Good overview of the coming mortgage debacle:

On a personal level, however, there is going to be pain as homeowners struggle to make higher payments. In 2003, of all new mortgages, 10.2 percent were interest-only, meaning the homeowner paid only the interest for the initial period of the loan. According to Loan Performance, a research firm, 26.7 percent of all loans were interest-only last year and another 15.3 percent were payment-option adjustable rate mortgages, which allow homeowners to choose how much they paid each month.

In some areas of the country where homes are expensive, these loans were highly popular. In most California cities, as well as in Denver, Washington, Phoenix and Seattle, interest-only loans represented 40 percent or more of all mortgages issued in 2005.

Traditionally, interest-only loans and adjustable-rate loans were used by people who expected to live in a house only a short time, but such loans have turned into ‘affordability products’ as housing prices rose. The interest rate on the loans, while below that of conventional 30-year fixed-rate mortgages at the beginning, resets after 3, 5, 7 or 10 years, depending on the loan. So, homeowners who took out loans in 2004 could find, for example, that their initial 4.25 percent loan climbs to 6.25 percent or 7.25 percent next year.

Someone now paying $350 a month for a $100,000 interest-only loan could be facing payments of $680 both because of the shift to the higher rate and because the borrower would have to start paying off the principal as well as the interest.

Zizou headbutts Fidel.
Zaps the deathstar.
Drinkz Coke.
Ad abzurdum.

And let’s not forget Jon Stewart on net neutrality.

If you know Hugh Macleod, you’ll find this cartoon hughlarious.

Hugh was an early buyer of Blogads and I, in turn, bought one of his cartoons-on-the-back-of-a-biznesscard.

Meanwhile, America grows bigger.

Go vote in the SXSWclick short film contest.

Many analysts are writing about the fragmentation of media audiences. And most, like this Fortune writer, moan about it:

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I’ve got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

To pick a single, timely, example, The Tribune Co. announced just the other day that its newspapers would be closing foreign bureaus in Johannesburg, Moscow, Lebanon and Pakistan. This is happening all over newspaperdom and it happened years ago at the broadcast networks.

Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.

The second arena where we are worse off is politics. This is related to journalism, as the moderate and responsible (okay, bland) voices of the MSM get drowned out by partisan, opinionated cableheads and bloggers.

Politics in America has become polarized for many reasons, but a big one is the fact that people can now filter the news and opinion they get to avoid exposure to ideas with which they disagree. Anderson suggests that this could well be a temporary problem, and that if the major parties continue to move to the extremes and the quality of debate continues to deteriorate, the Internet could well enable a new party or parties, to arise.

Mass culture provides intangible benefits, too. Big stars, hit TV shows and even commercials help knit a society together. Think of the feeling that comes a few times a year – the morning after the Super Bowl or the Oscars – when tens of millions of Americans share a common experience.

This analsys of course misses the fact that new communities are arising, knitting people together in novel and powerful ways. Something is being lost, but I’d argue that we’re gaining much more than a “mass of niches.”

Back from a week at the beach. Brilliant. We loved watching the home-spun fireworks all up and down the beach, with the official celebration off the pier in the distance. Some photos.

The blog legitimacy debate continues. Are blogs are derivative or a primary source? Does it matter? By commenting about a blog post about blogs linking to the New York Times, have I just proven the point? Which point?

Here’s a local version of the same debate.

It’s worth noting that futures on the US Treasury bonds, a “derivative,” now trade hundreds of times the volume of the actual securities they’re notionally based on. Easier to use, more liquid, faster… that’s what folks prefer, and that’s where the critical mass ends up.

Meanwhile, pleading conventional-magazine-hood, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media hunkers down, shuffles its deck and drops a few cards.

And a crusading blog is apparently blacklisted by the Governor of Kentucky.

In the net neutrality debate, I’m firmly in the “more internet good, speedbumps bad” camp. Which is to say, I’ve got a net neutrality sticker on my laptop.

Yes, stuff like this “bugged router” sure look scary.

The other side argues that, with customers paying $40 a month for broadband, who will be incented to pay to expand that pipe? Mike Turk, who I like a lot but appears to be on the other side of this issue, cites a WSJ piece citing a $560 a month “cost of future broadband”

But, when bandwidth consumption gets to this volume, won’t the companies providing the last mile just charge consumers for the extra bandwidth? Charge per gigabyte per month and then let the consumer decide what she watches? Works well enough for water, measuring volume without putting any kind of extra filters in to determine what brand of water is being drunk and from what source.

Josh Marshall has done ’em both.

I can understand someone from the world of small magazines being shocked by the responsiveness, rambuctiousness and even hair trigger hostility of the blogosphere. I haven’t done much magazine writing in the last couple years. But I come out of that world of small political magazines. And it is, in many more than just the obvious ways, a different world.

Write a piece for the New Republic or the American Prospect or even the far wider circulation New Yorker and you may get a few letters in the mail from readers. Not that many or that often, but sometimes. Friends and colleagues will tell you what they thought or argue with you about it. The publication will probably get a few letters to the editor. But that’s about it.

Your contact with the people who read what you’re writing is quite limited. On the other hand, TPM gets anywhere from 2-500 emails every day. Needless to say, many fly in within minutes of your finishing whatever is being responded to. And, believe or not, not all of them are nice.

Not long ago I got on the wrong side of the ridiculousness of the proprietor of one left-wing website. And his antics were so dishonorable and shameless that I don’t think I’d ever speak to the guy again. Still, I don’t think he was a fascist. I think he is, mundane a category as it may be, a dick. Or perhaps I’m the dick. To him, certainly. Still though, I don’t think fascism has anything to do with it.

More generally, I think the blogosphere, in contrast to more staid venues for writing, is something like the much more popular and participatory sort of theater culture you had in the 19th and well into the 20th century (you may remember seeing some hint of this funned up in old Bugs Bunny cartoons) where, if the audience didn’t like what they were hearing or seeing, they started booing. Or hooting. Or heck, maybe tossing raw vegetables.

Poll of DC insiders says netroots deeper for Dems. Mike Turk analyzes the data.

Meanwhile, Mike Cornfield says blogs are the agenda setter for the agenda setters.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the future of ad agencies. They’ve evolved over the last 150 years to mirror the massive industries they serve. Top down, structured as silos, good at scale and, generally, bad at nuance and speed. What’s next? Here’s a good interview with Clement Mok of Sapient.

By training, many designers are taught to give structure to form and systems, and create order out of chaos. That’s one kind of design; but then you have the medium of interactive games. I think from an engineering perspective, you would tend to structure and systematize the game’s play. However, when designing interactive games, you actually want the user interface to support wandering and exploration, as opposed to a structured and readily apparent system. It might not be a good idea to impose structure, rules, and order if you want to encourage play.

Other experiences like chat rooms, MySpace, and Instant Messaging facilitate a non-linear structure of play. Randomness, and the ability to find a unique experience, are part of the strengths and charm of these services. Having too many rules and structures might actually hinder a user experience. I think design should enable these experiences to happen. Design should provide the platform or system that will enable discovery and understanding. … An advertising account executive once told me that creative, media, and financials drive the world of advertising. If one fails, it affects the other. In my humble opinion, I think all three drivers are at various stage of failure.

I think the financial model of advertising and design is the most broken. The incentives and focus are in the wrong place. Agencies are spending too much time focusing on the size of their client’s marketing budget, when they should be focusing on how much value an agency creates for their client’s BUSINESS. In a world of fragmented markets, with more choices of media outlets and delivery platforms, not knowing how effectively one spends on media can bury you.

In the advertising world, one makes money by discounting creative, and charging for media purchases and placement. This used to be lucrative, because the channels were limited and because one can leverage a single creative for multiple media execution options. The industry evolved to a point where they can decouple the message from the media placement – they actually have agencies doing media independent of content. Now the clients have gotten smarter, and they’re doing the media buying themselves. As a result, the advertising agencies are hard pressed to recoup their creative cost without the media purchase component. Clients are now outsourcing their SEO/SEM work to firms that have little or nothing to do with the agencies.

The agencies are succeeding right now in spite of themselves because their clients don’t have anywhere else to turn. Look at what’s been happening the last three years in the relationship between clients and agencies. Clients and agencies used to have five- or ten-year relationships. When they talked about a long-term relationships five years ago, they started talking a three-year relationship. Over the last two to three years, the relationship tenure has just gotten shorter and shorter. The clients can’t afford to build those relationships now unless the agency can to demonstrate that they can bring the value they want.

The model of the big idea and the big content campaign is still relevant for certain industries, like fashion or maybe the movie business. They have not been able to translate those campaigns into other logical secondary platforms. They don’t have the capabilities to do it, and if they decide to do this, they don’t have the technical core competencies to do it well. If anything, the execution of those campaigns tends to be dumb and dumber, and the result is a very frustrating experience: long downloads, multiple instances of entering data, clumsy execution, and a lack of connectivity with other systems.