Martha Stewart, famous for her insider trading and trend-setting for the bourgeoisie, today took a whack at bloggers.

Who are these bloggers? They’re not trained editors and writers at Vogue magazine. I mean, there are bloggers writing recipes that aren’t tested, that aren’t necessarily very good or are copies of everything that really good editors have created and done. Bloggers create kind of a ‘popularity‘. But they are not the experts and we have to understand that.

Some bloggers are annoyed by Martha’s sneering.

I think Martha’s gotten at least one important think right. She’s right that many bloggers are not ‘trained writers.’ But she’s wrong that many bloggers are not experts. On the contrary, it’s the journalists who are not experts… they’re magpies, hopping from topic to topic as directed by their editors. Meanwhile, many bloggers are experts, writing daily about the same topic, a topic they’re passionate about, a topic they actuallyspecialize in for their day jobs. Which makes bloggers’ insights and questions far more important than those pushed out on deadline by the average dilettante journalist, trained or not.

Over beers at Steel String Brewery in Carrboro tonight, my friend Michael Batuzich came on fire.

“Here’s what Barack Obama should be saying to the Republican members of Congress who want to ‘negotiate.’

You want to negotiate? Sure, let’s negotiate. Here’s what our side wants.

First, give us the $10.10 minimum wage.

Next, give us immigration reform.

And give us food stamps.

Give us our judicial nominees.

Give us campaign finance reform.

Give us single payer health insurance.

Give us Glass Steagall.

And acknowledge climate change.

Finally, shimmy to the top of the Washington monument and shout three times: ‘the Democrats are the majority party, having won the majority of votes in the House, Senate and Presidency in the last election!’

Let’s put all those things on the table, and we’ll be happy to negotiate.”

Amen.

With 7600 square feet of new office space, we’re puzzled about where to put some of the desks. (Staring Martin and Bruno, shot with Martin’s GoPro.) Click a couple of times and you’ll get the gif below to animate.

There’s been lots of talk about responsive design for websites. If you’re not following the discussion, here’s the gist of the argument for responsive design: publishers should offer readers the same digital content everywhere, just repackaged and reformatted for different devices.

Google is pushing responsive design hard, arguing that ‘optimized’ sites will serve readers better by offering a uniform content experience. (Cynically, one might argue that Google has a strong interest in pushing publishers to push the same content out across multiple devices in various formats so the task of processing and presenting this information is simpler for Google if it’s not different across multiple devices.) The responsive design approach is cheaper for everyone too, since it means publishers don’t have to rethink their content strategies for each new device, just the formatting.

Now advertisers are beginning to explore ways to make their ads responsive. Build one ad, then tweak it automatically so it can run on a half-dozen form factors — desktop, iPad, mini, iPhone, XX and other tablets. You can see an example of one such solution here:

The idea of responsive ads seems silly to me. Imagine trying to build an ad that would “resize” automatically to run on TV, radio, glossy magazines and newspapers. In theory, this might be possible. But this strategy would result in least-common-denominator content, probably just chunks of black and white text. Though even this dumbed down ad wouldn’t work on radio, so maybe a transmitter could be constructed that would turn “responsively” this text into morse code.

Trying to resize both editorial and advertising reflects a giant failure of imagination. Just as the best web sites live and breath in the many dimensions that were unimaginable in the monochrome and two dimensional world of newsprint publishing, the best tablet and mobile sites someday will embody dimensions and colors and experiential textures that aren’t imagined in today’s world of desktop publishing and reading.

By definition, the best ads won’t be responsive; the best content and ads will be unfungible across devices because they’ll embody features that are unique to each tier of device. With this philosophy in mind, Blogads teams are busy working on new ad units that will be uniquely effective on tablets, rather than just resizing versions of desktop ad units. Watch this ever-mutating space to see what we come up with.

We helped execute some of the first ads of the 2016 campaign last week. These ads, run by EMILY’s List on Feministing, were promoting the potential Presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton (or some other woman.)

Turns out some Tea Party groups are running ads too, albeit against a potential 2016 candidate.

The most exciting thing about building a new tool is watching how various creative people decide to use it. Inevitably there are lots of unexpected behaviors and unanticipated idioms. That’s the case with tool that some of our team members are building called Pullquote, which makes it easy to link to a paragraph or idea. Below I’ve documented a few of these different use cases. (Shout if you’d like to help test drive the beta version of Pullquote.)

You may have heard that we’re putting some energy into Pullquote, a new tool that makes it easier for you to link to a paragraph. Let’s say you’re reading a long article and find some key nugget in the 17th paragraph. Rather than tweet a link to the whole article and suggest people “look near the bottom of the page,” you can now use Pullquote to direct readers directly to that paragraph. (Or sentence or even word.) This isn’t for everybody — mostly likely best for power-critics and people who like to share a lot on Twitter. Head over and join the beta if you’re interested.

Buried inside Ken Auletta’s recent New Yorker profile of Henry Blodget, there’s an ex-ray of the skeleton of Business Insider‘s P&L.

Six years on, the site projects $9.3 million in ad revenues for 2013. (Update: Henry B. wrote overnight that this figure was for 2012; I guess Auletta was interviewing Henry B in 2012, and their fabled fact checkers didn’t adjust the “this year” in Blodget’s quote.)

“That’s tiny. Ad rates are low. It’s tough to monetize,” says Blodget.

According to Comscore, BI has 9 million monthly US readers. (24 million global according to Google Analytics.) The rest of BI’s revenues (projected to total $11 million in 2013) come from conferences.

Anyone know how many editorial, sales and/or tech staff BI has these days? (Update: overnight Henry B. writes “~100.”)

Sick of copy/pasting text, then going back to grab the URL? Tired of linking to articles, then hoping people read far enough to find the sentences that matter? Have you ever just wanted to link directly to a sentence or paragraph on a web page? If you’ve got these itches, we’d value your feedback on Pullquotes, a side project some colleagues have created. Apply for an invite to become a pullquote slinging, micro-bookmarking pioneer at the bottom of the site.