Ben Hammersley says: “Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo.”

(For the record, despite this,
I refuse any association with this Yahoo! is cool meme. After careful
consideration since that first post, I’ve done enough personal research to
determine that Yahoo! is, in fact, not cool. For the record, neither is
Google. And while I’m at it, neither is Apple. In fact, the only thing
that is cool these days is Eagle Creek packing gear and Merlin Mann’s hipster PDA.)

(via: Rex)

Who was the first White House blogger? This is old news, in a couple of ways, but Robert Cox blogged something last night that, for obvious reasons, made me a little curious, myself. Bob, in reference to the publicity Garrett Graff received for his efforts to be the first blogger to get a day-pass to attend a White House press briefing, says that Garrett asked him whether or not that was a “first.”

Here’s Bob’s answer:

“Being credentialed “yes” blogging from the White House “no”. I imagine there are more than a few anoniblogs coming from folks working for the Administration and I do know that MBA Member Rex Hammock made news blogging a meeting with President Bush a year ago. For now I’d give the “first” nod to Rex….”

As the “blogging” part of being at the White House was a rather spontaneous thing, I’ve never really thought of it as being any kind of “first.” Frankly, it was not until Dan Gillmor mentioned it in his book, We the Media, that I considered it being anything of a blogging milestone (other than the historic reason this weblog will likely ever be linked to by Farked.com).

While Robert Cox, the founder of the Media Bloggers Association, is a great observer of such things and I’ll take his word, I can think of at least two others who may be able to make a ruling on who was the first White House blogger as they had a fairly close observation point during the period: The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin and Patrick Rufinni, who served as webmaster of Bush-Cheney campaign.

Ironically, Patrick agrees with little Dan has to say these days.

Gambling on a vaporzine: I’m not covering the vaporzine beat much these days, but I hate to miss out on being the first to pass along news of yet another magazine about poker, Poker Pros, scheduled for launch in July.

Larry Dobrow is wrong: I’ve never met MediaPost’s Larry Dobrow, but
I have linked to him often here on the rexblog. I usually link to his
weekly magazine reviews on my link blog, deli.cio.us/rexblog, as
well.

Today, I received his
review of Popular Science via
e-mail and could barely believe what I was reading. First, here’s what I
wrote
about the magazine about year ago, so obviously I am a fan and biased.
However, shortly after I wrote that review, the magazine received the
2004
National Magazine Award for General Excellence, which is the
closest thing the consumer magazine industry has to the Oscar for the
Best Movie of the Year.

Okay, so here is what Larry has to say about the current recipient of
the National Magazine Award for General Excellence:

Larry then goes on-and-on with a curious type of positive nod to the
editorial, “…the publication’s writing and reporting remains as
crisp as ever, with a tone that hits the sweet spot between abstruse
and shallow” and a slam to the magazine’s design: “Put simply, the
design is an affront to the words it houses.” Larry then gives the
current winner of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence
this bottom line:

As I read, I kept expecting
Larry to bring up why he thought the
judges of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence were
dumb-asses. But no where in the review can I find him mentioning that
the magazine has a reputation for anything other than being old and
dated and out-of-touch with what’s happening in all those “shiny”
magazines like Wired.

Sorry, Larry. Popular Science is firmly in 2004. However, it may be
time for you to get drug foward a bit.

More and more, I find myself telling someone, “Oh, just check my weblog
and I’ll post a link to it.” Then I realized, I needed a page to display those random promises. So, I set up this page:

RSS Newsreaders: Here’s that list of RSS newsreaders I told you about.

3/30/2005:  Links I mentioned while on a panel at the Folio: Entreprenurial Publishing Summit.

Below are links to sites I mentioned during a panel
presentation at the Folio: Entrepreneurial Publishing Summit, March 30,
2005, Chicago, Ill.:

Hammock Publishing Inc. (where I work)
Rexblog.com (my weblog)
Custom Publishing Council
American Business Media Custom Media Committee
Manufacturing Business Chalenge (industry week.com/Microsoft)
NFIB.com
Art of Speed
A Dirty Shame Weblog
Lefhacker
The Captain’s BlogAdFreak
Variety’s Bags and Boards
Variety’s TheStylephile.com
BusinessWeek’s Brand New Day5280.com
Make Magazine
What I recently blogged about Make’s launch
Worthwhile Magazine’s blog
JPG Magazine
Veronis Shuler Stevenson’s website’s “media headlines” are syndicated from IWantMedia.com
AP RSS feeds
PaidContent.org
Billboard’s PostPlay
The Eric Rice Show
WKRN-TV (Nashville)

RSS News Readers:

Online - Bloglines.com or MyYahoo
Windows - FeedDemon
Mac - NetNewsWire

Taking away Jeff Jarvis’ gold medal? Earlier today, I saw the following subject line in my newsreader on a post by Susan Mernit: “Is Jeff Jarvis the Ben Jonson of our age?” It took at couple of clicks to see she was referring to this Ben Jonson and not this Ben Johnson.
Had the question been about the latter, my response was going to be,
“Definitely not: Jeff is clearly more a distance guy than a sprinter.”

Custom publishing dejazine: As
defined by the rexblog, a dejazine is a
print magazine that comes back to life as an online magazine (however,
we continue to be confused as to what the magazine metophor means when
applied to something online — I like “website” personally, but I
digress). I don’t recall seeing before an example of this in the custom-publishing arena, but here is news that a
defunct custom (or, “customer”) publication is making a dejazine
revival. Lubrication Magazine, which
was published by Texaco from 1911-1996, is “making its return” in an
“electronic
format” from ChevronTexaco’s Lubricants University (by subscription only, however).

Rex! 360! Thanks to Steve! Rubel, I now have
one of those really “hard-to-get” (as in, just ask Steve! for an
invitation) Yahoo! 360 beta accounts! While there, be sure to check out the Rex! 360 blog as I have
posted a picture of my dog, Feste! 360!

Back from Chicago: After speaking at the Folio: Entreprenuerial Publishing Summit
in Chicago this morning, I’m back in Nashville. For those who attended
my session, I’ll be posting the promised links later tonight.

Heading to Chicago, but first: Thanks to the friend (who wishes
to remain anonymous due to his fear of copyright infringement lawsuits)
who sent me this re-captioned rendition of a famous New Yorker cartoon as a birthday greeting. Thanks. And it’s true.

For all you magazine art directors:  Panopticist has an early April Fools treat (nightmare?) for you.

Jason Fried says: “Yahoo never lost its mojo.”

Dave Winer says:  “Yahoo doesn’t have its mojo back. What a crock. Their idea of hip is to
copy everyone else, badly. Let the Flickr folks, who really do have
mojo, show that the elephant can dance, just a little.”

Subscription blogs: In preparing for a panel I’m on tomorrow morning at the Folio: Entrepreneurial Publishing Summit
(hey, if you’re there, please tell me hello), I did some rudimentary
googling over the weekend and saw a directory on a site called “Tekrati Analyst Cafe” with several “subscription blogs” for clients of  Forrester
Research and Gartner Inc., the research firms. (And this doesn’t
include Forrester’s free blog from Charlene Li.)

Gartner’s blogs have substantive-sounding titles while Forrester takes the down-home blog-like approach with its blogs’ names:

I also have run across a subscription “blog” from CQ called “Homeland Security” (sample) but it appears to be a daily news briefing that merely utilizes certain blog-conventions in its format.

Have any other examples of subscription weblogs? Add them to the comments. Thanks.