As some Democrats ponder erecting a cable network to get out their message, Greg Beato comments “the conservatives didn’t succeed by bankrolling me-too entries into established media; they succeeded by pioneering new forms, i.e. talk-radio and partisan cable news. The new medium now, of course, is the Internet. And the new form is the blog. So instead of scoffing at ‘obscure Internet Web sites,’ why not support them?” He suggests the Democrats fund 200 bloggers. This democratic approach would no doubt go against the grain, but “giving up control of the medium is probably your best shot at regaining control of the message,” says Greg.

Working on a secret print project, Ken Layne is reminded that the jig is up for print…: “I’ve taken to singing a variation of “Yesterday” when reading the L.A. Times: ‘Yesterday, all these stories were already played, now they seem so old and oh so lame, oh I read this crap yesterday.’ Try working on a weekly. Jesus, what’s the point? Well, the point is to Add Value, the way The Economist or Weekly Standard or NYT Week in Review adds value: get a bunch of good writers and let them make sense of it all. Even then, it’s too late. Today’s Week in Review missed some pretty obvious stuff, because the articles were finished on Wednesday or Thursday and edited early Friday.”

Yesterday I watched three of Jeff Jarvis’ “vlogs,” his self-produced videos of himself committing punditry.

I was skeptical. Though I know Jeff is charming in person and persuasive in text, I wasn’t excited about sitting through three self-edited minutes of punditizing. Since video isn’t easily scanned and sifted like text, I thought I’d quickly run out of patience waiting for his bon mots.

I was wrong. First, Jeff delivered a steady stream high quality ideas and amusement. If anything, I was sorry he didn’t deliver more slowly so I could transcribe some of his points. (Then I realized Jeff posted a transcript.) Second, the reward of additional information — expression, cadence, tone — more than compensated my inability to fast-forward or click on links. I was reminded (yet again) why meatings achieve so much more than phone, IM or e-mail.

For bloggers looking to convince or cajole, vlogs will be an essential tool.

I watched three vlogs. I’d give “Year-end media cliches” 2 stars for tone and content. “Christmas 2002” gets 4 stars for content and 3 stars for tone (the graphics distracted.) My favorite was “Fast food fades,” which was full of swiftly delivered, tasty nuggets of fact and opinion. Jeff rightly concludes, “The problem may not be that the burger culture is fading… It may be that the Boomer culture is fading.” Ten stars!

(Two quibbles: like their blog cousins, all vlogs should be dated and need separate URLs.)

Paul Krugman notes: “In the first 30 days of December 2000, according to Nexis, only six articles in major news sources contained both the word ‘deflation’ and the phrase ‘United States’; none of those articles suggested that deflation in this country was a real possibility. In the same period last year there were 292 hits; this past month there were 566.”

The pricing quicksand is watered in part by Moore’s law that computing prices fall by 99% every ten years. Dell handheld computers that now cost $299 outstrip the laptop I bought in 1999 for $2700. My phone bill has dropped from $300 to $100 a month thanks to Vonage.

The baby bust also contributes to deflation, as baby boomer couples realize they’ve bought every toy their 3.7 person household can use. Car prices have been flat for 2 years. Golf club memberships go begging.

And finally, the Internet, the great aggregator of supply, demand, coupons and automation, gives another downward kick to prices. Great CRM now costs $50 a month rather than $500. Medical insight is free and instantly available rather than $75 and an hour in the waiting room. Advertisers can enthrall opinion makers for $30 rather than $3000.

Pop historians usually start a new decade a few years after the calendar. If The Sixties started in 1963 with the Beatles and the Pill, will the 00s open in 2003 with closed wallets and free 64 MB memory cards? If the nineties roared like the twenties, will the 00s now sink, tumble, flounder, flush and drizzle like the thirties?

If so, nothing but cash will be worth more tomorrow.

Steven Budianky: “Biologists routinely speak of animals exploiting their ecological niche. Well, it turns out that we’re the ecological niche for dogs, and exploit us they do. While lions are busy scanning their field of view for prey to pursue, dogs are watching our hands to see where the food is stashed.”

Pew Internet Project asks: “Where would you turn for information? For health care information, 31% of all Americans said they would first turn to the Internet. For government information, 39% of all Americans said they would first turn to the Net.” Doctors and bureaucrats are being disintermediated. Why didn’t Pew ask the same question about news, which featured prominently in the rest of this survey?

The New York Times impressive sounding roundup of business trends called The Balance of Media Power Is Poised to Change. The FCC, Cable news, Satellite TV, TiVo, ViaCom, sexy magazines, EMI, newspaper profits… but no blogs. No mention of the media that is growing 200%+ a year, the media that unseated the Senate Majority leader, the media that helped shame the New York Times’ own editor into publishing columns that contradicted his campaign against Augusta country club. Ahh. Yes. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. As Mickie Kaus noted at the Yale blogging symposium, the New York Times wants a journalist to pen a hit piece on blogger triumphalism.

In constrast, the Washington Post is not in denial. Wrapping 2002, Cynthia Webb writes: “Blogs, or online Web logs of news and views, were the hot story of 2002, the year when blogging caught the eye of the mainstream press in a big way and pundits began to recognize blogs as useful tools for everything from venting about politics to raving about a favorite band.” (Via Hylton Joliffe.)

We’re back from Black Mountain, where we enjoyed seeing my parents and sister and her family. The kids enjoyed sharing a bedroom and giggling late into the night. Christmas day, we hiked an abandoned rail track and gawked at giant icicles hanging from the rock outcroppings.

On the 23rd a mutual friend called my wife with the news that Igor, the eight-year-old son of friends in France, died. He had a stomach ache, was diagnosed with leukemia and died three weeks later. Igor’s parents and older sisters doted on him. Our six-year-old worshipped Igor, wearing his hand-me-down clothes and adopting his mannerisms.

Most of us are off this week, but e-mail to info@blogads.com will be answered promptly. I’m in Black Mountain, NC, where the weather is unseasonably warm and the food is overly and overtly copious.

I thought Gawker just aimed to recycle gossip and cool Manhattan anecdotes. That would have been good enough. But there’s more. It’s worth listing the editorial tropes Gawker is exploiting:

a) Posting editor/publisher IM conversations.
b) Recycling reviews of Gawker.
c) Taunting Mefi and recycling the retorts. (a + b = c)
d) Lists and (coming December 31, I predict) lists of lists.
e) Celebrating classifieds as content.
f) Publishing footnotes.

None of this is unique. But consistently applied and exploited, these tropes make for Really Brilliant New Media.

At the same time, Jeff Jarvis has spent $99 on a new piece of software and is experimenting with video weblogging, or vlogging. He says: “The truth is, all you do to make TV is stare at a camera and read and say something: It’s easy. There’s no reason a blogger should not be the next Andy Rooney or Charles Grodin or Ann Coulter (easy marks, all!). I’d take any of their jobs, tomorrow.”

Actually, there’s a common theme between vlogging and Gawker. While some Mefi folks are deriding Gawker as elitist, totally missing the site’s irony, they also miss the site’s populism in style and content. Hiding beneath the veneer of “real estate porn” and “social climbing,” the most interesting content is purely found media — classifieds, IM, recycled reviews — other people’s discards. Like vlogging, it is something anyone can do… but only 1 in 10,000 will do well.