The Four Horsemen of Publishing

Viktor Vasnetov's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"

When publishers refer to The Four Horsemen, they usually mean Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

The concept of publishers having to joust with the fearsome, well-financed Four Horsemen started in the book-publishing industry. But the allegory is easily grasped by all publishers who warily view these web giants as, at best, frenemies.

The source of the moniker is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the New Testament's mysterious Book of Revelation, who usher in nasty waves of Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. You don't suppose we publishers are at all paranoid, do you?


This is the fourth in Dead Tree Edition's 31-part Publishing Word of the Day series that will be published throughout July. We guarantee you've never heard all of these words -- because some of them were dreamed up in our own devious little brains.

Ten Words That Summarize What Happened to Publishing in 2014

OK, fellow publishing fans, you can’t be ready to face this new year without understanding what happened in 2014. Here are the 10 words (yes, “magazine media” and “native advertising” are single words) that summarize the year that just was, along with links that provide further information:

1) Quorum: Demonstrating its indifference to one of the nation’s largest employers, Congress failed to act on fix vacancies on the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors, causing it to lose its quorum. It’s yet another example of USPS’s “Congressional oversight” turning into “Congressional overlooking,” except when there’s a chance to name post offices. And it's another reminder to publishers of magazines and daily newspapers that our primary means of distribution is still at risk.

Leaked Google document showed its preference for web sites
associated with print brands.

2) Penguin: As they watched their search-related web traffic soar, magazine and newspaper publishers came to realize that the evil empire of Google had now turned friendly. With its Penguin and Panda algorithm tweaks and other enhancements, the search giant increasingly referred people to credible web sites anchored by trustworthy print brands. Late in the year, Facebook also jumped onto the We Love Print Brands bandwagon.

3) Magazine media: Magazine people laughed at first at this new moniker for our industry. But now that a few magazines get a majority of their revenue from digital media and almost all have branched out into multiple non-magazine ventures, 2014 was the year the MPA-created term began to stick. We're not just magazine publishers any more, we tell anyone who will listen, but we're still having trouble figuring out exactly how to describe ourselves. That’s in stark contrast with daily newspaper publishers, who know exactly what they are: Screwed, unless they can find a patient billionaire to buy them.

Wholesaler's bankruptcy led to empty magazine racks.

4) Niche: Every month, it seemed, brought another web site that decided to delve into the magazine business, mostly with highly targeted publications. But the traditional consumer-magazine world of bloated circulation and egos continued shrinking, with stalwarts like Ladies Home Journal shutting down, others reducing their ratebase, and a major magazine newsstand distributor going belly up. A testament to the industry’s increased nichification: The number of U.S. magazines keeps growing, but the nation’s coated-paper industry finished the year with half the capacity it had just 11 years ago.

5) Antitrust: The U.S. Justice Department didn’t bat an eye when Quad/Graphics turned the large-publication printing market into a virtual duopoly by buying out Brown Printing. But it dithered for nearly the full year about the proposed merger of ailing paper makers Verso and NewPage, finally approving the deal on Dec. 31 -- but only after a major divestiture. These, after all, are the same antitrust geniuses who, deciding Amazon’s 90% share of the ebook market wasn’t big enough, went after Apple and major book publishers.

A destroyer of printed books and magazines? Nope.

6) Plateau: Even the enthusiasts who predicted a few years ago that ebooks would soon dominate the book scene finally started admitting in 2014 that ebook sales in the U.S. had reached a plateau, with a market share of less than 25%. Another supposedly disruptive force, digital magazines, also ran out of steam after achieving a much smaller share of the U.S. magazine market. The collapse of digital magazines is being aided by consumers’ shift from tablets to smartphones and abetted by Apple’s incompetence and indifference, as demonstrated by the woeful state of its Newsstand app.

7) Accountability: Advertisers began awakening to the reality that they were being duped by social-media marketing enthusiasts (“Let’s get everyone on Facebook to join the conversation about our toothpaste!”), content-marketing hucksters, and advertising impressions targeted at bots. Kraft even fired most of its advertising agencies, apparently deciding that targeting ads to people who Google “gang rape” is not the best strategy for selling “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product" (Velveeta).

8) Measurement: With the rising emphasis on accountability came a growing interest in measurement. The advertising industry started pushing for new ways to measure how many people see a web ad, and for how long, after realizing that a majority of the advertising “impressions” served by ad networks were never visible to an actual human being. Meanwhile, the MPA moved the goalposts on the measures of magazines’ success, emphasizing growing web audiences and omitting the depressing news about trends in ad pages.

9) FutureMark: The closure of FutureMark Paper, which was the only North American manufacturer that made coated paper containing mostly recycled fiber, provided stark evidence of a troubling development: Publishers, and perhaps the public, seem to have lost interest in using environmentally friendly paper. Or perhaps they are having trouble distinguishing between “green” and “non-green” papers.

10) Native advertising: Pundits, editors, and marketers spent the entire year debating whether native advertising was a savior or sellout for publishers. It would help if the debaters could agree on a definition for what they’re arguing about. Is it native only if it masquerades as editorial content? Does native necessarily involve the co-opting of journalists? What’s clear is that marketers are becoming disillusioned with banner ads but still see the web sites of reputable publishers as attractive venues for engaging the hearts and minds of potential customers.

For further reading: 

• Is Print Really Killing Publishers?

• Who Killed the Magazine App?: 9 Suspects

• Are Printed Magazines Growing or Shrinking? Yes

Google Loves Print, This We Know, For Its Guidelines Tell Us So

A leaked internal document reveals Google's predilection for the web sites of print-media publishers. Why? Doesn't it know that print is dead?

Google may be on the cutting edge of technology, but its search engine is going increasingly old school by favoring the web sites of print publications.

The expense of printing and distributing publications has led most publishers to start weaning themselves from dead-tree editions. But those same costs may be a key to Google's love affair with print-media brands.

Google's idea of a highest-quality web page

Google’s preference for print pops up frequently in its guidelines for quality raters, a 160-page document that advises the Google employees who evaluate web sites in order to improve the company's search algorithms.

Publishing Executive magazine has just published my article "9 Lessons Publishers Should Take from Google's Leaked 'Search Quality Rating Guidelines'," which draws lessons and warnings from the leaked document.

But why does Google prefer print – or, more precisely, why do its search results tend to favor web sites associated with printed publications?

The rating guidelines document doesn’t explain the preference explicitly and in fact never mentions the word “print.”

Clues aplenty
But the clues are plenty: Raters are told to give high ratings to pages that “clearly come from a highly authoritative source which is known for original content creation (newspaper, magazine, medical foundation, etc.)”

The Atlantic’s "Secret Fears of the Super-Rich" exemplifies an article deserving the highest rating because it provides “a satisfying or comprehensive amount of very high quality” content “on an award winning magazine website” with “a very positive reputation.”

The guidelines contain eight references to the word “magazine,” 15 to “newspaper,” and six to the Pulitzer Prize – plus additional examples of specific publications. Almost all refer to the publications’ web sites as authoritative, high-quality sources.

Google's clear message 
The message is clear: Search results should give preference to reliable web sites with content that is free of commercial influence -- and that often means the web sites of reputable publications.

Music magazine interview has highest-quality main content

A Google search of “diet pills” will return a myriad of results. If the first page is full of pill merchants and what they say about their own products (“Melt pounds away in minutes!!!”), all but the most gullible will be inclined to look for a new search engine.

But prominent links to trusted brands like Prevention, WebMD, and The New York Times will keep people coming back to Google.

Any idiot can create a web site (even me!) and fill it with useless, biased, or just plain wrong information. And plenty have. But a printed publication can’t rely for long on clickbait and other tricks.

To cover the costs of paper, printing, postage, etc., it has to generate much higher revenue per reader than does a web site. Survival usually depends upon having both subscribers and premium advertisers, which you can't attract and retain without earning a reputation for providing worthwhile content.

The permanence of print gives magazine publishers an incentive to get it right the first time – that is, to edit, rewrite, fact check, etc. And the additional cost of each page naturally leads to weeding out the weakest content. (Many print publishers have content on their web sites that does not meet the standards for their printed publications.)

Nowhere do the Google guidelines recommend checking whether the information on a publication’s web site has actually appeared in a printed publication. The assumption is that a print-media publisher’s standards and the necessity of protecting its hard-earned reputation will spill over to its web site.

How did Google reach that conclusion? Not from the publishing industry’s time-honored BOGSAT (Bunch of Guys Sitting Around Talking) method. And not from making value judgments about which web sites people "should" visit.

Google's motive: profit (Duh!)
Google is just trying to give customers what they want. It uses data from millions of daily searches to determine what kind of results give people the information they want so that they will continue using Google.

Google’s data obviously tell it that internet users believe information on a web site that is associated with a print publication tends to be more trustworthy than information on other web sites.

In the publishing industry's endless discussions of “print versus digital,” we often miss this lesson: Print means credibility, and credibility means more web traffic.

Having a printed publication is a source of sustainable competitive advantage for a web site. Just ask web-native publishers like Style.com, WebMD, and Politico, which have burnished their reputations by starting ink-on-paper magazines.

The Daily Bust 
Too often, the “Print is dead” types – mostly aging Baby Boomers desperate to prove their with-it-ness – have viewed print as a ball and chain on their digital dreams. Following that logic in 2010, Newsweek’s entire web presence was subordinated to sister company The Daily Beast. (WTF is a Daily Beast?)

Contrast that with Newsweek’s new digital-native owners who, recognizing the strength of the Newsweek legacy and brand, relaunched newsweek.com and invested heavily in its editorial content. And then, rather than fleeing print, they did the unthinkable, resurrecting Newsweek as a printed newsweekly.

Sure, neo-Newsweek is a niche publication with a tiny fraction of the multi-million circulation numbers of the glory years. But how many people look up circulation numbers when deciding whether a web site is credible? (And maybe a magazine with a few thousand high-paying customers has the same credibility as one with millions of bargain-basement subscribers.)

Laugh at Newsweek’s new strategy if you like; many pundits already have. But for the first time in years, Newsweek recently became profitable.

Related articles:

• How Google Is Becoming the Magazine Industry's New Best Friend  
• Is Print Really Killing Publishers? 
• Ten Ways to Celebrate International Print Day
• Are Printed Magazines Growing or Shrinking? Yes 
• Digital is Putting its Best Pixel Forward & Going Print: Mr. Magazine chronicles the many web-native brands that are now publishing printed magazines.
   

No Thrillah in Manilla: Paperless 2013 Founder Going Down for the Count

Manilla, a Paperless 2013 sponsor that aimed to save people from the horrors of printed and mailed bills, is throwing in the towel, according to TechCrunch.

Unable, in the words of its own ads, to get its "s**t toghether," the three-year-old Hearst unit will start winding down on June 30 and shut down completely on Sept. 30. (The 2013 article Killah in Manilla: Hearst's Green Reputation Tarnished by Subsidiary examined the company's questionable environmental claims.)

Manilla, along with Google, was one of seven sponsors of the controversial Paperless 2013 greenwashing campaign that was supposedly about helping the environment but was actually about bringing the sponsors more green stuff.

Without providing any data or analysis, the anti-paper campaign claimed that businesses become more environmentally friendly when they switch to cloud computing and other paperless processes.

The campaign used the hashtag "Paperless 2013" in social media, but environmentalists and print advocates staged a "hashtag takeover" to counter the campaign's self-serving and misleading claims.

Manilla's CEO said its sponsorship was “truly representative of Manilla’s overall mission ... to help improve the environment by reducing the overall use of paper.” But like the campaign, Manilla never documented how its services helped the environment -- or revealed anything about its own environmental practices.

The start-up's claims were an odd departure from those of its parent company, which is one of the world's largest buyers of publication papers and which has provided extensive reporting of its aggressive and carefully documented environmental efforts.

I'll state my position again: There are legitimate reasons to convert some paper-based functions to digital media. But don't make assertions about "going green" by going paperless without providing evidence, because digital media have a significant environmental footprint.

Who Killed the Magazine App?: 9 Suspects

OK, I apologize for the over-wrought headline: We publishers tend to be trend-happy. When something that was supposed to be the Next Big Thing turns out to be The Most Recent Overhyped Thing, we reflexively start debating whether it’s dead.

“I would not say the app is dead, but it might have a bullet wound to the leg,” app designer Josh Klenert remarked recently in a discussion of -- you guessed it -- whether magazine apps are dead.

In 2010, all the cool people in publishing were working on apps. But four years after the Star of Bethlehem appeared over Cupertino to announce the birth of the iPad, sales of tablet-based editions are barely a footnote for most magazine publishers, constituting a few percentage points of total circulation.

Pundits and industry suppliers keep proclaiming the inevitable dominance of the magazine app and the Second Coming of Steve Jobs, but most publishers have moved on. Their thought leaders and business-development resources are now focused mostly on the Web – and occasionally, God forbid, on print.

Just an afterthought
Tablet magazines have become an afterthought, intended mostly to impress 22-year-old media buyers and to shave a few percentage points off the 3P (print, paper, and postage) costs of meeting magazines’ bloated circulation guarantees.

So what happened? Despite the obvious convenience and sometimes stunning beauty of tablet-based magazines, nine forces are preventing them from thriving:

1. Publishers: The magazine industry has been widely criticized for its impatience, throwing in the towel too quickly on app development. In 2010, still smarting and scrambling from the economic recession, we publishers were still in the mindset, “If you can’t pull your weight, get the hell out of the lifeboat.” So when tablet editions showed no signs of immediate success, we cut off their rations. It didn't help that we undercut our apps by putting most of our content on the free web and by offering ridiculous discounts on print subscriptions but not on digital ones.


2. Advertisers: “Advertisers remain skeptical about paying for digital circulation,” Thea Selby of Next Steps Marketing wrote recently. “They are not yet convinced, even though the advertising is placed in a magazine-like setting, that they should be paying for the digital magazine advertising as they pay for print, based on circulation.”


3. Apple: The iPad’s creator teased publishers by creating its Newsstand as a way to encourage exploration and purchase of digital magazines, then neglecting it until it became an “unmanageable beast.” Now it’s mostly good for finding crappy Russian porn mags. It’s almost as if Apple’s lawyers told it to screw up its magazine business so that it wouldn’t get sucked into another antitrust investigation after the feds are through flaying its book-selling operation.


4. Google: With its menagerie of updates – Panda, Penguin, and the like – the giant search engine keeps tilting the Web toward credible publishers with bylined articles by respected authors. That gives publishers more incentive to put new content on the Web and not inside the walled garden of an app. The one place where Google has failed publishers is with e-editions: When it comes to search involving digital magazines, Google does “a worse job than Apple,” says Neil Morgan of Magvault.com, who’s no lover of Apple’s Newsstand.


5. Amazon: The e-commerce giant spoiled us by making books, both print and e-book, so easy to find and sample. It even has an elaborate recommendation engine that tells us about books we're likely to like. But it hasn't turned its exhaustive data or its magical algorithms loose on finding new subscribers for Kindle magazines.


6. Consumers: C’mon, despite all the whining about the discoverability of apps, people can probably find an electronic edition of their favorite magazine if they do some searching, right? Yes, but American consumers generally don’t go looking for magazines to buy. They pick one up on impulse at the grocery store, at the hair salon, or at a friend’s house. They have to be cajoled into subscribing with breathless marketing copy and special discounts. Hell, when it comes to apps they have to be cajoled just to look at a free sample issue. And when they do subscribe to an e-edition, they often forget about it (and therefore end up not renewing) because they still pay more attention to what’s in their snailbox than to the notifications on their tablet.


7. Angry Birds and its ilk: Despite an owner’s best intentions, there’s something about a tablet that wants to be more toy than tool. You’ve got a few minutes of down time and a tablet in your hands: Are you going to start plowing through that article on the global debt crisis – or try to beat your personal-best score?


8. Netflix: Streaming videos can look fabulous on a high-end tablet. Yet another distraction.


9. Smart phones: Phablets and app-heavy smart phones have turned tablets from a must-have item into a nice-to-have-if-you’ve got-some-bucks-to-spare luxury. Smartphone sales are booming, far eclipsing unit sales of tablets. iPad sales were actually down 16% in the First Quarter. When publishers said “mobile strategy” three years ago, they had tablets in mind; now the phrase means making your web site more smart-phone friendly.

Related articles:

• A Troubling Sign for Tablet Magazines? 
• How Google Is Becoming the Magazine Industry's New Best Friend
• 8 Media Trends You May Have Missed in 2013 
• A Renaissance for Print, Or Is Flat Just the New "Up"?

How Google Is Becoming the Magazine Industry's New Best Friend

After siphoning off billions of dollars that used to go to print advertising, Google’s practices in recent months have provided a huge boost to many magazine publishers. The search giant is about to provide even more help for publishers' web sites -- except perhaps for those that have jumped onto the “native advertising” bandwagon.

Google revealed this week that it is close to deploying “the next generation of Penguin.” The original round of Penguin algorithm updates last year ruined some spammy web businesses but apparently jacked up search-related traffic to the web sites of many legacy publishers.

“We expect it to go a little bit deeper and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin,” said Google executive Matt Cutts. “We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space . . . and trying to make sure that those rank a little more highly,” he said in a video released Monday.

He made no specific reference to legacy publishers. But with Google’s continuing bias toward bylined articles that are written by subject-matter experts, “Penguin 2.0” sounds like good news for magazine publishers that are active on the web (and who isn’t these days?).

Cutts’ advice to those preparing for Penguin 2.0 certainly shouldn’t scare traditional publishers, who for the most part have never really learned to write for bots because writing for real people is in our DNA: “Try to make sure you make a great site that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about, bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again, all the things that make a site compelling,” he said. “As long as you’re working hard for users, we’re working hard to try to show your high quality content to users as well.”

Upended by Penguin and Panda
In the past year or so, Google’s Penguin and Panda updates have already upended best practices for search-engine optimization (SEO), putting the kibosh on sleazy tactics like keyword stuffing and questionable links.

“It’s 2013 – nobody wants to read SEO content, not even the search engines,” says a recent infographic created by ContentVerve called SEO Copywriting:10 Tips for Writing Content That Ranks in 2013”. “Everything points to the fact that Google prefers natural content to obvious SEO stuff.”

ContentVerve’s tip #5 should warm the hearts of magazine publishers and other organizations with high standards for their web content: “Write LONG, in-depth, quality content. The average web page ranking on the first page of Google has over 2,000 words. Moreover, evidence points to the fact that in-depth articles get more shares and links than short, superficial ones.”

18 million experts
It’s no wonder that so many publishers have been celebrating record traffic to their web sites lately. And it’s no wonder that non-publishing companies are spending more and more dollars on content marketing that mimics the look, feel, and articles of traditional publishers’ web sites.

(Unfortunately, this trend means that the 18,134,377 self-appointed SEO experts in the U.S. who morphed into 18,134,377 self-appointed social-media experts are busy transforming/rebranding themselves into 18,134,377 self-appointed content-marketing experts.)

Cutts also warned that Penguin 2.0 will address native advertising (a term open to much debate and interpretation), especially for paid promotions made to look like editorial content.

“Now there’s nothing wrong inherently," he said, "with advertorials or native advertising, but there should . . . be clear and conspicuous disclosure so that users realize that something is paid, not organic or editorial.”

For further reading:

• Cheesy porn: For a truly amazing look at how sleazy web sites can still game the search engines, be sure to check out Digiday’s recent expose of non-porn sites using sex-related searches to drive traffic to their sites: . Don’t miss the image of Velveeta sponsoring gang rape videos, a classic fail that belongs in the Marketing Hall of Shame. (Yes, it’s possible Kraft is trying to turn Velveeta into more of an “adult” product, but the porn experts I checked with were not aware of any pasteurized prepared cheese products being used in porn videos. One of them with an overly active imagination did, however, manage to dream up a plot for a proposed video to be called “Velveeta Spread.”) 
• Craze-y: Dead Tree Edition recently examined why content marketing has become so popular among non-publishing brands in Publishing Without Profits: What's Behind the Content Marketing Craze? Content marketing could become a real threat to traditional publishers, except right now most of it sucks. 
• Thank you, oh large Chinese marsupial: Google’s first Panda algorithm update, in 2011, had an immediate favorable impact on the number of visits to Dead Tree Edition: The Google Panda Update Is a Change I Can Bear. Since then, this site’s search-related traffic continues to grow despite its criticism of Google’s greenwashing.
• A tale of two bit.lys: Publishing Executive has a related article I wrote about how the non-magazine ventures of many magazine publishers are thriving. I also shamelessly rip off Charles Dickens.

The Takeover of Paperless 2013

A group of companies including Google recently created the Paperless 2013 campaign to promote the use of online solutions, but unsubstantiated environmental claims caused the program to backfire.

The campaign went viral in the past few days, with hundreds of Twitter messages a day using the hashtag “#paperless2013.” But the tweets are running roughly 10 to 1 against the campaign, with most criticizing it for implying that digital media are always greener than paper-based media without providing any facts.

Welcome to a protest tool for the 21st Century – the hashtag takeover. I didn’t invent the concept, but I think I’m the first to use the term (which is ironic given my lack of social-media savvy. My Facebook page has cobwebs from neglect.)

The tactic sprang up in June as one of the grassroots responses to Toshiba’s ill-fated No Print Day. Toshiba was using "#NoPrintDay" to promote its gimmick, but defenders of print turned that hashtag into a

Google Using Blatant Greenwash To Promote New Catalog App

Google launched its Google Catalogs app this week with a shiny coat of greenwash.

"A Greener Way to Shop" proclaims the new product's promotional page, providing no substantiation for the claim.

"With Google Catalogs, you can subscribe to paperless versions of all your favorite catalogs," the page states.

Oh, so switching to information that's stored in energy-sucking data centers and then transmitted over the coal-fired Internet to devices containing a variety of toxic materials is environmentally sustainable simply because it involves no paper -- a recyclable product made mostly from renewable materials? C'mon, Google, a sophisticated company that has put so much effort into real sustainability initiatives should know better than that.

"Environmental marketing claims that include a comparative statement should be presented in a manner that makes the basis for the comparison sufficiently clear to avoid consumer deception," states the Federal Trade Commission's voluntary anti-greenwash guidelines. "In addition, the advertiser should be able to substantiate the comparison."

Related articles:

• Anti-Greenwash Group To Challenge E-Billing Claims in the U.S.
• Newspapers Are Greener Than Web News, Says Environmental Expert 
• Smackdown: Printed Editions vs. Digital Editions 
• The Greenwashing Media Award Goes to . . .

The Google Panda Update Is a Change I Can Bear

Maybe my incompetence in search-engine optimization is paying off. Or maybe Google really has figured out how to make Web searches more relevant.

The Internet world has been all aflutter the past month because of changes Google made to its top-secret search algorithms that it says affected 11.8% of queries. Some publishers are indicating their Google traffic is up a bit, while other sites some with seemingly good content have seen Google traffic drop by 40% or more.

Officially called the Panda update but sometimes referred to as the Farmer update, the changes were meant, in Google’s words, to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

For Dead Tree Edition, the changes seem to have increased Google traffic by about 18%. I say “seem” because search traffic to this little blog fluctuates greatly – and generally constitutes less than 10% of total visitors.

Dead Tree Edition is on the first page of results for some really long-tail search terms like “son of black liquor”, “NewPage bankruptcy”, and – everyone’s favorite -- “cardboard porn”. But the most common search terms are variants of “dead tree”, such as “dead tree blog”, which suggest that people heard or read about an article but didn’t have a link to follow. Or maybe my regular readers haven’t figured out how to use bookmarks, Twitter, RSS, or LinkedIn.

Anyway, I figured the best way to assess Panda was to compare the traffic from Google searches to that for Yahoo! searches, under the assumption that Yahoo! has made no significant changes to its search methods.

During the month leading up to the change, which Google says it started rolling out on Feb. 23, there was an average of 5.61 visitors coming to this blog from Google for every one coming from Yahoo. So far this month, the average daily ratio is 6.61, an increase of 17.8%.

I ignored the Feb. 23-28 period because of reports that it took Google a few days to implement Panda completely. With slightly different assumptions about what periods to study, the increase in the Google-to-Yahoo ratio was never below 12% and was sometimes as high as 21%.

Of course I’m biased, but it makes sense to me that Google’s update would favor a site that publishes only original content and – because of my own ignorance and Blogger’s limitations -- doesn’t play any SEO games. I just hope Panda also punishes those sites that republish my articles without permission or attribution.

Other examples of the hopelessly out-of-date D. Eadward Tree, Dead Tree Edition's Chief Arborist, trying to explain the Internet include:

• A Storm in the Cloud: Is Google Run By Brain-Dead Robots? 
• Twitter vs. RSS: So Much for Superior Technology
• Poe-Tweet for Twitter Quitters

A Storm in the Cloud: Is Google Run By Brain-Dead Robots?

Cloud computing is hot these days, and for most of us The Cloud means Google.

We use Gmail to send and receive messages, GDocs to create or exchange documents, and Google Reader to track our favorite Web sites. Those on the Web check their traffic with Google Analytics and monetize their sites with Google's AdSense. Some of us even use Google’s Blogger to create and host our sites.

All of these services are free – except that they can be very expensive. I found out the hard way:

Seven days ago, without warning or notification, Blogger (AKA Blogspot) disabled my blog. Visitors got a screen saying simply, “The blog you were looking for was not found” without any indication that the blog had ever existed.

My Blogger account had this message: “Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.”

I suspect a few recent spammy comments caused the problem, but I wasn’t even able to go into my account to delete those. I went through Google’s process of requesting a review and an appeal but got no response from the Googlopoly except this, “We received your unlock request on December 2, 2009. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.”

(Brilliant idea: If you've got a customer-service problem, blame it on the robots!)

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Several prominent postal-news Web sites had linked to my Dec. 1 article about the Flats Sequencing System, bringing thousands of visitors. Dead Tree Edition’s coverage of the black-liquor controversy had recently received praise from the Vancouver Sun’s Gordon Hamilton -- who as far as I can tell is the only reporter covering the North American forest products industry full time. A guest columnist had drafted the best article I have ever seen about paper buying. And a magazine that was planning to publish an article I wrote -- with links to Dead Tree Edition for more information -– got cold feet because of the outage.

I posted several messages on Google help forums that got no response except a rather surly one and a fellow blogger agreeing that the site obviously wasn’t spam. Finally, after 5 ½ days, I put in a query that caught the attention of an actual human being -- or maybe a robot that was programmed to mimic the customer-service skills of a Division of Motor Vehicles clerk: “OK, I've put this in Gatsby's queue. Possible resolution tomorrow, if you are not a turkey.”

He (She? It?) then suggested I read his post characterizing Blogger users as hyenas, coyotes, and turkeys – none of them having flattering descriptions. More than 24 hours later, this person or robot notified me that Dead Tree Edition was alive again.

When I started this blog a little more than a year ago, I decided to keep things simple because I didn't know my RSS from a hole in the ground. I chose Blogger assuming it would work well with other Google products and Google search. I also figured the money Google made from AdSense ads would give it an incentive to provide reasonable service even though I pay nothing for Blogger itself.

Two problems:
1) Google is brilliant in some areas but arrogantly incompetent in others. Several competitors have leapfrogged over its neglected Blogger product. And I’m glad I’m not into IM because Gmail’s “Chat” feature seems to be down at least half the time.
2) Google’s products don’t talk to each other well. While the blog was disabled, AdSense and Analytics continued recording visits and clicks at the cached version of Dead Tree Edition. But their bots apparently never said to the Blogger bots, “Hey, traffic and revenue suddenly dropped by more than 99 percent. What the hell is going on?”

So now what? I've already changed the settings so that I have to approve any comment before it is posted. I have learned so much from comments, so I hope that doesn't stifle participation.

I’m still studying the advice and feedback that came in during the past week from various webmasters and editors, which are worth sharing:

•  “You should look at hosting the blog yourself or use something like Wordpress.com or Typepad. BlogSpot is too much BS.” (This being a very part-time venture, I don't relish the thought of moving everything to a different site and changing software.)
  
•  “Do not resist. You will be assimilated."
•  “For what it's worth, I use Blogger.com to produce [a website], but I don't use Blogspot to host it."
•  “If you have copies of your articles that you can post elsewhere (posterous.com is a good option), let me know and I'll pass the word.” (Posterous is an interesting service, but I don’t see a business model for posting my stuff there – not that I have much of a business model now.)
•  Two sites offered to host the blog, but the business model there is a bit murky because not all of the content is suited to either site. Maybe I could cut Dead Tree Edition up and pass the parts around to different Web sites – one for postal stuff, another for paper articles, a third for environmental reporting, etc. Not sure if any legitimate site would want the infamous “cardboard porn” series or other humor items.
•  “Google, as you know, practically owns the Internet -- or at least they think they do. I don't know how you got in touch with them for an explanation...they try very hard not to give you anything but 'see our forums.'”
•  “I would strongly advise purchasing web hosting to have better control.”
•  “Get off Blogger.”
•  “I sometimes will run across such a problem with my websites, and because everything is automated, it's hard if not impossible to speak to an actual person.”
•  “I hate Google.”
• "I hope the outage is 'only a flesh wound' and that you are 'not dead yet'," wrote a fellow Monty Python fan.

So what do you think? Feel free to leave your comment here -- if you don't mind waiting for me to approve it before it's published -- or write me at dead.tree.edition@gmail.com.