While USA Today and WSJ circulation numbers are climbing or holding steady, respectively, the outlook is dire at other dailies.

BizzyBlog has more details.

As a former reporter, I have mixed emotions. In the late 90s, I participated in website content development for a major daily intent on transitioning its print presence. Clearly, papers recognized a decade ago that they were headed for a primarily electronic existence, but I’ll still raise a glass to the smell of fresh newsprint.

As a former PR flack, I’m wondering how agencies are adjusting their promotional fire. The explosion of web-based user-driven outlets has created plenty of new placement potential. Unfortunately, the overall audience is about the same size. So, instead of two million people reading an article on the front page of one daily paper, you get one person deciding which of two million sources he or she might get information. Does that mean more pickup for a press release, or is finding a way to make all those editors happy even possible?

Wikipedia’s recent edits page is long overdue for this mashup, which allows you to watch in real time as recent anonymous editors are located on a world map. Enjoy watching someone in the United Kingdom edit American Old West while a North Carolinian tinkers with Social Darwinism.

Reminiscent of Twittervision’s enhancement of Twitter, WikipediaVision can be surprisingly addictive. And it’s another great example of simple online applications that combine publicly available information to great effect (in this case, using the Google Maps API, hostip.info, and GoNew’s IP to country service).

The mission statement of our blog notes that one of our objectives is to cut through the increasingly chaotic din of contemporary communications. This is no mean feat. Thanks to infinite outlets and myriad voices, we live in history’s most cacophonous culture. To stand out, to be heard, we advocate a well-crafted combination of intelligence, eloquence, and—above all—clarity.

You can take another tack, however: outright volume.

Today pundits put forth screeds at such ear-splitting volume that an audience scarcely has time to call on their critical thinking skills. Of course, that’s the idea. When your point is weak and your logic is flawed, being able to bluster, bloviate, and bellow is an unfortunately persuasive substitute for substance. What’s worse is that those messages have no staying power. Like an annoying advertising jingle that sticks in your head long after the product is forgotten, volume-driven communications works in all the wrong ways. We don’t remember the message; we remember the messenger.

Short story writer and essayist George Saunders describes the inception and aftermath of this trend in his latest book, The Braindead Megaphone. In an Amazon blog post, he encapsulates the idea driving the title essay:

Our cultural discourse is being dumbed-down by mass-media prose that is written too quickly, and therefore fails to due justice to the complexity of the world. On the other hand, prose that is revised and that the writer lives with awhile can go deeper and deeper and become more nuanced and truthful.

I’m a huge fan of Saunders’ surreal fiction, and his essays have redoubled my admiration. They succeed as provocative cultural commentary, and perhaps as an optimistic indication that today’s overwhelmed audiences are regaining their sentience. Here’s hoping we’re rediscovering the importance of evaluating messages based on value, not volume.

Click here to check out a two-minute Braindead video breakdown.

I am one of those people who loves to research my family’s history. And while the Internet has been a boon to genealogy—you can find nearly anything you want—the genealogical data available online is hard to verify. So while the Internet is a great place to start for genealogy, it’s not yet the place to finish if you’re doing more in-depth research into your family history.

Living in the DC area, I do have several local spots that will give me good info. The National Archives has all the census data. The Library of Congress has a huge genealogy section. The National Genealogical Society is also good. Best of all is the Daughters of the American Revolution Library, which has a plethora of self-published books.

But for really good concrete evidence I’d have to spend a ton of money, fly out to Salt Lake City, and spend time at the Latter Day Saints (LDS) library. Unless someone out there wants to donate some cash…I ain’t going.

I could go to a local LDS Family Research Center and order microfilm and microfiche from Salt Lake City. But like a lot of people, I have fallen under the Internet age’s spell of instant gratification when it comes to finding information. A week or more of waiting: not gonna do it. And while the LDS is working on getting everything they have online, there’s only so much time in the day, and they can’t scan everything at once.

But soon there will be another way to get reliable genealogical evidence over the Web. Sorenson Companies (of video compression fame) is launching a new website called GeneTree. GeneTree is designed to help you to perform one of the most difficult genealogical tasks, which is to find other living members of your family tree (difficult because privacy considerations mean that often records on living relatives are not available—online or offline).

And how are they going to match family members? By, among other things, DNA.

Of course, this raises even more questions when it comes to privacy. Will anyone be willing to store DNA information online, where it could be hacked? The banking industry still has problems keeping our financial information away from prying eyes.

I am all for complete openess on the Internet…but is there a line everyone agrees shouldn’t be crossed? How far is too far when it comes to putting our lives online?

Did you ever stop to think about what we are leaving behind in the way of tangible communication? Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform on ancient clay tablets, the Rosetta Stone, and even Paleolithic cave paintings preserved information from past eons thanks to their rocky media. Today, however, we bombard each other with PowerPoint presentations, emails, text messages, and vlogs that live only in the electronic ether.

It seems only our past is worthy of imprinting on long-lasting material like monument stones. Why aren’t people chiseling Snoop Dogg lyrics onto bricks or blasting the word “McLovin” on the side of a quarry face?

If they knew about Harold Innis, they may start doing just that. Harold was a well-respected political economist from Toronto via the University of Chicago, who in the later, more cynical years of his life took a stab at mass media analysis. He probably hung around with people like Marshall McLuhan, drinking Latrobes, soul searching at Wrigley Field, and dreaming up fun titles for their dry books like The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Nevertheless, Harold made an interesting assumption: When communication is conveyed using durable materials like tablets of stone, they will be preserved over time and disseminated through an intimate if not respectful community that has access to view the information first hand. This is “time-biased” or “time-binding” media. Paper and electronic media, conversely, are light and fast, meant to be distributed over a larger community more quickly; this gives way to the theory of “space-biased” or “space-binding” media.

Harold went on to propose that space-biased media is the media that builds empires because the institutions of politics, religion, and commerce are influenced by the organization and vast distribution of information and hence create a social bias of the time-space continuum. In other galactic terms, time=no space, space-time=power, and power=a two-dollar hot dog at Wrigley Field.

What does this mean? I am not sure, but I think when something is written in stone, we trust it’s wiser than the moment in which it lives. We think it needs to be preserved in hard media, but it’s really only a sign for the times. Today, we let the legion electronic personal devices convey and capture every scrap of information so that everyone knows everything about anything. This numbs us to the authorities and institutions that bind us to their will. Depressed yet? Just wait…realize tombstones are a time-binding media, and make sure your epitaph inspires anyone who comes to visit. Oh, and don’t worry about launching empires.

Music execs are still reeling from Radiohead’s figurative finger in their proverbial eye—essentially an industry end-run that lets listeners decide how much they want to pay for the band’s new release. The reasoning is sound. At the end of the day, the band will make as much, if not more, than what they would have pocketed had they trusted distribution to a major label.

Similarly, UC Berkeley has just put a free fall course catalog online as well—hundreds of lectures hosted on YouTube and ready for everyone’s edification. MIT also offers up free courses, giving anyone with online access the opportunity to indulge in their own Good Will Hunting moment. No tuition required.

Check out Physics for Future Presidents:

The quality of content available online runs the gamut from sublime to ridiculous, and while traditionalist critics are quick to claim that online outlets simply give hacks a larger audience, the Web is also clearly evolving into a great leveler—a means of education and entertainment courtesy of well-respected players who want people to experience their products and services. It’s an investment in awareness that offers tremendous benefits to Web citizenry and payback in visibility and credibility for purveyors.

“It’s not only chickens and fizzing soda bottles that get the buzz.”

So says Gary Spangler, E-Business Leader, DuPont Electronic & Communication Technologies.

In the MarketingSherpa e-newsletter that landed on me today, I read about Mr. Spangler and his successful use of the blogosphere to promote marketing videos about the advantages of DuPont science called—big stretch—DuPont Science Stories.

Riveting, eh? Well, maybe not to me, but it must have been to the more than fifty thousand viewers who watched them. That number may not rival the biggest viral videos out there, but still, that’s great traffic, and proof that there’s an audience for everything. With smart online promotion you can find them for a heck of a lot less than blasting messages through broadcast media.

To build awareness for their Science Stories, the folks at Dupont took a few very effective (and comparatively inexpensive) steps:

1. Paid promotion on eight blogs, some specifically targeting the science community
2. Posting videos to YouTube, Google Video, and Blip.tv—all free sites
3. Creating their own microsite to also house the videos
4. Showing the videos in a player that let viewers email the link, connect to the player, or paste the video player directly into another blog or website

There are no monetary figures in the articles, but I can imagine those four strategies all run less than just a couple broadcast spots, not to mention the fact that the blog-based campaign was precisely focused on a relevant audience.

Kudos to Mr. Spangler for leveraging the ever-expanding blogosphere’s ability to reach niche audiences. The one question I’d offer is: could it have been done with zero paid advertising?

Check out Swamble for a fun and innovative social network (sign up for the “private beta”).

Swamble makes it easy to bet on anything: without cash. Online betting is currently illegal in the United States, but as TechCrunch notes in its Swamble review, that could change soon. On the other hand, non-cash betting can force you to get pretty creative—as in one user promising to shave his head if Notre Dame wins seven games this year. Miller beer and “bragging rights” are also very popular.

See also the Swamble’s recently added pro football facebook app.

Somebody at city-centric website LAist spotted this rotten example of display-ad deception:

Seems like a decent deal, until you get closer.

In LA, a rose by any other name just stinks.

Six years ago today, many of us at Mind & Media stood on the rooftop deck of our Alexandria office and watched the smoke rise from the Pentagon. Our thoughts remain with the families and friends of those who perished in New York, Pennsylvania, and our home state of Virginia.