For the last week or so, I’ve had this post of Matt’s flagged in my RSS reader, waiting for a response. In it, he castigates the advertising market for failing to competently embrace the web. Today the conversation continues: Ezra responds to Clay Shirky, and says that, contrary to what Shirky implies, the newspaper’s death became inevitable the instant digital technology was invented. Matt responds, noting, among other things, that newspaper brands will survive (which seems right — if Nuprin can do it, so can the New York Times), and that the papers’ failure to hang on to their classifieds business was a major mistake. I think that brings us up to date (whew!).

I’m with Ezra on this one, and apologize for the amount of overlap that this post will likely have with his own. But I think Matt is seriously understating the crisis facing the advertising industry. Narrowly, there’s the question of Craigslist. It’s a weird one, in that its creators have quite obviously avoided implementing features that would maximize revenue, or even just reported user satisfaction. They could have a slick-looking site, and a huge staff, and a big office in the Mission with polished concrete floors and free snacks in the break room. But they’ve decided not to, and that’s their genius: they realized that classifieds were going to be a race to the bottom, so they decided to get to the bottom first. This is a crucial realization — one that a lot of people involved in similar races just can’t accept.

I don’t think Matt’s right that this could have been stopped, but it probably could have been slowed. Competing on the basis of having fewer features rarely works, and it probably wouldn’t have for Craigslist, either, had the newspapers rolled out competent online options quickly. CL was allowed to build marketshare in an unusual and, in hindsight, inexcusable way. Also, we haven’t collectively reached that proverbial bottom, making CL’s success seem that much stranger. But we’ll get there; if the papers had responded quickly, we just would’ve gotten there at a more languid pace.

But classifieds aren’t the only doomed form of advertising. I think there are reasons to doubt advertising’s viability in a broader sense, too. More of it will inevitably have to be done online as people continue to spend more of their time on the net, but so far that hasn’t been working out very well. For one thing, there are technological ways to avoid online advertising. For another, although various form factors have been tried, the online medium still hasn’t been figured out how to capture viewers’ attention in the way that print and broadcast have — personally, I think the media may simply be innately immune to commoditization, thanks to the aforementioned ability of computers to avoid displaying unwanted information. Third, and probably most troublingly for the industry, online advertisers seem to have made a serious mistake when they offered concrete metrics to their customers. This action was perfectly understandable — the web makes it simple to collect objective data, and it’s easy to see why an advertising client might find the prospect of better stats alluring. The problem is that doing this reveals that advertising just doesn’t work very well.

In retrospect, it should be obvious: to whatever extent the advertising industry is capable of shaping the public’s sense of how to gauge value, naturally they will apply that talent to their own products first. The other advertising media smartly developed captive metrics agencies like Nielsen and Arbitron. But online advertising charlatanism is still in its infancy, and continues to be dominated by primitively objective concepts like “page views”, “click throughs” and “purchases”.

Right now the practitioners of online advertising have not yet succeeded in artificially inflating the perceived value of their product in the way that advertisers working in other media have. Perhaps this will change. I think it might not. It’s easy to forget how quickly advertising has evolved, and how quickly the public has evolved along with it. Although I admit that it’s probably an overly antagonistic framing, I tend to think of the relationship between the public and advertising as being analogous to the one that exists between humans and bacterial pathogens. In both cases the pace of evolution is staggering, but I’m left optimistic that humanity will come out on top.

For one thing, we’re awfully plucky. For another, there are fewer constraints on us. As viewers of advertising, we’re subject to various hindrances that seem to be biologically determined — among others, we’re susceptible to the concept of brands, and we’re keen to see sexy dames, and plenty of em (so to speak). But we’re free to come up with whatever compensatory intellectual constructs we need to help us maintain our senses of iconoclasm and connoisseurship, and our ability to maximize the value we receive for our money. Advertisers face many more restrictions: time, space, cost, reproducibility, risk aversion, various regulations, and, last but by no means least, the simple necessity of crafting messages that are both interesting and at least somewhat coherent from a commercial perspective.

I admit it: I’ve always been an advertising millenarianist. But I still feel a bit bad for them. None of this is to say that advertising will ever go away, but as the pool of novel advertising techniques shrinks and purchasers become more aware of its limited utility, the industry will naturally contract. And that brings us back to newspapers.

Ezra lays it out pretty well; let me do the same with a tedious half-analogy. Once upon a time the cost of distributing information was high. Then technology improved, and if you were able to make a big up-front investment, economies of scale allowed you to drastically lower the cost of getting data out. If you sold information-distribution services at a price in between the old one and your own, newly-discovered cost, you could make a lot of money. Firms flourished, and added premium features to differentiate themselves from their competitors, just like those little sticks of gum that come with baseball cards. The paid information distribution business continued to be lucrative — to get more lucrative, even! — to the point where the quality of the gum could be drastically upgraded. Sometimes even non-gum ingredients were bought up and converted into gum (it just seemed like the most efficient way to distribute them, frankly — look how much gum people were buying!).

But technology kept getting better, and that up-front investment kept getting smaller, and although by now everyone had pretty well fooled themselves into thinking it was the high-quality gum that moved units, that wasn’t actually the case. In fact, a lot of that gum was downright revolting¹.

These days distributing information costs very little, and there’s no minimum order. And people still chew gum, but not nearly so much of it. Hopefully the quality of gum available to them is better than it was, but I think the jury’s still out on that one.

ALSO: I hadn’t read Tim’s post before I wrote this, but he makes a number of excellent points. One thing that’s maybe worth adding: when he says “…the only way to avoid this grim fate is to spin off an independent subsidiary that can pursue new markets without worrying about fat profit margins or cannibalization of existing product lines… I’m not aware of any high-profile newspaper firms that attempted this”, I think the Washington Post may be a counterexample — the Post and their online operations are entirely distinct, and separated by a river. Typically they’re castigated for this decision, and to be fair I’m not sure to what extent the decision (which is now being undone) was made with Christensen’s principles in mind versus more immediate concerns (there wasn’t any more space in their downtown building). Either way, I don’t think WaPo.com was sufficiently independent to really embody Christensen’s model (as I understand it based on Tim’s account — I haven’t read the man’s work), but it’s the closest noteworthy example I’m aware of. Doubtless there were other, truly-independent ventures backed by major news organizations, which are now lost to memory thanks to “making money on the internet” being a very tough proposition in general.

¹ Bazooka Joe Scarborough (discarded gag for alternate metaphor: Kristol Pepsi)

It looks bad on paper. A rap song about the Blagojevich scandal filled with wonky in-jokes? Sure, points for adopting a timely form. But Mark Russell could set up a MySpace page, and that wouldn’t make it okay. Actually, it’d just underscore the outrages that he continues to perpetrate.

But damn if Spencer doesn’t have a knack for this stuff. This isn’t the first such track I’ve heard him cut that runs along these lines. Could anyone write a verse as verbally profane as Blagojevich’s profaning of the public trust? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try:

son1 has written a post that continues the discussion I began around colors and data visualization, and I’m jealous of it for two reasons. First, I can’t believe I didn’t think of and claim that post title for myself, because it’s perfect.

Second, he does a much better job of getting to the heart of what I was trying to express: that a surprisingly large amount of data visualizations are both correct and question-begging. The choices made by the creator will inevitably influence which conclusions are drawn. That isn’t to malign the idea of graphs and charts and maps — at their best they are arguments that contain all component data, and whose accuracy can be easily checked. But they’re still arguments.

Perhaps all this stuff has been said before and better by Tufte, but those books are expensive, dammit.

This post of Megan’s, which details why calls for “another Manhattan Project” are dumb, is quite good. I’ll go ahead and suggest that calls for “another Apollo Program” are generally even dumber — they’re the same thing, except the speaker doesn’t have enough guts to be willing to bring the A-bomb to mind.

But this got me thinking about the circumstances under which these sorts of projects can work. Here’s my stab at it. These sorts of national greatness problems need:

• … to be primarily an engineering problem.
• … to not contain the words “… and be economically viable”.
• … to have been solved at a smaller scale, or to seem solvable on the basis of some compelling math.
• … to not be about finding a solution to a biological problem, unless that problem can be solved by wiping out a non-microscopic organism.
• … to be undertaken out of concern that another country might get a leg up on us if we don’t succeed.

Obviously this is based on a small set of data points. Basically: we’ve built the atom bomb, gone to the moon, dug a big canal, built a bunch of roads, and run a number of impressive (and impressively expensive) science experiments. We almost certainly could wipe out malaria (almost did!), or develop cellulosic ethanol/Jimmy Carter’s “synthetic oil”, but we either don’t really want to or think it might be a waste of money. And we definitely haven’t cured cancer or AIDS, despite trying pretty hard.

There’ve been more than forty State of the Union speeches since Kennedy said we were moonward-bound, so I’m sure I’m missing at least that many calls for ambitious national initiatives. But this is the basic lay of the land, I think: you’ve got to pick something that seems genuinely urgent, and which is hard but not too hard. It’s simple when you put it that way.

As you might imagine, I’m rooting for China to announce that they’re building a space elevator.

Well, I guess it’s time for that “purple America” map from Robert Vanderbei to start making the rounds again. Yglesias has the 2008 edition posted over at his site. The basic idea here is that for all the talk of red and blue America, the political differences between regions are actually quite small, and we’re really a united nation with a vigorous political discourse, tra la la la. Then we join hands and sing.

And, you know, fine. There’s an element of truth to this, and it’s certainly a nice thought. But also true: visualizing information by using a linear red/blue scale is about the worst way possible to make data legible to the human eye. First: our vision is logarithmic. When a photographer drags out his “50% gray” card for measuring lighting, it’s actually 18% gray. Judging by the triangular key in the corner of Vanderbei’s image, he’s just taking the percentage of vote totals and translating it flatly to 8 bit color — a 100% Republican district gets an RGB 24-bit value of (255,0,0).

The colors themselves are also a problem. As I’m sure you all remember keenly from this post I wrote in 2006, perceptual image codecs spend more bits on brightness than on color because the color-sensing cones in your eyes have a much lousier dynamic range than the light-sensing rods. We’re worse at distinguishing between levels of color than between levels of brightness. And since the percentage of the vote in any given spot on the map should always sum to 100, with negligible green (third party) contributions, the brightness will be relatively uniform (although admittedly not quite due to the perceptual differences between colors — monitor calibration and colorspace begin to enter the picture at this point, and things get just as hideously complex as you might imagine).

(I’ll add, somewhat tentatively, that my recollection from college is that the green cone is the most sensitive of the three types in your retina, making red/blue coding about the least distinguishable color continuum possible. The situation’s complicated by your rods’ preferential sensitivity to blue wavelengths, though, and the ratio of work done by rods and cones varies with ambient brightness. So I’ll resist the temptation to make strong claims on this score.)

So what does this all mean? Depending on how you look at it, not much. It’s not as if Vanderbei has done anything wrong. It’s just that the choices he made will tend to produce a map that, at a glance, implies homogeneity. If, on the other hand, we pull out the red channel, desaturate the blue channel and maximize the contrast of the resulting image (in effect normalizing the values to the full possible dynamic range), we get something very different-looking — but still perfectly accurate, and still non-logarithmic (with the caveat that it gives third-party votes to the Dems). Click the image for a full-sized, easier-to-see version.

Yglesias’s point that this isn’t a huge change between cycles still stands, of course, but the shifts are considerably easier to see this way (and easier still on that cool New York Times map that ran on their front page after the election).

It’s also easy to see that there really are very Republican and very Democratic sections of the country. I don’t want to overstate my case — obviously this conclusion can be drawn from the color map, too. Still, using a whole bunch of linearly-defined purple pixels is a clever way to latch onto a media cliche, but not necessarily the best way to visualize information. Things are more black and white than they may seem, and certainly less purple.

I apologize; I’m totally fascinated by this Ashley Todd business. I can’t stop.

The latest development appears to be her claim that she was in some sort of psychogenic fugue state when she scratched the B in her face:

Unfortunately I am unable to speculate as to the veracity of such a claim; the DSM-IV doesn’t say anything one way or the other about sufferers’ tendency to send out Twitters containing pre-fugue exposition.

My professional journalist friends are professionally obligated to, well, be professional. Although this precept serves them and their readers well nearly all of the time, I think it will prevent them from analyzing the Ashley Todd affair with the thoroughness it deserves. So, unencumbered as I am by such considerations, let me try to clarify the lesson that should be drawn from all this: College Republicans are the fucking scum of the earth.

I say this not to insult Republicans in general. I disagree with members of the GOP about a lot of things, but recognize that nearly all of them are perfectly good, reasonable people. But in my experience, folks who become involved in the party’s machinery at a young age seem to be intensely despicable at a much higher rate than their more mature fellow travelers. I was hesitant to be skeptical of Todd’s account, at first — skepticism is not generally an appropriate way to respond to the claims of a victim of violent crime. But if the picture was sort of suspicious, Todd’s campus affiliations left me feeling even more dubious about her story.

College is a time for quixotic idealism. That’s not to say that young people can’t earnestly hold conservative beliefs, of course. But if a person is passionately pro-life or nutty for Nozick, he or she is, at that age, much more likely to become involved in an advocacy organization that tries to further those ends directly — it’s easy to find such organizations on a college campus, after all. Normal people get involved in politics by first caring about an issue, then realizing that the best way to achieve their ends is to organize their efforts under the umbrella of a larger party. That doesn’t happen all at once, though.

Who opts to instead immediately begin working for a demographically unpopular political party, where your chief activities will involve writing little-noticed op-eds and arranging speaking honoraria for recently disgraced administration officials? Often, the answer seems to be those with a Machiavellian enthusiasm for reaching the levers of power. These are not good people.

Why don’t I think the same criticism thing applies to the young Democrats? Well, to an extent I’m sure it does. But I think it’s probably easier to be a starry-eyed College Democrat. You can participate in various organizational efforts motivated by an idealistic conception of participatory democracy — registering new voters, that sort of thing. There will be a lot more of you, too, making participation more appealing to the sorts of people who want to get laid rather than the sorts of people who want to screw others — you’ll be surrounded by more normal people, in other words. You’ll also probably have less funding per capita and, by virtue of your numbers, more internal tension and examination, making it harder to twist inward into a tight little coven of aspiring conspirators.

But of course I’m speculating here. Besides, there’s no reason to get defensive; hijinks like those of Todd and Francisco Nava speak for themselves. Maybe the College Democrats are every bit as despicable as their Republican counterparts. But if they are, then they seem to at least be a bit more competent about it. Give them credit for that. There are few things more pathetic than a liar who’s not yet adept at her craft. Someone who tries to inflame racial tensions to further her political ends is one of those things, though.

UPDATE: Tim writes to remind me that not all College Republicans are horrible people. Well, alright. I overstated things a bit. But my point remains: fewer young people are attracted to the organization than to its Democratic equivalent, and to some extent they come for different reasons. Some of those reasons are not healthy.

A few others things. First, credit where due: much of the conservative blogosphere has from the start approached this story in a restrained and thoughtful manner. Second, those saying that Todd’s refusal of medical attention was a clue to the hoax are wrong — I’ve refused police offers of medical attention after getting hit by a car (twice, in fact). If something bad has happened to you and you’re pretty sure you’re okay, sometimes you just want to go home (if you haven’t got health insurance and are unsure who’d be footing the bill, this goes double). Third, Todd seems to now be alleging a history of mental health problems. Depending on how this claim turns out, my feelings about the hoax may become very muddy indeed. The territory where “couldn’t help it” begins is murky, and, from a practical standpoint, not necessarily coextensive with “should be excused”.

Megan doesn’t care for Matt Taibbi’s takedown of Byron York, in which Taibbi makes it sound like York has no idea what he’s talking about with respect to the financial crisis.

Naturally, I have no idea about any of this stuff other than feeling vaguely hostile toward Byron York. Still, I was a little uncomfortable when I first read that exchange: Taibbi’s scolding about credit default swaps came at a time when a lot of other people on the internet were also suddenly speaking knowledgeably about the financial meltdown and the rarified financial instruments to blame for it. That wave of spontaneous expertise seemed to occur suspiciously shortly after the air date of an episode of This American Life that discussed the crisis and CDSes in particular.

Which is not to say that TAL is wrong; I listened to that episode, too, and it seemed excellent! But it’s been both amusing and off-putting to see so many people brazenly parroting the same single News Source White People Like. I have no idea if this criticism actually applies to Taibbi, but the conversation between him and York certainly made it sound like it could.

UPDATE: Since Megan kindly linked back to me, I should probably add that while I can’t be sure that my speculation about Taibbi’s argument is correct, it’s very clear that York’s pathetic line about Freddie and Fannie is a regurgitated conservative talking point — a particularly lame, objectionable and well-debunked one at that. It seems likely that both sides of that conversation were blindly reciting other people’s arguments.

Michael Pollan was on Fresh Air a moment ago. It’s part of his world/public radio tour in support of Farmer In Chief, last week’s NYT Magazine article asking the next president to adopt better agricultural policies. I heard him giving pretty much the same spiel on a Philadelphia-area NPR station over the weekend, too.

I don’t want to quibble with the man’s larger crusade, but he keeps making one particular point that really bugs me. Pollan is fond of pointing out that since 1960 the average American household’s spending on food has dropped as a share of income, from 18 percent to 10.

I’m pretty sure this is dumb. Or half, dumb, anyway. I’m sure food has gotten cheaper in absolute terms, and that those savings have been paid for in animal suffering and environmental destruction.

But it’s also the case that household income tends to increase faster than the rate of inflation, while human nutritional requirements do not. Wikipedia says that real median income has increased about 30% since 1967. Unless I’m missing something, that means that if a family used to spend $1800 on food, today they spend $1300 — not $1000, as Pollan implies. If median household income data was available for 1960, rather than 1967, you can bet that the differential would be smaller still. And if you consider the fact that household size has declined from 3 to 2.6 people since 1967, the gap shrinks even more.

Of course, the picture is much more complicated than just a dollar amount. I’m sure we eat out a lot more, eat more processed food, eat more meat, pay more for specialty food and less for staples, and generally eat in ways that support Pollan’s thesis. But this particular argument about income is a bit dishonest, and I wish he’d quit using it. Nutritional needs do not scale with income.

This is a pet peeve of mine with economic arguments about consumption in general: they tend not to pay any attention to the limits of human biology. This is why I’m similarly suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more video resolution revolution — HDTV2, let’s say (pending the invention of a more confusing acronym). But to go beyond that will require video walls — they look cool in Total Recall, but why would you pay for something larger than your field of view? — or three-dimensional holo-whatnots. I’m sure the latter will be popularized eventually, but I’ll probably be pretty old and confused by then.

The human fovea has a finite number of neurons, and we’re already pretty good at keeping them busy. Personally, I think that household bandwidth use is likely to level off sometime in the next decade or two — there’s only so much data that a human body can use. Our bandwidth expenses as a percentage of income will then start to fall, both because the growth in demand has slowed and because income continues to rise, but also because the resource itself will continue to get cheaper as technology improves.

That won’t constitute proof that we aren’t spending enough on bandwidth, though. It’ll just mean that we’ve found some other stuff to spend our new money on, rather than simply ramping up our budget linearly. (My guess: hyper-ipods.)

My friend V made this video and asked me to pass it along:

Scary! And of course it’s hard to argue with the basic point that Sarah Palin is less qualified to run the country than the average Model UN participant.

The video implicitly makes another, more subtle point, too: Vladimir Putin may be a vampire.

Write your own “blood for oil” joke — I’m too terrified to do it.