Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

Online Media Gurus Still Drink the Flavour-Aid

There’s a piece in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, wherein J.D. Lasica interviews John Battelle (former publisher of The Industry Standard), David Talbot (founding editor of Salon) and Josh Quittner (former editor of The Netly News and current editor of Business 2.0). The subject at hand: how anything interesting in the media is happening […]

Last Word on the Lottery

So it turns out that the poor schlep at the nursing home didn’t have the winning ticket after all. He bought tickets for the pool, then was out sick for three days after the drawing. Nice friends this guy’s got, huh? Add a bunch of lawyers and a some reporters, and stir well. After all […]

The Internet is Growing Apace

I just came across this CNN story from January, but I don’t think it’s gotten the play that it merits. You probably know that the Internet has its roots in the Defense Department’s old Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA. The guy in charge of information processing for ARPA — what became known as ARPANet […]

Entertainment and Legislation

A couple of years ago, my friend Cia Romano introduced me to Susan Kitchens, whose excellent weblog I check out pretty frequently. Susan has a piece today about the LA Times’s coverage of the entertainment industry’s lobbying of Congress; in short, the entertainment guys want to put some pretty severe restrictions on how consumers use […]

Electronic Newspapers Within 5 Years?

Some of you know that there’s a company — E.Ink — making small quantities of an extremely thin, extremely flexible computer display. The Wall Street Journal carries a story today about the company’s prediction that within five years, people will buy a booklet of this stuff and download a copy of the day’s newspaper to […]

What Would You Do for $59 Million?

There’s a big lottery mess in New Jersey. There’s this multistate lottery called The Big Game that operates in eight states. On April 16, there was a drawing for a jackpot of $331 million. As happens, even at odds of 71 million to one against, there were three winners of $59 million each, in Georgia, Illinois […]

What? You Say There’s a Starbucks in New York?

The lack of timeliness in the New York Times’s coverage of cultural trends is a long-standing joke. Today, the Paper of Record has discovered that there are Starbucks everywhere: In New York, said Alan Hilowitz, a regional Starbucks spokesman, “People literally will not cross the street to get coffee.” So Starbucks, like Duane Reade, has […]

Gates on the Stand

Pretty good Amy Harmon piece in this morning’s New York Times about Bill Gates’s bravura testimony last week in the Microsoft anti-trust trial. I confess that I was disappointed; I’d so been hoping for something like the last 10 minutes of a classic Perry Mason episode. If we couldn’t have that, maybe a replay of his […]

Getting Back to Normal

One of the nicer things about living in my neighborhood has always been the fireworks. I live only a few steps from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which overlooks the East River and lower Manhattan. Ever other year, we get a front-row seat for the immense Macy’s Independence Day display. (Macy’s alternates putting its floats in […]