Today the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 416 points (about 3.3 percent). According to the Washington Post the main free fall in the market was “triggered by a technological glitch that caused a backlog of trades to be calculated at nearly the same time.” The story reported that about $600 billion in market value was loss. Now, the Dow was going to drop anyway today, but without the technical glitch how bad would the drop have been?

I know how much of our security and economy is based on computers and how fragile computer systems can be. To me it’s surprising that this kind of occurrence is as rare as it is.

England has now posted the First ‘ignore your sat nav’ roadsigns on roads where satellite navigation equipment literally steer drivers down the wrong path.

I switched my RSS feed over to feedburner. They provide stats for all the RSS readers subscribed to your blog. Thanks for the tip Chris.

The Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com has recently become one of the most celebrated online news operations (with references from Howard Owens and Rob Curley among others). Well, they are looking for a new editor and their ad for an editor is a little different because they are looking for a different kind of editor. They produced a website with a multimedia ad including a host who talks to you and welcomes you around the site (shot green screen supered in front of page of classifieds) and videos from reporters telling you what they want to see in a new editor.

What does it mean when your wife sends you this article and says “This is what would happen to you if you lived in China.”

• China treats Internet ‘addicts’ sternly

That makes me sort of scared for what she might have planned.

XM Radio and Sirius announced a merger yesterday. I guess the real question for is how satellite radio will look after the merger is over. Will the lack of competition between products cause the stations to offer fewer channels and fewer viewpoints? Will the lack of competition cause radio and service prices to rise? Will the lack of competition cause federal regulators to intervene because of the new monopoly status and use of the airwaves?

The US Patent office has just issued Yahoo a patent for customizable web page. In 1997 Yahoo filed a patent for a “dynamic page generator” that allowed a user to save a page and then have that page generate customized information. Just stop for a second and think about all the websites that offer this service that are now in violation of Yahoo’s patent. Just to name a few Google, Amazon, Bloglines and just about every major corporations intranet portal. The real question now is whether Yahoo will attempt to enforce it’s patent and request payments for everyone that uses there patented technology.

Mega newspaper corporation Gannett reviewed their business strategy back in December in a report to investment banking house Credit Suisse. The reports are only available as mostly boring hour long audio files, so you can go and see all the highlights posted on the Innovation in College Media blog. Here’s a couple of highlights that made me take notice.

• Gannett has trained 380 new videographers.
• Local and hyper-local content is the key in a news conversation future.
• They will focus on developing thousands of microsites.

The Mike Huckabee exploratory committee launched a new web site. It is a big improvement over the previous iteration that I blogged about when announced he was running for president. Some of the improvements in the sight include a title (I Like Mike), campaign blog, video, links to social networking sites Huckabee groups, refer a friend link and email sign-up for more information. My main criticism of the site would be the lack of meta tags, circa 1999 table based design and failure to use alt tags. Adding meta tags, using appropriate alt tags on header images and using semantic markup on the page would really help increase the sites’ SEO.

I’ve used a few of web analytic tools over the year, but by far my favorite was ClickTracks. They even made me a featured user on their site last year. My first web stat tool was Analog and then I added the Report Magic package onto it to build visual reports. Analog did a great job, provided the information I needed at the time, but I got tired of waiting for the reports to run so after trying AWStats I found the money to switch Deep Metrix’s LiveStats. After a few upgrades on LiveStats, I started having some server/database issues so I switched to ClickTracks. The level of analysis and targeting for ClickTracks is very impressive for the price.

Lately, I’ve been using Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) for all of my sites. It’s very easy to get up and running, provides full featured reports and it’s free. For a long time I used tools that analyze log files because you didn’t have to add any code (javascript) to all the pages on your site, but with the data that Google Analytics provides with their script I think it is worth the hassle of editing each page to add the code. Besides if you used templates on your pages, adding the code isn’t too much trouble.