I don't really blog anymore, so when I update here, I tend to cram a bunch of little things into one post so that my mom and the two other people who check this site regularly can get everything in one go. So here's the (monthly? quarterly?) update:
* Important things first: I was out of the country last week in a tropical mosquito-infested climate and took with me a Roald Dahl short story collection, Switch Bitch, which was passed on to me by John Hiler (erstwhile chronicler of All Things Blog, who seems to have disappeared but still has a site and presumably still maintains Xanga, which he founded) a long time ago and which has been sitting on my shelf untouched for a couple of years. Dahl's Uncle Oswald stories are fantastic. (In my experience, they're best read aloud outdoors at dusk after several medicinal doses of aged Jamaican rum, while being bombarded by preternaturally large moths.) They're dark--and darkly funnily--yarns about the protagonist's bumbling but largely successful exploits as a self-absorbed plutocratic Casanova who cannot bear any relationship "lasting more than 12 hours". They're great examples of good, old-fashioned storytelling, the rarity of which you only realize when you see it. Tonally, they remind me of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels, which I also like. Highly recommended, particularly when the air is sultry and the attention span short.
* I re-designed this site a couple of years ago, and you can tell that I did the work myself because the layout goes wonky in certain browsers. (I know next to nothing about CSS.) I'm looking for someone to redesign and clean it up for me (cheaply) as well as build another blog for actual albeit occasional blogging as opposed to just consolidating professional work, press, etc.
* My November Fast Company column is up now. I was going to write a piece about Why There Is No Hedge Fund Bubble, but I thought a piece about hedge funds would be a bit of a turn-off in a magazine for creatives. So I did a piece about teeny tiny bubbles in luxury markets that are heavily dependent on branding. You can read it here.
* About the Slate site: Just for the record, I thought it was a great idea, and I do think there's an audience. Contrary to Nick's assertion, Dealbreaker does exactly what it's supposed to do--capture a very small but very affluent audience. (Look at Dealbreaker's CPMs vs. Gawker's. I'm not saying it's a better model, but it certainly works. Advertisers will pay more for a better demographic, so you don't necessarily have to have large volume if you're well-targeted and your audience is attractive.) Dealbreaker is not a general interest biz publication like Portfolio. That said, the Slate site *would* be general interest. But I think there's a market for smart contrarian business commentary in that category.
Felix Salmon wisely points to Breaking Views as a comparable and suggests that if they made their commentary free, it would have interesting implications for that sort of content. But that said, Breaking Views has done incredibly well using a subscription model (as have many traditional publications, like Grant's Interest Rate Observer, which have a large following and could probably add to their top-line revenue with an online a la carte option, but don't.) Personally, I tend to eschew the subscription model because I have no experience with it and I don't know how to market subscription-only products, but if people are willing to pay for smart business commentary, they're certainly willing to get it for free. So I'm glad Slate is going into that space. My reservations about taking the job had nothing to do with what I think about the concept. I just don't want a 9-5 launching a website for a large media company. (Not right now, anyway.) If I'm going to launch a site, I'd rather do another startup. And I'm not saying I want to do another startup.
Posted by Elizabeth Spiers at November 3, 2007 3:02 PM