Another termite gnaws at the dead-tree pulpers. Michael Malone :

In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades ‘ only to then double or triple that rate of decline ‘ would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let’s finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate ‘ 90-plus percent ‘ that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.

So why do newspapers linger on? Why do so many papers refuse to accept reality and metamorphize into real Web presences rather than merely online downloads of their print copy?

One answer is that most newspapers are unbelievably retrograde. They grew up in a world of newsprint and that’s where they intend to stay. They cannot believe an institution as venerable as the newspaper can ever go away.

They are wrong. And their publications will die first. All of them.

Via Buzzmachine.

AtariDemocrat.

Journalism school professors who climb on soapboxes and proclaim that editorial decisions at leading publishers are unaffected by advertising should mourn the passing of the NYTimes‘ Circuits section.

At a time when interest in e-life is EXPLODING, the Times can not claim that the decision is made with the readers’ best interests in mind. Clearly the Times wasn’t able to compete for tech ad $s.

www.Dailykos.com now has ten classifieds. Interesting to see if other blogs adopt this approach.

New blogad sellers: PVRblog, Open All Night, How Appealing … other great folks on the way.

A good graphic and commentary at Boingboing.

WSJ: “The Louvre giftshop sells more than 330,000 Mona Lisa items annually, including 200,000 postcards, 20,000 magnets and 10,000 puzzles.”

Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Greens, Libertarians.

Some highlights:

— Democrat blog readers are most likely to contribute online (78%) while Libertarians the least (53%).

— Republican blog readers make the most (70% over 60K) and Greens the least (50% over 60K).

— Greens are the most antagonistic to TV (48% think it is worthless) versus 22% of Republican readers.

— More Republican readers think blogs are “extremely useful” (59%) versus Greens (44%.)

— Republicans are older; more Democratic blog readers are female.

— Libertarian and Green blog readers are mostly likely to be bloggers themselves (29%), while Republican blog readers are least likely to be bloggers (17%.)

Taegan Goddard summarizes the results of his readers’ responses.

Taegan Goddard’s Politicalwire is the first to sell blogad classifieds. Fittingly, the first ad peddles the URL www.political.com.

The second is a help-wanted ad from Oceana.org, which I fondly recall was the first DC advocacy group to buy blogads back in ’03:

Oceana is looking for a skilled web developer to use open source to help us in our mission to save the world’s oceans. We believe in the potential of the Web as an advocacy medium, and you’ll be helping us bring it to life — applying technologies like Linux, PHP, MySQL, RSS, and other cool tech along the way. If you love open source and want to make a real difference in the world instead of just grinding out cookie-cutter web sites, come join us!

So far, I’m very pleased with the nuts-and-boltsiness of these ads.

Update: Instapundit has just created a bulletin board also.

This ad format is still in beta, so we need your feedback. What would make these ads most useful?

Yes, you already knew that intuitively.

Now you can tell your pajama-bashing friends that the data from last week’s blog reader survey indicates that 70% of blog readers are influentials, those articulate, networked 10% of Americans who set the agenda for the other 90%. (RoperASW, the folks who wrote the book on Influentials, have more information on the definition on influentials here.)

I guess the CBS guy just forgot to mention that those pajamas are silk, not rayon.

When I mentioned 70% data last Friday at the panel on influentials at the George Washington University conference on Online Politics, Carol Darr, the institute’s director, said this ratio correlated with the data that her group had observed last year in a study of influentials online.

To put the blogosphere’s influentials density in context, consider that the WashingtonPost.com likes to brag that 34% of its readers are influentials. (See bottom of page 4 on this PDF.)

MediaPost did a good job synchronizing last week’s blog reader poll with Gallup’s survey, also published last, indicating that only 32 of Americans are even somewhat familiar with blogs.

Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup poll, says his results are not inconsistent with Copeland’s conclusion. Newport compared readers of blogs to readers of The New York Times. “We know that only a fraction of the American public reads the Times, but it affects everyone because that’s what the people who control mainstream media read.”

“In conducting our poll, it was not our intent to measure blogs’ gross influence,” said Newport. “I think it’s obvious that the most influential people in our society are the ones who read these things.”

For another angle on the same topic, see Kate Kaye’s post about my question to the WashingtonPost.com’s Cliff Sloan at Friday’s IPDI debate.

Here’s more coverage of the reader survey.

(We’re still exporting stuff from SurveyMonkey… slowly.)

Senator Harry Reid tells RawStory “What has happened in recent years, the Fairness Doctrine has been taken away, that is, equal time for pros and cons on an issue. And they also allowed the concentration of media power, so one station, one owner can own 1,200 radio stations. What this means is that wealth and power control most everything in this country. But one thing they do not control’wealth and power does not control the Internet. Through the Internet, regular ordinary people have a voice. That’s why I go out of my way to communicate any way that I can on the Internet and I think the blogs are a tremendously important way for the American public to find out what’s really going on.”

I’m getting stale on conferences these days, going to an average of two a month.

But I’m definitely going to SXSW next year. I’ve never had a better time conferencizing. The panel sessions were OK-to-good, the evenings were OUTSTANDING.

Normally at a conference cocktail hour, you find yourself spending ten minutes trying to find some common ground with the person next to you. At SXSW, you just had to turn to your left and introduce yourself and instantly, ka-ching, you were saying “wow, I’ve always wanted to meet you.”

Other friends, old and new, I enjoyed seeing: Will Pate, Steve Reading, Jim Cudney, Biz Stone, Eric Case, John Vars, Milan Negovan, Jackson West, Tony Pierce, Tantek Celik, Evan Williams, Richard Luckett, Ana Marie Cox, Philip Kaplan, Jason Calcanis, Tiffany Brown, Gokul Rajaram, Lockhart Steele, Jason Shellen, Alaina Brown, Jake Dobkin, Marc Brown, Mitch Ratcliffe, Susan Kaup, Rex Hammock, Mike Slone, and Edward Cossette.

As Jenifer Hanen told me “this is my tribe.”

PUD gave me a copy of his F-ed company book. He signed it and I got dotcom survivors Biz, Ev, JasonC, Richard, JasonS, Jake and Tony to add dedications. JasonC, who can be witty when he tries, scribbled out: “to a gentleman and a scholar: may we be never be f-ed and may we always be in good company!” Ev wrote: “I once f-ed a company. Don’t recommend it.”

Here’s a photo of Biz and me taken by Eric.

Update: a more jaundiced view of our Woodstock@Motel6 from The Register and Jossip.

Here’s a fun new angle to blog advertising, actually an old angle revived.

When we started blogads, we imagined an intra-community bulletin board filled with birthday greetings, rants, books for sale, party announcements, personals, lost dogs, lost causes… all the advertising ephemera that makes life fun and interesting.

We got a few of those ads. Then prices started rising, and gradually squeezed out the human-scaled stuff.

Well, here’s back to the future. Another unapologetically anti-IAB unit: 500 characters, no image, no edit, no HTML, no breaks, no bulkbuy.

You can buy the first of these ads here here to run on the great blog Politicalwire.

The unit is still malleable, so let us know what you think. Just don’t tell us it doesn’t conform to IAB standards, because that’s the point. 🙂

If you are currently selling blogads and one to add an adstrip like this to your page, just click “create an adstrip” on the “adstrip manager” page and then choose “classie” on page 4 of the adstrip set-up process.

I’ll be at SXSW through Tuesday. If you are going, drop me a line and we’ll coordinate a collision. Speaking Monday at 5PM, though not yet sure where.

I turn 43 Monday, which may explain this post’s title.