Blogs

Hoping to bootstrap on the success of "Army Wives," Lifetime Entertainment has enlisted a veteran TV executive as its new programming chief. JoAnn Alfano, a former NBC development executive who helped guide such shows as "Will & Grace," "Scrubs" and "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," on Wednesday reported to work as Lifetime's executive vice president of entertainment. She will be in charge of programming and scheduling for Lifetime Television and its sister channel, Lifetime Movie Network.

Pension funds and other big investors have been warned to scale back their return expectations in the private-equity buyout business. But they still committed $2.75 billion to a new leveraged buyout fund launched by Beverly Hills-based Platinum Equity. That was $1.25 billion more than Platinum CEO Tom Gores' target, he said -- and $2.05 billion more than went into his first such fund, in 2004.

There has been much discussion of the American dream of late. If you ask EBay Inc., it's alive and well. Why? Because a seller just reached 1 million feedbacks on the popular auction site. For those of you who have never tried to earn some quick cash by selling your junk on EBay, feedback is one of the ways you can tell whether sellers are trustworthy. Once you buy something from someone, you can rate that seller.

After dozens of bestselling novels, Danielle Steel still has words to spare: She's starting a blog. "It's like a letter to a friend, and fun to be able share something and say, 'Gee, I did this,' " says Steel, 61, whose run of hits includes three this year alone: "Honor Thyself," "Rogue" and "A Good Woman." "I've remained very remote and very private, partly because of all my kids [nine]. They're bigger now and I would like to communicate with my readers in a more informal way, not just through the list of my accomplishments on my publisher's Website."

It's more than a rumor: The great Silicon Valley gossip-rag experiment has come to a humbling conclusion. Nearly three years after launching Valleywag, blog magnate Nick Denton has decided to fold the site into Gawker, which covers the media business. For the last month, Denton has been saying to anyone who will listen that online advertising is undergoing a sharp slowdown as the economy continues to tank and Web publishers are going to get nailed.

"Grenade attack in Colaba market," read a Twitter message from a user named Abhishek Baxi on Saturday. Then a few minutes later. "Blast outside Oberoi Hotel in South Mumbai." Baxi was one of the first Twitter users to post updates about the attacks in Mumbai. But he was far from the last. The microblogging medium, along with several other new media platforms, saw its first sustained action in an international crisis. As awareness of the attacks spread, the Twitter throughput soared.

DO you feel the need to know exactly when Osteria Mozza, Pizzeria Mozza's sibling, will open or where Daniel Craig eats when he's with his agent? Is it hard to concentrate at work while you wonder who had dinner at Cut last night and which pastry chef just donned a new toque at the Water Grill? Now you can log on and find out.

LANES OF COMMUNICATION: Readers by the hundreds have responded to the call for traffic complaints, comments and solutions. Their entries on Steve Lopez's Bottleneck Blog express unbridled rage and keen insight, and tell the story of a region in which traffic, more than ever, is influencing everything from our choice of leisure activities to the time we spend with family and friends. The comments below are reprinted from the blog and represent but a sampling of input from throughout the region.

In reading the postings on the Bottleneck Blog about Steve Lopez's comments on traffic, I notice that a lot of contributors bemoan the loss of the Red Cars. Yet, at the time, no one seemed to mind that they were being taken off the tracks to be replaced by buses. Now I wonder about those who currently sing the praises of obtaining their news via the Internet. Perhaps 20 years from now people will start posting lamentations on blogs about how we need to bring back the simple, reliable, tangible daily newspaper.