However, I still would avoid a media talk. Isn’t Jay Rosen going to be there, or did I misread? You don’t want to give the same talks.

On the demo: I doubt even grandmas, much less executives, will be wowed by the idea of (gasp) interactive feedback during a presentation. The audience will not be thrilled by the commenters’ acumen. Online questions and real-time answers have been demoed for at least 15 years, probably longer–well before the web (which is not the same as the internet, for those who get them confused).

I suppose you could do the “mainstream media just doesn’t get it” pitch, or the miracle of bloggers getting the “real” news out to the .00001% of the population who gives a damn, but really, if they’d wanted that they could have gotten Hugh Hewitt.

Why not talk about the low barrier to entry, the ability to set up a blog almost immediately when need demands and grab an audience instantly? Example: Times Picayune blog, which had great traffic during Katrina, I imagine, and even the weird goofy dude who was blogging from his ISP office.

Or why not talk about the advantages of being able to watch interest gather and place ads accordingly? Ask them to think of the day when a marketer can place an ad, select the desired criteria (traffic, interest, subject), and have the ad move automatically to the active sites. Transaction costs: next to nothing. Efficient ads, at least in terms of audience. Maybe we shouldn’t think about building an audience over the long-term. Maybe a blogger should dream of getting three or four big hits a year that generate thousands of dollars and get pennies for post the rest of the year.

Why not talk about the need for investment dollars to build a business infrastructure to deliver things like ads more effectively?

Why not talk about the threat of adblocking software (which is, or will be, a significant hit to your revenue stream)?

I think you are uniquely positioned to present yourself not as just another blogger bitching about the media, but as a publisher.

Not really on point, but it was annoying:

“There are a lot of smart people who’ve never gone to college.”

No, there aren’t.

        I find the question hard to answer, because I don’t know the audience, what they might be interested in, or just what kind of thing they’re really interested in.  But after reading the “Program Highlights,” the following occurs:

        One feature of new technology is what I call “cropdusters.”  Even before the Wrights flew, lots of people saw that airplanes would be useful for military purposes, mail transport, and passenger carrying.  But who saw that airplanes would be used to dump chemicals on farmers’ fields?  Who foresaw skydiving?

        Another point I’d make is the importance of a wide diverisity of ideas for new technology and new markets.  Another aviation example: in the Great War, scouts might fly over someone and drop them a message, assuming what was being dropped wasn’t too fragile, but getting one into the plane required landing the aircraft.  This was a major drawback to using airplanes as messengers.  Then, in the fifties, (I think), the problem was solved.  Using WWI technology.  By a missionary, of all people.

        Want to put things on a plane, and take them off, without landing or dropping?  Attach a bag to a rope or cable; lower the bag out of the plane; have the pilot fly in fixed radius circles around a person on the ground.  The person on the ground can open the bag, take things out, and put stuff back in, all without doing anything but slowly turning in a circle.

        There are probably lots of revenue increasing ways of using the ‘Net that just haven’t thought of yet.  So companies need to get suggestions from lots of people.

        One example of a possible cropduster is the use Universal Pictures is making of bloggers to promote their new movie Serenity.  I saw the flick for free Tuesday night.  This probably cost the studio seven or eight bucks in foregone revenue.  In return, they got a review from me that would have cost them three or four times as much if they’d paid me minimum wage for time spent watching it (and they still would have had to show me the film).  My review and additonal thoughts are on my blog.  I mailed a copy to Glenn Reynolds, he linked to me, and in the last two days I’ve had over two thousand more viewers than I’d normally get.  That works out to less than half a cent per view, and almost certainly better for Universal than clicks on a banner add.

        In fact, even if I don’t influence a single person to see Serenity, Universal will profit.  I was reluctant to see the movie, fearing that Joss Whedon’s camera technique would make me vomit (literally; I have problems with induced motion sickness in some films).  The opportunity to see it free told me I could tolerate it, so Saturday I’ll see it again, with my wife.  Two tickets sales secured by one free pass.

        Another possible point: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, its all them things you know that just ain’t so.’  Why did nuclear power fail commercially?  Well, the people who were designing and building nuclear power plants thought of them as “just another way to boil water.”  It didn’t occur to them that association of nuclear reactors with nuclear weapons would cause widespread anxiety among the public.  And most of the designers managed to forget that there was a difference to boiling water with a fire, which can be turned off almost instantly, and whose ashes are inert, and boiling water with a nuclear chain reaction, which keeps giving off heat for years.  The utility managers also forgot that, since the power plants were new, nobody really knew what it would cost to design and build the plants, what percentage of the time they’d generate electricity (vs. being down for maintainence and repair).  Instead, the utilities swallowed the “too cheap to meter” snake oil, and it ended up costing them a bundle.

        One probable example of this concern over “media piracy.”  Drop in at Baen Books’ Free Library.  Baen put an electronic copy of a certain science-fiction novel, and the sales went up!  It turns out that a lot of people, after reading some or all of a book online, end up wanting a paper copy anyway.  Baen also sells electronic copies of every book in their catalog, with absolutely no copy protection.  You want to download it multiple times?  Go ahead.  You want to make copies for use on other media?  No problem.  Baen just asks that you not rip him off.  His bottom line is doing very well.

        Nor is this unique to science fiction.  James Randi put his book “Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural,” up online, http://www.randi.org/, complete, and the sales have increased.  .  A publisher of technical works (name forgotten, alas) put their entire catalog on the web, and watched sales increase.

        Yet the same publishers who distribute free review copies and advanced reader copies, knowing they’ll have no control of them, are somehow convinced that everyone on earth is dying to rip off their latest volume.  Too bad it’s not true.  If everyone on earth stole an electronic copy of “Turgid Prose, by A. Hack,” one in a thousand would like it so much that they’d buy all Hack’s other works.  Six million sales of Hack’s “More Turgid Prose,” later, the author and publisher would be much richer.

        Again, we have a deficiency of greed, and an excess of emotion.  “Those bastids are stealing my work!”  Yes, annoying, but ask yourself how many of thieves would have bought the work in question if they hadn’t been able to steal it?  Hardly any, probably.  And how much will it be offset by the free publicity?  Most likely, more than the lost sales of the “media pirates.”

        Finally (“At last,” Simon muttered), I’d emphasize that some problems can’t be solved technologically.  To do anything new, you have to DO SOMETHING YOU AREN’T DOING NOW.  At most companies, institutional barriers are in place to stifle new ideas, and prevent new actions.

        My ironworker father told me, with great amusement, of some owner at place my father had worked at, who hired a business consultant.  The owner was angry, because the consultant was “telling my how to run my business.”  Well yes, that’s what a consultant is for.  And when a consultant is listened to, where do you think he or she gets his ideas?  Frequently, from the firm’s employees.  But no listened to their opinions, which could have been had for free.

        The reasons for ignoring such good, free advice is an excess of ego, and a deficiency of greed.  Someone really interested in revenue maximization would constantly bug his employees for more suggestions.

  Another example: when I was a fast food manager, I was periodically called to meetings about improving training.  I participated, took notes, and then went back to the store and whatever they’d said.  You see, every day, I had to report sales per manhour and dollar of labor, and I was judged on how high that ration was.  During training, neither the trainer nor trainees are producing any sales.  So I only trained when I either couldn’t avoid it, or when the trainer and trainee were going to be on the clock anyway.

        I would have been glad to train more, and do it personally (I enjoy being a trainer and being trained).  But I wasn’t about to be fired.  In order to REALLY increase training, the company would have had to allow me to deduct the time and pay of the trainer and trainee from the daily figures.  But that’s the one thing the bosses never considered.

        Well, I hope this was of some use to you.

The House of Saud Must Be Destroyed!

http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/

Great audio/visual presentation, re what happens to the NYT less than ten years out, and what becomes of printed and online news media generally. Entertaining, worthwhile, and probably as accurate as such a projection can be.

BTW: The Kool Aid remark – rude AND clich

And I’ll pass on the short-sightedness of statements such as yours.

The press continues to lose readers. The ‘net gains them. Same with income. You read TODAY’S numbers, fella? Good for you. Of course, we all know that the world today is exactly what we will see in ten years. Nothiing changes.

Reynolds gets 1/100th of the Times’ audience today. How many writers and editors does the Times have? Hundreds? Thousands? How long has the Times been in business? How long has Instapundit been published? How many people are involved in its manufacture? Where are the younger readers going? What happens if a number of such efforts consolidate and gain funding?

“Media as in multi-billion dollar media corporations.”

Oh, future projections are all about who makes money NOW. What a visionary, forward-looking persepective! Like IBM sneering at Microsoft because software would never drive profits. And IBM was ‘right’ because IBM was a multi-billion dollar company. And when Bill Gates surpassed IBM, pundits like you told everyone he had built an unsurpassable software system. Because he had built a multi-billion dollar company. Two guys running a search engine out of their dorm room called “Google” could never challenge him 7 years later.

Kool Aid. Yum.

Does blogging reading/writing lead to isolationist viewpoints? I realize to a large degree it depends upon the individuals involved, but if I were to just stay within the narrow bandwidth of blogrolls on most sites would I ever get a mixture of opinion?

How does this compare to print and TV media?

Is bloggin and media technology today facillitating a spread between left and right views, or is it helping in any legitimate discussions which are fruitful between the left and the right?

Is there a great middle which will come together or is red/blue our only colors? Purple?

Will technology as I tried to explain in my post above allow for more integrity in the field of factual reporting? Or, will it just lead to more misleading comments on statistical averages and polls?

Will technology and media converge to find aboslute truths that are acceptable for viewing how media sources report on the news?

Will media technology allow a statistical IQ rating of reporters in the future?

Will media technology report the background and bias level or reporter in the future?

Will media technology lead to Truth in Accuracy ratings of reporters and media sites?

I think the answers are all yes to some degree.

Will there eventually be a ReporterWatch.org? ding, ding, ding – search confirms reporterwatch.com is already taken.

Will this convergence of technology, media and individuals lead to a higher level of trust if news is held more accountable to the public?

Will this step lead to more accurate knowledge of governmental decisions on the micor and macro level?

Will people actually be interested to know details or will they just want to see simpler forms of technological judgements in the forms of ‘altruistic ratings’?

Will there be esatblished a reporter indexing trust rating system to rate accuracy of each individual and media outlet?

Will this line of logic scare the PJ’s off ya?

I’d think so… because technologically, this is all doable to a certain extent today.

HonestyinReporting, MediaWatch, MEMRI are all examples of showing truth from different angles, but as of yet without a TRUTH INDEX.

I’m sure however it will spring up as well as lawsuits…

I imagine that the old media representatives who are present want secretly in their hearts to fit into the new and coming, um, order. Everyone wants to fit in. Show them how.

What they need to be doing is organizing themselves the way pajama media presumably is. And they particularly need to be information sources only, helpful to and appreciated by bloggers, not in the arena players, whom bloggers will chew up and spit out.

Stick to your knitting, you can tell them, and you’ll do fine.

Alternatively, try this reality check: If your numbers were correct, then Glenn’s site would be worth something on the order of, I’m guessing, $50m-$100m, that is, $10-$20 per unique monthly visitor. (The NYTimes recently bought About.com and its IIRC 20 million unique monthly visitors for ca $500m, ie $25 per visitor).

Somehow I doubt that a one-man site of this financial value would long have escaped the notice of Draper Fisher, Kleiner Perkins, or Murdoch, Yahoo, or the Times. Or that Glenn would have passed on an offer from one or more of those firms to cash out to the tune of $50 million+.

In reality, Glenn’s audience is worth maybe a couple of million dollars at most. Not chump change but also of no interest to any financial or strategic investor.

Put more bluntly, the blogosphere is great at negative feedback on MSM, but it has no self-reliant checks and balances due to the nature of its very independent nature. If Pajama Media is an attempt to be more self regulatory with editorial reviews and oversight as well as profitable, then its well received.

I think Pajamama Media is a very apt name considering this medium only just got out of bed, whereas print media has been here for over 2000 years, ‘evovled’ and distributed into the newspapers, magazines, and books we see today with oversight and editorial staffs, reviews and sophisticated levels of peer-reviewed specialties. I’m not saying we don’t have tabloid journalism, but the print media is well adapted over the years at least some self-regulation and management.

TV while still a teenager in some aspects has very much the same oversight aspects in place for serious journalism and reporting.

I enjoy many of the blogs, but we need to face the truth as well about the utilization of such media. There is very little oversight or editorial reviews and much the reason I read certain blogs is to re-establish one’s on viewpoint. My opinions tend to be more conservative these days, therefore I go to conservative blogs, rarely do I entertain the left position in the blogosphere. Prior to the net, the blogs, one had newspaper, magazines, and TV on the local and national levels. But many cities and towns are one horse towns with regards to the printed word. The internet and now the blogs obliterated this uncomfortable boundary and opened up the world to those seeking like minded opinions, as well as reopened many eyes to the fact that there are other intelligent opinions other than those of the well established print media.

There is this hear like mentality in the blogs however. With the left-right blogosphere attitudes and gang-like turf atmosphere of roving opinions from one blog to another. If an outside opinion does appear, with ferocity and usually of one accord the gang-members attack the unwanted entry into their turf. This happens on both left and right blogs.

The exception to the rule is like for example your post on Intelligent Design(ID) where the subject broaches an area not covered by the usual gang-leader and where members then find differences among themselves heretofore unknown. Then the ease of subject matter agreement is lost and members turn their vitriol on each other.

Typically the feedback of letters to the editor or reporter in general are ‘fed back’ to just those few people. Many never read or just with a cursory quick review and no action taken. But as many have already pointed out on here, the blogosphere with instant feedback changes the feedback loop and intangles all readers together within the conversational bounds of positive and negative feedback to the original story. Insults are thrown about more freely at each other as opposed to say just directed at one person. Personalities are more easily discovered and readily earmarked for future confrontations. Emotional involvement is more at stake with interactive feedback than a simple letter to the editor. The most one can hope for in the letter phase to a newspaper was a possible printing of the letter, but there is no guarrantee for the reader that he knows if his letter was even read.

Today, the reader becomes interactive immediately which then becomes the writer, the automatic sound-wall and feedback generator allowing the original report generator/writer to gauge and engage his readers much like that of talk radio and TV.

This amounts to more robust tracking of opinions and narrowing of subject matter agreement in some cases dependent upon the writers knowledge and need for agreeable readership. It tends to provide a tunnerling effect and limited scope of opinions.

This is all to say, some good and some bad comes out of this. People when exercising their opinion rome around in packs on the net to a large extent, whereas few will buck the trend or a right or left blog. Instead, much like turf warfare in gangland, you’ll see a link-to-writers-piece, saying go check this out and the ‘member gangs’ will then all hoard onto the other blog turfdom with quick opionionated attacks and slurs agaisnt the other blog. So, instead of ‘intelligent debate’ and considered opinion, what you end up with in many instances is just a gangland like turf war with no one really listening to the other.

What is interesting to find out is if the ‘new media’ will become respectable journalism in that it will allow different opinions with a conceivable notion of fair-play and less insult oriented hacker opinions. This problem is not just one of the blog, it resonates throughout the entire web sphere.

One observation that is very interesting is the fact that within the blogosphere, the right does not ‘appear’ to have the upperhand over the left in shear numbers of participants. I have no idea if this is accurate – just a gut feeling I have based upon my browsing the web. I think this would be an area of research in regards to say comparison of talk radio which is predominately right-oriented and the left is licking its wounds with institutionalized attempts at programs such as Air America. Talk Radio came from grass roots movements of conservative individuals frustrated and angry at a media which would never show, view or hear their opinion.

The blogosphere is not limited per say to one area of frustration and opinion on the right such as talk radio and is much more diverse in political opinions. If this leads in the future to both sides of the issues being aired fairly and people willingly able to ratchet down their attacks, insults and inuendos, then maybe a more informed public will emerge that is not so extreme in nature. One can only hope, but then some avenues of this are very entertaining in and of themselves.

Back to the talk-radio and blogoshpere differences. Why is it? Education? Conservatives are more apt to a verbal feedback? Interesting to look into.

And finally back to the top of this post with observations on quick hits and no research. The blogosphere tends to be a quick hit mentality in many instances. Boom, for example – “clap trap”, “psuedo-science”, without any knowledge shared of the subject matter, of material read, of opposing material reviewed. The question then becomes one of trust of the blogger. Is it just opinion and how much can one trust the opinion of a detective novel writer who has no expertise in geology, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics or scientific methodology and statistical analysis. How does one go from sharing an opinion on the Iraq war and Israel from a conservative opinion to that of expert on all things scientific? Obviously it does not and it while it is an individuals right to comment on all facets of life and the blogosphere gives the person the ability to do so, merely stating ones opinion does not make it so.

This calls into question the accountability of the blogosphere and the attempt I am guessing at relationships such as the ‘new media’ of Pajama Media to establish itself as credible sources of information.

If one is to be credible and accountable in journalism, one must focus on specific areas of expertise, just like anyone in a related job becomes skilled and knowledgable must do. Quick opinions thrown out in a blog without any true balanced research only serve to spur membership talking points and discussion. And while I like the interactive aspects of such discussions. The original piece lacks any credibility if the Blogger does not actually research the subject upon which they opine.

It also calls into question whether or not many blogs are not just indivdually glorified opinionated ego-centric diatribes on skewered subject matter open to a vast public.

Agree with Evolution – go here, Disagree – go here. The blogoshpere still has much growing up to do if it is to be taken seriously on subject matters that call for research and not just barbed comments to the fawning fans of a particular blog. Blogs like most things these days seem to focus on the extreme opinions these days. There is no discussion per say, just agreement on left and right. Honestly I do not know if the blogosphere is helping the country come together and discuss issues or polarising it even more into smaller junks of agreeability(word?).

Nevertheless, the medium is to rich and open to advancement to be ignored and it will change how our news is generated and understood. Plus as already known – its ability to nail down the truth on important matters previously and possibly overlooked by the larger media’s funneled gate approach. Still, one has to imagine that the blogoshpere itself will somehow have to funnel and order information. Can it do in the long-term any better job than that of traditional media today?

I think that question is still up for grabs, but from a technological perspective, it is easily more doable as histrionics, database searches and programmable subject matter become more avialable to an ever increasingly demanding intellectual membership base. No longer are high paid options of database research enabled to just the few media conglomerates as more and more articles are organized by subject matter, tabulated by dates, keywords and authorship, archived and available for massive online query mechanizms which allow for immediate feedback, questioning, and review for accuracy in support of factual reporting.

This will open up new avenues of ratings heretofore unrealized such as statistical ratings on areas such as reliability, truth factors, short and long term accuracy. Reporters and even bloggers will no longer be able to just state something without having statistical analysis relayed real time to a viewing audience on accurate data.

For example – ID is not psuedo-science. That’s just an opinion. A program can detect such word usage, determine the false logic implied by such a remark and then rate it on a scale of reliable sources and data previously published online and in scientific articles by PhD’s at top universities across the nation who disagree with certain aspects of evolution, are published in peer-reviewed journals and have the scholastic background to defend such a theory as ID.

Or lets simplify things down to the New Orleans disaster and media reporting there. Online programs will detect false reporting by the simple search and addition of the statistics reported by a police report or governmental agency report of deaths by murder, natural causes and actual death by flooding and hurrican Katrina. This is being done by individuals now but can and will be programmable in the future.

Will there be differences of opinion on the truth factors as seen by the statistical analysis of research media outlets? Or course, that’s why individual opinion and the blogosphere will still have differing opinions on how things work with regards to government, politics, science and whether or not color matters as a proof of evolution.

But, the blogosphere like any other medium will eventually have to provide internal oversight and editorial review processes for any serious consideration for a broader public base which trust it as a new legitimate source of news.

It is one thing to criticize MSM. It is another entirely to replace it. It is one thing to point out bad journalism and even false evidence, such as in the case of ‘proportional’ fonts and yet another entirely to adhere to a higher standard within the blogoshpere itself. I see just as many big ego’s online now as there are in the MSM. Blogging does not a humble pie make. Nor does it insure factual reliability or reduce bias. It only insures feedback if the blogger is mostly credible. It does seem to focus the readership actually in many cases toward a bias consensus, whereby everyone slaps each others back and protects their turf.

Balanced Blogging? Can it be done? Is it being done? Examples?

These I hope are good topics, issues and areas at which to look at for your speech in New York.

I apologize up front for the rambling nature of this post, unorganized as it might be, hope it helps.

Here is Instapundit’s sitemeter:

http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s11instapundit

At 162000 hits a day, that’s about 5 million a month. He’s one guy, and yet he pulls in 1/6th of the readership of the New York Times.