A lot of PR people I know – particularly those affiliated with the tech and social media industries – make frequent daily visits to Techmeme. What is Techmeme? Here’s their “ABOUT TECHMEME” blurb: “At this moment, the hottest stories in technology are scattered across dozens of news sites and blogs. That's an awful lot of sites for anyone to check. Fortunately, Techmeme arranges all of these links into a single, easy-to-scan page. It's auto-generated through a news-picking software system, so updates occur around the clock.” In a recent email to his subscribers, the ever-helpful, often-brilliant Sam Whitmore of Mediasurvey performed...
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Since PC Magazine is for the tech crowd the announcement that the publication (can’t call it a magazine anymore I guess) would cease printing a hard copy and be a strictly online operation isn’t a surprise. The New York Times covers this change in the flagship of Ziff Davis Publishing while the company reports that the magazine would be profitable in 2008 but it is forecast to lose money in 2009. Magazines as a whole are facing increasing competition from their online foes which are eating into advertising revenue. Coupled with a general economic malaise that is getting a tighter...
Photo Credit: Adapted from Gateway Arch by docdevore For the past five years my browser home page has been set to either Google.com or iGoogle. (I briefly flirted with the New York Times as my default but have integrated their feeds everywhere else.) This week I switched it to Gmail. With all of the features they have been adding lately, particularly through their Labs, Gmail is unquestionably my virtual Swiss Army Knife. It is not only my communications hub. It is my knowledge base and to some degree my feed reader. Some say it is becoming an enterprise dashboard...
One imagines Facebook as a geek utopia, where hackers who dropped out of college play Rock Band all day, then stay up all night coding. The reality: It's as depressingly Dilbertian as any other company — and COO Sheryl "No-Fun" Sandberg is making sure it keeps getting more boring every day. Take the latest tiff we happened to hear about — in the social network's business-development department, the home of glad-handing charmers who negotiate deals. You'd think they'd be experts at sucking up to each other. Tim Kendall (shown left), the company's director of monetization — Valleyspeak for "guy who...
The Dow, with its first sub-8,000 close in five years, wasn't the only index with a record-you-don't-want day: the ContentNextDex, our own index of media, tech, mobile and entertainment stocks, dropped nearly 6 percent to 507.32—the lowest close since we launched it officially in September 2007. Compared with the year's high of 1,076.02, that's a staggering 47.68 percent loss year to date. The ContentNextDex performance hovered between the Dow's 5 percent drop to 7,997 and the S&P 500's loss of 6.12 percent. ContentNexDex is a flood of red with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) snugly in the top five losers thanks to...
Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy.com. Tim Ferriss’ relationships with bloggers helped him reach the New York Times bestseller list with his book, The Four Hour Work Week. I recently called Tim to ask him how to market to bloggers. Here’s what he taught me: Start before you need something “I reached out to certain bloggers as far as a year in advance of the book being published,” Tim told me. By building his connections ahead of time, he never had to start a relationship with a blogger by asking for a favor. Meet bloggers...
From Serious Eats: New York On tonight's Top Chef, the aspiring top toques have to cook hot dogs. The show sprung a surprise on the contestants by bringing in one of New York's premiere hot dog cart purveyors, Angelina D'Angelo, to show them how it's done. I'm proud to see Angelina, because I wrote about her in my New York Times hot dog round-up in 2005. I love the idea of Angelina appearing on the show, but I have no clue why they chose Donatella Arpaia as the guest judge. Donatella's a really good restaurateur whom I know reasonably well,...
I’ve long been fascinated by the shifting circles in the New York Times‘ “sector snapshots,” those charts in the Business Section that show the relative sizes of companies in a particular field — and which ones are leading, slipping, lagging or improving relative to the S&P 500. On Wednesday, the Times ran the snapshot I’d been waiting for - the one that shows where Apple stands vis a vis its competitors in technology hardware & equipment. The version that appeared in my morning paper showed HP (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) in the first, or leading, quadrant (up for the week...
Filed under: Poultry, America, in sixty seconds, Thanksgiving, FallIt seems simple, but making tasty gravy is deceptively difficult. Some tips. Gourmet side dish recipes: Brussels sprouts with apples, savory slaw, potato mousseline, roasted fingerling potatoes with figs, sourdough dressing with truffles and chestnuts. Yet another French chef renounces his Michelin stars and quits the kitchen. Helping preserve heritage turkeys. Poultry workers punch and kick turkeys to death. Eric Asimov talks music and wine. Mashed potato re-use: Spanish croquetas, or potato patties with spinach and salmon. Recipes. The Minimalist says skip the marshmallows and try some ginger and orange zest, or...
If I was a candidate for public office, I would not turn to Mitt Romney for advice. If I was building a million-dollar country mansion, I would not make Romney my interior decorator. If I needed jokes for a standup act, Romney would not be my writer. But if I lived in a nation threatened by a automobile industry collapse, Romney would be at the top of the list of experts whose advice I heeded. The reason: Everything in his life has prepared him for this task. To understand Romney, one must understand that his entire professional career has been...
