Online Video is Recession Resistant

I got to talking about Revision3's frankly very odd decision to lay off some big names today over at Mashable, and the real reasons behind it.

I don't find it odd simply because I'm a huge evangelist for online video (which I am), but because of a discussion that Sean and I had a week or two ago concerning the recession-resistence of online video advertising. The conversation never got to air on Mashable Conversations (for reasons that are ironical and humorous, but unfortunately not able to be discussed here), but it was so good I decided to re-air the discussion on my own podcast feed.

The discussion centered around a number of interesting positive indicators from the world of online video, but mainly this one I found over at 901am:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report covering the first six months and the second quarter of 2008.



Internet advertising revenues in the US for the first six months of 2008 were $11.5 billion, setting yet another new half-year record that represents a 15.2 percent increase over the first half of 2007. The second quarter of ’08 was up 12.8% over the same period of 2007 and showed a slight decline of 0.3% from the first quarter.



Search and Display-related advertising continue to set records. Search revenues totaled almost $5.1 billion for the first six months of 2008, up 24 percent from the $4.1 billion for the same period in 2007. Display-related advertising totaled close to $3.8 billion for first six months of 2008, compared to the $3.2 billion reported for the same period in 2007, showing about a 19% increase. Display-related advertising includes Display Banner ads, Rich Media, Digital Video, and Sponsorship.

The numbers are quite impressive, and the bottom line that Sean and I drove at during the show was that given the rise in utilization of the ad type, grabbing a chunk of that for big name producers shouldn't be a tough task.

If you produce any video at all (or have a brand capable of carrying online video), you need to sit in on our discussion.

You also need to subscribe to my video feed in iTunes or something.  Why haven't you done that yet?

I Sort of Like the Adobe Media Player

I've been playing around with my new-ish machine, and I'm rediscovering a lot of stuff I just didn't have the capability to play with before because, well, my old machines sucked.

One of the things I've been doing is running around and installing just about every Adobe Air app I can get my hands on, because generally they slide around and do cool graphical things I've not seen in a while, and I like making my computer do pretty things on the screen. So I installed the Adobe Media Player.  

First, the good: it has the one capability I've always wanted in a media player for serialized online content - it plays my subscriptions one after another with no skips, halts, clicks, or other annoying things. 

The bad: the selection is very limited. I can't subscribe to podcast feeds of my own choosing.

It's a deal-breaker, unfortunately.

I've also realized that Rev3 has cancelled almost all my favorite shows with their recent layoffs. I wanted to watch Martin Sargent's shows and Sarah Lane's show.  Back to using iTunes for Tekzilla, I suppose.

That's all I got.  I'm off to sleep.

The Machine Won't Let Us Fail

I've never read George F. Colony's blog before, so I don't know his tone or expertise very well. I do know he had a Techmeme headline yesterday, and an interesting blog post behind that.

The post was called "Why this tech recession will be different," in which he enumerated five ways that this time around will be much different than the bust at the turn of the milleneum. It's a good read. You should check it out.

In case you don't have the time to read all that, let me sum it up for you why it'll be different this time: The Law of Accelerating Returns.

Technology begets technology. Last time around, we were scrambling for a distribution phase on this thing called the Web. These days, we're not in the Web business, or even the tech business. We're in the innovation business. Social media and advanced platform engineering have pushed us into the world of having to sell unproven (yet somehow wholly plausible and realistic) ideas that work rather than a website.

Don't believe me? Look at Android. Look at OpenSocial. Look at EC2/AWS. Look at Azure.

The game keeps getting changed every five minutes (and somehow that's not fast enough for us).

It's come too far to fail. We're no longer in the "does tech work for me" phase, but "how do I make tech work better for me" phase. The machine won't let us fail, at this point.

Wrapping Up Weekend Thoughts

I've received far too much attention this weekend for quitting FriendFeed. I would have wondered, if I were you guys, if what I did was a bit of a publicity stunt, given the attention it's received.  

It wasn't, though. It was me storming off in a huff from a community that occasionally just infuriates me with what I see as some extremely illogical behavior.

I'm more calm now, and I have a little bit of perspective.  A lot of people have pontificated here and elsewhere on my actions, and the one who seemed to best encapsulate my thoughts was Duncan Riley. He often has the scary ability to read into my actions online and then to be able to better elucidate what I'm trying to say.

After he put up his post, he pinged me and (amongst other things) said I should do my homework before quoting loons. He's absolutely right.

As I told him, I shoulda done a bit more homework. I knew the theory was espoused by the loons, but then I gave the 9/11 twoofers a fair shake until read both sides and decided they were indeed batty. Of course that process didn't really take place in the public eye like most of my thought processes do now, and I don't know if that makes me stupid or open-minded or just hurts my credibility, but that's how I seem to roll.

(note to self - compare and contrast issues with developing a publicly documented opinion vs. a privately held opinion. lots of new dynamics in play with all this social media stuff these days).

I think that during a campaign like this, I may have given it more credence than it was worth for the very simple fact (and this next thing isn't a surprise to anyone here), every candidate lies. Every candidate lies, and these two candidates even make a very public point at every debate to say "hey, everything he just said? it's a lie!" With all the falsehood flying, candidate credibility is at an all time low, and it's very easy to just question everything.

Look, I'm not keen on McCain. If you scroll back to some of the old podcasts Art and I did several years ago, you'd find that out. I like Sarah Palin because she's an American success story, but I don't agree with all her policy statements. All my favorite candidates were weeded out during the primaries, and I don't have faith in any of the third party candidates this year.

I don't need to be a watchdog for McCain anymore, and certainly there's no need for more Palin watchdogs. There are armies of reporters dumpster diving in Alaska, and on FriendFeed, everyone seems to have a direct line to these guys. 

A lot of people disagree, but I think that we're having to choose between a smooth talking and inexperienced cult leader and an inept campaigner who's barely a conservative. Some people like to be talked pretty to, and some people like to have a pretty vice president to look at. I fall in the latter category.

This doesn't make me a racist.

Aside from the Obama citizenship topic, which at this point seems only secondary to the larger issue: the state of debate on FriendFeed and my involvement in it...

I like political debate and conversation. I don't like it when I'm insulted or lumped into a group of folks through the use of damning pejoratives. You know what I'm talking about, if you've been on FriendFeed long, because you've seen it.  Many of you left me emails and comments like Mona did:

I've steered clear from political exchanges (as much as possible), since I already felt the judging and negativity during the primaries. Time and time again, it was a no win situation. When I questioned a policy, plan, or quote from O, I was automatically a racist or feminist. If I questioned Hillary, I was an anti-feminist... and here I thought I was just asking questions -- like I would with any candidate.

If what happened on Friday was an isolated incident, was simple disagreement or was even limited to political debates, I wouldn't mind it so much. 

• Far too many times, though, I've been called racist for simply deigning to question one candidate (you know which one). 
• I remember during the Thomas Hawk MOMA controversy, I was called a number of extremist things (I don't remember how it came to this, but I remember someone calling me sexist) for taking Thomas's side in the debate. 
• During the fallout from a piece I did on some blogging news, several prominent bloggers publicly conspired to do a video expose on my shoddy journalistic practices.
  
• Another blogger you likely read on a daily basis started a thread to have a virtual lynch mob come together and talk about how badly they all hated Mashable and our blog posts.

Every one of these comment threads had between 30 and 90 posts. They were all mob mentality. They all included people I had previously conversed with in civil manners coming out of left field and calling me horrible things.

It just comes down to the fact that I don't wanna end up like Mike Arrington.  I don't want to maintain a sh!t list of people who "done me wrong." When I get written up in ValleyWag, I want it to be because they are jokingly suggesting I should be replaced by a caveman, not because I threw out one of my peers from my party because of some unspoken misdeed. 

When I get insulting comments over at Mashable, they blend in with all the other griefers that stick around from the Alex Jones crowd and call me things like proto-fascist. When I see it on FriendFeed, it's got your real name next to it, and everything you've ever written. It's hard not to remember who said what. 

So to that end, I don't think I'll be headed back. The temptation, given my personality type, to dive back in, mix it up, and receive even more punishment is far too great. 

I do, though, appreciate the mountain of good will after the fact that's been shot my direction. Your emails and comments have been appreciated.  I'm not going to go all Spartacus and lead people up against the evil FriendFeed overlords or anything. Do it how you like.  If you can deal with the community there without pulling your hair out, you're doing better than I.  

So feel free to create a "Rizzn Room" and read discuss me in my absence if you like, or you can just hang out on my blog or at Mashable. Or whatever you feel like, really.  Although I spent a ton of time on FriendFeed, I'm pretty visible a number of other places, as well, so I'm sure you won't have problems finding me.

Quitting FriendFeed

Update: Jay Tannenbaum sent me this link on the history of the guy bringing the suit against Obama.  So the guy's nuts.  I said it sounded suspect.  That doesn't change the fact that there are some remaining questions about the certificate (that might be able to very easily be addressed, if attempted), nor the fact that nearly everyone on that FF thread behaved like animals (sheep, specifically).

Update 2: All my feeds on FF have been nuked.  If someone there would be kind enough to kill my account, I'd appreciate it. There doesn't appear to be a "delete account" button.

I've been wrestling with this for a long time.

I'm really over my fascination with FriendFeed.  I've written up this resignation letter about three times in the last several months, but always held off on posting it because I work for a major social networking publication, and I enjoy a few things about FriendFeed (like the lifestreaming technology and the traffic it generates for me).

Unfortunately, I just don't think I can take it anymore.  I shared an item today from a very widely read publication on Talk Radio goings ons, and it was about an issue that's been underground for a very long time that has finally hit mainstream: the controversy over whether Barack Obama was born in the USA.

This is not an issue that I particularly care about, nor is it something I'm willing to defend.  As I found out from some friends who emailed me during the discussion on FriendFeed, the guy leading the charge on this is a certifiable Twoofer. In my original comment, I didn't say I was willing to defend the guy blindly, nor was I trying to nail Obama to the wall. 

In fact, my exact comment was:

This is something I haven't made a lot of hay about personally, because frankly it sounds like conspiracy theory mumbo jumbo. The truth is, though, that Obama hasn't definitively shown he was born in America. The FactCheck.org entry on this is wrong, and so is the MediaMatters bulletin. There's a youtube video that explains all this a lot better than me - you should go check it out - it's likely one of the top videos right about now, so it should be easy to find. I'm not trying to nail him to the wall on this, but if it's untrue, it should be particularly easy to debunk for Obama

The truth is though, that there are a lot of unanswered questions.  All I did was point that out.

But a bevy of folks from the FriendFeed community (including one of the founders) decided to decend on me, insult my intelligence, tell me they've lost respect for me, and post the same FactCheck.org link.  They tried to deflect the issue, confuse the issue, call me racist, question McCain's parentage, and all other sorts of things, but answer the basic premise (that Obama is dodging this lawsuit and refuses to answer the allegations) they would not.

Whatever.  FriendFeed? You're fired.  I'll be by to collect my feeds in a few days.

Don't get me wrong, I love the technology, and it's a great idea.  It's not all the users - some of my best friends in the world are on FriendFeed, so this isn't an indictment of everyone on it.

Still, some of the most infuriating conversations I've had with intelligent people acting stupid have been on FriendFeed, and it's not in my continued mental health's interests to remain on the system. 

For those who've not been on FriendFeed, wanna know what it's like?  It's like Slashdot, but without the critical thinking. It's like Digg, but with a better vocabulary. It's like 4chan, but without the criminal record. It's like the comments on LittleGreenFootballs during the Rathergate scandal, but without the research. 

Simply put, it's a bunch of really smart people who generally feel they're too smart to go out and back up what they have to say with facts. Why? I don't know.  Maybe it's the format, maybe it's what happens when you get a bunch of bloggers in close quarters.  Something.  There's probably some good reasons there, but right now I don't have the perspective to come to any real conclusions.

As I said before, it's not a blanket indictment of everyone on there, but of the community spirit on the system.  Almost everyone I know uses FriendFeed, and that includes my best friends.  Somehow, though, when all my friends (and their friends, and their friends) get together in a conversation, something goes horribly awry.

In the future, if you want to follow me, you'll need access to my RSS feeds. If I get involved with another social conversation community (God help me), I'll let you know here, so you can talk me out of it.

Hopefully, My Last Post on the Economy

... of course, if you believe that, maybe you'll be interested in some land for sale in the Everglades.

But as I'm reading all these doom and gloom posts today about layoffs, an analogy springs to mind. If you take a look at the so-called layoff tracker that TechCrunch has, they list a grand total of 3,689 jobs lost, and 3,000 of those come from eBay and the unconfirmed Yahoo layoffs.

So of the 20 remaining companies that have announced layoffs, there have been only 689 employees laid off (half of which came from nVidia). Take nVidia from the equation and we're only talking about 320 people.

If you watch late night TV, as I often do working for overnights at Mashable, you see a lot of commercials for weightloss products.  Very often, they're making bodacious claims like "lost 10 pounds in three weeks!"

Quite honestly, I can fluctuate my weight by 10 pounds on a heavy eating day (granted, it'd take a couple trips to McDonald's). Similarly, though, if you look at the overall economy, either limiting the scope to all tech jobs or the entire American economy, this is nothing. This ebb and flow happens on a daily basis.

Just sayin'.

I hope I can get my brain off politics and economics and back into tech soon.  I'm starting to annoy even myself with this stuff.

I Am Not an Earthling

Political neophytes Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have been once again inflicting their beliefs upon the public.  This is not particularly new stuff from them.  Ever since the primary campaigns, Dave and Robert have been showing the world why they should stick to pontificating on technology rather than politics.  

Dave Winer's post was entitled "I Am Not a Liberal," and revolved around the mistaken concept that 'Obama is a conservative, and so is Dave.' Robert Scoble, never one to pass up an opportunity to alienate anyone with an ounce of conservatism, takes the "concept a step further" and proudly declares that he is "Not an American."

Judging by the responses in their comment section, both Dave and Robert have already alienated everyone from his audience who could have a different opinion than him.

If you read both of the blog posts and don't understand what's wrong with what they said, then this post isn't for you. Go read a couple of books on political ideology, maybe a history book or two, and come back and perhaps we can talk.

For the rest of you that barely made it through Dave's post and then halfway through Robert's post and were either laughing or crying from stream of pseudo-facts and straight up ignorant beliefs and statements, you know what I mean.

Need more insight as to what I mean?  Robert's post is sentence fragment after sentence fragment, each followed by the refrain "I am not an American."  Most of what he says are straw men arguements.  No one has alleged that marrying a Muslim woman doesn't make you American.

I mean seriously:  Robert doesn't understand the difference between Fascism and Socialism, despite the fact that he drops his holocaust credentials every chance he gets (for those of you playing the game at home, President Bush's nationalized banking is a positive move for Fascism, Senator Obama's plan for socialised medicine and socialized insurance is a positive move for Socialism).

On the spectrum of human political ideals, socialism is a left ideology.  That isn't some sort of uninformed, uneducated opinion... that's a simple fact. I didn't make it up, and you can find a number of scholars and informed opinions that agree with me. 

So when Dave Winer tries to tell me that because I consider his plans for socialized medicine "liberal," I must be ignorant, I have to wonder what planet he's hailing from. I furthermore resent the implication that I need to change my opinion of Obama, get on board for the big win and vote for him, or I'm somehow not playing on the side of "Team America."

Rob Diana wrote an excellent article for Mashable a couple weeks ago, and it was entitled: "Are Politics Damaging Your Brand?" I didn't chime in on it because I very obviously participate in political discussions, but I can't deny the effect that political opinions have on my regard of social media pundits.

I think that, two weeks of pondering, I've finally arrived at an opinion, and if you think about it, I'm sure you'll agree:

Political opinions don't necessarily damage your brand. Everything you say on a big enough stage will attract passionate detractors. When you very obviously will have problems passing Economic 101 and Intro to American Political Opinion, then you proceed to opine to thousands of Americans on politics and the economy, you very rightly deserve to have your brand damaged.

Robert Scoble and Dave Winer have been venturing forth into political punditry for a while now (Dave much longer than Robert). I almost never agree with either one of them, but as they've spent more time illustrating the nature and sources of their beliefs, it's become glaringly obvious that they only have a very knee-jerk and superficial understanding of the principles they espouse. Thus, I don't respect their opinions, and think a lot less of the rest of their opinion.

If they can't be bothered to understand what they're talking about when it comes to politics and the economy (and feel no remorse for propagating flawed opinions to the masses), why should I respect their opinions on the rest of their established domain of expertise?

What's the lesson here?

If you can't speak intelligently about something, and everything you write on your blog is read by thousands of people, it may be best to keep your opinions to yourself.  

It isn't because your opinions aren't valid.  Heck, even the numbnuts who were at that Sarah Palin rally a couple weeks ago who called for the death of Senator Obama had valid opinions (and this is America, where every opinion, no matter how stupid or offensive it may be, is valid).

You will, however, undermine your credibility if you speak on topics as if you were an expert when you very clearly aren't.

Another Reason You Shouldn't Listen to Recession Monkeys

This will be kept short, and I promise I'll use this blog for something other than ranting about the economy again soon....

.. but I caught an editorial by Bernard Lunn, a fellow I've never really taken seriously for a number of reasons.

Back in April, Bernard started writing for ReadWriteWeb, and erroneously asserted that we were in a recession. He's been asserting ever since (and for sometime before, I'm guessing, just not at RWW) that we're headed for gravely dire times.

As I've said, I'll believe it when I see it. I haven't had anyone conclusively demonstrate to me the connection between Wall Street and Main Street, and I've had a number of people refute it.

Back to the thing that set me off today, Bernard Lunn.  Today he asked, in all earnest, where the alarm bells were:

Seeing the Blogosphere afire with tales of crisis in start-up land, with emails going from the wise investors to their portfolio companies, makes me think: no duh! Driving with your eye only on the rear view mirror is not smart. I hate to say "I told you so" but some times I cannot help myself. We have been banging this drum for a year. Not that it took a genius to see that a downturn was coming, it was bleeding obvious! We followed up with perspective here and here. When the sky started to fall a few weeks ago we started to look on the positive side.

Wanna know why we didn't hear the alarm bells?  Because the false alarms have been going off for ages now.  There was only one person that predicted the situation we're in that I've heard mention it in the last three years, and he's not a blogger.

Everyone else has been pointing to our unemployment rate, which is still phenomenal, our GDP, which is still growing, and the price of oil and gas, which is now falling.

They've been, as Bernard so succinctly put it, banging this drum for years saying the bubble is going to burst any second now, and are wondering why we didn't believe them.

Has anyone heard the fable of the boy who cried wolf? Seriously, I can't be the only one to know that tale. Bernard isn't the only one, either.  People have been saying we're in a bubble and it's going to collapse on us since 2005, less than a year after the term came into existence.

Here's the bottom line, people: You can't say that the end is near for the entire duration of the boom and when it ends three years later claim victory. It doesn't work like that.

Update: Although I used Bernard as a foil for this piece, he gives four pieces of advice at the end of his post, all of which I agree with.  You should read it for that.

Recession as the New El Nino

I've spent most of the day alternatively playing with my son and resisting the efforts of those online to depress the crap out of me. I keep teetering between the idea that my past two articles in my "positive economics" series are correct, and the feeling that maybe I should just let go let the darkness consume me as well.

I've been toying with it, if you're on my GTalk list, you know what I'm talking about.

"my livingroom is a mess. i hafta clean it. i blame the recession."

“pizza hut says it's going to take two hours for my pizza to get delivered. i blame the recession.”

"sorry. may be slow to respond. i blame the recession."

Of course, I'm joking, but if you believe the dire picture that's being painted over the last couple of days, we're all headed to the stone age, and we need to all hone our haggling and bartering skills, because the money we make will soon be worthless piles of paper.

I spoke to a longtime friend of mine that's now in the banking and mortgage business. More specifically, he does foreclosures on mortgages - he's been talking about what happened last week for the last two or three years (maybe even longer). Even though it's probably an asshole move to a friend of that calibre to talk shop on the weekend, I just asked him point blank when the end was.

"A long, long ways away," he said. "At least, until property prices return to what they should be and the market becomes stable."

He also had some interesting thoughts on the bailout. I'm not personally comfortable with the bailout, because I'm of the opinion that this is somewhat of a market correction, and interfering with that hasn't seemed to help any (as I predicted it wouldn't last week).

"I'm not a fan of it, this partial bank nationalization that's going on, honestly," my friend told me. I'm also not a fan of banks buying banks. But i'm much more a fan of nationalization and mobility towards monopoly than I am of a banking system collapse."

I'm still curious on the connection between the investment banks and the consumer banks. I've not had that one exhaustively explained to me, and the one time I came really close to understanding it, I was talking with Jim Harper of the CATO Institute, and he was of the opinion (from anecdotal evidence collected by the Intsitute) that the two were divorced enough that there wouldn't be a systemic impact on commercial and consumer lending.

My friend disagrees, however.

"That's only partially true, in things I've seen," he explained. "One thing that we'll have a big problem with is the short term business loans that most companies use to operate, like the ones that only go from 14-45 days. They're most often used for payroll and such. Companies that take out the loan now tend to pay it back pretty quickly."

He then, in the way my friend does so well, explained the nightmare scenario. 

"However, one company running the risk of not being able to pay their employees for two weeks is something that's pretty unacceptable," he said. "That happens to one large corporation, well, can you imagine the panic? I mean, pick any large company it could happen to, and then watch the reactions."

"Imagine the new worry: Not 'will my job be there?' but instead 'can they get the loan to do payroll?'

Now, before you all start panicking, this isn't me changing my overall tone in coverage of this.  I wanted to press him for more details, but I'm guessing he got tired of me abusing our friendship and logged off to go zone out in World of Warcraft or something, so I didn't get permission to cite his name on this, nor did I get the chance to have him explain the likelyhood of the scenario.

Given the fact that I've known him for more than a decade, I can tell you a couple things about him: he's very prone to seeing the worst case scenario (though he calls it being a realist), he's the most logical person around (before he was a banker, he was one of my mentors as a coder and hacker), and doesn't make authoritative statements about things where he's generally unsure of what he's talking about.

Most importantly (and perhaps startlingly), he's been predicting the week we had this week to me for the last two or three years. 

You can choose to look at this one of two ways, thus, since I put a fair amount of stock in what he has to say:

1. This is going to be a long winter, so store your nuts. Preferably in a cellar below your log cabin in the middle of the uncharted forests.
2. Or, this will end, and there are what appears to be some termination conditions on this crisis, and they will eventually be reached.

Thoughts on any of this?

Don't Listen to the Recession Monkeys

"Well look at these morose motherfsckers right here. Smells like someone sh!t in their cereal. Bong!" - Holden McNeil

Look, I don't have a whole lot of time this evening to go into a great deal of detail, but I've gotta get this off my chest before I go to sleep, or I won't be able to...

This market collapse thing?  You haven't felt the effects of it yet. Trust me, you haven't.

If you just laid off staff using that as an excuse, either you were lying to them or you're fearful of something you don't fully understand.

If you're advising your startups to tighten their belts because you ain't givin' them any more cash, you're taking advantage of a situation where you know you can grab more power for yourself, not doing your flock any favors.

There is absolutely nothing that happened this week that has affected your life on Main Street, unless you're talking about your stock portfolio. Milk, butter, bread and gas are all down this week - quite significantly. That's more money in your pocket.

I'm not saying there won't be fallout. I'm not saying that this stuff will or will not continue to get worse or better. I don't know those answers. I've talked to some really high-powered economists this week, and they're not even sure.

They all agree on this, though: we all need to chill the fsck out. The sensationalist media missives and opportunistic business announcements are making this worse than it is.

If you're a writer or you manage a business - take a breath and really think before you post or make major course corrections. There are consequences to your actions. 

Don't act on fear, act on facts and logic.

A Perfect Confluence of Genres

It isn't often I use this blog to blatantly pimp my work at Mashable (there isn't much margin in that, trust me. :-), but I'm wanting to call attention to an editorial/expose thing I wrote late last night/early morning before I fell asleep.

It's one of those pieces that I'm not sure if it will be wildly popular in terms of attention or completely ignored. It could go either way - it has hotbuttons like politics, Hulu, YouTube, comedy, Sarah Palin, Tina Fey... but ultimately it's not about any of that so much as it's a story about censorship.

Oddly, in today's day and age, we just don't care about censorship anymore (particularly when it's happening because of a company, rather than the government). I remember a day when you could call "censorship" on the web, and every Blue Ribbon wearing mofo would hop to. These days, if it doesn't glitter like it came from Perez Hilton's MySpace profile, it just doesn't matter.

At any rate, here's the piece. And the reason why I point you to that is so that I can point you to an editorial that I wrote almost a year ago called Is The Listener's License Coming?

Government censorship, I can usually deal with. The bozos in our government are usually so clueless when it comes to technology that the way I figure, if I get caught for something, I probably deserve it.

What bothers me more is corporate censorship.  When large companies have too much power in terms of media inflence so that they're able to disappear free thought on the Web at a whim.

That's what both of these pieces are about.

Time to Hoard or Time to Diet?

It appears that everyone continues to fret and cry over the market losses today. Almost every blogger I've read today has had some sort of masochistic joy-gasm over the fact that the market is tanking like all get out today.

I've heard many anecdotal reports of bank runs taking place in New York for the last week or so. Meanwhile, I sit blissfully unaware of any real impact as the cost of gas continues to fall (as do essential commodities like bread and milk).

It wasn't a planned thing, but my family is both making and spending more money over the last two months than usual as well from various entreprenurial ventures. Rather than hoarding our money (which is supposedly losing value due to inflation), we're spending it. If the economy is truly tanking and all of my dollar bills are going to be worthless soon, I'd rather have stuff than paper.

Isn't that the wiser move of the two? Not to mention it brings about economic positives, like consumer growth and (sales) tax revenues.

We're just one family, but the way I see it, what happens on Wall Street is pretty far removed from what happens on Main Street. Lean businesses that count on either venture or growth based business models will survive, and those that rely on constant credit infusions will stagnate. That's a healthy thing. 

Sure, we need boom cycles, because out of excess comes innovation. Out of too much boom, though, comes bloated and truly useless business models.

In short, this is healthy for us. It's diet time for America, and we'll come out better for it when we're done.

Why Go Negative, Part 2

Scott Bourne, host of "This Week in Photography," put out a post today that summarizes my blogging career pretty nicely.

About 50% of my audience loves me and the other half, well - not so much.

Guess what - that means I am on the right track. If EVERYONE loves you, chances are you are not taking a side and long term, your audience won’t grow or hang around. You need some haters to know you’re on the right track.

Why do I go controversial? Because so many bloggers fake the righteous indignation and fervor and passion on topics that everyone already agrees with them on. Tempest in a teapot.

That sort of pseudo-controversial phrasing does no one any good. If you are reading a perspective you could already recite by heart that acrimoniously agrees with you, what have you learned or gained from it?

But if the author presents a reasonable viewpoint you don't agree with, and does so with passion and integrity, one of two things happen - if you agree with it, you are armed with more ammuntion for your worldview. If you disagree, you're forced to think a bit as to why, and sharpen your rhetoric for when you might actually need to defend your point of view.

Scott continues:

I’ve had one listener ... tell me no less than three times - that’s right THREE times, he’ll never listen to me again. Then about a week later, he writes back and says “This time I really mean it.”

The secret of radio style podcasts is to be just controversial enough to hold your audience’s attention. Half my audience hates me, because I have strong opinions that I’m willing to back up. BUT THEY STILL LISTEN!

I've had the same situation - just check out the comments on any editorial I've posted on Mashable (check the political ones first, though). You'll see the same folks over and over again promising to never come back to the site again.

It's not just the secret to radio - it's the secret to any editorial content. It's the whole reason I go controversial.