This Thing: Lesson Number 3 from the PBS Ideas Lab “Top 5 Lessons from the Failure of The Zonie Report” news project report: “Identify your competition, then link to them whenever possible… This may seem like heresy, but don’t be afraid to link to other sites with overlapping work. It’s good practice and a good service to readers, and it can help with site visibility in the long run.”
That Thing: Rush Limbaugh: “You know, I don’t often go there unless I am directed there, but there’s a gossip website out there that’s just hilarious. I love these guys at Gawker. They make up stuff about me all the time. They’re snarky as they can be about me, but for some reason I love these guys…”
Yes. Yes that is an ad on Gawker for Old Navy clothing.
Look at this. Gawker appears to be slowly spinning its Deadspin title into more of a comprehensive male-oriented site Deadspin XY. It makes sense for Denton to capitalize on the audience, especially since the blog faces so much competition in the very segment it practically created.
It’s like Esquire’s more athletic brother. Wonder when we’ll see the first post on fashion.
With eulogies like John Cook’s, Wilson is certainly glad he’s passed. Was he a flawed politician? Indeed. Would we trade almost any of today’s politicians, on either side, for him? Yes.
Cook is supposed to be the nuanced one… right?
For a long time now, Gawker has been playing with various forms of ad content. It did it’s blood vampire blog thing and Gizmodo did a full advertorial “Gawker Luxury Gift Guide” thing over the holidays that was barely identifiable as advertising. And then it began inserting ads that looked like blog posts; though these inclusions always clearly labeled “advertisement”and the color coded to distinguish them from other editorial posts. Fleshbot was the only one that used the same colors, until now.
An ad for Nokia (below) finally breaks the color barrier, with its “advertisement” tag colored the same as all of the other surrounding editorial content. Tricky, Nick, tricky.
Contextual advertising FAILs are fun. Contextual posting editorial FAILs are even more fun.
Below, Gawker shows how it’s done:
Oh lookiethere, Gawker’s Richard Blakeley is thoughtlessly using the term “Indian Giver” in a headline describing Jay Leno’s thoughtless behavior. How… classy: “Jay Leno’s Shocking 2004 Indian Giving Promise to Conan O’Brien”
UPDATE: Looks like Richard maybe got an email from somebody or something as the headline has been amended (below). Of course, there is no correction note of this change:
Hey, I know it’s all very cool to hate on Balckwater for being a terrible private machine that profits off death and misery and war. But does that really make it hunky dory to make the tired, overused, blogger ha-ha (!!) exclamations about Blackwater personnel being killed? (Aparently not!)
