E-Mail's Big Demographic Split - NYTimes.com

The Mexico Quandary - Safety or Savings? - NYTimes.com

"Threadless designs success with crowd-sourced business model"

"New Security Features from Google" - NYTimes.com

I would have expected, in a more perfect world, that newspapers would not leave this kind of reporting to a distant company and its computers. Instead, I would have expected this sort of thing to come from newspapers, helping customers.

"Britain - OK 2 Txt n Tweet in Court, Judge Rules" - NYTimes.com

"Only in Madagascar" - NYTimes.com

I am not sure that this story says anything about this?

"Lowes.com : Shipping & Delivery"

Very impressive, customer-responsive service if I ever saw one!

"How Green Is Your Real (or Fake) Christmas Tree?" - NYTimes.com

How are we doing with real trees "made" in NC?

Nook and newspapers

Today I saw a television commercial for Nook Color from Barnes & Noble. What struck me as they mentioned "newspapers" alongside books as the value a customer would derive from having one of these devices, was how rarely I see the newspaper promoted by anyone else in the value chain. That was nice to see and newspapers should look for more ways to arrive at the same result, not to mention working on ways to encourage people to use this and other devices to access what newpspaers have to offer.

"911 responders bill" - Google Search

See post on my Facebook wall about Jon STEWART and this legislation.

It's remarkable to me that nothing pops up in these search results that empowers us to DO something, if inclined as I am to act, to advance the legislation.

How do we explain this failure of something that I would have expected someone to have set up? More volunteer work needed?

This happens all too frequently, for me anyway.

Made in North Carolina

I am especially interested in the subject of what gets made, grown, produced in some way in North Carolina and how much of it winds up getting consumed there. I will be adding some posts tagged Made in North Carolina in order to record some of the things that I am finding.

"Bully’s Killing Is Unsolved, and Residents Want It That Way" - NYTimes.com

I am going to start posting a newspaper article each day, more or less, that really seems quite worth the effort for someone to read it. These will come from different newspapers in different places.....and I will tag them Daily Newspaper Stories.

For example, I am including this one because it provides us with a fairly comprehensive look at a case capable of repeating itself anywhere - a longstanding unsolved murder. It also is here because one could imagine that this story MIGHT have some impact on where, if anywhere, the case goes from here. Might it inspire a breach of the secrecy wall that seems to have been constructed?

"End Of Days For Bookstores? Not If They Can Help It" - NPR

"U.S. Survey Data Reveals Pockets of Wealth and Poverty" - NYTimes.com

I've got to say that it is really irritating to read something like this, find no mention of where to get access to the data or when it might be available. Equally irritating is to go to the Census site for this survey and find nothing at all mentioned there. The New York Times and the Census Bureau should really look more carefully at themselves in their mirrors. One hopes they would see, shall we say, a wonderul pair of improvement opportunities.

"Directory: People (Find People)"

One of "life's perplexing quesitons" that I cannot seem to answer is exactly why no newspapers have ever decided that maintaining the local director of people in the markets those papers sever was not the right strategy to deploy. How many times have you wanted to reach someone locally whose contact information you simply did not have.....? The answer to that is a lot of potential revenue for newspapers and huge potential value delivered to the market, I think.

"Foreign Language Programs Cut as Colleges Lose Aid" - NYTimes.com

There is a principle that unfortunately works in many circumstances --- that of a "downward spiral". When we choose - for whatever reason - to make it harder to learn the languages of other lands, I fear the impact on how we think and especially how we see the rest of the world. And I worry how much and quickly it can build on itself.