I teamed up with the Web Goddess on Sunday to produce a web report published today on a visit to a Jersey City parish by the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The occasion was a centennial celebration by Church of the Incarnation, launched in an era when black Jersey City residents had to travel to upper Manhattan to find an Episcopal church that welcomed them.  If the PB does something official in the Diocese of Newark, the Web Goddess is going to cover it, and I’m enough of a fan of The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori that I was willing to take an unpaid assignment.  Employing our usual division of labor, I did the words and the Web Goddess did the pictures — including the behind-the-scenes shot at the reception with your humble scribe above.  (That’s a shrimp tail on the PB’s plate.)

More behind-the-scenes tidbits: if you click through to the story itself, you’ll find a group photo of the PB with some young interns, and everybody is grinning broadly.  The smiles are because I, in my customary role as photographer’s assistant, am making bunny ears over the Web Goddess’s head while she takes the picture.  Works every time. I later told the spiritual leader of two million Episcopalians that making bunny ears is “the work I feel called to do.”

(Earlier blog posts in the Brush With Greatness series describe my encounters with Jimmy Carter and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.)

I try to learn something new every day.  On Friday I learned that in Madison, NJ, the fine for driving with an expired registration is $54.

Now, I’m a rule-of-law kinda guy.  Sometimes civil disobedience can be warranted, but generally speaking, I believe laws should be obeyed.  Bad laws should be changed, not broken.  A failure to enforce any law leads to diminished respect for all laws.

(I’m even opposed to the “neighborhood play” in baseball.  The infielder should have to step on second base while holding the ball to start a double play.  But I digress.)

I reflected on this (not the baseball part) at the end of my morning commute Friday, after a Madison police officer rolled to a stop behind me in the parking lot where I work, blocking me in.  I had seen the black-and-white SUV a mile earlier, parked in a driveway, pointed outward, watching the traffic go by.  I checked my speed, slowed down slightly, and kept cruising toward work.

Turns out he ran my plates and found the expired registration.  I’ve watched enough TV to know that it’s really a bad idea to get belligerent with someone who carries both a ticket book and a weapon, so I fought back some of the snarky remarks that came to mind.  A second patrol car also followed me into the parking lot, and the patrolman checked for wants and warrants while the sergeant was writing the ticket… and I’m thinking, isn’t there any real crime in Madison?   And: Isn’t there a doughnut shop nearby or something?  (The latter is particularly unworthy — he could have been eating a doughnut, but instead he was doing his job.)

The sergeant told me my registration was expired, and asked to see my credentials.  I pulled the paperwork out of my glove compartment and looked at the registration.  Ha! It expired at the end of September — only two weeks ago that day!  I can talk my way out of this!  I’m starting to make that case to him and I hear him say, “if it were a day or two, I could let it go, but two weeks, I’ve got to give you a ticket.”  Oh.  I felt the time-space continuum snap into a different shape.

I imagined I was outside myself watching this on TV.  There were lots of cars going in and out of the parking lot, people looking at me — I made a point of smiling bravely.  One of my co-workers walked by, and I asked her to send a search party if I’m not in the office in half an hour.  Just hangin’ out here, having a chuckle with my homies in uniform.

There was even a kind of good-cop, bad-cop dynamic.  The sergeant said he could write me up for “Failure to exhibit D.L. or Reg,” which sounds like the same thing but carries a $180 fine, but he wasn’t going to do that.  The patrolman walked over from his cruiser, handed my license to the sergeant and said “no wants or warrants — you’re not going to have him towed, right Sarge?”  Naw.

The sergeant told me I have the right to contest the summons, and showed me the relevant court date on the ticket.  Hm… should I try to take it to court, given that I’m, like, obviously guilty and stuff?

“It’s really important to keep your registration current,” he said.  Yes, I gathered that.  I paid it online as soon as I got home.

When the sergeant handed me back my credentials, I shook his hand and thanked him for his service.

Irene, Schmirene — let’s talk web traffic, baby!

I’ve just been notified that as of August 24, 2011, I have entered the august and distinguished pantheon of professional bloggers.  Specifically, I received my first payment from Google AdSense.  My autograph is now available for purchase.

It’s taken a lot of hard work and dedication to get to this point.  Since May 29, 2009, when I launched my first AdSense ads, I’ve made more than 300 posts to my blog.  Almost all of them involved a fair amount of research, writing and editing.  I keep  telling myself that I should do more quickie blog posts with just a single observation about a single aspect of an issue.  But once I get started, it nearly always turns into an essay — I described this slippery slope in “Mary Meeker, Entitlements, Wikipedia Drift, and Why It Takes Me Three Hours to Write a Blog Post.”

My average time investment is certainly less than three hours (although that post took longer than that).  Let’s call it 90 minutes.  That adds up to more than 450 hours of blogging, plus an indeterminate but not trivial amount of time spent backing up, upgrading and enhancing the design and recovering from hackers.  500 hours is a reasonable estimate.

During that time, the blog helped launch “My International Consulting Practice,” although I don’t count that vast revenue stream as a direct payment for blogging.  Unfortunately, my two biggest traffic days — an Instalanch and a Sullivalanch — both occurred before I got started with AdSense.

Enough background.  So how much is this lush AdSense payout that makes all the effort worthwhile?  If you know anything about AdSense, you know what’s coming.  Drumroll, please…

$102.34.  That, as my AdSense dashboard so helpfully calculates, is an average of $0.13 per day since I began publishing ads.  (I can almost hear you thinking: “Thirteen cents a day? Gotta get me summa that!”)

A good rule of thumb is that when you hear someone say “it’s not about the money,” it’s usually about the money.  However, sometimes the check really is in the mail — and blogging, for me, is not about the money. Thanks for reading my blog.

Hey, did I mention that I’m now a professional blogger?

Three years ago today I posted my first substantive blog post, about Senator Obama, the Democratic nominee for president.  Here’s how it began:

From the start, my take on Obama has been that he’s a talented and charismatic politician who some day could become an important senator.

We know now, of course, that Obama will never be an important senator.  But I think the post holds up pretty well.

There have been 443 posts since then (some of them more substantive than others). They’ve attracted more than 1,000 legitimate comments.  There also have been more than 93,000 spam comments, blocked by my Akismet plug-in.

Since I added Google AdSense advertising to my site in May 2009, the ads have earned me $93.16, or an average of 12 cents a day. Once that total reaches $100, the Google people will send me a check. (Ca-ching!)  I’ve had more than 47,000 unique visitors from 150 countries, and I’m grateful to everyone who has taken a look.

These stats don’t exactly make me a titan of the blogosphere, but I enjoy having an outlet for writing. My heaviest traffic came from my one and only Instalanche, in a post noting that Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner’s tax problems got less attention from the media than Joe the Plumber’s.  The one post I’d like you to read if you haven’t already is “Honest Labor: From Mach 2 to Muenster to Madison.”

I was going to do  this as two posts, but between entertaining, the sunshine, fireworks and various pressing chores, I didn’t get my July 4 post up in time.  Let me end with a favorite quotation from the Collect for Independence Day in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (page 242).  Regardless of your faith tradition, I hope you’ll join me in giving thanks for the Founders of America, who “lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn.”  And to my favorite sailor, thank you for your service, son.

Happy 5th of July!

Click image to embiggen

Do you ever wonder why people sometimes tend to do the exact opposite of what they should do?

For example, when leaving a voicemail message, many people will speed up while giving the all-important phone number — at the precise time when they should slow down.

So someone says “nineseventhreefiveohfiveonetwoonetwo” as fast as they can, and you have to listen to the message twice, or even three times, to capture the number.  What they should say is “nine seven three”… [pause] “five oh five”… [pause] “one two, one two”.

(No, it’s not my real phone number.  What, do you think I’m nuts?)

Now let’s look at the “help” page above from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  (If you can’t see the graphic because you’re using an RSS reader, thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. Now click through to the site already!)  My simple goal this afternoon was to upload a photo to help personalize the few lines of text I wrote for my Wikipedia user page.  It’s the same photo you see on this blog in the column to the right. (You did click through to the blog, right, RSS feeders?)

Wikipedia uses a proprietary coding language to invoke HTML commands so that users don’t have to learn HTML.  The Web Goddess, a self-taught guru who knows HTML cold, finds it confusing and not intuitive.  But the real problem is the poor design of the “help” pages.

The page above pops up from a simple “Upload file” link in the left navigation of the Wikipedia toolbox.  So far so good.  But… how do you actually upload a picture?

Click to embiggen

If you embiggen the second graphic, you’ll see that the page starts out by telling you how to do everything you might possibly want to do, except for the single most likely thing.

Do I want to look at six different help pages first?  Not if I don’t have to.  Do I want to put my face on Wikimedia Commons, so anyone can use the photo free for any purpose?  No, especially since my Wikipedia log-in doesn’t seem to work there, and I’d have to create a new account.

Finally, the fourteenth link on the page, in the third highlighted section, has the magic words “go directly to the upload form.”  So why couldn’t they have said that 10 minutes ago?

What does all this have to do with good people doing nothing in the face of evil?  No clue.  Tune in again later.

Mary Meeker

Mary Meeker, the early Internet visionary who endured derisive criticism when she (correctly) predicted that Ebay’s stock would soar to more than $400*…

No, that doesn’t sound right.  Off to Wikipedia to refresh my memory.

I’m a huge Wikipedia fan, btw, and I have no patience for whining complaints to the effect that “Wikipedia isn’t authoritative because anybody can change it.”  In anticipation of such whining I rarely cite Wikipedia as an authority, but Jimmy Wales’s* brainchild is a global treasure nonetheless. It’s easy to get distracted following one link after another, but Wikipedia is a far better starting point for most research than Google is. It’s no accident that Wikipedia shows up on the front page of most many** simple Google searches.

Where was I?  Oh yes, Meeker — I’m writing a post about her recent epic analysis of America’s financial statements, the blandly titled* “USA Inc.: A Basic Summary of America’s Financial Statements“.  And wow, Wikipedia just saved me from TWO mistakes in a single scene-setting introductory clause.  The stock in question wasn’t eBay*(capitalization corrected), it was Amazon… and it wasn’t Mary Meeker making that prediction, it was Henry Blodget.

(Here’s an example of why Wikipedia should be the starting point, not the ending point, for any serious research.  Although I had the wrong company and the wrong person, I clearly remember the hubbub around Blodget’s 1998* prediction that a prominent Internet stock — already considered vastly overpriced by Internet skeptics — would soon soar to $400.  Blodget’s Wikipedia entry, however,  says* this: “In October 1998, he predicted that Amazon.com’s stock price would hit $40 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%).”

Now, I know the number was 400, not 40, so I figure there must have been stock splits totaling 10-for-1 (not 10-”to”-1) since then.

Hm, I wonder how Blodget’s prediction has held up over the years on a split-adjusted basis?*

Let’s start by fact-checking my 10-for-1 split theory. Whoa… Amazon’s investor relations site* says the stock has split three times in the company’s history: 2-for 1, 3-for-1 and 2-for-1.  Repeated stock splits have a multiplicative effect — hey, I learned a few things in 15 years as a Wall Street corpcomm gumby — and there is no combination of those three stock splits that multiplies to 10.  Turns out the first stock split was before Blodget’s prediction and the other two were afterward.***

So that implies a total of 6-for-1, and the $40 price isn’t split-adjusted, it’s just wrong. I’m a Wikipedian — I should go correct it! Except you’re not supposed to do original research for a Wikipedia article.

And I’m not confident about the 6-for-1 factoid.  Nothing affects a stock’s cost as dramatically as a split, but other events can tweak the cost-basis calculation — buybacks, special dividends, etc.  I don’t know how to do the calculations**, but I know how to find someone who does.  On May 23, 2007*, the New York Times’s respected**** “DealBook” column stated:

Henry Blodget, the former Internet analyst, is taking some pride from a little-noticed milestone … shares of Amazon have risen back above $400.

More precisely, they broke $400 after being adjusted for stock splits: the online retailer’s shares were trading at $71.61 at midday Wednesday. That’s the price target that Mr. Blodget set for the company back in 1998, in what may be the most famous stock call in history.

OK, so assuming** there have been no other cost-basis-affecting events since 2007, we’ll use $71.61 as our new cost basis. (Note that $400 is pretty close to 6 times $71.61!!)  Since touching that level in mid May 2007, the stock rose to near $100 before collapsing (along with everything else) in 2009 to below $40*.  The stock has more than recovered since then, closing at about $189 earlier this month*.

So let’s see… $189/$71.61 equals about 2.6*, so apply that multiplier to Blodget’s original $400 price target, and we see that with a long enough time horizon, Blodget could have justified a price target of more than $1,000.***

(Hm… digging up that factoid took well over an hour, and it’s tangential at best to my topic.)

Onward! Meeker’s early claim to fame was as lead author of a groundbreaking 1995* primer that was blandly titled  “The Internet Report.”

Wikipedia’s fairly brief entry on Meeker yields the following nugget*, which seems pertinent to this post:

Meeker was characterized by Andy Serwer in Fortune magazine in 2006 as “absolutely first rate when it comes to spotting big-picture trends before they come into focus. She gathers massive amounts of data and assembles it into voluminous reports that, while sometimes rambling and overambitious, are stuffed with a million jumping-off points.”

“Massive amounts of data” and “voluminous reports”: Check, and check.  “The Internet Report” was 322 pages*, and the spark of an idea for this blog post was when I noticed that a key chart in her latest masterpiece is part of a slide deck totaling a bizarre 447* slides.

Meeker has applied her background as a securities analyst to examine the federal budget and balance sheets as though the U.S. were a company.  Here’s slide # 49:

Note the red line around the three huge pie pieces to the right.  They represent spending on entitlements — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance.  Entitlements collectively are nearly three times the size of defense spending, and entitlement spending is only going to accelerate as Baby Boomers move into retirement.  In fact, Meeker writes* (Slide 14): “Within 15 years (by 2025), entitlements plus net interest expenses will absorb all — yes, all – of USA Inc.’s annual revenue, per CBO.  That would require USA Inc. to borrow funds for defense, education, infrastructure and R&D spending.”

I came across the chart on FaceBook via the blogger TigerHawk — I am FaceBook friends with his not-so-secret identity.  He linked to an article about the analysis by Henry Blodget — hey, maybe that’s how I got confused!

Unlike me, TigerHawk “gets” blogging.  Here is the full text* of his post about the chart:

I propose a new rule: Any federal politician of either party who claims to care about our fiscal condition who is not also proposing steep reductions in entitlements is transportingly disingenuous and ought to be voted out of office.
More here. The link explains why “the U.S. is screwed,” but we are only screwed if we lack the courage to tame this monster. Until this problem is solved, no federal politician should ever again leave a meeting with constituents without having to answer the question “what is your proposal for reducing entitlements?”

Ah yes, brevity.  Maybe next time.

* Indicates a place where I interrupted  the flow of writing to do more research — often just confirming a fact or spell-checking.  After more than 400* substantive blog posts over two and a half years, I’ve realized that I just don’t “get” blogging.  The whole point is to make quick observations, right?  Some famous blogger (Andrew Sullivan?) once said that an average blog post should not try to make more than one point.  Check my headline: Fail!

**Indicates a place where I talked myself out of doing additional fact-checking.

*** Indicates a place where I feel entitled to more asterisks because I actually did quite a bit of research.

**** Meaning, I respect it today because it’s helping me make a point.

This annual post was first published two years ago.  It is dedicated to the men and women of the United States armed forces, and to every firefighter who has ever run into a burning building — 343 of them in particular.

The name of this blog comes from something that English statesman Edmund Burke apparently did not actually say, so I’ve felt free to modernize the language:

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”

Regardless of who said it first, that sentence is the purest possible distillation of my worldview, and today is a powerful annual reminder of why I regard it as an enduring truth.

The events of 9/11 were the legacy of more than two decades of doing nothing, or next to nothing, in response to attacks from fascists in Islamic guise.

Militant Islamists declared war on America in November 1979 by taking hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. This was followed by 1983 attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut; the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie in 1988; the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993; the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996; the simultaneous 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania; and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000; along with smaller atrocities too numerous to list.

Only after 9/11 did America, led by a President who despite his substantial flaws was resolute enough to call evil by its name, finally mount a sustained response and take the battle to the enemy. And no, Saddam was not behind the 9/11 attacks — but liberating Iraq and planting a (still-fragile) democracy in the heart of the Islamic Middle East is an essential part of the broader war.

All of this is why, despite profound disagreements with the Republican Party on social issues, despite voting for Bill Clinton three times (including 2000), I can no longer vote for Democrats for President. Not until the party has a standard-bearer who understands the cost of meekness in the face of fascism, and who is prepared to stay on the offensive against people for whom “death to America” is not a metaphor.

Big cyber-news today in Maplewood, NJ, the place one blogger once called “the center of the blogging universe.” The New York Times abruptly shuttered The Local, its New Jersey experiment in hyperlocal blogging.  I’ve chronicled the Maplewood Blogolopolis^TM here, here, here and here.

Instead of just shutting down, the NYT is passing its baton to Baristanet, a venerable (since 2004) hyperlocal news site for other parts of Essex County.  Baristanet has launched new homepages for Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn, the three towns covered by The Local.

Timestamps on their respective articles indicate that Mary Mann at Maplewood Patch broke the story a full 13 minutes before the NYT posted its own announcement on The Local.  Congrats, Mary!  (Of course, I could make my timestamp read whatever I want it to read, but Mary wouldn’t do that.)  The first cryptic comment on Maplewood Online was even earlier.  And the Maplewoodian weighed in a bit later in the afternoon.

After the Web Goddess alerted me to the news via IM, I promptly lurched into action.  Stealing a few minutes away from my day job (forgive me, Mother Lauren), I promptly posted a self-serving comment on The Local’s announcement, thereby creating a small flurry of traffic to my previous coverage.  Then I worked the rest of the afternoon.  Then I came home and watered the lawn and borrowed my neighbor’s spreader to put down some Scotts® Turf Builder® With PLUS 2® Weed Control (no, this is not a paid plug… but Scotts, have your people call my people).

Eventually I connected with Mary Mann, hoping I could get some snarky, back-biting comments, but it was not to be.  “I’m very sorry to see The Local go,” she said.  (At least I think that’s what she said — we had terrible reception, despite trying four connections on different cell and land-line combinations.  I blame the Rooskie spies in Montclair for sabotaging the phones.)

So how about these Barista newcomers?  “Jolie Solomon is wonderful — very talented,” Mary said.  (Solomon is the former Patch contributor who will be anchoring Baristanet’s Maplewood coverage.)  “I’ve always thought there was enough room for everyone” in the Maplewood hyperlocal scene.

Such a nice lady.  (Disclosure: she sometimes publishes my stuff.)

I just realized I haven’t bragged about this yet.  It turns out I’m an award-winning writer.

.

Active bloggers get used to seeing comments along the following lines:

I wanted to thank you for this excellent read!! I definitely enjoyed every little bit of it. I have you bookmarked your site to check out the new stuff you post.

Or:

This post is beyond awesome. I am always wondering what to do and what not to do so I will follow some of these tips.

Or:

Well said. I never thought I would agree with this opinion, but I’m starting to view things differently. I have to research more on this as it appears quite interesting. One thing I don’t get though is how everything is related together.

This is known as comment spam, and the examples above are not hypothetical — they are all actual comments intended for this blog, but trapped in a spam queue by the indispensable Akismet plug-in for WordPress. (And no, I have not been and will not be compensated for saying something nice about Akismet, or about any other product or service.)

The formula the spammers use is pretty transparent:  Say something flattering and brief, and vague enough that it could apply to any blog post.  Then format the comment so that the user name links back to whatever Adsense-gaming, drivel-infested website the spammer is flogging, fire up a comment bot, and post the comment to a few thousand or a few million blogs — some of which will not have any protection against comment spam.

I have no objection to Adsense itself — I use Adsense to serve up ads on this blog.  What I object to is the phenomenon of setting up multiple blogs with extremely low signal-to-noise ratios for the sole purpose of generating clicks and page views.

It’s hard to believe the spam-bloggers are making much money.  Under Adsense’s terms and conditions, I’m not supposed to say very much about my relationship with them, but I’m permitted to disclose truthfully how much money I’ve made.  Since I began hosting ads about 10 months ago, my total earnings have been $45.82, or about 15 cents per day.  If and when the total earnings reach $100, they’ll send me a check.  Ca-CHING! (Update: Woo hoo!  Got that check!)

In contrast to the spam comments, here is the text of an unsolicited email I received yesterday, referring to my previous blog post:

Hi Kirk,

I read your commentary on Left v Right echo chambers and I gotta say that win seems solidly in the ‘Right’ column. As you point out in your post the right leaning Fox is destroying CNN. I think you will like this video on the same topic. It analyzes news coverage from different sources to examine why audiences are migrating away from CNN. It also explores various theories about the future of new media and journalism. I hope you will consider embedding the video in your post.

Thanks,

–
Rosa Sow
Community Manager
[redacted]@newsy.com

Now to some degree, Rosa’s intention is the same as the spam commenters’: to drive traffic.  But what a difference in execution.  Her email is specific enough to prove that she actually read my blog post.  It has a flattering tone, without being over the top about it — and without giving away any hint of her own political views.  It forthrightly acknowledges that she has her own agenda — she wants me to embed her video on my site.  And it offers me something in return – a promise of news and information about a topic in which I have a demonstrated interest.

And since she asked so nicely, here’s the video:

I had not heard of Newsy.com until I got her email, but I’m glad to have learned of it.  I watched the video above a couple of times, and then sampled a few other videos on the site.  Their boilerplate self-description is on target:

A news analyzer, not a news aggregator, Newsy.com is the only multi-source video news service producing daily videos that analyze the key differences in how a story is being reported by various news organizations. Newsy.com offers context with convenience — in 2 to 3 minutes, users understand the nuances in coverage.

They’re based in Columbus, Missouri, which explains the frequent appearance of Kansas City Star columnists among their sources.  If I look at enough of their work, I may be able to diagnose a tendency to lean toward the right or the left, but they don’t seem to have any obvious partisan ax to grind.   Whatever their politics, they treat differing points of view with respect, which is exactly what I aspire to on this blog, although I don’t pretend to be neutral.

So Rosa, I hope you don’t mind that I’ve quoted your email message.  I sent you an email asking if it would be OK to publish it, but then I went ahead without waiting for an answer.  I figured that because it was an unsolicited email for commercial purposes to a recipient who does not know you, you had no reasonable expectation of privacy.  I’ll take your name off the post if you wish.

Anyway, thanks for the email, and congratulations on scoring a link.  I hope my vast traffic doesn’t overwhelm your servers, and I promise you that I’ve actually bookmarked your site.