Enjoy these little diversions.

• From print to Web: The Washington Post goes digital (good luck figuring out the capitalization scheme in that headline)
  Fortune Magazine paints a fairly positive picture of the Post’s efforts to “leverage” this “internet” thing everyone’s been hearing so much about. In all seriousness, the Post has done a pretty good job of adapting to The New Reality of Internet Tube.Oh or whatever they’re calling it now–they’ve been doing regularly-scheduled chats with writing staff and guests for a long time, and I think they have comments (reasonably moderated, not stifled) just about everywhere now. As you may have noticed, I have my complaints about the Post’s website, but I do appreciate that they’re at least making an effort to figure out what a newspaper will do in ten years.

  As an aside, check out this quote from the article:
  

  The best evidence of the difference is the fact that advertisers paid about $573 million last year to reach readers of the company’s newspapers, predominantly the 673,900 daily and 937,700 Sunday subscribers to the Post. Advertisers paid only about $103 million to reach the eight million unique visitors to the Post’s Web sites each month.

  Well, you know, there’s a lot you could take from that stat. To me, the proper conclusion is: nobody has any idea how to make online ads really work. There are a lot of reasons for this–they’re harder to target geographically, they’re easier for readers to ignore (or just block completely), etc.–but if you ask me, the problem is that they’re everywhere. I think The DECK is onto something. A single ad aimed at a particular niche of readers has got to be more effective than a million blinking neon lights blaring out the same stupid scams we all mark as “spam” in our inboxes.

• Impossible is the Opposite of Possible (embedded below)
  Michael “George Michael Bluth” Cera, star of the upcoming Superbad (an Apatow Corp. Production), made this a couple of years ago. It’s a spot-on, hilarious parody of Impossible is Nothing, which is hilarious in its own, unintentional, right. Cera and a buddy have a new CBS-sponsored online show thing: Clark and Michael, which I haven’t watched yet–but I have heard from a reliable source that it is very funny.
  
• Fontbook
  An extensive, fancy catalog of fonts. A great example of my odd interest in acquiring things that I have absolutely no use for whatsoever. To be honest, in order to really make full non-use of this thing I’m going to need to get a chrome- and glass-heavy coffee table upon which to rest it.

Dear developers working on Google Reader:

I have suggestions for two new features. Here they are.

1. I am one of the (I suspect) very few people who use the Share function in Google Reader. I like it because it’s a quick, easy way to compile a list of RSS items that I think other people should/would like to see. But I often wish I could annotate them, just with a sentence or two, explaining what I found interesting about them.^* That note might be a brief summary so people can tell what the item is about, or it might be an editorial comment about the item. Either way, it would help to put my shared items in context and explain why I am sharing them. Here’s an example:

   Off To London For The Ratatouille Screening. I would like to have this show up, both as a link in the Shared Items widget on my blog (you can see it to the right) and as a full item on my Shared Items page, with this note attached: “Why does the UK have to wait three months to see this movie?”

   What I’m asking for is functionality like you’ve created for the Email function within Google Reader. Instead of making “Share” a toggle switch, have it pop out a little AJAXy tab with a text box and a “Share” button. I fill in the text box with a sentence or two (maybe a Twitter-esque character limit), press “Share”, and off we go. The link appears, with my short note, in the various “Shared Links” media.

   I appreciate your interest in keeping things simple, but I think this functionality would be a big (and simple) improvement to Google Reader.

2. Sometimes I come across something I’d like to share that didn’t come through Google Reader. I would like to be able to click on a bookmarklet marked “Share This!” and have it incorporated into my Shared Items page. I know this could get a little complicated–what if the item I’m looking at isn’t associated with an RSS feed?–but it would really make the Shared Items product much more appealing to me (and it would give you guys a competitive advantage). On the Shared Items page, you could include a “Subscribe to This Feed” button next to every item (I’m surprised you don’t do this already)

I hope you will take my brilliant ideas into consideration and eventually put them into practice. Thank you for your time.

Best,
Jake

P.S.: Where are we on that address book product? It’s been seven months now, and I still think this is a no-brainer.

^* I’m not the only person to think of this–the Google Reader suggestions page includes this idea: “Shared Feeds: ability to add comment to a shared item, so people know why it was shared. (This could actually become a mini-blog that would be very easy to maintain in Google Reader, as opposed to having to cut-and-paste into blogger. For some people this is the only blog they would need).” There are some other ideas about the sharing function on that page as well, but many amount to the same thing.