Eubie's notes

Atlanta Business Chronicle: Carter: No comparison between Great Depression and today

“There is no comparison to the Great Depression and where we are now,” he said. “The Great Depression was much more severe. Right now, we have 7 percent unemployment. In the Great Depression, it was four times that. Back then, there was no money.”

All Things Digital: Google’s Plan To Save Newspapers: Make Them Look Better

All Things Digital’s conclusion: I think that the best place for newspapers to start is by cutting costs and generating more revenue. But maybe I’m missing something. Would a better-designed New York Times site make you more likely to, say, pay for a subscription to the New York Times? Let me know.

WSJ: Local Web-Ad Market Cools Down — Growth in the local-ad market is expected to shrink, challenging the ad and media-buying shops that rely on the local Internet market.

Time: 25 Best Blogs 2009 – TIME

BoingBoing: NYPD’s enforcement of non-existent subway photo-ban costing taxpayers a fortune in lawsuits

Business First of Columbus: Fed exec: Recession rewriting rules of recovery

Michael Hyatt: 7 Ways to Keep Your Spirit Up in a Down Economy

WSJ: Ode to Joystick: Downloading Titles Without Leaving the Sofa — Just as sales of music, movies and television shows have gone online, videogame sales are now headed onto the Internet, too.

Washington Post: Economy Strains Under Weight of Unsold Items — The unsold cars and trucks piling up at dealerships and assembly lines as consumers cut back and auto companies scramble for federal aid are just one sign of a major problem hurting the economy and only likely to get worse.

All Things Digital: MySpace’s Google Gravy Train Set to Stop Next Year

Midway through next year, Google’s $900 million, 3.5-year search advertising deal with News Corp. and MySpace expires. What are the odds that Rupert Murdoch’s social network gets anything close to that with a new contract?

Very, very low.

TechCrunch:Survey Of Insular Social Media Elite Says: Twitter Is Better Than Facebook For Businesses — Half the reason I like this is the headline

TechCrunch:CardPricer Finds There Is More Money Selling Baseball Card Data Than Selling Baseball Cards

TechCrunch:Tech Layoffs Surge to 300,000

Update from TechCrunch: Facebook Backtracks Under Community Pressure, Goes Back To Old ToS (For Now) and Wired:Let’s Learn From Facebook’s Terms-of-Service Flap — Facebook’s recent policy change regarding control over photos, notes and other data shared by its members sparks a major controversy. But it also renews debate over data ownership within online communities. Who owns your shared photos?

Michael Hyatt: 25 Things I Hate About Facebook

I was ready to deactivate my Facebook account last week. Then I heard Chris Brogan at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference. He put forth a model that I really liked.

To paraphrase, he said that your blog is your “homebase.” This is where you ultimately direct people. On the other hand, services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are “outposts.” The purpose of an outpost is to connect with people that otherwise wouldn’t find your homebase.

Rexblog: This may be the hippest recession ever

AP: Charlotte in same predicament as Wall Street — the city is losing thousands of jobs and an unquantifiable amount of prestige. Residents who invested heavily in the banks have seen their wealth dissipate and lifestyles change radically. Last fall when the stocks of Bank of America and Wachovia were taking their first drops people it was almost an open discussion on what great buys these looked like. The stocks kept falling though.

WSJ: GM to Offer Two Choices: Bankruptcy or More Aid — Would GM reorganizing through bankruptcy be as scary as GM wants us to believe?

NY Times: Novelties: Bringing Wind Turbines to Ordinary Rooftops

MarketWatch: S&P heads to first quarter ever of negative earnings — “This is the worst; after the sixth quarter of negative growth, it will be the first quarter ever of negative earnings,” said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst, at Standard & Poor’s.

TechCrunch: As The Economy Sours, LinkedIn’s Popularity Grows

NY Times: Ailing Banks May Require More Aid to Keep Solvent — But without a cure for the problem of bad assets, the credit crisis that is dragging down the economy will linger, as banks cannot resume the ample lending needed to restart the wheels of commerce. The answer, say the economists and experts, is a larger, more direct government role than in the Treasury Department’s plan outlined this week.

TechCrunch: Laugh All You Want, But The Microsoft Store Could Be Great and All Things Digital: Department of Déjà Vu: Last Microsoft Retail Store Foray Was a Bust

WSJ: Jenny’s Famous Number Lives On — the number in Tommy Tutone’s famous tune still lives.

A Four Bad Bear Markets update.

WSJ: Job Market for Economists Turns … Dismal

Economist: Hulu who? After much confusion, it is becoming clear what works in online video

But the bigger lesson from Hulu’s success is that supporting streamed video with advertising, rather than charging for downloads, turns out to work very well. Hulu’s ads are few and short, with a subtle countdown timer that makes them even more bearable. In some cases viewers can even choose which ad to watch, so it is more likely to be relevant to their interests.

Customers choosing which ads to watch — that would provide feedback many ad execs wouldn’t want to know.

Guy Kawasaki: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job