blogads for the opinion makers

I’m on vacation through July 5, hopefully (yes, correct usage) practicing on a new trombone when not hiking near Blowing Rock NC. Give Anthony or Peter or Miklos a shout if you need anything.

Congratulations to the four Blogads sellers who made Time’s list of “top 50 coolest sites” this year! Want to buy four of Time’s coolest sites in four clicks? Here’s your first click.

And contratulations to Nick Denton for producing three blogs on Time’s list.

Hot damn, check out the gorgeous new design of DailyKos. Blogads are, literally, center-stage. I’ll wager a pitcher of beer this look becomes a template for lots of other blogs AND sites.

The amusements of redesign… Kos writes: “One quick note: people keep complaining about the orange links and white background. Umm, guys? That hasn’t changed from the last version.”

PhRMA’s new blogad functions as an ad-as-blog by linking to supporting arguments by Rudy Guiliani and www.Powerlineblog.com Check Technorati or Blogpulse and you’ll discover that PhRMA’s position has a number of vehement blog supporters. As with focus groups, smart advertisers can pre-screen their messages against what bloggers are already saying about their issue.

Update: via Jarvis, I just found this great article in today’s WSJ about exactly this blog-watching by corporations

Now, a growing number of marketers are using new technology to analyze blogs and other “consumer-generated media” — a category that includes chat groups, message boards and electronic forums — to hear what is being said online about new products, old ad campaigns and aging brands. Purveyors of the new methodology and their clients say blog-watching can be cheaper, faster and less biased than such staples of consumer research as focus groups and surveys. …

Blog-monitoring services typically charge big companies $30,000 to $100,000 a year. They say their technology goes beyond basic tools, such as keyword searches or counting links from one Web site to another, both features available at no charge from online services such as Technorati.com and Yahoo’s Buzz Index.

Jeff Jarvis is annoyed by Dell’s service, proclaims Dell sucks, Dell lies. Matt Galloway suggests tracking the relative impact of Jeff’s rant in Blogpulse.

I’ve bought seven Dell laptops through the years for myself and Blogads and required no service on any of them. Extrapolate from my experience and conclude that Dells are amazing. (Though I’m obviously unqualified to talk about Dell’s corrections department.)

Matt Welch interviews Derek Sivers, the guy who runs CDBaby:

Like right now, I meet lots of 30-something musicians, who maybe spent their teens and 20s wanting to be a rock star, and now are kind of starting to think, ‘Well, maybe I can make a good living just putting out my music directly and doing it on my own.’ But they kind of had to fall over to that way of thinking. What I think will be really interesting is, imagine being a 13-year-old musician right now, growing up surrounded by this mentality of ‘Fuck the label, the label sucks, indie is cool, go direct, never sign over your rights to somebody else’! Imagine growing up in that mentality, and what that’s going to look like in 10 years!

NYT

Very intense exercise, as little as 12 minutes total over a two-week period, can double endurance capacity, according to a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Sixteen physically active college students ages 21 to 27 took part in the study. Eight were tested two weeks apart with no training in between. The other eight performed “sprint interval training” - they did four to seven 30-second sprints on a stationary bicycle, resting four minutes between each sprint. A researcher encouraged them verbally to pedal as hard as possible. They performed six of these sessions over two weeks.

The results were surprising. The average improvement in cycle endurance, measured by time to fatigue, was about 100 percent (from 26 minutes at the beginning of training to 51 minutes at the end). The group that did not train showed no improvement.

This kind of training, at least in its most demanding form, may not be for everyone. “We’re not suggesting that totally sedentary people jump on a bicycle and start pedaling their hearts out,” said Martin J. Gibala, the senior author of the paper, “and we’re not suggesting that people do only six minutes of exercise per week. But interval training is not just for elite athletes. Studies have shown that the elderly, and even people with coronary artery disease, can benefit from a properly supervised interval training program.”

Dr. Gibala, who is a professor in the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, suggested that even people whose only exercise is walking might improve their endurance by simply walking a bit faster for alternating intervals of time. “The main message,” he said, “is that people can get away with less exercise time if they are willing to trade duration for intensity.”

Researchers are uncertain why the training has such a big effect, but it probably stimulates changes in muscle function and blood circulation that increase endurance by metabolizing oxygen more efficiently.

Here is Blogads’comment on proposed FEC regulation of bloggers.. I thought about it for two months and pulled it together in the last twelve hours, amid peddling ads. Please forgive any flagrant grammar or spelling errors.

We went to see the Durham Bulls play Sunday night. It rained right through the starting time of 5PM and we resolved to leave at 6.15. At 6.10, the rain stopped and they started up the elaborate ritual of rolling back the tarpoleum. By 7PM, the game was underway. The Bulls were ahead into the 4th inning, with the Louisville Bats whacked home seven. Final score 9 to 4. Plus one ball retrieved from the right field stands before the game.

Great to see McDonald’s advertising on blogs for it’s new Redbox DVD service. The ad’s image is dreary as an ATM (I’d dreamed of something eye-grabbing like a DVD in a bun) but the direct appeal to blog readers — media-hungry, influential early adopters - is smart. Here’s an article about the idea.

This week, we also saw the first blogads for wine by Three Thieves, a label of Sutter Home. Though the ads don’t play this angle, there’s some harmony between the wine’s pitch — great wine in cheap containers — and the content peddled by bloggers. Anthony tried some this weekend and declared it “very drinkable!” Three cheers for Three Thieves, the official wine of blogads.

Finally, we also saw ads for MTV’s gay channel. Pretty dull ad, eh?

A little brainstorming about putting money where the mouth is.

Media companies:

NYT: $32. Short interest: 4.4%

GCI: $75. Short interest: 2%.

TRB: $36. Short interest: 1.6%

KRI: $63. Short interest: 6.1%

Amazed to see that only the NYT is significantly off its highs. Hmm. More context. Always worth remembering that markets can take 2 or 3 years to correct, and that bears lose lots in squeezes in the mean-time. Soros got killed waiting for the Japanese stock market to plummet in the late 80s. I got killed shorting Yahoo in the summer of 1998. Calling from Geneva, my guru Humphrey today reminded me (quoting Lance Armstrong): “the pain is temporary, but giving up is forever.” Or, paraphrasing Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, “just don’t get out.” Anyway, another wall to consider slamming your head against…

Housing stocks:

KBH: $75. SI: 7.9%

TOA: $24. SI: 1.8%

LEN: $62. SI: 6.3%

DHI: $37. SI: 2.9%

PHM: $84. SI: 5.8%

(For reference, GOOG’s SI is 3.5%, F is 4.3%, MRK is .8%.)

Finally, if you are still reading this far, you are indisputably a close friend or blood relation, so might enjoy blast from the archive of the Pressflex LLC proto-blog about a company set up to compete with our first, and still growing, venture that rents websites to newspapers and magazines in Europe. Punchline: the Swedish competitor’s URL is now for sale for $670.

In today’s Christian Science Monitor, Randy Dotinga takes a balanced look at the likelyhood that traditional publishers will successfully piggyback the p2p communications avalanche (aka blogging/IM/forums/wikis) by inviting plain old folks inside the curtain wall of corporate publishing.

This development raises profound questions about the news biz and its evolution - from what role a newspaper should play in its community (opinion leader versus discussion facilitator) to what “professional” standards should apply to nonprofessionals. Will editors accustomed to tight control ever adjust to the free-wheeling world of the Internet? Will online users view tradition-bound newspapers as anything but clueless has-beens? And finally, will the online world ultimately boost the industry’s sagging fortunes?

I’m quoted saying that bloggers are, by their nature, likely to make “comments that offend one constituency or another.” That’s a blogger’s peril and her charm.

We just saw the first purchase of a sponsorship across the law blog network. Laura Simmons, who made the buy for National Data Support wrote me: “Appellate attorneys and judges love our hyperlinked briefs. But the institution of law is generally very conservative, so we want to target those who thrive in the hyperlinked world. I’m really excited to sponsor the Law Blog Network.” Here’s her ad. She was smart to buy for three months.

MONICA VON DOBENECK “Of Our Palmyra Bureau” reports that a rural Pennsylvania county is going to be promoting the county with brochures that includes a scratch and sniff section scented with cow dung. An official says: “This is to educate people that if they have a farmer for a neighbor, they might have manure smells.”

Damn, we need this kind of thing for blog advertising. My colleagues and I spend a lot of time trying to explain blog readers to keeping up with the Jones advertisers. In fact, I’m eventually going to add some text up front on the site that says

If you are looking for cheap clicks, go here here. If you want 10 cent CPMs go here. If you want cantankerous, hard-to-convince, die-hard mavens stay here [link to here.

Matt Welch points me to photos from inside the HuffingtonPost’s opulent offices. So, please forgive me a knee-jerk rant:

There are lots of definitions of blogging: it’s a simple technology, a diary, a minimalist strip of HTML updated daily, a line of single time stamped posts in reverse chronological order.

Or, it’s a spirit: giddy, bawdy, gutteral, spontaneous, grass roots… real, man.

All that is empirical. I always add a puritan prescriptive twist to the answer.

Blogs are written by autonomous human beings, not corporations. Blogs are tools of autonomous personal expression. They may be commercial, but they are not corporate, because corporate means literally (and legally) “formed in a unified body of individuals.” Unified bodies of individuals can’t play tennis or kiss or blog. (Yesterday, Tony Pierce offered 31 tips on blogging, including “28. tell us about your friends.”)While people inside corporations can blog (using the pronoun “I”), corporations can’t blog successfully with the pronoun “we.”

This isn’t just grammar or semantics. Bloggers have some huge advantages over corporations who pretend to blog.

a) Bloggers speak authentically. They don’t have to worry about what their bosses say tell them to write. “Real” blogs are very much about personal expression. Bloggers have a
genetic advantage over traditional publishers. Blogging is in our social DNA, just like conversing, except blog conversations are amplified by the Internet to reach around the globe and entwine with thousands of similar conversations. Basically the blogosphere is a big
cocktail party. A blogger may dish out an anecdote about what her son ate for breakfast, an endorsement of a candidate, a curse word or a prayer and a movie review. In that mix are bound to be comments that offend one constituency or another. That’s human.

A newspaper can’t do that. Newspapers can’t knowingly offend a portion of their readership or shareholders. Newspapers are well-oiled machines designed to create a uniform product with all the sharp edges rounded off. Nobody would invite a newspaper to a cocktail party. It’s not human.

b) A blogger doesn’t need a policy hand book, because she’s already got a personal code of ethics … and, assuming the person is sane, the two always align.

c) Not least, bloggers have the lowest overheads. Bloggers can blog from their bedrooms, not 1500 square foot offices, which in the long run gives them a distinct economic advantage.

Jeff Jarvis overhears press poohbahs bemoaning the state of their industry and brainstorming: “Various ideas were raised by respondents that made my spine shake: taxing ads to support publications with fewer ads, giving postal subsidies only to publications below a circulation threshold, government search engines.” As Jeff put it: “Arrrrrgh.”

They sound desparate, don’t they? Recently, Jeff made ten reasonable sounding suggestions for saving journalism in this post. I offered some additional suggestions, which I’ll repatriate now to my own blog…

Suggestion #11: read Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive. Paraphrasing Hemingway, industries go bankrupt two ways, first gradually and then suddenly. By the time “suddenly” comes, it is years too late. After a four hundred year run of steady growth, the newspaper industry is a lot closer to suddenly than anyone thinks. (How many other large-scale industries have survived four centuries with their basic DNA intact? I’m sure there must be a few, but I can’t think of them. Shipbuilding? Government?)

Yes, the newspaper industry has been around for 396 years. (I’m using the word “industry” to categorize a single owner organizing a group of people, dividing labor, pooling resources and coordinating across time and space.) The machinery has improved light-years, but the industry’s core organizational DNA has been in place since 1609. Though substantial, changes since then have been quantitative, not qualitative.

Suggestion #12: read Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. A business is a complex organism with myriad interdependent parts coordinated via a command-and-control hierarchies. And industries are, in turn, complex intermeshed ecosystems built of multitudes of these individual organisms.

There are too many moving parts for massive change to be successfully be planned and executed. Imagine one commuter trying to change-out the engine block on his moving vehicle … in the middle of an LA freeway without killing himself and many others. When the operating environment shifts radically, de novo evolution from small, low-overhead organisms is the only route to inventing a new industry.

Beyond urging business executives to remember that everyone is trying to eat their lunch, Grove’s message is that business in the midst of fundamental environmental transitions need to listen hard, experiment daily and view everyone as a peer/partner and/or poacher. The key piece is listening hard. Institutions are built to cruise forward like aircraft carriers. But sometimes conditions fundamentally change, and survival requires the maneuverability of a one man kayak on a Class IV rapid.

Business is one half turning your own noise into signal and the other half distinguashing the environment’s core signal/trajectory from myriad noises. Grove offers a recipe for managing a business that has worked really well for 3 or 30 or 300 years when, suddenly, a bigger than average cloud of little things start going wrong. Just a rough month or the beginning of the end? The life of a business is full of three steps back followed by four steps forward & lost battles that win wars. You get used to taking the bad with the good. Sometimes, though, there’s a deeper message in the lost battle. In hindsight the tide’s turn is obvious, but lived in the moment, inflection points are invisible to almost everyone.

I’d urge everyone in the news business to reread Grove’s book. It’ll make your gut wrench.

Finally, to be clear, I don’t think publishers are in crisis because anyone does journalism better. Publishers are in crisis because someone does their business better. Their ad revenues are being vaccumed up by lower-cost non-publishing competitors. Worse,eBay, Google Adwords, CraigsList, Monster and even little Blogads are doing advertising cheaper/faster/better and along new axes. I too will rue the day the NYT stops publishing, but, sadly, I won’t be willing to pay $1500 a year for a subscription when advertisers have deserted it.

Publishers are also in crisis because they are losing the contest to engage readers. Which brings us back to paranoia. Publishers DO need to be paranoid. Their own customers, the readers, are competing with them in this game. Readers, whether as bloggers or commenters or list-serve correspondents or IMers or Amazon critics, are collaborating in a massive hive to process galaxies of information unimaginable just 5 years ago. This collaborative mode is a brilliant advance over corporate publisher’s proprietary/hierarchical/linear approach of processing information. It is faster, more cost-efficient and produces readership engagement that surpasses anything newspapers can imagine.

Advertise on Tour de France Blog by clicking here. The three month ad seems like a good deal, taking you right through the race.

And if you are trying to reach the lifehacking crowd (I should be so lucky as to require hacks rather than complete overhawls), advertise on 43folders by clicking here.

Just as the music blog network launched, the NYT gave a amusingly backhanded compliment to two of the blogs in the network in an article on music blogs:

Only a handful of music blogs, with names like Fluxblog, Stereogum and Largehearted Boy, have any influence, but even those still have a long way to go to fundamentally alter the landscape of the music industry. Many labels view blogs as little more than potential providers of free publicity; even a blog like Music for Robots, which gets about 8,000 unique visitors a day, is little more than a blip on the radar of major labels.

But blogs are acting as incubators for new talent like the Hysterics. It’s doubtful that MTV would have discovered the band as quickly otherwise.

Mark Nickolas, the visionary campaign manager who last year bought Blogads for congressional candidate Ben Chandler and made a 40-fold return on the investment, has launched a new venture: www.bluegrassreport.org

Lots of traffic for Gilligan’s Pie-fight.

And it looks like the Audi A3 “Heist” viral campaign was a big success. See some blogads from that here.

Shankar Gupta of Media Post does a great job summing up the new mininetworks bloggers are launching.

Though this didn’t make it into the article, Shankar was interested in the “folksonomies” angle of these networks, since the bloggers themselves build/maintain the categorical groupings rather than relying any third-party authority wielding some Platonic taxonomy. (Wikipedia defines folksonomy as “a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification.”)

The right word hasn’t yet emerged to describe the bottom-up aspect of these blogger-organized networks — mininets, nanonetworks, ad hoc networks, blogger networks? Maybe “folk networks” or “folknets” captures the spirit?

To remind you, here are the networks currently running:
NewYawkers
Sports
Gay
College hoops
Baseball
Evangelicals
New England Entertainment
Food blogs
LA
Philly
Economics
North Carolina
TV
Liberals
Republican Women
Law
Gossip
Music
Gadgets
Liberal women

More on the pathetic attempts by Old Media to prove its relevance to “The Youth” by buying ads… on Old Media?

Meanwhile, (via Buzzmachine) Starcom’s Rishad Tobaccowala says the disintegration and disintermediation of media means (effective) ad prices are going to rise.

Fragmentation and consumer control will drive the cost of digital media upwards by 20 to 30 percent annually over the next several years, predicts Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media and president of SMG Next.

“At some stage it becomes more expensive to buy Google than to buy network television,” said Tobaccowala, citing the pay-per-click auction environment and the costs of re-aggregating audiences once reached via a single network TV buy.

Tobaccowala spoke about the challenges facing media buyers at an online advertising conference in San Francisco this week.

“Less and less are you going to have products that are very broad-based,” he said. “We have a different economic model for our television-based plans, and a different one for the re-aggregated plans, and the second one costs 10 times as much.”

Tobaccowala also predicts media buyers will simply have to pay more to capture people’s attention in an increasingly consumer-controlled culture.

“The cost of getting someone’s attention is going to go up much, much more,” he warned.

Here’s a related thought:

perversely, virtually free and infinite ad space is not necessarily good news for advertisers. As volume increases, the cost of being heard rises even faster. The ad classics ‘ banner, button ‘ have been stretched into 15 shapes and sizes, ranging from the ‘microbar’ (88×33) to the ‘wide skyscraper’ (160X600). But even with this new artillery deployed the basic problem remains: traditional metrics for purchasing advertising like ‘demographics,’ ‘frequency,’ ’share of voice’ and ‘reach’ are becoming obsolete; so what if you can reach 80% of the males age 20 to 25 ten times a day for free if every competitor and his brother can do the same? In short, traditional advertising strategies for getting and holding the consumer’s attention may become as futile as inflating a zeppelin with a bicycle pump.

A great Friend of Blogads, Brian Clark, has redesigned his company’s GMDStudios to highlight the flawed essence of marketing and his own efforts as a marketer. I love the tipped test tubes and spilled ink. “We have ten years experience with having a hard time explaining what we do here at GMDStudios.”

Chatting with Brian today, who has a few fingers in indie film, he pointed me to The Next TV Network, powered by your computer and mine.

Blogging about Turner Broadcasting’s Gilligan’s Island pie-fight ad, Markos Moulitsas writes:

congratulations — the more people have bitched about the ad, the more successful it has become. It is now the most successful ad in the history of this site, with close to 8,000 click throughs over the low-traffic weekend. And, now that you have demanded I respond to the ad, thousands more will click through to see what the big deal is all about.

Sometimes, the best way to kill something you disagree with is to ignore it.

Reminds me a little of the time The New Republic got tremendous discussion when Markos rejected the magazine’s blogad. Sometimes the echos are far louder than the original retort.

Adding new servers last week, one key script was omitted. This meant that we significantly undercounted impressions on many blogs. We corrected the error this morning, and counts should be back to normal by the end of this week. I apologize for the error.

I saw Arianna Huffington on CSPAN this morning. I’d met her briefly a few weeks ago, but have never heard her talk at length. On CSPAN she was eloquent and on message, doing a great job of avoiding booby traps strewn by her callers on the left and right.

Arianna talked at length about her new fully-catered blogging cruise ship, the www.huffingtonpost.com, which debuted in May and features the posts of 400-odd Hollywood stars, planets, moons and astroids. Some of these folks don’t know how to use a computer, Arianna said, and HP makes it easier for them to express their thoughts in real time.

Arianna said she’s creating an entire business infrastructure — with offices in NY and LA — to support (aka bleed) the venture. Sounds like she’s drafting rules too. Arianna was asked about her views on anonymous sources. She said, in essence, “No way we’ll allow anonymous sources in the HuffingtonPost.” (Does this mean Arianna will be acting as an editor, something that may eventually rile those 400 headstrong stars?)

That declaration notwithstanding, a good chunk of airtime was devoted to revelling in the fact that the New York Times picked up on HP’s “scoop” yesterday: “*** Exclusive*** IS PARAMOUNT READY TO PULL THE PLUG ON CRUISE AND ‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III”?”

Getting into the office, I checked. Yep, the source for yesterday’s Huffington Post Cruise scoop was anonymous, her identity not even hinted at. This was a classic “we have learned…” lede.

Update: is my hearing completely distorted? Arianna e-mails: “I definitely did not say I would not allow anonymous sourcing at the Huffington Post. Of course I will and have in the Tom Cruise story. And I praised the anonymous sourcing in Deep Throat. And I said I hoped the wall-to-wall coverage of Deep Throat would encourage anonymous leaks from inside the administration on Iraq and how long they plan to stay there. What I took issue with was the widespread use of anonymous sourcing that, as the New York Times ombudsman has also argued, has led to so many false stories, as in the WMD leading up to the war.” In theory, the video is here javascript:playClip(’rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/wj060205_huffington.rm’) but I can’t get it to work, even using the CSPAN-mandatory Real Media player. Can you?

Update 2: Finally got the video to work. Section begins at 2 minutes and 15 seconds. The host asks: “Should journalists be allowed to use anonymous sources?” Arianna answers, “Well I’m very much against the use of anonymous sources unless there’s some compelling public interest and I believe that was the case with Mark Felt and Watergate. Yes, absolutely.” To be fair, though the answer sounded fairly categorical, Arianna was answering a question about journalists, not bloggers. And Arianna is obviously the only authority on her own beliefs and rules about blogging at the HuffingtonPost.

Perhaps she thinks that bloggers have a lower threshold for sourcing than journalists, since obviously Cruise’s fate in Mission Impossible III has no compelling public interest, at least on the scale of Watergate or Iraq. My point is not to pillory the HuffingtonPost nor (just) to have fun, but to highlight how quickly blogging can take on the institutional burdens of journalism — rule parsing, nitpicking, ombudsmanizing — when it rises above the level of an individual accountability and conscience.

(To be clear on my own views: HP’s sourcing was good enough for Hollywood gossip. Indeed, anonymous sources are a crucial part of journalism and the informational osmosis that makes societies function. When people (journalists/bloggers/gossips) rely on anonymous sources who are untruthful or so strongly biased that the story disintegrates on further investigation, the quoter, rather than the concept of anonymity, should lose credibility.)

Hmm, maybe HP will need to hire an ombudsman to explain self-contradictions and variations from the internal style book. More darn overhead. Ed: or maybe you need an ombudsman Henry?

Business logic aside, I’ve been vaguely uncertain what role this 400-strong Hollywood cast-party would play in the blogging ecoysystem, a place dominated at the top by experts, insiders, lawyers, mavens, Phds, business executives… and lots of plain old folks with grassroots opinions and experience not otherwise traditionally captured by corporate publishing hierarchy. But now I realize the HP may destined to become a real-time Vanity Fair/People magazine cum autobiography, covering Hollywood from the inside out. The Cruise scoop may suggest a promising future for HP.

Putting on my hat as a citizen journalist, I’ve dropped Arianna a line asking about the anonymous sourcing contradiction. I will keep you my loyal three readers (hi Mom!) informed.

Oops, I almost forgot to say: Unfolding!!!

Blogs cover every angle and orifice of American culture, so it is fitting that blog advertisers should exhuberantly reach for the same highs and lows.

Yesterday, I blogged about the blogad for academic theorist Camille Paglia’s poetry book.

Today, we’ve got Ginger and Maryanne thrashing each other in a Gilligan’s Island reality TV show pie-fight, courtesy of Turner Broadcasting (one of the first advertisers to push the envelope, with last year’s much-discussed Sex and the City blogad.)

Also today, covering another essential and under-covered angle of American culture, we’ve got a ticklish CareerBuilder ad featuring the Idiot Boss.

The Wall Street Journal features Glenn Reynolds writing about the changing news business news business. Glenn sees himself as an anchorman for a new kind of news network:

On my own InstaPundit.com weblog, I feature firsthand reports, often with photos, from places like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. My “correspondents” are correspondents in the original sense — people who correspond — rather than in the modern sense of people with good hair and a microphone. Other bloggers have broken stories from Iraq (involving both alleged war crimes by U.S. troops and large anti-terror marches left uncovered by American media), from the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and from Canada’s government corruption scandals.

Glenn slips in a nice plug for Blogads.