One of my points was that much of this information is flat – essentially, lacking the context and utility that social media and other technologies provide – and that I therefore doubted that newspapers could do much in the way of competing with those other approaches.An example is restaurant reviews…. AP has an example today, with a profile of Eater.com, a NY restaurant blog that is the latest darling of the eaterati and that seems to be turning the NY restaurant review and PR world on its head.Nearly every day, the two bloggers provide restaurant information on their popular Web site, Eater.com, posting tidbits that publicists aren’t ready to release and traditional journalists haven’t managed to print…. And their success has spawned a westward expansion with coverage of Los Angeles, as well as talk about adding San Francisco and possibly one or two other major cities….Leventhal and Steele’s site attracts tens of thousands of readers a day and led the influential Food & Wine magazine to call Eater “required reading” and dub them “intrepid web masters” for shaking up the eating scene.(The scene being shaken up, by the way, is the scene dominated – until now – by the old media’s approach to communicating this information.)… As a result, improving the findability of that kind of information (if it’s good to be found, it’s good to be – er – findable), while useful, strikes me a little like looking for loose change in the sofa, and certainly like fiddling while Rome burns.

Momus’ column in Wired is one of the more interesting pieces I’ve read on the Macworld keynote. On one hand it’s commentary on Apple’s ability to go deep with its branding, and an acknowledgement of the accomplishment this represents for Steve Jobs. It’s been said before, but this is limbic branding (hmmm – but only 216 google hits, and most of those are about Gruppe Nymphenburg); marketing that reaches deep into the Zeitgeist, and this is a rare feat…. I was in awe of John Travolta during Get Shorty, was dazzled by Damien Rice when I first heard “O” and was deeply moved by Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh’s writing in Lord of the Rings.