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Mediapost credits Perez with scooping other major news outlets on the quake.

This year’s Netroots Nation in Austin was amazing. Great people, conversations, energy, ideas, debate. But it looks like Netroots Nation will be held in Pittsburgh next year. Conferences are all about building a culture, and Austin is an amazing place to build a culture. I’m skeptical about Pittsburgh.

Newspaper holding company AH Belo announced yesterday that ad revenues were down 21% in the second quarter. That 21% is the biggest decline I’ve seen yet. (Belo publishes four daily newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News and Providence Journal.)

For broader context: here’s an article about the ill newspaper industry in the International Herald Tribune, ironically, a newspaper I used to write for. Yes, the article includes that dire phrase “since the Great Depression.”

More thoughts on the phrase “worst since the Great Depression”.

More Cuil weirdness…

I’ve been noticing the phrase “worse than the Great Depression” cropping up in news reports.

So, right now, there are 11 references to “worse than the Great Depression” in Google news. And 11,600 references in straight Google news.

Then there’s “worst since the great depression.” There are 53 of those in Google news and 12,500 of those in regular Google search.

This metric isn’t perfect, since the words will often be things like “the worst housing recession since the Great Depression” or “Beer sales in pubs are now at their lowest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s – down seven million pints a day from the height of the market” or “The US home foreclosure crisis has deepened to a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s…”.

All of which suggests we also watch “since the Great Depression” too. Right now, there are 2890 results for that combination in Google news and 588,000 in regular Google search.

(For fun, I tried the same searches on Cuil.com, the $33 million Google killer. I get 472,817,893 results for Great Depression. Wow! Wait a second, I get just 5,396,452 results for “great depression.” And just 330 results for “depression.” Guess Cuil hasn’t programmed the quotation mark restriction into their algorithms. Definitely the worst search results since the great depression.)

The new Google killer looks slick. But it lacks advertising. I’m not just talking about the kind that pays the bills, I’m talking about the entire content category.

We just created this draft of our tutorial video. What suggestions?

Having installed a cool new WordPress blog, I’ve got some good (but not perfect) spam filtering in place. Thank you to Zudfunk for being the first to notice and chip in.

It seems criminal that Wachovia, which yesterday took a monstrous $8.7 billion loss and already is preparing for another $5.6 billion in losses, is still paying a dividend. The bank has a toxic portfolio of $122 billion of the riskiest mortgages, called pick-a-pay, which allow borrowers to make no payments on principle for an initial period.

$122 billion.

Wachovia currently projects that 12% of these mortgages are going to default. Why should any of these mortgages, most of which are in housing quagmires California and Florida, not end up in default?

$122 billion.

Losses on anything like that scale would force Wachovia to borrow money from taxpayers, you, me, our children and grandchildren. So continuing to pay dividends to shareholders while in such dire straights is akin to seeking to shelter assets from potential creditors.

Congress, busy trying to stop intelligent investors seeking to profit from the stupidity of others by selling short-selling the shares of still-overvalued companies (like Wachovia), should instead be prosecuting money-losing banks that insist on paying dividends with “extra” cash that’s just an accounting fiction.

A dividend is by definition a distribution of profits to shareholders, so how is it legal, or morally conscionable, for unprofitable companies to pay dividends?

Hey, let’s say it one last time: Wachovia’s mighty vaults sit on a $122 billion pit of quicksand.

I’m signed up for the John McCain campaign’s official newsletter and just got a note titled “The media is in love.”

It’s a bizarrely junior-highish screed, first suggesting cattily that “some may even say it’s a love affair” and then, casting caution to the wind, stating in the final paragraph, “The media is in love with Barack Obama.”

Boohoo.

Update July 29, 2008: Here’s some context for McCain’s bitterness about the press turning its affections towards Obama.

Google’s notice last week that its growth continues to slow got a lot of attention. A couple of other data-points to highlight:

a) ValueClick, a network focused on lead generation and display advertising, announced on Thursday that it no longer expects a strong second half (H2 is usually significantly stronger than H1.) It revised its projections for total ‘08 revenues from $730-$745 million to $655-$675 million. Last year’s number was $665 million, so VCLK is saying it won’t grow. More details on their deceleration in online advertising.

b) Q1 ‘08 was the first quarter in many in which online advertising shrunk relative to the previous quarter.

c) In other bad news for money-losing Internet companies praying they’ll be acquired before they run out of money, AOL, previously an acquirer, is desparately seeking its own corporate safe haven as its ad sales plateau.

Watch Joe’s face for the moment when he realizes he’s run out of memory after 20 seconds of filming. Micah was using “qik” and amazing service that lets him broadcast live.

NPR ran a long feature this morning about how bad people think the economy is — gas prices cutting into wallets, falling house prices, health-care costs, tight credit, creeping inflation.

The real bad news is… we ain’t seen nothing yet. Unemployment is still beneath what used to be called “full employment.”

Labor and politicians could only dream of 5% unemployment in the 80s and 90s. Unless we see a massive boom in export manufacturing (vabuuely possible with the dollar at $1.60 to the euro) the unemployment rate is headed back towards 8%. At which point today’s chorus of woe is going to sound, retrospect, like “Yellow Submarine.”

I was walking down mainstreet in Blowing Rock, NC Saturday and noticed a well-dressed middle-aged guy who had paused behind a parked mini-van. His leg was jerking a little and he looked like he was concentrating really hard. I asked whether he was OK and he said, loud and clear and coherently, “yes, I’m fine.”

I sat down on a bench not too far away and watched him. He started to lean on the van’s protruding spare tire and shove it. I went over and asked again, “are you OK?”

He said again, very clearly and in a normal voice “I’m fine.”

20 seconds later, he was flat on his back, looking up at the sky.

“I’m going call 911, OK?”

“No, I’m OK,” he said.

At this point, the guy is sweating and looking pale, so I said cognitive dissonance be damned and ignored his opinions and called 911. A woman stopped and asked the guy if he’s diabetic and he said yes; she gave him a peppermint. Two minutes later he’s sitting up, and the paramedics arrive. I head off to dinner.

Later I learned that diabetics suffering from extreme low blood sugar can become unrooted and report that they’re fine even as they’re melting down. I’m still unnerved by the memory of trying to square this guy’s disintegrating physical condition with his bald-faced statements to the contrary.

I just took a McCain poll appearing on Linked-In. From a media perspective, the Linked-in poll idea is fascinating because once you respond, you get to see how other Linked-In users respond with results broken out by sex, age, industry. Wow, that’s powerful as a media experience for Linked-In and HUGE as a service for advertisers.

But right now, I’m particularly interested in the poll’s slant: “What has the most long-term potential to lower gas prices for Americans?”

The answers: “Oil exploration on US territories,” “Alternative energy research,” “Better Middle East Relations,” “Smaller vehicles,” and “I do not know.”

First, there’s no room for “other.” Second, most of the solutions imply, either directly or indirectly, government interaction. Third, the obvious answer, “the market,” is missing. The poll begs the question: is this a question a candidate needs to be thinking about?

If anything, the government should be raising prices on gas (through taxes) to help us all retool our life-styles to prepare for the day 10 weeks or 10 years from now when gas costs $10 a gallon. To those who say “if we save it the Chinese will burn it,” I’d say, “let the Chinese build their economy on waste and inefficiency, we’ll compete far better with them in ten years.”

In the long run, the best solution to high gas prices — the only real long-term solution — is higher gas prices in the short-term. People will stop driving SUVs, manufactures will rush to make batteries more efficient, entrepreneurs will figure out solar cells. There will be millions of solutions that no five-year-planning bureaucrat can imagine. And then the market will lower prices.