The website is matte and functional in an era of high-gloss web-design primacy. It’s hot and provocative in a low-brow, National Enquirer kind of way when so much of its audience is elite and cool. It’s unapologetically conservative and yet liberals don’t want to miss it either. It makes web designers' teeth hurt.

With all of those quirks and apparent contradictions, web scoopster Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report remains one of the biggest successes on the web. After 14 years, it’s not hyberbole to rank the site with Google, eBay and Facebook among the most significant online innovations since the birth of Al Gore’s medium — as the New York Times' media critic David Carr noted this week.Continue reading...

Desperate times, bank closings around the world, entire nations teetering on the brink of insolvency, and just general global financial meltdowns leave consumers feeling a bit edgy. That isn’t good for the brands that are helping to make them feel that way – including bailed-out banks like Citigroup.

And so it’s little surprise that Citigroup has stirred up a hornet’s nest of anxiety with a new communiqué to customers that is foreboding, at worst, and confusingly arcane, at best. It’s just not the kind of thing that a major bank brand should be doing as it tries to redeem itself in the eyes of American consumers.

For its part, Citigroup blames the feds.Continue reading...