Monday, October 25, 2004

Onward

Flying to Denver today for Digital ID World. See ya there.

By George!

How is it that I can write more about George Lakoff than any other blogger on the Web, and miss GEORGE LAKOFF :: LING 290L ;; LANGUAGE OF POLITICS? Guess I was out of the frame somewhere. (More about the frame thing here.) Or not listening, which is the more likely case.

But, as Dave Barry once said in a footnote answer to the question Who was Barry Goldwater's vice presidential running mate in 1964?, it doesn't matter.

It rocks (bad pun intended) that it's happening, and that some of my favorite bloggers are involved.

Now I'd like George and his class to help reframe the mind of Michael Powell, and maybe even the whole regulatory regime-in-progress that will (with our help) come to respect the Net as a place where markets (and much more) can grow and thrive, rather than as just another shipping system for transporting "content" from producers to consumers. Links here, here, here, here, here, here and here. (And here are a few more golden oldies.)

Thanks to David Isenberg for the pointer.

, Sherlock

BBC reports archaeological confirmation of the connection between constipation and protestantism.

Thanks for the pointer to Andrew Sullivan, who has the perfect headline for the story.

Jimmy's revenge

Jimmy Carter is campaigning to win for Kerry what Carter lost to Reagan. Today The Guardian reports an interview with Carter in which the former president spares no ire for George W. Bush or the press coverage of Bush's administration since 9/11. More here. An excerpt:

"When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief," he says. "And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions. The press have been cowed, because they didn't want to be unpatriotic. There has been a lack of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it's hard to think of a major medium in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and critical when criticism was deserved."

But Jimmy's got nothin' on Daniel Drezner, who writes,

So I'm voting for Kerry.

In my two threads on the subject (here and here), I've been amused to read suggestions by fellow Republicans that I'm overanalyzing things and should just trust my gut. If I had done that, I would have known I was voting for Kerry sometime this summer because of Iraq. To put it crudely, my anger at Bush for the number of Mongolian cluster-f**ks this administration was discovered to have made in the planning process in the run-up to Iraq was compounded by the even greater number of cluster-f**ks the administration made in the six months after the invasion, topped off by George W. Bush's decision not to fire the clusterf**ks in the civilian DoD leadershop that insisted over the past two years that not a lot of troops were needed in the Iraqi theater of operations. No, if I was voting based on gut instincts, I would have planned on voting for Kerry and punching a wall afterwards.

It's a big post. Read it. Comments too.

Bonus Link: Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda. Thanks to Rafe for the pointer.

Blog ad pong

Geoff Stearns: Have you seen my new blog ad? Says Geoff:

I feel that as more and more ads pile up, people will be alienated more and more until the next big thing comes along and we start all over again.

The question really is who will throw the first stone?

He also responds (in this post) to my response to the post. Here he adds,

Once a blog gets to be so big that the author can’t afford to keep it going without additional income and puts up ads for that reason, they become reliant on that income. They will post things more likely to bring crowds or potention click throughs instead of your every day 'whatever' content. Is this really a bad thing? I'm sure in some cases it might not change things too much, but in others it would cause a narrowing of the content on that blog. If something isn’t interesting enough, maybe the author would skip over it in persiut of something more main stream.

There’s a reason why Clear Channel sticks mainly to the top 40 music format. They get the most listeners that way, and therefore can charge their advertisers more and make more money. Blog advertising works the same way: the more viewers, the more cash for your ads.

Well, blogs don't have the cost structures of radio stations, and the costs of running them don't scale up the same way with readership. (Actually, the costs of running a radio station don't tend to go up with listenership, either; except perhaps for talent — although Clear Channel and other outfits like it have found ways to minimize those costs too.)

Maybe I'm wrong, but seems to me that the base costs of running even a popular blog are pretty darn cheap.

Of course, time is only free if it has no value to you. Still, this blog doesn't take me more time now (with up to thousands of daily reads) than it did five years ago (has it been that short/long?) when it had a handful of daily reads. In fact, I don't know of any blogs that have become "so big that the author can't afford to keep it going without additional income." But maybe I'm wrong about that. Either way, it's an interesting dialog already; and I look forward to moving it forward at BloggerCon.

Bonus link: Marc Canter's REbutt, enlighten and grimace, which follows on his Transparency and sponsorship in the blogosphere, and responds to Jason, Halley and Stowe. Sez Marc,

Pehaps we need to look at what this idea challenges - the very being of Jason's busienss model - banner ads. The very basis of everything he's got going - that high flow blogs will make bucks and that these measily B and C listers can't make doodley squat.

Well guess what?

That's me.

I don't have a high flow blog - yet my ideas seem to resonate with a few. If I can help change the world that way - with a few readers and if I can upset the applecart of bloggrs who blog about blogging anf who go to blogging conventions to blog about what blogging is - then coolio.

Cause that's so insular, navel gazing, intellectualizing - it's almost Bush-like in it's close mindedness.

Dean lost.

The Democrats are idiots and banner ads are so - so - so - 90's.

Bonus link #2: RSS feeds hunger for more ads, from Wired News.

Leverage

Mary Hodder notices something familiar about the blogroll at Manolo's Shoe Blog.