Your Evening Sift

Some of you may have noticed that comments were being moderated today. Last night and again this afternoon, the cockroaches came out and attempted to disrupt things a bit here at SFDB. I suppose until the boys grow up and become men, this will continue to happen so don't be distressed if you encounter a little moderation, as I'm going to try to mix it up a bit in an effort to deter these modern day Fred Flintstones of the SoFla blogosphere. With as much anger that these folks have at 2 AM in the morning, you have to wonder how they work all that into their home lives with their wives and their kids, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I have off tomorrow, so enjoy your Feels Like A Friday Thursday evening Sift...

A- Spokes 'n' Folks explains the impact that proposed changes at the Rickenbacker Causeway tollbooths are going to have for causeway cyclists.

Hundreds of bicyclists do training rides out the causeway and back, and out again, every weekend and sometimes more often. The riders' turnaround is less than 100 yards from the toll booths. Riders come back from Key Biscayne, merge left as they near the mainland, then shoot through the causeway office parking lot and across the outbound lanes to regroup and start again.

If you think of the toll booths simply as fare-collection points, the choice for the county would seem to be easy. But toll booths here also serve as traffic-control measures, making drivers slow down a bit before they venture out past the beaches on that first island before the tall Powell Bridge. If you remove the booths, cars equipped with SunPass can be traveling at highway speeds as they pass the point where today they must pause and wait for a gate to open.

B- Burnettiquette says that Michael Jackson was the Elvis of Generation X.

And love or hate the guy, you must admit that long after Britney Spears is a distant memory, and long after the Ashlee Simpsons, Pinks, Chris Browns, and Rihannas of the world are just dusty footnotes on some defunct VH-1.com memories page, you will remember the name Michael Jackson.

C- Grove Bucks are here, according to Coconut Grove Grapevine.

The Merchants Group is hoping to use these at other events, too, like during the Great Grove Bed Race and maybe even during the holidays. I think it could work for bar crawls and just about anything. In the future we could actually have people use them instead of money in Coconut Grove by giving them more for their Grove Buck, like every 100 Grove Bucks would cost $90.00 in cash to buy, so the person with the Grove Bucks would automatically have an extra $10.00 to spend.

D- South Florida Lawyers' own Sift covered some interesting territory today. Read the comments, too.

E- SFLTV does a comparison of two South Florida TV station's websites after they switched formats and became more independent of the TV stations themselves.

Right off the bat … JustNews.com wins quite handily. In total traffic terms, WPLG’s site has about 1.7 million readers monthly vs 417,326 for WTVJ.

Looking at the chart the first thing I notice is the trend NBCMiami.com seems to be in at this time. They have a huge drop off in unique visitors at the end of April 2009, while beating WPLG’s web site. But by mid May NBCMiami has another even bigger drop in visitors going from what looks like a high of 700-800,000 to something in the range of 250-300,000 at the lowest. And by mid June JustNews.com continues to make huge gains.

Now to be fair here, JustNews.com also gets front-page links on CNN.com because of the deal between InternetBroadcasting and CNN.

F- Brickell Life has an interesting idea for SoFla neighborhoods.

G- Florida's Senate race is drawing national attention and Bark Bark Woof Woof says it could get very entertaining.

If Mr. Rubio actually becomes the nominee, I'd like to see how he campaigns to win over the independent and moderate voters that make up a large part of the Florida electorate, which has been borderline blue for years and went for President Obama last fall. And even if he does appeal to the more conservative wing of the Florida Republicans, his Hispanic ancestry might be a little hard to swallow in parts of the state where they're still not crazy about voting for someone who isn't lily-white, Protestant, and whose name ends with vowel. Old times there are not forgotten.

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