I guess this isn’t news, but its worth noting that we reached a new low today, with fully 87% of Huffingandpuffing.com‘s most popular stories being either skin or rumors or both.

With America deciding to send 30k new troops to Aphganistan and historic health-care legislation being hotly debated, the only headline of semi-national import that fascinates Huffpo readers is “Palin’s Father: She Left Hawaii Because Asians Made Her Uncomfortable.” That “story” is actually a link and 80 word rehash of a point in a recent article in the New Yorker magazine, with no new reporting or insight added by Huffpo.

For the record:

Thank you Google ad relevance algorithms! You’ve got a weird sense of humor.

Even though the lead story today on Huffpo is “U.S. MILITARY CHIEF: ‘2010 WILL BE A PRETTY VIOLENT YEAR'” it nearly all the top stories are rumor and raunch. Six of eight top stories, in fact.

Ms. Huffington isn’t joking when she says “Huffpo isn’t just about politics any more.”

Want to help test a new service we’re coding? Drop me a line and I’ll get you a beta code for Twiangulate.

The service is simple, something we originally designed for staff use. Exhausted by plowing through lists of hundreds of people who our favorite tweeters follow, we rigged Twiangulate to (you guessed it) triangulate: create a short list of interesting people by comparing two or three target Tweeters’ followees. The process combines the robustness of code with the discernment of hand-sorting.

Here are a few pre-baked lists:
Politicos: @benpolitico + @jmartpolitico + @AriMelber
Open gov geeks: @cjoh + @ellnmllr + @bill_allison
Reason editors, past and present: @nickgillespie + @mleewelch + @vpostrel

Turns out that AriMelber, benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow 34 people in common. AriMelber and benpolitico follow another 24 in common. AriMelber and jmartpolitico follow another 47. And benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow a separate set of 53. If you’re a DC-news geek, charting who is on one list but not the others is fascinating.

Twiangulate’s ambitions aren’t huge. We’re just trying to help people more efficiently figure out who their friends, enemies and peers are following. Twiangulate augments Twitter’s SUL and its new “user generated” Lists, which offer essentially monocular snapshots of a dynamic, multi-dimensional world. Taking a more social approach, Twiangulate aggregates the wisdom of small crowds.

The gurus over at influence mapping firm Morningside Analytics recently built this map that illustrates the central of blogs in our liberal and conservative networks in the healthcare and energy policy debates.

Here’s the healthcare map, with our blogs highlighted.

And here’s their map for energy blogs with Blogads.

Here’s the post with more context.

Here’s my minutely edited version of a brilliant “quick review” guide to saving the media, originally inMetafilter:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avariciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Print readers will not put up with it
( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt
( ) [Assumes you’ll get very lucky]

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Readers’ unwillingness to pay for just news
( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
( ) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
( ) Sources’ proven unwillingness to “go direct”
( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
( ) The high cost of investigative journalism
( ) Unpopularity of weird [any] new taxes
( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
( ) Legal liability of “citizen journalism”
( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
( ) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
( ) The necessity of the editing process
( ) Americans’ huge distrust of professional journalism
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
( ) Technically illiterate politicians [anybody]
( ) The tragedy of the commons
( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites
( ) Google is happy to give the click revenue to somebody else for a penny less

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) That the US press dropped the ball on Iraq is a symptom, not a cause
( ) Print advertising pays so well because advertisers *can’t* work out the return they’re getting.
( ) Information does not want to be free
( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few readers are actually all that interested in, quite honestly
( ) That your friend was misquoted once in a paper does not mean journalism is bunk
( ) Everybody reading the same story is a feature, not a bug
( ) Having a free online “printing press” doesn’t turn you into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
( ) Wall Street won’t allow newspaper groups to back off from 20% profit margins
( ) Newspaper executives are second only to record industry executives for short-sighted idiocy
( ) E-paper still doesn’t give publishers back their ad monopoly and hence its revenue
( ) You can’t charge for online content unless all your competitors do it too, all at once.
( ) Ethics are hard to hold up when your bills are due
( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
( ) “Gatekeepers” can help keep out undesirable things
( ) Publishing less often makes you even less relevant
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Free society depends upon a free press
( ) Democracy is bad enough with the press we’ve already got
( ) You think print is bad? Imagine Fox News, as a blog. That’s what your idea will turn into.
( ) Reader-generated content is to professional news what YouTube is to big-studio movies.
( ) Have you read the comments on news websites? They make YouTubers look like geniuses.
( ) You are Jeff Jarvis
( ) Or Dave Winer

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

(via BoingBoing.)

If you head over to DailyKos, you can see the newest twist the SEIU is putting on their Tweet ads.

The recommended tweets, which appear on posts about healthcare like this one, include not only the SEIU, but peer organizations and even individuals like @owillis and @punditmom playing on the true potlatch spirit of Twitter and Follow-Fridays. You can see 3 variations below.

When are people going to get serious about Huffpo’s unseriousness?

Every day brings another round of accolades for Huffpo’s contributions to journalism. Maybe a Pulitzer, pant pant.

But beneath the skin (of buxom beauties) on Huffpo, there’s less beef than many (and Huffpo’s PR machine) give Huffpo credit for.

Take this post titled “Huffington Post Traffic Blows Past LA Times, Washington Post” from the Silicon Valley Insider, for example:

The Huffington Post has now blown past the sites of both the LA Times and the Washington Post, says Compete.com.

Huffington Post had 8.4 million uniques in September, up from 7 million in August. The LA Times site had 8.3 million uniques in September, versus 8.2 in August. The Washington Post took the hardest fall, going to 8.1 million uniques in September from 9.3 million in August.

The post ends by asking “What was that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was just saying about how print publications aren’t writing stuff people want to read?”

Read?

Maybe if the LA Times and Washington Post included lots of “content” like “Shauna Sand’s SEX TAPE: Lorenzo Lamas’ Ex’s Explicit VIDEO ONLINE” and “The 10 Creepiest Unintentionally-Sexual Ads Of All Time (VIDEO PHOTOS)” and “January Jones Drinks Beer, Dons Leather, Says Ex-Boyfriend Ashton Thought She’d Fail” their readership (or viewership) would be higher.

And BTW, those happen to be posts 2, 3 and 4 on Huffpo’s list of most popular stories today.

And here’s another recent set of Huffpo’s stunning contributions to journalism. As folks used to say about Playboy, no doubt lots of people read Huffpo “for the stories.”

Pulitzer, anyone?

If you’re a DailyKos reader, you’ve probably seen some new ads by the SEIU today appearing at the bottom of posts about health-care.

The ads look like this…

The images I’ve posted here aren’t actionable, but if you were looking at the real thing as a reader on DailyKos, you’d be able to edit the tweet and post it.

The ads offer a nimble advertiser a quick and easy way to fan the flames of a hot topic, co-joining blog reader passion and a timely topic to trigger a bonfire of tweets. Shazam!

More fun stuff on the way…

Update: PC Magazine chimes in: “If you’re like me, you’ve been losing sleep at night, worrying that third-party companies haven’t been able to effectively leverage the Twitter platform for their advertising benefit. Have no fear! Check out the admittedly clever ad above from the Service Employees International Union.”