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.)

Seems travel site Orbitz is beginning to add (in a small way) analytics to their ticket sales aggregation. I requested possible flights to London. The resulting menu of possible flights came back, topped by this new factoid: “Lowest fare below beats this trip’s 30-day average by $15.” This isn’t much on its own, since we don’t know whether the average is calculated from a) what people have paid b) the lowest offers or c) all ticket prices. (My bet is b.) In any case, the calculation represents Orbitz’ first step beyond pure reitteration of traditional travel functionality.

Application service providers start off selling an Internet enabled version of a traditional software service, but really come into their own when they leverage their meta view and massive data stream and layer automated consulting on top of the traditional service.

Sparteneity: “We do websites. Small ones. For ‘low-end’ clients, such as minor non-profits, musicians, artists, writers, and even (yes) local political candidates. But only if you are ready and willing to have a weblog as a central part of your site.”

Jennifer Bayot: “Krista S. Boughey of Hanford, Calif., recently learned that she and her husband, Britt, would have to pay $8 a month to receive paper invoices for their auto and student loans from USAA. Online statements and automatic payments would be free.” And “A number of studies and surveys show that the average company saves about $1 a bill by moving from a paper-based system to an electronic system.” Other companies are joining the pay-for-paper herd. The trend should deepen other online habits and suck more people into e-life. Once you are compelled to pay two bills online, why not do them all there?

Ever angered by web-stupidity, Olivier Travers, “Since there’s absolutely no value for me to give real information about myself to 99% of web sites that ask for it, I’ve made it a policy to feed them with the less credible bullshit I could come up with. I understand publishers want to profile users to answer advertiser requests, [but]… I have yet to see a site which does anything even remotely useful to me with my personal profile… Join me and make Afghan rich old ladies the fastest growing segment in online demographics. You need to make $200K or more a year.”

You’ve already read it, but for the record, here’s the fanstastic interview about Google’s UI approach. They’ve got eight people working full-time on UI.

Cashets “are designed specifically for small purchases — $1 or less — that you ordinarily can’t make on the Internet because sellers have a minimum.” Seems astonishingly simple. (Via BoingBoing.

Launched Sunday, Groxis’s Grokker is the latest attempt to offer a visual representation(s) of information groupings. “84 percent of Web surfers go no further than the first page of document titles in searching for information,” quotes the NYTimes.