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Archives: December 2002
Inflation in "deflation"
Paul Krugman notes: "In the first 30 days of December 2000, according to Nexis, only six articles in major news sources contained both the word 'deflation' and the phrase 'United States'; none of those articles suggested that deflation in this country was a real possibility. In the same period last year there were 292 hits; this past month there were 566."
The pricing quicksand is watered in part by Moore's law that computing prices fall by 99% every ten years. Dell handheld computers that now cost $299 outstrip the laptop I bought in 1999 for $2700. My phone bill has dropped from $300 to $100 a month thanks to Vonage.
The baby bust also contributes to deflation, as baby boomer couples realize they've bought every toy their 3.7 person household can use. Car prices have been flat for 2 years. Golf club memberships go begging.
And finally, the Internet, the great aggregator of supply, demand, coupons and automation, gives another downward kick to prices. Great CRM now costs $50 a month rather than $500. Medical insight is free and instantly available rather than $75 and an hour in the waiting room. Advertisers can enthrall opinion makers for $30 rather than $3000.
Pop historians usually start a new decade a few years after the calendar. If The Sixties started in 1963 with the Beatles and the Pill, will the 00s open in 2003 with closed wallets and free 64 MB memory cards? If the nineties roared like the twenties, will the 00s now sink, tumble, flounder, flush and drizzle like the thirties?
If so, nothing but cash will be worth more tomorrow.
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Puppy love: how dogs trick humans
Steven Budianky: "Biologists routinely speak of animals exploiting their ecological niche. Well, it turns out that we're the ecological niche for dogs, and exploit us they do. While lions are busy scanning their field of view for prey to pursue, dogs are watching our hands to see where the food is stashed."
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Doctors elbowed aside by web
Pew Internet Project asks: "Where would you turn for information? For health care information, 31% of all Americans said they would first turn to the Internet. For government information, 39% of all Americans said they would first turn to the Net." Doctors and bureaucrats are being disintermediated. Why didn't Pew ask the same question about news, which featured prominently in the rest of this survey?
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More proof things are (not) changing at NYTimes...
The New York Times impressive sounding roundup of business trends called The Balance of Media Power Is Poised to Change. The FCC, Cable news, Satellite TV, TiVo, ViaCom, sexy magazines, EMI, newspaper profits... but no blogs. No mention of the media that is growing 200%+ a year, the media that unseated the Senate Majority leader, the media that helped shame the New York Times' own editor into publishing columns that contradicted his campaign against Augusta country club. Ahh. Yes. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. As Mickie Kaus noted at the Yale blogging symposium, the New York Times wants a journalist to pen a hit piece on blogger triumphalism.
In constrast, the Washington Post is not in denial. Wrapping 2002, Cynthia Webb writes: "Blogs, or online Web logs of news and views, were the hot story of 2002, the year when blogging caught the eye of the mainstream press in a big way and pundits began to recognize blogs as useful tools for everything from venting about politics to raving about a favorite band." (Via Hylton Joliffe.)
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Closing 2002
We're back from Black Mountain, where we enjoyed seeing my parents and sister and her family. The kids enjoyed sharing a bedroom and giggling late into the night. Christmas day, we hiked an abandoned rail track and gawked at giant icicles hanging from the rock outcroppings.
On the 23rd a mutual friend called my wife with the news that Igor, the eight-year-old son of friends in France, died. He had a stomach ache, was diagnosed with leukemia and died three weeks later. Igor's parents and older sisters doted on him. Our six-year-old worshipped Igor, wearing his hand-me-down clothes and adopting his mannerisms.
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Season's greetings!
Most of us are off this week, but e-mail to info@blogads.com will be answered promptly. I'm in Black Mountain, NC, where the weather is unseasonably warm and the food is overly and overtly copious.
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Gawker and Jarvis: populist innovators
I thought Gawker just aimed to recycle gossip and cool Manhattan anecdotes. That would have been good enough. But there's more. It's worth listing the editorial tropes Gawker is exploiting:
a) Posting editor/publisher IM conversations.
b) Recycling reviews of Gawker.
c) Taunting Mefi and recycling the retorts. (a + b = c)
d) Lists and (coming December 31, I predict) lists of lists.
e) Celebrating classifieds as content.
f) Publishing footnotes.
None of this is unique. But consistently applied and exploited, these tropes make for Really Brilliant New Media.
At the same time, Jeff Jarvis has spent $99 on a new piece of software and is experimenting with video weblogging, or vlogging. He says: "The truth is, all you do to make TV is stare at a camera and read and say something: It's easy. There's no reason a blogger should not be the next Andy Rooney or Charles Grodin or Ann Coulter (easy marks, all!). I'd take any of their jobs, tomorrow."
Actually, there's a common theme between vlogging and Gawker. While some Mefi folks are deriding Gawker as elitist, totally missing the site's irony, they also miss the site's populism in style and content. Hiding beneath the veneer of "real estate porn" and "social climbing," the most interesting content is purely found media -- classifieds, IM, recycled reviews -- other people's discards. Like vlogging, it is something anyone can do... but only 1 in 10,000 will do well.
[6] comments (6118 views) | link
Link redundancy good -- visitors immaterial.
"Petco.com's marketers wanted to add a "button" that would take shoppers from the home page to a page featuring monthly specials. But the site already had a tab on its navigation bar and a link at the bottom of the home page to the specials page. The marketers worried that the extra link would clutter up the home page and only split existing sales from the specials page with the other two links. Instead, they discovered that the extra link boosted total traffic from the specials page by about 10%. What's more, they determined that while the three links split the number of visitors to the specials page about equally, the new button drove significantly more sales."
"The number of visitors was a popular indicator of success in the early days of e-commerce, but now it's considered a terrible way to tell if a site is doing well. Yet 97% of the retailers in a recent Forrester survey said they count site traffic. The number of visitors to the site may show you're attracting a lot of shoppers, but it won't tell you why some are buying and some aren't. 'Traffic for traffic's sake is not a metric that retailers ought to be focused on,' says Carrie Johnson, a Forrester analyst. (WSJ.com, PW protected.)
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Sullivan succeeds in "reader-supported journalism"
Raising $79,020 from 3,339 readers, AndrewSullivan.com has proven that "the web has the potential to deliver truly independent, reader-supported journalism." Congratulations Andrew!
Sullivan asked for $20 contributions. And that's roughly what he got. So now we've got an initial pricing point for high-quality online journalism. Wonder what would have happened if Sullivan had asked for $25? Or $10?
It is interesting to note that Glenn Reynolds had a wide range of donations yesterday. "Changing the PayPal button to let people pick the amount clearly unlocked untapped demand. It used to just take donations in the amount of $2.50 -- somehow I set it up that way and never got around to changing it. (This site, unlike, say, Andrew Sullivan's or Bill Quick's, isn't set up to be revenue-maximizing). But I got several emails close together asking me to change it to let the user choose the amount, and lo-and-behold, people responded with donations ranging from $75.00 to one cent. Yes, one cent. As an economist would say, it's a diverse mix of preferences."
Whatever the pricing point, whatever the naysays grumble, don't miss the trend: commerce and culture are inseparably entwined. We are going to see lots more of this.
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Interviews with bloggers
Kiruba Shankar is compiling a list of interviews with blog innovators.
[4] comments (6414 views) | link
$121,020, $121,040, $121,060...
Ten days ago blog pundit and evangelist Andrew Sullivan asked for $20 donations.
He got ribbed by some folks who claimed this begging was an admission of defeat. As one blogger I usually admire
opined, "So the net result of this development is that even the guy who was supposed to be making money at this isn't and that means there isn't money to be made. Blogs are wonderful. Blogs are fun. Blogs are good reading. But blogs are no way to earn a living."
Fast forward. By day two, 3000 people had already contributed. (I was one of them.) Today, Sullivan and his business partner Robert Cameron are still counting the money.
Any business that makes money so fast that it has trouble counting it is a good busines. What do you think? $100,000? $120,000? Whatever the number, Sullivan's payoff is a huge endorsement for blogging. He's got 20,000 passionate readers and some significant fraction of them are willing to underwrite his work.
Is that so different from the way publisher's make a living? Obviously, the big difference is that publishers employ five people for every one person who actually creates the product people value. So Sullivan has finally succeeded in the alchemy of smelting words into gold without passing through lead and five human baffles.
PS: Is Sullivan's success a harbinger of failure for other bloggers seeking underwriters, as one blogger told me last week? Every $20 Sullivan takes is $20 that won't go to another blogger, she said. Bull. Blog daily, blog passionately, pick a niche and exploit it better than anyone else around and add value to people's lives... and you can make a living blogging. Note that Sullivan has not even begun to really sell advertising on his site... I guess that is when traditionally publishers will really have to admit that the gig is up.
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New from Budapest...
Two new blogs of note. Steve Carlson has turned his august mailing list for NowEurope into a genuine blog with permalinks and comments. On top of it, Steve has attracted some good contributors including entrepreneur Miljenko Horvat and marketing genius Olivier Travers.
And Carlson has launched The Digital Entrepreneur, a site aimed at a) providing lots of insight for digital entrepreneurs and b) making affiliate commissions on tools aimed at those entrepreneurs. I'd suggest that Steve may want to reitterate what tools he's selling, since visitors will get turned off if they think he's just fronting. But this is a quibble and I'm Steve will find the right balance.
To kick launch the site, Steve has a good article on how he's used search engine demand to create his business. In coming years we'll see lots more businesses built from the ground up specifically to serve the weird and giant markets that only exist online. And, like apes that don't understand what an opposable thumb is good for, businesses built offline won't ever know what hit 'em.
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On the inside looking in...
Gawker, New York's newest trend transmitter and celebrity cyclotron, premiers tomorrow.
Crafted by Elizabether Spiers, Nick Denton and Jason Kottke, Gawker is addictive as popcorn and infinitely cheaper.
I've been watching site's dress rehearsal this week with a mixture of envy and glee. Envy because I wish I'd had the idea. Glee, because at least I'm not a gossip professional and therefore don't have to chew my toes with envy.
Some choice early lines include "On a scale of one to evil, we give that idea four-and-a-half Kissingers!" and this imagined speed-dating introduction "Nice to meet you, John. I'm Rachel. I'm 32. I have narcissistic personality disorder and a mother that makes Joan Crawford look like Mary Poppins. By the way, I just estimated your annual income from the ostensible quality and retail price of your shoes. Is that tie Ferragamo?" Despite the fervent fun, lots of calculation has gone into Gawker; the logo is gorgeous and the daily sections -- including a "To-Do List" and "Gossip roundup" -- are well pitched.
Tina Brown wishes she thought of Gawker first. As it is, she can only join the rest of us in gawking. On second thought, don't chew your toes too hard Tina, 'cause there are lots of thin media niches left to invent. Get to work!
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Blog reporting hits mainstream
The blogger role in Trent Lott's dunking is by now well established.
But while bloggers are often characterized as pseudo-pundits and fifth-column columnists, I'd like to point out that bloggers have done a fair amount of crucial reporting as well.
I bring this up because we often encounter a fair amount of sneering about bloggers and the news. Bloggers only "churn" what traditional press organizations report. Bloggers recycle. Bloggers pontificate. But bloggers aren't up to reporting.
In arguing that "bloggers can't/shouldn't report," most people thinking of "reporting" as Pulitzer-prize winning journalism mined from the trenches of Afghanistan or months long interogations of Deep Throat. Unfortunately, this accounts for only 1% of journalism.
Most reporting is far more mundane, but no less vital: turning up nuggets of information that have eluded public scrutiny. In Lott's take-down, bloggers definitely played this role by using past articles and quotations to deconstruct Lott's lies about his association with the white-supremist Council of Concerned Citizens (Josh Marshall) and digging out a sample ballot from 1948 to show what was really at stake in that election (Atrios.)
As Marshall put it as he unearthed the Amicus Brief which Trent Lott submitted on behalf of Bob Jones University in 1981, "Is TPM your source or is TPM your source?"
Note that this kind reporting is actually a cut above what most reporters spend their days writing -- cutting and pasting press releases and putting new spins on other journalist's work.
Bloggers are forced into reporting by the blindness and laziness of traditional media organizations. As Marshall noted about Lott's racist instincts: "The truth is that everyone who's sentient and even remotely keeps up on politics has known about this stuff for years -- at least since the last Trent Lott-segregation scandal broke back in late 1998. Sad to say, everyone just agreed not to pay attention, not to care."
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Clout
Finally, conclusive evidence that New York Times is influenced by blogs.
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Bloggers 'infatuated with revolutions'
Steve Carlson, who runs NowEurope newsletter, interviews me in December, 2002. I've copied here, for archival integrity.
Interview begins:
Henry and I know each other from Budapest, Hungary, where he served as editor of the Budapest Business Journal. Henry went on to found Pressflex, a privately-held consultancy that helps publishers profit from their web presence. Pressflex recently launched a service an ad network serving influential weblogs. According to Henry, PressFlex is now profitable.
In a recent post to nowEurope, Henry made three predictions for 2003: a) continued disintermediation of traditional commercial and social infrastructure, b) prolonged recession and c) thin media.
In this interview, Henry Copeland elaborates on his vision of how the blogging phenomenon, or 'thin media,' is revolutionizing the publishing world, and why this revolution is being led by outsiders.
Q: You coined the term 'thin media' to describe the blogging phenomenon. Can you tell us more about this trend, and what challenges it poses to the media establishment?
I use "thin media" to describe sites like LA Examiner, Gizmodo, AuctionBytes, Wi-Fi News and SciFan that are generated by only a single writer or a couple of part-timers.
They thrive in tightly focused niches. They generate some original content and analysis along with lots of links to other sites and articles.
Thin media publishers have none of the fat of traditional media. Usually, they've spend a couple hundred bucks to host a Pmachine or Movable Type site, rather than 10 or 100 or 10,000 times that -- what a newspaper or magazine spends on publishing software, presses, ink, paper and delivery trucks.
They market via blogrolls and Google rather than doing mailshots at $1 a name. They sell ads efficiently to other entrepreneurs and use affiliate marketing, rather than employing legions of ad reps.
Thin media publishers are far nimbler and will feed happily on new niches that are far too obscure for traditional media to notice and too thin for traditional media to profitably mine. And, because they are small and nimble, thin media can help discover and invent the Next Big Thing much easier than their big peers who are busy looking for huge revenues from huge services.
I think your sites (nowEurope, The Digital Entrepreneur) are a great example of thin media. Because you don't have legacy infrastructure -- staff, technology, clients -- you are free to chase new market niches.
Q: Isn't it ironic that you preach the thin media revolution, while your clients are traditional publishers?
I do a lot of drum banging for thin media on my own blog. Several people have asked whether this evangelism means Pressflex is antagonistic to print publishers. Absolutely not. I love the print publishers and think that they'll continue to thrive in their niches.
It is great to help publishers in places like Anjou in France or Peebles in Scotland thrive online. Done right, these publishers sites can turn a profit from selling subscriptions alone.
We're still adding new features to our publishing service, which now serves more than 80 publications in Europe out of the same code and database.
In fact, we just signed on some magazines for a major UK business publisher that has spent tens of millions of pounds on its own sites, but finally realized that it was more effective and efficient to outsource to a company with expertise, commitment, low overheads and economies of scale.
And we've had good results recently doing consulting for some giant publishers who are missing 50% of their traffic because their tech teams are oblivious to the importance of Google.
We've still got a lot of eggs in the publishing basket. We don't think traditional publishers will disappear -- they are just going to have a smaller piece of a bigger pie.
Q: You recently made your own commitment to the Thin Media revolution by launching BlogAds, an advertising network for bloggers. Why prompted you to do this, and how has the service been received?
I've always felt that the explosive growth in web publishing would come from entrepreneurs, the guys outside the traditional publishing food chain. I just couldn't see exactly who these guys were, and what would differentiate them from traditional journalists and publishers.
Then, eighteen months ago I was watching friends like Matt Welch and Ken Layne pull in 10,000-30,000 visitors a month working just a couple hours a day on their weblogs and realized "gee, this traffic overshadows what many print publishers with $2 million in annual revenues manage to attract."
And I realized that, with just a little smart writing and linking, these guys were connecting far more intimately with readers than the traditional publisher.
Now you've got Andrew Sullivan, financed by just $80,000 in annual revenue from readers, reaching as many opinion makers as the New Republic with its masthead of 79. You've got Glenn Reynolds, moonlighting from teaching law, doing nearly 2 million page impressions a month. So it is just a matter of time before the blogosphere is recognized as a revolutionary advertising platform.
Q: That's fine, but can you really develop BlogAds into a business?
At some point, we know these passionate blog audiences have to yield gold for advertisers, or the simple premise that has funded media for the last 300 years -- exposure helps a business grow -- has been false.
Frankly, though that time has not quite yet arrived. We've got some very satisfied advertisers on blogs. We can see the synapses firing. But won't push the thing hard publicly until we've rolled out what we regard as the complete feature set that will complete the circuit. We're still tinkering with the ingredients.
It's kind of like watching one of those nascent slime molds -- you can see the thing starting to respond to stimulus and flirt with swarming. So you tinker with the environment and see what are the right parameters, what's the right amount of stimulus, what's the critical mass?
I keep on my desk the copy of Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma that was given me by a smart VC back in the days when I still believed it was valuable to talk to smart VCs rather than customers.
The book lays out the histories of industries in which certain "disruptive" technologies -- tech which is cheaper, simpler, smaller and easier to use than traditional tech -- sometimes answer unexpected needs and, in doing so, eventually evolve enough to overwhelm existing products and market structures.
At the end of the process, whole new mountainsized markets have evolved out of what start out as commercial motes.
I feel like that is the track that weblogs are on. Patience and creativity is key. My favorite passage in the book is this one: "Disruptive technologies often enable something to be done that previously had been deemed impossible.
"Because of this, when they initially emerge, neither manufacturers nor customers know how or why these products will be used, and hence do not know what specific features of the product will and will not ultimately be valued.
"Building such markets entails a process of mutual discovery by customers and manufactures -- and this simply takes time." I skim that book at least once a week. It gives a healthy nudge to both your optimism and your realism.
Q: Some of the most prominent bloggers are people we know: Eastern Europe expats (or former expats). Who are these people, and what are they doing? Can you explain the Eastern Europe connection?
I like this question. On the one hand, there are lots of other blogging clusters, and maybe we are just more aware of our own. I bet there is a cluster of bloggers from Kent State U. out there right now asking each other -- "Gee, why are we such a big part of the blogosphere?"
That said, I do think there is a predilection for blogging among post-communist expats. In the early 1990s, Budapest and Prague attracted publishing renegades, a mini-generation of people who decided that life was too short NOT to join the adventure after the Wall came down. Once here, we couldn't tap into any old-boy networks or climb any corporate ladders; we invented new structures, businesses and networks.
We are, as a group, infatuated with revolutions. So blogging seems a natural fit for people like Ben Sullivan, Matt Welch, Ken Layne, Emmanuelle Richard, Nick Denton, Rick Bruner, you and me.
Somehow, having lived outside the system, we were better able to see blogging's unique applications. Rather than saying "gee, but this doesn't match traditional media's credibility or resources," we were more likely to say "gee, but look at all the neat new things it does do."
We've all stayed in touch, we've learned from each other. I told Nick Denton about Google a few years ago and he told me about ObscureStore.com. I'll say semi-seriously that, in the long run, I think I got the better half of the trade.
You take your friends more seriously than you take some case study you read in Business 2.0. Though I have to say I'm still astonished by the number of publishers, journalists, ad reps and professional writers who STILL don't get the professional implications of the Internet. They use Google every hour, but they still don't quite understand that nobody needs anyone's permission to publish. A few publishers see this, but not many. I'd love to meet more publishers who get it.
There are some other character traits that seem to run strong in bloggers. First, few of webloggings vanguard are trained journalists. Matt Drudge is a former mail boy. Glenn Reynolds is a law professor. Dave Winer is a programmer. Megan McArdle is an unemployed tech analyst. Second, a decent number don't have a college degree. Matt Welch, Ken Layne, James Lileks, Patrick Nielsen Hayden ... the list goes on.
So perhaps the meta characteristic for great bloggers is "outsiderness." Because they don't have big career or conceptual investments in the status quo, outsiders can better imagine trajectories in blogging. And because they are outsiders, they've got a grudge and are more motivated to put blogging's unique features to revolutionary use.
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There's that number again
Steven Levy in Newsweek is the latest to fall for Google's underreporting, writing that its users "punch in 150 million searches a day." Come on Steven, they've been saying "more than 150 million searches a day" for a year.
Sure "150 million" sounds big, but is plainly too low at this point. Would you ever bother writing that the United States has "more than 150 million" residents or, worse, 150 million residents? Dig for the real number rather than reporting the same number published last December.
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Blog triumphalism
I had a great 36 hours in New York. Munched oysters in the Oyster Bar with Megan McArdle. Learned that she, like Glenn Reynolds, is a speed reader. Megan started reading at 2 1/2 years and can read 6 text-book pages in a minute. She thinks that as bloggers get to know their peers, there will be more mergers among complimentary voices (as between Galt and Mindles Dreck.) We agreed blogs led big media in upending Raines and Lott; wondered how to prove it? Then to 123rd street for dinner with Rick Bruner and Elizabeth Spiers. I enjoyed two whiskies and split a bunch of appetisers with Rick. We watched Elizabeth manage 55% of a giant burger. She gave us the scoop on Gawker, which sounds like a brilliant cross between Romenesko and Page Six. Rick and I paid $7 for a sixpack of Heinekens at a bodega and noticed that single bottles of some Belgian beer cost $8 a bottle. Who buys that stuff? We stayed up late as Rick generously shared a warehouse full of tips on web marketing and Microsoft shortcuts. Friday morning, I met a senior official in blogdom. He noted that "blogs move markets" and shared a number of insights into the relationship between blogs and traditional branding. More on this in a future post. Then I walked to few blocks to munch cookies with Amy Langfield. Her blog is on ice while she figures out how her professional identity relates to her blog writing.
Coming home on the train, I read the New York Post ("The drumbeat that turned this story into a major calamity for Lott, and led directly to President Bush's welcome disavowal of Lott's views yesterday, was entirely driven by the Internet blogosphere") and New York Times ("without the indefatigable efforts of Mr. Marshall and a few other Internet writers, Mr. Lott's recent celebration of segregation would probably have been buried as well.") Yes, my spine tingled. Megan, here's our proof. Whether blogs did it or not, we're given credit by both left and right. In the science of opinion-making, appearance is reality.
In 2002, we've seen blogs move national markets. In 2003, look for blogs to move local markets. That's when the fun really begins.
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Australia treads old media ground
We're reading lots of panicked appraisals of the finding by Australia high court that Dow Jones is accountable for something it published on the Internet.
"The decision has potentially major ramifications for Web publishing world-wide," intoned the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Dow Jones. Even bloggers should worry, we were told.
Almost every lawyer quoted is on the payroll of one media conglomerate or another. Are we missing anything?
Publishers have always had to contend with prickly local courts, so it seems no surprise that this should happen online. Remember when the International Herald Tribune was fined $678,000 in Singapore for publishing something incredibly vague that was construed as being derogatory to the country's Prime Minister?
Do bloggers indeed have to worry? Probably a lot less than multinational media conglomerates. As the
WSJ article notes: "If the court finds in favor of Mr. Gutnick and 'it turns out Dow Jones doesn't have any assets in Australia, there will be further questions about getting a U.S. enforcement of an Australian judgment,' said Jonathan Zittrain, an assistant law professor at Harvard Law School. Some U.S. courts have declined to enforce overseas decisions that wouldn't stand up under the U.S. Constitution, he said."
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Instapundit -- the Paper of Record
Ever the zeitgeist-zapper, Ken Layne dubs Glenn Reynold's Instapundit the "Paper of Record" for chronicling the recent blogger posse that rounded up Trent Lott and threw him into ignomy while the traditional press was still saddling up.
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Froogle launch critiques
Some healthy intramural mind-butting going on at Marketing Fix.
Robert Loch raves about Google's new shopping interface (called Froogle!). Olivier Travers reviews Froogle's taxonomies and pronounces them DOA. "Maybe throwing Nuclear Physics PhDs at an online retail/merchandising issue is not such a bright idea. People at Amazon and eBay will see this and feel very comfortable," he says. He concludes: "there's no vacuum to fill in like Google did in web search."
I agree with Robert, who counters: "How can you say that there is no 'vacuum to fill' ?!? I'm guessing that Google has worked out [there's] a hell of a vaccum to fill, by noting how much people use Google search to search for products and services.... I bet if you had access to Google's full search data you'd find a black hole, never mind a vacuum."
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Goliath lashes out at digital Davids
Attempting to disparage free online business publications, WSJ.com has constructed a garish straw-site called Biz-o-rama and built a television and web ad campaign skewering the "publication," reports Internet News. (Via MarketingFix.)
With the era of VC-funded loss-gushing online competitors as dead as the Millennium bug, this campaign seems to be from the last war, one the Journal already won.
Or is it prescient? Could WSJ.com be worried now that Mindles Dreck has joined forces with Jane Galt? BTW, if you can't afford to drop a couple grand on a WSJ.com ad, why not spend $30 for a month's exposure on JaneGalt.net?
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Patience
Almost 250 years passed between the invention of the movable type printing press and the first daily newspaper. Technology didn't cause the delay -- individuals and institutions had to evolve in tandem to demand and supply the new service.
By this standard, today's weblogs -- frequently updated, highly networked individual or group-written chronicles -- are still in their infancy.
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Sullivan blogs new media, peddles old
In his new campaign for donations to support his blog, Andrew Sullivan says "we're working hard for ad dollars, but the landscape is still bleak."
Sullivan is in the brilliant editorial vanguard of p2p media, but he's still emulating big media by "working hard" for advertising and "big sponsors."
Big media advertising is all about tortured negotiations, murky metrics and bloated prices... it's hard work for everyone. Likewise on AndrewSullivan.com, potential advertisers need to burrow through the site to find contact information. The site offers no rate card and makes no pitch to advertisers. When Sullivan sold an annual sponsorship 18 months ago, it cost $7500. With his traffic up 4-fold, the same sponsorship might cost $30,000 today.
Sullivan won't begin to find a steady commercial audience until buying ads on his blog is as easy, transparent, affordable and automated as blogging itself.
If he's going to succeed as an Internet entrepreneur, Sullivan needs to serve other Internet entrepreneurs. There's ample evidence that the web empowers entrepreneurs who buy and sell (eBay) or advertise (Google.) Sullivan should sell blogads clearly and prominently, automate ordering and price CPMs at 1/100th of NYTimes.com's rate.
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Black hole
Olivier Travers, in a post titled "Decentralized My Ass," notes that Kevin Werbach's $2000 a head conference in Palo Alto about "decentralization" debunks its own premise that "intelligence is moving to the edges, through networked computers, empowered users, shifting partnerships, fluid digital content, distributed work teams, and powerful communications devices." As Olivier puts it: "I hope the irony doesn't go unnoticed by those who attended."
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Who toppled the Times?
Harvard media analyst Alex Jones, a former New York Times employee, says that the paper's final decision to publish sports columns contradicting its editorial position confirms journalism's ability to correct its own mistakes.
Not so fast. Am I the only one to wonder whether the Times could have safely ignored the criticism of employees and press peers had bloggers not kept the story bubbling? Certainly Times managing editor Gerald Boyd's Stalinist memo defending the column spiking would have gotten far less attention had it not been republished by Jim Romenesko.
I bet the Times could have successfully dismissed the issue as "inside baseball" but for the relentless stoking by bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Fritz Schranck, Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus and countless others.
If the Times' about-face is a victory, it's a victory for the new order, not the old.
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Life at the crossroads of culture and commerce
Talking about his company's roots in the perfect store, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar observed that "throughout history... commerce and civilization had always developed alongside each other. The first markets arose at crossroads, where traders came to reach the largest number of potential customers. If sales at the crossroads were good, the merchants stored their wares there permanently. If they were the best in the whole region, traders brought their families and settled there. In time, they put up walls and built an infrastructure, and commerce transformed the lowly crossroads into a city." In the same way, commerce and culture are entwined. Each evokes the other.
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Media bubble-boys
Is "the media" out of touch? The short answer is yes. Sunday's LATimes has the long answer:
"As recently as 1971, only 58% of newspaper journalists had college degrees; now 89% have degrees, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But only 15.5% of the total population age 25 and older have finished college. The median annual salary for "experienced reporters" working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation -- the 40 largest papers in the country -- was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for "senior reporters" -- and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers -- is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500."
I know that more than a few major bloggers don't have college degrees. Project for a rainy day: tabulate demographics of blogdom.
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Gawker on the launch pad
More thin media coming soon: Gawker, the NY gossip blog.
Behind its spirited name, Gawker has a fierce team. The site is edited by Elizabethe Spiers, designed by Jason Kottke and published by Nick Denton.
(Via Rick Bruner.)
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Popdex joins the fray
Welcome to Popdex, the newest contender in the continent being explored by Daypop and Blogdex.
Popdex's template, like its name, shares many elements with Blogdex. But, proving that it is never too late to tweak a good idea, Popdex emphasizes tiny but helpful info-nuggets like the total number of sites crawled (10,693) and unique links (317,676).
As of 9AM EST Sunday, Blogdex's #1 URL has 22 links, Popdex's has 25 and Daypop is tops with 44.
Although the site includes a first person blog, there's no "about us" or person's name attached to the site. The fantastic URL was only registered days ago by this similarly anonymous company.
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Sartor Resartus
John Hiler has done a heroic job of rounding up reviews of his own new review-heavy site for NY listings.
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Blogging is sexist, says the pot
I guffawed reading the recent NYTimes article analyzing blogdom's apparent domination by men.
Among the culprits named: a) "the mainstream media, which has focused its attention on a predominantly male group of bloggers who write about terrorism and Iraq and have come to be known as the warbloggers," b) Instapundit's blogroll is "heavily weighted toward men," c) all but one of the links on Scott Rosenberg's blogroll is a man, and d) "female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives."
Gee, that's fun speculation. But the author ignores the (male) gorilla looking over her shoulder. While she admits that the apparent maleness of blogdom might be "a holdover from the world of print, where men continue to dominate the opinion pages," she does not bother noting that 80% of the articles on the average front page of the New York Times are written by men and that 8 of 11 editors on the paper's masthead are men.
In this context, is blogging's skew (produced by the individual choices of swarms of men and women rather than one institution's biases and/or policies) worth an article? I guess mentioning the Times' own sex-skew would have made the article (or the Times) look silly.
Rebecca Blood, who was interviewed for the article, complains that "what I've learned about the press in the past few years is that each reporter has a story he or she wants to tell, and this process of interviewing people is largely an attempt to find others who will say what they already think is true. if you reflect back to them their pre-existing opinion, you'll be quoted. If you do not, you won't be."
I recall Mickey Kaus' comment at the recent Yale blogfest that an "editor at the NY Times keeps wanting me to write an article trashing blogger triumphalism." I guess we can expect more of such "journalism" about blogs from the Times.
The hypocrisy of the Times' riff on blogdom's possible sexism provides an interesting side-bar to the same paper's preachments against Augusta's sexism... without itself boycotting coverage of the event.
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Jingle blogs
Jeff Jarvis compiled a Christmas list of blog inspired gifts. Thank you for mentioning Blogads, Jeff!
Yes, give your favorite blogger a holiday boost by buying an Blogad promoting his/her blog on Megan McArdle (aka JaneGalt and Asymmetrical Information)'s new adstrip!
BTW, thanks to Jeff's list, I've just rediscovered Instapundit's band Mobius Dick. Jittery, full of text snippets... it's music to blog by. I'm listening to it right now.
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Google odometer stuck
A key Google metric, number of searches per day, has not budged in a year.
On December 4, 2001, an article in the Boston Herald said Google processed 150 million searches a day. That represented a 250% jump in six months.
A year later, Google still gives prominent play to the benchmark, closing the first paragraph of its online company overview with the words, "Today, Google responds to more than 150 million search queries per day."
Although true in a literal sense, the "today" is misleadingly newsy, since the same thing was true yesterday and for at least the 362 days before that. Nonetheless, the figure has become a refrain in press coverage of Google, including an article last week in the NYTimes.
Over the same period, eBay grew more than 45% in all its key metrics, and monthly page views on NYTimes.com jumped more than 50%. Even at obscure newspapers like French weekly Courrier de Mantes, site traffic has grown 400% over the last year.
As Internet traffic races ahead, why is Google's odometer stuck? Rather than invoke the tattered figure so faithfully, shouldn't journalists probe for an update?
Reached by phone, Google spokesman Nathan Tyler wouldn't tell me much more than "that's just the number we are using right now." He would not speculate about what's behind the number, but did stress that there are "more" than 150 million searches a day.
In the absence of something more concrete, here are some hypotheses about why Google hasn't updated the number:
a) Google no longer watches this metric. This seems unlikely, since the "more than 150 million search queries per day" boast remains prominent on Google's scrupulously maintained site. Moreover, this metric was updated regularly while it was growing.
b) The number of daily queries has not changed or has underperformed other top-tier Internet service providers. It is (barely) possible that Google, focused on generating revenues, views the raw volume of searches as a distraction and an expense. More searches mean more servers, not necessarily more revenues. Having honed its search technology, Google's engineers spent the last year on projects like Adwords and enterprise search solutions. (If the raw search count is no longer a core metric for Google management, this is bad news for users; it means management no longer focuses on improving our experience and growing usage.)
c) Daily searches have grown (or even exploded), but Google does not publicize the new tally either because it would tip off the competition or because Google is saving news of a big spike for use in the build-up to its long-expected IPO.
My money is on (c). First, Google is persistently focused on improving user experience so usage has probably grown in line with that seen at other top-quality sites. Second, my company's newspaper and magazine clients saw 50%+ growth in the number of visitors refered by Google over the last year.
Sure the 150 million a day figure is impressive. I quote it nearly every day in conversations with publishers. But isn't it time to update the figure?
(Postscript: Here's a brief time-line of the "150 million searches" factoid. When I looked at the same Google page back in April for this story looking at the raw data behind Google Zeitgeist, the number was... "more than 150 million." This USA Today article written in January 2001 (found courtesy of Google, of course) uses 150 million also. And here's the cache of a Boston Herald article from last December cites 150 million daily searches. I can't find earlier examples of the number.)
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Even for WSJ.com, ads are key
Neil Budde, the recently unplugged publisher of WSJ.com, says, "In 2002, advertising was up about 25%. We're not back to 2000 levels, but we were being more attentive to more appropriate advertising formats and placement of advertising. We've attracted a lot of advertisers back in. I still see a lot of upside. Back in 2000, the split between advertising and circulation revenues was about 60%-40%. Then [those percentages] reversed last year. Now it's a bit more tilted toward subscriptions, but advertising is creeping back. As you continue to grow the subscriber base, that's great, but the real opportunity is still to make this a more viable advertising medium and bring in more dollars."
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The forgotten life
Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry write in the (PWprotected) WSJ: "Taking the Net's pulse as we use it in our daily lives, though, is much more difficult. We don't keep diaries or system logs, so the days all blur together, and all of a sudden it's hard to remember what searching was like before the Google toolbar, or before all the CDs got ripped into MP3s, or what surfing was like before the cable modem arrived. It takes a substantial break in one's routine to be able to take stock of what's changed and what hasn't."
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NewYorkCityBlog: event listings with personality
John Hiler launches the NewYorkCityBlog. The site and e-newsletter focus (initially) on event listings for cinema, book readings and talks.
Looking at a listing in The New Yorker, John writes "It's informative and useful, like most listings... but where's the personality?! Here at Cityblogs, we get a little more fired up about good movies. Our dedicated cinema blogger (that would be me) would DEMAND that the reader race to the Sunshine to see Brooklynite Tony Manero win over Stephanie Mangano on the disco dance floor. I mean, how often do you get the chance to catch Saturday Night Fever in Dolby Stereo and on the big screen?"
John and I've talked at length about CityBlog's new angle on blog advertising, but I'll save my two cents until he's announced his angle. In the meantime, I've bookmarked the site and signed up for the newsletter.
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