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Introducing Bookcircuit

Sean Flannagan — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 12:22:08 +0000

Bookcircuit is a frequently updated list of literary events in New York City.

There are literary events happening just about every night in this town, and no good place online to keep abreast of them all. Bookcircuit aims to address that.

Weblogs: The Stats

Sean Flannagan — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:16:41 +0000

Number of new weblogs launched per day, according to Terrence Smith’s report on the NewsHour last night: 2,160

Number of professional journalists with personal weblogs who have recently been forced to stop blogging by their employers, according to Mark Glaser’s latest column: 3

Average American newspaper reporter’s base salary, according to Salary.com, in dollars: 31,092

Estimated amount of money made per year by Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report Web site, according to Business 2.0 magazine, in dollars: 800,000

Music About Music

Sean Flannagan — Mon, 28 Apr 2003 23:46:07 +0000

In his new meditation on the turntable in ctheory, Seattle writer Charles Mudede calls upon Heidegger, Marx, Walter Benjamin, Afrofuturist David Goldberg, DJ Marley Marl, Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and, unfortunately, Tone Loc to shed light on the true essence of the turntable. Worth a read, as he goes miles beyond the typical turntablist refrain that “the turntable is an instrument!” Pullquote:

Real hip-hop does not sample real sounds, like the toilet flushing in Art of Noise’s “Close (To the Edit)” (1984), but samples copyrighted music. The hip-hop DJ does not shape raw sound into a form recognized as music, but shapes information into a sonic form recognized as meta-music.

Suggestions for Companies Planning on Launching New Products with Weblogs

Sean Flannagan — Wed, 05 Mar 2003 23:45:28 +0000

Be open and honest about it. Get “meta” about it. If everyone on the internet is talking about your new campaign, mention this fact. Mention the surges in traffic you experience. Show that you share the same reality as your readers.
Make fun of yourself and your new campaign.
Read Cluetrain first.

Text Sells

Sean Flannagan — Wed, 26 Feb 2003 22:04:14 +0000

TEXT SELLS on the web, because people go online in the active pursuit of information, and flashy imagery too often distracts rather than informs. Ad-like images get tuned out by users, but text can’t help but get read (try looking at a page of text without reading). Google was one of the first to really capitalize on this fact (and the power of search intent) with their AdWords program, and over time the simple text-ad spread to other major sites like Amazon and the Onion. But now the text-link-sellers have begun to move in on the blogs and other thin/niche/nano-media. Henry Copeland has had his BlogAds service running for a while now, but his space is getting crowded quick. Just last week Matt Haughey pointed out the appearance of Google-like text ads on BlogSpot blogs mere days after Google’s acquisition of Blogger. Today Phil Kaplan‘s new text-link service MarketBanker is getting written up on ZDNet, and he’s talking up blogs.

Henry’s been doing a good job so far of differentiating BlogAds from Google’s text ads, but he’s gonna have a tougher time going up against MarketBanker. Both middleman services take a 20% cut, but MarketBanker’s service is more automated and seems easier to set up, if less personal. Ad formats differ and pricing structures differ, and we’ll have to wait to see which is the more effective and profitable package. Henry’s definitely more plugged into the blog world, but will that be enough to stave off this kind of competition?