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I Got Laid Though The New York Times

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Is this something new? Buried in the redesign of the NYTimes’s Web site, I just spotted this: personal ads from the New York Times, powered by Yahoo.

I guess it makes sense. Maybe Times readers aren’t likely to be as kinky as the bohos who scan the Voice — and with Net, why else would you bother with the print paper? — but that’s probably just my own prejudices speaking.

But maybe the real answer is that the paper wants to provide cradle-to-grave (so to speak) relationship services. You meet through The Times, feed your story to the Weddings and Vows pages, maybe register your wedding at a NYTimes bridal registry sponsored by NYT Magazine advertisers.

And if the relationship goes badly? Hey — the Metro desk is always looking for good crime stories….

Unusual candor from the MTA

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When the MTA screws up the subways in lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn suffers, too — sometimes to the point where you just Can’t Get There From Here. East Side trains run on the West Side, West Side trains run on the East side, and mysterious trains like the J appear more or less randomly on unexpected platforms.

Everyone who’s been suffering with the diversion of the Lex during the overnights and weekends will appreciate this sign, posted yesterday in the Brooklyn Borough Hall station.

New Lost Ave.jpg

 "New Lost Av" indeed.

 

Fun City II

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Good to know that a little water hasn’t dampened New Orleans’s taste for bizarre politics. First comes my friend Jason Perlow running into Mayor Ray Nagin waiting tables. (Check out the rest of his excellent food blog, too.

Then comes Kimberly Williamson Butler, the clerk of the criminal court and a N.O. resident since just 1999, who announced her candidacy on the steps of the courthouse after surrendering for ignoring a string of court orders. Oh, yes — it appears that her campaign Web site has a pic of the candidate superimposed not on an actual New Orleans scene, but on Disneyland’s New Orleans Square.

It would be all the more entertaining if the election weren’t so critical for the city’s future.

 

Boot Camp and Apple’s Strategy

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There’s a programmer named John Gruber who’s got a Mac-related blog called Daring Fireball. He doesn’t blog often but his analysis when he gets around to it is always worth reading.
He recently wrote at some length about Apple’s release of its Boot Camp software, which allows the newest Macs to boot Windows XP and Vista. Not the tech stuff — Gruber doesn’t write about technology as such — but the underlying strategy of letting Macs run Windows.
His points:

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It’s True: We *Are* All Nuts

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From today’s NYTimes:

“Nearly 1 in 7 adults in New York City described their mental health as being frequently ‘not good,’ compared with 1 in 10 adults nationally.”

The survey also shows, as Gawker pointed out, that the other 6 out of 7 New Yorkers lie to researchers….

Why the Net May Look Broken Today

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If you discover that you can’t reach big chunks of the Internet today, it’s not your fault or your ISP’s. Network Solutions appears to be down.

NetSol is the company that administers the .com piece of the net, and is far and away the largest domain name registrar on the Internet. For many years, it was the only place to go to buy a domain name. It’s fair, even now, to call it one of the Internet’s cornerstones. In a lot of cases, people who buy (OK, rent) domain names, just let NetSol handle the technology that translates a people-language domain name (like www.danrosenbaum.com) into the numeric name that the Net itself actually uses.

But when NetSol goes down, all the sites that use that service become unreachable. This is one reason that Network Solutions really really really really is not supposed to crash. Which it has. Bummer.

Fortunately, even though I use NetSol as my domain registrar (old habits are hard to break), my domain name service happens elsewhere. Whew.

 [Update: NetSol came back a couple of hours later. As Fred Allen once said, "There’s nothing wrong with putting all your eggs in one basket. Just watch that basket!]

 

The Opposite of Open Government

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NYTimes piece this morning (by Michael Cooper) about how New York State spends millions of dollars on pork-barrel spending but doesn’t actually itemize it anywhere. (Free subscription required.) Turns out that the state budget includes one line — $200 million for "Community Projects Fund-007" — that the governor and legislative leaders can disburse without fear of discovery or veto.

Whether or not this leads to abuse, I suppose, depends on your definition of "abuse." But the feeling seems pretty universal that it’s a pretty sketchy practice:

"It’s bad government, because the grants are not based on any known criteria," said Edmund J. McMahon, the executive director of the Empire Center. "There are no performance guidelines, there is no application process, and at the end, we don’t even know if the money was spent on what it was supposed to be spent."

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Mr. McMahon noted that while members of Congress are debating whether their process for funneling money to pet projects, known as earmarking, is open enough, the federal government at least requires disclosure of each project in Congressional reports that accompany legislation. In Albany, by contrast, the member items are kept secret. The Empire Center’s lists, released by the state, do not say exactly what the money is for or even which official requested it.

A couple of groups have managed to tease out where the money — borrowed money, by the way — has gone. 

The Slush Pile

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In the Old Media model, writers would submit articles to a magazine, get them rejected, stick them in a drawer and move on. In the New Media model, the articles are still rejected, but now writers can whine about it publicly and post them online.

Why the hell not? I mean, it’s not like the writers are getting paid for the piece, anyway… 

Failing with a 20 percent margin

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I love Molly Ivins, but I wouldn’t go to her for business advice. Still, her column today reminds anyone who’s interested of a very good point about the recent sale of Knight-Ridder newspapers: that far from being failing businesses, the papers had a 20 percent profit margin.

Lots of business would kill for that kind of margin. Then why did the KR board bail? Because newspapers are seen as a "failing" business, one "in decline." It’s true that they’re losing circulation, but that could be perfectly good thing: why spend oodles of money reaching the N+1th reader who doesn’t see the value in your product? (Propping up circulation, by the way, is what killed Life magazine; circ acquisition and retention was costing more than the marginal rate increase the ad sales people could charge per reader.)

Of course, seeing a newspaper as a local branded information resource rather than a bunch of pulped pine trees might extend profitability. But that would require looking at a financial enterprise as more than a quarter-to-quarter business. As Molly says:

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