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Am I in hock or not?
I keep seeing references, as in today's needlessly snarky San Francisco Chronicle piece about Salon -- and even by smart people in the blogosphere who should know better -- to Salon's "$79 million in debt." So let's squash this meme one more time before it propagates uncontrollably into the ether, like our old "error message haikus":
Salon does not have $79 million in debt. Salon has substantially no debt.
Salon's financials report an accumulated deficit of $79 million for our seven years of operations. If you break this down I think it's roughly $50 million in cash and the rest is non-cash accounting charges. If you look at the financials over the years you'll see that our spending for a couple years at the height of the boom (1999 and 2000) accounts for a disproportionate chunk of that.
This money represents losses, not debt. You'd think that's an important enough distinction for the financial press -- and the pundits in the blogging gallery -- to get right. Argue all you want about our business strategy, our prospects and the quality of our prose; but let's keep the facts straight.
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Soy vey
OK, by now regular bloglodytes have seen this link a million times. In case you haven't, though, I'm going to cycle it once more into rotation: It's -- how to describe it? No description is really apt. Soy-sauce-superhero-Flash with-cheesy-but-great-pop-music anime-samizdat! I dunno. See for yourself. Then check out this translation of the lyrics, courtesy Tom Tomorrow:
Funky that guy is Kikkoman.
Soy sauce is good for the body.
There is also a sterilization action.
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Must-read John Markoff story in today's Times detailing meetings held under the auspices of DARPA last summer that considered -- only to wisely reject -- restructuring the nature of the Net to allow the government to track pretty much everything. One more piece of the growing and increasingly weird "Total Information Awareness" puzzle: "The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible."
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Matt Welch offers a spirited response to the wise old men of journalism who tell us that the sky is falling.
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An organization is born
The Digital Storytelling Association opens its doors. This is the group forming out of the key people and energy from the Digital Storytelling Festival that used to take place every year in Crested Butte, Colorado, organized by the late and much-missed Dana Atchley. Here's the groups definition of digital storytelling. Operating for now out of Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen's Center for Digital Storytelling but international in scope and ambition, this association should serve as a useful resource for anyone interested in using digital tools to tell personal stories -- which would at this point include quite a large portion of the species.
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Salon Blog watch
Amanda Brightwell of Everything That Sucks sends a message to that guy in the Mercedes Benz.
The Raven takes apart Gregg Easterbrook's Wired piece on "The New Convergence."
Paul Hinrichs says it's time for W. and Vlad to get it on already.
Barbaric Yawp's Christopher Key offers a bit of autobiography, from Vietnam to business magazine-editing.
Necrolicious: Blogging about death.
Driver 8: "Salon's status as last man standing after 7 years of New Economy boom-and-bust has made it an attractive piñata to pummel." But we haven't busted open yet...
Don't miss your regular Salon Blogs Tour of Quality courtesy of Mark at Fried Green Al-Qaedas.
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