My friend Doug Arellanes lives in Prague and is somewhat obsessed with what he calls “Blesk’s Iveta Bartošová thing.” Blesk is a popular newspaper. Iveta Bartošová is a vapid Czech celebrity. Blesk covers almost every step Iveta takes, down to her car, haircut, album, boyfriend, shopping in Vienna, and day of sailing.

After noting this trend, Doug started keeping count and blogging it. His Blesk/Iveta count just hit 104.

Doug is a former journalist and understands that tabloids feed on celebrities, and that there are not many newsworthy events on the Czech celebrity circuit. But he’s still puzzled: “Even though this is a small media market, there are still lots celebrities around. So what is it about Iveta that gets her in the papers more than others? Heck if I know. By blogging her appearances in Blesk I hope to understand this better.”

Maybe there’s some tie-in with the power law… that theory of popularity that says that one player gets 1 million Xs, 10 get 100,000 Xs, 100 get 10,000 Xs and 1000 get 1000 Xs, etc? To put it another way, perhaps you could plot the distribution of Czech press mentions of celebrities on a log graph and get a straight line. Maybe Iveta gets 10 times more mentions than 10 other celebs, who themselves get 10 times more mentions than 100 other celebs.

This doesn’t sound logical. But it definitely happens all the time. Power laws seem to apply to the distribution of wealth/marketshare/synapses among brain cells, browsers, blog traffic, high-school friendships, network hubs, and capillaries. To anthropromorphise a little, it seems that complex systems comprised of autonomous but interdependent units often end up creating “celebrities” (or hubs) among themselves, and eventually, celebrities among celebrities. The rich get richer and Iveta gets another mention in Blesk.

Basically, it seems there’s some natural efficiency in doing things this way. After studying people entering a building with multiple swinging doors, urbanologist William Whyte wrote, in his fantastic book City, that an open door “is enormously attracting.”

Given a choice, people will head for the door that is already open, or that is about to be opened by somebody else. Some people are natural door openers. But most are not; often they will queue up three and four deep behind an open door rather than strike out on their own.

Why? Maybe people are lazy. Or maybe evolution has taught us that the crowd often knows something we don’t — “certainly someone would use that door if it was any good. Maybe it’s jammed.” Is it worth betting 10 steps, 15 seconds and 20 watts of mental energy that the crowd is wrong? Easier to line up for the open door.

And easier to write another story about Iveta. So, to return to Doug in Prague watching Blesk watch Iveta. Maybe fetishizing Iveta means Blesk photographers don’t have to waste time paparazzing outside random nightclubs and so charge less for their work. Fact checkers sleep easier. The old ladies who read Blesk have to remember and discuss the facts about only one celebrity. People stranded at a bus stop know there’s one reliable thing to talk about other than the weather. And Doug gets something to blog about.

Doug, of course, insists he doesn’t read Blesk because it covers Iveta. It’s the stories, he says. “I learned a lot of my Czech by reading Blesk. The stories are short, and they’re written for ten-year-olds. Which is exactly my level.”

Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked is a great overview of this weird power law world.

Thank you (and $5) to the Church Sign Generator.

This morning I’m listening to this.

As of 4AM EST, Adstrips are being served from a new server dedicated to ad caching rather than the overloaded backup server. We’ve moved this server from Serverbeach to Rackspace (“Fanatical support is the difference.”) Advertisers will be credited two days. (This probably won’t happen until next Monday while we catch up on a backlog of other work.)

We screwed up by relying on a cheap-and-solid-but-less-than-responsive hosting company, and I apologize for the outage.

OK, I’ve ordered a new server at Rackspace, with the help of salesman Freddie Garcia. (Call him and order something yourself at 800 961 2888 X 1418.) Rackspace promises 99.9999% uptime, which is, in our experience with other servers, what they deliver. The contract says “one business day,” but we hope to have something live by the end of today. Go Freddie go!

Update @ 10:10 PM Talked to Sarah at Rackspace, who says our server is in “final configuration and QC,” and should be “on the rack in the next hour.” (What a pleasure to be able to talk to intelligent people rather than waiting 24 hours for the second half of an incoherent e-mail.) So Tamas will be up early and configuring the new Rackspace server for pure unadulterated Blogads caching.

Some trivia: our servers are all named for birds. The faulty server was nicknamed magpie, after an orphaned bird Tamas adopted a few months ago (see photo.) That bird flew away, which Tamas now declares was a bad omen. So we’re going with an unflappable and high-flying name for this new server: condor.

Well, I’ve been up since 4.30 talking to Tamas and Csaba. We’re still mystified by Serverbeach. The backup server at Rackspace is doing OK, but we want to get a server dedicated to serving adstrips running away from Serverbeach ASAP.

Current ads will get a one day extension in compensation for last night’s two hour outage. Blogs not currently running their javascript should put them back in.

We’re still on hold with Serverbeach — amazing. Unfortunately, it will take a 24 hours to get a new server running, so we’re trusting our backup server can handle the fun today.

Another weird outage on the server that caches some Blogads. This server, hosted at ServerBeach, has been flaky. We just tried to restart using our Serverbeach console and, after ten minutes, the message came back “Support Ticket Open to Investigate.” We thought we understood what was going on a couple of weeks ago and had fixed the likely suspects… but apparently not. I apologize for the outage and will keep you updated.

(Update1: we’ve now got a backup server carrying the load. Will hardwire this backup switch in coming days.)

For any bloggers who enjoy coding, we’ve got some perl scripts that cache ads on your server and eliminate any risks… although, we sure plan on getting this current server glitch exterminated fast.

(Update2 turns out Serverbeach sent this note immediately after our server went down:

//Hello,

I’m currently working on your server. There were some hardware problems,
so I put your hard drive in a new server. However, the nic appears to be
bad, so I’m putting your hard drive in another server. I will let you
know when I’m done.

Thanks,

ServerBeach Support//

Nearly twelve hours later, no updates from ServerBeach. Looks like we need to head back to Rackspace, which prides itself on “fanatical support.” It is four times as expensive, but we’ve always had great experience with our servers there.

When was the last time you saw the NYTimes direct an advertiser to the Washington Post?

Umm… never.

Just as newspapers rarely quote other newspapers and almost never link from their own websites to news on other sites, traditional publishers would never ever send an advertiser to a competitor.

Bred in the giant Internet ocean, bloggers have different DNA. They know what goes around comes around. They know instinctively that swarming networks of individuals are exponentially more powerful than over-engineered corporations. They know that, thanks to the blogosphere’s referals and passionate readers, a single blogger working part-time can generate 10 to 50 times more page impressions per keystroke than a traditional media employee working 9 to 5 X 49 weeks a year.

With this in mind, check out this Atrios post and watch the right column of Pandagon. Now there’s one ad. Check back at the end of the day.

In theory, Atrios is cannibalizing his own ad sales, since new blogad seller Pandagon is cheap right now and many Atrios advertisers will likely buy on Pandagon.

But bloggers don’t eat each other’s lunches. Bloggers are chewing into the big publishers, with rate cards that over-charge 50 to 100 times, and TV, which soaks up $50 billion from American advertisers every year, despite the fact the most viewers are out of the room when TV ads run.

Linking to each other as no publisher has dared before, bloggers create a virtuous cyclone of audience and commerce.

(Speaking of new bloggers selling blogads, check out Oliver Willis and Talkleft… with more coming later this week.)

Saw it last night. Great movie for kids and parents.

Hugh Mcleod, a Madison Avenue maven and existentialist cartoonist, has been obsessing about blogs for the last year and finally started blogging a few months ago. Now, beneath a wonderfully illustrative cartoon, Hugh argues:

The long term trend for blogs is: less traffic. By that I mean, with more and more blogs appearing every day, that means less eyeballs per website. Sure, there’ll still be the occasional superstar like Gawker or Instapundit, but for us regular schmoes not on the ‘A-List’ we’re going to have to get used to having fewer visitors.

I disagree that more bloggers means = more competition = less traffic. That’s old-media-think. Blogs aren’t just publishing spigots, they are also vessles for capturing/imbibing the output of others. Every new blogger will read/link/engage at least ten (but maybe 100) other blogs.

New bloggers actually increase everyone’s traffic. While a newspaper with 10 readers has just 10 info synapses, 10 bloggers can create up to 100 different conversations. (Metcalfe’s law.) Sure, some folks get more traffic than others, as old Pareto first noted.

But any blogger who keeps banging away with passion and sincerity will someday have more readers than most local papers have today. The cost of communicating (distributing/finding information) has collapsed 99.99% since 1991. Now the quantity and structure of communication is slowly but surely catching up. We’re on the cusp of something magnificent.

Hartford, February 12, 1891

Dear Sirs,

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?

Ys
S L Clemens