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Archives: February 2003
Drudge hits new high...
Matt Drudge says "**THANKS A MILLION, MAKE THAT A HUNDRED MILLION, FOR MAKING FEB 2003 -- THE HEAVIEST TRAFFIC MONTH IN THE 8-YEAR HISTORY OF DRUDGE REPORT/// MAIN DRUDGE PAGE HAS BEEN VIEWED 113,257,740 SO FAR IN FEBRUARY, PASSING JANUARY 2003, THE PREVIOUS HIGH**"
As Hemingway said: "Find one thing you like and do it well and every day. You will be happy and the world will be happy." (Until later... of course.)
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'Currencies you’d like to see'
Pulling off a virtuouso performance in mixing genres, Matt Welch strings together some fun tales about busking in Central Europe and then astonishes with a glissando into some snappy commercial lessons (eight of them!) that apply to blogging. Desperation-buskers bum people out... harmonies, harmonies, harmonies... prime the pump.... Go read them all.
[3] comments (6482 views) | link
Google makes it official...
Well Google has gone and made it official, extending its Adwords program to the pages of HowStuffWorks, Blogger, and Weather Underground. The new program is called Content Targeted Advertising.
if users look up the weather forecast for Palm Springs on a weather site, they may see ads for deals on hotels and cars in the Palm Springs area. Or, if users are reading about how an acoustic guitar works on a music site, they may see ads for hand-crafted acoustic guitars.The service offers a great new tool for advertisers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we'll continue to strive to mold Blogads into a tool that offers additional advantages to bloggers and advertisers:
a) Bloggers get the bulk of the proceeds from their Blogads sales.
b) Bloggers get to approve every ad before it appears.
c) Advertisers get more options (images, longer text, comments.)
d) Advertisers can use superlatives like "lowest" and "best" which are not allowed in Google Adwords.
e) Google kills ads that don't get a 1% clickthru, so its tool is only effective for direct marketers, not brand-builders.
We'll scramble to keep Blogads differentiated. Google may be a brilliant and wonderfully benign company... but if it does get a monopoly on blog advertising, innovation will slow.
It is also worth noting that this "content targetted advertising" initiative moves Google even more firmly into competition with ad sellers inside traditional media (and or traditional media itself), since it will be competing head-to-head with the ad sales arms of the likes of NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and CNN.com right down to smaller outlets like Cleveland.com and Gazette.net/ All rely on well-paid teams of ad salespeople and expensive user profiling... will these be jettisoned for Google?
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New media still sellings ads with old media friction
Anne Holland writes: "Last Friday night I was chatting with Seana Mulcahy VP, Director of Interactive Media Mullen whose team buys hundreds of millions of dollars in online ads each year. 'Publishers make it impossible to buy from them!" she ranted. She's one of many media buyers who are increasingly frustrated with the lack of standards so art departments have to resize and redo ads constantly for each different site (the cost of which really adds up) and how hard it is to make an integrated ad buy across all of a single media company's channels without negotiating and cutting multiple insertion orders. Online advertising is to some degree also a service business. Being easier to buy from than your competitor may be a highly significant advantage. It's not content + eyeballs = profits. It's content + friendly service = profits.'" (Thanks Olivier!)
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Temporary solutions last the longest
BIOS, one of the building blocks of the PC, was hacked together more than 20 years ago as a temporary solution; engineers thought it would only last for the first 250,000 machines before being replaced by something better.
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Keep the glass half full by forgetting?
"New research shows that some traumatized people may be better off repressing the experience than illuminating it in therapy. If you're stuck and scared, perhaps you should not remember but forget." (Link.)
[3] comments (6920 views) | link
Google already selling ads on blogs...
A bunch of people have written to ask whether we're worried about Google's purchase of Pyra/Blogger, noting that Google could start to sell ads on the blogs that Pyra hosts.
Well, just days after Google bought Pyra, Matt Haughey has discovered that Google is already running its textads on Blogspot sites. For example, check out KEH Camera Brokers ad atop this photography-oriented blog and compare it with the ads running in the right column of this Google search for "Leica." See the redundancy?
These were not ads bought specifically to run on blogs, since no such choice exists in Google's Adwords forms; the advertiser likely opted to allow the ads to be "syndicated" onto Google's partner sites. (According to Googles Adwords terms, these partners include America Online, Inc. CompuServe, Netscape, AT&T Worldnet, EarthLink, Inc. and Sympatico Inc.)
Does this threaten our Blogads service? No. (That's not the same answer I'd give to the question "are you nervous as hell?")
For the forseeable future, we offer bloggers and advertisers certain unique advantages:
a) Bloggers get the bulk of the proceeds from their Blogads sales.
b) Bloggers get to approve every ad before it appears.
c) Advertisers get more options (images, longer text, comments.)
d) Advertisers can use words like "lowest" which are not allowed in Google Adwords.
e) Google kills ads that don't get a 1% clickthru, so its ads are only effective for direct marketers rather than brand-builders.
We'll scramble to keep Blogads differentiated. Google may be a brilliant and wonderfully benign company... but if it does get a monopoly on blog advertising, nobody's gonna be too happy.
[5] comments (7485 views) | link
The trajectory to know-where
A reader asks: "You have a book in the works on some of this stuff? :) Just the sense I get…"
No book. I'm generally unable to think in patches of more than 1000 words. I wrote a senior essay in college that resurrected Darwin's Christian credentials by re-uniting his language with its then-current theological context... and the damn thing mutated into an attempt to overturn the reigning theory of intellectual history... and nearly killed me. I was right, but history will never know it. I'm a sprinter and can't stick to an outline for more than a week. That said, I'm amazed to find that blogging is helping me churn out patches of text that might be woven together into something larger... micro-competitors versus behemoths, the network as the new publisher, disintermediation, intraction... oh no, better stop.
I'll stick to service-building and blog-storming. The force of competition, investors, colleagues and clients keep me tethered to a trajectory... even if it isn't yet clear exactly where that is.
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Paeon to populist media misses blogs
Writing in the National Post, Matt Welch makes impassioned arguments for populist print media against the entrenched dailies staffed by acres of complacent professional journalists. He champions the low-overhead free dailies run by Metro that target strap hangers.
Matt doesn't mention blogs, but the same logic applies... squared. Many blogs -- BoingBoing, Gawker, Slashdot and Tom's Hardware -- have the same populist content, lower costs of production and faster-compounding circulations. Look for more local blogs (Localogs?) as 2003 matures.
Remember, when ecosystems undergo radical change, the smallest organisms survive and adapt fastest and grow to dominate expansive new niches.
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With friends like Matt
"Just like everybody should have at least one friend who owns a truck, everybody should know at least one Matt Welch..." Howard Owens writes.
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College hoops
Went to see Amherst play Bowdoin Saturday in the first round of the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Bowdoin started a 6'6'' freshman from Iowa City, Iowa who looks like a stretched Rick Bruner. The kid played with a nonchalant excellence that could be easily mistaken for arrogance, blocking shots, tossing headfakes, scrambling by fleeter-looking players. But he missed a bunch of easy shots in the first few minutes that probably cost Bowdoin the game. The game was much closer than the final score, 78-67, looks.
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Weather.com's savings x-Sun
"Two years ago... weather.com, the Web site of cable television's Weather Channel, ran on 80 Sun servers. Today, the data center for weather.com is filled with 123 Intel-based servers running Linux — and Sun was sent packing. The savings on hardware were $2.3 million, according to Dan Agronow, vice president for technology at weather.com, who added that maintenance costs were lower, too." Link.
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Scheer blechh...
Welcome to Christopher Scheer. As one of the only incisive, funny and self-deprecating liberal bloggers, Scheer could go into orbit contra Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds. He's already been noticed by CNN.
Scheer joins Prague alumni Amy, Ben, Matt, and Ken. Rumors of Doug on the verge.
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The technical secret behind Google's purchase of Pyra?
Everyone is puzzled by Google's purchase of Blogger.
Google likely was not after either blogging brainpower and technology, since it didn't employ investment-banking SOP and talk to other blogtech players before making the purchase.
Yet Google couldn't have been after Blogger's content. As Dave Winer puts it, "Pyra claims to have over 1 million Blogger users, with 200,000 active users. But Google didn't buy their content, because Pyra doesn't own it, the users do. They didn't buy access to the content because they already had it."
In fact, Google does not "have it." Google doesn't really index Blogger-produced- or-hosted content, at least, very effectively. Want proof? Search Google for Blogger + Google... and you get a bunch of Movable Type sites. Of the leading Blogging tech providers, Blogger was the only one that doesn't handle Google particularly well.
So maybe the explanation for this buyout is mundanely technical: perhaps Google does want to improve Noogle by including more blogs. But Google knows that Pyra, the biggest blog host, doesn't have the resources (or desire?) to hack the minute-by-minutes swarms of freshbots that feed Noogle. Maybe Google wished Blogger put headlines into the title tag so posts would get their fair PR and be Google-user friendly. (Look at Evhead's titleless posts in Google and you'll realize just how annoying Blogger entries are when seen through Google's eyes.)
Was trading a few Google shares for Blogger the fastest way to improve Noogle? (Or to block Microsoft from acquiring Pyra and quietly reducing Blogger's Google-friendliness?)
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Only in England...
"Bindy" Lambton's roller-coaster obituary. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
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Coming up the curve...
Ernie the attorney gets an e-mail about the three stages of blog awareness. (Via Dave Winer.)
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Glogger as Km tool and small news (for Google)
These comments on the Google/blogger post at the fine Blogroots throw up the idea that Google bought Blogger to add to its menu of corporate offerings. After all, selling knowledge management tools to companies for $100,000 a piece is a lot more fun (for most) than selling sites for $29.95. Someone also points out that the Google hasn't yet put out a press-release. While this is a big deal for Bloggers and blogging, is it a big deal for Google? Finally, here's a link to the essay that first imagined Google.
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Hail Hylton...
Tireless Hylton Jolliffe is the superlative blog digester. I just wish he'd tell us what he thinks about it all.
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Advertising takes you places...
UC Irvine scientists "exposed volunteers to a fake print advertisement describing a visit to Disneyland where they would meet Bugs Bunny. Later, 33 percent of these volunteers claimed they knew or remembered the event happening to them. (Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character and has never appeared at Disneyland.)" Link
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'Thou rank, reeling-rip scut'
Want to vent? Go Shakespearean. (Thanks Dora!)
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Google to sell blogads?
What is Google doing with Blogger? Dow Jones says "Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch online newsletter, said one possibility is for Google to post small ads related to the themes of specific Weblogs that use the Blogger software. For example, Google might display travel-related links from advertisers that wanted to reach Web surfers visiting a travel blog that relies on the Blogger software. 'I think Google sees this deal as a great way to grab some content and get their ads out on it,' Sullivan said."
Great. Come on Google, let's rumble.
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More on blogs and the power law
Good power law graphs. (Via Interconnected.)
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Billions of websites
[Five] Eight years ago today, Dave Winer wrote: "Every new website begets more websites. If I have one, I want my friend to have one, so I can point to it. And so they can point to my site. Someday I'll be able to walk a network of friendships, automatically knowing that each of us has mutual friends. It'll be cool." His prophecy was called "Billions of websites." Read the whole thing -- it will make your spine tingle.
[5] comments (6983 views) | link
Instapundit on Blogads: 'highly desirable demographics for next to nothing'
Glenn Reynolds gave a nice plug for Blogads yesterday. "Now that Google has seen the value of tapping into the blogosphere, I think that a lot of other folks will want to, too." Blogads "lets advertisers reach select audiences with highly desirable demographics for next to nothing," writes Glenn.
[4] comments (6736 views) | link
A friend writes about Glogger...
A friend writes:
A couple of thoughts occurred to me on the Google/Pyra deal. I think it's good all around, having been to the Googleplex a couple of times and worked with them on XXX. They're great people, and yes, the food really is that
good.
Firstly, I understand they're in the runup to their IPO. They have a good cash position and are looking to generate interest. Wouldn't that mean more purchases of smaller companies at fire-sale prices are on the way? The really interesting question is, who's around that would make sense for them really?
A while ago I saw something in E&P a couple of weeks ago about their ability - if they wanted to - to turn Google News into a huge aggregator and paid content mediator.
In this way, a Pyra tie-up would give them a leg up on spotting the new "hubs" as you call 'em.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Winer's talking to one of the SOAP players. Maybe Microsoft themselves?
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Userland next on the block?
Just as Blogger was bought by Google, it sounds like proto-blogging software company Userland has a deal cooking with another major player. Or at least that is what Userland owner Dave Winer seems to be hinting when he writes: "I wouldn't be surprised if the other popular blogging tools had similar deals cooking. Not much more to say at this time. Except..."
Also, it is worth noting that Jeff Jarvis is one of the wise people who helped keep Blogger afloat.
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Glogger... and college hoops
Ken Layne mentions that Google, the Internet's most successful company, has bought Pyra, the company that owns Blogger.
Wow.
A Google spokesman says blogging is "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation."
Looks like Dave Winer is going to win his $1000 bet with NYTimes.com's Martin Nisenholtz sooner rather than later. Last April Dave bet that "in a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."
Google serves far more than the 150 million searches a day it admits publicly. And Google already serves far more people seeking New York information than does the New York Times.
Processing more than half all Internet searches, Google already has cornered the demand for information; with Blogger, it has a chance to dominate the supply as well.
Blogging... no... Internet publishing now moves beyond the beta-test.
Update: Cory Doctorow gives a good overview of Blogger history and suggests one future. And the New York Times reports on the deal and recycles the specious "150 million searches a day" number. AGGGG.
On a milder note, I noticed that Ken has been going to see UNR Wolf Pack college basketball games. We've also been enjoying college hoops this winter, watching the Amherst Jeff's (20-3!) win three games. In contrast to Reno, the bleachers hold only 400 and there's no beer... but seats are free. I haven't watched division III college basketball in 20 years and amazed at how swift and muscular the action is. The shot clock and weight-lifting seem have transformed the game.
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Slashdot chews on new elitism theory
Slashdot is having a good free-for-all about power laws and communities. Do all communities (or networks) inevitably over-reward some participants and under-reward others? And, if this is true, do enough benefits accrue from the sorting to overshadow the unfair distribution of rewards? As one Slashdotter puts it: "Friend/foe systems, such as the one here at Slashdot, tend to actually make community better rather than worse." I've chewed on this questionhere before.
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Beware when human meets Internet
Testing e-mail's viral capacity, a ninth grader in Mississipi e-mailed 23 people on January 13 asking them to e-mail their location to her at howfastorfar2003@aol.com and to pass her message along to their friends. By February 5, the girl was getting 1000 e-mails every 29 minutes, one minute faster than she could download them. After Shannon mercy-killed her account, people tracked down her phone number and called to explain they couldn't e-mail. Her total: 160,478 e-mails from 189 countries and 50 states. (WSJ password protected.)
We're still absorbing the Internet's true human scale. The world's most trafficked tourist attraction, the Eiffel Tower, sells 2 tons of tickets a year. But its total traffic since 1889, 204 million people, is probably less than Google gets in a week.
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Dave Winer at Harvard
I drove to Cambridge last night to attend a powpow convened by Dave Winer, the blogging innovator and evangelist who has been invited to agitate (or meditate?) at Harvard for a year.
Dave is as pugnacious in person as he is in pixels. He exhudes relish at his potential role as a blogging Socrates inside the crimson polis along the Charles River. Since blogging topples the walls that sustain entrenched geographic and geneological networks -- and what is Harvard but a factory for networking elites? -- I suggested that Dave may be a "jackhammer inside the Ivory Tower." He responded that a good tower has room for a jackhammer.
Dave ran the meeting like a blog, bouncing around, cutting off wandering threads, even playfully browbeating one participant ("Bob") who apparently regularly over-speaks around Dave. ("You only get to talk two times tonight Bob. Is this going to be one of them?")
I learned more about RSS, and have to look more at the SMBmeta project, which involves creating a small-business-specific xml format.
Only two of the fifty-odd attendees were women. One of them, Donna Wentworth did a heroic job blogging the event. Dan Bricklin has posted a short account and photos of the event, including one I shot. His camera was incredible, making the room seem far brighter than it actually was. Dan says he gets 150 visitors a day to this page from Google for people looking for "home network 802.11b." I suggested he sell blogads; in response, he joked "not unless I lose my job."
Hylton Jolliffe quietly rounds up the different accounts of the event.
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Ken prepares for the worst
Ken Layne's list of things to stockpile for the apocalypse includes: "500 lbs of ice. That should last a few days. 200 fresh oysters, beneath the ice. And a shucking gizmo. Condiments: lemons, Tabasco, horseradish, Tapatio, olive oil, etc.... Manual typewriter, index cards and a wind-up clock. Blogging will be impossible if it gets really bad. So I'll just type my posts and do a time-stamp and pin the cards on the wall ... in descending order."
[3] comments (7387 views) | link
Thin media extreme: Pirillo serves 47 'bustomers'
Publishing ads on nothing but his bare chest, web entrepreneur Chris Pirillo has netted $940 since January 22.
Chris, blogger, TechTV pundit and publisher of tech tips newletter Lockergnome, has sold 47 ads at $20 a piece.
If the formula for postmillennial publishing is low-overhead individually-generated content distributed to millions through the Internet, aka "the medium is me," Chris takes the trend to an extreme.
Always eager to experience "thin media," I Paypaled Chris $20 and bought an ad for Blogads. I also mailed Chris some questions:
> If you've got 10 minutes free, I'd love to ask you a few
> questions.
Feel free to ask more. ;)
It was inspired by several ideas, really. Chiefly, by something I did on the show I do every day for TechTV. I lifted up my overshirt and made reference to a video collection called "Girls Gone Wild." One particular online community (Leoville) was rather upset at the message this might have been sending to young women. So, for my apology, I spelled out their web site on my chest and left it in my webcam for the world to see.
I also did it to prove that I could prove somebody wrong. He used the term "viral marketing" incorrectly, and instead of admonishing him publicly, I thought I'd illustrate my point by creating something that had stronger potential to go "viral." It's always a craps shoot, but the more zany an idea is, the more potential it has for spreading.
Beyond that, I'm just a goofy guy who loves to do goofy things. I've been doing goofy things for years, but this is the first one that had mass appeal. Although, I'm still not sure why.
> In brief: When did you start?
A couple of weeks ago (rentmychest.com was registered on January 22nd). I called up my buddy Jake Jake) and told him to register it and I'd explain it later. I'm nutty like that.
> How many ads have you sold?
I believe 47 at the time of this interview. That's approximately US$940, not including PayPal fees. And yes, I do have a handful of repeat bustomers. One guy used it to freak out a close friend (in an innocent way), another guy is using it to promote his personal Web site, and a very close friend (Jodie Gastel) is using it to create awareness for her services at ScoreBrowniePoints.com. She reported record traffic, being the fourth bustomer, and came back for more.
> How many page views does Rentmychest.com get?
I don't know. ;) How's that for a statistic?! I threw up a counter at the bottom of the page, and anybody should be able to click it to get more data. I guess I don't care; I'm having far too much fun to get too serious about it.
> What is the best / worst advertiser feedback you've gotten?
Best? Jodie. She wanted to be the first bustomer, but she missed her opportunity, and then it didn't matter... until the second and third sale trickled in. I finally convinced her to take the plunge. It paid off.
Worst? I can't think of one. I've had no complaints so far. I'm writing crap on my chest, for chrissake. ;) People pretty much know what they're getting into, click-thrus or not.
> How does your wife feel about them?
She tolerates them, as she tolerates most of my stupid ideas. I don't think she thought it was a "great" idea when I first proposed it, though. "You think people are going to pay for that?!" Yeah, I did. And yeah, they did. Who's laughing now? Anybody who's visited.
> Where are the photos taken?
Right here in my living room, where I have "geek central station" set up.
> With what camera?
It's a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000. It takes decent pictures for the job (640x480). I open my image editor, use TWAIN to capture the still, wash my chest, and move on to the next one.
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[4] comments (19361 views) | link
Berkeley blog
There's a new blog focused on Berkeley. Says the creator: "I am happy to give blog authoring privileges to anyone who lives in Berkeley, and who commits to write about issues, events, and news that are directly related to Berkeley. People add entries as they please about Berkeley stuff, and we end up with a local weblog. Will it be as simple as that? Undoubtedly not, but it seems like a reasonable place to start." The idea was spawned by Peter Merholz.
I've been talking with friends in Amherst about doing similar here, so will be interested to watch the idea closely. When I first mention the idea, people say "but we've got a newspaper." Point out that having your "own" blog would mean you could write about that zoning issue that is driving the neighborhood crazy, or that soccer field mess, or the true price of multi-lingual education... and eyes start to light up. "Oh" becomes "WOW." As blogging and broadband spread and the local news hole continues to erode in print, this is a model to watch and nuture. (Via Gawker.)
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Power laws and the blogospheres
Clay Shirky continues to attract attention with his argument that blogs are a scale-free network; in rough terms this means that a few blogs get most of the traffic and will accelerate away from their peers to become mainstream media. Clay floated this idea on the NowEurope list many months ago and has made it several times recently, most fully here. Here's my take:
Clay's argument that 'the blogosphere is naturally elitist and will soon generate its own strata of mainstream media' contains two generalizations that should be untangled.
a) Yes, Clay is probably right that 5% of the blogs will always account for 50% of blog traffic. But it is wrong to talk about "The" blogosphere. We'll certainly have hundreds of blogospheres, each with its own elite and power law distribution. And we don't need to worry about stasis any time soon. These new spheres will be emerging for a long time. Glenn Reynolds obviously won't be the hub for French bloggers, and BoingBoing won't be the hub for evangelical Christians. New bloggers will invent and serve new spheres.
b) Clay suggests that because mainstream media is elitist (ie governed by the power law), all elitest media is mainstream media. "As we get used to weblogs, they will become mainstream media too, and will take on the trappings of mainstream media," he says.
Sure the blogospheres may each display elitist traffic distrubutions and may not be able to link to everyone. But Clay's equation of blogs and mainstream media elides the many traits -- links, chronology, personality, blogrolls, 95% lower overheads, Google-friendliness, trackbacks -- that make blogs different from (and subversive of) today's dominant media, aka "mainstream media." Lumping the two classes of media together is like declaring, 1.5 million years ago, that "homo erectus shares traits with the ape, so we can safely ignore their differences."
What makes blogs unique? I'll advance the argument that a key difference between blogs and today's media is corporate structure. As media organisms, blogs have shorter life-cycles, smaller metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit new media challenges. Weird, subversive, new things will come to pass.
If you're still reading this post, you might enjoy Albert-László Barabási'sLinked: The New Science of Networks, or at least my review of it.
[4] comments (6305 views) | link
LAX in the flesh
I trudged out through six inches of snow just before lunch to retrieve the mail and got a nice surprise: the prototype for the Los Angeles Examiner, still toasty after its flight from the coast. What a buzz to hold this thing, this bastard spawn of blogs and print.
My favorite line comes in a story about waiting in line to get into trendy LA nightspots. "This embarrassing sidewalk is the Majave Desert and her clipboard is the only canteen of water for miles." The comment from Nick Yulico on this page on the LAExaminer blog turned into the "Angelenos are Pansies" letter to the editor. On the Nuptials page -- my favorite spot in most papers -- we read about the not-so-recent union of Angelenos Emmanuelle Richard and Matt Welch.
I look forward to reading lots more of the gab, grub and grab of LA life as reported by the guys the Economist calls "Messrs. Layne and Welch."
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Name-brand blogs
Noting that Jim Romenesko changed his media blog's name from MediaNews to Romenesko after threats from the MediaNews newspaper group, Jeff Jarvis concludes this is a "smart move." After all, "he's the brand."
With blogs leading the way, maybe we're headed back to the days when businesses are named for their owners. Heinz, Levis, Merrill, Merck... these businesses were built from the blue-print of one individual's integrity and passion.
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The costs of development...
Wearing my Pressflex hat, I talk to publishers every week who think their own couple of sysadmins can whip up a great site. ("Gee, my cousin built a web site in one weekend, how hard can it be?") I check back six or nine months later, and these guys are usually still siteless (and sightless.) For anyone intoxicated by the idea of "cheaply" building their own app rather than using something that has been user-tested, this page paints a sobering picture.
[4] comments (5923 views) | link
eBay among America's biggest used car dealers
"EBay hosted 300,000 used-vehicle sales last year. That's just a sliver of the estimated 43 million used vehicles sold in the U.S. But in a highly fragmented market, eBay's tally makes it among the largest used-car sellers in the country," reports WSJ.com.
eBayers are willing to buy cars that are 1000s of miles away, sight unseen. They trust what they are getting. "Sellers often photograph their vehicles in copious detail because dealers who unload lemons through the site risk having their 'feedback' -- a permanent rating left by buyers -- tarnished by disappointed customers."
No wonder eBay is mopping up in used cars. If you've ever haggled with a used car salesman, the opportunity to give the dude feedback in front of 60 million other buyers is exhilerating.
[3] comments (9740 views) | link
If you can read this>> you can be a journalist
One of the funny things about reading some print journalists try to "get" blogs is just how bad their information is. You wonder whether an article was written three months ago and just stuck in the can or whether the journalists just don't bother to read the blogs they write about.
Take, for example, the Washington Post's latest report on blogging. Opines the scribe: "while blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth."
Hmm. The final paragraph notes that "people are pushing the boundary of blogging formats." For example, "CityBlogs.com is pioneering an attempt at locally oriented blogging in New York City." OK. Click on CityBlogs.com and discover that the site, launched in November 2002, hasn't been updated since December 17, 2002. Why didn't the Post get one of its "paid staff to ferret out and vet" the fact that CityBlogs has been shuttered longer than it was open?
Dave Winer, who was interviewed for the story, has some further thoughts.
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Iran/q
Rick Bruner hears the President say Iran when he means Iraq. Rick looks at the NYTimes' quotation but the mention of Iran has been omitted. What gives, Rick asks?
As I recall, there's some long-standing tradition among journalists of quoting Presidents EXACTLY. No cleaning, no sanding, no smudging. (Is this even codified in the AP style book?) Presidential words, after all, have incredible de facto and de jure power; they are, in some quasi-religious sense, the utterances of the United States itself. So this retouching shouldn't go unremarked.
While visiting Rick's blog, don't miss the BUSH SPAM one slot higher on the page.
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The continuing crisis
Ever dryly hilarious and sloshingly brilliant, Ken Layne explains why a new column in an Australian newspaper is called The Continuing Crisis.
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Slashdot effect updated...
Dave Winer says he gets roughly 5000 visitors when monster-community publishing site Slashdot links to him, and says this is typical of other Manila and Radio sites.
Dave asked why Joel Spolsky, author of Joel on Software, gets 400,000 reads from a Slashdot link.
For comparison, I wrote my buddy Ben Sullivan, who publishes ScienceBlog. He says "For me, the Slashdot effect is spilt in two. Sometime they put a story from Science Blog exclusively inside on their science section. That generates, maybe, 2,000-3,000 reads over several weeks. But a front page posting for all the world to see brings in about 10,000, almost immediately (12-24 hour period)."
So I wrote Joel, noting that other other folks get up to 10,000 page views when Slashdotted. Joel replied: "we get about 30,000 page views on a normal day and about 120,000 page views on a Slashdot day. This includes every page, not just the one that slashdot linked to, and I'm not counting based on referrers because that only gets the first page. ... I think my site is quite a bit stickier than average. (Every day I get a few emails of the form: 'I found your site from a link and spent the whole afternoon reading everything...')."
On his blog, Joel has added further context, noting that a) the number Dave originally quoted was for "hits," which are approximately 400% higher than "page views" and b) the Slashdot links always come on days when he's sent out his newsletter to 16,000 subscribers c) plenty of other bloggers link to him on that day.
For reference, a February 1999 article about the Slashdot effect's impact on traffic at three web sites concluded that Slashdot could drive up to 4000 readers to a popular link. An addendum to that article noted that the original article got 17,000 visits after being Slashdotted itself.
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Study: meditation makes you smile
NYTimes.com: "Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to index a person's typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic.... Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid....By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point."
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New BIG ads coming in NYTimes.com
Stephanie Miles reports in the WSJ, "In April, readers of NYTimes.com, owned by New York Times Co. will start seeing half-page ads running down the right side of the page as they read online articles. The navigational links that typically appear on the far left side of the page will move to the top of the screen, making room for the text of the article to the left of the ad."
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Travers: 'hook people with one another'
Olivier Travers has some good advice for publishers who think their archives are gold: "They still need to create products that are unique to the web in order to trigger better response rates. Database sites such as Hoover's or Imdb Pro can't be done in paper. Community sites, from eBay to ClassMates to Match.com, hook people with one another, and that's another unique value to the Internet. We need to see more of that, as opposed to premium rate archives of articles that aren't that interesting to start with."
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Monday notes
I heard what my son calls a "Zuki" concert yesterday, including a teacher's rendition of this cello piece. You can read a log of the Shuttle's final two hours here. Now what will happen to these three? The Nytimes business section headlines "Shuttle's Effect on Economy May Be Small"... why bother with the article?
[3] comments (6373 views) | link