Linked List: May 18, 2009

Monday, 18 May 2009

43 Folders Joins The Deck 

The premier ad network of the indie web just got better.

Seth Godin on Luxury vs. Premium 

Interesting distinction. Apple is a premium brand, but Microsoft’s new campaign is trying to paint Apple as a luxury brand.

Wired Can’t Sell Ads 

The New York Times on Wired magazine:

But Mr. Anderson has yet to solve the equation for Wired. Under his editorship, the magazine is an editorial success, winning three National Magazine Awards last month, which tied it for the most honored magazine. And Mr. Anderson’s own profile is higher than ever, thanks to his books, which roll messy business trends into neat canapés that executives pass around. He gives 50 speeches a year for an estimated $35,000 to $50,000 apiece.

But that has not equaled success for Wired in the downturn. The magazine has lost 50 percent of its ad pages so far this year, ranking among the worst off of the more than 150 monthly magazines measured by Media Industry Newsletter. Only Portfolio, which Condé Nast shut down last month, and Power and Motoryacht fared worse.

Power and Motoryacht?

Hivelogic: Top 10 Programming Fonts 

Dan Benjamin on monospaced programming fonts for Mac OS X. A few observations:

  • Unlike Times and Times New Roman (which I can’t tell apart even under scrutiny), Courier and Courier New are very different. Courier New is anemic, so thin and wispy that I find it hard to believe anyone can bear to use it for anything.

  • I still use Monaco 10, not anti-aliased, for nearly all my programming and writing. Could be that I’m old and curmudgeonly and that’s just what I’m used to, but I like to think that the whole point of using a monospaced font in the first place is to aid in character-level precision, and non-anti-aliased pixel fonts render characters more distinctly.

  • To my eyes, Consolas is the best anti-aliased monospaced font.