Slipr

Daily emails are awesome loyalty tools and traffic drivers. At least as good as RSS feeds. Yet, despite being the older technology, automated emails are not ubiquitous. (Probably because RSS feeds are automatically generated by every CMS on the face of the earth, while daily emails are still a pain in the ass to produce.)

Mediabistro believes in them so much they’ve put not one but two promotions for them on top of every single post on their blog (red arrows).

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MIMS
7 songs, 28:33 minutes

A plus D - Close To Konichiwa Bitches (Robyn vs. The Cure)

Santogold / xxxchange - L.E.S. Artistes (xxxchange remix)

Tokyo Police Club - Be Good (RAC Remix)

Dmitry Fyodorov - 1b-1

Trade Secrets - I Know You Got Soul (Acen Remix)

PJtheVIKING - Raining Blows (Original)

The Chemical Brothers - Where Do I Begin (A Copycat Remix)

Because really, what kind of computer skills are a bunch of square-jawed g.i. joes going to have?

In an interview with techie forum Slashdot in early March, he was asked if hackers with checkered pasts, and overweight geeks who couldn’t pass a physical training test, were candidates to join the growing ranks of cyber soldiers. “I believe even the most unlikely candidate, when working for a cause bigger than himself, turns out to be a most loyal ally,” the general wrote.
…
A visit to the embryonic Air Force Cyber Command at Barksdale by BusinessWeek reporters in March shows how the Air Force’s current ad campaign is more a Hollywood-version of Cyber Command. In an aging former recreation building on Barksdale’s leafy grounds, fatigue-clad airmen—some with the physiques of couch-potato hackers—use off-the-shelf PCs to monitor Air Force computer network traffic.

Recruiting for the Cyber Wars | BusinessWeek

Word of the day:

Zoonosis

Any infectious disease that is able to be transmitted (by a vector) from other animals, both wild and domestic, to humans or from humans to animals (the latter is sometimes called reverse zoonosis).

The word is derived from the Greek words zoon (animal) (IPA: zo’on) and nosos (disease). Many serious diseases fall under this category.

One of the first rules of writing web-friendly headlines is extracting the most unique or compelling detail from a piece and making that the headline. It’s the difference between getting dugg and being ignored.

But this is just annoying.

This is like following the headline “STDs Rampant in 5th Graders” with the dek “More 10 year olds have herpetitis than at any point except for two years ago, oh and all the years before 2000 when there was a frakking epidemic (you moron).”

This is why magazines aren’t nearly as threatened by the internet as newspapers:

Unlike newspapers, there is nothing on the internet that reproduces the magazine experience and is also better than magazines.

Magazines look good and, unlike awkward broadsheets, provide an excellent user experience. It doesn’t matter that (if they’re a monthly) they were written two months ago, because they’re about things that have a longer shelf-life. They’re where we go for insight and reportage, not news.

Some day there will be a device that at least mimics the magazine reading experience. However:

“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”

Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now? | New York Observer

Sticking article tools and related content in the flow of an article’s text is nothing new, and there’s plenty of evidence that it works better than most anything else in terms of click-through — or did you think the text on a typical New York times article was lately sandwiched between article tools and supplementary content just because their designers like it that way?

(It used to be more of a sinuous river hugging the curves of the tools and extra links, which I think is more effective — as soon as you put text into a rigid column you’re telling the reader to ignore what’s to the left and right of it — it might be ads.)

But this is new: Wired isn’t sticking its own content into what’s normally a related content space, it’s sticking Portfolio’s content into that space.

Previously, sites like Slate and WaPo have cross-promoted each other’s content in designated ghettos in their right columns (which, due to the ads, are a visual and click-through no-man’s land) but this is probably much more effective.

Granted, by doing this Wired is in part devaluing that territory — if I’m a Wired reader who doesn’t care about Portfolio (and I bet there’s a lot of them), I’m now being trained to ignore that space.

On the other hand, the last time I saw cross-promotion this well integrated was on Gawker, where whole posts (or at least the part before the ‘click to read more’) are regularly cross-posted and are the only reason I and probably a lot of other readers ever bothered to check out Jezebel in the first place — it showed up on Gawker.

It’s nice to see this space maturing, and everyone getting better at pimping their own material rather than watching it fall into the abyss of the archive.

Oil is getting scarce. OK, no problem, we drive smaller cars.

Water is getting scarce. Food is getting scarce. No problem, we desalinate, we put more land under cultivation.

But: Land is getting scarce. Oops.

From the end of Food Prices Rise, Farmers Respond

Despite the back-to-back increases [in price of commodities like soybeans and corn], the number of acres under cultivation [in the U.S.] is still about six million below the level of a decade ago. The government is not entirely sure why that is happening, but one possibility is that some land has been swallowed up by suburban construction.

Higher demand + inflexible supply = higher prices. The economic equation is so elementary it is a wonder we are not having a more urgent discussion about it.

I suppose the answer is that this will, as always, affect the poor first. Adios, developing world.