Gannett Doing Well Online

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Gannett had some positive things to say about their online ventures at the newspaper association’s mid-year review.  Click here to see a webcast of their review here (good until June 29, 2005).

Some of the numbers: Online and non-daily products are critical for our future… The
current annual online ad revenue run rate of $200 million dollars for
this year..this revenue is from domestic websites. Last month, online
advertising accounted for 6 percent of total revenues.

Why am I interested?  I have family that works there, although he probably doesn’t want to admit relations!  Hey bro.

How Cool is This Baby Name Game

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Here’s a nifty little name game you can play:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

Just go to the site and plug in any name, then watch as it shows you how popular that name is in any given decade.  It’s really just a graph, but the colors are spectacular and it is really addictive.

By the way my name (Jon, no h) peaked in popularity in the 60’s when I was born (ranked 82) before plummeting to 413 today.

Freakin’ on Freakonomics

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As I mentioned in an earlier post I’m starting in on Freakonomics, and I can now tell you I’m enjoying it immensely.  Based on my earlier post a good friend of mine (hi Rich) has asked me to send him the book when I’m done.  Until then he, and you, can enjoy the work of the Freakonomics boys on their blog.

Also, here’s a great piece on how the folks at RIAA should apply a lesson from Freakonomics to their problem with file sharers.

Proof That Your Boss Probably IS a Lying, Cheating Bastard

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The London Times printed an excerpt from Freakonomics that is pretty interesting.  A former economist for the US Government went into business providing bagels to companies each morning and leaving a box for the companies’ employees to put money in if they ate a bagel.  He also provided a suggested price for them to pay.  After that he relied on the honor system for his payment.

Being an economist the guy kept detailed data about his sales.  He was able to track the payment rate (or cheating rate if you want to be negative) on a company-by-company basis.  At one company he was even able to track the cheating rate of the executive suite vs. the lower level employees.  Here’s a quote:

He also believes that employees further up the
corporate ladder cheat more than those below. He got this idea after
delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors — an
executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and
administrative employees. (Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives
cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t
consider is that perhaps cheating was how they came to be executives.)

The excerpt also has some interesting comparisons of small companies vs. large companies, the  effect of weather and other factors.  Definitely a fun read.

FYI, I’m in the middle of reading Freakonomics (which is excellent) and I’ll probably be posting observations about it here in the future.

From Zero to Launch in 3 Hours, or Behold the Power of Blogs

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First a little background:  I was looking for an index of publicly traded companies in Winston-Salem and I couldn’t find it anywhere.  I figured there weren’t that many publicly traded companies in W-S so I wondered if I could create one myself.  That’s when the fun began.

First I logged onto the Forsyth County Library’s research site, which is free by the way.  Then I used the ProQuest feed from Hoovers to look up all Winston-Salem companies that they track (about 30 total).  Of those I found seven publicly traded companies and I created my own little tracking index on my.yahoo.

I was going to leave it at that, but then I got to wondering if there was any way to get a script that would allow me to post the index on my blog.  Within a few minutes I found a free service called barchart.com. All I had to do was input those same seven companies’ trading symbols into their system and it kicked out a piece of javascript that I could post on my site.  Pretty cool.

Then I thought a little more about it and decided that I’d like to create a blog focused solely on business related information for Winston-Salem.  I’ve been in W-S for about a year and in that time I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on the local business community and I figured a blog would be as good a way as any to keep track of this stuff.  That led me to create the Winston-Salem Business blog.

Over the course of about 2 1/2 hours I set up the template, built some link lists to local publications, business groups, etc. and wrote a couple of fairly generic posts.  Then I thought it might be fun to see if I could set up a newsfeed for Winston-Salem and Forsyth County business.

Back to my.yahoo I went.  I set up a news search for "winston-salem"+"business" "forsyth county"+"business", and copied the "rss.xml" link.  Then I found a free service called rss-to-javascript.com that allows me to put in any RSS feed and it spits out a piece of javascript.  I can then paste the javascript into my site and voila, I have my own customized newsfeed.

This is pretty amazing.  I’ve essentially built my own customized business news site for next to nothing (I use Typepad which gives me three blogs for a flat fee, so technically I guess it’s costing me about $4 a month).  If I wanted to I guess I could commercialize it with very little effort, although to build readership would take lots of effort and keeping it relevant and fresh even more blood, sweat and tears. 

I guess what I’m most amazed at is how quickly and easily I could physically pull together a business news site.  It just drives home the fact that a properly motivated entrepreneur could pop up almost out of nowhere and start eating the local business press’s lunch.

**Update** While Barchart.com seems to load every time, it looks like by rss-to-javascript.com service is worth what I paid for it (0).  It only loads about 20% of the time.  I’ll try and find a better feed at some point.

**Update #2**  It doesn’t look like it was the fault of rss-to-javascript.com for the non-loading. It seems that Yahoo!’s feed was iffy, so I went with Craigslist for jobs and the Biz Journal for the business feeds.  Only negative is that those "Triad" focus, not the more defined "Winston-Salem" focus I was looking for.  If I can get a more focused, customizable feed I will, but for now this will do.

Seeing Life from a New Angle

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My oldest son, Michael, has been spending this week at Laurel Ridge, a summer camp run by the Moravian Church in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  But Michael isn’t attending the regular summer camp, rather he is attending a mission camp.  Here’s what the kids in the 2004 version of mission camps did:

In three weeks 100 youth and 30 adults worked with 30 families to:

  • build 9 ramps
  • clean windows in 17 homes
  • mow, weed-eat, & clean 16 yards
  • complete 11 painting jobs
  • replace one trailer floor
  • do 6 carpentry projects
  • provide general cleaning and organization for 8 homes
  • build 3 picnic tables
  • complete 3 roofs over decks
  • landscape 5 yards

It just so happens that my aunt runs Laurel Ridge and so we’ve gotten a little advanced feedback on Michael’s experience this week.  According to my aunt Michael has been working on a house that features an indoor and outdoor woodburning stove (on the porch).  The indoor stove is used by the woman living there for heat and for cooking in the cold months.  The outdoor stove is used for cooking in the hot months.

I can hardly wait to hear about this directly from Michael.  After all, this is a kid who was astonished when he finds out there are still people connecting to the internet with dial-up.  I’d say he’ll have a very fresh perspective.

Dell Ticks Off Jeff Jarvis

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Dell, my home county’s (Forsyth County, NC) new big employer (and recipient of a rather generous incentive package from North Carolina and Forsyth County) ticked off Jeff Jarvis who happens to be one of the more prominent bloggers in the  U.S. Here’s his rant:

Dell lies. Dell sucks

: I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in-home service.

The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.

I’m having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn’t work, maxes out on CPU usage. It’s a lemon.

But what really irks me is that they say if they sent someone to my
home — which I paid for — he wouldn’t have the parts, so I might as
well just send the machine in and lose it for 7-10 days — plus the
time going through this crap. So I have this new machine and paid for
them to F***** FIX IT IN MY HOUSE and they don’t and I lose it for two
weeks.

Publisher’s note: I added the asterisks after the "F" in the post.  I don’t have a problem with the F-bomb, but my mom and kids sometimes read this thing.

Me-thinks the Dell PR people, not to mention their customer service folks, might want to get in front of this one.

Update: Apparently Dell hasn’t done anything to quell Jeff’s rage.  Here’s some links to some follow-up posts with excerpts:

  • Jeff’s second post: But that’s what bothers me most: I bought that warranty, the top-of-the-line, most expensive warranty that warrants to send someone to my home to repair my machine.

    Except that’s a big fat Dell lie. The person they would send to my
    home would not have the parts (or, according to some of my commenters,
    the expertise, training, and intelligence) to repair that machine.

    Smells like fraud to me.

    Smells like a class-action suit to some of my commenters and emailers.

    Calling Mr. Spitzer. Calling Mr. Spitzer.

  • In his anger Jeff then posted a piece with a link to what he eventually discovered was a hoax about Dell installing keyloggers ont heir machine’s at the behest of Homeland Security.  Jeff’s commenters quickly set him straight, but you can see the effect of Dell’s action (or inaction) on a normally rational and very influential person.  Here’s the post in question:

    Dell hell, continued: Laptop 51

    : I have no way to verify whether this is true, but a commenter in my Dell laments says he found a spy in his laptop.

    It didn’t take two seconds to smoke the hoax: see the comments. I
    posted this on the train; found the nearest starbucks; came online and
    there was the fact-checking mob. Thanks, guys. Of course, something
    smelled funny but I’m glad you found the cheese. You’re better men than
    I, Gungas.

Where are the Dell damage-control/PR folks?

And now this on 6/24/05:

Dell sucks. Dell lies. Continued and continued and…

: I just got my Dell back. They replaced the system board, the CPU, the
memory, the palmrest assembly, the keyboard, and the wireless NIC.

Within a half hour, it’s proving not to work. The heat, according to
an ap my son found, is up to 154 degrees. The machine is overheating.
The fan is on high. And the CPU is running at 100 percent. Dell sucks.
Dell lies.

Dell makes lemons. No lemonade.

Dell sucks.

 

Reporters are Using Blogs, But They Don’t Trust Them

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From Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion:

ClickZ reports
that a new study by Euro RSCG/Columbia University shows that more than
51 percent of journalists use blogs regularly, and 28 percent rely on
them to help in their day-to-day reporting duties.

What’s more the study found that journalists mostly used blogs for
finding story ideas (53 percent), researching and referencing facts (43
percent) and finding sources (36 percent). And 33 percent said they
used blogs to uncover breaking news or scandals. The only nit is,
despite their reliance on blogs for reporting, only one percent of
journalists found blogs credible, the study revealed.

He goes on to point out that there is no excuse for not monitoring blogs, and that those companies that start and maintain positive blogging conversations will get more press.

On another note the study should be good grist for the ConvergeSouth conference in October.