Oh, the internet
If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
It occurred to me that as a result of the internet, I have no idea how to pronounce: “Jason Calacanis.”
Oh I have a perfectly good idea of who he is and what he does and so on and so forth, but I’ve never actually heard his name said. I’ve been saying it like “Cala-CAN-is,” with the emphasis on the third syllable. But it could just as easily be “Cal-AH-canis” with the emphasis on the second syllable.
TOTALLY different name. I may never know which is correct.
Ad space is worth more than clicks
A week or so ago Jason Calacanis wrote a post about attention data and more tangentially about online advertising. He also flat out stated something that I think the web advertising community is probably (to the benefit of the advertisers) ignoring more than it should:
What I really hate about the CPC and CPL models is that when you embrace them you’re saying that there is no value to the impression. That looking at an advertiser is worth nothing. I’ll never except that as a publisher. No one clicks on a billboard or magazine ad and people pay a lot of money for those.
The wild, unbridled success of the Google pay-per-click model of advertising, especially in the “long tail” (did I use that term right?) market of individual blogs all over the world, has helped to define the way in which money is being spent on online advertising. The projected $50 to $100 million businesses are spending this year is quite probably based largely in the text-click-pay model.
The problem is that the more success theGoogle method enjoys, the more it hurts the greater web publishing sphere. Pay-per-click works wonderfully well in any service where users visit a site with the intention of clicking on a link. If you make a search in Google and an ad pops up that happens to be the most relevant link, there’s no reason not to click on it. Voila! Money for Google, click for the ad.
This method breaks down horribly on pages with content. All of a sudden, the web page is trying to keep the reader rather than send it somewhere else. In other words, most sites aren’t designed around sending viewers elsewhere — if they were, there’d be a lot less internet to go around.
But the pay-per-click model ignores the value of exposure. If a content site gets several million page views per months, that means a top banner gets several million impressions per months, which means that several million viewers have been exposed to your product. Throughout the history of advertising, this is how the equation has worked. Why is the click so important?
The bottom line is that there’s value in exposure, folks, and most of us are giving it away for free.
Two-minute mysteries
I remember that as a child I used to love reading through those little books of two-page mysteries, where some hard-boiled detective would walk into a crime scene, ask two questions, and solve the puzzle. Then he’d turn to the metaphorical camera and go “how ‘bout you, kid? You figure it out?”
I very quickly figured out that the answer was always the exact same: turn the page upside down and some idiot had written down his mistake.
The funniest bit, however, is what kinds of clues always solve the case. In some mystery about a “suicide,” someone claims they saw the dead man kick over a stool, but you couldn’t see a stool from where the man was standing. Clearly, hedunnit. In another mystery, someone claims they heard jingling change, but the dead man only had one coin in his pocket! Hedunnit.
This is ridiculous. Memory (at least mine) is about as reliable as British Telecom, and besides, just because people were lying or mistaken doesn’t mean they’re murderers. Next we’ll read the mystery about the man who saw Bigfoot but really killed Charleton Heston. Or better yet a woman who decides to go cliff jumping is killed by a man who swears he saw her jump from the cliff but he clearly couldn’t because he was in fact tied up and wrapped in an oriental rug stuffed in the back of a Volkswagen hatchback halfway down I-45. These things happen.
If this happens
Whatever else you say about Apple, they’ve done modern entertainment about x-billion times better than Microsoft, and if I can get a box that does DVR + iTunes (which is increasingly becoming my PC-media central), I am so insanely all about it. Especially if it’s priced to compete with the Xbox 360, which is MS’s real move into that arena.
But this is all speculation.
Hijacking the broswer
AOL has made a few “whoops” moves in the past week or so, ranging from shoving AIM bots into the top of everyone’s buddy lists to adding ad banners to unsuspecting AOLJournal users, and they’ve recieved a bit of a “bruhaha” (as Jason Calacanis puts it) in the blogosphere in the past couple of days. Personally, I’d add something to the matter but Clacanis has basically covered all the important things on his own blog, so why repeat?
But what gets me is that the other day I updated to the newer version of Wizz RSS for my newsreading fun in the hope that they’d added a feature I made up (you know, since they’re telepathic and all): that double-clicking on any of the RSS feed headers would take me to the feed’s respective home page. That would be sweet.
Unfortunatley, the only noticeable change is that Wizz now hijacks my broswer and sets my start page to the Wizz Computing homepage, regardless of how I configure Firefox. This is phenominally uncool.
So I’ve sent a little feedback note / question to “Andrew,” the guy who runs things there, and we’ll see if I can clear this up. If not, I guess I’ll go searching for an older and less intrusive version of the plugin.
UPDATE: I did hear back from them, quite quickly, and it turns out that I just had to re-install the plugin because there must have been some glitch in the install file I was using — regardless, it’s all fine and dandy now. I should go ahead and suggest the feature I thought of ;)
Space Blankets
Yesterday I discovered that the dark navy overcoat I brought out to England is surprisingly warm. It does a better job of keeping me warm than my leather jacket, which I thought was my warmest piece of clothing here, due to its thick fluffy inner lining. My overcoat not made of wool, and is in fact incredibly thin.
The only explanation I can think of is that the plastic-like lining inside this thing (which, incidentally, is rain proof since the coat is reversible) is secretly a space blanket. Space blankets, along with Tang and that pen than can inexplicably write in any position ever,* is one of the great things to come out of NASA during the space race. Never mind that landing on the moon stuff.
Although it doesn’t look like NASA has done much recently aside from providing public explosions, I think there’s still some deep-seated sense of glamour in searching the stars for other aliens and, more importantly, a better way to preserve space piss. Let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be an astronaut?
—-
* I’m not sure which is more impressive: that NASA spent hundreds of thousand dollars inventing a pen that would write in zero-g, or that Russia just used pencils.
The Bubble Project
This is a really cool thing that I spotted in some sort of newspaper a while back. I forget exactly when, but I’ve been trying to remind myself about it for ages, and finally I’m online when I remember it. It’s called The Bubble Project.
How it works is this guy, Ji Lee, goes around posting black speech bubbles over all sorts of advertisements, and then waits for random people to fill in the space. Sort of directed graffiti and social commentary, I guess. But there are some pretty funny and interesting resuts. I’ve posted a vew below, or you can browse the whole gallery yourself.
In search of a new image
[ EDIT: I’m on a different computer right now, and I can’t for the life of me get it to show the new style sheet. I know I replaced the files, so what is this browser loading? I haven’t got a clue. Stupid internet. ]
If you haven’t noticed already, I tend to redecorate the site once a month or so because a) web design is a hobby, and b) I get bored.
I’m currently in the mood to make the top banner a lot narrower, but in the process my image has been crunched and recrunched a thousand times, plus it somehow deleted the blog title that Wordpress puts up there automatically.
I’m going to try to find something that looks a little better in the next day or so.
The Mousetrap
I just got back from spending the weekend in London, where for the first time in my life I saw Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap. It was really fun to watch, especially since I spent the first half of the play thinking “my God, their accents are flawless.”
It also occurred to me that I do not actually know the words to “Three Blind Mice.”
I was also very proud of myself for figuring out the mystery (well, at least correctly guessing who the murderer was) halfway through the play. I congratulated myself on that accomplishment for about ten minutes before I realized how incredibly geeky it was to guess the ending to an Agatha Christie mystery.
Pretty soon I’m going to start guessing the winners of world-championship Monopoly, then Scrabble, then Mancala. At that point I will have mastered the art of geeky-guesswork and can retire to a large house on the hilltops where I’ll sit around working on my fake British accent and asking for Jeeves*.
—
* P.G. Wodehouse
Reading Chuck
I’ve been meandering slowly through the essays in Non-Fiction, which, as far as I can tell, has been re-titled and re-issued as “Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories.” It’s a maddening process.
Authors influence me like red dye influences water. I read Chuck, I want to write Chuck.
The problem is that he has a style that is so easily and ironically mistaken for a garish disregard of “the usual.” In actual fact, he’s a lot more complex than that, but that’s easy to forget when you sit down to write in his voice.
Like Douglas Adams’ The Salmon of Doubt, Non-Fiction is a collection of essays that make me feel inadequate. I read them and think to myself that if I spent as much time on each sentence as they obviously have, I might write with some style. Some pizzaz.
I never do.
I also don’t think that I could ever write with Chuck’s humor. Oh, he’s funny, to be sure. But his humor is like finding your grandfather’s vibrator.
Thanksgiving happened
I’m not usually one for posting about the little events in life. I figure that, hey, it’s Thanksgiving, and most people either already know that or don’t care.
Suffice it to say that I had a wonderful dinner, successfully baked a pie for the first time in my life, and was suitably thankful that the original pilgrims waited long enough to take food from the Native Americans before they set about stealing the country from them.
Hey, look!
Pubs will be open later than 11pm this weekend.
Are bloggers journalists?
I myself am not.
There’s some legal mumbo-jumbo going on about Judith Miller and the right for journalists to keep sources secret, and that’s all very important, but somewhat ancillary to the blogosphere. In my mind, there’s no real question about journalists; secret sources should be protected, because anonymity can be unbelievably important in the work that they do.
The question is whether or not bloggers should enjoy the same protection. Some people think yes. I think no.
There are a few simple reasons that the average blogger shouldn’t be given that kind of protection, most importantly because we run into a slippery slope problem. No doubt there are reputable and important bloggers who might want to conduct some secret interview, and would enjoy that protection in a legitimate way.
But anyone with an internet connection can make a blog. And if I can think of about eight million ways to make myself immune to a Supreme Court subpoena with a free Google service, then we have a big wrench in the justice system machinery. Press, as it is now, requires a license. There’s an official line drawn between what’s protected press and what’s not, and with that line comes accountablility that can’t be applied to a blog.
I’m not saying that a blog isn’t a publishing platform. That’s ridiculous and untrue. What I am saying is that there’s a legal distinction between the press and the public for a reason, and that reason is still valid.
Sidebar woes
My FlickR badge doesn’t seem to be working on the sidebar anymore. I’m kind of hoping it fixes itself sometime soon, but if it doesn’t I guess I’ll have to go back and rebuild the damn thing, then stick in in the code again. Doh.
Also, the sidebar Google Ads tend to disappear every now and then. The fact that they show up on other pages just fine suggests that maybe the googlebot just isn’t finding keywords on my main page right now. I do so love “debugging” my page.
Why I hate reality TV
Ever since people figured out what Reality TV was years ago, I’ve disliked it. I’m sure that my opinion isn’t the most valid since I barely watch any TV at all (and for some reason I’m a little proud of that), but I’m not really trying to convince anyone else that they don’t enjoy it, because that would be silly. It has, however, taken me a long time to put my finger on what bothers me about it.
As far as I can tell, reality TV is spectacle. These shows are based on human conflict and competition derived from ridiculous social stereotypes.
While as a comedian I have to appreciate the humor of stereotypes in general, it’s hardly spectacle. In fact, when you boil it down, reality TV is basically a half-hour of people being either dumb or annoying. And I get really impatient with both of those things, especially when I feel like people are in fact smarter than that.
As a result, I get impatient with reality TV. It’s not entertaining to watch; it’s just annoying. It’s a half-hour of me going “come on!” and grinding my teeth.
No thank you.
-
Subscribe
-
Jason's Shared Items
-
Contact Me
j [at] jason-preston.com
AIM/Skype: Jasonp107 -
MyBlogLog
-
Admin