Salam Pax discovers blogs
: Salam Pax tells how he discovered blogs and how Saddam’s censor didn’t discover him:
With blogs the web started talking to me in a much more personal way. Bits of news started having texture and most amazingly, these blogs talked with each other. That hyperlink to the next blog – I just couldn’t stop clicking. And the best thing about it was that Mr Site Killer had absolutely no clue.
Cheap bastards
: There was a minor stink over the pricing of Bloggercon, the Harvard weblog conference (I didn’t sniff at it; I’ve registered, with credit card). But that’s nothing compared with this:
I was asked to be on a panel about blogging at the Online News Association‘s conference in Chicago. Now, I avoid industry professional conferences like the plague — well, actually like I avoid memberships in professional associations — because I find they tend to be insular schoozefests that waste time and companies’ money. But this was about blogging and so I thought it was God’s work to go.
But I just found out that they not only want me to fly to Chicago on my dime and stay there on my dime (in a hotel with no Internet access — did they say this was the Online or Offline News Association?) and ruin my weekend (why would anyone have a conference on a weekend? — I smell a trend here and I don’t like it) and participate in creating the very content that is the conference … but then they want to charge me $475 for the privilege. That’s nerve.
Here’s my first object lesson about blogging for the ONA: Whatever you do to a blogger is likely to be blogged, with snark.
I’ll give you that advice for free.
Ticket to Norway, please
: A study of young Norwegian men and women and sex reveals:
: Young women in Norway make their sexual debut at an earlier age than men.
: Young women tend to enjoy sex more than young men.
: Young Norwegian women have had more sex partners than young Norwegian men.
: Women have become more aggressive in bed than their male partners….
“What’s worrisome is that young men are now more likely to sit alone in their rooms and masturbate while young women go out in the world and live out their newly liberated sexual lives,” said Pedersen, who was responsible for the study.
It also found that men now are the ones who crave more intimacy, kissing and hugging, long considered to be what women wanted most.
That’s just Norwegian men, of course.
Marketing 102
: Just wondering why Amazon — smart marketer of the Internet — keeps a Segway ad in the prime real estate atop its page. Surely, they can’t sell enough of the things to make it pay. Does it make them look cool? Does it pay off for their investment in Segway? What could be the rational explanation?
The Internet doesn’t need editors. The Internet is the editor
: Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc., appeared on a Fortune panel about media consolidation and said:
The consolidation of the media is not as big a concern to me as the proliferation of unchecked media on places like the web. And that scares me more than anything.
Let’s get this straight again: The media online is far from unchecked; its ass is fact-checked to hell and back by its own audience.
UPDATE: Answering a few questions in the comments. No, I am not calling Ken Layne an ass. I’m sure some have. But I am not. I am trying to give him credit for his legendary line that we, the online army, fact check your ass, big media and big pundits and big politicians. So I linked to him from the word “ass,” thinking myself quite clever. But let it be known that Ken Layne has many allies watching out for him. I apologize. We fact-check your thigh, how’s that?
