Earlier this week, Citibank raised $7.5 Billion from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA). To get some perspective on the deal, it seems logical to turn to the financial press.

Here's Bradley Keoun at Bloomberg.com:

Citigroup Inc., the biggest U.S. bank, is paying a "junk bond" rate to uphold Chairman Robert Rubin's pledge to preserve the company's dividend and weather this year's mortgage-market decline.

The 11 percent interest rate on $7.5 billion of convertible shares that Citigroup sold to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is almost double the rate it offers bond investors.

Wow! Junk bonds? Double the usual rate?

How about Marketwatch? Reporter Murray Coleman quotes Carl Salvato ("a portfolio manager at Great Companies Inc. in Tampa, Fla."):

"This deal helps their current subprime woes, but it comes at a very high price."

Citigroup has agreed to sell the coupons of its convertible bonds at an annualized 11% interest rate, Salvato said. "Market rates under normal circumstances would pay half that amount," he said. "So Citigroup had to agree to pay an interest rate similar to junk bonds in order to raise capital."

How about a wire service, which feeds the story to papers around the world? Here's Dan Wilchins and James Cordahi of Reuters:

Citi is paying a high price for the capital injection by selling mandatory convertible securities to Abu Dhabi which pay a fixed coupon of 11 percent. That is above the average yield on U.S. junk bonds, which is 9.4 percent according to Merrill Lynch data.

OK, that's pretty clear, right? Three "reputable" sources say "junk"; end of discussion.

Or not. Let's try the blogs. Here's Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed:

Andrew Clavell has the only lucid analysis I have seen on the Abu Dhabi [sic] cash infusion for Citi. Read it. Now.

OK, that's next: Citibank, ADIA and that pesky 11% interest rate:

Its not always that both the venerable FT and the Wall Street Journal dive into a story and miss the point so absolutely that you have to question their sanity.

Clavell's first point: the common stock already yields 7%, so that's off the table. The price range built into the future debt-to-equity conversion has a value, leaving only 1.5% per year (i.e. 150 "basis points"), which is a reasonable margin. (Read the post for the financial details.)

Since I'm elevating blogs over the MSM, I should point out that the Financial Times (FT) piece was on their Alphaville blog. In a followup piece, Paul Murphy even admits:

True to our tabloidesque instincts, FT Alphaville jumped on that word 'junk,' because it helps illustrate the story.

Er, that may be why journalists blog, but it's not why savvy financial readers choose blogs. To his credit, Murphy did (finally) bring in some outside expertise, a "convertible arb specialist":

Firstly, this is a mandatory convertible. It's NOT DEBT (obviously as it qualifies as tier 1 capital). An 11% coupon may sound high but if one considers what this structure actually is then it should become apparent that this is not high.

Again, read the post for the financial analysis.

My sentiments are aptly expressed by commenter klandnyc:

As a major financial newspaper, you should have gotten it right the first time that a comparison to junk bond wasn't the right way to look at a forward equity issuance. I think the most interesting thing about the deal is actually the media coverage of it. Junk journalism (your word, not mine) is being practiced en mass on both sides of the Atlantic. WSJ has an equally 'subprime' coverage comparing the deal to junk bond. In that sense, financial journalists aren't very different from their counterparts covering political news. It's all about sensational headlines sans nuance with very little fact checking.

Of course blogs aren't above criticism:

The picture is equally dismal in the blogger-sphere, with a few notable exception. For me, this one little deal turns out to a revealing and useful way to judge the quality and integrity of the hundred of so-called experts who blog everyday about developing financial news and deals. It differentiates those who know what they are talking about from those who don't but talk about them anyway. It's really not rocket science in this case. Anyone who was comparing the 11% yield to junk bond in this deal should start with learning about the difference between bond and equity - you know - the finance 101 stuff. Better still, they should consider writing about something else other than finance.

P.S. Emil Lee at The Motley Fool got the story right: Citi's 11% Isn't So Bad, a good indication that they've stayed true to their "new media" roots.

Billing itself as "Africa's social media aggregator", Afrigator has just gone beta. (I liked the tagline on their current Alpha-release home page: "Africa's talking - are you listening?" But the switch probably makes sense if a large part of their audience is within Africa.)

There are separate pages for News, Blogs, Podcasts and Videos. The Blogs page shows latest blog posts by category: All, Life, Entertainment, Business, Tech, Politics, Religion, and Sport. (Unfortunately that page is filled with predictable spam from Online Pharmacy Shop at the moment; with luck that will be fixed soon.)

For thorough coverage see Charl Norman (South Africa) at BandwidthBlog and Marshall Kirkpatrick (USA) of Read/WriteWeb. Erik Hersman of White African adds a count of blogs by country.

If you know of similar sites for other countries, please add a comment.

Yesterday Fred Wilson (A VC) shared his views on how an economic downturn might impact the Web. (It was also a guest post on Silicon Alley Insider.)

As background, Wilson mentioned:

I am also concerned by large and sustained budget deficits.

My prescription: a strong dose of Steve Conover's The Skeptical Optimist. US Debt-to-GDP ratio is not large compared to other major economies such as Germany and Japan, nor when taking a long view of history. The only "sustained" trend is downward, projected to be in balance by August 2009 (with the usual caveats).

Even more important: Why Debt Doomsday is a Myth (economic growth and debt rollover), and how to correctly use mortgages as an analogy to understand government debt (look across generations).

Wilson's post lists other concerns, and in any case there will be some sort of economic downturn at some point. So it's still worth a (cautious) read.

And now for something completely different (though I did find it on a blog)...

So, you walk over to the sink, wash your hands, then glance up ... and don't see yourself in the expected mirror. That actually happened to me once, though the explanation was much simpler than the following (6 min, audio in German with English subtitles):

Can you figure it out without cheating? (No fair if you understand German.)

Hat tip: 2BlogHumor.

As noted yesterday, new online software companies may succeed by shrinking the software market (as measured by total revenue). I'm bullish on the rise of blogs and other new media, but I suspect the same will happen here.

Newspaper revenue continues to shrink. Back in August, Alan Mutter ("Reflections of a Newsosaur") noted that Print ad sales hit 10-year low:

After six straight quarters of accelerating declines, newspaper print advertising sales in the first half of this year fell to the lowest level in a decade, according to statistics released today by the Newspaper Association of America [NAA].

Print revenues in the first six months of this year totaled $20.3 billion

That's the bad news. The good news: online ad revenue is up. The really bad news: online revenue accounts for a mere 7% of total revenue. And, it's unlikely to catch up. One third of print revenue comes from "the three principal classified advertising categories -- auto, real estate and recruitment."

Of course these problems aren't new (emphasis added):

here's the back-story: Recruitment advertising, which hit an all-time record of $8.7 billion in the final year of the dot-bomb era, amounted to only $4.7 billion at yearend 2006. Thus, $4 billion in revenues have vaporized in this single category in half a dozen years.

Note that bloggers aren't getting much of this pie. A small slice has gone to a few blog networks that host their own job ads, another portion has gone to Monster.com and the like, but the rest just went away, e.g. to CraigsList (inexpensive jobs ads in a few cities, free in the rest).

One thing bloggers are getting: an engaged audience. While browsing the Newsosaur archives, I came across the following comparison. A link from a Canadian blog named Small Dead Animals brought about 1,000 new visits -- vs. only 1 visit when Mutter was quoted on both Forbes and Business Week. The pattern was repeated 2 weeks later:

Once again, the traffic generated by Small Dead Animals overwhelmed by a substantial margin the combined (but still gratefully appreciated) referrals from [the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Daily News].

Zoho offers a suite of 14 online office software tools covering word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and more. Sridhar Vembu (co-founder and CEO) noticed this quote from the founder of a new competitor, Live Documents:

[Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame] said "If Live Documents makes 1 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues, then we would earn USD 200 million a year. If Live Documents makes 10 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues then our revenues would be USD 2 billion a year in the next three to four years."

Except that's rarely a good way to look at it. The Zoho blog points to a Jan. 2006 post from Guy Kawasaki:

it's also not that easy to get 1% of any market, so you look silly pretending that it is

It's actually an old complaint among investors.

Someone once told me that a rule of thumb used by venture capitalists was to steer well clear of any business plan based on capturing a small share of a large market.

(An aside to VC bloggers: I couldn't find much coverage on this topic; it's probably worth a post or two.)

Back to Zoho:

Finally, there is what I call the "tail problem" - it is the old 80-20 problem. It is quite likely that 80% of MS Office revenue comes from 20% of their user base.

And that's not the 20% that's likely to switch.

In April 2006, Startup VC (and former entrepreneur) Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital discussed an investment thesis that is counter-intuitive, but plays out repeatedly in new markets:

We love investing in technologies and business models that are able to shrink existing markets. If your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let's talk!

(An aside: 80:20 is 4:1; i.e. both rules of thumb are pretty close.)

Ironically, one of his examples was Microsoft shrinking someone else's market:

By 1996 Britannica's sales had dropped to $325 million - about half their 1991 levels – and Britannica had laid off its famed door-to-door sales staff. And by 1996 the encyclopedia market had shrunk to less than $600M. In that year, [Microsoft] Encarta's US sales were estimated at $100M.
...
So in just three years ... the encyclopedia market was cut in half.  More than half a billion dollars disappeared from the market.  ... While Microsoft made $100M it shrunk the market by over $600M. ... Every dollar of Microsoft's gain caused an asymmetrical amount of pain in the marketplace. They made money by shrinking the market.

Conclusion: Live Documents, Zoho and others in this space may end up sharing 10% of Microsoft's current office revenue -- by cutting it in half.

How does this model relate to the blogging market? Stay tuned. (Or add your view in the comments.)

Company links: Live Documents, Zoho.

Be sure to save room for dessert....

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal posted yesterday on: 20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To.

At BlogWorld Expo, we found that the easiest way to describe Blogcosm was "a blog directory, but focussed on the top blogs and providing detailed information on each: category, description, rank, associated people and their bios". When some bloggers learned that they couldn't submit their blog to our site or use Blogcosm to promote their blog, they left. That's ok; we have a different target in mind. Our tagline, "a daily reference", attempts to capture two goals: (1) update daily, (2) create a reference of lasting value. Other phrases I've tried: "like a Farmer's Almanac for blogs" or a "World Factbook on the blogosphere".

We've already assembled information that can't be found in once place elsewhere, with lots more on the way. Let us know if you have any specific requests.

Today's link bait award goes to Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped for: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

Google's Gmail is shown on the left; the imagined Microsoft version on the right. Funny -- not least because it rings true.

The general idea isn't new, e.g. check out this video (from Feb. 2006) on how Microsoft would redesign the iPod packaging. Quick summary:

Watch the whole thing (2:55):

Amazon's Kindle e-book reader is all over the (tech) news today, starting with a Newsweek cover story (dated Nov 26; gotta love print).

When certain topics come up in the news, I think "I wonder what so-and-so thinks about that?" These are blogs that I don't follow regularly (so many interests, so little time) but that I seek out when appropriate. For the ebook market, the "must read" is David Rothman's Teleread blog.

A recent sample:

• Amazon’s Kindle press release: No mention of Mobipocket by name
• 5,000-surfer poll: Lower e-book prices, not gizmos like the Amazon Kindle, will be the big spur for book sales
• Huh? The Kindle e-reader ISN’T ugly?
• PDF capabilities in Kindle: Newsweek puff job reveals more details
• Amazon-sized ego? Kindle to shun .epub? And, yes, the ugly box is the FINAL design

He's also a big advocate for the open ".epub" ebook standard by the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum). It's an XML format that is "reflowable", i.e. the column width and words per page adjust based on screen size and text size rather than being locked in like PDF.

If you have any "must read" blogs for certain topics, please let us know!

I believe that blogs, taken together, are a more reliable source of information than the mainstream media (MSM). That's a big topic, but here's one small example: selective editing that clearly distorts what someone says.

Here's my transcript of footage aired by CNN (per Dale Franks of QandO, who watched their investigative report):

John Cena is a WWE superstar, now recovering from an injury in the ring. He doesn't like being asked if he has used steroids. "This is a crazy question, and it's something that um ... it's tough to answer just because of the way society is now. The way people conceive things because performance enhancing drugs have got the spotlight and its a hot thing to talk about. I can't tell you that I haven't but you'll never be able to prove that I have."

Based on the report, Franks drew the obvious conclusion:

Mr. Cena was evading the question -- indeed, as much as admitting that he had used them, even though no one could ever prove it.

That was easy, right?

Oops, not so fast. Franks continues:

CNN wasn't the only organization that was taping that interview. The WWE taped it, too. And it's a good thing they did, too, because when you see the actual answer the Mr. Cena gave, it is nearly the exact opposite of the answer that CNN broadcast.

QandO embeds both videos; here's my partial transcript (with CNN's excerpts in italics; my emphasis added later):

CNN: Have you ever used steroids?

Cena: Absolutely not.

CNN: Even back in bodybuilding days and [???] days?

Cena: This is a crazy question, and it's something that um ... it's tough to answer just because of the way society is now. The way people conceive things because performance enhancing drugs have got the spotlight and it's a hot thing to talk about. Any time you see any athlete in any athletic venture, it could be the PGA tour, acheive physical greatness, something that is beyond the norm, even for a top-tier athlete ... it's not athletic achievement anymore. It's something that really gets me, it's he or she is on performance enhancing drugs. ... My answer to that question, "Have you ever used steroids?" is the only thing I can say: I can't tell you that I haven't but you'll never be able to prove that I have.

Because each one of you ... out there has an opinion on how I carry myself. ... I've been tested for drugs since I was 17 years old. I can take a million tests, I can pass every one of them. As soon as I pass it, there's some other guy on the other end going "aw, there's masking agents", there's this, there's that, I know the arguments because I've been in the situation. This is a subject that's very, very near and dear to me, only because: since I was a very small child, I've worked my ass off to get to where I'm at. And it sucks to ... have to deal with people saying that I rely on a crutch.

You know I wake up every day and I work myself to the bone because I love what I do. I got the best gig in the world, I love it. ... I take great pride in the fact that I have a God-given gift of above-average natural strength, and I show it off whenever I can because to me that's fun, that's entertaining, it's what I love to do.

One of the most important roles of blogs (and YouTube) is to show what was left out of a story. CNN edits out a clear "Absolutely not" in a sports story; I fear even worse for economics and politics.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/WriteWeb broke the news about Amazon supporting Open Social. Well, except that maybe they're not.

The press release, though clearly a draft (not uncommon, PR people send us draft releases all the time), is dated November 15th. So 12:00 AM EST on the 15th arrived last night and I wrote up a post

Alas:

According to an email sent to one of our writers at 11:59 PM EST the night before one minute before the release time - they threw on the brakes.

After some followup:

I offered to post a different update if they'd like to send me a statement. I meant a statement from them.

They drafted a sample statement putting words in his mouth. Er, no.

I'll give the last word to a commenter, drew olanoff:

We need a series of small conferences/meetings where these big company PR folks sit down with us, talk about how we work, what our morals are, and then work with them to fit it into what they do. NOT the other way around.

Fix it now people, or you'll be completely ignored by bloggers not as nice as Marshall.

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine argues for The success of the network:

I have been arguing for as long as anyone would listen that the future of media is less about products and more about networks. It's so nice to be proven right.

Recently, Samir Arora, CEO of Glam, visited to talk about his success story as a network and a platform.

After only a year and a half, Glam has overtaken [iVillage] as the new No. 1 [women's site in the U.S.]. ... iVillage is built in the Yahoo model of sites it owns or controls....

Glam ... is a network. [The above diagram shows] clusters made up of smaller circles, representing their content areas: fashion, beauty, fashion, lifestyle, celebrity, teen. Inside each of those clusters, if you squint, you'll see a small yellow circle. Those are Glam's O&O (owned and operated) sites. All the many purple circles around those in each cluster represent outside, independent blogs and sites in Glam's network. That is the secret to Glam's quick growth without the cost and risk of doing everything itself.

Read the whole thing for details: 400 publishers, 600 sites, some six figure incomes, $15-35 CPM for O&O, $8-15 for the network, O&O represent 30-40% of Glam's revenue for 20-30% of their impressions.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is a skeptic:

But Glam isn't really the largest women's site on the Internet - not by a long stretch. Rather, it's a collection of a few sites that they own that generate some page views, plus a big ad sales team that sells ads for 600 or so other blogs and websites.
...
Not only will competition hurt Glam, but their network partners will leave them once they grow to a certain size. As soon as it costs less to simply hire a salesperson instead of paying Glam 40% of revenue, they'll leave.

There's some truth to that, but I think it misses some key problems. As each site grows, it's difficult for the owner to match revenue opportunities with sales staff: first too little work for one rep, then too much, then too little for two, etc. Worse, it's a much harder sell: one site with modest traffic vs. a large network with as much traffic as the advertiser wants to buy.

In the comments, satisfied members of the Glam network raise another good point:

fashiontribes.com:

having Glam take care of [selling ads]- & also to group me with other premium fashion & lifestyle blogs - has enabled me to focus on creating content & actually blogging, instead of worrying constantly about making money from my blog. (They keep me from having to deal with actual salespeople, which is also a huge plus.)

I'll give Jarvis the last word:

Google grew by building a network. So did Glam. I say that is a model for survival and growth among media companies. Local newspapers, for example, should be building hyperlocal networks of local blogs; with them, they can expand coverage and reach in ways that were never possible when they depended only on staff.
...
I think what separates Glam from, say, Federated Media is that it is a content network and an ad network. Federated made stabs at that but didn't have the means or moxy to create a content brand as Glam did. Glam contributes mightily to the network with its brand, promotion, traffic, and curation. It benefits greatly from a network of content it doesn't have to employ. And the network benefits greatly from getting sales it couldn't otherwise have.

The blogosphere has had an impact on US politics; can it help political blogger "Kareem Amer" (a pseudonym for Abdel Karim Soliman)?

Sandmonkey passes along a report from The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. Per their press release:

Karim who is an Egyptian blogger sentenced to prison for 4 years for 'vilifying religions' and defaming the president was tortured & that was ordered and supervised by an investigation officer in Borg Alarab prison. Karim was also ordered into a solitary cell where he was assaulted again and had one of his teeth broken; this assault's date came to mark one year since Karim was sent to jail.

Several bloggers have weighed in: Instapundit, Atlas Shrugs, Gateway Pundit, Freedom's Zone and others.

Wikipedia's entry is under a different spelling: Kareem Amer. For background information and recent protests around the world, see FreeKareem.org. Posted yesterday from London:

After about 40 minutes in the cold ... one of the embassy officials ... approached us.
...
What was most galling about his position was his cultural relativism, and his denial of fundamental rights for all people in all places. He seemed to suggest that just as British culture condones the wearing of eye-catchingly short skirts (something that he said he found “offensive”), Egyptian culture condones the punishment of those unlucky enough to be caught saying the wrong thing – and that we ought to ‘tolerate’ that in the way that he tolerated mini-skirt-wearing women in London. We countered the official’s arguments as respectfully as possible, but our protestations that many Egyptians and Muslims supported Kareem’s cause fell on deaf ears. We gently reminded him that Egypt had signed the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, and that article 19 (section 2) of this covenant stated, rather unequivocally: “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice”. We told him that the international community, as a result, was watching Egypt’s conduct with a critical eye – but he seemed unfazed.

Nonetheless, the official promised us that he would return to his office, read Kareem’s blog again and would consider the issue more fully. We thanked him repeatedly for coming out to speak to us, and we continue to hope that the arguments we made will help influence him and his colleagues to reconsider their position on the case.

The small New York demonstration also got a hearing:

we went up to the second floor of the set-back building to let the consulate know that we were downstairs. As we prepared to walk out the door, the receptionist motioned to me.

“Would one of you please come and meet with someone?”

Which is how I ended up in the office of Mohammad Khalil, an assistant to the Egyptian consul. He was very polite and wanted to know all the details of Kareem’s case. “What is he charged with?” he asked me in Arabic. “Writing incendiary comments about the president and the religious establishment,” I told him, and then was quick to point out that the Free Kareem campaign isn’t about his views, but about the appropriate response to someone criticizing the government or Islam. He promised to look into the matter and I gave him my email address so he could follow up. This might mean that I will have a very interesting time at border control next time I visit Egypt

Visit the site for more reports from Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Berlin, and Wash. DC, plus announcements for several other cities around the world.

For additional background on blogging and human rights in Egypt, see Ethan Zuckerman's Sept. 16, 2006 post at My heart's in Accra.

Reflecting on last week's BlogWorld Expo, venture capitalist Tim Oren writes:

This is an upstart sector that has discomfited the traditional media - stolen audience, discredited stories and brands, and credibly threatens to build completely new distribution networks. It has meaningfully affected everything from the value of major corporate brands to national military strategies and political campaigns.
...
lesson one: This is a crowd that punches way above its weight.

(Source: Oren's Due Diligence blog; crossposted to Winds of Change.NET.)

Over 200 blogs are helping Soldiers' Angels raise money with a friendly competition between teams that support the Army, Navy/USCG, Marine Corps and Air Force. All funds go to Project Valour-IT:

Voice-Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops

Every cent raised for Project Valour-IT goes directly to the purchase and shipment of laptops for severely wounded service members. As of October 2007, Valour-IT has distributed over 1500 laptops to severely wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines across the country.

Soldiers' Angels "was started by a self-described ordinary mother of an ordinary young man turned hero" and features several other programs. Donations are tax-deductible.

One of the great things about trade shows is getting a chance to chat with people informally. i Marshall Kirkpatrick* and I ended up at the same table Weds. night. I'm enthusiastic about where we're going, and enjoy sharing with someone who really "gets" blogging. In the "old media" days, I might have treated every such encounter as a pitch and therefore stuck to talking points. But I prefer the more authentic world of blogs, and just treated it as a conversation with an interesting guy.

Though it's worth pointing out that the old way had some advantages too.

I thought Marshall's post at Read/WriteWeb was great, but the title threw some people off:

Blogcosm Challenges Technorati, Techmeme to Parse the Blogosphere

Er, challenging Technorati and Techmeme (a reader might think). These Blogcosm guys must be crazy.

But Blogcosm is neither a search engine nor a "meme tracker". We're not a new challenge for Techmeme -- I think people may have read a bit too much between the lines.

Initially I thought the title was just intentionally provocative. That may play a role, but perhaps the key word is actually "parse". Our approach to analyzing blogs is different than anything we've seen. (There's no shortage of interesting software opportunities; I've never been one to create "me too" products or sites.) Because we tackle fewer blogs, we can afford to provide more information about each.

Marshall's post hit Techmeme -- our first bit of blog fame. Fame is fleeting.... That's ok, we're hard at work on gathering and organizing more data, and presenting it in ways that we think people will find useful. We've only just begun.

(Do follow the links above. I appreciate the various feedback and attempted to clarify a few things as appropriate.)

If you're at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, please stop by and visit us in booth #225.

We launched Blogcosm with profiles of blogs; now we've added profiles of the people behind these blogs. The new index page starts with an alphabetical table of contents. There's also an index sorted by category, but that's pretty long at the moment. (TBD: split it by top-level category.)

For each person we include a short bio (if available) and list blogs and non-sites they are associated with. We also updated the blog profiles to include a list of people.

Each profile page has a comment form. If you have more information or good links for any person or blog, please share!

We just added a new section to Blogcosm: Events. The folks at BlogWorld Expo have provided a large schedule chart and information on the conference speakers. We sliced and diced that along with data that we gathered to provide views by date, track, and person. Blogs, people and dates link to the appropriate profile page. We've filled in most of the missing speaker bios and added cross-references to the speaker's blog and site affiliations. (Each detail page has a comment form; please suggest additions and corrections!)

If you're attending the conference, you may want to print several of our "one track, one day" views. They provide details on those speakers -- and just those, with no need to hunt around in a long list.

For example: navigate to the Advanced Track on Nov. 8 then click "Print this page". Tip: print "2-up" to save space.

If you haven't signed up for the conference but are tempted: it's not too late. Flights to Las Vegas are still available.

Please stop by and see us at Booth #225.

Tim Lee came up with a great post title at Techdirt this morning: Titanic Crew Strikes Over Deck Chair Arrangement. It's a good lead into his blog-centric view of a standardized Hollywood writers contract:

The web is such a diverse and fast-changing medium that it's hard to imagine a contract that could address the diverse needs of all its writers right now, to say nothing of anticipating the future evolution of the industry.

Citing the same NY Times piece, Marc Andreessen points out several challenges faced by the media business:

faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media, including film and television, to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games

He asks the "major media moguls":

Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales, leading to an industry-wide shutdown and massive economic pain for all sides in the world of traditional scripted film and television content?

Perhaps Marc has different sources? The NY Times article sounded like the other side was "picking a fight":

The sides have been at odds over, among other things, writers’ demands for a large increase in pay for movies and television shows released on DVD, and for a bigger share of the revenue from such work delivered over the Internet.

We report, you decide.

In today's Fortune, Michael V. Copeland unleashes the war metaphor.

In the consumer-technology blogosphere, the rivalry between Engadget and Gizmodo is as lively as a big-city tabloid war.

Where might he have gotten that angle? Here's Nick Denton (owner of Gizmodo's publisher, Gawker Media) on Sept. 6:

It's been the blogospheric equivalent of the great newspaper tabloid wars. For three years, Gizmodo has tussled with Engadget, the rival gadget blog.

Engadget's Ryan Block is dismissive:

the spin being, of course, that there's this huge, bitter public rivalry between us and Gizmodo. I wasn't sure how they were going to pull it off since it has all the makings of a non-story: two very different publications with two different angles and audiences.

Gizmodo had their say:

While nobody's screaming, "Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war" (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar), we do have a competitive instinct around here,

(Subtle message: Gizmodo is high-brow; we quote Shakespeare. But, we're not sure if our readers are as literate as we are, so we better point out that it's Shakespeare.)

How do you get attention when you feel you've been wronged? A time-tested technique: make wild unsupported claims and/or rush to ridiculous conclusions. ("The sky is falling.")

A blogger who uses the pseudonym "Jon Swift" reports that Facebook deleted his profile because he didn't include his real name.

As best I can tell, the company is just enforcing their terms of service on a single blogger. That's hardly a war, no "declaration" has been made, and (even if both were true), deleting accounts does not affect the blogosphere in any way.

Would a straightforward title have gotten the attention of Robert Scoble, or sparked Dennis Howlett to call Facebook Orwellian? Perhaps not, but perhaps so.

Even without exaggeration, the issue draws sympathy from Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries blog:

Do a search for Jesus Christ on Facebook. Or Flash Gordon. Or any other obviously fake name. You’ll instantly receive hundreds, if not thousands, of results.

If you can’t uphold your own terms of service on everyone, why do it on the selected few? I don’t really see how Facebook can consistently and systematically check the truthfulness of user provided profile data.

Good point.

Speaking of Facebook, here's my gripe: requiring date of birth strikes me as an invitation to identity theft. Hmm; wonder how that would play as a headline?