Miscellaneous Stuff

He also has a good article on Alexa and measuring blog popularity.  I see that the entire weblogs.com domain is the 5,613th most popular site according to Alexa.  Go UserLand (I tried to measure my own traffic and it only does full domains). [_Go_]

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JoeUser is having More iMac Frustrations.  It seems like us PC folk always have Mac issues.  I can easily see this: "Me: Hi I'm Scott, a recovering Windows addict and I just can't figure out iTunes.  Support Group: It'll be ok"  [_Go_] 

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I see from Keith that John talks about the PHP-Nuke forks.  As someone who uses Drupal this is helping me understand the whole Nuke* thing.  I had no idea there were so many forks.  How many ways can you make a CMS with PHP anyway?
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Slashdot Posts Info about the Spam Conference

Heh.  It always makes a blogger feel good when they beat Slashdot to the punch.  I posted about this last week.  Still Slashdot has some new news including who's attending:

zonker writes "January 17th will be the first (annual?) meeting of the Spam Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The informal meeting will feature Paul Graham, John Graham-Cumming, John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper among others (possibly including ESR though he hasn't yet confirmed). The free conference will consist of a number of talks about new ways to combat the growing spam problem, after which everyone's going out and getting some Chinese food. Should be an informative and fun meeting and a chance to meet some interesting people."  [_Go_]

A very cool set of attendees.  Although I suspect that Slashdot posting this may well wreck the conference by giving it so much publicity that the value of attending is null and void. 

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Ouch ! Byte.com May Be Going Offline

I've been reading Byte since (honestly) like 198x (where X is less than 2) and I can even remember one of the first issues I read where a big focus was CP/M! machines.  So this is just plain sad:

Important Announcement!

Dear BYTE.com reader,

Since BYTE.com opened its doors in 1998, the site has been freely available to all comers, with the goal that banner advertising would foot the bill. But in fact, as with a lot of sites, advertising has never carried its weight. Consequently, we're faced with two choices—finding alternative ways of funding BYTE.com or (gulp!) shutting it down.

Not wanting the latter, we've opted for the former, and we're asking for your help. On November 25th, 2002, BYTE.com will become a reader-supported web site. For an introductory fee of just $12 per year—that's only $1 per month—you can continue your uninterrupted access to Jerry's "Chaos Manor," Moshe's "Serving With Linux," Martin Heller's "Mr. Computer Language Person," David Em's "Media Lab," and more. The only change you can expect in the content is that, with your help, there will be even more rich technical articles and opinions than ever before.

SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY RATE: Register between now and January 1, 2003, and the special introductory BYTE.com access fee will be $12 per year. After January 1, 2003, the fee will increase.

SPECIAL BONUS: As a way of saying thanks for signing up, we're also offering you an introductory access package that includes a discount on the BYTE CD-ROM (which normally sells for $38.95). Sign up before January 1, and for just $19.95 (plus s/h for the CD), get one year of access to BYTE.com plus the BYTE CD-ROM. That's a savings of more than $30! [_Go_]

So I guess if you are a dedicated reader of Byte then you need to reach into your pocket to support it.  I do think it's a shame that they didn't at least say "After January 1, 2003, the fee will increase to $24" (or whatever the real # is; given hat this is the holidays, this just isn't a priority right now for most of us and a lot of us would probably ignore it). 

Marketing 101 Tip: Bundles

Its also surprising to me that they aren't offering some kind of bundle here with Dr. Dobb's Journal since:

• The audiences are definitely related (geeky / technical / developers)
• The editor in chief is the same (Jonathan Erickson)
• The publishing company is the same (CMP)

As a marketing person I'm  a big fan of bundles since it often can increase your revenue per transaction by a sizable percentage (50% or more) with little additional cost.  Both sites exist and will have security systems so it should really be just adding another bit to an authorization database.  Of course they probably run completely disjoint back end systems but even so this isn't rocket science.

Blogging Versus Magazines: Do You Still Read Print?

Once upon a time I used to read ten or more computing magazines a month (Byte, DDJ, PC Magazine, Linux Journal, JDJ, VBwhatever, Computer Language, InfoWorld, PC Magazine, PC Week, etc) and this newest potential failure is just the latest step in the evolution away from them.  Now my computing news comes mostly from blogs like Scoble, Gizmodo, or from targeted websites like News.com,  Slashdot, Toms Hardware.  Sure I still read a few magazines but damn few -- and often ones where I have a personal connection like:

• PC Magazine -- I still have on my desk my PC Magazine Editor's Choice Award so I'm a loyal reader probably forever
• Linux Magazine / Linux Journal -- After all, support what you believe in
• Dr. Dobb's Journal -- I'm an ex-DDJ author and used to create the DDJ CD-ROMs so I'm clearly biased here

Seeing the possible failure of Byte makes me wonder who's next?  I think if I was in the publishing space I'd be trying very, very hard to see how / if I could reduce my cost structure and offer things that make my print publication more valuable over an online source like a blog or website.

So do you still read print computer magazines?

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