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Archives: April 2003
'I do,' say eight eyes
I've been chuckling ever since reading this story about a guy who substituted a gag picture for his engagement photo. But like some goofy New Yorker cartoon, the photo suggests something unparsably poetic (I'm not sure what exactly) about courtship and marriage and shared visions. (Via ObscureStore.)
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Blog election ballistics
Washington Post's media pundit writes: "It seems this morning that bloggers have taken over the world. Or at least the 2004 presidential campaign. Or at least the not-so-invisible primary leading up to the campaign. The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging. Who needs television? Let's just eliminate the middleman." (Via Glenn Reynolds.)
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Back in the saddle...
After a week offline in North Carolina -- Black Mountain and Chapel Hill -- I'm back and plowing through seemingly infinite reams of e-mail. If I owe you an e-mail, I apologize for being slow.
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Google admits modest growth
Google finally upped its published estimation of its daily searches to "more than 200 million," after sticking to "more than 150 million" for more than 18 months. No doubt this revision was compelled by my vicious prodding.
Assuming the original number was accurate and that Google has grown at pace with other web businesses, the real daily search tally is probably more like 300 to 400 million. Why the coyness? (Thanks Steve!)
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London haze
I'm enjoying walking beneath London's emerald sky soaking up the heat and velvet haze.
Monday night, Seyed treated me to a fine plate of gnocchi near his house in west London and snapped my first mobile photo. He's got scores of disruptive twists to explore with Blogshares and I'm glad we're able to contribute to his cashflow. Seyed's idea is radical and, having met him, am confident he's gonna have lots of fun. To my VC friends: drop him a line.
This afternoon, I enjoyed a couple of beers with Phil, who runs the Internet operations for the biggest division of one of the UK local publishing giants; we compared notes about the various dragons breathing down his company's neck. To advertise the fine boat he's bought with friend to rent out on weekends, Phil may soon find himself in the perverse position of buying Google Adwords, since conventional media offers neither the volume, granularity or affordability he needs to reach clients. (Assuming my link alone doesn't give him a page rank of 10.)
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Unmarked quotes, quoting badly and sinful silence
What the Agonist did -- not putting quotation marks and attributions on stuff he posted -- was bad and stupid.
But it doesn't compare with the harm that can come from quoting (or even worse, misquoting) someone who speaks on the condition of anonymity... as the New York Times did this week.
Far worse than either of these, though, is the act of continuously failing to chronicle a regime's blatant brutality in order to preserve access to "the story"... as did CNN and, apparently, every other news service with Baghdad bureaus during Saddam's reign. Why abet a criminal conspiracy? What possible good came from staying to tell benign lies about the Iraqi regime?
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Riedel: 'a conversation again'
Wordsmith, artist and blogadvertiser Witold Riedel explains what he wants from the ads he buys on Google and Blogshares: "We are in a place in time where individuals can use channels of communication formerly only available to large corporations. It is possible for me, as a private person to use very targeted online (and offline) advertising to help you find me. And the great thing about the world wide web is that you can link to me and that I can help you become more visible, by linking to you, by writing about you. Suddenly the world is a bit of a conversation again." (Via Hylton Jolliffe.)
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Czechoslovakia before the statues fell
Doug Arellanes offers images from another fallen regime. I've realized that living in Hungary after the fall of communism nudged me, and many others I met there, to the right. But that's not something to explain in 50 words a few days before taxes are due. (The leftmost image is a menu.)
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Homefront fisticuffs
With hostilities in Iraq winding down and lots of ammunition unused, homefront fisticuffs are rising.
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Drudge uses Google News
Three of 22 of the items on the Drudge Report this morning are, like the article from my previous post, linked through URLs indicating that the articles were found using Google's news aggregator, known by many as Noogle. See the "partner=GOOGLE" at the end of the URL. Drudge may be using the Google link because it saves his readers from having to navigate the New York Times' registration or he may be relying on Google's news gathering algorithms. Either way, he's smart and, as always, on the cutting edge.
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CNN explains silence about Iraqi thuggery
CNN's chief news exec for Iraq explains that there were lots of things CNN didn't dare report, less their Iraqi staff be tortured or killed. "I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us." (Via Mr. Drudge.)
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Kicking DoubleClick
Over at MarketingFix., I had some fun debating the merits of the old-school online ad network DoubleClick.
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Now, to pray for peace
Great to take Baghdad, to see Iraqis celebrate, to see Saddam's statues tumble, to see the Arab street awed and even, though this is trivial in comparison, to see European and American pessimists stumped. Saddam's rout is a miracle wrought from will, courage and civilized force.
We haven't won yet, though. We need to bring peace, democracy and rationality to Iraq to redeem the lives this cost. I hope there are more miracles to come.
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Greenspun gets a blog
E-publishing genius Phil Greenspun finally has a blog. Can't wait 'til he starts posting some of his photos. Gotta go buy Greenspun on Blogshares. Damn, he's not listed yet.
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Scalpads...
Using eBay, this dude auctioned off the back of his head for $7000. "It's better than going to a bank for a business loan," he said. (Via Obscure Store.)
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Bet your mind: predict the future
Flipping through the March 24 issue of the New Yorker, I found the ever-smart James Surowiecki's article about web sites like TradeSports and Newsfutures.com, which allow people to bet on the resolution of current events. He notes that markets do a better job of predicting the future than mechanisms like forecasting and polling. The "Hewlett-Packard has used artificial markets for sales forecats. Essentially, H.-P. employees bought and sold shares depending on what they thought sales in a particular month would be. The number of people participating was small -- never more than twenty-six -- and each market ran for only a week, but in the course of three years the markets outperformed the company's official forecasts seventy-five per cent of the time."
With this in mind, it will be fun to see what Blogshares.com turns up. Lots of people have been trying to figure out how blogs power opinion building, and this market-based approach may make an important addition to the science of knowledge blogging. It's new "pop index" shows which are the most "widely blogs." Expect lots more slicing and dicing of that database.
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War traffic jam VIII
E&P reports: "After seeing a spike in audience the week the Iraq war started (March 19), many news sites saw steep declines in the week ending March 30. USAToday.com was down 17% among users at home and 16% among users at work, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Washingtonpost.com lost 11% of its audience at home and 5% of its audience at work from the previous week. NYTimes.com held on to its users at home, more or less, but slipped 2% among those at work." Meanwhile, Command-Post and Glenn Reynolds are steaming to new highes. In its first week, CP's daily high was 140,000 page views. Last week, the high was 160,000. And it looks like that high will get beaten today by 10 or 20%.
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Now trading ... up... down...
I've started trading on Blogshares. Bought blocks of Ken Layneand Nick Denton, sold some Layne at a profit and bought some of Seyed Razavi's blog. Amazingly addictive stuff. The other blogs I wanted to buy weren't trading yet.
Until I can figure out how to embed this logo permanently, here's the code that allows me to claim shares in my own blog.
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The coming depression: part IV
"The economy is stalling even as the Federal Reserve and the government do everything they can to stimulate growth. In economic cycles since World War II, government spending and low interest rates pulled the United States out of recession. This time, even though the Fed has lowered short-term interest rates 12 times in three years, and the government has swung from a $237 billion surplus in 2000 to a projected deficit of more than $300 billion this year, the medicine appears not to be working." NYTimes.com
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Full speed ahead for the fourth and final year of the Five Year Plan!
Soviet propaganda posters. (Via BoingBoing.) More...
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Michael Kelly R.I.P.
Michael Kelly, the guy who revitalized the Atlantic magazine, died today in a Humvee accident in Iraq. Bad.
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Lock step equities: leading where?
Stocks are trading up and down in relative unison, an effect last seen during during major free-falls like the '87 crash, the '97 Asian crisis and the '98 Russian debt debacle.
The market rallied sharply after each of these tumbles and periods of lock-step trading. Does this mean we're going to rally big once the Iraq war is resolved? Or is the correlation with inflection points rather than bottoms, which might instead mean we are next headed down?
We are, in the big scheme of things, still perched atop a 19 year rally, and may not have factored in swelling deficits, exhausted consumer borrowing power, a coming housing slump, and/or looming baby boomer retirements.
Most importantly, we may have yet realized that the 19 year equity rally may have been powered by nothing more than falling interest rates. The future value of money was rising for the last 19 years. Is it any wonder that stocks, which we buy because they will generate future profits, were rising in value too? As the Fed's ability to lower rates comes to an end, that trend is, by physical necessity, over.
I guess another possibility is that we are inflecting out of a rise into a plateau, the kind of bump and grind that we saw from 1965 to 1984.
See the Dow chart or click more for correlation chart.
More...
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Face in the dust
"The blast, when it came, was met with rousing cheers. The horse and its rider were sent hurtling off the pedestal, crashing to the base." This tale of the felling of a Saddam statue recalls October '56, when Hungarians ripped down a giant Stalin statue.
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War traffic jam VII
Josh Marshall wracked up 1.4 million page views in March. Indricotheriums beware, the grass is being eating from beneath your toes. (Via Mr. Jolliffe.)
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Stoop to graze... or die
From this month's National Geographic: "Bulk benefited Indricotherium, the largest land mammal ever (weighing the equivalent of several modern elephants.) Its size let it browse tall trees and discouraged enemies. But size also brought its demise: When climate change turned this giant's forest environment grassy, it couldn't stoop to graze and became extinct."
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War traffic jam VI
Andrew Sullivan writes: "March was another record traffic month: 1.88 million visits to the site from almost half a million separate people. 2.5 million page views. But my favorite piece of data is from Alexa.com. They rank websites, and like most such rankings, they're fallible, so don't put too much weight on this little piece of information. But according to Alexa, this site is now neck and neck, in traffic terms, with the Nation. In fact, the very latest data show this site just ahead of the Nation: we were ranked 6,116 Monday; they were ranked 8,728. No, I'm not putting out a full-fledged magazine, but the more you think about that simple statistic, the more remarkable it is. This site didn't exist three years ago; the Nation has been around for a century. This site, thanks to you, is comfortably in the black with no debt. The Nation has bled money for decades, as most such magazines do. Moreover, compare the stats for last month with the same month a year ago: we had 805,000 visits in March 2002 and 1,880,000 in March 2003."
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Drudge dredges dollars
Business 2.0 figures out that proto-blogger Matt Drudge is getting rich. Drudge has the highest ROI in online media, strike that, any media, strike that, any business other that's legal. (Via Hylton Jolliffe and Nick Denton.)
The genius of Drudge's model is very, very, old news, but Business 2.0's math is good.
Unfortunately, big media won't be able to copy Drudge's model. The DNA just isn't right. As I wrote previously, "as commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small 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 the new environment."
“We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices,” Drudge said in his 1998 speech to an assembly of sneering National Press Club members. As usual, Drudge was first with the story.
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In Reno, unwrapped in wires
Ken Layne fights the digital devil and wins. He celebrates in the kitchen.
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Chop suey
Jonathan Rauch writes: "Americans of Asian descent face racial discrimination when they apply to almost any selective university in the country. So do most whites. Asians and whites who wish to avoid being penalized for their color can apply to public universities in a handful of states that have banned or curtailed overt racial preferences. (The states are California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Washington.) Or they can choose a nonselective university. Or they can skip college. Or they can go abroad. Or else—tough."
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Scoring the war
Josh Marshall worries we will win the war but lose the peace.
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p2p interviews...
I missed this excellent series of folks-at-Times-Square interviews by my friends Amy Langfield and Jim Lowney.
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French clarification
Some good evidence that "France" isn't rooting for Saddam, despite claims to the contrary. I put France in quotation marks because, in my experience, "France" doesn't really exist, except as a blob on a map and a cloud of concepts... and therefore couldn't be antagonistic towards US interests anyway.
In my experience, most French people love both the idea of America (open, pragmatic and flexible) and Americans (individualistic, idealistic and ambitious.)
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War traffic jam V: NYTimes.com has new single-day high
NYTimes.com did 30.7 million page views on Monday, March 24, a new record for the site, according to Steve Outing's post. The site did 29.2 million page views on September 13, 2001. The site, as I recall, averages around 10 million page views a day. Interesting to note that many blogs saw traffic rise 5 to 10-fold after the war started.
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MLB.com
The WSJ reports: "The Web site of Major League Baseball saw record traffic on Opening Day, generating 35,000 subscriptions to its multimedia products. MLB.com said it had over 10 million visitors on Monday, the first day with a full slate of games in the 2003 season. Opening Day last year brought two million visitors to the three-year-old site, the lead venture of MLB Advanced Media, which is owned jointly by all 30 Major League Baseball teams. The site's previous record was 3.6 million visitors, for the last day of online balloting for the 2002 All-Star Game."
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Gawker is a person...
This profile of Gawker does an excellent job of highlighting what makes blogs so powerful -- personality -- and so tough for corporate media to match.
A magazine can spend years and countless feedback sessions trying to cultivate a personality. People get a personality at around 3 months of age without any extra effort.
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Salon slamming
I enjoyed trading views about Salon with Robert Loch after this Marketing Fix post. My favorite riposte: "Give me profitability over premium-priced CPMs any day." (What fun is writing if you can't giggle at your own stuff?)
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