LOTD: January 3rd

Just like everyone else I’m struggling to catch up from a long weekend.

• The New York Times has hired Rebecca Dana away from the New York Observer to report on the new media industry for their business section. Dana just graduated in 2004.
• ValleyWag takes a look at what they feel are some inflated numbers and other useless hype from Linden Labs about Second Life. [Via]
• Mack Collier asks how, if you were working for Kohl’s, you would handle a number of pictures across the internet showing trashed stores.
• Steve Johnson goes in depth on how Time’s naming of “You” as the 2006 Person of the Year means nothing at all for you.
• Reuters introduces RSS to the masses.
• Wall Street Journal 3.0 (a designation that makes me want to slap the nearest available person) launched on Tuesday, when all the markets were closed.
• Newstrust has launched as a not-for-profit version of Digg, which might mean all the difference to some people in terms of judging credibility.
• Yeah, I agree that the “Is Second Life good or bad for marketers” debate is pretty much pointless.
• The inability of YouTube to finish work on some key anti-piracy software means headaches for Google as they try to iron out relations with copyright holders.
• Yep, the future of media will be increasingly driven by how much control the people who actually use and consume that media can do with it themselves.
• Once again, the media is soiling its armor with anticipation over what Steve Jobs will announce at MacWorld. This sort of glowing coverage (I can think of an analogy but it’s not appropriate for a family-friendly blog like this) does not seem to wane no matter what kind of problems, either at a corporate or product performance level, the company experiences. For instance, I doubt that anyone will hold up signs saying “Backdate THESE options!” in the auditorium and no one will challenge what will likely be a disappointing announcement (they always are) by mentioning rebooting problems.
• Linda Zimmer has launched a wiki spin-off of her Business Communicators in Second Life blog.
• Oh my goodness, you mean putting music in front of people by, say, licensing it for podcast usage, is a good thing? I thought the whole point was to hide the music from the public until they bought the CD at which point they could immediately regret paying $16 for two good songs and start to despise the label, artist and retailer. Silly rabbit.
• It’s good to see that the Washington Post is making adjustments to their newsroom so that news is, for lack of a better phrase, platform agnostic. [Via]
• Steve Safran recommends some more than decent new year’s resolutions for newsroom directors to make.
• Kids are abandoning the now corporately-controlled social sites for ones that aren’t filled with so many rules. Those sites will then become the new hot thing for advertisers, which will attract corporate ownership which will impose rules which will push kids to new sites which will then become…you get the picture. Rinse and repeat until about 2015.
• Blah blah blah…YouTube…blah blah blah…consumer-generated-content…blah blah blah…media companies trying to make money…blah blah blah.
• Yeah, there have been some unexplained problems with Gmail and some questionable moves in their seeming manipulation of search results, but Google is still going to be the game to beat in 2007 and the rest of the foreseeable future.
• It’s so incredibly easy to fall down the media rabbit hole, something that I’m guilty of on a regular basis. But it’s becoming more of a problem now that there are so many darn options when it comes to media to consume.
• I’m usually the first to call someone, either company or agency, out when they cross the line in trying to buy favorable publicity, but it seems to me like everyone’s being a tad too harsh on Edelman and Microsoft, especially when sending out free stuff is not exactly a new idea. I think Edelman, through its mistakes in the past, has moved the goal posts on what everyone considers acceptable to an extent where simply sending out review copies crosses some magical ethical line, something that’s not really the case.