"10,000 Reasons Civilization is Doomed" Site Shut Down for Maintenance

The Website entitled "10,000 Reasons Civilization is Doomed," located at http://www.10reasons.org, is "down for maintenance for a few days, possibly weeks." So far, the site has tallied 5,777 reasons for civilization's demise -- could it be that the site's founders concluded that this was enough to prove their case?

GreenStoneMedia.com Goes Under

GreenStone Media, whose site was located at the domain http://greenstonemedia.com, was a relatively low-profile project financed by prominent feminists Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda whose purpose was to broadcast/podcast content of interest to women. The site also featured a Blog and a community area. The site's tagline was "Talk the Way Women Want" but its efforts to syndicate its content to offline radio outlets were largely unsuccessful: published reports state that it only reached 60,000 listeners in the U.S. Last Friday, August 17th, it ceased all operations.

My take on this project is that it may have been shut down prematurely. I would like to see evidence that a serious marketing campaign was ever launched to promote it via offline or online channels. GreenStone Media's folksy approach to womens' issues could have given it a fighting chance against the crass commerciality and cookie-cutter impersonality of many so-called "sites for women." Maybe if Gloria and Jane had pitched their project a bit more aggressively to the major media, or contributed more visibly to its content, GreenStone Media could have been a serious contender.

Jane Magazine Closing, Leaving Web Clutter Behind

RadarOnline reports that Jane Magazine, a 10-year old womans' magazine, is closing.

No big surprise here. Magazines are dropping left and right, killed off by the unstoppable juggernaut of the Web. Magazine execs deny this at every turn, but it's the most obvious trend in the world. I mean, the iPhone literally lets people surf the Web in the bathroom, the last bastion of the magazine. Yes, people read them on the subway and in doctors' offices but most people don't ride the subway and most don't spend much time in doctors' offices.

Jane's website (at janemag.com) never got much traction on the Web. With all the money that Conde Nast stuffed into it, its current traffic rank is 159,485, which makes it LESS popular than disobey.com, which has a budget of exactly zero.

When I went to Jane's Blog to check out how its readers were taking the news, I got a script error that froze my browser (see screenshot above).

Truly pathetic work; I doubt many will miss this monster, which will close sometime in August, when the last print issue ships.

BadAds.Org Is Dead

BadAds.org, a site launched in 2000 to serve as an online dumping ground for complaints about advertising, died a while ago (it's last Blog update was in November of 2003), which is too bad, given how bad many ads are. Still, in its time, BadAds.org got plenty of good PR, which proves that when you poke Madison Avenue, you're likely to make a lot of friends. Anyone with a strong desire to pick up Badads.org's torch can do so easily: the domain name is up for sale on the site's home page. In the meantime, if you're looking for bad ads, both adrants.com and adfreak.com do a fairly good job of critiquing them.