Gigabiting

image via the Urban Craft Center

The blogosphere seems downright sedate when you see what’s going on with zines.

For the uninitiated, a zine is a small circulation, independently produced publication. It can be a hand-drawn masterpiece or a crudely photocopied manifesto. The time and materials needed are seldom matched by sales revenue, but profit is rarely the goal of these labors of love. 1,000 copies at $3.00 apiece would be a pretty big deal to most zine publishers. Read entire article.

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Time Magazine’s annual roundup of the world’s most influential leaders, thinkers, heroes, and artists hits newsstands this week, and this year the list includes four individuals from the food sector whose ideas and talent transform the world we live in. Read entire article.

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The Wall Street Journal has one. And the New York Times. Playboy Magazine too.

What’s a news organization to do?

Newspapers and magazines have turned to selling wine as a new way of generating revenue from readers. There’s nothing new about the business model. Classified ads were the traditional way for publishers to take advantage of the communities they created. With subscriptions dwindling and the advent of free Craigslist classifieds, a diverse group of publishers has applied the same principles to wine clubs. Read entire article.

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Notice anything different on Yelp? Beginning this week, you can read reviews that the site’s automatic filtering system had previously hidden from view.

Did you think that Yelp was a level playing field? Silly you.

Yelp has been stung by charges that it manipulates its users’ feedback to favor businesses that advertise on the site. The review site insists that its filter serves to maintain the integrity of the site by screening out reviews that are biased and untrustworthy, such as positive reviews written by the business itself or negative reviews that come from a competitor. Read entire article.

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Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet is the latest diet fad to grip Hollywood. It seems like every day we hear of another knobby-kneed celebrity signing on to the six cookies a day regimen.

Of course strange eating habits and crash diets are nothing new in the land of the incredible shrinking starlets. Uma Thurman only eats raw food, Christina Aguilera limits herself to foods of one color for each day of the week (white, red, green, orange, purple, yellow, and rainbow), Reese Witherspoon snacks on jarred baby food, and Beyonce downs a mix of lemon juice, maple syrup, water, and cayenne pepper (and nothing else) for 10 day stretches. Read entire article.

Men are taking back the kitchen..

Of course plenty of men have always enjoyed cooking. What’s different now is that so many of them aren’t just men— they’re guys, they’re dudes, they’re bros.

The bros are a subculture that’s been closely associated with take out pizza and happy hour chicken wings. When they venture into their man-cave kitchens, they’ve been best known for barbeque skills and beer can chicken, eschewing anything as wussy-ass as salads and vegetables and any dish that requires a recipe. But this new breed of food dudes is stretching its culinary muscles. Read entire article.