Lee Iacocca is not in the mood to mince words about the state of the US and world leadership and he’s launching a web site for others to join him in this discourse. Iacocca’s site is an online forum designed to encourage open dialogue around the challenges of our time as we enter the homestretch of the Presidential election season.

The site will enable visitors to weigh in on topics from the 2008 presidential election to what soaring health care costs are doing to America, to the reasons we lag so far behind in developing alternative energy sources and hybrid vehicles.

The web site also serves as an online extension to Mr. Iacocca’s 2007 book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone. The site features an interactive scorecard that allows users to rate presidential candidates by the qualities Mr. Iacocca feels every true leader should possess. Mr. Iacocca has dubbed these his Nine C’s: curiosity, creativity, communication, character, courage, conviction, charisma, competence and common sense.

Visitors to the website will be able to grade the candidates vying for the 2008 nomination on the Nine C’s and have the results tabulated in real time.

Another recurring feature of the site will be a blog authored by Mr. Iacocca. In his blog, he will address topics of interest to him including the race to find a cure for diabetes– a subject of very personal significance to him. In 1984 Mr. Iacocca established the Iacocca Foundation For Type 1 Diabetes in honor of his late wife, Mary K. Iacocca, who died from complications of Type 1 diabetes. Since its inception, The Foundation has funded more than $26 million in promising research projects over the past 23 years.

Originally posted on December 3, 2007 @ 12:46 pm

T: The New York Times Style Magazine launched NYTimes.com/TMagazine, an online publication that reinvents the magazine in a digital format and also provides a daily presence on the web for T readers. The site will feature “The Moment,” a blog posting up-to-the-minute fashion and style news and discoveries by T editors and prominent outside contributors. The highly anticipated luxury site brings the visually rich content of T magazine to a larger, global audience. The quality journalism of T’s articles and photography will be coupled with Flash-based interactive content and original videos. The debut of the site coincides with the December launch of T Magazine in the International Herald Tribune.

The T: Magazine Web site was engineered by the New York-based agency createthe group, which was recently featured in an article in W magazine and is the leading agency behind sites for some of the world’s foremost luxury brands.

Originally posted on November 30, 2007 @ 6:01 am