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[T]hese exemptions ... create a black hole into which the bureaucracy can drive just about any kind of information it wants to. And you can bet that Guantánamo, Abu-Ghraib-style information is what DIA and others would want to hide.

"hese media outfits have very talented economists, financialists, and lawyers working for them. These are people who can accurately predict what will happen if the media companies were to take this course of action. They know how consumers will respond, and they know how it will affect their company's bottom line."

I hope you're just trolling. Most analysts in any field aren't worth shit when it comes to making predictions. That's why there are so many product failures every year, and why for every winner in the stock market, there's at least one loser.

Media people are among the most clueless. Take a look at how many movies bomb, at how many magazines die every year, how many tv shows don't go beyond the first season, how many newspapers are having to cope with declining readership

http://www.naa.org/marketscope/pdfs/Sunday_Nationa l_Top50_1998-2005.pdf Sorry, its one of those darned pdfs.

Sample stats:

1998 - 135,000,000 adult population, 92,000,000 readers
2005 - 150,000,000 adult population, 89,000,000 readers.

So, while the potential market has grown more than 10%, their readership has declined 4%.

This isn't a completely new concept. Anyone here remember the CueCat? Apparently they were stupid enough to try something similar to this...

"CueCats also come with a "convergence cable," a fancy term for a cord that connects a television's audio-out ports to a PC's microphone jack. Participating broadcasters, including Dallas-based Belo, will embed special audio cues (think dog whistles, to continue the animal metaphors) that again prompt the PC to call up related URLs."

http://www.naa.org/technews/tn001112/newmedia.html

For newspapers, at least, online ad revenue is growing quicker than print ads, but still makes up only a fraction of sales. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/art icle_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001570425

Text-based, targeted ads seem to be the rage because of affordability and ease (you don't have to hire someone to create the ad), but you have to keep in mind the masses and masses of people who still muddle through the pop-ups. Sure, it's easy to look through slashdot and hear about people who are quick to turn pop-ups, but don't discount the millions of people who don't understand how to turn them off. (Generally, these are the same people who still have their homepages set to msn or apple, and still have 12:00 blinking on their VCR -- yes, people still have VCRs.) I would guess that these people are likely the most susceptible to advertising messages, too.

I am surprised by the success of advergaming http://www.naa.org/artpage.cfm?AID=6563&SID=103, which is probably most often identified with Orbitz. So popular were the games that Orbitz unveiled orbitzgames.com earlier this year http://pressroom.orbitz.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?Rele aseID=174773, after it says its own study found 78 percent of those who played Orbitz online games would play again in the future. I don't take too much stock in companies' internal studies that are announced in press releases, but I think advergaming has popularity for business folks who might feel guilty (or afraid of getting caught) if they seek out online games. (But hey, if one just opens up while I'm on this site, why not play, right?)

Quick question: What are the feelings on pop-up vs. pop-under ads? I block both, but before I did I tended to dislike the insidiousness of pop-under ads more than the annoyance of pop-up ads.

We're hustling to implement online classified placement that will interface with our Atex system for print as well as give us the option to go online-only. All the data show folks who place their own print classified ads online end up spending more, and with robust competition locally from craigslist, we've got to put a mechanism in place for online-only ad placement.

I have tried listening to the one or two local college stations, but it was mostly alternative rock, heavy metal, and rap/hip-hop, none of which I enjoy. Oddly enough, I find the music (that which is there, which isn't much), on some local commercial stations more enjoyable than any of the music I've listened to on local college stations. Concerning the readability of physical newspapers over reading them on-line, that's all preference. Some may find that true, but others not. Regardless, it is a fact that in general, the newspaper readers that remain are dying off, and are not being replaced. This fact is already well established by the Newspaper Association of America. For more information on the subject, see an article at Tim Porter's web site. The Retriever's number of readers is unique, and not representative of the general state of America's newspapers.

The NBA tried to enforce that against Motorola in 1997 and lost. Basically, Motorola pagers were "broadcasting" details of the games, (i.e., Lakers grab the rebound and score). The NBA sued to stop Motorola from doing this. They lost.

You want lower cost-per-seat and easier maintenence overall? Spend half that money on a powerful server, and convert the desktop machines for use as thin clients. No more tweaking settings on each system! No more cleaning up after settings screwed up by users on each system!

I'm surprised not to see more references to the stories about other organizations doing this, such as:

Binson's Hospital Supplies

Newspaper Association of America

(vendor) Integrity Networking Systems

City of Largo

Home Depot

. . .

And if you'd like to really cut down on MS licenses, don't forget about Crossover Office.

WOW was really cool, but a few things stick out in my mind:

• Sunlight - Outdoors we could only use one side (3 of the vehicle's 6 computers) at a time because the glare from the bright sunlight made the screens on one side unviewable. I suppose a tent-like enclosure could have been rigged to prevent this, but that would have taken away from the vehicle's "cool" factor ("Look Mommy, there are computers in that car!").
• Lack of Interest - While a live, roving exposition of our Web site seemed like a great idea to me, in practice most people didn't seem very interested. Those who walked over and were interested in more than just the cool vehicle didn't have a very long attention span. Some of them commented they would like to check the site out at home, but at the event they didn't have the patience to stand around using a computer. I guess people are just used to sitting down to use computers... I noticed that the Newseum in Rosslyn had chairs in front of its Online Journalism exhibit.

  Several people actually came over and told us they thought the flashy vehicle's presence was a shameless promotion for the venerable Washington Post. One of them even promised to send a complaint to Katharine Graham, but I think he may have missed his medication that morning. :o) We laughed at him after he was out of earshot.

• Pencils - The free washingtonpost.com pencils we had were definitely more popular than the computers on the vehicle. In retrospect, I'm not sure if they helped lure people in or just distracted people from our main attraction.
• Mice - IIRC, WOW used trackballs instead of mice. I thought this was a really nice usability touch. To use mice, we would have had to provide large, awkward surfaces for "mousing."

You can see a picture of WOW here, but I can't find any of its related promotional materials on washingtonpost.com today. At any rate, I thought the vehicle was an engineering marvel. Good work, Todd! :o)

At other newspapers, intranets handle everything from archives to graphic information--and now, editorial systems. The advantage? By doing these things with a standard Internet browser and protocols, everyone can share information despite all the varied software and platforms found in a typical media company.

This is not an entirely new concept. In a paper presented in April at the Seventh World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Vlad Ionesco, then a researcher with KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, reported on a Swedish daily that has operated since June 1997 on an intranet-based production system.

The intranet for the 67,000-circulation, two-edition, six-day newspaper manages everything from tracking the work of individual compositors and designers to page scheduling. The system accepts messages from QuarkXPress about page status (through a QuarkXTension) and from other production equipment. Written in Java, a language that can run on almost any computer, it also enables variety of production reports.

See the bottom part of the story in this Newspaper Association of America Technews story. Workflow is a fairly common element of any groupware-oriented intranet application, even for publshing industry.

So even if Zope doesn't do workflow managment natively, for example, it doesn't take much to track such data in ZClasses that one puts together in 10 minutes, combined with the WorldPilot product to create an entire intranet publishing workflow system.