23 Comments

1. Lola:

Well, speaking of aggregation, what if Pajamas Media made it easy to search for vblogs? What if Pajamas Media strived to be as accessible as possible, providing a source for captioned videos? This would be a win-win situation – word of mouth (or rather, word of finger) spreads very quickly in the deaf community when it comes to sources that meet their needs. I sent you email about that accessibility blog

May 11, 2005 - 8:25 am 2. RBMN:

Nowadays you almost need a whole network to correct the false and misleading things that prominent Democrats, and their stenographers in the press, say everyday.

May 11, 2005 - 8:29 am 3. Wallace:

The lesson for me personally in all this is obvious. I need new pajamas!

My present models with the little feet in them, I fear, are passe. Luckily, the Google Ads listed on this page provide me with a good source of shopping for PJ’s with a more modern fashion statement.

May 11, 2005 - 8:32 am 4. Jeff Harrell:

Being as how it’s kinda early, my thoughts on this matter aren’t yet entirely clear. Pardon me while I ramble a bit.

My blog is not big by absolute standards. I get a couple thousand unique visitors a day. A big chunk of that is attributable to the fact that I’ve got a YOUUGE and diverse archive, so Google sends a fair amount of traffic my way.

But I have a set of regular readers who don’t just visit. They leave comments, they send me e-mails with tips or ideas, they hit my iChat, some of them even call me. (Yes, folks. My phone number is on my blog.)

I struggled for a while with what, exactly, to call these folks. They were obviously more than just readers. But to be honest, they weren’t really friends. I’d never met most of them. I called them regulars, commenters, the Faithful Horde. Finally I settled on the term that I think best applies: They’re contributors. And I try to treat ‘em as such. I answer their e-mails, take their calls, subscribe to their own blogs (if any).

For me, blogging is a very social phenomenon. It’s not just about me writing whatever the hell I feel like and posting it on the Internet. I mean, it is about that, but it’s not just about that. It’s also about interacting with people, exchanging ideas, doing that alchemical thing that happens when two opinions rub up against each other.

Obviously there are problems of scale here. If I had a thousand regulars instead of twenty or thirty, I’d be busier than a one-armed paper-hanger. Please let me have to deal with that problem someday.

In many ways, I think blogging is like a pyramid scheme. I start one blog and accumulate a couple dozen regular readers. Some of them go off and start their own blogs and accumulate their own readers, some of whom Ö and so on.

What’s the old joke about the Velvet Underground’s album? They only sold a thousand copies, but every single person who bought it started a band.

Same idea. Blogs inherently resist centralization because they’re so darned easy to start. Yes, guys like Glenn get a couple hundred thousand readers a week, or a day, or whatever his latest statistic is. But there are maybe twenty blogs in that class. The other seven million are like me: A couple thousand readers a day, maybe even less. And the network expands constantly.

Look, I TOLD you I was gonna ramble. Thanks for giving me the space, Roger.

May 11, 2005 - 8:54 am 5. David Thomson:

Google is an artificial monopoly. The bubble will likely burst because its business model no longer offers anything unique. A few years ago Google had the best search engine. Today, it has many competitors . What does it currently have going for it? Only a wide acceptance by the masses—and that can disappear virtually overnight. Dogpile.com, for instance, is the better option for serious searches.

May 11, 2005 - 8:57 am 6. Mike_Nargizian:

EVERY TIME I search on Google I get a website called upspiral.com with the relevant search come up first. The page goes to a search results and then changes? Is that a bug on my computer or has google sold out to an ad firm or something?

May 11, 2005 - 9:12 am 7. C.Y.:

While this doesn’t tie into one specific area (advertising or the news service), I’d just like to stress my beleif that for the venture to be truly successful, that smaller blogs and bloggers MUST feel like a needed and wanted part of Pajamas Media.

Much ado has been made about the involvement of some of the “rock stars” of the blogosphere (Glenn, Roger and Charles, Mark), but there are 250+ other blogs out there that need to feel like they are part of the process in some way for the venture to work long term. As a matter of fact, the main gripe I’ve heard from some bloggers is the belief that PJ Media might be the exploitation of the many for the betterment of the few. This concern must be addressed early, loudly, and often.

The big names are of course the draw for investors and media types. The venture obviously relies on them to generate the buzz for startup capital and sales. That said, there are some very competent smaller bloggers out there that I’m sure are very interested in contributing more to Pajamas Media, if they could only figure out how.

I have to think that least a handful of bloggers out there have other skills (writing/editing, marketing, design, programming) that could be useful to Pajamas Media, who would like to work for the advertising network and/or the news service full-time when positions can be created.

At some point this venture will need full-time employees, and it would strengthen ties with the blogosphere if the Pajamas Media org chart was heavily-populated by bloggers from the top all the way down.

Those are my immediate thoughts on the matter. Let’s keep the dialogue flowing…

May 11, 2005 - 9:34 am 8. David Thomson:

What is the number one advantage Google has over its competitors? This companyís very name has become part of our everyday language. Thatís it in a nutshell. It is normal for people to say they are ìgoogling.î The same thing happened when everybody ìxeroxed.î But please note that Xerox is now perceived as just another brand in a very competitive marketplace. I would bet that ultimately this will be the fate of Google.com. Only real technological advances will keep it ahead of the pack. Anything else is only a temporary illusion.

May 11, 2005 - 10:00 am 9. Rick Ballard:

Wrt Goggle:

1. Reflect upon obvious bias being generated algorithmically rather than by hiring second rate hacks like Dowd, Krugman, Rich, et al., ad nauseum.

2. Resolve to eliminate all usage of and reference to Goggle (including spelling its name correctly.)

3. Delete Goggle from Search Favorites folder, add Dogpile, Clusty. I like Clusty better than Dogpile but they both function well.

4. Write brief email explaining rationale for action and including web address for Dogpile, Clusty – send to ‘Friends, Relatives’ group (less than seventy people – but they have lists, too).

Why, yes, yes I’d say that Goggle has every chance of becoming the new AOL. The stock would make a great short for someone with patience. The big asset is the name – and names can be ruined.

May 11, 2005 - 10:10 am 10. Emmett Grogan:

I don’t know enough about this endeavor yet to comment intelligently, but that isn’t going to stop me! Heh.

Seriously, I’m concerned that the injection of lots of money into this venture is going to freeze the little guys out – such as small bloggers trying to build an audience, or independent advertisers who are individuals with a book, service, or business to plug. And please spare me the lectures about ‘this is how capitalism works, they should charge what the market can bear, they have the right to make money,’ and blah, blah, blah. No kidding – I know all that and don’t begrudge it. But it doesn’t make the little guys feel any less nervous that their voices, whether to their constituencies or their potential customers, are about to be drowned out by a really loud horn section that they can’t afford to join.

I’m a fan of all the principals, and I wish them all the success they can earn. I just hope there will still be a place for a relative nobody like me.

May 11, 2005 - 10:17 am 11. Peg C.:

Roger, I am going out of my way now to avoid using Google, and have uninstalled the toolbar (I get way more popups now so this is a big sacrifice). I sent them an irate email a couple of weeks ago re: their blackballing of conservative sites/bloggers and their loathesome anti-Semitism. I am sure they completely ignored me. If the jammies gang ever gets powerful and funded enough to start a new search engine, I’ll be ecstatic.

May 11, 2005 - 11:01 am 12. David C:

Questions I have – pertaining mostly to a friend who has a movie review web site:

1. “Blog News Service” – what does this mean, exactly? Only “Hard News and Political Commentary?” Is there room for a “Features” section, encompassing non-news, non-political stuff like movie reviews?

2. What about sites (like a movie review site) that aren’t really “blogs” in the technical sense? (And does being, technically, a “blog” matter? Would – to take an example of a frequently blogosphere-linked page that isn’t a blog – lileks.com have a place?)

3. What benefits can “smaller fish” expect? My friend has a successful movie review site, with lots of traffic by the standards of online movie reviewers, but apparently fairly low-traffic by “political blog” standards?

May 11, 2005 - 1:08 pm 13. Diecast Dude:

I guess I’m in a bit of a unique position, in that: 1) I blog about NASCAR; 2) while I’m not getting a zillion hits a day I do all right, and if you do a search for “nascar blog” on Google (or Yahoo or MSN) mine is at or near the top every time; 3) my blog is on AOL; 4) I signed up for Pajamas Media the day I heard about it.

I’ve never had a problem with Google as a search engine. Some of their other ventures fall in the “yeah whaever” category — does anyone actually go there when they’re looking for news? — but I file that under the overreaching department. I’m aware of Google’s peccadilloes when it comes to who and what is or isn’t listed as a news source, but since in terms of search engines right now they’re the eight hundred pound gorilla I don’t know what can be done about it. When better search engines are available, people will migrate to them.

I’ve also never had a problem with AOL. In fact, AOL has been incredibly supportive of its sports bloggers, placing links to them on different pages throughout the system and having a live streaming audio show once a week featuring its sports bloggers calling in. No, you can’t run ads on an AOL blog (to be technically correct, on AOL they’re called journals), but I’ve never viewed the blogging side of things for me as a money-making venture. That’s not what I signed up with Pajamas for. Rather, it’s the idea of providing a quality alternative to the MSM, which is no better at covering sports than it is with regular news as far as fairness or accuracy is concerned.

Anyway, that’s my take on the matter.

May 11, 2005 - 1:30 pm 14. Robert (New Victorian):

I’m hoping there will be ‘virtuous circle’ effect–by joining PJ I will get some exposure and marketing (especially, in the future, through contributing quality news items) and that my contributions to the news service will bring readers to my blog, which will rise to the level that the quality of work deserves, whatever that may be. Good for me, good for the company. Free enterprise rocks!

May 11, 2005 - 1:37 pm 15. erp:

Who knows where this new venture will take them, and how many curves and surprises there’ll be on the way, but I wish them all the best.

I like reading what other readers have to say and I’m glad Roger plans to make comments an integral part of the new enterprise.

May 11, 2005 - 4:01 pm 16. ShrinkWrapped:

“Google has tipped their “unresponsive” hand in two (probably more) important ways – seemingly opting for short term gain by not disclosing their ad rates”

We should opt for maximum transparency.

“and by exercising apparent political bias against certain websites, many of them bloggers…on their own Google News site. Now they seem to be on the brink of institutionalizing their bias through patented algorithms ranking news according to their authority system.”

Our political biases should be transparent as well, and any “authority system” should be post-hoc, which requires robust near-”real time” error correction.

May 11, 2005 - 5:16 pm 17. Dan:

I’ve no idea what to make of any of it. I did send in an email requesting info to join to the email link. I’ve never heard anything back. I don’t know if that means I “joined,” was turned down, or what anything I am reading here, as well as other places actually means.

I’m wondering if I haven’t been passed over for some reason, or if one day I am going to get an email saying welcome, sign here agreeing to so and so and, oh, BTW, here’s the ads for your blog – to which, at this point, I’d simply say, thank you, no.

All I can conclude is that I am either out, or no discussion, or dissemination of how this is shaping up is happening outside of a few people. The interview with Kudlow, given he is on the editorial board was, pardon me, good cheerleading lacking in any real information. He basically ended saying “Yah! Pajama Media.” OK, Yah!, what?

May 11, 2005 - 7:58 pm 18. Roger:

Dan,

I hate to say this but we have been swamped. Therefore a few emails (evidently including yours) have slipped through the cracks. Please excuse us and resubmit your request to join@pajamasmedia.com. Information will be sent to you. No slight was intended, nor did we intend to blackball you or anybody else. It was simply an accident.

Roger

May 11, 2005 - 8:17 pm 19. Dan:

Thank you, Roger – I honestly wasn’t feeling slighted, just was unclear if there was a selection process of which I was unaware. I’m glad to hear there wasn’t.

As an aside, I did read the previous post on, I believe, a server or email glitch that caused you to miss / lose several emails. As I was outside of that window with mine, I didn’t think it was the cause. Point being, you may want to let people who have not heard back know they should resend. There may be others like me wondering and not realizing their email was lost.

Just a thought. As Glenn and Charles are always swamped email-wise and understandably often can’t respond to individual emails, a blogger may be thinking this is SOP, as they are involved with PM.

Thank you, again, for the timely, clear response to my comment.

May 11, 2005 - 8:33 pm 20. Tim Worstall:

As Roger knows one of the things I am keen on doing is using bloggers to provide book reviews through Pajama Media.

Whatever number you actually believe for active bloggers (8 million? 400,000?) we are, cumulatively, a vastly greater resource of experts than that known by any MSM organisation. It should, therefore, be possible to match pretty closely a new book with an expert on that subject.

Of course, many bloggers already do book reviews, which is great, and hopefully there will be a niche within Pajama for aggregation of such. Iím hoping that the syndication side of Pajama will mean that some of those will be picked up and run in the more traditional media as well. (Obviously, people would need to write in the standard 600 word format.)

What I think bloggers can really add is that many books never actually get a formal review anywhere, yet itís pretty much guaranteed that thereís a blogger who actually wants to read the new book on absolutely anything, from the latest Terry Pratchett novel to the Federal Tax Code Guide.

Thereís some competition with the Amazon reviews, of course, in one way we could see it as simply complementary to those, with the added chance (slim perhaps, but there) that a review would actually make it into the syndication process.

Thereís two things that would be needed to make this work.

1) Someone to badger publishers into providing review copies, list those copies available, send them out to bloggers who offer to review them, generally keep an eye on the system. I propose me, of course. (I assume this is unpaid, itís alright, I can see how to cover the expenses.)

2)Permission to tell publishers that this is, while not part of Pajama Media, something under consideration as an addition to the syndication service. (It doesnít matter how weak that consideration is, either).

With those two things in place I can start trying to get the free review copies that will get it going.

What does anyone else think? Obviously, the model can be extended to CDs, DVDs, video games and so on.

May 12, 2005 - 5:02 am 21. Emmett Grogan:

Tim W., that sounds like a good idea to me, but I’d like to suggest that you not forget the independent or self-published author, and make sure they have an inlet into your book review process as well. There are a lot of good books out there that are simply ignored because they don’t have the imprimatur of New York publishing on them. Giving the big houses another avenue to drown out the independents would be cheating a lot of solid writers who have the deck stacked against them already, and their potential readers. Just my 2 cents. Thanks.

May 12, 2005 - 6:36 am 22. Tim Worstall:

Emmett,

Absolutely agree. Obviously not every book is going to get reviewed (between the UK and the US itís 150,000 new titles annually) but all people have to do to have a chance of being reviewed is to send in a copy. Iím sure that some will only send .pdfs for example.

Whether a specific title, CD, DVD, book, actually gets reviewed would depend on whether any specific blogger looked at the list of titles available and asked for that copy t o do so.

May 12, 2005 - 8:10 am 23. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

One emphasis of the Blog News Service could be human-interest stories of a type that the MSM is presently not covering very well–example: what it’s like to actually live in Iraq. There are dozens of Iraqi bloggers who could provide such stories, and indeed are doing so.

If you think about it, today’s MSM tends to focus on a very small slice out of the realm of human interests and experience. This is an opportunity.

May 12, 2005 - 5:39 pm

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