blogads for the opinion makers

On Tuesday, the day when the HuffingtonPost’s headline story was “SOTOMAYOR UNDER THE GUN” these were the site’s most popular stories:

Huffpo bills itself as a serious forum for liberal thinkers… I wonder what percentage of its clicks are purely skin? Huffpo’s always-sober lead story is a thin veneer of high-brow atop a smorgasbord of breasts, butts and assorted salaciousness.

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.

A couple of college buddies, still clinging to their AOL e-mail addresses, wrote yesterday to highlight the BBC’s article about Twitter being “hyped” and “one to many.”

Only 10% of tweeters really use the medium, says the Harvard study that served as the source for the BBC’s story.

Worse, “Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends,” the study’s author said. “It looks like a few people are creating content for a few people to read and share.”

Wow, “broadcast” is a serious indictment, coming from the Beeb and Harvard, two pre-eminent institutions of bombastic broadcast!

This Twitter backlash reminds me of the blog-bashing of 2001 and 2002, when journalists and academics were eager to “burst the blogging bubble” by identifying shortfalls, overreaches or variations from whatever standard of decency or probity they wanted it to live up to.

Back then, I had more time for blogging, so I’ll quote an old post about blogging backlash that outlines the basic rhetorical framework in play then and now:

What is it about blogs that so confuses and concerns newspaper columnists? I think most columnists lack the experiences and conceptual categories to understand “the blog.” Like a one-year-old baby grappling with the idea of other beings, the average newspaperman scribbling about bloggers can describe “the other” only as an ersatz version of himself.

In essence, the bashers complain that blogs don’t measure up to “real” media. The Boston Globe’s recent column “In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap” regurgitates the list of complaints. Individual blogs don’t appeal to a broad audience. They aren’t serious or objective or edited. They contain meaningless personal details. They can be trite, verbose, incoherent and/or self-aggrandizing.

We all know that none of these traits apply to newspaper columns, ergo, blogs must be bad. In fact, many blogs are so bad, Globe columnist Alex Beam concluded, that the most they can aspire to is being “mocked in a medium that people actually read,” ie the newspaper.

The weblog community has pummeled Beam, and blogging dean Glenn Reynolds does the best job of logging the individual punches. Also, don’t miss pre-publication e-mail exchanges between Beam and Virginia Postrel and James Lileks.

Here’s my own reaction to Beam and anyone else trying to understand blogs: measuring the blog against the newspaper is a waste of time.

For a start, let’s try measuring the blog against other media, ancient and modern.

Blogs compare rather well to an older and more widely used communications tool, talking. Anyone who complains about blogging as sloppy or fruitless might want to take a tape recorder along the next evening out with friends. The next morning, listen to the incoherence, grunting and mumbling that passes for scintillating communication. Not a fair test? As any newspaper reporter can tell you, even the most practiced, coherent and committed spokespeople rewind, elipsize and armwave their way through most points.

Most human verbal communication isn’t rocket science… it’s sloppy, looping, incoherent, and prolix… which is part of its appeal.

Then there’s the telephone. In its early days, “lack of seriousness” was a frequent complaint against telecommunication. As tech scholar Andrew Odlyzko writes:

Sociability was frequently dismissed as idle gossip, and especially in the early days of the telephone, was actively discouraged. For example, a 1909 study of telephone service commissioned by the city of Chicago advocated measured rate service as a way to reduce “useless calls.” Yet the most successful communication technologies, the mail and the telephone, reached their full potential only when they embraced sociability and those “useless calls” as their goal.

So forget about dissing blogs as chit chat. Forget about blasting blogs for unnewspaperness. The new order isn’t just a negation of the old, or a recombination of its components: the new media spawns new features and experiences which are indescribable in the old language. E-mail isn’t just “electronic mail,” it is bccing, subject lines, limitless dribble, forwarded jokes, FLAMING, writing a quick note when you don’t have the energy to engage in a full dialog, sig files. SMS is far more than “short messages sent by mobile telephone,” it’s a whole culture of instant feedback, global simultaneity, crooked thumbs, endorphined beeps announcing news and stimulation.

In the same way, blogging isn’t a diary, a reading log, a common place book, a collection of newspaper articles or opinion columns. But what is it?

Rather than asking how blogs fail, let’s enumerate what blogs do right. Let’s describe why they inspire so much passion. 500,000 bloggers can’t just be vain, right?

In February, I listed timeliness, willingness to credit others, passion, blogrolling, human interest, chronology, and devotion as the characteristics that make blogs so appealing and useful for readers. But a blog’s power comes also from its benefits to the blogger.

Blogs are a great tool for brainstorming and sharing knowledge. Blogs encourage us to write and think more clearly. Blogs force us to interact (intellectually and physically) with the texts we are reading. Blogs invite others to reward our creative effort with feedback and, sometimes, appreciation. Blogs weave new social networks, introducing us to people with common passions. Blogs disseminate “micro-opinions” that are important for a small audience but would never make it onto a newspaper’s op-ed or letters page. Blogs build a shared history of experience and opinion among friends and acquaintances.

Talk is cheap and so is blogging, which is what makes both such powerful social tools. Blogging confers the bonus benefits of searchability, and temporal and spacial scalability.

But enough comparisons and descriptions. The joy of tennis can’t be described, it must be played.

And so it goes with Twitter. There’s some strange new social experience being born amidst the @s and RTs and #s and bit.lyed URLs. Spending time grunting about Twitter’s shortfalls — only 10% really use it and most people are passive misses out on the amazing social experience some of us ARE having. If you want to learn what makes Twitter special, don’t look at the 9 million low-tweeters, looks at the 1 million people who love it and are helping to invent some new social codes.

Even if Tweets are not a true conversation, there’s something new going on in the vocabulary of @ and # and “d” messages betwixt and between folks. It will take us a long time to figure out exactly what and give it a name. But it won’t be along metrics defined (developed) by existing media. And folks who sit on the sidelines, fingers firmly in their ears and complain “this new stuff isn’t as good at what WE do” are missing the point entirely.

Comparing the demographics of PerezHilton’s Twitter followers with those of his blog’s readers, we found Perez’s tweeps to be significantly younger than the blog’s readers. Also more female, Libertarian and comment-prone. Interesting eh?

We’d love to run more comparisons like this, so let us know if you’d like to run a parallel blog/twitter demographic survey.

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?

Thank you Will!

Google turns five today, or at least that’s what I think their birthday-caked logo suggests.

For those who ever had any doubts, Google.com proves the vast vitality and potent potential of web computing. Why use some silly Encyclopedia-on-a-CD when you can tap into the Google resources: 3.1 billion online documents sorted by 10,000 servers and 200 million linking minds?

Five years ago, Sun and Microsoft spent a lot of time debating the primacy of the network versus the PC. Quietly, without anyone making a big deal of it, it has become clear that the network is winning.

Yep, I’m one of those folks who believe that soon ALL interesting computing will be done by “the Internet” and not by local computers. I live this belief. My “to do” list sits on a server in Budapest. Junk e-mail aimed at my head is deflected by the spam filters at Messagefire’s server. My company sits on servers in Austin and caters to clients sitting in Mantes, Manhattan, Paris, Haddington, Vienna, Eu, Oban, Cleveland, Geneva, London, LA, Lisbon… and, if need be, the moon. My phone calls are answered by a computer in … I don’t even know where.

The Internet gives businesses incredible economies of scale AND unprecedented opportunities to create new connections among ideas, people, goods and services. The best is yet to come… and come and come.

Yale comsci prof David Gelernter gives a nice philosophical overview of print and online newspapers. Along the way, he offers a brilliant brief for blogging, although he appears not to know the word. On print papers:

A newsprint paper is a slab of space (even a closed tabloid is larger than most computer screens) that is browsable and transparent. Browsability is what a newspaper is for: to offer readers a smorgasbord of stories, pictures, ads and let them choose what looks good. “Transparent” means you can always tell from a distance what you’re getting into (Are there lots of pages here or not many? Important news today or nothing much?)–and you always know (as you read) where you are, how far you’ve come, and how much is left. The newsprint paper is an easy, comfortable, unfussy object. You can turn to the editorials, flip to the back page, or pull out the sports section without thinking. It’s light and simple and cheap: Spread it on the breakfast table and spill coffee on it, read it standing in a subway or flat on your back on sofa or lawn, on the beach or in bed. You can write on it, cut it up, pull it apart, fold it open to an interesting story, and stick it (folded) in your pocket to show to someone later. These small details add up to brilliant design.

On “online newspapers:”

The web-papers of tomorrow should be “objects in time,” and here is the picture. Imagine a parade of jumbo index cards standing like set-up dominoes. On your computer display, the parade of index cards stretches into the simulated depths of your screen, from the middle-bottom (where the front-most card stands, looking big) to the farthest-away card in the upper left corner (looking small). Now, something happens: Tony Blair makes a speech. A new card materializes in front (a report on the speech) and everyone else takes a step back–and the farthest-away card falls off the screen and (temporarily) disappears. So the parade is in constant motion. New stories keep popping up in front, and the parade streams backwards to the rear. Each card is a “news item”–text or photo, or (sometimes) audio or video. “Text” could mean an entire conventional news story or speech or interview. But the pressure in this medium is away from the long set-piece story, towards the continuing series of lapidary paragraphs. There’s room on a “news card” for a headline, a paragraph and a small photo. (If the news item is a long story or transcript, only the opening fits on the card–but you can read the whole thing if you want to, by clicking the proper mouse-buttons.) So: a moving parade (or flowing stream) of news items–new ones constantly arriving in front, older ones moving back.

In a footnote, Gelernter admits that the online newspaper (blog) sounds a lot like his company’s attempt to revamp the basic OS, Scopeware.

Washington Post’s media pundit writes: “It seems this morning that bloggers have taken over the world. Or at least the 2004 presidential campaign. Or at least the not-so-invisible primary leading up to the campaign. The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging. Who needs television? Let’s just eliminate the middleman.” (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Josh Marshall wracked up 1.4 million page views in March. Indricotheriums beware, the grass is being eating from beneath your toes. (Via Mr. Jolliffe.)

Andrew Sullivan writes: “March was another record traffic month: 1.88 million visits to the site from almost half a million separate people. 2.5 million page views. But my favorite piece of data is from Alexa.com. They rank websites, and like most such rankings, they’re fallible, so don’t put too much weight on this little piece of information. But according to Alexa, this site is now neck and neck, in traffic terms, with the Nation. In fact, the very latest data show this site just ahead of the Nation: we were ranked 6,116 Monday; they were ranked 8,728. No, I’m not putting out a full-fledged magazine, but the more you think about that simple statistic, the more remarkable it is. This site didn’t exist three years ago; the Nation has been around for a century. This site, thanks to you, is comfortably in the black with no debt. The Nation has bled money for decades, as most such magazines do. Moreover, compare the stats for last month with the same month a year ago: we had 805,000 visits in March 2002 and 1,880,000 in March 2003.”

Business 2.0 figures out that proto-blogger Matt Drudge is getting rich. Drudge has the highest ROI in online media, strike that, any media, strike that, any business other that’s legal. (Via Hylton Jolliffe and Nick Denton.)

The genius of Drudge’s model is very, very, old news, but Business 2.0’s math is good.

Unfortunately, big media won’t be able to copy Drudge’s model. The DNA just isn’t right. As I wrote previously, “as commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit the new environment.”

‘We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices,’ Drudge said in his 1998 speech to an assembly of sneering National Press Club members. As usual, Drudge was first with the story.

Matt Welch, who coined the term warblog in 2001, has seen Google referals for the term jump from 27 in February to 942 in March.

Testing Nick Denton’s new Vonage line, I called his number and got a crisp connection.

I asked Nick how the tech blog he publishes, Gizmodo, is doing. He said traffic is growing 50% a month and is currently at 6,000 page impressions a day… with no marketing expenditure.

“We’ve sold a ton of Samsung phones” recently through Amazon affiliate links, he said. There are good days but also “long dry spells,” he said. When page views get to 15,000 a day, the site will add banners, Nick said.

Nick thinks Gizmodo could do 100,000 page impressions a day in 12-18 months. At that point, relative to its cost “in the very low thousands per month,” Gizmodo will be a “remarkably profitable little media.” Nick figures that a blog publisher can buy 200 posts for $1000, whereas a print publisher might pay the same money for just three freelance articles.

Based on what he’s learned from Gizmodo, Nick is planning a blog focused on New York high society. Real estate ads will be a prime revenue source. “The advertisers target old money in the New York Observer. We’ll serve the advertisers targetting the young money,” he said.

“We’re getting the formula refined for thin media.” If he could identify the right niches and locales, Nick said, “I’d love to launch one of these a month.”

Newspaper columnist James Lileks describes how he felt when the paper’s Internet connection broke and he was unable to read blogs:
“I felt cut off from the world. It was as if my window had been bricked up. I needed to know what was going on out there. Keep in mind that I had this feeling in a newspaper, where I had access to every wire service on the planet.” Yep, reading the news without blog context is like listening to an old Sony portable radio versus sitting in the midst of an orchestra. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Clay Shirky writes: “Weblogs aren’t a form of micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary. One obvious response is to restore print economics by creating artificial scarcity: readers can’t read if they don’t pay. However, the history of generating user fees through artificial scarcity is grim. Without barriers to entry, you will almost certainly have high-quality competition that costs nothing. This leaves only indirect methods for revenue. Advertising and sponsorships are still around, of course. There is a glut of supply, but this suggests that over time advertising dollars will migrate to the Web as a low-cost alternative to traditional media.”

If you write something long enough, people will draw diametrically opposed lessons. Jeff Jarvis reads the same post as “very depressing to the community of bloggers.”

My view: the pie for professional writers is going to get lots bigger.

Doc Searles writes: “I already have a dependency on Google News, without which I wouldn’t have found the last three links in the item above.”

Me too. Noogle makes writing about the news a completely different and more interesting game.

In months of scouting, I’ve never found a Drudge with a business focus. Now this page serves me.

You can do the same yourself with agriculture, sex, the NFL. But why not get more specific? There’s the Cleveland Browns, mutiple sclerosis, NRA or even the Google itself.

Of course, Google can probably never (in the next five years?) filter out the crud and provide the necessary context. Which leaves a huge amount of room for bloggers to add value.

Noogle may create a wonderful opportunity for bloggers to refine and interpret the spew of news. Energy that went into crawling the web can now be devoted entirely to thinking and writing about the product of that crawling.

Millionaire and aspiring LA publishing mogul Dick Riordan is a “rebel without a blog,” quips this article.

Hell, why doesn’t Riordan stop putzing around and just pay the LAEXAMINER team $300,000 a year to cover five journo salaries? Three scribes would report, with the other two copyediting and blogging.

Riordan could be battering the LAT next week rather than sometime in 2004. He could turn a profit quicker with far lower risk and, more importantly, have a bigger impact on LA life.

(Looking for further thoughts on the idiocy of funding a newpaper rather than a weblog swat team, Riordan should read this post, and this, and… in fact, he should read this whole blog.)

Forbes shuts ASAP, its 10-year-old print and web magazine about the digital economy. “There is no market for a dedicated new-economy publication,” says a spokeswoman.

I guess that depends on how you define the words “market” and “publication.” Yes, it may be uneconomical to cover the digital “As Soon As Possible” economy in a quarterly print publication. And if by “market” you mean $500 million a year, yes, that doesn’t exist today.

In fact, “dedicated new economy publications” like 80211b, Tom’s Hardware Guide, Slashdot and The Register seem to be doing OK. Perhaps the truth about the nimble digital economy is best reported by nimble digital Davids, not lumbering print Goliaths.

Ironically, ASAP’s last issue includes an article by blogger Greg Beato quoting the operator of DavidLynch.com, a site which more than covers its expenses of $30-40,000 a month through membership and sponsorship fees. “Eventually, small guys like us are going to prove that you can make money doing this…”

I hope ASAP’s eight laid off staffers can find themselves a home where they belong: on the Internet.

Updating a post about an antitrust action against price-fixing record companies, Glenn Reynolds notes that “The Tennessee Attorney General’s office emails me to note that actually the feds were on the case first — and, get this, refers me to this post on Blogcritics for more information on the subject. Is that cool, or what?”

At Lands’ End, 40 percent of all chino and jeans sales on the company’s Web site are now custom orders. Original projection: 10%. Once a customer finds the right fit, “they’ll typically buy every color in those jeans or chinos or whatever,” a Lands’ End exec tells the NYTimes.

Wi-Fi maven Glenn Fleishman writes: “My blog has given me the credibility that’s extended me back into a variety of print publications, including InfoWorld (see this coming Monday’s edition), Macworld (Bluetooth knowledge), and The New York Times (although I was writing occasionally for them, the Wi-Fi blog has resulted in stories they’ve asked me to write or that I’ve pitched). For freelancers, a blog like mine, on a focused topic, can truly change your career.”

Moxie and Doc went to lunch and thought they coined the Googlesphere. Google said otherwise. Perhaps they can get credit for popularizing it?

Daypop is back, just in time to record News.Google’s linkage by 178 blogs. Bots chasing people chasing bots chasing people.

Wordsmith and newly syndicated author Ken Layne describes the article syndication Internet service run by Featurewell. “There are some 800 writers – Jimmy Breslin, Eric Alterman, Catherine Dunn, Christopher Hitchens and Andrei Codrescu, to name a few – who use Featurewell to sell their work again and again to the 900 editors signed up with the service. Wallis has a reputation as a fierce defender of free-lancers’ rights, and this combined with his record of actually getting the money from publishers to journalists makes Featurewell a friendly place for an impressive roster of writers.” Correspondent.com, one of Pressflex’s publishing clients, offers a parallel service focused on Europe. And I know Red Dot provides an Internet-managed photo syndication service from Budapest.

If you are in the news business, forget how you manage and serve information. Don’t bother going to fancy content management summits. Instead, spend some time thinking about how readers acquire information.

Eager to test-drive the next content management system? Open a web-browser. Type www.google.com. Voila.

Serving over 5 billion searches a month, Google is by far the world’s biggest single information server, the global content management system. For premium, information-hungry readers, Google is, defacto, both the homepage and prefered acquisition tool for most important information.

What does this mean for news publishers? Consider New York, where Google thrashes the city’s paper of record on its own front stoop.

The New York Times portrays itself as The City’s Leading Information Source. And as one discovers by crunching the NYTimes.com’s own audience figures, the paper gets an average of 1.2 million visitors a day or roughly 11 million total users in a month.

These numbers pale when we consider that Google serves 12,195,400 searches a month for the words “New York.” And 68,400 for “World Trade Center.” And 91,200 for “Bloomberg.” And 144,400 for “NYSE.” And 630,700 for “Broadway.” And 752,300 for “Manhattan.” And 22,800 for “Pataki.” And 60,800 for “Empire State Building.”

You get the idea. Here’s the scary thing; the number of Google searches for “New York” has grown 62% since March. When was the last time the New York Times grew its web audience by more than 20% a year? (All Google figures gleaned from its old Adwords program.)

Here are some other Google search tallies for publishers to chew on. Google gets 11,260,800 searches a month for “London.” “Atlanta” gets 2,302,300 a month. “Los Angeles” gets 3,442,100 a month.

Now, Google goes for the news jugular. Google has been running an alpha version of its news scraper for months, putting relevant headlines atop search results. This week, its “news.google” page began serving up whole pages of relevant news scraped from 4,000 sources.

Noting that the NYTimes URLs in News.Google include the word “partner,” Dave Winer suggests some special benefit will accrue to the paper. I don’t know what he’s thinking. Will Google skew its news judgement to send some extra visitors to the Times? My bet is that the partnership simply (and only) jumps visitors past the Times’ registration module.

In fact, News.Google shames the NYTimes.com. On the ten articles highlighted on the current news aggregation for “New York,” only two are from the New York Times. Only one of ten for the “New York City” search is from the Times.

Assuming Google’s content relevance and peer weighting algorithms continue to run the show, News.Google will boost well-networked bloggers as Google’s source of highly referenced sites expands. The key thing to watch — when and how will Google expand the list of 4,000 news providers.

Kuro5hin and Slashdot are already included. (But no Metafilter?) Will Blogcritics or Instapundit or Scripting News be next? Will Drudge, the human headline squeegee, ever make the list?

The bottom of Google’s new

No humans harmed... but more than a few corporations will drown as the river of news floods and erases its old banks.

Want the latest news and views about News.Google? Where better to check than the [url=http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=google&sa=N&tab=wn]source itself.

(9/26/02 Nick Denton, former CEO of headline aggregating Moreover.com, examines a Google fumble in presenting news. And Leslie Walker writes: “the former editor in me feels humbled at how a computer is able to assemble on the fly an adequate version of what it takes a dozen or two humans to do at most major Web news sites.”)

In today’s NYTimes, Mickey Kaus worries that blogging journalists will save their best stuff for their blogs and bypass editors. Good point. Most writers are in it as much for mojo than money. Ego disintermediation is a big driver for blogging journalists. The article is written by journalist David Gallagher, who says (on his own blog) that he blogs “because self-publishing is the best thing about the Web.” (Via Hylton Jolliffe.)

Reading the same article, Amy Langfield asks: “should journalists blog?” And she answers, “As a former copy editor and desk editor, I want to say