For the Alliance

The picture frame was a freebie gift at Blizzcon. I imagine they’ll start selling them on Blizzard’s online store at some point, if they haven’t already.

More about TimesSelect going bye-bye

On the Media had a good piece this weekend on the dissolution of TimesSelect. The argument given on the show is that Google News and the like can’t see firewalled content, meaning fewer readers and thus fewer eyeballs for ads. At the end of the day, ad revenue outweighed subscription revenue. I still see a value in requiring registration, but I hope that the NYT’s experience (and the rumored end of the Wall Street Journal’s pay-only content) influences every other news site out there.

A blog I can “get behind”

This is what the Internet is for: Making fun of unnecessary quotation marks.

From the AP:

Isn’t it “funny” how something can “really annoy” you for ages and then you discover via “the Internet” that the same thing “really annoys” thousands of “other people,” too?

Yes, AP writer, it is “funny!”

The blight that Bethany Keeley exposes on her “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks (http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com ) is of a benign sort, of course, nothing like global warming or endangered wildlife.

But it bothers people mightily just the same, as this 24-year-old grad student and language-lover has discovered from the hundreds, occasionally thousands of visitors she gets daily. And nary a day goes by when she doesn’t receive a bunch of e-mails with photographic evidence of quote abuse, misuse or overuse.

As in:

-The sign in Fletcher, Okla., which advertised a tractor club’s ANNUAL SHOW — “Labor Day Weekend.”

-The restaurant billboard in Madison, Wis., which felt the need to put quotes around “Lunch” and “Dinners.”

-The bathroom sign that asked visitors to Leave the Light “On” during business hours. (“On” was also underlined. Twice.)

-The currently featured “Good Luck Amy” cake, which not only wastes frosting on those quote marks, but also adds parentheses around the whole message.

There’s also a regular stop sign with a handwritten “Stop” beneath it, for good measure apparently. Then there’s the security guard at a rest area in Mississippi, a “SECURITY GUARD” sign beneath him that unwittingly casts doubt on the whole enterprise.

Hesperia Days parade

It’s official: Rain or shine, the Hesperia Days parade is on. Look for me, Peter and Sharon doing our best beauty queen waves tomorrow morning as we roll down Main Street.

NYT says goodbye to subscription-only content

TimesSelect is dead:

Effective September 19, 2007, TimesSelect has ended. Content previously published for TimesSelect is available free to all NYTimes.com visitors

You still need to register to read a lot of the NYT site, though. Lots of sites do this, to keep an eye on who’s reading their articles so that they can better market you to advertisers. Of course, if you’re using Firefox — as you should be — you can just use the BugMeNot add-on to get around even that.

I don’t know if I buy that information wants to be free, but Internet users sure want it that way. Making Internet content commercially viable is going to require a change in the advertising model (TV advertising falling apart will end up helping here, in the end), not creating ways to irritate would-be readers.