oct17.com Blog

Henry Blodget mea culpa

March 22, 2008 on 10:56 pm | In bnet, technology, work | No Comments

From the do-you-really-think-anyone-cares dept.: I was a wrong about Henry Blodget. He’s a good blogger and a necessary read in the online media field.

Over year ago, some of my coworkers (includng my boss) were praising Blodget’s blog, Silicon Alley Insider, and suggesting we should get his stuff on the BNET blogs. I fussed and frumped, because of high-minded belief that someone booted from the securities industry for hyping stocks had no place in a serious business site. Not my site, anyway.

So while I was smugly ignoring the advice of people whom I usually trust, Blodget proceeded to blog his heart out on the business of the Internet and increasingly of the media. He did it well, and he’s gotten better. He’s recruited solid writers to back him up, and now the SAI gang is one of the few things I read every day to stay sharp on my industry. (You can see the feed of interesting stories I read the box to the right.)

• My latest SAI favorite: “Web Ads: Lots of Impressions, Little Value” by Michael Learmonth. I agree completely that theres’s a glut of of ad inventory and ad real estate on professional Web pages. (On CIO.com the other day, I counted more than a dozen graphical ads, sponsorship logos, or blocks of paid links.) The inexorable logic of ad networks will make this situation worse, except for sites that can create a stronger environment for fewer ads, and get paid more for that choice than for what Learmonth calls, “bombarding its users with low-value ad units.”