Bloggasm

In the youthful, tech world of the Digg.com audience, Microsoft is seen as the monolithic devil. It seems odd then that Digg decided to switch from its Google ads program to a new one put out by Microsoft.

As can be expected, Diggers aren’t happy. The link to the article is full of biting sarcasm, and the thread has already amassed nearly 500 comments, many of them negative.

The above-linked article seems to suggest that this is some kind of major blow to Google. But with their diverse google adsense program, spanning over thousands of websites, I don’t see how a single site, no matter how popular, can provide much of a dent.

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Related posts:
1. The Google-fication of Facebook
2. Online advertising increase keeping up with print advertising decrease?

I don’t frequent online message boards as much as I used to, but I know from experience that you’ll see some of the nastiest fights imaginable–especially in political threads– in little corners of the web frequented by trolls. There have been several instances where the rhetoric has grown so heated that people posted their home addresses to try to provoke the flamers into a physical, real-world fight. In one message board I read, a person had his membership at a science fiction convention revoked because he had threatened another attendee of the con.

To my knowledge, none of these real-world fights ended up happening. But recently, a man was sentenced for driving 1,300 miles in his car to burn down the trailer of another internet troll who had taunted him.

Though blogs have been covered thoroughly by the mainstream media, I’ve seen very few spotlights on online message boards. There are many that are frequented by thousands of people every day, and they’re likely a significant portion of online media. This is just one example of the potency of online flame wars, and how they have a tendency to escalate into outright chaos.

So I was reading up on The New Republic “scandal” at Sadly, No!, and I followed a link to the right-wing political blog Little Green Footballs. But rather than being led to that post, the link was rerouted to a screen screaming “You are a idiot [sic]” at me. The bloggers at Little Green Footballs most likely deflected the link to that page, which was largely debunked by Sadly, No!

Is this a new kind of “sore loser” journalism? Rather than owning up to mistakes, bloggers are now launching petty “gotcha!” attacks on readers who scrutinize the accuracy of their posts? This really is a new low for the right-wing blogosphere.

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Related posts:
1. Glenn Greenwald interviews Helen Thomas
2. The Al Gore smear
3. Wired writer pays her way onto the front page of Digg
4. Cool piece of journalism: Infiltrating the neocons

Editor and Publisher has a good article detailing the difficulties that companies like Nielson have in measuring internet metrics. Page views, long considered the best way to measure a website’s importance, have since been discredited as only a minor factor. Because of these difficulties, advertising companies are becoming reluctant to strategize their ad spending online. Though online ad spending will increase 25% this year, it’s being partially hindered by all this confusion.

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Related posts:
1. How sites like Digg change the news
2. Community newspaper revenue on the rise still

Perhaps my most famous bloggasm article to date is my “Your chances of getting laid through Craigslist” piece, in which I made up a bunch of fake casual encounters ads and placed them on craigslist to see how many responses each would get. I was reminded of this study today when I read “Married Man Seeks Same for Discreet Play” in New York. It details the life of a closeted gay man with a wife and child who uses Craigslist every week to meet other gay men anonymously.

Remember this incredibly lazy piece of journalism where CNN’s Paula Zahn decided to have an atheist-bashing “debate” without inviting on a single atheist? I’ve never held her in high regard ever since, and I’m not very sad to see that she’s leaving CNN after several years of bad ratings.

This is pretty impressive, Myspace has managed to remove nearly 30,000 registered sex offenders from the website. I’m not quite sure, however, what keeps them from just creating new profiles under different names.

I found it humorous in the above-linked article how the writer tries to tie sex offenders to the rise of online pornography:

The MySpace sex offenders figure was released as pornography is flooding the American culture. According to comScore Media Metrix, more than a third of the U.S. Internet audience visited sites that fit into the online “adult” category. And 44 percent of males ages 18-34 say viewing pornographic material is morally acceptable, a 2006 Morality in Media study found.