Month: October 2005

David Carr the sad state of the newspaper business and its struggle to figure out the whole Internet Thing in the New York Times, nimbly managing to avoid mentioning TimesSelect even once. But he’s figured out the business model for them:
…everybody knows consumers on the Web do not want to pay for what they can get free, right?
Maybe not. As iTunes has demonstrated, there is a vast swath of consumers who are willing to pay for what they want and avoid the moral taint of unauthorized use.
Egads! The pitch suddenly becomes clear: all that free stuff you’ve been reading online might feel good, but it’s morally tainted. If you want to enjoy your punditry with a clear concience, you’d best be ponying up $49.95, pronto: or expect to be seeing the ink-stained Ghosts of Newsprint Past, Present, and Future showing up by your bedside some dark evening soon.
This of course also suggests another market segment: those who, Hugh Grant-like, will seek out the dark and forbidden thrill of bootleg MoDo columns simply because of the stench of immorality that surrounds them.
Dowd isn’t the real vice, of course: everybody knows that she’s just a gateway to hardcore Krugman use….

It’s been a busy time for me of late, and time to do a quick status check, and let y’all know where things are at, and where they are heading.
By now, anybody reading this page is probably aware of the effort, which has taken up quite a bit of my blog-energy of late. It is still going strong, and we’re not done yet: there are big plans in the works to continue the momentum we’ve established and truly work to change the institutional fiscal irresponsibility of our Congress. So stay tuned.
Fewer of you may be aware of Relief Connections, which is an equally — if not more — important project I launched on the inspiration of Hugh Hewitt. The idea is simple: to provide an online forum where groups affected by Katrina — and now Rita — can post information on what they need to get back on their feet, and similar groups from across the country and world can respond to meet those needs. If you haven’t visited it yet, I encourage you do to do so. And if the spirit moves you, links and publicity for the site would be much appreciated.
These two special projects — and the Blog for Relief effort that preceded Relief Connections — have absorbed nearly all of my blog-time of late. But I have not forgotten about the core functionality of TTLB, and I am working hard to bring all the traditional TTLB functions back up to full speed — and better.
To that end, I did what essentially amounts to a full reboot on the Ecosystem last night: all historical links were deleted, and I restarted the scans fresh with an empty link database. So: if you saw your Ecosystem ranking jump around wildly today, that’s why. But please note that, for better or worse, I believe the rankings currently being displayed to be the accurate ones, not those from yesterday. So if you dropped in rank: sorry, but them’s the breaks.
I will be continuing to shore up and enhance TTLB’s core functions over the coming weeks and months. Expect to see a flood of new Communities and Topics, as well as new features on the Ecosystem blog details pages. And overarching everything will be a new approach to “customer service”, to be deployed soon, which I hope will help ensure that Ecosystem issues can be resolved promptly.
Finally, a cosmetic, but important change. When I relaunched TTLB with its new design in June, I relegated my own blog to a spot off the front page, reserving that prized spot for a summary of TTLB’s overall features. I’ve concluded now that was a miscalculation, and one that on some level, has discouraged me from actually blogging myself.
That decision has now been reversed, and my blog is back front-and-center. I will still be highlighting the latest & greatest items of interest in the Topic, Community, and