Links for the Day

Date July 26, 2007

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.

Category Posted in Links