First they tell you to swipe your credit card.
Then they tell you to push cancel.
Then they tell you to push credit.
I wish they’d make up their mind.
Posts Tagged ‘short stuff’
First they tell you to swipe your credit card…
Friday, August 20th, 2010A morale-boost for beleaguered newsies: E&P lives
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Editor & Publisher – was shuttered in December by its owner, Nielsen Business Media – has been sold and will continue to publish, according to a report by Folio: magazine. E&P is more than 100 years old, and has been the leading trade publication of the newspaper industry for most, if not all, of its history. Its demise was a blow to the gut to journalists everywhere, who for the last few years have watched the apparent meltdown of their industry’s fundamental business model.
The new owner is Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., based in Irvine, CA – a white knight that rides in, not on a horse but on a powerboat. Duncan McIntosh is a consumer marine media company whose properties include Sea Magazine, The Log newspaper and, most notably, Boating World.
There’s no deeper meaning to this. It’s just nice to write about a company that sees the value in a storied brand, tradition and a franchise that serves the media industry. No surprise that the company isn’t one of the diversified media giants, for which earnings multiples are the only meaningful metric.
The Adventure is over
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
National Geographic Adventure has lost its passport. It’s the latest casualty in the 2009 media meltdown. Staff was told today that the magazine, a 10-year-old extension of National Geographic, would close, according to a report by Folio:.
Seventeen staffers will lose their jobs, the report says. The brand will continue online and with other affiliated products.
Fun with spam, Lesson #113
Saturday, November 28th, 2009Content generators – we used to call them writers and reporters – are having a tough couple years. But they can rest easy on this evidence that, of the many indignities they may suffer, offshoring their jobs isn’t likely to be one of them anytime soon:
__________________
Sender: ydasyl@aol.com
Subject: We transform one dollar into one thousand!
Date: November 28, 2009 3:10:53 PM EST
Do you dream to have a rest with family this summer, but there is no money for this purpose? We shall prompt you the decision of this problem. Everything, that is required from you, it to register at the site of our online-casino, fill up the balance for ANY sum, which is suitable for you, and to start enjoying the gambling. You needn’t to be the master of board games to win huge money here. It is checked up by time!
So the Yankees won the World Series…
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Damn Yankees
… and the sun came up this morning. (But you couldn’t see it in Cleveland.)
Iran is on, no off, no on again, and off again in negotiations over uranium enrichment. Jon Stewart made me laugh again, and Rush Limbaugh is about to pop an artery over something or another. My son left the lid up; my daughter stepped right over a pile of her clean laundry in the hall for the fourth straight day.
Another bank either raised my credit card interest rate, lowered my credit limit, or both. The bagger at the grocery store would have put the Coke 2-liter on top of the Wonder Bread if I hadn’t stopped him.
Someone from Nigeria just sent me a personal note, addressing me as “Dear Kind Sir” and offering to give me several million dollars if I will help to launder it by providing my bank account number.
The bottom of my feet hurt a little bit when I got out of bed this morning, but I slept like a baby.
For these things, nobody is going to throw a parade on Broadway. So why should they when the most reliable dynasty in sports does the probable?
God how I hate the Yankees. How nice it would be if I could love them instead.
I could more easily stop being left-handed.
Playing the Twitter shellgame
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
I’m not giving up on Twitter. Yet. There are still a handful of people whose Tweets are interesting and useful to me.
But it’s a stupid game.
It has nothing to do with how much you have to say or how often you say it. It has everything to do with how many people you follow. I recently attended a webcast on how to build a social network on Twitter. The basic advice: follow a lot of people and they’ll follow you back. And if they don’t follow you back, unfollow them.
The rest of the session was inside ball: what rules Twitter uses to prevent such inanity and how to get around them (wait 24 hours before unfollowing anyone); how to identify non-followers quickly using Twitter’s minimalist interface (if you don’t have a direct-message option next to their name, they aren’t following you); and which tools you can use (Hummingbird, $197.00) to automatically follow people and then unfollow them if they fail to reciprocate.
By using this advice (not the software; just the advice) I tripled the number of people following me (from about 100 people after 4 months of thoughtful tweeting to 300 people after another day and just one tweet). Time spent in the effort: 15 minutes.
The etiquette at Twitter is simple: Someone follows you, you follow them back. And vice versa.
How this does anyone any good is beyond me; it assures that you have an audience of people who don’t give a wit about anything you have to say. And vice versa.
To prove the point, I just got a follow from someone whose list of followers and followees at this moment is in the range of 34,000. She has 14 tweets since May (4 months).
Fourteen? Really? That’s 1,960 characters, which isn’t even a respectable dependent clause to William Faulkner. That’s like 17 followers per word. If Jesus had a ratio like that, would Islam even exist?
When in history have so many people lined up to listen to so many people with so little to say?
What would YOU do with 9.5 man-years every day?
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
In a discussion/promotion for his business at LinkedIn, Mike Nobels writes that Facebook users spend a total of 5 billion minutes there every day.
That’s 9.5 people-years per day spent on Facebook. I don’t know the source of his information and I haven’t bothered to look at how many people use it; I don’t know the average time spent per user. I don’t even know why this is meaningful.
But it amazes me nonetheless.
