Bloggasm

Rather than posting here I should be working on my state taxes (I finished federal taxes last night) but I just don’t have the energy for it tonight. Speaking of taxes, the IRS website is incredibly shitty — I know that government websites are known to be terrible but you’d think they’d take extra care with that one, considering it’s the nation’s money-maker.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. May 1 is RSS Awareness Day, which is certainly something I can support. I knew what an RSS feed was long before I actually started using them. There’s just this odd inertia that keeps you from actually getting on the bandwagon, but once you do you immediately realize it’s worth it. Signing up for RSS feeds relieves some pressure on bloggers to post around the clock because an RSS worldview doesn’t involve you having to check a website over and over again to see if it has been updated. There are some sites I subscribe to that barely ever update, and without the RSS feed I would probably never know when something new has been posted. Rather than explaining what an RSS feed is on my own terms, here’s a handy dandy link to the Wikipedia entry.

2. “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.” The description says it all.

3. Jeff Jarvis explores the true value of his blog. Rather than focusing solely on what the blog brings in through direct advertising revenue, he also adds in the money that comes in indirectly — speaking fees, book deals, other gigs — and determines that the blog is worth over a million dollars. Not bad for a site that averages only a few thousand hits a day.

4. This is pretty huge. Gawker Media has sold off three of its blogs, including Wonkette. Gawker founder Nick Denton references the coming online advertising decline, saying he’s dumping his less profitable sites in order to ride out the storm. I still find it weird, though, that they would get rid of Wonkette, which has become some sort of symbol for the rise of the blogosphere as a powerful media outlet — it was often cited in mainstream media stories about the power of blogs. It’s especially a weird move given that it’s a contentious presidential season that has resulted in rising traffic for most major political blogs.

5. It looks like we’re seeing a new use for POD: computer generated books. That New York Times article doesn’t do a great job of explaining how the guy’s company works, but I wouldn’t be able to point to more representative example of the long-tail benefits of Print On Demand.

6. It looks like AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was jailed for two years without charges, is definitely going to be released. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who led the smear campaign against Bilal, has remained mostly silent on this issue.

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.

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.

I actually got a chance today to comb through my RSS feeds at length, so for once you might find some of these links to not be a week out of date. Either way, here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. I’ve long said that the reporting on the demise of the newspaper industry rarely contains any real context because it tends to ignore the journalism industry as a whole. Though newspapers are laying off reporters, we’re seeing an increase in the number of journalists who either blog full-time or write for other online venues for a living. Gawker has published a chart of newspaper revenue over the last few decades and as you’ll see it adds even more context to the equation. Chris Anderson explains the chart at length.

2. Here is a brilliant account of the tension and parasitic relationship that website owners have with Google. Considering I’m experiencing my own falling out period with Google right now, the piece rang especially true for me. I’ll probably have a longer post on this later.

3. I’ve noticed that hard-core Digg users have formed odd, cyclical alliances with certain political figures or themes. At first, you couldn’t visit the social bookmarking site without coming across a pro- Ron Paul story. Then it was nonstop pro- Obama articles. Now, on a slightly related and perhaps more bizarre note, we’re seeing intense anti-Clinton articles making it to the front page. Here is a good example. How do these trends begin, and why do they suddenly end for a new tide of political stories?

4. I don’t find Maureen Dowd funny at all, but this post explaining her writing sure made me laugh.

5. It’s kind of neat when every now and then we get to see a Gawker Media blogger go and bite the hand that feeds him by attacking his own boss on the blog. You don’t see things like that in traditional media outlets. Look here to see a Valleywag contributor complain and viciously attack his boss for a new round of pay cuts.

6. There have been a number of news stories showing that CNN has been winning the ratings game against Fox News, something that would have been unthinkable two years ago. I have a love/hate relationship with cable news, but when I do tune in I usually stick with MSNBC.

7. A South Carolina senator is proposing a tax surcharge on purchased pornography, saying that the money should go toward managing sex offenders. Because we all know the completely made up connections between looking at porn and going on to become a sex offender.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. This blog offers 10 tips to keep your journalism job while your daily paper is being hit with tons of layoffs.

2. Porn star Ron Jeremy says that he would allow his daughter to act in porn as long as she would be a porn star like Jenna Jameson. This revelation is slightly less shocking when you realize he’s talking about his hypothetical daughter, since he doesn’t actually have one.

3. The Columbia Journalism Review on the media’s reaction to the Obama/Wright controversy

4. Michael Arrington, the blogger for the popular site Tech Crunch, argues that blogs should team up to take on big media. I think it’s plausible in some niches, but nearly impossible for stories that significantly drain resources, like war reporting.

5. An interview with a long-time writer for the satirical The Onion.

6. First there were nerdy pick-up lines. Now there are Penguin pick-up lines.

It’s a light list today, but here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. After months of rumors that it was going to happen, Tucker Carlson gets the ax.

2. How internet alt porn turned into a big business.

3. Clinton’s campaign sends out a negative press release attacking Obama. Then Obama’s campaign uses a clever way to respond to it.

4. Black reporter and cameraman show up and report the news and racist rednecks attack them while shouting racial slurs.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. A gay porn company has been exposed in an HIV scandal, resulting in several DVDs being taken off the market.

2. Apparently The New Yorker is on a hiring binge, welcoming in two new writers: Ariel Levy and Kelefa Sanneh. Since that’s my dream job, I’m definitely jealous.

3. If there was an award for melodramatic blog posts, this one would get it. Will a Gawker media blog cause a string of suicides? Not likely, though he does make some good points.

4. This article isn’t about media or journalism, but should be read as an example of what excellent new journalism is.

5. Why it would be stupid for a media company to try and buy up an A-list blog.