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A review of thelobby.com, by Rex H.: According to an e-mail I just received, the Starwood Preferred Guest program has launched a blog called “TheLobby.com.” They’re not calling it a blog, except the e-mail URL is:
http://www.thelobby.com/?IM=SPG_EM_BLOGLAUNCH
But what’s with the (as described in the e-mail announcing it) “amazing team of the finest travel writers to provide tips, reviews and recommendations, and much, much more on a daily basis”? On the website/blog, no kidding, they have the following list of “Our Writers”: Publisher: Marc S., Editor: Mark, Writer: Thomas C., Writer: Nick L., Writer: Philip S. If they were going to make up names of writers, they should have at least made up a female writer or two.
Technorati Tags: businessblogs
 Travel advisory: This blog will not be updated until Friday morning, at which time, it will be host to the next edition of the Carnival of Entrepreneurship. (Here is the current edition.)
Technorati Tags: smallbusiness
Anxiety in the Age of Prosperity: Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, observes there’s a disconnect between the statistics one associates with a good economy (i.e., what we have currently) and why Americans are so negative about the economy. (Sidenote: Even small business owners are losing confidence.) He speculates it could be Bush’s dismal approval ratings or the uncivil tone of political debate or the way media cover business (heavy focus on problems, less so on entrepreneurial success stories.) His theory why Americans feel bad, even in a good economy: “It’s all about the pace of change. Which is accelerating.”
My theory: I’m sure the pace of change and uncivility and misguided media coverage and bad Bush polling numbers have something to do with it, but I believe anxiety is baked into our DNA. Our ancestors were the anxious ones who were the first to flee when they heard rumors that a saber-tooth tiger was moving into town. Something about that anxiety gene makes lots of us invent crises to worry about if we don’t have real ones.
Related theory: Our ancestors also were the ones who dealt with their anxiety by spending long hours gossiping with each another about famous good-looking cave-people. For some reason, I developed this theory in Jr. High.
Technorati Tags: smallbusiness
Map wars – you are here: Yahoo! is rolling out a new map feature it says kicks Google’s (I made that part up). However, John Battelle does say Yahoo claims it has “higher resolution satellite images.” I’m checking it now to see if I can find my dog running around my back yard.
I’ll be impressed when one of them adds that feature that CTU used the other night to track Audrey Raines driving through the Sepulveda Pass. It works great unless your vector is locked out by a class one priority override.
Update: Apparently, Yahoo’s satellite is not passing over my Nashville neighborhood’s vector, or perhaps it is being locked out by a class one priority override, as I have a much clearer image of my patio grill via Google maps than via Yahoo (both are screen grabs of the closest zoom available to me).
Update II: Jeremy Zawodny had much
better results than me. Fortunately, I won’t be doing any air
sailing over my neighborhood.
Technorati Tags: google, maps, yahoo
Blog art: Okay. Art is, well, you decide. UNDERSTANDING VORN is Internet art by Jonathan J. Harris. It’s been around a long time but, gee, somehow I missed it. Here’s how it works:
“Every five minutes it scours thousands of weblogs, searching for the four most recently posted pictures that begin with the letters ‘V’, ‘O’, ‘R’, ‘N’. Every five minutes, UNDERSTANDING VORN changes, filled with fresh words and pictures from the blogosphere….When picked by the program, these blog writers experience the artist’s 5 minutes of fame, their work shown in the VORN grid. Then, minutes later, their work vanishes, as a new crop is chosen…Currently, UNDERSTANDING VORN culls its data from Flickr, and from over 800,000 LiveJournal weblogs, whose authors are primarily teenagers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Russia. Take their posts for what they are: the spontaneous musings of teens given a platform to speak their minds. The posts are often silly, sometimes sad, sometimes scary, occasionally moving, but always very candid, very real.
Thanks, Kerri. Her art, I understand.
Technorati Tags: blogging, puppy
Neat freak: I’m pointing to this WSJ article (free) for the following what-he-said quote from Jann Werner: “The trick is to figure out what the Web does better, and let it do that, and then see what the role of the magazine is and what the magazine does better.”
However, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll also read this classic:
“I’m a neat freak….It seems to me that an orderly desk is reflective of an orderly and organized mind, you know? And there’s a level of immaturity to people who just can’t clean up after themselves. And I don’t think it has anything to do with creativity. We and I have done a great job managing creative people and getting the best out of creative people, so I don’t think that my obsession with neatness matters.”
Technorati Tags: magazines, publishing
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