Day: March 17, 2006

I’ll be in Los Angeles for three days at the end of March. First, on Tuesday, March 28, I’m a panelist at OMMA Expo in the afternoon, on a panel called “Does RSS = R$$? Feeding Publisher Profitability.” Then, on Thursday, March 30, I’m a panelist at Digital Hollywood’s Spring 2006 event, Alternative Media & Advertising: Personalized Consumer Broadband, RSS Feeds, Blogging and Podcasting. In between, I’ll see what I can learn at Digital Hollywood.

I picked up a slim paperback by Roald Dahl called Over to You a few months ago. This collection of short stories was initially published in 1945, pulled together from their initial appearances in various magazines of the time. All the tales spring from Dahl’s experience as an R.A.F. fighter pilot in the first years of the war, before he was injured. These are bleak and sparse stories. Only one, “Beware of Dog,” showed a hint of the edge and dust-dry bitter humor which makes many of Dahl’s later short stories such a vicious pleasure to read.

Since the volume was published 61 years ago, I’ll point to Wikipedia for this list of Roald Dahl short stories. And the full page shows an interesting life lived broadly. I have a couple of later collections on the shelf… may have to dip into them once again, just for that keen edge.

Dahl wrote various wonderful stories, but the one which I got to first, long ago, was Danny, the Champion of the World. I expect a re-read would spoil it somewhat, as it was written for a younger audience, but probably not as jarring as the Narnia re-read.

This March 13, 2006 article from the NYTimes will disappear behind the paywall shortly, but I’ll link to it all the same, for two reasons.

1. To point out how a multi-brand property gets boiled down to a single audience
2. To bewail style guides, although I love them dearly in other contexts

The article: “Hungry Media Companies Find a Meager Menu of Web Sites to Buy“

Perhaps the site most discussed and analyzed as a potential major takeover is Cnet Networks, the operator of News.com, a site focusing on business and technology news. The price tag for Cnet, which is publicly traded, with a market value of around $2 billion, would be $2.5 billion to $3 billion, said Mark May, an analyst for Needham & Company who covers Internet services and digital media.

Cnet is “too expensive” to be a ready takeover candidate, Mr. May said.

Other analysts said that Cnet had prompted much debate among major media companies, which had been unable to determine how lucrative the Cnet audience could become.

These rumors have been published before. Whatever.

My first point is that CNET Networks operates more than CNET News.com, but a reporter is most likely to know one of our news sites.

My second point is that seeing “Cnet” bugs me terribly. Years of insisting that it’s CNET (all caps) cannot fight style guides at publications, which (understandably) make it a policy not to capitalize names which are not abbreviations. (It’s more nuanced than that, but I’m not a copyeditor, to everyone’s relief.)

It must grate on Yahoo! that every publication drops the exclamation point from their company name. But it’s less egregious, visually, than “Cnet” versus CNET.

Note to self: when naming anything, consider not only the URL (my first instinct these days), but check the AP Style Guide, too. Maybe Chicago while I’m at it. 😉