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.

I’m not usually one to be there with an over the top rave, but you have to check this thing out…
Musicovery

I was really beginning to wonder if it would ever come back. I was even starting to think i had been mistaken about how great it was. And more than one friend who didn’t see it has challenged me on my effusions.

Well, I still like it. Even more than before. Sure there’s an Amazon banner and ads, but they go away with the new option to pay for CD-quality sound.

Shouldn’t there be a way to hook this up with the new super-fast Apple home wireless and get this through the house? (Well, it’s not Itunes, so not likely to have a solution from them.) It’s amazingly beautiful, useable, friendly (courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave and clean.) “Reverent” is is not. and that’s all that remains of my brief stint as a boyscout as well (see an upcoming post for further revelations as i endeavor to become the very last person in the world to address the 5 things you once were meme that i was tagged with months ago)…

Short List: Discover Music, Share With Friends

There is at least one really special thing about each of these, and one might be best for you. I have use for a few depending on where i’m listening, and who i’m sharing with. Every one has redeeming qualities.

• LastFM (Trusty. Reliable. Easy to explain. would have been it if all the rest hadn’t happened.
• Pandora (Bionics. I’ve enjoyed my Massive Erotic City Attack mix, with hours of music that i can’t put my finger on how, but just does sound like Madonna and Prince fronting UK electronica)
• Imeem (Sharing music on playlists with your friends. A whole Social Network.)
• Webjay (which truly changed everything)
• Faces (upload playlist and embed player somewhere likeMultiply)
• Qnext (looks great. Just started trying out the just-available version 3.0 which allows you to “webcast” your stuff, allows peer-to-peer music sharing among friends combined with a or Meebo type multi-instant-messenger capability that bring Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, ICQ and AOL/AIM into a single instant message window. The styling’s nice too.
• FIQL (amps it up and take it out all dressed nice, but somehow doesn’t have the energy of W’Jay.)
• Beatport (though doesn’e necessarily fit with the others but is as beautiful as any and a great place to buy electronic and dance music)

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.
.

“I think gay marriage should be allowed if there’s a ceremony kind of thing if you want to call it that. I don’t have any problem with that…I think private ceremonies are fine. I do not think gay marriage should be legal.” –John McCain (via: Towleroad)

This double speak from McCain is what could lose him the election.

It had the power to bring down Kerry in the last election. Hillary’s lack of authenticity as pointed out regularly by Arianna Huffington(a May Huffington Post piece which also notes that McCain’s authenticity was “getting paler by the minute” even then.) and her coyness on gay issues is a big negative, not only in terms of not standing with us, but in terms of her ability to win if she’s given the chance to run and hasn’t gotten less coy by then.**

That said, McCain’s comments provide an opening for us to change this political discussion. I’ve been meaning to finish a post i started on this sometime back. Watch for it soon. Perhaps today. This might be just the news peg for me. We give the oppostion the edge by agreeing to discuss “gay marriage”. Gay marriage is allowed. We can get married with the blessing of many religions, communities, and most importantly by our own free will.

**ASIDE: And i remain wary of Ms. Clinton’s well-known and long-held position that democrats must not openly and unequivocably support gay and lesbian issues if they want to win, going so far as to blame her shortsighted, unpolitic attempt to change healthcare on her husband’s gays in the military issue and staying away from support ever since.)

Photos by Buck82 and Hot Rod (both Flickr cc)

After two warm up issues, the new editor, Aaron Hicklin, is breathing life into the old guy. Though it’s stayed the most read gay magazine for 13 years, it’s had a tough time staying “must read.”***

Hicklin started nicely and from a tough position. I’ll reserve real judgment until i see the whole issue. The Planet out gay industrial complex PR team pumped out something more than standard launch hyperbole promising the redesign will bring a new day for all gays. Also,

“Out is repositioning itself in the hierarchy of sophisticated fashion magazines.”

…which is as unparseable as the non-sequitorial, sartorial equating of “more fashion”

with maturity in the quotable release quote, “gay grows up.”First media notices were generous and open. Not so the blog commenters, real readers outside the media game. Punches were not pulled and they trashed the magazine from concept to logo kerning.Towleroad’s were super snarky, lashing out with a frustration that clearly went beyond not liking the cover design and to the intense desire to see themselves as they are (or perhaps as they would like to be).

I never had to deal with that kind of immediacy in print…before the issue hit subscribers…but i have dealt with flames since. Hinklin did good. He posted a note through Andy, “We invite readers of Towleroad to put their brains where their mouths are, and spend time with the magazine over the next six months.” and offered a bunch of free 6 month subscriptions.

Nice. Not a page from the more traditional, unwritten, old-school editor’s book, WWAD (”What Would Anna Do“) Much more Cluetrain Manifesto. They got 50 addresses in less than 15 minutes. And comments–at least about the editor–got a lot nicer.

In addition, accept my congrats on the launch with my best wishes for success in forging the right magazine for this moment and having a good time doing it.

(But, since you’re asking for insights…and i don’t have a magazine…First, those commenters are not agitating for more fashion, and can make your mag work if they like it. Second, retool your press released vision of making the mag “more reflective of modern gay culture: more celebratory and less political.” Never before have so many people had such a good time talking about gay marriage, being out at work, living where they want, openly celebrating their relationships, and not taking shit for living their lives as they see fit. They may call it other things, but every bit of it is political in its impact. It’s all good material.

An anything goes, political, fashionable, and self-ridiculing mag is a whole lot more fun to make and read.
**Disclosures: I’m helping Andy with Towleroad.com, and I was the founder and editor-in-chief of Out magazine way back when I could register out.com. Funny to check in and see the “Hunk of the day” and the early-morning-rewrite of the gay items from gossip columns we launched with, using Mosaic (later Netscape). The technology has come a long way, and there are ads on the net now, but some base editorial things just work for the audience. Wish I’d registered more domains, and wish i didn’t sound like some really old guy talking about the 60s or something. ….just let me tell you about ACTUP…
**ASIDE: Others without certain post-engagement contractual clauses might put it differently.