Cold turkey, etc

We had a tranquil Thanksgiving break, chiefly occupied with eating lemon meringue pies and hiking. We went up to Lookout over Black Mountain a number of times and also drove over to Yellow Mountain section of the Appalachian trail. We had sandwiches at this barn and then hiked to the top of this bald or one like it. On one of our hikes, we passed a happy fellow who told us Taco looks just like his cousin's dog -- a "Newfoundland duck polling retriever." Most people try to pin our mutt as an Australian shepherd, so I thought he was joking. But at home I did some lateral Googling and found the "Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever"... and there is some resemblance. We found a giant cricket, apparently dead, who thawed out by the time we got home. Named Lassie.

I've been reading AJ Leibling and enjoyed these lines:

"'But we never did come together again for the reason that the Guildsman found out they could do just as well themselves [rainmaking] provided they had the right sort of Cannon.'"

...

"Whatever Hearst's talents as a newspaperman and an operator of newspapers, this principal contribution to American journalism -- a contribution that changed the whole nature of the profession -- was to demonsrate that a man without previous newspaper experience could, by using money like a heavy club, do what he wanted in the newspaper world except where comparable wealth opposed him. It was a concept as simple as a very big bank roll in a very small crap game."

The Economist on blogs:

Old media also face a newer and more unpredictable source of competition - the blogosphere. Bloggers have discovered that all you need to set yourself up as a pundit is a website and an attitude. All through the recent election campaign, the new media outsmarted the old media when it came to setting the news agenda…
... all orthodoxies are being chewed up by a voraciously unpredictable news media, which is surely all to the good.

Thanksgiving in Reno.

Though it lost the game, Yale trounced Harvard with a prank.

Erik D'Amato's stunning "Worst of Budapest" is a must for the expat hordes. Though fitting, the wall-paper should go.

"Blog" is the least understood word of the year. "A Merriam-Webster spokesman said it was not possible to say how many times blog had been looked up on its Web sites but that from July onward, the word received tens of thousands of hits per month."

Ensconced in Geneva, Humphrey tells me about Hedgestreet. Humphrey's the smartest financeer I know; thinks the $ is going down another 20% but reminds us the Europeans will suffer most, since their exports will be slaughtered by goods manufactured in $-pegged China.

Finally, here's an interesting precedent for entrepreneurs peddling their wares with an eye on current events: a teapot (made in England!) in 1770 for sale in the colonies bearing the legend "No Stamp Act." A reminder that a good news hook can sell just about anything.

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WSJ: Harrah uses science to stimulate sales

Over the past decade, casino moguls such as Steve Wynn and Kirk Kerkorian built glamorous resorts in Las Vegas that depend on tourists -- especially high rollers who make big bets. Harrah's thinks those consumers aren't as profitable as regular gamblers because it costs more to lure them to the casino.

...

Based on the data churned out by this system, Harrah's redid the layout of the East Chicago casino's slot machines, using lessons learned from drugstore chains such as Walgreens and CVS. For example, the casino moved popular slots such as Wheel of Fortune to hard-to-reach areas, betting customers would seek them out just as they find the pharmacist in the rear of a store. That created more space in well-trafficked areas for other games.

To generate excitement, Harrah's placed a "party pit" with blackjack and roulette games in a central location and staffed it with dealers trained to break into song. Around the pit, the casino replaced nickel slots with $5 Double Diamond and Hot Pepper games previously cloistered on an upper deck for high rollers, hoping low rollers would turn from the tables and take a flier on their way out. "This is the candy bars by the cash register," says David Patent, vice president of casino operations.

The theory worked. The average amount spent on a single bet on these machines soared to $10, compared with $2 in the casino overall, because new gamblers were drawn to high-denomination slots. Overall, the casino's profit margins rose to 15% in the third quarter, compared with 12% in the busy first quarter when that casino usually expects to earn its highest margins, Mr. Patent says.

...

In one effort rolled out first in East Chicago this fall, Harrah's dispatches "luck ambassadors" to give nominal gifts to big losers -- people who are losing more than expected as tracked by the boat's central computer system and Harrah's loyalty cards. Harrah's has learned that gamblers are more likely to play longer and make a return trip if they receive a small goody.

Richard Pearlman recently lost about $100 at video poker. As he was licking his wounds, Brenda Freeman Winfield, a Harrah's luck ambassador, sidled up to his Deuces Wild machine. Mr. Pearlman told her he was feeling "terrible."

"This will change your luck," she said, handing him a $5 cash voucher. Mr. Pearlman, an 81-year-old resident of Buffalo Grove, Ill., brightened immediately. He winked and asked her to throw in "a blonde and two redheads" as he signed the voucher and turned back to the machine.

A successful intervention, says David Norton, a Harrah's senior vice president of marketing, will leave a customer saying: "OK, so I lost my $75, but I got two-for-one" tickets to a Harrah's show.

...

Recently, a joint promotion with toymaker Hasbro Inc., maker of the game Monopoly, had the casino buzzing. Patrons stopped at a lobby desk to pick up a Monopoly game and register for a Harrah's drawing to win prizes including cash and trips to other casinos. Gamblers, Harrah's has found, love drawings, which offer a whole new range of ways to get lucky. Harrah's loves drawings, too, because they keep patrons in casinos longer while they wait to hear the results.

...

Harrah's patrons can apply for a Total Rewards loyalty card and receive points toward anything from a hotel stay to catalog gifts; the more they gamble, the better the perks become. Each cardholder is assigned a "customer value" based on the theoretical revenue they will generate. Customers with higher values get quicker responses from Harrah's phone systems. When a gambler dials Harrah's toll-free reservation line, the computer bounces the number off its database and places the caller in the appropriate service queue.

The operator who picks up the phone is trained not to let on that the caller has been recognized. "That would be too creepy," says Rich Mirman, Harrah's senior vice president in charge of development, and a trained mathematician and economist.

...

Unlike rivals such as MGM Mirage, Harrah's tries hard to keep less profitable nongambling customers out of its hotels by calculating their customer value and making them pay through the nose. In October, a room at the aging Harrah's Las Vegas was quoted to a caller at a nightly rate of $199, only $14 cheaper than a super-luxury room at Bellagio.

A frequent gambler could be charged anything from nothing to $199 at the Harrah's casino, the company says. The price is based on a complex mathematical formula that takes into account how long the customer typically stays and what games he or she plays, among other details.

In one of Harrah's biggest changes, the company has reconfigured the duties of its VIP hosts, who take care of the company's biggest gamblers, previously one of the most old-fashioned jobs in the business.

In his gray-walled cubicle in East Chicago, Mr. Salvador's job is more of a telemarketer than a traditional casino VIP host. Instead of spending time on the golf course or the casino floor, as hosts do elsewhere, Harrah's hosts must phone at least 240 customers each month. The old hosts "were spending all their time on the loyal customers," says Mr. Norton, who worked at American Express before joining Harrah's. "We wanted them to stimulate sales."

Unhappy with their new duties, about a quarter of Harrah's hosts left after the company implemented the system about a year ago, the company says. But telemarketing is fueling Harrah's VIP business, which is growing by about 20% a year, Mr. Norton says. Next year, Harrah's plans to give its hosts hand-held computers to log every interaction they have with a customer, even a chat on the casino floor.

That information will come in handy as Harrah's begins to move its customers around its soon-to-be expanded network. With new resorts in Las Vegas -- increasing its holdings there to six from two -- Harrah's is planning to expand its cross-marketing. Customers who graduate from regional casinos to one of Harrah's hubs tend to stay longer and spend more. Even a small number of extra trips will add significantly to Harrah's sales.

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Misc

Friday night, we went to see the UNC women trounce the Elon basketball team. Saturday, the last soccer of the season. Yesterday, with temperatures in the 60s, we hiked on the Loblolly trail at the William B. Umstead park.

Finally, an eight year old boy, contemplating a trip to NY, asks "when we go to that Statue of Liberty, can I steer the canoe?"

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Atlanta

I'm in Atlanta for the day, in part to participate in this panel.

A tip for e-nomads: some ATL staff claim there is no wifi access. Others say you have to pay 65 cents a minute to "Laptop Lane." But if you park in the seats across from the Delta Crown Club (at least in terminal A), you can hook into their T-mobile wifi, assuming you have a T-mobile subscription.

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Bloggers on the beat

Blogger Jarvis has an ugly scoop: biggest recent FCC fine results from three letters.

Think the FCC is just about dunning smut? Consider that our local NPR station now won't let a sponsor mention "reproductive rights" lest the FCC be politically offended.

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Hysteria mounts among elderly publishers!!!

Check out the hysterical journalese in today's NYTimes front page story about blogger analysis of election fraud theories: "all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster" ... "an online market of dark ideas" ... "the swift propagation of faulty analyses"... "ground zero in the online rumor mill" ... "a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out"... "a round of Web log hysteria"... "second-guessing... has largely characterized the blog-to-e-mail-to-blog continuum. Some election officials have become frustrated by the rumor mill" ... "the online fact-finding machine has come unmoored" ... "'a snowball of hearsay.'"

Gee, the only semantic tar missing are "Satanism" or "fundamentalism." Note that only the last of those wonderful nuggets of purple prose was actually generated by someone other than a journalist, the blogger's erstwhile competitor for public mind-share.

Of course, the whole process may have been positive, the Times admits. "While the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories."

And of course, the story is "balanced" with a quote from John Byrne of BlueLemur saying, "Of course you can say blogs are wrong. Blogs are wrong all the time."

I've got some questions.

1) Has the Times yet covered this debate, which prompted a letter by three congressmen to the GAO last Friday? No, at least not if my search of the Times archive is accurate. If this is something experts have been debating, is this article about bad bloggers just a lame way to back into the story?

2) Since the main point of the story seems to be that "blogs are baaaaad; oh, and by the way, they've unearthed something interesting we haven't covered yet," there's some vital context missing. For example, why aren't readers reminded that that the same new "hysterical rumor-mill marketting dark ideas in a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out building a snow-ball of hearsay" has, in the last year, discredited the likes of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, editor of the NYTimes Howell Raines and CBS anchorman Dan Rather?

Anyone for some wild and unsubstantiated theorizing about that omission should start a blog or post a comment here...

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New blogs on the block

Azeem Azar, journalist, bon vivant and wearer of horrid paisely shirts, has launched a couple of blogs, one about UK politics, the other about travel.

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NYTimes.com traffic figures -- exclusively here on my blog :)

Last week Comscore released some figures that indicated that NYTimes.com had roughly 1 million visitors on election day. That sounded low, since NYTimes.com had 1.1 million visitors on election day 2000. So I wrote the Times and asked (yes, bloggers can interview the press as well as vice versa.) Old media ain't dead yet folks. Congratulations NYT. I got back this impressive chart:

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Night on the town

I enjoyed a couple of whiskeys at the Whiskey Bar on 47th and Broadway last night with Tig Tillinghast, Steve Hall, Anne Holland, Brian Clark, Jason Calacanis and other folks who handed me their cards. I then wandered over to a bigger party on 44th street -- thousands of drunk online ad people, partying like the bubble never burst. Too loud to talk, so I left and walked down to Han Bat to indulge in a big bowl of bibimbab.

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Bloggers bad, secrets good

WSJ:

In trying to diagnose what went awry on Election Day, many of bloggers' critics seemed to be saying the Internet was at it again, and this time that creepy cesspool of comic-book geeks and pornographers was spitting out bad election data. But it's not as if Matt Drudge and Ana Marie Cox were making up numbers while sitting at home in their PJs. The numbers they and other bloggers posted came from the National Election Pool, an organization owned by the big networks and the Associated Press. NEP's numbers go to those outfits and to other media organizations that pay boatloads of money to get a peek. The numbers weren't some Internet invention, but data generated at the request of the mainstream media.

And it wasn't just wild-eyed bloggers who saw them and believed them, with or without the necessary caveats. The joy on James Carville's face was obvious -- and according to numerous reports, so was the gloom in President Bush's camp. The problem is that those numbers were terribly misleading, not that bloggers had them. And yet, somehow, we find ourselves in a referendum on blogs. If talk-show hosts had been reading the exit-poll numbers into their mikes, would we be knee-deep in worries about this crazy new technology called radio?

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Shark's teeth!

Some of us love shark's teeth. This week a pile of gravel from the Aurora, NC mine dumped at our local school yielded up a prickly handful. Fossil shark's teeth photos. We need to get more info here, phone: (252)322-4238. The obsessives gather here.

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Foreign Policy: blogs 'an elaborate network with agenda-setting power'

Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell in Foreign Policy

Every day, millions of online diarists, or “bloggers,” share their opinions with a global audience. Drawing upon the content of the international media and the World Wide Web, they weave together an elaborate network with agenda-setting power on issues ranging from human rights in China to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. What began as a hobby is evolving into a new medium that is changing the landscape for journalists and policymakers alike.
...
The media only need to look at elite blogs to obtain a summary of the distribution of opinions on a given political issue. The mainstream political media can therefore act as a conduit between the blogosphere and politically powerful actors. The comparative advantage of blogs in political discourse, as compared to traditional media, is their low cost of real-time publication. Bloggers can post their immediate reactions to important political events before other forms of media can respond. Speed also helps bloggers overcome their own inaccuracies. When confronted with a factual error, they can quickly correct or update their post. Through these interactions, the blogosphere distills complex issues into key themes, providing cues for how the media should frame and report a foreign-policy question.

Small surprise, then, that a growing number of media leaders—editors, publishers, reporters, and columnists—consume political blogs. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a November 2003 interview, “Sometimes I read something on a blog that makes me feel we screwed up.” Howard Kurtz, one of the most prominent media commentators in the United States, regularly quotes elite bloggers in his “Media Notes Extra” feature for the Washington Post’s Web site. Many influential foreign affairs columnists, including Paul Krugman and Fareed Zakaria, have said that blogs form a part of their information-gathering activities.

...the blogosphere serves both as an amplifier and as a remixer of media coverage. For the traditional media—and ultimately, policymakers—this makes the blogosphere difficult to ignore as a filter through which the public considers foreign-policy questions.

...as more Web diarists come online, the blogosphere’s influence will more likely grow than collapse. Ultimately, the greatest advantage of the blogosphere is its accessibility. A recent poll commissioned by the public relations firm Edelman revealed that Americans and Europeans trust the opinions of “average people” more than most authorities. Most bloggers are ordinary citizens, reading and reacting to those experts, and to the media. As Andrew Sullivan has observed in the online magazine Slate, “We’re writing for free for anybody just because we love it…. That’s a refreshing spur to write stuff that actually matters, because you can, and say things you believe in without too many worries.”

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WSJ: Bloggers face life after the election

In the WSJ, Carl Bialik takes a hard look at post-election blogging. He talks to two happy advertisers.

Brian Clark, who just ordered a bunch of ads for Sharp's Aquos televisions:

"We think that there's an interesting opportunity now with the political blogs, if you aren't taking on the political topic itself," said Mr. Clark, adding, "We're looking at this as a way to reach a diverse audience with a product that has nothing to do with politics whatsoever." Mr. Clark, who calls his company a "new media buzz consultancy," said readers of all blogs are an attractive audience: "A lot of these people are influencers. They are just as likely to have a blog of their own where they end up writing about something of interest to them." He likes the political sites in part because post election, "There's certainly not the competition for the slots anymore."

And Beth Hirsch, from Audible.com:

"People read political blogs because they are passionate news junkies looking for content and information," Beth Kirsch, an online marketing manager for Audible, wrote on her own blog about the campaign. "Moreover, blog readers talk to each other and their friends about what they read and see on blogs, and the news media trolls the blogosphere looking for stories."

In an interview, Ms. Kirsch said, "It was a very effective and successful campaign." She said she'd be interested in running ads in the future, targeted to blogs' topics and specific readers. As for the potentially controversial content on blogs, Audible spokesman Jonathan Korzen said, "There are always people who will accuse us of being to the left and right of their political opinions. We hope they will forgive us. We are a retailer, and like any retailer we sell books that speak to the right and to the left."

So far, seems more like an optimal path than an obituary.

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Backlash from the old guard

Over at CBS Marketwatch, Frank Barnako keeps cheerfully chipping away at what he perceives to be the bloated self-importance of the blogosphere. He baits his lede: No one reads blogs. Oops! I did it again. Better get under my desk before the e-mail flames arrive.

And CNN's Allen Wastler jumps in with a parody of blogs: "Hi, welcome to my blog, where I'm going to leak my insights and comments about the election (i.e. drivel) onto the Web, diary style, for all to see. You see, I figured I'd join this fad which, for some inexplicable reason, has become all the Net rage. Sort of like chat rooms once were..."

Both cite Comscore data that suggest that blogs (other than Drudge) have far fewer readers than traditional media. "Hey, no one reads blogs -- why is everybody so excited about them!?" (Here's a hint for a journalist looking for a scoop -- there's a cool lede buried in point (c) below.)

Three reasons. Radical influence, radical economics and radical momentum.

a) Influence. Like atom bombs versus conventional explosives, blogs have a vastly disproportionate impact relative to their size. Only 1 American in 10 is an influencer; only 1 American in 100 cares passionately about news and wants to read tomorrow's news today, rather than last month's news next week in Time. OK, blogs cater to an elite group, so small someone with a telescope aimed slightly in the wrong direction might claim "no one reads blogs." But it is the "nobodies" who read everything else. And advertisers would far rather hit an elite, motivated and highly networked group of influencers than a dispersed and disparate muddle of inert nobodies.

b) Economics. Blogs are hugely more economically efficient than traditional media. OK, so NYTimes.com had 944,000 visitors on November 11, while DailyKos had only 86,000, according to Comscore. (Frank cites 260,000 for DailyKos, but let's stick with the lower number for now.)

A hundred year old institution, with one of the best known brand names in the news business, NYTimes.com The New York Times spends $180 million a year (according to former editor Howell Raines) on its 1100 person editorial staff (according to NYT public editor Daniel Okrent) and publishes ALL their collective output online. At the two year old Dailykos.com, one Markos Moulitsas is responsible for 86,000 visitors. Notice a startling difference in scale of efficiency? Can you say 100 to 1 in terms of headcount and perhaps 500 to 1500 to 1 in expenditure?

Or what about Ana Marie Cox, who professes to blog drunk in her pajamas or less, and had 31,000 visitors on 11/02. Versus NYT.com, that's a headcount efficiency of 30 to 1, and an efficiency in expenditure that's 10 to 20 times that.

Put a and b together and suddenly things aren't looking so good for the old guard are they? Now, consider c...

c) Momentum. What was NYTimes.com election traffic four years ago? According to the Times itself, 1.1 million people, or about 10% more than Comscores estimate for this year. (Update: a NYT staffer e-mails nothing this is not apples to apples: "We had significantly more traffic this election day as compared to 2000... ComScore doesn't track significant segments of our audience, which is why you are seeing the discrepancy." I hope for some apples to apples figures for you later.)

Smart journalists (and bloggers) are trying to write about the future -- they see a trend and try to extrapolate. You don't wait 'til your feet are wet to get out of the way of a flash flood. But don't worry Frank and Allen -- no one reads blogs. (I'm sure you are not reading this, right?) Your paychecks are safe. For now.

Update: Also worth reading Steve Hall and Rick Bruner's skewering of direct marketeer copy writer Bob Bly's burp on blogs, which includes his complaint about "the ease with which people can post and disseminate content."

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WSJ chronicles exit poll dissemination via blogs

WSJ headline: How Insiders Were Fooled: Bloggers Leaked Secret Data Giving Kerry an Early Lead, But Networks Honored Rules

Thanks to lessons learned four years ago when big media made some wrong calls, the average American watching television Tuesday night got a pretty accurate picture of how the election was going.

But for about seven hours in the afternoon and early evening, several million "insiders" with access to exit-poll data -- blog readers, print journalists, TV executives, politicos and their e-mail buddies -- had a different impression.

...

At 1:58 p.m. Eastern time, mydd.com, a political blog, posted exit-poll results from 12 states, with the caution that they were "early numbers." They showed Kerry with a four-point lead in Ohio and a three-point lead in Florida. At 4:27, the site added another set of numbers, commenting: "Kerry continues to lead Florida overall as well. Again, these are exit poll numbers, so doubt them, but it looks great!"

Slate posted its first results at 3:15 p.m.; earlier, it had posted a long note explaining its decision to publish the exit polls, including a disclaimer about their potential inaccuracy.

...

"I hope I've had some role in killing exit polls," wonkette.com Editor Ana Marie Cox, one of the bloggers who reported exit polls, said in an interview yesterday. "To the extent that blogs provide people with bad or misleading information, I hope that teaches people not to trust media in general."

It wasn't only bloggers that reported exit polls. WSJ.com, the Web site of this newspaper, posted an article between 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. saying the early exit-poll data "purported to give Mr. Kerry an early lead in several key states" but raised questions about the validity of the numbers. The article linked to mydd.com, which posted the figures. "To have a story about how the election is playing out on the Web and not mention the exit polls would be a disservice," said Bill Grueskin, the managing editor of WSJ.com.

Reuters news service ran a story at 6:17 p.m., citing political Web sites and their exit-poll data indicating a strong Kerry lead. Reuters also quoted an article from the conservative National Review casting doubt on the validity of the polls.

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BusinessWeek asks, "Blogads -- is there life after November 2?"

In Business Week today, Sarah Lacy gives a good overview of the challenges bloggers and Blogads face right now. To recap what I've said several times recently: with the lowest overheads in the media industry, bloggers and Blogads.com are here to stay.

Will post election blogads work for everybody? Absolutely not. But the US advertising market has turnover of roughly $250 billion a year; to keep a lot of bloggers in the clover, we just need to please a tiny portion of the market... folks like Mark Bennett and his clients. Back to BusinessWeek: "Certainly, the role of bloggers in the political season has caught the attention of some ad agencies. 'Initially it was something we suggested clients try, and I think the results surprised them,' says Matt Bennett, creative director at San Francisco ad agency Call & Response. 'Now they're coming to us and asking us to run a campaign solely on blogs to generate discussion.'"

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Signs of the times

The first two ads of November 3 are for absinthe and RightWingStuff.

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Zzzzzz

At 2.17AM EST, Megan McArdle asked: "I'm wondering about all this coverage -- who's still up watching it? I have to be; it's my job to watch it. But are ordinary citizens still awake right now?"

Here's the answer: using our servers as a proxy for traffic on the most popular blogs, everyone but Megan, Europeans and insomiacs was asleep. Marked in CST, here's the final graph for the day on one of our servers:



Comparing the map in 2000 with 2004, it looks like the comparison with Verdun -- huge expenditure for minute territory shifts -- is apt.

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Game over?

Yep, that looks like 1600 CET was the blog traffic high for today (and this year?)

Earlier than I expected, and 20% lower than I feared. Whew. For now, I'm going to get a glass of red wine and a book.



Update: forget the book. I'm watching this CSpan page and this great CNN page. (Click on the state and then click on the county... you can drill right down.)

As I told CBS Marketwatcher Frank Barnako yesterday: this is an "alt-tab election"... certainly for me at least.

WSJ: "With traditional media outlets playing it safe about calling election results this year, Web logs -- or blogs -- have taken over, reporting everything from voting-booth stories to early exit polls and state results."

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First peak for the day

Looks like we peaked, at least for now, about an hour ago, 1600 CET

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Traffic still rising

A couple of hours ago, I thought traffic on blogs selling blogads had peaked for the morning, but it looks like we're still grinding higher. I thought we'd have a mid-day lull. Maybe not.

My bet for the peak of blog traffic today is 10PM EST.



In case you are wondering, the traffic above is on one of our 15 servers doing various Blogads tasks. Nine months ago we had one; a month ago we had six. I hope 15 is too many.

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NYTimes: Election 2004 is over and the winner is... bloggers

Today's NYT op/ed page: "Every four years, by journalistic if not political tradition, the presidential election must be accompanied by a 'revolution.' So what transformed politics this time around? The rise of the Web log, or blog. The commentary of bloggers - individuals or groups posting daily, hourly or second-by-second observations of and opinions on the campaign on their own Web sites - helped shape the 2004 race."

Wow. That's an earlier concession speach than I expected. We won.

(Update: here's another article from today's Times: "Despite their partisan nature, [blogs] became a source of information for many political aficionados, in many cases at the expense of the traditional media, said Nick Hahn, managing director at Vivaldi Partners in New York, a strategy, marketing and brand consulting company. 'The blogs don't market themselves,' Mr. Hahn said. 'People self-select the blogs they read.' For that reason, they may be particularly effective ways to reach younger consumers, who often dislike having products sold to them but enjoy feeling that they have discovered something for themselves."

It's a rout!

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What's next?

Two journalists have asked me several questions in common in recent days "aren't blogs just niche publications that will never get big?" and "what happens to blog advertising after the election is over?"

Since these seem to be in the water, here are my thoughts:

There are 300 million Americans. Consider what Reed's law means when you apply it to 300 million people. Basically, there are trillions of trillions of combinations of people (aka unserved niches) within that 300 million people.

Those niches are unserved (vis information and intra-niche communications) because traditional media economics -- the cost of building a printing press, hiring trucks, chopping down trees, paying for the CEO and her secretary and her nephew in ad sales, paying the shareholders -- made it economically impossible.

But now blogging and it's appendages have lowered the bar radically for creating and serving info markets.

What's next for blogads? Although some cool advertisers -- more than ever in fact -- are in the pipeline (like today's Bill Murray ad!), after the election we'll undoubtedly see a big drop in political advertising as candidates disappear and political causes catch a breather and regroup. And for a time, other advertisers may focus less on blogs, at least until the next unprecedented event pushes blogs back into the spot-light as THE revolutionary media of the 21st century.

In any case, relative to today's fortissimo, political ad volume in coming days weeks may seem pianissimo. Don't freak. Averaging out the daily shouts and whispers, the long-term trend for blog advertising is still in a sharp crescendo.

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Signs of the times: Votemaster, CNET and Bill Murray

www.electoral-vote.com reveals himself as Andrew Tanenbaum, an American comp-sci professor in Amsterdam. With some outrageous ideas and programming and blogads on 90 blogs and some college newspapers, his traffic has grown to 700,000 page impressions a day in roughly 2 months. I've corresponded with Prof. Tanenbaum, but until today didn't know who he was. Isn't the Internet wonderful... one brilliant citizen can build an astonishing service and, by tapping into nature's second-best network after the brain, reach millions of people in a matter of weeks?

CNET does a wrap of blogs' political influence. "It is on the quick-shifting pages of the political blogs that the real pulse of the campaign can be felt," write John Borland. The past year's growth of political blogs is a template for lots of other niches, folks.

My favorite actor, Bill Murray, is appearing in blogads promoting the new trailer for his Jacques Cousteau movie Team Zissou. I'm there.



Dan Gillmor posts a hack's e-mail promoting a company's service to "manage bloggers," which Dan' readers vitriolically deconstruct.

Emmanuelle's new LA wheelz.

Beth Kirsch, who the big blogads order from Audible.com, blogs about what blogs mean for her company. She concludes: "the combination of niche and buzz marketing supported by blog ads is powerful." Beth pulled together Audible colleagues and developped a truly snarky set of ads. As the husband of a new iPod owner -- ask me how to derail your wife's iPod to Korean! -- I've just signed up for Audible.com.

Marketing guru BL Ochman, sums up sums up blog advertising at MarketingProfs.com, as "a good (if scary) buy for advertisers."

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