Eubie's notes

JoeyDivilla.com: Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck

I’m going to explain my belief that while netbooks have a nifty form factor, they’re not where the mobile computing action is.

ReadWriteWeb: The Emerging World of Real-Time Cellphone Data — in aggregate it can tell us how many people are attending an event to warning us about trouble spots up ahead on the highway.

LifeHacker: Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Windows Downloads

ReadWriteWeb: How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom

ReadWriteWeb: Study: iPhone Users Recall Mobile Ads Better than non-iPhone Users

The Raw Story: Cookies, not torture, convinced al Qaeda suspect to talk, FBI interrogator says — comments from Ali Soufan, former FBI interrogator on why interrogation is better. In the The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, Soufan played a key role in connecting the pieces to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden through his skillful interrogation of Abu Jandal, a lieutenant of Bin Laden. At times, in the book, it sounds as if Soufan was the only person at either the FBI or CIA who could correctly connect the pieces and find the wheat among the chaff.

WSJ: The End of the Affair –P.J. O’Rourke writes a witty essay about what’s happened to our love affair with cars.

WSJ: Weighing a Crusader’s Legacy — a new biography on I.F. Stone, including allegations he worked closely with Soviet intelligence prior to WWII.

WSJ: Crime Novels in a Cold Place — More Scandinavian mystery novels on the heels of “Wallander”

WSJ: The Secrets of Independent Retailing Success — “Retail Superstars” tells how the maverick, eccentric or just plain detail-oriented independent retailer can still flourish in the era of big-box stores. One sure-fire crowd pleaser: Make sure your restrooms are nice.

WSJ: Startling Spy Story —Eric Ambler ‘s espionage novel “A Coffin for Dimitrios,” whose protagonist is a mystery writer, was postmodern back in 1939.

WSJ: Charlaine Harris on ‘True Blood’ and Vampires

New Yorker: New Yorker iPhone Cover Lifts Sales for Brushes App — I was tempted too, and I can’t draw

Scott Rosenberg: How charging for articles could hobble the future of journalism

I fear that if our newspaper publishers take the collective charge-our-users approach, they will not only doom their own enterprises but will also make the transition we are currently facing — from a paper-and-broadcast news world to a purely digital one — longer and more wrenching.

All Things Digital: Little Laptops With Linux Have Compatibility Issues — XP is old but it’s still kicking.

While publishers continue to debate about whether people will pay for online editorial content and how to charge them for it, consumers are pumping millions of dollars into the app ecosystem through both subscriptions and micro-payments.

TechCrunch: The Awesome Potential Of Retweet

The ability to retweet retweets is critical because it means that messages could spread throughout the twittersphere frictionlessly. I believe this would make Twitter the leading way that memes spread in our culture.

TechCrunch: This is Not a Sponsored Post: Paid Conversations, Credibility & The FTC

Under new guidelines proposed by the Federal Trade Commission, brands and bloggers both may be held liable should either the FTC or scorned consumers deem that their actions or claims misguided them, or misrepresented the actual performance or efficacy of the product or service in question.

All Things Digital: This Week’s New Yorker Cover, Brought to You by the iPhone drawn with an iPhone app called Brushes — nice

Calculated Risk: Agricultural Land Prices Decline Sharply in Q1

In real terms, the current increase in farm prices wasn’t as severe as the bubble in the late ’70s and early ’80s that led to numerous farm foreclosures in the U.S.

AllThingsDigital: Hearst: Zombie Seattle Paper Doing Better Than the Original — also Puget Sound Business Journal 2 months out, web-only P-I claims more readers

TechCrunch: Not Safe: Poll Finds 1-in-4 Americans Text While Driving

WSJ: Recession Turns Malls Into Ghost Towns — including a focus on Charlotte’s Eastland Mall.

Calculated Risk: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation Deficit Increases

With companies moving away from defined benefit plans, there will be fewer companies paying for insurance in the future – so the PBGC will probably have to be bailed out.

Bizjournals:Portfolio.com moving to bizjournals in July
and AllThingsDigital: Portfolio Lives! Sort Of: Web Site Adopted by Condé Nast’s Corporate Cousin.

ReadWriteWeb: Digg: Shouts Out, Share on Facebook and Twitter In — Facebooks and Twitter and maybe Linked-in are becoming the hot linking, networking sites.

AllThingsDigital: Smartphones Selling Far Better Than Dumb Ones — iPhone sold more than 3.9 million handsets in Q1. Non-smart cell phones saw sales drop.

CSMonitor: Why journalists deserve low pay — it was hard to read, but hard to dispute too.

Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.

Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.

WSJ: Orszag: Economy’s Freefall ‘Seems to Have Stopped’

ReadWriteWeb: The Dam Just Broke: Facebook Opens Up to OpenID — Fewer registration windows, fewer passwords to remember, but will web sites lose connections with readers?

Six Apart: Before switching to WordPress, I used MoveableType for several years. Six Apart. Now Six Apart is playing nice with WordPress by offering several of their tools including an ad network, anti-spam and services for WordPress Users.

Denver Business Journal: Denver Post, MediaNews plan to start charging for Web news — many have been talking ending the give-away of print content. It will be interesting to see what content is put behind the wall.

ReadWriteWeb: Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew (Updated)

WSJ: IPhone Gets Bigger as Ad Medium

Calculated Risk: OECD: Global Economy at “inflection point”, U.S. Still in “strong slowdown”

TechCrunch: Calling All Coders: Journalism Schools Want You To Save The News Industry

WiredNews: Google Offering Training Services for Hyperlocal News in Europe

WSJ: Their special report was on starting over as an entreprenuer good pieces from it are:

1. Starting Over—as an Entrepreneur —For laid-off or worried workers, launching a business may seem the best path to survival.
2. Becoming a franchisee is often seen as a good first business for an entrepreneur. How does a recession change the equation?
3. Top entrepreneurs talk about how to keep your customers, and find opportunities, in tough economic times

WSJ: The Next Age of Discovery — As scholars race to digitize crumbling archives, they’re unearthing new finds – from lost gospels to an alternate “Medea.”

Fascinating project this summer:

This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.

WSJ: The Class of ’09 Curse: Low Wages for Years — College graduates who land jobs will likely suffer lower wages for a decade or more compared to those lucky enough to graduate in better times, studies show.

WSJ: Banks Won Concessions on Tests

WSJ: The Next Age of Discovery — As scholars race to digitize crumbling archives, they’re unearthing new finds – from lost gospels to an alternate “Medea.”

WSJ: Eiffel Tower: ‘Odious Column’ of Metal

WSJ: New Ways to Buy Bach Online

Drumbeat: Many gains and a big constraint for wind industry

The U.S. has become the world’s biggest wind-power generator and of the electricity production added in the country last year, 42 percent came from wind turbines. But as more megawatts come on line, the problem of getting power from wind-swept plains to places where people actually live becomes more urgent.

WSJ: Cellphone Users Drop Landlines —  recession convince more that landlines are not needed. And The Numbers Guy: Americans Become Harder for Pollsters to Reach