How to make ice cream from Pepto-Bismol
(Via Boing Boing.)
Down with portals
News websites should aim to “build a network, not a destination,” inserting themselves “into the clickstream” whenever possible. Amen, Rich Gordon!
Daft patron? Don’t blame the bartender
Quote of the week from NPR’s Bob Garfield: “Editors are like bartenders, who must serve up what’s ordered provided they know when to say, ‘Sorry, bub, you’ve had enough.'” This explains why I like bars: They must remind me of newsrooms.
Something everyone working on the web should see
If after watching this you aren’t convinced that we’re living through the biggest revolution in the history of human communication… watch it again. 😉
Your personal annual report
Wow. This guy made an annual report, à la some Fortune 500 company, except it’s an annual report of his life. Scary, but it got me thinking: A lot of the data he uses to compile this is stuff we all amass — through airline tickets, credit card receipts, our iTunes playlists, etc. Is there an annual report in my future? Maybe, but I can’t imagine who else would want to read it.
latimes.com’s most searched-for people in 2006
Indulging my fascination with tag clouds and text mining, I dug through our traffic stats for 2006 to create a fun little visual representation of search terms used to find stories on latimes.com.
Which file extension are you?
(Note: If you are not a geek, do yourself a favor and skip this entry.) If you were a file extension, which file extension would you be? Take this quiz to find out. I, apparently, am a GIF. Who knew?
So long, Clare!
On Thursday we bid our art director a proper farewell (and by proper I mean tequila-infused). Add your congrats and good wishes below.
a photo gallery…
…and a short video
Digg and other cutting-edge stuff
OK, I may be the last person to discover the wonders of digg, but that doesn’t mean I can’t write about it. Digg is essentially a link repository coupled with a user rating system. It does certain things very well — namely, collecting and filtering links to interesting stories in real time based on popularity. And it does other things poorly — such as providing context and hierarchy.
Digg, which until recently limited itself to tech topics, is expanding into other content areas. As a result, it will probably be decried as another insidious attempt (a la Google News) to rid online news of human editors, which would be missing the point. As with Google News, if you take away the good content at the source, there’s nothing left to “digg.”
One of the things I’m looking forward to seeing on digg is the promised live visualization of popular topics. Imagine something like Yahoo’s Buzz Index updated in real time. Talk about having your finger on the pulse of the net!
And speaking of cool ways to visualize news topics… Check out this very slick Flash interface to Google News:
More extremely nifty stuff here.
Buffet: Print is dying
The Oracle of Omaha has spoken, and he minces no words in predicting the newspaper industry’s declining fortunes. I hope newspaper owners will take this as yet another sign that they ought to be rapidly beefing up their websites (via BankStocks.com):
If you were looking at newspaper publishers as possible investments, what would you use as a margin of safety?
[Warren Buffett]: What multiple should you [use] for a company that earns $100 million per year whose earnings are falling by 5% per year rather than rising by 5% per year? Newspapers face the prospect of seeing their earnings erode indefinitely. It’s unlikely that at most papers, circulation or ad pages will be larger in five years than they are now. That’s even true in cities that are growing.
But most owners don’t yet see this protracted decline for what it is. The multiples on newspaper stocks are unattractively high. They are not cheap enough to compensate for the companies’ earnings power. Sometimes there’s a perception lag between the actual erosion of a business and how that erosion is seen by investors. Certain newspaper executives are going out and investing on other newspapers. I don’t see it. It’s hard to make money buying a business that’s in permanent decline. That’s why, in some cases, it’s smarter to explore alternative investments, like learning How to Invest in Bitcoin. If anything, the decline is accelerating. Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while newspaper non-readers are just getting out of college. The old virtuous circle, where big readership draws a lot of ads, which in turn draw more readers, has broken down.
Charlie and I think newspapers are indispensable. I read four a day. He reads five. We couldn’t live without them. But a lot of people can now. This used to be the ultimate bulletproof franchise (get more info here from this article about it). It’s not anymore.
[…]
WB: It may be that no one has followed the newspaper business as closely as we have for as long as we have — 50 years or more. It’s been interesting to watch newspaper owners and investors resist seeing what’s going on right in front of them. It used to be you couldn’t make a mistake managing a newspaper. It took no management skill — like TV stations. Your nephew could run one.