November 2011
63 posts
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Chefs Take Twitter to the Next Level, Field... →
How some top chefs are using Twitter to keep in touch with customers, promote last-minute deals and improve business.
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Self-Published Authors Need Success to Begin -... →
How some authors are making money (sometimes a lot, sometimes very little) self-publishing online. A few good techniques here for the adventurous and enterprising author.
October 2011
106 posts
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Google+ has its pluses - The Washington Post →
The essential advantage Google+ has over Facebook: it allows you to organize your connections around specific shared interests. Facebook, in response, has tried to guess why we’re connected to specific of our friends. That may not be the way to go, given the limitations of logarithms.
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“Day one, I’ll take a nap.”
– Herman Cain on his first action as president-elect or president. (via think-progress)
A man of action, that Herm.
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WSJ: The Fast Food Revolutionary →
Love this Journal piece about the founder/CEO of the Chipotle burrito chain. Unlike their competition, they invest heavily in providing sustainably raised meat and produce, and it’s paid off with massive success, as customers pay more for good quality at what is still a very good price. The chain is now the biggest buyer of sustainably, humanely raised meat in the country. Very impressive.
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Urban art: Helping L.A. murals rise again -... →
LA Times editorial strongly supports new city law allowing more street art and murals, with some interesting thoughts about making an ordinance that’s not TOO specific.
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The Art of Resistance - WSJ.com →
The collision of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s art and his political activism. Smart review of a man recently voted by one art pub as the most powerful person in art.
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Braaaains Deals in los angeles, ca - YP.com →
Fun HTML tricks for the Halloween weekend, courtesy of my pal at YP.com. Let it run for a little while. Very entertaining.
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Dial 9 for congressional approval - PostPartisan -... →
“Down to paid staffers and blood relatives,” John McCain quips after poll puts public approval of Congress at 9 percent. Well, Moms McCain ain’t so happy either, brother. Better not forget Mother’s Day this year.
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ChapStick Gets Itself in a Social Media Death... →
Chapstick chaps itself, and a bunch of others, with mishandling of Facebook ad campaign. Adweek with a painful-to-read case study on how NOT to handle an Official Social Media Mess. What they did, do the opposite. Really. On just about ever point. Amazing they were so comprehensive in their mishandling of it.
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Good news and bad news for news on the iPad –... →
More from a not totally disinterested party (the FT) on the recent Pew study of how people consume news content on the iPad.
Tablets are great for news consumers, and there’s evidence that “power” users are actually willing to pay for quality content such as the FT (or NYT or WSJ, etc.).
Also good news: CPMs for advertising on tablet-based news feeds remain high, even if not...
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Lapham's Quarterly: The World Business in the... →
The exquisite Lapham’s Quarterly takes a bemused look at the vagaries of the modern book publishing business, though calling it a “business” certainly evokes a certain sense of amused disregard for reality.
laphamsquarterly:
Imagine an industry where seventy percent of your products lose money. You knit ten different types of wool socks. Seven don’t sell enough to cover...
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Apple’s Newsstand: Wait for 2.0 | Monday Note →
Apple’s Newstand feature, part of the new iOS5, has sent online subscriptions/downloads to magazines and newspapers sharply upward. Now, let’s see what they do when it’s actually a more compelling offering.
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Tablet computers: News outlets look to them for... →
Are tablets going to be the future of newspapers? Reading news one of favorite uses of tablet owners, and it’s only going to increase. Me, I love the WSJ on my iPad. Thinking about the NYT and FT too
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“After an unscheduled stop at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, the president...”
– From an LA Times story about Obama’s brief visit overnight to Los Angeles. I LOVE that he had an unscheduled stop at ‘Scoe’s, one of the epicurean outposts of low-culture cuisine in the city.
Not sure about the message a ‘Scoe’s meal of gravy-soaked fried chicken and...
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Digiday - Khoi Vinh: Magazines Are Failing at the... →
Ex-NYT design chief Khoi Vinh says in this interview that magazines are blowing it so far in creating iPad-savvy apps of their publications. He gives high marks to EW’s Must List app, a distillation of one of the most useful features on that magazine, as an example of what’s possible.
But the bigger shift will be a box full of content delivered in a monthly lump to a more a la carte...
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“No one, least of all me, is suggesting that running a newspaper company is a...”
– David Carr gives media execs who lay off workers while lavishing bonuses on themselves the SMACKDOWN. Worth a read. (via cmonstah)
This is a really important point that doesn’t get made enough: A lot of big media’s wounds are self-inflicted. To take an example from one truck that ran out of gas,...
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L.A. councilman: Google 'unable to meet' security... →
The bumpy process of moving the City of LA’s email system to Google’s cloud continues to lurch along, as new requirements on security for sensitive LAPD files and other issues continue to emerge.
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Is This the Future of Punctuation!? →
Save the semicolon! A nice rundown on the running down of certain punctuation marks endangered by our, ahem, truncated and accelerated communications channels these days, particularly the most informal and widely used ones.
markcoatney:
By contrast, use of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the...
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The True Size Of Africa →
Forget how humongous Africa really is? Check out this graphic, which nicely wedges the US, India, China and most of Europe into its footprint, with bits of the Sahara left over.
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“Let’s see, my online news wishlist might include … an ability to simultaneously...”
– When we start to see more tools like the ones envisioned here by news blogger Torie Rose DeGhett, we’ll start to see more routinely cool and powerful online news-gathering/sharing efforts. I look forward to that.
Torie Rose DeGhett/The Political Notebook answering our question, “What tools...
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Online Music Tools and Services Help You Find New... →
A handy NYT rundown of some of the more useful online sites and tools out there, including Tumblr, to discover and wade through all the music now available on line. It’s a great time to be a music fan. Now, if only I could grow a few extra sets of ears, even if I WOULD look even funnier than I already do.
This AM’s Digital Hollywood panel went well, even minus 2 members. Good job by all the remaining ones. Now, on to, like, work.
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Our Last Graph About 9-9-9, and the Only One You... →
Not much more to say here about Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, except I can see why the millionaire former businessman likes it so much.
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What happens to books when the Kindle is free? —... →
A smart look at what happens when books, online, cost just a couple of bucks, and the system of delivery is both convenient and cheap/free. Do ads support book-length works then? Are physical books reduced to being, mostly, “fetish” items (yes, I’d say)?
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“He’s not running for president; he’s sort of strolling for president.”
– George F. Will • On Herman Cain. If Cain is strolling for president, Newt Gingrich is crawling for president. source (via • follow)
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Mike & Morley make Fox News, talking Millennials, culture, politics & their great new book http://ht.ly/70nJs
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The Complete Syllabus: “The Future” by The Editors... →
The marvelous Lapham’s Quarterly is focusing its next issue on “The Future.” Here’s the syllabus of books from which they extracted dozens of visions of what the future would look like, beginning with Aeschylus and working to Ray Kurzweil. Can’t wait to check this issue out.
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“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer...”
– Amazon.com executive RUSSELL GRANDINETTI, on the e-tailing giant’s foray into book publishing. It will release 122 titles this fall, including a memoir by Penny Marshall for which it reportedly paid $800,000.
I’d love to get a take on this from traditional book publishers, some of which are right...
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TidBITS iPhone iPad iPod: Apple Sells 4 Million... →
Apple dogged by too much success: sells 4 million iPhone 4S units over weekend, hooks up 20 million customers to iCloud, performs at least 25 million iOS 5 upgrades.
All of that slows things down a bit over the weekend, to the frustration of many, but I expect it will shake out soon enough.
All of this demand leaves me wondering if the critics of the phone know as much as they think they know...
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iPhone 4S video compared to Canon 5D MK II | TUAW... →
Want HD video with an HD price? A side-by-side of the new iPhone 4S with the digiphile favorite Canon D5 compares very favorably in many though definitely not all situations. And it costs one-tenth the price. I can see all kinds of uses for this. And the point-and-shoot camera sector is getting blown out completely.
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Big Cash Edge Powers Obama In Drive for 2012... →
Good NYT rundown of the OTHER 2012 presidential race, to raise money. Obama’s investing in infrastructure, and out-raising/spending all the GOP candidates combined.
A separate piece floating today says he’s focusing on a few pivot states that won’t require him to win Ohio and Florida for re-election.
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Eric Newton: Journalism schools can be leaders in... →
Knight and Carnegie foundations embark on $20 million program to improve journalism education at 12 universities, including my alma mater, the University of Missouri, and to connect students with new ways of doing meaningful, impactful journalism.
I love a lot of the ideas in here, and remain hopeful that as we navigate the painful transition from a print-oriented universe to an online-oriented...
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Social Media Gives Wall Street Protests a Global... →
Social media continue to drive the spread of Occupy Wall Street and its sympathizers globally. From Tea Party to Arab Spring to OWS, social media continue to be amplifiers for the disconnected and discontented.
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Chris Paine and 'Revenge of the Electric Car' -... →
Chris Paine rolls out his sequel this week to “Who Killed the Electric Car?” With several companies now selling reasonably priced all-electric vehicles, it’s a very different world.
The story is particularly fascinating because of the decision (unusually brave and smart for a big corporation) by GM to bring Paine in to watch the development of the Chevy Volt. I can’t help...
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Here Are The Four Charts That Explain What The... →
Some great data here about the sources of dissatisfaction by many regarding imbalances in corporate profits/CEO pay compared to (non)rises in worker pay, etc.
Thanks to my friend Trish Halamandaris for highlighting this piece. It really boils down the hard data behind the dissatisfaction of many.
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“Today, our foreign and economic relations remain indivisible. Only now, our...”
– Hillary Clinton, as quoted by Leslie Gelb, who rightly pinpoints her contention that economic power in a multi-polar world is more important than military power. And yet, Mitt Romney fixates on the defense budget in a recent major speech, talking past the new world, and evoking one now 20 years...
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“Really? You’ll go out with me? I’ve already stopped talking to other...”
– An earnest astrophysics graduate student, excited to hear that my daughter agreed to go on a date with him. He is named, in perfect Dickensian fashion, Ernest. She has advised him that it’s not necessary, quite yet, for him to quit his World of Warcraft guild. 