DISQUS

And the answer to the question "does the blogosphere have a sense of humour or irony" is a resounding NO...

But I think it's really stretching things to place this kind of satire in the same context as Loren Feldman. The difference here is that the New Yorker is eminently qualified to skewer Republican fearmongering. To succeed at satire you have to understand what it is you're satirizing.

I didn't say "low barrier to entry", but "lower barriers to entry", which is much more than just semantics. I was saying "lower" relative to what it would have taken to start a competitor to a major publishing property in the 1980s. It's gone from "virtually impossible unless you're already vastly wealthy" to merely "very difficult"...

And as to the reason why a bunch of bloggers haven't cut out Nick Denton, well that will almost certainly happen, as it does in virtually every creative industry. And they'll go on to form their own network, which in turn will be criticized for exploiting the poor old bloggers who work for it rather than own it.

Denton has momentum and a critical mass of readers, but these aren't things that are necessarily related to how much capital you have at your disposal.

"If you're a blogger at an established site like Gawker, it's quite obvious that for every dollar you make in bonus pay, Denton has made much more in terms of extra advertising revenue. You really earned that dollar. But then, at the end of the quarter, Denton pushes your income back down to its base rate, and spends the excess advertising revenue not on you, any more, but rather on his newest properties - properties which, if and when they start making money, will benefit him but not you. If I were in such a position, I'd think that Denton should fund new blogs out of his profits and not out of my bonus: after all, they're his new blogs, not mine."

To me this line from Felix Salmon's article is a classic example of the misplaced belief common in the blogosphere that it's somehow a democratic environment in which perceived unfairness will be corrected. The truth is Denton has done what is really the only thing you can do to make money from writing these days -- he's assumed the role of the aggregator and the distributor, not the author. He's built brands that attract a growing audience, and created a structure in which he benefits from the "marginal cost of x trending to zero". The irony is that unlike the publishing moguls of years past, the barriers to his bloggers going off and starting their own equivalent networks are much lower than the capital one would have needed to invest to displace an established publishing property in the 1980s.

And really, good for him. He's certainly producing much more interesting content than many more traditional publishing properties have been doing for decades, and the quality and intelligence of his sites is generally light years above the likes of TechCrunch, VentureBeat, etc.

"it makes a whole team of designers happy, and it's nice to look at, but it accomplishes very little."

Well there's the essence of our disagreement. If looking beautiful wasn't important, then for better or for worse entire industries or categories of products wouldn't exist. Being nice to look at is actually hugely important and even if you don't like the term "engaging with the brand" it's something that is often best supported by animation and video. Animation and video aren't just frivolous eye candy; they help sites deliver their content and if used well keep visitors on the site.

Flash video, for example, is not the best choice by only a small margin; it's simply the only viable choice for ubiquitous video content on the web today.

Then there are other examples like using Flex on Yahoo! Finance (their interactive charts are one of the only things that keep me visiting the site, and other than Flickr it's the only Yahoo! property I still rely on).

Seriously, I'm not trying to be argumentative here -- and I completely accept the argument about *bad* Flash sites -- but I'm genuinely curious to know what you think are the alternatives to using Flash for rich content.

Personally I'm not a fan of Flash when it's used for the entire interface, but there is no better method of delivering rich visual content. Flash has relatively low barriers to entry so it's easy for a bad designer to create a truly dreadful site, but it's also relatively easy for a bad developer to inflict gratuitous AJAX on the end user so that their CPU usage is pinned at 100%. I don't think either scenario is really a criticism of the tool so much as the person implementing it.

I also wonder if this post shows how easy it is to maintain a relatively narrow view of the web from within the world of tech blogs, in which it's all about text and rapidly produced video, not about production values or building engagement with brands. Automotive sites, sports sites (like Nike's Jumpman site, and many of the sites developed by agencies like AKQA for video games, etc. may not be your thing, but they can certainly be effective for their target audience.

Oh, and without Flash, YouTube and Flickr couldn't exist in their current forms...

"Is this another example of how only the traditional media can do this kind of long-form journalism?"

Nope, it's an example of how only intelligent, thoughtful people can do this kind of long-form journalism. The web is, as you say, an incredibly powerful medium, but so many of us have fallen into the logical fallacy of believing that because some journalists don't get it, the best reporting must now come from amateurs.

That's just about the funniest thing I've read this year. Even funnier are the comments on Denton's post, all trying to be too clever by half.

Playing devil's advocate, I'd say that's how it creates more ad inventory, not how it actually makes money. I'm not sure that it is good keyword context, since the words in a document I'm reading have little or no relationship to brands or products in which I might be interested.

There are different kinds of balance -- portraying an accurate story vs. giving equal weight to opposing opinions even though one is much stronger than the other. For example, if an author is writing about evolution, the last thing I want is for the opinions of creationists to be given equal weight to the facts presented by credible scientists.

Not at all -- I actually meant it was unfair of Fred Wilson to single them out. I thought your post was bang on.

Seems a little unfair to single out Matt and Erick, both of whom have a history of writing pretty insightful and newsworthy stuff. The two posts that annoyed me most recently for their lack of research, insight or accuracy were the Techcrunch piece about the "evidence" showing Yahoo users are poorer than Google's, and the one on CenterNetworks aimlessly speculating about the link between teen suicide and social networks. Those seem like much better examples of sensationalist link baiting.

A reasonable analogy might be the people who shop on the home shopping channels. Sure they often spend a lot of money but that rarely has anything to do with their income level.

"of course, if you’re British, dry toast is pretty exciting"

Hey, I resemble that remark.

My take is that the Yes We Can backlash is more a case study in how the online commentary can over analyze a story to death. Relative to old-style campaigning, the Obama video is massively significant.

Sure, the video might be over the top and self-indulgent, but the NYT has a great op-ed by Frank Rich (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10ric...), contrasting Yes We Can with Hillary's Hallmark TV special, which was watched by almost no-one and barely discussed anywhere. I think the story remains that on the one side we have a tidal wave of online coverage of a video that cost the Obama campaign absolutely nothing, and on the other a struggling Clinton campaign mired in old-school thinking.

I agree that it's a metaphor, but maybe for the technology and computing segment of the magazine industry rather than the industry as a whole. Any magazine that's focused on time-sensitive information and analysis of the start-up world is going to struggle desperately in the print world. However, my first-hand experience of owning a high-end lifestyle magazine tells me that a healthy market continues to exist for certain kinds of print media.

Feels like a solution that benefits the advertiser much more than the user. To get these kinds of connections happening between the offline and online worlds, I think you need to have some kind of community effect, not just a response from a consumer to an ad.

Allen,
The real point is that no matter how much time you invest in your blog, the time, expense and effort is much lower than producing a track or album.

It's not about the time you spend producing really good content; it's about the noise created by others who collectively are producing an overwhelming volume of copy at the same time, because the barriers to doing so are so low.

Note that I didn't say it was ludicrously easy to create *good* blog content, but rather that *good* isn't enough to create the same market that exists for music.
D

Something's been bugging me for a while about the chorus of "content must be free". On the surface it implies a wonderful and democratic world in which advertisers support an ever-more diverse pool of artists. But underneath it feels like it's simply about aggregating content for no other purpose than to sell advertising. It's just as cynical and no more egalitarian than the actions of the media barons of old.

I also agree that it's misleading to talk about paying for music and paying for blog feeds in the same context. It's hard and time-consuming to create great music so the market will to an extent always respond to its relative scarcity. It's ludicrously easy to set up a blog and write a few hundred words a day, so there's almost certain to be more decent content than buyers. I don't mean that in any way to disparage those who blog regularly; I simply think it's a reality of this economy.

I think the key concept is "Facebook economy". It's not like hitching your wagon to Google via AdSense, since the monetization strategy is well defined and proven. Even if there are risks in being so dependent on Google, at least there is real money to be made. And as Markus Frind has demonstrated it can scale to numbers well beyond the "lifestyle business" level. In Facebook's case they've got to create a functional economy of their own before anyone can really determine the implications for app developers of being so closely aligned.