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Archives: September 2003
Bed in Boston?
Know somebody who has a guest bedroom near Bloggercon and wants to disintermediate a hotel Saturday night? I'll pay $50 or bottle of Oban whiskey for a place to lay my exhausted, blog-riddled head. Write me. (Update: I'm set. Thank you Barbara!)
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Clark ad prime for blogs
Steven Johnson, author of Swarm, has created a punchy campaign ad for Clark that would look great as a blogad. Good size, good emphasis on witty use of words and images. Which campaign will be the first to recognize the explosive and cost-effective potential of advertising on blogs?
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Creativity index
Joe Queenan:"...it is true that residents of the New York area wake up every morning and turn on their radios to find out if the bridges to Manhattan are still standing. This is certainly no treat. But at least they do so knowing that if the bridges are still standing they can go across them and look at the Vermeers. Or the van Goghs. Or the Yankees. In Raleigh, if the bridges are still standing, the only thing you can do is go across them to Durham." The creativity formula he's poking fun at is here.
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Only on a blog...
Josh Marshall publishes an unbroken string of 100+ questions & answers from a White House Press conference this morning. This is the kind of "I publish, you decide" journalism that can only appear on a blog. In juxtaposition to the sound bites published by traditional media, this is a factual banquet. Finally, the message is the message.
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Sandy weekend notes
Our Y-guides campout was derailed, so we drove over the Wrightsville beach Saturday. Inland, rain was pouring down from huge black cloud banks, but the beach was sundrenched. We found a dead Jelly bomb jelly fish and enjoyed bouncing in the surf near Johnnie Mercer's Pier. My son improvised a javelin-style throw and enjoyed tossing the baseball 20 yards. Madamoiselle enjoyed bucking deeper waves. We slept at the Sleep Inn and ate at Elizabeth's Pizza -- one of those family-run strip-mall restaurants plastered with exhuberant framed paintings/photos of Italian tourist attractions, plastic covered menus, everyone having fun, huge fish tanks separating the tables and the ceiling strewn with christmas tree lights. 
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Riptide...
When I lived in London in 1984 -- a strange year of drinking ale with Cockney bond traders and sniffing port and the country air with my posh boss and his wife -- I also developped a strong affection for the music of Robert Palmer, particularly his album Double Fun. I put on that CD a couple of weeks back and was sucked out into the sea of memory.
So when I saw today that Robert Palmer had died of a heart attack, I didn't at first connect. Damn, gone at 54. I'm gonna get out that album, or maybe Riptide, right now.
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Blogs 'will disappear'
Writes the New York Press: blogs "will disappear when some of the more high-profile bloggers—those who came up from nothing with a will to write, not those high-vis journos who slummed in the freeform—find jobs in the mainstream press, where they clearly thirst to be. Their sites will atrophy, and the left-behinders will become bitter, scream 'sellout' and lose interest. The blog is a dead form within two years."
I wonder how writers like Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, Ed Cone, Amy Langfield, Virginia Postrel, Megan McArdle, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Welch and Liz Spiers -- "made" print journalists who also love to blog and have bigger audiences than many print magazine publishers -- fit into the NYPress's projection of "atrophying" blogs?
These bloggers don't seem to be fading, but rather finding new joy (and scoops) in blogging. Speaking as someone who spent seven years in the trenches of journalism, I'd bet there are more journalists yearning for freedom beyond print than bloggers yearning for the corporate harness.
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Contact > content
David Rushkoff: "Content only matters in an interactive space or even the real world, I'd argue, because it gives us an excuse to interact with one another." (Via Scott Knowles.)
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Raucous Corvids
I'm proud to know these guys. Listen.
(By sheer coincidence, Blogads' main server is named magpie, a species in the corvid family.)
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A greedy grab to monatize blogs...
A little greed is a good thing, but this is ridiculous.
Jason Calacanis has announced Weblogsinc, "a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product." The resulting network, Calacanis says, will make easier for business readers to find information. That might happen. Might.
But who is going to write these blogs? "Our goal is to partner with individual webloggers, letting them do what they do best (writing, creating community, researching) while supporting them with what we do best (upgrading the software that drives their Web site, generating revenue, running the business). We split the profits 50/50 with each of our bloggers taking out only hard costs (i.e., sales commissions, credit card fees)."
That's 50% of the profits after hardware costs and sales commissons are paid. So, assuming sales commissions are 30%... for every $10,000 in advertising revenue, a blogger will get let's say... hmm... $2000?
Sounds like Calacanis has basically replicated the cost structure of traditional media, minus the printing presses.
There's no room for blog owners/managers, unless the owner and operator are one and the same. As Calacanis himself has already moralized about the defection from Gawker of blogger Liz Spiers, bloggers who are employed by blogs are easily tempted by other offers.
Why join Calacanis' keritsu when a whole portfolio of best-of-breed services is already alive and constantly evolving. Relying on the blogosphere for network traffic, Movable Type and pMachine for blogging technology and Blogads for ad sales, the same blogger could keep $8000, less some Paypal fees.
This is THIN media; lightweight tools, extreme specialization, rampant collaboration, swarming individuals, ad hoc decision-making... lots of small pieces loosely joined, as Dave Weinberger put it so nicely. (Via Buzzmachine.) Update: some good context from Wired.
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French casualties in WWI
World War I cost France 1,357,800 dead, 4,266,000 wounded (of whom 1.5 million were permanently maimed) and 537,000 made prisoner or missing -- exactly 73% of the 8,410,000 men mobilized, according to William Shirer in The Collapse of the Third Republic. Some context: France had 40 million citizens at the start of the war; six in ten men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were permanently maimed.
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Hurricane notes
We lost power at around 2PM Thursday. No really spectacular wind or rain. Had a laugh-filled dinner by candlelight. Biggest excitement: son peeing with the aid of a headlamp. Power came back up around 2PM Friday.
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Blogger bites advertiser
Publishers often get pushed by advertisers either to run flattering profiles or to kill unflattering exposes. Often enough, publishers succumb to the temptation. (Some publishers have even institutionalized the practice of drafting editorial staff into writing advertorials.)
Journalism professors worried about a blogger's ability to handle the same temptations should take comfort from the case of blogger Sgt. Stryker, who yesterday sold an ad to author Harrry Helms for his book Inside the Shadow Government.
Stryker reacted by poking fun at Helms' ad (or site or book?), calling it "basically poorly written fiction that would be funny if it weren't so passe."
Apologetic to his readers for running the ad, he commented "...never let it be said that I let principle get in the way of making a buck (25, in this case)."
Helms, an author with plenty of books for sale at Amazon, asked for his money back and we obliged. I understand that it would be galling to have your socio-political analysis trashed by someone who you've just paid $25 for publicity. But from a PR perspective, the ad and Stryker's reaction were a home run. Plenty of other advertisers would kill for Helms' 18% clickthru.
Blogs are an unedited space where people curse, brainstorm, rhapsodize and generally shoot off their mouths. With individual personality, ethics and accountability on the line and undiluted by the corporate "we," bloggers seem more likely to bite the hand that feeds them than lick it.
This isn't your grandmother's newspaper. And for the right kind of advertiser, that's the best news in a long time.
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What is the "news business" when news is as common as sand in Arabia?
Journalist Jeff Jarvis: "The line between "news" and "non-news" is hardly drawn with a straight-edge anymore, folks; that's just wishful thinking, it's old-school thinking. Is the New York Times news when Jayson Blair writes it? Nope (a cheap shot, I admit). Are The Star and The Enquirer news even though they're tabloids? More and more, yes. Is the Today show news when it's flacking for Dr. Phil's new diet fllimflam? God, no! Is FoxNews news? Absolutely. Is a weblog news even though it may not be written by a professional and may include opinion? If it's reporting something worthwhile, of course. Is a forum post that reports the scores from last night's Little League game news? To its audience, you bet it is. Is a picture taken at a news event by a witness news? Yup. News -- and the definition of news -- are no longer owned by the newsmen."
Lots of other great ideas in Jeff's rant against traditional publishers who don't get the electrified media.
To add my own two cents: News is now of/by/for the people. Anyone can push words around the world in 0.2 seconds for free, so distribution of information -- the engine of traditional media economics -- is no longer rewarded. Profits will flow only to those who create communities/connections that bust through the noise of infinite free news. Hallelujah!
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Small and fiesty
Glenn Reynolds riffs on the implications of home entrepreneurship.
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The Wild East redux
A long time ago, I wrote an article about a bunch of young Americans in Prague. Details magazine, then edited by the fast-rising James Truman, bought the article and gave it the headline Wild, Wild East.
Now, nearly a dozen years later, a New Yorker editor has gathered a bunch of short stories by people like Arthur Phillips, Josip Novakovich John Beckman, and Charlotte Hobson about life in Eastern Europe and titled it... The Wild East. I thought that title cliched even in 1992. But I guess, like amber, some cliches become so ossified they take on a new brilliance and attraction.
Unfortunately, so far at least, none of the fiction I've read about the decade after the fall of communism come close to the weirdness and wildness of that time. Fiction just can't compare.
Footnotes: #1 many of those young Americans are now bloggers: Matt Welch, Amy Langfield, Ken Layne, Doug Arellanes and Ben Sullivan. Other bloggers I met in the Wild East include Rick Bruner, Nick Denton and Emmanuelle Richard. I guess you could call us the "Wild East Blogger Bunch." Grunt. OK, footnote #2 I've met a couple of people in bars through the years who claimed they moved to Prague after reading my brilliant prose. Was that you? Leave a comment.
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Sunday
Pancakes and sausages with friends, then scrimaging soccer three kids vs one father, then to the botanical garden, where we saw a praying mantis, many blue tailed lizards and monarch caterpillars and chrysali. And we played chess on the giant board.
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Looking back and up
The photographer: "The point is moot, for we already know the identity of the man in the picture. He is you and me."
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Saturday night R&R
Several weiss beers tonight with Todd Melet at Tyler's Taproom. Todd connects newspapers and advertisers, and in his spare time, aims to boot the local mayor out of office for hanging a swastika-festooned American flag behind his desk. (Update: looks like Todd woke up Sunday and started to blog.)
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Housing hogs...
Rounding up "creeping aspirations," CNN reports that "The median size of a newly built home in 1970 was 1,500 square feet... by 2000, it had increased to 2,300 square feet, even though the median family's income hasn't changed much."
An economist attributes this to "expenditure cascade," in which everyone tries to catch up with the Jones. Perhaps the baby boomers, constituting America's consumer center of gravity and now at their earning peaks, also account for this bloating of expectations.
Time to go long wheel chair manufacturers?
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Hyena, lawnmower, eagle, bazooka, alligator, noo...
Here's a sound for every occasion. (Thanks Mom.)
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Buying in to blogs
WashingtonPost.com: "These suit-coat-wearing men and high-heeled women gracefully sipped chardonnay while figuring out how blogs could increase their business revenue."
Not everyone can dance or be hip, and not everyone can blog. For many, it will be more cost-effective to Blogad, underwriting some of the bloggers who've already mastered the form?
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Wired editor: 'look at bloggers'
Wired magazine's editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, explains how he monitors technology news. "I don't look that much to journalists, not directly. I tend to look at bloggers," says Anderson. (Via Paidcontent.org.)
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Milk is white
Doug Arellanes (who led the Czech team that programmed my first newspaper portal site) has a bunch of links to old TV ads from communist Czechoslovakia. As Doug paraphrases Vaclav Havel in another post : you can learn a lot about a person from his aesthetics. And you can learn a lot about a culture from its ads.
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Words to remember
"For some why" (rather than "for some reason") and "just a second" (useful anytime.)
"The boys and the girls don't sit together not because they don't want to but because everyone has a best friend and everybody's best friend has a friend and usually those people are all boys or all girls, so you end up with a table of all girls and a table of all boys."
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Happy birthday Google... and remote computing
Google turns five today, or at least that's what I think their birthday-caked logo suggests.
For those who ever had any doubts, Google.com proves the vast vitality and potent potential of web computing. Why use some silly Encyclopedia-on-a-CD when you can tap into the Google resources: 3.1 billion online documents sorted by 10,000 servers and 200 million linking minds?
Five years ago, Sun and Microsoft spent a lot of time debating the primacy of the network versus the PC. Quietly, without anyone making a big deal of it, it has become clear that the network is winning.
Yep, I'm one of those folks who believe that soon ALL interesting computing will be done by "the Internet" and not by local computers. I live this belief. My "to do" list sits on a server in Budapest. Junk e-mail aimed at my head is deflected by the spam filters at Messagefire's server. My company sits on servers in Austin and caters to clients sitting in Mantes, Manhattan, Paris, Haddington, Vienna, Eu, Oban, Cleveland, Geneva, London, LA, Lisbon... and, if need be, the moon. My phone calls are answered by a computer in ... I don't even know where.
The Internet gives businesses incredible economies of scale AND unprecedented opportunities to create new connections among ideas, people, goods and services. The best is yet to come... and come and come.
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Blogs are the opinion bull's eye
Blogs get more praise for being hives of influence in this article by Joseph Jaffe. (Via MarketingWonk.)
"Blogs have become virtual community centers where connectors construct web-like beacons outwards and reach out to interested parties who in turn perpetuate and strengthen the momentum generating from the organic and ever-evolving message board."
When you target your message, why not aim for the bull's eye?
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In the garden...
Some notes on recent activities:
After tossing the baseball and basketball, we spent the morning weeding/mulching the school's garden. Saw a toad, an egg-laden spider, hundreds of crickets, monarch caterpillars.
I went to a PTA meeting last week. Didn't realize Dads don't do PTA... I was the only male among 30 people in attendance.
I traded in my Road Runner Cable modem, which had been turning off unbiden... the lady at the counter exclaimed "something definitely ain't right here"... turns out her modem had done the same thing and she sees lots of these trade-ins.
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Welch in the CJR
My old comrade Matt Welch blasts alternative weeklies in the Columbia Journalism Review... and goes on to offer a meticulous argument that blogs are the future of journalism. Even for those of us who've read and written these things many times, Matt's rendition is sweet.
Plus there's some great egg-tossing. Standing at the bar during an Altweekly convention in San Fransisco, Matt reports, "I started a discussion about what specific attributes qualified these papers, and the forty-seven-year-old publishing genre that spawned them, to continue meriting the adjective 'alternative.' Alternative to what? To the straight-laced 'objectivity' and pyramid-style writing of daily newspapers? New Journalists and other narrative storytellers crashed those gates long ago. Alternative to society's oppressive intolerance toward deviant behavior? Tell it to the Osbournes, as they watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Something to do with corporate ownership? Not unless 'alternative' no longer applies to Village Voice Media (owned in part by Goldman Sachs) or the New Times chain (which has been involved in some brutal acquisition and liquidation deals). Someone at the table lamely offered up 'a sense of community,' but Fox News could easily clear that particular bar."
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Two keys to growth: stomp and yell
A new Bain study looks at what makes brands grow. As this blog sums up: "Quick, pick the best indicator a brand will grow faster than its category: Brand size? Newness? Leadership within a category? Such is conventional wisdom, but a recent Bain study of 524 brands across 100 categories found none of the above. The study "winners"-defined as any brand that beat its category's growth each year from 1997-2001-invested differentially in just two components of the marketing mix: product innovation and advertising."
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Budget adds to productivity?
Budgeting fails in many big companies, say some Harvard Business School profs. "In some instances, the budget process consumes up to six months and 20 percent of management’s time." (ViaFastCompany's new blog.)
I don't know. Budgeting has always taken what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time for our small company -- gee, we should be out selling or programming... or drinking beer -- but in the end we always learn interesting new things about ourselves and our vision. Interesting, invaluable things we couldn't have learned through "normal" liberal arts brainstorming. We don't get overwrought about holding to the budget -- sh*t happens -- but it's good to try to periodically corral your dreams behind a fence of numbers.
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