Couldn’t sleep, maybe it was the spiced up Italian food I had for dinner last night, or just maybe it’s the Global Markets of Britian, Germany and France that are down an average of -5% morning, suggesting Monday will be another day of losses in the Dow - all too familiar by now - and nail biting.

Nope, reading my RSS Feeds in Google Reader this morning, as my stomach churns, is a Twitter message (which can be one of my “feeds”) telling me about a depressing New York Times article about Facebook…..

“…Awkward piece in NYTimes Magazine makes me never want to organize / attend Facebook meetup: http://tr.im/l4w [Via @serial_consign's blog.]

Actually, the article is titled Facebook in a Crowd and reminds me of three facts - 1) that few virtual friends are going to show up when you set up an event AND 2)  Facebook and a few other Web 2.0 services, are going to be part of the new “glue”  that holds us together as the World Financial System unravels, perhaps, entirely. 3) Maybe there’s a way to measure the influence of a “virtual friend” or an “event” by holding one of them and seeing “who actually shows up”.

As I get tired, and ready to try to go back to bed again, with that sinking feeling that may be part my own exhaustion and part what is going on in the world, or even with my friends, a few that have just been “let go”, and even the uncertainty of anyone’s financial future right now (including my own), even as my body is telling me it’s time to sleep again … my thoughts go to 2 OP-ED articles appear in Monday’s New York Times.

In Paul Krugman’s Widening Gyre there’s the crisis of the emerging markets to get my stomach to churn again, and get dizzy, along with some poetry to go with it, according to Krugman, the Hedge Funds are now failing and it’s taking down developing markets, that were thinking, even recently, of decoupling and thriving as the West declined  ….. but that is not to be … because….

“…..as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

“….The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.”

And if that didn’t finish me off, and give me more fatigue to go back to bed - William Cohen writes in  “Shoot the Horses?” that ….

“….a banker friend, and he told me the “unraveling” could go on for ages. I thought he meant the unwinding of all the leverage that had inflated everything from the price of stocks to the price of homes.

But, just to be sure, I asked him: “Unraveling of what?”

He paused, before saying, “Almost our way of life.”

A friend of his, he went on, has a horse farm north of New York City. “I told him, for heaven’s sake, you have to get rid of your horses. Shoot them if necessary.”

That got me thinking.

Are we going to be living on horse meat before we get to the bottom of this?”

Now, I’m really getting dizzy and need to sleep, again, when I read further down in the article:

“…. It’s really a wonder, when you think about it, that there are still two guys in the race to become U.S. president, pulling out all the stops in these last eight days of campaigning to be chosen as the one to face the nightmare.

Let’s fast-forward a year to October 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Crime is up across the country. The economy is shrinking. No arm-twisting from the Treasury has managed to restore the broken confidence between borrowers and lenders. Banks, the few still standing, are holding fast to their cash. Property prices are down more than 25 percent from current levels.

The Dow is still heading south as people get used to the idea of stocks trading at no more than 10 times earnings, rather than the much higher ratios our former leveraged world delivered.

New buildings stand empty all over New York because at the end of a boom — that’s to say right now — a lot of new construction comes to market. Exports, long a bright spot in the economy, have plummeted because of a rising dollar. The deficit and national debt stand at unprecedented levels.

The hedge fund industry is decimated — its model of flipping cheap borrowings into leveraged bets around the world has blown up — and one desperate, even contrite, former master of the universe has just sold a Rauschenberg for $9 million less than he paid in 2004.

People still have way too much debt, and the collateral for it keeps evaporating. They are angry. Civil unrest is stirring.

I ask you, Senator McCain, Senator Obama, do you still want the job?”

To finish me off, but give us some hope again, maybe a new WPA program, a New York Times Editorial: As China Goes covers how China is doing what we should be, and spending money to stimulate it’s own economy, and support it’s people, which seems like we need to emulate, and hopefully, will emulate soon, with new leadership:

“….To get China’s consumers to spend, the government will need to spend more at home, investing in public works projects and providing more social benefits — including health insurance and pensions — so its citizens don’t feel they have to save so much for a rainy day.

This is clearly in Beijing’s interest, though China’s leaders are still clinging to the old export strategy.

China is already feeling the impact of a slower world economy. Both economic growth and export growth have braked sharply. The slowdown threatens job creation, direly needed to absorb millions of rural Chinese seeking employment in the cities.”

If anything, all of this stuff I read, which helped my stomach churn, or made it stop, is meant to highlight just how interconnected our world is now - how different it was from 1929 or 1932, in that those systems that were put in place to prevent the Great Unraveling that his happening now, were meant to safeguard on a national level - but no one thought the world would be so interconnected then, as it is now.

And now, time for bed, again - if only for a few hours - till I wake up and read the news, all over again.

Meant to write about this earlier this morning - get a lot of my ideas while walking.   On the way to work I read Paul Krugman’s post  Let’s Get Fiscal where he said Alan Greenspan managed to replace on kind of financial bubble with another:

“…But the truth is that we were looking Japanese for quite a while: the Fed had a hard time getting traction. Despite repeated interest rate cuts, which eventually brought the federal funds rate down to just 1 percent, the unemployment rate just kept on rising; it was more than two years before the job picture started to improve. And when a convincing recovery finally did come, it was only because Alan Greenspan had managed to replace the technology bubble with a housing bubble.”

Started thinking about how we often have to approach a problem by multiple paths at the same time, but there are situations where we take a problem in one area and change it to another - but the problem isn’t really solved, just changed into something else.   I guess that makes Alan Greenspan more like a magician - abiet, a bad one.

But it also got me to think about how many other things get “solved” by “simplistic thinking” - and I need to applogise if my thoughts at the end of the day aren’t as clear as they were when it first occured.   At times, decisions are made on a strategic level with out really seeing and understanding what’s going on, and I’ve come across that recently with Social Media - CMO’s don’t understand Social Media all that well, and I suspect, Web Analytics, not much better.

What I’m trying to say, is that, at a strategic level, some decisions are made that don’t really make that much sense.   And that’s exactly the opposite of the sense I got when I read Paul Krugman’s article today.

In the thick of allowing the financial system to slide over the abyss, policy makers didn’t actually understand the implications of the decisions they made - some of it was idology, but another part was not really understanding fundamentals.

And in way, by saying “Alan Greenspan had managed to replace the technology bubble with a housing bubble ” much of the situation we’re now in is explained - it’s not a detailed explaination - but as a “handle” in order to get a grip on it - it works.

And it reminds me of a book I read a while back called Focusing by Eugene T. Gendlin

Gendlin wrote that sometimes, when we have a lot of complex feelings - there’s an overall one, that when identify it, acts as a “handle” - I think that’s what Krugman’s one liner of Greenspan does - it gets us to see what happened in a way that makes sense - and it’s exactly that kind of clearity that Greenspan and company, lacked - which is why they could rationalize the kind of stuff they did, and why the house of cards that was set up with international finance, fell apart.

But that’s just my take.

I’m going over to the Metropolitan tonight - and that always gets me in a good train of thought - perhaps I’ll have more to say about this later on.

About the New York Times article on Krugman Wins Economics Nobel

I have to say, this is great news and suggests. that on the international finance and economics, Paul Krugman, has been recognized as an thought leader - which is kinda timely, given that he’s been pretty much right on most of the major issues in the several years I’ve been reading his OPED Column in the New York Times.

I also think the Nobel Prize was given to Paul Krugman, to bolster his position, just now, with the Financial Meltdown that has occured over the last few months - and especially in the last month.

Congratulations, Paul, there’s no one that deserves this award more than you.

Final session at WordCamp NYC tonight, and I’m totally saturated, especially with the subject of the last post on security, plus, I did not cover Jen Simmonds who spoke about Video on Wordpress.

Jeremy started at NYT in 2006, in April 2006, started launching blogs at NYT, 152 at present. Active blogs are being written to once a month (65 blogs).

The idea is blogs that are presently not written to (sessions, like Tennis) are still valuable is something the speaker had to win support for.

When a stakeholder came to ask for a blog to develop content and concept, you end up being their therapist, it takes a lot of effort to explain blogs. There are about 500 bloggers at the New York Times, many can’t even operate the default dashboard.

There is a smarter way to deal with this; people need attention to grow, and giving them the right attention to grow.

The Dry Method - documentation on how to use the product could be put in a single place, so when dealing with stakeholders, you can interact at the most important level if their need.

90% of our time is based on administration with people and it seems to make sense to streamline it.

Communities that read a NYT blogs, a particular blogger, building tools for more meaningful discussions.

The Annotated ….. Post a entire speech, then have readers comment on what they read, then take a reference to the comment as a link back to the comment from that section.

Most blogs at the NYT today are at 2.5.

Paul Krugman’s blog is posting several times a week and his column is published twice a week, so a distinction between opinion vs commentary vs blogging.

We started an internal blog at the NYT called “On The Blogs” to distill information about blogging so it doesn’t need to be repeated over and over again, with every new stakeholder.

Well, I feel I have covered as much as I could today and iwabt to catch a SMX East party tonight, briefly, before heading home.

You know what, Bush Signed $700 Billion Dollar Rescue Bill After House Vote and meanwhile, Paul Krugman wonders Has the bailout already failed?; that’s fast, the bill isn’t even an hour old and it all ready sounds like it won’t fix that much, according to Krugman:

“..But I have a prediction: well before January 20, Congress will be asked to vote on bailout 2.0.”

So, is the next “buzzword” going to be “Bailout 2.0?  We’re haven’t even started Bailout 1.0.

Oh well.  Easy come, easy go, so they used to say.

Anyway, Here’s some Buzz charts from Radian6, though I haven’t got time to summerize anything - feel free to ask me for more clarification if you need it:

Above, the Number of Video Posts from YouTube about the Bailout.

Number of Twitter Posts - notice the patterns are different  based on Media they appear.

An interesting post from Jeff Jarvis today about The rise of the third estate and the need for Social Media participation and, by extension, Social Media Measurment- though what we have now, is still poor and ill suited for what’s required, moving forward.  According to Jeff Jarvis:

“…. No one’s in charge. I didn’t think that’d be worse than having the bozos we had in charge. But it is.

You’d think the one thing our politicians would be competent at is politics. But they couldn’t even count votes.

We knew the White House was a vacuum. Congress is a vacuum. Wall Street is lie. Detroit and the era it represents is dust. Journalism is sinking like a wet witch.

Who’s in charge? It’s falling to us, the people. We’re in charge. Problem is, we’re not ready. We’ve used the internet so far to organize some knowledge and yell at each other. We are just beginning to create the tools to organize ourselves. If only the meltdown of every authority structure could have waited a few years. Then again, necessity is the mother of organization. New structures don’t replace old structures while they’re still in place. New structures fill voids. And, boy, do we have some voids to fill.

We’re not ready, but then again, sometimes circumstances makes the person - maybe it’s time.   Now, I’m not really for or against the $700 Billion Dollar Bailout (see Bush Urges Congress to Pass Bailout in today’s New York Times) but I noticed how many people on Facebook mobalized to send the Congress representatives mesages against the bailout.

And Paul Krugman, more than anyone else, has been able to explain the $700 Billion Dollar Bailout like Where will the money come from and interestingly, in an analysis very similar to what Web Analysts produce for Traffic and Attribution, Krugman published this chart yesterday in a post on Politics of crisis

Just saw a video about a bunch on Economists at Princeton earlier this week - and it’s amazing how much Economic Analytics reminds me of Web Analytics.

Too bad what’s being analyzed is such a mess - The Economy

Again, I digress from Web Analytics, to talk about current events outside Analytics - but which Analytics could be applied to.

I am happy to see that Conseratives and Liberals, Right and Left, Republicans and Democrats, - no one likes the $700 Billion Bailout Plan proposed by the Bush Administration - even though everyone agrees on some type of radical action needs to be taken now.

Paul Krugman’s Cash for Trash OPED in today’s New York Times displays an understanding of the current financial situation and his ability to simplify it into 4 steps (almost like the 4 stomachs of Cows); by being able to conceptualize this Wall Street Meltdown into a series of steps with sequences he’s displaying the best skills of a Web Analyst - the ability to take complex information and synthesize it into a working model.

I believe, making sense of the data, what Paul Krugman does, is the one fundamental skill all Web Analysts need - the ability to use synthesis to take a complex situation and derive insight into it.

Even if you don’t agree with Paul Krugman the $700 Billion Bailout Plan if too flawed to pass in anywhere near it’s current form, at least you can get a sense of understanding, of empowerment even, by reading his OPED on Cash for Trash.

Here’s Paul Krugman’s 4 step analytics summary of current dire economic predicament the United States is in; Krugman thinks instead of bailing out Wall Street firms at step 4, with no accountability, we should be giving them more liquidity at step 2, in return for part ownership.

I just want to point out, again, the importance of forming a “working model” of a situation from which you can then preform analysis - if you can not conceptualize a problem, then any solution (ie: Secretary of the Treasury Paulson’s solutions, for example) are little better than throwing darts at the dart board (problem), and in the dark.

” … So let’s try to think this through for ourselves. I have a four-step view of the financial crisis:

1. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.

2. These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt. This problem is especially severe because everyone took on so much debt during the bubble years.

3. Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs.

4. Financial institutions have been trying to pay down their debt by selling assets, including those mortgage-backed securities, but this drives asset prices down and makes their financial position even worse. This vicious circle is what some call the “paradox of deleveraging.”

“….. The logic of the crisis seems to call for an intervention, not at step 4, but at step 2: the financial system needs more capital. And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.”

And, even arch conservative William Kristol does not like the Bush Administration’s $700 Billion financial Bailout Plan, and most conservatives don’t like it either - for much the same reasons that Krugman does not like it - it’s bailing out the wrong people and has no oversight previsions, making the Treasury Secretary too much power.  William Kristol writes in his New York Times OPED:

“… I’ve been shocked by the number of (mostly conservative) experts I’ve spoken with who aren’t at all confident that the Bush administration has even the basics right — or who think that the plan, though it looks simple on paper, will prove to be a nightmare in practice.”

Of course, Kristol wonder’s if Barack Obama or John McCain have the courage and exhibit the political will to oppose the $700 Billion Bailout Plan with the upcoming Presidential Election around the corner - what if, by opposing the $700 Billion Financial Bailout Plan the economy gets even worse, perhaps going into a deep recession, or even … a depression, then the electorate will blame what ever candidate voted against it.

On the other hand, were Barack or McCain back the current $700 Billion Bailout Plan and it fails quickly, blood would be on their hands, as well - and it could change the outcome of the election.

Using the Analytics approach I mentioned earlier in this post, the synthesis of information into a working model, so that you can then come up with insight and wisdom - the $700 Billion Bailout Plan looks too much like Authorization plan the Bush Administration floated just before it went to War with Iraq - the pressure to quickly “act” and vote - seems to be a familiar tactic that is used by this administration, to force people to act, often out of fear, against their own best interests - because they don’t realize, with the rush to act, what interests are actually being compromised.

We do need to do something quickly - but not that quickly - perhaps not even before the upcoming election .

We should, I think, work towards a solution and try to contain the damage on Wall Street and in the Global Financial Markets, but without giving the Treasury Secretary a blank check to do whatever he wants.

I also enjoyed reading Roger Cohen’s  Fleecing America in the New York Times OPED section tonight - Cohen brings another perspective - that United States is no longer the predominant Economic Super Power and that, primarily, under the Bush Administration, the bulk of what was once our Wealth, has moved off shore, to China, Russia and India. .. and the joke is on us - though Krugman was warning about this day for the last 5 years, last I counted - and the joke is on us - all of us - now that reality is setting in.

Not only that, but he somehow brings in sales for the disgusting artwork of Damien Hirst - the guy who puts dead large Sharks in formaldehyde, just like this one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; here’s part of a story about this artwork in Time Magazine in a story tiled “A Shark’s Tale”

Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, formally known as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, has been presented as a three year loan by its owner, the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, to no less a grand lady than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

And to think, this is the same Met whose trustees used to be touchy —granted, it was long ago — about admitting Picassos into the collection.”

In case you missed it, the age of America as the dominant financial power - gone.  Read this (you can agree with it, or not, but even if you don’t agree - then come up with something better to explain what’s going on):

“…. It’s that the Hirst bull market in the midst of the most convulsive week for financial markets since 1929 says something important about the global economy and America’s declining place in it. In case you missed it, Hirst sold 223 works last week for just over $200 million, well above Sotheby’s pre-auction estimate.

Oliver Barker, the auctioneer, identified the Russians as major buyers. Sotheby’s took a preview of the sale to New Delhi, where it received a number of pre-auction bids. Jose Mugrabi, a New York dealer, told my colleague Carol Vogel that Hirst is a “global artist” who can defy “local economies.”

For local, read American.

Anyway, a post script. In his piece for Bloomberg News that I’ve linked to above, Martin Gayford notes that the same Damien Hirst is asking 50 million pounds — $100 million — for his new diamond encrusted skull.

Sounds like the “diamond encrusted skull” of Damien Hirst won’t be sold to anyone around here - unless Treasury Secretary Paulson has his way and gets his and G.W. Bush’s  $700 Billion Bailout Plan approved by Congress - then maybe, maybe, some Wall Street Bank or Financial Instituion will have the money to throw at Damien Hirst and buy the diamond encrusted skull - and put it next to “The Bull” on Wall Street (Nah, maybe Goldman Sach’s will buy it with TaxPayer’s money and display the skull in their lobby.

But seriously, just about everyone thinks the $700 Billion Wall Street Bailout Plan is too flawed to pass in it’s current form.  Hopefully, the pressure to “do something now” will not be successfully exploited, as it has in the past, to stick us all with a bill we don’t want or, for a fact, need.

And while I’m at it - I said the other day I would provide an “influencer” list from Radian6 surrounding the the $700 Billion Bailout Plan - here it is.

And here’s a link to the entire file - knock yourself out - but note the Huffington Post seems to be on top of almost any political story, including this one.  Could it be the Huffington Post is “more influential” for this discussion on $700 Billion Dollar Bailout than the New York Times?  Beats me.

Finally, here’s a series of Topic Clouds from Radian6 on the $700 Billion Dollar Financial Bailout and how it varies by media:

Blogs only:

Blogs tend to focus on discussing the government “plan” to buy the distressed securities while letting the Financial Institutions that got us into this mess, off the hook.

Online Videos Only -

Online Videos focus more on the size of the Bailout - based on the Topic Cloud Meta-data:

Main Stream Media -

Twitter - Micro Media

Interestingly, the Topic Cloud for Twitter is much more useful than the others, from my point of view as it contains some of the TinyURL’s that are being shared online over the last day.  I think, and maybe Radian6 needs to figure out a way to do this - a way to work URLs into the Topic Clouds are needed, in general.

At least, here they happen, with Twitter, due to the nature of the content and the size of a micro post.

For example, the stories that are being talked about in Twitter are “Bush administration wants $700 billion for Wall St. bailout” with the “size” of the bailout being most notable - also the use of slang missing from the other Topic Clouds shown.

Forums

Well, that’s about it for this long, long post.

I expect Monday and Tuesday to be filled with a lot more turmoil as Congress and Online News Media take a closer look at the the $700 Billion Bailout Plan - but I hope we just don’t find ourselves back in 2003, when Bush called the shots and we ended up going into Iraq due to faulty information.

Paul Krugman has his doubts about it - No deal, on the main story  of a $700 Billion Is Sought for Wall Street in Massive Bailout, or 2,000 dollars for every person this year.

I’ve been getting a few readers who are critizing me for having poltical views and writing about them in a Web Analytics blog.  On the other hand, we’re whitnesses to  what appears to be the collapse of the global financial system.   Why would that be off limits to talk about in a Web Analytics blog?

Ok, so it it needs to be about Web Analytics, what are the influencers here - at least, let’s put Social Media on it, and that’s running now - it’ll be ready in a few hours.

One thing I noticed about Radian6, is that ranking news stories based on “Engagement” works better if the story is a few days old, as you need that much time to get a lot of comments on stories where a reader can leave comments.

It seems to me that we’re living in historic times, in a lot of ways, and it’s all of our responsibilities, I think, to process what is happening around us and comment on it, as we can.

More, later.

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Was trying to write a post last night (in between a FeedBurner problem which I fixed on this blog) and a software update, and I lost the post.  However, what I was seeking to prove was, using Radian6 , that much of the “noise” that’s dominating the conversation on the Presidential Election is coming from the Right.

The problem I found with Radian6 is that it can’t easily segment the voices and tie it back to intent - in Web Analytics, we can set up custom segments and follow the pathing though a site, in Radian6, the closest thing one can do is set up a “source filter” but it’s too cumbersome to do it for several sources of media -it’s almost as if the data from Raidan6 ought to be able to be Mashed Up, like stuff you can do in sites such as Many Eyes, etc.   But you can’t do that today.   Still, what I found was interesting - and got me thinking about how conversations are dominated.

When I thought about it, using Radian6, I found the Influentials for Sarah Palin, mostly on the Left and Center (see below); you would have thought the reverse, based on the news.  Could it be that whomever figures out how to dominate the conversations, shout the loudest, wins?

Yes, I wish Radian6 could tell me the “Who” behind what stories are going out - sure, it can give you the “influentials” (see below)

But it will still take additional work to find out (for example) how much of what is in Huffington Post is muddying up the waters or not.

With so much coming from the Huffington Post - I wonder if the real issues of “message” are the Conservatives and Neoconservatives are simply more focused, two dimensional stereotypes that are able to succeed with noise pollution, perhaps even using other liberal blogs in a viral way.

It’s almost as if what the Barack Obama really needs now is to focus the message - use the resources he has, just like the Republicans have learnt to do - to create message, just as they do.  For all the talk, I don’t see Democrats good at that - everyone is so busy wanting their own point of view, that’s my sense of it, that they don’t come together enough to decide what the message it - and how to create their own “white noise“, maybe.

It’s not about slinging more mud, it’s using the resources you have - it’s focusing the message and using all the blogs and Social Media to push it out, into Google, into other search engines and social networks - into Mainstream Media.

The Left is really, really good at that, dominating the conversation - they have gotten really good at making a few people look like 10,000 people when they want to - I believe that’s how they won in 2000 and 2004, and partly how they think they will win today, as I wrote in Real News vs. Perception - Paul Krugman’s Blizzard of Lies post (along with an expected October Surprise - how could there not be one or two of those? - they seem to happen, almost as if on cue, just before the election, usually to the incumbent’s party advantage).

Anyway, found this skit on Saturday Night Live last night about Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton pretty funny, and very accurate, actually.  So much of real news, thesedays, is fake news.   Maybe parody is the real news today, much of what we get from Mainstream Media is “noise”, often orchestrated.

Actually, there’s nothing really wrong with having orchestrated news as long as you can get the real news from somewhere else, and as a political party, you have a way to have more input into how news is orchestrated, so at least, people get a fair, balanced point of view; but they don’t, the Right knows how to manipulate the news much better than the left - that’s how they win, I’m convinced of it now, having thought about it a bit over the last 8 years - they find a way to control and dominate the conversations, and  then, they win.

So would it be fair to say, who ever defines and controls the conversations, politically, wins?  What do you think?

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