You might be interested in my deconstruction of another recent Keen-inspired piece — the Hesse WaPo article from last week:

http://mikecaulfield.com/2008/05/07/if-the-wapo-calls-a-tail-a-leg/

A brief bit of digging found that the example she uses in her lede (and returns to at the conclusion) is in fact erroneous — her experts are wrong and the web is right…

Hi Terry,
The comment pages don’t wrap properly when I’m using Safari on a Mac. The comment text spills off the page to the right so I have to widen the browser window and scroll to read comments. That could be what bugged andy, too.

I enjoy reading your posts, thanks.

Old media: some sitcoms were funny, even if other people thought they were crap, and they attracted viewers. Cronkite became a trusted news source and CBS News had great ratings.

New media: some YouTube clips become very popular, even though “production values” are low. Some bloggers become very popular because they’re entertaining, or because people feel they can trust their information.

Note that in neither case does it really matter whether the people producing the content are getting paid for it, or are recognized “experts” in some field.

Popularity is all that matters to advertisers, usually, and that does not depend upon who produces the content.

As for an advertiser’s association with the content: at one time, boycotting advertisers worked because advertising was the lifeblood for a television production, or a newspaper. Losing a sponsor might mean that there was no money to produce content, which at the time was an expensive proposition.

That is no longer true.

It’s a false assumption. When I can put my content up for free, I don’t have to have advertising revenue to support it, and advertising dollars do not have leverage over content producers like they once had. Removing that leverage makes it less likely that people will worry about whether an advertiser’s ad is on a site they don’t like.

There’s another small factor in the removal of advertising as leverage, which may need to be studied, it’s just a hunch on my part. To most browsers on the Web, the ads are kind of like background noise and they seem chosen almost at random - people are so desperate to monetize some sites that the ads have nothing to do with the content of the site. This perception of randomness, for me, means that I don’t blame the choice of ad on the site owner, for I feel like they didn’t actually get to choose the ad anyway. I know this is just perception, and that many people _do_ exercise some control over their ads, but it’s the way it feels to me. Like I said, a hunch.

What’s wrong with my stylesheet? (I used to have a dog named “shit for brains.” We called him “SB.”)

Thanks,

SB