Keeping history alive by making it fun

The power of History Pin is captured with this 1856 photo of the Champs Elysee in Paris laid over a present-day photo. I've stumbled across three different labors of love online recently that all shared a common link: they're committed to protecting things in great danger of disappearing forever. To top it off, these efforts are fun and rewarding history lessons, almost like history as entertainment (or is it the other way around?).

Having dug into my own little history project, I'm familiar with the thrill these kinds of personal projects bring others. So I know exactly what inspired others to put in the time to launch these three awesome projects:

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Help me with my math

We all know the financial markets are crazy, but if you want proof even serious investors can be distracted by shiny objects, try this on for size.

Smart Money magazine reported this month that Twitter's $8 billion valuation means each of the 51 billion Tweets you and I and everyone else send annually is worth 16 cents. Seriously? My Tweets are genius, but I wouldn't pay 16 cents for them. That 16 cents should make every serious investor stop and take notice and stay far away from any IPO until Twitter shows signs it can earn consistent and sizable revenue. For those who don't know, the company is losing millions of dollars, and has since it launched and is still struggling to find any sizable revenue stream to pay its enormous serving costs, let alone investors. An IPO is simply a way to get others to pay for the party.

Then The Wall Street Journal reports that Tumblr is on the verge of raising up to $100 million in outside investment, giving the blogging company a value of $800 million. This for a company that, while very cool and growing in popularity, generates almost no revenue and has no clear concept of how to make money.

Hmmm ... reminds me of Pets.com, a flash-in-the-pan company whose business strategy was to lose money on every sale.

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Six months of The Daily

It's been a little more than 6 months since The Daily first arrived on iPads, stirring up enthusiasm for a new opportunity for newspapers.

Shortly after launch, I reviewed The Daily and found it had some major issues but a lot of upside.

So, where are we at six months later?

I'd say the real news is that The Daily is still around.

Post launch, I read The Daily nearly daily until Rupert Murdoch put up a paywall sometime in the Spring. Frankly the interactive Sudoku puzzle was the big draw pulling me back day after day, so I subscribed for a few weeks, but then simply got too busy to hunt it down each day.

An improved index page gives prominence to the hard-news in The Daily.I recently resubscribed, on a week-to-week basis, to see what's up. The key changes are better navigation and sleeker design; optimized video that loads fast and streams cleanly; no app crashes; a new weekly Travel section; page remakes for big news during the day; and more interactive features such as You Write the Caption and invites to submit audio memories for stories like the 9-11 anniversary.

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