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Archives: January 2004
Does political blog advertising work?
Jerome Armstrong , who handled the Dean Blogads purchases, had an interesting comment in today's Online Journalism Review. "Campaigns are not evolutionary models. They're what works now and will get us through the next election. Institutional memory skips every four years, so there's a lag time on innovation. As far as big purchases that really make an impact -- we're not there. We're able to push the envelope to do some of this, but I don't have nearly the resources as the people doing television ads." I definitely got this sense from talking to Jerome when he was buying Blogads for Dean.
Well, I guess maybe the innovation is going to happen in the Congressional races, where the campaign is perpetual. A couple of days ago, I heard from Mark Nickolas, campaign manager for Democrat Ben Chandler, who is running for Congress in Kentucky in a special election. Impressed by the political heat blogs are throwing off, Nickolas had decided to divert some cash from radio spots to blog advertising. After we talked, he bumped his blogad budget up 40%. His aim was to learn something, and hopefully cover the cost of his campaign.
The ads started running Friday. That afternoon, heard from Nickolas. Nickolas said the campaign had already covered the cost of the ad buy. At that point, the ad is not yet even running on 1/3 of the buy. Earlier today the campaign treasurer called Nickolas on his mobile, saying "Get in here. We must have some kind of bug. We've gotten 5 online contributions in the last three minutes ending in 18 cents." After a little poking around, Nickolas figured out that the gush of $X.18 was coming from Atrios' post suggesting that if his readers gave, they should tack on 18 cents so the contributions were identifiable.
I asked Nickolas if this information could be repeated by e-mail or blog and he said, "sure, we're thrilled."
[5] comments (3855 views) | link
The indispensable political blog
Just found myself quoting this AP article about political blogs in an e-mail to an advertiser, and realized I'd failed to blog the memorable lines. "Web journals like Joshua Marshall's have become indispensable this campaign season: They mobilize supporters, question traditional media coverage and feed the insatiable appetites of political junkies." And then this classic: "Larry Purpuro, coordinator of the Republicans' e.GOP Project in 2000, said many bloggers were little more than 'armchair analysts in their bathrobes (with) no serious interest in leaving their living rooms to actually help the campaigns.'" The headline? "The indispensable political blog."
[7] comments (2718 views) | link
Unfurling...
It's rare that I'm an early adopter. Of course, I got in early on Blogads, but I still don't own an iPod or digital camera or GPS. So I'm proud to have gotten in early on Furl. Ck it out.
[9] comments (3445 views) | link
New server...
Appears that condor, the server caching blogads, is being swamped by New Hampshire primary traffic. We originally planned to bring on a new server Friday to absorb projected load, but will accelerate launch to tomorrow morning. The new server will be named "sparrow" -- fast and lite-feeding.
The good news, for tonight, is that Americans on the East coast are going home, which usually drops blog readership. Usually. We'll see.
Update 7.24AM The sparrow if flying happily. Tamas and Csaba have reconfigured so that even at three times yesterday's load, adstrips will serve fast. Now we'll start planning for what comes after 3 X growth... in a few weeks?
Update 2.53PM Kill one bottleneck and find another! All images are being served swiftly now after some load balancing this morning. Have just rented one more server to absorb any over-flow from these bubbly primaries.
[4] comments (2710 views) | link
Web populism
Up to the minute coverage from New Hampshire: Jerome Armstrong.
The federal budget as a pile of oreos.
Glenn Reynolds, a mild-mannered law professor in Knoxville, opens the latest Wired magazine and finds himself dubbed an "Internet rock star."
[4] comments (2832 views) | link
Newspapers blog? Naaa
Last week, Newspaper Association of America threw a blog at its annual Internet convention and nobody came.
The Poynter institute asks:
So why didn't it work? Were all attendees just too busy? Isn't it rewarding enough any more to get your voice heard? Are we transforming into a bunch of lurkers who prefer to profit from the work of others but aren't willing to get involved ourselves? Or are we already at a turn of the life-circle of the blogging phenomenon, where this will become more and more a professional business and the vast majority of people will look for a new tool? [Via Buzzmachine]I've done a lot of puzzling about what makes blogs BUZZ while newspapers just gargle.
Voice? Blogrolling? Simplicity? Authenticity? Speed of delivery? Brainstorming? All of these help.
But can these factors full explain why a blog post by Josh Marshall or Atrios or Glenn Reynolds gets 100 times more readers than an article written by an individual employed by NYTimes.com?
Then, commmenting last week on Welch's blog, it hit me. Enemies.
Trying to economize to take advantage of the telegraph and pool copy via the Associated Press, newspapers neutered themselves by impartializing their articles. (You've heard how partisan AND popular newspapers were 100 years ago, right? It's been downhill ever since.)
Most communities are forged as much by antagonism to others as by fraternity with peers. To create and sustain themselves, NY needs NJ, the Red Sox need the Yankees, Yale needs Harvard, North needs South, Democrats need Republicans... ad infinitum.
Blogs, which are blatantly and joyously partisan, can actually get into dialogs and debate. And it is partisan debate that drives traffic and passion and community... the wonders of blogging.
And I don't think any newspaper or, frankly, any top-down VC-funded friendship-linkster tinkertoy is going to match the blogging's magical partisanship either.
Update: Steve Outing points out that the Poynter post I cite above was written by Katja Riefler, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Poynter Institute.
[5] comments (4040 views) | link
La network effect
My buddy Matt Welch writes a long and empassioned plea for bloggers to start selling Blogads titled "Hey Bloggers -- Especially You Popular Political Types -- Why the Hell Don't You Accept BlogAds?" He notes that he makes roughly 36 times more from Blogads than from his tipjar. And he makes a ringing call for an LA Blogad network:
The more participating blogs from Los Angeles, the easier it is for advertisers to make a useful, targeted group buy (and therefore pay me more money!). This also works for subjects -- media, baseball analysis, DIY music, whatever. If Cathy Seipp and Nancy Rommelmann and Kevin Roderick would spend the five minutes necessary to join the BlogAds network, the SoCal/media BlogAd buy would be exponentially more attractive. I guess they don't need any extra money….Now, we should get all those LA bloggers to point to this page with Los Angeles blog advertising venues.
BTW, I didn't get to listen to the NPR's "blogging of the president" show last night. Did any of the brilliant but self-effacing bloggers on the show mention that they sell the web's cheapest-most-effective advertising... or is mentioning commerce Not Done on NRP?
[10] comments (3496 views) | link
New blog advertisers
A big thank you to Ed Cone and David Weinberger for encouraging the folks at O'Reilly to advertise on blogs their Digital Democracy Teach-in.
Anybody else out there who has a buddy who needs to rally support for a good cause or publicize something intellectually stimulating or just sell some funny T-shirts, please tell them about blog advertising. It will be good for your buddy and bloggers. Meanwhile, send your enemies here or here.
[5] comments (3635 views) | link
Josh feasts on Edwards
Josh Marshall hears James Carville say John Edwards is the world's best stump speaker, so he goes to see Edwards speak. "For most of the time Edwards was doing his presentation, putting on his show, I hadn’t the slightest question what Carville was talking about. While I was watching, in the moment, that is, I also didn’t have much question that Edwards would be the eventual nominee. He’s that good. His comfort level with a crowd, his ability to roll with and into their moods and reactions, and his ability to craft his talk into a resonant story (a narrative, as we used to say) is simply light years beyond what Kerry or Clark can manage. (Dean is sort of in a whole different category --- he tries for something different.) He’s down-to-earth, gesticulating all over the place, with folksy aphorisms and punch lines all put in the right spots, but in an unforced, uncontrived matter. He’s funny and folksy, in a campaign sort of way."
Despite the feast, Josh is hungry later.
[5] comments (2729 views) | link
Outline for UNC blogs and journalism forum
I've been asked to do a short session Tuesday at the UNC Weblogs in Journalism conference. The session addresses "how bloggers are disrupting traditional publisher's role as gatekeeper." Here's my outline:
Blogger advantages over journalists
* link network
--- 10 newspaper readers become a 100-synapse blogosphere
--- expensive distribution & marketing versus free
* freedom of voice
--- authentic
--- niche-plumbing
* partisanship
--- great newspapers were partisan, founded around war or political causes ("neutrality" concocted by AP business folk)
--- most great blogs dynamized by partisans, enemies, trolls
Results
* blogs get 100 times more traffic per keystroke than traditional journalists...
* some individual bloggers equal audience of $200 mln newspaper chains
* some bloggers net $2500 (Drudge gets estimated $100,000) a month in ad revenue, growing 15%/month
Blogs open new advertising dimensions
* extra room to communicate (versus portal) means more nuances
* feedback and ricochets (versus control) means more buzz
* audience affinity (versus demographics) means more traction
* affordable (versus high overheads of publishers) means usable by entrepreneurs, causes
[4] comments (3082 views) | link
More press on political blogs
Newsday: "Political Web logs (or more popularly, blogs) - freewheeling hybrids of personal observations, reportage and opinion that are updated several times a day - have become surprise players in the 2004 campaign. The political blog sites are many and varied. They also are influential. ... the Internet is a major political information source this year."
[5] comments (2800 views) | link
WP: Bloggers join cartoonists and talk radio as political taste-makers
Dan Balz's front page story in the Washington Post says Howard Dean has two problems: his below par finish in Iowa and the concession speach "war cry that has quickly become the target of editorial cartoonists, radio talk show hosts and Internet bloggers." Is this a new low or a new high for national blogger influence? (Via Josh Marshall.)
Me, I'm not so bothered by Dean's shriek, per se. People made fun of Steve Ballmer when he hollered, shrieked and danced around like a squirrel who got into the pepper-shaker... but Microsoft could still whup France's derriere any day. You think Dr. Dean sounded freaky? See the Ballmer video and you'll hear that his pitch is identical to Dean's and about 10 times longer.
[4] comments (2765 views) | link
Start-ups
Just stumbled across a summary of a study of 450 start-ups via a comment on Fred Wilson's post. Some interesting insights:
* "Over-funding actually allows companies to follow a flawed strategy for too long."
* Success is a "a trial and error process."
* "In 93 percent of the cases, the strategy that a company emerges with (at exit) is completely different from the strategy it set out to implement. The report cites a Harvard Business School study that found it takes four to five years for the right product and business model to emerge."
Everything I've seen of entrepreneurship suggests there's a huge amount of trial and error involved. Just as in baseball, where 4 runs out of 5 are determined by luck rather than skill, it is usually impossible for the outside observer to see, in the short run, who really has talent.
Footnote: These timelines are uncannily applicable to our start-up's experience. Pressflex was founded in 1998 to serve as the webmaster for local publishers. The business premises that underlie Blogads -- ASP, single decision-maker, low (or no) price point, telesellable, networked, generating ROI, splicable into any platform, serving outsiders rather than insiders -- jelled in late 2001 as we head-scratched about agonizingly slow publisher uptake of our superlative Pressflex service. The idea for Blogads pinged in March 2002 and the service launched in August '02... almost exactly 4 years after we created Pressflex.
[4] comments (2996 views) | link
Political blog traffic gushes upward
Another record day for political blogs, as you can see from the logs of the server that pumps out blogads. (Left edge is most recent.) 
[5] comments (3052 views) | link
Iowa vignette about Dean and Edwards
The best reporting I've seen yet on Iowa comes in a Daily Kos post. Here's a telling vingette about how Dean's troops mishandled one caucus:
the Dean precinct captain on the floor was ineffective and diffident. I watched with amazement as a more-motivated, more-mature Edwards captain named Susan Voss (sans T-shirt, sans sideline coaches) went over to the Gephardt folks in Precinct 63, who at that point had only seven members but needed nine for viability. Susan sat down at their table, looked them in the eye, appealed to them about how Edwards is an "articulate, bright, caring person." You can tell not only that she meant it, but that she could personalize it. She didn't have any training, and it showed - it showed as authentic, that is.
Then, with grace and aplomb, she got up and said she would make room so a guy named Arturo, from the Kucinich group (also non-viable, and hoping to move Gephardt's people to them to achieve viability), could have his turn.
Meanwhile, the Deanies are sitting with their hands folded. They are not even talking to each other. No comity, no motivation. The precinct captain eventually comes over, unsure of what precisely to do with himself or how to speak to people. The Geppies are still sitting at the school library's tables at the far end of the room.
The Dean captain meanders over, stands over the Geppies, providing physical distance that is conveyed in a non-verbally and dismissive way. Worse, his main message is little more than, "C'mon, don't you want to join us?" or "Are there any questions or issues you have about the Governor?" The Geppies are literally staring at his navel, because it's hard to make eye contact with somebody whose head is three feet over your own with craning your neck.
There were six delegates to be assigned by the 60+ people who turned out at Precinct 63. Dean had 16 of the caucus-goers at the start, and ended up with 14. Kerry didn't budge much, but Edwards gained strength. Gephardt managed to cobble together the two defections from Kucinich he needed, and got one delegate, as did Dean and Kerry. But Edwards left with two, and he can thank the dynamism, assertiveness and tact of Susan Voss for that second delegate.
[8] comments (2972 views) | link
Referendum on the Internet?
Yaooouweee! Gotta love a horse race.
If you read any pundits today opining "yes, the Internet's impact on politics was greatly overrated," PLEASE send me the URL so I can put the pundit in a barrel and take a few shots.
[7] comments (3356 views) | link
The revolution in 18 words
Publishers strive to monopolize distribution and commoditize talent. But blogs commoditize distribution, restoring the writer's monopoly on talent.
[8] comments (3522 views) | link
Democratic bloggers outpace Republicans
Noting that Ed Cone has started selling Blogads, Glenn Reynolds writes,
"I haven't done a survey, but it seems as if BlogAds has more penetration on the lefty side of the blogosphere. If so, I wonder why? UPDATE: Henry Copeland emails: 'God knows I've tried to get more centrists, libertarians and Republicans aboard. :)' Hmm. I guess for non-lefties it's all about the love, not the money! Actually, Henry's been after me to join blogads for quite a while. I'm not sure why I've been slow to do it, actually. I just have been."Love or money?... Or does $50 or $2000 a month make a bigger difference to leftie-blogger households? Funnily enough, many of the first folks to sign on to blogads --Matt Welch, DailyPundit, Tacitus, Jane Galt-- had libertarian or right-of-center audiences. As I've noted before, it does seem a little odd that Andrew Sullivan, avid partisan of the grand-ol'-party-of-the-market-place, sticks so loyally to PBS-style pledge drives. (BTW, Sullivan made $80,000 in last year's pledge drive. When are we going to hear the results of this year's drive... have I missed something?)
Meanwhile, there's some of interesting theorizing about on why the left has been more vigorous in its blogging recently. Republican blogger Tacitus looks at DailyKos and says "Hands-down, in terms of efficacy, reach, influence, and intelligence, it simply has no match." He asks, "Why are the explicitly pro-Republican weblogs so anemic?"He continues:
some of this may simply be a function of the partisan power dynamic: Democrats are hip-deep in the internal debate period known as the primaries, abetted by the lack of a single standard-bearer attendant to the party out of power; Republicans have a President to rally 'round, and hence less incentive to thrash out issues. But some of it is also, I think, a function of the differing approaches to organization and the internet taken by the national parties. I can't speak for the DNC, but I am fairly sure that the RNC is a top-down, strictly hierarchical organization. They'll rely on their own devices; certainly not Meetup, certainly not blog-based fundraising, and they certainly won't allow comments on their candidate's official weblog.Tacitus suggests that Republican political operatives may not be ready to cede autonomy to the bloggers: "what, after all, is their incentive to surrender even a small amount of control and decentralize? Conversely, what is the incentive for the independent Republican blogger to make the effort to help his party and his candidates if the formal hierarchy is going to be lukewarm at best."
Here's my view: being out of office makes a big difference. First, the primaries fuel the D-blogosphere. Horse races are more exciting to report/comment on, particularly when the feedback loop closes and the bloggers become participants in the race they're reporting on. Also, David is usually the innovator; David grabs the cheapest tool at hand while Goliath sticks to the traditional heavy armor and expensive sword.
Tacitus rightly concludes, "Almost without realizing it, the Democrats will emerge from this election cycle with a seriously good and adaptable internet machine."
[9] comments (4000 views) | link
Welcome to 123CCTV!
Welcome to 123CCTV, which ordered ads on 18 blogs yesterday and 57 blogs today. This makes 123CCTV the biggest advertiser yet in the blogosphere. Go on over and buy something and tell 'em bloggers sent you.
[10] comments (9102 views) | link
Speed chess
Happiness: Friday night after a hard week listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue while playing six minute speed chess and nearly getting beaten by a third grader.
Joy: later, getting beaten.
Also, I got beat at "pig" playing basketball Saturday by a first grader. I choked on the clutch shots, he didn't.
[7] comments (4133 views) | link
Winning ad
Try not crying when you see this ad.
The Internet has the potential to up-end America's political pyramid. I hope it gets here in time.
(Actually, our unfunded liabilities are more like $47 trillion.)
[6] comments (2913 views) | link
Blogs key to political campaigns
Washington Post: "Political candidates trying to use the Internet to win support from young, Web-wise voters should avoid pop-up and banner ads and instead use interactive media like Internet chats and 'blogs,' according to a study released today." (Thank you Hylton!)
[6] comments (3424 views) | link
Our local TV news covers blogging and advertising
You know blogging has hit some kind of cultural extreme when our local TV station, NBC17, does a story on the local angle on blogging. I hope they post the video, because it's very funny to see the anchor raise his eyebrows when he first mentions the blog, "a kind of online diary," and then segues to two 40-ish males raving about the idea. Yes, I got my 15 seconds of fame. The other guy in the spot is Todd Melet, who I introduced to blogging just a few months ago.
The reporter did a credible job of explaining blogs in 90 seconds. The blog I was scrolling through showing ads on was Atrios, although NBC didn't show the URL. Funnily enough, the spot also did not mention the Blogads URL. Is is possible that our lead -- "You need to woo the early adopters that traditional media can't reach. You need to impress 100,000 opinion makers with a colorful pitch, not pester 100,000,000 nobodies with a soulless textad or banner" -- hit a nerve?
Update Here's the actual TV spot in a popup window.
[7] comments (4252 views) | link
Political blogs excite journalists
NPR's ombudsman eats crow after dissing blogs.
E&P reports on TPM blogger of the year award.
SF Chronicle says political insiders watch blogs like DailyKos. Here's one enthusiastic insider/blog reader:
"I'm a reader. I think Markos has done an incredible job," said the president of the New Democrat Network, Simon Rosenberg, a centrist who worked in Bill Clinton's famous "war room" during the 1992 campaign and continued working for Clinton throughout his presidency. "Kos is one of the places I go for full-time information every day," Rosenberg said. "If people like me do that, you know it's having an impact."Tallahassee Democrat says:
"Blogs are the biggest communication innovation for the 2004 election," wrote Alexis Rice, author of a recent blog study at Johns Hopkins University. "Blogs are transforming campaign communication and will become not only an important tool in the presidential election, but in future state and local elections."Before receiving his award yesterday, Josh Marshall reports, Josh tried to explain blogs to Arthur Schlesinger, one of Josh's heros. He wanders over to the great historian and his wife and starts babbling.
To be polite Schlesinger’s wife asked me to explain to them just what a blog is. And though I get this question pretty often, it turns out to be a rather challenging one if the people you’re trying to explain it to don’t necessarily have a lot of clear web reference points to make sense of what you’re saying. I ended up telling them that it was something like political commentary structured like a personal journal with occasional reporting mixed in. Now, as I was explaining and watching the looks on everyone’s faces it was incrementally becoming clear to me that this was playing rather like saying that something was like a washing machine structured like a rhinoceros with the occasional sandwich thrown in. And, as Schlesinger himself had said rather little through all this, it was also dawning on me that being one of the four guests of honor at this little event was providing no guarantee against making a bit of a fool of myself.
[8] comments (2725 views) | link
Blogger of the year: Josh Marshall
The Week Magazine convened a whole herd of big-wigs in New York today to celebrate opinion journalism.
Josh Marshall was honored as "Blogger of the Year," reports Jeff Jarvis, who was there and helped, along with Glenn Reynolds and Daniel Radosh, to select the winning blogger.
The crowd included Tina Brown, Abe Rosenthal, Mario Cuomo, Jim Hoge, Elizabeth Spiers, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, Edward Epstein, Harry Evans, Vartan Gregorian... and if I understand correctly, Susan Cheever, Robert Caro, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lani Guinier, Edward Rollins, Wendy Wasserstein, Steven Ratner, Walter Isaacson, Alex Jones, Lauren Hutton...
Here's the citation for Marshall:
Joshua Micah Marshall, author of TalkingPointsMemo.com, represents the best of the Internet’s new medium of opinion, the weblog.Josh, ever the mensch, said "I'd like to thank you not so much for choosing me but for choosing bloggers."
Weblogs – personal journals with links and commentary – have quickly moved from the fringes of political discourse into the mainstream. On his well-red, well-regarded political blog, the Washington-based Marshall (also a writer for Washington Monthly and a Ph.D in American history) is best known for tenaciously dogging the story of then-Majority Leader Trent Lott’s racial indiscretion at Strom Thurmond’s retirement -- a story the big media outlets had largely ignored. Marshall, a liberal in a medium better known for its conservative and libertarian voices, has also aggressively covered the Bush administration's strategy.
Marshall calls himself an opinion journalist, but he is also an accomplished reporter. He snared one of the first exclusive interviews with Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark, for instance. Marshall recently asked his online readers whether he should report from the New Hampshire primary; in less than a day, the audience pledged enough to pay for his trip, and Marshall decided to report for them, rather than for print. “I’m much more invested in my Web site than in any of those other things that pay me,” he said recently.
But Marshall is also making his Web site pay. He has received advertising from one presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, and from a gun-control advocacy group. Why are they advertising? Because Weblogs – and Marshall’s weblog in particular – are where the influential reach the influential. They matter.
If you want to beat Tina Brown to ordering a Blogad to start influencing influercers, here's Josh Marshall's ad order form.
[14] comments (3137 views) | link
Internet user more affluent than newspaper readers
The Media Audit finds: "Even as Internet usage has surged, the quality (for an advertiser) hasn't gone down. "More than 60% of Internet heavy users have household incomes of $50,000 or more and 50.4% have one or more college degrees.... For newpapers, 45% have household incomes of $50,000 ore more and 38.9% have one ore more college degrees." Heavy user is defined, for both groups, as spending more than an hour a day with the media in question. (PDF via Jeff Jarvis.)
[9] comments (2597 views) | link
Review of the Corvid's Fought Down
This is a bad album. Bad for anyone who likes voices smooth as a baby's bottom. Bad for those who don't dream. Bad for anyone who doesn't love the Stone's Some Girls, the idea for which Jagger stole from Layne in an LA bar in 1992. Bad for those who are satisfied. Bad for those who hate music that tells stories... "did you know i slept in her bed, you were off in dublin, i'm an honest man, i did nothing you weren't with her in the morning she was perfect, same girl you ignore, you came home mad about something, you don't matter anymore." Bad for folks who don't mix their drinks or music... whiskey, country, beer, rock& redneck, gin & roll, oak-barrel-aged grunge. Bad for folks who don't want to hear The Who sing Mel Tillis. Bad for people who don't like a good time. Because, as the first song says, "you're in for a good time, drop on by now, don't be crying, the people are friendly, just wait and see all your drinks are free, you're in for a good time..." Bad bad bad.
(I've given the album five stars in Amazon and submitted this review. Now we'll see if Amazon has a sense of irony and lets the thing through their filters. If you are a bad person, click here to order your copy today. For those of you who don't know me or the Corvids, you should know that we know each other. Yes, I'm biased. Look closely and you'll find two Corvids in this 1992 article.)
[6] comments (3011 views) | link
A new online filing cabinet from Amherst
When we were living in Amherst, I met Michael Giles, a clever and friendly coder who had just moved to town from CA. We've kept in touch and I've been watching Mike gestate a cool tool called Furl. Beside being a nice play on URL, "to furl" means to roll up and store, which is exactly what Mike's tool does.
At first glance, Furl seems a subset or offshoot of blogging... you use it to save URLs and comment on them on your own web page.
But once you've used Furl a little, you see that the tool set Mike has assembled has its own life and may hit a much broader audience -- the folks who don't have the time or ability to blog, but who do want to quickly save and share information. And Mike adds some neat features; once you've bookmarked an article, Furl's server automatically stores a copy so that even months from now when that NYTimes archive page is long-locked, you can refer to the article; you can easily categorize pages and rank them; Furl also makes it easy for colleagues or peers to pool information; after downloading one nugget of code, you can Furl from your browser with a single click. You can also use a javascript to import your links somewhere else... like this:
Before you write in to tell me that Radio or Blogger or Bill Gates or Tim Berners Lee or Piltdown Man or UrMama did something like this years ago... sure, all these features are available in different forms in lots of other tools. But by putting them together in one integrated package, Mike's done something really simple and handy.
I'm using Furl to brain-dump pages that I'd love to blog, but don't have time to do right. Still fiddling with his marketing angle, Mike calls Furl "your online filing cabinet," which I think does a good job of summing up the benefits of the tool for the 90% of Internet users who still think "blog" is a plumber's term for a type of wrench.
Go help Mike beta test Furl.net.
[10] comments (5344 views) | link
Web grabs young and smartest politics-watchers from old media, Pew finds
Traditional news mongers have just about died and willed politics to the Internauts, according to a survey and analysis released yesterday by the Pew Internet and the American Life project.
In brief: all age groups, particularly the young, are foresaking traditional news sources like nightly news shows and newspapers and mobbing the Internet. People who rely on the Internet are better informed than patrons of any other news media. Nearly one person in three online is doing something political with Internet tools. Here's the details I dug out of Pew's report:
- * "The Internet, a relatively minor source for campaign news in 2000, is now on par with such traditional outlets as public television broacasts, Sunday morning news programs and the weekly news magazines." Today, 13% of the public "regularly" learns about the campaigns from the Internet, up from 9% four years ago. That contrasts with nightly network news, which dropped from 45% to 35% over the same period, and newspapers, which dropped from 40% to 31%.
* The really bad news for old media: its fascination for younger citizens is being eclipsed quickly by the web. Just 23% of 18-29 year olds say they regularly learn something about the election from the nightly network news, down from 39% in 2000. Almost as much of the same cohort, 20%, now rely on the Internet for political news.
* The average Internet reader is also far better informed than folks relying on other media. Asked to identify which presidential candidates were a former Army general and former House majority leader, 39% of Internet fans gave two correct answers, versus 31% for Sunday political TV watchers, 30% for newspaper readers, 21% for those devoted to TV news magazines, 20% for watchers of nightly network news and 14% for local TV news watchers. Tom Brokaw, who's your Daddy?
* Not only are the folks who rely on the Internet for their election news exceptionally well informed compared to everyone else, they are also particularly politically active. Fully 30% of Internet users engage in some form of online political activity. 18% get candidate information, 18% send/receive campaign e-mails; 10% get information on local activities; 9% visit web sites of political groups; 8% visit candidate web sites, 4% engage in chats, discussions, and blogs. (Pew's terminology is fuzzy here, but I guess this refers to blog posting rather than blog reading.)
* While generally less political than the general public offline, 24% of all 18-30 year olds are politically active online, versus just 18% of the general public.
For the record, Meet the Press pundits said blog, blogger or weblog 31 times, which must set a record for television. And the transcript makes it sound like they tittered each time. Sadly, Pew's study suggests that, today, at least 69% of Meet the Press's viewers still have no idea what a blog is.
[7] comments (3617 views) | link
Ibolya shadow
The Ibolya Cafe, where Matt Welch, David Reilly, Miklos Gaspar,Susan Skiles, Ken Layne, Renee Cordes, Jim Lowney, Ben Sullivan and I used to hold the Budapest Business Journal's editorial meetings, has gone the way of the dodo and print newspaper scoop. But Rick Bruner, visiting Budapest recently, finds the Ibolya's unlit neon sign still hangs above a new cafe. Matt, who was also in Budapest over New Year's, reports, "at current rates of development, the entire city of Pest (Buda is the hilly half across the Danube) will be one sprawling café/wine bar/bistro/restaurant by roughly 2007." And anyone wondering why Matt
The Ibolya is 20 seconds walk from the Cafe Central, where the concept of six degrees of separation was birthed in 1929. Of course, while the Cafe is now nicely restored, when we were working in that neighborhood in the nineties, the place was a combination bagel store and video arcade.
Finally, anyone wondering why Matt recently wrote that "gulping down cheap & sweet champagne, even for a short while and mixed with better quality stuff, can lead to acute, projectile-style poisoning, for up to 20 hours," should check out this photo to see Matt's hangover in the making.
[9] comments (3605 views) | link
A load off my mind
Watched W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick. Playing Egbert Souse -- pronounced with a gleeful French twist as "Sue-zay" -- Fields wanders into the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, his favorite bar.
"Um, was I in here last night and spend a twenty dollar bill?" asks Souse.
"Yeah," says the bartender.
"Oh, boy," he says, then grins like a baby given its bottle. "What a load that is off my mind."
After falling out of bed laughing, all I could think was... unfunded US social security liability. Twenty years from now, a befuddled US retiree will stumble into a bar and mutter to the bartender -- "Did I spend $2 trillion in here a couple of decades ago?"
[7] comments (2674 views) | link
Remember your last exams?
Csaba Garay, one of the key guys coding Blogads, took December off to complete his master's degree at Hungary's brutally hard Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem. I haven't talked to Csaba since before Christmas. Wow, it makes my spine tingle to remember taking those final exams.
Csab (11:50 AM) :
exams: 2 down one to go.
henry (11:51 AM) :
great. and the thesis bug got resolved?
Csab (11:51 AM) :
but the last one should be easier than these two...
Csab (11:51 AM) :
yupp. I allready turned it in..
henry (11:51 AM) :
great.
henry (11:52 AM) :
must feel darn good.
Csab (11:55 AM) :
yes, it's a biiig relief...
henry (11:55 AM) :
must feel like a weight lifted from your shoulders.
Csab (11:55 AM) :
especially after this last exam i had today... I was up all night studying hard for a 'C' (3)
henry (11:56 AM) :
Wow. Sometimes the best grades are the 3s... which are much better than 1s, right?
Csab (11:56 AM) :
The teacher was kind of picky. giving me a hard time...
henry (11:56 AM) :
Ugg.
henry (11:57 AM) :
I'm glad to report that blogads is growing pleasantly as you study... at current rates, bloggers will be doing roughly 100 million impressions a month in November, so we'll have to work hard to keep up. :)
Csab (11:57 AM) :
2 days ago i was told i was stupid to pick this subject as a final exam (i did not know about it...) and turned out to be true. There were only 2 other guys besides me, while on other courses there were like 20-30...
henry (11:58 AM) :
ouch.
Csab (11:58 AM) :
that IS great news about Blogads! I'm glad to hear that. You do a good job at marketing, and promoting!
henry (12:00 AM) :
your nice machine and a string of lucky synapses... leading from mattwelch to gregbeato to atrios to talkingpoints to daily kos and others... i hope the string keeps unrolling for us.
Csab (12:01 AM) :
i hope so too.
henry (12:01 AM) :
ok, won't keep you. when are you back with us?
Csab (12:01 AM) :
tomorrow!!!!
henry (12:02 AM) :
wow. i better get my head organized.
Csab (12:02 AM) :
:)
henry (12:02 AM) :
ok, i wish you a good night's sleep and some relaxation.
Csab (12:03 AM) :
will have a little drink with friends tonight, then a long good night sleep, and back in the saddle..
Csab (12:03 AM) :
thank you!
Csab (12:03 AM) :
see you tomorrow then!
henry (12:03 AM) :
see you tomrrow.
Here's a prior icq with Csaba via his mobile phone. Why do I blog this stuff? Because I'd like to remember it, and hope a couple of you who know us will enjoy the grist.
[7] comments (2733 views) | link
Extremely local advertising
The Lexington Herald-Leader reports:
Since November, Raymond Popovich has been battling his insurance company over a claim. His latest strike was a public one: a large red, white and blue sign in the front yard of his Meadowthorpe home. The sign, equipped with a flood light for night viewing, says: "Shelter Insurance Company Wouldn't Pay My Claim! How About Yours?" Neighbors so far are OK with the new billboard. Well, most of the neighbors. Two doors down from Popovich lives the insurance agent who sold him the policy, Willie Lee Morrison Jr., who drives a truck emblazoned with his name and the name of his company.(Via ObscureStore)
[7] comments (2666 views) | link
Fueled by politics, blog traffic rockets
Looks like political weblogging is going into orbit. Judging from the ads being pulled from our server, daily traffic this week is up 30% versus good days in December. Glad we invested in that new Rackspace setup last fall.
Reading the history of any newspaper, you'll find two engines driving step-changes in audience levels: the sustained narrative of a political race or lower prices.
Blogging has both.
With 170 million Americans online and only 3 million of them reading blogs, we've got a lot of upside.
What would happen if blogs selling ads grow 30% each month through November? Without adding new blogs, Blogads will be serving 96 million impressions monthly. Ahh, the joys of compounding.
I'll try to post something tomorrow graphing current traffic growth. To try to better reflect this momentum, we've changed the way we forecast monthly impressions on our order page. We used to tally the prior 30 days, but now count the last seven days impressions and multiply by four.
(Footnote from New York Times history: October 10, 1898: "In a gamble, [Adolph S.] Ochs lowers the price of the [New York Times] to 1 cent [from 3 cents.] Circulation triples within a year, to 76,000 from 26,000, and advertising revenues soar.")
Update: Here's the graphic I promised. Most recent data is at the left. 
BTW, another thing to notice... blogs are read during the work week, during the day. Ergo: most political blog readers are people with jobs, people with jobs with computers, people who are actually taking time away from their jobs to look at blogs. These are the "knowledge crafters" who advertisers crave to meet. Put it all together and you could argue (I sure do!) that these readers are 10-fold more engaged than the folks wandering by the average television at 9PM on a Tuesday night... the folks most political advertising is currently wasted on. Here's the day graphic. The leftmost edge is 8.40AM EST. Over the next four hours traffic will rocket as people in across the country roll into work. 
[6] comments (3568 views) | link
Advertising history
Looking more at old ads in the Duke archives, these excerpts give me a sense of advertising's winding path of invention:
1841 - Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 - Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1856 - Mathew Brady advertises his services of "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes" in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1861 - The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 - There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1864 - William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1869 - George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1870 - 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1879 - John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s - $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills.
1885 - New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1889 - James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1890s - Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.
BTW, I saw Cold Mountain last night. As fine as the book. Renee Zellweger excelled.
[7] comments (7079 views) | link
'Extremely pleased' advertiser on Atrios and DailyKos
Got this note, titled "Site Traffic Quadrupled OVERNITE: A Testimonial you will like" at 3AM from Richard Luckett, the creative Texan behind lefty paraphernalia-seller and publisher Agitproperties, about blogads he's running on DailyKos and Atrios.
"HC:
I wanted to get the word out about our new column written by an anonymous Army intelligence officer just back from Iraq and Afghanistan for two years. These ads were updated late Monday night. I was extremely pleased with the results. Feel free to use this info as you see fit. I even wrote the pitch for you. ; )
Richard"
Here is Richard's testimonial:
Agencies: are your clients’ shrinking ad dollars this well-placed in front of a pool of potential consumers virtually pre-screened to have an interest in what they are selling? These stats prove plainly that a small, inexpensive campaign of well-written and well-targeted blog ads can quadruple a site’s traffic (and potential sales) overnight.Many Internet advertisers would not be ashamed to see results like that for an entire campaign, not just day one. As you may recall, Luckett has raved about blogads before, saying ads on blogs are four times as effective as ads in the Village Voice. I should note that it is not just blogs that drive Luckett's success. His laser-sharp design and punchy copy are key. He also changes his creative every one to three days, sooner if an ad is dogging. Here's the eye-grabbing graphic for the ad he mentions:
Day before “The Trooper Speaks” blog ads were posted:
Total Page Views for this date:289
Unique Visitors for this date:178
First Time Visitors:148
Returning Visitors:30
Average Page Views per Visitor:1.6
Average Page Views per Hour:12.0
Average Unique Visitors Per Hour:7.4
Day after “The Trooper Speaks” blog ads were posted:
Total Page Views for this date:1,545
Unique Visitors for this date:743
First Time Visitors:695
Returning Visitors:48
Average Page Views per Visitor:2.1
Average Page Views per Hour:64.4
Average Unique Visitors Per Hour:31.0
Here is the ad's current text:
After two years in Afghanistan and Iraq, "Anonymous", a U.S. Army Intelligence officer, speaks out weekly on what he saw and experienced. His sad, brave and poignant words should be required reading at CENTCOM. Read his new column exclusively at agitproperties.com, the home of the world-famous FAUX NEWS coffee mug, KIRK ANDERSON'S Got Allies? tee and our new COALITION OF THE BILLING tee. agitproperties.com - the truth starts here.
[11] comments (4352 views) | link
Local political blogging?
I had lunch last week with Ed Cone last week in Greensboro. Ed took the first and most exhaustive look at Dean's Internet Strategy, and lots of journalists have since followed in his path.
We debated whether Howard Dean's Internet tactics might work in local campaigns this year, specifically for the NC campaign of Chester Erskine Bowles for Senate.
I think Ed is right that blogs + Meetup could make a big difference in the NC contest, particularly in a tight race. I agree that a little effort could catalyze dozens of 'Bowles blogs' by June. But I'll stick to my guns on my third argument: well-established institutions and inside players are too often willfully blind to new tactics and technology, particularly when the technology upends the power structure they've built their lives and bank accounts around.
So, no Bowles blogs this year in NC unless someone outside the Democratic aparat pushes them.
[11] comments (5459 views) | link
Politics and technology in 1928 advertisement
Wandering around the Duke University Ad archives, I found this 1928 Chicago Tribune advertisement for a Zenith radio titled "At the conventions, you'll always get the whispered 'asides' with a Zenith Radio."
Not only the speeches and the voting -- but the speaker's whispered 'aside' -- the fascinating by-play will be yours if you have a Zenith receiver -- just as if you were at the Chairman's right hand.
1928 was the first year radio played a roll in national politics. After conventions held in June, the election pitted Republican Herbert Hoover against Democrat Alfred E. Smith.
Funny how easily the word 'blog' could stand in today for that 1928 radio. The Zenith ad testifies that news technology and politics have always been entwined, and reminds us how eloquently ads describe the interplay of culture and material life.
[9] comments (3609 views) | link
Random motes
A friend and his son play the (old): Game of Life: "I take a chance at becoming a Millionare Tycoon and put all my money on 6. I spin. Unbelievable - 6! I win! Alex does not take it well - goes off to his room and makes an angry sketch of me and puts it on his wall."
Hugh MacLeod writes: "All products are information. The molecules are secondary."
Shhh! Don't tell Ken, but he's sliding back to regular blogging. Just a sip a day.
Today in Jeff Jarvis' comments, I coined "adparatchik," meaning an ad industry functionary beholden to the reigning command-and-control mythos and high-margin apparat of TV and print advertising. (Maybe I'm waxing nostalgic for Budapest?) Anyway, Google says there are no prior instances of adparatchik. It gave me a good chuckle, but I won't hold my breath waiting for the word to get used again.
Finally, an interesting article arguing cow's milk is linked to diabetes and cancer.
[8] comments (3770 views) | link
Dan Okrent's killer arguments against print
"Twenty, thirty, at the outside forty years from now, we will look back on the print media the way we look back on travel by horse and carriage, or by wind-powered ship," Dan Okrent, then Editor at Large for Time, Inc. told a bunch of journalism folks at Columbia University three years ago. Today Okrent is helping shake-up the New York Times' inbred culture as its Public Editor.
Argument number 1, said Okrent: cheap digital substitutes like tablets are coming. Number 2: "last year, Time Inc., spent $1 billion dollars on paper and postage. End of argument. Or, if you’d like, let me put it this way: you may prefer to ride across town in horse-and-carriage, or across a lake in a wind-powered yacht, but no one makes that carriage or that yacht for you anymore, at least not at a reasonable price."
Finally, "But the real power of the [printless] business model resides in the potential of digital advertising. Except for direct mail, until the Internet came along no advertising medium existed in which the advertiser could be sure his message was received by his targeted audience. We go to the bathroom during commercials, we flip the pages past magazine and newspaper ads, radio and billboards are white noise. But with a truly interactive medium – with say, a question about the advertisement asked next to the button that gives you your thirty cent credit against the cost of reading your Wall Street Journal – the effectiveness of media advertising changes radically. And if you don’t think advertisers influence the direction of American mass media, you ought to talk to Tom Goldstein about the curriculum here at the J-school."
I like Okrent.
[7] comments (2734 views) | link
Coffee with the Instapundit
Cruised over to Knoxville to have coffee with Glenn Reynolds. We've crossed paths at several blogging conclaves, so it was fun to have an extended rap. Among other things, we covered bears, caffeine addiction, cougar hunting, home-baked video, the civilizing effects of caffeine, webmail, Matt Welch, Moneyball, bandwidth costs, the hidden positives of blogger bias, and help-wanted ads.
[8] comments (2599 views) | link
Blog advertising for TNR.com (but not on DailyKos)
You may have noticed new blogads for The New Republic on Atrios, Talkingpointsmemo and PoliticaWire. More to come -- roughly a dozen blogs in total.
Clever and effective, TNR's text and image jibe well with blog content and style.
Update: having recently bashed TNR for its coverage of Dean and suggested "cancel your subscriptions!" Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, proprietor of DailyKos, rejects TNR's ad submission: "If TNR wants to wage its war against Dean, that's their perogative. I won't let them do it around these parts." Then 140+ DailyKos commenters dissect the ad's pros and cons.
(For context, here are some past cases of blog advertising reverb. And here's the original debate about whether Kos should run blog advertising.)
[9] comments (3806 views) | link