Dis-aggregation.

Read an article in Vanity Fair last night about Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the NY Times, by Mark Bowden. It was very interesting.

The article talks about how Sulzberger has not been able to make the Times financially successful in the internet world.

Former editor Max Frankel had some ideas about the future role of newspapers, "“The second idea was much more important, and came a little later,” Frankel says. “I wrote that one big coming threat posed by the computer was disaggregation: the Internet disaggregates the hunt for information. The need for information would survive the advent of the digital era, but the package offered by The New York Times might not. So how do you protect the package? What was so great about The New York Times was not that we offered the best coverage in any particular field but that we were very good in so many. It was the totality of the newspaper that was a marvel, not any of its particulars. The Web threatened to break that up. One way to weather this, which I suggested, was that we needed to pick the fields in which to be pre-eminent. If you want to have the best sports package, then start hiring the staff and make yourself the best go-to place for sports information. If it is business, or politics—whatever—pick one and make yourself the best, or make a strategic alliance.” This is the approach taken by ESPN.com, by Bloomberg.com, IMDB.com, Weather.com, and a multitude of others. Any one of dozens of sites specializing in, say, politics or the arts could have been taken over and built up around the Times’s expert staff."

I hadn't thought of that. Why should you get movie reviews from the same place you get sports stories?

Denver Blizzard. Friday April 17, 2009

Nice. We can use the water. Plus they let us out of work at three. It's Sunday now, sunny, warm, and the snow is melting fast. When I went out on the patio to see how cold it was I noted it smelled like pine trees. It had kind of a fresh quality. Reminded me of camping out. Very nice.

Now I'm thinking of going camping this summer. Hmm. I have next week off. Maybe I'll go for a hike. El Dorado canyon perhaps...

Paradise Lost

I'm on book 4, around line 160. I'm kind of enjoying it. I like the writing style but I am having trouble following the action. For example:

164: Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
165: Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.
166: So entertained those odorous sweets the Fiend
167: Who came their bane, through with them better pleased
168: Than Asmodeus with the fishy fume,
169: That drove him, though enamoured, from the spouse
170: Of Tobit's sone, and with a vengeance sent
171: From Media post to Egypt there fast bound.

Satan's enjoying the smells of Eden. Milton compares this experience to some other literary/historical characters I am not familiar with - Asmodeus, Tobit, Media (is that a character?). That said, the scene seems interesting. Satan was reminded of how things were when he was an angel. He was taken by how lovely Eden was. He thought about going back and asking for forgiveness. Good stuff.

Anyway, I'm hoping to make it through this whole thing even though the writing is half opaque.