Portfolio.com is live (still waiting for the cover, however). I read about it first on PaidContent.org. Mr. Magazine has photos of the magazines being dropped off at FedEx. Gee, ain’t hype great. Minonline.com is reporting that the New York Times will have a full “exclusive” splash on Monday. I guess “exclusive” means “not online” as Samir, the best magazine launch tracker in the world (it’s a micro-niche), and I seem to be getting our emails to Condé Nast Business president David Carey answered rapidly. If there’s anything a “main stream media” reporter would like to ask him, I’ll be happy to forward it.

Later: It’s about 1 p.m. in Nashville and I’m going offline for the rest of the day. However, I decided to post the accompanying screen grab of a cover that appears on the new website and ask if that’s what we’ll be seeing exclusively in the New York Times tomorrow? Back later with the answer.

Even later: I’m back at home, but wanted to update this post to say once again that I’m glad Samir Husni is now blogging as no one can come anywhere close to his magazine-launch wonkishness. He’s the go-to authority on the subject of magazine launches. No one else comes close. I’m glad he’s now using a blog to augment his website and annual guide.

It’s official: (4:50 p.m., Central) Samir and I just received the following email from Condé Nast Business president Portfolio magazine publisher David Carey (former publisher of the New Yorker, for those without a program to follow along), who reads blogs and responds to bloggers on Sunday afternoons in-between launching the most highly-anticipated new magazine in years:

“Boy, you guys are good…

We’ve been loading content onto the site all afternoon and evening, and you’re right — this is the actual cover. I love it. When you see it in person, it’s quite striking. It does indeed glow.

Here’s some background, if you’re interested….

This image is by fine art photographer Scott Peterman, who is best known for his megacities project, where he goes in by helicopter or shoots from rooftops. This one is entitled “Surge,” he took it from the Empire State Building. In some ways, it’s an homage to Bernice Abbott’sclassic 1930 photographs — but with a modern twist. The cover serves as a commentary on the society we live in — it’s a little bit Gilded Age, a little bit cautionary tale.

The cover flap runs on newsstand copies (200,000 single copies distributed at airports and bookstores starting this week) AND charter subscriber copies — who will also receive their copies by the end of the week. We like that we can get the cover image totally clean, and use the flap to educate the readers about what’s inside.

Great catch guys — you two had it first!

Except for a quick review of the magazine sometime tomorrow, I now officially retire from the magazine launch blogging beat — unless, of course, it is a magazine I launch.

Last, last post: There seems to be a universality to the “it’s a bad time to launch a business magazine” theme. That misses the point, as I’ll post tomorrow.

Okay. Sign me up. I am hopeful that what Thomas Friedman paints as a possibility can become a reality.

Says Friedman:

“One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French. Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.”

For reasons that have to do with personal convictions related to conservation, preservation and a deep love of nature, as well as my decades-long concern (to put it mildly) for my personal and our collective dependence on oil companies and the suppliers of their product, I have found myself becoming more and more radicalized in my desire to do whatever I can do to lessen my personal consumption of oil. I think our lawmakers should view our dependency on oil as a threat equal to any other threat we face as a nation. And I don’t care if the oil comes from the Gulf of Mexico or Alaska — as long as we’re dependent on oil as our major source of energy, that dependence is a threat to our country strategically and economically. I’m even opposed to programs that turn shale or coal into oil as those efforts compete with efforts to find alternatives to oil. I don’t believe our problem is merely dependence on supplies of oil — I believe our problem is dependence on oil, no matter what its source. I think federal and state lawmakers should enact aggressive (even war-time-like) measures that encourage the development and acceptance of sustainable, renewable and clean energy sources other than oil.

So, I’m with Friedman on this: Being green is geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic, patriotic. And even if it’s better for the environment and will help address global warming, there is nothing “vaguely French” about it.

[Note: Also, be sure to the watch the video on the making of the origami flag that appears on the cover of the New York Times Sunday magazine.]

[Pre-apology: I apologize if this post seems insensitive to anyone who knows any of the people mentioned in it. I also apologize to anyone who may be offended by any of the words used in it. Indeed, if anyone, anywhere is offended for whatever reason, I will be happy to remove the part of the post that offends them and will also be happy to suspend myself from blogging for whatever period of time I feel necessary to teach myself that I should never make a mistake.]

I guess it proves false my claims of not being a geek when I start thinking of news events in terms of how they affect Ineternet search engines. Take, for example, a word that I never use outside of a garden, but that has appeared prominently in the news over the past week, “ho.” Not since Ken Jennings’ famous Jeapordy answer in the form of a question, “What’s a ho?”, have I seen the word appear so prominently in my newsreader. Obviously, the week was filled with Don Imus-related news that included the term. Then, last night, the iconic Hawaiian singer, Do Ho, died of heart failure. As of this morning, a search of the term “ho” on Google news revealed that all of the first-page results were about the singer, except one, an article by a Chicago Tribune writer that has the headline, “Talking about the word ‘ho’: So when did this coarse term become mainstream?“

Stranger still: The search terms “Don” and “Ho” used together could one day lead to results that will require, as they say on Wikipedia, “disambiguation.”

Technorati Tags: search

• Keeping up with the web’s new lingo | BusinessWeek
  Quote: With words being created, put to use, and accepted in the blink of an eye, they’re becoming a challenge to the reference world’s gatekeepers
  (tags: blogging internet linguistics)
• Technorati plans ‘branded info portals’ | Adweek
  Blog search engine Technorati has acquired news-aggregation technology in order to help brands create their own information and conversation portals.
  (tags: conversational-media socialmedia web2.0 technorati)