Matt Drudge By the Numbers
A numbers genius—not Nate Silver!—has pored over the 171,000-plus recorded updates of the Drudge Report since 2002 and put it all into chart form. Most stunning-yet-not-surprising statistic: two-year-old Politico ranks 16th among sites linked to by Drudge. Kalev Leetaru, the coordinator of information technology and research at the University of Illinois' Cline Center for Democracy, went back through seven years' worth data from the Drudge Report Archives—which has been taking a digital snapshot of the Drudge Report each time it's been updated since 2002—and mined it for clues as to how the elusive Junior Vasquez fan controls our media diet. One of the many interesting datapoints unearthed by Leetaru's analysis is a curious drop in the total number of updates to the Drudge Report in 2008—an election year that should have seen a huge increase in the amount of stories, and therefore updates, that Drudge was covering. As a possible explanation for the drop-off Leetaru cites our reporting in March about the departure of Drudge understudy Andrew Breitbart from his operation. Breitbart left the site in mid-2008, and Drudge evidently had trouble keeping up the pace. Leetaru saw another counterintuitive drop-off in updates during the Iraq War in 2003, which he explains by citing the overwhelming coverage that Iraq got in the news outlets Drudge relies on for stories. As newspapers focused their resources on Iraq and stopped writing about animal attacks, weather, and robot sex, Drudge had less to work with: As major global events displace the news coverage that an aggregator relies on, that aggregator is forced to reduce its update cycle to accommodate the reduction in stories to link to. As expected, Breitbart.com has been the chief beneficiary of Drudge links, netting 14,923 (or 14.5% of all links) since 2002, largely because Breitbart himself was doing the linking. Nice gig! The top newspaper beneficiary was the Washington Post with 6,471, nearly twice as many as the New York Times. And even though it was in existence for only two of the six years that Leetaru studied, Politico ranked 16th in terms of total Drudge links, catching nearly 50 in January of 2008 alone. Leetaru also did a word analysis of Drudge's headlines—an undertaking that, given Drudge's facility as a headline writer, could serve as a guidebook for newspaper editors looking to save the industry—but decided not to filter out filler words and articles, so we only get the astonishing news that "to" is the most commonly used word in a Drudge headline. But the weird thing is the "Bush" outranked "a." Leetaru only charted out the Top Ten words; we've asked him for the full rankings and will let you know if he gives them to us. [Via Politico.] MORE >>
Everything Wrong with the Internet in One Gaming Banner Ad Campaign
If you believe technology is rapidly turning us all into hedonistic degenerates, these advertisements for an online video game give you a perfect case study. The game, Evony, is about empire-building strategy. The ads, increasingly, are about boobage. Web entrepreneur Jeff Atwood, who first highlighted the ads, writes that they "take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom," and toward the moronic, hypersexualized future foretold in Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy. Yes, sure, inevitable cultural and intellectual decline of America, whatever. Vulgarians that we are, we're far more burned up by the game's false advertising: After all that flesh, there's not actually a "queen" to "save" in the game! The boobage was strictly for "marketing purposes," according to Evony. Now that's something you can (probably!) sue over. The first ad emphasized Evony's pedigree as a clone of the strategy game Civilization, in which the player must "build an empire to stand the test of time." The next picture used a stolen catalog photo to emphasize the game's ample... opportunities for adventure! But that ad really didn't convey the teamwork aspect of the game. To get across the "cooperation" theme, what could be better than hot twins?? The word "lover," perhaps. There's your ad! The words "my lord" in prior ads really didn't properly convey a player's dominion over buxom females as well as a kneeling woman with an exposed bra and a sword pointed at her chest. But we'd have gone with, "buy our game or we stab this hot lady" for the tagline, here, as it's really more direct than "Help! Save the Queen," but without distorting the original message. Oh, forget about saving the queen. So much work! Click here to just have wench sex and rule the world, already. The orgasmic wench-elf and the kneeling queen and the lusty court twins were all too subtle, it turns out. Click here to play the boob game!* (*Game does not actually involve boobs). (This is an actual ad.) [Coding Horror] MORE >>
Sarah Palin Quit Because She Was Not Very Good At Her Job
Last week, we continued trying to figure out why Sarah Palin quit her job. We could think of a couple reasons! And today, the New York Times seems to throw its weight behind one of those reasons. We phrased it as, "She Just Hates Governing." Today's Times story on the days leading to Sarah Palin's resignation suggests that "she just hates her life, and Alaska, and is not very good at governing" might more accurate. So what happened is Sarah continued to be obsessed by every single petty attack against her, real or perceived, by any enemy, from any corner. When she talks about how she was unable to focus on helping Alaska because the governor's office was bogged down in frivolous ethics complaints, what she means is that she was personally consumed with everything bad said about her. Like, here is one of those all-consuming ethics complaints that were hurting Alaska: By all accounts, Ms. Palin became consumed with the complaints, no matter how small-bore - which many were - or where they came from. When a local Democratic blogger accused her of becoming a "walking billboard" by wearing a jacket emblazoned with the logo of Arctic Cat, her husband's team sponsor at the Iron Dog snowmobile race, she issued a news release titled "Governor Comments on Latest Bogus Ethics Complaint." "Yes, I wore Arctic Cat snow gear at an outdoor event, because it was cold outside," her statement read. A follow-up release was triumphantly titled "Ethics Complaint on Governor's Apparel Dismissed." So, yes, Palin was fixated on attacking local bloggers, on responding to everything Levi Johnston said and did, and on taking on a late-night comedian for making a dumb joke. The Republican Governors Association tried to send an aide up to help her out, and party bigwigs tried to help her set up a PAC and a legal defense fund, and meanwhile the Alaska legislature just wanted her to govern, and Palin could not really handle all of those things, at once, and so she quit. But not before she randomly fired someone who annoyed her, again, because that is her style. Dr. Butler said he resigned his post in June in part because the administration asked one of his highly regarded division heads, the state public health director, Beverly Wooley, to resign. "I felt that it was not a good time to be downsizing," said Dr. Butler, who is now working on a swine flu vaccination at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Butler said the governor's office apparently deemed Ms. Wooley insufficiently supportive of the parental consent bill backed by Ms. Palin. Ms. Leighow would only say, inexplicably, that Ms. Wooley had been terminated by the health department, not the governor. At least we can be confident that, while Sarah Palin has quit politics, she will never quit being a petty, thin-skinned liar, surrounded by sycophantic enablers. And she will certainly not disappear from the public eye as long as Levi Johnston remains free, and on television! Visit msnbc.com for... MORE >>
New York Observer Owner's Lessons on How to Lose Money and Alienate People
Jared Kushner, boy wonder real estate scion and New York Observer owner: watch, as the young man fumbles his newspaper business and insults his staff! Marvel at his father's family-destroying schemes! And, his secret for attracting Ivanka Trump, below! Gabriel Sherman has a huge profile of Jared Kushner in New York magazine today, with a hefty section devoted to his father's little "Set up my brother-in-law with a hooker and secretly tape it and send the video to his family" episode, which landed him in jail. But let's start with Jared's high praise for the Observer, the paper that's been wracked by layoffs and budget cuts under his leadership: "I found the paper unbearable to read, it was like homework," Jared tells me. Haha. But Jared is changing that! With his powers of motivation. After he hired PR man Bob Sommer as President of the Observer, he told him, " We called it Weekend at Bernie's, because it was like dead people walking around." Good one! After the NYO's longtime editor Peter Kaplan left and severe layoffs hit the paper, Jared put it to his underpaid, beleaguered journalists straight: At a meeting last month, Jared told his staff that the Observer needed to move on. "Kaplan is a classy guy, but he's old-school," Jared said. "If we were doing our jobs right, Gawker wouldn't have a reason to exist. Curbed wouldn't have a reason to exist. "Every Observer writer wants to be a novelist," he went on. "But we need to be deliberate about when we are short and when we are long." Jared, you are our reason to exist. And your writers don't want to be novelists; they have to, because you laid them off. But Jared's not the type to buy into the doom and gloom; he 's optimistic about the dying newspaper industry to a comical extent. Let's hope he's just lying to put on a happy face: "I think we're definitely at a bottom for newspapers," he said a couple of weeks later. "Once this Russian winter is over, once the papers fail that should fail, you'll see a resurgence. I think the Observer two years from now will be a very viable entity." He also promised to run the NYO as a "profit-making entity," which would be a pretty historic moment! Jared seems like not a terrible guy, though, considering the way he grew up—favorite son of a mogul father, who hired a PI to set up his brother-in-law, who he hated, with a hooker, and then had to be talked out of sending the video of the incident to his brother-in-law's children. Jared does not seem to be that cut throat, at least. His dad made huge donations to Harvard and then to NYU to smooth Jared's admission to those august institutions. And it's paid off; the swaggering underclassman has blossomed into a total heart throb. Ivanka Trump found his pimp game irresistible. Their steamy secret of attraction: "Jared and I are very similar in that we're very ambitious," Ivanka tells me one morning in her office on the 25th floor of the Trump Tower. "That's what makes it so amazing to be in a... MORE >>
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