Rugby Magazine Wins Industry Award

Rugby, a sport magazine designed by 5W Mignon Media for Groupe L'Equipe, has won the 2006 award for best print media launch in France. L'Equipe is the largest sports publisher in France.

"Meet Me at the 7-11!"

There are companies out there looking to put flat-screen TVs into 7-11s and millions of other consumer outlets across the country and then charge advertisers to reach these new audiences. The chains like the idea, as the screens are free or very low-cost, and they get to roll house ads into the mix.

But what if they brought participatory media into the mix? The local General Store dominated American social life for decades, and could again: Imagine these convenience stores allowing their local customers to upload karaoke videos, short art films, comedy sketches, home movies, and much more. Authors would bring friends, they'd hang out and watch their video, and others, two, three times, and...buy more chips and soda. And hang out.

The store could sponsor poetry slams, and sewing circles, and...become a center of local life again.

Skype to Offer Free Calling to Handsets

In a move to ramp adoption in North America and maintain its lead in VoIP telephony, Skype has announced free calling to land and mobile phone numbers, for the remainder of 2006, for US and Canadian users.

When a company like Skype, which already counts 100 million users worldwide, has to resort to such a huge increase in customer-acquisition costs, we begin to see the enormous fight shaping up in the telco universe. This is gonna be huge.

Magazine Websites: Get With the Program(ming)

Why do so few US magazine Websites lack RSS feeds? It would seem a straightforward way to keep in touch with a pub's most-engaged readers, those who choose to sign up to read continually updated content.

Here's a list of magazines that don't have RSS feeds; sadly, there are many more. Maybe some old-fashioned letters to editors will get them to move?

• Discover
• Utne Reader
• Parenting
• Parents
• Smithsonian
• Ebony
• Sunset
• Martha Stewart Living
• The Atlantic Monthly

Updating Blogs

David Sifry has a report, the second in a series analyzing Technorati blogosphere data, indicating that only a bit more than half (19.4 million) of the blogs tracked (37.3 million) get updated regularly 3 months after launch. Sifry goes on to point out that Technorati tracks about 1.2 million new postings a day - almost 6% of those 19.4 million working blogs.

Of course, we can't know if that's one (very tired) blogger updating his or her blog 1.2 million times in a day, or 1.2 million bloggers updating once - the truth is somewhere in-between. Is 6% a good number? Does it matter, or will we continue to have an ever-increasing amount of link-rot in the blogosphere. Think digital kudzu and search engines as the machete...