Bloggasm

If I wanted to open a link in a new tab, I would right click on it and do so. Please don’t set the page so every time I click on a link it opens a new window.

Thanks,
Simon

Ps. Is there a way to override this? Also, I noticed that sometimes when I click on links at Digg it opens the page in a new window and other times it doesn’t. What am I missing here?

It wasn’t long after Google acquired the advertising company DoubleClick for over $3 billion that it announced that it would be laying off 300 DoubleClick employees.

Now we learn that shortly before laying them off, Google required all DoubleClick employees to sign non-compete contracts, meaning that after leaving the company they couldn’t work for a competitor for a full year.

I really despise non-compete contracts for lower-level employees. If you’re the owner of a company and you get bought out and accept an offer, then I completely agree that the company buying out should have you sign such a contract. But forcing an employee who had no say whatsoever in the buyout process, an employee who has no financial stake in the company (other than the fact that it supplies his pay checks) and didn’t benefit from the buyout at all, to sign one of these contracts? I understand why it’s done but I also think it should be tough shit on the buyer’s part.

With the decline of the newspaper industry I think this is going to become a real problem. Just as those laid off DoubleClick employees won’t be able to take a job within the industry for at least a year, these newspaper reporters are getting screwed out of making legitimate career moves just because their publishers jumped ship.

The weekend is so close I can taste it. Despite the fact that I did almost no internet surfing today, I somehow have managed to amass quite a number of links. I must have been a web junkie yesterday. Here is some media-related news for your amusement:

1. Apparently back in 2006, Senator Joe Lieberman accused his Democratic challenger Ned Lamont of hacking his website. Well, it turns out the FBI has known for almost two years that this claim was complete BS.

2. A NY Times reporter embedded in Iraq gives his first-hand account of what it’s like to be held up at the purgatory-like checkpoints and the paranoia that journalists over there face every day.

3. Want to hear something bizarre? Rush Limbaugh’s fans listen to his ads more often than they listen to him. Of course, sometimes they’re doing both at the same time, since talk radio hosts often do mini-infomercials themselves. Does anybody else find it funny when they do this? It’s hilarious to hear Limbaugh puff up his manly war chest during his show, only to become a company’s bitch two minutes later so he can shill for its product.

4. Is it wrong to get off on pornography that uses the Holocaust for titillation? “In early-1960s Israel pornographic, possibly anti-Semitic novels that detailed sensational tales of the torture and rape of male concentration camp prisoners by curvaceous female Nazi guards rapidly rose from marginal pulp reading to mass-market popularity.”

5. Possibly some good news. Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who was detained and held without charges by the US government for two years, may soon be released. An Iraqi judicial committee made the order. Predictably, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin isn’t happy after she spent so much time being used as a propaganda mouthpiece to try to frame him as a terrorist in the public eye. Malkin should really deduce that when the military resorts to anonymously feeding information to a right-wing hack, they really don’t have a leg to stand on.

6. Not long ago I went off on a rant about how PR people are terrible at their jobs, and based it on my own experience dealing with them. Since writing that post, for some reason my dealings with PR people have improved greatly. I don’t know if it’s because they read the post or because I’m starting to attract a higher caliber of marketers. Media Shift talks about the Web 2.0 version of a press release and how journalists and bloggers are becoming unneeded now that PR newswires can shoot your press release directly into Google News and other news aggregators like Techmeme.

I have gone nearly six months now without cable. I keep myself fed with the occasional Netflix rental but otherwise I am now in a perpetual state of television fasting. This stems from my own cheapness rather than any objection to the medium — I moved to an apartment with more expensive rent and utilities and suddenly the idea of spending another $40 a month on cable seemed much less necessary.

But before this plunge I watched anywhere from a half hour to an hour of cable news a night, usually when exercising. Though in the past I was pretty eclectic about which network to watch, sometime early in 2007 I settled on watching MSNBC almost exclusively. What show I watched depended entirely on when I got around to exercising that night, but more often than not I would find myself following the ping-pong match that is Chris Mathews’s Hardball.

At first, I found the show entertaining. But then when we entered February and March of 2007, Matthews, unlike the rest of America, which was just starting to prepare itself for a presidential season, was ready to draw blood. He became obsessed, in every single episode, — every single god damn night — with who may or may not run. When he didn’t have a potential presidential candidate to pester with his annoying “areyagonnarun??” prattle, he and his guests would spend 15 to 20 minutes of every night repeating the same “analysis,” a mixture of the obvious and wildfire predictions not tied to any actual public opinion polls.

Soon, I found myself reaching some kind of internal crescendo and having to change the channel in the same way that I had to switch off the radio after listening to Dr. Laura Schlessinger tell yet another pregnant mom that she better quit her job and abandon the feminist notion of a career. You reach a point sometimes when bottlenecking no longer gives you pleasure; just as some movies are so bad that they sink lower than the realm of camp, Matthews had managed to frustrate me to the point of driving me away.

But then came the six months without cable and I didn’t give him much thought other than reading the occasional blog post or media article panning him. Today, though, I revisited Matthews at length when I read a profile of him in the New York Times Magazine Suddenly I was barraged with flashbacks of his contrived “Ha!” and duck-like speech, his sportscaster play-by-play shallowness, his horse race coverage. I realized then that he is the epitome of what’s wrong with cable news.

Matthews is the antithesis of wonkery. He and his guests almost never provide insight to policies; there is no depth given to the issues themselves, other than the occasional argument over whether a specific platform can get pushed through into law. Candidates like to repeat the cliche that they’re not running for themselves, they’re running for the country. But Matthews shows no pretense over his coverage; it is about the candidate. His show is a character study of the presidential hopeful, a back-and-forth sportscaster analysis.

What’s worse is that he is the definition of the mainstream media’s bizarre concept of a “centrist.” To them, fair and balanced isn’t about truth, it’s about making sure the scales are equally weighted with both liberals and conservatives. All opinions are created equal in this cable news world, regardless of which opinion is held up by facts. Nothing three dimensional is ever revealed in this world because, to pundits like Matthews, politics is a continuous game of “gotcha.”

To illustrate my point, take a look at this quote from Matthews’s profile:

On the morning of the Cleveland debate, Matthews was standing in the lobby of the Ritz when Russert walked through, straight from a workout, wearing a sweat-drenched Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, long shorts and black rubber-soled shoes with tube socks. “Here he is; here he is, the man,” Matthews said to Russert, who smiled and chatted for a few minutes before returning to his room. (An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, tried, after the fact, to declare Russert’s outfit “off the record.”)

If MSNBC is so afraid of being candid about something as simple as Russert’s exercise outfit, then why should we expect anything more from the politicians they’re supposed to cover? MSNBC — and other cable news channels — have become the two-faced political machines they’re supposed to counteract. They’re nothing but noise.

Anybody who has spent considerable time on the internet knows that one downside to online life is how easy it is to get caught up reading (and possibly participating in) an internet flame war. What’s most frustrating about this tendency is the fact that once you snap out of it and force yourself to stop, you come to this self-realization that you’ve just completely wasted an hour of your life performing an utterly inconsequential task. Despite the fact that you’ve spent the entire time reading, you haven’t learned anything new and chances are you’ve managed to get yourself annoyed with anonymous people, most of whom never even bothered giving their real names.

So the reason I’m telling you all this is because that’s my excuse for why I have so few links for you today. So here are (a small number) of media-related links for your amusement.

1. This year’s Pulitzers have been announced. Given that these link lists always result in me having to post news a day or two late and just about every media blog out there has already reported this news, I’m boring myself right now just by linking to it. Okay okay, here’s a link to Gawker trashing the Pulitzers and calling them worthless. You didn’t think I’d let you leave without a little red meat, did you?

2. Now here’s the real news. It turns out that the Huffington Post has surpassed The Drudge Report in unique visitors. I have long despised Drudge, not for his politics but because I could never for the life of me understand why he became so popular. He had an absolutely ugly site and most of the links he posts are to mainstream news sources. I could easily do his job for him by just subscribing to the RSS feeds of all the major news sites. Every now and then he publishes his own scoop, but they’re usually factually inaccurate and relatively rare. In fact, the only time I ever visited his website was when I was reading some news feature about how Drudge rules our world. Then I almost had to visit the site just to confirm, in my head, “You mean that Drudge?”

3. A new study released recently shows that news readers and newspaper editors widely disagree on how comments should be moderated on news websites. It brings up the good point that if editors are expected to avoid anonymous sources unless absolutely necessary, then anonymous commenting should be similarly shunned. I’m not necessarily against anonymous commenting, but I rarely, if ever, engage in it myself.

4. Will Feminism and porn ever be compatible? I explored this issue a long time ago over here. I think the problem with trying to remain PC when making porn is the fact that a lot of sexual turn-ons are non-PC. I’m not an expert on sexual theory, but I would think there’s some (dark) correlation between what is forbidden and what turns us on. This provides a dilemma for pornographers.

Not a day goes by when you don’t read an article bemoaning how Craigslist, the free classifieds site, is swiftly wiping out paid advertising in newspapers (it’s poised to bring in $81 million in revenue in 2008). Publishers groan at the realization that consumers will never pay for a product when they can get it for free. In newspaper board rooms the company’s name is no-doubt uttered in lowered, ominous tones.

But more and more we’re also reading articles about the dark side of Craigslist and what happens when you set the bar so low that there’s no cost for entry. Just recently, two hoaxers posted a fake advertisement that resulted in an Oregon man’s home being looted, most of his worldly possession taken away. In 2006, a man named Jason Fortuny posted a fake sex ad on Craigslist pretending to be a woman wanting some BDSM sex. After several men responded, sending their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and even nude pictures, he then placed all their information on the web so that these people were damned to a life of embarrassment and humiliation, their emails forever just a Google search away. That same year I performed my own (now-famous) Craigslist experiment where I created fake no-strings-attached ads for different sexual orientations and found out that straight women receive so many replies to advertisements that it’s virtually impossible for a straight male to get sex through Craigslist.

But these are just the more radical examples. To understand what I mean, look no further than the job listings at the Richmond Virginia Craigslist. If you comb through those listings you’ll find out that only a tiny percentage of them are legitimate. Most don’t even list the name of the company to which you’re applying. That’s because many of the advertisements are placed there by job recruiting agencies, basically urban cockroaches that try to gather resumes and place you in an admin job while scraping away a commission. To test out how easy it was, I just placed a fake job advertisement and it took less than three minutes.

That’s what happens when you offer a service for nothing. You have such an overloading avalanche of those trying to utilize a free service that the more legitimate advertisements are drowned out. Don’t believe me? Try replying to a female-for-male ad in the “no strings attached” section. I guarantee you that you’ll get a response asking you to visit a woman’s webcam or a dating website. In fact I’d be surprised if more than a single female in the “no strings attached” section is posting a legitimate ad.

So what happens when you charge money for the advertising, as is done in newspapers? Suddenly, the cost for placing illegitimate and spammy advertisements is much, much higher. A job recruiter agency can’t go in and place dozens of fake ads in a day because it would cost thousands of dollars. The profit margin for landing a commission quickly heads south, probably into the negatives.

But that’s the cost of free. Even if every advertisement were legitimate on Craigslist, the rush of those trying to cash in on the free service diminishes the effects of each individual advertisement. As classified ads in newspapers lessen, each individual ad becomes more powerful. You get more bang — i.e. more responses — for your buck.

The only question is how long it will take the consumer to realize this. How many lackluster responses does a person need to get before he decides to try the paid route and cash in on the benefits of doing so?

Posted below is a screen shot for today’s most popular technology stories (linked to by bloggers) at The New York Times. As you can see, nearly all of them center around online media rather than offline gadgetry (the only one not about online media focuses on a new kind of camera). That’s not surprising, since bloggers tend to link to articles about the media in which they work. This trend could possibly explain the “blogger” stories like the one I wrote about earlier today.

Of course the newspaper can’t ignore the traffic numbers. And the editor of the paper has already said that one day, in the not so distant future, the New York Times will be an online-only news source. Given this, will more and more of its focus shift away from the real world to this virtual one? Will they just start churning out ego-boosting profiles on bloggers knowing that they’ll reward them with lots of links?

Here’s the screen shot: