Eubie's notes

NY Times: What Wal-Mart Knows about Customers’ Habits. It another of those Wal-Mart articles that creates both admiration and concern, such as Fast Company: The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know. Their vast amounts of data, more than twice the amount available on the internet, gives them the ability to see that demand for Pop-Tarts and beer will go up before a hurricane. They make sure there’s plenty in effected stores.

They are tough competitors and do so many things with brutal efficiency. We as consumers enjoy those low prices, while at the same worry about what else are we buying with Wal-Mart’s low prices. One view of the Sears/Kmart merger announced this week is that combining the two will create a stronger competitor to Wal-Mart (NY Times: Trying to Get Big Enough to Battle Wal-Mart).

CBS MarketWatch: The free vs. subscription debate: Commentary: Did the online ad model win?. “So now that the Web has been commercial for about 10 years, can we conclude that the online advertising model for news is a better mousetrap than a subscription-based model? Apparently.”

GlennLog: What Bandwith RSS Uses. This article takes a look at the growing bandwidth on this well-known tech blog through its RSS feed. The problem isn’t RSS as it is ill-behaved aggregators that hit the same sites repeatedly even when the sites are not updated. Its become a costly issue for bloggers when they face bandwidth surcharges.

NY Times: Work Out Now, Ache Later: How Your Muscles Pay You Back. The old culprit was lactic acid. Now scientists aren’t sure. They’re focusing on the theory that the pain is caused by microscopic tears in the muscles.

Boston Business Journal: Tomato squeeze: Shortage hits eateries

San Francisco Business Times: Buffett betting big on workers’ comp: Oracle of Omaha sees billion-dollar opportunity in California

Washington Bureau: VCs see federal R&D cuts, but gold in Calif.

BBC News: How to smash a home computer. Freezing hard drive not recommended for repairing hardware.

Tabloid newspapers (size not content) are looking like the new thing for print newspapers. Since converting to a tabloid, Times of London, the paper’s environment has changed dramatically. The editor of the Times says the changes were driven by the realization of what the internet is doing to people’s reading habits and tabloids were a better format for that. Tip: The Pomo Blog.

Romenesko points to a Chicago Tribune article where design guru Mario Garcia reiterating his prediction from 1996 that a large number of daily newspapers will be tabloid format by 2020.

Lockergnome’s Tech News Watch: Your Odds of Becoming an Identity Theft Victim. Odds are 1 in 465.

HometownLocator offers lots of info on 42,500 U.S. cities, towns and ZIP Codes. Tip: ResearchBuzz.

Minonline: How Not to Be Your Print Magazine Online. “Most brands have gotten beyond that early online impulse to recreate their magazines online and have discovered that extending a brand online means locating and focusing on its core competency in a task-oriented Web environment.”

Examples: “At People Online, the staff recently moved onto the same floor as the print side, yet the editorial direction of the Web site has become much more focused on a core competency, using the Web to break celebrity news.” and at “Fortune.com the emphasis has turned to print archives for financial researchers and deeper versions of the famous “lists” of corporate and individual wealth.”