Writing in the WSJ, Russell Adams dissects the failure of the Washington Post’s foray into “hyperlocal online publishing,” Loudon Extra.

The Journal sites three problems: a) lack of links from WPost itself when a big story breaks b) huge geographic spread (520 square miles) and diversity in Loudon county and c) lack of engage and d) hiring nonlocals.

Two other things to consider. The Post hired the guy to create Loudon local based in part on his success building “the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World’s KUSports.com, a site dedicated to University of Kansas sports that grew during Mr. Curley’s three-year reign from 500,000 monthly page views to a one-time peak of about 13 million monthly page views.” Didn’t anyone tell WPost UKansas sports audience a) is a lot bigger and more fanatic than school board audience and b) isn’t local?

And it also doesn’t help that Posts “Loudon Extra” site doesn’t seem to be Google friendly enough (though I can’t see exactly where they’re failing.) My evidence: if you search Google for “site:washingtonpost.com loudon extra” you get only 2200 results and “site:washingtonpost.com loudonextra” you get only 1 result. Their URLs are Goog-friendly (see below), but they seem (on quick inspection) to lack an index page that would make it easy for Google to do a comprehensive spidering. Yep, that was too easy. Someone from the Post wrote to point out that I mispelled “Loudoun.” Ding. Using the correct spelling, the site ends up with 33,000 entries in Google.

Remember when Goog spent the first quarter tanking, trending lower in sync with Comscore analysis of declining paid clicks, analysis that turned out to be wildly misleading in the end?

Well, GOOG jumped this week in trading leading up to Comscore’s release of a very bullish report on Google’s paid click growth. After being down Monday, Google opened Tuesday at 548 and spent all day trending up, closing at 560. The stock gapped higher the next morning and opened at 568. That night Google closed at 568. After trading closed, Comscore released its estimates
and Google jumped to 575 the next morning.

So anyone who had an inkling Tuesday morning that Comscore’s release Wednesday night was going to be very bullish for Google made a quick $27, a profit that would be vastly multiplied by playing in options.

NYTimes has a great grim story about online advertising this morning.

The prices paid for online ads bought through ad networks dropped 23 percent from March to April, according to PubMatic, an advertising-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., that runs an online-pricing index. Large Web publishers fared the worst in PubMaticâ”s study, with the prices they received through networks dropping 52 percent.

The article also noted that AOL’s display revs were down 19% in the first quarter, and a downward revision in earnings guidance at WebMD.

The article blames the slump on the looming recession, but there’s definitely something else at work. The online ad marketplace is suffering from the dreaded TMPFAST syndrome. That’s “Too Many Pigs Feeding at the Same Trough” for those of you who haven’t lived through past bursting bubbles. Since the press started proclaiming a couple of years ago that “any idiot with a site can make billions,” new idiots have been lining up to line their pockets. In building their business plans and seducing their eager to be seduced investors, these pigs have focused on the inarguable growth of online advertising (“how can you go wrong in a market that’s growing 30% a year?”), while ignoring the grim reality that millions of similar idiots have been engaged in the same fantasy.

The result won’t be too surprising… and there’ll be lots of sausage to go round for those with an appetite.

Shot by l0s71 with this license.

Ian Schafer looks around online for ads for the Smart car and finds none.

… it seems that that support would logically come from some tech-savvy, highly-connected, vocal groups of people that use the web to find each other. So if the Smart car is so smart, where’s the love of the people that it needs to succeed? Where’s the embrace of the (measurable) medium that can jumpstart a revolution?

As a driver of a ’92 V240, I know horsepower from horsemanure, but DO read the Sunday NYTimes, where the car got trashed.

As Smart tries to jump on the Mini’s bandwagon, some myths need to be addressed. First is that the Smart has been a smash success in Europe. In fact, Smart has been a small but weighty millstone around Mercedes’s neck, never reaching sales expectations and posting more than $3 billion in losses over a decade.

The second myth flows from the first: that the Smart is arriving to show America how small cars should be done. But the Smart isn’t the sophisticated runabout that people might expect.

Sure, the Smart is cute, if you enjoy cars from the Weebles school of design. And it’s ridiculously easy to park. My only pleasure came from slotting the Smart into spots that would have discouraged a St. Bernard.

But the Smart’s diminished size brings diminishing returns. From supermarkets to metered spaces, American parking slots are sized for the biggest cars and S.U.V.’s. Because you can’t straddle the lines at the mall or double up at meters, the Smart offers no advantage there.

The Smart’s only edge is its ability to park motorcycle-style by backing or nosing perpendicular to the curb. Oops, strike that: New York’s parking department said that move is off-limits unless signs specifically allow angle parking for all cars.

Compared with suburb-dwellers, the urban single or family is also more likely to rely on one do-it-all car. That means the versatility to carry friends, escape for a weekend and deal with cargo.

That’s where the Smart gets really dumb. For roughly the Smart Passion’s well-equipped price of $15,510, one could have several pint-sized models ‘ the terrific Honda Fit or Nissan Versa come to mind ‘ that are sportier, hold twice as many people, up to six times the cargo and get nearly the same mileage. (Fold the Versa hatchback’s rear seats, and there’s 50 cubic feet of storage, compared with just 7.8 cubic feet for the Smart).

So maybe Mercedes is intentionally avoiding the instant avalanche of cruelty that advertising in a networked marketplace might bring. If networking multiplies success, does avoiding networked media stifle or at least postpone failure?

I had a short piece in the SXSW quarterly mag that just came out. It was fun to try to carve the thing down from 400 words to 200. Here she is:

My favorite hour at SXSW ’08 began with boredom. I was watching a panel on social media metrics gum its topic. I shuffled my feet, opened my laptop. Twittered. Stewed.

Ian Schafer leaned over. “Get on Meebo.” I wasn’t alone in my frustration!

— guest439761: “20 minutes in and haven’t really heard anything.”
— Christen: “don’t tell me that there are metrics, tell me what they ARE, how to measure them, what the benchmarks are.”

Michael Bassik went to the mic: “To give the panelists a heads up, Meebo chatters are demanding numbers and names.” The moderator responded: “We’ve still got 30 minutes, we’ll get to metrics.” Ten more metricless minutes passed.

— mvp: “someone hack the system and get this up on the screen.”
— mediastorm: “i say we all walk out.”
— nancy: “don’t laugh! the panelist will think they are interesting.”

We started plotting. Strip and storm the stage? A sweater flew, then a sock. We synchronized hand-raising. We coughed in unison. We riffed on metrical drink names and games.

Suddenly our hour was over. So soon? Awww. We’d net-worked a sixty-minute revolution, transforming private anger into collective action and a humorous new culture. And we were ready for Sarah Lacy.

Kudos to SXSW for publishing something critical of itself in the house publication. But I guess not that critical, because the hour was the most fun I’ve had in social media in a while.

Clay Shirky ties together gin, sitcoms and lolcats:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

I’ve been arguing for a while that blogging and web 2.0 grow out of a surplus of spare time/energy people have in the office — and that smart companies can recycle the energy thrown off by that “spare” work. Shirky takes this to the logical extreme, saying society can do the same. Hat-tip to Gmarch on twitter.

As you may have heard, Blogads is once again repping Wonkette.com. More here, here, and here. The latter link, on the LA Times blog, is particularly good on the nuances of what’s going on.

To answer a question that came up a number of times yesterday: Blogads has zero ownership interest in Wonkette. We’ll be the exclusive ad rep for the blog and our webmaster sister, Pressflex, which hosts sites like TheBanker.com and PerezHilton.com, will serve as its webmaster.

Blogads repped The Wonkette throughout 2004 and 2005 and had a mutually profitable relationship. As Blogads aficionados know, we’re very reluctant right now to accept new blogs in the network; we’re focused on serving our current blogging partners, the bloggers who’ve helped build Blogads, thrive. We’ve committed to represent Wonkette, a blog that’s favorite of DC insiders and boasts a thriving community of commentors, because we believe the addition will add net dollars to the mix of bloggers we already represent.

Like Nick Denton, I think a brisk cold wind is blowing across all media. During the looming depression, times will be particularly tough for new social media companies. Many late arrivals to the field, still flush with cash and pheromone$ injected by VCs eager to hop aboard the Newest New Thing, don’t yet feel the wind or see the snowflakes falling. (As in all gold rushes, a few glimmers of gold dust quickly swelled into golden boulders in the popular imagination, and the greedy and the needy flocked to the promise of gold laden with giant earth movers, leased Porsches and giant Excels stretching into hundred million dollar profitability in 2013.) Now, even as reality turns against the newbies, these folks happily starve or borrow for a while believing they, specially and uniquely, deserve to hit it big. But that willful fantasizing (they patience for now) won’t last forever. We’re beginning to hear rumors that several high valuation VC-funded companies — blog networks, blog publishers, blog whatevers — are almost out of cash, and will need to do down rounds (when early owners find their shares significantly diluted) to raise more cash and stay afloat. More on this in coming weeks. (As Mr. Drudge says “Developing!!!”)

As the social media winter looms, the winners will be the folks with strong relationships, low overheads, a strong commitment on innovation rather than coat-tail riding, and, most of all, a indelible passion for the business. We’re looking forward to seeing you after the bust. Meanwhile, we’ll be mining bronze, silver and some gold with Mr. Denton, Mr. Layne and our many blogging friends.

Check out the latest (and last for a while) version of our “intro to Blogads” video. Thank you Nick Faber!

We’re thrilled that Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection is spending some of its $300 million ad campaign on blogs.

(BTW, we’ve lobbied hard for multiple links, better images, more information and sizzle. I wish the ad and its landing page were about more than harvesting e-mails. Oh, wait, that’s all The Internets are good for.

TV is the place to deliver message right? Afterall, 100% of the candidates who’ve won elected office in the US in the last 30 years have relied on TV advertising, so TV must be essential and effective.