The Daily News gleefully thought up some new songs for
the Rolling Stones' upcoming tour:
(I Can't Get No) Metamucil
Limpin' Jack Flash
Let's Take a Nap Together
The New York Times' new print edition business section debuted today, but it doesn't seem to add much to the existing mix. The most important shift seems to be the cutesy
renaming of the feature coverage:
Business travel: "Itineraries"
Commercial real estate: "Square Feet"
Technology: "Circuits" (this was pre-existing, but now it has context)
Wall Street analysis: "Street Scene"
Because hell, if I didn't find commercial real estate exciting
before, I am going to be just tickled pink to flip to Square Feet each week!
In this delightful mid-decade era of dotcom revivalism—VC money! hot tech stocks! freelancing!—comes
Max Delivery, a new service for downtown Manhattan. Get DVDs and toothpaste delivered to your door an hour! I'm guessing the ridiculous perks of Kozmo and Urbanfetch (movie pickup, no tipping, free T-shirts) no longer apply, but with built-in delivery fees and New Yorkers' demanding style, this business model could rise once again.
It's good to see my old employer,
VNU eMedia, get into the world of weblogs, and with the right people involved. VNU has launched a pair of blogs, one for Billboard and one for Adweek, in an attempt to reach a larger, younger audience. (Given Billboard's circulation woes—down from a rate-card quote of
32,323 to a New York Times-noted
20,000 and change—it couldn't happen soon enough.)
The blogs themselves are hosted on blogs.com and run by outsiders with, I'd imagine, heavy oversight from the appropriate editorial staff.
Billboard PostPlay has potential. It's staffed in part by the journalists at
paidcontent.org, and Rafat Ali's team is solid. But would someone please tell Billboard's graphic designer to come up with a more sophisticated PostPlay logo? This one screams 1996, and it's poorly optimized, too. Not the best way to make an impact online. Speaking of which, could someone at Billboard set up a server-side redirect so the
home page actually works?
AdFreak seems to be a midpoint between
Adweek magazine and, say,
Gawker. Given the VNU copyright in the footer, this is an official site, but the logo and lack of a masthead makes it feel like a parody, or a foil to the similarly good-but-underwhelming
AdRants. I kind of like the content, but chalk this one up as a work in progress.
Keep an eye on these blogs, and watch for the magazines' evolution as well. Billboard's new print redesign promises an interesting evolution, one that I hope my old friend Ken Schlager, now Billboard's co-executive editor, will turn into an unqualified success.
Back in March I popped into
del.icio.us the stock charts of 10 listings that were sent to me via email spam. I was curious whether the blind feeds led to any quick ramp-up, in days or weeks, via speculation or otherwise. Hit "read more" for the results.
read more
