Apt. 11D

The Republic of Facebook

With 500 million members, can Facebook be called a country?

See the Economist for more.

Online Links

The Internet continues to revolutionize life. New companies are forming. Old ones are floundering. A bunch of relevant links:

Colleges hire companies to build their online classes. 

"Social media may remain wildly popular but never be wildly profitable." Advertisers aren't making much money using Twitter and Facebook. Don Draper could figure this out, I bet.

Kindle titles are outpacing sales of hardcovers at Amazon. 

Digital Diplomacy.

Content farms give me the chills.

Bookshelves and Broadband Access

David Brooks writes a column today that brings together two of my favorite topics: education and technology. First, let me fish out the important facts that he throws in his column.

He points to one study that found that disadvantaged kids who were given 12 books of their own choosing had higher reading scores than kids who didn't have these books. They were also less affected by "summer slide."

Another study found that the spread of home computers and high speed Internet access was associated with a decline in math and reading scores. 

So, kids that have books in their home do well in school. Kids that have computers do badly.

Things That I've Learned About People From Blogging

I've learned some stuff about people from blogging all these years. Warning: Gross generalizations ahead. Proceed with caution.

• People read blogs at work.
• Because blogs are a diversion from work, they are looking for entertainment. Could be a fight in the comment section or just a good laugh.
• They are also looking for inspiration.
• People aren't doing that much work at the office.
• They don't read blogs much after 5:00 PM, during July and August, and over weekends.
• They prefer funny to serious posts, but a mix is best.
• Don't post about serious topics after 3:00 PM or on Fridays.
• Don't post anything that you hope will get wider attention in the blogosphere after 3:00 PM or on Fridays.
• People organize their RSS feeds on weekends, not during the week. 
• People like pictures.
• People don't like to read too many words.
• People love lists of movies.
• If you make a serious and depressing point in a blog post, you should follow it up with a ha-ha.
• People like a certain predictability to a blog. You can be a generalist with eclectic content, but you should be somewhat predictable about topics and extremely predictable about providing the content.
• People like to know who they're getting info from. If you don't have an important job at a think tank or a university or a newspaper, you need to divulge more personal information. Photos help.
• Women like political posts, but they like different topics than men.
• • Women like political posts about issues that are directly relevant to their lives.
  • Women don't like horserace stories as much as the guys do. BTW, most articles in the media are horserace stories, so the media hasn't figured that out yet. 
  • They prefer to read about political debates, rather than policy specifics or quantitative research.
  • If I write a post that I know will impress the boys (Charts! Numbers! Name dropping of academics!), it will often turn off the chicks. I've stopping caring and just write about whatever interests me.

Read Something New

Time Magazine has come out with its Best Blogs of 2010 list. I always like browsing through their list to add to my copious RSS feed.

Check out Shit My Kids Ruined. Here's the New York Times article about this blog.

Weigel Explains

Weigel explains.

Vast Field of Dead Blogs

According to an article in the Economist, the blogosphere is slowing down. Facebook and Twitter have replaced blogs as a vehicle for sharing information and links with others.

Charting the impact of these newcomers is difficult. Solid data about the blogosphere are hard to come by. Such signs as there are, however, all point in the same direction. Earlier in the decade, rates of growth for both the numbers of blogs and those visiting them approached the vertical. Now traffic to two of the most popular blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, is stagnating, according to Nielsen, a media-research firm. By contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%. Growth in advertisements is slowing, too. Blogads, which sells them, says media buyers’ inquiries increased nearly tenfold between 2004 and 2008, but have grown by only 17% since then. Search engines show declining interest, too.

I discussed the impact of Twitter and Facebook back in July and earlier this spring.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Blogger Resigns

This afternoon, my twitter feed erupted with references to Dave Weigel, a blogger for the Washington Post responsible for covering conservative politics. He made some derogatory comments about Matt Drudge and FOX news on Ezra Klein's Journolist that became public. He resigned from the Post. The listserv has been disbanded.

The Village Voice has a round-up of the affair. More from American Spectator and Blogging Heads. My, those DC bloggers are an incestuous little group, aren't they? Here's the Daily Caller. Ben Smith at Politico. Red State. Sounds like the guy is going to end up with a position on Huffington Post. Steve Benen.

Klein has a must-read post about the origins of Journolist and the "faux-intimacy" of the web. Wow. Love that phrase. I totally get it.

There's a lot of faux-intimacy on the Web. Readers like that intimacy, or at least some of them do. But it's dangerous. A newspaper column is public, and writers treat it as such. So too is a blog. But Twitter? It's public, but it feels, somehow, looser, safer. Facebook is less public than Twitter, and feels even more intimate. A private e-mail list is not public, but it is electronically archived text, and it is protected only by a password field and the good will of the members. It's easy to talk as if it's private without considering the possibility, unlikely as it is, that it will one day become public, and that some ambitious gossip reporters will dig through it for an exposure story. And because that possibility doesn't feel fully real, people still talk like it's private and then get burned if it goes public.

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post has more gossip about the resignation.

Most bloggers are outraged by this incident. Weigel, by all accounts, is a decent guy. You have to go to Ann Althouse and Pajamas Media to read posts that are gleeful about Weigel's departure.

And more from Julian Sanchez.

Jonathan Chait thinks that the WaPo didn't realize that Weigel wasn't a conservative when they hired him.

Only conservative reporters can interview conservative politicians? We're really in strange territory here.

Andrew Sullivan says that Weigel is a sane libertarian, not a liberal.

And from the other side. Jeffrey Goldberg says that Weigel said some really childish, unprofessional stuff on a public forum and should have known better. He also says the WaPo was stupid to hire him.

The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards. 

UPDATE: David Weigel explains ALL.

Blogging Death

What would you do if you had a long time blog and something really bad happened in your life? Would you blog about the "bad thing"?

Many bloggers have been at it for six or seven years now. They're blogging about books, politics, parenting, whatever. And then something terrible happens in their personal life - a death, a foreclosure, a divorce, illness. It's inevitable, really. Some blog about it and find the blogging process cathartic. Others make veiled references to the "bad thing" and then go about business as usual.

I've read about tragedies before on the blogs. I remember when Sam lost his son, Aidan. I've also been following Katie Granju as she grieves over her son's death. Right now, she' s nine months pregnant with her fourth children and nearly bedridden with grief. She's blogging a lot about the horror of losing a son.

Advertisements and Children

My buddy, Erin, has started a cool new blog aimed at educating parents about the impact of marketing and media on children. She's done a series of blog posts on FOX TV, which shows ads for The Family Guy during episodes of The Simpsons.

I was sitting down to watch the new episode [of the Simpsons] with my boys last night, and before it started, there was a promo for Family Guy in which the mother is dressed in a dominatrix costume, holding a whip, and the weird little old man baby is strung up by wrists and ankles in his diaper. So now there's an image of some deviant sexual behavior in the brain of my sweet little 11-year-old boy. How does this effect his mind, and his development? It made me very angry. Why can't we watch a fun show together without an assault on my values and on my kids health? I don't even mention the 14-year-old: He's probably seen it and worse.

She finds it ironic that a network that runs news shows with grumpy men grumbling about family values also runs entertainment shows that treat kids to images of dominatrices.

She filed a complaint with the FCC and is blogging up a storm.