And he’ll write it on a blackboard 100 times
: So Arafat finally condemned the bombings in an effort to meet Powell’s conditions for a meeting. The statement:
We are condemning strongly all the attacks which are targeting civilians from both sides and especially the attack that took place against Israeli citizens yesterday in Jerusalem.
BFD
: The full text of Arafat’s statement is about as strong as a marshmallow.
Fitting
: So the latest is that Colin Powell’s meeting with Arafat is put off from Saturday to Sunday. Let’s hope he’s using the time to get fitted with a belt of explosives. Now that is how we should negotiate with Arafat!
Consequences
: FoxNews reports that in the aftermath of today’s suicide/homicide bombing, Powell is now reconsidering meeting Arafat. Thank God. There has to be some consequence to the horrid acts he controls.
Food market — yeah, that’s a military target
: The mayor of Jerusalem — just on FoxNews — had only moments before been in the marketplace the latest Palestinian suicide/homicide/bomber/slime just attacked, killing at least 6 and injuring more than 70. He was buying a cake for his shabbos meal. He was pissed. He should be. So should we. So should Europe. So should the entire damned civilized world. Back off? Now? Are we nuts?
Hairy belly alert
: Dan Hartung sends me this picture of Palestinians in the new international sign of surrender — “Shirts Up!” instead of “Hands Up!” (see yesterday’s post). By the way, these guys aren’t starving.
Terrorists are our enemy
: Jonah Goldberg has a particularly FOS (full of it) column today arguing that we should end our war on terrorism because terrorism is not an “ism,” like communism or fascism; it is a means.
Bull.
Terrorists purposely targetinnocent civilians for their political ends. Terrorism is wrong. It is evil. Those who harbor terrorists are terrorists. (Listen to me spouting Bush!). Terrorism is a wrong in and of itself. Terrorists are our enemies, for we have been attacked by them.
Goldberg proceeds to give inane examples to try to prove his point. He asks whether we’d be against Irish terrorists if they started their crimes again. You bet. Would we invade? No. England doesn’t need the help. But would we go after those here who harbor and support such terrorists? Yes. He asks what we’d do if terrorist rebels got started in godless China. Well, if they purposely targeted civilians to cause terror in the population for their political ends, no matter how noble, I sure as hell hope we would not support them.
Terrorists are our enemy.
That is why I hope Bush keeps winking and Sharon keeps digging them out. Every terrorist he catches is one who cannot blow himself and innocent children up in Israel… or here.
Terrorists are our enemy.
The president says it. I agree. I just wish he’d mean it.
A proper memorial
: The punchline to Myron Magnet’s piece in City Journal about a proper 9.11 memorial:
Whatever monument we finally choose, it should rise in a square amid a rebuilt center of business, not in the midst of a 16-acre necropolis. Even though emotions are raw, we have to keep in mind that we are building for the ages. Fifty years from now, the best memorial to those who died in the attack will be that their monument adorns what is still the world trade center. They believed in the ceaseless activity of commerce and finance that extends prosperity and freedom around the globe. They wanted to be where the action is. And future generations should remember them in the midst of the energetic, ever-striving, optimistic world that they helped to create, that their murderers sought to annihilate, and that we will keep forever alive.
Been hitting the hummus too much, fella?
: There is a new international signal of surrender, thanks to the suicide/homicide bombing lunatics in the Middle East: Pulling up your shirt to show your naked belly, not covered with dynamite. I can’t find the picture online but I saw it in the paper the other day as Palestinians surrendered to Israelis on the West Bank. They didn’t have their hands up. They had their shirts up.
Bloghdad
: Via Tal G, a blog in Persian. Of course, I can’t read a character of it but I checked out the links, thinking I’d find incendiary stuff. No, just links to news, tech, and movies. Hoping for some translation…
Blogs re blogs
: Tim O’Reilly [via Boing] with pithiness on blogging:
These daily diaries of links and reflections on links are the new medium of communication for the technical elite. Replacing the high-cost, high-octane, venture-funded Web site with one that is intensely personal and built around the connectivity between people and ideas, they are creating a new set of synapses for the global brain. It’s no accident that weblogs are increasingly turning up as the top hits on search engines, since they trade in the same currency as the best search engines–human intelligence, as reflected in who’s already paying attention to what.
Weblogs aren’t just the next generation of personal home pages, representing a return to text over design and, lightweight content management systems. They are also a platform for experimentation with the way the Web works: collective bookmarking, virtual communities, tools for syndication, referral, and Web services.
: Arnold Kling at Econoblog:
My view is that blogging “professionally” is like participating in an open source software project. The economic benefit consists of an enhanced reputation that could be used in other ways.
: David Weinberger will be blogging from China for the Boston Globe, of all papers. Guess they’re trying to make up to us for the sin of A Beem.
: Ken Goldstein adds — and adds and adds — his two cents on blog traffic.
Aw, shucks
: I am so damned honored and delighted to be on the warblogger watch list for my crimes against humanity [via Clay Waters].
This is the Nixon enemies list of the new millenium.
Obsession
: Rossi is worried that she’s obsessing on 9.11.
I think I’ve become the Norma Rae of 9/11.
Seriously.
I’m starting to make myself (and evidently all or most of my friends) rather ill as I stand grim-faced on a table and hold a sign that reads, “WTC!”
It’s not that I’m not interested in moving on.
It’s just that, the more time goes by, the less other people talk about it, the more I feel obligated to fill in the gap.
I know the feeling. That’s why I keep this blog, so I obsess on 9.11 here and act normal in public. Let’s make this just our secret, eh?
A mitzvah
: Somebody bought away Rossi‘s Blogspot ad. She asked where it was me, since I’m a fan. I had to admit it wasn’t. But I decided this means I should do it for somebody else. I did it for a nice Catholic mom’s site. Congregationalist performs mitvah for Catholic. Ah, the diversity of the blog.
The mother of invention
: There’s a war raging around him but Israeli blogger Tal G is innovating for blogdom. He calls it a killer ap. I wouldn’t use that phrase where he is. Anyway…
So here’s an idea: a tool – call it PunditPal – that presents pre-specified “third party” content together with web pages viewed. So suppose you like James Lileks – when you browse to some outrageous NY Times article that Lileks has ripped apart(and linked to), his takedown would automatically appear in a separate pane.
Scintillating
: Matt Welch adds two cents to the plans for blog newspapers (below).
I think one main other thing the best bloggers bring, is a kind of personality that is no longer easily found at newspapers, due to the effects of cookie-cutter professionalization, monopoly hierarchy, or weird luck…. The audience has latched on to some of the bloggers for precisely this reason, I think, and a newspaper — local or national — could liven up their pages considerably simply by doing a better job at recognizing emerging talent, some of which is right in their back yard.
Note, too the crossover artists. No, not Dolly Parton. I mean James Lileks.
The Daily Blog
: Glenn Reynolds has a vision of the future of news that I’ve been playing with for sometime (and I know a few other very smart people who are playing with variations on the same theme… and you know who you are): Blogs as a new generation of online national newspapers.
Essential to this vision is the assumption that news is becoming a commodity. News is not a commodity when you get real reporters doing real reporting and uncovering real news; witness the Pulitizers this season and how the big boys with the big resources managed to tackle the 9.11 story and truly inform us.
But workaday news coverage — of press conferences, press releases, earnings announcements, trials, campaigns, even games — is pretty much a commodity, whether it’s in print or on TV (that’s why broadcast and news networks keep talking about pooling resources) or on radio (that’s how Metro can provide vanilla news to radio stations just as it provides vanilla, private-labeled traffic) or online. You and I can all watch the same presidential press conference and the people sitting in that room with George hear nothing different from what we hear and add no real value; that is commodity news. In his Tech Central Station column, Reynolds recognizes the impact of this trend even in big newspapers:
The sad truth is that even top-of-the-line mainstream news institutions like The New York Times are becoming more like webloggers all the time, cutting the size and number of foreign bureaus, and relying more and more on wire services for original reporting to which they add commentary and “news analysis.” That opens an opportunity for a widely-dispersed network of individuals to make a contribution.
The big thing that mainstream journalism brings is reach and trustworthiness. Critics of media bias may joke about the latter, but though reporters for outlets like Reuters or The New York Times may — and do — slant their reporting from time to time, their affiliation with institutions that have a long-term interest in reputation limits how far they can go. When you rely on a report from one of those journalistic organs, you’re relying on their reputation.
And so where does this lead? In Reynolds’ view:
An organization that put together a network of freelance journalists under a framework that allowed for that [Amazon] sort of reputation-rating, and that paid based on the number of pageviews and the ratings that each story received, would be more like a traditional newspaper than like a weblog, but it would still be a major change from the newspapers of today. Interestingly, it might well be possible to knit together a network of webloggers into the beginnings of such an organization. With greater reach and lower costs than a traditional newspaper, it might bring something new and competitive to the news business.
It’s important to focus on who is bringing what value to the audience. Bloggers — individually and as a group — bring two things of value, as I see it:
The first and (some would disagree) most important value is selection. Bloggers (with or without lives) spend a great deal of time combing the Web and other media (witness the various Punditwatches) to find the best (and worst) of what’s being reported; they sift so you don’t have to. Individually, some are great at this (starting with the amazing Professor Reynolds himself). Collectively, the world of bloggers is also good at spotting and creating buzz (see Blogdex and Daypop). That is why I got this domain name: We are a buzzmachine.
The second value bloggers bring is perspective. Bloggers ask questions and poke holes and give their opinions about the news everybody has and that makes the news often more interesting or just entertaining. That is why most bloggers do it.
But traditional news organizations bring value that bloggers do not, besides real reporting. They bring consistency and reliability and jugment. I can read my favorite five or 10 bloggers every day and I will not get as complete and well-rounded a view of the world as I would leafing throught the New York Times because there are many things in there that are important, that I need to know, but that did not happen to interest my set of bloggers. The New York Times and my local paper also bring news judgment; you can quibble with their choices but you cannot quibble with the notion that they give me an easy way to find out what’s most important today.
And there is a fourth element of news value that bloggers (apart from one I can name) do not bring: Local. A vision of a blog newspaper works nationally; it is the new USA Today. But right now, it’s hard to bring real local reporting and news to the venture; that will remain a strength of local newspapers (along with local advertising and classified). And, yes, I am associated professionally with local newspapers; I know their strength (and the wise newspaper person recognizes the potential of weblogs as well).
Still, Reynolds is right: There is the start of something new here. I just hope I’m part of it. Glenn Reynolds, Nick Denton, Ken Layne, or Matt Welch — just keep me in mind.
: Eric Olsen has many thoughts and posts on this and on blog traffic here.
Whew
: This made me glad I’m not in school anymore.
Middle East 101
: A good graphic primer on the origins of the Middle East war(s) from the Guardian.
Guerilla media
: It sure beat the media big guys: An American serving in the Israeli army in Jenin called Howard Stern’s show on his mobile phone this morning and reported on the attack on Israeli soldiers there hours before the same news was on CNN (according to a colleague who monitored both). Just a guy with a phone.
Today in the Muddle East
: How dare the EU consider sanctions against Israel? Europe had better watch its anti-Semitic reputation.
: Powell offers observers to babysit a ceasefire. Uh-oh. We end up on the ground there; we end up the enemy.
: The Saudi crown prince warns that continued Israeli military action will endanger American interests. Is that a threat?
: The blind Egyptian cleric who masterminded the first attack on the World Trade Center passed messages to his cohorts through his American attorney, now arrested.
: Rand Simberg is pissed at the church for being pissed at Israelis for answering sniper fire in Bethlehem — and not being pissed at the Palestinians who took over the church with weapons in hand. “Christians everywhere should be outraged.”
Numbers game
: There’s much buzz today about blog numbers — from John Scalzi (the first piece, the second) and in response from Matt Welch, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and Tom Tomorrow.
Well this is something I actually know something about. It’s part of my day job. I even did time — and, oh, yes, it was a sentence for bad behavior — on the Audit Bureau of Circulation committee that set definitions of page views, visits, unique users, and such for the online and publishing industry (alongside the Internet Advertising Bureau and others).
So here are the boring facts:
: A page view is probably the best measure for bloggers. That is defined, simply, as any page requested by a user. I count that in two ways: My ISP gives me stats that count the HTML files served as pages; I also use a counter that counts each time its graphic is called up on a page. I get up to a few thousand page views a day.
: “Hits” and “files” are meaningless. Each time a browser goes to a server to get a new image, that’s a “hit” on a “file” and obviously, the more files you have a page, the more hits you’ll have (thus graphically lavish Tony Pierce or Photodude would have more hits per page than the spare, Shaker Drudge or Instapundit).
: Visits are a bullshit measure. Some services count a visit as a continuous string of page views from one user or one IP address. But for many reasons, that falls apart quickly (you could go off to another site and then come back and you may or may not be counted as one “visit,” for example). Ignore visits.
: Unique visitors are a great measure — that’s the measure of actual people who come to a site in a day or, cumulatively, in a month; that’s the real circulation or, in ad jargon, the “reach.” However, the ONLY reliable way to count that is via registration or cookies (so each user has a unique identity). No small-fry site will have the technology to do that reliably.
Thus, I suggest that Blogdom settle on a standard for traffic bragging: page views. You count the actual HTML pages you serve (or you count along with a counter) and that’s the most accurate number to report.
Now to the real ego question: How big is big? Obviously, it’s not hard for a big media site with big media advertising to out-do a blogger. The sites I work on (at Advance.net each do tens of millions of page views in a month; as I’ve said before, just the high-school wrestling forums on just NJ.com can do 250,000 page views in a day).
I’d say that Glenn Reynolds’ 43,000 page views in a day holds up quite respectably next to that considering that he has no promotion, no advertising, and his content is essentially one-page deep.
More important, add Reynolds to Sullivan, Welch, Layne, all the folks on my right column (and, humbly, me) and you have a very respectable audience across Blogdom. That is growing. That is worth paying attention to.
: Update: Glenn Reynolds links to this item, causing traffic about traffic, and Rebecca Blood responds, via him, arguing against page views as the standard and in favor of unique IP addresses as a proxy for unique users and audience size. Only problem with that is, most counters and basic ISPs do not provide that data. And IP addresses do change if you keep coming back through, for example, AOL, so it’s a less accurate measure.
I’d say what we’re trying to measure is heat and buzz and page views do that well. Yes, people go to Instapundit often in a day and that’s because Glenn provides new content and real value about 22 hours a day (what does your wife say about all this, Glenn?).
There’s also some discussion of the value of search engine traffic. Anybody who finds a site via a search engine is, of course, quite valid; that’s how people find half the content on the Internet. Search engines that spider sites to catalogue them should not be counted but that’s more of an issue for big sites than for simple blogs (though we do get spidered); I’d count that as digital dust.
End of statistical nerdfest.
