blogads for the opinion makers

Check out what Huffpo’s readers are excited about today.

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with any of this stuff… it’s just that this bonfire of skin is a long way from the highbrow content that Arianna claims to be championing:

WaPo’s web columnist Dan Froomkin gets the ax because his online articles don’t get enough traffic.

Think about all the coverage that will disappear in coming years as this philosophy becomes standard.

Think about all the far away places about which the average person knows little and care less — Sudan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Pakistan, Ghana, Taiwan, South Korea, Peru — that won’t measure up to the web’s popularity standards and slowly disappear as take-it-or-leave-it bundle of The Newspaper is replaced by the “every word for itself” metrics of web publishing.

The HuffingtonPost has stepped up to hire Froomkin — no doubt garnering a nice little spike in page impressions and PR — but is itself on vanguard of the desperate commercial scramble to add frothy content to drive page impressions and revenues. (Right this second the most popular stories on Huffpo are #1 “Sarah Palin’s Most memorable style moments” #2 “Women’s iconic swimsuit movie moments” #3 “ADN confirms, Sarah Palin’s story doesn’t add up” and #4 “Emma Watson’s Wardrobe Malfunction.”)

I’m not arguing that Froomkin was a great journalist or deserved to stay at the Post. I’m just marking this small moment in the shifting climate of publishing, a moment in which web metrics nudge aside the editor’s judgement.

“Disciplines are cultures, with embedded practices and ways of thinking that have been successful at tackling certain kinds of problems. When a new problem or opportunity arises that does not fall into one of the traditional disciplinary bins—like converging technologies–then practitioners from different fields may find they have fundamentally different perspectives on it, including whether there really is an opportunity. This kind of communications barrier depends, in part, on one’s level of inclusion in the disciplinary culture (Law & Bijker, 1992) and on which invisible colleges a particular member of the culture belongs to (Crane, 1972).” (From draft workshop proposal, Trading zones, interactional expertise and interdisciplinary collaboration, by Michael E. Gorman, University of Virginia)

Someone asked about our logo.

Here’s a distilled version of its origin. Boy was our first logo ugly.

Luckily, we had a contest and got reader feedback.

Whew!

Last week Tina Merrill joined us a COO in our Carrboro NC office.

Our US staff has grown steadily since 2002 to the current 17, so we’re all very excited to draw on Tina’s great energy, organizational skills and business insights.

Tina spent the last 3 years working as Finance Director for the Southern Rural Development Initiative. Before that, Tina founded and ran Citizen Canine, a luxury dog care business, in Oakland CA. Tina graduated from what is formally known the Stanford Graduate School for Business after a stint in the energy industry. (Her employer there had been acquired by Enron, so Tina can share some horrifying tales from inside the E-beast.) Rounding out her checkered past, Tina graduated from Harvard with a BA in economics.

Jason Calacanis, the Donald Trump of the interwebs, has written an adrenalized chest-thumping column on living near the edge.

I’ve been to the precipice and faced the fall a couple of times. I’ve
learned a couple of things from the experience. I can tell you that
the first time it happens, you’re terrified, because everything you’ve
done–all the effort and dreams–will probably be lost (like tears in
the rain).

The second time it happens, you’re deeply concerned, but know it ain’t
over until you’re splattered on the boulders below.

The third time it happens, you smile and say “let’s get it on!”

Three?

Funny that politicians and economists never do A/B testing of policies.

In every bear market, there comes a moment when reasonable people say “Enough is enough. Let us take a stand. Prices are now 20% lower than they were a month ago. The market is cheap. We will buy and show that we are wise.”

These reasonable people are called suckers. They mistake “cheaper” for “cheap.” They’re trading the market looking in the rear view mirror. Watching the sunny day behind them, they don’t notice the tornado just ahead.

I write this because stocks are up in overnight trading because IBM’s Q3 results were good and IBM projects strong numbers going forward.

I.B.M. said its third-quarter net income rose 22 percent, to $2.05 a share, which was 3 cents higher than analysts’ consensus estimate, as compiled by Thomson Reuters. …

I.B.M. went beyond saying it did well last quarter. It also reaffirmed its previous guidance for its profits for the entire year, despite the weakening economic outlook in the United States and elsewhere.

The company expects to earn $8.75 a share for 2008, a 22 percent increase over 2007.

Just what the suckers need to hear.

“Valuations look attractive,” said Espen Furnes, an Oslo- based fund manager at Storebrand Asset Management, which has the equivalent of $48 billion. “It’s time for a rebound, the stock market has just fallen too rapidly. IBM’s numbers show that it’s not all doom and gloom out there.”

No, Oslo based Espen Fumes IBM’s numbers show that Q3 was OK and IBM economists and treasurers haven’t absorbed (or can’t yet admit to themselves) that things have changed.

See Espen, it’s like the seasons. Plants that grow in the summer doesn’t grow in the winter. Animals that eat those plants either hibernate, migrate or die. Espen doesn’t know it yet, but it’s now officially winter. Winter, Espen, is a silly time to plant seeds or buy swimming suits. And its a silly time to buy stocks. Even if the market does rally 10% in the coming week — and it easily could — the downside risk is still far greater than the upside.

We still do not know — and IBM forecasters certainly do not know —

Plenty of folks bought Lehman Brothers at $20 a share in August because “Hey, it’s trading at a 60% discount to its price in May, this is crazy cheap!” They discovered crazy cheap can, in hindsight, be crazy expensive when shares are headed in a matter of days to $0.17.

In the closing four minutes of trading today, Google dropped $70 on volume of 4.27 million shares to $341. Usually trades 50 to 100,000 shares in a 4 minute stretch. Either somebody knows something, somebody panicked or somebody mistakenly added an extra zero (or more) to a sell order. In after hours trading, Google is back up at $410. To put the swing in perspective, that’s a roughly $20 billion swing in Google’s valuation in 4 minutes.

Update: Clearly there’s zero liquidity in the markets right now. A big seller comes along and all the buyers hide. Who me? I’m not a market maker in the hottest tech company around. Maybe they’re going out of business and I don’t know something. Pity the poor guy who finally stepped up to buy the 4.27 million shares at a deep discount (approximately $280 million discount to be exact)… only to have the trade DKed the next day. (DK: Street lingo for “don’t know” or cancelled trade.)

A new Bain study looks at what makes brands grow. As this blog sums up: “Quick, pick the best indicator a brand will grow faster than its category: Brand size? Newness? Leadership within a category? Such is conventional wisdom, but a recent Bain study of 524 brands across 100 categories found none of the above. The study “winners”-defined as any brand that beat its category’s growth each year from 1997-2001-invested differentially in just two components of the marketing mix: product innovation and advertising.”

Olivier Travers, editor of Scifan, is tired of losing affiliate commissions to skimmers. “This weekend I’m going to experiment with, and most probably implement, those scripts that lock out infected users. I’m not going to sit there idly when thieves rob us out of our commissions while Sophie and I bust our asses building the best database about SF/F books out there.”

When Google.News (aka Noogle) pulled an obscure ABCNews.com article on Kashmiri violence onto its front page, the site got 500 referrals in ten minutes, according to Staci Kramer. (The Kashmire article had not made the front of ABCnews.com.)

Olivier has dropped from #2 to #7 in Google. He wonders: is Google braking blogs? Tony Pierce, once #1 for Tony, is now #11. I see Dave Winer has the same symptoms. David Weinberger notes that he has plummeted from #6 to #25, supplanted by namesakes like David Bowie, David Lynch, David Gray, David Brin, David Grisman, Harry and David.

Inspired, I just spent a couple of minutes looking for myself among the Henry clan. After 6 pages, I gave up. Note to self: create an app allowing bloggers to track their Google status.

Seeking to cash in on (and exacerbate) the confluence of Moore’s law and Baby-bust deflation, Olivier Travers launches The Happy Deflationist. As Olivier describes it: “Fresh deals and bargains found for you on eBay, Amazon.com, and elsewhere on the web. Tech products, computer hardware, books, DVDs and CDs. Stuff that you actually want to buy, and can afford as well.” It’s the poor man’s Gizmodo.

Jason Kottke writes: “Anyone who meets me online — including possible friends, fellow Web design enthusiaists, or potential employers — has access to 4+ years of my thoughts before they even have to strike up a conversation. That’s damn powerful stuff.” Yep, so much so that I currently feel it would be tough to hire someone who is not a blogger. It would feel like they were hiding something.

A couple weeks ago, Krzysztof Kowalczyk argued that the best resume is a blog. “My opinion is that it’s impossible to tell anything from a typical resume. So a guy says he knows PHP. Does it mean that he’s a PHP guru who has written 100k lines of PHP code or that he’s just finished ‘Learn PHP in 15 minutes’? No way to tell. My idea: blog your resume. In addition to a standard resume keep a log of all the stuff you’re learning and doing. E.g. if today you wrote a 5k lines perl script that spiders the web and extracts interesting info, you would to your log a dated entry: Finished 5k line Perl script to spider the web. Used LWP::Simple module… ”

Curriculum Vitae means “a summary of one’s education, professional history, and job qualifications, as for a prospective employer.” CVs inevitably distort and elide. History is written by the victors; likewise CVs are overwritten by our winning ideas. Our missteps, mistakes and stupidities get forgotten.

A blog captures our professional and personal accretions in real-time, records the quality of our interactions and snap-shoots our judgements. Other important factors get recorded: do we play well with the other children in our class? do we share credit? do we collaborate? listen? articulate? admit mistakes? grow?

This transparency may be a crucial selling point for Weblogs4hire. Don’t hire a blogger to blog for you. Hire her because you understand her skills and personality. Because you trust her. Because she’ll fit better with your team, last longer, and (not least) communicate better.

Dave Eggers, author of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” will issue his second novel himself and “sell it only through the McSweeney’s Web site and 100 or so independent bookstores. Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other giant retailers are to be cut out of the action.” The WSJournal adds:

“Mr. Eggers seems to have taken as his playbook Jason Epstein’s ‘Book Business.’ Published last year, it ought to be required reading for serious writers everywhere. Mr. Epstein, a former editor at Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, argues that the trend toward centralization in book publishing and retailing is coming to an end. In an environment where competition for bestsellers and name-brand authors has sent advances and marketing budgets soaring, profit margins among the mainstream houses are wafer thin. Chain bookstores, saddled with pricey real estate and high labor costs, must themselves bank on an ever-increasing supply of bestsellers; this reliance on quick turnover marginalizes serious, slower-selling books. But the chains are finding it ever more difficult to compete with the ruthless price slashing of Amazon, which will, at no extra cost, deliver to your doorstep. The whole middle-man apparatus of corporate publishing, argues Mr. Epstein, will totter toward obsolescence as e-book and print-on-demand technologies gain traction, reducing the need for costly warehousing and shipping. Someday, he maintains, writers will contract directly with independent editors and publicists, and the trade will revert to its roots as a cottage industry of like-minded souls banding together in fluid groupings around projects of mutual interest.”

: “I can’t stress enough just how simple it was to set up my adstrip for [url=http://www.weirdfiles.com]Weird Files. I’ve sold two ads this week and am running another two free ads — for my hosting service and the crazy Fortean Times magazine.” Next up, Blogads on KENLAYNE.com and LAEXAMINER.

Internet marketeer Tim Ireland offers a number of services, including “Weblog Seeding.” Here’s the description: “No doubt you’ve watched a movie or two where some mad scientist, intent on wiping out every human being on the planet with a killer virus, does so by releasing it in multiple strategic locations. The same approach needs to be taken with online viral agents. Web users are creatures of habit, and rarely venture out of a set group of communities and websites. For this reason, a multiple seeding approach is required to give your virus the best chance of wide exposure and exponential growth. Weblog seeding is by far the most effective technique of getting your viral agent in front of as many eyeballs as possible.”

Congratulations to Emmanuelle Richard and Matt Welch, the first double Blogad family. Emmanuelle scores another first: a French blogad. Be sure to click and contribute the cause of blogging a la mode francaise. Finally, I’m excited that Emmanuelle pushes the envelope so nicely with her house ads, especially the one for Dot.con.

Ken Layne writes: “The cost-cutting, personality-hating newspaper chains have done everything possible to do away with popular columnists. The most successful tactic has been to let the popular columnists die off and quickly kill all discussion of replacements by issuing the standard ‘he/she could never be replaced.’”

To the folks who think great writers won’t ever make a living from blogging, I can only say: what are you gonna read if they don’t?

Professional journalism is being crushed by lead-coated, 19th-century overheads. Although a few true-believers fight back, each year, another 5% of the newspaper heap gets amalgamated or liquidated. Eighty percent of newspaper revenue funds executive parking garages, ad rep bonuses, printing presses, phone bills, delivery trucks, and 3-martini-lunches.

The fires of competition will boil off these impurities and slag. Wordsmiths and other idea entrepreneurs will thrive; the advertiser will get five times more bang for her buck; readers will get more and better commercial information.

Jay Niemann writes: “This Weblog is an experiment in grassroots entrepreneurship. Specifically, it concerns the sale of unusual vinyl records.”

Meanwhile, Ken Layne launches a blog called Weird Files to promote print syndication of his columns about weirdness, specifically UFOs, crop circles and Black Helicopters.

And Ben Sullivan is promoting his Blogads by advising buyers, “If you’re selling something, I’ll keep your ad up until it gets sold, or you tire of all the responses you receive. Something I called Guaranteed Classifieds.”

The Washington Post reports: In the early days, when Starbucks “had little advertising money, it used its storefronts as billboards and clustered them close together. The goals: to intercept consumers on their way to work or home or anywhere in between, and to build brand awareness through ubiquity.” Today, 1 in 3 Starbucks is cannibalizing a neighboring Starbucks’ sales, but those sales recover within a year. (Via Obscure Store.)

By creating blog metadata standards, the BlogMD Initiative hopes to make it easier for readers to find bloggers and for bloggers to find each other.

Jeff Jarvis writes: “The bottom line is that entertainment and media can build a new, more profitable and efficient bottom line if only they let the audience help them. They can eliminate many of the middlemen. … Some companies will wise up and prosper. And many new companies and relationships will grow; I see huge opportunity in creating new collections of talent, new ways to produce, and new ways to distribute.” (Via Matt Welch.)

Here’s the first report of a marriage proposal precipitated by a blog. I’ve speculated before about the potential for blogs to cannibalize conventions, clubs, churches, corporations, and cities,… but I didn’t think about singles bars. (Via Instapundit.)

Mark Pilgrim writes: “I am consistently getting over 200 referrals a day from people searching [Google] for Ellen Feiss, a query for which I have ranked in the top 10 for the past 3 weeks when I discovered the Ellen Feiss store and an assortment of fan sites.” Six thousand unique visitors a month for one topic: many publishers would kill for aggregate readership like that.

Tara Sue Grubb, 26, is being hailed as the “first congressional candidate with a weblog.” She doesn’t offer a bio and doesn’t like linking, whether to other ideas or other community organizations or individuals. She doesn’t mention her opponent by name. And she writes things like “Prudent followership in a leader yields prudent leadership for the people.”

Well, we’ve got to start somewhere, I guess. I like the boldness of Dave Winer’s claim that “in five years every member of the US House will have a weblog and will be communicating directly with the electorate.” That may be true. But Dave doesn’t state the corollary: 98% of Congress will be new before every member blogs. These old dogs just won’t blog, or at least do it naturally enough to convince the public. Furthermore, the political infrastructure that manufactures Congressmen also will have to be junked/rewired.

Building new markets takes decades. (See prior post.) Unless armed with guillotines or AK40s, revolutions are the same.

(8/26/02: Dave has worked up a new site that includes a blogroll to Grubb’s opponent.)

Dave Winer writes: “Ten years isn’t enough time to create a new market.”

Using Blogrolling, I just added a link to Hylton Jolliffe on my personal blog. I then went to Blogrolling’s “latest links” page, where Jolliffe was now The Latest Link. Amazing to see the synapses wire in real time. (Time-stamps would be nice addition.)

Continuing to fulminate against blogs earning advertising or commission revenues, Dave Winer writes: “I can’t believe people still think that advertising and commissions on catalog sales have anything to do with this medium. That’s so ink-stained and so wrong.”