Given Enough Eyeballs...

...all attempts at burying politically embarrassing information are shallow:

A time-honored Washington practice of trying to extinguish, pre-empt, or redirect news coverage by dumping stacks of previously secret government documents on the press may be in for some changes after a headlong collision with hundreds of liberal Web loggers in the wee hours of yesterday morning.

On Monday night, the Justice Department delivered to Congress more than 3,000 pages of e-mails, memos, and other records about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. The handover came so late that many news organizations had to scramble to try to skim a few headlines from the files before latenight deadlines.

Despite the late hour, readers of a liberal Web site, tpmmuckraker.com, tackled the task with gusto. They quickly began grabbing 50-page chunks of the scanned documents from a House of Representatives Internet server, analyzing them and excerpting them. The first post about the Department of Justice records hit the left-leaning news and commentary site at 1:04 a.m. Within half an hour, there were 50 summaries posted by readers gleaning the documents. By 4:30 a.m., more than 220 postings were up detailing various aspects of the files.

Ah, there's nothing like a bit of distributed activity early in the morning - open politics at its finest. (Via Boing Boing.)

Is the Great God Google Too Good?

A few weeks back I wrote about how that nice Mr. Google was sending me around 50% of my traffic to these 'umble pages. I have a confession to make: I was wrong, it's not 50%. It's more like 60%, going on 70% some days. In fact, if the graph of visitors sent to me by Google continues to climb at its current rate, I shall probably soon have the entire planet visiting every day.

And it seems I'm not the only one impressed by Google's ability to deliver what we used to called "eyeballs" in those good old Web 1.0 days. Here's what The Daily Telegraph's "digital editor" (impressive, I'm still analogue myself) says:

“The most important driver of all readers [to our site] is Google, except for people who know us and come directly. It plays a critical part of exporting our brand, particularly to the U.S.”

At least I don't seem to have sunk quite so low as The Times, which

“is training journalists to write in a way that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google’s unpaid search results.”

Maybe Google is becoming a little too efficient at this game - to the extent that it's warping the world it's supposed to be serving.

Eyeballs as Micropayments

Here's a post that wraps up a lot of ideas.

I've often wondered why micropayments have never taken off. Personally, I'd be fine with the idea, and I can't believe I'm the only one. But they haven't, even though various technologies have been around for over a decade.

Maybe eyeballs are the solution. That is, the attention economy creates a de facto micropayment system without the need for a complicated infrastructure:

Money is a very important and useful medium of exchange for high-value, tangible products. For small-value, intangible products, the costs tend to exceed the value of the transactions—especially when you add in the overhead associated with making payments at a distance. Fortunately, human beings are clever. We’ve begun to find a variety of substitutes for money that work better in cyberspace. This isn’t the repeal of market economics, but rather an extension of them to deal with changed circumstances.

(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)