Michael Gracie

Let’s be honest - if you read beyond the catchy headlines you’d never get the grass mowed

• The psychology of foreclosure - Robert Shiller makes everyone mad (Calculated Risk)
• “Dude, where’s my file” - asking the portability question the in context of business reality (Scott Karp)
• Ben Bernanke’s Bubbles - Greenspan is probably pissed…they were his bubbles last week (Wall Street Journal)
• Real bloggers twitter - or, why the real world will never catch up (Louis Gray)

The “Mobile” category is now gone…I’ve moved the paltry five posts to “Office.” I’d like to say I did this for the same reason Russell Beattie tossed mobile, but it’s not. I still believe in the general concept of internet mobility, but its contortions (like blogging) just don’t suit me. When I’m away from the desk I’m usually either:

• Walking the dog - He gets pissed if I use the phone during his time and starts “drag-assing”, which results in a half-hour walk taking two hours.
• Driving - I can weave through traffic and tap out text messages, but I have trouble logging into Wordpress while doing the same.
• Meeting - Downright rude to blog while in a meeting, although I’ve seen a few folks try it only to wonder afterwards why they were alone in a previously crowded room.
• Drinking, eating, or otherwise making merry - If you must have web access while drinking, I suggest you find new friends to drink with; if you’re doing it while eating, remember to clean the keyboard afterwards.
• Fishing - The water is my church, and my fly box is my Bible. You might blog while you’re in Sunday services, but if I do it during mine I run the chance of dropping my Blackberry in a river and voiding the warranty.

I think that is more than enough excuses.

I was shooting for a leg amputation instead

The New York Times called for the death of blogging, or maybe that’s death from it. No need to link to it - the echo chamber takes care of all your referencing needs.

While folks throughout the world were keeling over on their keyboards, I was out on a river Sunday. We had sun for about ten seconds, and snow flurries for the other seven hours. The water’s edge was icy, and the water itself was roughly one degree warmer. I made the mistake of standing in said flow.

I’d picked up a North Face Denali jacket for a cool hundred bucks during the one and only stop on the way up, and with capilene from head to toe you would have thought a die hard could take it. Could have.

Roughly fifteen minutes after arrival, my right foot started feeling damp. A half hour later the whole leg was soaked up to the knee. What gives?

This…

…as in giving me a quart of water shloshing around inside my waders.

I put up with it for the rest of the day, but by the time we prepared for the hike out I felt like I was walking on a stub. The moment I complained the jokes started flying:

• “Let’s get rid of the toes right here on the trail. It’ll make the hike easier.”
• “Do you have a liquor flask? Not for the pain - we need to sterilize first.”
• “Are you sure you didn’t just pee in your waders again?”

Ha ha ha. I wound up getting comped a meal and a microbrew (out of pitty, I guess). But my sides still hurt from the comedy.

I do not wish to demean anyone’s death. It is certainly tragic, and I am sure those whose hearts failed from the stress are dearly missed. I send both my condolences, and a message…

There are a lot more important things in life than grabbing internet headlines - one of mine just happens to be catching fish (and getting heavily ribbed by my friends).

Blogging is an endless struggle for attention. Not many people get that attention, and some only get it from the same folks who they are providing attention to (in other words, they create a big “circle jerk”). Bloggers will use every excuse under the sun to make you think they are big, bad and bold, when in fact they are as obscure as the rest of us.

Among the signs that a blog is unsuccessful (read: full of shit)…

- “I’m changing my layout to suit my readers needs” - when they should have said “I’ve been using a prepackaged style sheet because I don’t know CSS, and I think all these high-powered bloggers’ success is highly correlated with their beautiful graphics”; they will soon come to the realization that Adobe Creative Suite costs a mint, that their design friends are too busy to help (because the masses cannot afford Adobe CS), and they’ll wind up with an even crappier style after trying on their own.

- Using terms like “my host” a lot - “My host” means “Blogger”; they’ve masked the fact with their own URL (purchased at GoDaddy for $4.99) so you think they have a server to themselves; readership is too ignorant to know better.

- “This blog is really busy” - should be “I’m a political blogger with absolutely no original thoughts and I know it - everyone commenting on my site is just like me - we just finished toasting our link around at Drink Asininely.”

- “We just received our first advertising partner” - actually, Google just approved their Adsense account after 400 emails back and forth, arguing a lack of content and/or a consistently broken site due to faulty HTML tags; get ready for “ad slather” (the use of “we” to make you think they are just one step behind Daily Kos).

- “We are changing blogging platforms, because MovableType is too slow.” - this means PageRank = 2 and Alexa ranking is unrecordable; even though Hugh Mcleod and Glenn Reynolds are still using MovableType, the blog owner has run out of excuses (”we” used in this context means unemployed webmaster - since CMS went open source).

Of course, if you are Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media (a guy who understands the economics of blogging) you don’t conjure lame reasoning - you simply restructure.

You aren’t going to find any scoops here, as I don’t pay much attention to politicians or celebrities, and I think the media is “pre-paid.” So it doesn’t really matter to me whether this site is afforded the same protections as the mainstream media. Nonetheless, we are all one big community, so it is a bummer to hear the Onine Freedom of Speech Act died.
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I once said that blogging is no venture. It seems I have been proven wrong once again, as AOL bought Weblogs, Inc. for a purported $25 million. Granted, Weblogs, Inc. is a bit more than just blogging - it is a network of blogs that drives ad revenue. I won’t back down - I was wrong….maybe.

Note that AOL may have paid a “bubble” price considering all the hype around blogging. The network drew in ad revenue that was supposedly in the tens of thousands of dollars per month. And then there are all the underpaid bloggers that made the Weblogs, Inc. network churn out the content in the first place. Will they continue on their $500 per month track? I doubt it. A more likely scenario is they extort bigger bucks from AOL or just set off on their own.

So, you have an asset churning minor cash flow, using an un-naturally low cost infrastructure that builds all your value, and has legs with which to walk out the door. This thing will no doubt need some work to justify the price.

Congrats to Jason Calcanis and Co. - to AOL, well good luck!

Saying that blogging can be a venture is like saying that Jerry Bruckheimer productions would be action packed without Jerry. Business 2.0 explores the idea a little further in Can Blogging Ever Become Big Business?, but I have to give the question a resounding no.
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FindLaw is pushing to get to the bottom of the recent high-profile personnel firings over blogging. In Blog-Related Firings Focus on Policy, the Associated Press article jabbers on about policy for a bit, before cutting to the chase.

It’s common sense folks.
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