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Glad to read the news.

I was on an airplane, I read an ‘airplane book.’ The title in question was Wolf Pass, by Steve Thayer. Thriller, set in 1962 Wisconsin with repeated flashbacks to WWII. Nazi sniper in Wisconsin in 1962, with JFK thrown in, just because. I finished reading this very quickly, and left it on the plane. And that’s why it’s called an airplane book. 😉

How like the Yankees to name their spring training facility Legends Fields. Even as a childhood fan, I have to admit it’s a bit much. But a sunny Saturday in Tampa was not a bad way to pass the time. Glad to be home now, though, and sticking around for a few weekends to come.

Back on Sunday, after checking out A-Rod in Tampa.

Vin Crosbie has released the first look at his vision for the future of the newspaper business online. I’ve printed it (it’s long, even though this is only the beginning), and I’ll review on the plane tomorrow. Looks like it’s part of an OJR series on the future of news.

Johanna Rothman on project managers, aka program managers. With a link to a discussion on Joel Spolsky’s site. I like the job description, whatever the title.

One of the earliest efforts to get newspapers to work together online was called New Century Network (NCN). There were several powerhouse newspaper chains involved, and the goal was to build a national portal which pulled together the best news and information from each of the various chains involved. Various fatal flaws:

• Newspaper chains hate each other more than they hated Yahoo and Excite, whom they rightly (well, at least in Yahoo’s case) saw as the real competition.
• News was not a killer business online in the early days. I think information, after communication, is the killer app of the internet, but whether it’s a killer business is still being learned/explored.
• Too early. NCN wanted to bring together national advertisers as a key part of its business plan… but online advertising was still too ad-hoc in the 1996-1998 time frame.

I was involved with NCN pretty closely as a partner while working on Snap.com (known then as Snap! Online). We used their zip-code mapping file, I remember, to surface the right newspaper website when someone asked for ‘local’ news. It worked, but NCN didn’t even last as long as Snap.com did, and that’s saying something.

All this comes to mind because Hypergene bemoans the plethora of newspaper passwords needed today, and suggests a news passport. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll say here that it will never happen, for (at least) the first reason cited above.

OK, that’s not true. Voting is easy. Informed voting is hard. And I can’t say that I really live up to the informed part as well as I should. In California, we’re voting on various initiatives which determine how billions of dollars should be spent, and it all boils down to yes or no answers. Spending billions of dollars (or even millions!) just shouldn’t be that easy… and even after something passes (I’m guessing some of these will), there will be a lot of money and time spent (what %? not sure I want to know) on exactly how that money is spent. In a slightly better world, that’s what the people we ‘hire’ to do these jobs — our elected officials — would do, and would do without passing the buck on making the unpopular decisions to spend money back to the voters. No one wants their name on something that costs voters money. This probably explains the willingness of both parties to take sides on an issue which really doesn’t cost money either way: same-sex marriage. Oh well.

I enjoyed researching my college thesis more than writing it, so I appreciate that the Brittanica folks are providing suggested citations formats for the web. [via Hypergene]

I don’t expect to use these guidelines much, but I hope you enjoyed your Leap Year.

“leap year” — Encyclopedia Britannica,from Encyclopedia Britannica Premium Service. (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=48637) [Accessed February 29, 2004].

When driving to Tahoe, you want to check road conditions. And you hope that it doesn’t say — as it does right now — chains required. Oh well.