Eubie's notes

Edmunds.com: Journalist works undercover selling cars. Learns some of the tactics to encourage people to buy or feel that they’re getting a good deal. At the same time, sales people are caught in a struggle between sales managers and customers. Knowledgable is buyers best defense.

From CBS MarketWatch: Value Line projects the Dow will finish 2004 at 9,400 — about 1,200 points lower than where it is now.

Articles says Value Line is being too cautious. ValueLine turned negative on the stock market in December, because the P/E ratio is historically high and earnings are not expected to grow that fast over the next five years.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer began dayparting today, says Brian Chin, in his seattlepi.com Buzzworthy blog.

Dayparting is when the site dramatically changes during the day to appeal to different audiences. Newspapers are attracted to dayparting to counter their traffic pattern of heavy use in the morning and then falling off the rest of the day. News has strong draw in the morning. Entertainment and shopping sites draw better in the afternoon and evening. Here’s Seattle P-I’s daypart schedule.

Fark, for example, has heavy traffic after 4 p.m. when people have finished their work for the day, but it’s not time to leave yet.

Dayparting is a new concept to newspaper web sites. It’s ancient history for TV networks. The TV guys, says it’s further proof that newspaper sites will be more like TV in the future.

Mad cow disease bodes well for bison biz — Denver Business Journal

The heck with proposals; women are buying their own diamonds — Cincinnati Business Courier

After years of losing ground from media such as TV and subscribers, newspapers are being identified as the last mass media. Short article in Editor & Publisher doesn’t say whether this means newspaper publishers will sleep better now.

Last week a Pew Report survey found only 31 percent of people surveyed learn about candidates and their campaigns from newspapers. Newspaper’s share fell to fourth behind local TV news (42%), cable news network (38%), and nightly network news (35%). Nightly network news and newspapers had drops of 10 percent and 9 points, respectively, from the 2000 survey.

Cable news network gained 4 points from the 2000 survey. Internet gained 4 points to 13% while Web sites of news organizations accounted for 11% among those surveyed. The category Web sites of news organizations was not in the 2000 survey.

I prefer RSS and aggregators (bloglines for me) than a browser for checking in on bloggers and news sites that I like. But I’m going to give Furl a chance.

Here’s why: Furl is a new web browsing tool that lets you save and organize thousands of useful web pages (you know, the ones you want to save for future reference but then can never find again) in a personal “web page filing cabinet”.

Here are two sites for bargains: Free After Rebate and Discount Watcher. Both have RSS feeds. Discount Watcher’s feed can become large quickly, though.

Here’s one from Reuters that makes me glad I wasn’t there: “A hiking magazine apologized on Thursday after it published a route plan that would have sent walkers striding into thin air off the north face of Britain’s largest mountain, Ben Nevis.”