Independent Rock The Vote

Image by daniel arnold! via FlickrWilco w/ Fleet Foxes served up a tasty cover of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" today. Awesome.

Greetings all,

Such tumultuous times. And in the spirit of giveaways that seem to be sweeping the nation, we've got something free for you. No it's not a pile of cash (sorry) but rather an audio postcard of sorts from a summer's night in Oregon with our friends the Fleet Foxes & a lovely Bob Dylan tune. All we ask is you go to http://wilcoworld.net/vote/ and click the "I pledge to vote in the 2008 Election" button. If you can spare it, we also encourage you to consider a donation to Feeding America http://www.feedingamerica.org/ . Happy listening (and please feel free to pass this email along to friends, family members, etc.).

The Wilco HQ Distribution Dept.
http://wilcoworld.net/

A Retail Model To Rival WalMart

Image by Getty Images via Daylife German low cost/low price grocers Aldi are getting a lot of buzz within the business sections these days...

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/business/07feed.html?ref=business

Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_17/b3880010.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

WSJ (Consumerist.com): http://consumerist.com/tag/recession-watch/?i=5023316&t=broke-consumers-turn-to-deep-discount-stores-like-aldi

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• The rise and rise of the discount king
• Aldi sales soar as rivals feel the pinch

Forecast for Farecast: Buy Now - UPDATE

UPDATE: According to Roger from Microsoft, Farecast now has a new URL, which is http://farecast.live.com, and they've been forwarding visitors since May 21. Roger also had a great point about Compete's data, which does not show sub-level statistics and can thus show some skewed numbers. Thanks for the comment Roger. I'll keep an eye on your progress. -

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This past April, Microsoft purchased one of my favorite travel sites, Farecast.com. Farecast no longer looks like itself, and has MSFT logos tattooed all over its homepage. I wondered to myself, does the Farecast user care about this management change, or do they prefer to obtain travel information from an independent and trusted source.



Though this data is not scientific, it looks like Farecast users have started to drop. There are certainly other reasons why this could have happened (e.g travel seasonality), so stay tuned to this integration.

Stat of the Day (7.7.08)

Image via WikipediaI've been doing some research on teens and college students on their study habits, and found this nugget:

64% of teens admit to using text messaging shorthand in writing scholastic papers.

This is nothing to LOL about.

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project