I’m not surprised by any of the breweries on this list, nor am I surprised by their ranking.  I don’t really consider Sam Adams (Boston Brewery) a craft brewery anymore.  They’re just too big, too national; they’ve traded in their quality of product for the ability to compete with the macro-domestics.  But otherwise, you can’t go wrong with any of the breweries on this list.  They’re all making great, quality beers.

My 10 favorite from this list would be (in no particular order): Deschutes, Magic Hat, Matt Brewing Co. (Saranac), Stone Brewing, Dogfish Head, Lagunitas, Brooklyn Brewery, Rogue, Abita, and Shipyard.

This winter, Avatar is the only motion picture event.  There is no Harry Potter, no Lord of the Rings, no obvious competition for this type of film.

Especially when you look at all the numbers involved between a $300 million production budget, $150 million marketing/publicity budget, 14 years spend developing the necessary camera technology.  Yeah, sure there are no bankable stars, but it’s directed by James “freaking” Cameron?!? I get worried reading between the lines that Fox is already making excuses for the movies perceived failure.

Perhaps most significantly, the meat of the business isn’t particularly good. On Friday, I stopped into an Arby’s for the first time this millennium. It was clean, and I noticed an array of products beyond the bare-bones menu I recall from my Midwestern youth. Moneybox may be a food snob, but he is a nondiscriminating connoisseur of street food and greasy fare who still makes the occasional run for the border at Taco Bell. (Don’t tell Mrs. Moneybox.) But even I had difficulty completing the reporting for this assignment. Forget about salads and vegetables. As I scoured the menu—the gyro, the french dip, the patty melt—I had difficulty identifying anything that had gone through less processing than uranium. A few bites of a roast beef sandwich slathered with goopy cheddar sauce, and I was done. On the food chain, the thinly sliced beef is about as far from Boar’s Head deli meat as Boar’s Head oven-roasted ham is from the vaunted jamón Iberico.

Well, okay, it probably is the roast beef.  But the restaurant doesn’t even have anything else to offer customers aside from it’s namesake sandwich.  Not a good business decision.

Which means that people with DVRs still sit through commercials because they’re too lazy to use a remote.  With 1/3 of US households watching television through their DVR, when factored into ratings, many shows are increasing their viewership in the  range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent.  The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

Shocking!  But there it is.  Only now have networks come to realize that just because people watch television shows on time delay or on the internet doesn’t mean that people aren’t watching shows.  Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but I guess it does take a television executive about three years.

We took notice when Google first announced they were going to add a music search function.  If you haven’t seen the music search feature yet in your searches, you will; they are rolling it out slowly.  However, you can test it out here.

I’m not terribly sold on this, but it’s a step in the right direction.  What I’d want is something that searches for Mp3s like the Hype Machine, as well as torrents.  But I understand the legality involved with both of those practices and how that functionality isn’t in Google’s best interests.

It’s already been neutered, now that you can only watch five episodes of a show at a time, but now Hulu is basically putting their business in jeopardy by charging people to use the website.  There isn’t a timeline in place for when this will happen, but News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey hinted it would be sometime in 2010. 

Here’s the thing — Hulu’s  value is derived almost exclusively because it’s free.  The people that watch Hulu, could easily switch to Casttv.com for example, or just Bit Torrent.  It’s a risky gamble.

Well, the site has relaunched and though I haven’t given the new version a go, it looks like they’ve managed to license content and keep things on the up and up with the content providers.  The layout is a bit different than I remember it being, but nothing radically so.

According to a press release:

The sources within the platform are a bit different than you may remember, but we are very excited to announce that we are launching the platform with licensed content from over 100 TV and Radio sources from around the country.  There will be at least one television news source in each one of the top 50 US cities, where the majority of the sources allow you to search, clip and share their broadcast news content.We’re also excited to unveil an entirely new site design.  Picking up where we left off, we’ve brought to life many of your suggestions from the beta.  The new site will have:

• Daily featured clips
• The ability to cross search each of our sources simultaneously
• The ability to conduct local market or regional searches
• The ability to generate instant local or category based RSS feeds
• The interactive display of all clip closed caption content for easy quoting for your blog
• A new section called “As Seen On” where we will feature your Redlasso blog posts
• A brand new Redlasso blog where we will feature great content, our members sites and Redlasso updates
• New Facebook and Twitter pages, and much more coming soon!

It’s always difficult to gain traction after losing it, but hopefully Redlasso can do so once again.

“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”

As an aside, Trillin’s profile of R.W. Apple Jr. is one of the finest examples of profile writing.  Right up there with “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” in my humble opinion. [via]

Last week, Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian laid off my best friends. They were model employees of Comcast/E! Entertainment and now because Keeping Up With the Kardashians decided it was of the utmost artistic integrity to stage a television “wedding” some of the best people I know are looking for work.

The price for the lavish “wedding” was rumored to be a cool one million dollars — chump change to Odom who just signed a $33 million contract with the Lakers. Pocket cash for Bruce Jenner, a motivational speaker and hero of the 1976 Olympics. A sliver of Khloe’s inheritance money, better known as the Orenthal James Simpson defense fund.

You get the point. These were wealthy people and still they twisted E! Entertainment’s arm, probably not too hard, to pay for the wedding.

The company made a conscious decision to hold a fake non-binding (maybe it was real, I don’t know) wedding and then coincidently hold layoffs a few days afterwards. A total of 36 people were let go just after that magical ceremony. I’m not sure if there was a direct correlation, but I’m assuming all of their yearly incomes add up to just about a million dollars. At the very least a few jobs could have been saved by passing on the charade.

What kind of company can make such a cavalier decision?  

It’s indicative of the times we live in that a business is more concerned with showering rich people with money rather than keep 36 hard-working people employed.

Paparazzi pictures and photos from a helicopter made the ceremony look legit. And sure everyone involved is saying the right things, but honestly the couple met a month ago.

It was a star studded event, which you can watch in November, d’uh. Seacrest made the mandatory company appearance and quickly Seacrested out. Lamar’s teammates were there like Kobe and lunatic Ron Artest (just signed by the Lakers in the off-season); the girls all wore matching Laker purple gowns.

How terribly cute and clever.

And so you may care about the celebrities and the wedding by proxy, because you’re forced to, because this type of show is shoved down your throat and you have no choice but to pay attention. However, let me tell you about the people who should be in your thoughts. The people who have had their lives change due to a cultural atmosphere with no integrity.

The folks let go weren’t the typical friends you find in LA. They should have been treasured as diamonds in a sea of cubic zirconium. A few of the real people this town has to offer.

“Jo” [named changed, protect the innocent and all that] was an amazing person to have around the office. If not for her I wouldn’t have met the woman I love. That’s pretty hard to beat, but she’s also my Madame Cleo. She’s always been there to listen to me and cheer me up and occasionally predict my future.

Being a big baseball guy, I compared her to Kevin Millar of the 2004 Red Sox. Not because she chews tobacco and grabs her crotch but because she’ a great club house gal. She doesn’t have to get a hit to make us all better. Every championship team needs that special someone who is good in the dugout, making everyone feel better, developing hand shakes or hitting you in the face with shaving cream when you knock in the winning run. Jo was our Kevin Millar.

She knows endlessly more about me than I do of her. That’s how she wants it to be. She’s the greatest listener I’ve ever known. Her advice is impeccable. My life and work is better for having met Jo. She’s the closest thing I have to a sister in this town and that’s saying a lot. No disrespect to my actual sister.

In laying off Jo, E! chose to can the only person in the department with a child. There is no consideration, no thought, no compassion, no sympathy. You think Lamar and Khloe will ever have to worry about taking care of their child?

So you could watch two D-list imbeciles pretend to have the greatest day of their lives and blow a million dollars of corporate money, Jo now has to find a way to feed her three-year-old little girl, make rent payments, figure out how to cloth her, and give her a normal life.

The other two friends were no less special. Two hard working guys who truly aspire to change this crazy city we live in; yet they were expendable if it means producing more of the same fake reality. But I’ll spare you.
When are we in Los Angeles going to see that we perpetuate this type of social retardation? We infect America with a virus eating away at that part of the brain that separates Meryl Streep from Tila Tequila.

We direct this type of entertainment at Middle America because we believe that’s what they desire. We think they want something stupid, mindless, the lowest common denominator of entertainment, so that’s what we feed them. Hollywood, I’ve lived in “Middle America” and the garbage you spoon feed them is not what they want but it’s all they have to eat. You’re throwing darts in the dark, making entertainment and programming choices based on false assumptions about an amorphous region of the country and honest-to-god real people’s lives are at stake.

I implore you to take chances. Go out on a limb. Remember they only love it because you tell them they do. Therefore, they’ll love it all. You have the opportunity to alter lives in a positive way.

I hate knowing I contribute to the dumbification of America. We make celebrities out of talentless whores (both genders). Its killing me and suffocating this land. Can we give them more? Can we challenge ourselves to take chances on programming that matters? Can we stop perpetuating the pathetic death of culture?

It’s the same formula over and over, young easy girls and aging rock stars. What’s David Lee Roth up too? You just paused and thought that would be a good show didn’t you? Can we regurgitate another washed up actor? Are there anymore Baldwins out there? It’s enough to make you want to smash your television or at least cancel the 500 cable channels with nothing on.

This is my resignation from the lobotomization of America.

“This is the last straw,” an art historian working at the Louvre, who declined to be named, told the Daily Telegraph. “This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum.”  He went on to say, “I’m not against eating in a museum but McDonald’s is hardly the height of gastronomy.  Today McDonald’s, tomorrow low-cost clothes shops.”  The horror!

The demand for flying isn’t there, because, let’s face it, flying is aggravating and a hassel.  Companies have reduced something that was once a joyous marvel into essentially the equivalent of drunken wingman sex  — utterly repulsive, totally forgettable, a relucatant necessity.  No one wants to fly, but we have to otherwise friends, family and co-workers will be disappointed.  

“Do you not want these services, do you want to pay for them or do you want higher ticket prices? These are your choices,” Richard Aboulafia, a vice president with the aerospace and defense analysis firm Teal Group, told MSNBC.  Really?  Those are the only choices. 

Maybe the airlines need to figure out a better business model and go from there, instead of just tacking on stupid, unnecessary fees to squeeze every ounce of profit from consumers.

I don’t have the slightest idea what that means, but company names like Macy’s, Hertz, CBS, AMD, Sprint Nextel, Goodyear Tires and the Las Vegas Sands are enough to raise some eyebrows.

It’s probably a bit cooler than it is useful at this moment.  But, if I were  a major news organization I would have this up splashed across a monitor in the newsroom. 

For people who still scoff at Twitter, I tell them, think of it as a digital telegraph or news wire (that also allows you to chat with friends).

Well, anyways, for whatever reason PBR because the choice of a certain generation, like Pepsi!, instead of other cheap piss-water beers (High Life, Keystone, Olympia, et. al.). 

“Hipsters boosted PBR sales by 17 percent that year, and sales are up a good 24 percent this year, more than other “subpremium” beers that have spent more advertising dollars trying to appeal to recession slummers.”   Now PBR is repaying those peeps by raising their prices as much as $1.50 more than the other piss-water beer brands. 

What this means is that certain people are going to learn to say Champagne of Beers awfully fast.  At the end of the day, sometimes a cold watery-lager tastes great, but spending that extra $2.50 to get a dank six-pack isn’t going to break the bank.

“The group’s president, Troy Newman, blamed the economic downturn for its money woes in a desperate plea e-mailed Monday night to donors. But the Wichita-based organization has also been under attack from both fringe anti-abortion militants and abortion-rights supporters since the May 31 shooting death of Dr. George Tiller.”

Some good suggestions from Jezebel: “Let’s take up a collection, buy up their HQ, and turn it into a Planned Parenthood.” And “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of total douchebags.” [via]

Update: It occurred to me, well, readers really, that I should have linked to Planned Parenthood as a resource and to offer them my support. Terrible oversight on my part. My apologies, seeing as I linked to Operation Rescue.

As if you needed yet another way to consume more information, Google has rolled out what they are calling Fast Flip: “The way we would describe Fast Flip would be that it’s not quite a feed reader, and not quite an online magazine. The front page of Fast Flip presents you with several rows of content that can be sorted by topic—the top row lets you choose between recent, most viewed, and recommended headlines, while the second row lets you choose between various hot topics (unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift resides in this row as of this writing), and the third row lets you choose between specific news sources.”

Whereas an RSS reader is something you can specifically taylor to your individual tastes, Fast Flip acts as a method for scanning newspapers and magazines (no blogs I suppose).

Google has partnered with 36 magazine and newspaper publishers, who will receive revenue generated from ads on the site. Currently, the publishers include The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and ProPublica, according to The Official Google blog.

The BBC reports that other publications such as Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, Popular Mechanics, and Slate, have signed on with Google. (Full disclosure: The Christian Science Monitor is one of the newspapers featured on Google Fast Flip.)

In a classic double-middle-finger salute, Gawker Media has decided to publish the piece with a Russian translation for the world to read.  Or at least Russia. 

Simon Owens, of Bloggasm, sat down with Nick Denton, ruler of the Gawker Media Empire, to find out why. 

Why did he think Conde Nast was going to such great lengths to bury the story?

“I assume concern for the commercial prospects of their Russian titles,” he said. “And remember that the punishment of disobedient journalists can go beyond the impromptu tax audit. Paul Klebnikov of Forbes was killed.”

Gawker has never been one to back down when republishing controversial documents. When the Church of Scientology tried to get the media company to take down leaked video of Tom Cruise’s evangelizing several months ago, the media company refused.

“I’ve always thought that a site like Gawker — though we try to seek out corruption and hypocrisy in New York — would serve a clearer public purpose in Moscow, Beijing or Riyadh,” Denton said.

If you want to read the piece in English, you still have to buy the magazine.

And in most cases, even if you’re paying $60 per month for the highest internet speeds, say from Comcast, they tell you it’s piping in at 12-15 mbps, but really it fluctuates between 5 mbps and 9 mpbs.

The good news is that these American internet service providers want to lower the bar instead of raising it to the Un-American standards of other countries.

“It would be disruptive and introduce confusion if the commission were to now create a new and different definition,” Verizon said in its letter to the FCC.

Comcast Corp, the biggest cable provider, said that “simpler is better” and that the actual online experience of any particular consumer at any particular moment in time involves a wide range of factors.

“Many of which are outside the control of the Internet service provider,” Comcast said in its letter, which argued for defining “basic” broadband as having a downstream and upstream speed of 0.256 mbps.

It’s good to see American companies succumbing to the time-honored American tradition of doing the least amount as possible and calling it good enough.

Really, when all is said and done with the American Empire, cultures will look back at our politicians, artists, companies and overall legacy and say, yup, America sure did know how to lower the bar; instead of rising to get over a higher and higher bar they just decided to crawl underneath it and call it progress.

In exchange for $4 Billion, Disney acquires Marvel’s staple of 5,000+ characters.  The news comes as a bit of a surprise for a deal of this magnitude.  The terms of the deal seem to be similar to the one they struck with Pixar several years ago, with Disney acting as a distribution/marketing side and Marvel obtaining creative control of their properties.

The most exciting news?  Pixar head John Lasseter met with Marvel executives last week, “about a possible team-up between Marvel and Pixar and got ‘pretty excited, pretty fast.’ They say there’s definitely an opportunity there.”  Yes, yes there would.  If nothing comes of this deal except Pixar being involved with Marvel Animation then it’s totally worth it.

Though I suppose, Disney ruining the Marvel characters by making them family-friendly would also be a terrible thing.

UPDATE: The L.A. Times weighs in on how Disney can broaden its brand with the purchase of Marvel. The Beat has a good roundup of news related to the deal, too.

It’s remarkably easy to compare the cost of services, plans, phones, etc. against one another, but the piece obfuscates that by relying on he-said-she-said journalism. 

Not only that, but Dan Richman buries the meat of the piece — that the FCC is launching an investigation into cellphone company pricing practices — to the very bottom, rather than that being the hook to do actual consumer journalism.  To you know, perform a service and determine whether or not Americans really are being ripped off by cellphone companies, which most assuredly we are. 

U.S. residents pay the world’s highest rate — about $53.30 per month — for a “medium-use package” including 780 minutes of outgoing voice calls, 600 text messages and eight multi-media messages per year, says an August report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.In contrast, Finns, Swedes and the Dutch pay $11 to $12 per month for the same plan, according to the report, which covers 26 countries.

Americans also pay the most — about $22.50 a month — for what the group termed a “low-use package” including 360 minutes of outgoing voice calls, 396 text messages and eight multimedia messages per year. That compares with $4.16 a month in the least expensive country, Denmark, with Finland, Sweden and Norway just slightly more expensive.

And yet this passage is glanced over in deferrence to the mouthpiece of the cellphone service industry, which, suprise!, claims that Americans don’t pay that much at all and in fact it’s cheaper than other countries.  Obviously. 

One way to think about this is to ask yourself if you are happy with the level of service you receive for the amount you pay.  You want unlimited minutes, texts, and data every month?  Well, that’s $100 from any of the four cellphone carriers in America.  Even for the minimum plan you’re talking about $40 with no texting or data. 

If you want to understand how America cellphone companies rip consumers off look at the pricing structure for text messages.  Let’s use a baseline of 200 text messages a month. 

Without a bundled package it costs 20 cents per message, or $0.20.  Sending 200 text messages would cost $40 per month.  So, of course you purchase the 200 text message bundle for $5 per month, figuring you’re saving yourself $35 per month. 

It actually costs a cellphone company .3 cents, or $.003, to send a text message.  It costs a cellphone company only $.60 to deliver 200 text messages, for a net profit of anywhere from $4.40 to $39.40 off text messages alone. 

You can imagine what the profit margin off minutes and data plans (unlimited for $30 per month) is as well. 

The point being is that it would be nice if the upcoming FCC investigation causes cellphone carriers to be a little more consumer-friendly either in the wallet or in the service plans they offer.

About a month ago, Apple mysteriously rejected a Google app for their new Voice program.  It turned out that it was AT&T that forced Apple’s hands, being that they are the sole provider of service for the iPhone. 

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

Apple has an exclusive deal with AT&T in the U.S., stirring up rumors that AT&T was the one behind Apple rejecting Google Voice. How could AT&T not object? AT&T clings to the old business of charging for voice calls in minutes. It takes not much more than 10 kilobits per second of data to handle voice. In a world of megabit per-second connections, that’s nothing—hence Google’s proposal to offer voice calls for no cost and heap on features galore.

What this episode really uncovers is that AT&T is dying. AT&T is dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

I have AT&T for my wireless phone, mostly because I’m too lazy to switch, but also because rates/plans are pretty standard.  These companies want to pretend like we don’t know they are ripping us off, but we do. 

It drives me crazy that a data plan is $30, 200 text messages is another $5 (sending and receiving), etc. etc.  (If you paid per MB of data for texting it would run you close to $5000) In the end you’ve got to spend about $100 a month to have a worthwhile cellphone.  Otherwise you’re better off not really having one at all.

From the Guardian: “Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm’s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year.”

In their defense, however, they did set aside nearly $1.2billion in profits to pay for these bonuses.  It’s just that, well, um, you know, there’s that whole $10 billion they borrowed from tax payers that should be paid back first.

Among the are Lehman’s, Washington Mutual, WorldCom, General Motors, Chrysler, Enron, Conseco, Texaco, Pacific General & Electric, and Thornburg.

In case you were wondering, nine of them occurred this decade.  Texaco happened in 1987.  The other nine all happened under George W. Bush’s watch.  Think about that for a moment.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  As Chrysler, Thornburg, and General Motors all filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009 under Obama’s watch.  However, it’s not a stretch to say that the policies of Dubya led to their imminent collapse.  I would hardly blame Obama for their demise.

The rebranding has already begun now that GM has filed for Chapter 11 and 60% of the company is owned by the US Government.  The automaker unveiled this commercial, in the hopes that you would buy their pledge to change.  GM has also set up an entire website dedicated to educating consumers about the road to recovery; visit GM Reinvention for more info.

You’ll excuse me if I don’t fall for this.  It all seems a little bit like apologizing for getting caught doing something wrong.  Like they’re not sorry for doing the bad deed, they’re just sorry everyone is upset with them.  Maybe if they had looked at their business plan ten years ago, heck, fifteen, and began to reinvent themselves then, they wouldn’t find themselves in this position.

Seems like an obvious idea with an entire generation of people now being raised to have their lives entirely online.

Eddie Lopez is the kind of tech-savvy guy for which a service such as Legacy Locker was made. The St. Paul, Minnesota, man has three online banking accounts, a PayPal account, domain names, Web-hosting accounts, multiple e-mail addresses and many social-networking accounts.

“I do think this is something people should be really considering these days,” Lopez told CNN when asked about services such as Legacy Locker. He wants to hire a service to handle his digital assets but is concerned about privacy.

“Although I’m glad there’s people breaking ground in this area, I don’t think I would jump at the first opportunity to sign up,” Lopez said. “My concerns are turning over such an exhaustive list of user names and passwords to a single business. That’s one-stop shopping for any hacker to get access to just about every detail of my life.”

Lopez had the brilliant idea of giving half the information to his family and half to an online storage company, like Legacy Locker, so that hackers won’t have all the information.  And that in the case of his death his family would be entrusted with the usernames or passwords to complete the set of information they already had.

Google rolls out yet another web app, and it’s ambitious.  Google Wave.  It looks to be a blending of email, IM, and several other things; they claim it’s the logical evolution of web communication. 

It’s good that they’re thinking in these terms because basic email, IM, et al. haven’t really evolved much over their respective existences. 

From Tech Crunch:

Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree. Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale. The much better comparison is coincidentally the company started by another group of (former) Googlers, FriendFeed. But Wave is a different product for a number of reasons, and seemingly has loftier goals — all of which I’ll touch on below.

Here is the app in action to give you a better idea of its potentiality. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

But Frito Lay potato chips, a subsidiary of Pepsi Co., has launched a new advertising campaign to position themselves as everyone’s “local” potato chip. 

Frito-Lay is one of several big companies that, along with some large-scale farming concerns, are embracing a broad interpretation of what eating locally means. This mission creep has the original locavores choking on their yerba mate. But food executives who measure marketing budgets in the millions say they are mining the concept because consumers care more than ever about where their food comes from.

“Local for us has two appeals,” said Aurora Gonzalez, director of public relations for Frito-Lay North America, which is owned by PepsiCo. “We are interested in quality and quickness because we want consumers to get the freshest product possible, but we have a fairly significant sustainability program, and local is part of that. We want to do business more efficiently, but do it in a more environmentally conscious way.”

The original “eat local” movement, an amalgam of food and environmental politics, came of age a decade or so before the term locavore was coined in 2005.

You’ll excuse me if I don’t go throw up in my mouth for a second.  Look, I’m all for for large companies to market their product in whatever manner they see fit, but as consumers don’t for one second be fooled into thinking that Frito-Lay is local.  They’re not.  And it’s laughable that they would be so audacious to even attempt a marketing campaign based on that notion. 

The locavore philosophy eschews large farming operations in favor of small farm community; it stands against bland,  mass-produced foods shipped across the country, the use of chemicals and certain agricultural practices, like raising animals in small, confined areas.

It is, in essence, what the organic movement was intended to be before that was co-opted by large corporations. 

Two quotes are telling in the NY Times article:

1. “The local foods movement is about an ethic of food that values reviving small scale, ecological, place-based, and relationship-based food systems,” Ms. [Jessica] Prentice [inventor of the term locavore] said. “Large corporations peddling junk food are the exact opposite of what this is about.”

2. “The ingenuity of the food manufacturers and marketers never ceases to amaze me,” said Michael Pollen, the author of “In Defense of Food” and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. “They can turn any critique into a new way to sell food. You’ve got to hand it to them.”

It’s a customizable fountain of information, a much better way to consume news than their other endeavor. 

It’s still curious that the New York Times is one of the few old school newspaper companies that actually seems interested and invested in the manner they deliver news through technology.

The L.A. Times reported yesterday morning that the streaming-video site is causing a rift between its makers and the cable and satellite companies, like Time Warner Cable and DirecTV, who’d like exclusivity in return for the millions they’re paying TV networks to broadcast their shows.

It’s why cable shows on USA and FX have surprisingly been dropped by Hulu.  Even with ABC set to join the fold, cable subscriptions haven’t been disappearing, but this quote was fairly pertinent. 

“The appetite for full-length TV shows online was larger than anyone thought or expected,” said Bobby Tulsiani, Forrester Research media analyst. “And now people are starting to wonder, do we even need the cable connections?”

No Bobby, no we don’t.  Unless of course, you want to watch sports or live television events.  The problem is that cable companies aren’t just going to roll over and let their customer base dry up.  Perhaps the scariest aspect of the article on Hulu’s future is the notion of authentication. 

The partners also are discussing setting up a tiered system for online video, with some shows available for free — such as prime-time network offerings — while others would be reserved for existing cable TV subscribers.

“Everyone is coalescing around a central area — authentication,” said Tony Vinciquerra, chief of Fox’s television networks. “If we can move this in the right direction, it will be something relatively seamless to the consumer, and good for business overall.”

But that concept is not good or seamless for the consumer.  As soon as you go down that rabbit hole, then the usefullness of Hulu becomes extinct. 

Make no mistake, Hulu isn’t free.  The central conceit that Hulu is free is a specious argument.  Every show has five 30-second commercial breaks.  Just like television you watch on cable. 

People should cancel their cable subscriptions en mass to prove how useless that service is.

The Kindle DX has a 9.7-inch screen, a bigger hard drive (holds 3,500 books), wirelessly downloads books in under 60-seconds, and a nifty $489 asking price. 

And yet, and yet, we’re still reluctant about it. Really?  $500?  Maybe I could justify that if it were a touch-screen tablet; a mini-computer that did more than just read electronic books (like say, if Apple were to ever come out with a sexy tablet – something halfway between a netbook and the iPhone that also read ebooks, what would be the point of the Kindle?). 

Does anyone use a Kindle or have used one and can give us lowdown on its appeal? [Amazon]

Here, Pontin, draws the distinction between the newspaper as print object and journalism.  It’s a distinction that has often gone overlooked by many proclaiming newspapers are dead.  The tangible print aspect and old business model of newspapers are certainly dead; however, the blood of the paper – journalist and reporting – will never stop flowing.

Pontin does an excellent job factoring in the three facets of the industry: content, advertising, delivery platforms. 

5. The most important publishing platform of the future will probably be lightweight, thin, flexible screens that use electronic ink. That’s because the editorial distributed to such screens will be as interactive as that on today’s websites yet retain the fonts, graphical design, and illustrations and photographs of traditional media (a wonderfully rich visual grammar that art directors labored over for centuries). But publishers must not become fixated on platforms; they must regard them as mere distribution channels favoring different kinds of content. Again, publishers should offer their readers as much choice as is reasonable. Over the next decade, they should distribute editorial content to personal computers over today’s Web, to small devices like the iPhone, to larger devices like Amazon’s Kindle, to electronic-ink devices as they emerge, and to print publications (at least for a little longer).

The industry doesn’t need major readjustments, as some would think, but often is the case that it just needs fine tuning and vision.  Pontin is rational and practical in his manifesto, something that those shouting “print is dead, print is dead” do not fully grasp.  [via @vanityfairer]

And the more popular Hulu becomes, the less compelling Apple’s strategy of renting and selling video content online is, says Gartner (IT) analyst Michael McGuire. “Over time, perhaps the direct-payment model goes away,” he says. Hulu is poised to become a bigger threat in the event it can strike content-sharing partnerships with cable companies, analysts say. Cable content could help the unprofitable Hulu wring profit from the placement of ads alongside its programming. For cable companies, partnering with Hulu represents a way to remain relevant as consumers increasingly view video online.

Once Hulu can get some of the premium cable outlets on board like HBO, Showtime, A&E, et. al. then it’s not a matter of content companies being worries, it’s cable companies that should be scared. 

Since there are very few CBS shows I watch, most of my television viewing is done exclusively on Hulu. 

Apple might not dominate video content, but it will have it’s technology products and music sales.

But that’s about to change.

“You’ve got to have real maple syrup in Vermont,” said Sam Handy Jr., the restaurant’s general manager.

Handy said IHOP corporate was “very accommodating” when dealing with the maple syrup request. With a special dispensation, the IHOP, celebrating its soft opening Tuesday, is free to serve maple syrup.

The real stuff comes at a premium, however. The individually packaged one-and-a-half-ounce containers of Grade A Dark Amber syrup from the Sugarman of Vermont in Hardwick cost an extra 99 cents. And the real stuff is not on the menu. At a restaurant where only two menu items are more than $10, paying an extra dollar for a shot of real maple syrup is pricey, especially when one container is hardly enough to cover a single pancake.

Even though I’m not from Vermont, I strictly adhere to the notion that it is a sin to eat pancakes or waffles with anything other than real maple syrup.  Doesn’t have to be from Vermont, but it has to be real.

1. News Timeline is another way of presenting the news as if it were a calendar.  I’m not exactly down with the interface, but the concept of presenting news as a visual day in and day out story is fascinating.  For some, I would imagine, it makes connecting the dots and seeing the relationships a bit easier.  Also, Google News now has a timeline feature on the right of the story aggregation page. 

We’ll see if this thing catches on, or whether or not they can improve upon the concept.  Because right now, the concept works, but the execution does not. 

2. Similar Image Search attempts to improve upon their image search functionality by grouping like photos together.  It doesn’t exactly work perfectly, but I would think down the line this is where their image search function is heading once the web becomes a bit more semantic. 

3. Profiles seems like web 1.75 or whatever, but this will pay dividends for users and Google alike down the road.  For Google they have yet more specific information about a person to taylor adds and content, etc.  For users they can set up a profile to their liking which will become the de factor first thing anyone sees when searching for them.  In other words when perspective employees go trolling, instead of Myspace of Facebook, they’ll see a respectable Google Profile.  

From the Google Blog: “To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we’ve begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We’ve also added links so it’s easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.”

This would be a major coup for Hulu, giving it three major networks under it’s umbrella. And would make me happy.  I hate ABC’s online video player.  It’s the worst.

If Hulu could swing deals with sites smaller cable outfits like AMC and A&E or some premium cable networks like HBO, Showtime, etc.  then Hulu would effectively become the flagship for online television.  I’m not saying that’s going to happen, just that that should be their goal.