Like Brian Morrissey at AdFreak, I’m not a big fan of tag clouds (or “weighted lists”, to use a description from my visual-design past). Whatever their utility as navigation tools, they’re usually ugly as sin, especially when applied to a blog/site that devotes 90 percent of its content to one or two topics (obviating the need for this sort of filtering in the first place).

But take away the navigation aspect, and apply the size-weighting of fonts to mindshare concepts, and you’ve got something. Specifically, you’ve got Brand Tags, an experiment of name-brand products and services with word-association.

Above is a sampling for Tropicana, with a pretty typical lineup related to juice products. Not all brands fare as well or predictably, though: American Airlines ominously tags high for 9/11, while Jagermeister embarrassingly (for a liquor product) registers a strong false-postive as a beer product.

It’s intriguing, although I’m not sure how much faith you can put into an anonymous and limited sampling. Definitely worth a gander, though.

While CBS will be getting a robust and sprawling Web media operation in its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET Networks, in my mind there are two chief reasons for the deal:

- News.com

- TV.com

It just about begins and ends there. Both those sites — or, more properly, their browser addresses — make synergistic sense under CBS’ umbrella. Everything else — the long-established audiences, the physical Silicon Valley hub — is incidental, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see chunks of CNET eventually get jettisoned by the new corporate parent.

CNET has occupied that valuable news.com URL real estate for more than a decade. I always thought it was peculiar that such a fundamental brand/concept should take you to a narrow slice of news, instead of a more-general news portal; but that’s CNET’s reward for cornering that domain so early. Having news.com resolve to CBS News would confer an almost default status to the network for online news consumption, simply by virtue of the easily-input Web address.

Meanwhile, the TV.com domain came under CNET’s control more recently. Just nurturing its existing community-building formula will pay off for the short term; further out, it could be used to cement CBS’ position in televised media even further.

Yes, I’m characterizing this deal as essentially another dollars-for-domains transaction. Unlike other instances, though, this one actually makes sense. There’s no other way to establish the kind of mindshare that two dead-simple dot-com addresses bring. Having these two roads lead to CBS online properties will count big, with overall brand-building and online revenue generation via ads and other channels.

Speaking of Tom Sachs, he’s a multi-media kinda pop-cultural artist, as evidenced by his collection of short films.

They look to be mostly stop-motion animation pieces with funky soundtracks/voiceovers attached. Sachs collaborated with the Neistat Brothers on these, and the influence definitely shows.

My favorites from this group are: “McDonald’s Teaser”, musically accompanied by the late Wesley Willis’ “Rock and Roll McDonald’s”; and “Bitches and Money”, a 1/25th-scale tour through a ghetto, backed appropriately by NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta”.

Sue Simmons is a bona fide institution in New York City local news media, second only to her co-anchor Chuck Scarborough. Personally, I can’t remember when they weren’t occupying Channel 4; they were a firm part of my childhood channel-surfing.

Which is what makes her live-TV “What the fuck are you doing??” flub today all the more shocking (in a fun way!):

The shit hit the fan, of course, prompting an obligatory apology from Sue. Order is restored at the local NBC flagship affiliate.

Way to cash in, Moldy Peaches.

It was only a few months ago when you were compelled to reunite as part of the soundtrack for indieflick-hit Juno. Having gotten a taste of that — which included mass-audience gawking via “The View” — you’ve now lent your signature song, “Anyone Else But You”, to Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island for their latest TV commercial.

And probably worse, it’s not even the original song, but rather the melody with some reworked, marketing-specific lyrics grafted on. Selling out doesn’t get any more customized. I’d say the indie cred has flown right out the window…

I wish I could find the commercial online; I guess it’s too new to have been YouTubed.

There are two ways of looking at Cablevision’s $650 million purchase of Newsday from Tribune Co.:

1. Underlying the apparent mismatch between a dominant cable provider and an entrenched but struggling newspaper is a potentially lucrative synergy:

But even if the prospective deal has an element of vanity to it, Cablevision could make the following argument. It has roughly three million cable subscribers in Long Island, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, while Newsday has about 300,000 subscribers. Cablevision’s customer relationships could help it sell more subscriptions, while overlapping ad sales forces at the two companies could result in cost savings. And Cablevision owns a 24-hour local news channel in Long Island, which could use the news gathering capacity of Newsday — and in theory cut costs.

This makes the acquisition of Newsday the equivalent of securing an established and dedicated advertising channel for Cablevision. Nassau County is prime demographic territory, so any additional inroads a media company can make and present to ad clients is extremely valuable.

2. In order to extract the maximum value out of its unwanted asset, Tribune owner Sam Zell orchestrated an elaborate competition among Newsday’s suitors:

The trick was for Zell to turn this into a bidding war. That was difficult at first. The three interested parties acted as if they had the upper hand. Cablevision did some tire kicking, but the Dolans didn’t make an offer. [New York Daily News owner Mort] Zuckerman reportedly made a lowball bid.

Zell turned up the heat by entering into negotiations with News Corp. to accept $580 million for a majority stake in Newsday. [Rupert] Murdoch clearly felt he had the inside track. He began courting Long Island’s political leaders whose support he would surely need to get the deal approved by the FCC in Washington. That’s because News Corp. already owns the [New York] Post and two New York City television stations.

It now appears Zell was using News Corp.’s offer to establish a floor for the bidding. Zuckerman soon matched News Corp.’s offer. Then Cablevision did what non-strategic bidders often do in such situations. It offered to pay a higher price than either newspaper publisher.

And viola, Newsday becomes a hot property. Where it goes from here under the Dolans’ stewardship remains to be seen.

From one of my most fave-o-reet episodes of “The Simpsons”, I present “Skinner & the Superintendent”, or (as I prefer) “Steamed Hams”:

And for good measure, the key exchange:

Superintendent Chalmers: I thought we were having steamed clams.
Seymour Skinner: Oh, no, I said steamed hams. That’s what I call hamburgers.
Superintendent Chalmers: You call hamburgers steamed hams?
Seymour Skinner: Yes, it’s a regional dialect.
Superintendent Chalmers: Uh-huh. What region?
Seymour Skinner: Uhh… Upstate New York.
Superintendent Chalmers: Really? Well, I’m from Utica, and I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase ’steamed hams.’
Seymour Skinner: Oh, not in Utica. No, it’s an Albany expression.
Superintendent Chalmers: I see.
[Chalmers bites into a steamed ham.]
Superintendent Chalmers: You know, these hamburgers are quite similar to the ones they have at Krusty Burger.
Seymour Skinner: Oh ho ho, no. Patented Skinner burgers. Old family recipe.
Superintendent Chalmers: For steamed hams…
Seymour Skinner: Yes…
Superintendent Chalmers: Yes, and you call them steamed hams despite the fact that they are obviously grilled.

One last tidbit: Along with the obvious allusions to Pulp Fiction throughout, this episode also owes its title — “22 Short Films About Springfield” — to Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. The title and structure of which, in turn, was inspired by the 32 pieces that comprise Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

The above is a crop from a bus-shelter ad I cameraphone-snapped a month ago, somewhere in midtown Manhattan. I like the composition, in that it used the familiar symbol signs for the human form to get its point across about the alienating effect of social phobia.

Not to mention that I have a touch of that particular anxiety myself. So I really identify with that black standalone glyph — much as I’d prefer to be one of those multicolored in-the-crowd types.

Something out of my current fiction-reading that rings true for me:

“…I’ve always found the minute portraiture of nineteenth-century fiction fairly useless. For me, those precise descriptions of the hero’s nose/mouth/eyes/moles/forehead never come together as an actual face. Maybe it’s a failure of synthetic imagination on my part, but in my mind they always end up jumbled, like a portrait in the analytic cubist mode. It’s always easier to visualize the minor characters, with their bestial analogues, done in the broad stroke of caricature — Mr. Fox, Mr. Rat, Miss Sheep. Then, too, as a reader I like to take a certain amount of responsibility for filling in the details.”

- Connor McKnight, protagonist from Jay McInerney’s “Model Behavior”

I’ve always experienced a similar shortcoming whenever trying to mentally reconstruct a detailed description of some literary character. It never gets to the “cubist mode” stage for me, though — I simply don’t bother to connect the intended dots, and the visages just remain vague.

For that reason, I avoid prose that goes into such exacting detail, because it does nothing for me, and in facts bogs down the flow. I prefer a sacrifice in that area in favor of better-paced plot and dialogue. And I guess I take that “responsibility for filling in the details” to heart — give me enough of the framework, for character and even setting, and I’ll come up with the construct.

(Yes, my “current” reading material is a decade old. What can I say, I’ve been pretty disappointed by the new releases I’ve sampled lately, and so have gone back to the well, author-wise. And actually, there’s a lot of McInerney that I’ve never read before, including this novel.)

For several years, the gaming industry has kept up a steady drumbeat about how, based on sales figures, videogames are now a more significant part of the entertainment-media world than the former king of the hill, movies.

Note that “based on sales figures” part, because it’s an obvious reason why the argument doesn’t hold up:

Software publisher Take-Two Interactive bandied the behemoth sales figures [of more than $500 million, for new release “Grand Theft Auto IV”] on Wednesday, days after “Iron Man” vaunted an unexpectedly huge opening weekend box office [of $200 million]. The eye-popping digits left many wondering how such a blockbuster could be so soundly trounced by a controverisal video game.

The simple answer: “GTA IV” costs more to buy…

The standard edition of “GTA IV” is $59.99, while a special edition goes for $89.99 and comes with a soundtrack, art book, duffel bag and safety deposit box. Either way, every time a copy of the game is rung up, what’s added to the week’s tally is significantly more than the $7 average ticket price to see a movie in the U.S.

It’s not hard to figure it out: If Product A costs some nine times more than Product B, naturally a dollar-for-dollar comparison will favor the higher-ticket product, even when unit sales are much lower. Bottom line, there are a lot fewer people buying game discs than there are people waiting in lines outside multiplexes. And as far as what influences the popular consciousness, that’s what counts — movies trump videogames in everyday parlance.

This would seem to be intuitive — except somehow, it’s not. I guess it’s fueled by gamer fervor more than anything else — a desire to deflect the persistent characterization of gaming (especially console videogames) as strictly niche. When Take-Two announced the $500 million-plus opening-week sales of “GTA IV”, it made sure to couch it in language that stacked it against other media: “Breaks Entertainment Launch Records” according to the headline. That’s technically true, and because three-quarters of news-scanners won’t read any further for clarification, a meme is born that videogames have gotten “bigger” than movies and everything else — whatever that means.

In any case, I give AP reporter Derrik J. Lang some credit for bothering to dissect the obvious. It won’t dispel the common misconceptions floating around, but at least it’s out there for the record.

It’s official: Isabella Rossellini has gone crazy.

Or “buggy”, which would be more in line with the theme behind her “Green Porno” series of insect-sex (”insext”?) short films for Sundance Channel. I mean, it’s one thing to produce nature documentaries on the same reproductive topic — that give it a veneer of scientificness. But to (sorta) dress up as a spider, a dragonfly, etc. and act out the wild wiggling? Cute, but way out there, man.

Although, maybe she’s on the crest of a trend. Perhaps Jerry Seinfeld cracked open the door with Bee Movie, with everyone else just now catching on.

The National Hockey League Eastern Conference Final begins tomorrow night between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers. This all-Pennsylvania playoff series has the Keystone State all geeked up, as fans from each city are plotting public-monument desecrations in the rival towns.

Top target in Philly: The statue of Rocky.

The attack may have already happened overnight - just as a similar outrage was apparently committed by Montreal Canadien fans during the previous hockey series.

The evidence: On the pavement in front of the bronze Italian Stallion lay a black No. 87 Sidney Crosby jersey around 9:30 this morning. The sleeves appeared to have been cut off, perhaps to facilitate draping it over Rocky.

In retaliation, Brotherly Lovers are putting the cross-state call out:

I am recruiting a Philly native and loyal Flyers fan that is living in Pittsburgh to place a Flyers jersey on a significant landmark in Pittsburgh (panther statue on Pitt campus, in front of Mellon Arena or anything you can think of) and send me a photo of it to submit to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

It’s all pretty childish, but hey, both cities are thirsting for a championship. Nice to see some passion for the postseason. And at this rate, I think Pennsylvania is giving Minnesota a run for its money for that “State of Hockey” moniker.

This should be interesting: I just got a guaranteed ticket to see today’s taping of “Late Show with David Letterman”, airing tonight!

How? The weirdest sequence of events: I was walking up Broadway, killing time while getting within the vicinity of a couple of afternoon appointments. At around 50th Street, it occurred to me that I was getting close to the Ed Sullivan Theater, which reminded me of my seldom-invoked intentions of attending a Letterman taping. I dismissed today’s possibility right away, simply because I didn’t think there’d be any tickets available as late as this afternoon.

Then, I walk by a girl who’s hawking “Late Show” tickets. She’s pissed because the two guys she was already talking to were “assholes”, in her words; so she turns to me. She confirms she’s with Worldwide Pants, the show’s production arm. After some preliminaries, she hands me a confirmation form letter with my name on it. According to that slip of paper (photo of which I’ll add later, after I get home — having some issues trying to email it to myself right now), I’m guaranteed a seat in chilly Ed Sullivan! (No joke, they really do tell you ahead of time to bring a sweater; I happen to be wearing a light jacket, so I’m set.)

I have to trek back down there in about half an hour to confirm, then head back there again for the 4:30-5:30 taping. They’re not kidding about this thing eating up your whole day. Fortunately, I was able to move around my meetings for this afternoon, or else I’d have to chuck this adventure. As it is, I’m currently cooling my heels in a damned *$ on 60th.

So, hopefully, I’ll finally get to see Dave live and in person, doing his thing. According to the TV schedule, guests tonight will be Ashton Kutcher, magician Mac King (because this is, after all, Magician Week on the “Late Show”), and musical legend Steve Winwood. Not the lineup I would have picked, but it’ll do.

UPDATE: Here’s the photo proof — first the confirmation letter:

And the resultant ticket:
Well worth the sacrifice of an afternoon. I won’t bother with a show recap; you can find that here. But here’s some general impressions:

- I actually didn’t find the famously deep-frozen theater to be all that cold. I wouldn’t want to sit there in just shorts and tshirt, but in a shirt and dress pants, I was fine.

- The theater stage is surprisingly compact — looks a lot bigger on TV.

- Even though everything was live and only a few yards away, I couldn’t shake how it still looked like a televised presentation — even though I was watching with my unaided eye. I guess it was the lighting doing its job, because somehow, I didn’t get the feeling that I was really there in the same room with Dave, Paul et al.

- “Johnny Twain” may be a lame filler segment. But he can belt out “Hooked On A Feeling” with muy, muy gusto! (I’m guessing that performance won’t be making the telecast.)

- Steve Winwood rocks.

It’s a bit of a hike, but I’ll have to keep Larry’s Barber Shop, on the northern fringe of Hell’s Kitchen, in mind for my next haircut. Not only will I get a new ‘do, I’ll also get a chance to watch a random mobster movie while I wait.

From the mirrored reflections of the talking heads in his tiny shop on 57th Street near 10th Avenue in Manhattan, [shop owner Larry] Babizhaev receives political opinions, financial advice, sports commentary and other news between haircut and tip.

Along the way, some of his customers started recommending films like “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “A Bronx Tale.” “I just got hooked,” Mr. Babizhaev said.

He began spending a good portion of his tips on mob movies and “anything to do with gangsters.”

Providing a DVD to watch is definitely preferable to some inane snip-snip chit-chat. Only snag: I’m not sure I’d be satisfied watching just a snippet of a movie. But then, I wouldn’t want to spend two hours in a barber shop just to see the complete “Pope of Greenwich Village”, either.

Another example of the incestuous ideamill that makes up Hollywood:

- “The Return of Jezebel James” was a recent sitcom on FOX about a straitlaced professional woman (Parker Posey) who wants a baby, but can’t conceive on her own. So she enlists a surrogate mother (Lauren Ambrose), who happens to be a scatter-shot, roughneck polar opposite. Odd-couple wackiness ensues!

- Baby Mama is a current major motion picture release about a straitlaced professional woman (Tina Fey) who wants a baby, but can’t conceive on her own. So she enlists a surrogate mother (Amy Poehler), who happens to be a scatter-shot, roughneck polar opposite. Odd-couple wackiness ensues!

Yep, same difference. The only serious divergence I can see is that the sitcom’s characters were sisters, while the movie’s characters were brought-together strangers. Otherwise, this was cross-pollination.

The end results: “Jezebel James” was a flop, lasting only three episodes on TV, while Baby Mama debuted at No. 1 at last week’s box office (although a relatively weak one, banking only $17.4 million).

There may be something behind the principal actors’ displacement into different media: Posey and Ambrose are accomplished indie-movie stars, while Fey and Poehler are best known from “Saturday Night Live”. The SNL connection likely had a lot to do with the movie’s success, as the duo there was basically carrying over their “Weekend Update” chemistry to a big-screen milieu.

Sezmi is an upstart pay-TV service that’s pitching itself as something close to a one-stop video-entertainment hub for the household:

Sezmi’s system takes some explaining. At its heart is a TV set-top box that receives video content in three different ways. Two are available through other means: digital over-the-air local broadcasts, the kind that are available to anyone with a digital TV and a rabbit-ear antenna; and Internet downloads through the home’s broadband connection.

The third delivery method would be unique to Sezmi. It plans to have local TV stations use vacant portions of their airwaves to transmit basic cable channels like Nickelodeon and Discovery. Given the limited spectrum available, the stations won’t be able to transmit a full lineup, and only some of it will be in high definition. Sezmi plans to mitigate that by having stations send out the most-watched shows and have the set-top boxes save them on their hard drives, making them available for viewing on demand.

Some noise is being made about this three-pronged delivery system being overly complex. My sense is that it doesn’t matter how complicated it is, as long as it works. Consumers aren’t going to care how it all comes together; all that’ll count is that it pipes in the content that people want, and at a competitive price.

The company is on the right track in branding itself as “TV 2.0″, as that conveys an expansion of standard cable or satellite. It should take that messaging one step further with a simple value proposition that goes something like: “Local, cable, and VOD — plus YouTube. All on one screen. Sezmi.”

In a sense, Sezmi would be a TV provider that’s media-agnostic. You wouldn’t have to switch from one screen (television) to another (computer monitor) to consume all manner of video content — you’d access it all from your remote control. That’s crucial in achieving the long-anticipated melding of television and Web:

In general, Sezmi’s attitude toward Web content is to integrate it seamlessly into the overall universe. Individual repositories or “zones” of Web video, such as YouTube, can create their own XML Sezmi page. In a demonstration of the technology, a local news page was organized in a basic layout of weather, news, traffic, and featured stories, with a video box in the lower right-hand corner and additional data to the top right.

Of course, the tricky part will be getting the infrastructure and carriage in place. Sezmi is building limited content agreements and presenting itself as an ideal partner for regional ISPs and telecom providers, but it’s got to have a presentable channel/content lineup to offer up. And even then, it won’t be easy:

The company faces a lot of competition. Apple TV is going to be more attractive now that it can get movies on the same day as they go on sale as DVDs. Vudu also has a lot of movies on demand available. Tivo’s Series 3 box can appeal to high-definition video junkies. AT&T is rolling out its DSL-based IPTV service nationwide, promising interactivity and movies on demand. And Digeo will have its Moxi boxes out later this year as well. It’s a crowded market and Sezmi will need big partners or a big advertising budget to overcome all the noise.

In the face of this, Sezmi has all the signs of being a short-lived attempt at next-stage television. It could be fun to watch anyway, especially as elements of its approach influence the rest of the industry.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a PR-blast email offering up an interview opportunity with the CEO of SocialMedia Networks. Just another Web advertising middleman, but with a twist: It’s exclusively targeting the Facebooks and MySpaces of the online world.

I didn’t take the bait, partly because I knew someone else would.

Ads on social network sites aren’t new, although far-reaching monetization attempts have met resistance. Marketers follow the eyeballs, and when more and more people spend more and more Web time on these dedicated sites, that’s where the money will go.

But how effective will these ad pitches be? Operating on the premise that a website is just another website might not work in these settings, because something like MySpace is tacitly considered a no-sell zone. That doesn’t mean it won’t yield responses, but those will probably be accompanied by higher-than-normal instances of backlash.

In a sense, blogging marketer Paul Chaney probably best characterizes this approach thusly:

Advertising on social media sites like Facebook, Bebo and others is akin to going to a restaurant and asking for a seat at someone else’s table. Maybe they’ll be receptive and maybe they won’t. Conversely, to create your own branded socnet is to invite others to have a seat at your table.

It’s all context. That’s why I always felt that all those commercial presences via MySpace/Facebook pages — promoting movies, consumer products and even rock bands — are odd fits. If a social network’s purpose is to foster person-to-person connections, how is someone supposed to credibly claim a “relationship” with a marketing piece?

Conversely, I don’t agree with the call for advertisers to create their own dedicated, branded site just for a MySpace-like experience — that’s a lot of heavy lifting for a campaign which might or might not have a short shelf-life. I guess that opens up an opportunity for a third party to offer up a middle-ground solution: Cookie-cutter social-network setups that can be developed for single-purpose messaging campaigns and that can be ramped up quickly.

Try to follow along here:

To introduce their new non-pizza offerings, Pizza Hut had some fun with an April Fool’s announcement that it was rebranding itself as “Pasta Hut”.

As a follow-up to this campaign, it’s been running a TV commercial to promote these new dishes, called Tuscani Pastas. The spot follows a time-honored format — hidden-camera taste-testing — but with a questionable wrinkle:

The commercial purports to gather unwitting eaters to try the food at Tuscani in New York, and then revealing to them on hidden camera that in fact it’s Pizza Hut pasta, not Tuscani’s pasta.

As far as I can tell, there’s no Tuscani restaurant in New York. Although it’s a pretty effective ad, it seems to me that if they made up the whole thing it’s particularly egregious, even for the advertising world.

No Tuscani’s, but no problem:

The people were invited to an actual restaurant that is named Provence, he adds, but [according to ad agency BBDO] “we intentionally did not reveal the name and instead outfitted the restaurant as ‘Tuscani’ to reinforce our new product launch.”…

True, the fact that the restaurant is presented as if it is named Tuscani is not factually accurate. But I believe that it falls within the realm of artistic license, particularly since the campaign has already used an element of imaginary name-changing.

But wait, it gets even more convoluted:

One final note, dear readers. The New York Times reported that the restaurant Provence was scheduled to close last week and reopen in May under a new name, Hundred Acres. Maybe Pizza Hut could ask the owners to rename it Tuscani — at least long enough for folks to stop by for a pasta dinner.

So basically, the restaurant on TV is a fake makeover of a real NYC restaurant, which is itself now “fake” in the sense that it’s no longer open — but is in the process of getting a real makeover/rebirth.

Throw in the French/Italian/fast food cuisine switcheroos at play here, and my head hurts. On top of that, my stomach’s growling.

There’s no ambiguity about the inspiration for Tyler Knox’s “Kockroach: A Novel”, as the book’s opening line should tell you:

As Kockroach, an arthropod of the genus Blatella and of the species germanica, awakens one morning from a typically dreamless sleep, he finds himself transformed into some large, vile creature.

And if it doesn’t tell you, then I’ll let one Franz Kafka enlighten you, “Metamorphosis”-style:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

I’m a sucker for such literary remixing, as my earlier reading of Joe McGinniss Jr.’s “The Delivery Man” as latter-day “Less Than Zero” attests. If nothing else, it shows off an author’s reverence for the writerly giants.

Notice the level of reversal that Knox imbues in his prose. Not only does he accomplish the bug-to-man change (that “large, vile creature” being a human), but he picks up on Kafka’s granting of “anxious dreams” to Gregor Samsa to, in turn, establish that Kockroach, being a cockroach, would be bereft of any dreaming at all prior to all this. Dealing with more active mental faculties becomes a key driver in Knox’s telling.

I only wish “Kockroach” had held up beyond its opening couple of chapters. A nice enough attempt at hardboiled comic noir, but ultimately a bit of a mess, with most of the characters (including, regrettably, the lead female, who also serves as one of the three narrators) being too underdeveloped to keep the story going. A transformation — in the form of another editorial proofing or two — could have done wonders.

My publishing roots compel me to hit the new MoMA exhibit on George Lois‘ iconic Esquire covers from the 1960s and 70s.

While the heady news topics of those times provided ample raw material for Esquire and Lois to weave their magic, there was a much more fundamental design concept at play:

What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image.

Relying upon a single image to sell an issue (and that’s what it comes down to for any magazine, really) is a chancy high-wire act. Either the casual browser bites on the compelling cover, or else s/he ignores it and moves on. That’s probably why so many publishers hedge their bets by loading, and overloading, their covers with so much accompanying bullet and blurb text.

And for me, it’s become a turnoff. In fact, I recently canceled my subscription to Lois’ old periodical stomping grounds, in large part because I was finding that those text-gorged covers were constantly turning me off each month. Far from enticing me to open the cover and dive in, the instant in-your-face design seems a bit too desperate for attention.

In a way, it pains me to make that observation. For years, I considered the standard teaser-cover to be pretty user-friendly, even to the point of being a good template for online publishing adaptation (think of each of those cover blurbs as a hyperlink). But somewhere along the way, the aesthetic became diluted, I think.

Today, Lois’ image-only style would stand out simply because every other mass-market title persists with the textual path. It’d be a refreshing change.

So today at around 1PM, I flipped the TV channel to ESPN, fully expecting to see the first round of this year’s NFL Draft in full swing. I haven’t been particularly interested in the lead-up, but I wanted to get a token fix of Mel Kiper et al.

But, shocker of shockers — no draft coverage. Because there was no draft, because unlike years past, the league and the networks decided to slightly streamline football’s most overhyped offseason event:

- The draft will start at [3PM Eastern] Saturday, three hours later than had been the case, but only Rounds 1 and 2 will be held that day. The third round has been moved to Sunday.

- Teams will be allowed 10 minutes to make a selection in the first round instead of 15, and the time between second-round picks will be seven minutes instead of 10.

- Sunday’s portion of the draft will start an hour earlier [10AM Eastern] and teams will have five minutes between picks in Rounds 3-7.

The later start time Saturday is beneficial for ESPN and the NFL Network because viewership grows throughout the day. But the reduction in time between picks is going to be interesting.

The quicker pace between selections has greater impact than just television coverage and ad sales, of course. Teams do jockey for trades during that between-selection time, even if it is for slot-swaps to move up in a round. Potentially, that means a reduction in horsetrading, even if it is only for trivial fourth-round positioning.

Still, as much as I ignored the draft for the past couple of years, I do feel a void. It was a reliable background noise if I chose to tune in. Today’s mid-afternoon start didn’t work for me at all; as a result, I’ve peeked in for maybe five total minutes of coverage. I doubt I’ll catch much more tomorrow.