Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

If California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman learned anything at EBay, it should have been that wealth generated from Silicon Valley can help line government coffers. The Internet boom generated a lot of stock market wealth in the late ‘90s, which helped erase government budget deficits with capital-gains and other taxes. (This included Whitman herself, a [...]

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Many years ago, I worked with Steve Outing at The Chronicle. Over the years, Steve has become a thought leader in the online media industry. His projects also include an “eyetrack” survey for the Poynter Institute about website consumer behavior. His current projects include reinventingclassifieds.com, a solution to help the troubled newspaper classified industry. He [...]

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I like to click around on websites, so I clicked on the “Your ad here” icon at the very top of theunion.com. I was little surprised by what I found. It is here (and republished below). Nobody seems to be growing their website traffic very much, if at all, at least using the metric that [...]

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UPDATE: Aaron Klein is reporting on his Facebook site that a Visa has now been issued for his newly adopted daughter from Ethiopia, after an unexpected U.S. government delay was keeping the family from coming home. “Thank you for all your prayers, retweets and help,” he writes. “We are headed home tomorrow night as planned.” [...]

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The political action committee behind the Tea Party Express directed almost two thirds of its spending to the Republican consulting firm that created it, Sacramento-based Russo, Marsh and Associates or people associated with it, TPMuckraker is reporting. Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) spent about $1.33 million from July through November, according to FEC filings examined [...]

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The editor/publisher is lamenting in his column on Tuesday, “Nevada City shoots down pot shop effort, leaving Callanan Park dealers with monopoly.” Don’t let the attempt at humor fool you. He was on the wrong side of the issue, just as with cheerleading for the reopening of the Idaho-Maryland mine even before the DEIR (which [...]

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Newsweek is predicting Jerry Brown will beat Meg Whitman in next year’s governor’s race and, likewise, Barbara Boxer will beat Carly Fiorina. The outcome will hinge on the environment, according to the newsmagazine. “Both women are hoping populist anger will color the Golden State a redder hue, but they’ve misstepped by staking their campaigns on [...]

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After 27 months, the McClatchy and Sac Bee watch blogger is calling it quits. “There is a definite demand for newspaper watchdog blogs,” he writes. “I have averaged 2,000 hits on weekdays, about half that on weekends. Publishing this blog has been fun and rewarding.” The McClatchy watch blogger writes: “I have a consumer’s perspective, [...]

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Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman will lose their political races in California next year, Newsweek is predicting. “The senatorial and gubernatorial hopefuls have both run booming companies — Hewlett-Packard and eBay — and California could use some business sense (you can already hear the ads),” Newsweek writes. “Convincing, perhaps, but the government isn’t a business. [...]

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While the rest of the world zigs, we zag: *Our elected officials, led by Tom McClintock and Dan Logue, are leading the charge to stop AB 32, to control greenhouse gas emissions, dead in its tracks. Their effort, and its exaggerated base of supporters here, is gaining national press attention. McClintock lost to Brown in [...]

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