So I visited mecca today, aka, Lawrence, Kansas.

You know, the place that gave us Lawrence.com and made Rob Curley famous.

Innovation in Lawrence hasn’t stopped just because Rob left. Dan Cox and his team in Lawrence are doing a great things.

I learned stuff today about what they’re planning and how they’re working that left me truly impressed. These are smart guys who really get it. They are also realistic and not resting on the laurels of past Digital Edgies. Expect changes.

One of the things Dan and his team have launched recently is a product called Marketplace. I think it’s just smart. Simple, elegant, functional, and built with the small market advertiser in mind.

If I wasn’t impressed before, or not impressed with what Dan shared about the product’s performance, here’s a little transaction that knocked me off my feet:

My wife and I love mid-century modern furniture, so when I noticed a mid-century modern furniture store in town, I had to make time in my day to visit it.

After looking around, a woman approached me and I asked about a web site where I might be able to order stuff, and she gave me a card with a URL, www.blueheronfurniture.com. Then a gentleman approached me and we chatted a bit about my interest, and he handed me another card, saying something like, “rather than go to our web site, go here.”

On the back of the card was scribbled, “ljworld.com, marketplace, search for ‘furniture.’”

Can you imagine a local merchant recommending your IYP/directory product over their own web site?

To Dan and everybody in Lawrence, thanks for letting me poke around your shop today.

A couple of years ago, there were pundits galore spouting non-sense about how much “local” advertising Google was taking from newspapers.

But for anybody who actually did a local search on Google, it was pretty clear that all of those “local” advertisers where actually national plays trying to reach a local audience, or aggregators, or arbitrage sites. They were not newspaper advertisers, except in the real estate category.

Up until today, there seemed like plenty of opportunity for newspapers to us its superior local resources to protect and expand local advertising online. But Google has some up with a plan to answer the “feet-on-the-street” challenge. It’s kind of scary. They’re paying freelancers to take pictures of local businesses to add to Google Local, bridging the gap between impersonal self-serve and an initial human contact to make the introduction.

Also interesting is the payment scheme, It’s a $10 rate per business - but, note, it’s $2 for the content and $8 AFTER the business has verified the accuracy. Read: after we have established a real contact connection with the potential advertiser.

This currently appears to only be a US program, fyi. For those of you out there who claim to “own the channel”, think about this. Smart college kids eagerly showing your local advertisers all about the chance to get featured in a prominent spot on Google Maps, for free.

Rachel Sklar Jason Linkins has an issue with video classifieds.

Uhm…okay. We are drawn to movement–and shiny things! But aren’t classified ads supposed to be simple, and cost-effective? Once you factor in the expense of the video equipment, the matte paintings, the storyboards and craft services, hasn’t the cost-to-benefit ratio been blown out of the box?

She’s reacting to a piece in the LA Times that says, “Video classifieds are new … ”

Except they’re not.

Video classifieds pre-date web 2.0 by a good couple of years. Digital Media Classifieds, now Digital Media Communications, started turning recruitment ads into video six or seven years ago, or further back.

When I first heard about DMC, I was skeptical, but then we instituted the program in Ventura and quickly learned three things — Advertisers loved it, job hunters watched the videos, and the up sell created a significant revenue stream.

Video classifieds are a no-brainer, and letting users generate their own ads get in on the fun just makes a lot of sense.

Nielsen/NetRatings needs you to care about audited metrics. That’s how they make their money.

I’ve just never been convinced online advertisers care about audited metrics. In more than a decade of doing online publishing, I’ve never had an advertiser ask me or one of my reps for audited traffic numbers. I’ve only heard tall tales of national advertisers asking for such numbers.

Online advertising — and maybe all advertising — is about performance. Whether you’re selling CPC or CPM-based advertising, if you can’t deliver results commensurate to your characterization of your site’s performance, you won’t retain advertisers.

The trend in online advertising is more toward performance metrics every day.

That’s why Nielsen swamping out the imprecise page view measurement for the equally imprecise time-spent metric seems so very unimportant.

For Nielsen, it’s all about revenue — their revenue, not yours.

UPDATE: BTW, how meaningful is “time spent” in the age of tabbed browsing? I might leave a tab open for hours before going back to a page and re-engaging in whatever I was doing earlier.

Over the years I’ve read various quotes from Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster defending craigslist’s business practices.

Every time there is a phrase pops into my head: Master politicians. They are as good at spin as any inside-the-beltway veteran.

Let’s parse this quote from Buckmaster:

“Walled garden” is a misnomer — this term arose to describe AOL’s attempts to keep their subscribers from accessing the internet at large — we do nothing of the sort, and in fact encourage users to go elsewhere

Here Buckmaster dodges the question by reframing the its intended meaning. Clearly, the intent is to use “walled garden” as a metaphor for craigslist’s unwillingness to open its site to third-party aggregators. Whether or not the original meaning of the phrase is as Buckmaster says it is matters not. He’s clearly spinning here. Instead of dealing with the criticism, he’s recasting the phrase into terms he can easily dismiss.

Of course, craiglist users can go elsewhere. That’s not the point. The real question is, are the people who supply the (mostly free) content that make craigslist what it is afforded the opportunity to benefit from wider distribution of their content? In that sense of “walled garden,” craigslist is, in fact, a walled garden. No amount of spin changes that.

I don’t mind that craigslist is a walled garden. I just think Newmark and Buckmaster should be honest about it.

Likewise, I have never before heard the term “proprietary” applied to craigslist, given our well-known near-exclusive reliance on free software.

Again, the question is being recast into a meaning that Buckmaster can wave off. Whether craigslist runs on open source software is irrelevant to the question of whether its business practices are proprietary. In fact, it’s ironic that Buckmaster would proudly wave the open source flag while defending very Microsoft-like business practices.

Newmark and Buckmaster are free to pursue whatever business practices they like, but they should stop hiding behind the spin of “we’re just here to serve the users.”

While I’ve said before that newspapers should not blame Craig for their woes, and I’ve also said Craig gets far more blame than he should, craigslist is also clearly not a friend of local newspapers. The company is far from harmless; it’s just that casting craigslist as the main villian is rather foolish.

That said, for all of Newmark’s and Buckmaster’s spin about how they’re not greedy capitalist, how they exist to serve users, how they care about communities, how they regret the decline of journalism, and value solid journalism, etc. — what have they done to help newspapers? Where are the partnerships that might benefit both a local paper and a craigslist site?

Newmark and Buckmaster owe newspapers nothing. They are under no obliation to seek partnership opportunities — opportunities that could benefit local communities on multiple levels — I’m just asking the question because I just don’t buy the craigslist spin that the company is all that White Hat.

Greed isn’t always about money. Sometimes it’s about control and attention. I suspect that Craig Newmark and Bill Gates aren’t all that different inside.

Google is making a fairly significant change to how AdSense works for advertisers.

In short, Google is dealing with what is known as the “blind network problem” - advertisers pour money into AdSense, and they get a sense of how the campaign performed in aggregate, but they have no idea which sites did great, and which sites did poorly, or often, even which sites they ended up on (unless they specified via the relatively new site specific buys on AdSense.) This new set of reporting addresses this issue, allowing advertisers to determine where their campaigns are doing best, and then they can optimize accordingly.

This is significant for publishers, too. If you care at all about how much money you make from AdSense, you will want to figure out how to ensure your site is one of the better performing sites.

I also think it will help knock down some of the made-for-AdSense sites … assuming they’re not among the better performing sites, and/or advertisers have more control to ensure their ads don’t appear on smarmy-appearing sites.

New England media blogger Dan Kennedy takes issue with Ryan Sholin over this bit from Ryan’s now famous list of myths newspaper people believe:

It’s not Craig’s fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they’re looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.

And Dan writes:

Uh, actually, it is Craig’s fault. Not in the sense that Craig Newmark did anything anything wrong or evil when he created Craigslist. Rather, I’m talking about a simple reality — he and newspapers are in two different businesses, and his business has caused serious damage to the news business.

And I’m here to say, actually, it’s not Craig’s fault. It’s our own damn fault, and I may very well be one to share the blame as much as anybody. I’ve been around long enough to remember what things were like before Craigslist, and while back then I may not have had sufficient power to make a difference, I certainly remember how much newspaper classifieds sucked.

Let’s see, pre-craigslist:

• The only way to place a classified on a newspaper web site was to CALL the newspaper call center and talk with a live person. Forget about 7/24 online ordering.
• If you did place an ad, it wouldn’t appear online until the next day, after the print edition was out.
• The browse and search features initially sucked.
• While I personally don’t quibble with charging more for the online ad, you did have to pay more, which differentiates newspaper classifieds from Craigslist enough to be a factor (but as you can see from this list, just one of many, and I don’t think the deciding factor).
• You couldn’t add a picture, let alone expanded text.
• You couldn’t prefer to have people contact you via e-mail or a blind web form.
• You couldn’t place a risque ad.
• You couldn’t put the ad online for any longer than the print ad ran.
• If you were placing a help wanted ad, newspapers did little or nothing to help you reach qualified job candidates (that actually changed rather quickly in the newspaper game, but initially, it was pretty difficult, and then when it was possible, the additional charge was not competitive with Craigslist or even Monster)
• You couldn’t place your related web URL in the ad.
• Newspaper web sites were not reaching the young audience that was more interested in the kinds of things Craigslist made its name from, like rooms for rent and free stuff.
• You couldn’t place an online-only ad, either paid or, more importantly, for free.
• There has never been a social network associated with placing a classified ad on a newspaper web site (except for a couple of recent exceptions, such as Bakersfield.com).

So there were lots and lots of mistakes newspapers made in the early days of classifieds online, and then when Craigslist began to show some disruptive power, newspapers were slow to react.

That said, Craigslist is not the sum total of the newspaper industry problems. Criagslist actually fills a market need that was not being met at all by newspapers, and only where Craigslist is really, really popular, has it cost newspapers any significant revenue (such as San Francisco). For the most part, Craigslit has expanded the classified market place, not taken a slice of pie from newspapers.

So, sorry, Dan, it’s not Craig’s fault.