Eubie's notes

WSJ: Commercial Property Faces Crisis — Some experts say it now looks as if the current commercial real-estate slump will rival or even exceed the one in the early 1990s, when bad commercial-property debt played a big role in dragging the economy into a recession.

WSJ: How Big Is That Widening Gyre of Floating Plastic? — The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it has been called, has become a symbol of what some say is a looming crisis over trash. But this floating mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean is hard to measure, and few agree on how big it is or how much plastic it holds. That makes it difficult to determine what to do about it.

Ad Age: Media Giants Want to Top Google Results: Argue That Professional Sources Should Be More Recognized Than Blogs

Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they’re newly upset that Google’s algorithm penalizes paid content.

Another shot in the professional journals vs. blogger war.

ReadWriteWeb: 4 Ways Companies Use Twitter for Business — summarizes Gartner Report looking at four types of business uses: direct (company tweeting), indirect (employees tweeting), internal and inbound signaling (listening). I was suprised to see how much was being said about our papers before they were regularly using Twitter

Silicon Alley Insider: 6 Features Twitter Users Say They’d Pay For

The Register: Apple proves: It pays to be late — iPhone wasn’t first, and it avoided issues that held others back.

TechCrunch: Please Miss, How Do You Re-Tweet? – Twitter Heads To UK Schools — The British government is proposing that Twitter be taught in elementary schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK’s education system. Will UK students learn QWERTY keyboard or just texting with telephone keypad?

TechCrunch: iPhone Makes Up 50 Percent of Smartphone Web Traffic In U.S., Android Already 5 Percent

WSJ: One-Month T-Bill Yield Dips Below Zero — safety and liquidity seem highest priorities.

ReadWriteWeb: The Twitter Platform: 3 Years Old and Ready to Change the World — We’re not talking about Twitter clients, we’re talking about Twitter data mining.

ReadWriteWeb: Federated Media, Twitter and Microsoft Launch ExecTweets

WSJ: Blogs Provide Insight to Would-Be Franchisees

Michael Hyatt:Christian Book Expo: My Take — Hyatt was part of the group planning the Christian Book Expo in Dallas. It turned out of have less than 1/10 of the hoped-for audience. But it was interesting to read his conclusions of why it didn’t work. It seemed to be as much from planning that it would be very successful rather than failing to plan. I’m one who thinks we learn more from mistakes.

Beatblogging.org — bloggers who focus on everything from tech to hyperlocal, such as Dallas school boards. Featured today: What makes a good, modern journalist?

ReadWriteWeb: Google Changes Could Decrease Downstream Traffic — A greater number of related queries will now be listed for many searches and longer page excerpts (“snippets”) will be shown in response to longer search queries. Those look to us like ways to keep people on Google longer.

PaidContent: Facebook Beware: More Mainstream Companies Are Adopting Twitter

NY Times: Sweden Says No to Saving Saab —  Swedish government is not willing to save the automaker

NY Times: Wall Street Journal Is Told to Feed Newswires. Memo from Robert Thomson, new Wall Street Journal editor: “Henceforth, all Journal reporters will be judged, in significant part, by whether they break news for the Newswires.”

What that means, according to people in The Journal’s newsroom, is that the first version of breaking news to go out on the wires should be just a headline and a couple of sentences, written in the simplest terms and sent out as soon as possible, rather than a fuller article written in the more complex language of the printed paper.

NY Times: Young and Old Are Facing Off for Jobs — The young argue that employers favor older workers, who in turn say they are being discriminated against.

The number of employed workers ages 16 to 24 has fallen by two million over the last two years, to 18.3 million, while the number of Americans 65 and over who are working has risen by 700,000, to 6 million.

Wired: Skype Dials Up Bid for Business

WSJ: Are Immigrant-Owned Businesses Surviving Better than Most?

E&P: Advance Announces Company-wide Furloughs — Also Ann Arbor News’ to Close — 3 Other Newhouse Papers Go to 3 Days and NY Times: 4 Michigan Papers to Cut Back on Print

CNet: Nielsen: Twitter’s growing really, really, really, really fast — now with more than 7 million users compared with 65.7 million at Facebook. Twitter grew 1,382% in past year while Facebook grew only 228%.

Twitter was acting up today. Maybe it’s all those users updating like mad today during the March Madness games.

Huffington Post: 8 Hard Truths About Stimulating Small Business

The trouble with a small business bailout is deeply rooted in practical logistics. Small business is as diverse and wide spread as the country is. There are something like 25 million small businesses, and 20 million of them have no employees. How does the government help them?

Michelle Leder who writes footnoted.org is now digging deeper into the public records with blog on NY Times — Perks Watch

Calculated Risk: Foreclosure Resales now 52% of Sales in California Bay Area.  The entry summarizes a release from DQNews.com, but their headlines was boring: Bay Area home sales climb above last year as median falls below $300K

CSMonitor: Feathery find could rewrite dinosaur history

CSMonitor: Change pay, change teaching? — One thing holding the teaching profession back is its vastly outdated pay system, say proponents of new compensation plans.

NY Times: As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up — The use of BlackBerrys, iPhones, Google and Twitter by jurors is wreaking havoc on trials around the country.

WSJ: WPP, Google to Fund Web-Ad Research

Though the two companies have committed just $4.6 million to the three-year program, their venture marks the latest example of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley working together to shed light on questions that face the industry as it tries to persuade marketers to spend more than a fraction of their budgets online.

ReadWriteWeb: Is There a Reverse Network Effect with Scale?

But just as Moore’s Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures. In this post, we’ll look at which ventures suffer from reverse network effects, which don’t, and which may suffer depending on the strategy they choose to adopt.

WiredNews: AT&T Tunes Cell Towers to Help SXSW Geeks

Dave Winer: If you don’t like the news… — Everyone is now a journalist. You’ll see an explosion in your craft, but it will cease to be a profession.

WSJ The Numbers Guy: The Scrabble Statistics — Changing culture and the growth of the language now makes it easier to score big in the game.

Chicago Tribune: Crain’s Chicago Business reduces pay, staff

WSJ: Obama Seeks to Avoid Auto Bankruptcies — So are GM and Chrysler too big to go through a bankruptcy organization?

All Things Digital: A Fail You Can’t Blame Twitter For: ABC’s McCain Interview

A Twitter interview must have sounded great to all involved at first blush — Everyone’s talking bout this Twitter! We gotta get in on this! — but if they’d given it any thought, they’d would realize it’s pointless: Twitter is a great broadcast system, but a lousy tool for one-to-one communication.

So conducting an interview using Twitter is like eating soup with a fork. You can do it if you really want. but there’s no reason to do so.

Reuters: U.S. credit card defaults rise to 20 year-high

Yelvington — Know your own business model

As I observed Friday, newsrooms are categorically blind to the underlying business realities of their own employers. This leads to needless shock and amazement when an overleveraged newspaper chain falls on hard times, a lot of pointless hand-wringing about the future of journalism, and a parade of kooky ideas about how “we” are going to “make them pay” for all the really great content that Google, et al, are “stealing.”

NY Times: Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web

But The P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting.

Also: Puget Sound Business Journal: Seattle Times in dire trouble: economist

NY Times: No Bonuses Here: Buffett Is Paid Just $175,000

TechCrunch: Daily News Habit Doubles Among U.S. Mobile Users

ReadWriteWeb: Despite Recession, More Than 50% of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media

WSJ: More Directors Are Cutting Their Own Pay

AllThingsDigital: ABC News to Interview John McCain — on Twitter

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at The New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

TechCrunch: Scoble’s New Thing: Building 43

NYTimes: Bonus Money at Troubled A.I.G. Draws Heavy Criticism and As A.I.G. Lists Firms It Paid, Anger Boils Over

All Things Digital: Yellow Pages Companies Sinking Into Oblivion — For a vivid reminder of the way the Internet–combined with a vicious recession–can destroy a well-established industry, consider today’s news from the collapsing Yellow Pages business.

WSJ: Value Is the New Green — Green hasn’t gone away, but companies are having to consider their “value” equation to try to serve the millions of consumers who either can’t afford premium experiences, or just don’t want them anymore.

All Things Digital: Guess This Makes Him a Dis-Appointee — Obama appointee Vivek Kundra’s new job as chief information officer has gotten off to an inauspicious start. After just a week on the job, Kundra is taking a leave of absence following an FBI raid on the District office he previously led.

WSJ: Washington Post to Meld Business News — Combining the business section into other sections saves money and bulks up those sections making the paper fuller. Those thin sections reminds everyone of the paper’s ad woes.

BoingBoing:Haunting photo-essay on rotting buildings in Detroit— These photo are so beautiful, but eerie.

ReadWriteWeb: Facebook’s New Public Profiles: Good for Businesses, Bad for People

Forbes: The Rise Of The Social Nervous System

As ever more people get connected, we see an acceleration in the way the Internet is used to coordinate action and render services from human input. We are witnessing the rise of a social nervous system.

Recessionwire: Iditarod Economics: Don’t Cut Your Prices

NY Times:Unlocking the Secrets of Gray Hair

NY Times: Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems — Why swiping your credit card through a plastic bag works.