blogger. Blogging for blogging's sake, you might call it. He's tightening the belt and asking his faithful readers to lend him a hand by becoming micropatrons. It's probably easiest to explain what he's attempting to do by stating upfront what he's not trying to do:
"Kottke.org will also not become any less personal or any more professional. This is still my personal web site and is not going to mutate into a vertical blog about tech, design, politics, pop culture, or even asbestos. I'm not turning into a journalist. I'm still going to write and post almost exclusively about things I am interested in, whatever those may be at any particular moment. Just so you know, I may occasionally post cat photos, as is my right as the editor of a personal web site."
A number of New York restaurants like Bed and Uncle Jack's Steakhouse are using their Web sites to flog anything and everything -- from shirts and CDs to jewelry and steak knives. The e-commerce efforts have two results -- padding the bottom line with non-food-related sales and acting as a source of buzz for possible expansion into new markets, says the New York Times. In fact, one lecturer at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration thinks that some restaurants may be so successful selling over the Web that the restaurant business eventually becomes a sideline endeavor:
"The restaurant could stop but the products could go on. If you make enough money this way, you might come to the point where you just get out of the business of waking up in the morning and spending all day cooking and being behind the stove."
The Chicago Tribune publishes a fun piece about New York's own TheSmokingGun.com, which is back in the national spotlight, thanks to the Michael Jackson child-molestation case. Over the past eight years, the "tart, celebrity-centric Web site has found and posted original documents about the missteps of the rich, famous and those who aspire to the same..." Now, The Smoking Gun -- one of the 28 most-quoted sites on the Internet by bloggers despite having only three employees -- has once again scooped the nation's major media outlets with a 1,903-page document related to the Jackson case.
Crain's New York, citing a report in the Financial Times, says that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (the owner of media assets such as the New York Post and Fox News) is "in the process of crafting a new Internet strategy for the media empire." Murdoch and about 50 senior executives at the company met in New York on Wednesday to discuss how to leverage the power of the Internet.
According to the Financial Times, "the company is taking the most serious look at its online operations since Mr. Murdoch's son James spearheaded a failed high-tech push in the 1990s. News Corp. is refocusing on the Web amid declining readership for newspapers, a sharp rise in consumer broadband use, and growth in Internet advertising, especially in the area of paid searches."
Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp (which owns Internet properties such as Expedia, Hotels.com and Match.com) posted a loss of $46 million for the quarter, primarily as a result of two massive write-downs: a $185 million write-down of the value of its call center services business and a $33 million write-down in the value of a U.K. travel channel. Without the charges, InterActiveCorp had earnings of $250 million, a 10% increase from the year-earlier period.
In order to promote its Yahoo Personals online dating service, Yahoo arranged a special Valentine's Day promotion in Herald Square yesterday:
"Yahoo set up an eight-foot tall model of a haystack stuck with giant needles. Finding the right mate can seem as hard as finding a needle in a haystack... but in Yahoo's haystack, the needles were in plain sight, and everyone who grabbed a needle won a prize. The gifts ranged from one-pound bags of ground coffee from Dunkin' Donuts and heart-shaped boxes of Godiva chocolates to the top prize: diamond-encrusted hoop earrings - the real thing."
Not to be outdone, online dating rival Match.com displayed classic Magnum photos of couples on a digital billboard at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The company also hired a photographer to take pictures of real-life New York couples as well in order to display them on the billboard.
A brief item in today's New York Post: New York Model Management is collaborating with teen Web site company Bolt Media to launch a "coast-to-coast model search" that will include a "cybersearch" for four new supermodels. The article hints that all aspects of the model selection process - or at least, the submission of pics - will be handled online. If nothing else, writes the Post, the models selected will be "younger and more cyber-friendly" than the types of models currently appearing on shows hosted by Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum or Sports Illustrated. After all, Bolt bills itself as the "#1 youth hangout on the Web."
There's been a rash of "gee-whiz, that's cool" stories about new product offerings (usually in beta version) from innovative companies like Amazon and Google. Google Maps, for example, launched on Tuesday and just a few days earlier, Amazon's A9 subsidiary unveiled a form of photographic Yellow Pages. In this week's Circuits section, the New York Times profiled two more sites worth checking out: LiquidInformation.org, where "text is parsed into a forest of hyperlinks," and Wikinews.org, an "experiment in collaborative news gathering and reporting." Both sites are hoping to change forever the way that Internet users use online information and news.
Unsure whether IAC/InterActiveCorp is over- or undervalued at $24 a share? Kiplinger takes a quick look at Barry Diller's far-flung empire, hinting that investors should keep in mind Diller's track record as a deal-making "dot-com mogul" and a close eye on the company's travel-related businesses. Wall Street analysts are now predicting that IAC/InterActiveCorp will turn the corner in 2005, with the stock price rising to $31 or even $34 a share.
Fast Company also has a nice overview on how the various parts of the IAC/InterActiveCorp empire fit together: "Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp aims to acquire top businesses in a bunch of markets, then get them to work together to build a winning suite of online brands. So many companies crash on the rocks trying to create synergies. How do IAC's leaders do it?" There's commentary from a number of executives who run some of Diller's highest-profile businesses (Match.com, Hotwire, Evite, Hotels.com, LendingTree).
Just in time for Fashion Week in New York: a nice piece in the International Herald Tribune about the growing visibility (and importance) of online fashion & style sites like Daily Candy, hintmag and JuliB.
"In New York, where being the first to know about new trends is nearly a blood sport, virtual stylistas are increasingly prominent, sending daily or weekly emails that aim to give readers an intimate look at the latest designers, sales, restaurants and nightspots." That means premium, mainstream advertisers (Nike, Jeep, Apple) -- not just pure fashion brands -- are lining up to place ads on the sites. By some estimates, as many as 20,000 people a day visit the most popular of these sites.
From Paid Content: Rumors are swirling that the New York Times is currently the frontrunner to acquire About.com (recently put on the auction block by Primedia): "They are the most natural owner, focused on content where as the others have a broader mix of business, and they badly want to boost growth of their successful but slower growing online properties. I put the odds at 5-to-2 that NYTimes emerges as the buyer."
Paul Conley, a former senior executive at About.com, also weighs in on the prospect of the New York Times buying the company: "The Times has been late in adopting the ethos of citizen journalism. Buying About would give them a leap forward. More importantly, About is the king of the targeted ad."
David Pogue of the New York Times discovers how a wiki works: "I'd heard of the Wikipedia, but I'd never quite understood it. It's supposed to be a free online encyclopedia, written and edited by EVERYBODY... It sounds like a cool idea, but I just never understood how it could work." That is, until he watched a Web movie about the heavy metal umlaut narrated by Infoworld blogger Jon Udell.
Cash Fetch, a new eBay drop-off store in Queens that has been open only three weeks, is already turning into a "haven for people who want to pick up a few extra bucks by ridding themselves of unwanted household items, buy bargains or even make charitable donations - all via eBay, but without the hassle." Among the items available for sale: vehicles, computers, electronics, sports memorabilia, comic books, antiques and art. From the article, it sounds like business is booming. However, a quick look at the company's eBay auction page shows only four items currently up for bid: three pieces of furniture and a "hair supply special."
BuzzMachine is among the first blogs to notice the launch of CampusJ, a new "big-time blog" that covers Jewish news at a handful of New York schools (Columbia, Hunter, NYU and Yeshiva). The goal of the CampusJ project is to "train a young generation of Jewish journalists in the reporting styles and methods of new media, while giving them the training and opportunities to enter the journalism workforce better-equipped than many of their fellow-classmen."
Getting around the city by public transportation can be a nightmare, so it's not surprising that a number of popular Web sites attempt to solve this problem. There's the government-backed Trips123.com, of course, which offers 24-hour assistance on how to plan a trip around the metro area. Or MapQuest, which offers directions and a graphical map interface.
But here at Corante New York, we've been taking a look at a new site, HopStop.com, and we like the results thus far. It's a simple, user-friendly interface that offers transportation directions in a number of different languages (Russian or Swahili, anyone?). Plus, best of all, it's been updated to reflect the recent changes to the V, A and C trains resulting from the fire at Chambers Street on January 23. There's even a new Hopstop Mobile option to get directions via cellphone or PDA.
In response to rumors that Craigslist will start charging rental brokers for each listing, real estate blogger Property Grunt weighs in with a fascinating look at why rental brokers both respect and loathe Craigslist.
"What does the future bring for craigslist and rental brokers? Whatever the outcome, Craig is going to be sitting on the catbird seat because his site gets a ton of traffic and eBay already owns a percentage of the site... For rental brokers it’s a completely different story. The Grunt has already heard rumblings from the grapevine that certain rental brokerages have no desire to play by Newmark’s rules and will be forbidding agents to use craigslist. Agents who primarily use craigslist for their business will feel the pinch and will have no other option other than to use whatever internet ad space is available to them or buying ads in the New York Times."
Tech Central Station was kind enough to publish "A Little Bit Broken, a Little Bit Perfect" -- my response to an article about the information literacy movement that appeared in the New York Times recently. The title of the article is from one of the Internet's inventors, Tim Berners-Lee, who once remarked that, "The Web will always be a little bit broken..."
The gist of the piece: "Information will continue to flow to the edges of the Internet and the pace of technological change will continue to occur at a breakneck pace. In the process, experts will appear in places you might not expect. Controlling access to information is no longer possible as it was even fifteen or twenty years ago. More importantly, controlling the way people think about information is no longer possible as it once was. Information, as many have pointed out, wants to be free, and the desire for freedom is a powerful force that can not be denied."
In one of its 10 predictions for 2005, Greenhouse Associates speculates that public libraries (e.g. New York Public Library) will emerge as content sales channels: "With more people working outside of large companies and with people in those companies generally getting less support from a formal information resource center, public libraries may become a key link between information services and end users. A number of major city libraries and state library consortia have cut deals to allow their patrons free access to premium databases... Importantly, these deals allow library patrons to access the databases from outside the walls of the libraries -- via the internet, with a library card number." (Hat tip: Paid Content)
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is shutting down nearly all its money-losing online and catalog operations. If you were hoping to buy something online after Valentine's Day, forget about it: "A note on marthastewart.com's shopping home page announced the company's final sale and directed customers to look for Martha Stewart products elsewhere."
It's not all gloom and doom for Martha, though. She'll be getting out of jail soon. Plus, there's been talk that The Donald and Mark Burnett are planning a Martha guest appearance on the final episode of "The Apprentice" this spring -- and even speculation that Martha may get her own spin-off of "The Apprentice." Plus, she did make the cover of New York Magazine this week -- not bad for someone doin' time at Camp Cupcake.
Amazon.com's A9 subsidiary plans to offer a local search service that can display photos of neighborhood businesses - a total of 20 million building photos in 10 major United States cities (including New York, of course). Before launching the new service, A9 sent out an SUV equipped with a digital video camera to Manhattan, where "a driver spent more than a week cruising down streets, capturing images and cataloging the location of each business using a global positioning system receiver." A9 calls the process "bringing the Yellow Pages to life."
Design blogs written by twenty- and thirty-something style mavens are starting to shake up the world of mainstream shelter and design publications, says Lockhart Steele (the new managing editor of Gawker Media) in a New York Times piece. It's a move that only makes sense: "Now that blogs, or Web journals, influence just about everything from politics to technology news, they are starting to transform the once clubby design community." Whether it's for advance word on new design trends, tips on how to find new products, or just chatter about decorators and tastemakers, more people are heading to blogs for the inside scoop.
AdRants says that the branding campaigns of New Jersey-based Vonage and Massachusetts-based BroadVoice are disturbingly similar: "Maybe it's just us but we wonder if broadband phone company BroadVoice couldn't have made its ad campaign and website just a little bit closer to an exact replica of competitor Vonage's website. From typeface similarity to the use of International flags to the duplication of page layout, there's something strange going on here. Who knows. Maybe the two companies own each other but hat's for the financial media, not us, to worry about. For us, it's just wrong for two different brands to look so similar. It's confusing for the consumer."
There's one company moving into the broadband voice market that won't be confused with either Vonage or BroadVoice, though, and that's Google. As the Guardian (and other news sources) have pointed out, "Google is the latest dotcom business looking to increase its revenues by offering broadband internet users the ability to make cheap phone calls over the web."
ClickZ reports that New York-based Quigo Technologies will launch Private Marketplace, a private-label version of its AdSonar system. The new offering will allow advertisers to buy contextually targeted text ads on individual sites. According to the CEO of Quigo, "Now the publishers get to control pricing, the types of advertising that go on the site, and those that don't."
It's an argument that a number of companies -- including USAToday.com and The Knot -- find compelling. In fact, Wayne Porter suggests that Quigo "seems to be targeting Google's Achilles' Heel - the control and pricing of inventory for larger properties."
Sometimes, the best way to explain a high-level concept is by using a richly detailed, easily understood story. For example, Jason Kottke explains how Craigslist is creating new cottage industries seemingly overnight with a simple story about 'a man with a van':
"I'd never really thought about it before, but in some ways, Craigslist helps lots of people build businesses cheaper and more effectively than more "robust", complex, and expensive enterprise software solutions. Movers are just one example. Craigslist can help you find employees for your business. If you've got a van, you can pick up free furniture and electronics around the city, fix or refurbish, and sell it. You can start a business doing computer troubleshooting, piano lessons, buying and fixing up old motorcycles, or escort and sensual massage services."
In a New York Times article, Gary Rivlin wonders whether social networking site Friendster will be able to make it after failing to capitalize on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in 2003. At the time, the company was flush with cash, the darling of VC investors and the epicenter of the red-hot social networking world. Now, Friendster is trying to fend off more popular upstarts and has recently experienced a number of high-level executive defections.
Other social networking sites such as Ryze (which once claimed thousands of members in New York City) are no doubt trying to stumble on the magic formula that will keep venture capitalists happy and the 18-to-29 demographic buzzing.
The finalists in 30 categories have been announced for the 5th annual Weblog Awards ("Bloggies'). Voting will take place between January 24 and January 31, with the winners being announced sometime in March. Please take time to vote for the following NYC-themed blogs: Gothamist ("Weblog of the year," "Best non-Weblog content"), Gawker ("Weblog of the year"), ManhattanTransfer ("Best kept secret") and OverheardInNew York ("Best community Weblog").
AOL, a unit of Time Warner, announced a new Internet search engine (AOL Search) as "part of an effort to gain a larger share of the online advertising market." The move, of course, will pit AOL squarely against formidable competitors such as Google and Yahoo. In AOL puts a stake in the ground, John Battelle explores the implications of AOL tossing its hat into the Internet search ring, explaining how terms like "media model of search" and "programmed search" apply to AOL and Time Warner.
The results of the Manhattan Project are in: Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion stopped 32 random New Yorkers near Grand Central Station on Wednesday morning and asked them three simple questions about blogs. Of the 32 New Yorkers polled, 18 had actually heard of blogs and six of these (19% of the total) actually read blogs (mostly A-list blogs like Drudge and AndrewSullivan).
18 of 32 ain't bad -- but it ain't so hot either, considering that blogs have been all over the news for the past 12 months and that well-heeled New Yorkers queuing up for bagels at Grand Central during peak rush hour must represent a favorable demographic of some kind. I can see now why it must be so frustrating for corporate marketing types to devote millions of dollars to creating a multi-media branding campaign and then find out that most consumers have never heard of the product - or worse, confuse it with a competitor's product.
NYC-based The Knot (which operates the wedding planning site TheKnot.com) will tie the knot with Ithaca-based Great Boyfriends, reports Crain's New York. The Web sites GreatBoyfriends.com and GreatGirlfriends.com, both operated by Great Boyfriends, post information about eligible singles who are "vouched for" by their friends, family members, ex-wives or ex-husbands -- in essence, a referral service for online daters.
There's only one thing better than a Great Girlfriend, though -- it's the Imaginary Girlfriend: "This is a service provided by a real life girl where she will pretend to be your long distance girlfriend by sending you personalized love letters, emails, pictures, leave phone messages (if you want), and provide other girlfriend-like services. This relationship appears real to others that may see these things, but it is not. There will be no actual real life meetings or relationship between you and your Imaginary Girlfriend other than that specified in your order..."
Online grocer FreshDirect is "beginning to affect the Manhattan real estate business," according to this week's New York magazine. Many real estate brokers are using FreshDirect as a key selling point in winning over noncommittal buyers, with some buildings even going so far as to place stainless steel refrigerators in the lobby, right next to the doorman's desk and the mailboxes. Quite simply, "persuading New Yorkers to leave established neighborhoods for fringe areas, especially those buyers already struggling to find family-size apartments, has been easier than ever for brokers." FreshDirect has even helped allay concerns about neighborhoods like East Harlem: "FreshDirect changed the game. While we’re not like the rest of the Upper East Side, buyers can’t use that as an excuse now."
According to Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times, at online travel companies like Expedia, "virtual travel agents are virtual no more." Look for Expedia (a unit of Barry Diller's IAC/InteractiveCorp) to open small kiosks and even retail shops in major tourist centers like New York and Hawaii. It's all part of an effort, say many analysts, to protect profit margins in the increasingly competitive online travel space. By establishing a physical presence in places like hotel lobbies, Expedia hopes to sell more vacation packages and destination services.
The New York Times takes a closer look at how Craigslist is circling the world with online classifieds, one city at a time. After expanding to London and Toronto in 2003, Craigslist added "a flurry of sites" (Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Sydney) at the end of 2004. Now, in 2005, Craigslist has plans to expand to a dozen or more new cities.
In the sense that Craigslist "bills itself as a community-based operation in the techno-utopian spirit of the early Internet," it bears more than a passing resemblance to Google, which emphasizes a "Don't be evil" mindset. As the article points out, Craigslist could easily charge for ads, but has thus far been careful not to. That's a lot of money left on the table, since the global market for classified advertising is close to $100 billion. But, as founder Craig Newmark explains, "Our site is a place to get simple jobs done. Life isn't fair, but we try to be fair to everyone. That's a fundamental value across the world, no matter where you come from."
It's almost guaranteed that Eliot Spitzer won't like this -- high-school and college-age kids from New York competing in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, a no-limit Texas Hold'em poker tournament in the Bahamas. At the tournament, kids who gamble online will match wits with old-time casino denizens in an attempt to snag prizes worth close to $1 million. After some initial resistance, online poker players are now warmly accepted in the real-world casinos: "At first there was really a tremendous amount of skepticism from the brick-and-mortar guys, in the same way they said when the VCR came out, movies would go away. But the industry has come to understand what the online card room component is... Many who start out playing on the Internet move on to land-based casinos, which is increasing the pool rather than somehow taking away."
For now, the old-time casino pros seem to have the upper hand -- but only until the young kids learn the tricks of the trade. In one example cited in the article, a college senior made the trip to an Indian reservation casino in upstate New York in order to refresh himself on the differences between online poker and poker in the brick-and-mortar casinos ("you can't auto-fold in a casino"). In another example, a freshman at NYU organized impromptu poker games in the dormitory to learn the finer points of Texas Hold'em.
Hibernation season has its rewards, says Michelle Slatalla of the New York Times. While brick-and-mortar stores are cleaning out their racks in order to display their new Spring collections and, as a result, offer only picked-over remainders, "there's still plenty of good post-holiday sale merchandise available online."
Noticed over at Craig Newmark's blog -- some brief remarks about charging for real estate listings: "Making sure: charging rental brokers in NY... for rental listings. We're not talking about charging for real estate for sale. Any of this will be preceded by a discussion which involves the community, that'll help us do it right." Charging for real estate listings on Craigslist has been debated for at least the past six months, so it looks like this is more than just idle speculation. For more on the business rationale behind the move, check out Will Swarts' article End to Free Web Ads May be Near. Says one Columbia University professor interviewed for the piece: "The thing that’s had a huge impact on real estate is Craigslist. It’s been revolutionary, and so interesting. I have seen something almost like fear when publishers talk about losing their classified franchises to the online world."
Which might explain the recently announced online revamp at the Village Voice...
Ahh, the mean streets of Westchester, where one of the biggest quality of life problems is cyberbullies. We're not talking about the kinds of bullies who steal your credit card information via the Internet, encrypt e-mails with viruses and worms, or clog your blogs with comment spam. No, they're much more dangerous than that -- they call you "fat" or "ugly" or "unpopular" online (which, presumably, hurts much more than being called "fat" face-to-face). Not surprisingly, the parents of Westchester are mobilizing -- nobody has the right to call their wonderfully precious children horrible names. There's a - get this - "summit" planned for February 8. If you can't make the summit, at least sit down and watch Mean Girls, so you know who you're dealing with...
NYC-based iVillage ("The Internet For Women"), has acquired Healthology, a privately held company that is a leading producer and distributor of physician-generated video- and article-based health and medical information on the Internet. The total price tag is $17.2 million ($15.5 million in cash, $1.7 million stock). According to the CEO of iVillage, the deal will, among other things, enable the company to "monetize the health and wellness space ."
From ipodder.org (via Dave Winer), some big news from WNYC (New York Public Radio): "NPR’s On the Media, which WNYC produces, is now available for podcasting. This is the first National Public Radio program to take advantage of this new technology."
Truepictures on the announcement: "As a regular listener of the station, I can say with great confidence that WNYC is possibly the most well-run radio station in New York City. It takes the epitaph of "the medium is the message" combines it with a great production schedule -- in this day of 100% pre-recorded stations -- live programming to create a great package. I think other stations wouldn't be as successful with podcasting as WNYC will be. Another step forward for Public Radio and the sanity of those of us who cannot stand top-pop garbage."
There's more about the Time Warner turnaround story at Forbes where investment manager George Putnam recommends purchasing Time Warner at $25 a share (the company's stock is trading at around $19 now).
Well, the end of the holiday season means that it's finally time to start checking the visitor stats again. More visitors mean more sponsors, preferably sponsors with really deep pockets. We usually use SiteMeter to check our statistics, but reBlog points out that there's another way to play the Web site statistics game: VisitorVille.
"VisitorVille is software that takes a new visual approach to web analytics; instead of representing website visitors simply as numbers or graphs, it displays them as real people in a real environment. You can watch your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city. VisitorVille brings your website visitors to life as animated characters in real time."
Wired Magazine calls it "SimCity for Traffic Nerds," while Lockergnome raves that "VisitorVille takes your normal, boring traffic and brings it to life."
Investment bankers may be looking for potential suitors for DoubleClick, but that hasn't stopped the company from signing an advertising deal with FOX Broadcasting. According to ClickZ News, FOX will use DoubleClick's DART for Publishers ad serving product and its Motif rich media management platform to distribute ads on its TV show Web sites (e.g. TV shows like "24", "The OC", "The Simpsons" and "Arrested Development").
New York-based GuruNet has launched a new Web site, Answers.com, that will yield "succinct information" on any term in any document. Answers.com is a kind of "answers on demand" service, a broad-based "super-encyclopedia" of knowledge. Despite the superficial similarity to a search engine, the new service is not being positioned as a direct competitor to Google -- search engines return links, while Answers.com will return, well, answers. The CEO of GuruNet explains: "We believe sometimes you don't want to search for Web pages, and what you want is a quick definition. Sometimes people want information very quickly and that's not Google's strength. We are not competing head to head with any of the search engines. We complement or supplement their offerings. Google is in a league of its own."
As if that wasn't clear enough, CNET takes another approach in explaining how Answers.com differs from Google: "The key difference between GuruNet's Answers.com and a search engine like Google is that Answers.com offers an array of editorially produced reference materials, while search engines list Web pages their algorithms deem relevant to the search term."
There might be a few kinks to work out, though. A quick search of "Corante" at Answers.com resulted in a very polite, "Did you mean courante? " No! Corante is not a "17th-century French dance"!
The site RateMyTeachers.com is now allowing parents to add comments, according to the New York Post. Parents will now be able to judge teachers in New York-area middle schools and high schools on a scale of 1 to 5 -- a move that the site's co-founder claims will force teachers "to engage parents as well as students."
Two hundred Upper West Side residents are slated to participate in Con Edison's Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) experiment. The idea is charmingly simple -- computer users in Manhattan should be able to plug into a power outlet in the walls of their buildings and receive broadband Internet access. For power companies, the tough part is convincing consumers that they should consider BPL instead of DSL or cable. According to the New York Post, this might not be as hard as it sounds: "Since power lines run everywhere, BPL has the potential to reach more customers, while eventually helping to drive down the cost of broadband Internet access."
Gary Stein, an analyst at Jupiter Research, takes a look back at his favorite topics of 2004. Not surprisingly, blogs made it to the top of the list. The chattering masses have always loved blogs, of course, but now it appears that advertisers and marketers are also tapping into the blogosphere as a rich source of real-time information: "The ability to tap into consumer conversations is fantastic and powerful. Companies are falling all over themselves trying to figure out how to use the blog phenomenon to their advantage. All too often, they conclude they should use blogs to talk. Please. Brands do enough talking as it is. Use the blog space to listen." (Hat tip: Micro Persuasion)
The holiday spirit is alive and well at the New York Daily News. On the day after Christmas, the paper published two "feel-good" stories about the Internet full of holiday cheer.
Upon discovering that kids in Harlem often lacked books or even access to books (the nearest public library on 115th Street has been closed for two years), a teacher at Harlem's Frederick Douglass Academy teamed up with an employee at BarnesandNoble.com to create a Web site seeking donations to buy books for underprivileged students. Within days, the pair had raised more than $500 for new books -- thanks to a helpful plug from fiction writer Neal Pollack's blog.
The other story looks at the online subletting of NYC apartments during the holiday season, with a big plug for Craigslist. During the period December 1 - December 20, there were 8,000 holiday sublets listed for Manhattan and another 1,490 in Brooklyn. Thanks to Craigslist, individuals subletting their apartments earned enough cash for air travel and Christmas presents, while out-of-towners enjoyed a Christmas in New York.
