Jeff Jarvis suggests that AdAge is telling advertisers they have nothing to fear from their conservatism and myopia.

I'll be resuming posting on this journal in the near future. In the meantime, everyone should continue reading the often infuriating but more often wise postings at Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine. Hint: pay attention to what he has to say about media and ignore everything else.

Within the past 10 minutes I've visited two newspaper sites that served up pop-under ads (my popup blocker kills the popups).

Both of the pop-unders were for different varieties of what appears to be spyware masquerading as a recommended "registry cleaner" or some such.

Have these newspapers investigated these ads, or are they just happy to trash their readers' computers and their trust as long as they're paid for it? My guess is that they're purely in it for the money, which they need to finance their sanctimonious lectures about trust.

Whether my guess is right or wrong, many people will make the same guess, and conclude that the newspaper site is untrustworthy and to be avoided. But hey, making goal is more important.

We've never knowingly served up a pop-up or a pop-under and never will.

If we’re able to realize even a tenth of Yo Chicago’s audience and revenue potential, it will spawn imitators around the country. Our innovations will then come to seem commonplace. Many of them will vanish, as we imitate the imitators who find better ways of doing what we’re doing.

A year from now, even I will have forgotten many of the elements in the metropolis of “firsts" that Yo Chicago and its content represent. It’s difficult enough now to track the firsts, and even if it were possible to enumerate them all, there isn’t enough time to do so – or enough value in the effort. If you doubt that, just try describing a new city sewer pipe by sewer pipe, house by house, alley by alley, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Know us first and best by our ambition: we’re out to build a dazzling destination metropolis. It helps to think of the process we’re in as playing SimCity.

I like the SimCity analogy because it picks up some continuing threads in my life. There’s the Master’s in Urban Planning program that I began and didn’t finish, but that left me a lifelong disciple of Jane Jacobs and Saul Alinsky. There’s my son Jordan, who’s been a SimCity addict / adept for more than a dozen years. And, any game I’m in I’m in as much for the serendipity of it, and to pass the time, as for any other payoff that might result.

Think of Yo Chicago as a sim city. Thus far, we’ve passed some enabling ordinances and sketched out a plan to generate high revenues from low taxes. Until other revenues begin, we have a business that pays enough in taxes to pay the bills and provide funds for investment.

We’ve laid out some water and sewer lines, provided a lot of electricity, built some traffic and communications infrastructure, added a few parks, a decent library, some photo galleries, the plot plan for a public square, the foundation of a school …

We have to build wider before we can build higher. As we get further along in our metropolis, we’ll have some twisters, some lightning bolts, possibly even a meteorite impact. We’ll have to learn to cope with pollution – and hopefully with congestion – and will need to call in the fire and police departments on occasion. Some of our vacant lots will never be developed. Some of our buildings will become distressed and need to be demolished. Development will proceed in directions we don’t currently anticipate, and will cost more than we expected.

We have some proven guidelines to follow. We’ll begin to draw some tourists and some curiosity-seeking transients, and convert some of them into temporary or permanent residents before we can attract much commercial development.

We can maintain focus, because our competitors are languishing in their Detroit while we concentrate on building our New York.

New memes, on the surface, have a lot of explanatory power. If nothing else, they lend an air of authority to the people propounding them.

I have a bias, probably driven by my age, for older concepts. And so I was taken by the way that News Corp's Peter Chernin explained his company's Internet strategy to a crowd of analysts, as quoted by Ad Age magazine:

“We are a pretty simple company," he said. “We are trying to make content and then we want to be able to get it into viewers’ homes …"

That's our strategy too.

Just back from Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

Catching up on Web developments. The buzz about podcasting continues.

We didn't discuss podcasting in our New Homes content meeting, and I hope we never do. Discussion is the first step toward implementation.

I've yet to listen to a podcast that wasn't truly awful. The temptation is to believe that there must be podcasts out there that are worth listening to … what Wilde called (referring to second marriages) "the triumph of hope over experience." I've yet to find one.

My personal podcast pledge: never did it, never will.

We’re meeting tomorrow to begin outlining a content strategy for NewHomes1.com.

I’ve never been able to make any sense out of the content is / is not king debate that flits on and off the Web stage.

What I do know is that there are some things that people who are thinking about a new place to live in Chicago always seem to want more of.

They want to read more about neighborhoods and see more pictures, and they don’t want any of that to be the bland pap that the typical real estate section carries.

They love lists, especially if those lists are exhaustive, and if pieces of those lists are recast in fresh, off-beat and striking fashion. Some love highrises, some love lofts, some fixate on new construction and some on fantasy homes. Everyone wants to hear more of the story, from more viewpoints, than real estate people want to express.

Andrew Duncan e-mailed earlier today that, for us to be successful, “there needs to be a ton of pages available, and not a skimpy ton, but a hefty TON." He has that right.

We’re going to start our march to dominance with content.

Great content costs. It doesn’t come easily. It will build an audience that draws more voices that want to be heard on how they live and want to live in Chicago. Advertisers will want to participate in that conversation.

We don’t expect any of our competitors to work as hard as we do at building an audience by giving people what they want.

Newspapers urgently need to begin rebuilding their business models to reverse the decline in circulation and print revenues, and build online revenue streams that are robust enough to support the journalistic enterprise.

Few would disagree with any part of that thesis – but there's no consensus on where and how to begin, and much (misguided?) skepticism about whether the resulting revenues will be adequate to support journalism as we've known it.

We believe that, with committed leadership, a willingness to invest, and the right set of Internet-based tools, newspapers that can even dimly envision a new business model can substantially increase their print revenues and readership in the short term, and buy the time and resources they need to build online revenues sufficient to support aggressive, independent journalism.

We've spent the past year building that tool set, with an obsessive focus on the evolving needs and wants of readers and the people and businesses who want to connect with them. If we get those pieces right, there should be newspapers who will adopt our tools.

We concede that many, perhaps most newspapers may line up with Bush 41 in being willfully blind to "the vision thing." Too busy navel-gazing, as the blog pundits contend? Whatever. We've met some of those papers, and they're not our market.

A few newspapers have begun using our new tools. They're not buying into our vision, just using us based on our track record of performing reliably and well over the years for our major newspaper customers.

While we're waiting for our "build it and they will come" (yup, that's about it) business plan to prove itself out, we're going to use our tools to build revenues for our own publication and our own Web site.

This site will tell the story, with all its twists, turns and conflicts, of how we use our HomePagesUSA tools to grow revenues for a small niche publication (New Homes Magazine) and its previously neglected companion Web site (NewHomes1.com).

Our goals for the next 18 months

• Grow New Homes Magazine print revenue by 50%
• Develop the largest online real estate audience in Chicagoland
• Achieve the highest real estate revenues of any site serving Chicagoland

Our starting assets

• Leadership that's committed to the goals.
• A talented, opinionated staff that's unafraid to express their views.
• A willingness to invest for the future with no guarantee of returns.
• New Homes Magazine

, a free, 10,000 circulation, 10-times a year tabloid focused on new residential construction along Chicago's lakefront. 2004 revenues: $474,000

• NewHomes1.com. Unique visitors for the twelve months ending March, 2005: about 26,000. Revenues for the same period: next to nothing.
• HomePagesUSA.com. An easy way for almost anyone to publish almost anything instantly on the Web and for newspapers to include print and online distribution.
• Online competition that is generally lame, lazy, slow-moving, stale, boring, manipulative and fragmented.

Our longer-term goals

• Leverage our audience and customer relationships into much broader content areas beyond real estate, or
• Better yet, be bought out. We've run newspapers in the past and they're hard work and not much fun.

Along the way, we'll tell you about our unfolding vision, how we're executing on it, how it looks to and impacts the people involved in the process, what it costs and what it produces. We'll report our successes and our failures, our agreements and disagreements.

Welcome, my friends, to the show that hopefully ends.