Overnight ratings are in for Vegas, and they are off 7% from last year, a very similar number to the amount that the California race was off 2 weeks ago.

Why?  Two of the dullest races, back to back with a week off in between.  It is hard to maintain interest when you have a week off so early in the season, and the two races themselves were total snoozefest that not even the most dedicated fan could find much fun in.  You could have watched the first 10 laps and the last 10 laps of Vegas and gotten about 99% of the excitement and joy that came in about 3.5 hours of broadcasting.

The week off thing really confuses me as well.  Drivers bitch and moan and complain about no time off after July… but there we are, 3rd week of the season, already taking a break.  Most of the off weekends are piled up in the first half of the season, and that really hurts.  Changing the schedule to have two western races with a week off in between really takes away from the whole deal as well.  On top of which, the weather in Vegas was really quite poor this year, and it often is questionable in the winter / early spring period.

I know there are only a few tracks on the circuit that could handle a race after Daytona, but that is more an issue of economics than anything.  Rockingham use to be the traditional “after daytona” race.  It is a smaller and more entertaining track, but had suffered occassional issues because of bad weather.  I looked at the 2000 and 2001 schedules, and it was bang bang bang sex races in a row to start the season, on a variety of tracks (Daytona, The Rock, Vegas, and Atlanta… then Darlington and Bristol).   Now the first four races are all on tracks 1.5 mile or greater, and it isn’t until race #5 that we get something other than aero and drafting.

At the end od the day, I don’t know the answer, I don’t have a clear idea how to fix it.  With so many cookie cutter tracks on the schedule, it is pretty much impossible to make it as interesting as it once was.  Trading out race dates at places like Winston-Salem, North Wilkesboro, Rockingham, and such, and replacing them with 1.5mile D shaped ovals sprinkled all over the US has taken away much of the character and nature of the series, and replaced it with a sort of generic “race of the week” look that to me just looks like the same track with a different name painted on the wall and a different background on the wide shots.  Otherwise, it is the same old same old, playing into the hands of the teams with the most money for development of downforce and plate race cars, and less reward for the good drivers that tend to flourish on the slightly tighter or more skill oriented tracks.

A 7% haircut on viewership isn’t going to be enough to make things change, but I think that NASCAR will see as the season goes on that certain races (like, say Bristol) will bring in the crowd AND the viewers, and snoozefest 1.5 mile tracks will continue to sell decent tickets (as the only NASCAR race in a region for a whole year) but the fans will turn the noses and remotes up at this somonex on wheels, and they will find better things to do.

Wake up NASCAR… The “new” fans out west are not turning up like you wanted (California race wasn’t even near a sell out again), meanwhile Interesting, fun, and challenging tracks from the history of the sport sit idle, spoiling in the sun.

Free North Wilkesboro 🙂

Well, this week has been a little bit fucked up and weird. Some weeks you get into the pace and beat and shit and stuff happens. This week I have been all over the road like a drunk driver just after closing time. It truly has been weird.

First off, I have been driving a rental car for the last 2 weeks while my car got fixed. Yeah, some dumbass snow removal guy decided that reversing without looking was a really good way to save himself some time on the job. instead, it got him writing reports and arguing with insurance companies, who found him to be responsble and me to be fine and clear. Anyway, I got the car back today but there are a couple of things still to do to make it all right again, so I will be going back and forth on the issue I guess.

The weather has been fucking mental as well, it was freezing cold last weekend, and today it is raining and they are talking about 11C by Sunday. Spring usually rolls in slowly, but this time it looks like a freaking freight train coming to run us over. I am not really ready for it.

I have also been working on my least favorite thing, accounting. I hate the work, I hate checking it, and I hate that in the end it just means that I have to send the government money. Nothing fucking good there!

Worst part? The last episode of The Deadliest Catch ran this week, so I am way fucking bummed out about it all. First because it was an interesting show filled with real, decent, hardworking people that I can truly identify with, and second because I didn’t know when it started that this was also a documentary of the last year of this style of crabbing. Basically, for pretty much all times, they used a derby style system – total catch permitted was X tons of crab, and everyone starts on the same day and they go until the X tons has been caught. If you catch more you make more, if you catch less you make less. Pretty simple, right?

The Deadliest Catch was exactly about the competition and spirit of “try harder, work harder” that made these guys special. They would work for days at a time non-stop in order to get the most crab before the limit was reached. Sort of a combination business and sport. You could see the intelligence, the knowledge, the experience, and the skill that these people use to win the game. No fucking basketball hoop or other false prize – this was all about money and pride. Amazing.

It saddens me no end to know that many of the people who were on the show have since lost their jobs in the crab fishery because the quotas were only granted to some boats, and others were purchased by the state and put out of service forever. Approximately 250 boats fished for Opilio crab in 2005, and in 2006 I have seen numbers under 100 boats total. Truly fucking amazing how the government can take something noble, prideful, and all american like this and turn it into a red tape clusterfuck beyond all understanding.

Anyway, losing one of the few TV shows I truly enjoy sort of sucks.

Besides that, I have had a little problem this week getting traction on an idea I have been working on. Nothing like having a really great idea but not being able to exactly put it down on paper or share with others. I sort of shared part of it with one person, but I didn’t get any feedback yet which is sort of driving me around the bend a bit wondering. That is just one of those things, I guess.

I am also looking to sell my house this real estate season, 2 other similar houses have sold in the last couple of months on my street and I feel pretty good. But to do that, I have to get the house into salable condition and make sure all the odds and ends are taken care of, which is a bitch. Worse, as I go along, I find more shit that needs to be taken care of, so I am actually sort of going backwards instead of forwards. Fuck.

Finally, spring break season is on, which is usually a quiet time in the online busines as students go away, and families often take trips etc. So as a result, pretty much everyone I know is saying “quiet this week”… Things should pick back up in a little bit, but for now, it just sucks.

Anyway, back to work I go, I guess… enough bitching for one day 🙂

I got it.

I mean, yeah, I get it, I really get it… but Chris Locke probably won’t like my conclusions.

Let me paint a picture for you. Let’s say you go to the electronic store to look for a new TV. At many of the big box retailers you go into the sales people will be all over you like stink on shit. You can’t even get NEAR the product before someone is there to help you find the most expensive thing in the store. They push, they shove, they try to sell you extended warrantees and in home service and setup and 101 other things. They pressure you like made to spend the most money and make them the most commission.

The Gonzo Marketing version would be this: You go into the same store. The sales staff are all hidden in dark corners where you can’t see them. The place is filled with other people who aren’t looking for TVs, but instead are enjoying watching the discovery channel on 64 big screen TVs. As you walk around, they talk to you about the green leaves on the screen or the life cycle of the wild animals or how to save the rain forest. Now, you love the rain forest, and you start to talk to that person about the rain forest, and how it is important and stuff. All the while, you are watching the picture on this really nice new plasma TV that happens to be right next to you. The person mentions they have one just like it at home, and it is really great. They talk some more about the rain forest and stuff… and then they mention that this plasma is much better than the LCD screen and much brigher and stuff, and really is a good bargain right now at $300 off the normal price. Did they mention that their son works in sale here? I am sure he could get you another $200 off on it… let me introduce you… and you end up buying the over priced plasma TV from your friend.

The “father” is in fact employed by the store, and gets a commission on every sale. Rather than looking like sales staff, they play the friendly “other shopper” and disarm people by making them think that they are NOT selling them something. It is clever, but it is massively misleading and dishonest (and I suspect illegal in some manner, but I can’t be sure)

The company and the individuals have to team up together to create the perfect ruse. They have to setup the TVs just right, put the right show on the screen, and have enough people around that they are sure to hit something you are interested in. Once they get you talking, it won’t be long before they can make the sale without you realizing you were getting cornered.

Putting it in the web context, it basically breaks the assumed trust of blogs and bloggers. While we know (see previous post) that bloggers are not entirely honest or at least not entirely correct, there is a trust that they are blogging with some sort of obvious purpose. Commercial blogs are obviously commercial, and personal blogs are obviously personal. Some sites shade the lines, but basically you can tell one from the other. The Gonzo Marketing idea is to go into the personal blogspace and invade it with nice people who in reality are just well disguised fronts for the sale department of their companies.

I guess what cheeses me off the most about this is that Chris Locke goes on and on about the personal responsilbity and the great potential for power that comes with the self publishing world of “weblogs” and personal webspaces. He goes on with the power of the pulpit to preach to us about how we will all have this great personal power, and how it will be the thing that liberates us all.

Then he carefully explains to greedy corporations how to invade, subvert, and abuse this very liberating form of self expression and turn it into just another mass media turd, by assembling as many micromarkets as you can touch and leveraging them together just like any other billboard campaign.

It really sucks to see something so potentially good subverted from the get go by the person preaching about it the most.

Well, I am getting down to the end of Gonzo Marketing (book by Chris Locke, aka rageboy), and I must say this has been an eye opening experience when it comes to looking at blogs (and some of the other things I am working on). It is a bit of a tale, but let me tell you what I got out of all of this.

First and foremost, Locke tries to paint the picture of the internet as a sort of great social commune of people sharing interests, creating geocities websites filled with dancing hamsters and talking about organic gardening. He touched just barely on the new at the time idea of weblogs, which we all know now as blogs. He correctly did predict that we would all spend out time talking to each other in little personal interest sites. Everyone is a writer, and editor, and a researcher. We all bring our personal experiences and knowledge to the table, and away we go, filling the web with endless amounts of wonderful, insightful personally slaved over and loved information.

That much, my friends, he got right.

He goes on to attempt to sell this concept to industry as a “gonzoâ€? or underground marketing campaign. Basically, unleash your employees to create personalized websites about whatever interests them, and attempt to leverage that into some sort of sneaky personal brand connection concept. It is a stunning abuse of the very trust he seeks to promote in the wide open social commune that he calls the net. It is a bit like sending in undercover spies or some sort of digital trojan horse. Pollute and corrupt the system from the inside.

Thankfully, that sort of bloated neo-corporate blather for the most part has been lost in the sea of the web, because people are not so easily tricked by the bullshit of forced originality. It is a very well known fact that most blogs are abandoned within a few posts of being opened, as most people discover that they really have very little to say. Attempting to force employees to talk about whatever for fun and corporate prodfits is an even bigger non-starter, and as a result, most of what was in Gonzo Marketing regarding personal interest websites has pretty much failed.

In it’s place, we find things like myspace and any number of pathetic dating sites packed full of losers hiding behind fake photos and even faker profiles. In both cases, the goal seems only to score the most “friendsâ€? and not to actually talk about anything. A personal grandstanding and very shallow shout outs, totally transient in nature. For most of these people, the net is just a glorified school dance or pickup bar with smaller drink tabs and no reason to dress up.

Those who do chose to blog come in a couple of groups. The best bloggers tend to be the professionals that you actually want to know more about. I personally love to read Matt Cutt’s blog (he is a higher end Google guy, double meaning intended). It is filled with great information about how Google runs, things going on, and the weird things that Matt really enjoys. It is a real mish-mash, but good fun overall and not at all forced in language or subject.

In the middle area there are hundreds of thousands of people who ruin personal blogs on about every subject in the world, from anthills to zits and everything in between. Some of these are well written by people who have some skill and a real interesting point of view or passion for a subject, and others are just hack jobs from people who can barely string together a sentence. There is a ton of passion in these sites.

There is also the commercial blog. I run some of those ( like The Little Tit site or DDCup Big Booby Blog ) that are aimed to provide a service and inform a group of like minded people about things they might like. My personal preference in breast size doesn’t come into play here, I professionally write from either point of view without issue, as I understand both, and they are darn good information and resource sites that visitors tend to enjoy. Over time I open more sites of the same general concept, reaching out to people with similar desires or pleasures. It is actually one of the most fun parts of my day to work on these sites.

Finally, there are the blog mega sites, like stile project or consumption junction that were bloggy type sites really before blogs existed. They are sort of the all things to all people, and are quite popular for various reasons.

What Locke failed to address in his book was the issue of integrity and truthfulness in blogging. It is very easy to write almost anything in a blog (My sister is an alien) without anything being able to check out the facts (nobody can prove she is an alien, now can they). The web is filled with blogs that lie, steal, cheat, and mislead’ and that what keeps the blog world from being anything more than a poorly organized social experiment.

Let me give you an example. There are any number of “celebâ€? blogs out there, chatting about the latest gossip, often posting nipple slip pictures, embarrassing moments, and shots that are pretty darn funny. These sites get huge numbers of visitors every day, and they tend to try to sell people off to celeb nudity sites like Mr Skin or similar sites.

Every wonder where they get those pics from? Simple: THEY STEAL THEM.

Every wonder where these sites get their funny videos from? Do you think they have film crews all over the world chasing stupid drivers and dumb skateboard riders around? Nope’ THEY STEAL IT.

Now, consider this: If they are willing to steal material to fill their sites, would you consider that they might be a little bit fast and loose with facts too?

Nobody is checking nobody knows.

If you get your news from blogs, then you probably dont have all the truth just be careful, okay?