I had a great 36 hours in New York. Munched oysters in the Oyster Bar with Megan McArdle. Learned that she, like Glenn Reynolds, is a speed reader. Megan started reading at 2 1/2 years and can read 6 text-book pages in a minute. She thinks that as bloggers get to know their peers, there will be more mergers among complimentary voices (as between Galt and Mindles Dreck.) We agreed blogs led big media in upending Raines and Lott; wondered how to prove it? Then to 123rd street for dinner with Rick Bruner and Elizabeth Spiers. I enjoyed two whiskies and split a bunch of appetisers with Rick. We watched Elizabeth manage 55% of a giant burger. She gave us the scoop on Gawker, which sounds like a brilliant cross between Romenesko and Page Six. Rick and I paid $7 for a sixpack of Heinekens at a bodega and noticed that single bottles of some Belgian beer cost $8 a bottle. Who buys that stuff? We stayed up late as Rick generously shared a warehouse full of tips on web marketing and Microsoft shortcuts. Friday morning, I met a senior official in blogdom. He noted that “blogs move markets” and shared a number of insights into the relationship between blogs and traditional branding. More on this in a future post. Then I walked to few blocks to munch cookies with Amy Langfield. Her blog is on ice while she figures out how her professional identity relates to her blog writing.

Coming home on the train, I read the New York Post (“The drumbeat that turned this story into a major calamity for Lott, and led directly to President Bush’s welcome disavowal of Lott’s views yesterday, was entirely driven by the Internet blogosphere”) and New York Times (“without the indefatigable efforts of Mr. Marshall and a few other Internet writers, Mr. Lott’s recent celebration of segregation would probably have been buried as well.”) Yes, my spine tingled. Megan, here’s our proof. Whether blogs did it or not, we’re given credit by both left and right. In the science of opinion-making, appearance is reality.

In 2002, we’ve seen blogs move national markets. In 2003, look for blogs to move local markets. That’s when the fun really begins.

We’re reading lots of panicked appraisals of the finding by Australia high court that Dow Jones is accountable for something it published on the Internet.

“The decision has potentially major ramifications for Web publishing world-wide,” intoned the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Dow Jones. Even bloggers should worry, we were told.

Almost every lawyer quoted is on the payroll of one media conglomerate or another. Are we missing anything?

Publishers have always had to contend with prickly local courts, so it seems no surprise that this should happen online. Remember when the International Herald Tribune was fined $678,000 in Singapore for publishing something incredibly vague that was construed as being derogatory to the country’s Prime Minister?

Do bloggers indeed have to worry? Probably a lot less than multinational media conglomerates. As the
WSJ article notes: “If the court finds in favor of Mr. Gutnick and ‘it turns out Dow Jones doesn’t have any assets in Australia, there will be further questions about getting a U.S. enforcement of an Australian judgment,’ said Jonathan Zittrain, an assistant law professor at Harvard Law School. Some U.S. courts have declined to enforce overseas decisions that wouldn’t stand up under the U.S. Constitution, he said.”

Ever the zeitgeist-zapper, Ken Layne dubs Glenn Reynold’s Instapundit the “Paper of Record” for chronicling the recent blogger posse that rounded up Trent Lott and threw him into ignomy while the traditional press was still saddling up.

Some healthy intramural mind-butting going on at Marketing Fix.

Robert Loch raves about Google’s new shopping interface (called Froogle!). Olivier Travers reviews Froogle’s taxonomies and pronounces them DOA. “Maybe throwing Nuclear Physics PhDs at an online retail/merchandising issue is not such a bright idea. People at Amazon and eBay will see this and feel very comfortable,” he says. He concludes: “there’s no vacuum to fill in like Google did in web search.”

I agree with Robert, who counters: “How can you say that there is no ‘vacuum to fill’ ?!? I’m guessing that Google has worked out [there’s] a hell of a vaccum to fill, by noting how much people use Google search to search for products and services…. I bet if you had access to Google’s full search data you’d find a black hole, never mind a vacuum.”

Attempting to disparage free online business publications, WSJ.com has constructed a garish straw-site called Biz-o-rama and built a television and web ad campaign skewering the “publication,” reports Internet News. (Via MarketingFix.)

With the era of VC-funded loss-gushing online competitors as dead as the Millennium bug, this campaign seems to be from the last war, one the Journal already won.

Or is it prescient? Could WSJ.com be worried now that Mindles Dreck has joined forces with Jane Galt? BTW, if you can’t afford to drop a couple grand on a WSJ.com ad, why not spend $30 for a month’s exposure on JaneGalt.net?

Almost 250 years passed between the invention of the movable type printing press and the first daily newspaper. Technology didn’t cause the delay — individuals and institutions had to evolve in tandem to demand and supply the new service.

By this standard, today’s weblogs — frequently updated, highly networked individual or group-written chronicles — are still in their infancy.

In his new campaign for donations to support his blog, Andrew Sullivan says “we’re working hard for ad dollars, but the landscape is still bleak.”

Sullivan is in the brilliant editorial vanguard of p2p media, but he’s still emulating big media by “working hard” for advertising and “big sponsors.”

Big media advertising is all about tortured negotiations, murky metrics and bloated prices… it’s hard work for everyone. Likewise on AndrewSullivan.com, potential advertisers need to burrow through the site to find contact information. The site offers no rate card and makes no pitch to advertisers. When Sullivan sold an annual sponsorship 18 months ago, it cost $7500. With his traffic up 4-fold, the same sponsorship might cost $30,000 today.

Sullivan won’t begin to find a steady commercial audience until buying ads on his blog is as easy, transparent, affordable and automated as blogging itself.

If he’s going to succeed as an Internet entrepreneur, Sullivan needs to serve other Internet entrepreneurs. There’s ample evidence that the web empowers entrepreneurs who buy and sell (eBay) or advertise (Google.) Sullivan should sell blogads clearly and prominently, automate ordering and price CPMs at 1/100th of NYTimes.com’s rate.

Olivier Travers, in a post titled “Decentralized My Ass,” notes that Kevin Werbach’s $2000 a head conference in Palo Alto about “decentralization” debunks its own premise that “intelligence is moving to the edges, through networked computers, empowered users, shifting partnerships, fluid digital content, distributed work teams, and powerful communications devices.” As Olivier puts it: “I hope the irony doesn’t go unnoticed by those who attended.”

Harvard media analyst Alex Jones, a former New York Times employee, says that the paper’s final decision to publish sports columns contradicting its editorial position confirms journalism’s ability to correct its own mistakes.

Not so fast. Am I the only one to wonder whether the Times could have safely ignored the criticism of employees and press peers had bloggers not kept the story bubbling? Certainly Times managing editor Gerald Boyd’s Stalinist memo defending the column spiking would have gotten far less attention had it not been republished by Jim Romenesko.

I bet the Times could have successfully dismissed the issue as “inside baseball” but for the relentless stoking by bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Fritz Schranck, Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus and countless others.

If the Times’ about-face is a victory, it’s a victory for the new order, not the old.

Talking about his company’s roots in the perfect store, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar observed that “throughout history… commerce and civilization had always developed alongside each other. The first markets arose at crossroads, where traders came to reach the largest number of potential customers. If sales at the crossroads were good, the merchants stored their wares there permanently. If they were the best in the whole region, traders brought their families and settled there. In time, they put up walls and built an infrastructure, and commerce transformed the lowly crossroads into a city.” In the same way, commerce and culture are entwined. Each evokes the other.