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I’ve been cracking up at the reaction to Dan Lyon’s cover story at Forbes — Attack of the Blogs

I know Dan — been working with him since high school, literally — at the Lawrence Eagle Tribune, PC Week, and brought him into Forbes in the late 90s, when he set off a great stink with his story that picked on Lotus Notes.  He’s one of the best tech journalists in the business, and this time, his piece on blogging … well, I love watching the reaction of the reactionary blogosphere which is so dependent on the so-called MSM for fuel for its rage.

First thing, Forbes was trolling for the reaction that it is getting. They are laughing all the way to the pageview bank.  Everytime some blogger stands up and wrings his or her hands over how horrible Forbes is, the magazine is loving every moment of attention.

 Get over it. The best response I’ve seen to Lyon’s piece is the EFF parody of the article as if Lyons had substituted pamphleteers for bloggers during the American Revolution.

Congratulations to Mike Noer at Forbes.com for the excellent special report on communications. The NYT lauded it this morning though the buzz about the project has been bubbling the past week. Great integration of text and audio and Mike tells me a podcast compilation is coming as he was "writing the script" on Thursday.

Here’s the project. 

Stanford iTunes

As an old fan of lectures on tape (I have boxes of cassettes on everything from the history of opera to the Theory of Relativity), I’m been combing through iTunes’ podcast directory (which is broken by the way) looking for good university level lectures to make me smarter while gettting dumber behind the wheel to-and-from work.

Stanford has launched a nice section within iTunes (how did they do that?) that has some lectures — but’s all homecoming reunion stuff — lectures for the masses and not the students. Anyone know of some serious stuff — like the Justinian Dynasty in Byzantium — or is this stuff slow in coming, being held back as a possible revenue source by e-learning groups?

I grabbed a few lectures and will listen this evening. 

Drivers License Search – National Motor Vehicle License Bureau

This is an outrage and an affront to privacy zealots everywhere. I strongly suggest you log in and remove your name from this heinous database.

Doing the numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc deal

Here’s Tristan Louis’ workout of the deal. 

A stinking $5,000 and change. Based on Tristan Louis analysis of the AOL-Weblogs deal and is pretty funny

Thanks to Boing-boing for the pointer 

Exec Sued Over 241k Strip Club Tab – October 21, 2005

Savvis CEO disputes major lapdance bill. Proof positive of the old stripper adage: "You won’t get laid but you sure will get f$%#ked" 

A VC: Walls of Mass Destruction

Fred Wilson is right-on when calling for the Times to drop the cost-wall on its braindead Select program.

David Carr meanders around the topic as well today — saying the print industry is killing itself  by going to the Anschultz’s freebie model.

It’s all wrong. I buy content — all the time — and I get annoyed by publishers who try to stick the gun in my ribs online — especially publishers who are already taking my money for the print product. 

SportsGeezer: Rowing: Not Just for Preppies Anymore

Our buddy Art Jahnke gives a nice plug to The Book of Rowing. 

Bubble 2.0

Very interesting browser because it tries so hard to focus on web 2.0 essentials — namely integrating tagging via del.ici.ous into the browser metaphor and tossing blog authoring into the mix. No obvious sign of the Flickr function, but I do note a high degree of correlation between the browser’s tool functions and those in Firefox (no big surprise there given the legacy of the development team).

I don’t think it’s going to fly anytime soon in middle-America, but it does hold big potential for addicted bloggers and taggers, that is for sure.

I just downloaded Flock, the developer’s beta and am testing it’s built in Wordpress capabilities.

Media Executive Interview Series: Greg Strakosch, CEO, TechTarget: PaidContent.org

Rafat Ali discusses IT publishing with Strakosch. Not much net new here for me, but some interesting insights into the company perceived as the masters of lead gen.  

Jon Udell: Attention economics

Udell on Clive Thompson’s Sunday Times piece on Meet the Life Hackers – 

SF Cover Explorer – a few thousand science fiction covers+

A most excellent thing to play with. 

Magazine 40×40

ASME reveals the top covers of the past four decades. If this doesn’t make you already miss print magazines, nothing will. I don’t foresee a list of the top homepages of all time … ever.

I’ve put my vote in for the "kill this dog" NatLamp cover.

Running blog stories late in the magazine

"But too often we consider ongoing blog dramas as old news–without realizing that they’re still fresh to many who don’t read blogs."

So true and a good example of how an integrated publisher’s online operation can act as an early-warning system for the print operation.

Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times

One of the best things I’ve read in a very long time. This is a story I would have wished I had written back in the day. Strongly recommend it, for it is a good insight into the next wave of man-machine interface design, user interface theory, and desktop productivity. 

Todd Borglund, our head of production at CXO, is fond of showing two sites to me, over and over again. One is ESPN, the other is the new AOL homepage, the "free" version that represents the end of AOL’s long-running battle to tuck content behind the walls that brought down Prodigy, CompuServe and the other proprietary online services of the 80s.

AOL has been bleeding subscribers to its ISP business at a rapid clip — I recall one news squib last winter that estimated 500,000 suscribers per month were cancelling their service and moving their business to their telco’s DSL offerings or cable company’s cable modem plan. AOL was built on racks and racks of modems, and now, with dial-up hanging on in the rural areas, something had to give in the demographic model to get people back in front of the content.

So the walls have come down.

Skip back to the late 90s, when AOL was the Google of its day, commanding massive marketing muscle during the dot.com nuttiness, asking for, and receiving $20 million marketing packages for high-velocity startups trying to amass, at all costs, all the eyes they could. Was there any more powerful force in new media? Could anyone have foreseen a time when AOL — as much a part as the cultural gestalt as any digital phenomena ever was or will be — would be replaced by something that was free? Having suffered in the land of Prodigy and CompuServe in 1994, my allergy to walled gardens hoped and prayed that the dumbing down of the Internet that AOL represented would be replaced by something less expensive, more standard, and more open. (Remember the idiotic Instant Messaging interoperability battles between AOL, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo? That towel got tossed last week.)

Then came the big  step-in-it-with-both-feet move by Time Warner in January 2000, the peak of the insanity, when Levin took off the suit, pulled off the tie, and committed one of the biggest M&A blunders of all time.

Today one wonders as Google and Yahoo and Microsoft circle AOL if they are suitors wooing a bride or vultures circling a crawling man in the desert, waiting for the inevitable? Whatever the state of AOL’s health, I agree with Todd, at least they have a nice homepage and some credible blogs after stealing Weblogs for $25 m.

At Newspapers, Some Clipping – New York Times

"Mr. Ridder, for one, said he had to "divert more resources to the parts of the business that are growing," a choice that is bad news for print. "We will not have the resources to put into the core business," he said. Mr. Singleton explained the calculation. "By 2010, we could be generating half our operating profit from online," he said. "That will cause us to add to our online resources and shift down on print. That’s bad if you’re in print and get laid off, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the paper or the industry.""