Food Critic Grabs Pulitzer Prize
LA Weekly’s Food Critic Jonathon Gold not only grabbed the first Pulitzer for this alt paper, he’s also the first food crtiic to get the prestigious award. The timing is fortunate, as the paper only has a circulation of about 200K, and current owners have applied several layoffs.

Since alt papers are now getting Pulitzer Prizes, maybe bloggers will someday as well. There are some excellent food and travel bloggers out there that deserve some higher recognition.

Feedblitz Twitter Extension
If for some reason you feel compelled to subscribe to blogs using Twitter on your cell phone or via Google Talk, FeedBlitz now offers this. There is of course the 140 character limit of Twitter to contend with. [via  Digital Inspiration]

Graphita Web-Based Photo Editing
Don’t feel like paying big bucks for graphics editors like Photoshop and Fireworks? Too cheap even for PaintShop Pro? Mashable reports on a new web-based image editor named Graphita. It hasn’t even launched into private beta, and public beta takes place in May. You can sign up now though.

Originally posted on April 19, 2007 @ 11:53 am

New Graphic AdSense Ads?
While doing my usually daily quick-check of my own websites this morning, I came across a 200×200 animated handbag ad (on my 2 yr old tech site, of all places). This is a Google AdSense ad, but it sure looks an awful lot like a Doubleclick ad. And why a handbag ad, considering pretty much every other AdSense ad on my site has been very targeted to the content?

Note: A quick browse of 901am shows the ads here, too, though not necessarily animated, and still not targeted.

SNL Funnyman Will Ferrell Launches Video Sharing Site
Will Ferrell, arguably the most talented SNLer ever (I’ve been watching since 1976) has teamed up with biz partner and comedian Adam McKay to launch a video-sharing site, FunnyorDie.com. VC firm Sequoia Capital, whose name I see all over the web, has funded this start up. [via Ars Technica]

The main page starts off with the following message in bright red:

Too many people are blowing off work to download our videos. If videos are slow or missing your boss wants you to go back to work and try later. – The Landlord

A Tax Upon You
It’s been a long time coming, but a number of US senators and others want retailers to be taxed for any online sales. That means they want those businesses to hand over data of any purchases. Some online retailers do not have to charge tax on the shipment of products to customers living in certain states.

This is going to be a dog’s breakfast of legislation. As I understand it, US states have the jurisdiction to decide whether or not brick-and-mortar businesses should charge tax to out-of-state customers. Can you imagine what’s going to happen to competing online businesses based in different states, with different sales tax percentages?

Originally posted on April 18, 2007 @ 11:12 am

Techcrunch has the scoop: eBay has acquired social networking meets random surfing outfit StumbleUpon for $40-$45 million.

Valleywag does the figures and works out that whilst the deal is obviously good for the folks behind StumbleUpon.. they only ever took $1.5m in funding and never had a full venture capital round; the price means that sites like Digg may only be worth $100-$150 million, and the entire sector worth no more than $500million, which is probably significantly less than the sum total of funding that has gone into startups in Silicon Valley alone.

Originally posted on April 18, 2007 @ 7:49 pm