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Category: Technology

Newspaper Deathwatch: Attacks from Without, Attacks from Within

Newspaper Deathwatch: Attacks from Without, Attacks from Within

Another really bad week in which to be a lover of print media. Yesterday came the stunning announcement that The New York Times Company ad revenues for all papers had declined 18% in July when compared with last years numbers. Even worse, especially if you’re a member for the Boston Globe or Worcester Telegram staff, the ad numbers for the Time’s New England Media Group dropped 24% vs. last year. Keep that in mind for a couple minutes…we’ll come back…

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The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

We’ve all done it. Try to email something to a friend and Outlook, or whatever mail client we use accidentally selects a different contact to send to. It’s not such a big problem when you’re sending pictures of the baby, or directions to the weekend barbeque, but what happens when you accidentally send sensitive information to the wrong person, like a journalist. The problem is utterly compounded when you give accidentally give access to your information sitting out in the…

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Full On Winston Wolfe Mode

Full On Winston Wolfe Mode

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I’ve been in full on Winston Wolfe mode for the past week and a half as I got pulled into a time critical project to upgrade performance using Akamai for 15 or our websites, some of which I’ve never seen before. The good news is that the Akamai DSA product is for real – an incredible boost to performance that requires very little work to set up and very real benefits. This sums up…

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Duncan Riley: At the end of the war, Newspapers commit ritual suicide

Duncan Riley: At the end of the war, Newspapers commit ritual suicide

Duncan Riley writes at Inquisitr that the Philadelphia Inquirer has set a new policy requiring that all “signature investigative reporting” appear in print before it hits the web site. Romenesko has a copy of the memo sent to Inquirer staff. The important parts: Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re…

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Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks

Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks

Traffic stats – the red headed step child of statistics, damned lies cloaked inside a slathering of untruth and then wrapped in that un-Godliest of file formats, xls and used to bludgeon all that is sane and rational out of your web strategy.  This is the stuff that reduces grown webmasters, those mastadonian throwbacks of an earlier tech era, to tears, and enables the airline magazine reading, conference attending execs to think they actually have a handle on what’s happening….

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Why Most Online Communities Fail…

Why Most Online Communities Fail…

David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“.  David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages. 1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great…

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WordPress 2.6 – It’s a CMS, Baby!

WordPress 2.6 – It’s a CMS, Baby!

I remember when I first setup WordPress back in 2003, the old 1.x days, my comment was that “It’s just like a CMS (content management system) with most of the functionality removed.” Well, with the release of WordPress 2.6, I can finally eat my words. It’s now simply a content management system, and a darned good one at that. That’s right, content management system. To call it a blogging platform is to sell it short. It’s now all the features…

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Product Marketing 101 – Never Remove a Free Feature

Product Marketing 101 – Never Remove a Free Feature

I started working with Mysql Workbench 5.0.23 today, which they list as the successor to the sometimes buggy, sometimes brilliant FabForce DB4 mysql modeling tool.  I”m not the guy to give you a feature by feature breakdown on the product, but I can tell you this:  When you create a new product version you should never take what were free features in the predecessor and make them extras you only get in the “standard edition.” In this case, the import…

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MySQL Table Locking & WordPress Scalability

MySQL Table Locking & WordPress Scalability

I ran into an interesting issue recently, and since I had so much trouble finding a solution, I’ll post about it. We have a very large WordPress site with somewhere around 32,000 posts. Sometime during may the database (MySQL 5.10) started to randomly crash, taking along with it the Apache server, etc. Every time the crashes occurred, we’d find that the number of users had climbed over the available processes, in this case, 501. We went through a whole host…

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Yet Another Newspaper Outsourcing Post

Yet Another Newspaper Outsourcing Post

Sean Pollay pointed out that the Boston Herald will be outsourcing printing and laying off up to 160 employees.  This from E&P: The Boston Herald will layoff between 130 and 160 workers under a plan to outsource its printing operations to other locations within the state, the paper reported Tuesday. The publisher attributes the action to the fact that some of their newspapers have presses that are more than 50 years old, which one would expect are a maintenance nightmare. …

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