Friendly immunization...

Let's do a little cosmetic surgery on this idea.

Reuven Cohen of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his colleagues note that random immunization programs require that a large fraction of the population, typically 80 to 90 percent, be protected in order to stop the spread of disease. Alternatively, if enough information about the network and its connections is known, targeted immunization of the most highly connected individuals--so-called super-spreaders, who have the potential to infect a high number of people--can be effective. Unfortunately, such information is difficult to acquire. The researchers instead propose a tactic known as acquaintance immunization. In it, a percentage of the population is selected at random and asked to identify a friend. Those friends, in turn, are vaccinated. According to the team's calculations, because super-spreaders know so many people, there is a high probability that they will be named at least once. As a result, immunization of a much smaller fraction of the population can successfully halt disease transmission.

Now I'm just going to change a few words.

Reuven Cohen of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his colleagues note that random advertising requires that a large fraction of the population, typically 80 to 90 percent, be contacted in order to spread an idea. Alternatively, if enough information about the network and its connections is known, targeted advertising to the most highly connected individuals--so-called super-spreaders, who have the potential to infect a high number of people--can be effective. Unfortunately, such information is difficult to acquire. The researchers instead propose a tactic known as acquaintance advertising. In it, a percentage of the population is selected at random and asked to identify a friend. Those friends, in turn, are targetted for advertising. According to the team's calculations, because super-spreaders know so many people, there is a high probability that they will be named at least once. As a result, advertising to a much smaller fraction of the population can successfully spread ideas.

(Those of you who read this blog regularly -- skip the next sentence.) Yet more evidence that, since we catch so many ideas/products from our peers, blogs are brilliant hubs to advertise on, right?

(Quote taken an article on Scientific American with hat tip to Biz Stone.)

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Howard Dean steered by 'the blog people'

Until I read Ed Cone's post, I had skipped past the lead quote in Wired magazine's story about Dean and the Internet, assuming it was from some Internet-soaked sod like me. But it was Howard Dean himself who said, "If I give a speech and the blog people don't like it, next time I change the speech." Interesting.

I enjoy Dean's populism and love what Dean's doing with the Internet, but think many of the issues he excites Democratic activists with -- anti-war drumming, re-regulating of telecoms, stifling corporate options, raising trade barriers -- may alienate the middle of the political bell curve. If so, Dean risks being tagged as Dukakis with rabies.

Update: Here's the cover of today's USA Today:

They used to be known as the boys on the bus: the big-name columnists, network TV producers and reporters for large-circulation newspapers who had the power to make or break a presidential candidate's reputation. Now they've got competition. In the 2004 election, the boys (and girls) on the bus have been joined by a new class of political arbiters: the geeks on their laptops. They call themselves bloggers. (Via Buzzmachine)

The article focuses on the editorial competition bloggers pose, which misses an important half of the story, the half that begins with a $. (A story traditional publishers would rather not tell?) Don't forget folks, many of the bloggers mentioned in this story (Atrios, TPM, DailyKos with more on the way) are selling ads. You can buy ads running for five million page impressions on blogs (a month's worth) for under $2000... impressions that pack a political wallop that far outweighs $200,000 spent on an equal number of page views in the traditional press. Gee, could you even round up 5 million primary-focused page impressions on NYTimes.com in one month?

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Dan Okrent discovered Bill James (or, does a once-obscure baseball fanatic now ghost-write the corporate strategy for America's leading newspaper?)

I know this is old news for some baseball fans, but I was just (finally) reading Michael Lewis's Moneyball (amazing!), and noticed that Dan Okrent, the New York Times' recently named ombudsman (or public editor), was one of Bill James' first readers.

Bill James? He's the guy who, writing in his spare time while working as a night watchman in a bean factory, pulled the rug from beneath many of baseball's hallowed truisms, enchanted millions of readers and revolutionized the way winning teams like the Oakland As and Boston Red Sox are managed.

And what might this have to do with Okrent's new job helping to clean up the NYT post Jason Blair? I know this will only appeal to a handful of media geeks, but... here goes...

My old colleague Matt Welch, who was raving about Bill James and his science of sabermetrics when we worked together in the 90s, has been nudging me to read Moneyball since June. As Matt argued then, there are lots of useful Jamesian lessons for "Overcoming Invisible Ideologies and Conventional Pieties in a Hidebound Industry"... which, as Matt suggested, could apply the business of publishing just as it applies to baseball. (Here's Matt's review of Moneyball, and posts 1 and 2.)

So, here's Lewis on Okrent and James:

In 1980, a group of friends, led by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Okrent, met a La Rotisseri Francaise, a restaurant in Manhattan, and created what became know, to the confusion of a nation, as Rotiserie Basball. Okrent can plausibly be said to have "discovered Bill james. Okrent was one of those 75 people who, in 1977, ran across the one-inch ad in the Sporting News James took out and sent off his check to Lawrence Kansas. Back came an unpromising mimeograph. Then he read it. "I was absolutely dumbstruck," he said. " I couldn't believe that a) this guy existed and b) he hadn't been discovered." Okrent flew to Lawrence to make sure James indeed existed then wrote a piece about him for Sports Illustrated. It was killed: James arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after a Sports Illustrated fact-checker spiked the piece. "She went through it line by line," recalled Okrent, "saying 'Everyone knows this isn't true. Everyone know that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowds when he pitched, that Gene Tenaece was a bad hitter, that....'" Conventional opinion about baseball players and basball strategies had acquried the authority of fact, and the Sports Illustrated fact-checking department was not going to let evidence to the contrary see print.

Which brings us to October 2003. Sure, it is quite possible that NYT hiring of Okrent had nothing to do with his sabermetric credentials. But one could imagine that Okrent, who understands how a grass-roots movement of outsiders can revolutionize a staid industry sunk deep in its own prejudices, might appeal to NYT's owners.

The connection was obvious to Matt before Okrent was hired. Here's Matt in Canada's National Post, writing in June about Moneyball:

What lessons can we learn from this tale? That the pursuit of better information will eventually unearth discrepancies and irrationalities, even in a field as seemingly well-studied as baseball. That the gatekeepers of information and judgment will instinctively and defensively protect their turf, rather than question their own legitimacy. That intelligence and passion can still win in the end, especially if they take advantage of the networking power of the Web.

The most obvious application for these lessons is in other sports, especially under-measured ones like professional basketball (already, several people have attempted to become "the Bill James of the NBA"). But any industry addicted to its own traditions, conventional in its hiring practices, and hostile to outsider analysis, is vulnerable. Especially if it attracts the attention of fanatical observers who publish their own Web sites.

Any good Jamesean knows to avoid small sample sizes and results-based analysis, but I for one can't help notice that Moneyball came out just as The New York Times editor Howell Raines was being drummed out of office at least in small part because of the hounding of a thousand individual outsiders. It's a bad era to be a gatekeeper. Thank God.

To augment and retread Matt's points, then; read Moneyball and you'll see that:

a) Long-established businesses can completely misunderstand the engines that drive their profits and losses.

b) Businesses too easily ignore insights that their fans/customers offer for free.

c) Businesses that trade on ego can be very slow to consider new statistics about their players/participants, long after the tools become available to more objectively analyze those statistics.

d) Collaborative efforts by amateurs can create vast bodies of knowledge and distilled insight that overshadow anything imagined by closed-system corporations.

e) It can take a long time for self-evident truths, even when plainly published and proven successful, to be accepted integrated in an industry. As one Moneyball reader, a baseball journalist, explains why the baseball industry is so slow to accept James' insights: "Most of the men who make baseball decisions have a vested interest in the status quo, because without the status quo their knowledge isn't as valuable."

f) Disaggregating information (what attributes actually make a double? does hitting or pitching win games? what pitching stats actually reflect great pitching) can yield vital clues about the real keys to winning. As traditional labels/categories are broken into new fragments, new strategies can be assembled that eliminate numbers of expensive traits and, by extension, the jobs players and coaching positions... which yields much cheaper, more effective organizations.

g) Even in competitive marketplaces, business cultures that are built around misapprehension, mislabelling and miscounting can thrive. As long as the competition inhabits the same warped culture, inefficiencies go unpunished by the marketplace.

h) Watch out for guys with laptops.

i) At the individual level, baseball seems to be about artistry and flair and ego, but in aggregate, it's a game of numbers. The team that best understands the numbers and executes most cost-effectively wins... in the long run.

j) Most of what we think of as music/narrative, is actually noise/randomness. The marginal results of skill are almost invisible to the naked eye. In a baseball game, luck accounts for 4 runs, skill accounts for only one run. This means most of what commentators are chattering about is luck AND only over the course of a long season does skill win out. To put it another way, in a five game series, even the poorest team has a 15% chance of winning against the best team. (page 242) This perspective reinforced by Nassim Taleb's book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life.

Matt's right. Moneyball's lessons can apply to publishing. I don't have the time right now to drag out the relevant quotes, or analogies but may do so later and update this post. I'm on page 88 right now...

Read Moneyball and connect the dots. I think it is probable that NYT management already have, or else there's some weird cosmic convergence at work with Bill James at the vertex. Remember that NYT is one of the owners of the Red Sox, the team which hired Bill James as an advisor in November 2002. And the Sox' reliance on James was profiled (last summer?) in the NYT magazine, but I can't find it online. So is James helping write the game plan at NYT these days? Someone who reports for a living should call up and ask whether Sulzberger has ever met James.

I've been pretty pessimistic before (here and here) about Okrent's chances of changing the NYT. Learning of Okrent's evangelism for Bill James, I've gained respect for Okrent... and the folks who hired him.

Update: I've finished the book. It's the best written book I've encountered. Wow, Lewis is a narrative wizard. And, sure enough, on the final page Lewis thanks Okrent for reading the book in draft.

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Dollar, in quiet desperation, continues to sink

Watching the dollar slip quietly below $1.25 to the Euro, I'm suddenly reminded of that poem not waving but drowning.

Too bad I can't offer cheerier references. As it happens, I'm just now listening to Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's rendition of "Keep on the Sunny Side of Life" but those lyrics don't seem to apply.

The US is dangerously in hock to the rest of the world and unable admit or address its problem. If international investors panic out of the dollar and US assets, we're in for a long ride down. Currency markets often overshoot, way overshoot, what seem to be reasonable levels, so it is not unreasonable to worry about $2 to the Euro. Anyone want to give me ten to one odds we hit this level in 2004?

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The dirty secret behind today's non-partisan press

Tim Rutten, media critic for the LA Times, bemoans rising public skepticism about press objectivity. "To an extent unforeseeable just a short while ago, next year's general election is shaping up as a referendum not only on America's political future but also on the direction of its news media." (Via Buzzmachine.)

Well, here's a vote against the status quo that employs Rutten. I'm tired of listening to press panjandrums congratulate themselves and their peers for their objectivity. (Many journalists are so self-righteous as to demur from voting in elections, lest their hands be smudged by the appearance of partisanship.)

Here's the dirty little secret behind today's ideal of "pure" journalism. Nonpartisan publishing is a business invention, created to allow newspapers to take advantage of the telegraph and pool resources in the second half of the 19th century. Their ain't no ethics in it, folks. George Krimsky, the former head of news for the Associated Press' World Services and author of Hold the Press (The Inside Story on Newspapers), admits that journalistic objectivity was an economic expedience:

Organizations like the Associated Press (AP) were formed to act as centralized gatherers and disseminators of the news, serving newspapers that could not afford to have correspondents in far-away places. In order to serve a variety of different publications (on the left, right and center), the AP could take no political or ideological position. It just delivered the facts as best and fast as it could, and stayed out of politics. What started as a business necessity gradually took on the mantle of moral righteousness.

The Associated Press's economies of scale are being superseded by the Internet. As the economics of 20th century publishing disintegrate, the artificial constructs are disintegrating also. Is this bad? Remember that before the aberation of nonpartisan publishing, a partisan press thrived for 200 years, and fostered triumphs like the American Revolution and the abolition of slavery.

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Looking ahead in 1982

As predictions for 2004 abound, you might enjoy reading Time's 1982 Machine of the year article about PCs. A lot of the numbers are wrong, but the basic trajectory is remarkably accurate. (Via WSJ's Realtime column.)

I was particularly amused by this passage:

In his 1980 book, The Third Wave, he portrays a 21st century world in which the computer revolution has canceled out many of the fundamental changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution: the centralization and standardization of work in the factory, the office, the assembly line. These changes may seem eternal, but they are less than two centuries old. Instead, Toffler imagines a revived version of pre-industrial life in what he has named "the electronic cottage," a utopian abode where all members of the family work, learn and enjoy their leisure around the electronic hearth, the computer. Says Vice President Louis H. Mertes of the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust Co. of Chicago, who is such a computer enthusiast that he allows no paper to be seen in his office (though he does admit to keeping a few files in the drawer of an end table): "We're talking when—not if—the electronic cottage will emerge."

Any day now. I'm still a believer.

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Dean advertises on blogs

Looks like a whole bunch of blogads were purchased while I was away. Among others, Howard Dean's presidential campaign bought ads on blogs like Atrios, Politicalwire, Pandagon, Calpundit and Oliver Willis promoting the new Bushtax site.

Attention, candidates for any office out there from local dog catcher to the president -- blog readers are the America's most passionate and active citizens. We've seen some single issue ads pull 5% clickthrus.

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Notes from the hills

Hit Christmas gifts: Hogwarts Express lego set and Snap Circuits Jr. Electronic Lab Kit and, for me, a fountain pen to replace the one I lost in July.

Matt's review of LOTR sums up my feelings in three words: "four gratuitous endings." Disliked the newest and overly-sensuous Peter Pan movie.

We went on lots of long walks last week beneath brilliant blue skies. Today talked to a bear hunter who said the bears are "lying down" right now. Is that hunter-speak or WNC vernacular?

Inspired by Rick Bruner, I bought a new pair of shoes in Asheville. After closing the first sale, the salesman asked if I also wanted to buy a pair of dress shoes or sneakers; I told him, only half jokingly, "this pair serves as both."

We went to lunch in Asheville at Salsa, the best lunch ever. I'm going back later this week.

I've been passing through Asheville on and off for the past 41 years. The place used to be one big bus stop -- ramshackle and full of transients. Now Asheville is packed with tourists and new age boutiques.

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Henry to the hills

Heading to Black Mountain for a week. If you've got an urgent issue, call Budapest or e-mail info at blogads dot com.

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NYT and its critics

Jeff Jarvis dissects an e-mail sent by NYTimes "public editor" Dan Okrent to bloggers complaining about New York Times' uncoverage of a Baghdad peace demonstration

Jeff and his commenters rightly pummel Okrent for including the self-indicting excuse that "the organizers of the demonstration failed to alert the Times in advance."

Anyway, if Okrent is going to send e-mails to bloggers and then get chewed up in blogger's posts and comments sections, he'll soon realize that having his own blog will be far more efficent mode of communication.

But bringing all those conversations into an Okrent blog will be dangerous. The critics will benefit from the new efficiency too. The traditional publisher's hub-and-spoke approach to communication keeps readers divided-and-conquered. If the debate concentrates in one space and readers can see what other readers are thinking, they can more readily gang up on the paper.

Of course, the ganging up is going on anyway via posts like Jeff's but the process is slower and less public.

In his first official column, Okrent says the Times gets roughly 800 e-mails and letters a day.

As we know, a number of blogs run by single, part-time individuals get that many or more responses each day.) What nuclear chain reaction will be set off when those posted ideas are available to the public and can interact with each other?

Anyway, kudos to Okrent for stepping onto the slippery slope of debating bloggers. Like Lear, he may soon realize: that way lies madness.

Note to self on something to do later: dissect awesome old-media smugness/backhanded-self-congratulation of Okrent's first paragraph of first column:

MOST people who are subjects of newspaper articles they believe to be unfair or inaccurate have few avenues of recourse. You can write a letter to the editor, and if you're extraordinarily lucky, it will leap out of the enormous haystack (The Times gets more than 300,000 letters and e-mail messages every year) and into print. You can ask for a correction, which even if granted isn't likely to be seen by nearly as many people as the original story. If you've got a lot of money and a lot of time, you could even hire a lawyer.

300,000 letters a year? Gee, that's almost as many as Instapundit gets!

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Blogs through history

The Economist notes:

WHERE do you go when you want to know the latest business news, follow commodity prices, keep up with political gossip, find out what others think of a new book, or stay abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments? Today, the answer is obvious: you log on to the internet. Three centuries ago, the answer was just as easy: you went to a coffee-house.

then offers lots more historical context. (Via Instapundit)

Here's an old mumbling of mine about the continuities between blogs... European coffee-houses... and salons and newsletters in pre-1789 France.

More history: an old post comparing Instapundit to Socrates.

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Ricochets

Amy Langfield takes a sledgehammer to the reported purchase of Daily Candy for $3.5 million. "Daily Candy is a load of marketing crap," she says.

Blog entrepreneur Nick Denton trades punches with web designer Noel Jackson.

The Slashdot community of programmers chews on outsourcing and an MBA's Trojan horse to introduce outsourcing to management.

And, to end on a happier note, Hugh MacLeod launches business cards with cartoons on the back. I'm gonna get some.

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Calpundit selling Blogads

Kevin Drum, the Calpundit, is selling Blogads.

Reader reactions range from: "You are performing a valuable service here and deserve to be rewarded for it," to "You capitalist running dog!" to "I like the small-format ads, hate the new three-column format."

Kevin is one of the leaders of the Democratic blogosphere and worth the $150 a month his rate-card indicates.

To set the record straight: Kevin says I "kept bugging" him. I think of it as persistent nudging.

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Meetup in Chapel Hill

Had lots of fun at the Chapel Hill blogger meetup last night. Good notes and a photo at Ross White's blog.

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Cave man art: not precocious but mature

Tiny carvings 30,000 years old, recently discovered in a cave in the Swabian Mountains southwest of Ulm, are being haled as proof that early man was a precocious figurative artist.

Says Nature magazine, where the findings were announced: "the complexity of the findings undermines the traditional view that art began crudely and gradually acquired sophistication. 'The new evidence refuses to fit,' says [archaeologist Anthony Sinclair of the University of Liverpool, UK.] 'It seems that the first modern humans in Europe were astonishingly precocious in their skills.'"



I've talked before about ancient artifacts with my father-in-law, a Hungarian artist and avid artifact-scavenger along the Danube river. I once tried to argue that the cave paintings at Lascaux, supposed dated at 15,000 BC, were modern fakes. "No way ancient man could concoct something that subtle and stylized," I opined.

On the contrary, he said. Early art doesn't look like the art of a five-year-old because it is actually the work of a mature culture. Europe's current artistic tradition is less than 3000 years old. Is it any wonder that early man, with 5-10,000 years to perfect his technique and mannerisms, was a great figurative artist? It would be remarkable if early man had not developed a sophisticated artistic tradition.

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Blogads code is in good hands

Tigger, Csaba Garay and Tamas Decsi.

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Small is bountiful

Less information often means more, a point brilliantly illustrated yesterday by designer Jason Kottke, as he parodies the metadata overload around many blog posts.

Google, the metadata mogul, has done a great job of furling distracting details. Says Google interface guru Marissa Mayer

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That's worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are - you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.

Unfortunately, a lot of sites are like geeky see-through watches -- they are so proud of all the stuff under the hood they insist on inflicting it on the innocent passer-by... who just really wants to know the time, after all.

Hmm... what else should we strip out of this blog... or all of Blogads? (Yes, our order form will be reworked in coming weeks.)

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Frictionless politics

Economist Robert Coase argued in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determines the size of a corporation, notes economist Everett Ehrlich, who then riffs on implications of Coase's theory implications for modern political parties in the Internet age.

To an economist, the 'trick' of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase's theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that's why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

...

Here are some predictions. First, if Dean loses the nomination, he will preserve his organizational advantage and reemerge as a third-party force four years from now. He has done with technology what Ross Perot could not do with money alone. Second, the evangelical right will become a separate political party in the near future, and will hold its own conventions and primaries. Like the Conservative Party in New York state, it will usually endorse Republican candidates. But evangelicals will use their inherent party-ness to make the Republican candidate stand in front of them and give a separate acceptance speech. And finally, in the next six or eight presidential elections, a third-party candidate will win the presidency. Issues -- most likely the coming fiscal debacle and the inescapable abrogation of promises made on Social Security and Medicare -- will give the third-party candidate an opening. But technology will give him, or her, the means.

(Since he's writing in the Washington Post, Ehrlich graciously demurs from deconstructing the news business with the same logic.)

Funnily enough, I ran across this June 6 post earlier today, "Mark my words: blogs are going to drive the next presidential election."

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Domain registration surge suggest e-commerce vitality

Moniker.com reports 40,000 domain registrations in the last two months, up from 7200 in the same period last year. That's another sign that online business is booming as entrepreneurs realize that going online puts you only 1 click away from 600 million people.

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Advertising reverb on blogs

Buying blogads delivers lots of things: boat-loads of cost-effective clicks, face-time with opinion makers, 150X200 pixels plus 300 characters of text...

Blog advertising also creates an intimacy traditional media can't match... or doesn't want to match. This weekend, five bloggers who had sold ads to the John Kerry campaign asked Kerry to disavow TV ads linking Howard Dean to bin Laden.

"We write this open letter as a group of bloggers whose audience you respect enough that you advertise on our web sites," they began.

The provenance of the attack ads was murky and seemed entwined with Kerry's operatives. "We feel it is incumbent on you and your campaign to make it clear that this kind of attack is unacceptable," wrote bloggers Atrios, Talkleft, NathanNewman, Oliver Willis and Pandagon.

The Kerry campaign has since disavowed the ad.

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Blogging: dumpster diving for facts and opinions?

Rick Bruner reports: "Steadily, we are furnishing our entire apartment with things our neighbors have thrown away. Not broken-down junk covered in coffee grounds and rotten cabbage. Stuff you'd actually want inside your home. Or we would, anyway." Click to read what Rick and Adi have salvaged, including their huge recent coup.

(Blogging resembles scavenging: finding pieces of treasure in the stuff that other people discard or ignore?)

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Home equity loans boom

Wow, the volume of home equity loans has tripled since 1999.

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IBM moves 5000 programming jobs

WSJ: "...International Business Machines Corp. has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere. The unannounced plan, outlined in company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Raleigh, N.C., Dallas, Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere in the U.S." And: "A former IBM executive in India, Pawan Kumar, now chairman of closely held vMoksha Technologies PLC, an outsourcing firm there, says IBM has 9,000 people in India and plans to increase that to 20,000 by the end of 2005. Mr. Kumar says the cost advantages of hiring Indian programmers aren't as large as the salary differentials imply, because building in India requires more investment in infrastructure and more spending on supervision to smooth communications between U.S. customers and workers in India. He says the true costs amount to about $100,000 in the U.S. and $50,000 in India for people to do the same work."

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Political landscapes

Fun links: Farm belt. Southern Lowlands. Upper coasts. The datasharing revolution.

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Alternate history: Mcblog in 1972

Dave Winer obliquely suggests McGovern would have won in 1972 with blogs.

What other alternate histories could be explored? Would the Nazis have been stronger or weaker in a blogging Germany? Would a blogging Alfred Wallace have outshown Charles Darwin? Would the blogging Buddha have swamped Jesus? Could KingGeorgeIII.blogspot.com have hung on to the colonies?



(Image borrowed from Scripting.com.)

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Adjustable rate noose

The uptake of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) has doubled in the last year, now accounting for one home mortgage in three, reports CNN. When rates head higher, which is inevitable with $600 billion yearly government debt sales looming, these folks are going to get squeezed out of their homes. The bankers who push ARMs on people should be ashamed.

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Zeyad's independent Iraqi news service

Jeff Jarvis writes about Zeyad, an Iraqi blogger:

Thanks to the Internet and weblogs -- and a little help from the community there -- it is possible for one man in a country just coming out from under dictatorship and war to speak to the world, to exercise free speech, to help spread that free speech, to report news, to make news, to build relationships, to create understanding. That is the moral of the story of the blogosphere: All that is now possible. Anyone can do this. Any of us can support it. All it takes is one person.

Jeff helped Zeyad get started back in October and is rightly proud. Here is Zeyad's site and here's his post about yesterday's anti-terrorism demonstrations.

-- warning --

Ok, stop here if you don't want to see me rant again about corporate media versus real blogging.

--end warning--

(For context, folks in places like Davos wonder can "Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs?" More optimistically, some bloggers like Jarvis think corporate media can incorporate blogging. I disagree: the New York Times can't blog.)

Zeyad's blog offers a prime example of things corporate media can not do. It can't pursue absurd dreams. It can't get other people excited and linking in. It rarely strays from the rest of the corporate pack. It can't speak with sustained passion. It can't converse and it can't pay people to converse.

Corporate media ain't human. It is a machine, a legalism. It's an it.

Blogging is not a technology -- blogging is the brainstorming human spirit, unadulterated by corporate filters and armor, linking to kindred spirits. Corporate media can't do that.

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History of online news (since 1960!)

Steve Outing points to David Carlson's interesting timeline of online news.

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Old bloggers never die, they just get archived

Science writer Steven Johnson writes on his blog's first birthday: "I suspect the most rewarding part of all of this will arrive ten or twenty years from now, reading through the archives in chronological order, making all the long-forgotten connections ('That's right -- we were just moving into the Brooklyn house when I came up with the idea for that book,' etc.)"

I sometimes find it uncanny rereading old posts. I can still remember the color of the sunset reflected off the apartments opposite our house in Mareil Marly when I wrote my first blog post. These things are textual snapshots imprinted with the scent and texture of the moment.

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Clark campaign blogging gets media notice

Glenn Reynolds says Cameron Barrett's blogging for Clark, covered yesterday by AP, is one of the few things going well the candidate.

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Corporate squeeze

Rubbermaid, the corporate spine of the town I grew up in, is closing its headquarters and factory there. In 1993 and 1994, Rubbermaid was named America's most admired company by Fortune. Here's Rubbermaid's history.

The jobs will be moved to cheaper production facilities "abroad," so some will see Rubbermaid's demise as evidence for more trade barriers. But here's an interesting argument blaming Walmart, which dominates retailing enough to dictate what manufactures can peddle. Brands mean little when Walmart dominates the sales channel. An important lesson for publishers who deal with Google.

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Winner loses

A new test for Presidential candidates. (Skol Ken Layne.)

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Sullivan emulates PBS

Pandagon is annoyed that Andrew Sullivan is once again asking for donations.

I do think it is funny that while Democrat blogs like Atrios, Talkingpointsmemo, DailyKos, Pandagon, Talkleft, OliverWillis and many others have embraced the good capitalist practice of peddling ads, Republican Sullivan sticks so loyally to the tactics pioneered by PBS. Listen in:

If you read the blog regularly, we're asking for the same amount as a good cup of coffee a month. If you think this site is worth that, and you want to keep it afloat, please help. All the details are here. Without you, this new experiment in online journalism is impossible to finance. With you, it can go from strength to strength. So please don't delay.

The only thing missing is the soundtrack of phones ringing in the background and the frequent reprise "our phone volunteers are waiting for your call."

A year ago when he was fund-driving, Sullivan wrote "we're working hard for ad dollars, but the landscape is still bleak." I responded then: "Sullivan won't begin to find a steady commercial audience until buying ads on his blog is as easy, transparent, affordable and automated as blogging itself." A year later, he's still doing things the hard way.

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Zoom a zoom a zoom

Cool image zoom.

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Online buzz leads sales by two weeks

Jeff Jarvis reports this startling research about the correlation between online buzz and music sales: "Walter Bender of MIT and Dan Gruhl, graduate now at IBM, said they independently did research on buzz on music online and they each found that online buzz presaged retail sales -- up and down -- by two weeks. We are influencers influencing buyers."

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A day in the life...

Hello
You're fired
Be ready for holiday fun
Hot Deals For You LaserGun Only $6.96. Was $19.96!!!!!!
Fwd: Purchase Prescription Medication Here Withou
Send Me Deals Bloating? Gas? Irregularity? Good News...
Avalanche Gifts the gift of money
Closout - Special Omaha Steaks-Save up to 50% & get 3 Free Gifts
Orlando Bishop No More Pill+s, add 3+ inches

(Spam subject lines, in the order captured by my filter.)

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Christmas scars Czech children and other random facts before the week begins

Doug Arellanes reports on a Czech Christmas tradition.

I played Pacman last night for the first time in 20 years. I haven't gotten any better. After some shyness, my daughter played too and said, "I can see why you think that's cool." Then we watched "Cat in the Hat." Great movie. Yes, Jeff, it's safe for kids who believe in Santa. :)

This morning, we continued our family's recent spate of church shopping. (Had visited University Presbyterian twice, but were put off by its triumphalist smugness... although my son liked the white columns.) Today, we went to the Community Church, recommended by some laid-back friends. The church has a worthy history. Unconventional service, but you (ok, I) gotta love two middle-aged men rendering Joni Mitchell's "River" as a Christmas song.

I also enjoyed the sermon, which pivoted on the point that the gospels have been translated twice -- from Aramaic to Greek to English -- and that lots of meanings have been lost and found in those translations. Read a couple of versions of a translated work and see there's a lot of room for creativity in even a single round of translation.

To experiment a little, I ran the Lord's Prayer through Babelfish translator from English to Spanish and back. Here's the English outcome:

Our father, who the sky art sanctified is known kingdom, thy thy comes, thy will be done, in the Earth because he is in sky. East Dénos perdónenos day our daily bread and our infractions, as we pardoned to which violate against us. And condúzcanos not in the temptation, but entregúenos of badly. For thine it is the kingdom, and the energy, and the glory, for always and always. Love

My son doesn't like the Community Church's modernist architecture. Yes, the lack of windows is pretty idiotic, and could be easily fixed with a sledgehammer. (Sadly, I'm almost comforted by the concrete: I grew up spending Sunday mornings inside a sinfully ugly, windowless concrete chapel completed in 1971.)

To remind you why River is a great Christmas song, here's the opening verse:

It's coming on christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on...

Finally, I'm eager to know what Josh Marshall has up his sleave to report about "the never-truly-busted-open OpEd Payola scandal."

PS Shannon Okey suggests everyone contribute to the knitbloggers' "give farm animals to a poor village" drive.

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Journalist biases are key to understanding their work... and readers

Jeff Jarvis praises Dan Okrent, NYTimes' new "public editor," for hanging his biases out for all to see. Jarvis says: "Now that got me to wondering why every journalist shouldn't have a public paragraph such as that. I was raised in this business in the belief that we never said such things; we wouldn't reveal our votes or parties or belief or grudges because that would be bias; that wouldn't be objectivity. But not revealing them is a lie of omission." He adds: "In this new, transparent world, it is better to be transparent. I've been learning that even now, even here on this blog, where I've found it better to reveal more and let you judge what you think of what I think."

I also think transparency is good for the business of journalism. Readers connect better with honest, three-dimensional journalists, aka human beings.

And advertisers can pick their audiences more easily. In the interest of transparency, I should mention that our company has a patent pending based on exactly this concept.

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Storming Davos

Dave Winer considers the agenda of CEO confab Davos:

"'Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet?' Giggle. They asked the question backwards. 'Have blogs and the Internet already replaced Mainstream Media?' For many, the answer is yes. Seems like the WEF is trying to tell their membership (large corps) what they want to hear. It's up to you to not co-opt those cute little blogs. Heheh."

My favorite publisher and blogger Jeff Jarvis nominates himself to speak. I second that nomination and nominate Josh Marshall and --why not? -- myself. Marshall is an independent journalist using his blog to break news and make money. I'm helping advertisers bypass traditional media and connect with blog audiences -- media's most influential. Who else should go?

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Gram Parsons

A couple of years ago, we paid $9 for a Gram Parsons double CD: GP and Grievous Angel. We've listened to it on and off. This morning again. Incredible: A song for you, Hearts on fire, $1000 wedding. His bio. The "$1000 wedding" song is weird, mysterious and gorgeous. "And he swore the fiercest beasts could all be put to sleep the same silly way, and wear the flowers for the girl, she only knew she loved the world, and why ain't there one lonely, only one sad note to play, supposed to be a funeral, it's been a bad bad day." How does Parsons' singing make this word-wreck so soul-grabbing? Call me a sap, but I darn near cry every time I hear it.

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Bloggercam

Now I can keep an eye on Biz and buddies.

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Advertiser: 'blogads are absolutely phenomenal'

Richard Luckett, who handles marketing for leftish vendor Agitproperties, has been one of our most creative advertisers, running a series of humorous ads on Atrios and now DailyKos. Richard called me up last night to rave about how well things are going. This morning he reprised his comments by e-mail:

Businesses and ad agencies that dismiss blogs and blog ads are nuts! Blogads are absolutely phenomenal. Compared with print ads we've run in the Village Voice, blogads target our exact demographic and give four times the 'bang-for-buck.' You are keeping our fulfillment guy extremely busy. Bloggers put us on the map and blogads are definitely keeping us there.

Advertisers should study Agitproperties' strategy. Update your ad text and image often. Be cheeky. Be exhuberant. Use some html tags. Know your audience. Keep some pitches inside. And put your fulfillment guy on overtime.

Here are the components of the ad Richard is running today:

Ho Ho Faux!

What better way to enjoy a cup of holiday cheer than in our 12 oz. FAUX NEWS coffee mug in "Hannity's Heart" black?

See it, along with our infamous FOX-baiting O'REILLY YOUTH tee, our world-famous FAUX NEWS tee, our timely Got Allies? tee, way-cool TED RALL stuff and more at agitproperties.com - for the unrepentant Leftists on your gift list.

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No more 'bad wurds'

"Dear Mom, today I had a problem in school...." Unbelievable. Makes me want to vomit. (Via Volokh.)

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Why the New York Times can't truly blog

Jeff Jarvis, vigorous blogger and president of Advance.net, writes "I'll bet you'll be seeing weblogs from The Times sooner than you think.... "

Jeff is the smartest and best-wired publisher I know. But what the heck, I'll take your bet Jeff, if you'll accept some tweaking.

There are tremendous barriers, both psychic and fiscal, to NYT truly blogging.

NYT may allow journalists to publish some reverse-chronological, lite-edited, almost-real-time, time-stamped online news. But this is not really blogging and it won't achieve the desired impact: more wattage and page impressions.

I'll bet $20 that if or when NYT "blogs," each new "blog" will omit at least five out of the following eight blog characteristics:

* strong opinions
* a sprinkle of personal details from the blogger's life
* a blogroll
* an independent traffic counter
* a unique domain name
* the blogger's photo
* some snark
* lots of links to other blogs and news sources

These are the ingredients that give blogs ten times more readers per keystroke than conventional journalism. Without the individualistic impulse that makes blogging great, NYT's blogs will be Frankensteins... all the meat but none of the spirit.

OK, so those are the psychic barriers. Now the financial.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says he's "startled" to learn the NYT has more readers daily online than in print. He thinks this trend will impel NYT to start blogging.

Well, if Professor Rosen had been reading this very blog rather than the Times, he'd have learned about the traffic milestone in October of 2002. But, although other media repeated the news, the NYTimes still hasn't written online or in print about the startling milestone or highlighted it to investors.

Like Professor Rosen, NYT shareholders will be startled too, I think. And concerned. Concerned that NYTimes.com reaches more people than the print journal, but, because of a vastly more competitive environment, achieves less than 3% of print's revenues.

Which brings up the show-stopping question NYT shareholders will ask if management ever admits that 1/5 of a NYT journalist's paid hours are devoted to blogging. "Why the h*ck are we dumping resources into such a low-margin business? How are we going to compete with passionate zero-overhead bloggers empowered by the blogosphere, the biggest traffic spinner since the cloverleaf?"

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see the NYTimes trying to sell blog impressions to advertisers. It will further legitimate blogs and reinforce the startling fact that blog advertising, unencumbered by publishing's traditional cost structure, is 95% cheaper. I just don't think NYT shareholders can stomach watching their company wade into a link-quagmire to battle 10,000 infopreneurs.

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Horizontal user innovation networks

Steve Lohr's recent NYT overview of "markets as conversations" failed to mention Cluetrain, but did mention an interesting document that I pursued further this morning.

MIT professor Eric von Hippel researches the ways that technology users may form de facto peer networks to innovate new functionalities and invent new dimensions of commerce and design. Von Hippel surveys fields ranging from pipe-hanging to windsurfing to open-source-software to mountain-biking and examines the conditions under which users rather than traditional manufacturers can lead the way via horizontal collaboration.

User innovation networks can function entirely independently of manufacturers when (1) at least some users have sufficient incentive to innovate, (2) at least some users have an incentive to voluntarily reveal their innovations, and (3) diffusion of innovations by users is low cost and can compete with commercial production and distribution. When only the first two conditions hold, a pattern of user innovation and trial and improvement will occur within user networks, followed by commercial manufacture and distribution of innovations that prove to be of general interest.

...

These user innovation networks have a great advantage over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years: they enable each using entity, whether an individual or a corporation, to develop exactly what it wants rather than being restricted to available marketplace choices or relying on a specific manufacturer to act as its (often very imperfect) agent. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed by others and freely shared within and beyond the user network.

Cool stuff.

He'll need to add blogging to his list of subjects to study. This whole view of horizontal user innovation networks becomes particularly interesting (and recursive) when you start to think about users innovating in the creation of technology that drives the networking/innovation process itself. Think about it this way:

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Monday AM with a cold...

Anonymous blogger Atrios is now selling clever t-shirts saying "I am Atrios."

Rick Bruner explains what the holidays look like for someone unburdened by child or dog. Scroll down to the November 24 entry on this page.

Pleased with the results from the first go-round, John Kerry's campaign has re-ordered ads on Talkingpointsmemo, Atrios, PoliticalWire and Agonist. New ads ordered on Oliver Willis, Talkleft, Pandagon and NathanNewman.

Having gone nine months without a cold, I spent the night with that grating feeling in my nose and throat. Ugg. I guess I'll drive over to Raleigh Thursday to see Virginia Postrel speak. 12:00-2:00 pm, Speech, Brownstone Hotel 1707 Hillsborough Ave.

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