The Future of Newspapers...There Isn't One

Over the last week or so there has been a lot of talk about why the newspaper business is doing so poorly. Obviously they have an old model.

My wife and I get our local newspaper (Dayton Daily News), on Thursdays and Sundays. But how much do we read of it? Not much. We subscribed to it because we wanted the ads. The sections I look at the most are 1. the classifieds (out of curiosity) and 2. the Sunday Real Estate section (we'd like to buy a house soon).

Does that mean I don't read anything in the paper? Not exactly. I skim over the headlines at breakfast. But there isn't much to read about. Half of the articles are from the Associated Press. The ones that aren't? Not exactly the best writing in the world, or on topics that I am especially interested in.

This Is Pretty Cool

Frog Round (for iPod) on Vimeo

Another Reminder of Why Gmail is Awesome

Web Worker Daily recently had some cool Google Calendar hacks, some of which I was not aware of. One is a slick Firefox add-on that allows you to enter items into your calendar without having to open it up. It works the same way as the "Quick add" feature.

One of GCal's continued criticisms is it's lack of an adequate task list. However, one of the other really sweet hacks that I was not aware of was the ability to have your to do list from Remember the Milk (a site completely dedicated to online to-do lists) embedded inside your calendar. This is where GMail comes in.

As was generally the case at the end of 2005, I signed up for an account for just about every site that was reviewed on TechCrunch, Remember the Milk being one of them. Had I visited it much since? No. I didn't really find it that useful to have to go to another site just to look at my task list. Therefore, when I tried to log in today, could I remember my password? Nope. Although I think I did have the right password, I wasn't using the right user name. However, a quick search of my mail for "Remember the Milk" found me the email I needed, way back from October of 2005. Had it not been for Gmail's huge storage capacity and awesome search, I would have never figured it out.

Bottom line. I love Gmail. (Their Calendar is pretty sweet too...especially with add-ons!)

When It Comes to Blogging, I'm Somewhere in the Middle

I came across a post by Jason Warner, a recruiter at Google, listing what he has determined the phases of blogging are for the average person. The list sums up just about everything I've felt when it comes to blogging. Although I can't say I've reached the bottom part of the list. All in good time.

Even Google's Founders Had their Weak Points

I'm in the middle of reading a book about Google. Last night I read about how they were using Quicken to manage the accounting back when they first got started, before Eric Schmidt became the CEO. HAHA! Quicken!

Now, granted, as an accountant, that completely baffles me (and makes me laugh). But to people not familiar with the necessity of keeping accurate financial records, it doesn't make any sense. According to the book, they didn't understand why they should have to pay for a big enterprise accounting software when Quicken was doing a perfectly fine job.

Ironically enough, much of Google's business is built around the idea that you should give the customer what the want. Products that fulfill a need. In the case of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they didn't think they needed something better.

I wonder how often that is the case?

One Down...Many More to Go

I finally finished The Long Tail last week. I've decided my new goal is to read three books each month for the rest of the year. I have a huge list of books I'd like to read, and it is continually growing. But I never had any true goals. Just that I wanted to read all these books. Now I have a SMART goal.

In reference to a previous post, Anderson did address service businesses in one of the final chapters to a limited extent. I would've liked to hear more of his thoughts on it, but that's why I'm subscribed to his blog.

Playing with Twitter and No Privacy

It's amazing how fast something can take off. I finally joined the bandwagon and got a Twitter account. The first time I recall hearing about it was when I listened to the MacBreak Weekly podcast that was taped at Macworld and one of the girls on there kept getting updates. Now two months later everybody's on it. It is definitely fit for people who like spying on others. Our privacy is going and going...and nobody seems to mind.

What's a blog reader to do?

Seth Godin wrote a post about a week ago simply titled what smart bosses know about people who read blogs. I couldn't agree more. As much as I started reading blogs because the topics they were discussing intrigued me so much, now I read them just as much to stay smart.

But as I was thinking about it more I wondered, what if your boss doesn't know about blogs? Or at least is not very familiar with them? Do you still have an advantage?

Or perhaps your boss just isn't as smart as the next guy.