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| Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
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Sorrows in progress 
| | From the current issue of The American Conservative, How Do We Get Out? by Pat Buchanan. I've been reading Buchanan's latest book, How the Right Went Wrong, and it's a mind-blower. Not the least reason for which is his writing, which is tight as a drum. An excerpt: |
| | At the root of the insurgency—the goal of every enemy fighter—is a determination to drive America out. Our presence, our use of tanks, Bradleys, gunships and fighter-bombers, causing inevitable civilian casualties, is recruiting more enemy than we are killing. |
| | That the number of enemy and incidence of attacks have multiplied fourfold in a year forces us to one conclusion: we are losing this war. For the guerrilla wins if he does not lose, and the Iraqi insurgents are not losing. |
| | How do we win this war? How do we end it? How do we get out without leaving an Iraq that is a far graver terror threat than any Saddam Hussein ever presented? |
| | Then there's Chalmers Johnson, the old cold warrior whose latest book is The Sorrows of Empire. I missed his talk at UCSB on Sunday, but in an interview with our local paper (read it before it scrolls behind the costwall), he said: |
| | My wife and I have traveled extensively in Indonesia. It's the world's largest Islamic country. I would have thought it was inconceivable that these people who carry their Islam so lightly would have turned against the United States. Today, it seems like every kid in Jakarta is wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Osama bin Laden on it. The military is playing directly into the hands of the terrorists... |
| | The rest of the world now knows that the only thing that can stop the American imperialist juggernaut is to have nuclear weapons. We now know that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. (Other nations are concluding that) if he had such weapons, we would have been as cautious with him as we are with Iran or North Korea... |
| | In Brazil, president (Lula) Da Silva is thinking, "We're having a lot of problems with the United States these days over trade policy. If they put us on a list (of enemy nations), the only thing that will stop them is nuclear weapons." |
| | The Brazilians abandoned their nuclear weapons program when they signed the nonproliferation treaty. They have plenty of uranium. He may want to ask his cabinet how fast they could reconstitute that program... |
| | It's all being put on the tab. Our deficits are being financed by East Asia, China and Japan. They ship massive amounts of capital to this country every day. The day that the Chinese minister of finance decides he would rather put his country's savings into Euros rather than dollars, the stock market will collapse and interest rates will go off the charts since we will have to finance our own debt. That would wipe out an awful lot of people. It would be the 1930s again. The United States would be a formerly rich country, like Argentina today... |
| | What's at threat here is the structure of republicanism, which Madison, Jay and Hamilton wrote into the Constitution: A genuine separation of powers. James Madison wrote that the single most important article in the Constitution is the one giving the right to go to war exclusively to the elected representatives of the people (the Congress). He said the responsibility should never be given to a single man. In October 2002, on the basis of a false and corrupted national intelligence estimate claiming a major peril to the country, both houses of Congress voted to give that power to a single man, to use when and if he saw fit... |
| | We haven't declared war, according to the Constitution, since World War II. But we've had hundreds of secret wars in that time. The largest of them was our recruiting, arming and training of Islamic mujahadeen, which were sent from all over the world to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. That has come back to haunt us... |
| | The military-industrial complex has corrupted the electoral system. Take any big project, like the B-2 bomber. They put pieces (of the manufacturing process) in every state, just in case some congressman gets the idea that he doesn't want to vote for some new weapons system. (That becomes very difficult, because) it would mean putting people out of work (in his district). Even liberal senators and congressmen fight to keep military bases open, because they employ people. What would liberal Santa Barbara think if someone proposed closing Vandenberg Air Force Base? |
| | ...The key structure of our republic is the separation of powers into coequal branches that are intended to balance each other. (The plan was) to ensure there is no single, overwhelming, unaccountable source of power in the society. Power is not overly concentrated in one single place. If that breaks down, then the Bill of Rights is just a piece of paper. |
| | That was the warning of George Washington in his famous farewell address. It was the warning of Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell statement about the military-industrial complex. One of the things I'm arguing is these warnings have not been heeded, and the consequences are now coming due... |
| | It's not unusual to see the collapse of empires. They're collapsing at the speed of FedEx these days. In my lifetime, I have seen the collapse of the Nazis, of the imperial Japanese, of the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires. It's nowhere written that the American empire should go on forever -- especially as it makes classical errors. Like the Romans, we're creating a world of enemies. |
Now it's official
| | Blogging is all about ECO-logy. Branding is all about EGO-logy. The two are not compatible. Which is why brand-wimpy Microsoft has hundreds of bloggers [a well-known fact], and why you can get fired for blogging at uber-brand Apple [so I've been told]. |
| | Apple like the conversation they're currently having. They don't want it to change, internally or externally. They want to control the means of conversation. |
| | I've seen branding work. I've seen blogging work. My conclusion? |
| | We just thought just marketing and advertising were dead. Nope. Branding kicked the bucket, too. |
| | Actually, you can get fired for blogging pretty much anywhere, I would imagine. It's just that Apple has a Brand Culture, and Microsoft has ... something else. Whatever it is, it's a lot more blog-friendly. Says here, |
| | Searching for "apple employees blogs" on Google returns nothing but links to pages talking about Microsoft employees blogging. |
| | That was April. Its a bit different now. Maybe Chuq has the best explanation here. |
| | In any case, branding, that concept Procter & Gamble borrowed from the cattle industry, ain't what it used to be. |
| | Advertising has been a visual medium, ever since Bernbach's "Think Small," the hallmark campaign of the Creative Revolution. But now, with the rise of blogs, writers will be needed to engage customers in one-on-one conversations. Traditional advertising is impersonal. It's a brand speaking to everyone. What leading brands need to do, and in some cases are about to do (in this writer's opinion) is employ individual voices — customers, associates, agency staff, freelance writers and consultants — to carry on a daily conversation with their customers. |
Uncle
| | We are being defeated by ants. |
| | I got up early this morning to work. 5am to be exact. After two hours of applying the ant wrangling wisdom I shared three years ago, removing, I would guess, by a conservative estimate, fifteen million Argentine ants... from trails that ran all through the kitchen, the living room, the hall, the front bedroom and the back office... I arrived at a standoff where they merely pooled and spread at the perimeters. I've been at it off and on all day. |
| | Rain is the reason. The buggers live underground, but they don't like wetness. Just sticky stuff. We've had torrential rains here for two days. On the upside, it's an end to a long, scary and lucky fire seaon. On the downside, the ants move inside. |
| | I hate using insect spray, but I've given in and done that, squirting down the little holes where they come into the house. Hopefully, that will work. The Sun is out. It's beautiful outside. And I believe there's more food out there than in here. |
Humility engine
The commercilization will not be revolutionary
| | Funny, I didn't think blogs with advertising were "commercial" as much as just, sort of... sponsored in some way. In fact, before Dave invited me to moderate the Making Money session at bloggercon, I didn't put a whole lot of thought about advertising on blogs, beyond noting that, for all its progress at making making remarkably appropriate classified-type advertising work on the Web, Google's Adsense (along with Adwords) were just a first step. A big one (much bigger, in fact, than Madison Avenue imagines). But, toward what? |
| | A holy grail: advertising that's 100% appropriate, and something the reader would actually like to see, rather than just tolerate. |
| | But even if we get that on our blogs, is having it there a good idea, beyond making us some gravy money? To borrow Dr. Weinberger's most socratic question, What is blogging for? I don't think it's to make money. (Yeah, neither are most magazines and newspapers, but they also have advertising because they need to make money.) And I guess I should talk, because I never felt I needed to make money on my blog. Others aren't so lucky. |
| | Meanwhile, there's this sense that blogs with ads (I just wrote "ads with blogs"... Freudian slip?) are "commercial," while blogs without ads are not. That's a new one on me. Really, are BoingBoing, Instapundit or Moxie different with ads than they were without them? I'd say yes, but I'm not sure it's in a bad way. They ugly up the pages, but they also say stuff the authors want said. The equivalent of bumper stickers, seems to me. Not "commercialization" in the usual meaning of the term. |
| | Anyway, we're talking here. This is good. |
| | So I've been working on a new program - which I've been shopping around to a few peeps - which will pay bloggers to blog. I've gotten lots of great feedback and we're about to announce the program, so I've noticed a few posts recently which surround this topic. |
| | There's lots of money available for marketing, some of it going to advertising. But wouldn't it be coolio if some of it went directly into blogger's pockets? I like the feel of it it my pocket! |
| | We designed this program to tap into the pure state of what (as I see it) a blogger is - somebody who, off on their own, has something to say. |
| | If through paying this blogger to blog about a particular product, the company can have it's agenda achieved - then why not? |
| | Rather than risk prejudicing you with my response, I invite folks to talk about it at the Making Money Bloggercon session. Marc can't be there, unfortunately; but that shouldn't stop a good meme from spreading, if it has the goods. |
| | John Battelle also weighs in with this: |
| | As someone who has had a hand in this (at BB), I can only add that I hope we get this right. What do I mean by right? Well, that we pursue ads that are endemic and respectful of the conversation between author and audience. It's early, very early, and many models will be tested and fail, and many "types" of sites will evolve. Net net, however, I very much believe that we're well on our way to new, lightweight publishing models that point the way toward a very compelling future. |
| | Agreed, with one quibble. If blogs be journals (which I believe they are), they don't have "audiences." They have readers. They are not TV. |
| | Framing is everything, George Lakoff says. Our frame is journals and journalism. We've relaunched the whole category, for everybody with a will to write, rather than the few who buy ink by the barrel. What are we going to do? |
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