T-75 and Counting

PodcastNYC lists out 9 Ways to Kill Podcasting. Articulating some of the ‘this feels wrong’ parts of the iTunes, Yahoo podcast directories.

On the other side, thanks to Dave Winer for comparing the river-of-news vs. portal presentations. Personally, I see time-based navigation as a good way to see how a story evolves – though, I think the story itself should be the primary navigation method.

Any individual item in an rss feed has a number of attributes. From my perspective pubDate, source and author are of secondary to title, link, description.

Oh, and if your interested in getting early previews of this project – drop me an email.

“If It’s in iCal, It’s Real”

Part of yesterday’s desk cleaning was taking a critical look at my Thing To Do stickie and committing to trimming it down. All the To Do List things I’ve looked at are independent of calendar – aside from some vague notion of deadline.

A while back in scheduling a conversation with Dave Slusher, he said;

“If it’s in iCal, it’s real.”

So, I’m migrating all my existing ToDo to actual, slots on the calendar. New things will go straight to the calendar. This should end the ‘what should I focus on now’ question.

Shrug The Movie

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for passing along word of Atlas Shrugged the Movie.

Fun Facts from the previous link:

  • First draft of Part 1’s (of 3 ??!!) script completed and rated 8/10 in ‘philosophical fidelity to the novel’.
  • Angelina Jolie is interested in playing, “the greatest female character in all of literature”, Dagny Taggert.
  • “…everybody has been waiting breathlessly for an Atlas Shrugged movie since 1973…”

All this brings up a good question – did I even finish the book? Hmmm. I’m pretty sure I read the last chapter.

T-80 and Counting

Hit a fairly big roadblock today. I’m sure there’s a number of workarounds. I’m guessing this difficulty is a hint that I need to think about the mechanics of the project differently. I very well could be building it the hard way – and the roadblock is telling me that.

Katie Couric Steals Bloggers Pen

“They pulled me out of the auditorium and told me that they’d become aware of the fact that I had a blog, they said, ‘We don’t want you to participate.'”

Wow.

Big Media just keeps giving us reasons to ignore them.

UPDATE: and, according to this New York Times article on the event, we are ignoring them quite happily:

“… few people thought they could find a way to be home at 5:30 in the evening…”

More at MNSpeak.

Way Off Target

I caught the same article Dave did this morning at the CP Blotter and didn’t think anything of it.

Thankfully, Dave did a little poking around and found the “three of every four dollars in profit” is not on all of Target profit, but rather on the 15% increase in profits in a single quarter.

What does that mean in numbers? Hypothetically. Let’s say a company has a year’s profit of just under a $1 million ($998,675 to be exact), 15% quarterly profit increase might look something like this:
Q1 – $200,000
Q2 – $230,000
Q3 – $264,500
Q4 – $304,175

Now let’s compare the two numbers;
(City Pages) 75% of Q1 to Q4 profits: $749,006
(Business Week) 75% of Q3 to Q4 increase: $29,756

That’s a discrepancy of $719,250.

That’s not just a big difference – that’s bad, deceptive, and misleading journalism.

BTW – if you want to crunch the actual numbers yourself, here’s Targets 8K filing. If you’re wondering, Target’s 2006Q1 earnings were $886 million.