The behavioral psychologist Abraham Maslow once noted, “When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” Unicast ? a New York online advertising technology firm whose name infers anything but interactivity ? today unveiled what might be…
In 1998, we formulated a Philosophy of New Media. This past week, we took time out from this Web log (and other things) to reformat its pages. Not only does this Philosophy point out the misnomers and misperceptions that currently plague most…
CNET’s News.com recently reported that webzine Salon.com has now generated 35,000 paying subscribers for its Salon Premium services. Indeed, Salon’s press release announcing that level of paying subscribership received favorable play in trade press for online publishing. That’s too bad, because some…
Perhaps no story portrays the newspaper industry’s current woes as well as this: On Monday, Kmart Corporation was named the Best Overall in the Newspaper Association of America’s third annual Retailer of the Year awards competition. The following day, Kmart filed for…
According to Tom Wolfe‘s book, The Right Stuffto screw the pooch was a slang phrase that test pilots in the California desert used during the 1950s to describe a pilot who died in the wreckage of his plane. News last week that…
We yesterday mentioned the Handspring Treo as an example of a handheld ‘converged device’ that can handle multiple forms of content and communications. Today’s New York Times Technology section reviews (free registration required to read the review) both the Treo and the…
We’ve long been a fan of REASON Magazine Editor Virginia Postrel, who also is one of four experts who takes turns writing the Economic Scene column in The New York Times Business Section. Here are two reasons why we like her: In…
“To borrow from the tagline of the new blockbuster film Lord of the Rings, it may be the one Web page that binds them all. But did it united them in darkness?” That’s is how CBS MarketWatch leads a story claiming that…
Dozens of applicants to Harvard University didn’t hear ‘You’ve got mail!’ when American Online rejected the university’s e-mails about their acceptance as Harvard students. According to Boston.com, AOL’s e-mail filtering system mistook Harvard’s mass e-mailing as a spam attack and blocked those…
According to a story in The South China Morning Post , Computer Associates and Kaspersky Labs repor that that 90% of computer viruses were transmitted via e-mails. According to MessageLabs, an average of one message in every 300 contains a virus, compared…
Despite rocketing use of the Internet in Germany, consumer use of television, newspaper, magazine, and book use remained constant, and radio use in that country increased slightly. For figures and rankings, see the story in Europemedia.
We have long preached that consumers will soon carry a single portable electronic device for all content usages, rather than carry multiple devices (mobile phone, Personal Digital Assistant, MP3 player, laptop PC, digital camera, etc.) that each deal with only one form…
Last month, the UBS Warburg Pincus Media Conference saw a rather frank and bleak slide presentation (9.5-megabytes in size) from the Newspaper Association of America’s Vice President of Market Analysis Jim Conaghan with forecasts for 2002. Online publishers can incidentally take some…
In mid-December, Forrester Research issued a report entitled Guides Redefine Mass Media that states, “Media companies in every sector face a collapse of their distribution control – and distribution control is what maintains media industry profits. Industry troubles have only begun.” Mass…