blogads for the opinion makers

Hungary always has trouble portraying itself to foreigners. Tourist brochures and posters offer kitsch photos of Hungarian cowboys, algaic hot baths or Disneyesque turrets. The images rarely capture the Hungary’s incomparable blend of old and new, bravery and cowardice, east and west, hot and cold, idealism and cynicism, wine and coffee, innocence and sin, river and dirt. The place literally straddles a fault line. The top photo on this page is one of the first images I’ve seen in a long time that makes me long for Budapest. (Via Emmanuelle.)

Emmanuelle Richard has updated her blogroll. I love these categorized blogrolls and keep meaning to do more roll slicing and dicing in my own nav bar.

The fog of war.

I invested $29 in a fishing license yesterday and we went fishing at the foot of the falls at Puffers’ pond. No fish for us. But at one point, I sensed a big chocolate-colored dog at my feet and looked down and discovered a sleek fat beaver. He looked up at me, turned and waddled casually up the stream towards my son, then slipped into the water and surfed down the rapids out of sight.

The Amherst Bulletin reports:
Suspicious Activity Saturday 1:46 a.m. Police received a report of possible road rage when people on North Pleasant Street got out from their vehicle and were seen wielding a tire iron. Police said the people were just using the iron to repair a tire that had been damaged after going over a pothole.

Noise Complaints Sunday 12:41 a.m. A loud part on Phillips Street was not excessively noisy. 6:01 p.m. Yelling was heard in the area of The Boulders. It was just a man and woman whose relationshp was breaking up.

Suspicious Activity Sunday 11:18 p.m. Police spoke to a man sitting in a truck parked outside the Dunkin’ Donuts on College Street for several hours. The man checked out OK after he told police that he was just enjoying his new vehicle and lost track of time.

Suspicious Activity Wednesday 5:58 p.m. A man with long hair and a goatee knocking on the door of a Station Road home was just soliciting for the Sierra Club and was gone when police got there.

Citizen Assistance Wednesday 5:58 p.m. Teawaddle Lane residents told police that they lost their groceries somewhere between the supermarket and their home.

These make a lite reflection of the reports Ken Layne offers from Sparks.

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.

Annoyed by eBay and Paypal’s increasingly restrictive policies, a group of kink vendo are trying to redirect their businesses to a new auctioneer. Network theory suggests that specialist hubs might be able to thrive and innovate when a network monopolist ignores their interests. See also this article by Christopher Null.

Former US senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart has a blog.

I’m excited to be invited to present a paper at the Vienna Blogtalk May 23-24. Thank you to Ben and Greg for critiquing my draft proposal.

Peter Merholz, my favorite info architect, has launched a multi-author blog focused on East Bay. He says “I believe that there’s a shining future in regional weblogs. They can be an amazing community resource. Particularly for communities too small to warrant a daily newspaper, but too large to be satisfied by a weekly 4-page newsletter.” Damn, I’ve got to get my Amherst blog going. (Via Corante.)

Steven Johnson writes: “in his classic novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done’ as Vonnegut describes it, ‘a team that do[es] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.’ A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a ‘false karass,’ a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is ‘meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.’ … When you find yourself in a karass, it’s an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID. For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software…”

Actually, although I thought he’d perfectly established the trajectory for an article about blogging, Johnson goes on to write about a piece of software the maps social interaction.

Even a poll about how often geeks shower turns to Iraq.

Blogcritics stayed above 20,000 visits yesterday, with many people linking to this round-up of Book-Film-TV-Video recommendations. Meanwhile, www.Command-Post.org’s traffic grew another 10%.

To recap why this is so impressive, Command-Post did as many page views on its third day online as Fark, a communal blog aggregating bizarre headlines, did in 1999. Day five matched Fark’s 2000. (The future? Fark did 30 million page views in 2001 and is on track to do 250 million in 2003.)

Ever the shrewd polemicist, Glenn Reynolds tars with a broad and colorful brush the BCC’s scorn for America’s ambition to oust Saddam. My favorite riposte today: “A common thread among anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism is the fear of being outdone by people willing to work harder. It’s not surprising that such a fear exists among a disproportionate number of those who take state-supported jobs.”

“The U.S. Air Force has hit Iraqi TV with an experimental electronmagetic pulse device called the ‘E-Bomb’ in an attempt to knock it off the air and shut down Saddam Hussein’s propaganda machine, CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports. The highly classified bomb creates a brief pulse of microwaves powerful enough to fry computers, blind radar, silence radios, trigger crippling power outages and disable the electronic ignitions in vehicles and aircraft.” Later, all references to the E-Bomb disappeared from the story. Has the military embedded a censor in CBS’s editing booth? (BoingBoing reports.)

Home equity loans are the crack cocaine of the American economy — fun while they last but then a real disaster. Banks like Wells Fargo are pushing Americans to “unleash the spending power locked up in your home!” and arguing that the practice isn’t risky because banks generally lend no more than 75% of the home’s value. Well, sure, the practice is not as risky for the bank that has the home as security, but for a family that has to sell or give up its home if the economy softens, the practice is potentially ruinous.

How many remember that half of America’s mortgages were in default in the depths of the Great Depression.

Proof we should worry: 10% of spam is pushing home refinancings. Yes, folks, step right up… pulling cash out of your home to buy a new car is about as wise as paying to “increase your bust size 20%!!!” and “FREE LUNCHES FOR ALL!”

Jeff Jarvis, one of the enlightened big media execs who blogs and has succeeded in fostering blogs within his company, notes that Time has now joined CNN from axing a reporter’s blog. Jeff runs through all the pros and cons of publisher-funded blogs and concludes, “I predict competition will open this up. If Newsweek blogs, Time will. If FoxNews blogs, CNN will. Give it time.”

Jeff rebuts publisher concerns that j-bloggers will hurt their brand’s credibility. But he doesn’t address what I’ve assumed that the core publisher fear: that the j-blogger will establish a big audience of his/her own and hive off into nanopublishing.

Although publishers pay the bills for now, blogs dissolve the fundemental formula of publishing economics, the imbalance of power that allows a publisher to remind an uppity journalist: “you need our distribution more than we need your copy.”

But perhaps the moguls don’t see this as a threat, but just failed dotcom fantasy?

Winter ended first thing Saturday when a six year old boy awoke and shouted: “the whole front yard is full of grass!”

He’s been singing “the blues” recently, having been hooked by something mournful on the car radio. Inspired, he now croons, “Ohh, baby, I just want to call you on the telephone.” We’ve bought “Whole Lotta Blues,” a compilation CD, and now dress each morning to John Mayall and Eric Clapton jamming “Steppin’ Out.”

Glenn Reyolds says he got 600 Instapuntit-related e-mails yesterday. Blogcritics’ traffic was up 10-fold yesterday, winning 24,000 visits.

Reading up-to-the-minute blogs and news sites, the Layne family subscribes to the local paper “for the coupons and the (limited) local news, and the whole front section is about as worthless as putting on a condom after you got laid. If I wanted to read a bunch of L.A. Times articles from Friday, I would’ve done it Thursday night.”

The intensity of interest in Internet based news is clear in our traffic logs: a) we didn’t have the normal weekend dip and b) visits doubled yesterday morning as people returned to their broadband offices. (I bet newstand sales are up no more than 20%.) To see a traffic graph for one of our servers click (more…)

Tony Perkins has apologized here for his reaction to my roasting of his new group business blog Always On.

Tony adds: “i want to be a part of [blogging], becuuse frankly it is the most fun i have ever had in my professional life.”

Apology accepted Tony. My critique of your strategy stands but I hope you will continue to improve. Every drum beat for blogging is helpful.

Joi Ito, pundit VC, suggests that its “better to try to learn how to blog before evangelizing.” Not wanting to use Always On to pursue a personal debate, you’ve been restricted to using my comments section and Elizabeth Spiers’. Take Joi’s advice and create your own blog. We’ll have some fun.

Google seems to be having trouble scaling its fabled advertising technology in war time. (Via Soundbitten.)

Just four days after launch, group war news blog Command Post is on its way to 40,000 visits today.

Nearly 70 bloggers contribute breaking war news and links to the “warblog collective.”

Web traffic is usually 50-90% lower on weekends — most people surf from the office — so it will be interesting to see what kind of traffic the site gets Monday.

To put the site’s explosive traffic in perspective, the site’s third day (yesterday) saw nearly half as much traffic as super blog Instapundit, which had 80,000 visits yesterday.

Update Monday 7.30AM: More than 60 bloggers posted roughly 300 links to breaking war news Sunday on Command Post. The site had 55,000 visits and 72,000 page views.

The event-tied collective news log is a simple mutation of the communal posting format pioneered by sites like Slashdot, Fark, Metafilter and Kuro5hin. Will each important future event have its own collective log?

Is this the fastest grass-roots media launch in history? Fark had 50,000 page views in 1999, 100,000 in 2000, 30,000,000 in 2001 and is now doing 19 million a month. Wonder what Command Post’s traffic will look like a month from now?

Baghdad taxi driver to self-styled human shield:“Really, how much did Saddam pay you to come?”

Ben Sullivan is a keen observer of office sociology. He e-mails: “Have you noticed, the nomenclature of Gulf War 2 is starting to emerge. Where GW1 had ‘Mother of all,’ and ’sorties,’ in GW2 ‘Shock and awe,’ and ‘Coalition of the Willing’ are early favorites. As in, ‘I’m putting together a Coalition of the Willing for lunch today’ or ‘Mike’s Powerpoint presentation left us in Shock & Awe.’”

Equipped with big screen CNN, laptop and Wifi, Glenn Reyonds indulges in some barstool punditry.

Andrew Odlyzko: “Back in 1850, spending on telecommunications (primarily the postal service, with a pinch of the electric telegraph thrown in) in the U. S. was about 0.2 percent of the gross domestic product. By 2000, that had grown to perhaps 4 percent (including the traditional voice telephony, Internet, cellular, and parts of the postal system). Thus over the last 150 years, telecom spending has been growing about 2 percent per year faster than the economy as a whole. That is a nice growth rate, but it is too moderate for the New Economy expectations.”

And anti-war friend in London reads his Rabbi’s earnest plea for peace and e-mails that it “raised in me the frequent suspicion I… and almost everybody else I like and spend my life with, are taking a sort of humanitarian free ride ‘ playing the folk songs and feeling moved at the modern art exhibitions, and secretly glad that the Donald Rumsfelds out there are willing (eager?) to take the responsibility on themselves and kill whoever needs to be killed for our safety and everyday luxuries.”

Jeff Chan: “Unlike Amazon, eBay is not an innovative company. Amazon has constantly improved the shopping experience by introducing useful features like collaborative filtering, personalization, book browsing, and web services. eBay, on the other hand, appears to be coasting on its monopoly position, and not too smoothly either. The reputation system is not robust. There is no scaling of ratings by dollar amount of transactions nor any use of network flow algorithms, or even a two-level system that Amazon uses to rate reviews.”

Rick Bruner offers a cogent summation of the reasons Bush is right on Iraq.