Friday, September 10, 2004

DailyKos beats Fox on the Web. Chris Bowers at MyDD notes that blogs are competitive with cable news websites: Over the past thirty-one days, the ten most trafficked political blogs, Dailykos, Instapundit, Atrios, Josh Marshall, Little Green Footballs, Wonkette, Political Animal, Teagan Goddard, Captain's Quarters and Real Clear Politics (listed in no particular order), totaled just over 28,000,000 unique visits. This compares favorably to the website traffic of the three 24/7 cable news networks. By 2006, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the top ten blogs have a combined traffic significantly greater than the three cable news networks combined. I can only wonder at the operating costs of these ten blogs versus the operating costs of the other three websites (100-1?). [unmediated] I'll go way out on a limb to guess, though, that the 24/7 cable news networks had markedly higher cable viewership than the thousand-most-trafficked political blogs. 9:43:19 PM    comment []

MyDoom spawns four small offshoots. Four minor copies of the program surface, which some security experts believe indicates that a more lethal MyDoom may be on the way. [CNET News.com] 9:40:40 PM    comment []

The Serious News Blogger. As long as blogs have been around (yeah, that's not that long), we've heard complaints that they're mostly feeding off the "real reporters," just commenting on their work. Of course, that's still the case for many thousands of blogs, but now "real reporters" are writing blogs and providing original reporting. A great example is Campaign Extra, by Philadelphia Daily News senior writer Will Bunch. Rather than saving the good stuff for the print edition, Bunch is making some waves in political reporting on his blog. An example is his recent coverage of Stephen Marks, the guy behind the (...) (Continued at Poynter E-Media Tidbits) [unmediated] 7:18:00 AM    comment []

Just how lost PFF is. I continue to be astonished at how far PFF has moved from its roots. The group has issued a press release demanding Supreme Court review of Grokster, buttressed with supporting blog entries by Bill Adkinson and a "grid" by Solveig Singleton with a six (yes, count them, six, with some including italics) factor test that courts are to apply to decide whether a technology is legal or not. I can well understand New Dealers racing to craft multifactored tests to regulate innovation. But I thought the whole point of the conservative (economic) movement was to teach us how harmful such regulation was to innovation and growth. Any test that cannot be applied on summary judgment guarantees that federal judges will be forced into a complex balancing to decide which innovation should be allowed. And thus, any industry threatened with competition can then use the courts to extort from these new competitors payment before they are permitted to compete. That is precisely what Valenti says the VCR case was about. He didn't want to stop the VCR, he tell us. He wanted only to force VCR manufacturers to pay for the right to sell consumers VCRs. Courts, and lawyers, have ruled Silicon Valley long enough. The great hope of the Grokster opinion was that it would return us to the time when entrepreneurs could invent without seeking a permission slip from a federal court (to borrow from the President) . It is simply bizarre to see PFF now call for a return to the days of industrial policy regulated by federal judges. Especially bizarre when you consider how taxing this policy will be to many of the "supporters" of PFF. Many (e.g., Apple, Microsoft, Intel), but alas not all (EMI, Vivendi, BMG). Thus the danger of putting principle up for bid. [Lessig Blog] 7:16:58 AM    comment []