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Archives: June 2004
The no-alternative press: ad rates double in LA
NYPost: "A lawyer who saw his advertising rates in a Los Angeles alternative weekly newspaper double after its owner, Village Voice Media, eliminated the competing weekly in a controversial market swap, has sued, claiming antitrust violations."
Good thing that hundreds of bloggers are offering alternatives to mediocre media monopolists.
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The Terminal
We drove to Black Mountain Sunday night through thunderstorms. Slept until 11AM yesterday, a rare treat. Then a short hike through the fragrant woods, finding a brown ladybug and a red newt. While the sandwich generations played rook, last night my wife and I ate at Salsa in Asheville -- more restaurants and tourists than ever -- and then to see Tom Hanks in The Terminal. It's a hard movie to peg -- starts serious, then gets frantic, then shuffles into a mythic/magical realism mode. Perhaps because the lead character reminded me -- in gate, visage, ethic and accent -- of Dragan, my tennis buddy in Paris who has long been infatuated by the US, I really enjoyed the movie. Today, another hike and then back to the heat of eastern NC. Update: we found a turtle (now named "Bob"), a mouse and some Indian Pipes (a non chlorophylic flower) on Sunday's hike.
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Protecting children from p2p software?
Yale scholar Ernest Miller pens a scathing deconstruction of proposed legislation criminalizing p2p software to "protect children" (and the music companies that give generously to Senate sponsor Oren Hatch and his confreres.) (Via Boingboing.)
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Lone rangers of journalism
To me the biggest corrupting influence in this country in the production of literature and journalism is the attempt to make it an academic subject—the creative writing classes, journalism schools. That’s the wrong approach. It’s an attempt to establish a career path for writers. And also to take the risk out of it and say if you do X, Y, and Z, then you get this plum. I think the best stuff is done by lone rangers.
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Blogging from Iran
Miklos' sister Mona decided to go from Hungary to India by bus, train, camel and foot. She started blogging the journey and talked a women's magazine in Hungary into paying her. Here's her blog and a photo:
I asked Miklos for more details. He replied: "Mona is 28. 2 years ago she spent 4 months backpacking in Tibet, India and Nepal, including a one month of volunteering as an English teacher in a village she passed through during her hikes. She decided to go back to Asia again once she has saved up some money. She flew to Istanbul, and is planning to make it to Australia on the ground/sea. She has crossed Turkey, Iran and is almost out of Pakistan. (She is in Lahore.) Sometimes she travels alone, but she typically finds travelmates for various sections of the road on the Internet. Dress code: She wants to fit in somewhat, so she buys new clothes as she travels from one culture to the next. She is adopting the most liberal local style – which typically means that her head is covered, but she does not need to wear a chador or a burka. However, in some places in Iran she had to wear a chador to go to religious sites. She borrowed one from the people she was staying with. A key accessory is a (fake) wedding ring. Despite this, every other day someone she speaks 3 sentences with asks her to marry him. She began doing a (password protected) blog on TravelPod from the get go. It is in Hungarian for her fan club back home. From Turkey she wrote every other day, from Iran, once a week, but from Pakistan she can get to an internet cafe only once in two weeks. Before Pakistan she had constant problems with keyboards. On the Turkish keyboard the 'y' replaces the 'i'. So she kept wrytyng lyke thys. It is really too bad that her blog is in English, because both her stories and her style are excellent."
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Transparency Aren't Them
Already under attack for sloppy news practices, the publishing industry is now getting chewed up for fraudulent circulation tallies. Glenn Reynolds notes that blog traffic figures are readily available from multiple sources.
The Internet has changed the climate; with more tools for accountability, expectations are rising.
BTW, a couple of recent articles mentioning blog advertising in English and French.
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Conferences
The first blog conference I went to was in New Haven in late 2002. I was fascinated to meet David Pinto, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, Mickey Kaus, Jack Balkin and many others. The next conference I attended was the first BloggerCon in Boston -- I met Kerry's CTO, Dean's head blogger Mathew Gross, David Weinberger, Josh and I caught up. I had a fantastic time speaking (and listening) at Blogtalk in Vienna last year, where nearly all the presentations were original, newly-crafted and jury approved.
But recently, the fun is fraying. Conferences seem increasingly like watching the proverbial ten blind men debate the essense of an elephant. Lots of unmatched premises and anecdotes. This post sure sounded unsettlingly familiar.
NB: when is some conference organizer finally going to take Dan Gillmore seriously when he keeps repeating -- as he's done each of the five times I've heard him speak -- "my readers are smarter than I am" and invite his readers to speak rather than him? (Correction: replace "smarter than I am" with "know more than I do..." see comments for context.)
So it is with great trepidation (and some hope of doing better) that I've accepted invitations to climb onto the stage at Blogon2004 and Chris Pirillo's Gnomedex. To keep things interesting -- at least for myself -- I've resolved to agree with nobody, perhaps not even myself. All wisdom is conventional and worthy of scorn, at least for the space of a thought experiment or three.
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Blog readers easily undercounted by traditional bigCo methods
Since 90% of blog reading occurs at work, blog readers will likely be radically undercounted by the likes of comScore and Nielsen, we can infer from reading this article. The rub:
High-traffic Internet sites often employ outside survey firms, such as Nielsen/NetRatings or comScore Media Metrix, to measure site traffic. Both use huge "panels" (comScore claims to have 1 million panelists) of computer users who, in exchange for incentives, permit the companies to track which websites they visit.
But because many companies won't allow their workplace computers to be used for such purposes, "these panels clearly undersample at-work users," says Richard Gordon, a professor of online journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
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An old favorite
Seems that of the sweetest voices on the Internet is back for a while at least.
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Blog readership survey refractions
Imediaconnection looks at blog readers and Emarketer does too. Emarketer created some nice graphics that beat what we were able to pull together.
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Baptism by pixels
Lots of buzz about bloggers covering the Democratic National Convention this year. Much more potential for excitement/revolution when you've got bloggers participating in gatherings like the Southern Baptist Convention, events that, unlike the DNCC, are unscripted and not already covered by 5000 reporters? (Via Instapundit.)
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Blog readers discussed by MediaPost
Kate Kaye does a great job rounding up the recent blog reader survey in MediaPost.
One thing unmentioned in the article that Kate and I had talked about: the number of bloggers among blog readers. Kate said she's sometimes suspected that blogs are read mostly by people who write blogs, so was surprised that only 21% of blog readers are also bloggers. On the other hand I was surprised that that many are bloggers themselves.
I guess 20% strikes a nice balance: guaranteeing that messages broadcast beyond the blogosphere, but also increasing the chances that blog ads can resonate within the blogosphere and pick up secondary links or discussion.
(Worth re-reading Duncan Watts on mathematics of epidemics, and the necessary balance between inside/outside, closed/open to sustain propogation.)
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Hespos: Yes, Blogs Are A Great Advertising Environment
Online advertising guru Tom Hespos has tasted blogs and now wants a whole meal.
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The universal sportscaster
Doug Arellanes reports that Czech soccer commentators are... not brilliant. Some things seem to be constant across cultures.
Likewise, have you ever wondered about the fact that in every culture known to man, there's a political left and right? Even if they aren't called such, the two (or more) sides co-exist and thrive by deriding and scheming against each other. (Ever wonder about those those cave-drawings of donkeys and elephants?)
Is it that, as with the Y chromosome or the gene for left-handedness, we're all born with some marker that tells us which side of the aisle or barricade to stand on? Or that we've all got some kind of natural born political IQ; some people are simply smarter and get "it," the political truth, while the other dummies just see things from the wrong side?
More likely, it's that humans are hard-wired to cluster into groups and then define our groups in opposition to other groups. The stakes are social as much as they are ideological.
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We're all human
Doug Arellanes reports that Czech soccer commentators are... not brilliant. Some things seem to be constant across cultures.
Likewise, have you ever wondered about the fact that in every culture known to man, there's a political left and right? Even if they aren't called such, the two (or more) sides co-exist and thrive by deriding and scheming against each other. (Ever wonder about those those cave-drawings of donkeys and elephants?)
Is it that, as with the Y chromosome, we're all born with some marker that tells us which side of the aisle to sit on or which side of the barricade to stand on? Or that we've all got some kind of natural born political IQ; some people are simply smarter and get "it," the political truth, while the other dummies just see things from the wrong side?
More likely, it's that humans are hard-wired to cluster into groups and then define our groups in opposition to other groups. The stakes are social as much as they are ideological.
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Snapshot of the past
WSJ: "In January, Kodak forecast a 10% to 12% industrywide decline this year in unit volume of rolls and single-use cameras -- essentially a single roll with a disposable case. But in 2004 through May 16, IRI charted a 16% decline compared with the same period a year earlier. And in the four weeks to that date, the drop was 19%. For both periods, the decline in overall dollars paid at retail was smaller, as pricing remained firm for single-use cameras."
Sometimes the wheels just fall off all at once. I was short Kodak stock for a few months in 1999. Right trade, wrong millennium. General rule of thumb when investing: things usually take ten times longer than you expect. Be patient. And then be patient some more. 
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RNC blog advertising
Just noticed Republican National Committee ads on a few blogs. Given all the ink sprayed about liberal advertising on blogs, I wonder if any journalists will notice this entrant.
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Live from Bucharest
My comrade-in-ink Matt is back in the mysterious East of Europe. Emmanuelle will have photos here soon I hope.
We went to see HP last night, celebrating the end of school. The Pythonesque ballooning-aunt-to-bus-ride-to-hunchback-butler-to-Weasley-warning sequence had me thinking "this could be the greatest movie of all time!" But then HP lost its manic jag and slipped back to being merely a very good movie for kids-at-heart.
Championship T-ball game at 1PM today. With Sabermetric precision, we've determined that 22.1% of (our) outs come from jogging to first base, so we all practiced running to first base last night.
Update: Everyone played lots of positions. Pirates were the home team and didn't get our last at-bat when the Dodgers fell one short of matching our 15 runs.
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Engagement
Ads that make you think, win says a new advertising manifesto. Points 4-6 are particularly relevant to blog advertising, I think:
4. Active learning, or high involvement processing, produces enduring attitude changes.
5. However, most of us tend to process most media passively.
6. Despite appearances TV is a relatively low attention medium.
(Via Steve Hall.)
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Advertiser: blog ads blew the conventional media out of the water
Jeff Jarvis exchanges e-mails with Jeff Sharlet, the editor of a new site called The Revealor, about the efficacy of the site's recent advertising campaign. The low down:
The Revealer spent $7 k on advertising in the last month or so (most of our budget). We decided to divide it, roughly, between conventional online media and blog ads. Blog ads blew the conventional media out of the water.Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, DailyKos, Matthew Yglesias, Hit & Run, Washington Monthly and Donald Sensing all generated multiple times more traffic than 'conventional media.'
And all are for sale right here.
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Slicing survey by politics
Here are more reader results from Blogads' survey of 17,159 blog readers May 17-19, 2004, this time broken out by party affiliation. This page contains the results for:
Greens,
Democrats,
Republicans,
Independents,
Libertarians
To recap: here's the aggregate survey. And here's the breakout of women and men.
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Blogads on the radio
As a long-time Prairie Home Companion listener, I'm thrilled to have made a brief glide today across the airwaves of Minnesota Public Radio. I put in plugs for Wonkette, Talkingpoints, RealClearPolitics, Dailykos, Instapundit and the rest of the blogosphere.
Here's the spot and here's the blog for John Gordon's radio show.
Only one problem... uhm... I thought they had a machine to edit out the "uhms." With my tendency towards elipses and subclauses, you can see why I like the control that writing affords. Will do better next time, I promise Mom.
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Game face
Lunch Friday with a couple of execs from a successful gaming website.
As we parted, we exchanged cards. On the back of each of theirs was an odd sounding name.
"Those are our player names," they explained.
Hmm. I joked (or was I serious?) that I really haven't played an interactive game since Pong, when name choices were limited to either "left" or "right."
I returned home to find that my (similarly ancient) friend Steve has just programmed a java version of pong.
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Through both ends of the telescope
A map of media mogoliths in Manhattan. And collection of photos of the new "no photos, please, we do the filming!" notices before movies. Insert insightful essay about dinosaur grave-yards and the resourceful longevity of microbes here:
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Today's agenda
"When you and I were born there were 6,000 languages spoken on Earth. Now, fully half are not being taught to schoolchildren. Effectively, they're already dead unless something changes. What this means is that we are living through a period of time in which, within a single generation or two, by definition half of humanity's cultural legacy is being lost in a single generation."
Interesting and depressing. Half of all human languages gone in our lifetime. (Via my buddy Lee Barstow.)
The good news: a decent-sized meteorite is headed our way very soon (give or take 20,000 years) and will wipe out human life (and most other life) anyway, so we'll be amply punished for our stupidity.
Which isn't to say we should drop our moral compasses and start tossing Milkyway wrappers in the park, letting our kids watch American Idol or read Wonkette, drinking martinis before noon or stealing quarters from blind beggers.
But we humans shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. We're a passing ripple on an ocean that is 1 million light-years across.
Agenda for today: enjoy t-Ball and Harry Potter and a sweet carbonated drink and a cheesesteak sub, and also try to do some good things -- lasting 5 seconds or 80 years -- for other people.
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Help wanted
A small, positive sign of the signs: Taegan Goddard is looking for a paid editorial assistant to help power his highly regarded blog Political Wire.
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Where are they now?
What news from Hiawatha Bray, who wrote in a March 2002 article for the Boston Globe that "blogging is an ephemeral fad, destined to burn itself out in a year or two." The original article has disappeared into the Globe's archives, but its trace is here. Isn't it time to revisit that prediction Hiawatha?
And from April 2002, there's this subtler but no less erroneous prediction by a Smith college economics professor,
People work for companies when it's too difficult to provide goods and services directly to the marketplace. For example, print newspaper columnists could theoretically sell their works directly to consumers. They could go door to door selling their opinions for, say, two cents a copy. Obviously, it would be too difficult for a print columnist to physically distribute his writings directly to households. It's far easier for him to join a newspaper and rely upon the entire paper being sold to his readers.To deconstruct the argument: the reason we can't eliminate colleges/newspapers is NOT that professors/journalists would lose their tenure, it is that students/readers couldn't be sure they were getting a good eduction. In hindsight, it seems Smith isn't living up to its duties of "assessing professors' [predictive] abilities."
Blogging has succeeded because it has made it possible for a solo web journalist to create and distribute his research, reporting, and written opinions. A few years ago a good writer who lacked programming skills would not have been able to create a decent news web site. The efficient way to publish news on the web was for journalists to band together in some media company and have this company provide the necessary computer expertise. Because of Blogger, it's now feasible for someone who is only mildly computer literate to create his own professional-looking regularly updated web site. Blogger has reduced the need for media companies because individual journalists can now physically produce and distribute their own content. Alas, Blogger has not eliminated the benefit to journalists of working for firms.
The weakness of solo blogging can be illuminated by considering why professors work for colleges. Imagine a world where there are no colleges, only professors. Professors would advertise their classes and students would pick which classes to take and directly pay their teachers. Professors could still issue grades and some organization could determine when a student has taken enough classes to qualify as a "college" graduate.
Information costs are the primary reason this solo operator model of higher education is impractical. It would be too difficult for a student to determine which professors are competent to teach. It's far more efficient for the student to pick a college and for the college to incur the information costs of assessing professors' abilities.
And finally, last week was the second anniversary of my manifesto "Blogonomics : making a living from blogging." Seems like decades ago. Now that battle-cry seems mildy credible, but as the two blurbs above indicate, sounded idiotic at the time.
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Design by committee
Why are many TV political ads so bad? Joshua Green reports:
Design by committee, Brabender says, stifles creativity and produces lousy ads. Less is often more in a visual medium like television, but many pollsters and campaign managers seem blind to that: they try to cram as many issues into an ad as they can. If someone throws five tennis balls at you, he points out, it's tough to catch any of them. But with a single ball it's easy. ... political ads have remained strikingly similar since the 1950s, even as consumer ads have evolved dramatically. The difference seems to be that consumer advertisers prize originality, whereas political advertisers prize conformity. In that regard political ads function as a microcosm of politics generally—characterized by frequent and dramatic hyperbole, but resistant to all but the most incremental change.
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More pieces in the puzzle
Daniel Drezner surveys journalists who read certain weblogs and finds... that they read certain weblogs. More interesting than the list of blogs read is the list of journalists reading 'em.
Speaking of journalists reading weblogs, when Kathleen Pender interviewed me about Blogads for the San Fransisco Chronicle, she was almost giggling when she glimpsed how much money some bloggers now make. "$700 for an ad? Wow."
I was busy last week in New York visiting current blog advertisers and calling on prospects. You can get a huge amount done with phone and IM, but, as one friend puts it, face2face is the ultimate in bandwidth. I used Starbucks/T-mobile as my mobile office and managed to stay reasonably on top of things.
Chatting with Jeff Jarvis at the New School's personal democracy forum, I discovered that this sister Cindy was a preacher in my family's church in the mid-seventies in Ohio. (Vis the forum, I'm not going to another event that has a panel on political blogging in which 3/4 of the panelists aren't political bloggers.)
The week ended in New Haven at my 20th reunion. Who were all those middle-aged people? One friend's teenage daughter told her pop that we were "a bunch of old farts talking about stupid shit." Indeed.
We chewed on all sides of Iraqi war. As I walked among the halls and courtyards, many of them carved with rollcalls of the battlefields and casualties of World War I and II, I wondered: have any alumni of Yale -- the alma mater of our two presidential candidates -- died in Iraq?
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