Dan Rosenbaum / Center Ring Media

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Your Print Job May Be Delayed.

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Big fire at the Quad/Graphics printing plant in Lomira, Wisconsin.


Quad, if you don’t know, is one of the world’s largest printers. The Lomira plant is the biggest printing complex in the Western Hemisphere; this story says the 46-acre campus employs 2000 people and includes an apartment complex. From CNN:



The area where the fire broke out was a new part of the printing plant that had only been in operation for a month, Feiereisen said. The 10-story building was used for paper storage and contained 25,000 palettes of paper with 1 ton of paper on each palette, he said.


[Later: Here’s the report from the local newspaper, the Fond du Lac Reporter.]


 

Not A Light, Exactly. And It Might Not Be the End of the Tunnel. But Still….

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From the NYTimes:



Outlook Improves for Magazines Ads. The decline in advertising pages in magazines slowed in June, falling by the smallest amount for any month so far this year, according to data released yesterday by the Publishers Information Bureau.


Slim comfort, but comfort nonetheless, when the best you can say about your industry is that a calamatous decline is slowing. You want to help? Go out and buy a page in your favorite magazine. If you can’t think of which one, let’s talk — I’ll be glad to build one to your specifications.


 

Oh, Go Find It Yourself

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Blog Panic. Atlas Says “Goodbye World, Hello Tequila!”


“Today I’m accepting something important.


I cannot cope.


I am now subscribed to 37 news sources.  I add about one new source a week.  Each of these is easily capable of delivering at least one or two items each day that are really interesting to me.  That I want to talk about.  But I cannot absorb this quanitity of new information even on a good day.  There is no time to reflect, to mull, to doze on it.


So I have resolved that I don’t care.


I won’t cope.


I’ll let good stuff go by the wayside.


Other people will find it.


Google will keep track of it.


It’s all their when the time comes.


I’m not Atlas to the internet.


Even to my own small chunk of it.


There.


I feel better now.” [Curiouser and curiouser!]


This is a difficult thing to accept, especially when you have an aggregator that pulls everything in for you. I hit this stage a few months ago, but it’s especially daunting when you go out of town (or injure your back!).


And that’s what it is – a stage. I think there are stages to blogging. Excitement, Fun, Overwhelmed, Panicked, Acceptance, and then the cycle starts anew. Are there “12 steps of blogging?”


 

Get Enough Smart People in a Room, and Who Knows What’ll Happen?

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From  the excellent Privacy Digest via the also excellent The Shifted Librarian:



Last week the Berkman Center held their second annual Internet Law Program, an intensive course in (surprise) internet law and developments. You probably didn’t spend the time/money to attend, but the topics covered are interesting enough (to me anyway) to check it out even second-hand. Dan Gillmor attended and posted his notes: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 part 1 and Day 5 part 2. Donna Wentworth was there, trying to record the seminar in real-time; hopefully she’s learned her lesson. There is tons of interesting stuff in there – it’s worth your time to read through if you have any interest in the subject matter at all.”


Tons of interesting stuff indeed. I spent most of the week being depressed that I wasn’t there. What a great thing that must have been….


 

What’s With the Blue Dot?

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The blue dot over by the Blogrolling table is an experiment in randomization. Go ahead. Click it. You’ll be tossed through the rabbithole of the Internet to some other weblog. I have no idea where, and it’ll be different everytime you click on it.


The only thing the other weblogs have in common is that they all carry the blue dot, a project of Joe Jennett’s Best of the Cool.


Let me know where you land.


 

Is This Campaign Doomed?

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Janet Reno to host dance party



“We’ve consistently heard from people that if we had a dance party of our own it would be a terrific way to engage young people in the campaign.”


Voter polls show Reno leading the race for the [Florida] Democratic gubernatorial nomination. If she wins the September 10 primary, she will face Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the younger brother of President Bush, in the November general election.


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Finding the Pony.

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There’s a bad news tech story floating around that’s getting spun idiotically as a good news story. Some San Francisco consultancy says that 93 dot-coms have closed down since the beginning of the year. The good news is supposedly that that’s down from the 345 that folded in same period as last year, and the 862 that folded the year before.


What seems to have eluded both InformationWeek (where the story originated) and the AP (which picked it up), is that the dot-com world is hardly the target-rich environment that it was two years ago. Yes, the number of failures is down dramatically; it apparently hasn’t occurred to anyone connected with this story that there are a hell of a lot fewer companies available today to fail.


Let’s put it this way. There are 25 people in a room, and 15 of them die on the first day. Ten more die on the second day. By this consultancy’s reckoning, the second day represents progress, since fewer people died that day than on the first day.