Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Rumors of our demise…

by

I know it’s easy to read our latest financial filings and assume, as some correspondents have, that Salon’s tragic fate is already a done deal.

Here’s the situation: We are a public company, I am an executive of the company, and as such there is no way I can sit here and go into detail about all the steps we’re taking to secure Salon’s future. Our SEC filing, upon which all the coverage has been based, specifically stated that Salon would run into trouble if it fails to raise new funds. Somehow that conditional clause seemed to drop away from most of the press reports. Sure, nothing in business is certain, but Salon also has a long history of raising the money it needs to survive.

This is the quote from our CEO, Mike O’Donnell, in our press release:

“We are in active, continuing discussions with potential investors to complete an equity financing that would give the company financial stability for 2003. Salon has reported the issuance of notes with equity conversion features in recent months and believe these will become part of a significant round.”

Unlike the AP, which didn’t even bother to call us for comment before running its imminent-death notice, this CBS Marketwatch report tells more of the story from our side.

Those of you with long memories will recall that Salon’s imminent death has been predicted with almost clockwork regularity over the past several years, each time we have filed a quarterly statement with the SEC. And yet here we are. When we celebrated our seventh anniversary last fall, David Talbot published an amusing review of some previous — and inaccurate — predictions of our doom. It’s worth another look as the vultures gather once more.

Bulletin: American people support France, Germany over Bush!

by

Much remains up in the air as I write this: Will the Bush administration barrel forward with its Iraq invasion timeline in the face of international opposition and domestic uncertainty? If it does, is the war a blitzkrieg or a quagmire? Either way, does the U.S. have the will or the interest to commit long-term resources to rebuilding Iraq afterwards?

One thing, however, is now beyond dispute: President Bush has shattered whatever popular consensus he forged or inherited in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The press, which tends to discard conventional wisdom only slowly and under duress, is still suffering a hangover from the grim autumn days of 2001 — a notion that Bush has achieved wide popularity and deep respect as a leader able to pull the nation together at a moment of crisis. One look at the latest polls shows just how fully that vision of Bush now lies in ruins.

The New York Times/CBS poll released today show’s Bush’s approval ratings now down to almost exactly where they stood before 9/11 — a moment, let’s remember, when the Bush presidency seemed rudderless and statureless: 54 percent approve, 38 percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing. These numbers have dropped nearly 10 percent in the last week. Even worse for Bush are the “is the country on the right track” numbers: down to 35 percent “on the right track” versus 56 percent “on the wrong track.”

The other headline here is that, though the American public continues to support war against Iraq by about a 2/3 margin, and supports “the way Bush is handling the situation with Iraq” 53-42, the majority also continues to feel that the U.N. and inspections should get more time: When the poll asks, “Should the United States take military action against Iraq fairly soon, or should the United States wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time?” 59 percent support the latter choice. (That’s 10 percent more than voted for Bush in the first place.)

Dear reader, what this means is that the majority of the American people agree with the “perfidious” French and Germans and disagree with their own administration.

Somehow this little fact does not bubble to the surface of most of the press coverage of the current crisis. The media are locked into a template established in the wake of 9/11: International crisis looms; President Bush proposes resolute action; the American public rallies. That worked in the months after 9/11 because the resolute action proposed (a war upon al-Qaida’s Taliban sponsors) made sense to the public as a response to the World Trade Center attacks. As Bush tries to repeat that performance today, the public is not going along — probably because the response does not make a whole lot of sense and does not seem to accomplish what should be our central goal, reducing the threat of terrorism and making the United States a safer place.

Now, polls are fickle, and one doesn’t want or expect a leader to make decisions based on them alone. But when an American leader pushes a risky and potentially difficult war, he needs more than a thin and confused margin of support — support that isn’t even really support once you look at it closely. That was the lesson of Vietnam.

Oh, I forgot — Bush wasn’t there.

Brand You

by

Back in the ’90s, during the Net boom, Fast Company published an article by Tom Peters titled “The Brand Called You.” The idea was for professionals to start handling their own lives and careers with the same approach that a company takes in managing its brand.

The term “branding,” of course, comes from cattle, and there was always something suspicious about the idea of bringing such thinking into the realm of individual lives.

Now we have a new kind of branding on the personal level: Real honest-to-god physical branding. People walking around with corporate logos and advertisements not only sewn onto their clothing and plastered over their accoutrements but actually tattooed on their foreheads.

The idea is the brainchild of a London marketing outfit. Students who agree to be branded receive $6.85 an hour for three hours of being “out and about” with their foreheads on display.

Moo!

Look, Pa! No economic policy!

by

The reports from inside the Beltway keep telling us, with numbing repetition, that George W. Bush (“43”) is utterly determined to avoid the fate of his father, George H.W. Bush (“41”). Not for 43 the sad fate of 41 — who fell from the glory of a military victory over Iraq in Year 3 of his presidency to the ignominy of electoral defeat in year 4, because voters decided he wasn’t doing enough to get a recession-burdened economy moving again. 43 is on the case! 43 will keep one eye on the bread-and-butter economic issues even as he locks his aim on Saddam Hussein. No one will be able to say that 43 doesn’t care about the economy — Karl Rove is making sure of that.

And yet, from the vantage of one year before the ’04 primaries, Bush 43 looks amazingly, uncannily like a replay of Bush 41. The economic policy details differ, but the political shape is parallel.

Despite all the rumors, the recovery doesn’t seem to have arrived in any neighborhood you or your friends actually live in. Nearly three years of the current downturn have left the economy still feeling like a disaster area. The Republicans now control both houses of Congress, but the Bush budget is such a hodge-podge of giveaways to the wealthy, outright deceptions and deficit-inducing, tax code-complexifying “reforms” that even the president’s own party is rejecting it out of hand. His all-but-launched war on Iraq — completely unaccounted for in that budget — has roiled the markets and put corporate spending on hold. His team still can’t get its message straight (do deficits matter or not?). Is anyone home?

Yes, a year is a long time, and a lot can happen between now and New Hampshire 2004. But we’ve had three years of George Bush, and three years ought to be enough time to get an economic policy together. Bush’s is MIA. Unless there’s a major turnaround in the next six to nine months, the Democrats ought to be able to make something of that. If they can’t, they don’t deserve to govern.

Postscript My readers correctly point out that we’ve only had two years, not three, of George Bush. (The perils of late-night posting.) I guess it just feels like a long time…

10 years of digital storytelling

by

If you’re in the Bay Area you should consider this event Thursday evening at the Yerba Buena Center: “Voices Known: Celebrating 10 Years of Digital Storytelling.” This is a kind of anniversary party for the Berkeley-based Center for Digital Storytelling, a major hub — maintained by Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen — of the digital storytelling movement that I’ve been writing about, on and off, for years now. It’s a live performance featuring Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Awele Makeba, Brenda Wong Aoki/Mark Izu, Scott Wells and more. Tickets are $15-25 (info at 510 548 2065).

Oh, really? No sir, O’Reilly!

by

Tom Tomorrow features an amazing transcript of the O’Reilly show in his blog today.

I don’t watch O’Reilly’s show myself; after seeing him a couple of times I became quite convinced that he is an overbearing blowhard with whom I did not need to waste any portion of my earthly existence. But this transcript is astonishing. O’Reilly has invited one Jeremy Glick onto his show: Glick, it seems, does not think invading Iraq is a good idea. Glick’s father perished in the 9/11 attacks. O’Reilly is unable to hold these two thoughts in his head without having it explode. By the end of the transcript he is shouting “Shut up! Shut up!” at his own guest.

A good day for slashdotting

by

Some days Slashdot is just an endless loop of Microsoft-bashing and obscure developer jokes. Other days, like today, it’s a treasure trove.

First, they alerted me to this bit of browser-skulduggery: Did MSN deliberately set out to make Opera users get a “broken” version of its home page? I tend to be skeptical of such claims — on the Web, things break easily enough by themselves, so my default assumption is glitch before malevolence — but the Opera site’s explanation sure is persuasive.

Then I clicked over to this unbelievably fascinating explanation of the continuing mystery of hiccups. It seems that the latest theory suggests they are related to that stage of our evolutionary development when we had gills; and fetuses hiccup as they’re recapitulating that stage. But read the New Scientist piece for yourself.

That old broadband song

by

“Broadband” is in the news again, sigh. The word has a huge capacity for mischief, since it means so many different things to different people. Today broadband means high-speed, always-on Internet connectivity, usually delivered via cable or DSL. Broadband is, we’re told, the axe that will break AOL and the torch that will fire up the tech economy once more.

I’ve been a broadband skeptic for years based on my own experience and my observations of my friends. I don’t think broadband “transforms the Web experience”; it just fixes it. Broadband makes the Web work the way it’s supposed to.

What broadband does not do, and will not do, is turn the Web back into a TV-style broadcast medium — which, I’m afraid, is what Hollywood and the media industry keep crossing their fingers and hoping will come to pass. Sorry, guys.

To be sure, broadband does enable all sorts of interesting peer-to-peer and Web services-style applications. Wonderful. Only Hollywood and the media companies, far from investing in new ways to use this broadband potential, are actually terrified of these tools.

Truth is, right now broadband is just a good, reliable way to get your e-mail, read your Web sites and maybe download some music files. And that’s what it will remain until someone comes along to show us the next great thing.

I like the way Mitch Ratcliffe put it in a recent post:

  The unexpected will decide this market. That is, someone is going to come up with an engaging client that turns broadband into a symphony of excitement people will flock to. And, frankly, that game is still wide open to all the players, dial-up laggards included.

Actually, Napster was that “engaging client.” Look what happened to it.