Closer To The Ideal

Here is every blog post ever written:

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful and ridiculous example of such people the author could find. This sentence is a three-word refutation of the post linked in the previous sentence, the first of which three words is “Um.” This sentence implies that the linked post is in fact typical of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This sentence contains a link to an Internet video featuring a cat playing a piano.

This sentence implies that everyone reading has certainly seen the folly of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence reminds the reader that there are a few others who agree. This sentence contains one-word links to other blogs with whom the author seeks to curry favor, offered as examples of those others.

I added these comments to the comment thread of that post:

This comment was only partially written when the poster accidentally submitted it by hitting the

and:

This comment is an attack phrased as a series of questions, allowing the poster to put forward an aura of faux objectivity, though careful readers can clearly see through the pose.

and:

This comment starts off by strongly agreeing with the above blog post, but then goes on to summarize the blog thesis in such a way that it becomes clear the commenter thought the blog author was making exactly the opposite point of that which was actually written.

and:

This comment is written by a well known writer who has a regular column at the New Republic but who feels deeply threatened by the thesis of the above blog post and who is, therefore, posting here anonymously to suggest that the blog author here is utterly wrong and immoral, whereas decent, well meaning people tend to agree with the writers at the New Republic. When it becomes publicly known that this New Republic writer is posting comments using false identities, their career as a writer will suffer a terrible setback, from which they will never recover.

and:

This comment points out that anyone who wants to do anything about the issue described in the above blog post is, paradoxically, a hypocrite, because, for this issue, the laws of unintended consequences work in such strangely ironic ways that, in fact, the best thing we can possibly do about this issue is to do nothing at all.

and:

This comment is posted by a troll who is well known, and utterly hated, by those readers who frequent this blog. The troll comments on every post on this blog.

and:

This comment is made by a regular reader of the blog who hates the troll who just posted the previous comment. The regular reader now begs the owner of this blog to permanently ban the troll forever. The regular reader appeals to the others who post comments on this blog to agree that the troll never contributes anything useful to any conversation on this blog.

and:

This comment expresses outrage that the author of the blog post should be writing about this particular issue, when, in fact, the author of the blog post has never written about the suffering of the people of East Timor, which is clearly a much larger and more important issue, effecting many more people. The poster of this comment suggests that no one will ever take the author seriously, until the author has written about all of those other issues, of which East Timor is only an example, which are clearly more important than the issue raised here.

and:

This comment parses the words of the original post, and parses them again and again and again, using clever rhetorical tricks to falsely “prove” that the words mean something very different than what they first appear to mean. This comment then urges reader not to fall for the innocent, naive impression they may have been left with after first reading the blog post, but rather, to see deeper, and thus understand the hideous, monstrous, secret aims of the author of the blog post.

and:

This comment is written by a hardened veteran of blog comment flame wars but who, hoping to gain the credibility of an objective innocent, claims “This is my very first time posting a comment to a blog.” They then disagree with the blog post and point out that they know of absolutely no one, anywhere, who would agree with the blog post.

and:

This comment is written by someone who clearly arrived on this site after having searched on Google for a term that just happens to appear in the title of the blog post. They then ask “Where can I buy incendiaries?”

Interesting article about making a lot of money with Amazon’s affiliate program:

I have earned $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program since I began using it as a way to make money online late in 2003. Around half of that amount was made within the last 12 months.

In this post I want to share what I’ve learned along the way on how to make money with Amazon.

While Amazon’s Associates program is not my largest income stream (I rank how I make money blogging here) it was actually the first experiment that I did with monetizing blogs. I began to experiment with it in the last quarter of 2003 (just before I started using AdSense).

I started using it on a personal blog that had been going for around 12 months and had around a thousand readers a day – the first quarter was not spectacular in terms of earnings – I made $31.80 (around 30 cents a day) and almost gave it away.

David Simon writes the single most ludicrous, misguided, uninformed post about the future of the newspapers that I’ve yet seen:

The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism—two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good for the nation. It’s down to them. The rest of the print journalism world is in slash-and-burn mode, cutting product and then wondering why the product won’t sell, rushing to give away what remains online and wondering further why that content is held by advertisers to be valueless. The mode is full-bore panic. And yet these two individuals, representing as they do the two fundamental institutions that sit astride the profession, still have a card to play, and here’s a shard of good news: it’s the only card that ever really mattered. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, are at the helms of two organizations trying to find some separate peace with the digital revolution…

Melodramatic. Two brave souls have the power to save the noblest industry on Earth, the 4th estate, they can perform “an essential civic good for the nation”, but only if they act bravely and wisely. It is a good setup for a movie. How is it that Simon got so far out of touch with reality that he doesn’t understand how sentimental and over-heated this is?

Simon is so desperate to save the newspapers, that he wishes they could break the law:

Most of all, I know that here you are being individually asked to consider taking a bold, risk-laden stand for content—that antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert. Would that every U.S. newspaper publisher could meet in a bathroom somewhere and talk bluntly for fifteen minutes, this would be a hell of a lot easier.

This by itself says a lot about how doomed the newspapers are – that their supporters think the only way to save them is by breaking the law. Having written this paragraph, Simon should then draw the obvious conclusion – that there is no legal way to save the newspapers. But he is deep in denial. He has a strong emotional attachment to the newspapers, so contemplating their demise causes him too much pain – so he escapes into fantasy:

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future—let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it—both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees.

I’m familiar with “a miracle might happen” reasoning. I went through a lot of this when my father died: “The doctor says there is no hope, but a miracle might happen.” Of course, now, looking back, I can clearly see I was deluding myself. Simon is at an earlier stage. He has not yet started mourning because he believes the thing he loves can still be saved.

He then indulges a fantasy in which he is someday regarded as a hero (I assume he will someday be embarrassed that he wrote this):

And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America’s two national newspapers did these things in concert—resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue—you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

Especially stupid is his dismissal of the idea that online ad revenue will someday be greater than what it is now:

Clearly, the product still moves. But to what purpose, when more and more readers rightly identify the immediate digitized version as superior, yet pay nothing for that version, and online advertising simply doesn’t deliver enough revenue?

He then makes a ludicrous comparison:

For the first thirty years of its existence as America’s primary entertainment medium, television was—after the initial purchase of the set itself—provided at no cost to viewers, instead subsidized by lucrative ad revenues. The notion of Americans in 1975 being asked to pay a monthly bill for their television consumption would have seemed farcical. Yet in the ensuing thirty years, we have become a nation that shells out $60, $70, or $120 in monthly cable fees; indeed, whole vistas of programming exist free of advertising revenue, subsidized entirely by subscriptions.

So, somehow the fact that Americans are willing to pay money to get more content proves that they are willing to pay money to get less content.

Maybe the most funny thing in his whole essay is where he compares the brave, visionary geniuses who run the television industry with the stupid, crass, profit-obessessed buffoons who run the newspaper industry:

But unlike television, in which industry leaders were constantly reinvesting profits in research and development, where a new technology like cable reception would be contemplated for all its potential and opportunity, the newspapering world was content to send its treasure to Wall Street, appeasing analysts and big-ticket shareholders. There was no reinvestment in programming, no intelligent contemplation of new and transformational circulation models, no thought beyond maximized short-term profit.

Oh, those damn newspaper publishers! Always obsessed with short-term profit! Why can’t they be more like the noble, far-seeing statesmen who run the television industry?

But here is the saddest paragraph of all, the one that truly shows how much Simon is gripped by the past, rather than what is to come:

In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished—some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover—day after day—the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work—in effect becoming online newspapers with all the gravitas this implies—they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism’s potential.

David Simon will only respect New Media once New Media is able to replicate what Old Media gives us everyday. And here, possibly, is the one and only thing that Simon and I agree on: New Media will never replicate what Old Media gave us.

This is reality: the newspapers will largely die, and nothing is going to take their place. There will be other forms of media in the future, but they won’t look or act like what the newspapers did.

Here is the only passage in the essay where he correctly notes that the newspapers have been dying for a long time, and the Internet is only speeding a long-term, secular trend:

Last, and perhaps most disastrous, the rot began at the bottom and it didn’t reach the highest rungs of the profession until far too much damage had been done. As early as the mid-1980s, the civic indifference and contempt of product inherent in chain ownership was apparent in many smaller American markets. While this was discussed in some circles, usually as a matter of mild rumination, little was done by the industry to address a dynamic by which men in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, at the behest of Wall Street, determined what sort of journalism would be practiced in Baltimore, Denver, Hartford, or Dallas. If you happened to labor at a newspaper that was ceding its editorial ambition to the price-per-share, it may have been agony, but if you were at the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times, you were insulated.

I’ve rarely read an essay where the author’s fear of change was so near the surface, so present in every sentence.

There are at least 2 ways to attack Simon’s ideas. One is offered by Brad Delong, who makes the case that the newspapers are often full of lies and misrepresentation, and so he generally finds his favorite blogs more interesting:

I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

To some degree this is the “Daily Me” phenomenon: my RSS reader is now tuned to bring me things written by people I learn from, while the editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times select stories on the basis of… bizarre and incomprehensible algorithms. To some degree this is because this is because the WP and the NYT are pitched at a level far below the one I want to read at, in part because they think their audience is less clued-in than I am (Peter Baker and Helene Cooper; Dan Balz) and in part because their reporters are out of their depth (i.e., Tobin Harshaw). In part this is because they are unprofessional (i.e., Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston not situating their article in its proper context in the journalistic enterprise begun by The One-Percent Doctrine). To some degree this is because their reporters know nothing about how representative their anecdotes are and so have absolutely nothing interesting to say (Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore; Michael Rosenwald)….

But there is a bigger problem: the army of small start-ups that want a piece of the New York Times’s market. Last year I spent $30,000 to start a new political web site. That is, I spent a small sum, and attracted a small audience. But there are thousands of entrepreneurs like me. Collectively, we spend millions each year, trying to establish sites that can take market share from existing newspapers. And every dollar we spend is a torpedo aimed at the old institutions of media.

In the old days, it took millions of dollars to set up a new newspaper. USA Today took 15 years just to break even. The large scale of the needed capital acted as a barrier to entry, and protected the newspapers from competition. Now a new web site can get going for just $100,000 (I’ve previously written about the costs of websites). Nothing can bring back the old days, when the newspapers could generate high margins, safe behind the barriers that kept competition limited. But David Simon doesn’t see this. Consider the static, unchanging nature of the world in which he thinks he’s living in:

Antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert

See, in Simon’s world, all of the owners of all of the media companies are known, and could be called together to meet, if only it weren’t for antitrust considerations. What Simon doesn’t see is the vast army of entrepreneurs who are just off-stage, waiting for the right conditions, ready to strike.

My world is very different from Simon’s world. Here’s the world that I live in:

1.) Consumers do not want to pay for online content, so if the newspapers put up pay walls, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

2.) However, if a miracle happens, and suddenly consumers are willing to pay for online content, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

Either way, more funding will continue to be invested in online media ventures, and the endlessly growing supply will drive down everyone’s margins. More so, we are in for a prolonged period of over-supply, which will drive down everyone’s margins very low, so those businesses that were built around the assumption of healthy margins (and that would include the major newspapers) are going to go bankrupt. A prolonged period of very low margins will mean that only those ventures that are built to survive very low margins will, in fact, survive. And, obviously, the web-based ventures, free of the costs of printing plants and distribution networks, sometimes even free of having an office, can get by on some extremely narrow margins.

There are no scenarios in which the newspapers survive.

Jory Des Jardins writes with nostalgia about what print media used to be like:

I’m sure if I had stuck it out a bit more and not taken a new media job five years in I might have made more of a go of it. But things discouraged me about traditional media. It had an established power structure that made it nearly impossible to get noticed. I wrote things I was proud of on the side, while editing more established writers in the waking hours and writing uninspired copy as a freelancer. But I hadn’t really established a voice that was worthy of cashing in favors from editor friends of mine.

…I’d only hoped I would be able to pursue this growing interest in a model counter intuitive to the people I used to work for. A model that democratized media, to a large extent, and made possible a notion terrifying to most people like me who hinged their self-worth on “making it” in traditional media: that there’s a whole helluva lot of talent out there and it ain’t all on the Hearst, Conde Nast, or Time Warner payrolls. Traditional media just took in whom they could fit, who matched the pedigree, or who had an uncle who could introduce you to the editor, or who had this random bit of luck and was seen for what she could produce, and sometimes bonafide talent. But so may others could not even make it to the filter, let alone make a living at it.

Back in my print days, there was something so alluring about being one of a few selected, whose name would be committed to print. And there’s a whole community of folks, I’m sure, who still hold print sacred. I’m one of them, even as someone whose name has only made it via her work in new media. I fretted so long about being a part of it that even while it’s suffering I promise to someday return — if it will have me. Many bloggers who are doing just fine building platforms online still look at the book deal as the summit of success. I’ll know I’m fully evolved when I couldn’t care less about hardcover, softcover, or any cover.

Traditional media was hierarchical and often unfair. One’s actual talent was often overlooked due to the personal politics inside each organization. It is hard for me to feel nostalgia for the old model, though possibly I feel a slight nostalgia for the great era of photojournalism, when people like Henri Cartier-Bresson were at work, an era which was funded by the mass circulation magazines.

But all business models die, eventually. In the modern era, we’ve achieved the freedom to constantly re-invent ourselves. While this is occasionally stressful, it is a freedom that people have spent centuries fighting to establish. And this freedom is one of the most exciting aspects of being alive during this era. Karl Marx has a reputation for being critical of market based economies, but few people described our era as perfectly as he did:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Penelope Trunk says you won’t make money from blogging. I assume she’s talking about personal blogging, otherwise her advice amounts to “You can’t make money with an online magazine” and clearly that is not true, since there are lots of profitable online magazines (like TechCrunch, Salon, etc).

Apparently, in the world of personal blogging mommy-blogging is a profitable exception:

Welcome to the world of mommy blogging, where women juggle the demands of childcare with building audiences online. It’s also, increasingly, a place where top brands battle for their attention, hoping for reviews from “real moms” and access to the valuable power of word of mouth. Being a player in the mommy blogger world can mean access to free products, getting big media buys and even trips to the red carpet in Hollywood and Caribbean cruises.

Reputable news sources on the tech industry, such as Techcrunch, seem very positive about the future growth of the Twitter eco-system:

Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images, music, and video.

Twitter seems to be taking off the way weblogs and RSS feeds took off during the last recession. But weblogs and RSS feeds were open platforms, with dozens of companies competing to offer tools. The openness and the competition helped drive the tools forward, which helped the practice of blogging to move forward. There was never a single company that could say “Weblogging will no longer be allowed unless you start paying a fee for our tools” (SixApart tried this and immediately lost market share).

Twitter is just one company. It is only as open as it wants to be. Right now, it is synonymous with micro-messaging (micro-blogging?). But I am doubtful that a single company can come to represent the whole of some online activity. I suppose the nearest analogy would be Google and search, but that seems like an imperfect fit. The highest estimate of Google’s market share is 72%. Whereas Twitter owns 100% market share of Twittering.

Sarah Lacy used LinkedIn to try to help a friends of her get a job. It occurs to her that the depression will be very good for LinkedIn:

In terms of ego and validation, I got the pride of knowing my network could help someone I care about. And not just help someone with something minor– help someone potentially find a new job. In this case she wasn’t laid off but, in an economy like this where hundreds of thousands are, survivor’s guilt runs high. Especially if you’ve been laid off before and viscerally remember that feeling. You want to be able to do something when you hear that kind of news, and LinkedIn offers that, whether it’s an introduction or just writing a recommendation for a laid-off friend. It was one of the first times an interaction with LinkedIn gave me that social media endorphin rush that I more commonly get with Twitter, blogging, Flickr or Facebook.

This is a horrifying failure of risk management and system administration good practice:  JournalSpace loses all data in its database and has no backup:

Blogging platform JournalSpace (which I’d never heard of to date) has ceased to be, following a wipe-out of the main database for which there was no back-up in place. According to the JournalSpace blog, the database was overwritten as a result of a malicious act from a disgruntled ex-employee.

The lack of backups is the fault of management, for they had the authority to make better decisions, and they had the ethical responsibility to protect the data of their users. Nevertheless, they try to shift the blame to one of their employees:

It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.

The employee might be guilty of criminal actions here, but that doesn’t let management off the hook for having been so unprepared. If it hadn’t been an employee it might have been a tornado or earthquake or some other disaster – and the blame still would have belonged to management. Multiple backups, in different locations, is the precaution that a responsible company must make.

cb sums it up well in the comments:

lol, gotta love an internet company that has ‘a guy handling IT’. As if the IT side of things is an afterthought-which apparently it was in this case.

There is a second part to this story that I find very sad. One of the users of JournalSpace, a woman calling herself tinythoughts, shows up in the comments at TechCrunch and expresses her sadness, whereupon she is immediately attacked for her having ever used JournalSpace. I am puzzled and worried by the attitude that would defend the company and blame the customer.

This is tinythoughts:

i had one of the oldest journals on journalspace. i am really upset about losing about 6 years of writing, and my layouts which i made. it was bad enough when they lost years of comments. this is far worse. i am pretty sure i archived most of everything up til about a year ago on my external hd. i’m actually a lot sadder about this than i thought i would be.

This is the criticism that is then thrown at her:

If you value your work so much, you shouldn’t be using something that’s free and expect not to lose it.

At the end of the day, piss all you want. It’s your damn fault for leeching off a free service and expect it to continue to provide for you.

The day of FREE is over!

And then this was her response:

it wasn’t free. i was a paying customer for most of the time i was on there, until the first big data loss. after that, i did not get a pro account anymore and also began to write less on there.
as for losing my stuff, which i did value, as i said, i did back it up myself after that first data loss. however, i liked it where and how it was, accessible online to me and anyone else. we are talking about almost 6 years of content. that is not some small thing. even if you’re dumb, you should be able to understand that.
btw, i work in this industry myself, and i am pretty sure the days of free are not over. but all the best to you on being rude anonymously to others online.

She also adds:

I don’t believe their story. I think there is more to it. They’ve had problems before and they always lay it out like their users are technically stupid and willing to accept any dumb answer given to them. What happened really was a great loss for many users, who had been there for years, a community of really great people. The greatest loss is all of the time, life, love, and community each of those users put into journalspace, where it was all documented and washed away like sandcastles on the beach. I might be upset for my own loss, but not nearly as sad as I am for many of my friends there. I think journalspace owes them more than a lame excuse and an empty sorry.

The fact that someone is willing to attack the customers in this case, rather than the grossly irresponsible company, actually saddens me more than the already sad fact that a lot of people lost years worth of work. (Though if I lost that much work, I’d cry for days.)

Sam Zell made a terrible mistake when he bought the Tribune Company:

When the Tribune Company announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, last Monday, Sam Zell, the man who bought the company a year ago, for $8.2 billion, said that its problems were the result of a “perfect storm.” You take readers and advertisers who were already migrating away from print, and add a steep recession, and you’ve got serious trouble. What Zell failed to mention was that his acquisition of the company had buried it beneath such a heavy pile of debt that any storm at all would likely have sunk it. But although Zell was making excuses for his own mismanagement, the perfect storm is real enough, and it is threatening to destroy newspapers as we know them. Layoffs and buyouts have become routine. The Miami Herald and the San Diego Union-Tribune are reportedly on the selling block, while lawmakers in Connecticut are trying to keep two newspapers there afloat. Even the New York Times Company has slashed its dividend and announced that it would borrow against its headquarters to avoid cash-flow problems.There’s no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen per cent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year.

Newspapers are simply a method of delivering ads:

It turns out that subscribers are more expensive, not less expensive, than online readers. Yes, they pay more — but they’re not paying for intensive reporting, experienced editors, and the like. They’re paying for printing presses, mobbed-up newspaper delivery operations, and the whole enormous physical infrastructure involved in getting thousands of tonnes of newsprint delivered to millions of front doors every morning. It’s a hugely expensive operation, and its costs are nowhere near covered by subscription revenues.

There’s an old saying that you’ll never understand newspaper economics until you understand why newspaper vending machines are designed so that you can take as many papers as you like for your quarter. Newspapers are, first and last, devices for delivering ads to readers. It’s the ads which account for all the profits, not the cash coming from subscribers or people who buy their paper at the newsstand. Yes, news itself is free, nowadays. But it always has been. What we’ve been paying for all these years was never news, it was papers.

Lately there have been a lot of articles about the newspaper industry. We are told that this recession is killing off newspapers, everything is moving to the web. There is some mourning, people wonder how journalism will survive once the newspapers are gone. But consider the other side – where will the ad dollars go? When the next boom hits, America will have a lot less newspapers than it has had in the past. And much more of the public will think it natural to get their news online. Doesn’t it seem that at some point quite a bit of ad revenue must become available to online ventures?

Chris Makarsky (who I used to work with at Category4) says goodbye to MySpace. I appreciated his scathing critique of the hype surrounding this badly designed site:

I registered for my account two years ago to see what all the commotion was about. I resisted for a few years prior to that, but after Rupert Murdoch’s $550 million spending spree and the site’s continued appearance in mainstream media outlets, I finally started to wonder if perhaps my unfounded prejudices against the site were unwarranted, that the site perhaps did provide some sort of benefit to its users.

However, I quickly discovered I wasn’t wrong at all, and after putting minimal effort into branding my user page, I happily left the site, destined to never return.

I was good on that claim until recently. Just a few months ago, my profile listed my last login date as October 22, 2005 — a badge of superiority I wore with pride. But then someone else using my computer logged in on my behalf one night, stripping me of my distinction. (The form was auto-filled by the browser… boo.)

Interesting bit from the New York Times on the changing relationship between musicians and their fans:

Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.

Coulton welcomes his fans’ avid attention; indeed, he relies on his fans in an almost symbiotic way.