Interesting to see the disconnect between investors in two industries.

NYT, a company with zero revenue growth year over year and rising costs, trades at 17 times profits.

And YHOO, a company with revenue growing 30% a year and stable costs, trades at just 20 times profits.

AP reports:

CBS Corp. is enlisting eggs in its scramble to attract viewers.

The CBS logo and slogans promoting the TV network and its series will appear along with coded expiration dates on eggs sold by grocers — another promotional measure in the competitive world of television.

More than 35 million eggs will be marked with phrases such as “CSI: Crack the Case on CBS” and “The Class, New Grade-A CBS Comedy” as part of a deal between the CBS Marketing Group and EggFusion, an egg-coding company. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The campaign will begin in September, when the fall TV season begins, CBS said Saturday at a meeting of the Television Critics Association. EggFusion, based in Deerfield, Ill., will use laser technology to create the expiration dates and “On-Egg Messaging,” the company said in a statement.

However, CBS isn’t putting all its eggs in one marketing basket. The campaign is part of what the network is calling its “Outernet strategy,” an effort to reach viewers “outside their homes as they go about their daily lives,” the network said in a statement.

Other networks have tried offbeat ways to attract viewers, such as putting messages about shows in public restrooms and Walt Disney Co.’s use of dry-cleaning bags to promote the ABC hit “Desperate Housewives.”

Nothing like hitting the right people at the right time with the right idea. Congratulations guys! (Free bonus: lots of people wrote about how stupid you are, so you get all that earned media too!)

Good overview of the coming mortgage debacle:

On a personal level, however, there is going to be pain as homeowners struggle to make higher payments. In 2003, of all new mortgages, 10.2 percent were interest-only, meaning the homeowner paid only the interest for the initial period of the loan. According to Loan Performance, a research firm, 26.7 percent of all loans were interest-only last year and another 15.3 percent were payment-option adjustable rate mortgages, which allow homeowners to choose how much they paid each month.

In some areas of the country where homes are expensive, these loans were highly popular. In most California cities, as well as in Denver, Washington, Phoenix and Seattle, interest-only loans represented 40 percent or more of all mortgages issued in 2005.

Traditionally, interest-only loans and adjustable-rate loans were used by people who expected to live in a house only a short time, but such loans have turned into ‘affordability products’ as housing prices rose. The interest rate on the loans, while below that of conventional 30-year fixed-rate mortgages at the beginning, resets after 3, 5, 7 or 10 years, depending on the loan. So, homeowners who took out loans in 2004 could find, for example, that their initial 4.25 percent loan climbs to 6.25 percent or 7.25 percent next year.

Someone now paying $350 a month for a $100,000 interest-only loan could be facing payments of $680 both because of the shift to the higher rate and because the borrower would have to start paying off the principal as well as the interest.

Zizou headbutts Fidel.
Zaps the deathstar.
Drinkz Coke.
Ad abzurdum.

And let’s not forget Jon Stewart on net neutrality.

If you know Hugh Macleod, you’ll find this cartoon hughlarious.

Hugh was an early buyer of Blogads and I, in turn, bought one of his cartoons-on-the-back-of-a-biznesscard.

Meanwhile, America grows bigger.

Go vote in the SXSWclick short film contest.

Many analysts are writing about the fragmentation of media audiences. And most, like this Fortune writer, moan about it:

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I’ve got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

To pick a single, timely, example, The Tribune Co. announced just the other day that its newspapers would be closing foreign bureaus in Johannesburg, Moscow, Lebanon and Pakistan. This is happening all over newspaperdom and it happened years ago at the broadcast networks.

Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.

The second arena where we are worse off is politics. This is related to journalism, as the moderate and responsible (okay, bland) voices of the MSM get drowned out by partisan, opinionated cableheads and bloggers.

Politics in America has become polarized for many reasons, but a big one is the fact that people can now filter the news and opinion they get to avoid exposure to ideas with which they disagree. Anderson suggests that this could well be a temporary problem, and that if the major parties continue to move to the extremes and the quality of debate continues to deteriorate, the Internet could well enable a new party or parties, to arise.

Mass culture provides intangible benefits, too. Big stars, hit TV shows and even commercials help knit a society together. Think of the feeling that comes a few times a year – the morning after the Super Bowl or the Oscars – when tens of millions of Americans share a common experience.

This analsys of course misses the fact that new communities are arising, knitting people together in novel and powerful ways. Something is being lost, but I’d argue that we’re gaining much more than a “mass of niches.”

Back from a week at the beach. Brilliant. We loved watching the home-spun fireworks all up and down the beach, with the official celebration off the pier in the distance. Some photos.

The blog legitimacy debate continues. Are blogs are derivative or a primary source? Does it matter? By commenting about a blog post about blogs linking to the New York Times, have I just proven the point? Which point?

Here’s a local version of the same debate.

It’s worth noting that futures on the US Treasury bonds, a “derivative,” now trade hundreds of times the volume of the actual securities they’re notionally based on. Easier to use, more liquid, faster… that’s what folks prefer, and that’s where the critical mass ends up.

Meanwhile, pleading conventional-magazine-hood, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media hunkers down, shuffles its deck and drops a few cards.

And a crusading blog is apparently blacklisted by the Governor of Kentucky.

In the net neutrality debate, I’m firmly in the “more internet good, speedbumps bad” camp. Which is to say, I’ve got a net neutrality sticker on my laptop.

Yes, stuff like this “bugged router” sure look scary.

The other side argues that, with customers paying $40 a month for broadband, who will be incented to pay to expand that pipe? Mike Turk, who I like a lot but appears to be on the other side of this issue, cites a WSJ piece citing a $560 a month “cost of future broadband”

But, when bandwidth consumption gets to this volume, won’t the companies providing the last mile just charge consumers for the extra bandwidth? Charge per gigabyte per month and then let the consumer decide what she watches? Works well enough for water, measuring volume without putting any kind of extra filters in to determine what brand of water is being drunk and from what source.

Josh Marshall has done ’em both.

I can understand someone from the world of small magazines being shocked by the responsiveness, rambuctiousness and even hair trigger hostility of the blogosphere. I haven’t done much magazine writing in the last couple years. But I come out of that world of small political magazines. And it is, in many more than just the obvious ways, a different world.

Write a piece for the New Republic or the American Prospect or even the far wider circulation New Yorker and you may get a few letters in the mail from readers. Not that many or that often, but sometimes. Friends and colleagues will tell you what they thought or argue with you about it. The publication will probably get a few letters to the editor. But that’s about it.

Your contact with the people who read what you’re writing is quite limited. On the other hand, TPM gets anywhere from 2-500 emails every day. Needless to say, many fly in within minutes of your finishing whatever is being responded to. And, believe or not, not all of them are nice.

Not long ago I got on the wrong side of the ridiculousness of the proprietor of one left-wing website. And his antics were so dishonorable and shameless that I don’t think I’d ever speak to the guy again. Still, I don’t think he was a fascist. I think he is, mundane a category as it may be, a dick. Or perhaps I’m the dick. To him, certainly. Still though, I don’t think fascism has anything to do with it.

More generally, I think the blogosphere, in contrast to more staid venues for writing, is something like the much more popular and participatory sort of theater culture you had in the 19th and well into the 20th century (you may remember seeing some hint of this funned up in old Bugs Bunny cartoons) where, if the audience didn’t like what they were hearing or seeing, they started booing. Or hooting. Or heck, maybe tossing raw vegetables.