Eubie's notes

The Christian Science Monitor: Several government reports this week tell the story. For the first year since the Great Depression, the personal savings rate went negative in 2005. Pay and benefits, meanwhile, rose just 3.1 percent last year – the lowest rate since 1996 and not enough to outpace a 3.4 percent jump in the consumer price index.

Charity Navigator: We help charitable givers make intelligent giving decisions by providing information on over five thousand charities and by evaluating the financial health of each of these charities.

Philip Greenspun is an interesting writer. His latest piece is about retiring early. Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren’t that organized, disciplined, or motivated.

Years ago, he wrote Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, a book I read and re-read when it was new. Another good article is Why I’m not a writer.

WSJ: Larry Ellison’s Leveraged Lifestyle Revealed in Lawsuit Documents

In mid-2000, for instance, documents originally prepared by Mr. Ellison’s personal financial adviser, Philip Simon, show that the Oracle co-founder and chief executive owed a total of more than $1 billion to five different banks, just $328 million shy of tapping out his line of credit. At the time, Mr. Simon anticipated additional spending by Mr. Ellison of more than $700 million over the next three years, including $20 million a year for “lifestyle,” $194 million for a new yacht and $80 million for Mr. Ellison’s America’s Cup yacht-racing team.

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.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).”