Dana Blankenhorn

Where Santorum Might Have Had A Point

Rick Santorum jumped the shark and sank his Presidential hopes recently by condemning college education. 

(The original of this picture is at FiscalTimes.) What he said, specifically, is dead-wrong. The idea that you're “a snob” if you support higher education is beyond stupid. He deserved what he got for it – Romney as the GOP nominee.

But beyond that, there is some truth hidden away inside his statement. Sometimes the squirrel does indeed find a nut.

We've become credential-mad in this country. What the President said, and quite rightly, is that trade schools and similar training programs, as well as college, are essential to the maintenance of a highly skilled workforce.

But should cooks really have to attend a college in order to cook? Should people running radiology machines need a degree in order to point it at people?

I don't think so. I think many programs for what are basically trades are misguided and wasteful. After due consideration, I'd add journalism to that list.

Breitbart

When Saul Alinsky died I don't recall the mainstream media making a big deal of it. If Abbie Hoffman had died in 1972, I doubt anyone in the mainstream media would have cared. I wasn't told to feel sad when Gadhafi got what was coming to him, or when they hung Saddam Hussein.

But Andrew Breitbart was a "publisher." And that makes his death, at 43, a day of national mourning. 

That's the way it is in journalism. You don't get to change things if you're a writer. Or an editor. You do get to change things if you're a publisher. And you don't need any ethics to do so, either. Journalism operates according to the golden rule – he who has the gold makes the rules.

No one ever asked where Breitbart was getting his money. They just asked if his checks bounced and, if they didn't, sit right down here next to Morty Zuckerman, Rupert Murdoch and Mr. Sulzberger, could you move down a seat so Breitbart can get his tookis in there, thank you very much.

This is, and has been, the big lie of the American media, of the journalism “profession” itself. It always was a clown show, an entertainment, not a “profession” at all. Anyone can get in if they have table stakes.

Exhibit A. Breitbart.

What Warren Buffett Doesn't Know

Warren Buffett won himself some headlines today with another call for newspapers to charge people for content. 

Newspapers grabbed this one eagerly but there's something neither they nor Buffett know.

They already do charge. All of them.

They charge you in time. The time it takes you to read anything is a real cost, to you. I can very much understand why you would resent anyone talking about charging you money for something you're already paying for, with your time, attention, and (assuming you believe what you read) credibility. I resent it, too.

Especially since, in the old print model, content was always free to begin with. The cost of the paper was never more than the cost of getting it from the printer to you. The cover price was split between the newscarrier (or newstand) and the truck that dropped piles of paper on the street (or driveway).

How were writers paid 20 years ago? Advertising. The ads that surrounded the content paid for the writers, the editors, the salesmen, the typesetting, and the printing. Not to mention the executives at the top of the tower and the profits that went to shareholders.

Internet Made Me a Video Star

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A few weeks ago I was contacted by Curtis Hollister of Investor Candy (the fellow on the left above.)

Curtis had seen my work at Seeking Alpha and was launching a video service for investors. Would I be interested in helping out?

Before I knew it, I'd turned the back bedroom into a rudimentary studio, complete with a green screen I hung over a bed and a fancy video camera Curtis sent me. He asked me to look into First Solar, which I did, then scheduled a GotoMeeting call.

The result is what you see above. He sat in his office and asked questions. I sat in my office and answered them. Same thing I've done for decades, only in reverse. He used a little technical magic to transform my bedroom into the Atlanta skyline and voila.

Let me know what y'all think. Has the Internet made me a video star or should I stick to my typing?

Why Money Hates Democracy

Time.

More than questions of power, money hates democracy because democracy takes time.

Markets don't take time. Markets can move immediately. Or so money believes.

Of course, not all markets move immediately. Real estate doesn't move immediately. Corporate investments don't move immediately. When decisions have to be made, corporate boards can make them quickly. In a crisis, money can accelerate things.

Democracy can't. In a crisis, democracy actually grinds more slowly. Everyone whose ox may be gored (and that means everyone) wants to be heard in a crisis, wants equity in a crisis.

But crises don't wait. And when money is on the line in a crisis, time is money. Thus money loses patience with democracy, it would rather have autocracy at that point.

The Real 2012 Campaign

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 50 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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To hear the TV networks tell it we're about to be inundated by a flood of TV ads that will leave us sour and the country divided.

First of all, who are the “TV networks” anyway? They're the talking heads at Fox, MSNBC and CNN. How many people even watch those things? Maybe a total of 5.5 million people. How many voters are there? Turnout in 2008 was 132 million.

Oh, yes, but what about the local stations, and the “real” networks? That's where the money is going. You think people don't know where their mute buttons are? You think people are hanging on to every word of an ad for a candidate in a way they don't for one from a local car dealer?

Most people already have their minds made up. This has always been the case. John Alford of Rice, my old school, insisted to me recently that we're increasingly becoming segregated by politics, that our politics even defines who we marry, and that we may become two separate breeds of people, red and blue, over time.

Uh, no. People change as their circumstances change. Your world gets rocked in some way – you can't get a job coming out of college, you lose the career you had for 40 years – and so does your worldview. But this happens far away from the TV screens. It happens organically, inside us, as we experience life. We come out of these experiences different from the way we went into them.

What happens when our world is rocked? Where do we go? You think we go to TV? What is our medium of choice in these hard times?

The Internet.

Making Money Online

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Making money online, for myself and for publishers, has literally been my life's work.

I started in the spring of 1985, over a quarter of a century ago. In the years since I have found many business models try and fail, many compensation models try and fail. But I've also found something that works, and I want to offer it to you now.

It's a modified pay-per-view structure, very similar to what I've seen work at ZDNet and (more recently) Seeking Alpha, which I began writing for this June. Setting it up is as simple as being able to measure page views, assign a value to those page views, and link page counts to the names of authors.

Seeking Alpha's model is very simple, a penny per page view. If you get 1,000 people to read your “premium” content, that's $10. Average 150,000 page views per month, as many writers with something to say can, and it's $1,500 – not a serious salary but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Free as in Fake, Fake as in Controversy

Karl Fogel of QuestionCopyright recently played “gotcha” with Richard Stallman and Glyn Moody – whom I hold in the same favor he holds Stallman – then steps up in Techdirt and plays the false equivalency game.

Fogel himself has an axe to grind here, so this is not an “interview.” Not that there's anything wrong with his axe. “Our projects highlight the restrictive effects of distribution monopolies,” he writes. “We're trying to change the terms of the debate, so that copyright reform efforts aren't stuck always reacting to industry rhetoric that equates copying with theft, plagiarism, and the abuse or destruction of the original work.”

Right.

Celebrate Sausage

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Ever make sausage? It's fun. Some cheap pork shoulder, cut it up, throw some spices in there (it likes sage, cumin, salt – feel free to disagree) and run it through the grinder attachment. Put it in the freezer for a few minutes before you grind it, so it won't cook.

(Shown here is V&V Sausage, made by distant relatives of my wife in Cistern, north of Flatonia TX along State Highway 95. Yummy!)

You can make sausage out of anything. I've had vegetarian sausage. You can buy non-animal casing (it's cheaper) and make a day of it.

Nearly every culture enjoys what Anthony Bourdain calls “meat in tube form” because it's such an efficient use of food resources. (Bourdain's favorite is blood sausage – mostly blood with grains and some nasty bits. Done right it's heaven.)

Know something else people all around the world like? Democracy. Representative government. Transparent decision making. All of which, it turns out, have a whole lot in common with making sausage, only you're using human hopes and desires instead of tasty animals and vegetable matter.

While most people love sausage, most claim to hate sausage-making. While everyone claims to love democracy, they also claim to hate the process.

This is what is wrong with America. The process IS democracy.

In the last two years we've had three major episodes of democratic sausage-making in the news, episodes our media has succeeded in making seem so distasteful we've soured on the sausage thus made without even trying it.

These were, in order, the health care debate, the deficit battle and (now) the European effort to get its fiscal house in order.

Why Analysts Never Give Open Source a Break

There's a simple reason why, after 20 years, we still have analysts with big firms who are ignorant about open source.

There just isn't a lot of money in it.

(As always when you see this guy on this blog, I'm going to point you to the wonderful game from the good folks at Hasbro that has taught generations of kids money is just a game of picking cards and rolling dice.)

This is a feature and not a bug.

By its nature, open source reduces distribution costs to zero and marketing costs to near-zero. Even when an open source company has a sales department they're not really selling. They are converting. They are trying to turn people who have already downloaded and started using the software into paying customers. Their success is determined, in large part, by the prospect's success in getting value from the software.

In other words, the stuff sells itself.

Market analysis is not journalism. It's marketing. Analysts look for opportunities on behalf of buyers and sellers in a marketplace. They sell this knowledge in order to build markets. But what is there to sell if buyers can just download the stuff, and sellers are just converting users into buyers?

Long story short, open source is a direct threat to market research. Typical market research processes don't work in the open source market. Sure, you can get gross comparisons of lots of open source projects, to help you decide which one to put your time and money into. For a company of size this is valuable stuff. But the typical “magic quadrant” analysis just doesn't have a market. Sorry.

Rather than acknowledge this reality, firms like Forrester, Gartner and IDC dance past it, or pretend it's not real. They don't train their people to understand open source because there's not enough money in it – for them. So they don't know it. And they probably never will.