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Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Good news and bad news

The good news is that this here blog, begun with such hesitancy and foot-shuffling in early January, has recently received its two-hundred-thousandth visitor.  It took us from January 7 to May 9 to reach 100,000, and just under two and a half months to double that.  We have no delusions of grandeur around here—we’re no Atrios or Kos or Billmon or Crooked Timber—but we do sometimes speak about ourselves in the first person plural, and that’s already pretty grandiose, we think.

The bad news is that ever since I posted a pair of items on Dinesh D’Souza, I have earned myself my very first cybershadow.  But he doesn’t send me hate mail.  Instead, he’s filed a nasty “review” of my book, Life As We Know It, with amazon.com, under the heading “a reader from Minneapolis.” The first time he did it, he posted something like “Bérubé is a puerile hate-monger who denies the existence of political correctness and fails to answer the arguments of Dinesh D’Souza with reason.” I came across this “review” about a month after it was posted, and wrote to amazon.com to ask them whether they had any quality-control mechanisms on board, since the “review” had nothing to do with the book.  Happily, amazon.com wrote back in a couple of days to say, sorry ‘bout that, we’ll delete that “review” within 48 hours.  A few days later, though, my “reader from Minneapolis” was back (he’s still there, if you want to check), complaining about my aversion to reason and insisting that I’m using my son’s disability to advance my “extreme politics.” (It’s true—Life As We Know It argues for national health care and endorses John Rawls’s “justice as fairness” critique of utilitarianism with a critical caveat about the Rawlsian “original position.” I’m one short step from Stalin!  Dude, I’m completely X-Treme!)

I’m not worried about the “review” in itself, now.  It’s hardly going to matter to me or to my book.  But I’m worried that there are people out there who’ve read my critique of Dinesh D’Souza and have become so enraged that . . . that . . . ooooh, they will write bad things about me on the amazon.com website! That’ll show me!!  Really, this is a very odd, very mediated form of political “retribution.” I doubt that it was common in Cicero’s Rome or Machiavelli’s Florence, not that I’d prefer to have those methods applied to me and my family.

And then there’s the swarm of viruses being sent my way lately—one of which breached the Penn State firewall and my own Norton Antivirus program.  (I think it’s called “backdoor.") For the past week my laptop has been wheezing through the Internet, reconfiguring my email and producing dozens of popups where there were no popups before.  (One morning this past weekend I turned on the laptop and saw popups even before I’d opened a browser.  Those of you who’ve seen the last twenty minutes of The Ring will have some idea of what this was like.) I suppose I’m infected with spyware or something, but this is really beyond my technical chops.  So, if anyone out there has any suggestions, please, now’s the time.  I have no idea whether this trouble is related to the recent emergence of my friend from Minneapolis, but I do know that I’m glad I’m getting myself a new laptop soon.

Back to the good news.  We learned this summer that Nick was accepted to a great college, Washington University in St. Louis, whose architecture program sounds just perfect for him.  (I haven’t posted much about Nick, partly because some of his friends read this blog.  Friends of Nick, stop reading this blog!  Yes, that means you.  And you, too.  Go read a book—haven’t you seen that recent National Endowment for the Arts report about the decline of reading in America, a decline which just happens to be most precipitous among 18-to-25-year-olds?  You rotten kids aren’t reading enough fiction.  Go read fiction, rotten kids.  Go.) The bad news is that the tuition and fees, over four years, come to a dollar amount that is eerily close to the number of visitors this blog has had since January.  (Had Nick gone to Penn State, by contrast, he would have been charged the standard child-of-faculty rate, namely, one-quarter of the quite reasonable in-state rate for tuition.) The obvious solution proposed itself—instead of begging for spare change from readers via PayPal, I could just install software that deducted one dollar from the savings accounts of readers visiting the site!  But I was told that the technology that would permit websites to make involuntary deductions from readers’ private savings accounts is still months away from successful deployment.

No, I’m making that up.  Really.  I would never pick your pockets-- and I will never sell out!!  (Unless a very good offer comes my way.) But I did briefly consider selling blog ads, after I read this fascinating item by Maureen Ryan in the July 13 Chicago Tribune.

CHICAGO - (KRT) - A year ago, blogger Glenn Reynolds joked to the Tribune that he was making “burger-flipping” wages from the trickle of funds readers donated to his popular Web site, Instapundit.com.

These days, Reynolds can afford to order steak. Since he began accepting advertisements on his site five months ago, Instapundit.com has been bringing in several thousand dollars a month.

It’s starting to look as if bloggers can make a living from their sites, thanks to an advertising boom. Companies who want to reach specific consumers - current-events mavens, conservative PhDs, cell phone fanatics - are hooking up with blogs that can deliver those eyeballs. Some politically oriented blogs are also riding an election-year advertising wave, but industry experts expect the trend to last well beyond November.

Blog ads!  Why didn’t I think of this before?!?  I get about 1.5 percent of the Uberpundit’s readership, I should be able to pull down 1.5 percent of his income, or a couple dozen dollars a month. . . .

But then I thought, wait a second.  Check out this seventh-to-last paragraph, on the fortunes of Nick Denton and Gawker Media:

Some advertisers are also wary of bloggers’ freewheeling writing styles, but Denton has rebuffed potential clients who’ve asked him to reign in his cheeky staff.

Golly!  Advertisers might be wary of my cheeky, freewheeling writing style.  So much for that little get-rich-quick-and-pay-for-college scheme!  But I understand.  It makes sense for advertisers to stick with writers in traditional print media, even if neither they nor their editors know the difference between “reign in” and “rein in.”

(Addendum:  apparently the Macon, Georgia Telegraph, whose copy of the Tribune essay I’ve linked to above, has seen fit to publish the article under the headline, “Bloggers Earns Extra Income Via Ads.” Which reminds me:  rarely is the question asked, is our bloggers earning?)

Again, I invite anyone with advice on spyware and popups and annoying cybershadows to advise away.

Posted by Michael on 07/20 at 04:36 PM
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