Bloggasm

Geez, I didn’t realize that I had let so many of these pile up without posting them. Anyway, here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. I don’t know how many people know this, but media organizations love political seasons because there’s a huge influx of paid political advertising that go into them. Not just with political candidates, but also special interest groups. Unfortunately for newspapers, presidential candidates stick mainly to radio and television advertisements. But it looks like this year the internet is going to get a sizeable chunk of that ad revenue.

2. On a related note, internet ad revenue is expected to hit $50 billion by 2011.

3. In a world in which phone calls, faxes, emails and websites are easily-used research tools, is journalism suffering because journalists no longer need to visit the locale on which they’re reporting? Media Shift explores this issue.

4. The New York Times has a cool profile of a military blogger who has embedded himself in Iraq.

5. I’ve never heard of Josh Harris, but then again I was just a kid in the 90s. Whoever he is, he’s trying to make a comeback.

6. Although I enjoy reading Digg and subscribe to its RSS feed — I’ve also made it onto its front page twice — I long-ago stopped caring whether my site every gets linked on it. Too many people try to game it; friending and networking and all sorts of silly tactics to try to get on its front page. It really is a sad sight to see so many bloggers write about the best way to make it onto the front page. The irony of it all is that a reader wrote in to me to tell me Bloggasm seems to have been banned from being submitted on Digg — something I find humorous considering how many people who aren’t banned who are actively trying to game it. Anyway, to address this gaming problem, Digg creators have once again changed the super secret algorithm to try and stop said gaming.

7. “An Afghan court on Tuesday sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that three judges said violated the tenets of Islam.” This is a US-backed government in a country we’re currently occupying. Surely the US can do something to reverse this?

8. Note to Fox News guests: Don’t go on television and start ranting about a video game you haven’t played or know nothing about, or else the internet will pwn you.

9. Mashable has a cool post about the nightmare that the internet has caused for PR companies. I wrote a similar post awhile back titled When viral marketing backfires. Mashable lists International Delete Your Myspace Account Day as one of its examples.

10. It’s always interesting when authors turn down book prizes. Do they do it because it essentially doubles the publicity for the book? In light of the Oprah/Franzen debacle, forgive me for being a skeptic.

11. Jon Stewart vs Jonah Goldberg.

12. I’m a 42-year-old gay man with a superhero fetish

13. An article arguing that female stars like Spears and Hilton get piled on by the press while male stars, who are experiencing similar downward spirals (Heath Ledger) get ignored until after the downfall has reached its end.

14. Daniel Schorr, a 91-year-old NPR commentator, tells bloggers to get off his lawn. He then turns to the journalist interviewing him and says, “Where are my pants?”

15. The Columbia Journalism Review was among the first to bring up the idea of government subsidizing journalism. Now Tech Crunch picks up the torch.