I’m at an IPDI Online Politics conference. Fascinating people and topics, including the FEC’s wrestling match with the idea and execution of blogs.

I haven’t been able to get an e-mail out, so here is the URL for the results of this year’s blog reader survey.

The United Church of Christ placed a nice block of blogads today. You can read about the reasoning behind the order here.

Though we work with a growing list of religious blogs, both Christian and Jewish, this is, as far as I know, the first time a church has bought blogads. (This is also the first time I’ve seen a blog post written about a major blogad buy by the buyer.)

The blogads are part of the church’s attempt to end-run the TV networks who have rejected the church’s ad. As the UCC ad buyer put it:

In the tradition of this nation’s earliest pamphleteers, bloggers are sharing news and information as a mark of a truly free society, not as something that can be controlled and manipulated by multi-national corporations.

As well as being on the cutting edge of the evolution of media, there’s a certain historical symmetry in the church’s blogad order. The United Church of Christ represents America’s Congregationalist churches, which are the theological descendents of the Puritans. The Puritans came to America to speak their own minds and escape England’s rigid and heirarchical religious orthodoxy. And there’s more than a hint of the emphasis on personal autonomy and bottom-up truth-seeking in the blogging community.

This ad had a personal impact on me. When I mentioned my experience to the UCC’s ad buyer, he asked me to post to the UCC’s blog. You can read that post here.

Some of the great fun of the blogging business is the way small shifts in perspective can open up a huge new avenue of opportunity. Most days you stare at a brick wall, but some days you take a small step forward or sideways and feel like you’ve turned onto the Champs Elysee. One long broad straight road lined with trees and lights. The way forward is obvious.

I think Nick Denton just stepped around one such corner. Standing in as editor of one of his publications, Nick says: “I’ll be checking tips@gridskipper.com, but I had another idea. If you’re using Wists, Delicious or Flickr, and you’re posting an item that might be good for Gridskipper, just add a gridskipper tag. I’ll be monitoring the feeds. Maybe we can even syndicate them to gridskipper.com.”

The recent e-mail exchanges between Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, and Jeff Jarvis, blogger, are kinda surreal.

Keller is right (and pretty damn funny) in pointing out that Jarvis is a self-appointed chair of a committee of one and speaks for no-one but himself. But Keller seems to be realizing that he himself, an employee designated by some profit-seeking pension fund managers, lacks any unique non-corporate claim to the epistemological or civic podium.

The context: corporate media is on the run, and the Keller/Jarvis e-mail mud wresting is a sign of the times. On the business side, publishers see revenues leaching away to Google, Craiglist, Monster, eBay and thousands of no-overhead publishers. On the editorial side, publishers realize that their 400-year-old monopoly on the publishing megaphone is gonzo. Thanks to free blogging software and the blogosphere’s speed-of-light neural network, a rag-tag army of swarming individuals increasingly leads public opinion.

Ten years ago, the New York Times’ editor might have claimed that the newspaper’s one million readers had “elected” him truth-meister. But today Keller knows that some bloggers individually and many in aggregate can make the same claims. Worse, Keller knows that bloggers themselves helped oust one of his own predecessors, Howell Raines.

It used to be that the editor of the NYT or LAT could say “it is not news until we report it.” That used to be literally true — most people didn’t pay attention to a story until a big paper or three jumped into the fray. “News” was something manufactured by publishers. Now the thought sounds ludicrous.

Vis the economic and communication function of media, the key question is what/how we
constitute “common knowledge.” There’s lots of emerging economic theory around the importance of “common knowledge” — the idea that I know that you know that I know that you know something. Corporate media used to be the unrivalled engine for creating common knowledge. That’s less true every day.

At present, bloggers can’t run a news cycle on their own, from gossip to factoid to outcry to resignation. Blogs still need corporate media to complete the chain-reaction, because blogs lack corporate media’s mass market reach. We haven’t yet reached the point where everyone says “everyone knows ABC…” because ABC has been covered by DailyKos and/or Instapundit. But that day is coming fast. And when blogs become the acknowledged manufacturers of common knowledge, corporate media will be superfluous to advertisers. (Which is not to say bad or societally useless.)

Sounds pretty draconian, I know, but if you connect the dots — persistently rising blog
traffic, opinion maker migration into p2p communication, eroding corporate publishing audiences, cannibalization of corporate revenue streams by online players — that’s where you end up.

I will miss corporate media’s thoughtful investigative journalism and great beat reporting. But I’m pretty sure the market won’t.

(I originally wrote this in answer to Hugh Forrest’s question for the SXSW Q&A page. http://2005.sxsw.com/interactive/?PHPSESSID=e2a4e0d0c3f91251d3ba662eab189f24 … other answers will be posted there later this week.)

Lots of people are excited that Jason Kottke is turning “pro” as a blogger.

Well, not exactly professional because he’s not getting paid by anyone for a specific good or service, he’s asking for donations, patronages, whatever. Fine. A hyper-text busker.

Heck, I sent him $50 last week and wished him luck.

But why sneer at bloggers who sell ads? Jason: “A lot of people don’t like advertising, and I wouldn’t want advertising to change what I write’you know, having to change a post because it offends an advertiser or writing posts in a certain way where it would make sure that certain Google ads appear on the page.”

Hell, a lot of people do like advertising, Jason. Craigslist does 1.4 billion page impressions a month of the sordid stuff. Many magazines are bought as much for their ads as their articles. eBay, the biggest cultural institution invented in the United States in the last 100 years, is one giant advertising factory. And some of our political culture’s most interesting scraps of 2004 are ads bought and unbought on blogs like Jason’s.

Anyway, good luck busking.

Ken Layne, who recently had a son, notes that our friends “Charlie & Bonnie had a baby girl last night, and I was mighty happy to hear this good news. This whole “let’s all have a bunch of babies” thing is fun as hell. There’s a serious Martian Mining Colony gang in the works, in 20 years or so, and I hope they all send lots of e-mail & photos back to their folks here on Earth.”

I’ve decided next Christmas I’m only buying presents from blog advertisers, as part of our “We wish you a bloggin’ Christmas” (TM) campaign. The early contender for my chief Santa’s helper is the irredeemably irresistibly Reemco.

We went fishing last Saturday and briefly landed a catfish. First soccer practice on Thursday, cool but brilliant. Walked to school today, after a long winter of riding. T-bones with Tig Tillinghast last night here, introducing dogs and telling him about our favorite children’s books. Two great videos this week via Netflix, Small Change and the Dinner Game. Dinner at Carrburittos. A captivating child’s copter game. As with most human endeavors, gravity rules.

Yale does a good thing.

Alex Lencicki of Crown Books, pivotting off of Knopf’s advertising for the esoteric cult hit Kafka on the shore, serves up a blogad for the new book Angry Black White Boy, a hip-hop inversion of Invisible Man.

Instead of serving up the publishing industry’s online standard, a shrunken and fuzzy book cover that insults the viewer, Crown gives us custom-designed bold, ink-dripping image perfectly sized to fit on a blog.

Crown doesn’t quite equal Knopf’s genius of excerpting/linking to blogs — the book hits stores tommorrow — but does link directly to a review in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Crown one-ups Knopf, though, with an MP3 of the book’s prologue, including the click-bait “explicit lyrics.”

Great to see a couple of book publishers brainstorming and learning from each other in public, real-time text.

Like bloggers, really.

The Federal Election Commission is mulling regulating blogs, notes Michael Bassik. An FCC member suggests bloggers’ links might be regulated: “Would a link to a candidate’s page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they’re at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.”

So we’ll be regulating the ability of American citizens to express themselves online.

Glenn Wilson (a party to the suit in question) e-mails:

The copyright protection status of every electronic journal in the country is on the line. Please listen up and get ready to help.

All online publishers should file friend of the court briefs in the case of Glynn Wilson v. Random House and Kitty Kelly for plagiarizing Glynn Wilson’s Bush AWOL story.

Otherwise, a federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama is about to rule, effectively, that we have no copyright protection publishing online. THIS IS A HUGE DEAL.

The copyright office at the Library of Congress needs to write some new rules on this. They now say that electronic journals do not have to mail register stories to be protected. But the legal precedents under the old statute say you do. This is a gray area in the law that needs to be cleared up.

Certainly it was not Thomas Jefferson’s intent to allow corporate publishers to steal from online publications without fear of being sued for copyright violation for plagiarism. Was it? So the spirit of the law and the purpose of the law is on our side, if the precedents are not.

This is a huge national story. Please check with your legal counsel and your editor and publisher and get involved.

Last year we had a lot of fun doing a reader survey. With the dust of the election settled and lots of folks chattering about “whither blogs?” it’s time to do another.

If you want to send readers to do the survey, just link to the 2005 blog reader survey (copy/ paste this actual link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=34292894798 into your blog) and tell people to supply your blog’s name as the answer to question #16. The survey should take about four minutes to complete. The results will help us communicate with advertisers, the press and the public about the huge and unique audience that blogs serve.

If your blog readers put your blog name in #16, we’ll then happily provide you the full data broken out for your own readership in coming weeks.