Important Questions
Now that CBO Director Peter Orszag’s designation as the new administration’s OMB Director is official, we can get down to the really important questions. For example: Wither the CBO Director’s blog? Acting Director Bob Sunshine has a post up saying goodbye to Orszag, but no word on the future, perhaps because he’s only the acting director. And will OMB have a blog?
I raise these issues somewhat in jest. But also in earnest. The CBO blog was, in my view, an excellent idea. Blogs have a reputation for being full of fluff and trivia, but they’re actually an ideal publication outlet for hyper-earnest, incredibly boring reports that are of very little interest to anyone. Obviously, the highest traffic is going to go to sites that write about stuff people do find interesting. But it’s not the CBO’s fault that its products don’t attract widespread interest — it’s inherent to their mission. And the genius of online publishing is that there’s no problem with being unpopular. The nature of publishing is that the higher your fixed costs of production and distribution, the more important it becomes to be able to move a large volume of product so as to spread the fixed costs out. But online your fixed costs are essentially zero. What’s more, putting your stuff on a blog — even if it’s mostly links to PDFs and stuff — can render your material much more salient to Google, thus meaning that that minority of people who are interested in what you’re doing have maximum chance of finding it.
17 Responses to “Important Questions”
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November 25th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Does GAO have a blog? If any government organization should have a blog, its’s GAO.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
For example: Wither the CBO Director’s blog?
I don’t see any reason to.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
What I remember from Orszag’s blog is that at first he would have the entire weblink address on display for his hyperlinks which wasn’t very aesthetically pleasing or the common practice of blogs, although it advertises to the reader where the hyperlink is linked to.
After criticism from certain quarters – notably Matt’s blog – he learned on the fly how to hide the web address and quickly changed course. Hopefully Obama’s economic team has learned from the mistakes made by our government during the past 8 years.
November 25th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I disagree. The marginal costs of distribution are nearly zero with a blog, not with a printed publication. The variable costs of the resources need to produce the specific content are hard to characterize, but probably equivalent in terms of labor.
The fixed costs borne by the publisher are much lower for a blog -basically a PC and an internet connection. The total fixed costs of a blog are… who knows… they include the cost of blogging sofware and the internet, but those are in the short run fixed costs and borne by third parties or public. Most of the fixed costs of print are borne by the publisher, or are converted to a flow rental cost for the equipment.
November 25th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
One thing for sure is that this blog is a very serious waste of time.
November 25th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Heywood is it that time of the month again??? Huh?
Orszag probably had some assistant or techy help him with his blog. He is sort of young so maybe he did know how to do it. It displays a nice temperment of transparency.
Then you have Bush in his debate with Kerry talking about the “Internets” or ex-Senator Stevens discussing the “Intertubes.”
November 25th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Just think of the awesome name he could give his blog: Good Day Sunshine
November 25th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Sorry if I was unclear Peter K., I’m referring to the blog named Yglesias.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
The CBO blog was, in my view, an excellent idea.
There was a good post in October punching holes in the idea that a cap-and-trade emissions policy or carbon tax is likely have a large effect on greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:46 am
One small point: Don’t use PDF on the web. PDF is intimately tied to dead trees. This is fine for a document that you intend to put on dead trees, but for web publication, a format that forces you to chop up your document into chunks the size of a standard-issue slice of dead tree is unhelpful at best – even on top of the processing and memory requirements of PDF reading software and the inconvenience that causes for the end user.
If I never have to scroll past the bottom margin of one “page” and the top margin of the next “page” to read one continuous document online ever again, I’d like that just fine.
Electronic documents allow you to break up your document into chunks that *make sense*, not just chunks that are of a certain size; furthermore, most margins are a waste of screen space in an electronic document. (You don’t need them to be there to prevent a misaligned page trimmer from slicing off part of the text, and nobody’s going to scribble in them.) Different media demand different approaches, so don’t chain your electronic document readers to standards that made sense for dead trees.
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