blogads for the opinion makers

I hear it is 10 degrees cooler in Black Mountain. Back Monday.

“In 2002 the oldest baby boomers (born in 1946) were 56 and the youngest (born in 1964) were 38. Now, consider this: Consumers between 35 and 44 spend about 20 percent more than average consumers and those between 45 and 54 spend about 30 percent more. In 2001 these two age groups represented about 40 percent of U.S. households — and half of spending.”…

“In 1946, just after World War II, consumer debt amounted to 22 percent of household after-tax income, reports the Federal Reserve. (That is, for every $10,000 of income, there was $2,200 of debt.) Now debt is almost 110 percent of income.”

Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post.

Eli Israel, who runs the fantastic spam filter Messagefire that’s been advertised on a number of blogs, writes, “Thanks for the blogads service. We’ve gotten very good CPM and CPC rates this way; it’s definitely been helpful to us.”

David Diamond reports in Wired on initial feedback on MIT’s open source online curriculum: “One of the most popular offerings turned out to be Laboratory in Software Engineering, aka 6.170, a tough requirement for electrical engineering and computer science majors. Lam Vi Quoc, a fourth-year student at Vietnam’s Natural Sciences University, relied on 6.170 lectures to supplement a software lab he was taking, and Evan Hoff, a software developer in Nashville, followed the course to improve his coding skills. In Karachi, Pakistan, a group of 100 students and professionals met weekly to study 6.170. In Kansas City, five members of the Greater Kansas City Java Professionals Association gathered monthly to take the course. In Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, Priya Durshini Thaunoo used 6.170 to prepare for a master’s degree program at the University of Mauritius. Saman Zarandioon, an Iranian refugee living in Vienna, studied it to continue an education that was stalled by the Iranian government. And software developer Rahul Thadani in Birmingham, Alabama, took it to sharpen his skills.” Great to feel the spine tingle. (Via BoingBoing.)

The thing may work well, but when I search Google for “Management 15.810,” (Introduction to Marketing) which Wired lists as one of MIT’s most popular open source courses, I find this this page, which is a gateway to a bunch of pages that are blank except for the words, “This page is a stand-in for empty content.” Hmm.

Newspaper owners often depend on government advertising — notices for things like zoning changes, tax notices and land sales — for their profit margin.

“The St. Petersburg Times earns more than $750,000 per year from legal notices and employs the equivalent of nearly three full-time staff to handle the requests, according to advertising director Richard Reeves. The Pinellas Review, a 1,000-circulation weekly, gets 90 percent of its revenue from such ads,” reported the St. Petersburg Times.

So publishers are lobbying hard against legislation in Florida that would divert these notices online and cut the newspapers out of the taxpayer-funded ad moolah.
As more citizens read their news online than off, continued giant government expenditures on print advertising are going to be hard to justify. If local publishing looses its subsidy, someone is going to have to step in to fill the information vacuum.

Perhaps it is time for local bloggers to lobby for some of this advertising. The government could help underwrite blogging… publishing of the people, by the people, for the people.

Still catching up on blog reading. I enjoyed Rick Bruner’s blackout notes, which end with this wonderful image: “Stars over Manhattan.”

As you folks get drowned by spam, consider Messagefire, which filters/kills this stuff on its server.

Good article on Voice over IP. Unfortunately, when your cable connection sucks — as mine does right now — the future doesn’t look that bright.

Some magazines are getting shredded in newstand sales, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Did the pixel buzzsaw finally pulverize paper?

Sales up or down for the first six months of the year versus same period in 2002:
Better Homes and Gardens -15.5%
Cosmopolitan -9.0%
Entertainment Weekly -5.5%
Fast Company -55%
Fortune -12.5%
Martha Stewart Living -18.1%
Money -28.9%
O, The Oprah Magazine 37.5%
Reader’s Digest -19.7%
Real Simple 10.1%
Rolling Stone 4%
Sports Illustrated 3.5%
Weight Watchers 11.1%

Blogads gets a first (brief) mention in the Economist, one of my favorite publications. Look in the side-bar.

Amy Langfield has outstanding blackout reportage. Here’s some banter from the subway car where she spent two hours. “One guy realizes the cop is taking out the pregnant women to exit first and the guy says: ‘I’m pregnant!’ ‘Me too,’ another guy says. ‘Me too,’ says a woman. ‘It just happened. Just now.’” Read the whole thing.

An investment banker friend points out that the CEO of the Internet phone company I use — Jeffrey A. Citron of Vonage — paid $22.5 million to the SEC in January of this year for participating in “an extensive fraudulent scheme” in the nineties. Hmm.

Wonder why this doesn’t get mentioned when magazines like US News & World Report write about Vonage.

Amy Langfield digs into NY and NoCal animosity to Southern California. Steve Locke digs up summer memories.

The country’s first and last waterbed-only shop is run by a guy named Roland — wait for it — Formica, reports the NYT. After waterbeds were invented in 1967, sales peaked around $2 billion in the mid-1980s and now have plunged to $456 million. Creatures of fashion, people have foresaken an improving product. “The modern water bed is soft-sided and looks exactly like a conventional mattress. A virtually leak-proof water-filled bladder is held in a foam case, instead of wood, and a thick pad of ticking is zipped over it. The mattress can be placed on any standard platform bed or on top of a box spring, is nearly waveless, uses standard sheets and, once emptied, is far easier to move than a coil-filled mattress.”

My favorite Formica sales line: “You may just wake up in exactly the same position in which you fell asleep, never moving once all night.”

I just got a nice note from a girl who, nearly a decade ago, interned at the paper I then edited. She did translations and wrote some shorts and artful opinion pieces for us. She’s grown up and still writes nice essays like this one about cooking with Grandma and this one about “stuff.” Great to hear from you Zsofia.

Having just moved, I’m also pondering the meaning of stuff. In fact, I am appalled and astounded by the volume of detritus that gets pulled along in our wake. Once-worn shirts, notebooks with just a few words scribbled within, half balls of twine. We’re like garbage scows that can’t unload.

Expecting that her parents would find wonderful artifacts in the mysterious office of her now dead grandfather, Zsofi’s disappointed. “I wasn’t there when my parents cleaned out his room after his death. But I often wondered about what they would uncover, the family mementos, silly souvenirs from trips, or secret diaries. I was hoping for some stuff that represents who my grandfather was and wasn’t. When my parents were done, the picture was sobering: My grandfather left behind 20 bags of trash and about $900 in a bank account.”

Yep, I sometimes long to be a monk who travels through life with nothing but his toothbrush and boots. I guess this side of me was first articulated by Colin Fletcher’s Complete Walker, which I read like a bible when I was 14. I remember being enchanted with the idea that drilling holes in your toothbrush handle could trim hundreds of pounds from your total hike. OK, perhaps this afternoon I’ll throw out some of those boxes of computer wires and notebooks. Perhaps.

Triangle weblogs. And more. And answers to the infernal NC driver’s license test.

Sat in the stands along the third base line last night, watching the Durham Bulls defeat the Richmond Braves 5-2. Deep blue sky and 82 degrees when we got there, 79 when we left at the top of the ninth. Fastest pitch was 91 mph. Our guy threw 81mph most of the time.

The big excitement came at third base in the fourth inning. As Mike Potter reports, “The Bulls had a chance for a big inning in the fourth, but a baserunning mistake killed it. With one out and Brooks Badeaux on second and Lombard at first, Jason Smith singled to right. Bulls manager Bill Evers held Badeaux after a big turn at third, and Badeaux was caught in a rundown with Lombard continuing to third. With both runners standing on third, Lombard was tagged out, and Badeaux was then tagged out after leaving the bag. That precipitated an animated argument from Evers, who was ejected by plate umpire Don Goller after covering up home plate.” Actually, Evers kicked dirt, with great child-like spite, on home plate after he was ejected.

The US Treasury is flooding the market with debt sales as it seeks to fund the booming budget deficit. As the Washington Post reported, the government has revived 3 year note sales, having stopped selling this type of security in 1998. Further, “five-year notes, which used to be sold quarterly, are going to be sold monthly, while the 10-year notes, which have been sold quarterly, will now be sold eight times a year.”

In all, the government will sell $230 billion in the second half of the year, more than any other six month period in the nation’s history.

Interest rates are headed higher. This isn’t rocket-science, folks. When supply rises and demand stays steady, prices fall. Lower bond, note and bill prices mean higher interest rates. And higher interest rates means… lower housing prices.

As mortgage rates rise in tandem with US treasury rates, mortgage demand is swooning and may soon be comatose.

A smart Democratic challenger to Bush would be banging this issue hard.

Ben Hammersley gave us a nice plug in the Guardian, calling Blogads “a very simple way to sell space on your site.” And Nic Howell gave us a good mention as he chewed on the nuances of thin media in New Media Age. Unfortunately, it’s password protected.

Ironically, while Nic quoted me correctly, I’m wrong. Here’s the relevant extract: “Blogads customers are typically entrepreneurs, says Copeland. ‘Testimonials from advertisers say we have exactly the 500 or 5,000 people they’re trying to reach,’ he says. But despite opening up a new channel to customers, Copeland hasn’t had interest from ad agencies. ‘They’re part of the whole ecosystem of people which we’re trying to disintermediate,’ he says.”

OK, I’ll eat those words: we’ve seen some good interest from ad agencies in recent weeks and are realizing Blogads can fit well in their ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is like ice-sculpting, right?

We’ve moved to Chapel Hill. Whew. Unfortunately, my new cable provider, Time Warner, seems to have been swallowed by a worm, so I’m on dialup and accessing the Internet only intermittently until cable is live.