blogads for the opinion makers

Want to help test a new service we’re coding? Drop me a line and I’ll get you a beta code for Twiangulate.

The service is simple, something we originally designed for staff use. Exhausted by plowing through lists of hundreds of people who our favorite tweeters follow, we rigged Twiangulate to (you guessed it) triangulate: create a short list of interesting people by comparing two or three target Tweeters’ followees. The process combines the robustness of code with the discernment of hand-sorting.

Here are a few pre-baked lists:
Politicos: @benpolitico + @jmartpolitico + @AriMelber
Open gov geeks: @cjoh + @ellnmllr + @bill_allison
Reason editors, past and present: @nickgillespie + @mleewelch + @vpostrel

Turns out that AriMelber, benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow 34 people in common. AriMelber and benpolitico follow another 24 in common. AriMelber and jmartpolitico follow another 47. And benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow a separate set of 53. If you’re a DC-news geek, charting who is on one list but not the others is fascinating.

Twiangulate’s ambitions aren’t huge. We’re just trying to help people more efficiently figure out who their friends, enemies and peers are following. Twiangulate augments Twitter’s SUL and its new “user generated” Lists, which offer essentially monocular snapshots of a dynamic, multi-dimensional world. Taking a more social approach, Twiangulate aggregates the wisdom of small crowds.

The gurus over at influence mapping firm Morningside Analytics recently built this map that illustrates the central of blogs in our liberal and conservative networks in the healthcare and energy policy debates.

Here’s the healthcare map, with our blogs highlighted.

And here’s their map for energy blogs with Blogads.

Here’s the post with more context.

Here’s my minutely edited version of a brilliant “quick review” guide to saving the media, originally inMetafilter:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avariciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Print readers will not put up with it
( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt
( ) [Assumes you'll get very lucky]

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Readers’ unwillingness to pay for just news
( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
( ) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
( ) Sources’ proven unwillingness to “go direct”
( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
( ) The high cost of investigative journalism
( ) Unpopularity of weird [any] new taxes
( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
( ) Legal liability of “citizen journalism”
( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
( ) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
( ) The necessity of the editing process
( ) Americans’ huge distrust of professional journalism
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
( ) Technically illiterate politicians [anybody]
( ) The tragedy of the commons
( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites
( ) Google is happy to give the click revenue to somebody else for a penny less

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) That the US press dropped the ball on Iraq is a symptom, not a cause
( ) Print advertising pays so well because advertisers *can’t* work out the return they’re getting.
( ) Information does not want to be free
( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few readers are actually all that interested in, quite honestly
( ) That your friend was misquoted once in a paper does not mean journalism is bunk
( ) Everybody reading the same story is a feature, not a bug
( ) Having a free online “printing press” doesn’t turn you into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
( ) Wall Street won’t allow newspaper groups to back off from 20% profit margins
( ) Newspaper executives are second only to record industry executives for short-sighted idiocy
( ) E-paper still doesn’t give publishers back their ad monopoly and hence its revenue
( ) You can’t charge for online content unless all your competitors do it too, all at once.
( ) Ethics are hard to hold up when your bills are due
( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
( ) “Gatekeepers” can help keep out undesirable things
( ) Publishing less often makes you even less relevant
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Free society depends upon a free press
( ) Democracy is bad enough with the press we’ve already got
( ) You think print is bad? Imagine Fox News, as a blog. That’s what your idea will turn into.
( ) Reader-generated content is to professional news what YouTube is to big-studio movies.
( ) Have you read the comments on news websites? They make YouTubers look like geniuses.
( ) You are Jeff Jarvis
( ) Or Dave Winer

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

(via BoingBoing.)

If you head over to DailyKos, you can see the newest twist the SEIU is putting on their Tweet ads.

The recommended tweets, which appear on posts about healthcare like this one, include not only the SEIU, but peer organizations and even individuals like @owillis and @punditmom playing on the true potlatch spirit of Twitter and Follow-Fridays. You can see 3 variations below.

When are people going to get serious about Huffpo’s unseriousness?

Every day brings another round of accolades for Huffpo’s contributions to journalism. Maybe a Pulitzer, pant pant.

But beneath the skin (of buxom beauties) on Huffpo, there’s less beef than many (and Huffpo’s PR machine) give Huffpo credit for.

Take this post titled “Huffington Post Traffic Blows Past LA Times, Washington Post” from the Silicon Valley Insider, for example:

The Huffington Post has now blown past the sites of both the LA Times and the Washington Post, says Compete.com.

Huffington Post had 8.4 million uniques in September, up from 7 million in August. The LA Times site had 8.3 million uniques in September, versus 8.2 in August. The Washington Post took the hardest fall, going to 8.1 million uniques in September from 9.3 million in August.

The post ends by asking “What was that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was just saying about how print publications aren’t writing stuff people want to read?”

Read?

Maybe if the LA Times and Washington Post included lots of “content” like “Shauna Sand’s SEX TAPE: Lorenzo Lamas’ Ex’s Explicit VIDEO ONLINE” and “The 10 Creepiest Unintentionally-Sexual Ads Of All Time (VIDEO PHOTOS)” and “January Jones Drinks Beer, Dons Leather, Says Ex-Boyfriend Ashton Thought She’d Fail” their readership (or viewership) would be higher.

And BTW, those happen to be posts 2, 3 and 4 on Huffpo’s list of most popular stories today.

And here’s another recent set of Huffpo’s stunning contributions to journalism. As folks used to say about Playboy, no doubt lots of people read Huffpo “for the stories.”

Pulitzer, anyone?

If you’re a DailyKos reader, you’ve probably seen some new ads by the SEIU today appearing at the bottom of posts about health-care.

The ads look like this…

The images I’ve posted here aren’t actionable, but if you were looking at the real thing as a reader on DailyKos, you’d be able to edit the tweet and post it.

The ads offer a nimble advertiser a quick and easy way to fan the flames of a hot topic, co-joining blog reader passion and a timely topic to trigger a bonfire of tweets. Shazam!

More fun stuff on the way…

Update: PC Magazine chimes in: “If you’re like me, you’ve been losing sleep at night, worrying that third-party companies haven’t been able to effectively leverage the Twitter platform for their advertising benefit. Have no fear! Check out the admittedly clever ad above from the Service Employees International Union.”

A new survey seems to undermine reports of Twitter’s impact on movies by looking at the decision-making of individual users. Unfortunately, focusing on individual relationships, the analysis doesn’t take into account the structure of the network that actually generates the stimuli that individuals receive. First, the survey:

“Our research found a significant overestimation of the Twitter Effect,” Kevin Goetz, the president of OTX’s worldwide motion picture group, told me. “The number of people who use Twitter are only about 10% to 12% of all moviegoers. And when we asked people what was the most influential source of moviegoing word of mouth, Twitter finished last, at the bottom of the list.”

OTX did an online survey of nearly 1,500 moviegoers in mid- September, the bulk of the sample being moviegoers from age 13 to 49, the key moviegoing demographic group. When asked what was the most influential source for word of mouth, most respondents picked “family and friends and coworkers,” which scored 40%, followed by Facebook (31%), MySpace (9%), IMDB (8%), with Twitter and online message boards bringing up the rear with 6% each.

“The data suggests that all the media play for the Twitter Effect is really jumping the gun,” says Vinnie Bruzzese, the exec VP of OTX’s motion picture group. “It has an impact, but it’s coming much later on, not as initial reaction. There may be people with a lot of followers on Twitter, but the most influential people in terms of word of mouth are still the people you’re talking to every day — your friends and co-workers.”

But the science of networks dictates that the etiology of infection/influence for individual final users/consumers isn’t as important as the influence on the people in the center of the network, the hub.

As the great new book “Connected” explains, most natural human networks aren’t shaped like this:

But this:

In short, all nodes (aka consumers) are not created equally. As the caption notes, “even though C and D both have six friends, they have very different locations in the social network. C is much more central, and D is more peripheral; C’s friends have many friends themselves, whereas D’s friends tend to have few or no friends.”

Twitter users are, by definition, like person C in this graph — they’re hyper-communicators who are highly networked both online and off.

Health Care for America Now (HCAN) launched a bunch of cool blogads this morning promoting their “sick of it” campaign.

The best, in my opinion, does the very clever trick of pulling into the ads recent tweets that use the #sickofit tag.

If you look closely, you can see that all the clickable elements — tweeter’s nickname, hashtags, any URLs — are visible within the ad.

And if you go look at the ad live on Talkleft (or 100+ other blogs) you can see that each of those elements is separately clickable. This ad has not only the virtue of providing users with more information, timely information, but making the community part of the message. And isn’t that what social media is all about? Maybe we should start a #socialads4socialmedia tag?

Here are a couple of other ad versions running at the same time:

Congratulations to HCAN for kicking off the autumn ad season with a genius ad.

The ad, placed on the the epic FAILBLOG, touts a Twitter hashtag campaign (#failephant) attacking GOP healthcare policies. Here’s a copy of the current ad.

Now if we can just get HCAN to feature a feed of the #failephant tweets in their ad, this will be an unFAIL home-run. (See example at left.)

A colleague just saw this ad on Facebook promoting an SXSW panel. Clever.

There seems to be something of a cover-up going on at the HuffingtonPost.

Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.

The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.

While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.

For the record, here are screen grabs of the most popular Huffpo stories, as ranked by page views, for three different days earlier this summer, just before Huffpo decided to hide its skin-fixation:

And here the new format, which obscures but not entirely hides, the Huffpo readers’ hormonal urges:

Our scheduling and versioning UI just took a nice hop forward. (Nearly a leap?)

After lots of agonizing, things got a lot easier when we realized that our ad units cry out to be displayed horizontally in the admin interface. Having turned the interface on its side, suddenly an ad scheduling calendar suddenly made a lot more sense.

The interface still isn’t perfect, but it is a big improvement over what we had yesterday.

Here’s what you see after you’ve uploaded two versions of an ad. You click on the dates below each version to indicate when that version should run. (You can add as many versions as you want.) This illustration is for a one week ad. If you wanted to run a one month ad, you’d see 31 days. (Click to enlarge.)

If you indicate that three ads will run on one day, the machine automatically distributes the SOV proportionally.

And if you want to change the weighting for a particular day (or all the days with that particular set of versions), you click a day in the list in the left column and get a screen like the following one, in which you can then customize the weighting for that set of creatives.

Obviously this UI still isn’t perfect, so we need your suggestions and critiques… either in the comments or by e-mail.

We launched a new ad format over at DailyKos in April. Called the “Action Tag,” the ad format allows an advertiser to promote a specific action after a post that deals with a relevant topic area. The SEIU helped inspire the ad functionality and been using Action Tags to promote actions around health care and employee free choice.

This weekend, some of the folks at DailyKos started to debate the new functionality, weighing in on its pros and cons. The discussion has been lengthy and inspiring, and has provided some good ideas for improving the functionality, which we’ll begin to impliment shortly in concert with SEIU and Dkos.

Above and beyond the particulars of the debate, I’ve enjoyed the fact that the debate has revived a discussion that began four years ago about an risque ad for Turner Broadcasts’ reality TV remake of Gilligan’s Island. It’s amazing to see the pie-fight meme live on in the Kos community.

Some deep chord sounded in me on reading the NYT’s story about the John Lennon museum display in New York capped with this image:

Near the exit is “Telephone Peace,” a white telephone mounted on a wall, with a card telling visitors to answer the phone when it rings.

“This is something we did at the show in 2000,” Mr. Henke said. “Yoko would periodically call in and speak to whoever answers.”

Ms. Ono seemed amused at the prospect. “Yes, you pick up the phone,” she said, “and it will be me.”

Why?

Having screwed around with Yahoo Pipes and other RSS tools and found them never quite doing exactly what we needed, we’ve built a new tool to robustly combine and permutate feeds. If you’re interested in helping us test the tool, drop me a line.

Thanks to a pile of new code written in Budapest over the last 3 months, advertisers can now run multiple ad versions in a single day, assigning a weighting to each version. Advertisers can use this feature to keep ads fresh for readers or to test which version is most effective. (If you’re a current advertiser, click “versions” link on an already purchased ad and you can start juggling creative!)

We’ll be letting advertisers know about this and updating our Youtube overview of Blogads, but if you’re a blogger, feel free to post about this new feature to get the word out!

Ads make TV more pleasant: First:

In one experiment, Nelson, along with Tom Meyvis and Jeff Galak of New York University, had 87 undergraduates watch an episode of the sitcom “Taxi.” Half watched it as it was originally broadcast, with commercials for the Jewelry Factory Store and the law office of Michael Brownstein, among other ads. The other half watched the show straight through, without commercials.

After the show was over, the students rated how much they enjoyed it, using an 11-point scale and comparing it with the sitcom “Happy Days,” which they were all familiar with. Those who saw “Taxi” without commercials preferred “Happy Days”, but those who saw the original show, Jewelry Factory Store and all, preferred “Taxi” by a significant margin.

In similar experiments, using other video clips and a variety of interruptions, the results were the same: People rated their experiences as more enjoyable with commercials, no matter their content, or other disruptions. The effect wasn’t limited to watching TV; interrupting a massage also heightened people’s enjoyment, one experiment found.

The opposite was true for irritating experiences, like listening to vacuum cleaner noise: A break only made it seem worse, they found.

Second

Skittles.com redirects to its Facebook page. Though their Twitter experiment raised a few eyebrows, this one is fun for a day.

Michael Lewis weaves another wonderful narrative explaining another sordid, smelly corner of the meltdown:

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Keep climbing.

In the week ending Feb. 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 667,000, an increase of 36,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 631,000. The 4-week moving average was 639,000, an increase of 19,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 620,000.

Floyd Norris reports:

The government said this week that net purchases of [long term] securities fell to $412.5 billion in 2008, less than half the 2007 level and the lowest annual total since 1999, when the federal government was running a budget surplus.

Money did come in, but it was diverted into the safest investment around, albeit one with almost no expectation of profit, Treasury bills. Overseas investors increased their holdings of those securities by $456 billion, an unprecedented flow.

Relying on foreign investors to fund our deficit is not unlike running a Ponzi scheme. It’s fine as long as new money comes in, but when the money flow stops, we’re effed. As the chart below shows, we’re now addicted to foreigners’ short term financing.

Some of the best reporting in the NYT has been the micro-histories by life-style reporters. Today’s story about the upper East Side restaurant Sette Mezzo is another great snapshot. The restaurant, which serves $40 for pasta and $30 for salad and water, is the family canteen for the likes of Si and Donald Newhouse, Tom Tisch, Jonathan Tisch, William Lauder, Saul Steinberg, George Soros, Lily Safra, Leon Black, Michael Schulhof, Mike Nichols, Donald Marron. Cash only. (Or you can throw it on your monthly tab.)

Even here, though, the recession’s cool breeze is blowing.

starting in November, when fresh black truffles arrive, they can be added to any item at $50 for the first flurry of shavings (subsequent shavings are discounted). White truffles bring any entree price up to $200. “I always cover the top,” Mr. Mania said, adding that at a certain other Italian restaurant, “they give you three slices.”

Not that there have been many takers lately. “Nobody ordered truffles this year,” Mr. Esposito added. “It must be the economy.”

I was wrong to that the Times isn’t conversing. Here’s some chat-back from another NY institution, the 92nd Street Y Tribeca. (Thank you Ken!)

I was the only person in the cab line at La Guardia Wednesday. The line-minder said they’re now doing 300-400 cabs a day, versus 1000 six months ago.

WSJ reports:

“Start-ups are failing faster and you’re going to see a major shakeout,” says Martin Pichinson, a managing director of Sherwood Partners, a Mountain View, Calif., firm that specializes in winding down start-ups. Since mid-January, his firm has shut down an average of three start-ups a week, up from just one or two closures a month in September, he says.

And this is what an silicon undertaker looks like.

Nobody does doom and gloom like the Brits. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:

Events in Japan have turned deeply alarming. Exports fell 35pc in December. Industrial output fell 9.6pc. The economy is contracting at an annual rate of 12pc. “Falling exports are triggering a downward spiral of production, incomes and spending. It is important to prepare for swift policy steps, including those usually regarded as unusual,” said the Bank of Japan’s Atsushi Mizuno.

The bank is already targeting equities on the Tokyo bourse. That is not enough for restive politicians. One bloc led by Senator Koutaro Tamura wants to create $330bn in scrip currency for an industrial blitz. “We are facing hyper-deflation, so we need a policy to create hyper-inflation,” he said.

This has echoes of 1932, when the US Congress took charge of monetary policy. We are moving to a stage of this crisis where democracies start to speak – especially in Europe.

The European Central Bank’s refusal to follow the lead of the US, Japan, Britain, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden in slashing rates shows how destructive Europe’s monetary union has become. German orders fells 25pc year-on-year in December. French house prices collapsed 9.9pc in the fourth quarter, the steepest since data began in 1936. “We’re dealing with truly appalling data, the likes of which have never been seen before in post-War Europe,” said Julian Callow, Europe economist at Barclays Capital.

Spain’s unemployment has jumped to 3.3m – or 14.4pc – and will hit 19pc next year, on Brussels data. The labour minister said yesterday that Spain’s economy could not “tolerate” immigrants any longer after suffering “hurricane devastation”. You can see where this is going.

Ireland lost 36,500 jobs in January – equal to a monthly loss of 2.3m in the US. As the budget deficit surges to 12pc of GDP, Dublin is cutting wages, disguised as a pension levy. It has announced “Rooseveltian measures” to rescue the foundering companies.

The ECB’s obduracy has nothing to do with economics. It fears zero rates as a vampire fears daylight, because that brings the purchase of eurozone bonds ever closer into play. Any such action would usher in an EMU “debt union” by the back door, leaving Germany’s taxpayers on the hook for Club Med liabilties. This is Europe’s taboo.

In New York Magazine, Will Leach visits Twitter’s offices and captures the company’s wonderful dream-state:

The first day I was in the Twitter office, I sat in the corner, playing with my own Twitter page, taking notes (it feels somewhat silly to write in a notebook there), and waiting to talk to Williams. For lunch, executives, including Stone, hosted programmers in the lounge to talk about some sort of open-source mumbo jumbo I didn’t understand. Their HD television was tuned to a still photo of a fireplace. They were wrapped up in the meeting. I attended to my computer.

And then I noticed something on Twitter Search. The first person was “manolantern,” who, at 12:33 local time, posted, “I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive (sic) in manhattan.” After that, the updates were unceasing. Some fifteen minutes before the New York Times had a story on its website (and some fifteen hours before it had one in print), Twitter users who witnessed the crash of US Airways Flight 1549 were giving me updates in real time. One of them was a man named Janis Krums. Krums lives in Sarasota, Florida, and happened to be on a ferry navigating the Hudson when the plane hit the water. He immediately took a photo and posted it to TwitPic and sent a “tweet” with a link to the picture and “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” He then, perhaps coming to his senses, began to help passengers off the plane. (He ended up giving his phone to one of them and didn’t get it back until that night.)

Now think about that for a second. In the midst of chaos—a plane just crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking, he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums, that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.

Of course, no one at Twitter noticed any of this going on. This is the New Communication. There was no screaming and running through a newsroom, dispatching any reporter in the vicinity to the scene. For an hour, the boring open-source meeting droned on. No one in the room knew a plane had crashed. The next day, Stone would tell me that the site didn’t even get a traffic spike. “That’s only for huge shared experiences, like the inauguration, or Mumbai.” Twitter had unleashed something … and its executives were completely unaware, as its system worked on its own, without them. That might be what the future holds for Twitter. Or it might not be. It all depends on whether you’re willing to wait for something that might not come. It all depends on whether you’re willing to believe.