blogads for the opinion makers

I met Joi Ito briefly at Bloggercon. He more than lives up to his reputation — he’s smart, charming, impassioned and humble.

He visits Disney Tokyo with his daughter: “When we encountered crowds I realized that my behavior was a bit different than most of the people, but obviously not unique. I would avoid crowds and try to go in the opposite direction of crowds. If I noticed I was near the front of a crowd or ahead of a crowd, I would accelerate and try to stay ahead. Otherwise I would change course or go the other direction. If there were lines, I would choose the shortest one. I saw some people doing exactly the opposite. Even though there were ticket windows open, they would go to where people were lined up. If there was a crowd, it often attracted more people. Even if people were ahead of the pack, they walked slowly and were engulfed by the crowd.”

He defends journalists: “I think we should stop picking on professional traditional journalists. I think that if journalists need help from their editors to write, (in the case of Japan) want life-time employment, need someone to protect them in court, need paper boys to reach their readers and need a brand to provide legitimacy, I think they should be allowed to do this. I think it’s mean to pick on them too much…”

Doug Arellanes gives a 45 second overview of Prague’s touristic pleasures. .

A new study by the Kaiser Foundation finds that 65% of children live in homes where television is on half the time or more. 43% of four to six-year-olds have a set in their bed room. 36% live in a home where the television is always or nearly always on — and these tots are about half as likely to know how to read. (Of course, I couldn’t read until I was seven and got to watch nothing but Wild Kingdom and Disney once a week on an ancient wood-paneled television that stood on four legs.) (PDF summary of study.)

Ad Age reports on the higher standards being set by advertisers and the indignant response of publishers. “We are in business, in part, to serve the media buyers,” said Thomas O. Ryder, chairman-CEO of Reader’s Digest Association and newly elected chairman of Magazine Publishers of America. “But there is a point at which this becomes silly and counterproductive, and we are rapidly approaching that point.” (Marketingwonk.)

The server where adstrips are cached is down right now. I’m not sure why and am trying to get the issue resolved.

If you are a blogger, for now the best solution is to take your adstrip javascript down. We’ll credit advertisers for the outage. For the future, the best solution is to use our blogger-side adstrip caching scripts, which we are happy to walk you through setting up.

I’m sorry about the problem and look forward to having it resolved in coming hours. (Update: as of 8.15, we are live again. Sorry for the trouble. More tomorrow.)

In less than 24 hours, Josh Marshall raises 4864.00 to cover expenses as he blogs live from the Democratic primary in New Hampshire.

Great overview of blog advertising by Kate Kaye in Mediapost.

The New York Times has hired its first fulltime blogger, Daniel Okrent.

Most newspapers would call the new guy an ombudsman. And even though the NYT folks are calling Okrent “a public editor,” he’s a b-l-o-g-g-e-r.

Okrent won’t be edited. He has no newspaper experience. “He will be given an unfettered opportunity to address readers’ comments about The Times’s coverage, to raise questions of his own and to write about such matters, in commentaries that will be published in the newspaper as often as he sees fit.”

Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the paper’s publisher, says “Working at its best, it’s a highway with two-way traffic.”

Here’s my question:

“Dear Mr. Ombudsman and Mr. Sulzberger,

Isn’t an $120,000-a-year ombudsman/public editor an anachronism, now that the paper has 750 bloggers scrutinizing its pages and publishing their thoughts 24/7 for free?

Yours truly,

Hank”

I’m mystified. What purpose does an official critic serve today? What kind of two-way street has 18 wheelers going in one direction and a lone tricycle (occasionally!) going the other?

With hundreds of questions being raised daily on blogs, would it be it be better to let reporters and editors who create the news answer these questions themselves?

Perhaps reposing questions and underwriting/packaging official criticism in a finite space make it easier to ignore the gushers of unofficial criticism, even to ignore the relativism and indeterminancy that undergird journalism? Perhaps there are other rationales. I’ll say it again: I am mystified.

…

This is another tiny slice of the history of the sister concepts of “public” and “publish,” I think. For hundreds of years, the definitions of “public” and “publish” have been evolving. In the earliest days, the public space was the town common or church steps, and to publish (make public) was to post a notice in that space, where any and all would likely see it. As towns grew into cities and public spaces evolved, multiplied and subdivided, the only entities who could effectively “publish” were those with printing presses and the financial wherewithal to distribute their publications. Later, print publishers were joined in this monopoly by broadcasters with expensive equipment and licenses.

Late in this media history, the “ombudsman” was invented by publishers who had become embarrassed by their monopoly over the public space.

But now, the public space, the space most anyone and everyone can see and have in common, is once again public — anyone can publish. Thanks to the Internet and spontaneous networks among millions of bloggers, the public space is much larger and more porous, and traditional publishers are just one current in a sea of information.

The ombudsman can be hung up in some museum of artifacts with the buggy whip. Sorry, Mr. Okrent.

Renowned editor Tina Brown, via a Washington Post chat: “I love the blog.s Think they are really channging the collective voice of journalism. People are sick of mediated coverage. They like the noholds barred appraoch.” (Via Jeff Jarvis.)

In the comments on this Buzzmachine post, Dave Winer, author of Scripting News, asks: “Who says that blogging is going to overthrow journalism?”

Certainly not I, Dave. Does anyone think there won’t a healthy trade done in reporting on information of public interest for, at least, the next millennium?

What I can say is that blogging will overthrow/surpass traditional publishing — with its first, second and third generation owners, title-encrusted executives, executive saunas, multiple layers of bureacracy, ombudsmanists, ad reps, ad rep Porsches…

The organizing principle and profit engine of newspaper publishing for the last 350 years has been control of distribution.

Moore’s law has liquidated that control. All sorts of technology — cheap servers, cheap bandwidth, cheap blog CMS, Google, ubiquitous devices for online reading, cyclonic blog networks — combine to collapse publishing’s fundemental barrier to entry. (As Jeff puts, the gatekeeper is dead.)

There’s only one barrier remaining — a machine can’t be funny or eloquent or cutting or wise. Moore’s law gives us a glut of bandwidth and CPUs but not creativity. Which means authors are the last remaining publishing players with any pricing leverage.

In fact, Dave, nobody should think that “journalism” is going to be overthrown by blogs. Quite the contrary: journalism is the only part of today’s media economy that will thrive.

Matt Welch: “There are many terrific side-benefits to this blogging stuff, but one of the most elemental is that it’s easier to keep in touch, meet great new people, and make vast geographical distances seem insignificant. Pretty cool.” In point of fact, I learned in this post that my old friend Charlie Hornberger (via Prague, Budapest and Austin) finally got hitched.

We went to the NC State Fair this afternoon. We enjoyed: airguns at the Fish & Wildlife stand; giant sand sculptures; a dozen baby pigs suckling; the rabbits; a goat getting its hair cut; little brother tossing two baseballs at the piles of blocks; big sister tossing two rubber balls into a small wastebasket; a chronological display of old plows and threshers; the smells of roasted corn, silage, cotten candy and barbecue fused in the seamless die of a clear, blue fall sky. Our favorite activity by a country mile: holding the baby chicks at a table in the poultry barn.

A carnie tipped us on how use the bb-machine gun to obliterate the red star target and win a prize — rather than trying to cover the star with holes, shoot a circle around the star and cut it out. Also, he said, boys with two front top teeth missing are usually seven.

Check out the fair webcam.

Read all about the folks who own (and now control) America’s 12th largest newspaper chain: here.

Kate Kaye writes in Media Post: “Many candidates have experimented with campaign websites, email fundraising pleas and, less frequently, banner ads. Now some are beginning to display a stronger grasp of what the Web has to offer.” In recent weeks, we’ve seen a number of politically oriented businesses selling t-shirts and bumper-stickers buy blogads and have seen huge growth in page views on politially hot blogs like Political Wire, Atrios and TalkingPointsMemo. It’s only a matter of time before we see campaigns flinging Blogads. (Via Political Wire.)

A modern children’s tale: a few months back, Tamas found an orphaned magpie in his garden begging for food from Tamas’ pet turtle. Tamas adopted the magpie and brought him into the office every day, where he perched atop various computer screens. Then, one day, a flock of magpies flew past an the orphan joined them. Here’s the inquisitive fellow. Somewhere, Tamas has tape of the magpie perched atop the turtle’s shell, tapping away, saying to the hiding turtle, “come out to play!”

Retired four-star admiral Hal Gehman, who chaired the post-mortem on the Columbia debacle: “They claim that the culture in Houston is a ‘badgeless society,’ meaning it doesn’t mater what you have on your badge — you’re concerned about shuttle safety together. Well, that’s all nice, but the truth is that it does matter what badge you’re wearing. Look, if you really do have an organization that has free communication and open doors and all that kind of stuff, it takes a special kind of management to make it work. And we just don’t see that management here. Oh, they say all the right things. ‘We have open doors and e-mails, and anybody who sees a problem can raise his hand, blow a whistle, and stop the whole process.’ But then when you look at how it really works, it’s an incestuous, hierarchical system, with invisible rankings and a very strict informal chain of command. They all know that. So even though they’ve got all the trappings of commuication, you don’t actually find communication. It’s very complex. But a person brings an issue up, what caste he’s in makes all the difference. Now, again, NASA will deny this, but if you talk to people, if you really listen to people, all the time you hear ‘Well, I was afraid to speak up.’ Boy it comes across loud and clear. You listen to the meetings: ‘Anybody got anything to say?’ There are thirty people in the room, and slam! There’s nothing. We have plenty of witness statements saying, ‘If I had spoken up, it would have been at the cost of my job.’ And if you’re in the engineering department, you’re a nobody.” (Quoted by William Langewiesche in November’s Atlantic magazine.)

Having mastered Beethoven’s Minuet in G on the violin, a first grader I know has moved on to a subtler art: burping. I never mastered the trick of gulping air and letting it escape at the right raucous tempo, but this kid can crank out a dozen belches in 30 seconds. I try strenuously to frown.

Arellanes reports from the front lines in Prague.

Listening to Chris Lydon’s interview with Len Apcar, editor in chief of NYTimes.com, it’s clear Apcar takes blogs seriously. Apcar: “There are some terrifically informative blogs that are breaking news, shaping events. And… the NYTimes has always been an information leader and we cannot ignore this, we need to be involved, and thinking about it, and thinking about how it can be adapted to our purposes and our standards for our audience.”

The interview is incredibly revealing about what the Times gets… and doesn’t get about blogs. Per utterance, blogs generate more page views and passions than traditional media, and I’m pretty sure that big media simply adopting the pace and the style of blogs isn’t going to close that gap. I’ll try to transcribe more later.

I’m constantly pleasantly surprised by the blogosphere. Matt Welch posted about Atrios’ fantastic success raising money for a new laptop, and the post’s comments set off a heated but valuable brainstorming session about SoCal grocery strike.

Joyful and brash, my old Budapest bud Rick Bruner still keeps me giggling daily with his blog.

Music critic Kate Sullivan, sister of my buddy Ben, writes:

i don’t know how to explain it exactly, but i think the process of having to critique music all day for money fucks with the way you hear it. because critiquing music becomes tied to your income, and your sense of who you are in the world, you can easily lose track of the real reason people listen to and make music in the first place. music becomes a platform on which to prove your intellectual superiority, a tool for the construction of your ascendancy–you have to become superior to the music. i understand this because i am a critic, too, and a writer, and i do understand the necessity of “mastering” your subject before you sit down to write. when you sit down to write, you have to feel that you can “kill” your subject–you have to become its master, or you’re sunk. or so the logic goes.

the problem is that you start to build a kind of resentment toward your subject–and why not? it’s your adversary. you’re the gay vegas guy in a codpiece and it’s the white tiger. you gain all your glamour and mystique through the wild beauty of the animal you have tamed. you think those guys would be rich fuckers if they were working with carp? critics secretly know that their whole gig is based on someone else’s glamour and power and freedom. and so they get a little baby chip on their shoulders, that just grows and grows–especially since most of them have musical yearnings of their own.

(Via Matt Welch and Amy Langfield.)

Jeff Jarvis, one of the wisest scribes I know and boss of media giant Advance Publications’ Internet arm, sums up perfectly: “bloggers are influencers talking to influencers.”

Italian journalist Robin Good writes a clueful overview of Blogads: “Blogads are addressing the great potential made available by those independent publishers, reviewers, columnists and commentators who, on a frequent periodical basis, communicate and address relevant issues with wit and intelligence and which specialize in some very clearly identifiable theme.”

He mentions Blogads’ Cluetrain-ness, as Seyed did earlier this week. This makes me really happy, since the Cluetrain Manefesto is what sparked my own first blog entry in August 2001. (One of my joys attending Bloggercon was that I met two more of the authors of Cluetrain — Chris Locke Doc Searls. I’d broken bread with the good Dr. Weinberger previously.)

Cluetrain begins with the thesis that “Markets are conversations” and hammers corporate robots and robotic corporations for forgetting to converse humanely. The idea is profound and companies have gone only 0.01% of the way to incorporating its lessons.

But hey, is it too early to consider the next step? Drunk on caffeine and words at Bloggercon and playing a game of antimetabole, I started musing about the idea that “conversations are markets,” particularly conversations conducted through weblogs. We speak of “getting” or “winning” links for our own good thoughts… and we also commonly “give” or “reward” links to the good work of others. We “pay” attention to others and “earn” attention ourselves. Seyed Razavi has distilled several dimensions of this whole “conversation as market” metaphor with his great simulation Blogshares.

Blogads also tries to close the circle on the “markets are conversations are markets” idea. We help authors who earned conversational “riches” — respect and links and eyeballs — to arbitrage some of that intellectual capital back into the stuff you buy groceries with.

Of course, publishers do the same thing, but they take 80% of the juice, versus the 20% we charge.

Neil Postman died Sunday at the age of 72. I read Postman’s indictment of television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in 1987. The argumentation was brilliant and the conclusion unescapable. I unplugged my television and haven’t watched anything on it since but videos. I’m deeply in Postman’s debt –so far, the TV-hours he liberated add up to roughly three years of conversation, reading and musing… life.

As California’s new governor likes to say, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” The dollar has dropped more than 5% in recent days for no apparent reason. In fact, the economic reports have hinted at US strength and European weakness — both are usually good for the dollar.

So what gives? Although rumors that Russia is considering pricing oil in euros rather than dollars have now been denied, it is worth reflecting on the double-whammy that could be cast by our spiralling budget deficit and the de-dollarization of the world’s reserves.

But hey, Europe’s problems — geriatric populations, sclerotic businesses, paralytic bureaucracies — are even worse than ours. Perhaps the rupee or yuan shoud be the next reserve currency?

Seyed Razavi, the [url=]Blogshares[/url] guru, writes a long and thoughtful review of Blogads and Google Adsense. Seyed says some nice things about Blogads, but also notes some places we need to keep improving. His conclusion: “in terms of appropriateness, usability, quality of service and cluetrain-ness I would recommend BlogAds to bloggers. Google is something to consider and exploit (as they exploit you) but not something to build a lasting partnership with.”

Mark Redetzke: “Plenty of traditional shops talk about media strategy and include the Web. More than you might think don’t ever talk about it (or if they do, they bring up interactive as window dressing only, then quickly move on). They’ve never done anything online. Why? It’s a self-perpetuating stalemate. They don’t have enough Web business to justify hiring experts. So they stick to what they know and don’t create strategies or campaigns that include meaningful Web components. Obviously, they never get enough web business to justify hiring subject matter experts. And the world passes them by. I blame this on the laziness that pervades most media departments. They work seasonally. Most don’t challenge themselves to learn more about a medium that currently penetrates nearly 70 percent of households. Shameful.”

Bloggercon was a stimulating as a thermos full of espresso.

A big part of the fun was renewing conversations with Hylton Jolliffe, Jeff Jarvis, Liz Spiers, Josh Marshall, Pressflex/Blogads investor Esther Dyson, Biz Stone (moving to Google!), Glenn Reynolds, Shannon Okey, Phil Wolff and Scott Johnson.

I met Matt Gross, Eric Folley, Oliver Willis, Ed Cone , Doc Searls, Chris Locke, Halley Suitt, Sooz, Scott Rosenberg , Scott Heiferman, Sanford Dickert and Joi Ito.

The intellectual ferment of the weekend is too much for me to try to recall here with all the other work I’ve got to do. Three random anecdotes:

Len Apcar, a editor in chief at NYT.com, told me he’d come to Bloggercon skeptical about whether blogging had a place inside the newspaper… but had become convinced blogging does fit in. Apcar said he’d gotten a chuckle out of my answer on the Bloggercon website to the question, “what’s the first thing NYTimes.com’s blogger in chief should do?” (My answer: short NYT shares. Click “comments.”)

Liz Spiers told me her parents, fundamentalist Southern Baptists, had only very recently learned of her big city blogging exploits at Gawker. Her local newspaper paper published an article on blogging and did a side bar on her. Her mother was shocked and her childhood pastor wrote to say how sad he was that Liz had strayed so far from her moral upbringing. (Update: my mom, herself a child of the South, writes to say “I didn’t realize blogging is immoral!”)

At dinner Saturday night, I brought up Swartzennegger, asking Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Jarvis to help me understand their nonchallance about his verbal and manual assaults on women. Glenn and Jeff, along with Liz Spiers, each said they’d rather have a competent scumbag in office than an incompetent angel. I proffered the “what if this was your daughter/wife/mother/sister?” debating line, to which Glenn responded: there’d be nothing left of Arnie if he tangled with Instawife. I asked if this is because Glenn knows his way around a handgun. “No, it’s my wife who would rip Arnold apart. I’d show up with a broom afterwards to clean up.” Only Hylton seconded my unhappiness with Swartzenegger. He said later that he knows a number of people in Telluride who say AS is notorious there for accosting women during the annual film festival.

Cooking tonight, I pulled out an odd little cook book we acquired in a pile of used books in Paris a few years back: Snob in the Kitchen, published in 1967.

It’s written by one Simonetta, “one of the world’s top fashion designers;” she’s memorialized in a photograph on the back cover in a leopard-skin coat talking on a huge telephone holding her cigarette at a rakish angle. The book was illustrated by her cousin, HRH Giovanni de Boubon, Prince des Deux Siciles, and as luck would have it, our copy is inscribed by Giovanni to his aunt Isa, “the only one in the family who was kind enough to buy the book.”

I’m making spaghetti capri, which is basically anchovies, tuna, bruised garlic, basil, parsley and pepper. Zowee!