Dave Winer, a trailblazer in blogging software and all around visionary when it comes to the social web, is increasingly pessimistic about the survival of small and niche blogs in the face of Twitter’s “140-character grunts and snorts.” By extension, Winer sees diminishing coverage of important information niches. He sees a possible solution, networking, but thinks its unlikely: “If we could do more networking on a more regular and systematic basis, that would create incentives for more people to do it [blog], and would build flow independent of Twitter. But blogs work like everything else. Installed leaders don’t generally help upstarts.”

Dave was amazingly prescient in foretelling the exponential wave of people-powered publishing that started with blogging and rolled on through Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram et al. This post from early 1995, titled “Billions of websites,” included this passage: “Every writer can participate in the web. Someday, very soon, I believe, every writer will. That’s the next big opportunity in the online world.”

As an avid Instagrammer, I’ve been studying various photo sharing apps closely. I think it’s hilarious that Wedpics, a wedding photo sharing app based in Raleigh, NC, features its CEO prominently in the rocking wedding in the company’s promo video.

If you do business with us, either as a blogger or as an advertiser, you’re definitely invited to our 10th anniversary party next Tuesday here in Durham at the Pinhook. Be sure to RSVP so we know how many pigs to roast.

With the economy and election looming, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s tax plan and personal taxes are under discussion.

Our most recent survey of blog readers shows that readers of liberal blogs are nearly three times more likely than conservative readers to believe that wealthier individuals should be taxed at a higher percentage rate than others.

The survey also showed that while liberal readers are also three times more likely to believe that Mitt Romney should definitely release his personal taxes to the public, fully  28% of readers of conservative blog readers think Romney should release his taxes, versus the Internet average of 54%.

Posts about our prior survey results are here, here, here, here, and here.

The numbers come from surveys conducted between March and June on well known political blogs including ThinkProgress, Political Wire, Wonkette, Drudge Retort, Right Wing News, Althouse, Outside the Beltway, News Hounds, Pandagon, Linkiest, Wizbang, Viral Footage, Informed Comment, The Agonist, Jack and Jill Politics, Yid With Lid, Burnt Orange Report, Chicago Boyz, NoisyRoom, The Steel Deal, MyDD and damnum absque injuria.

Many of these blogs are members of Liberal Blog Advertising Network (LBAN) and the Conservative Blog Advertising Network (CBAN).

If you’re a blogger and would like to see how your readers compare to the readers in this study, send us a note to data@blogads.com.

Limited Run, a company that helps artists and musicians sell products online, says that 80% of the clicks they bought through Facebook ads came from robots.

Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs.

When Limited Run tried to get more information from Facebook… silence. “So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes.”

In the comments, the CEO of Yousites says the same thing happened to his company.

And here’s a deep dive into Facebook “likes” from bots, which concludes that “someone or a group of someones is utilizing bot networks and compromised accounts to sell actions in Facebook, and the voluminous Liking is a byproduct of attempting to randomize any patterns that would identify their core network or their customers.”

And while we’re on the topic of clickbots, don’t forget last year’s attack of the bimbots!

A survey of 2,011 liberal and conservative blog readers taken in the 24 hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Obamacare found that liberal blog reader support for the ruling was strong, while conservative blog readers were unhappy about the ruling. What’s surprising is that the average Internet reader (13,311 responses) was even MORE displeased by the ruling.

This data is in sharp contrast to polling done in the days before the ruling yesterday, in which a plurality of Americans hoped the Supreme Court would not overrule healthcare law. Is our data wonky or is there a serious undercurrent of dissent here?

The poll, taken after the SCOTUS decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, shows that liberal blog readers are over 2.5x more likely than conservative readers to support this ruling.

To round out today’s post, we’re including some background data gathered in recent weeks on people’s health and health care coverage.

Conservatives are 1.5x more likely than liberals to feel older than their current age.

Yet, liberal and conservative blog readers are equally likely to pay for health insurance through an employer or other organization, and 14% less likely than the internet average.

Posts about our prior survey results are here, here and here and here.

The Supreme Court results come from surveys conducted by Blogads in conjunction with Civic Science on 6/28 and 6/28; the general health questions were answered between March and June on political blogs including Political Wire, Wonkette, Drudge Retort, Right Wing News, Althouse, Outside the Beltway, News Hounds, Pandagon, Linkiest, Wizbang, Viral Footage, Informed Comment, The Agonist, Jack and Jill Politics, Yid With Lid, Burnt Orange Report, Chicago Boyz, NoisyRoom, The Steel Deal, MyDD and damnum absque injuria.

Download full results

While our recent surveys have focused on ways in which conservative and liberal blog readers disagree, this week’s results show they do actually agree on some things.

Readers of liberal and conservative blogs agree that the personal computer will take a backseat to mobile devices over the next decade. They also feel strongly that employers and schools should not have access to their private social networking information.

BUT…

Fans of political debate will be relieved to know that America’s political polarity has NOT yet subsided.

Conservative blog readers are more than four times more likely to be very concerned with national security threats and more than three times more concerned about the US federal deficit.

Ever wonder why do partisans’ views on things like mobile phones and school privacy match so neatly, while opinions on issues like US security differ so strongly?  Most likely this is because the parties have not (yet!) staked out positions on those issues.

As Ezra Klein notes in the June 25 New Yorker,

Each of us can have firsthand knowledge of just a small number of topics—our jobs, our studies, our personal experiences. But as citizens—and as elected officials—we are routinely asked to make judgments on issues as diverse and as complex as the Iranian nuclear program, the environmental impact of an international oil pipeline, and the likely outcomes of branding China a “currency manipulator.”

According to the political-science literature, one of the key roles that political parties play is helping us navigate these decisions. In theory, we join parties because they share our values and our goals—values and goals that may have been passed on to us by the most important groups in our lives, such as our families and our communities—and so we trust that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues.

Posts about our prior survey results are here, here and here.

The numbers come from surveys conducted between March and June on well known political blogs including ThinkProgress, Political Wire, Wonkette, Drudge Retort, Right Wing News, Althouse, Outside the Beltway, News Hounds, Pandagon, Linkiest, Wizbang, Viral Footage, Informed Comment, The Agonist, Jack and Jill Politics, Yid With Lid, Burnt Orange Report, Chicago Boyz, NoisyRoom, The Steel Deal, MyDD and damnum absque injuria.

Many of these blogs are members of Liberal Blog Advertising Network (LBAN) and the Conservative Blog Advertising Network (CBAN).

If you’re a blogger and would like to see how your readers compare to the readers in this study, send us a note to data@blogads.com.

Looks like the rumors of a new pizzeria in the center of Durham are true. This sign went up last week at 101 East Chapel Hill Street for Pizzaria Toro.

The place will be operated by Gray Brooks, who got started cooking at Crooks Corners while a student at UNC and more recently was Executive Chef of Seattle’s Serious Pie.

You can follow them on Twitter here.

Ten years ago today, I posted an essay titled “Blogonomics: making a living from blogging.” Peering into the future of media, I argued that traditional publishers would soon be defeated by hordes of ad-supported bloggers.

At the time, both claims — that a) traditional publishing was doomed by people-published content and b) that blogging would be lucrative — seemed ludicrous. Shares in The New York Times were just a couple of months shy of their all-time high, $52. Martin Nisenholtz, then managing NYTimes.com, spoke for most media insiders when he dismissed the “weblog phenomenon” as nothing “fundamentally new in the news media.” (more…)

John Cleese argues that taking your time and tolerating the anxiety of not having a solution are crucial to exceptional creativity.

I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues, who seemed to be more talented than I was, never produced scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it. Even though I think he knew the solution was not very original. (more…)