It’s not often Matt Drudge posts a headline about a company laying off fewer than 20 workers–especially nowadays.
announcement 19 employees would be released while the company would ditch its traffic based writer bonus payments and readjust its priorities. Gawker’s announcement is more important than just the 19 jobs lost because of what it says about the economy via-a-vis new media companies.

A little background here. Gawker Media is the company responsible for Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Defamer, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Valleywag and Gawker (the up-to-date list is tough to compile as there are conflicting lists on Gawker’s own sites). As
, Gawker’s definition of journalism is decidedly not old school.

“…a chain of professionally staffed blogs that eschewed media conventions like, oh, fairness and reporting, for brutal, well-turned takes on fairly mannered industries.

Where Gawker is old school is its pursuit of cash and fear of a flat economy. As published on
, Gawker’s chief Nick Denton minced few words in defending his defensive position even while year-to-year revenue is up 30%.

“But now the credit crisis is clearly going to affect every sector of the economy. Advertising buys typically plunge after the Christmas shopping season, and 2009 is obviously going to be exceptionally difficult. We have to prepare for the worst, now, rather than when the worst comes upon us.”

Among the Gawker blogs set to take the biggest hit is
–a personal favorite and daily must-read for me. Yesterday, in an open letter to his readers, editor Ben Popken revealed he’d be cutting Consumerist’s staff in half–from four to two.

“This means it will just be myself and Meghann posting during the week. Not sure what to do about the weekends, maybe we’ll just post some raw reader letters. It’s very sad.”

Consumerist is successful if your only metric is traffic. In the real world all readers are not equal and Consumerist has more trouble than the other Gawker blogs turning traffic into cash. This doesn’t bode well for this one-of-a-kind website.

It’s no surprise to see old media companies like newspaper publisher
trading at ½¢ per share. JRC is being undercut by new media at every turn. But isn’t Gawker supposed to be the leaner, meaner, more able to thrive media? Nick Denton says, maybe not.

“The golden age of the blog is over, people will say. Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily. I could come up with some bullshit line about how much worse it would have been to wait until we were forced to control costs; or how much more unpleasant life will be at the many internet ventures and newspapers
that won’t make it through the downturn. I could give you my optimistic spin about the glorious future that awaits us on the far side of this downturn.

But there is no escaping the fact that we’re losing some excellent colleagues and the environment next year will be bleak. The one consolation is that there will be plenty of news for us to break –starting with this email, which you are free to leak.”

It’s a sad day on the Internet.

BACOLOR — President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo formally signed into law Sunday the Bacolor Rehabilitation Council Act (BRCA), finally giving residents of this town the chance to see their beloved hometown rise from volcanic ashes.

Bacolor was buried in lahar and other volcanic debris since the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.

The BRCA, which was signed by President Arroyo at the Don Honorio Ventura School of Arts and Trade (DHVCAT), the alma mater of her father former President Diosdado Macapagal, was authored by Gonzales in the lower chamber and sponsored by Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, chairman of the Senate committee on local government, in the upper chamber.

Previously known as House Bill (HB) 3389, the law is tasked to draft a comprehensive rehabilitation plan for the town of Bacolor, which shall be submitted to the President for approval, and to meet regularly to evaluate the progress of the rehabilitation plan.

The geekily quirky, unfortunately named,
a few days ago, it’s getting more and more difficult to know what’s significant based solely on the naming and numbering scheme. GIMP.org says, “GIMP 2.6 is an important release from a development point of view.” I’ll treat it that way.

which is the current image manipulation standard.

There is no doubt GIMP does lots… certainly most of the things Photoshop does. It just doesn’t do them as gracefully or easily. As soon as I fired up GIMP 2.6 I opened a photo I’d taken–a jpeg file. I tried to sharpen it. No problem, except, unlike Photoshop, GIMP only previews the sharpening in a small window. There’s no way to see what you’ll do to the whole image until you’ve done it.

The same goes for levels control–a feature on Photoshop I couldn’t live without. As I slid the level control points on GIMP there was no change to the photo until I stopped. There is no instantaneous feedback. It’s tough to find just-the-right-spot this way.

One prior shortcoming of GIMP is about to be overcome–or is overcome if you’re willing to enable an experimental mode. “Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework
L, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL. ” That should please critics who passed on GIMP because of 8-bit color limitations.

I have never felt so guilty about writing a review. I really want to like this program–almost as a matter of principle. Don’t get me wrong. I really like GIMP. It’s a fine graphics program without considering its unbeatable price. However, there are finer. Even with its welcome enhancements GIMP isn’t the top-of-the-line graphics program it might someday be.

In a
on Microsoft’s Live Labs site, Microsoft said that the market has “caught up” to where it was going with Deepfish, and that there was no need to continue the program.

The proxy service Microsoft was using for Deepfish was shut down on Sept. 31.

“Mobile browsing is now advancing to the point where mobile devices rival the desktop–which is what we wanted to see,” Microsoft wrote. “User experience advances such as usable touch and intuitive zooming interfaces weren’t widely available at the time. Deepfish helped drive that innovation. And now that the marketplace has caught up to where we thought it needed to go and continues to advance.”

“It wasn’t our intent to create a full browser for the preview, but rather simply demonstrate that a novel and simple new user experience was the best way to achieve that,” the post said.

In March 2007, Sascha Segan
is also available.

earlier by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley.

If you commute to the office or school, you know that the trip can be boring–and a little entertainment goes a long way. Some decent reading material can take the edge off, and
is designed to provide plenty of options.

The service offers hundreds of free eBooks that you can download and read on your iPod or other mobile device, including classic literature and popular novels. And in the unlikely case that you don’t find something in the catalog you’d like to read, the service allows you to convert your own documents, your favorite RSS feeds, and even entire Web sites into eBook format.

There’s no shortage of eBook download sites on the Web, but eBook Hood combines a broad catalog of interesting books to download and read with a document converter that lets you take your own material with you when you leave the house. The ability to convert documents and load them up on your mobile device or your iPod is really compelling, and the ability to parse and convert Web pages and RSS feeds is particularly useful. The Web and RSS conversions aren’t perfect, and work best with feeds that are either text-only or at least majority text without a ton of formatting, but the fact that the features are there is impressive.

eBook Hood’s catalog of books is also impressive. The service boasts a broad selection of books from classics such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and George Orwell’s “1984″ to more modern works, such as Steven King’s “The Shining.” The site’s developers have been having trouble with the catalog database recently, so browsing and searching the entire collection has been off and on, but you can see a sample of the available books on the sidebar.

Click on one of the books’ names, and you’ll be taken to its download page, where you can select whether you’d like to download the ebook in iPod format or plain text. You can also select
and Bookeen Cybook formats if they’re available, and the service is beginning to offer PDF downloads. If you love a book and want a paper copy, a link to purchase the book at Amazon is usually available in the eBook notes.

Additionally, registered members of the service can vote on books, add the book to their favorites, and add their comments to the book’s discussion section. Members who have added the book to their favorites are shown at the bottom of the page, and you can click on any member’s name to view their profile, see the books they’ve uploaded to share with the community, view all of their favorite eBooks, or add them as a friend.

If the user reciprocates and adds you as a friend as well, you’ll be able to see any books they may have uploaded that have copyright restrictions or that might be part of their personal collection. If you visit the community section of the page, you can see all of the eBooks most recently uploaded to the site, the service’s top readers and top users, and the service’s most popular eBooks.

eBook Hood’s community is growing, and it’s obvious that the site is suffering some growing pains. The service is well worth the attention and a little patience while the developers steady themselves, however. Its broad collection of books and the robust user community would be enough to make anyone want to sign up, but the ability to build out your own library of notes and books from your own files, your favorite Web pages, and other documents is a huge benefit.

When you visit YouTube and look for music videos from your favorite artists, you’re usually opening new tabs or windows for each video that you want to watch, so you don’t lose your search results. If you do lose them, you either have to go back, perform a new search, or rely on the “related videos” that YouTube provides to find more of the same.
can help; the service helps you build a playlist around your favorite musicians, so you can watch videos without stumbling on someone’s karaoke cover of your favorite song.

PlisTube is remarkably well polished for a Web service that’s in beta. You don’t have to create an account with the service if you just want to browse some of the available playlists, but if you want to make your own playlists, add video to your favorites, and share playlists with your friends, you’ll need to give up an e-mail address and sign up.

In either case, simply type in the name of the band or artist that you’d like to build a playlist around in the search box, and PlisTube gets you started with the top results for your search term. The service adds the first videos to your new playlist, and then show you the search results from YouTube in a thumbnail view at the bottom of the page. If you find a video that you’d like to add to the playlist, you can easily add the video and refresh the page to see your updated playlist.

Once your playlist is created, you can easily browse the entire list, drag songs around to change their order, remove songs from the playlist, or just sit back, relax, and watch the videos. Once you’re finished managing your playlist, you can save it and return to it whenever you choose. You can always return to the playlist to edit it or add more videos. Each playlist has a unique URL, so you can send it around to your friends–but PlisTube doesn’t have any built-in features to publishing your playlist on your blog or social networking site.

If you’re curious as to what other people might be interested in, the front page lists the most recently created playlists; click on any of them to view them. You can also click buttons at the top of the screen to see playlists added by date, and search for your favorite band or artist to see if another user has already generated a playlist for them.

PlisTube uses YouTube as its primary source of video, so if your favorite band isn’t well represented on YouTube, don’t expect to turn up too many results for music videos. It would be nice if PlisTube expanded its search to other popular Web video sites and if the service incorporated additional playlist sharing features, such as a blog widget or even links to share your playlist through your favorite social network or online bookmarking service, But the service is in beta, so those features may be coming soon. In the meantime, PlisTube is a blissful alternative to rummaging through YouTube search results when you want to see music videos.

Apple today rolled out updates to iTunes and to Apple TV software. Both offer
for the popular software, but rest assured: Those are in the mix as well.

iTunes 8.0.1 offers a fix to Apple’s recently introduced Genius feature by keeping the current song playing while the user creates a playlist. The update also syncs spoken menus to the iPod nano and improves VoiceOver accessibility.

The new Apple TV 2.2, meanwhile, improves security issues with the media device. The update also adds new features to the set-top box: Users can now use the hardware to create Genius menus.

Edit 1:20 PM PDT: Finally, HDTV is now available at the iTunes store, although only for U.S.-based PCs. Individual episodes will cost $2.99, but the “season pass” pricing varies, depending upon the number of episodes in a given season: in general, they’ll cost between $29.90 to $59.99 per season, PC Magazine’s Sascha Segan reports.