Blogging for Dollars

Mar 09 2007 Published by under Craziness, Free Speech, Marketing, Miscellany, Stuff That Sucks, The Internet

Since I actually enjoyed Music and Lyrics, and because this article seems to imply the only reason a blogger should say that is if he’s being paid, I figured I would set the record straight. I received no compensation for plugging Hugh Grant’s movie.

To the larger question of bloggers selling posts for a fee, here’s the only problem I have with that.

Laura Neiman, 33, a Denver mother of five whose blog is called LaLa Girl, wrote wistfully about a Caribbean yacht charter service.

“We don’t get a whole lot of opportunity to sail the open seas in landlocked Colorado, so I really can’t relate to this at all,” she began, “but I keep reading about the popularity of yacht charters as an alternative to a ‘regular’ vacation.” [Emphasis mine]

If you’re a blogger, and you would be writing about something anyway, I don’t really care if someone pays you to write about it. Just tell me that. Something along the lines of, “Hey, I actually like Rocky Mountain Oysters, and some clown is paying me to tell you that, so let me relate a funny story about the consumption of bull nuts.”

The trouble with something like PayPerPost is it clutters the internet with irrelevant thoughts on things people legitimately care about. I might actually be interested in a yacht charter vacation and want to read about the experience someone else had with it. I don’t care if he’s getting paid.

Instead, I have to sift through 10,000 Google results from some assholes who have never been on a boat but chose to plug the idea so they could make $6. If I wanted useless information, I would dig through the comment spam to find deals on prescription drugs I have never even heard of.

What are the arguments made by the pinheads who write on behalf of PPP?

Caldwell’s traffic has doubled thanks partly to PayPerPost’s fanatical users, who link often to fellow Posties. That gives her a bigger audience for her unpaid musings on topics including a recent dream about Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays Dwight in NBC’s sitcom “The Office.”

“People talk about how we’re destroying the credibility of the Internet,” Caldwell said. “Let me tell you ‚Äî there are a lot worse things happening online.”

Well, I agree with that last part. If this clown wasn’t busy selling posts about some crappy movie, she might well be advocating for net neutrality. If that’s the case, I say, “Blog on sister!”

For the rest of the people who have decided that posting about things they know nothing about simply so they can get a check for $5, here’s some unsolicited advice.

Rethink your life. Get off the couch, stop pitching online coupon sites to the poor bastard unlucky enough to stumble upon your blog, and use your unrealized potential to build houses for the poor or something that gives back to the world instead of cluttering up the Internet.

And yes, by god, I really did like Music and Lyrics. If you don’t believe me, you can check it out for yourself. It should be on video in a week or two. It was only in theaters for about 3 hours, but the showing I caught was in focus… so that was good.

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Michael Moore and Predictions

Nov 17 2006 Published by under Congress, Democrats, Government, Politics, Republicans

Michael Moore has penned a lengthy editorial for the LA Times that may be just about the dumbest thing I have ever read. It does, however, afford me an opportunity, for posterity, to make some predictions about the newly elected Democrat majority based on his pledge.

What I don’t want is for you to drop into the deep funk we liberals have been in for two-plus decades. Yes, your Republican revolution is over, but hang in there. And do not despair. I, and the millions who voted for Democrats, have no interest in revenge for the last 12 years. In fact, let me make 12 promises as to how we will treat you, the minority, in the coming years.

Thus, here is “A Liberal’s Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives”:

1) We will always respect you. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.

They encourage such dissent as long as you agree with their conclusion, but differ on how to get there. As evidenced by a college professor calling students racist and comparing them to Hitler because they believe we need tougher immigration laws.

3) We will not spend your grandchildren’s money on our personal whims or to enrich our friends. It’s your checkbook too, and we will balance it for you.

Sure, because history has clearly demonstrated the fiscal restraint of the Democrats when they have majority status. After pronouncing all of Reagan’s budgets “Dead on Arrival”, the Democrats in Congress pushed through massive spending increases and then blamed the ensuing budget deficit on Reagan (who, last I recall, never cast a single vote in Congress between 1981 and 1988).

4) When we soon bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq, we will bring your sons and daughters home too. We promise never to send your kids off to war based on some amateur Power Point presentation cooked up by men who have never been to war.

Instead, Democrats will engage in half-cocked attempts at social justice “nation-building” in places like Darfur, put a temporary end to violence until we take a few casualties, withdraw our troops at the first sign of impending violence, and create power vacuums all over the world where anti-American sentiment can fester among those who suffer at the hands of retaliation for America’s involvement.

5) When we make America the last Western democracy to have universal health coverage, and all Americans are able to get help when they fall ill, we promise that you too will be able to see a doctor, regardless of your ability to pay. And when stem cell research delivers treatments and cures for diseases that afflict you and your loved ones, we’ll make sure those advances are available to you and your family too.

Universal health care will, of course, guarantee that we have the same third-world health care system that every other nation has, you have to wait in line for days to see that doctor they’ve guaranteed you, and all of our drug companies will flee for a second-tier nation that is more interested in economic benefit than in socialized medicine. They will become the world leader in drug research and sell us back the medicines we should have developed here. That would include fetal stem cell research…

7) Should a mass murderer ever kill 3,000 people on our soil, we will devote every single resource to tracking him down and bringing him to justice. Immediately. We will protect you.

Wow! That’s great. So in the event that 3,000 of my fellow Americans are killed, we’ll pursue the same pansy foreign policy that led to 3,000 being killed the last time and spend tens of millions of dollars to bring him to justice under a system that was unable to convict O.J. Simpson; let an admitted pedophile loose simply because they couldn’t convict him of killing a girl he never knew, met, or saw; runs rough-shod over a university lacrosse team based on the allegations of a woman, who by all accounts, is little more than a crack-whore; and yet finds time to persecute school districts for the heinous crime of including “under God” in the pledge of Allegiance.

8) We will never stick our nose in your bedroom or your womb. What you do there as consenting adults is your business…

Unless of course you are in there smoking tobacco products… in which case it’s fuqing on… You’ll be ticketed, arrested and sent to tobacco re-education facilities for forced detox.

9) We will not take away your hunting guns. If you need an automatic weapon or a handgun to kill a bird or a deer, then you really aren’t much of a hunter and you should, perhaps, take up another sport. In the meantime, we will arm the deer to make it a fairer fight.

So we’ll object to the violation of your constitutional right to privacy and demand protections for terrorists planning to kill you, but not think twice about violating your constitutional right to bear arms.

12) We will not tolerate politicians who are corrupt and break the law. And we promise you we will go after the corrupt politicians on our side first.

Right after we make every attempt to promote the most corrupt amongst us to leadership positions in the House and successfully promote the most corrupt amongst us to the highest position in the Senate, right Mike?

In response to his generous pledge, I make one simple promise to Michael Moore. I will spend every waking moment of my life working to overturn the results of this election and to elect principled fiscal conservatives to Congress. Count on it.

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Good News and Bad News

Nov 08 2006 Published by under Congress, Elections, Politics

Well, yesterday kind of sucked on some fronts, but totally rocked on another… Sure the GOP took an ass-whooping, but on the upside, Britney is back on the market. The irony? Everyone pretty much saw both events coming, but the major players were in denial right up to the end.

I’ve decried the GOP’s abandonment of the center-right voters for some time now, and it looks like at least one person agrees that is what brought us down. Unfortunately for me, it’s Ron Brownstein.

Social conservatives gleefully trumpeted the Administration efforts to advance the far right agenda while the libertarian wing of the party was shunned in favor of deficit spending and explosive growth of federal programs. That created a situation in which the moderate-right voters fled the party.

Hopefully this serves as a wake up call to the GOP and they will return to their pursuit of fiscal restraint.

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I Love To Say I Told You So…

Oct 24 2006 Published by under Democrats, Elections, Politics

Call it a modern day tale of the ant and the grasshopper. You remember that story, right? The ant spends all summer foraging for food and making a stockpile while the grasshopper plays and plays. When winter comes, the ant has enough food to get through to spring but the grasshopper starves.

Well, the Democrat party is trying to teach us that lesson all over again and the LA Times has covered it for us.

So far, there is little indication that the incumbents are heeding the call from the activists. Some of those with large accounts are considering bids for higher office. But the activists argue that they should be focused less on their personal aspirations and more on the broader party interests.”We just don’t want to see anyone hoarding at a time when there is a need for the greater good,” said Eli Pariser, executive director of the MoveOn PAC.

For most of the last two years, these same activists have been praising Howard Dean for his “50 State Strategy” and talking about the huge payout they would get. But in the end, it comes down to a handful of targeted races (all but one or two of which were known two years ago).

The DNC, whose only function is to provide for the “greater good” of the party, has squandered tens of millions of dollars in places like Utah where they have no chance to make gains. Now the Democrats are having to take out loans to compete in the places in which they knew, as early as January of 2005, they would need to compete.

Thanks, MyDD, for teaching the country a lesson that most of us learned in the second grade. Spending everything as soon as you get it is a mistake, and saving for a rainy day is always a good idea.

For the Republicans, have good cheer. The financial advantage our candidates enjoy should pay rewards in two weeks.

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Podcasting Pols?

Jul 21 2006 Published by under Democrats, Elections, Republicans, The Internet

RepublicansPoliticsI hate reading stuff like this. The reporters that write it usually have a passing familiarity with politics, or a passing familiarity with technology, and attempt to be prognosticators of future political technology trends, but just come across sounding sort of stupid. Case in point:

Within a few years, it may be possible to target cable TV spots — this ad intended for older voters, that one for renters — the way customized mailers are now routed to selected homes.

The trouble with this little comment is it a) ignores the fact that this is already pretty much possible if you have microtargeted your audience, b) flies against media trends which show Americans in huge numbers bypassing ads all together through DVRs and c) it assumes that cable is still going to be the medium of choice in a few years. That assumes that user-created video will not continue to grow and technologies like IPTV won’t provide all programming on demand.

You can already achieve most of that anyway. By microtargeting your audience, and determining which channels beer drinkers of a particular brand loyalty are watching, you can get pretty close to that degree of specificity simply based on the several hundred channels.

The bigger problem is the shift in media consumption patterns. Look at the iPod and the television programs they sell as a model of new media. I buy only what I want; watch it on demand; and see no commercials at all. Granted, for a cycle or maybe two, the media environment may move so imperceptibly that cable targeting is a cool trick, but I think, and most agree, that long term trends in media consumption are significantly different.

And though cellphone technology is still in its political infancy, some campaigns are already using text messaging to get out the vote, recruit volunteers or lure prospects to their websites, which feature all manner of interactive links.

The trouble with cell phone technologies is the rigid platform that most cell companies employ. For instance, every cell phone company, to meet e-911 laws, has a GPS locator in their phone. Programming applications to access that functionality so you could, for instance, give someone a map to their polling place based on where they’re standing is difficult if not impossible because the cell phone networks don’t allow you access to the hardware.

Sure, you could eventually VCast a message to a phone, but only if you do it through the approved channel of the provider. The reason the cell phone use in other countries is much higher is because their phone systems are more open.

How do you know when something has gone viral? “When it takes on a life of its own,” said Bassik, traveling from family to friends to co-workers and on and on, infinitum.

That, however, is exceedingly rare in politics. More often, the Internet seems to act as a centrifugal force, pushing people apart as they burrow deeper into niches: conservative or liberal blogs, websites devoted to celebrating political personalities, or trashing them. Where the people go, candidates follow, and in today’s 50-50 politics, there is strong temptation to aim at those extremes ‚Äî fragmentation leading to further polarization.

Here is another problem with assuming that all political growth will be viral if people are skipping the mass messages – the party’s have to allow it. There is a tendency within political circles to tightly control the message. To have things go viral, they generally need to be fun, engaging, entertaining, and sometimes goofy. Those are all adjectives that would rarely, if ever, be used to describe politics.

As evidence of people’s interests in online politics, the article cites the 50,000 people that are tuned in to get video tape of the Republican conference’s press events. Wow! That’s huge. That works out to about 0.00025 of the voting age population. I would be that number is tied pretty closely to the number of Republican political hacks employed in the US.

The fact is, stodgy old men pontificating about politics and how to continue a partisan blockage without accomplishing anything isn’t going to go viral. What is likely to go viral is Jon Stewart making fun of stodgy old men pontificating about the Internet’s miraculous series of tubes. Unfortunately for the old men, that’s more likely to lose them votes than it is to win them.

(By the way, I don’t find it surprising that the article does not quote a single Republican, and makes only passing mention of two GOP efforts while quoting multiple Democrats. They also don’t bother to point out the fact that the RNC was the first of the political parties to podcast, the first to elevate the Internet operations to a senior staff position, and is generally regarded as doing more, and better things online than their Democrat counterparts. But why would I expect the media to get that right?)

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