Adman Chris Matyszczyk ponders over at Technically Incorrect whether Apple’s ads are in fact better than Microsoft’s. If you’re gut says yes, you’re gut is right, but Chris lays out just why this is.
If you asked anyone in the wider beyond to tell you about just one striking piece of Microsoft brand advertising in the last 13 years, you might find them looking as if they’re trying to recall the name of their twelfth one-night stand.
Serendipity led me to the GlobalPost this afternoon as I tried to clear out the tons of unread items in my Google Reader (after two hours, I still have 1000+ unread items). First I read an article linked from McClatchy’s Inside South America blog about Brazilians’ perception of Americans as ignorant. A few minutes later, I saw that MinnPost has partnered with GlobalPost. I’m glad to see there are people out there trying different approaches to funding good news coverage. I missed last month’s article in the New York Times about GlobalPost.
That ad-supported reporting is only one part of the GlobalPost business plan. If it is to succeed, it will depend in part on how many people sign up for a separate paid section of the site, which was to have been available in test mode beginning last week but is now expected to go online in the coming days.
I have a never-ending love for Brasil, a country I’ve never been to, and when I finally get there, I’ll be referencing the Guardian’s list of Brasil’s top 10 beaches.
This isn’t the first time I’ve attempted keeping a blog; several other version have lived at doughamlin.com since I registered it in 2002. Past versions are lost to posterity, and I’m OK with that.
The latest iteration of this blog is by any measure a patent failure: I launched it on June 1 last year and have a grand total of three posts (this one is the fourth, and I had a fifth, which I ended up taking down). This is entirely my fault, and I aim to change it. But I am asking for your suggestions on how I change it.
I recently started a link blog, where I comment on the best of what I find online — I modeled it after Kottke.org and Snarkmarket, and the links run the gamut of my personal and professional interests, which are many. (If you follow my Tumblr or Google Shared Items feeds, you’ve seen fewer links from me lately, as they’ve all been going on my new link blog instead.) I’ll share the link to this new blog soon, but I want to make sure it has enough content before letting it loose (I also want to make sure I’m disciplined enough to keep updating it).
One option I have is rolling my new link blog into this blog; this is probably the surest way to ensure regular and frequent posts on this blog. However this would also corrupt my original purpose for Doug’s Blog, which was to post longer, thoughtful posts about… well about whatever is on my mind.
I could also do nothing, and continue to post longer item here infrequently, with short, frequent updates at the link blog.
Or I could nuke (i.e. delete) this blog, which is what I’ve always done with my past blogs that I deemed failures.
I’m sure there are some compromises too, and I’d be happy to hear them.
So, I know I have at least one loyal reader, and I’d love to hear thoughts on what I should do.
Obrigado!
Heffernan muses on online news comments, which she calls a “bête noire for journalists and readers alike.” Turns out most comments on news stories aren’t intelligent. Who knew?
Commenters, in short, rarely really sock it to a columnist. They also too often go automatic, churning out 100-word synopses of one stock ideological position after another. But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t, as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.
I was hoping to see Thursday night’s opening film at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, “500 Days of Summer”, but my sieve of a memory prevented that from happening.
I did, however, manage to take in “The Girl from Monaco” (“La fille de Monaco” for your Francophiles) and “I’m Gonna Explode” (“Voy a Explotar”) Sunday night and enjoyed them both.
The festival runs through April 30. Check out their calendar and get your butt in a seat.
YouTube makes newspapers look like good investments, Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate:
According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube.
And then there’s Facebook:
Last year, TechCrunch reported that Facebook spends $1 million a month on electricity, $500,000 a month on bandwidth, and up to $2 million per week on new servers to keep up with its users’ insatiable photo-uploading needs. (Members post nearly a billion photos every month.)
Design doesn’t matter. At least that’s what I learned at the Tropicana Executive Training Program.
After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars.
My favorite quote about the Tropicana packaging debacle is this non sequitur from a February article in the New York Times:
“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.”
A.O. Scott writes in praise of the short story.
Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose.
I was thinking of writing a WordPress plug-in like this, but it turns out the work is done: AP Style dates and times.