B12 Solipsism

I guess it depends upon what your motivation for blogging was when you began…

many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

[From When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone ... - NYTimes.com]

For me, blogging is just a way to help myself remember interesting tidbits of information, possibly helping others do the same. If a magic genie appeared, and granted me a wish, suddenly growing an audience to become a full-time blogger would not be one of my requests¹.

note: this entry never even got posted back in June, 2009. I’d hazard a guess that I had another thought on the topic, but got distracted before starting to type it out. Oh well.

1. working on a film, perhaps, and being a full-time highly paid art photographer would take precedence [↩]

The blogosphere is starting to think about the new FTC regulations we mentioned yesterday. Case in point, Nine reasons why the rules will solve no problem, and just cause headaches:

However, I don’t believe that the new FTC guidelines actually help to further the goals of transparency but rather, instead, the new rules will be rife with abuse and misuse and uneven application. Here’s why:

1. Adversely affects smaller blogs. Small blogs like ours do not have editors. We don’t get paid to review and what we do is truly a labor of love. Yes, we are starting to host ads but we cannot afford a full time editor for our reviews. Blogs without editorial staffs will be subject to the new rules while blogs and mainstream publications, regardless of other issues and relationships, will not. Let me state it this way: the blogs with the highest earning capacity will likely be exempt while the blogs with the lowest earning capacity will not. I found it fascinating that Richard Cleland of the Bureau of Consumer Protection said this:

Cleland said that a disclosure was necessary when it came to an individual blogger, particularly one who is laboring for free. A paid reviewer was in the clear because money was transferred from an institution to the reviewer, and the reviewer was obligated to dispense with the product. I wondered if Cleland was aware of how many paid reviewers held onto their swag.

“I expect that when I read my local newspaper, I may expect that the reviewer got paid,” said Cleland. “His job is to be paid to do reviews. Your economic model is the advertising on the side.”

From Cleland’s standpoint, because the reviewer is an individual, the product becomes “compensation.”

[Click to continue reading The FTC and the Unreasonable Case of Disclosure | Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary]

and Number 7, especially as it pertains to Twitter is a bit of a joke:

Eliminating any relationships. § 255.5 requires disclosure of “material connections”.

When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience), such connection must be fully disclosed.

I’m not sure what this pertains to. I have attended luncheons, parties with publishers. Do I need to explain each and every piece of swag I am ever given? Could I even possibly remember every pen and mint tin I picked up? I doubt it.

It’s important to note that in various interviews around the web and in the Guide itself, the FTC contemplates that any comment, tweet, post on a facebook page, participation on a message board, must be accompanied by the relevant disclosure.

As for Twitter, the FTC isn’t letting you get a pass with the excuse that 140 characters–Twitter’s famous text limit–is simply too short. “There are ways to abbreviate a disclosure that fit within 140 characters,” Cleland said. “You may have to say a little bit of something else, but if you can’t make the disclosure, you can’t make the ad.”

I do wonder how long it will take before this policy is attempted to be enforced, and how long before a high-profile case goes before the courts. Do I have to hire an editor now? An advertising manager so there is a wall between “content” and “advertising”? How come celebrity magazines¹ are seemingly exempt from the FTC? If I read another positive review about a Michael Bay film, I may ask the FTC to investigate.

1. print and television [↩]

Interesting write-up of the Mrs. O blog

ON the blog Mrs. O, fans of Michelle Obama’s style can view photos of the outfit she wore on a recent date with the president-elect and find out where to buy the same purple designer coat.

The advertising agency behind the blog, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, does not work for Mrs. Obama or for the fashion designers the site features. In fact, mrs-o.org is not for a client at all. It is an entirely new business created by the Zag division of Bartle Bogle, which the agency started to invent new brands.

Mrs. O and Zag are part of a business model transformation in the advertising industry. Agencies are parlaying their expertise in marketing the brands of other companies into creating and marketing their own.

…

Zag got into the fashion blogging business in September, after Mary Tomer, a 27-year-old account planner at Bartle Bogle in New York, hatched the idea for the blog. She noticed Mrs. Obama’s style during the Democratic convention, yet could not find information on what she wore.

She decided to create a Web site, which she described as “a central resource for tracking her style and providing as much designer information and commentary as possible.”

Instead of writing the blog in her spare time after work, like most bloggers with day jobs, she approached her employers to see if they would bankroll her new hobby. They readily agreed.

“Mary was very sure about what she wanted, and when you read about the best brands, they are unrelenting,” Mr. Jenkins said. “That’s what I preached to my clients for the last 10 years, and now we have the chance to do that ourselves.”[Click to read more Advertising - Ad Agencies Create and Market Their Own Brands - NYTimes.com]

and this is how my photo ended up there:

Ms. Tomer and the site’s other writers find pictures of Mrs. Obama in newspapers or on the photo Web site Flickr and get permission from the photographers to post the photos free. They research her outfits by calling designers, searching on sites like Style.com and, when stumped, turning to the blog’s readers.

At first, Bartle Bogle thought of the site as an experiment in new media. Quickly, though, “there was a realization that there was a bigger idea here that was a very viable business opportunity,” Ms. Tomer said.

Ms. Tomer was very polite, professional, and of course I was pleased to be affiliated, even tangentially, with her website. I hope she’s able to parlay Mrs. O into a great success, for at least eight years…

(Apology to Brian Eno for the title snatch)

Fascinating overview of the 21st phenomena of Digital Intimacy¹ by Clive Thompson in Sunday’s NYT Magazine. I’m old and crusty enough to still be an old-fashioned introvert, but I’ve certainly exposed and expressed my thoughts to a much wider audience in the last couple of years than all my college years combined².

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.

…

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

[Click to read more of I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com]

As far as following people I don’t know: I learned from Flickr to be careful who I follow, otherwise the data stream becomes overwhelming. I’m usually not interested in baby photos of strangers, nor of parties I’m not invited to filled with people I’ve never met. Still, I know a lot more about acquaintances and friends from the past than I ever thought feasible, or enjoyable, and I’m quite delighted with the interconnectiveness of it all.

Oh, and for me, twitter became interesting after I:

1. connected it to my cellphone, but not getting updates every time somebody posted, just so that I could post while bored in waiting rooms and in airports, yadda yadda.

2. started using a third party application instead of the twitter webpage (I use the free version of twitterific, there are other clients)

1. Like this blog, for instance, or twitter, Facebook, Flickr, tumblr, FriendFeed, LibraryThing, you get the idea [↩]
2. which lasted from 1986-1993, if you are curious [↩]

RIP, Tina

Sad news indeed. Friend of this blog, and friend of me, Tina Oiticica Harris has passed away after a long bout of anarchic illness. We’ll miss you Tina!

Around 3am this morning, I woke up with a weird sense of anachronism about Tina’s 56th birthday.
Unfortunately, Tina-la-vecina as she was known in the Santa Monica Unified School District checked in Hotel California on Monday and isn’t available to solve this riddle.

[Click to read more An anarchic birthday]

[The Rookery - 35mm, Illford film, Nikon 8008, scanned in Photoshop 3.5, or maybe 4.0]

Received my copy of this collection of essays, put together by Friend of B12 (FOB, as it were), Ginger Mayerson. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks good. Damn good. The front and back cover are photos of mine, so if you are creating a library of my published works, go ahead and order a copy (the Lulu Press version is larger, and is only $7, or you can order a slightly smaller version at Amazon for $9).

The Journal of Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1, is a collection of the following blog essays: On Essays by Paul M. Rodriguez, Liberal Fascism: An Interesting Moral Question by Steve Gimbel, Paint Splatters & Pixie Dust by Dan Kelly, Ten Dates of Christmas? Ten Lords A Leaping: The Gallant Mariner by Deborah Teasdale, Vanity by Susan O’Doherty, The Pillory of Hillary by Becki Jayne Harrelson, Reparation… by TJ Bryan, Richer Than The Sum Of My Skirt by Birdie C. Jaworski, The Music’s Between Us by Kathy Moseley, How to Scare People With Statistics by Tom Good, Red Lipstick by Eva Lake, Barbarella: A Woman of her Time? by Patti Martinson, An Invert’s Manifesto by Chad Denton, Roadtripping by Molly Kiely. Enjoy!

[From The Wapshott Press » J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon]

The Journal of Bloglandia is soliciting essays for a second volume, with more details here

(repost*)

Simon Dumenco is not impressed by the Huffington Post’s business model.

Last week, the Huffington Post, the liberal news/political blog co-founded by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, successfully lured [Betsy ]Morgan away from CBSNews.com. The inevitable headlines and analysis — about how the scrappy blog was edging ever closer to mainstreamness by luring a respected news veteran to be its CEO — was helpful not only in underscoring Huffington’s status as a national media power broker.

It also helped everyone forget Lerer’s astonishing statement in USA Today, just days earlier, that HuffPo has no plans to ever pay its bloggers. “That’s not our financial model,” he told the paper. “We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.”

Coming right out and saying that — and saying it that way, with those particular words — takes cojones. Not our financial model. Geez, wow. Not since the Pets.com sock puppet scored a deal to write his memoir (published in 2000 as “Me by Me: The Pets.com Sock Puppet Book”) has there been a more tellingly, creepily poetic new-media moment. In fact, if it weren’t for Betsy Morgan’s vote of confidence in the Huffington Post — if Morgan weren’t willing to put her career on the line to endorse the blog’s place in the media firmament — Lerer’s pronouncement could have been HuffPo’s jump-the-shark moment.
[From Advertising Age]

Gawker’s media empire doesn’t pay its writers much either, but both Gawker and HuffPost bloggers get paid more than B12’s stable of bloggers (who make about a dime a day, after expenses are paid. Those Google ads on our sidebar bring in less and less.) Dumenco continues:

First of all, arguably, it’s the other way around: Despite Arianna’s cable-news omnipresence, it’s the excellent work of such regular bloggers as Harry Shearer, Nora Ephron and Bill Maher that gave HuffPo visibility, promotion and distribution. They lent their credibility and influence — and their built-in audiences (Shearer with his radio show, Maher with his “Real Time” on HBO, Ephron with the fans of her books and movies) — to Arianna and Ken. And for what? Bupkis now — and bupkis forever! (Suckas!)

Second, the vast majority of the Huffington Post’s bloggers get virtually no significant visibility, promotion or distribution simply because there are so damn many of them — 1,800 at last count, which means that unless you’re one of Arianna’s favorites (and/or a scoop-slinging insider), you’re probably rarely going to get on the home page — and if you do, only fleetingly.

Third, the Huffington Post actually does pay some of its bloggers — the ones it has on staff, such as “Eat the Press” media editor/blogger Rachel Sklar — so the financial model is, well, what then? Pay some of the bloggers some of the time? Don’t pay the bloggers who are wealthy enough from their real gigs not to care? That, to me, is not only not a real “financial model,” it’s a wacky, ad hoc, college-newspaper-esque compensation scheme unworthy of a self-proclaimed “great company.”

Mind you, Lerer has also claimed that the Huffington Post will be profitable in 2008 — after burning through at least $10 million in venture capital. If HuffPo ever gets a lofty valuation — through an IPO or through the sale of a publicly valued stake — the serfs will surely revolt as they watch Lady Arianna and Lord Ken and their backers get rich(er).

I’ll admit I was skeptical when the Huffington Post launched, but I do glance over there from time to time, and do find stories of interest to me occasionally. There are so many bloggers though, that I’d guess 80-100 entries are posted a day, and who has time to read them all?

* From time to time, I’m reposting articles from my old blog to my new. No reason, really, other than the best way to test something new is to use it, use it, use, you gotta work it, work it. I’ll try to remember to try [sic ]to append *reposted. Please don’t be irritated if I forget.