Monthly Archives: December 2002

My devoted fans send me e-mail …

Hey, el Idiota:

You’re loyal readers want to know, mi amigo, where’s this fiction you keep promising? Some of us are beginning to think you are full of la mierda. You talk big, but don’t deliver.

And how come, when you act like you’re such a big blogger, you barely blog all week? ¿Arriba qué es? No wonder Instapundit doesn’t link to you.

Thank you for your concern, Ricardo. You are, um, so kind.

Would it sound too lame if I plead “I have a life”? Like, I didn’t blog much this weekend because my wife said I’d be sleeping on the couch for the next week if I didn’t get the spare room painted. And let me tell you what a chore that was … at 9:30 last night, we decided the walls needed a second coat, so I buzzed down to Home Depot. Problem was, the only guy working the paint department at that time was a burned out hippie who was busy playing nursemaide to a husband and wife squabbling over trim colors. He gave my request for a gallon of flat “Rising Sun” scant attention, and I was too much of an el Idiota to notice, so I came home and applied a coat of semi-gloss “Sunburst,” which is just a shade darker. While Home Depot was kind enough to front me more paint and primer, I had to redo the entire room, including prime over the semi-gloss.

So, rather than blog this weekend, or write my suspect fiction (you can decide the meaning of that ambiguous phrase), I painted. Unfortunately, I wasn’t painting still lifes of mobile homes; rather, I was transforming the guest room into something civilized.

As for the rest of the week, and the rest of my life for that matter. Let me tell you about some of the irons I have in the fire.

Leaving aside the fact that it was Christmas week and I spent four days in San Diego with our families (meaning mine and my wife, not yours), I have a number of responsibilities and interests. For example, I have a full-time job that is, in fact, really a full-time job. Then I’m trying to get in better shape and lose weight (and not doing too badly at it), so I go to the gym pretty regularly. That takes up time, and believe me I would rather blog than spend 20 or 30 minutes on a treadmill. And to keep abreast of my work, I’m trying to brush up on XML, read a couple of general interest programming books and … AND … learn JAVA. Of course, I want to continue spending some time with Bukowski now and then, but he’s been feeling neglected of late. And I do like to take some time to actually read other people’s blogs regularly (check out all of the great blogs on my blog roll, including Glenn Reynolds‘). Not to mention, I’ve got Pierce‘s Blook to read.

Besides all that, there are several Web sites that I am responsible for, so I have to pay attention to those.

And when there is time, I still try to squeeze in a few hundred words on one of my short stories. I’m not making this up. I do do fiction when I can. And intend to continue to pursue those goals.

And, of course, there is always the wife. Can’t forget her, though apparently, Ricardo, you would like me to. Love needs more maintainance than a Web site, you know. I am careful about that.

And I would still like to sneak in time to study Spanish, but it never seems to work out.

And see that picture of me in the upper left? I’m holding a guitar. I dare you to ask me when the last time was that I actually touched my guitar. Go ahead. I double dog dare ya. Continue reading →

A few thoughts on Steve Outing’s end of the year column …

He predicts for 2003:

Even though pop-ups are intrusive enough that they work better than the old standard Web ad banners, I think they’ll slowly die out due to consumer backlash.

Consumers hate television commercials, too, but we still have them.

My speculation is that advertisers will still find pop-ups appealing and will continue to buy them so long as click-through rates and branding studies show them to be effective. In fact, I would think that as more and more consumers install and use pop-up blocking software, pop-ups will become even more attractive to advertisers — because there will reach a point where the vast majority of consumers who actually see the ads will be those who have the least resistance to them. These are the consumers most likely to respond.

The real challenge for online publishers will be in devising a way to price these ads. Many pop-up blockers register an ad impression because the ad opens briefly, so the publisher cannot give a true accounting of impressions. So, if there ever was an ad format best designed for price-per-click fees, poppers are it.

Personally, I hate poppers, but just because we consumers hate them doesn’t mean that advertisers won’t continue to love them — they just need to deliver enough ROI, and I don’t think that is too big of a hurdle.

On the classified front, Outing is most pessimistic:

Most newspapers won’t move quickly enough and will see further loss of recruitment market share to Monster.com, et al within their local markets.

Recruitment advertising has traditionally been a newspaper’s strongest suit and most important revenue source. This is changing, and no matter what newspapers do, newspapers will never again dominate this market as they once did. This is the biggest change the “new economy” has wrought. I don’t believe the situation is hopeless, however. While newspapers will need to scramble to better meet the needs of their clients (and they need to start looking on HR departments as clients, and not customers), newspapers remain the business best positioned to help local employers.

My prediction: Look for newspapers to start providing personalized job matching services — not, per se, a searchable résumé bank; rather, recruitment teams will start pre-screening résumés for employers and giving them the best possible matches, at a premium price. The newspaper will become the head hunter, even on lower-end jobs.

Outing is also bullish on Wi-Fi, or the wireless Internet. I remain bearish. First, where is the revenue? I can’t see recommending that my employer spend a lot of time and effort in PDAs, cell phones, and tablets until I can see a revenue model that works. While it was important for newspapers to jump into the online world in 1994/95, when revenue models were hard to imagine, I don’t think newspapers need to remain cutting edge about every new technology that comes down the pike. Getting online was a no brainer because it opened up a world of possibilities and it was clear pretty early that the Net would become important. Also, falling behind then was dangerous, but falling behind on PDAs doesn’t seem nearly as fatal. Wireless, as popular as it seems today, remains a boutique service, and the consumers of such services are even less likely to pay for wireless content than Internet consumers. And with the smaller screens, where do you put ads?

Yes, there is a market for breaking news (national and international), sports scores and stock reports on wireless, but there are also plenty of news channels providing those services already. I’m not sure there is a screaming need to get local news (which is what the vast majority of online news professionals are concerned about) on PDAs.

My big prediction for 2003 and beyond is to look for online newspapers to bank less on banner ads — including poppers and rich media ads — and more on leveraging print/online synergies, such as the Top Jobs application, print ads online, coupons and the like. Newspapers are also going to continue to move in a direction that leverages their standing in their local communities to better meet the needs of advertisers and consumers. Applications like online auctions that provide local advertisers with unique and inexpensive means to market directly to consumers will continue to grow and morph into new ideas.

I would say more, but I don’t want to give away the shop. Continue reading →

In high school, I had a t-shirt that read … “The Only Band That Matters.”

At the time, I really believed it.

That band was The Clash.

Joe Strummer is dead.

My punk heroes keep dying on me. It’s quite sad. Continue reading →

What the hell is Xanga and why the heck am I getting so many referrers from that site the last few days? Continue reading →

If I had been home, I would have kissed the postman today … twice.

Arriving from good friend, kick-ass journalist and fine musician Kevin Featherly was a CD titled “Gettysburg.” It is the result of what happens when you turn loose a talented man with a home recording studio and CD duplication tools and a good printer. As expected, Kev’s songs are soulful and deep.

And what happens when you give a talented man a keyboard connected to the Internet? You get the Bus Blog, and arriving with Kev’s bundle of joy was Tony Pierce‘s “Blook,” a collection of his best writing from the first year of the Bus Blog. I ordered my copy. Have you? You should. I’m only a few pages into it so far and already overstimulated on good writing.

My copy of the “Blook” is number 70. I guess that makes me about half as important as Glenn Reynolds . I’m cool with that. I’ve been reading Pierce for a lot less time. Unless, of course — novel concept — Pierce numbered them according to the order in which orders were received, if you follow what I’m saying. I wonder what numbers Layne and Welch got?  Who the hell cares — all the cool people already have the book anyway, I’m sure. And that’s what matters (hey, don’t get mad at me for gloating — I’m so rarely among the cool — it’s a heady feeling). Continue reading →

OK, where’s a gawker.com for Los Angeles/Hollywood?

UPDATE: Denton responds with: What about LAExaminer.com? My answer: I love LAX, but it’s not quite the same.

BTW: I should have mentioned … first heard of the gawker through >Instapundit.com Continue reading →