All about quietly

Programs quietly easing credit crunch

New Games For Windows 2.0 Client Exists

10 Tips For Negotiating A Big, Fat Severance Deal

Silicon Alley Insider

- 8 hours and 22 minutes ago

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=485037e314b9b9ed00e70a5amaxX=392maxY=306" border="0" alt="caseofcash.jpg" title="caseofcash.jpg" width="392" height="306" /Today, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/viacom-to-lay-off-850-via"850 at Viacom/a, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/nbc-cuts-500-starting-with-news"500 at NBC Universal/a and another a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/att-firing-12000"12,000 ATT/a found out they will lose their jobs in layoffs.We hope not, but if you're in a media company that hasn't had layoffs yet, you could be next./p pHere's the good news, a href="http://careerprotection.com/index.html"CareerProtection.com's Kirk Nemer/a told us: It's really, really important to your employer that you go quietly. So much so, that often, companies are willing to bribe laid-off employees with a fatter severance package to make sure of it./p pHere are ten rules for making sure you're the squeaky wheel that takes your employer for a ride:/p ul listrongDo not sign anything right away./strong After breaking the bad news, the HR rep will try make you sign a release within two hours. Don't. If you're being cut as a part of a general layoff, you have at least three weeks to sign your severance package agreement, which is really an agreement to not sue the company. If you did sign it -- and if you're older than 40 --you can revoke your signature within a week./li listrongNo severance package is take it or leave it. Negotiate./strong Your employer expects you to. The most important thing to them is that you do not sue and go away without controversy. They can't take away a severance package once they've already offered it.br //li listrongDo not, however, negotiate while you're still in shock./strong Go home. Eat dinner. Weep. Then come back and make them pay you more to go quietly.br //li listrongFind out how many others are being cut from your particular office/strong. If its 50 or more, the WARN act requires your employer give you 60 days notice (or at least 60 days pay)./li listrongMake sure they offer continued health benefits/strong. Federal lay requires 18 months of continued coverage via COBRA. Sometimes you can make them pay for some of it.br //li listrongMake sure you're getting the bonus you earned last year./strong /li listrongIn fact, make sure you're getting paid for all your accrued benefits/strong, such as sick days or vacation time./li listrongAsk for outplacement services/strong -- or money to pay for them.br //li listrongMake sure your severance package is commensurate with your tenure/strong. You should get more than the people who worked for you and peers who have been at the company for less time./li listrongGet advice from a professional/strong, not just a blog post./li /ul pstrongSee Also:/stronga href="http://businesssheet.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/13-tips-for-dealing-with-your-laid-off-friends"strongbr //strong13 Tips For Dealing With Your Laid Off Friends/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/iipXIqom72n0UWMfafEWYsHolxs/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/iipXIqom72n0UWMfafEWYsHolxs/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=jArtffrL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=jArtffrL" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=xafdxIfj"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=d3Vcg00S"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=EVk3DKNx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=EVk3DKNx" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=QW846B0R"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=ezCxBSMC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=szcG9cRs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=zpxnjUuc"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/sp2sYd0n3sc" height="1" width="1"/

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Disgraced N.Y. Gov. Returns As A Columnist

MacNN: Haier tries Wi-Fi players again with Sport model

Haier tries Wi-Fi players again with Sport model

The Light Of Lesser Suns

365 tomorrows

- 21 hours and 13 minutes ago

Author : Glenn Blakeslee

He became part of the Grand Flyby Mission midway through the third decade of his life, as a junior designer on the Flight Data Subsystem team.

He found himself at the leading edge of spacecraft design, and worked with the members of his team to build a robust device capable of data-handling functions for a long-term project.

He went to the Cape for the liftoff, was amazed to see the spacecraft climb on a column of flame. He met a girl on a Florida beach, and a year later married her.

The next years were heady times, as the spacecraft arrowed its way to the outer planets: Jupiter and her moons were imaged, and Saturn and her rings fell to the instruments aboard the spacecraft. He lived as fast as the data coming in, speeding the crowding freeways of LA in his sports car and drinking more than usual. He had an affair, which his wife did not discover.

The spacecraft’s mission was extended, and he found himself no longer a junior engineer but in charge of a team. The FDS was his baby, he the hands-down expert. The spacecraft was the first to perform a flyby of Uranus, and the first to photograph Neptune.

In the fifth decade of his life, he found himself settling down. His fast car had long ago been traded for a family-style sedan. He spent hours at work designing methods for upgrading the spacecraft, and when he and his team succeeded the job of the spacecraft changed again, to a long-duration interstellar mission. His wife learned of his dalliance a decade earlier and, bored and facing an empty nest, divorced him.

Some of the instruments on the spacecraft â€”those with no use in the sparser stretches of the solar systemâ€” were shut down, and though the incoming data never ceased it did slow. He found his staff reduced, which was expected. He found his life had settled into a slow rhythm â€”collecting data from the far-off spacecraft, sending updates across the expanse, sleeping and eating.

One year after the spacecraft crossed the termination shock â€”the inexorable slowing of the solar windâ€” he suffered a heart attack. He took time off but kept charge of his small team. With doctors orders he was back on the job, but charged with shutting down two more of the spacecraft’s systems. Three years later he retired.

He kept a firm hand on the spacecraft’s systems as a part-time consultant. With only two instruments still collecting data, the mission had collapsed to a terminal phase. They held a party when the spacecraft entered heliopause, and it reminded him of the good old days, when the spacecraft was running fast through the outer planets and the data stream held discovery after discovery. Now past the edge of the solar system, the spacecraft would coast quietly forever.

It became apparent to him that he and the spacecraft had led parallel lives, from a fast and fiery launch to a slow cold end.

Late in his eighth decade he found that his time in the sun had created a defect in his skin which, in the darkness and solitude of his late age, would probably end his life. So, too, the spacecraft: its time in the sun had ended, the reactors that powered it all but discharged. But it sped on, and so might he.

The rapid telemetry of his heart would slow, the data stream of his brain would trickle to a stop â€”but he knew, somehow, that he and the spacecraft would ride together, into the light of lesser suns.

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Henry Blodget: Financial-Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter

Wired Top Stories

- 22 hours and 14 minutes ago

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman./p pRecently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: a href="http://www.clusterstock.com/"Clusterstock/a, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and a href="http://www.businesssheet.com/"the Business Sheet/a, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch./p pBlodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built."/p pAnother way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions mdash; the grayer, stodgier ones mdash; may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for citeThe New York Times/cite, the newspaper's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11pubed.html"ombudsman went haywire/a. "The citeTimes/cite luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the citeTimes/cite."/p pIt's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything./p pemSenior writer Daniel Roth /em(a href="mailto:daniel_roth@wired.com"daniel_roth@wired.com/a) emwrote about the a href="/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi"future of the electric car/a in issue 16.09./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:e5509a1338aa2d046a0f36f53c86fd46:KTSfKmr30cBfHohgGm6zBCE5aLDI579Ry5%2FoG9QrW9e1KIT2xpDAJhCNE%2FP6%2BodTaIRTxDwhJCc5xg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:85af8ef1f22075639f5e1be7151d039b:KjXRBL7FimCdPfkcPkDUOZbe%2BR8tiL4gaeJxl%2FnucFQ8UL28mzRmZSeHpMqoJwFUINppaALMULUa'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:db4d557cf92ff9467e13e01b1aee6530:PWDj6Lri2aPp2F0l1o37LwimABRJS%2Bw%2FOQMMPSWuRMZRLZhLRGI4Q9jz2JLAIoyYna2BguNYIBWs'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:064842e7a9d26f4e96559df7ad75369c:Ri7lRQ2YuIojw9J42qFhanIkt9g%2B2lNj7ky0mPfhji4DJCDrd66IrgRLO78oVkOke9RGBuQDA3ra'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=V04TVZ"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=V04TVZ" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334201" height="1" width="1"/

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heart attack,weakness,investigations,coo,conclusions

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

John H Armstrong

- 22 hours and 14 minutes ago

pspan style=font-size: 14px; font-family: Verdana;a href=http://www.theboyinstripedpajamas.coma href=http://johnharmstrong.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451cfe769e2010536195aa9970b-pi style=float: left;img alt=BITSP_S_Poster border=0 class=at-xid-6a00d83451cfe769e2010536195aa9970b image-full src=http://johnharmstrong.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451cfe769e2010536195aa9970b-800wi style=margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; title=BITSP_S_Poster //a The Boy in the Striped Pajamas/a is a one of the most moving films I#39;ve seen in a long while. I doubt the critics will acknowledged it as they should but it is a four-star film to me. (a href=http://www.rottentomatoes.comRotten Tomatoes/a gave it a 64% rating, which is pretty good for the ratings of professional critics!) Only one other film that deals with the Holocaust from the perspective of a child#39;s viewpoint comes remotely close. emLife Is Beautiful /em(1998), starring Roberto Benigni. It has ranked as my favorite such film butnow I have to put this new Disney film in the same genre and give it just as high a rating. This film is good enough to see in the theater embefore /emit comes out on DVD. It has already received a Heartland quot;Truly Moving Picture Awardquot; and deservedly so. It is family approved for ages 12 and above. I think this is about right. Young children could not handle the dark side of the Holocaust presented here without some emotional problems but everyone else will be moved in a way that is truly human. When the film ended I sat in the last row of a fairly packed theater audience and quietly wept. I felt my usual anger at the Nazi#39;s but I also felt in a very deep sense the reality that children see things we do not readily see and experience life in a way that we must all seek to learn again. /span/ppspan style=font-size: 14px; font-family: Verdana;The film#39;s story line is situated in the 1940s. A German officer, with his wife and two children (ages 8 and 12), are moved to the country from his work in Berlin. The children, and the wife, soon realize that they are in the midst of a Jewish death camp. Bruno (Asa Butterfield, an eleven year old actor), the son of the German officer, begins to realize that life is very different here than he ever imagined in the city of Berlin. He has no friends and grows bored. Bruno is curious, as all such boys will be at eight. He wants to explore the farm but his mother forbids it. Eventually he slips out and finds a barbed wire encampment. Here Bruno establishes a friendship with a little Jewish boy, Shmuel, who is also eight years old. He is delighted to make a new friendship. He visits his friend every day. This is where the title of the movie comes from since Shmuel lives in quot;striped pajamasquot; behind barbed wire in the extermination camp. Day after day the two boys talk and play building a close friendship. I will not tell you more about where the story goes since to say more will give away too much. /span/ppspan style=font-size: 14px; font-family: Verdana;a href=http://johnharmstrong.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451cfe769e201053621fa1d970c-pi style=float: right;img alt=BITSP_S_Shaking_Hands class=at-xid-6a00d83451cfe769e201053621fa1d970c src=http://johnharmstrong.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451cfe769e201053621fa1d970c-120wi style=margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; //a The story line is arresting, the theme is truly touching, and the ending is gripping and chilling. You will be hard pressed to leave the theater without being touched very deeply. The central point, emseeing and experiencing evil from a child#39;s perspective,/em is the whole point. Don#39;t allow critic#39;s comments about British accents in a Nazi film put you off. See it. The film is a comfortable 94 minutes in length and well directed with beautiful scenes and solid adaptations. /span/ppspan style=font-size: 14px; font-family: Verdana;The film is based on the book, strongemThe Boy in the Striped Pajamas/em/strong, by John Boyne. The book was published in 2006 and immediately won awards. In Ireland it won two prestigious awards and was voted the children#39;s book of the year. It was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and eventually made it as a best-seller on the emNew York Times/em list. Boyne, born in Dublin, studied literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and is now working on his seventh novel. I intend to read more of his work based upon seeing the screen adaption of this fine story. /span/pbr /

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angers,midst,colleges,perspectives,best seller

UK Round-Up: Google Ads; Amazon MP3; News Corp's Sun Online; EMI Execs

paidContent.org

- 1 days and 2 hours ago

pSome snippets from our sister site a href="http://www.paidcontent.co.uk"paidContentUK/a: /p p -- a href="http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-google-turns-to-hard-liquor-relaxes-alcohol-ads-rules/"bGoogle turns to hard alcohol, relaxing ad rules in January/b/a: Here's one for the New Year hangover... Google (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=GOOG" class="ticker" title="GOOG"NSDQ: GOOG/a), whose UK ad income has a href="http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-google-to-uk-advertisers-please-keep-spending-with-us/" title="plateaued in recent quarters"plateaued in recent quarters/a, will relax its paid search advertising rules to allow hard alcohol to be advertised from January 12, paidContent:UK has learned. Whilst advertisers will be able to buy ads on Google only for ibranding/i (ie. pointing to a drink's marketing site), "ads and sites promoting the idirect sale/i of alcohol both online and offline will remain restricted as per current hard alcohol policy", according to the forthcoming guidelines, which we have seen. /p p -- a href="http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-amazon-brings-mp3-to-uk-baits-rivals-with-3-albums/"bAmazon brings MP3 to UK/b/a: The best way to take on the UK MP3 download market? If you're Amazon (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=AMZN" class="ticker" title="AMZN"NSDQ: AMZN/a), iby stealth/i. Today the e-tail giant quietly brought its a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/MP3-Music-Download/b/ref=sa_menu_dm1?ie=UTF8node=77197031" title="UK MP3 download store"MP3 download store/a to the UK this morning. Like its US forebear, there's repertoire from all four majors, plus Cooking Vinyl, Harmonia Mundi, Beggars Banquet, The Orchard (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=ORCD" class="ticker" title="ORCD"NSDQ: ORCD/a), Concord and Ioda. There are three million non-a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/dmusic/help/faq.html/ref=amb_link_82595093_1?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLEpf_rd_s=center-1pf_rd_r=1GPF741E0H098TE80SHWpf_rd_t=101pf_rd_p=464019253pf_rd_i=77197031" title="DRM-protected"DRM-protected/a songs. /p p -- a href="http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-news-corp-newspaper-sites-step-up-relationship-will-link-to-each-other/"bNews Corp sites step up cooperation/b/a: Not one to be left out by growing overlap elsewhere around News Corp (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=NWS" class="ticker" title="NWS"NYSE: NWS/a). a href="http://www.thesun.co.uk" title="Sun Online"Sun Online/a is now starting to formally link out to other news sites in the Murdoch portfolio. The site has added a footer to its homepage and all of its section pages, linking directly to 10 stories each on four other sites in the group - bnot just domestic Sky News and Times Online but US stablemates FoxNews.com and New York Post/b. /p p -- a href="http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-emi-gets-more-terraforming-hands-execs-work-is-done/"bEMI gets more terraforming/b/a: After Terra Firma scorched EMI's earth over the last year, its new CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti is sowing new seeds with his own management restructure. On the way out: bChris Roling/b, Terra Firma portfolio MD, brought in in August as EMI COO and CFO; bAshley Unwin/b, Terra Firma's talent MD, who had been UK and north America COO since December; and bFrancois van der Spuy/b, a Terra director. Others who may leave, a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/privateequity/3543107/Terra-Firma-loses-string-of-executives-seconded-to-EMI-Private-Equity.html" title="Telegraph.co.uk says"Telegraph.co.uk says/a: bStephen Alexander/b, Terra's operations MD, and bRiaz Punja/b, EMI's finance MD. /p piOur streamlined mobile application for the BlackBerry and other smart devices brings you the latest headlines quickly on the go. a href="http://m.paid.mwap.at/"Click here to download/a./i /p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=QLHtYj"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=QLHtYj" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=J8evO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=J8evO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=qiSqO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=qiSqO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=i4tao"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=i4tao" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=xIeFO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=xIeFO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=dwsvO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=dwsvO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/474091544" height="1" width="1"/

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coo,drm,emi,music,cooperation

Do You Think Mac OS X Needs Anti-Virus Software? [Qotd]

Gizmodo

- 1 days and 3 hours ago

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/12/custom_1228246664653_mr-t-antivirus_01.jpg" width="804" height="367" style="display:block;float:none;" /As you probably know, the BBC and a bunch of publications pounced over a "new" Tech Support Note recommending the use of anti-virus software, accusing Apple of "quietly" changing their tune about the Mac being virus-proof. a href="http://gizmodo.com/5100996/false-alarm-apple-mac-os-x-anti+virus-recommendation-is-old"We discovered this was false/a. Then a href="http://gizmodo.com/5101266/apple-removes-antivirus-support-note-reiterates-os-xs-built+in-protection"Apple removed the notes/a, saying they were obsolete because Mac OS X is designed with built-in protection. Certainly, Mac OS X's architecture and their out-of-the-box security policies make their OS safer than Windows. Or does it? Despite a href="http://gizmodo.com/5101337/giz-explains-why-os-x-shrugs-off-viruses-off-better-than-windows"the technical arguments/a, do you think Mac OS X needs anti-virus software?/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=0c751b9f6a42d02e31a327ab93173326p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=0c751b9f6a42d02e31a327ab93173326p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=0c751b9f6a42d02e31a327ab93173326" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=7rmLhu7j"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=S9yk1Tx3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=8ovHxMpA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=8ovHxMpA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=6YGRqFXL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=6YGRqFXL" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/q3K433mncpM" height="1" width="1"/

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proof,alarms,gizmodo,cache,apple

Slashdot: Apple Says Macs Are Safe, No Antivirus Needed

Apple Says Macs Are Safe, No Antivirus Needed

MacNN: Amazon quietly expands MP3 store to UK

Amazon quietly expands MP3 store to UK