I’ve Said Too Much

As if to confirm my earlier post about classifieds being a crowded space, here comes SiliconBeat on ZiXXo, another new classified ads player:

For less than $300 a year, local merchants can create online coupons that will appear in a special section above or below the free ads on ZiXXo. Users print out the coupons and redeem them. Hogan and his staff have devised a coupon-wizard system that he says makes it easy for merchants to create online coupons in minutes. Merchants can change the coupons whenever they want.

“Seventy-nine percent of the U.S. population uses coupons,” says Hogan. “”But on the Internet, it’s much better than clipping and saving. If we can use classified ads to build local communities, then we can capitalize on the coupons.”

That leads us to Hogan’s next challenge: luring local merchants to buy into the online coupon program.

Experts view local businesses as a huge, untapped market for online advertising, potentially worth billions of dollars.

I can’t work out of this is brilliant or mad:

Amazon.com is jumping into the online Yellow Pages business with a splash today, touting a photo service that allows shoppers to stroll through cities without ever having to leave their personal computers.

The service, called Block View, is the brainchild of Amazon’s search engine subsidiary, A9.com, based in Palo Alto. Company employees have driven more than 20,000 miles in camera-equipped sport-utility vehicles in recent months, videotaping tens of thousands of storefronts and converting the images into 20 million photographs.

To date, the company has collected images for 10 major metropolitan areas, including San Jose and other Bay Area cities. But A9 officials said they hope to have coverage for the entire United States.

If someone came to me with a project like this, my first question would be: can it scale? My second, related question would be: can we support it?

But I suppose this just goes to confirm that the classifieds space is going to get even more crowded over the next couple of years.

According to this post at Google Blogoscoped, Google is testing an AdSense switch widget, which allows users to click to change which ads an AdSense widget is displaying. Interesting thing would be if this could be tied in to some kind of user preference cookie which remembered my preferences wherever I saw an AdSense widget. But I’m sure they’ve thought of that!

John Battelle links to adMarketplace Network, an interesting platform which is seeking to build a “publisher network” of sites delivering ads. Unlike AdSense, this seems to deliver graphical advertising rather than text links, with the advertiser choosing what type of creative they want, and what type of audience they want, and then the ad going out and being served on a network of sites. This is very similar to Battelle’s earlier vision of sell-side advertising.

Anyway, they’re powering eBay keywords. Battelle points out that they’re now offering publishers a bounty on introducing clients to the network. The publisher who does the introducing then participates in revenue from that client wherever they are on the network.

Steve Outing writes at Poynter about how advertising is starting to disappear from homes which can afford PVRs and commercial subscription services:

But I wonder if there will be another near- to medium-term effect, because DVRs and satellite-radio subscriptions are still luxury items not as likely to be purchased by lower-income families (because of the additional monthly subscription fees). Will conventional broadcast advertising shift — to more commercials for Wal-Mart and fewer for tony stores, more for inexpensive cars and fewer for Mercedes — because fewer middle- and upper-income consumers are being reached?

To me, the problem with advertising has always been explaining the contract between the advertisers, the publisher and the consumer. People understand banner ads or outside posters because they can predict them and understand their grammar; increasingly, they can’t predict TV advertising, and they could never predict pop-ups. So those forms are more disruptive. But advertisers are in a race to disrupt users more and more, so what we’re seeing is a positive feedback loop: users become more annoyed by disruption and thus seek more innovative ways of avoiding it, and advertisers respond by trying to become even more disruptive.

What’s needed is a more creative approach to advertising, one which combines personalisation, sponsorship, “just-in-time” retail and interesting branding experiences. Easy to say. But is it even possible?

This from Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits: the story of how the Bakerfield Californian has responded to Craigslist entering its market by launching its own free classifieds service:

What’s the business model? Product manager Dan Pacheco (whose other life is as president of Colorado-based consultancy FutureForecast) says the plan is to build as large of an audience as possible, then down the road perhaps charge for some ads — though that’s not anticipated for some time. This is the Craigslist model: Craig’s city sites don’t charge for ads, except in a couple major markets where the company has begun charging for employment and some rental ads. Pacheco says other ideas for Bakotopia to make money are being discussed, but nothing’s yet ready to be talked about publicly.

Bakotopia is clearly aimed at the young people of Bakersfield. It is NOT branded with the Californian name. The site’s About page has no reference whatsoever to the newspaper. You’d only figure out the connection if you knew that Bakotopia parent Mercado Nuevo LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Californian.

And, as if to confirm the hyper-power of Craig, this post from Kottke about how the mere presence of Craigslist in a major population centre leads to the creation of new forms of business that don’t have to pay for advertising:

Paul told me that these days, he got most of his jobs from CL and only one or two a week from personal referrals. I found that surprising and when I pressed him further, he told me that because of CL, he’s been able to do pursue moving (which he really likes doing) as a full-time career. I can’t remember the exact quote, but Paul said something to the effect that he can’t believe he’s getting away with starting a full-time business on CL without it costing him a single dime.

There’s a fairly amazing report out from Pew on people’s search behaviour which includes these highlights:

Internet users are extremely positive about search engines and the experiences they have when searching the internet.

Internet users tend to settle quickly on a single search engine and then stick with it

Some 44% of searchers regularly use just one engine, and another 48% use just two or three.

Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.

Internet users trust their favorite search engines, but few say they are aware of the financial incentives that affect how search engines perform and how they present their search results.

Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored� results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not.

This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they presented paid results.

Feedster has launched a jobs site which aggregates RSS feeds from various other job sites. So I don’t need to visit those other jobs sites anymore. So I don’t see their advertising, so their economic model starts to collapse, those sites start to disappear, and Feedster is left without an RSS feed.

Are free feeds the technology that ate itself? SiliconBeat reckons this is is the first step towards a world where companies publish their job vacancies for free as HTML/RSS/whatever, and our aggregators pick them up. But that world’s a way off, and until it comes Feedster’s likely to be feeling some heat from media companies that depend on classifieds to continue. It’ll make Schwimmer v. Bloglines look like a church picnic.

John Battelle’s got a great post on AOL’s new-found enthusiasm for search. The overall gist is that AOL, having decided to become more “web-like” by opening up its content to non-subscribers and basically dismantling the walls to its garden, is having a similar epiphany when it comes to search.

As one might expect, AOL has joined Yahoo in taking what might be called the “media model” of search. The media model takes a person’s query and salts the results with all manners of human edited results - mostly from content the service owns, or content that the service access from partners, or content from the web that the service edits together to create what has been called “smart search”, “search shortcuts,” “programmatic search,” and the like.

AOL is taking this to the extreme. It is, after all, a major division of a gigantic content player, and up until now, that content was locked away behind the failing access business model. No longer. AOL Search is taking the media model of search to the maximum - they have 60 full time employees creating edited “snapshots” which respond to what AOL Search chief Gerry Campbell says are 20% of all queries. That’s 2.5 million snapshots preloaded, so when you type in a popular query, you get an “answer, not just a list of results.” I imagine that number will only continue to grow. Yahoo circa 1995, anyone? This time, however, AOL only has to pre-load queries which prove out to be worth the time - the log files will tell them which ones. As will the economy. “We won’t have a smart box for a query like ‘birds of the Maldives’” Campbell told me. ” But that’s why we have Google.”

The idea of having a team of people whose sole job is to direct people to content which I can make money against is, of course, really not that new. Yahoo! already does it, the BBC has done it for a while.

What is interesting is whether or not this is going to become a pretty standard Web-monkey style job for most digital media firms who are combining search with a database of content which can be monetised. For a long time, Yahoo!’s surfers - the people who were paid to find sites and categorise them in the Y! directory - looked like an expensive anomaly paid for by the dotcom boom. Now, they’re looking like an essential component in the digital media wheel.

If there is a long-tail, and if navigation design has to simplify, and if search becomes more and more the main means of navigating digital content, then someone has to point users in appropriate directions based on their searches.

David Jackson makes a nifty case for Yahoo! buying Six Apart, and also links to a Mary Meeker investment report on RSS and blogging which I’ve just printed out and will consume at my leisure (note to Meeker: don’t use columns in PDF files, as I have to scroll down and up again to read them onscreen, hence the print-out).

Jackson makes the point that what Yahoo! would be buying with Six Apart is not the technology itself - they’re perfectly capable of building something themselves - but the network of existing blogs in the MovableType/LiveJournal universe. In the old days, they’d call this “buying an audience”, but this is something much more complicated. What they’d actually be buying is the right to put their ads on the blogs in that universe.

This seems to be an interesting power-reversal. Suddenly, bloggers are valuable because they’ve created real estate, and just like the side of a building is valuable to a billboard company, so this real estate is valuable to the Googles and Yahoo!s of this world. Jackson argues that the demand for text ads is “exceeding supply”, which is probably true. If it is true, it suggests that bloggers are busy building real estate which can almost instantly be monetised. They’re a bit like Dutch engineers reclaiming land from the sea. When I publish a blog, I add to this real estate, as I do every time I post something.

So, like the universe, the blogosphere expands and expands, possibly infinitely. But what’s it expanding into?

It looks like Advance Internet, Jeff Jarvis’s daytime employer, are getting serious about local publishing, according to this post on BuzzMachine:

Advance Internet, which includes NJ.com, MassLive.com, OregonLive.com and other fine local sites, is about to create a half-dozen town blogs in those markets — new, group blogs (using iUpload) to which any neighbor can contribute. These will live alongside the many individuals’ blogs, local forums, newspaper headlines, blogs outside the services (and their RSS feeds), and more. The idea is that — as in GoSkokie.com and NorthwestVoices — people may not want to start their own blog but they have plenty of news to contribute to their communities: opinions, news updates, sports reports, photos, calendar items, and so on. The hope is also that once we have a critical mass of content in a town from all these sources, a critical mass of audience is sure to follow. This means, we hope, that we can target ads down to the town level and automate them, saving the cost of sales and production, and price them in such a way that we can serve local advertisers who heretofore could not afford to market in big papers. That, I emphasize is the hope — untested, unproven. Testing that is the job.

Not exactly keeping it quiet, is he? Nice to say…

There’s a fascinating debate going on about the decision of one professional blogger, attorney Marty Schwimmer, to remove his RSS feed from Bloglines. Or, more accurately, to ask Bloglines to no longer display his feed. Schwimmer’s reasoning is that Bloglines is, in fact, a website (he uses language like “frames”, possibly naively, but in a way which gives you a different perspective). As such, it is potentially a website using his content to make money (Schwimmer rightly points out that, when Bloglines finally starts displaying text ads as it surely will, there is a good chance that a rival law firm could be advertising on his own content.

Of course, looked at through one prism, this is entirely correct. Schwimmer publishes his content using a non-commercial Creative Commons licence, so why should Bloglines make money off his postings, when he has no explicit commercial arrangement with them?

But wait, says the other side of the argument (put by Scoble, among others): RSS is a “syndication” platform, and once you syndicate content, the person you’re syndicating it too normally has the right to do pretty much what they want with it (other than change it), including seling ads on it. If you don’t want that to happen, don’t syndicate it.

What this all shows is the extent to which RSS is driving ahead faster than legal and commercial norms can keep up with. As this interesting post makes clear, a lot of our thinking on what’s right and wrong or fair and unfair is based on non-legal, woolly things like: is it on a website? Is it in a browser? Is it in a client or on a server?

Content, of course, wants to be free. But as with the question of ownership, which I blogged about last week, the notion of fair use is lagging behind the technology within which fair use or otherwise takes place. It’s hard to have a rigid view either way: for me, both sides of this argument are right, because the answer will lie somewhere in the middle. Content owners which are businesses need to have their ability to maintain their business protected, but they also need to embrace the reality that control over their content is becoming a slippery thing. If RSS stands is syndication, who are we syndicating to? Everyone?

We live, as they say, in interesting times.

This is a big day - Technorati goes live with its tagging system.

It’s a beautiful idea: combine del.icio.us and Flickr tags with blog categories to create a folksonomy on another level again to anything we’ve seen before. Even if your blogging software doesn’t support categories, you can still use an href tag with a rel=tag element in it to make sure your post is tagged within Technorati.

As Simon W points out here, it’s always going to have unlooked for and occasionally odd results, but I challenge anyone, anywhere, to better this page as an overview of what the world is thinking of Apple right now. Yes, when I looked the top story was out of date, and yes it’s ludicrously random, but really, at the end of the day, does any of that matter more than the fact that it exists at all?

And here’s a thought - how would Technorati respond if Guardian Unlimited added the tag hrefs to the end of all their stories?

It’s easy to get so excited by blogosphere-citizen-journalism-collaborative-filtering and such-like to forget that the digital device that people use more than anything is their mobile. UK newspapers have a lot to learn from their European counterparts about the strategic use of mobile - check Stockholm City, which only interacts with its readers by SMS, including selling classifieds and canvassing readers for opinion - but the Sun in particular seems to be pushing the envelope, at least in Anglo terms. This from Media Bulletin:

News International has launched Sun Mobile selling Sun-branded content for mobile phones, including Page 3 screen savers, games and ringtones.

Sun Mobile will be accessible to users in more than 130 countries, due to News International’s partnership with Bango, which manages content delivery and payment. Around half the traffic for The Sun online comes from the US and Canada.

Simon Ashley, commercial manager at News Group Digital, said: “It is vitally important that The Sun has a strong presence in all media whether it be print, web or mobile.”

Guardian Unlimited’s efforts to date in this space have been limited to text alerts, which have proven pretty successful. But, like everyone, we’re having to think about the way mobile changes people’s consumption of news and, more importantly, how it changes their perception of the relationship they have with their news provider.

TeleRead has some advice for the New York Times. I certainly don’t agree with all of it, but it’s never less than interesting. Take this:

Idea #6: More video on the Times’ Web site

The Times Web site still isn’t enough of a multimedia animal. The newspaper should recycle video content from its cable TV programs to the newspaper’s Web site to add to the richness of the multimedia there–both daily editions and database content. If the Discovery cable network bails out, then so be it. Nielsen/NetRatings, according to BusinessWeek, says a mere 27,000 people watch Discovery Times. Needless to say, the Times’ Web videos could be archived forever and would be increasingly valuable as TVs and computers converged. Charge for most videos until bandwidth costs come down sufficiently to offer large numbers of them for free.

or this

Idea #4: Closer ties with the blogging community

Plug more closely into the blog circuit. In a dream world for the old media, blogs wouldn’t exist. But they do, and the Times Web site would do well to try to include links to relevant blog items and other outside sources at the end of each story on issues of major interest. This already happens to an extent, but let’s see more of this.

Video and links to the blogosphere are, I think, inevitable for the big legacy media news brands. Figuring it out is going to be, erm, interesting.

Just when I was getting really interested in videoblogging, I go to one of the pioneers, ryanedit.com, to find that her site’s been suspended for “exceeded monthly traffic quota.”

The lesson being: if you’re going to start a revolution, make sure you’ve got the bandwidth.

I love the idea of Google putting itself into a blue box and then being bought off the shelf for 5 grand. It’s smart, transforming thinking - though I hope they’re not overselling the ease with which you can install it. My experience is that search is always messy, time-consuming and difficult, which is why people often overlook it. Even Yahoo! was guilty of neglecting its search technology at the height of the dotcom boom, until Google came along and reminded everyone at Y! why they were there in the first place.

But Google is obviously making this messiness a lot less, well, messy.

The Google Mini is easy to install and even easier to maintain. You can usually install and configure the Google Mini in less than an hour.

The Google Mini fits easily into any standard data center rack. After setting it up in your data center, you’ll connect it to your network with an Ethernet cable, provide basic network settings – for example, an IP address – and then configure and manage it through an intuitive web-based interface.

Because the Mini accesses content over your internal network, there’s no need to connect it directly to a server and no limit on the number of servers it can crawl.

If that’s really true, it’s unbelievably cool and equally unbelievable disruptive, and Google will once again have put search at the centre of people’s Web efforts.

Just tried the beta of Yahoo! Video Search for the first time (probably very late to the party, but nothing new there), and it’s pretty impressive.

What’s even more impressive, though, is Yahoo!’s enthusiastic adoption of RSS, in this as well as other ways. Most of us have played with My Yahoo!’s RSS capabilities (although I still prefer my client-side Shrook), but Yahoo!’s also implemented a program to allow content publishers like GU to submit their content to the Y! search database by RSS. Very smart, I think (though I’ve still not been able to get anyone from Y! to explain exactly how to do it).

And now this - Video Search supporting enclosures, with full support for a standards-setting programme and a clear, user-friendly description of why this kind of thing is important:

Why should I syndicate my content?

The question is, why wouldn’t you? RSS syndication is a simple and inexpensive way to build awareness of your content and your brand and it’s also a great way to drive traffic to your site and content. By investing a small amount of time creating your RSS file with Media RSS, you’re enabling broad distribution of your video content to many sources with minimal ongoing work. The flexibility of RSS means that you could reach any site or device that supports Media RSS, which in the future could include such devices as a Media RSS-aware DVR or TV.

Syndication can help you attract new users, especially if your RSS feeds are submitted to search engines. In addition, it can also help you build stronger relationships with your existing users who want to know as soon as new content gets created and published.

Hear hear. In the context of the “exploding TV” discussion currently taking place all over the place, this is really interesting.

The IPPR and the All Party Internet Group are hosting a seminar on intellectual property rights, dubbed Digital Rights and Digital Heritage: Preserving Creativity in the Internet Era. It’s on February 2. Go here for more details.

That’s certainly an interesting title, and the line-up includes people from the BBC Creative Archives Project. So I’m going to try and go along.

Just realised I’ve been sending out summary RSS messages rather than full-text posts. Apologies, that wasn’t the intention. Should be full-text now.