Archive for August, 2007

What’s NYP’s problem?

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

I can only assume that someone at New York Press thinks that the only way to truly be punk is by bringing down punk idols. How else to explain the paper’s Hilly Kristal obituary, headlined “Club Killer Dies.” The gist of the short item is that Kristal—who ran CB’s for over 30 years— ”screwed up [...]

Flash memory gear that’s just too damn small

Monday, August 27th, 2007

I’ve spent way too much time recently trying to track down the following items that have mysteriously vanished in plain sight: A second-generation iPod shuffle. A 512MB Sony Micro Vault Tiny Several SD cards, including a 1GB version salvaged from my old Treo Pundits have warned for ages that products like those [...]

Rings, Flies, what’s the diff?

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

 Props to HuffPo for catching Forbes.com getting just a little confused about the inspiration for CBS’ latest exploitation series. Great headline on HuffPo’s post, too—though if I remember correctly, it’s pronounced ass-mar.

A requiem for ecards

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

The latest in my series mourning failed business models. Remember back in the bubble era, when online greeting cards looked ready to make their paper cousins irrelevant, much as email had killed personal letters? Dancing, singing, tacky, tasteless ecards were so hot that zero-revenue startup BlueMountain.com sold for $780 million, all on the strength [...]

Is Bubble 2.0 finally here?

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

Having lived through the first Internet bubble (without, alas, getting rich), I’ve been following all the “Bubble 2.0” talk over the past couple of years with some bemusement. After all, unlike the first bubble, we haven’t seen companies go public and watch their stocks soar to stratospheric heights not justified by their earnings (unless you [...]

About my snazzy new picture

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

I’ve been thinking about adding a picture of myself to this blog, but I don’t have a big enough ego to actually add a picture that looks like me. So, I decided to get something a little stylized. My first choice was to go to Iconizeme, but they have a ridiculous waiting list, so I [...]

Radar exposes eco-hypocrites

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Major props to Radar’s Jeff Bercovici for his writeup on so-called greenies like Laurie David and Leo DiCaprio, who tool around in private planes while exhorting the rest of us to bike to work and use solar power to heat our homes. As Bercovici states:

It’s always galling to be exhorted to curb your consumption by [...]

Hardball: Tainted products from China are good for the U.S.

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

At CR, we’ve been covering the ongoing issue of tainted products from China for some time. And many other media outlets have been doing so as well, from CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who warns of the dangers posed by products from “Communist China,” to the crew at Consumerist, who have dubbed the whole mess the “Chinese [...]

I am not Spock

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

The much-ballyhooed people-centric search engine Spock just launched, and I’ve checked it out in the obvious way: with an ego-search. And, man, am I disappointed. While I could live with being in 5th or 6th place, a search for perton came up blank! Well, not blank blank. But I wasn’t there, which in ego-surfing terms [...]

A requiem for TimesSelect

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

While some may gloat about the apparent demise of the fee-based TimesSelect service, I see no reason to celebrate the service’s inability to bring in enough subscribers to justify its continued use of a subscription business model.

The simple fact is that there really is (almost) no such thing as free content. Someone is always paying, [...]