I had such fun live-blogging the last debate, I’m gonna do it again.
The words start to flow around 6 pm PST. See you there…
Nobodies business
I want to pick up a few threads I’ve been collecting and meaning to post about but haven’t had time for till now.
Let’s start with Matthew Klam’s New York Times Magazine cover story on bloggers from a couple of weeks ago. As a group portrait of a handful of high-profile political bloggers it was, I thought, a good read, and reasonably accurate, based on my own impressions of some of the people covered. But this passage jumped out at me and screamed for comment:
“In a recent national survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than two million Americans have their own blog. Most of them, nobody reads. The blogs that succeed … are written in a strong, distinctive, original voice.”
This passage crystallized the fundamental and profound divide between most professional journalists and most bloggers. “Most of them, nobody reads.” Now, even the world’s most neglected, forlorn and unpopular blog has at least one reader — the author. So Klam’s first message to these bloggers is, “You are a nobody.” But in fact most of the millions of not-terribly-well-known blogs on the planet do have a handful of readers: friends, relatives, colleagues, the person who staggered in the door from a Google search and stuck around.
“Everyone’s famous for 15 people.” Not a new concept (here’s a reference from 1998), but still a valuable one. And one that continues to elude most journalists, who can’t lay aside their industry’s yardstick of success long enough to understand what’s happening on the Web today.
For Klam, as for so many of us media pros, “the blogs that succeed” is synonymous with “the blogs that reach a wide audience.” But publishing a blog is a nearly cost-free effort compared with all previous personal-publishing opportunities, and that frees us all to choose different criteria for success: Maybe self-expression is enough. Or opening a conversation with a couple of new friends. Or recording a significant event in one’s life for others to find.
Many of these blogs do not meet the definition of “journalism,” but who is Klam, and who are we, to say that they are not “successes”? Who are we to discount the human significance of untold numbers of personal stories and thoughts and ideas communicated to handfuls of readers — to dismiss this vast dialogue as the chatter of “nobodies”?
(David Weinberger has a similar reaction here.)
Of course there are blogs and bloggers who judge their enterprises according to the traffic yardstick. Steven Levy’s recent Newsweek column even suggested that some bloggers are beginning to become what is known indelicately in the Web industry as “traffic whores”: “The low road is a well-trodden path to big readership.” As some bloggers try to turn their pastime into a business or a livelihood, this is inevitable.
Unlike Levy, though, I’m less worried about the occasional “ankle-biting” blogger who grows hoarse-voiced in hope of page-views — and more impressed by the unflagging explosion of memorable new blogging voices and contributions to the burgeoning pool of human knowledge online.
This is the dark matter of the Web universe, the stuff J.D. Lasica is writing about in his book. Collectively, it outweighs all the “bright” matter of the more commercial Web sites with their vast traffic. This much was known as early as the mid-’90s, when we began to see that, though the top 20 Web sites may have dominated the traffic claimed by the top 100 Web sites, the top 100 Web sites still commanded only a fraction of the Web’s total traffic. This was a new world.
What’s happening today is that, thanks to Google and RSS and other technologies still aborning, that world is beginning to get organized, and as it becomes better organized it can’t help becoming more economically significant.
Here’s where I’d bring in Wired editor Chris Anderson’s now justly celebrated “Long Tail” piece. Anderson takes a look at consumer behavior patterns on Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody, and other “big catalog” services online. These services restore back catalogs and “mid lists”; they restore a nearly infinite number of oldies into circulation. Individually, these works have minuscule demand; collectively, they’re huge:
“Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country. This is the Long Tail.”
People don’t get this yet, Anderson writes: “We assume…that only hits deserve to exist” — just as we assume that if you don’t have a big circulation, “nobody” reads you.
Anderson’s piece focuses chiefly on the entertainment industry, but the principle is a broader one. If you want to keep climbing the ladder from blogs to the entertainment industry all the way up to the global economy, the next piece to read is James Surowiecki’s little essay on “the bottom of the pyramid,” which talks about the vast economic opportunity in creating products for the planet’s teeming billions of poor customers. (“Though developing nations don’t have much money on a per-capita basis, together they control enormous sums.”)
There’s an old saying in the land of the Broadway theater, where once I tarried, that you can’t make a living there, but you can make a killing. Perhaps the Internet’s fate is to transmute the worlds of publishing and entertainment and even global trade from the hit-or-miss nightmare of a Broadway-like lottery into something more hopeful — a world where it’s a lot harder to make a killing but a lot easier to make a living. Is there anyone, outside of a few boardrooms, who’d find that a loss?
Some things never change
Back in 1999 I wrote a column that pointed out that it’s really hard to get accurate numbers on visitors to Web sites, that MediaMetrix can’t be trusted (it undercounts critically important at work users), and its competitors aren’t much better.
Fast forward to 2004. Wired News’ Adam Penenberg writes a column that says that it’s really hard to get accurate numbers on visitors to Web sites, that MediaMetrix (now Comscore MediaMetrix) can’t be trusted (it undercounts critically important at work users), and that it’s competitors aren’t much better.
Adam’s right. Plus ca change… And today, the whole explosion of RSS and blogging promises to further cloud the statistics that marketers want.
In my column, I argued that the whole concept of “reach” as the be-all and end-all yardstick of success on the Web had some pretty negative implications, favoring sites and services with broad and superficial followings. I still think that’s the case. If there’s a future for businesses and services that offer depth and rich value rather than “quick hit,” low-loyalty visitors — and of course, sitting here at Salon, I think there is — then we need to do better than MediaMetrix, Neilsen and company.
Mistakes, mistakes
One last thought on that “three mistakes” question that Bush ducked.
This is a really basic, standard-issue job interview question that every job-hunting college graduate learns to deal with. (It’s a variant of the “Tell me about your weaknesses” line of inquiry.) You know the interviewers want to hear something about how you deal with failure or criticism or learning from error. You need to show them that you are a little self-reflective. You’re obviously not going to reveal something that’s so damaging it disqualifies you from the job, and no one expects you to. But the very nature of the question is a test of tact and self-awareness.
The one thing you know never to do is what Bush did tonight: You don’t rattle off a list of your successes when you’re asked about your mistakes. You don’t say, “Let’s not talk about where I was wrong — here’s where I was right.” Say that and you flunk the test.
I was honestly surprised Bush was so obviously unprepared for the question. (As my colleague Geraldine Sealey points out over in Salon’s War Room, the president was asked a similar question at an April press conference, so he’s had some time to think it through.)
Then I thought about it and realized, gee, George W. Bush is a man who never in his life had to prepare for a real job interview — one that actually would determine whether he could pay his bills. Maybe he had interviews, but you’ve got to figure the family name and the pedigree opened the door and sealed the deal. The interview would always have been a formality. Fortunately, this debate was more than that.
Josh Marshall’s commentary on this matter is also illuminating:
“In the Bush world you never admit mistakes. The only mistakes the president can think of are the times he appointed people who admitted mistakes — who put reality above loyalty to the president.”
Kerry’s prize, just for showing up!
I imagine the Bush people are happy tonight — this debate wasn’t the obvious rout the last one was. But I still think the essential dynamic here helps Kerry. The problem for Bush is simple: The more time he spends in front of the American people in a forum that is not handpicked and tightly controlled by his own handlers, the more it’s clear that there’s nothing more to Bush.
If you already support him, well, you already support him, you’re probably not going to change. If you’re a Kerry supporter, like me, you’re just going to keep shaking your head in disbelief. So all that matters is the slim wedge of people outside of the two camps. And with each debate, those people are seeing that, with Bush, that’s all there is, folks. His lines are writ in stone, and we’ve heard them already. Here they were again: “He changed positions.” (As if that in itself were a crime.) “I know how these people think.” (The line reeked of dismissive condescension in the first debate, yet here it was again: does it play to the know-nothing xenophobic heartland?) “We’ve already got 75% of al-Qaida.”(Oh, so why are we so worried about a terror attack? Ah, that’s right, we got 75% of the leadership as of 9/11/2001 — then we gave them some real effective recruiting help by invading Iraq.) Love him or hate him, you couldn’t come away from this debate feeling that you’d heard or learned a single new thing from Bush.
Meanwhile, with each debate Kerry gets to display more of himself, gets to prove — simply by virtue of showing up, being fast on his feet and articulate and smart and able to stand up for himself — that he is nothing like the insane caricature of himself that the Bush ads have portrayed.
The time Bush spends in the spotlight diminishes him; the time Kerry spends in the spotlight enhances him. Since a political campaign can’t hide the candidate, this leaves Bush in a bind. No wonder Kerry’s strategists were willing to compromise on so many details of the debate formats to get Bush to commit to a third engagement. On to the next debate!
Well, Bush’s team fixed their candidate’s veneer since the first debate: No smirks, no grimaces, lots of smiles. Still, they can give the guy a paint job, they can patch the cracks; but the timbers are still rotten, and the whole structure is sagging. Kerry once more seemed more alert, more connected with reality and in touch with the complexity of the world any president faces.
Questioner has asked Bush to name three mistakes he made, and he basically stonewalled. Iraq was right, the tax cut was right. Maybe he made a few bad appointments, but he won’t say who. No mistakes worth naming. There you have it: President Bush — “I’m perfect.”
Kerry: “Gut check time: Was this really going to war as a last resort? “
Surely President Bush could have thought twice about saying to Kerry, regarding his position on partial-birth abortions, “You can run but you can’t hide.” Sound familiar? If memory serves, it’s what he said about Osama bin Laden back when he was willing to mention that name in public. So far, bin Laden has managed to hide quite well.
Kos has the scoop on the lumber thing: “President Bush himself would have qualified as a ‘small business owner’ under the Republican definition, based on his 2001 federal income tax returns. He reported $84 of business income from his part ownership of a timber-growing enterprise.”
Stem cells: Kerry just pointed out the single overwhelming fact here, that hundreds of thousands of embryos are either going to be destroyed eventually, or they could be used to find cures for diseases.
Bush is saying “embryonic stem cell research requires destroying lives.” If he believes that, why isn’t he outlawing fertility clinics? By his definition, they’re mass murderers, and the thousands upon thousands of Americans who have created and destroyed embryos in the course of fertility treatments should be locked up in jail. There is no logic, no morality, nothing but pathetic politics in Bush’s stem-cell policy.