But more common metals used in the tech industry could fare better, even if their prices rise due to worldwide demand. For example, lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars and smart phones won't run out anytime soon because there is an overabundance of lithium, Jack Lifton, an independent consultant for U.S. rare earths, told the Gold Report during a December interview.

Other important elements tracked by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS):

Iron and steel make up about 95 percent of all the metal produced in the United States and worldwide, and find uses in thousands of products. These are the least expensive of the world's metals.

Aluminum is the second most abundant metallic element in the Earth's crust, just behind silicon. Its light weight, durability, corrosion resistance and malleability make it the most widely used metal after iron.

Copper has one of the oldest lineages of any metal, and has served as the foundation for many ancient civilizations. It still represents the third most-used industrial metal because of its thermal and electrical conductivity characteristics that make it highly useful in power transmission, telecommunication, and many electronic products.

Gold is still coveted for its monetary value and for jewelry, but it is also an excellent electrical conductor. As an industrial metal, its applications include computers, communications equipment, spacecraft and jet aircraft engines.

Silver has been used for thousands of years to make ornaments, utensils, and coins. Of all the metals, pure silver has the highest reflectivity, and the highest thermal and electrical conductivity. As a result, silver has many industrial applications including mirrors, electrical and electronic products, and photography.

Niobium and Tantalum find uses in a variety of high-tech applications. Niobium (also known as columbium) shows up in jet engine components and rocket subassemblies, while tantalum is used to make parts for cell phones, pagers, personal computers and automotive electronics. The U.S. currently imports both resources from countries such as Brazil, Canada and Australia.

• 10 Profound Innovations Ahead
• 7 Gadgets That Changed the World
• Shortage of Rare Earth Elements Could Thwart Innovation

• It's based on Android 2.1. The build currently being circulated is identified as 2.1 version 1, mirroring the update just pushed to the Nexus One last week.
• Google Goggles is now pre-installed (no matter how unhelpful it may be).
• The browser's now multitouch enabled, just like Google Maps 3.4. Huzzah! No Flash, but then again, we weren't really expecting that.
• Interestingly, the home screen's still got the same look as 2.0.1, meaning it doesn't adopt the Nexus One's rotating 3D grid of app icons -- it's still got the pull-up drawer tab at the bottom.
• No active wallpapers. Bummer!
• The news and weather widgets introduced on the Nexus One are included. Maybe certain capabilities of 2.1 are going to be restricted to devices with minimum performance benchmarks?

Motorola Droid's next update to be Android 2.1, includes multitouch browser originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

With that in mind, I decided to filter the barrage of iPad coverage through a publishing lens. What follows are intriguing ideas culled from all sorts of sources. Most revolve around content applications the iPad may provide.

There's no way I'll catch all the good stuff -- there's just too much out there -- so please use the comments area to post links and commentary that grab your attention, publishing-related and otherwise.

Ebook pricing could get interesting

The iPad's release portends a price-point battle between Apple and Amazon. That's ebook pricing, not hardware.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is pushing book publishers to set two ebook price points, $12.99 and $14.99, with Apple taking its customary 30 percent cut from any sales. They key word in all this is "set." The big kahuna of ebooks, Amazon, controls its pricing. Most bestsellers are parked at $9.99, which is below what Amazon pays a publisher for a title. Amazon is subsidizing its low price point.

But that's the present. The future is a different matter. The thought is that Amazon is taking a short-term loss on ebooks so it can solidify its position as the dominant channel. Once it owns the ebook market, Amazon can ditch the subsidy and force publishers to renegotiate pricing.

That's the fear, and Apple appears to be playing to it by giving publishers an option: get a measure of pricing control through Apple, or make more with Amazon but pray they don't rewrite the rules later. (Apple could always rewrite rules, too ...)

What's really interesting about this -- and kind of bizarre -- is that the binary Apple-or-Amazon thinking obscures an important point: mobile devices already offer publishers plenty of pricing options.

What about e-reader applications?

Steve Jobs famously quipped a couple of years ago that "people don't read anymore." Well, I guess Apple changed its stance on that one. The new iBooks app -- and accompanying store -- is a big ol' cannonball in the ebook pool.

Early discussion on a back-channel publishing list I follow has focused on how Apple will treat its new ebook competitors. Will established applications, like Stanza and the Kindle app, be removed? Kirk Biglione, co-founder of Medialoper, thinks competitors will remain in Apple's universe. Just don't count on sharing titles across apps:

Look for books to be added as a new media type in the device media library. The other reading apps may be able to co-exist as long as they don't access books stored in that library. So, for example, you probably won't be able to use Stanza to read iBooks. [Note: Kirk gave me permission to post his comments.]

One thing to consider here: Past inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission may soften Apple's competitive instincts. At least for a while.

Of course, FCC heat doesn't preclude Apple from a little friendly rivalry. Digital Trends picked up on the backhanded compliment Jobs gave Amazon during the iPad presentation:

... [Jobs] basically told the online retailer that we'll take it from here.

The reading/viewing experience

Apple has already shown what it's capable of on the music and video front, so I'm curious to see how it handles the book experience. Early word is positive from folks who've had a chance to demo the iPad. Here's Gizmodo's take:

It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyesbut time will tell on that.

The iPad is backwards compatible with existing iPhone applications. That seems useful on first blush, but Joshua Topolsky of Engadget called out a big issue with "old" apps:

It's kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen.

More to come

I'll be adding to this post in the coming days as more analysis bubbles up. Again, please use the comments to point out interesting or informative links you come across as well.

It won't.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with The New York Times. There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn't fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn't, and that's the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn't a company that rhymes with The New York Times but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my Wordpress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I'm getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I've made my point: a good Internet media product doesn't have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that's putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren't the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with The New York Times. Those outfits have overhead I don't. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can't even imagine. They can't just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can't support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York's 21 Club, if you hadn't already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn't work out that way because Internet users won't generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks. And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I've heard so far I'm guessing the new Apple product will be like the Apple TV a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It's in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamor, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad.

Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

I am making this my first New Year's Resolution and I will stick to it. I will. I will.

The resolution is to be an advocate for structured data on the web. I will sing it from the mountain tops and whisper it from the valleys. Well, I might yodel it in both places but I certainly will be vocal.

In the great quest for efficiency online it is time we move beyond the 19% of websites that have XML feeds that structure the sites data to a full onslaught of education for web publishers. The semantic web is depending on it.

The semantic web is in a gestational state and no where near reaching its potential to revolutionize the way that we interact with information. The tech certainly isn't there yet in the capacity of computing and the redundancy and review that needs to be applied to content for fully actualized linking.

What is apparent however, is that about 81% percent of the web is missing its opportunity to hop on this dog pile of ever growing linked data with information from the publisher and not just the bots that are crawling it. There is much information that can be gleaned from microformats within certain publishing platforms but there is still a mass of information that goes without inclusion into the structured whole.

As part of this resolution I will continue to push for RSS feeds since they are the simplest technology to get up and running when it comes to websites. There are tons of tools available to the put feeds on any site and every blogging platform today offers something in the way of feeds either with Atom, RSS or custom XML.

The time has come to bring data together and prepare for the long tail that awaits in a decade from now. Consider adding structured data to your site now like adding it to a time capsule. And instead of it being an 8-track requiring a special player it is more like a stone tablet with the language of the people or the machine.

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My First New Year's Resolution is a post from: TechStartups.com

There is hope. The Huffington Post calls this The Obama-Effect in Journalism, where small donations from a crowd is used to fund stories. If crowdfunding becomes the future of journalism, the editorial power will shift from an elite group of editors deciding on what is important to the community choosing which issues they care about most.

Several companies such as Kickstarter have figured out a way to fund the creative mind. Musicians and journalists can connect with fans to raise money for their projects. For example, Polyvinyl Records sold their overstock through Kickstarter and racked in $15,000. The donors received complementary DVD sets for their payments.

David Cohn founded Spot.us, a non-profit that recently had one of its community funded stories end up in The New York Times. Spot.us raised money for Lindsey Hoshaw's $10,000 trip to the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. Hoshaw spent a month aboard Captain Charles Moore's research vessel, the Alguita, to report on the plastic trash floating in our seas. Eventhough The Columbia Journalism Review was underwhelmed by the actual reporting of the story, it is an example of how community funded reporting can be done.

Hoshaw's garbage patch story might be a one-hit wonder. Crowdfunding isn't going to save traditional media. The real issue is figuring out the best payment model for online content. Sadly, 80 percent of us admit that we wouldn't pay to read anything online. But if you're in the minority, these companies will collect your spare change.

Image: flickr/ Donncha @ InPhotos.org

Fund Your Stories and Projects With Small Donations is a post from: TechStartups.com

As the in-house SEO coordinator for CNN.com and the rest of Turner's news properties (including CNN Money, CNN International and iReport), he has overseen a 17 percent increase in traffic from search year to year and oversaw one of the single largest search traffic days in the site's history with the 2008 presidential election.

Editor's Note: We asked Topher to write this for Tech Startups because his work is impressive. SEO's of all types can benefit from his experience.

Now that the new CNN.com has been live for a while, I can sit back and say, yes, the SEO effort worked!

With that in my pocket, I wanted to walk you all through the path that I took to have as SEO-friendly a site as possible when it went live October 24.

Got involved with the process as soon as I could

They brought me in, and I inserted myself as much as I could during the wireframe stage. This was great, and I was able to ask a lot of questions about what items were on the page and what they would show the user.

After the wireframes, the next thing in front of me was the series of mockups that evolved into the final comps for the site. This was even better than the wireframes because I was given a real idea of the modules and items on the page, and then I could ask some tough questions about the technologies we would be using to build it out. I was able to have some really great conversations with them about the use of Flash and Ajax and the up / down side of using them in each case.

Finally, I was looking at the HTML reviews and was able to see the real world the code we were using and catch the little things that might be forgotten.

Do not forget about the little things

This was huge for me to be able to see the real-world code in HTML review and also final templates before launch.

This is the time I found all the little things that I might have overlooked or that were removed from the code in the final stages. I was not able to get it all in there at this point, but if it was just a mistake, this was the place to catch it.

Win the war, not the battle

Yes, things that I wrote about in the SEO requirements did not make it to the live version of the site. Yes, I wish they would have, but in the end, it is all about winning the overall war, so don't fret. Keep your eye on the big picture.

The ends justify the means

In the end, the big picture is to get more traffic to your site from search, and that is my goal at CNN. I wanted to have the new site give the editorial team and me a good chance to optimize it to get as much search traffic as possible.

This is not the end of the road

Now that the site is live, I cannot give up. I need to keep on with the things that did not get in by launch day. Remember also that SEO is not a stand-still kind of world, so there is always something new to try to get done on the site.

In-house SEO Tips From A Master is a post from: TechStartups.com

Most of us are generally aware that television isn't the healthiest of activities. Yet, like cigarette smoking in the 1970s, it's one of those harms we continue to whitewash or worse exposing our children to it as though it were as innocent as playing with Tinkertoys.

Yet as today's Boston Globe reminds us, TV is not this passive device you sit your children in front of with no ill effects. Decades worth of research have shown the harmful effects of TV on your child's development. Most child psychologists and child development experts recommend no TV whatsoever for a child before the age of 2 or 3. None. Yet a whopping 43 percent of parents plop their toddler down in front of the television set, apparently blind to the consequence of their actions.

But don't take my word for it. Look at the research:

Countless studies have documented the inverse link between devotion to the boob tube and achievement in school. Researchers at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons concluded in 2007, for example, that 14-year-olds who watched one or more hours of television daily were at elevated risk for poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, poor grades, and long-term academic failure.'' Those who watched three or more hours a day were at even greater risk for subsequent attention and learning difficulties,'' and were the least likely to go to college.

In 2005, a study published in the American Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that the harm caused by TV watching shows up even after correcting the data to account for students' intelligence, family conditions, and prior behavioral problems. The bottom line: Increased time spent watching television during childhood and adolescence was associated with a lower level of educational attainment by early adulthood.''

The baleful effects of TV aren't limited to education. The University of Michigan Health System notes on its extensive website that kids who watch TV are more likely to smoke, to be overweight, to suffer from sleep difficulties, and to have high cholesterol.

There are also the studies that show that teens who watch more sexual content on TV are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the next three years than their peers. Imagine an illicit drug was resulting in twice the amount of teen pregnancies and how quickly parents would be an uproar to stop the peddling of that drug in their neighborhood.

Ah, but you argue, I grew up on TV and I came out okay! Sure, personal anecdotes and analogies are great, but not a great way to inform public policy or carry on a serious public health debate. What works for a single individual at a single point of time in a single household doesn't carry the same weight as a scientific study that examines data across families and neighborhoods, studies that were carried out over time and with attention to possible alternative explanations (such as the fact that maybe in your household, TV time was more strictly limited than you remember, or the content in the programs themselves was very different than today's content).

The upshot we Americans watch way too much TV and we raise our children on TV, somewhat oblivious to its negative effects on our children's development. While TV isn't evil, it is a powerful media that has a well-understood impact on a child's or teen's development. Like the Internet, it should be allowed with clear rules and conditions, and time doing it should be monitored and limited. What the right number for you and your family will vary, but it should not be whenever they want and as much as they want.

Read the full article: Silence that idiot box!

The Census Bureau's latest annual report offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of American households for 2008, the first full year of the recession. It shows that the poverty rate hit 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.

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Verizon reported second-quarter results this morning, and saw revenue rise while profits fell. But those of us who care about the fate of broadband should note that the carrier is ramping up its fiber-to-the-home triple play and likely stealing customers from cable providers. Verizon added 303,000 net new FiOS fiber-to-the-home Internet customers, to end the quarter with 3.1 million of them. That's a 56 percent growth in subscribers from the previous year for the super-fast service. Verizon also added 300,000 net new FiOS TV customers, bringing its total to 2.5 million FiOS TV consumers by the end of the quarter an 82 percent boost from the year prior.

FiOS, which is the driving force behind several cable operators' planned DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades that will boost broadband speeds to 50Mbps or even 100Mbps, is putting pressure on the cable industry. FiOS Internet sales penetration (sales as a percentage of potential customers) increased to 28.1 percent, compared with 23.5 percent during the same period a year ago, while FiOS TV sales penetration increased to 24.6 percent, compared with 19.7 percent from the year before. FiOS TV service was available for sale to 10.3 million premises by the end of the quarter.

Some of that penetration growth appears to be coming at the expense of cable providers, although it's hard to be sure because various cable operators don't have footprints that directly compete with Verizon's. However, Comcast which competes with Verizon in 12 percent of its footprint, has seen its video subscriber penetration fall to 47.5 percent in the first quarter of the year (it won't report second-quarter results until Aug. 6) from 49.5 percent in the first quarter of 2008. On the broadband side, it's faring better having boosted its penetration to 30.2 percent for the first quarter of this year, up from 28.4 percent for the same period in 2008. That may be in part because of cable's faster speeds when compared with regular DSL from telcos.

Cablevision, which competes with Verizon in 30 percent of its footprint and has been aggressive about countering FiOS speeds, has seen a 1.5 percent drop in penetration for video subscribers, according to its first-quarter 2009 results. (Cablevision reports second-quarter numbers on July 30.) As those cable providers start reporting their numbers, keep an eye on how penetration rates are faring. They may claim it's a lousy economy, but FiOS may have something to do with it.

---

Innovations. Markets. Profits. We Got An App For That: Mobilize 09 $595 Regular, $395 limited time Learn More

We recently posted about how 37signals increased their sign-ups by 200% with A/B Testing.

A lot of you are using WordPress, which makes A/B testing pretty tricky, so we've recorded a screencast tutorial to show you how to do it.

Editor's note: We'll be covering topics like A/B testing and marketing your web app at The Future of Web Apps London.

If you're new to A/B testing, here are a few resources to get you started:

• An Introduction to A/B Testing by Jesse Farmer
• Wikipedia definition
• Google Website Optimizer video tutorials
• Advanced Website Optimizer Tricks
• Official Google Website Optimizer blog
• Google Website Optimizer Tricks

The Video

Please note, if your goal page is on a different domain or sub-domain, you need to make small modifications to your tracking code.

Enjoy this article?

If you liked this article, feel free to re-tweet it to let others know. Thanks, we appreciate it :)

Filed under: Cellphones

Security official suspended, turned over to authorities in apparent connection to Foxconn employee's suicide originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Its taken a bit longer than we all might have hoped, but it seems that Android is really starting to pick up the steam it deserves. Be it Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson.. if they're a big gun in the mobile manufacturing world (Well, outside of certain obvious exclusions), they're probably working on an Android handset or two. The first off the bat and the most dedicated so far has been HTC - and if the latest rumors hold true, they might be looking to throw even more weight behind it.

According to the Digitimes, HTC may be looking to put the Droid onto as much as fifty percent of their handsets. Now, HTC doesn't push'em out as fast as some other manufacturers (by the way, Samsung, we're totally talking about you), but they still pump out a good number of'em each year. And of their lineup, almost the entirety is Windows Mobile. Digitimes also adds that HTC is aiming for around 30% of their handsets this year to be Android-based. We can think of about 5 or 6 we're expecting to see by years end (including those that have launched already) -f it that's 30% and HTC continues to make around as many total devices next year, we can probably expect at least 9 or 10 Droidphones from them next year. Fuzzy math? Absolutely. But we can hope, can't we?

[Via EngadgetMobile]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

When I had coffee with Jason Fried of 37signals after FOWA Miami, I asked him if he had learned anything about A/B testing that they hadn't blogged about. And wow, did he have an amazing little tip to share

Four Amazing Words

He said that they tested various phrases on the Highrise homepage for the call-to-action button. They originally had used various permutations of Free Trial and Sign-up for Free Trial. Then they tested the phrase:

See Plans and Pricing

This resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups. That's right. 200%.

He believes it's because people are afraid if they click a link that says Free Trial then they'll somehow automatically signup for something and be trapped. However, See Plans and Pricing encouraged them to explore, without the fear of commitment.

If that isn't a case for conducting A/B Testing, then I don't know what is.

Venture capital dollars going to startups in the U.S. stabilized in the second quarter at $3.7 billion, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The venture money invested in the quarter is still only about half of what it was a year ago (when it was $7.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008), but is 15 percent above the low point in the first quarter of 2009 (when it was $3.5 billion). All in all, VC investments are trending at mid-1990s levels, which isn't such a bad thing.

The average deal size came up a little bit to $6 million, from $5.3 million last quarter. Seed and early stage investing picked up after venture capitalists fled to the perceived safety of later-stage investments in recent previous quarters.

The rebound, if you want to call it that, hasn't hit the Internet sector yet. Internet deals brought in only $524 million in the quarter, down from $593 million the quarter before and $1.7 billion a year ago. Clean tech isn't doing so hot either, with only $274 million invested during the second quarter compared to $911 million a year ago. Most of the action came from biotech and medical devices, which saw bigger jumps in funding during the quarter to $88 million and $628 million, respectively.

Remember, this is only one source of data (most of it from Thomson Reuters). We actually measured nearly twice the dollar amount of venture deals during the quarter on CrunchBase, which we'll share more fully soon.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

If you can't follow price action, and economic figures are clouding your headit won't hurt you to do less.

Here is a chart from @keithshepard that will show you what I like to see.

The breakouts and price action I am seeing that confirm what I am looking at on that chart.

To make money in good markets, you can't think. It feels like we are upon one. I don't have price tragets to give you. I have no idea where the markets or individual stocks can/will run too. When I enter a position, I have a stop in mind. It will slowly move up if the stock continues to move up after I buy it.

The chart shows you that there is no rush to get long. If we are truly entering a good market, they tend to last a while.

DO NOT rush in. Let good breakouts and price action slowly get you invested.

Here is a list of all-time higs:

$TKLC, $ARO, $HTS, $ARST (own it), $STEC, $HMSY (own it), $SWKS, $MVL, $CLW, $MJN, EW, $MGEE, $AAP, $ROST, $OPTR, $ULSM, $MV, $MFE, $BPSG

HERE is a list of stocks to remind you that trends end and stops are important:

$ABK, $MNI, $CORS, $CIT, $GFG, $MDTL, $MPG, $PEIX, $HSWI, $DRL, $AMFI, $LEE, $NCT, $CHB, $CRBC, $CNB, $QRCP, $CT, $MBHI, $FTBK, $YRCW, $EGT, $FTK, $LCC, $WNC, $SRZ, $FMD

No shortcuts.

It's come to this. You've been tasked by your company or have enlisted an agency to create a viral video/campaign. However, you probably don't know what a viral campaign even looks like in the first place. There is a good reason for this: No campaign is actually viral in the first place.

Viral campaigns are actually just campaigns that are done well, resonate with their target audience and cross over to mainstream appeal. A viral campaign can cost as much as a million dollarsor be shot in someone's backyard for $50. It's all about the message, idea, and product you are trying to sell.

1. Try to Be Cool. Nothing looks worse then a corporation trying desperately to get d0wn with the youth. If you aren't cool, don't try to be. Otherwise you will end up looking incredibly stupid and out of touch. A recent example of of cool advertising is this Nissan Cube Commercial. Or you can really go for the gold by appealing to the girls from 1999: The Frosty Posse

2. Appeal to the Wrong Demographic. You can create the coolest thing since sliced bread. A campaign that is lauded by anyone that sees it (until they see what demographic you were going for). However, if it doesn't mean anything if the campaign doesn't connect with your product's main audience. You mean white paper jokes don't appeal to 8-12 year olds? Go figure.

3. Fail to Seed Properly. Seeding a campaign is no longer just an option. You best have all your ducks in a row pre-launch. Otherwise no one is going to see your campaign much less care about it. This is why utilizing PR outreach and social bookmarking becomes so important. Getting your message in front of the right people is becoming nearly as important as the message in this noise filled world.

4. Don't Integrate Your Message. You can't actually move product without having your content live everywhere. It needs to be a fully realized campaign with multiple heads in order to get the most bang for your buck. Just throwing a micro-site into the mix and calling it a day won't cut it.

5. Try to Make Something Viral. Want something to go viral desperately? It probably won't. Going viral usually is the result of either quality or unintentional hilarity/re-purposing. If you can't create or have someone create something from your campaignyou probably aren't going to go viral.

6. Play it Safe. Piss someone off. Be controversial. Be ridiculous. You can't have viral success if you are unwilling to cross a few lines and make a few people feel uncomfortable. That's just the nature of the beast.

7. Don't Make it Easy to Share or Remix. If you don't provide the tools to tie your campaign to social media, you will fail before you even begin. Take advantage of the rapid sharing/editing capabilities of social users. Do most of the work for them and enjoy the bump.

8. Remember: Funny>Smart. As a general rule of thumb, this is something to definitely keep in mind. The theory of relativity isn't going to gain as much traction as something that is incredibly funny. Ask Dane Cook (or Raaaaaandy).

9. Fail to use Auto-Tune. Name something from the past 6 months that has gone viral in the past that hasn't utilized some manner of auto-tune. Like it or not T-Pain owns the world right now.

10. Set Out to Create a Viral Campaign. Guess what? You won't. The chances of you actually creating a bona fide viral campaign are less then one percent. So concentrate on creating great work, pleasing your clients and being the best at what you do. If you get a viral hit? Fantastic, that just means you can keep doing the job you love.

The folks behind PrimaCloud, a cloud computing and storage product that offers a service-level agreement that it claims delivers 99.99 reliability (that means it can go down 53 minutes each year), said today it will save $1 million by virtualizing its network and will spend 50 percent less to deliver its high reliability cloud. The company has installed boxes from Xsigo Systems that sit between the servers and switches and create a cloud through which the network traffic from the virtual machines loaded on the servers is routed. The network can handle traffic destined for other servers or for the storage network without requiring separate cables.

This, combined with gear from Sun's Fishworks effort, has allowed PrimaCloud to virtualize its storage, networking and hardware saving it money and boosting reliability said Eric Novikoff, COO of Enki, which built PrimaCloud. The completely virtualized computing infrastructure, and creations of these three clouds, is an example of the next big change sweeping computing. Most clouds right now rely on virtualized hardware and some virtualized storage virtualized networks are the next focus.

Novikoff said PrimaCloud couldn't fully utilize its servers because of I/O limitations each virtual machines only had access to so much bandwidth on each server. When that bandwidth was tapped out, even if the server wasn't fully utilized, the machine had reached its limit. After virtualizing the I/O and using data center orchestration software from Enigmatec, Novikoff said when I/O limits were reached the job moved over to a new machine automatically. He was also able to allocate more bandwidth per server, so it became less necessary to move jobs around that often.

---

The future of mobile: GigaOM Pro provides insider perspectives and analysis on the trends defining tomorrow's mobile market. Learn more

I've been a strong advocate of getting a search deal done with Microsoft, Icahn, who owns about 5 percent of Yahoo and is a director on its board, told Reuters on Friday. It would enhance value if a deal got done, because of the synergies involved, he said in a phone interview.

Yahoo board member Icahn wants Microsoft deal | Technology | Reuters.

See Also:

• Icahn Still Gunning for Microhoo
• Microhoo Tea Leaf Watch: Proxy Directors Set Free
• Yahoo Investor Pushes For a Microhoo at $22 a Share
• Analysts, Icahn Stir Up Microhoo Pot
• Microsoft And Yahoo Near Ad Deal: All Things Digital
• Bartz Choice Signals Bid to be Yahoo (!) Again
• Microsoft Approaches Yahoo Again, This Time As a Partner

(From my Marketing News column.)

There are two kinds of brands in the world. If you are a marketer, you know what I mean. There are brands people like to talk about, and brands they don't.

Brands of the first kind the brands that marketing thinker Rohit Bhargava calls talkable are uncommon. Apple's iPhone is a talkable brand. So is Harley-Davidson. If you market a talkable brand, you have the luxury of tapping into customers who love you, but you'll have to be careful those customers have already decided what the brand stands for, and woe unto you if you go against their wishes.

Brands that people don't like to talk about I'll call them boring brands are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you're really earning your living as a marketer. That's because you are trying to get people interested in something they don't really care about.

I've been analyzing social strategies for both kinds of brands, and they form an interesting contrast.

Let's start with the talkable brands. In a recent survey [Forrester report "The Social Tools Consumers Want From Their Favorite Brands"], we asked online consumers whether they'd like to interact with various forms of social application with their favorite brands. Forty-two percent said they would, but the types of interactions they preferred were varied. About one in four consumers would interact with these brands in a discussion forum, one in five would watch videos, and one in six would be interested in connecting with them through a social network profile, like a Facebook page. Only 12% want to read a blog about the brand, which reinforced the earlier research we'd done, showing that blogs are the least trusted form of communication between companies and customers.

What does this mean for the marketer? It means connecting with those enthusiasts is going to be more than a full-time job. First, examine the applications they've already set up on their own their discussion forums, their blogs, their own videos and social network groups. Figure out what you want to join up with, and what you want to create. And you'll have to create multiple applications, because as this research shows, your customers don't agree with each other about where they'd prefer to connect with you.

As a result, you'll probably have make sure they all to those social network profiles, communities, and videos connect with one another, and with the sites your fans already have. We recently worked with a B2B company that faces this exact problem its customers use its products, love them, and have already set up user groups online. The good news: whatever the company does, it will have active participation. The challenge is not messing up the relationships already percolating in the existing user group.

The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. [Forrester Report: "Social Technology Strategies for 'Boring' Consumer Brands".] The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won't talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.

Applications that talk about customers problems create borrowed relevance, since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. American Express (credit cards are boring, face it) created the Members' Project, a contest to choose deserving charities, since it realized that charity would generate more passion than credit cards. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn't talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.

Borrowed relevance is a versatile strategy. Liberty Mutual (in another boring category, insurance) wrapped itself in relevance by creating The Responsibility Project, a community about moral decisions. Johnson & Johnson built a Facebook page for mothers of ADHD kids because, as with all medications, its ADHD drug is boring but its sufferers generate interesting problems. Doritos invited its customers to make ads in the 2007 Superbowl, since an ad contest is more exciting and more social than a corn chip.

Regardless of whether your brand is talkable or boring, as you launch these social applications, you'll generate something very valuable people who care about your brand, or at least the problems it solves. I've begun to ask brand marketers a question: who are your most engaged customers? I don't want an answer like women 25 to 34 with at least one child. I want an answer like Emily DiBernardo, she lives in Kansas and she just can't stop talking about us. With social applications, you'll find Emily.

If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it's boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they're about to become some of your most important corporate assets.

Ask your friends what business Google is in and the answer you'll most likely get is search. And they would be wrong. Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company. A full 97 percent of its revenue comes from advertising on its various properties, including YouTube, plus partner sites through its AdSense product. Sure, Google has Android and Chrome OS and everything else, but it doesn't make money from them they're just there to get people to watch more ads.

Digital Sky had already put $200 million into Facebook. The Russian fund's follow-on investment had been discussed prior to being activated today.

Employees can only cash out some of their money (20 percent, VentureBeat reported previously). In the meantime, they're strengthening the grip of DST, backed to a major degree by a censorious Russian oligarch and purported "gangster" (Alisher Usmanov, pictured). Writes Kara Swisher at All Things Digital:

If fully accepted by those employees eligible, it will give DST 1.54 percent more of Facebook, for a total of 3.5 percent of the company. That makes DSTbased in London and Moscowone of the bigger Facebook investors, with a stake larger than one owned by Microsoft (MSFT).

If the money brings Facebook closer to Russia's defacto dictatorship, at least the social network's employees are recycling the money in a truly aggressive, capitalist fashion: One employee spoke to Swisher about a down payment on a house. Talk about doubling down on risk!

The number of funds which raised capital also dropped in half from last quarter to 25 funds, a 13-year low. And the average amount of new capital going to each fund was $68 million, down from $94 million in the previous quarter.

Capital is fleeing the sector, partly because there is less capital to go around, and partly because venture capital exits appear to be blocked. Although there was cause for hope during the quarterwhich saw five venture-backed IPOs poke their heads above the waterthe NCVA doesn't expect venture funds to bring in major new infusions of capital until 2010.

For startups with proven traction there is still money out there. For instance, Pandora just raised a massive $35 million round last week and we tracked $6.4 billion in venture money going into companies last quarter, a 25 percent drop from the year before but still a healthy rate of investment. VCs are getting more selective about where they put their cash, but when they do they are more likely to bet big.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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The Interview and PDF

The interview is about 20 minutes, a good listen. If you want to do justice to this subject, read the PDF first as background, and then listen to the MP3. For the super-busy skimmer, we attempt to distill the essence below.

Download the MP3.

The Return on Asset Bombshell

This is what caught our attention in the email -- and is the reason we wanted to do this interview:

"U.S. companies' return-on-assets (ROA) have progressively dropped 75 percent from their 1965 levels despite rising labor productivity."

That is dramatic. If you had to select a single measure by which to judge the value delivered by a CEO, board, or management team, it would be return on assets. To quote from the Wikipedia entry:

"The return on assets (ROA) percentage shows how profitable a company's assets are in generating revenue. This number tells you what the company can do with what it has, i.e. how many dollars of earnings they derive from each dollar of assets they control."

And here is the bit that matters:

"Return on assets is an indicator of how profitable a company is before leverage."

If you want to understand the financial meltdown that happened at the end of 2008, just think leverage, i.e. debt. Companies juiced up their earnings using leverage. They have been doing this more and more in the last 30 years.

What happens when you take that away? You get the return on asset bombshell that the Shift Index reveals. It is like taking steroids away from an athlete and then saying, "Now, how fast can you run 100 meters?"

Only a US and BigCo Problem?

The massive ROA drop was measured across all public companies in the US since 1965.

It would be very interesting to see the results for Europe and Asia. Would they be different? Has anyone run those numbers?

Public companies tend to be large. We were interested in knowing whether this was simply a BigCo problem. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we report on startups and small companies. Our assumption for some time has been that an historic shift in power is taking place from BigCo to SmallCo, which can be explained by Coase's Theorem.

Now that we've seen huge companies, household names such as Lehman and GM, crumble before our eyes, thinking that BigCos are in serious trouble is no longer a radical idea. And as nature and economies abhor a vacuum, this must create opportunities for others. The question is whether this shift will be simply from some BigCos to others, as they out-compete each other, or a more fundamental shift from BigCos to SmallCos.

We asked John Hagel about this, and he told us his view that the shift in power to smaller companies, even to free-agent individuals, is a short-term trend and that bigger companies will return to dominance once they figure out how to operate in this new environment. He told us that BigCos face a great challenge in part because:

"They grew up and became successful in a different environment, where scalable efficiency was the way to generate and sustain economic value."

He goes on to explain that money follows talent and that large companies are having a hard time articulating to the most talented and creative individuals why they would be able to grow and prosper more within large institutions than as free agents or in small ventures. He believes that large companies will be able to make that transition. Clearly, given his role with Deloitte, which provides management consulting to large companies, he has to take that view. But he has also voted with his feet on this issue, by even joining a large company like Deloitte in the first place, when he was already a successful free-agent author and consultant.

His fundamental message is that BigCos need to offer a rationale other than just scalable efficiency. This is consistent with Coase's Theorem. His view is that this rationale will be "scalable learning." Scalable learning sounds like it could become an over-used buzzword, but when you listen to him describe how companies build networks of partnerships that learn from each other, it comes alive.

It certainly will resonate with anyone who has worked at a startup.

The question is whether BigCos can learn to work like agile startups again. In other words, is it possible to teach elephants to dance?

How Can Enterprise 2.0 Vendors Articulate Their Value in This Context?

I asked John if he saw a day when more CTOs and CIOs would become CEOs, because really understanding systems and technology has become so essential for leaders. He was skeptical. In fact, John views the risk-averse nature of most CIOs as a big stumbling block.

John pointed out that most companies have "only skimmed the surface" of opportunities to use social media to build richer knowledge networks that cross the firewall and connect with partners and customers. Indeed, he talked about the problem of how "most CIOs are tending to become extremely risk-averse." He pointed out that CIO turn-over is increasing, and that the reason CIOs get fired is often because of some big operational blow-up. So, they avoid anything that puts current operations at risk. In doing so, they may be creating even bigger issues, as large companies miss opportunities to leverage social media to create new value.

John's advice to Enterprise 2.0 vendors is to become a lot better at articulating how their technology can build value and competitive advantage at scale. That is obviously easier said than done. But doing it is essential. The CIO will be motivated to look at operational risks only if the CEO tells him or her that the risks of ignoring them are greater.

The Interview and PDF

Download the MP3 and PDF.

Recently Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Kapow, demonstrated his company's value around managing data services quickly, without hand coding. At the Web 2.0 Expo in April, he demonstrated a, iPhone mashup application created using Kapow tools and IBM Rational EGL as an example of the conference's Power of Less theme.

Traditionally, it would have taken at least three months and significant IT resources to create and integrate a web data source and serve it to a mobile device, Andreasen explained prior to the demo, but today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized web application for the iPhone.

Kapow boasts that the Web Data Server 7.0 is the industry's only platform that can access, enrich and serve web data with complete assurance 100 percent of data, 100 percent of the time.

The value is more than for convenience. More than ever, web-based content plays an essential role in many business processes and analytical presentations. Doing operational and business ecology business intelligence (BI) requires fast and easy integration of web-based content and data assets.

With Kapow's patented visual development and Web data automation platform customers can gain data access to any intranet or extranet business application, as well as any website or application on the web, the company says. This cuts out manual approaches, now quite common.

Rapid data access is vital for today's agile application development, like mobile, WOA and other types of agile business applications, Andreasen says. Regardless of whether

. . . today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized Web application for the iPhone.

or not developers have programmatic access via an application programming interface (API), Kapow provides easy access to enterprise and public web data, then extracts and transforms it into a standard web service or data feed, he explains.

A key element in the data server are the Kapow robots that the company says use standard web protocols and security mechanisms to automate the navigation and interaction with any web application or website, providing secure and reliable access to the underlying data and business logic.

Offering an example of an application built with its technologies, the company points to a hypothetical sales app providing a full 360-degree view of prospects and customers by automatically extracting data from internal customer relationship management (CRM) systems, subscription data feeds such as Edgar Online, corporate sites, blogs and social media sites including LinkedIn, Technorati and Facebook.

New features in the Kapow Web Data Server 7.0 version include:

• 100 Percent Browser Engine Compliance, which handles complex web data sources, including JavaScript and AJAX intensive Websites.
• Intuitive point-and-click integrated development environment (IDE) for surgical data extraction accuracy with no coding.
• Scalability improvements offering real-time performance optimization and the ability to download large file downloads directly to disk for enterprise scale projects
• Browser-Based Scheduler, which provides automation of data refresh and synchronization schedules.
• Authentication for RoboServer, which provides seamless integration with existing enterprise security and authentication systems.

Availability and Pricing

Further information and pricing is availabile at http://kapowtech.com/index.php/products/overview.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7's market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009.

In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its overall market share erode by 11.4 percent. Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn't count last week's upgrade. See the dotted line just below the light blue IE8 line? That is a combined set of other browsers and appears to include Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2.0.

If you look at a 30-day version of that same chart, it shows Safari 4 with 4 percent market share and Chrome with 3 percent market share. It doesn't yet break out Firefox 3.5, but if you assume that makes up the bulk of the remaining dotted line which jumped to nearly pass IE6 in the past week, you can figure out more or less which browsers are taking share from Microsoft. (I've used data from the most recent daily chart in this post, but embedded the monthly chart below which has data as of June 30).

As I said, this is early data from one source. Net Applications, another commonly cited source for browser market share, is currently reviewing its June numbers, but I have a feeling they will show similar trends. (This Wikipedia page shows other browser market share sources, most of them haven't been updated since March). It is difficult to make any firm conclusions at this point, since market share is shifting so rapidly as every major (and minor) browser tries to convince users to upgrade.

But we are in the midst of a major upgrade cycle simultaneously across IE, FireFox, and Safari (with the Chrome wild card thrown in). When all is said and done, we might see a major shake-up in market share and almost definitely will see leadership pass from IE7 to another browser. The question is will that be IE8 or Firefox? Whichever one wins, the good news is that IE6 is finally dying.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share

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Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don't count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com's 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people's attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Apple saw the iPhone's market share triple over the past year, capturing 12.9 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, according to a new Gartner analysis.

For the quarter ending September 30, iPhones accounted for 3.4 percent of the market in 2007. That figure was more than 3x higher on the same day in 2008.

Nokia is the leader worldwide in smartphone sales, with 42.4 percent of the market. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion comes in second with 15.9 percent. In North America, Apple is in second place behind RIM, with iPhones accounting for over a quarter of all smartphones.

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza also noted that this quarter marked the first time iPhone sales exceeded those of Windows Mobile devices; that's pretty astonishing when you consider how many flavors of WM handsets are out there.

[Via Macworld.]

TUAWiPhone triples market share as of Q3 2008 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple saw the iPhone's market share triple over the past year, capturing 12.9 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, according to a new Gartner analysis.

For the quarter ending September 30, iPhones accounted for 3.4 percent of the market in 2007. That figure was more than 3x higher on the same day in 2008.

Nokia is the leader worldwide in smartphone sales, with 42.4 percent of the market. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion comes in third with 15.9 percent. In North America, Apple is in second place behind RIM, with iPhones accounting for over a quarter of all smartphones.

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza also noted that this quarter marked the first time iPhone sales exceeded those of Windows Mobile devices; that's pretty astonishing when you consider how many flavors of WM handsets are out there.

[Via Macworld.]

TUAWiPhone triples market share in Q3 2008 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Despite being three years old, the Dear Red States Craigslist posting from 2005 is suddenly circulating again. I guess it must be election season that has revived this. But I figured I'd take a quick shot at a response.

Dear Red States We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us.

Hot Damn. Thanks. You're like people who have stayed long after the rest of the party goers have gone home. We've been hoping you'd finally leave, but we're too polite to simply throw you out.

In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches.

Well, actually, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Washington are typically considered swing states, but you can have them. Congratulations. You got two states too cold to live in, a failing automotive industry, and Washington.

As for the beaches, we got the entire gulf coast an the Atlantic up to North Carolina. You got the rocky coast of the northwest and the Jersey Shore (whose tourism board just recently announced their new slogan Guidos in Speedos). Again. Congrats.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85 percent of America 's venture capital and entrepreneurs.

I don't mean to quibble with your argument, but Bank of America is the nation's largest and one of the few solvent banks. It's located in North Carolina. We'll take that.

I also suspect that most of the corporate CEOs that built that wealth will move in with us since better than 75% of them vote Republican.

You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

You can have the tax revenue. We'll give the other 1/3 back to the people since they know how to spend it better than your army of bureaucrats.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire

Since our troops will be coming home in a year under President Bush's plan anyway, that's fine with us.

You're also likely impose strict gun control while we a) have a tendency to support regime change b) have a lot of guns. In addition, since most of America's nuclear arsenal sits in silos in the red states, if we ever decide we want New California back Well, let's just say, Sleep tight!

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90 % of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 % of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 %of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

You got me there. Let's just hope that all the Asian students who are attending those schools will let you mow their lawns when they graduate.

While I will miss the pineapple, I think I speak for my red state family when I say we're ok giving up the wine and stinky cheese. After all, we still have all the Jack Daniels from Tennesee, all the Coors and Budweiser beer products from Colorado and Missouri, most of America's steak, and all the cigars we can roll with that North Carolina tobacco.

You also seem to forget that a) we will get most of America's total acreage. We get America's strategic oil reserve, we get all the oil in Texas and Alaska. With a much smaller population, we'll have enough energy to last generations. If we run short, we have no problem drilling off the coast of New California since we know we won't run into you there. Even if we do, like I said, we have all the guns.

That is a shame about the condors. I hear they're good eatin'.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 % of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92% of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

I can live with that.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you. Additionally, 38 % of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

By the way, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico .

Peace out,
Blue States

Ugh! You get Hollywood? Bummer. You've just taken on a huge sector of the economy that creates little of actual value, yet gets paid better than most CEOs. But we're willing to accept that since you have agreed to permanently dispose of Paris Hilton, Rosie O'Donnell, and Britney Spears. Thanks for taking care of that for us.

In closing, let me simply say thank you again. I think this arrangement will work out beautifully.

Shuffling the deck is nothing new at Time Inc., of course; indeed, it seems to be management's answer for everything from sagging ad revenues to the common cold. But this reorganization sounds like a pretty big one, involving a "more centralized management structure" and plans to share resources between titles.

Writes Tim Arango, "Power within Time Inc., which through many mergers over the decades became the modern Time Warner, has long been diffuse, with individual publishers and editors essentially running their own shows. That distinct culture is coming to an end."

My friend Julia & I just bought a vacation home in Detroit. It's a small but comfortable three-bedroom house in good condition that sits on a shorefront plot of land along the banks of an actual river. The location is serene, and the price was right the whole thing cost less than a new Cadillac Escalade. A lot less, actually. But that was only part of the appeal. Just as important to us was the idea that Detroit is poised to become a laboratory for the latest social trend: The Greening of America.

Sure, Detroit may be the scariest place you can think of to live or even visit. Or is it? With the decline of the American auto industry, over seventy percent of the city's populace fled to the burbs between 1966 and 1990. For those who remained, heroin and crack cocaine savaged the city's neighborhoods. Yet when everyone else moved away, most of the thugs did too, leaving huge swaths of once-dense urban blocks very nearly depopulated and quite a bit greener.

The nightmarish view of downtown Detroit and its suburbs is ancient history. The city is currently home to a strong (though small by coast-city standards) art scene. Wayne State University is becoming known for it's cutting-edge gallery shows, while older artists have contributed much to Detroit's exceptional public art installations. Detroit is also the epicenter of the Urban Adventure movement, with intrepid explorers coming from as far away as Europe and Australia to clandestinely explore the city's beautifully decaying factories, mansions, hotels, mental hospitals, and skyscrapers.

Most of all, though, Detroit is already one of the greenest cities in America. I mean green as in green grass! Visit any typical residential block in the heart of Detroit, and what do you see? A handful of occupied houses and a few piles of rubble that once were homes, while the rest of the block has completely reverted back to nature. Rabbits, possum, raccoons, and the occasional deer ramble through this urban landscape as though they own it. We've gone canoeing along Detroit's storied River Rouge canal, and we've climbed the abandoned, 37-story {REDACTED}* Building to get an up-close view of a peregrine falcon nest. Detroit's public transportation system is no worse than that of most other American cities, and it'll only improve as the renaissance continues. Also oddly enough, the city has one of the newest and best freeway networks in the country great biking and roller-skating lanes for when we run out of oil. Homeowners can plant gardens on their spacious lots or those next door as they like.

The price of owning anything in San Francisco, Brooklyn, L.A. or any other prime location became prohibitive, even surreal long ago. Even with the recent downturn in the housing market, it is still impossible for most artists, writers or craftsmen to buy in these places. Meanwhile, the industrial engine of the Rust Belt continues to freeze up, providing green spaces in cities like Detroit. At the same time, more people are able to work from literally anywhere in various Internet and computer related jobs. Being able to break away from the overcrowding and frenetic pace of life on the coast(s) for long periods and kick back in a relaxed tree shaded waterfront home that we actually own outright is a luxury that, I for one, after thirty years in Frisco never thought I would know. Detroit has plenty of water, green trees, wide-open land and no crucial military targets. Everyone world round thinks it's a dump. There's no place to go but up for this town. The icing on the cake is the simple fact that no one will ever waste a Nuke on Detroit.

Ghetto Ice Cream Truck driving through a Detroit neighborhood. [via Urlesque]

A similar article was published in Everywhere Magazine Issue 04.

photos by Julia Solis

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Escape to Detroit