VOICES FROM THE INTERNET Pulitzer prize fighting People are drawn to existing competitions like moths to a flame. It's precisely the wrong way to succeed. Lots of journalists take significant detours in their careers and their writing in order to win a Pulitzer. Maybe not to actually win one, but to be in that class, to have peers that have won one. Mystery novelists stick to the center of the road, because that's where the road is. Movies are written and released in order to win an Oscar. Once there's a category, a ranking, a place to battle for supremacy, we run for it. Do you go to trade shows or enter markets or submit RFPs or push for a GPA or even gross ratings points because there's a list of winners or because it's what you actually want to do? Most bestseller lists and prizes measure popularity, not effectiveness. I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet. – sethgodin.typepad.com Who benefited? When Toyota stumbled there were (muted) shouts of glee around the car producing world. “Yay! They fell flat on their face! Let's pick up the pieces.” Well, nobody said it openly, but action speaks louder than words: Ford and Hyundai revved up their “quality” aspects (wink, wink,) GM and Chrysler fired up their incentives (it's all on the taxpayers, so who cares?) Ford and Hyundai said “to hell with subliminal messages” and followed with the money. Even Nissan couldn't help themselves and offered a bounty to deserting Toyotaphiles. February came and went and Toyota only registered a 9 percent drop (year on year after the carpocalypse). This was quite confusing. Especially give the fact that production had been halted and dealer stock was quarantined until fixed. Analysts had predicted double digits drops and were surprised themselves. Everyone had expected something out of a George Romero film to happen to Toyota. So, suddenly, this turns into an Agatha Christie story. “Who benefited from Toyota's stumble”?From Korea, The Chosun reports: “It wasn't us!” They say they expected Hyundai-Kia to snap up absconding Toyota customers, but as they put it: “Hyundai and Kia, which were initially expected to be the greatest beneficiaries of Toyota's woes, saw their sales in the U.S. rise 10 percent in February on-year, less than the 13 percent overall market growth seen that month. The sales results show that the Korean carmakers still need to do more to win over U.S. consumers. Declines in sales at Toyota translated directly into rising sales of similar car models at Ford, Nissan and Chrysler, but not at Hyundai and Kia.” The Chosun posits that it must be Ford and GM who benefited from Toyota as Ford's figures shot up 43 percent and GM's rose 32 percent. But this doesn't sit well either. As our Lord Niedermeyer reported, Ford's fleet sale rose 74 percent and GM's grew 114 percent. This accounts for the majority (but not all) of Ford and GM's growth. Not to mention GM loaded up on leasing, too. So, now things are extremely hazy. If Hyundai-Kia and Ford didn't win retail customers over with their quality and GM and Chrysler didn't woo customers with their incentives, then who did? The most likely candidate would have to be Toyota's cross town rival, Honda. With the Accord shooting up 41 percent, its close image to Toyota and even Acura growing through its CUV's, it would seem that they are the main beneficiaries of Toyota's woes. But until they break out those fleet sales, we can never be sure. – thetruthaboutcars.com Google acquisition Another day, another Google acquisition. This time, Google bought DocVerse, a company founded by two former Microsoft employees which built a plug-in for Microsoft Office that lets you collaborate with other people in real-time. “DocVerse combines the benefits of web-based collaboration tools like Google Docs and Zoho with the power and familiarity of the world's most popular productivity application, Microsoft Office. DocVerse offers the first ever product to truly enable real-time sharing and editing of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. Its key advantage is that it does not require you to learn a new way to work by seamlessly plugging into Microsoft Office.” DocVerse doesn't use Google Docs as a back-end for real-time collaboration, but Google will probably integrate with Google Docs. – googlesystem.blogspot.com Asteroids did it? Findings from a panel of more than 40 international experts have brought them to conclude that a massive asteroid impact did indeed spell the end for the dinosaurs, according to a newly-published report in Science journal. Whilst this theory has long been in place, other studies have suggested that massive volcanic activity in India's Deccan Traps may have been an alternative destructive force which triggered the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction 65 million years ago. Following a comprehensive study of more than two decades worth of scientific evidence and findings, the scientists came down firmly on the side of the asteroid impact which occurred at Chicxulub, Mexico. To give some idea of the scale of the impact, the evidence indicates that the rock would have been roughly the size of the Isle of Wight and would have unleashed a force equivalent to a billion Hiroshima bombs. The cataclysmic chain of events, such as mega earthquakes and tsunamis, and a global change in atmospheric conditions, would have wiped out the dinosaurs, and indeed much of life on Earth, in mere days. The key indicators for the asteroid impact were the presence of large quantities of iridium in samples dating to the time of the extinction and the appearance of “shocked quartz” in rock layers. Iridium is extremely rare on Earth, yet common in asteroids and space bodies, whilst shocked quartz is only discovered in meteorites and at the sites of nuclear explosions.
