Buckley bows: This weblog has been intending all day to blog the “divestiture” of the National Review by its founder, William F. Buckley Jr. But, one thing after another happened and the next thing this weblog knows, it was watching the movie Dodge Ball with a 13-year-old.

National Review has a rather unique magazine business model. For the past 50 years, it has never been profitable, but, as the NY Times explains in its eulogistic coverage of today’s announcement, “It makes up any shortfalls each year with contributions from about 1,000 to 1,500 donors, and every other year it sends a solicitation to its subscribers in an effort to add names to the “A list” of regular donors. Mr. Buckley will continue to write the fund-raising letters, he said.”

By the way, one of the recipients of Buckley’s divested share of the unprofitable magazine is his son, who, as we’ve pointed out, is not a fan of Esquire, but is one of the this weblog’s favorite authors of humorous novels and who, if the directory by the elevator is accurate, has an office in a same rather large building in Washington D.C. where this weblog hangs out when working in our nation’s capital.

Wfluxed: If this weblog knew anyone who worked for someone named Newhouse, this weblog would suggest that at a convenient time, they drop a hint to Mr. Big that the whole shopping-magazine thing perhaps has jumped the shark. By the way, this weblog also thinks the phrase “jumping the shark” has jumped the shark. On second thought, the Newhouses have done just swimmingly without any advice from this weblog so we take it all back.

Fast Co.’s slow linking update: BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow says Fast Company’s new in-bound linking policy is only slightly less clueless than the previous one the magazine has been shammed (primarily, by Cory) into replacing.

Cory says their linking policy should be something like this:

The Web exists because no one has the right to grant or withhold permission for links. Fast Company exists because of the Web. Accordingly, we neither grant nor deny permission to link to our site, and urge you to do the same.

If they’d post that policy, he says he’ll buy 20 subscriptions to the magazine. (Which they’ll report as 30 Which the new circulation staff will appreciate.)

When is a magazine not a magazine? This weblog doesn’t get too hung-up over people using the word “magazine” to describe something other than a magazine. However, it would be nice if announcements of “new magazines” would at least bury in the press release some where what kind of “magazine” it is. Is it a print magazine — the usage of the word that’s been around for few hundred years? Or, is it a website that changes on a regular schedule, as Slate magazine (which only uses “magazine” in the header and in describing what’s in “other” magazines? Or is it a PDF? As for this weblog, we’ll stick to focus on magazines containing atoms.

iDissed: As mysteriously as iDisk disappeared for this weblog and others (but not all) for 15 hours, it has now mysteriously reappeared. This weblog predicts, however, that its iDisk-hosted (for a fee paid to a large corporation) images will be moving closer to home in the near future.

Shameless self-promotional post: This weblog is not used to getting listed among “companies making good business use of blogs,” so forgive our lack of humility in pointing to this brilliant column on marketingprofs.com by the incredibly insightful writer B.L. Ochman.

Quote:

While many businesses are still getting used to the idea of having any kind of Web presence, forward-thinking companies are looking at blogs as simple, self-sustaining Web sites and Intranets. Blogging can be a remarkably effective marketing tool. It’s also an excellent way to stay in touch with customers and hear concerns that can be an early warning system of potential problems. Many marketing campaigns cry out for blogs, but companies are missing great opportunities.

If you, too, would like a similar obsequiously written rexblog post about how great your writing is, please feel free to mention this weblog in your next column.

iDisk outage: If the discussions at Apple.com are any indication, this weblog’s problems with iDisk are fairly widespread. As this is a service run by a large corporation for which this weblog pays $100 a year, we feel it is appropriate to publicly chatise Apple Computer Inc. for not at least posting a message explaining why the service is not working. We really like how easy it is to use iDisk and some other handy .Mac features but 12-hour (and counting) blackouts are not among that list.

Theme week: Yesterday this weblog posted two items about magazines wallowing in consumerism and cliched street pop culture. So, it seems appropriate that to today we blog the vaporzine announcement of the third attempt at Trump World, slated for a September launch.

(rexblog flashback: November 14, 2002: [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "ftpSite" hasn't been defined.]
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