Are our digital interactions activities ephermeral, destined to live only until the next refresh or are they more enduring? This has been a central question to the privacy debate that’s ensnarled Facebook as more and more users of the social network are realizing those pics of last night’s party could make for headaches in the future.

Given that background, I found this Ad Age story about Backupify quite interesting. Basically, Backupify is a service that allows brands to create a permanent record of their pages on Facebook and other popular platforms.

Why would they want to do that? Here’s Ad Age’s explanation:

The potential scenarios are numerous but one can imagine one where a Fan Page administrator could do something that is against company policy or simply go rogue, posting inappropriate messages. With backed-up Fan Pages, the company has proof in case of a lawsuit.

“There are records and data that reside on a company’s page,” said Linda Goldstein, head of the Advertising, Marketing & Media Division at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. “And if a page gets hacked or if there is a disruption of service or if your account is suspended by Facebook, you would want to maintain this record for claims, lawsuits, government inquiries.”

This is striking because it brings more third-party vendors into the privacy picture. After all, it’s not Facebook that’s facilitating the backup of those fan pages but another company entirely and one that might not be visible to the Facebook user. If and when that all that litigation now being predicted by privacy advocates begin, it’ll be interesting to see how those outside companies are involved.

I learned two things from The New York Observer’s cover story on the problems facing Slate as it drives a Lark into its 14th year of existence. The first is that Slate, owned by The Washington Post Co., needs some PR help. At the bare minimum, it needs someone who can get all its various editors on the same page with respect to matters like, oh, the general state of affairs.

Witness this perplexing passage:

“Slate is having a very good year,” [Slate Group Chairman-Editor Jacob] Weisberg said.

“Slate is not a profitable magazine,” [Slate.com Editor David] Plotz said. “The Slate Group is not profitable. We need to make sure that we are.”

I wouldn’t advocate anyone lying to a journalist, and I especially wouldn’t expect that from fellow journos. But someone here needs to make a decision on messaging strategy. Either transparently opaque, like Weisberg, or opaquely transparent, like Plotz, will do. Pick one and run with it.

The quotes come directly after Plotz expresses his admiration for Gawker Media, a recitation of the gossip comglomerate’s revenue estimates, and a wave at a comparison between those and Slate’s numbers. The problem with that is that no one knows Slate’s numbers. You might look at the $27 million created by Slate and the WashingtonPost.com in the third quarter and assume that one third of that comes from Weisberg’s operation since the Post’s web traffic is, according to The Observer, double Slate’s. That means Slate brings in around $9 million a quarter, or $36 million a year, likely more than Gawker but not awfully impressive.

But the point of the Observer article isn’t to parse Slate’s performance as a business. It’s to question how the publication is dealing with a web that’s changed vastly since its founding in the 1990s. The way that’s framed brings me to the second thing the article taught me and that’s that, among media industry reporters, there is only acceptable way to look at web publishers today and that’s through the sheer volume of traffic they attract. And that’s not a good thing if you care about different models and approaches flourishing online. Audience juggernauts like Gawker Media and Huffington Post have become the standard to which everything else must be compared, a rather limited way of looking at the world.

To be sure, Slate has had its traffic hiccups and looks pretty mature by now, audience-wise. (See the chart below.) And I’d agree with the article that Slate doesn’t dominate the conversation the way it might have back it’s younger days, especially in pre-blogging years of 2001-2004, when it was a bastion of intelligent Bush administration criticism.

What leaves me cold is the article’s prescriptions on how Slate should improve. SEO is tossed around, but the Observer piece never really explains how Slate is missing the mark on search or how it’s left behind in broader technological terms and, thanks to Plotz’s platzing over the site’s unspecified deficiencies, it doesn’t really have to. In addition to the Gawker fetish, he’s way into hating on his own product. Sample: “Technologically, we’ve had a hard, hard decade… Compared to our competitors, we’re behind, not agile. We’re used to a Web that’s a little bit slower, a Web where there weren’t so many great competitors as there are now.”

Well, there’s not much you can do about web publishing getting democratized. That’s sort of bigger than any one person or website. And I don’t quite get his point on speed, unless he’s talking about being faster to publish and having more churn. I feel like what’s underlying all this is the suggestion that the problem is Slate’s relatively expensive model, which prizes good writers and smart, often long pieces on weighty topics over the id-stroking churn of other, faster-growing publishers. To which I’d ask, so what?

Obviously, profitability and size of audience are important and if Slate’s is moving backwards on either that requires fast action. But quality of audience also has to be important and that won’t come with doing the aggregation thing, if that’s what Plotz is getting at. Gawker chief Nick Denton is right on when he says, “There’s a limited audience for smart centrism. That’s their biggest problem.” That’s only one way to look at it. Another is to figure out how you can go deeper with the (probably desirable) audience you already have and not worry about using the same traffic tactics everyone else is.

Here’s a traffic chart on Slate:

You might call an article on The Awl about a summer spent toiling for Demand Media, one of those content farm businesses built on weapons-grade SEO and horrendously paid freelancers, low-hanging fruit. I regard it as a juicy peach. Or at least a not-mealy apple. In any event, magazine editor Jessanne Collins relates her interactions with both the automated and human sides of Demand’s management of its legions of freelancers. Read the rest at Ad Age.

When a man who became rich and relatively famous by making ads, you have to do a double-take when he publicly proclaims to be the next Ralph Nader, which I did in this piece for Ad Age:

Along the way, Mr. Bogusky has compared himself to Ralph Nader, which, at the risk of being rude, is not just laughable. It’s ROTFLable. Mr. Nader may at this late date come off as an election-ruining clown in a flammable suit and shoes from Sears, but he’s a baller when it comes to consumer advocacy and has been since the 1960s, when he got into the game by launching a full-frontal attack on automakers’ woeful safety record.

Read the rest over at Ad Age or download a PDF.

A strange experience with my cable provider resulted in this story. After a few days of having no internet in my home, I called Time Warner to complain. I got nowhere fast on the phone, but when I started Tweeting it was a different story entirely:

Why should I, or any consumer, have one kind of experience on the phone and an entirely different kind online? Why does a customer willing to deal with his complaint in private end up being compelled to take it public? Are companies, as they are drawn to exciting new mediums giving short shrift to the old ones, like phones, where a lot of consumer experiences are still made or broken?

Over the past few years, companies have invested heavily in human and technological resources that allow them to better listen to what people are saying about them online. And many have gotten quite good at using social channels like Twitter or Facebook to quell complaints or, on the flip side, amplify the nice things that people have to say about their brands. But savvy as many brands have gotten online, offline customer service remains a different story, as my experience with my cable provider attests.

Read the rest at Ad Age or download a PDF.

Consider:

Since the beginning of the year, a veritable Cannes jury worth of senior creative talent has shrugged off the leashes of big agency networks for their own start-ups or for creative pursuits outside the ad industry….Longtime agency watchers will say this kind of churn has always been part of agency life, but to dismiss the trend as part of some cycle is ignoring some key questions that agencies need to answer. After all, the pressure on these companies’ business model is intense. While the economic gloom might be lifting, for most it still lingers and, besides that, agencies are getting hit from all sides: Cost-cutting, conservative clients; procurement officers; more competition from small and midsize shops; newfangled concepts such as crowdsourcing agencies; and a business model still very reliant on the production of ads, not ideas.

Read the full story at Ad Age or download a PDF.

Today Jonathan Franzen is getting all the attention, thanks to the Time magazine cover story that is unlinkable and probably unread behind Time’s paywall. That’s all ok, but the one writer with initials J.F. you need to know is Joshua Ferris, who wrote the awesome “Then We Came to the End” and the possibly even better “The Unnamed.” The former is about an ad agency as it unravels through round after round of layoffs. It’s written almost entirely in the first-person plural, a tact that could seem gimmicky but isn’t.

His second book is about a big-shot New York lawyer who comes down with a perplexing condition. He suffers from long bouts of being compelled by his body — or his mind maybe (it’s never clear) – to walk and walk and walk andwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkand walkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalk. He walks until he can walk no longer and passes out wherever he is: a parking lot in Newark, a dumpster in Queens and so on. The only way to stop him from walking it to physically restrain him.

Suffice it to say, this kind of behavior is not something that can be easily integrated into one’s life. That fact means “The Unnamed” is not a happy book and that is not something you would regard as a spoiler were you to read it. I am offering up an excerpt and, in the effort of providing context but not spoiling, I will say only that at a point in the novel the protagonist begins to hear voices. (And you would be wrong to assume that those voices are causally related to the walking.) There’s a passage, which I typed out below, in which one of those voices is addressing the protagonist’s self. Or something like that — I can’t be metaphysically precise on this matter.

Ferris is a extremely controlled, powerful writer. With just these two books, he’s carved something of a niche that I hope he keeps adding to. He’s the master of portraying the miseries of modern, corporate life in a fresh way. I feel like everyone else –Chabon, Lethem, all those guys who are one tangle with Oprah from being on the cover of Time– wants to write about detectives and comic books. This guy Ferris writes about work — and these are jobs that people who would read him actually have i.e. not gumshoes or dicks or codebreakers or whatever — and how that work chips away at one’s being.

I can’t say I get this freshness from Franzen. I think his essay on birdwatching in “How to Be Alone” is wonderful, but a recent rereading of “The Corrections” left me cold. I found myself skimming large swathes and all the characters felt very type-y and, again, very dated. And for some reason being dated in the late 1990s is worse than other ways of being dated. I guess that’s why we wear Journey t-shirts and put “Don’t Stop Believin’” in our HBO finales, but hide our Third Eye Blind CDs in a cardboard box inside a red Rubbermade bin and mislabel our MP3s so as to disguise them. Hypothetically.

Here’s the excerpt, which feels like Wallace Stevens is alive, writing novels. Again, it’s someone essentially talking to his self and not in a fun or functional way:

I respected you more when you were indifferent to God. You were beset by matters of urgency in your life that took precedence over the lofty speculation of divinity studients and men in pews on Sundays. You didn’t jave the time. You didn’t make it a priority. You formed the notions on the fly, in flashes of grim insight, in brief feelings of certainty that consumed you entirely and then quickly faded into the background. When you die, you thought, you die. Why linger on that unpalatable truth? And the alternative, the alternative was a sham. You hated the institutions and the corruptions and they hypocrises and the evils. You thought it was all a racket designed by the mighty to fleeced the weak and keep them in check. The existence of the numinous, the mystical, the godhead itself — who knows? Maybe. But what evidence was there? You had been chiseled by reason to a diamond point. You were deferential to logic and evidence, skeptical of specious oratory, an enemy of hearsay. At best, you put the possibility in abeyance, knowing that even when one of your cases went to trial, when every detail was presented and picked over, every side aired and attacked and defended, there was slippage, lacunae, things no one would ever know. God was like that. God was a trial. But if pressed you sided with disbelievers and sometimes you even showed contempt for those who spoke with the conviction of the weak and the credulous. You had that luxury. You stood outside of the wind and the rain. Your insights and argunents came to you in prosperity. Death was far off. You could afford to be leisurely. A drink was better than a thought. A meal was better than a conviction. Your family and your work were more meaningful to you than the ministrations of a hundred gods. That is, until you caved….The verdict arrives in doses, century after century, and looks increasingly grim. The world is too old. The soul is the mind and the brain is the body. I am you and you are it and it will always win.

You can buy “The Unnamed” on Amazon, naturally.

Usually Captchas make me feel visually- or cognitively-impaired. This one reminded me that, at some point, I’m going to die.







At least, I”ll be receiving Jason Hirschhorn’s media newsletter throughout the journey.

As the series a small subset of white people likes hurtles toward 1965, it’s time to think about what shape the historical backdrop will take. (All dates are from Wikipedia and, thus, accepted without question.)

March 10: Goldie, a London Zoo golden eagle, is recaptured 12 days after her escape.

Don turns from his newspaper, picks an errant tobacco leaf off his tongue, gazes out his office window, and thinks birds should not be kept in cages. Then, tired, he moves to his couch for a nap.

April 9: Charlie Brown and the Peanuts Gang appear on the cover of Time Magazine.

Cooper calls his man at Time.

April 14: In Cold Blood killers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, convicted of murdering 4 members of the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, are executed by hanging at the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men in Lansing, Kansas.

Sally reads “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Glenn puts Betty’s lock of hair in the Draper mailbox.

May 6: A tornado outbreak near the Twin Cities in Minnesota kills 13 and injures 683.

Don turns from his newspaper, looks out his office window and is stung by sadness and regret. He remembers those twins he passed up with Sterling. He puts the issue of “Time” with Charlie Brown in an envelope, addresses it, and adds the parcel to the outgoing mail.

May 22: The first skateboard championship is held.

Peggy ollies, prompting Pete to say, “A thing like that…”

June 19: Houari Boumédienne’s Revolutionary Council ousts Ahmed Ben Bella, in a bloodless coup in Algeria.

Ben Bella shows up at the agency, looking for help with his image. Don is bored, tells him to gather his things and get out.

September 25: The Tom & Jerry cartoon series makes its world broadcast premiere on CBS.

Don sips his scotch, squints at his black-and-white set, then, reminded of cats, lays down on the couch for a nap. Harry integrates Pond’s Cold Cream into the series — almost.

October 3: Fidel Castro announces that Che Guevara has resigned and left the country.

Ernesto lands at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce when he hears there is work to be had on Lucky Strike, which, the revolutionary is surprised and disappointed to learn, is a cigarette brand.

Sample dialogue:
Che: We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.
Draper: What do you do?

October 28: Pope Paul VI announces that the ecumenical council has decided that Jews are not collectively responsible for the killing of Christ.

Upon hearing the news, Sterling says to Pryce, “Then I guess we can trust them with Don. Let’s hire one and then tell Advertising Age.”

November 7: Pillsbury’s world-famous mascot, the Pillsbury Doughboy, is created.

The Lucky Strike client asks “for one of those” and then wiggles his finger into Sterling’s tummy. Don takes a nap.