Davos Newbies

The Wall Street Journal had a good analysis of the possible waning of Wal-Mart earlier this week. But the most fascinating part was the Flash-animated map showing the growth of Wal-Mart outlets in the US over 40 years. You have to think of a spreading epidemic.

Update That link to the map doesn’t seem to work, even though the Journal encourages readers to email it to people. I don’t know whether it’s a temporary outage or something systemic.

The Financial Times writes about the bewildering number of acronyms plaguing French life. I’d never encountered the acro-stocracy before.

Make a phone call from Mt Everest, they write.

That’s all well and good, but I’m seeking something simpler. I live in a fabulous neighborhood in Berkeley, but it’s a nearly perfect black hole for mobile telephones. I know for certain that users of T-Mobile and ATT need to wander out on the street to get a faint signal. On most days I can see various neighbors wandering along the sidewalk, trying to find that magic spot where their phone will work. Verizon users seem to be better served, and my family is planning to switch to them, damn the contract penalties.

All of the services, by the way, have coverage maps that pretend that we should get a good signal. We don’t.

As a Wall Street Journal subscriber, I received an email telling me that I now had a personal page on WSJ.com. Clever, I thought, a WSJ version of Pageflakes or Netvibes. I wouldn’t use it, but it’s a good idea.

However, the Journal falls into the usual pit of old-style newspaper sites: we wouldn’t dare give you access to anyone else’s content. I can remix all sorts of WSJ content, but there’s no option to add other feeds. How could anyone with a brain who knows what an RSS feed is do such a thing?

Instead they could have provided the many WSJ.com subscribers their first glance of a new world of multiple information sources. Felix Salmon has even provided a helpful visual guide to the econoblogosphere that they could have shamelessly cribbed. A bad, missed opportunity, but one that could easily be rectified.