Abandoning the News by Merrill Brown is an essay commissioned by the Carnegie Commission on the changing technology habits and media consumption patterns of 18 th 34 year olds and what the shift means for traditional news sources.
Brown says: " This audience, the future news consumers and leaders of a complex, modern society, are abandoning the news as we've known it, and it's increasingly clear that a great number of them will never return to daily newspapers and the national broadcast news programs."
Brown's suggestions for radical thinking are spot on.

Parody is one of the sincerest forms of admiration, brutal as it may be, and the boringboring parody of BoingBoing is both amazingly mean and wonderfully detailed--and clever. Sean Bonner has a mirror at metroblogging and it's a scream.
Only flaw is that BB is rarely boring--but you can suspend belief and just laugh over all the details in the parody--it's a Where's Waldo of little jokes.

Okay, remaindered links:
Wordpress: Is Wordpress and wordpress.org an open source project like we've all been told or is it a company? (Via Waxy)
Post a secret on a postcard.
Belle de Jour--Is Laura Hilton the one?

Tom Biro posts about a forum hosted by Reuters next week on blogs and the media.
Sample question: Are bloggers journalists? Should they be afforded the same rights as journalists?
Jay Rosen and Dave Winer will lead a crew of corporate folk in what will no doubt be a familiar catcheism.
I will be in DC that day, or I would probably show up and sulk, maddened there were no women on the panel and annoyed at myself for caring.
This is how you know the bubble is back---corporate entities want to host discussions on topics that others have been discussing ad nauseum--only now that the bwanas are interested, they have enough muscle to get the natives dancing again.

Ouch, that was mean. Maybe the meanest post I've written in a while.
Time to cut back on the conferences, for sure.

Is Jeff Jarvis the Ben Jonson of our age? After reading Jeff's latest journalism and blogging post, I 'm tempted to say yes--I crowd round his coffeehouse broadsheets, for sure.
What's so cool?
Today, Jarvis runs the changes on the component pieces of journalism and examines what it means to practice journalism (as opposed to, say, being a journalist--think verb). He calls it "the new journalism of acts."
An excerpt from his long post: "The right question is: Can journalism be improved? Can journalism be expanded? Can journalism be exploded? I believe -- no surprise -- that a key to the future of journalism is embracing the idea that everyone does journalism. This doesn't mean that all journalism is equal or good or of interest. We still need to find ways to aggregate, select, edit, present, and distribute information in ways that are efficient, effective, and reliable for each of us."

We've got a lot of great people thinking about journalistic traditions and new ways to create and distribute information--for those of us who love media, this question is never dull (and for everyone else...)

Someone sent me the Business 2.0 article about Adriana Huffington recruiting high-level corporate and celebrity talent to "blog" for her new newsletter, the Huffington report. According to author Greg Lindsay, Huffington and her business partner, PR wizard Ken Lehrer are recruiting buds(and clients?) like Larry David, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tina Brown to, uh, blog.
Lindsay quotes an email that says:
"We'll just provide a megaphone for the thoughts you're already thinking, the conversations you're already having, the e-mails and instant messages you're already exchanging with your friends.

The idea is that the members of our blog will weigh in whenever the spirit moves them: when a news story makes you mad, when you see a movie or read a book that turns you on, or when you have a cause that you don't think is getting the coverage it deserves. And we're not just talking about politics -- this blog will be about politics and entertainment and money and sports and religion. Anything and everything."

Uh, sounds great, maybe like the graveyard of the elephants--you know, the place where cultural pundits go to shake their big ivories one last time--or am I confusing the Huffington Report with Radar Magazine?

Update: More on this from Rafat.

Behind on all the good stuff going on with attention.xml. Yahoo! 360, Jay Rosen, but am packing up for the movers and dealing with some personal business.
Back to regular--and more frequent-- posts by the weekend; light posting over the next couple days.

What is it with Google? Blogger is way to erratic a product for a company of their size.
Pull out threat to move site again...

CNET: fotolog.net gets $2.4 mil (via Rafat)

Paul Kedrosky likes Brian Dear's EVDB, an events database: "A web-based calendar doesn't work because any sufficiently comprehensive calendar is so overloaded with data that it is literally unreadable. A better approach is an exposed API for a user-editable service (okay, a wiki) via which people can access & change the data. "

tony pierce: why are anonymous negative commentors so repulsive?

Blog Herald: David Duchovny's new flick has a blog,RSS, podcast.

David Byrne starts an internet radio station (via BB)

Tild gets creative:

As of this week, I'm moving to Palo Alto.
Starting the next stage in life with a kid in college and newly single.
Time to start keep on keeping on.

So, wish me luck.

Ayelet Waldman, writing in the NY Times today, says: "If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else inthe world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children."
Now on one hand, I think this is Waldman's shtick; on the other hand, she's a terrific writer and her shtick sure interests me. And when she had a blog--it rocked.

Today's new (to me) blogger's list is in honor of all the women who are starting over.
The grand prize goes to the single parent writer of Prose and Cons, whose post on How to turn your laid-back mellow hippie roomate into a passive-agressive bitch is an instant classic.
Some excerpts:

• "Use her brand new Cuisinart stainless steel "everything pan" on high heat, permanently discoloring the finish
• Continue chatting on the phone after 1:00 a.m. when she's trying to sleep on the other side of the wall
• Borrow her heating pad then leave it plugged in on HIGH under a pile of clothes until she finds it there a week later
• Turn your room into a pig sty two days after she cleaned it for you
• Watch your soap opera in the living room while she's trying to write when you have a TV in your room"

Also, reading Does it really matter anyway, Fork in the Road, and the digital media focused Rock-n-Go, by Xiao, a Chinese blogger (and a great read that has nothing to do with this week's theme, but check him out anyway.)

Om Malik's got a blog piece as good as anything running in Wired, 2.0 or NYTimes on Yahoo's resurgence on some shrewd initiatives that made them cool and up and coming once more. Russ Beattie, Jeremy Zawodny, the purchase of flickr and oddpost, the launch of my yahoo rss and beta of Yahoo! 360 all have played a role, says OM--and then there's the spectacular financial performance:
"For Yahooligans, 2004 was a year of frustration. No one noticed the fact that company's stock posted a hefty 72% gain, ending the year at about $38 a share. Overlooked was the fact that it had sales of $36 billion and net income of $834 million. That's twice as much money it raked in 2003, and nearly three times the profit. It is no surprise that many Yahoo insiders felt like the Yankee fans - no matter what they did, they were going to be overshadowed by Google."

Great piece, Om.. can we have more like this one, please?

Julie Leung is one of my most favorite bloggers because her life wisdom--and questioning--is part of what she shares in her blog. This week, she muses on how so many bloggers--including A-listers Winer and Blood say they feel like outsiders. She writes: " ... high school didn't have search engines and feeds to display the power of popularity. (snip)
The more we try to be like others, the less worth we have. Diversity is beauty.(snip)
The truth is we are all outsiders. Our secret fears are real and revealed. We are each random points, outliers, misfits, rejects and strangers. We are alone. We are all different. Yet we are all the same."

Bonus link via J: Deborah Branscum's comparison of High School and the Blogosphere.

YPulse has a great bit on AOL and teens--apprently, AOL Red released a survey reported in the New York Post that said: "..Half of the country's teenagers would rather open up and discuss their feelings with a blog than with their parents. In addition, a majority of teens said they are turning to blogs over traditional Web sites because they are more entertaining and humorous."

So there.
More here.

At OJR, new vet and educator Nora Paul takes stock and asks Is online news reaching its potential?
Conclusion(the rest is worth a read): "...The great promise that was seen for this as a new form of journalism has yet to be fully realized. New methods for crafting and delivering compelling news stories online are still a long way from being fully developed."
(Via Amy Gahran, Poynter)

Via kottke and Tammy Green on flickr:

Alan Mutter notices that the top news sites are going to aggregators, not creators, and asks :"If publishers eventually right-sized reporting into extinction, would the day finally come when all the links on Yahoo and Google were missing?"
Mutter is dead-on--the AFP suit has gotten many news and information companies thinking about requiring licensing deals from news-based search portals and aggregators.

Susan sez: Now that aggregators are describing themselves as media companies--because they provide media to consumers, of course--look for some bitter licensing and revenue battles--and a strong push, for both aggregators and news creators--to get beyond the ad revenue model.

Forrester's Charlene Li on Yahoo! 360: "Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people. To this end, your home page on the service shows the most recent content published by people within your network. This might be a blog post, a photo album, review, or an updated profile item. This page is constantly refreshed as the people in your network update the information on their spaces. This fundamental concept of linking people through their updated ?stuff? is what makes Yahoo! 360 unique ? and inherently will drive usage of the service higher than traditional social networks."

AskPang comments: "Isn't much of the point of things like del.icio.us and flickr-- and for that matter, blogging-- that they let us maintain our "strong ties" (to use Mark Granovetter's phrasing) of friends and family and associates-- our known, mapped universe of people who are interested in us and the things we know/do-- while also expanding our network of "weak ties" to people who share certain curious combinations of interests, people we have never met but whose work we've read, or just sometimes work at the same cafe that we do, etc.?"

Mass market --meet early adopter.

Q: When is an embargo not an embargo?
A: When a major news organization breaks it, cause they can.
Tom Biro gets down and dirty into the Topix.net story, the news embargo and the practice of--well--keeping agreed-upon secrets.
If embargoes matter to you, this is an interesting write-up.
If not--well, go have some coffee.

1999 was back tonight, if the iPod carrying, black and plaid wearing hordes lined up for (free) tacos outside of Adaptive Path's South of Market offices at the party in honor of their new space and four years in operation were any indication of just how much the bubble mentality is back in force.
Of course, now we have flickr where we can check out the party photos--and the taco truck.

AOL Music announced today that they will make the title track of Bruce Springsteen's new album Devils & Dust available on the web exclusively on Monday, March 28th as part of AOL Music's First Listen program.
Gone are the days when First Listen, as their program is called, was a jealously guarded premium for AOL subscribers (guess they must be dropping like flies.)

In a related note, former AOL Music GM Evan Harrison, now over at Clear Channel, has just launched his own online music program called"Stripped." Would you be surprised to hear that it sounds alot (like, totally) like AOL Sessions.

Goin' head to head now, guys?

In yet another sign the long tail of open media is being paid close attention to by bigger companies, Yahoo launched a new search engine for content licensed under a Creative Commons license.
What will be it like when they apply their search tools to flickr?
(Via egfeed)

Jeff Clavier fisks the Topix numbers and comes up with some theories. He writes :"There are enough whispers of the return of a bubble in the RSS/new media world to try and figure out whether this was a $5M or a $50M deal (see, I am not the only one wondering). And then quotes Bambi Francisco saying that Topic was valued between $50 and $100 million. Jeff writes:
"So we have confirmation that a large part of the consideration went to the shareholders of the company - allowing them to partially cash out, and a small portion went to the bank as operating cashflow. Great deal (somewhat similar to the MySpace financing where the original owner partially cashed out, and the co got some cash). Back to the original feeling of delight for these guys, etc.

However the valuation seems... rich."

I spoke with someone last night who has another emerging tech company who was thrilled about this deal...it makes his company, like the others on Rafat Ali's best bets for buyouts list, seem all the more valuable.

Via Craig: "Millions of Americans have made it crystal clear that we don't want drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Yet many members of Congress are choosing to ignore their constituents and listen to the Bush administration's drilling boosters instead. Show your support for the Arctic Refuge by tying green ribbons in your yard, hang them in your home, pin them to your clothes or wear them around your wrists. When your members of Congress come home for spring recess and see green ribbons in every neighborhood and the news media in every state taking notice, they won't be able to ignore us any longer! Visit arcticribbon.org to learn more about the green ribbon campaign and how you can get involved."

Phil Wolff discussing Korean blog stats, the impossible numbers of bloggers, the very real broadband and wireless stats, and Bernard Moon's analysis of Korea's (broadband) lessons for the U.S.
Moon says : "If you visit any Korean blogs, you'll soon discover that they're all like MySpace on steroids ... lots of steroids. One hybrid service to develop out of Korea's broadband incubator is CyWorld (HatTip to Pip Coburn, who mentioned this site in a prior post). Think of a blog, social network, and Flickr (a social network that lets users manage and share their photos online) rolled into one, and you begin to get an idea of what CyWorld is all about."

Wolff comments: "Francesco Cara's UsageWatch.org: How many people publish, read or contribute to blogs? 2.0. A January 2005 roundup of Cyworld traffic growth and Korean blogging in general. "The Cyworld form of blogging has reached 79% adoption among young people in their 20s and 30s (source SK Communication); and 90% adoption among young people in their 20s (source researcher KoreanClick)."

Bonus: Moon also writes: "Korea's broadband environment allowed a nation of just 48 million to create the first MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game), the first paid online casual gaming services, the first avatar services, and the first mini-hompies. (Susan--what's a hompie?)

So, what do you know about RSS adaption in S.Korea? How does it compare with the US?
Yes, getting back to that language question...)

NowPublic--new. A social network meets a citizen journalism platform and you get--Now Public. Congrats to Mike Tippett on the launch...now, critical mass needs to build.

EVDB: Brian Dear launches a better mouse-trap, uh, I mean events database, calendar and platform for event organizers. Brian explained this to me a few weeks ago, and it sounds great.
No, let's see. (Via Ross Mayfield) see beta@evdb.com

J-Log: "What is FeedBeep, you ask? It's a service (with an obligatory blog) that connects RSS feeds to your SMS-enabled cell phone. That's right. When breaking news hits the Internet, you can be alerted to the fact on your cellphone. What else could it be used for? How about: learning about new marketing jobs in the Chicago area on craigslist.org, getting notified about social and local events from upcoming.org, etc. Cellphone use hasn't hit its peak yet in the US. We're years behind the asians, or so I read."

XML feeds to your phone--they've got lots of gov data, UPS data, and tutorials on how to set up more feeds yrself.

Susan sez: Is this new, or just broken out so it makes sense? Experts, please...

Update: PubSub is involved.

CEO Skrenta lays the deal out.
PR rep Rubel weighs in, along with Malik, Battelle, Hammock, Ali, and Jarvis.

Update: Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch: "Topix.net would not disclose the terms of the deal, only to say that the funding was less than $5 million. The capital will be used by the nine-person team, partly to give a salary to the founders, who hadn't paid themselves in three years."

Clarification: Valuation for Topix.net is rumored to be way higher than Bloglines. If the $$ rumors are right, the founders should be feeling pretty, pretty good.

Earlier today, Tony Gentile had a rumor that Topix.net was acquired by Knight-Ridder--it's true.
Knight Ridder, in partnership with the Tribune Media Company and Gannett, has acquired 75% of Topix.net for an undisclosed amount.
I spoke with Rich Skrenta, Topix CEO and founder, and he told me that the deal would allow Topix to remain as an independent entity based in the Valley--and deploy their skills across the KRD-Trib-Gannett platform.
The press release states: "Topix.net will use content and funding from Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune to expand and refine its NewsRank technology, services and operational infrastructure. ..Collectively, Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune operate more than 140 newspaper Web sites with nearly 30 million unique visitors monthly. The companies have partnered together in other joint ventures such as ShopLocal.com and CareerBuilder.com."

This is an awesome event for the (self-funded) Topix guys, and an amazingly shrewd move by these newspaper partners--for far less than the NYTimes, they've acquired a resource that will help them launch and create local feeds, monetize text ads far better than Google AdWords can off the shelf, and help make them a leader in the search, local and RSS spaces.
The deal also plays well with Knight-Ridder's recent acquisition of 5 local daily newspapers in Silicon Valley, including the Palo Alto Daily News. If Topix.net's talent is to aggregate and categorize local feeds, then these newspapers are both prime content for Topix and a potential platform for a new targeted local business--not a bad plan. And if KRD and partners are willing to take a run at adding citizen journalism--watch out!

So folks, maybe old media ain't so old anymore.

P.S. Plus, this is disruptive to the other companies (and there are many) pitching their search and RSS services to newspaper partners, who now see 3 of the big ones locked up...and to the big aggregators who now find online news business are alive and kicking still.

NJ.com reports that the Jersey Journal, one of the first Newhouse papers and the paper of record for an amazingly diverse slice of urban New Jersey is getting a new format and going tabloid on April 25th. ""Our plan is to continue doing the same responsible community journalism that readers have come to expect from us in a lively, more colorful format that we expect will attract new readers,"said Journal editor Judy Locorriere.

Jeff Jarvis, who is both Buzzmachine's author and the president of Advance.net, was a consultant on the redesign and is quoted as saying: "The Jersey Journal is going to be watched very carefully. I'm not sure that tabloid is going to work for every newspaper in the country. But it just feels so right for Hudson County. It's the right format for this paper."
Steve Newhouse, editor in chief of the JJ, is quoted: "We are confident that the switch to a daily tabloid edition will help us grow."

Susan sez: This is just great. The Jersey Journal was one of the long-time local papers in Jersey, but had trouble for a while finding its audience--because of the amazing diversity of the area. The move to a local tab is a great idea and it is so wonderful to see Newhouse investing a bit in the paper. I worked in the same building with this crew for 3 years, and they're so into their product...hope this is a resounding success...can't wait to see it.

The chance to put the words Standard Deviance and Andrew Krukoff into one sentence is too good to pass up, and the news via SD is that Elizabeth Spier's Media Bistro Fishbowl site has hired La Krukoff to replace one of its fledgling (and now flown-away) bloggers.
IMHO, Krukoff is a pisser, as they say in Brighton Beach, so that makes him perfect for the gig, right?
(And it ain't NY till you've worked for/with Spiers, Dobkin and Denton, right?--Isn't that the NY blogger's trifecta?

(I feel an article for NY Magazine coming on. Ow, gotta lie down till that thought goes away.)

Andy Carvin has paid attention to some of the issues related to non-Latinate languages and creating RSS feeds and has some comments about how the UNICODE project has helped power non-Latinate sites (and therefore their RSS feeds).
He writes: "For languages with RSS support, knowledge gets produced and disseminated at a rapid pace, allowing more online knowledge to be produced, and an expanding community of people able to talk about this knowledge and contribute even further to it. But for languages that can't be transmitted via RSS, they'll be stuck sharing content at a much slower pace, to smaller, less-connected audience."

So, what do readers know about producing RSS feeds in Chinese, Vietnamese and Cyrillic languages?
Any experts out there? Inquiring minds need to learn more.

More comments--points well taken, around monetizing Blogspot, aka what kind of revenue can you make from a blog services site.
Point-n-Click points out that it's not just about the ad dollars but the overall ROI.
Rick Bruner made a similar point in another email.

Guys, you're right--up to a point. It's inarguable that there's a network effect in which low cost of production/high page volume can make text ads amazingly lucrative--and make the Blogspots of the world wonderfully high-margin ventures.
BUT, most agencies--and many marketers--want to spent their ad dollars online on rich media, intrusive blockades, and brand-building programs--this kind of stuff they buy on cable TV.
No matter how much companies such as Revenue Science and Tacoda overlay their ad targeting capabilities on blogging sites--and on targeted and aggregated RSS feeds--we don't know that the high CPMs agencies spent on campaigns on their favorite sites will spill over into the blogosphere in a broad way ( Nick Denton has already proven he can get this kind of advertising, but who else has? And, I would argue, Gawker Media is a far cry from the unwashed masses at Blogspot, of which, somehow I am one).
The Times is a good example of a media company that is hedging their bets--they've invested a huge amount in reporting and targeting so they can get premium ad buys on their sites--and they're now the owners of About.com--so they can pull in more types of ad revenue--and get a cool platform to build out. But for the Blogspots of the world, crack sales teams or not, I'd say that those premium agency dollars are going to be harder to come buy, and/or will be spent only when agencies have exhausted most of their budget on their favorite premium sites--for now.

And will this change in the future?
Of course.
Blogging is the road ahead.
But it ain't all there just now.

Josh Rubin points to SNIF, or Social Networking in Fur, an MIT Media Lab project that uses LEDs, FOAF and all sort of other techie gear to improve the mutual sniffing between dogs and their owners, and has amazing cute pictures of his two Sealyhams.
Susan sez: "My dog Winston and I go to the dog park almost every morning, and we know all this stuff without any high tech tools, so there."
Okay, now that I yapped a bit, I'll come clean--this is good stuff.
(via Modern Pooch)

Bonus facts: According to the researchers, there are more than 65 million owned dogs in the United States.
Nearly 40% of US households own at least one dog.
Nationally, pet owners spend upwards of 32 billion dollars on their animals annually.

So Hewlett-Packard is buying Snapfish, a SF-based photo service that's like a mini- Ofoto.
Guess it's a way to sell printing supplies to 13 million people.
What's next? Murdoch buying Six Apart?