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Archives: September 2004
The view from Dallas
Sitting in Dallas airport, wired by T-mobile, hoping to catch a few minutes of the debate before my flight to Reno takes off. There will meet Marc Brown and Ken Layne and get the post-game analysis.
When not napping, read David Allen's Getting Things Done on the flight. Made lists in keeping with Allen's regime.
The airport is silent... for a moment.
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Recount
In August, lots more political advertising online than previously estimated.
And with Hollywood scheming to forbid us do anything with pixels and bytes but pay for them, IPaction, a new PAC, seems like a great idea.
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Ticked off
Bloggers are "are to journalism what ticks are to elephants." And "a lot of the attack against the mainstream media is coming from bloggers, which is like astronomers being assaulted by people who swear that aliens force them to have sex with Martians." And "Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world."
Just when it seems like everyone loves blogs, it is great to see some people haven't yet drunk the cool-aid -- still some market-share left to win!
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New order page gizmo...
Visit this beta version of our new order page. Takes a few seconds to load, but basically lets you do lots of tricky blog selection in your browser without recourse to our admin server. To see what I mean, first select a bunch of blogs. Then click "view only selected blogs." Zing! Then, if you want, choose a sorting mechanism, for example, sports, and keep selecting blogs. Click "View only selected blogs" again and, zing!, you can see the total list you've selected so far.
Still trying to figure out how to make it obvious for users, but once you get the hang of it, this is a joy to use. Still to come -- advanced searching with lots of categories in play. Your feedback welcome to info(at)blogads.com.
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Soros blogs... (and buys blogads)
You may have noticed blogads for georgesoros.com, which promises some blogging by the man himself later this week. Wonder how many other magnates have been smart enough to secure their own URLs? Check out billclinton.com, jerryford.com, jimmycarter.com, billgates.com and punchsulzberger.com. Only one of those guys controls his own URL... guess which one? (Don't even try DonaldTrump.com, leads to a hijack screen.)
As Soros' fellow Hungarian expat andygrove.com said, "only the paranoid survive."
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Misc
Earthquakes at Mount Saint Helens. (This is the kind of great link Drudge coughs up in tweny seconds that takes corp-media hours to link.)
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NYTimes magazine on liberal bloggers
Great to see Matthew Klam's profile of bloggers Markos Moulitsas, Josh Marshall, Ana Marie Cox, Duncan Black and Jerome Armstrong in the NYTimes magazine today.
Some Kossites' cavil at Klam's carping, but (as a former magazine writer) I think the profiles are not unkind and the free publicity fantastic. The first rule of magazine writing is "kill your subject or see your story killed," so Klam had to highlight sex appeal and blogger foibles to get the story past his editors. Second, the NYTimes is profiling people who it must, finally and fully, recognize as competitors, so unadulterated praise was unlikely.
Update: a couple of friends have asked: why wasn't Blogads.com mentioned? As portrayed in the mag, money seems to flow magically into blogger pockets -- "The blog ad money had fallen from the sky, and it had saved him." ... or..."Since February, with the explosion of blog traffic and the invention of blog ads as a revenue source, a few elite bloggers have found themselves on the receiving end of a Howitzer of money, as much as $10,000 a month."
It's some kind of virgin birth, no mechanism described or even imagined. I had a good chat with Klam, so the omission wasn't due to ignorance. I've also heard, from Amy Langfield, that Klam mentioned Blogads and me on CNN. My guess is that digging into the mechanics of the easy-as-blogging advertising revolution would have been too complex for this personality-driven article. Still, it's a shame the simple URL www.blogads.com wasn't included, since the URL is the funnel for the magical cash Klam exclaims over.
Bloggers, collaborating to pool advertisers just as they pool news and readers, are driving a commercial revolution as well as an information revolt. Rather than depending on publishers to earn their cash, bloggers can set their own rates and play their own game. Rather than watching publishers funnel off 90% of their cash, bloggers can grab the lion's share for themselves. Writing about reporters getting end-run to the news by bloggers is well enough, but perhaps the commercial end-run not a story the NYTimes magazine wants to stress with readers?
Think bloggers are still commercial small fry? Bloggers selling blogads are on track to do 75 million impressions in September. (That's up from 5 million last December.) To put that number in perspective, that is 1/6 NYTimes.com's total monthly impressions and 1/3 of monthly traffic for WashingtonPost.com.
Update II: thank you to bloggers Steve Gilliard, Duncan Black and Markos Moulitsas for writing so generously about my role in the blogging revolution.
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Misc
In today's Mediapost, Kate Kaye does a nice profile of Blogads code guru Tamas Decsi, capturing his humor, serenity and appreciation of life's surprises.
Fun to see the paper I used to write for in the 90s cover Rathergate and blogging.
Here's a good snapshot of the latest iteration of Hungary's political ambiguities by Nick Thorpe.
Congratulations to Roland Piquepaille for getting written up in the Times of London.
The Slashdot swarm discusses political blogs. (Thank you Csaba!)
Martin Hitz covers blogs and blogads in Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Finally, be sure to look for Matt Klam's article about political bloggers in this Sunday's NYTimes magazine.
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Heck of a town...
Spent Monday-Wednesday meeting with bloggers and advertisers, then wandering the sun-girded grid of New York City. Perfect fall weather. Flew at 5.40 AM Monday and returned at 8.30PM yesterday, so got in three full days for the price of two. My aging feet were beaten at the end of each day. Great bibimbab at Hanbat at 35 W 35th Street. We stood in line twenty minutes at TKTS for half-priced tickets to "I am my own wife," one actor doing a dozen roles, exploring the paradoxes of reporting (on subjects or friends), collaboration (with regimes or friends) and collecting (anecdotes, furniture or grips on reality.) I was appalled by Wooster and Greene Streets, which were filled with galleries a decade ago but now look like our local mall, all J. Crewe and Occitane. Fanelli's bar is a lonely rowboat of authentic grime amid flotillas of chrome clothes racks and suede sofas.
(BTW, congratulations to Mike Giles, who has just sold his project Furl.net to LookSmart. Usually, I'm a late adopter -- although I had a laptop in 1991, still no PDA or digital camera or Ipod -- but I was one of Furl's first beta users/reviewers.
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Heading to NYC
Back from Camp Kanata, where we canoed (7 times!), played street hockey, shot pellet guns, shot arrows, put-putted and caught two turtles, a Katydid and a tree frog. Now, to pack my bags for three days of meetings in NY with advertisers and breakfast Wednesday with Alan Brody. I'm hoping to sneak into a museum or two in the late afternoons.
In passing, I got a chuckle out of Glenn Reynold's new FAQ on Insta-blogads.
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Misc
Taco has gained 10 pounds since he joined us in August.
French cafes, down to 60,000 from 150,000 fifteen years ago, plan to create an institute to address the problem. The institute will seek to "improve service, comfort levels, products and hygiene." (Isn't TV the issue, as in America?)
If we don't get flooded, we're headed to Camp Kanata this weekend.
A new blog for history buffs: www.historywire.com.
Amazing.
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Ad Age bashes blogads
Advertising Age Magazine advises against blog advertising. (The story isn't online, so I can't link.) Media maven Jeff Jarvis has read it, and notes that AA quotes PR executives who would, naturally, prefer the money flow to them rather than through ad agencies to bloggers.
Plausible subliminal motive for an out-of-hand dismissal of what is clearly a thriving niche: AA notices that bloggers on its own beat are undercutting (radically) AA's own rate card. Old media being defensive about uncorporate insurgents? Nahhh.
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Blogs are driving this election
Enjoy history? Here's a June '03 prediction about blogs' impact on the '04 election:
Mark my words: blogs are going to drive the next presidential election. Bloggers will publish leaks the traditional news (or even Matt Drudge) won't touch and will be knawing on particular factoids or angles long before and after traditional press. Smart insiders will secretly read, publish and/or stoke blogs. The press will quote blog pundits. Bush may mutter the b word. Blog readers, themselves articulate early adopters who are influential in their own communities, will be influenced by the blogs they read. Traffic will double (again!) for Instapundit, Talking Points Memo, Atrios, Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos, Jane Galt, Matt Welch...(I guess traffic has actually gone up ten fold since then.) For other amusement, some musings on what Watergate would have looked like with blogs, with good comments by Welch and Layne.
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Outline for breakfast next week in NY
I'm speaking next Wednesday at Alan Brody's iBreakfast in NY. Here's a draft outline of my ten minutes fast-talking. Will be working to simplify.
Blogger advantages over corporate publishers:
* link network
--- 10 newspaper readers now 45-synapse blogosphere
--- expensive distribution & marketing now free
* voice
--- authentic, direct
--- relentless
* partisanship
--- great newspapers were partisan, founded around war or political causes ("neutrality" concocted by AP business folk)
--- great blogs dynamized by partisans, enemies, trolls
Results:
* blogs get 100 times more traffic per keystroke than traditional media...
* some individual bloggers equal audience of $200 mln newspaper chains
* some bloggers net $10,000 (Drudge gets estimated $100,000) a month in ad revenue, growing 15%/month
Blogs open new advertising dimensions
* extra room to communicate (versus portal) = more nuances
* feedback and ricochets (versus control) = more buzz
* audience affinity (versus demographics) = more traction
* affordable (versus high overheads of publishers) = useful for entrepreneurs, causes
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Closed for maintenance (tomorrow)
We'll be doing some overdue maintenance work tomorrow on our admin server. While ads will continue to be served normally, advertisers may be temporarily unable to buy or update ads, and bloggers won't be able to revise prices or blurbs. We'll get it over as fast as possible.
To repeat: any downtime will NOT affect ad serving, which is handled by other servers.
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Poohbahs miss blogad action
In today's MediaPost Kate Kaye does some admirable number-crunching of the online spending of the two parties and candidates and other players, as seen in figures compiled by Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance.
No mention of blog advertising, which isn't Kate's fault.
Without blogs, the AdRelevance numbers for political advertising are kinda paltry -- 5 million here, 10 million there, maybe a 100 million for the month -- that's total per party -- on sites like NYTimes.com, Salon, MSNBC and Fox.
Use a telescope and all you are going to see is stars, I guess -- never the grassroots.
Overlooking those weird little things called blogs, Adrelevance ignored hundreds of millions of political ad impressions in July and August. Consider that a one month ad on a flight of top political blog will probably get 45 million impressions, and blogs saw plenty of these in the last two months.
(Here's a prior post looking at how blog readers are often undercounted.)
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Political affections
Kudos to John Hlinko and ActforLove.org -- buyer and seller of Blogads -- for his success.
Saturday, CNN looked at the success of political dating sites and featured Hlinko. In a graph pitched as tempering the upside the political dating services, CNN noted that 57% of recently polled singles are open to marrying someone with political opinions significantly different from their own.
Sure, pre-internet, you were safe building a business for the mass market, shooting for the least common denominator. Now you can serve underserved niches... and 43% is a pretty massive underserved market.
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Remembering 9/11/01
We'll spend the day biking in the woods, no doubt talking about three years ago. Then maybe eat at our favorite pizzeria. These quiet strands of Neil Young's poetic idiocy seems about right for today. (Neil Young - 2/27/71
Royal Festival Hall - London, England, in particular.)
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Blog junkies drive news cycle (again)
Guess another one ten million people (and 10,000 candidates) are going to learn to say "blog" if this story gets wider play. (Blogad seller Powerlineblog gets special mention.)
Update: 9/11/04 The WPost says that "Conservatives hammered Rather and CBS yesterday on talk radio and Internet sites." (Ahh, Internet sites.) The NYTimes mentions "Web logs... newspapers and... television competitors to CBS News" as leading the attack on the documents. (Hey! Shouldn't that be "news papers" and "tele vision?")
9/12/04 The LATimes admits blogs' impact -- headlining a story No Disputing It: Blogs Are Major Players -- Netizen's late-night post questioning CBS claims about Bush's service spreads at warp speed -- but does lots of handwringing about anonymous bloggers. (Will they unhandwring if the docs prove to be forged?) Then, apparently forgetting Atrios and Josh's key digging and dishing that ousted Senate Majority leader Trent Lott, the article wrongly notes, "This was the first time, some said, that the Web logs were engaging in their own form of investigative journalism...."
9/13/04 On the opinion page of the NYT, William Safire dares type the b-word, crediting "alert bloggers" with leading the charge against CBS's coverage of the latest TANG memos.
9/14/04 More NYT stylesheet fluctuations. "Blogs" (rather than "Web logs") finally mentioned in article titled "CBS Offers New Experts to Support Guard Memos. Oddly, blogs aren't mentioned as the arsonists who started this fire, but only:
a) as a source of solace to CBS; for example, a CBS defense "featured computer and typewriter specialists who had called or posted defenses of CBS on Internet blogs."
and
b) a (previously unmentioned) resource for traditional publishers: "Bill Glennon, a technology consultant and I.B.M. typewriter specialist who had posted his thoughts on the memos on a blog and was quoted over the weekend in publications including The New York Times, said CBS called him Monday morning."
9/15/04 WSJ in "Forgery Charges Could Damage CBS Credibility" on page B1: "What began as the buzzing of conservative bloggers on the Web has turned into a full-blown media story that uncomfortably raises the specter of lasting debacles such as CNN's Tailwind scandal and NBC's General Motors incident on Dateline."
And Investor's Business Daily quotes lots of actual bloggers in Blogs Take Lead Role In CBS Memo Furor.
E&P highlights some editor's handwringing: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000629751
I know it's incredibly obscure substory, but traditional media's ambivalence about the role of blogs in CBS's seige and its gyrations around the word "blog" itself is, for me, fascinating. The bottom line for traditional journalists, editors and publishers -- and you can see it playing out in all these stories in different ways -- do you accept blogs as a powerful new media force that is here to stay... or would you rather ignore them and hope they go away?
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The anti-mud party
Jeff Jarvis and Tony Pierce are agitating for a clean campaign -- no Swift boat vets or TANG whacking or faux Purple Hearts or Kitty Kelly coke. They argue that what the candidates did 10-30 years ago a) is irrelevant to current and future performance AND b) won't impact swing voters.
Funnily enough a journalist asked me yesterday whether moderate bloggers could ever attract monster traffic like those of top Blogads sellers. I had pointed out that us/them punch-fests are much better for traffic than on-the-onehand/otherhand-wringing. The journalist suggested "perhaps the moderates could piss both sides off." Maybe Jarvis and Pierce will spark something like that. Perhaps the restless political dialectic has finally produced a defined and angry middle, the anti-mud party, to serve as a new pole.
Me, I'm not joining the anti-mud party.
I disagree about a) and b). Neither Jarvis or Pierce are swing voters and so miss the muddy point. The electoral reality is that swing voters will swing on only two things. First, character. Learning about a man's past and watching him weather criticism of that past -- trivial or serious -- tells a lot about who he is and will be. Second and more importantly, momentum. Like it or not, studies of undecided voters find that they tend to vote for "winners," the guys who seem to be ahead on election day. Sad but true.
So the winner will the guy who muscles through the mud-slinging. To wish otherwise is noble, but a waste of key-strokes.
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Skype is a bandwidth (or CPU) hog?
Downloaded p2p phone service Skype this AM. Later in the morning, noticed that images on sites were slow/no loading. Turned Skype off, browsing returned to normal. Anyone else have this problem with Skype?
OK, found a couple of threads suggesting others share my pain here but nothing in Skype's user forums.
Update: things are working smoothly today. Hum.
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Hiking
We drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway Sunday and enjoyed hiking the Graveyard Fields trail. (Here are some someone else's pictures of the area.) Taco (now 37 pounds) got the longest walk of his short life. In the falls at the top of the valley, we found a orange and brown salamander, speckled exactly like the small granite basin he lives in. Wedged among the rocks at the bottom of the falls, a boy spotted a dead fawn, probably swept over the falls in a recent downpour. Finally, we saw a tiny ring necked snake. The moist trail, warmed by the day's steady sunlight, smelled like a perfume shop. I hope we can go back and see what it looks like mid-winter, assuming the parkway isn't snowed shut. (Here's another hike two miles up the road we should consider.)
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Sex echoes
Blog maven and CBS Marketwatch columnist Frank Barnako picked up on the Sex and the City blogad order.
BTW, blogger and radio commentator Hugh Hewitt, having run that blogad for a few hours, decided to put principles over money and take the ad down, after hearing from readers arguing that Sex and the City doesn't necessarily square with his Christian conservative worldview.
Some people worry that bloggers are more susceptible than publishers -- who've taken lots of ethics classes in journalism school or school -- to being bent by advertising. I've always felt that the contrary holds. In contrast to traditional corporate publishers, each blog has a single decision maker, perfect transparency and point-blank accountability. In short, everybody knows where the buck stops.
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Sullivan out of the closet
Andrew Sullivan declares: "I CANNOT SUPPORT HIM IN NOVEMBER."
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Vote for Carrie
Just sent out an avalanche of blogads, our biggest single order yet, for Sex and the City. Something I really wouldn't have expected a year ago.
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Political flavor to 'normal ads'
Stuart Elliott in the NYT on the proliferation of political motifs in ad campaigns: "Rather than waiting until fall, as they usually do, to introduce advertising with election themes, agencies are already infusing commercials, Web sites, promotions and print ads with images of voting booths, campaign buttons, flags, debates and conventions. These trappings of democracy are being augmented with copious references to compassionate conservatism, hanging chads and states colored red and blue."
Watch this space today and you may see a new sexy blogad that typifies this trend.
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