Using NYTimes.com’s Newstracker, you can now receive news auto-generated whenever a certain word appears in an article, byline and/or headline. The service is free, but is probably a good candidate to join NYT.com’s premium services. I recall that LATimes.com once offered something similar called Newshound, but right now can’t find it (or any other e-mail services) on that site.

Distilling books has become big business, notes the Peter Myers in the WSJ. The old-timer, Soundview Executive Book Summaries (: 227 titles), is now challenged by [url=]audiotech.com (149 titles), (1069 titles), [url=]getAbstract.com (2,080 titles), and [url=]Summaries.com[/url] (305 titles). The form ranges from rephrasing to exclusive quoting of highlights. Audiotech rates top in the review.

Manindra Agrawal, a mathematician at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, discovered a definitive test for prime numbers in August. The formula for determining that numbers are prime has eluded mathematicians for centuries.

Last week he visited Princeton last week to explain his discovery. “While no slouch in math, Prof. Agrawal said he sometimes had to use Google to find information on the more recondite aspects of number theory,” reports Lee Gomes.

Assuming that the the letters page of today’s International Herald Tribune contains a representative sample of reader opinion, readers are traumatized by the prospect of a New York dominated paper. I count sixteen negative letters, two centrist and two in favor of the new structure. Depending on how you filter the numbers, if the paper’s editorial mix does become dominated by New York editors, the IHT will lose either 16 readers… or 80% of its circulation.

“Yet another editor friend says that at one national publication he worked at, the general executive-level understanding was that only about a third of the magazine’s ratebase was truly legit (i.e., actual people who really wanted the magazine). Much of the rest of the lofty ratebase was comprised of ‘readers’ gained through a shady circ-pumping operation that charged a bounty of a few bucks per head. Did those faux subs come from mysteriously billed old ladies in Florida? Trailer-park residents in Iowa? It was never quite clear.”

So I’ll ask again — given the passion with which bloggers are read, why would anyone advertise anywhere else?

Darn juicy audience! (Via Weinberger.)

Heather Green writes: Samsung increased its online budget from virtually nothing to about $10 million this year. “We believe it’s a critical and highly profitable information channel for us and for consumers,” says Peter Weedfald, vice-president for strategic marketing and new media.

John Crudele, business columnist for the NYPost disagrees with the recent book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. “At best, if the sun is shining and a journalist happens to have gotten a good night’s sleep, a company has a 50/50 shot at producing positive PR. Create an ad and the chance of a positive message getting out is 100 percent.”

Noting that “i would have loved to read Royko several times a day, and at night, and on the weekends even if he just wrote a little blurb on a sunday night saying ‘i just watched the sopranos. wtf was that?'” Tony Pierce suggests the LATimes hire him as its resident blogger. He writes: “imagine what would happen if readers from around the world finally had a chance to see los angeles, the city of their dreams, through a tiny little window of happiness and love. and sarcasm. and celebrity interviews. and photo essays. via a young single man who takes a bus to work who finally was given a break by his hometown paper. i bet you in a month i could get 1,000 links and the entire web will be abuzz from the groundbreaking move the LA Times made by signing up one of the web’s most loved and innovative and creative bloggers.” (Via Amy Langfield.)

“‘The sad thing is,’ says Katherine Rosman, former Brill’s Content senior writer and frequent New York Times Sunday Styles contributor, ‘as proud as I am of the time I put into Brill’s and what Brill’s tried to do, I don’t think anyone gives a [expletive] that they –Talk, Brill’s, Industry Standard — don’t exist today.'” More than anything else I’ve read, this quote demonstrates the difference between blogs and magazines. I bet not many of hiatusing Ken Layne‘s 5000 readers feel the same way. What media methadone would slake the craving for Obscure Store, Instapundit, Sullivan or Scripting News? (Via Media News.)