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“…if nothing else, the Internet is a fearsomely effective way to lose time.” Rupert Godwin of ZDNet UK, on a WiFi-enabled train trip of over 4 hours. [via Jeff Carlson (.thought)]

Chaos here for the Super Bowl, with 8 kids running/crawling/sitting around, none older than 3-1/2 years old. So I guess it’s understandable that even with TiVo, I didn’t watch the game very closely. And the ads were disappointing… very few worthy of watching or a rewind. The Janet Jackson disrobing, however, did garner a few gasps, and repeats. Lots of debate over whether it was planned or not. I can’t imagine that it was, but what was he trying to do?

Tim Bray details his experience with using Google AdSense on his blog. He’s making some money… of course, he was well known prior to blogging, and he’s earned a solid readership with his blog. The interesting points to me are:

• Google knows his traffic, down to the individual page level. He finds this useful, since he’s got a traffic counter which filters out spiders, robots, etc., as a side-effect of the revenue. I think it’s more troublesome if you’re a commercial website to share details at this level of granularity. But maybe we really are headed to a transparent society.
• Fascinating how controlling the terms and conditions are… Bray wrote very carefully to avoid crossing any lines while still sharing interesting info.
• There is even less incentive to put full posts into his RSS feed, since the ads aren’t there.
• You always need new material, both because clicks level out and (interesting) new readers click Google ads more than long-time readers.
  

  When people first see the Google ads, quite a few click on them. Then, as time goes by and repeat visitors have seen them before, the click-through rate and the revenue fall off; but interestingly, after a few days the click-through rate stops declining and levels out.

That last point lingers… have even text ads started, ever so slightly, to reach saturation? Everyone on the web has some form of ‘banner blindness,’ where you’ve been trained to consider graphics as possible ads first, information second. The Google AdSense display code is malleable to your site, but it’s also easy enough to recognize after you’ve seen a few iterations. Are we all learning to ignore it already? Even if, as Google hopes, the ads are contextually relevant? Something to watch.

Martin Nisenholtz’s keynote at the SIIA conference three days ago comes to me via E-Media Tidbits, the Poynter group blog. Rich Gordon also pointed to Larry Pryor’s 2002 article describing the ‘third wave’, with credit to Vin Crosbie (whose big promise comes due shortly). Nisenholtz is the CEO of NYTimes Digital, which publishes, most prominently, NYTimes.com.

Basic point of the speech: we’re just getting started in the online publishing world. A few pullquotes:

The twin attributes of early online services — aggregation and sorting — are becoming increasingly available to the masses, not just in the context of documents, but increasingly through access to all media.

As we all know, this has already disrupted the commercial music business and — in what I referred to in an opinion piece in Ad Age in November — portends a “control shift” in which all media move gradually under user control.

…

Phase Three is as much about social networking as it is about information retrieval.

…

Users will be able to associate content from a wide variety of sources, including filtered access to other users, through a common interface. Online communities will be available to discuss any “article” at any time of the night or day. A user lands on the article and discussions about that article are continuous. News reports become a focal point for social networking. Again, we see this bubbling-up in Web logs today.

In this vision, two very important boundaries which all of us have grown up with, know and understand change. The first is authority. In a newspaper or in a television news broadcast, the journalistic experience is one-way and bounded. In this new experience, sources range and are scored.

I wonder if Nisenholtz has read Amazoning the News? I love many parts of this vision, put forth in 2001, and I think the application of “share, inform, create, entertain, transact” to news will be dynamic.

One typo: psychograpahic. Not nit-picking, just noticing.

I appreciated his references to the famous Vannevar Bush “As we may think” article in The Atlantic Monthly (July, 1945). One of my proudest early moments in online media was being part of the team at The Atlantic that digitized that piece, first for AOL users in early 1994 and then onto the web in late 1995. The piece — for obvious reasons — had been online before that, probably even on the early bulletin boards and newsgroups, but we were proud to publish the words again in the same publication, 50 years later.

Fascinating Michael Crichton speech from April 2002 on why speculation is so futile — and the media has fallen farther and farther because of their willingness to indulge in this (yes) idle speculation.

Even though the speculation is correct only by chance, which means you are wrong at least 50% of the time, nobody remembers and therefore nobody cares. You are never accountable.

His example teasing apart the words from a New York Times article opened up my eyes. I’ve enjoyed most of the Crichton books; I think I’ve read them all. More and more, the novels read like screenplays, and that’s not a compliment, but he usually knows how to keep a story moving. The Andromeda Strain is nearly brilliant. The Great Train Robbery is brilliant. This essay on speculation reminds me of Crichton’s talents… and makes me wish he’d tighten up his novels a bit, even though he knows they’ll sell no matter what.

One more quote, but you should really read the entire essay.

…there are some well-studied media effects which suggest that simply appearing in media provides credibility. There was a well-known series of excellent studies by Stanford researchers that have shown, for example, that children take media literally. If you show them a bag of popcorn on a television set and ask them what will happen if you turn the TV upside down, the children say the popcorn will fall out of the bag. This result would be amusing if it were confined to children.

I do see from his official site, that I’ve missed a few of his books. Maybe I’ll get to them, maybe I won’t.

Update:In further scanning/reading this evening, I found this tidbit on NYTimes.com, in their political group blog (although they don’t use that word… shhhh!):

“As someone who had been counted out himself, [President] Clinton also warned about being too certain about predicting the outcome of the nominating contests. “You may know what is going to happen,” he told the assembled press corps. “But I don’t.”

I haven’t read the usability guidelines (128 page PDF linked from this page), but of all the things my tax dollars could go to, this isn’t the worst.

Haven’t crashed in a day or two, but just want to keep the link just in case I need new ideas.

I don’t want to start a software company, but I do enjoy and appreciate the efforts of various developers, at large and small companies. I always wonder how well the small guys are doing. Here’s an MSDN piece on Getting Started with Your Own Software Company [via Slashdot]. Coincidentally, Brent Simmons created a Yahoo Group for Macintosh software developers to trade thoughts, directly aimed at smaller developers, like himself. Hope the Download.com team is paying attention.

Got out to see In America last week, and I’m glad we did. The decision was made as much by an inability to agree on anything else as a positive expectation about the film, but we were (unjustly?) rewarded all the same.

Very, very brief scene setting/plot summary: Irish parents with two young girls moves to modern-day New York City, illegally, and move into a tenement, the only apartment they can afford. Life proceeds from there, with a few colorful incidents, but mostly just family dynamics. This is a family struggling with past, present, and future, but also finding occasional joy in the small moments. It’s not light-hearted, but it’s about as real as a movie can be without being, well, real life (which isn’t that dramatic in two hours, most of the time).

I will admit that I felt a horrible sense of foreboding through most of the film. Something bad was going to happen. I was sure of it. Well, while it’s not a 100% Hollywood wrap-up ending, I was quite misled, to my relief. I’m more emotional all the time. I blame my kids. 😉

Note: All Flash movie site. Bah. But, they link to an external site for reviews, which shows some honesty.

Over the weekend, the boy delivered a classic line, although he didn’t know it. The girl was in a dress, which is rare enough since she’s seven months old. The red dress has a belt which is knotted in the back (aka, a bow). The boy asks “Why is she tied up in a dress?” I couldn’t really answer that one then. Or now.