Sophie completed her first marathon on Sunday.

Wow! The course’s second half was hillish and hellish.

I hope to run one someday (New York?!) with her.

Bloomberg sums up the argument that collapsing commodity prices forecast a recession. This view assumes that most commodity prices aren’t speculative and reflect fundamental supply and demand. (I’d always tended to view commodity prices as largely driven by psychology, which would mean that talk of a recession is what drives commodity prices lower.)

About a year ago, TechCrunch reported that it Google was finally cracking down on Payperpost, the service built to enable advertisers to pay bloggers to post about their products and services. Many Payperpost advertisers buy links just to drive up their own prominence in Google, since Google ranks a site according to how many sites link in to that site.

The Google move was first reported in a post on PayperPost’s blog, and was then linked by TechCrunch. One year later, it appears that Payperpost has taken the post down (redirecting the link http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/11/google-goes-aft.html to the general corporate blog), but TechCrunch’s “snapshot” tool still had a copy of the post. Here are the salient pieces:

Last night Google decided to go after some of the bloggers in our network, reducing their PR from whatever they previously had to zero. Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

It is no coincidence that Google has gone after some blogs that utilize PayPerPost and many of our competitors services. We offer a very attractive alternative to AdSense and are leading a charge to provide real monetization for everyday bloggers. Unlike the Google AdSense black box, we are palms up when it comes to revenue share and give bloggers the lions share of advertising dollars that they deserve.

I find it laughable that high profile bloggers like TechCrunch aren’t being penalized in the same way. Perhaps it’s the fact that they use AdSense. Perhaps it’s the fact that they are silicon valley insiders and are invited to special Google events. Either way I don’t see the difference between a sponsored post in our system or this sponsored post. Both are paid for, neither use no-follow.

…

What does this mean for Bloggers?
If you have been hit by Google unfortunately there is little we can do. We know that Google PR does not reflect your actual traffic and it is sad that Google chooses to over look that to protect their own bottom line. We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks “bob”) that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.

This is Censorship.
One of our programmers actually had his blog de-ranked last night because he mentions PPP often as an employee. He has never taken a sponsored post, nor does he sell sponsored links. He is simply blogging about his day to day experience here. I find this outrageous. I encourage you to write to Google and your Congressmen.

Write your Congressmen? What ever happened to this brouhaha?

I start each week’s New Yorker with James Surowiecki’s columns. So I’m thrilled (and a little daunted) to discover that he’s now posting multiple entries a day on his New Yorker blog.

Here’s a great post about the mediocre Nikkei. I’m so glad that didn’t end up on the cutting room floor in some editor’s office.

But beyond getting to read more of Surowiecki’s rational masterpieces, the blog is disquieting, revealing that in addition to writing brilliantly Surowiecki is also confused, and probably owns more stock than he’d like to admit. (To himself or to his wife?) There’s a recurring barely suppressed cry of “Fix it!”

Bloomberg reports:

Ad sales are falling at CBS’s radio and TV stations as the U.S. economy shrinks. At the TV unit, which accounts for almost two-thirds of revenue, advertising dropped 14 percent. CBS said NBC’s broadcast of the Beijing Olympics took viewers during the period and coverage of the presidential conventions limited ad opportunities, along with the overall slump in the market.

What used to be called the “consumer confidence” survey may be due for a renaming. The FT reports:

Consumer confidence fell from a reading of 61.4 in September to 38 [in October] – the lowest level since the index was established more than 40 years ago and well below economists’ expectations that it would drop to 52. … The previous all-time low in the index was set in December 1974, when consumer confidence fell to a level of 43.2. … Americans’ assessments of their “present situation” declined from 61.1 in September to 41.9 in October. Meanwhile, the “expectations” index collapsed from 61.5 in September to 35.5 this month.