Then join the Facebook group

Top Posts from “Full List of Stuff White People Like”
#96 New Balance Shoes
White People in the News: Education Special
#11 Asian Girls
#1 Coffee
#9 Making you feel bad about not going outside
#4 Assists
#88 Having Gay Friends
#2 Religions that their parents don’t belong to
#81 Graduate School

Of course there is already a Stuff Queer People Like in nascent stages, an offshoot of a blog to watch.

Newsweek has named Towleroad one of its 5 “It” Blogs in the July 9, 2007 issue. The whole package is great, “What You Need To Know Now”.

Wow, great company to be in. Congrats, to all. We learn tons from these guys — especially the cat pics on Cuteoverload – all the time.

If you don’t know these other blog, please check them out. Now. And since Newsweek doesn’t actually link to its It Blogs on the site it has with MSNBC, here are some links. Don’t want you to mess up your wrist.

New York, NY (PRWEB) January 31, 2007 — Towleroad premium gay news for gay men (http://www.towleroad.com) attracted more than 3.5 million unique visitors in 2006, will hit 500,000 unique visitors for January, and served more than 20 million pageviews last year to its site “with homosexual tendencies.” Founder Andy Towle thanked the growing Towleroad community and invited their participation in further growth.

Towleroad grew organically through daily coverage of news, political, cultural and entertainment stories mixed up with photos of attractive guys in the news. Again in 2006 a few of the year’s biggest stories were initially reported by gay bloggers, and went on to on to become major straight-focused media events. Among the highlights, Brokeback, the church and state sex scandals around the election, Lance Bass, Neil Patrick Harris’s graceful landing with David Burtka after stumbling over a publicist and all the other tales of the celebrity closet, the scariest of course being the hostile homophobic set of Grey’s Anatomy.

Earns Place as a Savvy Must Read :

Towleroad is now part of the daily “must read” for groups of DC politicos, NY media types, Hollywood execs, gay gadget lovers, and others looking for, as blogger PopMuse put it, “the gay news you need.” By year end, many groups recognized Towleroad’s unique role:

–Peer bloggers gave the site a sweep of the Gay Bloggies, 2006 including Weblog of the Year
–The gay press included Towle in both the Out 100 and Advocate year-end issues
–Straight-focused news organizations have made Towleroad one of the relatively few daily contributors to Google News and Topix. Pieces are regularly also featured by by Reuters and internationally.

A Great Word-of-mouth Audience for Entertainment Launches

Somewhere between the comprehensive Brokeback Mountain guide and publishing the first review of Dreamgirls anywhere, the entertainment industry began to recognize Towleroad’s growing audience as well suited to word-of-mouth launches and movie openings. The Dreamgirls distributor followed up Towleroad’s review with a significant ad campaign focused on “opening” the movie, targeting Towleroad’s brand aware, media savvy guys who care about and what to know what’s new and what’s opening across the board.

Attractive Demographic. Extraordinary Cross Readership

New numbers from Quantcast.com** put Towleroad in the top 2-3,000 sites globally ranked by on unique visitors and show attractive demographics for marketers across the board. (http://www.quantcast.com/towleroad.com). The site shows higher than average participation in the 25-34 range and significantly higher in the primo advertiser target 18-24 year old males; Presumably, it’s the slightly older respondents that index Towleroad very high for post-graduate education and household incomes greater than $100,000+. The site has significant readership overlap with Wonkette (100-times as likely to read), Daily Kos (70 times), (New Yorker 45 times), as well as rollingstone.com, ew.com, style.com, and pinkisthenewblog.com (300 times as likely).

High Profile Ads

Working with key partners Blogads and FeedBurner among others, Towleroad has recently carried ads from AOL, Discovery Card, Nikon, Best Buy, EMI music, New York Times, RIM Blackberry, Bahamas Tourism, and Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage among others. Good results and the research numbers make significant campaigns more likely.

Partnership to Expand

“I am humbled by the positive response and great feedback Towleroad has received this year and am thrilled to announce a partnership with Michael Goff that will facilitate Towleroad’s growth into new areas. As OUT magazine founder and former general manager of Microsoft’s MSN, Michael has been an editor and an entrepreneur many times over and brings a wealth of experience in both gay media and Internet properties.”

Goff said of the just announced partnership, “I couldn’t feel more privileged to be working with Andy. Andy has single-handedly taken Towleroad to incredible heights, maintaining a quality aesthetic and robust content with frequent surprises. Most importantly he’s kept focused on his readers needs by tapping his past experience as a professional photographer, national magazine editor and published poet. He’s set a high bar for us and we’re taking that seriously as we combine our efforts and reach out to other bloggers, journalists, and business people to collaborate.”

The two have know each other for a number of years, and began collaborating mid-year on new projects while expanding business components of Towleroad and broadening the site’s offerings with the already popular TowleTech and Guide to the Tube regular features.

More on Towleroad founder Andy Towle.

More on entrepreneur Michael Goff.

The two with their small team will launch their first new project in the coming weeks.

**NOTE: Because Towleroad is (proudly) hosted at TypePad, it is reachable at towleroad.typepad.com as well, If using Quantcast.com (or Alexa or others) be sure to combine the two results. On Quantcast, combine numbers from the core site at http://www.quantcast.com/towleroad.com with numbers from http://www.quantcast.com/towleroad.typepad.com

It might have been my unpublished post about how i look forward to working in a bipartisan manner with Republicans just as soon as we impeach this Republican and get some other ones in there.

Didn’t anyone else feel like perhaps it would have been better to just step back a second and let W squirm, rather than rush to the White House and any available mic to say how eager Democrats were to work with the president, going from “worse than Nixon” to “work with the president” literally overnight. And the image of Pelosi at the White House just reminded me of the no-idea Dems pushing for war in Iraq and left me with that sinking new-boss-same-as-the-old boss feeling.

But as in my prediction that the dems could never take both houses, I would be delighted to be wrong.
.

After the guy who re-did the shower and another who hauled away the junk, Craigslist served up the recent-immigrant entrepreneur whose team cleaned and shampooed the rugs. He doesn’t know where that list came from or who this Craig is, but "I don’t waste my money on the other places anymore. I stopped every one." Not a single ad in newspapers, yellow pages, penny savers, or Yahoo Local like he used to. He gets more calls, almost all from the better-off with more computers. And that’s fine by him. As is the cost. He doesn’t think much of the prospects for newspapers going forward. Does a good job too.

And finally, a business-travel lifehack that’s made my life better…Since about a year ago, if I am in a city for more than a few days with work to do, first thing I buy a used CRT monitor off Craigslist. I send off 3-5 emails when i hit town and usually get a quick response. The longest took 5-6 hours. They’re about 1/10th the cost asked by retail rental services, and these monitors are conveniently all over town rather than in a single store. Here’s the rss feed for monitors under $100 in NY.

I acquired one after a late flight, when it was hard to get a cab but a seller responded in minutes. I was back at my hotel, set up, and revising notes for a morning meeting within 20 minutes. There’s always a choice of 17" and 19" models, ranging from "come and get them" to "$35". And I’ve been lucky to find always find them blocks or a quick cab from my where i’m staying. Most laptops support extended desktop mode, so even a 15" doubles your work area. Twice, I got a full size keyboard thrown in when i asked if they had one for sale. (You can also get them new for under $10 in discount stores.). And when i leave….
Then I just abandon them. I just check out. I leave them in the room. **
It feels wrong. I’ve offered a last gasp of life to those beasts that will never be allowed on my desk at home again. Hotels won’t hold them for others because they really are big and ugly. The maids don’t want them, nor could they get a 1000 pound monitor out without some management rule kicking in. I’ve offered them back to sellers saying I’d leave the monitor for pick up at the front desk. But even with assurances that i’m not looking for a refund, they admit they don’t ever want to see the things again.

I even tried to ignite an entrepreneurial flame in one seller, promising i’d rent one every time if he’d deliver and pickup. And i assured him there were clearly others like me. He wasn’t having it. Maybe someone else out there can make that work. Othewise, I’ll keep doing this until they’re gone.
**ASIDE (Tip): I have learned to leave a note taped to the screen so you don’t get off the plane to messages on every number you have from the concierge, proudly assuring you that your precious equipment is safe and will be shipped off and billed to your credit card. I did head that off.

cc attribution license pics. By Flickr members: southernpixel, endlisnis, and akubba

…with full audience participation.

…and it’s not as bad as that sounds.

• An overview of BarCampLA in David Markland’s video log from blogging.la

Like the blogosphere, simple tools that work, ostensibly polite people with an obsession or three to share, conversations with faster comments, real asides and trackbacks, blog stalkers, climbers and celebs.
Posts, or presentations, ranged from 1st grade art class (pic: Cody Simms, kid’s allright) to seriously alpha-geek visions for things i hadn’t considered. Also a young guy’s fleshed out plan for a tv network, the launch of a new non-profit, Bloggingforgood, (not too late to join), and Jason Calacanis‘ critique of 10 overblown digital entities in 15 minutes, with the audience as his geek chorus yelling “Bullshit”.

• Tons of Flickr pics

And to round up: the content was better than you’d expect, if not as varied as the blogosphere. A lawyer and a Microsoft evangelist business blogged, a Scottish dude in kilt podcasted through, a Franklin Covey-hating dominatrix (and certified hypnotist/life coach ) prostelytized for the cult of Getting Things Done, Belkin came thorugh with a pile of free powerstrips…and somehow, though it seems impossible, I didn’t hear a single reference to the Oscar’s all day.