For better or worse, the just-concluded SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas carries the weight of massive geek expectations. The big reason has to do with Twitter: it was at SXSWi in 2007 that the now-ubiquitous messaging service first gained wide exposure. The buzz from Austin traveled far and wide throughout the blogosphere and, up in Washington, I was inspired to join Twitter three years ago yesterday. The rest is history.

Each subsequent year, the question buzzing around the Austin Convention Center has been the same: “What’s the new Twitter? What’s the new big thing?” With a few years’ distance, it’s clear that the rise of Twitter is sui generis, like the blogosphere itself. SXSW is a great launching pad for new services (here’s one from this year called Lunch.com), but no law of the universe dictates that every March in Central Texas, something new and wonderful will take world by storm.

And a funny thing happened this year: I don’t recall anybody asking about the next big thing. I think I know the reason, and it is not that there wasn’t something to talk about. It’s that the next big thing was obvious from the first day.

Read the whole thing at: At SXSW, Last Year’s Next Big Thing Was This Year’s Actual Big Thing.

Apart from the auto-launching pre-roll ad—I tried and failed to pull this off DVR myself—not too shabby: I got two sound bites, the final conclusion restated in the reporter’s words, and some hilarious B-roll which is clearly the two of us shooting B-roll. Enjoy.

One of the more interesting projects I’ve been working on related to 3121 is the social advertising, which we launched last week concurrent with this blog. In fact, there is a chance that you are reading this blog post now after having clicked on one of these ads. And if you arrived here from Facebook or LinkedIn, then I all but guarantee it. And I know for a fact that you work on Capitol Hill.

In some ways, advertising on social networks is not much different than traditional online advertising: the creative (yes, that’s a noun) consists of text and a graphic, with a link to the page you want people to visit. But they can also identify key demographics with a much greater degree of accuracy than even Google’s Adwords (which we are also using). Members of Facebook and LinkedIn supply their own demographic information, which is great for finding just the people you want and only the people you want.

Want to reach single female college students in Boston, Massachusetts who are fans of Gossip Girl? Facebook counts more than 1,600. How about married thirtysomething men in Portland, Oregon who are fans of The Big Lebowski? More than 600 of them. The possibilities are endless.

In your case, if you do fit the Capitol Hill profile, you probably saw one of the two following ads:

As you may have guessed, Facebook also lets one zero in on just employees of the United States Congress. (How many? At least 7,500.) LinkedIn has a different system but one which is very similar: identify people who work in legislative offices, set that to Washington, DC and we hope you’re someone who is interested in 3121.

“Everyone looks at the numbers and says, ‘Wow, advertising is growing 20 percent a year online,’ and they get really excited about that,” he said. “But most of that growth is cost-per-click — it’s Google, it’s AdWords, it’s AdSense. So display advertising stopped growing a year ago, and the problem is the number of impressions online doubles roughly every year, and so you have this gigantic overhang of supply, and demand has not only stopped growing anyway but is also definitely down in a commercial sense. Put it all together and it’s kind of a perfect storm.”

I asked him whether the Democratic administration and the billions of dollars in increased government spending were providing any new markets for ad buys. He wouldn’t discuss the specifics but confirmed that they were seeing some strong pockets of interests in affected industries and interest groups.

The closing of Pajamas Media, Copeland said, was definitely good for Blogads. When the conservative network launched, it managed to swipe several major conservative bloggers, leaving only a handful of the larger ones behind. Copeland told me that, starting in April, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin will be returning to Blogads.

Indeed michellemalkin.com is back from Pajamas Media. Of two display slots on her site, one ad is running in the $450/week slot, though the $1,500 premium slot remains unfilled. However, this pattern could be seen long before the recession hit, and it’s always been my suspicion that the premium account is meant to sticker-shock buyers into believing the lower slot a bargain, while making the occasional big score from a flush-with-cash advertiser buying out the category.

I digress.

The Malkin-owned Hot Air however is not coming back to Blogads, not yet if at all. That site is running Google display ads as well as ads from Intermarkets, which handles Drudge Report and a few other political sites with less-Niagaran traffic.

Also quoted in Owens’ column is Chris Bowers of Open Left, who also goes through Blogads. Here’s what ad column on his site looked like on Friday:

I say that because as of Saturday afternoon, they’ve thrown a display ad that wasn’t in there before. Those displays can’t be bringing in a great deal of money. I’ll bet more than anything they’re running just to keep up the appearance of healthy advertising, and hopefully lure other advertisers into the column.

Meanwhile back on Bowers’ former site, MyDD, Jerome Armstrong is keeping the lights on with Google ads, Jane Hamsher’s CommonSense Media and something I’ve never heard of called Pulse 360 that nonetheless has an impressive network. Its Blogads slot remains on the site, unfilled. Two years ago, that would have been unthinkable. At Daily Kos, long one of Blogads’ top earners, Markos Moulitsas has had a diversified pool of ads for some time; today premium Blogads slot is unfilled, one flash-based display ad occupies the (almost-identically placed) lower slot, and just one traditional Blogad (JPG/GIF + a few lines of text) is running (pictured at right). That’s Markos Moulitsas’ latest book, as if you needed me to tell you that. I presume that Daily Kos today is earning significantly less than its election-season peak.

What about Blog P.I.? I haven’t sold a Blogads slot in months, but then again, I almost never do. My traffic may be better than Michael “Heckuva Job” Brownie’s, but I consistently rank near or at the bottom of the Political Insiders Advertising Network. What can I say? I write for a very niche audience when I have the time and inspiration. That’s no way to build an audience, and consequently no way to build an advertising base.

I wonder if this slowdown and possible leveling-off of blogging as a business could bring back some of the amateurism of the blogosphere — a tradition Blog P.I. upholds proudly, if occasionally, at least until someone is willing to pay me to do this (though I am grateful to NMS for hosting this site). Until that time, I’d like to see an ascendance of long-form blogging from experts. More analysis, less attitude. More Ed Feltens and fewer Duncan Blacks.

This is an especially good time for it, as back-and-forth discussions and quick-hit commentary is already moving to Twitter. Of course we’ll need someone to pick out the best stuff, like Memeorandum but with an eye for quality. Just as Silicon Alley Insider suggested yesterday, a curator’s approach to content could be where editing as a profession is going.

Of course, for that you need money too, and money will be scarce over the coming year, which is why I think we will see less blogging for dollars and more blogging for ideas. It will be painful for many, and already has if you consider Gawker’s contraction. But it might be a worthwhile thinning of the herd. And there will be plenty of time to blog for dollars when the Dow is back over 10,000.

Anyway, I’ll be delivering an all-new slide presentation (or “Powerpoint,” if you prefer) about Wikipedia, different from the SEO/reputation management talk I’ve been giving for nearly a year now in various incarnations (available for download on SlideShare). This one doesn’t really have a fixed name either, but it’s up on the board as “Govt + Wikipedia: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly + Tools for Transparency.” Once it’s ready I’ll be posting it to SlideShare as well, so watch for the link to appear in this space later today, and for this paragraph to be modified accordingly. For the sake of planning ahead, the link will go inside these brackets: [Click here.] If you’re in the District and interested in coming down to see it, here be the coordinates:

Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet
George Washington University
805 21st Street NW
Washington, DC 20052
Room 309

For those who have been around town since Tucker Carlson could last be seen on CNN, it’s the building where Jon Stewart berated him on “Crossfire”.

In addition, I’m going to have another big announcement here very soon. Watch for it Monday (and if it’s already Monday, click right on head. Here’s a hint: Some version of this is indeed coming back — just not to Blog P.I.

The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?

My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.

Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.

And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:

Grants to become a journalist, what’s next, grants to become a lawyer?

Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.

I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:

In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.

P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.

Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.

N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.

The liberal tilt of mainstream newspapers and magazines certainly has something to do with the professional networks within which editors find writers for their stories. But it also has something to do with conservative journalists rarely operating outside their zone of comfort. And especially in magazine articles, they tend to add commentary to existing stories rather than going out and finding new ones.

This is how it works: Liberals get reporting jobs. Conservatives get opinion columns.

Obviously, I’d like to see that change. Just as obvious is that this is a long-term project, and though other factors are involved, substantial and sustained investment is a must. So let me point out one place where this is happening: The Phillips Foundation is one such organization, and just this week they put out a call for applications to its 2009 Journalism Fellowship Program. From the release:

Print and online journalists with less than 10 years of professional experience are eligible. The Foundation created this program to provide fellowships for projects by journalists who share the Foundation’s mission to advance constitutional principles, a democratic society and a vibrant free enterprise system.

The Phillips Foundation awards $75,000 and $50,000 full-time fellowships and $25,000 part-time fellowships to undertake and complete a one-year project of the applicant’s choosing focusing on journalism supportive of American culture and a free society. In addition, there are separate fellowships on the environment, on the benefits of free-market competition, and on law enforcement.

I think anyone would call that substantial, and considering that the program is going into its 15th year, sustained it is, too. Applications are due by March 2, so if this is your kind of thing, you better get cracking.

Instead of other posts I may have promised in weeks past, I bring you another video featuring yours truly. In this one, VOA’s Brian Padden profiles myself and Faiz Shakir of Think Progress and the way we see things as political bloggers from opposite sides of the aisle:

Funny that it contrasts my >200 daily views with Think Progress’ <200K views; cut from my interview is the next part where I mention getting 20K views one day the previous week. Although I am not saying Padden should regret choosing me as an interview subject, comparing my when-I-have-time politech blog with the Center for American Progress' propaganda pipe organ is hardly an even match.

I'd also have to say I'm a little weary of repeating the now well-established line about the left's advantage online; it's not that it isn't still true, but that it isn't interesting. I’ve used Blog P.I. to follow some of the ways Republicans have closed the gap over the past couple years, and once I have the time to resume blogging in something like a consistent manner, I’ll work harder to make that point more constructively.

I’ll admit, I think this was my weakest appearance. Our discussion leaned heavily toward economic systems and policy, which admittedly has not been a focus of my reading ever since, well, about the time I moved to the District. Funny, that. However, the Bheads forum regulars yet again seem not to hate me and even sort of have my back, for which I am grateful.