Newmark's Door

Where were the FTC's economists?

I hope--I certainly hope--they protested vigorously but were overruled. The new blogger-disclosure ukase is extremely dopey. Walter Olson critically comments and he links to other critical comments.

Megan McArdle--". . .  it's so transparently stupid that I don't even know what to say"--agrees.

Jack Shafer at Slate--"The guidelines have to be read to be believed. They are written so broadly that if you blog about a good and service in such a way that the FTC construes as an endorsement, the commission has a predicate to investigate"--does, too.

And Dan Costa at PCMag.com snaps:

. . . I thought it would be worth my time to wade through the 81-page guide of regulations. After all, the penalty could be $11,000 per violation. Near as I can tell, the regulation will require every blogger to disclose payments, gifts, and professional interests for every tweet, post, or email that supports a given company. In other words, this mess of regulations misunderstands media, creates unenforceable rules, and, quite possibly, violates our First Amendment right to free speech. 

"The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions"

I'm guess I'm lucky I have just e-mail and blogging.

The washing machine saga

Hugely entertaining story of a sleepy woman, a two-month-old "Olympic Pooper", and a brand-new, $1300 broken washing machine.

Note to business managers: it's always been true that almost every sale is important. But it's especially important in an age of blogs and Twitter that you don't gratuitously irritate women with Olympic Poopers.

Paul Tuns . . .

is a ". . . Toronto-based writer and editor, whose articles, columns and reviews have appeared in more than 35 publications. I am editor-in-chief of The Interim, Canada's life and family newspaper, author of Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal and a regular contributor to the book pages of the Halifax Herald."

Mr. Tuns also linked to this blog last Thursday and wrote that Newmark's Door was one of his "favourite blogs". Both of which I greatly appreciate.

But Mr. Tuns--who doesn't seem to have an e-mail address on his blog and a quick Google search didn't uncover one, either--thinks that the Door is written by the craigslist Craig Newmark: "Wired has a long profile of Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Newmark has one of my favourite blogs, Newmark's Door, from which I steal lots of material for Stuff."

It is not. It is written by me, an associate professor of economics, with no business connection to craigslist or the other Craig (who, by the way, blogs at CNewmark).

So if you run into Mr. Tuns, please inform him, or, Paul, if you happen to read, please get us straight, O.K.?

"A Commenter Bestiary"

This blog has drawn all the types listed, but I recognize the types. A fine and funny classification.

Happy Fourth of July

No posts today and tomorrow. See you on Monday.

"Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest"

From the New York Times, 6/5:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

Not me. When I started in April 2002, I figured my immediate family would read occasionally and maybe--maybe--one or two other people.

That was 8410 posts and 7126 non-spam comments ago.

"100 Awesome Blogs by Some of the World's Smartest People"

I've only looked at about twenty of these, and of those twenty, I'd recommend most highly Joel on Software and Carpe Diem.

A blog to watch

"Contrarian Journal: the Journal of an Independent Mind". By Reuben Moore, Managing Director of Brick and Garden Real Estate.

Although we haven't met, Mr. Moore is clearly a scholar and a gentleman, as evidenced by his May 13 entry.

Blogs for startups

From "Venture Hacks: Advice for Entrepreneurs".