January 2006 Archives

Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day

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NY Times: An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of "To Kill a Mockingbird" drew Harper Lee, one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters.


Science Blog: Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.

NY Times: Many people in their 20's are abandoning traditional media channels, posing a challenge to marketers trying to reach them.

Highlights:

Mr. Hanson almost never buys newspapers or magazines, getting nearly all of his information from the Internet, or from his network of electronic contacts.

"Papers are so clunky and big," he says. If those words are alarming to old media, they are only the beginning of a larger puzzle for today's marketers: how to make digital technology their ally as they try to understand and reach an emerging generation.

and


Among those with access to the Internet, for instance, e-mail services are as likely to be used by teenagers (89 percent) as by retirees (90 percent), according to Pew researchers. Creating a blog is another matter. Roughly 40 percent of teenage and 20-something Internet users do so, but just 9 percent of 30-somethings. Nearly 80 percent of online teenagers and adults 28 and younger report regularly visiting blogs, compared with just 30 percent of adults 29 to 40. About 44 percent of that older group sends text messages by cellphone, compared with 60 percent of the younger group.

NY Times: (M)ore than 450 advertising and marketing professionals listened to speakers tell them how to reach customers using some alternatives to traditional advertising, like viral and buzz marketing, that are becoming increasingly popular within the industry.

NY Times: For five years, the man who infuriated professions unused to scrutiny has taught a journalism seminar annually at his alma mater, Yale. Now he and his wife, Cynthia, former Yale classmates, are donating about $1 million in endowment money and additional operating funds for a program to train and provide career guidance to students interested in journalism.

Seattle PI abandons dayparting

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Seattle PI.com was an early adopter of dayparting, where the web site's focus would shift to reflect people's interest at various times of the day -- news in the morning, entertainment in the evening.

Now they've abandoned the effort, according to Brian Chin's Buzzworthy. (T)wo years of hard-won experience made it clear that we can't be all things to all people all the time. People might want to play games or shop or read celebrity gossip, but they weren't coming to our site for that (well, maybe for the gossip)."

Boston.com: interesting story about editor who publishes old articles from famous authors that are now in the public domain.

Fortune Small Business The scant research that exists suggests that, as risky as starting an independent business is, buying a franchise is an even bigger roll of the dice. In the early '90s Timothy Bates, a professor at Wayne State University, studied Census Bureau data on 20,000 new enterprises and found that 38% of franchise units failed over a four-year period, vs. 32% of independent startups.

If being an entrepreneur sounds appealing, try the tests at WSJ's StartupJournal.


NY Times: An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as an epidemic.

Derek Rose: sago mine disaster/ media flubbub:

Looking back, I think we all did get caught up in the euphoria of the celebration, as Alexa told me. Perhaps we just put aside our natural skepticism for a bit.

But put aside journalism for a second … what kind of human beings would we be if we didn’t get overjoyed about the rescue of a dozen miners?

NY Times: The plan was for Spirit and Opportunity to explore for 90 Martian days, but the rovers have spent hundreds of days on the Red Planet.

Scientists thought the rovers' solar panel would become covered in dust and become ineffective, but occasional mini-tornadoes on the surface clean the panels.