Zoom: According to the WaPo, NASA’s developmental “scramjet” is an engine so blindingly fast that it could carry an airplane from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in about 20 minutes — or even quicker. Sign me up for that flight.

Vaporzine update: TechTarget announced today that it is launching a monthly magazine targeted to Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and other senior-level IT executives in midmarket enterprises. Beginning in April 2005, TechTarget will distribute CIO Decisions to a qualified, controlled circulation of 60,000 CIOs and senior IT executives involved in setting their organizations’ IT budgets and priorities.

(via PaidMediaContent.org)

Stop laughing: According to the NYT, “Maxim magazine has begun an ad campaign intended to convince advertisers that it is now the last great refuge of American men.

Analyze this: My friend Steve Rubel points to a Forrester analyst’s recommendation for a corporate bloggers code of ethics, which made me come up with my own code, which I call:

Code of ethics for people trying to codify what corporate blogging should be:

1. I will not pretend to be an expert on something I only study.

2. I will not list truisms and suggest they should be adopted as a “code.”

3. I will not try to create some “best practices” gobbledy gook for something that is so new that it is pre-embryonic.

4. I will acknowledge and correct mistakes I make when I don’t understand that a conversational “media” environment is, by its very nature, “self-corrrecting” and therefore does not need some mis-directed code.

5. I will acknowledge that a corporate blog can have comments, delete comments, preserve posts, delete posts, be high quality or low quality or do whatever it damn well pleases…but that the whole world will get to take screen shots of whatever it posts and that something called archive.org will preserve all the crap as well.

I’ll stop there as I think I’m blowing my reputation as someone who disagrees agreeably.

Satisfaction: A new survey of 200 consumer magazines is gaining subscribers among big media planning firms, according to Michael Shields of MediaPost.com. “Press, Monroe Mendelsohn Research’s new magazine research product aimed at gauging individual magazine’s connections with readers, is set to debut next Tuesday…”

Quote:

When released, the new research tool will purport to go beyond current metrics provided by companies like Mediamark Inc. (MRI)–delving into measures of reader involvement and/or engagement, which have emerged as the industry’s most-repeated buzzwords over the past few years. Press rates magazines on attributes such as “I look forward to reading every issue,” “Is cutting edge,” and “Contains ads that I trust.”

I suggest they add the question, “Do you have a copy of the magazine sitting on the top of your coffee table or displayed in another place where people can see it?”