Jeff Jarvis, populist and publisher, considers the recent news that Dr. Pepper has concocted some murky scheme to incent bloggers to create buzz for its weird new milk drink. Jarvis offers this advice: buy blogads. “You won’t find a cheaper CPM anywhere! And just the act of buying a real ad on a weblog will get people to talking about your product (if you’re first on the block to try this trick).” Merci Jeff!

Here’s a cool blog designed by blogger (and Blogads seller) Emmanuelle Richard to help 50 French freelancers strike against Radio France. Matt Welch offers some commentary in English.

A blog seems like a strong fit for strikers since they’ve got numerous personal tales, a history of grievances and evolving negotiations.

Having studied the forums he runs for his own CMS software, Joel Spolsky has just started a forum focused on on New York. It be interesting to watch this grow, since Joel has a passionate readership and forum usership.

And in his latest “JoelonSoftware,” Joel shares all sorts of interesting theories about what makes forums work.

Talking about why his forums are so simplistic, Joel writes: “In the early days of the Joel on Software forum, achieving a critical mass to get the conversation off the ground was important to prevent the empty restaurant phenomenon (nobody goes into an empty restaurant, they’ll always go into the full one next door even if it’s totally rubbish.) Thus a design goal was to eliminate impediments to posting. That’s why there’s no registration and there are literally no features, so there’s nothing to learn.”

He adds, that registration, “so easy to implement and thus so tempting to programmers, is the best way to kill dead any young forum. Implement this feature and you may never get to critical mass. Philip Greenspun’s LUSENET has this feature and you can watch it sapping the life out of young discussion groups.”

Great stuff.

College town slums.

Oh, gee, this is gonna be fun. Doctor Pepper is introducing a new milk-based soft drink via some secret bloggers.

“Dr Pepper hopes to develop a ‘blogging network’ to hype Raging Cow and ‘be part of the ‘in the know’ crowd,” says its brand-marketing honcho Andrew Springate. Those spreading the news via their blogs won’t disclose their flackitude, says Springate, because officially they’re not paid Dr Pepper employees; they only get promo items like hats and T shirts. ‘We’re independent and can advertise Raging Cow the way we want,’ says Nicole, 18, a Louisiana high-school senior with a popular blog.

Wouldn’t it be simpler and more effective to buy some killer Blogads? I guess Andrew Springate wouldn’t have a job, though. (Via Instapundit.)

Ken Layne revels in the police blotter for Sparks, Nevada, “done in a dark narrative style.” Here in Amherst, things are lighter. Every week we’ve got at least one or two loud, unexplained noises, rabid raccoons, people who “check out OK,” dogs that bark but are gone by the time the public defenders arrive. I’ll find a few and post ’em.
‘
OK… I’m back. Some fender benders, a loud band, a stolen cell phone… ahh, here we go…

“A person or animal was reported stuck in the ice on Cranberry Pond Feb.20 at 2.56 P.M. Police wehn to the pond and found the object to be a hay bail.” And, “A River Road resident was advised not to snowblow snow into the road.” And, under the “Suspicious Activity” heading, “Sidewalks were reported unshoveled on Amity Street. Police said the sidewalks appeared to be clear of snow.” And here’s one of our “Disturbances:” “A West Street woman requested assistance in removed (sic) someone from the home with whom she was arguing. She later called back to say the problem had been settled.”

Matt Drudge says “**THANKS A MILLION, MAKE THAT A HUNDRED MILLION, FOR MAKING FEB 2003 — THE HEAVIEST TRAFFIC MONTH IN THE 8-YEAR HISTORY OF DRUDGE REPORT/// MAIN DRUDGE PAGE HAS BEEN VIEWED 113,257,740 SO FAR IN FEBRUARY, PASSING JANUARY 2003, THE PREVIOUS HIGH**”

As Hemingway said: “Find one thing you like and do it well and every day. You will be happy and the world will be happy.” (Until later… of course.)

Pulling off a virtuouso performance in mixing genres, Matt Welch strings together some fun tales about busking in Central Europe and then astonishes with a glissando into some snappy commercial lessons (eight of them!) that apply to blogging. Desperation-buskers bum people out… harmonies, harmonies, harmonies… prime the pump…. Go read them all.

Well Google has gone and made it official, extending its Adwords program to the pages of HowStuffWorks, Blogger, and Weather Underground. The new program is called Content Targeted Advertising.

if users look up the weather forecast for Palm Springs on a weather site, they may see ads for deals on hotels and cars in the Palm Springs area. Or, if users are reading about how an acoustic guitar works on a music site, they may see ads for hand-crafted acoustic guitars.

The service offers a great new tool for advertisers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ll continue to strive to mold Blogads into a tool that offers additional advantages to bloggers and advertisers:

a) Bloggers get the bulk of the proceeds from their Blogads sales.

b) Bloggers get to approve every ad before it appears.

c) Advertisers get more options (images, longer text, comments.)

d) Advertisers can use superlatives like “lowest” and “best” which are not allowed in Google Adwords.

e) Google kills ads that don’t get a 1% clickthru, so its tool is only effective for direct marketers, not brand-builders.

We’ll scramble to keep Blogads differentiated. Google may be a brilliant and wonderfully benign company… but if it does get a monopoly on blog advertising, innovation will slow.

It is also worth noting that this “content targetted advertising” initiative moves Google even more firmly into competition with ad sellers inside traditional media (and or traditional media itself), since it will be competing head-to-head with the ad sales arms of the likes of NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and CNN.com right down to smaller outlets like Cleveland.com and Gazette.net/ All rely on well-paid teams of ad salespeople and expensive user profiling… will these be jettisoned for Google?

Anne Holland writes: “Last Friday night I was chatting with Seana Mulcahy VP, Director of Interactive Media Mullen whose team buys hundreds of millions of dollars in online ads each year. ‘Publishers make it impossible to buy from them!” she ranted. She’s one of many media buyers who are increasingly frustrated with the lack of standards so art departments have to resize and redo ads constantly for each different site (the cost of which really adds up) and how hard it is to make an integrated ad buy across all of a single media company’s channels without negotiating and cutting multiple insertion orders. Online advertising is to some degree also a service business. Being easier to buy from than your competitor may be a highly significant advantage. It’s not content + eyeballs = profits. It’s content + friendly service = profits.'” (Thanks Olivier!)