Jason Calcanis sells ads readers can comment on--how cool is that?
Former Gridskipper editor Andrew Krucoff has his say about Gawker Inc. and that ad fracas: " I tried, I really fuckin' tried but the service journalism aspect of travel writing bored me to no end."
Andy Baio sleuths out Overture's new AdSense-like product. Or not?
Steve Yelvington asks about RSS feeds: "Who owns the feeds, and what can be done with them?"
This is a great question, especially as search engines and newsreaders begin to think about seeking advertising for categories--like automotive and financial--that have been high-value customers for media companies--after all, they would profit from repackaging the headlines and digests (or whatever) from other sites.
There are no licensing models in place yet to address this kind of redistribution, though most media folk recognize that the days of the remix are here to stay.
For media companies releasing headlines and digests as a way to build traffic, the focus has been on framing use by individual consumers (and bloggers). I'm expecting that additional models of reuse and repackaging for smaller players--like bloggers with over X level of traffic--will emerge as well--and they will have subscription fees, micropayments, or other types of value/revenue exchange attached.
VC/Technology Investor Bill Burnham takes a hard look at where AOL is today:"With management in denial, broadband competitors stealing their high-end customers and competitors like NetZero stealing their low-end customers, AOL is clearly getting ripped apart."
Burnham wonders if AOL can successfully copy Yahoo and thinks...not.
(Via Internet Stock Blog)
Robert Lindsay had the best experience when he called Technorati about a problem--and they treated him like a king. (Via Blog Herald)
If you think this post about Technorati's great service isn't going to populate all over the blogosphere, think again--we're in a world where the best outcomes--and the worst--can make lots of noise.
--So this post made me smile.
Kate: "I worship Baklava. It's a religion that pays off nicely. Oh sure, it doesn't explain the injustices in the world, nor does it provide any moral compass. But you know what? It doesn't matter because you're eating Baklava."
And guess what, it has no calories.
Seth Godin:"Because once companies increase their conversion efficiency, they'll probably be willing to pay 400% more than they pay now for the right words."
(Short version: He lost his keys and the advertiser didn't deliver on the keyword click. Led to big insights.)
Search Engine Blog talks to Topix.net founder Rich Skrenta. Rich emphasizes that Topix strives to automate editorial functions in categorizing stories.
Recognizing named entities challenges the machine first to be able to tell whether the story cites the movie star or the ordinary person with that name, and then to understand whether the story is actually about the person or just mentioning him or her in passing (this is a big flaw in Google news alerts.)
Rich also talks about dmoz, the open directory, and says that "while directories were very interesting in the mid '90's, keyword search has eclipsed them as the main ways consumers find information on the Internet."
And my favorite quote from Rich: "Search is a first step to full utilization of a world-sized corpus of encyclopedic information, combined with the full value that community participation in the content & commerce process can provide."
A good read.
Skyblog: Live Journal-ish, en francais (Via Code Consult)
Paid Content: Staci Kramer says NYTimeser John Markoff's story favored his podcasting pals.
Two Way Web: Dave Winer fisks Markoff and writes some great, smart stuff.
EContent: Steve Smith's smart story on how search is shifting user behavior, traffic and ad revenues.
What's on Tonight? Allen Weiner asks why the iPod can't be a content management device.
BuzzHit: Tony Gentile notes HotJobs now has RSS feeds for saved searches. How about MSFT, he asks? Scoble says checking(at 3 am!)
Snarkmarket: Will Jarvis be the Times' new omblogsman?
Reading Cory Doctorow's account of Ben Hammersley's role in setting the Sunday Observer (UK) up with a new blog--and an accompanying complement of podcasts, moblogs, full text RSS feeds, open comments and delicio. us bookmarks--all super cool stuff--reminds me that it only takes one or two people of the *right* people to make a difference.
Here, it's tech god Ben Hammersley, who's made all the practical magic happen, and Neil McIntosh, who's the other blogging guy in the picture--and then--I suspect-- Guardian new media guy Simon Waldman, who's made the Guardian into a digital media showcase, much to the readers' benefit.
And, most excitingly, it looks like the Guardian is prepared to make all their work on the Observer blogs and related folksomonies etc. truly open source--to release the templates and the code so they can be used elsewhere.
This is a very bold step for a media business and a wise business decision--can't wait to see what it spawns.
Imagine the impact if the Washington Post, the NY Times, or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example, took some similar steps.
Hey, so here's a radical notion.: WHY DON'T THEY?
Remember, small is beautiful. (This picture got5.5 million hits in one week!)
Link cosmos here.
The super-fantastic blogger, the Manolo, the man with the fetish for the feets, has been immortalized in the funny papers.
We bow in homage:
It's NYC. You're an up and comer with alot of moxie (ironic,of course) and you get a chance to helm your very own Gawker Media site.
This is as big a break as getting accepted to grad school at Wharton, maybe bigger, and even your parents have to be thrilled.
But merely days after your new site launches--with lots of media attention, of course, the one big advertiser pulls out. The money she's gone, nada, zip.
What happens then?
Does big boss scream or hand you back your job?
Well, if you're Gridskipper editor Andrew Krukoff and GawkerMedia head Nick Denton, the correct answer is you tough it out.
"We'd rather lose the occasional advertiser than the character that attracts the audience in the first place. If an advertiser wants a safe environment, there are thousands of tired media outlets to choose from,"Denton told PRWeek, proving, once again, that experience matters and cojones count.
And guess what? They got another travel advertiser.
Jason Tester's got a big jones for flickr and here's what he has to say: "In the past week I've lost a fair bit of sleep to the year-old Web photo community Flickr, going from about 4 photos to almost 800 in just a few days. I'm not entirely what prompted my change of heart, since I always claimed that I could get into carrying a camera and taking photos but the photo-sharing and -tagging genes were just not in me. Regardless of what got me started with Flickr, I've been going non-stop. During the times I've come up for air from uploading, tagging, and exploring I've made some observations about the service and the interactions it facilitates."
Jason goes on to describe the fun of tagging and commenting on photos and the sense of community--and fun--it creates--but doesn't tell us his flickr ID.
Seeing his photos would have been cool.
Rafat Ali asked Jim Kennedy for more details on the AP's intent with RSS feeds--as in, are they trying to create a news portal (The answer is no.) Jim responded(in part):
"It's an experiment right now to explore the impact on traffic to the news pages we host for member newspapers and broadcasters. We have a service called Custom News, which provides hosted national and international news pages for hundreds of member sites. These RSS feeds click through to those pages.
If a user picks up one of the feeds from a member site, clickthroughs will always go to that member's version of the hosted pages. "
More here.
Demonstrating that highly intelligent grown men of the writerly persuasion can never resist a chance to impress one another with witty writing and nit-picking minutae (also known as micro-content) blogger/ czar Jeff Jarvis and NYT exec editor Bill Keller are on round three of their email exchange.
A couple more rounds and these two will decide to write a book together, no doubt.
Meanwhile, the closing exchanges have warmed up.
Keller has progressed from "I hope you will accept this in the same constructive spirit as your open letter. And if not, I hope you will have countless hours of fun fly-specking it for evidence of bad attitude and hidden agendas.
Best regards, Bill Keller" to
"Obviously if I thought blogs should be disdained or dismissed, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But I gotta go. Best, Bill "
and Jarvis has moved from "So how about it, Mr. Keller? We'll bring the bagels, you bring the sandwiches" to
"Finally, various commenters have pointed out that you would make a great blogger. They're right. In fact, because you are writing these emails with full expectation that I'm going to post them, I could argue that you are blogging. Welcome to the club, Bill. best, jeff"
Sweet and heart-warming, don't you think? Definitely a big step forward for both blogging and mankind, oops. I meant the news media.
AP story today about a Canadian couple who perished in the tsunami, but whose recovered camera shows the tsunami's approach.
John and Jackie Knill, who took the photos.
Their last shot.
Consultant and food blogger Elise Bauer's got an analysis of blogging tools going that considers the degree to which Google spiders pages associated with certain weblog tools, with an eye to establishing market share for each tool. Elise's list follows(detailed analysis at her site):
Two points that caught my attention:
Speculation continues.
flickr is so cool and has so much buzz-- the service currently has more than 250,000 members and 3.5 million photos on its website.
Om says: "Most of the deal-related chatter is coming from blogging world insiders who have said that Flickr might have inked the papers last week, but Yahoo is holding off on an announcement until March 1."
More here and here.
Susannah Gardner interviews full-time (and six-figure?) Australian blogger Darren Rowse.
Those who want to go fulltime with blogging, take note: "I currently have a goal of posting 25 posts per day 7 days per week. Of course this is across 17 blogs, some of which I post multiple posts per day, others I would only post on a couple of times per week. I don't always meet this goal (although some days when I'm on a roll I can do much more than that) but its what I aim for. I figure if I want to make a full time living from blogging then I need to put significant levels of effort into it. If I post for a full year at this rate I'll have added 9125 pages which gives every opportunity for someone to find it using search engines."
Can anyone say New Grub Street?
(Via Micropersuasion)
Commemorating a friend's bloganniversary, Anil writes about blogging friends: "Why are the first real posts on Ernie's and Mena's blogs both about going to Vegas with your parents. I think this either says a lot about my circle of friends or what it took to have a good, funny blog a couple of years ago."
Rich Skrenta reports that AOL Local will be use Topix.net headlines on their new local search service.
Susan sez: IMHO, Topix is a small company that is doing both the technology and the business right. Rock on, guys!
The Associated Press has quietly added RSS feeds to their corporate site. This is the first time AP stories are available directly on the web in RSS (as opposed to running through Yahoo News.) The seventeen feeds include Top News, US, World, Business, Sports, and Technology--and are headlines/digest feeds available for non-commercial use. Right now the feeds go to generic AP story pages. According to VP/Director of Strategic Planning J im Kennedy, in time they plan to implement geotargeting to direct clickthrus to local/regional members who use the Custom News service.
Some terms worth noting in the language of the redistribution rights:
AP has been hard at work studying the next generation of digital and social media--this is the first tangible product of those efforts.
(Disclosure: I have consulted for the AP.)
Update: Some folks are wondering, l ike Jeff, if AP is planning to link their stories through news partners--the answer is yes.
Paul Kedrosky: "Dave Jung says his ical calendar page is newly getting pinged like mad by a Googlebot. " Is a calendar beta next on the roadmap?
IRE: New Jersey has over 200 toxic waste sites, but is that an excuse for building schools on them?
Traffick: Wishlist for NYT's About.com--Peter Horan, take note.
South Korea's Ohmynews turns 5ive--oops, I mean five. (Via Lasica)
Richard MacManus on About.com vs.Kottke: "As a writer whose goal is to (very soon) earn a decent living via blogging, I wonder how viable the 'work for peanuts' approach of About.com is nowadays."
Silicon Beat: Craig Newmark intends to support citizen journalism. But how?
My brother and his family are here from New York for a couple of days. This is the first time they've been back to the Bay area in a while, and this time they have kids with them, my nephews, ages 6 and 11.
Tonight we went to Saravana for vegetarian Indian food; tomorrow I'm taking the kids either to Winchester Mystery House or over to Santa Cruz to see the surfers (and walk the boardwalk).
Back to the same old on Thursday.
Howard Rheingold's piece on education and mobile computing and Professor Bryan Alexander caught my attention in a big way.
Some quotes:
"Blogs and wikis were yesterday. Moblogging is today. Tomorrow, Alexander anticipates the arrival of sensor networks, digitally tagged objects and places, augmented reality, location-based knowledge, and something Alexander calls "swarm learning."
"Bryan Alexander asks us to start by understanding that mobile machines are by their nature intimate media -- they are not just untethered from the desktop, they are carried in the pocket, held in the hand, rested on the lap. Because of this intimacy, "emotional investments increase," Alexander claims, citing research to that effect: "Michele Forman, the 2001 National Teacher of the Year in the United States, notes that her high-school students became very attached to their wireless laptops. They significantly increased their personal writing and composition. Such machines become prosthetics for information, memory and creativity. Are we ready to respond to such attitudes from IT staff, instructors, and participants in the physical and information architectures of campus spaces?"
"The nomads arrive suddenly, surprising the urban population and appearing without warning in city streets, markets, libraries and homes. Kafka?s tale focuses on the incomprehension of the city-dwellers, as well as on their dogged willingness to attempt living life as if the nomads simply weren't there. The story charts their progressive decay and their slipping grasp on reality while the nomads build a new civilization literally in their front yard. It's a very funny story, in Kafka's unique way, but of course it's also a cautionary tale, especially for those of us in higher education. At colleges and universities around the world, the nomadic swarms are already arriving."
We are our mesh, the nomadic swarms. Neat. Brilliant.
Jason Kottke of kottke.org has quit his day job and will work on the site (and related endeavors, one assumes) full time. The guy's asking for a little money; I gave--and I hope it's a great success--kottke rocks.
Russ Beattie's having a bit of fun: "Before the About.com announcement, I would have said around $250 million. That's a wild-ass guess, I have no idea. 7 million blogs times $820,000 apiece would be $5,740,000,000,000 which is probably a bit high. But now I'm thinking Six Apart guys are going to announce a run up to an IPO any day now, and then get scooped up by one of the Internet giants soon thereafter: Yahoo, Google, MSN, or AOL."
LOL.
Delight might be the best word to describe my feelings on clicking into New West, the just launched regional web site operated by former Industry Standard publisher Jonathan Weber. Positioned as the voice for the West (meaning Missoula, Boulder, Salt Lake and other parts West, as opposed to California, Oregon and Washington, I guess), this site has the slicks of a top quality regional magazine (think the old Texas Monthly) but is built on a blog platform (with what looks like wonderously detailed meta-tags and super clean CSS, not that I know, really.)
Visitors can sign up to become citizen journalists, and a magazine is promised in 2006 (nothing like well-thought out plans for world domination.)
The site looks well architected, with areas for policy as well as lifestyle--and an animal section(hope Pam Houston is there with her dog.)
And the citizen journalism intro is no slouch:
"Citizen Journalism is an integral part of what we're trying to do here at New West. The idea stems from our philosophy that an educated, engaged citizenship will be instrumental in this evolution of the Rocky Mountain West we're always talking about. The idea is that you as the reader have access to much of the information that we as journalists do and there is no reason you can't be a writer, a reporter, a pontificator or a blogger yourself. By empowering the public with a medium to speak their minds, or report on the world around them, we are hoping to expand the media offerings here in the West. Similarly, in a world where sense of community is waning, we also want to create online hubs where readers can foster a neighborly discussion of the issues at hand, all the while connecting themselves with each other and their sense of place."
So, readers who sign up can comment on specific pages--ie they become "citizen journalists" by joining the story--and while they own their words, New West has the right to use them anywhere they want--for free.
Not everything is working yet, but this looks like an exciting launch--and an integration between the old and the new.
Cool.
(Via Buzzmachine)
Update: How could I forget to note that New West was the title of the illustrious journal founded by journalism great Clay Felker?
In true mining town tradition, Weber's site's name stakes his claim.
Good suggestions on being a better blogger, useful for newbies and veterans alike.
For more on the following points, dig into Brigg's blog:
1. Read more blogs.
2. Use a link blog.
3. Make sure your blog has a feed.
4. Find a niche - but evolve it.
5. Link, link and comment.
6. Keep notes on everything.
7. Make sure your presentation is good.
8. Be interesting, even controversial, but not stupid.
9. Be funny.
10. Stick at it.
Everyone's probably seen the news that Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide on Sunday. Thompson was one of those writers who changed my consciousness at at early age--as one of the leading practicioners of the "new" journalism, he showed me what non-fiction writing could do at a time when I was just starting to put words to paper.
His gonzo journalism also provided huge entertainment value--to me, a kid from the suburbs, this far-out character's brilliant writing suggested there was a lot I had to learn--if only I made the effort to look outside the box.
RIP. Condolences, everyone.
Some folks hacked Paris Hilton's Sidekick phone and published the photos (sexy), the address book(full of celebs) and the notes therein.
In addition to revealing that she met Mark Cuban and got his number, Paris' Sidekick notes show this blonde business person is smart, smart, smart--at least about working her angles.
(And then there are the fascinating what could this mean posts, like:
Tell ken about jess trying to bone JT
Its nick u bitcg 732 5397329
and the immortal
Buy a lap top
Ron perlman 2125725060
1 a start fininf band members and dance class work out )
More at Teagan.
Update: Apparently, this hack triggered lots of phone calls.
Victoria Gotti is quoted: " "I got 100 calls in two hours. I didn't want to take the phones off the hook because my oldest son was out on a date. This went on all night. Finally, at 5:30 a.m., I took them off the hook. This morning, I put them back on and they started ringing immediately. It's driving me insane."
5 million web pages link to a Creative Commons license--can you find them all on the net?
Charlene Li: "I expect that NYTimes.com, Boston.com, and About.com will tie together their use of Tacoda?s behavioral profiling (both are already clients of Tacoda), thus allowing them even greater ability to track specific profiles across the sites. So if a user visiting auto pages on About.com later visits NYTimes.com to read international news, NYTimes.com will still be able to provide an advertiser like Ford access to a car enthusiast."
Absolutely!
So 2 seconds on Jeff Jarvis, self-described "mediaman by day, blogboy by night, " as visionary citizen's media educator--In his second letter (in reply) to NYTimes' Bill Keller, Jarvis says, as a side note--
"I wrote up a proposal for a (pardon me) Citizens' Media Center and damned near got funding for it.... The goal is to teach journalism students how to recast their relationship with the public via this medium, to teach bloggers the skills and standards of professional journalism, and to teach big media how to interact with the public in new ways via this medium. One of the deliverables (as I'm told one says in grant proposals) is to bring together bloggers and reporters -- that is, citizen journalists and professional journalists -- to build understanding, to show that we're not enemies, to demonstrate that we share a common goal to inform the public, and to demonstrate that we can better do that together."
Jeff, as a project this is a gotta-have it, a great idea. Even if it's run by a consortium of Universities with Knight and Carnegie support, it's well worth making happen.
Wished I could have gone to this conference, but hey some of us have to work (or just went to other conferences).
What's catching my attention, long-distance:
1. The NYT's angle on buying it, and what that says about the future of print newspapers. It's clear that NYT management realizes that a strong Internet presence is mandatory to tie together communities of readers and advertisers. Classified advertising and Jobs Wanted advertising are the largest profit makers in the Newspaper business. About.com can bridge those communities and enhance just about every NYT print property they own.
2. Primedia's reason for selling it to reshape its portfolio, pay down enormous debt, and streamline a previously unwieldy company that was out of control under the previous leader. Kelly has done a yeoman's job of creating the metrics through which each publisher and division must jump. The stock has moved higher over the last few months because I think many investors see that the team there is getting a handle on the business. Frankly, I would have wanted to hold onto about.com...but, at $410M sale price, that helps reduce the debt significantly. In business, you sometime have to make short-term decisions to ensure there is a long-term future. It is a tremendously smart move on Primedia's part to reduce debt now.
Dave Winer suggested the money was paramount and enough with the details, but as someone who's followed about.com since it was The Mining Company, this latest incarnation interests me--and makes NYU Professor Jay Rosen's latest essay a compelling read.
Standouts:
The whole essay is here, and worth a full read if this interests you---and if you're interested in newspapers' efforts to adapt and thrive in a digital age, this should interest you.