"I'm a prisoner of hope, even when there's evidence to the contrary. William James said it so well when he talked about faith being the courage to act when doubt is warranted." Cornel West

"This is the hard work of your life in the world: to make it all up as you go along, to acknowledge the introvert, the clown, the artist, the reserved, the distraught, the goofball, the thinker." Anna Quindlen

"I suppose I became successful by a combination of dumb luck, low cunning, and risk-taking born out of curiosity." Sting


Survey says: Media Life Magazine ran an online poll of buyers. Lisa Snedecker shares the findings including...

• Buyers believe ABC has the best fall schedule (52%), followed by CBS (18%) and Fox (17%). MyNetworkTV has the worst sked (32%) with NBC following (26%).
• Two thirds believe Don Imus will return to radio by Christmas.
• Forty-six percent believe Murdoch bought Dow Jones to bolster his coming cable biz channel, rather than any intense desire to battle NYT or for reasons of pure ego.

Read Buyers see tougher go for older media - Lisa's summary here.

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web: Marc Canter, Joseph Smarr, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington take up the task of a first draft. It's a good one. Bravo guys! Read the Bill of Rights here, Scobleizer's take, Joseph weighs in here. Awaiting: takes from Dave Winer, Doc and David Weinberger.

"Give us one big idea that will make a difference, help us to achieve better results" That, dear friends, was the final Q&A comment put to me at the end of this morning's conference call. I decided to quote Scott Berkun and said "Good managers of innovation recognize that they are in primary control over the environment, and it's up to them to create a place for talented people to do their best work." Thanks to Scott I also added two chasers. Tom Kelly: "Innovation flourishes in greenhouses. What do I mean by a greenhouse? A place where the elements are just right to foster the growth of ideas. Where there's heat, light, moisture, and plenty of nurturing. The greenhouse we're talking about, of course, is the workplace, the way spaces take shape in offices and teams work together." Lewis Thomas: "One way to tell when something important is going on is by laughter. It seems to me that whenever I have been around a laboratory at a time when something very interesting has happened, it has at first seemed to be quite funny. There's laughter connected with the surprise - it does look funny. And whenever you hear laughter...you can tell things are going well and that something probably worth looking at has begun to happen in the lab." So I ended my comments with this question - how much laughter are you hearing in your stations?

Congrats & cheers: Yahoo! buys BlueLithium (one of the bigger ad networks). Michael Wolff, Caroline Miller, Ken Doctor and the Highbeam Research crew as their new project Newser bows in beta. Kudos to the Faster, Smarter News guys and dolls. Michael's back story, Is This the End of News, here via VF.