billso.com

The Honolulu Advertiser, like other Gannett newspapers, has spent a considerable amount of time and effort to set up a hyperlocal blog network at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com. The Advertiser’s web site is littered with small graphical ads that promote individual blogs with the same cookie-cutter approach: the blog’s name, along with the author’s name and picture, with an uninspired tagline such as “A blog by…” or “Blog with…”

Advertiser Editor Mark Platte wrote a progress report in this Honolulu Advertiser op-ed article called Blogs a hit, and we’d love more. One section of this article is interesting:

I’m always on the lookout for new blogs, specifically in areas that aren’t already covered, and I am always asking staffers and those outside the staff if they are interested in blogging. Some have started blogs and decided the time commitment is more than they bargained for, so they drop out. But blogging is about experimenting, and if a blog doesn’t work, there’s no problem replacing it with another authored by someone with a fresh perspective.

This Poinography article from the same day, 15 June 2008, called Editor wants more hits and ad revenue, er, bloggers examined the same section with a cynical view.It’s true that print and broacast advertising revenues have been on the decline for years, as advertisers make more online media buys. The title of this TechCrunch article is a good starting point: Top 100 Advertisers Shifted $1 Billion To the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And Newspapers.

As Advertising Age notes, the economy has something to do with this trend: Top 100’s Ad-Spend Growth Grinds to Halt.

The Advertiser has been involved in a long-running labor dispute with its writing staff. The blog network is one way to recruit new, non-union writers who could provide online content during a strike or walkout.

Many of the Advertiser’s bloggers are already union journalists for the newspaper, but the majority of the neighborhood bloggers are new recruits to the Advertiser.

Authority and timeliness

A newspaper’s blogs should be as authoritative and reliable as the print and online editions. I enjoy reading the New York Times’ blogs, especially Bits and The Lede. The blogs provide Some of the Times’ blog articles are a draft or preview of a longer article that appears a few hours later in the print and online editions of the newspaper itself.

A few of the Advertiser’s 36 bloggers need assistance in learning how to blog. Kim Fassler, in an article called Friday Tidbits in her Quarterlife Cafe blog, mentioned that she has problems finding topics for her blog posts:

I suppose Quarterlife Cafe would probably fall into the category of “meaningless fluff” designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into reading the newspaper. But, hey, if I can get just one more apathetic twenty-something to read just one more article and learn just one more important aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I’ll write all the meaningless fluff I can muster.

That post had five subheadings in it, with Kim’s comments on Iran, teenage pregnancy, and cloning. I would have split that single post into 4 articles posted throughout the day.

Some of the comments on Kim’s story were excellent. One person noted that the Advertiser’s blog software seems slow, for example. Their pages do resolve at a lazy pace, but that’s some a good server-side cache could fix.

Tomorrow I’ll post an announcement about a new direction for my blog.

US drivers can’t understand fuel efficiency - at least when it is measured in miles per gallon (MPG). When I was growing up in the early 1970s, MPG became a national buzzword as gasoline prices soared.

But when fuel economy figures are presented in gallons per mile (GPM), more drivers were able to compare fuel efficiency between vehicles, partly because the GPM figure can be directly multiplied by the pump price. An owner can calculate the total gallons she will use in a week, month or year, along with the cost.

It’s a handy metric to remember, especially as some drivers wrap their cars with advertising decals to subsidize their commute.

If you’ve filled up your tank, and you know how many miles you’ve driven since the last time you added fuel, just divide the gallons purchased by miles driven to obtain GPM.

To make the GPM figure more understandable, researchers Richard Larrick and Jack Soll presented the figures as gallons per 100 miles (GPCM).

To calculate GPCM, multiply the GPM figure by 100, or divide 10000 by MPG.

The chart below compares MPG (left axis and the blue line) against GPCM (bottom axis and the red line). To use the chart, just find the figure you want to compare, and trace a vertical line up or down to find the conversion:

• A car that gets 10 MPG uses 10 gallons to drive 100 miles.
• A more efficient car that gets 50 MPG only needs 2 gallons to drive 100 miles.

As I was writing this article, I was pleased to discover that Rich Larrick and I both graduated from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1986.

See Reuters, the New York Times, Consumerist, the MPG Illusion site at the Fuqua School of Business, and the original article in Science.

Updated 23 June 2008 738 HST: Rick sent me these comments about my blog post:

“GPM is useful when deciding about buying a new car, deciding between cars, etc.  It guarantees that people see that improving from 10 to 11 MPG, 16 to 20 MPG, and 33 to 50 MPG all save the same amount of gas over  some distance — 1 gallon over a 100 miles or 100 gallons over 10,000 miles.  Without GPM, people expect larger linear improvements in MPG to yield more savings (that’s the illusion).”

There’s a site called Ask500people.com that lets users post and answer questions. Last night I asked:

1. How much free space do you have on your main hard drive?
2. How many text messages did you send today?

Several blind people live near our home, and sometimes they cross in front of our driveway. I’m always patient, as it’s obvious to me that they are listening for engine noise.

Before I saw this article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, I hadn’t realized that blind people cannot hear gasoline-electric hybrid cars at crosswalks. I’m ashamed to say I had never thought of it, even though I owned a Honda Insight for two years.

Most hybrid automobiles shut down their gasoline engine at a full stop, and some models, like the Toyota Prius, can use their silent electric engine at low speeds. There’s no gas engine noise to warn blind pedestrians of an approaching vehicle.

The American Council of the Blind has proposed a research study, to be conducted by the US Department of Transportation. The research would determine if an indicator noise could be added to hybrid cars to help the blind hear the vehicle. Crosswalk signals now include an audible signal, to help local governments comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). A Federal solution is vastly preferable to local and state regulation. In the past, the Federal government has mandated other safety features for automobiles, including air bags, brake lights and seat belts. Audible signals for the blind could be combined with for backover avoidance technology that is designed to warn drivers of children and objects behind their reversing vehicle.

Perhaps Neil Young can write the warning song, and test it on his electric 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible.

Image courtesy of Aaron Gustafson through a Creative Commons license.

Updated 6 June 2008, 10:26 HST: New Scientist posted an article about this issue yesterday, along with this YouTube video.

IDG, the publisher of InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, MacWorld and other technology magazines has been shifting away from paper to online editions. This New York Times article mentions that the transition has generated more revenue than the company expected:

Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.

This is remarkable given that some IDG titles like CIO magazine are distributed free of free of charge. Advertisers subsidize the content for both the web-based and print editions. While some IDG titles like InfoWorld are online only, CIO is still available in a twice-monthly print edition, largely because advertisers believe the target audience is less likely to read the online version. CIO also features longer articles than InfoWorld these days.

IDG has also added multiple RSS feeds to its web sites, to capture readers who prefer to use feed aggregators.

Many of these IDG magazines have been cited in previous billso.com articles, such as this post from 7 May 2008. I also list some of these titles on my references page, which contains many reliable and authoritative sources for researchers, managers and my students.