Eubie's notes

When the NY Times (The Next Leap for Linux) and WSJ (How far behind is Linux?).

The pieces were more toward everyday users who might be thinking of trying Linux. Their opinion was that while there are many things good about Linux, especially Ubuntu, it’s not a replacement for Windows for most folks.

NY Times: “(S)ince common tasks like watching a movie or syncing an iPod require hunting for and installing extra software, Linux is best for technically savvy users or for people whose needs are so basic that they will never need anything other than the bundled software.” WSJ: “If some of Linus Torvalds’s own family members back in Finland don’t use Linux, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

The pieces were on the eve of Ubuntu’s newst release “Gutsy Gibbon”. For Linux users the reviews are very good:

* Wired News: Review: Ubuntu’s New ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ Brings Linux Out of the Jungle
* Digg: Comments on Wired story
* Boing Boing (and comments): New Ubuntu Linux release is easy, sexy

Rising gasoline prices, increasing traffic (see bizjournals’ Where the toughest and easiest commutes are) might cause one to think of biking to work.

The biggest risk in biking is safety of the biker, which is topic of Freakonomics blog entry Will bicycling to Work Get You Killed? Yes, fatalities for bikers per kilometer are 12 times higher than drivers (study was made in Europe). But, in typical Freakonomics style, non-bikers have 39 percent higher mortality.

Lifehacker: How To: Digitize old records and tapes. Includes tips on using Audacity to clean up recordings from vinyl albums and tapes.

Typical supply/demand issue. Paidcontent.org hosts a seminar on the economics of blogging as a paying job and finds that falling ad rates and more competitors are driving down the income a blogger could expect to earn. The seminar also said blogging is like to grow because advertisers are becoming more comfortable with ads on blog sites.

But the advertising market is very results focused in onlne advertising. Says Jeff Burkett, director of sales ddevelopment at Washingtonpost’s Newsweek site:

We have solid double-digit CPMs. But aside from that, brand advertisers are not interested in how many clicks do they get. What they care about is ‘Am I reaching my target audience?’

Financial Times is opening it’s content up for 30 days before putting it back behind the pay wall, paidcontent.org reports. Looks like the headline should have been First NY Times, then FT, then WSJ …

Researchers studying handedness found data in a group of early 20th-century films of everyday English life.

The researchers concluded left-handedness declined in Victorian England because of social and school pressures and the rise of industrial tools, among other factors, reaching bottom around the turn of the 20th century.

read more

If it were a movie, it would have been a blockbuster. It it were a book, it would have passed “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Los Angeles Business from bizjournals: First-day sales for ‘Halo 3’ top summer blockbusters, last ‘Potter’ book

Steady growth in earnings is a touchstone of value investing, but Mark Hulbert, editor of The Hulbert Financial Digest, writes in NY Times piece: Posted in Uncategorized /

WSJ: For Facebook, GeoCities Offers a Cautionary Tale: Can Rise and Fall of Once-Hot Site Sway Decisions on Funding, IPO?

Geocities was one of the hottest properties of the internet in the mid-1990s. Lots of folks built their first sites and posted their first photos on Geocities. It also led to several clones, Angelcities, Tripod and others. Geocities was purchased by Yahoo, Tripod was purchased by Lycos. It was the early days when search engines were expanding to portals.

And now there’s Facebook, Del.icio.us, digg and mySpace. From WSJ: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was 10 years old when David Bohnett, then a 37-year-old mainframe programmer, hatched an idea: Set up a Web-based “community” where young people could divulge their most intimate feelings.

Good story on how fleeting hot on the internet can be, how companies often spend billions to buy stuff and then not know what do with it and how hard it is to build a sustainable long-term business

“It’s not that easy to monetize social media,” says Eric Hippeau, a managing partner of Softbank Capital that made more than 20 times its investment in GeoCities. He also sits on Yahoo’s board. “Once Microsoft’s deal with Facebook expires, as does Google’s deal with MySpace, they’re going to have to sell advertising for themselves and it’s going to be a challenge.” So far, he says, “it’s not that easy to match the right advertising with the right audience.”

Facebook is still a hot property. The day before WSJ’s article, Microfsoft was eyeing an investing up to $500 million for a 5 percent stake in Facebook. WSJ has some of the history of Geocities, as does Wikepedia’s history of Geocities.