Parick Hoffman

If there’s one thing Mitt Romney and President Obama can agree on, it’s how much they can’t stand the press.

I watched in amazement on Wednesday as Romney’s press wranglers tried to physically stop reporters from asking questions at a rope line in St. Petersburg.   Even a Secret Service agent jumped in, telling them to “come off” the line.

Since when did covering a meet-and-greet become a federal offense?

Were campaign officials afraid that the candidate would say something off-message that they would then have to defend for the next news cycle?  The words “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order” – Romney’s dismissal of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden — are probably still ringing in the ears of campaign staffers.

Square Martin Media

Are you feeling forlorn on Facebook?

Wish more people would pay attention to your status updates?

Are you waving and no one’s watching?

Well, your troubles are over. Now there’s a handy-dandy way of getting more traction for your posts, photos and paraphernalia.

You just have to pay for it.

Facebook, reports Tech Crunch, is testing a “highlight” option in which you pay a few bucks to have more friends see one of your posts. Turns out a measly 12 percent of your friends see your average update now.

At the moment, only a small portion of Facebook users have this pay-to-play option, but there’s a free version to explore whether folks are drawn to this feature.

With Facebook preparing for its monster IPO on Friday, this obviously has implications for Mark Zuckerberg’s bottom line. But I’m more interested in what it says about us.

Via Flickr user Muffet

People hate ads, with two exceptions: 1) If we don’t hate a particular ad, or 2) If we are being paid to show someone else the ad.

We hate ads so much that we’ve made ad avoidance an art. A tool that facilitates skipping ads is now part of a standard cable sign-up package. We’ve built software that removes ads from webpages. Ads are used as a punishment: Spotify and Pandora will intersperse their music offerings with ads unless you pay them not to. Their ads might as well be cobbled together like ransom notes out of various typefaces from the newspaper. Not that anyone buys the newspaper any more. Unable to figure out how to turn a profit and with digital ad revenue stumbling (at least for the Times), the newspaper industry is evaporating.

We keep trying to convince ourselves that the flexibility and interactivity of the web will save advertising. That we can gimmick our way to profitability. Pop-ups, pop-unders, overlays, interstitials. Like the straight man in a Three Stooges movie, advertisers are in a constant state of realizing they’re being had. “Hey, wait just a minute…” But the barrel of gimmicks isn’t bottomless.

Image created by a Photoshop genius at PandoDaily

Regular readers will know that PandoDaily has been somewhat, ah, skeptical of Bravo’s new “Silicon Valley” reality show, which begins shooting next month. “Snobs!” cried one critic. “Wait until you know more details before you judge!” wailed…well, actually, the exact same critic who in no way has been lobbying for a cameo on the show.

And, sure enough, now that said details have begun to emerge, it appears we may have entirely underestimated the legitimacy of “Silicon Valley.”