MediaFlect

Have moved MediaFlect over to Blogger for a number of reasons — including ease of use.

You can see it at MediaFlect.com, or mediaflect.blogspot.com.

Thanks for checking.

Dorian

check out mediaflect.blogspot.com for MediaFlect’s coverage of Streaming Media East.

If you’re an advertiser, Google History, which I wrote about yesterday, is the best thing since, well, there is no “since” because never before has an advertiser been able to potentially know all someone’s media activity and target ads based on it.

Google History tracks not only your Google searches but also, if you let it, all your Web surfing activity. Imagine the power of being able to target someone based on exactly what sites they’ve visited — even to weight the ads after guaging their level of interest, based on the sites they visited, how much they surfed each one, even which pages they went to within those sites — perhaps even how many links they clicked or what they did.

Here’s a little look at my Google History for one short period of time.

I looked up some software plugins, a New York media group, and Niagara Falls (my wife wants to visit the region this summer). Already, you know a lot more about me than you did, and if you wanted to target me with an ad you’d have some darn good ideas of what might work.

Thanks to Jack Myers for inviting me to write a column for his Jack Myers Media Business Report. The first one went out last week, and today appears on Jack’s Media Village Web site.

The nut of it: Google’s got a looming issue over privacy, because of all the data it collects on people — from Gmail to Blogger to Google Ads and Analytics — and it had better be out front on this issue, or it could pay a high price in the long run.

The argument’s been further bolstered by Google’s new “Web history” initiative, which I learned about from Shelly Palmer, also in a column for Jack. The search engine will, if you let it, track not only all your Google searches, but if you download a toolbar, ALL your Internet surfing activity, and spit it back to you. I’ve allowed it to see only my Google searchess, and it’s an intriguing peak at what I’ve used Google for in recent days (wow, do I use it a lot!). It’s also a little creepy to think that someone could, some day, take a look and see everything I looked at — be it business or personal, prurient or pure. I can imagine the picture someone could draw about me, or anyone, and am not sure it’s a picture we’d like others to have access to.

Aye, aye, aye, aye. Who knew Mel Blanc was the Frito Bandito? Listen to the first part of the “On the Media” piece and you can clearly hear the voice is the same as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The story’s on “racist spokescharacters.” Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were stereotypes, but racist? Little Black Sambo toothpaste (above) maybe.

Arun Rath, subbing for Bob Garfield, did his best Garfield impression, “edited … by … Brooke” in the show’s end credits. Rath did some that’s rarely done, but was kind of refreshing: asking someone doing depressing stuff all day, if it takes a personal toll: “I mean, does it ever get to you? Do you ever have trouble sleeping at night, just knowing all of this stuff?”

Brooke Gladstone talked about David Halberstam, with David Remnick, who told me he was a good friend of Halberstam. My experience with Halberstam was much more limited — and odd.

For those of you you may be seeing this for the first time, it continues a tradition of critiquing On the Media I began at FishbowlNY.com.

Harvard Business Review’s Web site, a persistent big revenue generator at very low cost for the school because of all the MBAs buying publications, and case after case after case, will soon do away with its complex digital rights management scheme.

The way it is now, you pay, say, $6 to buy PDF of a document replete with research and data about anything from the inner workings of Wal Mart to USA Today’s attempts to reorganize to Disney’s foreign currency hedges, and then you end up infuriated because you can’t download it to your laptop after buying it on your desktop, or print it out easily, or send it to your PDA, or email it to yourself or to classmates you’re working with. (If you call the 800 number, the people are very nice at granting new permissions, but who wants to waste all their time like that for every little thing?)

While there’s been some debate at Harvard – I’m told there’s a lot of pilfering of the school’s materials off the Web in China – the folks in Cambridge have decided to simplify things, essentially removing the digital rights management, so that folks who buy the cases legitimately can use them more easily. So, if you buy a case at the site, you’ll be able to do all the things that now are so difficult – email, print, open on more than one computer, etc.

Expect the new scheme this summer, though it could be delayed – these things take time, you know.

The tuxes and gowns were just so, the champagne and fondue flowed (white and black chocolate fountains!), and the glitz went from KT Tunstall singing her hit “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” to John Waters and Carrie Fisher flubbing a couple of their lines on stage.

Fun, impressive, and magnificent as the National Magazine Awards took over the Rose Theater, now at Columbus Circle, for the evening. A few folks, though – including one top editor up for an award — bemoaned the lack of intimacy. The event a few years back was at a Waldorf hotel ballroom, where the crowd mingled and table-hopped as the winners were lionized on stage. Well, as some noted, at least it wasn'’t live on TV – yet.

At the National Magazine Awards: With folks tittering about Newsweek NBC’s Mark Whitaker saying that New York Magazine editor Adam Moss is the new David Remnick (after New York last night cleaned up the way Remnick’s New Yorker has in previous years), a pithy comment by Moss got missed.

“I’ve never understood,” Moss said after apologetically taking the stage for the fifth time to accept an award, “why we don’t give these awards to the writers, themselves.”

He’s not alone in wondering why it’s always the editors-in-chief who accept awards, even for the work of individuals.

The David Halberstam I knew was all the things people have written about him since his death in a car accident this week: overbearing, a great reporter, quick-witted, pedantic, perhaps with a high opinion of himself. To me, he was also generous beyond reason.

While I was working for Newsweek’s Japanese edition in 1987, we decided to do a Q&A with Halberstam, as he had just published The Reckoning, considered the definitive tome about the rise of Japanese automakers at the expense of Detroit. It wasn’t hard to find him – he was in the Manhattan phone book. I called him up, and my bureau chief, Fukiko Aoki (Pete Hamill’s wife, by the way), and I went over to his lovely high-ceilinged apartment, complete with an inside terrace and a floor-to-ceiling bay window, on west 67th Street. He was gracious and well-informed, and intelligent, and gave good sound bite answers. (I’ve scanned the interview as I submitted it to my editors — there are 6 pages, you can get by swapping in the page number in the url. A piece of the way it appeared is in the image, above.) I remember him being extremely complimentary of Hideko Takayama, with whom I later worked in the Newsweek Tokyo bureau, for the tremendous help and research she had done for him on his book.

Halberstam and I kept marginally in touch, and a couple years later, when I was applying for a Fulbright fellowship, a good friend well-versed in academe asked if I knew any high-profile journalists with name recognition who could write a recommendation. I asked David, and much to my surprise, he most generously said he liked me, thought I was a “smart kid,” and “yes.” In person, he talked exactly the same way he did on air, droning in his deep, booming voice, seeming to lecture, talking in long sentences with lots of commas and few periods, and absolutely not liking to be interrupted. He took a recommendation I had written for him, rewrote it beautifully, and sent it in. I got the fellowship and went to study at Tokyo’s Sophia University for a year.

While I was in Japan, David came over on a tour – he was something of a celebrity there – and while he didn’t schedule me in, we did bump into each other at an event he was headlining. I said “hi,” as he walked through the halls with a leading politician he was interviewing. He winked and nodded – odd gestures for him, I thought – and kept walking.

Throughout the years, I would occasionally do a little something for Daviod – send him a fact or a contact for something he was working on. A number of years after the Fulbright, I called to ask him something, and he very gruffly hung up the phone, very unfriendly. I wasn’t sure what I had done to piss him off. Perhaps I had not done enough for him? Maybe he was just in a bad mood that day. I never knew, and never asked. I would occasionally see him walking around the neighborhood after 1997, when I joined ABC News, with offices on west 66th Street, but there was never a flash of recognition from him, and I never tried very hard to say “hi.” I did see him in the building occasionally, when he was going for an interview on Nightline or one of the other shows. Even when he said “hi” in the ABC halls, I don’t think he knew who I was.

What is most tangible to me, though, is his generosity in doing something for someone he didn’t know very well and whom he didn’t have to help. I’m not sure I would have gotten the fellowship – a wonderful experience, and chance to really learn Japanese – without his generosity.

Longtime media critic Michael Wolff, currently of Vanity Fair, tells fashion, celebrity and media pub Women’s Wear Daily he’s “unfailingly courteous” everywhere he goes, responding to some diners who were apparently offended by his behavior in a restaurant. This video (via FishbowlNY)– shot on my camera by Dylan Stableford at a breakfast we both attended — shows that Michael also knows how to mix it up.

Michael also tried to pry information out of me at the event to corroborate rumors that offers had been made to buy mediabistro, where I was editorial director. I demurred.