BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: Weblogs

  • Consider the source

    113 comments on Consider the source

    A certain blogger and comment troll I won’t name or link to – nya, nya — has been getting lots of links in the last two weeks with his list of ham-handed, sophomoric insults, some sexual, aimed at those he thinks are right-wing bloggers. I went back to look at some of his trollish comments here just to give you a sample of how this little gut talks. Here’s what he said to one woman in a comment:

    Trying pouring drano down your throat, then slap a piece a duct tape over your mouth. Shake well.

    Consider that he also made remarks about Malkin’s “tits” — not to mention affirmative action “jokes,” dismissing that Democratic cause. Somebody ought to take away his official PC Club membership card. He’s the guy who tries to decree who’s liberal. But I don’t think he’s really liberal.

  • For sale?

    9 comments on For sale?
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    B.L. Ochman hears and reports rumors that Technorati is about to be bought by a search engine. I hope it’s not Google! Follow the buzz on technorati with the technorati tag.

    : LATER: And now I’m seeing rumblings that it’s not true. Note that another company (whose name I lost) spent the day denying rumors that it was bought by Google.

    Is it money or rumors that make the world go ’round? I forget.

  • The numbers

    19 comments on The numbers
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    Two people I respect tweaked me — one in a post, one in email (both with a business interest in the matter) — for what I wrote about the comScore kerfluffle (or efforts to start one). I think they misread me but that probably means I miswrote it, so let me restate to be clear:

    First, I am delighted that we have the comScore research. I think this is incredibly important in the growth of blogs as a business — for those who want it to be a business — for this states their metrix in terms that advertisers will respect and understand… and buy. Remember that I pushed very hard for such research to be undertaken at Bloggercon II.

    Second, the things in the results that don’t sound sensible can probably be corrected with improved methodology and I hope that comScore is smart enough to call upon the expertise of this open world to help them improve that methodology. Fred asks for Jason to hand over his server logs to help them and he asks for time and he’s right:

    The issue with panel research is you need time to develop the statistical algorithms that weight the panel data correctly before you scale the numbers. And you need a very good dictionary of the domains you track. These take time to nail down. Clearly Comscore hasn’t nailed it yet, but they never said they had.

    But third, even with the best study, I stand by my point that panel research — as valuable and necessary as it is for advertising to be able to judge an even playing field of properties — is at the end of the day still bullshit. Fred argues:

    Jeff is so wrong about this that I find myself shaking my head on this one.

    First, the problem with panel research of old is small sample sizes. The panels that have been used for decades in old media are almost always less than 100,000 people primarily because it is cost prohibitive to collect data from a larger panel. Clearly that is way too small for accurate measurement.

    But Comscore invented the concept of a “megapanel” in 1999 and is currently measuring over 2 million unique Internet users. That’s the beauty of the Internet, you can measure online at a scale unimaginable offline. At that kind of scale, panel research is not only accurate, its amazingly accurate. As far back as 2001, Comscore was able to predict a missed quarter for Amazon.com. And the panel size and the technology have improved significantly since then.

    Well, I spent years in publishing and then the internet seeing how wrong panel research could be. People magazine allegedly had
    eight readers per copy     according to panel research. On the face of it, that’s absurd. But it determined the readership and thus cost per thousand and thus ad rates for People. And that paid my salary. But it was bullshit. And everybody knew it.

    Online, I saw these big panel studies rate some of my smaller sites as huge and some of my biggest sites and nonexistent. And the reason for that, clearly, was that the sample didn’t have people clicking on mice in Ratbutt, Alabama. The problem is that when you measure small things — and blogs, individual blogs, are still very small — the effectiveness of a sample panel will decrease exponentially and the impact of one reader or one missing reader can be amplified to ludicrous extremes.

    My fourth point is that, yes, I agree with Fred that Jason should take a deep breath and get over it and others who nitpicked the study should take it in the context of all such studies: They are all bullshit, so untie those knotted knickers and move on.

    For, yes, this is an important study. It shows that blogs are big and growing. It shows the relative size of their audiences against other media properties and makes them real. It starts to give advertisers (and us) the flavor for the unmedium — our interests, our habits (e.g., political blogs get more traffic from smaller audiences), our demographics, and all that.

    So what I’m really saying — though, clearly, I said it badly — is that the details and the nitpicking and the fact that it’s just bullshit doesn’t matter and so it’s not worth fighting over, especially if it can be improved. This is what advertisers need. This is what will make them buy.

    My fifth and final point is that we would be foolish to stop at this kind of syndicated research as the basis of building blogs as a business, for — just like Google AdSense — it devalues and misjudges us. We have greater value in our relationships and influence and we need to find ways to measure that. No, that is not a substitute for the basic audience metrics advertisers demand. But it will prove our higher value and we can then get paid for that higher value and that is a good thing.

  • Blog junkets

    12 comments on Blog junkets
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    The AP does a story on the blog junkets to Justice Sunday II.

    I’ve been surprised at the comments on this, with more apparent acceptance than I’d have predicted about the idea of taking money from someone who wants blog coverage. (Some of the comment carried the invisible satire tag, though.)

    I certainly understand that bloggers don’t have the money of news organizations behind them and can’t afford to travel to cover events. And that is precisely the issue: Because bloggers don’t have money, it can create an opportunity for those who want coverage. The Family Research Council was quite clever to take advantage of that (and because of it, they’ve even managed to get AP coverage before their event).

    Live8 did it, too, offering backstage passes and, as I remember, plane trips for those who covered it. And I was uncomfortable with that as well.

    That quid pro quo — especially if not disclosed — can tell the public that blog coverage, if not the blogger, can be bought.

    Of course, bloggers are hardly alone. The travel industry still gives junkets to travel writers. Editorial writers take junkets, according to the AP:

    Yoest, who worked for now-Ambassador Robert H. Tuttle in the Ronald Reagan White House shortly after graduating from college in 1986, got the idea to invite other bloggers while traveling on an expenses-paid trip to blog the July G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. Some bloggers’ travel expenses there were paid by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as were the expenses of some editorial writers from U.S. newspapers.

    And the entertainment industry was famous for giving trips to get press.

    I hope we don’t find ourselves in a position where people give things to “get blog.”

    The money crunch is coming to the big news organizations, too. That’s why we hear so much fretting over how they are going to support journalism as ad and circulation revenue fall. Mind you, it is the ad revenue — which also causes fretting and fear about church-and-state and conflict-of-interest and selling-of-souls — that gives news organizations the freedom to cover news. That money doesn’t come with an assignment for a story. Then again, of course, a paper that gets a lot of tech ads decides to start a tech section to sell more tech ads (until tech dries up).

    Now many of us in the j-world are talking about getting charities and citizens to pay directly for reporting. That does come with an assignment. That, too, can be gamed: foundations with an agenda can “underwrite” stories from independent journalists.

    Is that much different, in the end, from a foundation underwriting specific areas of coverage on NPR. You hear those promos: Health coverage underwritten by the so-and-so foundation. Without that grant, would NPR have had the same coverage? Did the foundation affect NPR’s judgement and product? Can one answer a hypothetical?

    I’m not sure where this all falls out. I’ll just repeat my own wish until we all figure it out: If you take it, disclose it.

    : LATER: In the comments, a snippy journalist (redundant?) demands to know the names of journalists who took the foundation’s money to go cover the G8. The implication is that this dastardly AP reporter lied about the pure ethics of editorialists and that I spread the libel. Well, in a quick search, I find this from the Cleveland Plain Dealer [full dislosure: a paper in the company I worked for until recently] by Elizabeth Sullivan, a columnist and editor on the editorial page:

    The One Campaign, aimed at eradicating extreme poverty, drew a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote its style of all-inclusive advocacy. The U.S. activists’ trip to Edinburgh was underwritten by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (which also subsidized some journalists’ expenses, including mine) and donated seats from Virgin Atlantic Airlines.

  • Competition

    33 comments on Competition
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    The haughtily named Chartered Institute of Journalists issues a hissy fit over news organizations encouraging citizens to gather news, saying that such efforts are “totally unacceptable and border on the irresponsible.”

    How ridiculous. I’d say that the CIJ’s attitude is journalistically offensive. We journalists should believe that more information, more news, more coverage, more knowledge are all good things for journalism and for society.

    The CIJ frets that this puts citizens in danger. Well, we’re all big boys and girls and we can make those decisions. It also complains about copyright and payment to citizen journalists. There, too, they can take care of themselves and chose to share or sell or not.

    I think the real problem here is that they can’t stand the idea the competition — maybe even competition who work for free because they believe in sharing what they know.