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Archives: March 2003
Great Budapest photo
Hungary always has trouble portraying itself to foreigners. Tourist brochures and posters offer kitsch photos of Hungarian cowboys, algaic hot baths or Disneyesque turrets. The images rarely capture the Hungary's incomparable blend of old and new, bravery and cowardice, east and west, hot and cold, idealism and cynicism, wine and coffee, innocence and sin, river and dirt. The place literally straddles a fault line. The top photo on this page is one of the first images I've seen in a long time that makes me long for Budapest. (Via Emmanuelle.)
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Emmanuelle rerolls her nav bar
Emmanuelle Richard has updated her blogroll. I love these categorized blogrolls and keep meaning to do more roll slicing and dicing in my own nav bar.
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Dam big
I invested $29 in a fishing license yesterday and we went fishing at the foot of the falls at Puffers' pond. No fish for us. But at one point, I sensed a big chocolate-colored dog at my feet and looked down and discovered a sleek fat beaver. He looked up at me, turned and waddled casually up the stream towards my son, then slipped into the water and surfed down the rapids out of sight.
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Our town's police blotter
The Amherst Bulletin reports:
Suspicious Activity Saturday 1:46 a.m. Police received a report of possible road rage when people on North Pleasant Street got out from their vehicle and were seen wielding a tire iron. Police said the people were just using the iron to repair a tire that had been damaged after going over a pothole.
Noise Complaints Sunday 12:41 a.m. A loud part on Phillips Street was not excessively noisy. 6:01 p.m. Yelling was heard in the area of The Boulders. It was just a man and woman whose relationshp was breaking up.
Suspicious Activity Sunday 11:18 p.m. Police spoke to a man sitting in a truck parked outside the Dunkin' Donuts on College Street for several hours. The man checked out OK after he told police that he was just enjoying his new vehicle and lost track of time.
Suspicious Activity Wednesday 5:58 p.m. A man with long hair and a goatee knocking on the door of a Station Road home was just soliciting for the Sierra Club and was gone when police got there.
Citizen Assistance Wednesday 5:58 p.m. Teawaddle Lane residents told police that they lost their groceries somewhere between the supermarket and their home.
These make a lite reflection of the reports Ken Layne offers from Sparks.
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War traffic jam IV
Matt Welch, who coined the term warblog in 2001, has seen Google referals for the term jump from 27 in February to 942 in March.
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Kink in the pipeline
Annoyed by eBay and Paypal's increasingly restrictive policies, a group of kink vendo are trying to redirect their businesses to a new auctioneer. Network theory suggests that specialist hubs might be able to thrive and innovate when a network monopolist ignores their interests. See also this article by Christopher Null.
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Bloghart
Former US senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart has a blog.
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Vienna blogtalk!
I'm excited to be invited to present a paper at the Vienna Blogtalk May 23-24. Thank you to Ben and Greg for critiquing my draft proposal.
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Localog: East Bay blog
Peter Merholz, my favorite info architect, has launched a multi-author blog focused on East Bay. He says "I believe that there's a shining future in regional weblogs. They can be an amazing community resource. Particularly for communities too small to warrant a daily newspaper, but too large to be satisfied by a weekly 4-page newsletter." Damn, I've got to get my Amherst blog going. (Via Corante.)
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The karass lives...
Steven Johnson writes: "in his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, 'a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing.' A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a 'false karass,' a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is 'meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.' ... When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID. For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software..."
Actually, although I thought he'd perfectly established the trajectory for an article about blogging, Johnson goes on to write about a piece of software the maps social interaction.
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Drip, drip, drip
Even a poll about how often geeks shower turns to Iraq.
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War traffic jam III
Blogcritics stayed above 20,000 visits yesterday, with many people linking to this round-up of Book-Film-TV-Video recommendations. Meanwhile, www.Command-Post.org's traffic grew another 10%.
To recap why this is so impressive, Command-Post did as many page views on its third day online as Fark, a communal blog aggregating bizarre headlines, did in 1999. Day five matched Fark's 2000. (The future? Fark did 30 million page views in 2001 and is on track to do 250 million in 2003.)
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Reynolds snarks on BBC snobs
Ever the shrewd polemicist, Glenn Reynolds tars with a broad and colorful brush the BCC's scorn for America's ambition to oust Saddam. My favorite riposte today: "A common thread among anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism is the fear of being outdone by people willing to work harder. It's not surprising that such a fear exists among a disproportionate number of those who take state-supported jobs."
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CBS's disappearing E-Bomb
"The U.S. Air Force has hit Iraqi TV with an experimental electronmagetic pulse device called the 'E-Bomb' in an attempt to knock it off the air and shut down Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine, CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports. The highly classified bomb creates a brief pulse of microwaves powerful enough to fry computers, blind radar, silence radios, trigger crippling power outages and disable the electronic ignitions in vehicles and aircraft." Later, all references to the E-Bomb disappeared from the story. Has the military embedded a censor in CBS's editing booth? (BoingBoing reports.)
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Loan sharks circle homes
Home equity loans are the crack cocaine of the American economy -- fun while they last but then a real disaster. Banks like Wells Fargo are pushing Americans to "unleash the spending power locked up in your home!" and arguing that the practice isn't risky because banks generally lend no more than 75% of the home's value. Well, sure, the practice is not as risky for the bank that has the home as security, but for a family that has to sell or give up its home if the economy softens, the practice is potentially ruinous.
How many remember that half of America's mortgages were in default in the depths of the Great Depression.
Proof we should worry: 10% of spam is pushing home refinancings. Yes, folks, step right up... pulling cash out of your home to buy a new car is about as wise as paying to "increase your bust size 20%!!!" and "FREE LUNCHES FOR ALL!"
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Jarvis: competition makes blogs inevitable in big media
Jeff Jarvis, one of the enlightened big media execs who blogs and has succeeded in fostering blogs within his company, notes that Time has now joined CNN from axing a reporter's blog. Jeff runs through all the pros and cons of publisher-funded blogs and concludes, "I predict competition will open this up. If Newsweek blogs, Time will. If FoxNews blogs, CNN will. Give it time."
Jeff rebuts publisher concerns that j-bloggers will hurt their brand's credibility. But he doesn't address what I've assumed that the core publisher fear: that the j-blogger will establish a big audience of his/her own and hive off into nanopublishing.
Although publishers pay the bills for now, blogs dissolve the fundemental formula of publishing economics, the imbalance of power that allows a publisher to remind an uppity journalist: "you need our distribution more than we need your copy."
But perhaps the moguls don't see this as a threat, but just failed dotcom fantasy?
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The grass is greener on this side of the calendar
Winter ended first thing Saturday when a six year old boy awoke and shouted: "the whole front yard is full of grass!"
He's been singing "the blues" recently, having been hooked by something mournful on the car radio. Inspired, he now croons, "Ohh, baby, I just want to call you on the telephone." We've bought "Whole Lotta Blues," a compilation CD, and now dress each morning to John Mayall and Eric Clapton jamming "Steppin' Out."
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War traffic jam II
Glenn Reyolds says he got 600 Instapuntit-related e-mails yesterday. Blogcritics' traffic was up 10-fold yesterday, winning 24,000 visits.
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War traffic jam
Reading up-to-the-minute blogs and news sites, the Layne family subscribes to the local paper "for the coupons and the (limited) local news, and the whole front section is about as worthless as putting on a condom after you got laid. If I wanted to read a bunch of L.A. Times articles from Friday, I would've done it Thursday night."
The intensity of interest in Internet based news is clear in our traffic logs: a) we didn't have the normal weekend dip and b) visits doubled yesterday morning as people returned to their broadband offices. (I bet newstand sales are up no more than 20%.) To see a traffic graph for one of our servers click
More...
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Perkolation: Tony apologizes
Tony Perkins has apologized here for his reaction to my roasting of his new group business blog Always On.
Tony adds: "i want to be a part of [blogging], becuuse frankly it is the most fun i have ever had in my professional life."
Apology accepted Tony. My critique of your strategy stands but I hope you will continue to improve. Every drum beat for blogging is helpful.
Joi Ito, pundit VC, suggests that its "better to try to learn how to blog before evangelizing." Not wanting to use Always On to pursue a personal debate, you've been restricted to using my comments section and Elizabeth Spiers'. Take Joi's advice and create your own blog. We'll have some fun.
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Google gags on pacifist advertisement
Google seems to be having trouble scaling its fabled advertising technology in war time. (Via Soundbitten.)
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New group war blog traffic rockets
Just four days after launch, group war news blog Command Post is on its way to 40,000 visits today.
Nearly 70 bloggers contribute breaking war news and links to the "warblog collective."
Web traffic is usually 50-90% lower on weekends -- most people surf from the office -- so it will be interesting to see what kind of traffic the site gets Monday.
To put the site's explosive traffic in perspective, the site's third day (yesterday) saw nearly half as much traffic as super blog Instapundit, which had 80,000 visits yesterday.
Update Monday 7.30AM: More than 60 bloggers posted roughly 300 links to breaking war news Sunday on Command Post. The site had 55,000 visits and 72,000 page views.
The event-tied collective news log is a simple mutation of the communal posting format pioneered by sites like Slashdot, Fark, Metafilter and Kuro5hin. Will each important future event have its own collective log?
Is this the fastest grass-roots media launch in history? Fark had 50,000 page views in 1999, 100,000 in 2000, 30,000,000 in 2001 and is now doing 19 million a month. Wonder what Command Post's traffic will look like a month from now?
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Saddam's shields
Baghdad taxi driver to self-styled human shield:"Really, how much did Saddam pay you to come?"
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Colleagues display 'Shock & Awe'
Ben Sullivan is a keen observer of office sociology. He e-mails: "Have you noticed, the nomenclature of Gulf War 2 is starting to emerge. Where GW1 had 'Mother of all,' and 'sorties,' in GW2 'Shock and awe,' and 'Coalition of the Willing' are early favorites. As in, 'I'm putting together a Coalition of the Willing for lunch today' or 'Mike's Powerpoint presentation left us in Shock & Awe.'"
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Live from the Mellow Mushroom
Equipped with big screen CNN, laptop and Wifi, Glenn Reyonds indulges in some barstool punditry.
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Growth 'nice... but too moderate'
Andrew Odlyzko: "Back in 1850, spending on telecommunications (primarily the postal service, with a pinch of the electric telegraph thrown in) in the U. S. was about 0.2 percent of the gross domestic product. By 2000, that had grown to perhaps 4 percent (including the traditional voice telephony, Internet, cellular, and parts of the postal system). Thus over the last 150 years, telecom spending has been growing about 2 percent per year faster than the economy as a whole. That is a nice growth rate, but it is too moderate for the New Economy expectations."
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No simple peace of mind...
And anti-war friend in London reads his Rabbi's earnest plea for peace and e-mails that it "raised in me the frequent suspicion I... and almost everybody else I like and spend my life with, are taking a sort of humanitarian free ride – playing the folk songs and feeling moved at the modern art exhibitions, and secretly glad that the Donald Rumsfelds out there are willing (eager?) to take the responsibility on themselves and kill whoever needs to be killed for our safety and everyday luxuries."
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eBay coasting on its monopoly?
Jeff Chan: "Unlike Amazon, eBay is not an innovative company. Amazon has constantly improved the shopping experience by introducing useful features like collaborative filtering, personalization, book browsing, and web services. eBay, on the other hand, appears to be coasting on its monopoly position, and not too smoothly either. The reputation system is not robust. There is no scaling of ratings by dollar amount of transactions nor any use of network flow algorithms, or even a two-level system that Amazon uses to rate reviews."
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The right way to Iraq
Rick Bruner offers a cogent summation of the reasons Bush is right on Iraq.
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Instapundit: still growing 15% a month
A few months ago, folks worried that Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit blog had peaked. They shrugged off suggestions that the dip in traffic might be due to the holiday funk most sites experience.
Yesterday, Reynolds had 130,000 visitors, nearly triple what he was averaging in December. He's on track to double December's visitor count.
The stampede of visitors is obviously fueled by the pending war with Iraq. But will peace (next week or next month we hope) erode Instapundit's traffic?
My bet is no. Although Instapundit has been covered in dozens of general interest print and online articles, most people outside the blogosphere still haven't heard of him. (None of my local friends remember hearing about the Knoxville blogging avatar, even though I mention him once a week.)
There's lots of room to grow, both for Reynolds and other bloggers. I remember talking to some honcho at CNN.com in 1998, who explained that CNN.com traffic always hit new highs during big news events and then held that new level until more news came along to boost the site further. Other successful online publishers report the same ratchet effect.
To see this from another angle, Reynolds' traffic seemed huge when he did 640,000 page views last June. Now, Instapundit is on track to do that number on a good day sometime this year.
This post from September 2002 offers a theory about some of the unique mechanics, beyond sharp thinking and swift writing, of blog traffic growth.
Living by the "own the niche and link like a banshee" rule, a slew of blogs -- ranging from BoingBoing to Obscure Store to ScienceBlog to Gawker to Blogcritics -- are riding the same sharp steady growth curve.
And, unlike traditional media like NYtimes.com and CNN.com and ersatz blogs like Always On, they are doing it part-time and/or with almost no overhead.
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Always On... the defensive
In reply to my critique of his business plan, former magazine editor and new blog entrepreneur Tony Perkins lashes back: "AO now has over 10,000 registered members, and we have only been up for a little more than a month."
"You didn't like my interview with sony's idei? well, over 40,000 people did, and so did dozens of media outlets and blog sites around the world."
"you think nick denton's opinion counts? well, it's nice that you put your faith in cowards. i used to hang out with that guy when he was a nobody, he then called me 'unimpressive' years later on his blog, then refuses to respond to my emails."
(Yep, I do think Denton's opinion counts. He's one of the smartest people I know.)
Perkins continued: "i billed over $65,000 in my first month, against less than half of that much in expenses, so please don't lose any sleep worrying about my business plan."
"finally, if you don't like AO v.5 (there IS a reason we call it that), wait for v.75 to be out soon, and brace yourself for v1.0 due this summer before you get too bitchy."
Did my critique strike a nerve? Blogging offers a wonderful arena for testing your business idea against 100s or 1000s of other astute (and/or passionate) minds. I get the impression that Tony, apparently better at boasting and bashing than listening and learning, isn't yet fully acclimated to blogdom's give and take.
Tony, if you can take a break from interviewing some prospective advertiser, I've got one quick question: why wait to v1.0 to revise your allegiance to pompous and vapid headlines and untimely posts? You can disagree with everything else I've said, but please don't tell me you are proud of these things.
Check out this flatulence at the top of today's page: "Michael Dell's 21st Century Vision: AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins asked Michael Dell to tell us about Dell's past, future, and present, and how he thinks technology will transform the world in the next ten years." Posted last Wednesday, the article has been read 2507 times.
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Puma puts its foot in Gawker's mouth...
Gawker has been running photos of a mock Puma shoe ad that is sexually provacative.
Now Puma has sent Gawker a cease and desist letter. Elsewhere, Puma reps are arguing that a blog is "not a media outlet" and so not protected by the First Amendment. (Regardless of whether blogs are media, I'm sad to hear that someone from Puma thinks only the media that has a right to free speach.)
Gawker is sticking to its story.
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Old ads guaranteed to give joy
James Lileks writes, "The newspaper where I work has one copy of every paper it’s published. One copy. It’s on microfilm, and it’s a fragile medium; half of the rolls are badly scratched, and the older ones are brittle. Most people consult them for the stories, but that’s only half the joy. The real news of the day, as it pertains to the lives of the people who bought the papers, were the ads. When I’m looking at the microfilm and I see an ad I like, I hit PRINT. These are some of the old curious ads, rescued from the dark coils." (Via the inimitable BoingBoing.)
So on his site, Lileks has posted ads for sanitary cigars, wombat coats, the New All-Electric Freshman Equiphase radio, overalls for "short and fat" farmers, fresh cigarettes, the Whoopee Cap, Norge Rollator Refrigeration, Women's Nonrationed Winter Boots... the list goes on and on and on.
"The real news of the day, as it pertains to the lives of the people who bought the papers, were the ads." That's a beautiful and almost-always-overlooked thought. Ads tell a vital story, narrating and nurturing our material life.
These vacuous banners and buttons we spend our todays avoiding don't tell a story, they don't engage. And they won't last.
If you are buying Blogads, please feel free to upload an image, but please don't forget to use some words too. Tell a story. Have some fun. And we'll keep your ad for Lileks' granddaughter to chuckle over.
(Speaking of telling stories with ads, check out the ad on Blogcritics.org for Half Mast, which is teasing readers with successive text snippets from the novel.)
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Welch on French fries: 'act with the utmost possible nobility'
Matt Welch pours some salt and vinegar on attempts to take the "French" out of our fries.
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Old news on today's front page
You may have noted the rash of stories about a peanut allergy cure. The Google News service shows 76 news items from publications ranging from the New York Times, Business Week to the PakTribune.
Depending on who you read, the big news is that a) a small company called Tanox has developped a cure for the sometimes deadly problem and/or b) that cure is being blocked by legal wrangling with Genentech and Novartis.
The eruption of stories offer an interesting case study in the manufacture of "news."
In fact, all this information has been floating around since October, but has made headlines now because Tanox held a news conference this week and is publishing the results of the clinical trials completed last fall.
Hell, I covered it on my other blog in November and tried to get a couple of news organizations excited about the story. No luck. I looked for other bloggers who are interested in the subject and also ran dry.
As a former (and reformed) editor, I can testify to the fact that most editorial "news judgement" is not about judging what will important or interesting to the public, but about covering what other outlets are covering or will soon cover.
Had there been enough bloggers interested in peanut allergies (and had they known about each other) the "news" that is making front pages today would have been widely publicized four months ago.
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'Always On Network' is all ways old
Tony Perkins, former editor of fat and failed Silicon Valley magazine Red Herring, got some nice ink recently for his new online publication, the Always On Network.
Perkins was featured in a Fortune last month as "a bellwether for technology journalism."
And in an AP story ("one of the most clueless articles in a while," said Nick Denton) that was picked up by CNN, Perkins was offered up as an avatar of a corporate blogging revolution.
Blogging has proven the vitality of participatory journalism, said Perkins. "Now there are people like me coming along and trying to figure out how to package it," Perkins said. "It's time to take it to the next level."
Funnily enough, Perkins "next level" looks a lot like the "last level"... a curious recursion to the ancien regime.
First, while blogs are wonderfully transparent and easy to parse, the AO Network is damn confusing. The headlines are overblown... in font and pretense. The section categories are overbaked. (And there's something about dumping all your personal details into Salesforce where advertisers can access it.)
Yes, Perkins has made a valiant stab at "hubness"... he's tapped all his Silicon Valley connections and tried to pull them into the site. But this thing is organic as vinyl siding.
Today's Always On top post has this catchy headline in 30 point type: "Sony's Idei Part Three" and this vacuous subhead "In a rare and incredibly candid interview, Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation, tells AlwaysOn what he really thinks. Here is Part 3 of this three-part series."
But that's not the worst: the Interview was conducted in January at Davos, Switzerland. So nothing new has happened since then? This is blogging? No, this is publishing at its worst: big names, expensive places, inflated ideas... old news.
If the copy is old, the business plan is mummified. Sure, Perkins brags that he spent only $150 on a pMachine license, but he spent another $50,000 on development. He's got 4.5 people on staff.
He's got FAT advertisers -- Accenture, KPMG, technology-oriented law firm Gray Cary, and the Silicon Valley Bank -- old economy behemoths aping nu-economy mores. Selling premium sponsorships to those folks takes wining and dining (or old friendships), which is not a scalable business.
Great to see Perkins headed in our direction, but he's built an (relatively) expensive and rigid infrastructure and business model before he's built an audience. He's not in a good position to duck and dive, tweak and twirl. It's gonna be tough to keep the network "always on."
Lesson for thin media infopreneurs: the key to a big ROI is keeping the "I" denominator small.
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Amherst bloggers get boost...
Jeff Jarvis has officially brought blogging to Western Mass. Jeff brings a lot of personality to his own blog and I'm fascinated to see whether institutional blogs like these can sustain an authentic tone.
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Latest on blocked peanut allergy cure
No progress on the lawsuit that has stalled a peanut allergy cure.
As I noted in November, watching doctors (as in, "first, do no harm") stall cures with lawsuits is galling.
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Corporate waist
Warren Buffett: "If you buy a fraction of a plane, I'll personally see that you get a three-pack of briefs from Fruit of the Loom." (Link.)
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Citysearch offers PPC beside search results...
Looking to siphon off YellowPages revenues, local search portal CitySearch will soon add pay-per-click ads to local searches. The ads will be sold by 100 on-the-street sales representatives, a telephone sales force of 30 and a web form.
I've never used CitySearch... do they have any credibility? Would seem to me that sites with exciting brands and personal affinity -- either national like Google or local like LAexaminer or Gawker -- would do much better.
And won't the local plumber hire a high school kid to spend all night clicking on his rival's ad?
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Saturday rambles
We went for a walk yesterday in the woods at the notch. Even though the snow is still two feet deep, the sun and temperate breeze convinced us that spring is near. We listened to the creek gurgling beneath the ice. Breezes knocked puffs of snow off pine bows and down our necks.
Last night, we watched Amherst trounce Southern Vermont 84-60, to advance to the NCAA division III round of 16.
The comments section for this Matt Welch post has an interesting round-up of thumb-waving (up or down) on the Iraq war.
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Anaconda, Omaha rules...
I haven't played poker in 15 years and got to sub in on a local game last night. I'd forgotten how much fun it is. I was down to just a few chips and then won three hands in a row, coming out a chip or two ahead. Flushes are good, right? Several of the guys there also read this blog... guys, say hello to 600 million people!
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The right way to juice bloggers
Jeff Jarvis, populist and publisher, considers the recent news that Dr. Pepper has concocted some murky scheme to incent bloggers to create buzz for its weird new milk drink. Jarvis offers this advice: buy blogads. "You won't find a cheaper CPM anywhere! And just the act of buying a real ad on a weblog will get people to talking about your product (if you're first on the block to try this trick)." Merci Jeff!
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French strike blog
Here's a cool blog designed by blogger (and Blogads seller) Emmanuelle Richard to help 50 French freelancers strike against Radio France. Matt Welch offers some commentary in English.
A blog seems like a strong fit for strikers since they've got numerous personal tales, a history of grievances and evolving negotiations.
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Joel does NYC forum
Having studied the forums he runs for his own CMS software, Joel Spolsky has just started a forum focused on on New York. It be interesting to watch this grow, since Joel has a passionate readership and forum usership.
And in his latest "JoelonSoftware," Joel shares all sorts of interesting theories about what makes forums work.
Talking about why his forums are so simplistic, Joel writes: "In the early days of the Joel on Software forum, achieving a critical mass to get the conversation off the ground was important to prevent the empty restaurant phenomenon (nobody goes into an empty restaurant, they'll always go into the full one next door even if it's totally rubbish.) Thus a design goal was to eliminate impediments to posting. That's why there's no registration and there are literally no features, so there's nothing to learn."
He adds, that registration, "so easy to implement and thus so tempting to programmers, is the best way to kill dead any young forum. Implement this feature and you may never get to critical mass. Philip Greenspun's LUSENET has this feature and you can watch it sapping the life out of young discussion groups."
Great stuff.
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Indigestion...
Oh, gee, this is gonna be fun. Doctor Pepper is introducing a new milk-based soft drink via some secret bloggers.
"Dr Pepper hopes to develop a 'blogging network' to hype Raging Cow and 'be part of the ‘in the know’ crowd," says its brand-marketing honcho Andrew Springate. Those spreading the news via their blogs won’t disclose their flackitude, says Springate, because officially they’re not paid Dr Pepper employees; they only get promo items like hats and T shirts. “We’re independent and can advertise Raging Cow the way we want,” says Nicole, 18, a Louisiana high-school senior with a popular blog.Wouldn't it be simpler and more effective to buy some killer Blogads? I guess Andrew Springate wouldn't have a job, though. (Via Instapundit.)
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Sparks from the dark side
Ken Layne revels in the police blotter for Sparks, Nevada, "done in a dark narrative style." Here in Amherst, things are lighter. Every week we've got at least one or two loud, unexplained noises, rabid raccoons, people who "check out OK," dogs that bark but are gone by the time the public defenders arrive. I'll find a few and post 'em.
'
OK... I'm back. Some fender benders, a loud band, a stolen cell phone... ahh, here we go...
"A person or animal was reported stuck in the ice on Cranberry Pond Feb.20 at 2.56 P.M. Police wehn to the pond and found the object to be a hay bail." And, "A River Road resident was advised not to snowblow snow into the road." And, under the "Suspicious Activity" heading, "Sidewalks were reported unshoveled on Amity Street. Police said the sidewalks appeared to be clear of snow." And here's one of our "Disturbances:" "A West Street woman requested assistance in removed (sic) someone from the home with whom she was arguing. She later called back to say the problem had been settled."
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