Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Content: Paid vs. Free

I went to a conference yesterday, called DPAC4 -- about digital publishing and advertising.  Part of me wants to write a post just listing the names of some of the sponsors and companies that the attendees work for, because reading through the list made me feel like I live in the future, where the alphabet has extra P's, V's, X's, and Z's.  It must be the same feeling middle-aged people had a few years ago when they were first learning about the Internet, and names like Google and Yahoo and Amazon and eBay.  And now those names all seem perfectly normal to us.  And I'm sure if I were in the digital advertising market, doing the kind of business many of these companies do, they would all be familiar to me.  Okay, I cannot resist the impulse to just put them all in a paragraph and throw it out there.  So, before I get to the actual thing I want to write about, here goes nothing:

(read them out loud, fast as you can, for full effect.)

Pontiflex. eXelate. Vindicia. PubMatic. LeadDog. rocketdognyc. Mindshare. Silverpop. Peer39. pulse360. Social2B. Zinio. VIVmag. Nabbr. Jumptap. Proclivity. AdMeld. Spongecell. EyeWonder. Rubicon Project. Synapse Group. DubShot Digital. Medialets. Mediaedge. ValueClick Media. mOcean. Theorem. KickApps. Kargo. Ovum. Colona. Alterian. VivaKi. Consilyum. Luxottica. Twistage. Converseon. Phreesia. ideeli. Drillteam. ClipSync. SearchLight. ePrize. Samepoint. Breakpoint. Meebo. buzzd.

With that out of the way... one of the panels had Steven Brill talking about his new venture, Journalism Online, which has signed up 1200 newspapers/magazines/other content-producing sites to start charging some readers for content that is currently free.  He emphasized that it's not about putting up pay walls -- which publications have already seen that, for the most part, don't really work -- but about taking some percentage of the most avid users and finding a way to charge them some amount to use the site.  And all the payment information would be processed through Journalism Online, so you set up one account and once you do that, it's easy to pay for things with a click.

He said there are a whole bunch of different payment schemes that the sites can come up with, but the example he used is perhaps there's a site that you go to most days and read an article.  Maybe you would get the first 20 articles per month for free, but then you'd be asked to pay, either per article or some monthly flat rate, and around article 15 you'd get some warning box pop up telling you that you're reaching the point where you're going to have to pay.  And the expectation, he said, would be that perhaps they could get 10% of the people to pay, and that this would be fair, because these aren't just casual users of the site, they're the people really relying on the site and deriving real benefit from it, the site matters to them... and you're still letting most of your readers use the site for free, and so unique visitor traffic won't really go down...

My initial reaction is that this sounds to me like either my gut understanding of how people use the Internet is wrong, or this is a terrible mistake the sites thinking about signing up for this plan.  Here's how I see it: the people using your site the most, the people relying on your site, who keep coming back-- these are not just readers, these are avid fans.  These are the people most rabid about your brand and your content.  These are probably the people linking to your articles, e-mailing your articles to friends, spreading your brand far and wide on the Internet, doing most of your marketing work for you, getting you new readers, blogging about you, talking about you, providing real value to you.  And so, of all of your readers, these are the people you want to charge?  Even if I take Brill's contention that some of these people will pay, because they value the content and want to keep reading-- and I'll get to that in a moment-- some of them absolutely won't.  Not even because they don't want to (although some won't), but because the kinds of people who are visiting one particular site 20 times a month are probably visiting fifty other sites 20 times a month-- especially if they're blogging or Tweeting or reading a lot of stuff online and sharing it with people-- and they can't afford to pay for all of them.  And so you lose some fraction of not just your readers, but your biggest fans, your biggest brand advocates, the people spreading the word deep into the Internet.  Traffic will fall, I would think, by more than just the percentage of users you ask to pay who decide not to.  And those readers will never come back.  Because not only will they find other stuff to read, they'll discover things that are just as interesting and that they're just as happy to spend time reading.  Because reading time is finite, and the Internet is almost infinite.  And told to go away, readers will go away, and some other site will take them and never give them back.

Not to make this personal, because it isn't.  I don't think my thoughts about paid versus free content are personal.  But, hey, I screwed up regarding the Anonymous Lawyer blog.  Not on purpose, and perhaps unavoidably.  But at some point post-publication, when I was working on the sitcom pilot script and trying to write other things, I stopped regularly updating and lost most of the audience.  I could post every day for a year at this point and I don't think I'd get the whole audience back.  You're either in someone's rotation, part of their routine, or you're not.  And once you're not, it's hard to get back.  That's fair.  There is an unlimited amount of stuff to read, and why check back somewhere that either isn't giving you something new, or wants to charge you for something you don't want to pay for.  RSS readers change that game a little bit, but most people don't use one, and they don't really change the game for newspapers and the kinds of sites Journalism Online is dealing with, as opposed to blogs.

Anyway, back to what I was saying.  So you've got Newspaper X, that I love to read, and upon reading article #15 of the month (which might very well happen on the 4th day of the month, just for purposes of my example), a warning box pops up telling me I've got 5 more articles until I'm going to have to pay.  What do I do?  I start being very careful about what I read on this site.  I start reading less, I start to see if I can make it through the month only reading 5 more articles.  I start looking for alternatives.  Maybe I find them.  Maybe I don't.  Maybe one month I pay.  Maybe the next month I don't.  But what am I doing?  I'm rationing my content.  I'm weaning myself off of it.  I'm making myself less dependent on your website, so I don't have to pay.  I'm not linking to your articles as much, because I'm not reading them as much.  I'm becoming less of a fan.

But maybe not.  Maybe I love your site.  So I pay.  Gladly.  And I keep linking to it.  And I keep sending readers over there.  But, oh no, I've sent readers over there a few times, and maybe they love the site too.  But they're getting that warning that they're going to have to pay soon.  So they start to be careful.  They stop following my links.  They stop linking on their own sites.  They get worried.  I get worried-- I don't want to send my readers somewhere they can't read without paying.  It doesn't make any sense to.  I read the message boards at Baseball Think Factory.  The site links to baseball articles and has comment threads beneath.  They don't (often) link to pay sites.  They used to link to ESPN when ESPN had something interesting.  Now no one who's doing the linking bothers to read ESPN anymore, so even when there's a free article, there's no link.  ESPN has left the conversation, because it started charging.  Are they making lots of money charging?  Maybe they are.  They shouldn't be-- there's better stuff out there, for free.

Brill started out the session making what sounds, on its face, like a completely legitimate argument.  Don't journalists deserve to get paid?  If you want coverage of the war in Afghanistan, someone has to pay for it.  It costs money.  Throughout history, readers have paid for content.  They will still pay for content.  The content has value.  People should pay. 

That's all fine, and I agree that people SHOULD get paid for content.  That's very different from saying that anyone is going to pay.  I think it's good that we have reporters covering the war.  I, personally, won't pay any money for it.  It doesn't matter enough to me.  And I especially won't pay if I don't absolutely have to and there aren't alternatives.

Here's the problem.  Yes, people historically paid for newspapers.  And, no, they didn't complain about it (too much).  Brill argued that the problem is that we've trained people that content should be free, and now we have to untrain them.  But that's not really the issue.  The issue is that newspapers used to have a monopoly on content, you had one or two or three or four newspapers in town, and if you wanted any content at all, you had to pay someone for it.  So you paid.  But the Internet has taken away that monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly.  If you live in Milwaukee, your choice isn't the Journal-Sentinel or nothing.  Your choice is the Journal-Sentinel, or the New York Times online, or the London Times, or the Jerusalem Post, or ESPN, or some guy's blog.  If the New York Times does everything better than the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (and maybe they don't-- this is just an example), then the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is screwed not because people think content should be free but because even if people didn't think content should be free, now that they have a choice about their content, they don't want yours.

Brill did acknowledge that.  He said that papers like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel are slowly realizing that they shouldn't have a Washington branch, because the Washington Post is doing Washington better than they are.  That they don't need to cover the local sports teams, because someone else can do it better.  That they don't need a theater critic, an movie critic, whatever-- because someone else is doing it better and no one's going to pay for it.  And what's left is local news, and they should do local news better than anyone else, because they can, and because maybe someone will pay for it.

But here are the two (and there are probably more than two) problems there:

1. Once you've fired everyone except for the people doing local news, you're not really left with enough to keep putting out your core product -- that is, your actual physical newspaper.  Oops.  You're out of business.  Who's buying a physical newspaper filled with wire stories plus a local news section?  Isn't that the model for stuff like AM New York, that they give away FREE for subway riders?  Wire stories plus a bit of original content where you have real value to add?  FREE.  And people still don't read it.  You've just destroyed your core business, and...

2. And so what are you then?  You're an online local news provider?  Didn't the Rocky Mountain News try that after they stopped printing, and didn't 600 people sign up and it failed?  Is anyone paying for local news?  Is local news as a category of content something anyone will pay for, even if you're the best at it?  Does coverage of town meetings provide value to anyone? 

And so is the plan that only three or four newspapers will end up existing in the whole country, and we'll go back to the monopoly/oligopoly system from before the Internet, where everyone charges?

Maybe in the Journalism Online world, we do-- maybe ultimately the world gets sorted into verticals, and you pay the sports site you like for your sports news, and the politics site you like for your politics news, and we do away with actual newspapers altogether and if you want a printed edition of your combined vertical news providers, you can order that up and it spits out of your printer every morning.  Maybe.  And maybe what the Internet ends up doing to journalism is what happened in local markets beforehand-- the best content wins, and instead of having 300 sports sections to choose from, you have 5, and they're all pretty good, and you pay for one of them.  And, oh, most journalists lose their jobs and only three reporters go to presidential news conferences?  Maybe, if that's all the market can bear.

Except here's the other problem.  The problem isn't, as Brill was saying, that we've trained people to expect to read for free.  We've also, just incidentally-- and I've never heard anyone talk about this, so if someone else has talked about this, point me over there so I can check it out-- we've also trained people to WRITE FOR FREE (or for ad revenue... which is the baseline comparison really -- Brill is merely saying newspapers can't survive on ad revenue alone, but no one's arguing the ad model can't pay some percentage of the cost of existing), and the Internet has given them an audience. 

So, yes, journalists SHOULD get paid, and deserve to get paid... but the Internet has also let lots of people discover the reward of writing and finding an audience, and created a world where tons and tons of people happily create content and put it up for the world to see, without expecting to be paid for it.  Sure, some would like to get paid-- and others are able to use the audience and the platform to find other ways to get paid, whether as book authors or consultants or speakers or people who sell something but use their writing to promote it or through regular jobs that they get thanks to their established expertise.... And a lot of them write for free really well.  [And not even just for free-- a lot of them make some actual money from the ads on their sites, and even if that's not enough to keep a newspaper going, it's enough to keep someone on his own motivated to keep writing.]  Many of the things I read online are written by people who are not working for organizations that pay them to write.  And if suddenly all the newspapers decided to charge, I would probably be able to find decent substitutes for most of them, among people writing for other reasons and not asking for money.  And, guess what-- if suddenly all the newspapers charge, that's probably really great for someone like Political Blogger X, who makes an okay amount of money from the ads on his page and doesn't want to charge his readers.  His overhead is so much lower than a physical newspaper-- no building, no support staff, no printing costs, no expense accounts-- that maybe the advertising model actually works.  And is *real* journalism actually any better than some (not all!) of what is out there under the ad-supported model?  The real journalists who started out as bloggers -- or the bloggers who started out as real journalists -- would probably say it's not.

And, almost my final point: we have finite time to consume content of any sort.  The Internet and digital technologies have vastly increased the amount of potential content out there.  Fifteen years ago, if we didn't get the newspaper, what else could we do with our content-consuming time?  We could watch TV (but only if something we wanted to watch was on), we could listen to music (but we'd have to buy it), we could read books (but we'd have to buy them), we could watch a movie (but we'd have to buy or rent it), we could play a video game (but we'd have to buy it).

Now, we can watch TV (and, because of DVR, at any given time we have a lot more appealing choices of what we could watch), we can listen to music (which we may or may not have to buy -- see, e.g., Pandora, or free.napster.com), we can read books (and now we can buy one instantly and read it right away, if we want), we can watch a movie (and maybe, thanks to Netflix, there is no marginal cost of doing so), we can play a video game... OR we can screw around on Facebook, or any of the millions of other websites that aren't looking to charge money and yet might actually be valuable to us.  So even if journalism isn't free, we have more options to change our mix of consumption to include more free things than we might have had fifteen years ago.  We have more similar alternatives.

Which is why I think it's going to be really difficult to get people to pay for journalism online.

One final point though-- if everything good does end up wanting to charge, and so reluctantly we end up paying, I don't know that Journalism Online has the right model down anyway.  Because if everything moves vertical, and so we have one site we pay for our sports news, one for our food news, one for our health news, one for our political news... maybe there are 10 or 12 or 18 different categories of news we might pay for, and yet together it's really just going to make up what used to be combined in a print newspaper.  So maybe we're willing to pay a dollar a day for that bucket of content, max.  Newsday just announced they're charging $5/week for their online content.  That's way too much.  A site providing one vertical someone wants to read might be able to charge $1/month, perhaps?  $2/month if they're really adding value?  But is the New York Times going to charge people $2/month under Journalism Online?  I have no idea, but I'm guessing it's going to be higher than that. 

What if instead of every site charging individually, if Journalism Online was able to get everyone to sign up for its program, you just buy the bundle-- a dollar a day, and you have the universal pass to get all of your journalism.  Like your cable box, like your Netflix.  And if you don't pay, you don't pay, and you get nothing.  You get Facebook and blogs.  And the BBC.  And NPR.  I guess.  Then they win because they're a monopoly... just like newspapers used to win, because they were a monopoly.  So what I'm saying-- monopoly is the only way this will succeed.  I think.  Yes, that is what I am saying.

Thoughts?

Elizabeth Warren / Michael Moore Interview

From the Huffington Post... seven minutes of terrific interview footage (broken up into three parts) of Elizabeth Warren talking to Michael Moore about TARP and credit cards and consumer protection.

Worth watching.

The money quote: "I teach contract law at Harvard Law School, and I can't understand my own credit card."

(Also, found as I was trying to figure out if other people were blogging about this interview, a nice article in Mother Jones about Prof. Warren, and a piece where Matt Taibbi wants her to run for President.  We could do a lot worse.)

White Collar

USA knows what it's doing.

They've found a formula, and it totally works.

Just watched the White Collar pilot, and it's terrific.

One flaw: the lead character's friend-- he did just a little too much of the work.  If he's going to be doing some of the work, then what do they need the prisoner guy for?  He's one character too many.

Second flaw: couldn't care less about the girlfriend he's chasing, I don't think it adds anything at all to the show.

(But the two leads are great.  Nice vibe.  The dynamic totally works.)

I reserve the right to take back this opinion after episode 2.

Fascinating / Sad article from ABA Journal

About Mark Levy, an appellate lawyer who committed suicide earlier this year.  Long piece, but very well done and worth reading.  Makes growing an appellate practice sound very difficult.

There's a book to be written -- and maybe it already has been -- about how most jobs are really sales jobs, even the ones that don't seem like they ought to be.  And if anything I feel like the new economy only intensifies that.  Seems like we're very close to a point where the expectation is that everyone-- certainly writers, but, really, everyone-- has a web presence, has a platform, needs to be growing a following, always prospecting for business, taking control of their career.  It seems like people can rely-- across so many industries-- less and less on organizations keeping them afloat, on finding a place they can have a career for 40 years without having to start fresh somewhere else or on their own.

And while you can absolutely insist that it's not just more lucrative but also more stable and more satisfying to cultivate your own business, to have an audience of customers who will follow you in and out of organizations, to be in control of your professional life and be able to shape it however you want-- I think what doesn't get acknowledged as much is that it's hard and sometimes tiring.  Maybe you don't want to be updating three blogs, two Twitter feeds, and a Facebook page seven times a day, forever.  Maybe you don't want to have to come up with value you can add to the world every day.  Maybe you don't want to have to think about networking and new leads and selling yourself.

But more and more, I think the world is moving to a place where to be successful, we have to. 

And certainly in a business like law, fundamentally you're selling yourself to clients, and most people won't be protected by a firm forever, and won't be guaranteed a job as long as they work hard and complete their tasks.  (And this isn't new, I suppose.)  And as a writer, there are fewer and fewer expectations that someone can land at a newspaper or magazine and stay there for a career.  Or in publishing.  Or in finance.  Or anywhere.  I mean, I can think of a few exceptions-- if you're a schoolteacher, once you're in the system you're probably reasonably safe.  Police officers and firefighters probably don't need blogs to ensure career security.  I'm having trouble making that list a lot longer.

Not sure how all of this came out of my reading about a lawyer who committed suicide, but there it is.  Check out the piece.

SuperFreakonomics

There seems to be some controversy about a chapter on global warming in SuperFreakonomics, the sequel to Freakonomics coming out this week.  The publisher sent me a free copy of the book a couple of weeks ago, hoping I'd blog about it.

I read the book.  Most of it.  Skimmed a few of the chapters (including the global warming one, so I have absolutely nothing intelligent to say about the controversy over whether their proposed approach makes sense-- not that I would have anything intelligent to say on this subject even if I'd read the chapter).

I expect the book will sell well.  The original sold four million copies.  So even if this one only sells a small fraction, it'll still have done fine.  But I think the success of the original-- which spawned so many similar kinds of books, by economists and social scientists, looking at the world through an economic lens-- has made this sequel feel kind of irrelevant and derivative.

The problem may be that I've read too many of the books Freakonomics paved the way for.  Books by Tim Harford and Dan Ariely and Barry Schwartz and a dozen others whose names are not jumping as quickly off the tip of my tongue.  And SuperFreakonomics doesn't reinvent the genre here.  It's just another Freakonomics sequel, distinguishable from the others only because it's written by the same guys who wrote Freakonomics, and not because it does anything better or differently.

I've read a half-dozen other discussions of the Kitty Genovese case, where 38 people saw a woman get murdered and no one intervened.  I don't know if the discussion here really added anything.  There's a 40-page chapter that leads off the book, about the economics of prostitution.  It didn't keep my interest.  The authors repeat Malcolm Gladwell's findings about more elite athletes being born near the age cutoff for school, so that they're older than their teammates growing up.  It's not that there are no new insights in the book-- it's that they're buried among stories and facts that I've seen before, that I've read before.

For someone who's read Freakonomics and that's all-- who didn't delve deeper into the card catalog over the past four years, since Freakonomics was published-- then I think saying this is more of the same is a great thing.  This is a book anyone who read and enjoyed the original should also enjoy.  But it's not breaking new ground, or at least I missed it if it is. 

There are worse things to say about a sequel than the original was too big a success, it spawned dozens of copycats, and so the terrain just doesn't feel new anymore.  Malcolm Gladwell's books are sort of in that same boat, and they still sell amazingly well, and I read them, and they make me think, and I'm glad they exist.  Really, the worst thing I can say about the book is that I feel like it missed the opportunity to create a new category the way that the original did.  The authors have this incredible platform, this huge reader base-- they had the chance to do something different and take the field in a new direction that would once again spawn a legion of imitators.  They didn't.  But would it have even been possible to?  Repeating what the first book did-- becoming a phenomenon, and in effect starting a new book genre-- would have been almost impossible.  Can I blame them for sticking to a formula they'd already found success with?  Not really.  If Anonymous Lawyer had sold a crazy number of copies, and someone wanted to pay me for a sequel, I'd be happy to do it instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Why Aren't Amusement Parks Thriving In The New Economy?

The easy answers to that question: the recession, tourism down generally, cost is too expensive.  But putting all of that aside, it crossed my mind this morning (I don't know why) that I don't know why theme parks (seemingly) haven't been able to capitalize on the fact that they're one of the few entertainment-related destinations that technology shouldn't be lowering the marginal appeal of.  Let me throw these thoughts out there--

1. High-definition television, along with improved camera angles, instant replay, etc have made watching sports on TV really really good.  The difference between watching sports on TV now and watching sports on TV 15 years ago-- as demonstrated by watching five minutes of a not-that-old game on cable, and being really baffled by how bad the color and detail is, even though it seemed to look fine at the time-- is noticeable.  I'd go so far as to say it's a no-brainer that you see a game better on TV than live.  And live sporting events have gotten so expensive that sort of hard to justify going, at least from the perspective of wanting to watch the game.  As an activity once a year, as a destination involving food and crowds and nice weather, it's fine-- but given that every game is televised (which wasn't the case fifteen or twenty years ago), many out-of-market games are now televised as well, and the television broadcast is so good, I would argue there's less of a pull to go to live sporting events now than there used to be.

2. Bootleg live concerts available online, with pretty decent sound.  So one of the pulls of live music (not the only one, of course)-- hearing the songs live, hearing how they sound outside of a studio-- is not so important anymore.  There are more concert DVDs than ever before, recorded music quality is very high, live music quality is not always so good (loudspeaker systems in arenas, etc), concerts are crazy expensive and often overcrowded and way too loud... I would argue, again, there's less of a pull to go to live concerts than there used to be.

3. Movie downloads available online, Netflix, OnDemand, etc.  HD-DVD and BlueRay.  Less reason to go to the movies.

4. Discovery Channel and other stations showing animals in the wild-- this is a less compelling point than (1) through (3), but perhaps this makes zoos less interesting.  I don't believe this, but I'm listing it anyway.

The one thing we haven't found a substitute for-- roller coasters.  Watching a roller coaster on TV is nothing like being on one in person, at least not in the same way as watching a game on TV or listening to a bootleg concert recording can be.

So why shouldn't theme parks be doing amazingly well, in comparison with sporting events and concerts and movie theaters?

I don't really know.

Not to mention -- I don't have real data, but I'm pretty sure my points are all *completely wrong* -- that sports attendance, concert attendance, and movie attendance have all gone way up over the past decade, that more and more people are doing these things and spending more money doing them.  And that amusement parks just haven't kept pace. 

Intuitively, this seems wrong to me.  And yet there it is. An incorrect theory I felt compelled to write about!

Excuse, and a book review

I haven't blogged in way too long because I've been fighting a cold that's been lingering for way too long... but is hopefully on its way out.  I've been meaning to write a post recommending a book I read a couple of weeks ago.

Say Everything, by Scott Rosenberg, is a really neat history of blogging, how blogs came to be, some blog pioneers, and the value blogs add to the universe.  Of course, it's probably fair to discount my opinion just a bit because I'm sort of the target audience-- but, hey, you're at least reading a blog, if not writing one, so it's not like you're not part of the target audience too.  At first skim, I was a little bummed that Anonymous Lawyer wasn't pioneering enough to merit a mention-- not that many blogs-turned-books before that point, not that many anonymous blogs growing audiences trying to figure out the authorship-- but after reading the book I was less bummed.  I was farther along on the curve than I realized.  Back in 2002 when I started blogging about law school, blogs felt pretty new-- I wasn't reading any, and no one I knew was writing one.  The legal blog community was small enough to know who everyone was, and obsessively check your reader numbers against them.  Still, I'd only heard the word blog because I saw it in a USA Today article-- blogging was already an established thing.  Just because it hadn't grown to an unmanageable size within the law student population didn't mean anything besides the law student population was behind the curve.  And by '04 when I was writing Anonymous Lawyer, anonymous blogs were old hat.  I just didn't know about them yet.  The blogs I think of as early-stage blogs-- blogs where the authors were ahead enough on the curve that they've gotten book deals (The Amateur Gourmet, for example), or mainstream media jobs (Aaron Gleeman's Baseball Blog, for example), started around when I did-- but we were not early adopters, at least not when looking at the bigger picture of blogging.  All that said, I think if there's one shortcoming in Rosenberg's book, it's that he perhaps overstates the impact of blogs that came and went before anyone was really paying attention-- and misses the later part of the story-- that it's some of these later blogs, that got in there before the blogosphere exploded, but late enough that there were enough readers to care, that have made a genuine impact on culture and society, produced movies and books and television shows (Stuff White People Like, for a recent example on the book side), and blurred the line between "mainstream media," whatever that is anymore, and the blogosphere.  I'd love to see a Volume 2 -- about the rise of blogs on the New York Times site, for instance, and how the corporate takeover of much of the most highly-read blogosphere (the percent of high-traffic blogs owned by corporate entities as opposed to human beings has got to be so much higher now than just 3 or 4 years ago) has changed what initially mattered about blogging, has changed a list of the most popular blogs from a set of mostly personal diaries to pages filled with impersonal linking and news-reporting, and has moved the blogosphere closer and closer to what we've traditionally thought of as mainstream journalism.

In any case, that's not really a criticism of Rosenberg's book-- he doesn't claim to take on what I'm suggesting he could have-- just a thought about a follow-up.  The book was really compelling.  I hadn't heard of all the sites he talked about, and learned a lot more about the ones I have.  Much better sense of how blogs came to be, and the early experiments with the form.  Much better sense of the history.  All done in a highly readable fashion.  Recommended.

Tigers-Twins

Wow, that was quite a game.