CNet senior editor Molly Wood writes:

There are no secrets in technology today. Thanks to rumor sites such as Engadget, Gizmodo, and the army of sniffer sites they link to daily, nearly every big product release (along with some small ones) has been revealed, dissected, and evaluated long before it hits the shelves. Leaks, once the primary purview of political and business journalism, are the bread and butter of modern-day gadget hounds. …

Thanks to the Internet, there’s a new model for controlling information–that is, a complete lack of control. Bloggers, rumor sites, and even inside sources are running the show, but tech manufacturers are still stuck in their Cold War-like product release behaviors. They tightly control the distribution of both goods and information, hoping to maintain absolute secrecy in order to generate maximum results (that is, buzz) upon release, as well as protect any possible industrial advantage. But at this point, the only ones who are still following those rules are the journalists whose job it is to give you complete reviews of new products, so that you can make well-considered buying choices. …

As you know, Mac OS X Tiger was released today. It shouldn’t surprise you to know that Apple is a big vendor offender, when it comes to getting its hardware and software into the hands of reviewers, who can then helpfully inform your buying decisions in a timely fashion. I know–since my very first day as a tech journalist, and for the five years I spent on the Apple beat, the company tormented me by refusing to send hardware (its belief is that it’s better to have the stuff on the shelves than in the hands of reviewers), withholding software until the last possible minute, then calling me to complain about the rare review that wasn’t utterly glowing. …

Get a group of tech journalists together and you’ll hear them all complaining about the same companies regularly withholding review units or demanding a mountain of paperwork in exchange for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it loan period. But we’ve made these deals, over the years because we had to, in order to get the products into the labs, and tell you what to buy and what not to buy in a helpful fashion. Nowadays, our Faustian bargain is breaking down. …

On the one hand, the media are the idiots in this story. We’re the ones running around, tearing our hair out, agonizing over breaking NDAs on products that have been completely revealed by so-called unofficial sources. …

We media types need to quit kowtowing to manufacturers who are trying in vain to hold on to the last shred of control they think they have. Those manufacturers need to wake up and smell the RSS feeds–the information’s already out there. Quit acting like you’re doling out spoonfuls of sugar to the deserving few. Your audience is getting its sugar elsewhere. …

Meanwhile, Engadget.com’s publisher Jason Calacanis (who gave me the heads up on the CNET article) attacks Wood, suggesting that, in engaging in this self-flagellation and mentioning her own company’s policy of returning review products and refusing to do paid reviews, she “claims that Engadget and other blogs have no ethics.” Jason invites bloggers to investigate CNET’s ethics.

Another great blogad to consider as you build your own: by Vivavi.com. This ad is a round peg for a round hole. The guy buying the ads wrote to say “we’re very pleased” with the clickthru and that Vivavi’s “contemporary, ‘green’ products cater to a lifestyle-driven, issues-oriented consumer, which makes the blogosphere an ideal place to hear about Vivavi.”

I got a huge chuckle today when I read that a new Forrester research study finds 64% of companies planning to advertise on blogs. (via Mr. Barnako.)

Ha. Ho. Hee. From what I’ve seen, 93% of those companies still don’t have an actual clue what a blog is and, of the remaining 7% (ie 4.2 of the total), only .01% actually understand why blog audiences are fundamentally different from the audiences you can buy from MSNBC for 10 cent CPMs or Google for 25 cent clickthrus.

Compared with those mass market audiences, blog readers are more finicky and less likely to click. They are more likely to complain or to deride an advertiser’s product. Like an antique violin, they are harder to play, harder to keep in tune.

So if that 64% “gimme some of them blog things!” advertisers factoid is within a factor of 100 of being accurate, there are going to be millions of square pegs chasing round holes in coming months.

And shortly thereafter, there’ll be as many bitter “advertising on blogs sux!” stories. You’ll see a tremendous backlash of “I tried to advertise my mobile home business and ended up with $47 CPCs” or “People laughed at the movie our agency advertised, now the client is mad, please give us our money back ASAP” stories.

We’ve now done this three years three years, seen thousands of ads and talked with hundreds of advertisers, from the biggest to the smallest. There are, by my count, still fewer than a dozen advertisers in America, out of the hundreds currently advertising on blogs, who really understand why and how to communicate in the blogosphere. Most of these folks are independent companies outside the big agency pipeline, the pipeline that so efficiently dilutes interesting products and ideas into least common-denominator cookie-cutter ads, ads that fail miserably to connect with America’s most sophisticated, pugnacious thinkers.

As I said, the coming year is going to be mighty amusing. Gee, maybe the backlash will go so mainstream that Business Week’s cover will detail the “Blog bubble: how we all drank the coolaid and got a stomach ache.” And all the Rosie Ruizes will head home to the showers.

At which point, a couple of thousand patient and ever-iterating advertisers will actually understand this stuff. And then real fun will begin.

“Print Insists It’s Here to Stay” — the headline in yesterday’s NYTimes yesterday — ranks right up there with Richard Nixon’s “I’m no crook” in the department of disquieting declarations.

Turns out newspapers and magazines are going to spend 10s of millions of dollars advertising to… umm… remind advertisers that their money is best spent in newspapers and magazines. Watching the pulp-vendors spend that money will be a major test of their own perception of where readers are headed. They won’t spend the money in their own pages, obviously, because they can place house ads for free, right? Anyway, the challenges are great.

Earl C. Cox, who is the Martin Agency’s chief executive and is leading the newspapers’ public relations campaign, told newspaper executives at a recent conference that the current perception of newspapers among advertisers was that they were “static, inflexible and hard to buy.” And, he added, “It doesn’t help any that media buyers are under 30 and their focus is elsewhere,” mostly on the Internet.

Hmm. Maybe these folks should consider advertising on blogs?

I should make clear that I love reading The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Time and Newsweek in print. I’d hate to recline on the couch clutching my laptop. But I’m increasingly annoyed by articles and ads I see in newspapers. They look dull and preachy and dated. I wonder how long it will before advertising in print, like not having a URL a few years ago, hurts a company’s image?

Amy Langfield’s New York blog advertising network got a perceptive write-up today in MediaPost.

ANDREW RASIEJ, ONE OF THE challengers to New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, has turned to the Internet to promote his candidacy in the Democratic primary this September. His campaign went live Monday on over 20 New York City blogs, NYTimes.com, New York Magazine’s Web site, and a handful of influential progressive political blogs.

Can you hear the drip, drip, drip of sales oozing away from corporate media? A group of NYC bloggers of all interests and political stripes have banded together and made buying/editing/monitoring an ad an affordable no-brainer… as easy and obvious as buying ads on venerable, ancient media brand-names. Amy says two blogs are joining, with others in the wings.

Meanwhile, Adam Kuban’s food blog advertising network is getting good traction with food bloggers… soon to be joined by two of the top foodblogs: Chocolate and Zucchini and 101 Cookbooks.

Newspaper circulation off 1.9% in the last six months.

Ken Layne, hater of all things new, spawns the evil idea of “iJacking.”

How does it work, you ask? Simple. These days, people often share songs with their pals, which is a terrible crime known as Piracy or Felony Child Endangerment. Find out what kind of music your victim enjoys. If it’s your wife, for example, you might casually ask, ‘Lady, do you enjoy music? If so, please list three musical acts that would interest you, especially if I said I just downloaded secret new bootleg music by these acts.’

Then you offer to put this secret music on her iPod.

And then you load a cornucopia of awful things onto said iPod.

What kind of awful things? I’d stay away from traditional ‘songs,’ because they tend to be several minutes long ‘ giving the victim time to skip the song and find out its title ‘ and there’s always the chance your victim will actually enjoy whatever crap music you install. Instead, just put a bunch of Deeply Wrong short audio clips, things that flash by with great weirdness & violence, leaving your victim confused and agitated. Did I really just hear that?

Here’s some fine material I found on the Google in just minutes: animal sounds, police sirens, scary guns, utterly devastating Kentucky Fried Chicken employee-training tapes, etc.

Another good idea is to record yourself yelling at the person, or record strangers yelling at the person to do something, like ‘Duck!’ or ‘Hands up, Creep!’ You will need to be creative when recording these tiny mp3 files. HOT TIP: Use a stereo microphone for these bits and stand to the left or right of the mic when yelling; it’ll sound much more realistic when your victim is jogging or whatever and suddenly hears an angry voice in one ear. If your victim is religious, get somebody with a creepy British accent to say godly stuff, very personal. God is ashamed of what you did with that guy, etc. Got a bug-phobic buddy? Try a swarm of bees! Let the victim’s unique personal fears and shame help you choose the perfect sounds!

Ken, the master of nasty tricks and disinformation, elsewhere claims that he and I learned about podcasting at the same time. I swear I knew about it at least five minutes before Ken. Speaking of Ken and (lower on the page) Business Week, Ken reminds me of the time a bunch of stuff Ken had written online for one publication magically migrated into an article by someone else in Business Week. (See clenched teeth editor’s note at the bottom of this story… iJacked as it were.) And speaking of iJacking, try this gorgeous ballad on your iPod.

A good article from the NYTimes about the crumbling franchise TV Guide, trying to keep up with TV and its myriad audiences.

In a presentation to Gemstar’s biggest investors, the company identified a quandary for TV Guide, 95 percent of whose circulation is by subscription: a large portion of the subscribers are “traditionalist,” “older, 65-plus” and “more analog,” compared with those who are listed as younger and “digital.” Mr. Loughlin did not say what percentage was in the “older” category, but he conceded that TV Guide’s subscribers were unlikely to impress the advertisers in a more upscale publication like, say, Vanity Fair. “It’s a mass book,” he said of TV Guide. “It isn’t Traditional Home.”

In its 2004 annual report, Gemstar acknowledged a “substantial decline” in program advertising – the ads for particular movies and shows in the listings. It added that the decline of these ads, the core of TV Guide’s ad revenue, “could be permanent.”

I always admire the courage of Times reporters who dig into corporate publishing maladies that are so darn close to home for their own livelyhoods.

Meanwhile, blogger Michael Prieve spun the dial today and built a neat network of TV blogs. If you want to support their new network, drop this link in your HTML:

<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/tvblogs_ad_network/order>Advertise on TV weblogs</a>

Here’s the great logo Michael concocted:

Steven Berlin Johnson, one of my favorite writers, has a new contrarian book coming out about how television shows, and their watchers, are actually becoming smarter.

All of what Johnson says about TV has to be learned by advertisers too. I can’t summarize his arguments well enough, but here are some hints from an article in the Sunday NYTimes magazine.

“Since the early 80’s, however, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to date, ‘The Sopranos,’ routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters. An episode from late in the first season looks like this.”

“The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well.”

“If early television took its cues from the stage, today’s reality programming is reliably structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren’t fully established at the outset. You learn as you play.”

“You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you’re exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.”

And, in the same issue Michael Lewis writes a wonderful portrait of the battle between other people’s expectations and your own identity, between being perceived “in” and struggling for recognition. He closes:

In Anaheim that afternoon, Brendan Donnelly quickly got ahead of Teahen, 0-2, and then tried to put him away with a pitch on the outside corner. Teahen reached out — and when he reached he traveled backward in time . . . he was reaching not for Brendan Donnelly’s fastball, he was reaching for . . . a Wiffle ball and trying to flick it over the left-field wall. He was reaching out as a small, fast high-school middle infielder who was not designed to hit home runs . . . he was reaching the way a small boy who doesn’t know he will grow into a big man reaches, just hoping to poke the ball into the hole between third and short and beat it out. He was reaching out the way he had always reached out. They had tried to stop him from reaching out. To teach him power. They had tried to sever his game from its roots. And he didn’t let them. And that was why his bat made hard contact with Brendan Donnelly’s sinking fastball. That’s why he was here now. In the big leagues. Standing on first base. Safe.

If you read print newspapers, you may have seen a full page ad last week in the New York Times or today in USA Today taking Wal-Mart to task for relying on cheap Chinese labor and depending on US taxpayers to fund its worker healthcare.

And if you read blogs, you’ve seen ads like this. The ad is a little busy for my taste and I’d love to see some links in the text, but the overall message is strong. Walmart Watch, the group running those ads, has a community website packed with information and a blog. Here’s their post about the USA Today ad . And the post about the NYTimes ad.

Straddling the line between elderly media and online, Jeff Jarvis continues to excel as the go to man for the latest obituaries. Today’s post contains this chart excised from a Mary Meeker presentation at Adtech (where I’m on a panel tomorrow about blog advertising if you feel like stopping by.) This chart and others in Meeker’s presesentation presentation that traditional media gets far too much ad revenue relative to its mindshare.