blogads for the opinion makers

Jerome Armstrong , who handled the Dean Blogads purchases, had an interesting comment in today’s Online Journalism Review. “Campaigns are not evolutionary models. They’re what works now and will get us through the next election. Institutional memory skips every four years, so there’s a lag time on innovation. As far as big purchases that really make an impact — we’re not there. We’re able to push the envelope to do some of this, but I don’t have nearly the resources as the people doing television ads.” I definitely got this sense from talking to Jerome when he was buying Blogads for Dean.

Well, I guess maybe the innovation is going to happen in the Congressional races, where the campaign is perpetual. A couple of days ago, I heard from Mark Nickolas, campaign manager for Democrat Ben Chandler, who is running for Congress in Kentucky in a special election. Impressed by the political heat blogs are throwing off, Nickolas had decided to divert some cash from radio spots to blog advertising. After we talked, he bumped his blogad budget up 40%. His aim was to learn something, and hopefully cover the cost of his campaign.

The ads started running Friday. That afternoon, heard from Nickolas. Nickolas said the campaign had already covered the cost of the ad buy. At that point, the ad is not yet even running on 1/3 of the buy. Earlier today the campaign treasurer called Nickolas on his mobile, saying “Get in here. We must have some kind of bug. We’ve gotten 5 online contributions in the last three minutes ending in 18 cents.” After a little poking around, Nickolas figured out that the gush of $X.18 was coming from Atrios’ post suggesting that if his readers gave, they should tack on 18 cents so the contributions were identifiable.

I asked Nickolas if this information could be repeated by e-mail or blog and he said, “sure, we’re thrilled.”

Just found myself quoting this AP article about political blogs in an e-mail to an advertiser, and realized I’d failed to blog the memorable lines. “Web journals like Joshua Marshall’s have become indispensable this campaign season: They mobilize supporters, question traditional media coverage and feed the insatiable appetites of political junkies.” And then this classic: “Larry Purpuro, coordinator of the Republicans’ e.GOP Project in 2000, said many bloggers were little more than ‘armchair analysts in their bathrobes (with) no serious interest in leaving their living rooms to actually help the campaigns.’” The headline? “The indispensable political blog.”

It’s rare that I’m an early adopter. Of course, I got in early on Blogads, but I still don’t own an iPod or digital camera or GPS. So I’m proud to have gotten in early on Furl. Ck it out.

Appears that condor, the server caching blogads, is being swamped by New Hampshire primary traffic. We originally planned to bring on a new server Friday to absorb projected load, but will accelerate launch to tomorrow morning. The new server will be named “sparrow” — fast and lite-feeding.

The good news, for tonight, is that Americans on the East coast are going home, which usually drops blog readership. Usually. We’ll see.

Update 7.24AM The sparrow if flying happily. Tamas and Csaba have reconfigured so that even at three times yesterday’s load, adstrips will serve fast. Now we’ll start planning for what comes after 3 X growth… in a few weeks?

Update 2.53PM Kill one bottleneck and find another! All images are being served swiftly now after some load balancing this morning. Have just rented one more server to absorb any over-flow from these bubbly primaries.

Up to the minute coverage from New Hampshire: Jerome Armstrong.

The federal budget as a pile of oreos.

Glenn Reynolds, a mild-mannered law professor in Knoxville, opens the latest Wired magazine and finds himself dubbed an “Internet rock star.”

Last week, Newspaper Association of America threw a blog at its annual Internet convention and nobody came.

The Poynter institute asks:

So why didn’t it work? Were all attendees just too busy? Isn’t it rewarding enough any more to get your voice heard? Are we transforming into a bunch of lurkers who prefer to profit from the work of others but aren’t willing to get involved ourselves? Or are we already at a turn of the life-circle of the blogging phenomenon, where this will become more and more a professional business and the vast majority of people will look for a new tool? [Via Buzzmachine]

I’ve done a lot of puzzling about what makes blogs BUZZ while newspapers just gargle.

Voice? Blogrolling? Simplicity? Authenticity? Speed of delivery? Brainstorming? All of these help.

But can these factors full explain why a blog post by Josh Marshall or Atrios or Glenn Reynolds gets 100 times more readers than an article written by an individual employed by NYTimes.com?

Then, commmenting last week on Welch’s blog, it hit me. Enemies.

Trying to economize to take advantage of the telegraph and pool copy via the Associated Press, newspapers neutered themselves by impartializing their articles. (You’ve heard how partisan AND popular newspapers were 100 years ago, right? It’s been downhill ever since.)

Most communities are forged as much by antagonism to others as by fraternity with peers. To create and sustain themselves, NY needs NJ, the Red Sox need the Yankees, Yale needs Harvard, North needs South, Democrats need Republicans… ad infinitum.

Blogs, which are blatantly and joyously partisan, can actually get into dialogs and debate. And it is partisan debate that drives traffic and passion and community… the wonders of blogging.

And I don’t think any newspaper or, frankly, any top-down VC-funded friendship-linkster tinkertoy is going to match the blogging’s magical partisanship either.

Update: Steve Outing points out that the Poynter post I cite above was written by Katja Riefler, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Poynter Institute.

My buddy Matt Welch writes a long and empassioned plea for bloggers to start selling Blogads titled “Hey Bloggers — Especially You Popular Political Types — Why the Hell Don’t You Accept BlogAds?” He notes that he makes roughly 36 times more from Blogads than from his tipjar. And he makes a ringing call for an LA Blogad network:

The more participating blogs from Los Angeles, the easier it is for advertisers to make a useful, targeted group buy (and therefore pay me more money!). This also works for subjects — media, baseball analysis, DIY music, whatever. If Cathy Seipp and Nancy Rommelmann and Kevin Roderick would spend the five minutes necessary to join the BlogAds network, the SoCal/media BlogAd buy would be exponentially more attractive. I guess they don’t need any extra money’.

Now, we should get all those LA bloggers to point to this page with Los Angeles blog advertising venues.

BTW, I didn’t get to listen to the NPR’s “blogging of the president” show last night. Did any of the brilliant but self-effacing bloggers on the show mention that they sell the web’s cheapest-most-effective advertising… or is mentioning commerce Not Done on NRP?

Favorite spam subject field of the day: “Re: connotative”

A big thank you to Ed Cone and David Weinberger for encouraging the folks at O’Reilly to advertise on blogs their Digital Democracy Teach-in.

Anybody else out there who has a buddy who needs to rally support for a good cause or publicize something intellectually stimulating or just sell some funny T-shirts, please tell them about blog advertising. It will be good for your buddy and bloggers. Meanwhile, send your enemies here or here.

Josh Marshall hears James Carville say John Edwards is the world’s best stump speaker, so he goes to see Edwards speak. “For most of the time Edwards was doing his presentation, putting on his show, I hadn’t the slightest question what Carville was talking about. While I was watching, in the moment, that is, I also didn’t have much question that Edwards would be the eventual nominee. He’s that good. His comfort level with a crowd, his ability to roll with and into their moods and reactions, and his ability to craft his talk into a resonant story (a narrative, as we used to say) is simply light years beyond what Kerry or Clark can manage. (Dean is sort of in a whole different category — he tries for something different.) He’s down-to-earth, gesticulating all over the place, with folksy aphorisms and punch lines all put in the right spots, but in an unforced, uncontrived matter. He’s funny and folksy, in a campaign sort of way.”

Despite the feast, Josh is hungry later.

I’ve been asked to do a short session Tuesday at the UNC Weblogs in Journalism conference. The session addresses “how bloggers are disrupting traditional publisher’s role as gatekeeper.” Here’s my outline:

Blogger advantages over journalists
* link network
— 10 newspaper readers become a 100-synapse blogosphere
— expensive distribution & marketing versus free
* freedom of voice
— authentic
— niche-plumbing
* partisanship
— great newspapers were partisan, founded around war or political causes (”neutrality” concocted by AP business folk)
— most great blogs dynamized by partisans, enemies, trolls

Results
* blogs get 100 times more traffic per keystroke than traditional journalists…
* some individual bloggers equal audience of $200 mln newspaper chains
* some bloggers net $2500 (Drudge gets estimated $100,000) a month in ad revenue, growing 15%/month

Blogs open new advertising dimensions
* extra room to communicate (versus portal) means more nuances
* feedback and ricochets (versus control) means more buzz
* audience affinity (versus demographics) means more traction
* affordable (versus high overheads of publishers) means usable by entrepreneurs, causes

Newsday: “Political Web logs (or more popularly, blogs) - freewheeling hybrids of personal observations, reportage and opinion that are updated several times a day - have become surprise players in the 2004 campaign. The political blog sites are many and varied. They also are influential. … the Internet is a major political information source this year.”

Dan Balz’s front page story in the Washington Post says Howard Dean has two problems: his below par finish in Iowa and the concession speach “war cry that has quickly become the target of editorial cartoonists, radio talk show hosts and Internet bloggers.” Is this a new low or a new high for national blogger influence? (Via Josh Marshall.)

Me, I’m not so bothered by Dean’s shriek, per se. People made fun of Steve Ballmer when he hollered, shrieked and danced around like a squirrel who got into the pepper-shaker… but Microsoft could still whup France’s derriere any day. You think Dr. Dean sounded freaky? See the Ballmer video and you’ll hear that his pitch is identical to Dean’s and about 10 times longer.

Just stumbled across a summary of a study of 450 start-ups via a comment on Fred Wilson’s post. Some interesting insights:

* “Over-funding actually allows companies to follow a flawed strategy for too long.”

* Success is a “a trial and error process.”

* “In 93 percent of the cases, the strategy that a company emerges with (at exit) is completely different from the strategy it set out to implement. The report cites a Harvard Business School study that found it takes four to five years for the right product and business model to emerge.”

Everything I’ve seen of entrepreneurship suggests there’s a huge amount of trial and error involved. Just as in baseball, where 4 runs out of 5 are determined by luck rather than skill, it is usually impossible for the outside observer to see, in the short run, who really has talent.

Footnote: These timelines are uncannily applicable to our start-up’s experience. Pressflex was founded in 1998 to serve as the webmaster for local publishers. The business premises that underlie Blogads — ASP, single decision-maker, low (or no) price point, telesellable, networked, generating ROI, splicable into any platform, serving outsiders rather than insiders — jelled in late 2001 as we head-scratched about agonizingly slow publisher uptake of our superlative Pressflex service. The idea for Blogads pinged in March 2002 and the service launched in August ‘02… almost exactly 4 years after we created Pressflex.

Another record day for political blogs, as you can see from the logs of the server that pumps out blogads. (Left edge is most recent.)

The best reporting I’ve seen yet on Iowa comes in a Daily Kos post. Here’s a telling vingette about how Dean’s troops mishandled one caucus:

the Dean precinct captain on the floor was ineffective and diffident. I watched with amazement as a more-motivated, more-mature Edwards captain named Susan Voss (sans T-shirt, sans sideline coaches) went over to the Gephardt folks in Precinct 63, who at that point had only seven members but needed nine for viability. Susan sat down at their table, looked them in the eye, appealed to them about how Edwards is an “articulate, bright, caring person.” You can tell not only that she meant it, but that she could personalize it. She didn’t have any training, and it showed - it showed as authentic, that is.

Then, with grace and aplomb, she got up and said she would make room so a guy named Arturo, from the Kucinich group (also non-viable, and hoping to move Gephardt’s people to them to achieve viability), could have his turn.

Meanwhile, the Deanies are sitting with their hands folded. They are not even talking to each other. No comity, no motivation. The precinct captain eventually comes over, unsure of what precisely to do with himself or how to speak to people. The Geppies are still sitting at the school library’s tables at the far end of the room.

The Dean captain meanders over, stands over the Geppies, providing physical distance that is conveyed in a non-verbally and dismissive way. Worse, his main message is little more than, “C’mon, don’t you want to join us?” or “Are there any questions or issues you have about the Governor?” The Geppies are literally staring at his navel, because it’s hard to make eye contact with somebody whose head is three feet over your own with craning your neck.

There were six delegates to be assigned by the 60+ people who turned out at Precinct 63. Dean had 16 of the caucus-goers at the start, and ended up with 14. Kerry didn’t budge much, but Edwards gained strength. Gephardt managed to cobble together the two defections from Kucinich he needed, and got one delegate, as did Dean and Kerry. But Edwards left with two, and he can thank the dynamism, assertiveness and tact of Susan Voss for that second delegate.

Yaooouweee! Gotta love a horse race.

If you read any pundits today opining “yes, the Internet’s impact on politics was greatly overrated,” PLEASE send me the URL so I can put the pundit in a barrel and take a few shots.

Publishers strive to monopolize distribution and commoditize talent. But blogs commoditize distribution, restoring the writer’s monopoly on talent.

Noting that Ed Cone has started selling Blogads, Glenn Reynolds writes,

“I haven’t done a survey, but it seems as if BlogAds has more penetration on the lefty side of the blogosphere. If so, I wonder why? UPDATE: Henry Copeland emails: ‘God knows I’ve tried to get more centrists, libertarians and Republicans aboard. :)’ Hmm. I guess for non-lefties it’s all about the love, not the money! Actually, Henry’s been after me to join blogads for quite a while. I’m not sure why I’ve been slow to do it, actually. I just have been.”

Love or money?… Or does $50 or $2000 a month make a bigger difference to leftie-blogger households? Funnily enough, many of the first folks to sign on to blogads –Matt Welch, DailyPundit, Tacitus, Jane Galt– had libertarian or right-of-center audiences. As I’ve noted before, it does seem a little odd that Andrew Sullivan, avid partisan of the grand-ol’-party-of-the-market-place, sticks so loyally to PBS-style pledge drives. (BTW, Sullivan made $80,000 in last year’s pledge drive. When are we going to hear the results of this year’s drive… have I missed something?)

Meanwhile, there’s some of interesting theorizing about on why the left has been more vigorous in its blogging recently. Republican blogger Tacitus looks at DailyKos and says “Hands-down, in terms of efficacy, reach, influence, and intelligence, it simply has no match.” He asks, “Why are the explicitly pro-Republican weblogs so anemic?”He continues:

some of this may simply be a function of the partisan power dynamic: Democrats are hip-deep in the internal debate period known as the primaries, abetted by the lack of a single standard-bearer attendant to the party out of power; Republicans have a President to rally ’round, and hence less incentive to thrash out issues. But some of it is also, I think, a function of the differing approaches to organization and the internet taken by the national parties. I can’t speak for the DNC, but I am fairly sure that the RNC is a top-down, strictly hierarchical organization. They’ll rely on their own devices; certainly not Meetup, certainly not blog-based fundraising, and they certainly won’t allow comments on their candidate’s official weblog.

Tacitus suggests that Republican political operatives may not be ready to cede autonomy to the bloggers: “what, after all, is their incentive to surrender even a small amount of control and decentralize? Conversely, what is the incentive for the independent Republican blogger to make the effort to help his party and his candidates if the formal hierarchy is going to be lukewarm at best.”

Here’s my view: being out of office makes a big difference. First, the primaries fuel the D-blogosphere. Horse races are more exciting to report/comment on, particularly when the feedback loop closes and the bloggers become participants in the race they’re reporting on. Also, David is usually the innovator; David grabs the cheapest tool at hand while Goliath sticks to the traditional heavy armor and expensive sword.

Tacitus rightly concludes, “Almost without realizing it, the Democrats will emerge from this election cycle with a seriously good and adaptable internet machine.”

Ed Cone: “I spent a few minutes at the Blogads site, and the next day I got an email saying that someone wanted to give me money. Click, click, cash.”

Welcome to 123CCTV, which ordered ads on 18 blogs yesterday and 57 blogs today. This makes 123CCTV the biggest advertiser yet in the blogosphere. Go on over and buy something and tell ‘em bloggers sent you.

Happiness: Friday night after a hard week listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue while playing six minute speed chess and nearly getting beaten by a third grader.

Joy: later, getting beaten.

Also, I got beat at “pig” playing basketball Saturday by a first grader. I choked on the clutch shots, he didn’t.

Try not crying when you see this ad.

The Internet has the potential to up-end America’s political pyramid. I hope it gets here in time.

(Actually, our unfunded liabilities are more like $47 trillion.)

Washington Post: “Political candidates trying to use the Internet to win support from young, Web-wise voters should avoid pop-up and banner ads and instead use interactive media like Internet chats and ‘blogs,’ according to a study released today.” (Thank you Hylton!)

You know blogging has hit some kind of cultural extreme when our local TV station, NBC17, does a story on the local angle on blogging. I hope they post the video, because it’s very funny to see the anchor raise his eyebrows when he first mentions the blog, “a kind of online diary,” and then segues to two 40-ish males raving about the idea. Yes, I got my 15 seconds of fame. The other guy in the spot is Todd Melet, who I introduced to blogging just a few months ago.

The reporter did a credible job of explaining blogs in 90 seconds. The blog I was scrolling through showing ads on was Atrios, although NBC didn’t show the URL. Funnily enough, the spot also did not mention the Blogads URL. Is is possible that our lead — “You need to woo the early adopters that traditional media can’t reach. You need to impress 100,000 opinion makers with a colorful pitch, not pester 100,000,000 nobodies with a soulless textad or banner” — hit a nerve?

Update Here’s the actual TV spot in a popup window.

NPR’s ombudsman eats crow after dissing blogs.

E&P reports on TPM blogger of the year award.

SF Chronicle says political insiders watch blogs like DailyKos. Here’s one enthusiastic insider/blog reader:

“I’m a reader. I think Markos has done an incredible job,” said the president of the New Democrat Network, Simon Rosenberg, a centrist who worked in Bill Clinton’s famous “war room” during the 1992 campaign and continued working for Clinton throughout his presidency. “Kos is one of the places I go for full-time information every day,” Rosenberg said. “If people like me do that, you know it’s having an impact.”

Tallahassee Democrat says:

“Blogs are the biggest communication innovation for the 2004 election,” wrote Alexis Rice, author of a recent blog study at Johns Hopkins University. “Blogs are transforming campaign communication and will become not only an important tool in the presidential election, but in future state and local elections.”

Before receiving his award yesterday, Josh Marshall reports, Josh tried to explain blogs to Arthur Schlesinger, one of Josh’s heros. He wanders over to the great historian and his wife and starts babbling.

To be polite Schlesinger’s wife asked me to explain to them just what a blog is. And though I get this question pretty often, it turns out to be a rather challenging one if the people you’re trying to explain it to don’t necessarily have a lot of clear web reference points to make sense of what you’re saying. I ended up telling them that it was something like political commentary structured like a personal journal with occasional reporting mixed in. Now, as I was explaining and watching the looks on everyone’s faces it was incrementally becoming clear to me that this was playing rather like saying that something was like a washing machine structured like a rhinoceros with the occasional sandwich thrown in. And, as Schlesinger himself had said rather little through all this, it was also dawning on me that being one of the four guests of honor at this little event was providing no guarantee against making a bit of a fool of myself.

The Week Magazine convened a whole herd of big-wigs in New York today to celebrate opinion journalism.

Josh Marshall was honored as “Blogger of the Year,” reports Jeff Jarvis, who was there and helped, along with Glenn Reynolds and Daniel Radosh, to select the winning blogger.

The crowd included Tina Brown, Abe Rosenthal, Mario Cuomo, Jim Hoge, Elizabeth Spiers, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, Edward Epstein, Harry Evans, Vartan Gregorian… and if I understand correctly, Susan Cheever, Robert Caro, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lani Guinier, Edward Rollins, Wendy Wasserstein, Steven Ratner, Walter Isaacson, Alex Jones, Lauren Hutton…

Here’s the citation for Marshall:

Joshua Micah Marshall, author of TalkingPointsMemo.com, represents the best of the Internet’s new medium of opinion, the weblog.

Weblogs ‘ personal journals with links and commentary ‘ have quickly moved from the fringes of political discourse into the mainstream. On his well-red, well-regarded political blog, the Washington-based Marshall (also a writer for Washington Monthly and a Ph.D in American history) is best known for tenaciously dogging the story of then-Majority Leader Trent Lott’s racial indiscretion at Strom Thurmond’s retirement — a story the big media outlets had largely ignored. Marshall, a liberal in a medium better known for its conservative and libertarian voices, has also aggressively covered the Bush administration’s strategy.

Marshall calls himself an opinion journalist, but he is also an accomplished reporter. He snared one of the first exclusive interviews with Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark, for instance. Marshall recently asked his online readers whether he should report from the New Hampshire primary; in less than a day, the audience pledged enough to pay for his trip, and Marshall decided to report for them, rather than for print. ‘I’m much more invested in my Web site than in any of those other things that pay me,’ he said recently.

But Marshall is also making his Web site pay. He has received advertising from one presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, and from a gun-control advocacy group. Why are they advertising? Because Weblogs ‘ and Marshall’s weblog in particular ‘ are where the influential reach the influential. They matter.

Josh, ever the mensch, said “I’d like to thank you not so much for choosing me but for choosing bloggers.”

If you want to beat Tina Brown to ordering a Blogad to start influencing influercers, here’s Josh Marshall’s ad order form.

The Media Audit finds: “Even as Internet usage has surged, the quality (for an advertiser) hasn’t gone down. “More than 60% of Internet heavy users have household incomes of $50,000 or more and 50.4% have one or more college degrees…. For newpapers, 45% have household incomes of $50,000 ore more and 38.9% have one ore more college degrees.” Heavy user is defined, for both groups, as spending more than an hour a day with the media in question. (PDF via Jeff Jarvis.)

This is a bad album. Bad for anyone who likes voices smooth as a baby’s bottom. Bad for those who don’t dream. Bad for anyone who doesn’t love the Stone’s Some Girls, the idea for which Jagger stole from Layne in an LA bar in 1992. Bad for those who are satisfied. Bad for those who hate music that tells stories… “did you know i slept in her bed, you were off in dublin, i’m an honest man, i did nothing you weren’t with her in the morning she was perfect, same girl you ignore, you came home mad about something, you don’t matter anymore.” Bad for folks who don’t mix their drinks or music… whiskey, country, beer, rock& redneck, gin & roll, oak-barrel-aged grunge. Bad for folks who don’t want to hear The Who sing Mel Tillis. Bad for people who don’t like a good time. Because, as the first song says, “you’re in for a good time, drop on by now, don’t be crying, the people are friendly, just wait and see all your drinks are free, you’re in for a good time…” Bad bad bad.

(I’ve given the album five stars in Amazon and submitted this review. Now we’ll see if Amazon has a sense of irony and lets the thing through their filters. If you are a bad person, click here to order your copy today. For those of you who don’t know me or the Corvids, you should know that we know each other. Yes, I’m biased. Look closely and you’ll find two Corvids in this 1992 article.)

When we were living in Amherst, I met Michael Giles, a clever and friendly coder who had just moved to town from CA. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve been watching Mike gestate a cool tool called Furl. Beside being a nice play on URL, “to furl” means to roll up and store, which is exactly what Mike’s tool does.

At first glance, Furl seems a subset or offshoot of blogging… you use it to save URLs and comment on them on your own web page.

But once you’ve used Furl a little, you see that the tool set Mike has assembled has its own life and may hit a much broader audience — the folks who don’t have the time or ability to blog, but who do want to quickly save and share information. And Mike adds some neat features; once you’ve bookmarked an article, Furl’s server automatically stores a copy so that even months from now when that NYTimes archive page is long-locked, you can refer to the article; you can easily categorize pages and rank them; Furl also makes it easy for colleagues or peers to pool information; after downloading one nugget of code, you can Furl from your browser with a single click. You can also use a javascript to import your links somewhere else… like this:

Before you write in to tell me that Radio or Blogger or Bill Gates or Tim Berners Lee or Piltdown Man or UrMama did something like this years ago… sure, all these features are available in different forms in lots of other tools. But by putting them together in one integrated package, Mike’s done something really simple and handy.

I’m using Furl to brain-dump pages that I’d love to blog, but don’t have time to do right. Still fiddling with his marketing angle, Mike calls Furl “your online filing cabinet,” which I think does a good job of summing up the benefits of the tool for the 90% of Internet users who still think “blog” is a plumber’s term for a type of wrench.

Go help Mike beta test Furl.net.