Category Archives: Quick Links

YouTube makes newspapers look like a good investment

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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

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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.”

Praising the short story

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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.

Mapping the Creative Class

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We’re all familiar with those game-changing books. The ones that you can’t escape for weeks on end if you spend any amount of time with NPR, The Economist or The Wall Street Journal. The ones that explode all over the media until they’re quickly never mentioned again. When it comes to these books, you’d be excused for thinking there’s some sneaky cabal of publicists angling for those 100-word blurbs in Newsweek and prime real estate at Borders. (Hmm.)

One such was 2003′s The Rise of the Creative Class, whose premise is so simple (We live in a knowledge economy? Who knew!), you might feel like a dolt for not having written it yourself. Well, Richard Florida is back with his third follow-up, Who’s Your City?, and the Web site has some intriguing maps.

A few of my favorites.


Minneapolis is apparently a part of Chi-Pitts. I’d love to know how they came up with these areas.


Why are all the single women in the East and men in the West? Can’t we do something about that? Some sort of singles exchange program.


Extroverted people in southern Wisconsin? I don’t buy it. neurotic people in New York? Yes.