I’ve Said Too Much

Yesterday we launched the new Observer blog, our fifth blog launch after Online, The Guide, News and Games.

There’s lots of reasons why this is interesting. Here’s just three:

1. The Observer is the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, and the people who work on it understand the particular rhythms of a Sunday better than just about anyone (the Observer is also the sister paper of the Guardian, and its web presence, like the Guardian’s, is part of Guardian Unlimited.

So it’s really interesting that they’ve focussed on a blog as a means of maintaining connections with their audience all week long. It’s also interesting that they’ve really put their personnel where their mouth is. The blog’s being edited by an ultra-smart cookie, Observer web editor Rafael Behr, and the first day saw posts from executive editor Kamal Ahmed (who posted about developments between deadlines) and Nick Cohen, who has some claim to being Britain’s top polemical writer. If they keep that up, the blog really will be essential reading for anyone who wants to get under the bonnet of the Observer machine.

2. To build the blog, we decided to get some tagtastic juice from the Regent of RSS himself, Ben Hammersley. Ben’s done all the development work on the blog, and we’ve agreed with him that most of the source code he’s produced will be made available as open source. There’s a “folksonomic zeitgeist” widget on there which is particularly interesting. Ben’s been working directly with Rafael and GU’s assistant editor Neil McIntosh.

3. We really rethought the design of the blog, starting from first principles and designing it as a blog in its own right rather than a section within Guardian Unlimited. The headlines in there are using sIFR technology, which is a new departure for us, and there’s also got a new ad format which we’re trying out. And, of course, every time we put something out which allows users to comment, we learn something new.

Oh, and just for good measure, we’ve got our first Podcast on there, too. From John Naughton, no less. In for a penny, in for a pound.

So it’s an exciting development for us. It’ll be fun watching the new baby as it makes its way in the world.

I thought the announcement that AP were rolling out their own RSS feeds, but I missed completely the most interesting part of it. Thanks for paidcontent.org for putting me straight here:

So I asked Jim Kennedy, the VP/Director of Strategic Planning at AP, to clarify some points, and this is what he sent in: ‘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. We also placed a
link to the feeds on the corporate site, which has always directed people to the Custom News pages. For now, if a user picks up a feed from the corporate site, the clickthroughs go to a generically branded AP hosted page. Soon, those clickthroughs will be ‘geo-targeted’ to members appropriate to the
user’s location. So, it’s really a strategy to drive traffic to member news sites as well as to AP news.’

Related stuff on paidcontent.org: AP’s Local Blogging Plans

(Via PaidContent.org.)

Unmediated links to a couple of real-world events which are using social software in really innovative ways.

Northern Voice in Vancouver, B.C. , last weekend, used tags as a way to create an extended event. The site is a blog. They provided ways you could subscribe to PubSub, Technorati and other feed services. They aggregated headlines from what people had to say about the event from around the web. Their wiki kicks butt.

Unmediated also points toTED in Monterey which are doing similar things, and calls these things “X-Events” which I like; we certainly need some kind of name for events and conferences which use existing tools like Flickr, Delicious and Technorati to plug themselves into the virtual world. I particularly liked the way people were taking collaborative notes at Northern Voice using SubEthaEdit.

(Via unmediated.)

There’s some very good stuff in PressThink: Two Letters in Reply to “A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com” from local newspaper operators. Two highlights:

From Mike Phillips, editorial development director for Scripps-Howard Newspapers:

Permalinking makes the site better, but a blanket permalinking policy would be wasteful.

As we talked about this, our online general manager, Bob Benz, said a lot of an intensely local newspaper’s content has no tail potential - that is, nobody’s ever going to want to access it again after the usual seven-day expiration date.

I counter proposed with what I dubbed the Phillips-Benz Continuum. At the right end of the continuum is obits– surely the example of local content with the longest tail. At the left end is a story about a proposed sewer project moving from one level of administrative review to another– surely a story with no tail at all. All the other content is in between. After a bit of rigorous measurement and discussion, surely a newspaper could calculate where on the continuum, on the average day, permalinking should start.

And from the publisher of the Daily Peg:

As far as our model, we intend to be fully searchable, but think that there is a middle ground between freely available and walled off. We’re still working it out, but our thought is that you can Google us and read any story you want for free and without registering, but you’re limited to x number of stories a day at that level (”x” being something greater than one and less than the whole site.)

The idea is that registration, and maybe even subscription is crucial to our ad model. But, the ads are primarily local — and its locals that will primarily use us every day multiple times per day. (We hope!) So why should I hassle you in New York with registration in order to monetize serving up an ad for a Chinese restaurant in East Dallas that does neither you nor the restaurateur any good. I can’t imagine a lot of folks out of market wanting to read more than a couple things a day on our site — and if they do, that’s another business altogether.

Of course, just by posting this I’m adding to the mountain of unverifiable buzz around the story, but there’s rumours out there that a Flickr, Yahoo deal is in the works?, according to Om Malik:

Rumors are flying thick and fast in Silicon Valley: Yahoo is all set to buy Ludicorp, the company behind the hot photo blogging web service Flickr, for an undisclosed amount of money. Its not the first time rumors of these talks have made the rounds. 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. At this point, it could all just be that–chatter.

Read the full post over on B2Blog.

(Via Om Malik on Broadband.)

Peter Chernin is a big, important fellow with far more knowledge of everything to do with media than I could ever hope to have. Which is why I find Peter Chernin’s 10 rules for media survival more annoyingly trite than perhaps I should.

According to the editorsweblog:

President Peter Chernin challenged fellow executives to face the media industry’s biggest problems through a forward-thinking speech entitled ‘10 rules for Media Survival’ at the Forrester Consumer Forum last week. Chernin explained that networks and advertisers need to work together on new formats, and that companies need to turn to technology for new forms of distribution. In particular, Chernin addressed the most contentious issues currently facing the media and threatening future profits including: fragmentation, ad-skipping, and piracy. After addressing media’s increasing difficulty to follow its traditional pursuit of passive audiences due to technological advancements, Chernin laid out his 10 rules for survival.

So far so good, I wouldn’t argue with any of that. But then look at the rules themselves (I’ve left out the ones I can’t argue with).

‘Rule 1: Realize that consumers’ desires of control, choice, convenience, and simplicity have not been altered by the recent changes in technology.

I think that’s not entirely true. I think “expectations” of choice have altered massively in the last five years, thanks to smaller and smaller hard drives and rampantly expanding digital content availability. It’s true to say that consumers “desire” choice, but it’s naive to ignore how their perceptions of choice might have changed.

Rule 2: A wired home does not change anything. It merely allows consumers to move content from one device to another within their home.

Now that really is silly. Does Chernin really believe that my ability to surf the web from anywhere in the house hasn’t changed the way I surf and what I look at? Does he really believe that my ability to program music for a dinner party from a laptop in seconds doesn’t change my view of the music being served up?

Rule 4: Consumers don’t reject advertising, they reject complacency. Advertisers need to evolve the methods through which they reach consumers, especially their old habit of using 30 second commercials.

In what way do consumers reject “complacency”? I know that Chernin isn’t going to get up in a public forum and say the advertising model may well be broken, but it needs bigger thinking than this. Google AdSense changes the advertising world completely, both in terms of what advertising can do for users (ie, how useful it is), in terms of the relationship between a media owner and an advertiser (this relationship is now more intermediated than ever) and in terms of accountability. And in the broadcast world, consumers DO reject advertising if they have the right technology. I have Sky+. I fast forward through adverts. Period.

Rule 6: If content is king, then marketing is the crown prince. Broadcast or cable networks need to create tightly focused brands, like HBO, FX, or MTV.

But I could just as well posit the alternative: that in a world where technology allows me to pick and choose individual programmes from a range of providers quickly and easily and then watch it at my leisure, channel brands are increasingly meaningless. In that world, The O.C. is the brand, because that’s the thing I’m looking for.

Rule 9: Nothing compares to the spontaneity and thrill of things that are live, including sports, news, and entertainment.

This seems rather self-serving and not at all true. “Nothing” compares? What about video games?

Rule 10: If the industry does not solve the problem of piracy and can thus not protect content, all other rules are meaningless.’

But if “nothing compares” with the thrill of being live, why is this a problem?

Source: Forrester Magazine through paidcontent.org

(Via editorsweblog.org.)

I checked out Greasemonkey for the first time today, and thought: uh-oh, shake-up coming. Greasemonkey is essentially a delivery mechanism (in the form of a Firefox plugin) for dHTML scripts. One such script, for instance, removes Google Adsense from pages.

Why is this important? Well, because it asks some very pertinent questions for media owners attempting to run businesses on the Web.

Question 1: what is a web page? Up until fairly recently, there was an easy metaphor for a web page. It was a digitised form of content which you could either sell (via subscription) or monetise with advertising. It was, in lots of ways, analogous to a newspaper page: relatively fixed.

But now, that analogy is rapidly breaking apart: RSS breaks it apart, because now I don’t need to visit the page to consume some of it. Greasemonkey breaks it apart, because now I can make changes on the fly to the page as it suits me. Google’s new toolbar breaks it apart, because now links that don’t belong to me as the web page publisher are now appearing (so does Google own some of my page now?). The Opera mobile phone browser breaks it apart, because now my web page is being reconfigured on the fly in order to appear on a different device.

None of these things need involve me, as a publisher (even RSS feeds can be created by scraping my original web page). It’s as if a newsagent could take a newspaper and change it utterly, right down to removing the advertising, before selling it to a reader.

Question 2: who owns a web page? Again, that’s been pretty clear up until now - if I, as a publisher, put a web page out, I own it. There are even terms of use governing how people can use my web page. But as the model of the web page breaks down, how does this ownership change? If a user has written a script to alter the appearance of my page (legally or illegally), don’t they share in its ownership (I’m talking about perceptions here, not legal contracts)? And if I don’t like what they’ve done to my page (such as taking the advertising out) how do I enforce my ownership effectively? Are we all going to turn into the RIAA?

Question 3: what do we call the emerging “user-created environment” where personal RSS readers combine with Greasemonkeyed/hacked websites and del.icio.us shared taxonomies to create something amorphous and fundamentally “not-owned” other than by an individual end-user? And, on the assumption that nobody is going to create really difficult content all the time unless they can make a business out of it, how can business models be preserved in this open primordial soup?

Big questions. One facetious meta-question: just what the hell are we doing here?

I hadn’t thought about it this way, not being a regular user of NYT online, but Jay Rosen makes the point very well - that up until now, NYT Digital has not seemed to understand the importance of permanence on the web, indeed has seemed to make decisions that run directly counter to these notions, and the one thing that About.com seems to get above all else is the importance of permanence and the long tail (which is why their pages come up so often in search results).

I think this is interesting, but it does seem rather an expensive way of going about things. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to make all their URLs permanent and not dump stuff into the archive after n days, rather than buying someone who already knew why this was important? Facetious question, I know, and there’s a lot more to it than that. The more I think about it, the more this looks like being about content clusters and niche tribes than about anything else.

Well, it’s all gone a bit NYT on here today, but Dan Okrent has written an interesting column about communicating with readers who contact the newspapers, usually with some kind of grievance:

Here’s what you can do on the Web. You are not limited to three slender columns of the right side of the editorial page; nytimes.com stretches from here to the horizon. In the electronically archived version of articles - the ones that exist for the ages - you could move letters from their own ghetto and append them to the articles they address; that’s the way that corrections are handled. In fact, even in the print edition, it makes sense to move letters about news coverage away from the editorial page, where they reside in inappropriate proximity to ideological arguments about editorials and columns, and to a space of their own, perhaps on Page A2. If the news pages and the opinion pages are truly separate, then truly separate them and give news editors, not opinion editors, responsibility for letters relating to news stories.

The better use of the Web site could also give readers the chance to see letters from The Times. One of the great frustrations of my job is seeing the thoughtful letters that go out from Times reporters to readers who have taken issue with something they’ve written. Why frustration? Because one reader gets the benefit of the thoughtfulness (and, sometimes, the writer’s candid acknowledgment that he or she might have done something better), and a couple of million others who might appreciate it do not.

Okrent goes on to say, though, that this view is unpopular at the Times, as it is seen as opening the editorial staff up to a “public confessional.” The usual suspects have piled in on this as a clear sign that the Times does not “get it”, that a public confessional is entirely the point. But I think Okrent’s post is thoughtful and realistic. The Times gets a thousand letters every day to its official letters page alone. I hate to think what the total volume of incoming mail must be, if you include emails and letters to individual journalists. The idea of having a live, open commenting system of this scale would collapse under the weight of the need to moderate it.

So what’s the answer? I have no idea. But I think any answer needs to balance the needs of reporters to be supported by the institutional cotton wool a newspaper provides, with the obvious need for the general public to correct and balance the view of that newspaper. I really don’t think “putting all the letters into a blog”, as Dan Gillmor suggests, is the answer for a newspaper of the NYT’s size. It might work in Greensboro. At a national and international level, any individual post, however interesting and revealing, would just as likely be drowned out by screaming about the Middle East.

PaidContent have done a good interview with Martin Nisenholtz, SVP-Digital Operations at the New York Times, which includes this:

It seems really primed for target advertising.
Nisenholtz: That’s the essence of it. That’s where all the ramp is. There’s tremendous running room in this business. The model we’ve acquired is a web 2.0 model; it’s not a centralized model, it’s a decentralized model where the content is created by passionate individuals who have a competency and a desire to reach the public and that scales into many, many categories and it scales potentially geographically. When we think about the strategy going forward, we think there is tremendous running room in the business, tremendous ramp against that scalability, which is much harder to do in a more traditional content environment because the way the content is created tends to be more costly.

I think that’s a really articulate and really interesting precis of a digital media future, in that it combines thinking about community, clusters of interest, targetting advertising and super-niche content.

This, from TheFeature, is pretty interesting, I think:

When 3 launched in the UK, part of the hype was its pitch that everyone would be making video calls over the 3G network. The company quickly learned what a mistake that was. Not only did people not want to pay so much for seeing whoever they were talking to, but the high prices and ugly phones meant that it was difficult to even find someone else to take part in the other end of a video call. While the company quickly ditched that focus, it’s still been pushing a variety of higher end offerings for quite some time — and recently started talking up mobile music videos, highlighted by a live concert broadcast to subscribers.

While an entire concert may be a bit of overkill for phones, short videos seem to be somewhat more compelling filler for subscribers, leading 3 UK to proudly announce that 10 million videos had been downloaded to phones.

It goes on to say that 3 are probably making next to no money on this, and may even be losing money. But I think it’s particularly interesting for digital publishers that busy people with a plethora of devices might find fragments of video more attractive than anything “complete.”

Which reminds me that at least one phone manufacturer is repeating the mistakes of the dotcom boom by showing a guy watching a movie on his phone rather than going to the cinema. For me, mobile media jumped the shark in 2000 when an advert showed a woman watching a movie on a bus on her mobile. Overselling, anyone?

The good ship Guardian Unlimited has moved, lock stock and lots of smoking barrels, into the main Guardian Newspapers building on Farringdon Road. There are crates everywhere, but it all seems to have gone pretty smoothly. The fact that we’ve moved back into the same building as the newspaper probably calls for an extended analogy with the integration between print and digital media…

Mary Lou Fulton from the Bakersfield Californian, which seems to me to be one of the very few citizen journalism projects that isn’t just vapourware, has some very interesting things to say about newspapers on the subject Will “We Media” save the newspaper? over at Morph. One thing she says:

The 7-day subscriber is the lifeblood of the newspaper industry. We count these subscribers obsessively and spend an increasing amount of money trying to woo more of them. Meanwhile, over on the Internet, we also have customers, sometimes in larger numbers than in print. Some of us have web registration systems that show the overlap between print and online, but these two mediums are largely stovepiped. Consumers today use multiple products and multiple platforms for information. Maybe the subscriber of the future only gets the weekend paper and gets customized e-mail content plus SMS text alerts from us during the week? How do we transition away from the 7-day subscriber mentality and orient our product design and sales processes around more fluid kinds of consumer scenarios?

Absolutely, and something that rarely gets mentioned in all this talk of a fluid, participatory media. Without staggeringly flexible and sophisticated back-end subscriber databases and printing facilities and billing mechanisms and advertising fulfillment, a lot of this stuff is going to remain in the hot-air file.

Cityfeeds.com - London is the London version of Cityfeeds, a new service which aggregates “City-based” RSS feeds to create an “about this city” service.

It’s a good idea, pretty well done. My main problem with the London one is that some of the feeds in there (particularly our own UK News feed) are not about London at all, they just mention London a lot. So, for instance, there’s a story about the Hunting bill coming into effect, which is most definitively NOT about London. But they are asking people to suggest feeds.

Poynter has put up some stuff from the Online Publishers Association about consumption of video clips online:

Eyes backed by bucks are watching short, newsy online video clips, Chasers. And while that might not seem like news to some, the Online Publishers Association put out a web-video viewing study of more than 27,000 users from 25 different websites showing these web-videos watchers are mostly male (63%), married (56%) and packing cash, with 23% saying their household income is more than $100K.

Of these, “66% seek news and mostly watch 1-2-minute clips.” Movie trailers “ranked high with nearly half the audience, with a little over a quarter saying they also seek out music videos and sports.”

The Washington Post has redesigned its home page, with new rollover navigation along the top of the page, a very prominent search box (powered by Yahoo!), cleaner code promising faster loading and a “cleaner design” at the bottom of the home page, according to executive editor Jim Brady.

I do think this is a massive improvement on what went before, but I’m still rather overwhelmed by the sheer volume of links to individual articles. Personally I would have liked to have seen a more explicit “site DNA” on the home page encouraging me to browse. I also think the ad positions are a little messy (they look like an internal compromise to me). I’m not yet convinced about rollover menus as primary navigation, and these particular rollovers have a nasty habit of firing up when I try to put my cursor into the search box. And the search itself still doesn’t give me a sense of the structure of the site, as it’s only crawling articles.

But enough gripes. They’ve done a good job in moving it on, so applause to them.

So, what does the story that Yahoo! is creating 400 jobs in Ireland for its European operations mean for the London office?

The announcement was made today at a press conference held by Micheal Martin, the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The new jobs will be created over five years and will focus on areas such as website editorial, IT, financial service, web hosting and customer services. Some 75 per cent of the jobs will require third-level education.

Here’s something to bear in mind the next time someone suggests cutting back on a website in order to increase sale of its sister newspaper: in Spain, four major dailies significantly increased circulation in 2004:

The stats are out for Spanish dailies’ 2004 circulation on PRNoticias and they’re reversing the decline that has plagued the industry since 2000. El Mundo had the most success increasing its audience by 7.5%, followed by El Pais at 6.5%, ABC at 3.8% and la Razon, which increased its readership by 3.2%. El Pais remained the most popular paper with an average daily circulation of 468,776. The newspapers’ directors have previously stated that the 2004 numbers would be positive and attribute the success to the multitude of kiosk promotions used throughout the year.

And yet El Mundo, the paper that saw the biggest increase, also surpassed 6 million readers in January:

elmundo.es, the website of Spain’s main daily, has beaten its own record by reaching more than 6 million unique readers in January. In only three months, the number of the site’s readers grew by more than a million, affirming elmundo.es’ position as the most consulted news site in Spain, as well as in the Spanish speaking world. With monthly figures for the New York Times being around 17 million and France’s Le Monde at 3 million, elmundo.es is not making a bad showing at all, especially for a European paper.

Things that make you go “hmmm.”

There’s a characteristically thoughtful post from Jon Udell out there about our online identities and how we might manage them. Udell also points to a Doc Searls post on the same subject. Both talk about two “grassroots alternatives” to some of the proprietary identity standards that have emerged, principally Microsoft’s Passport and the Liberty Alliance (Udell also mentions Shibboleth and WS-Federation, about which I know very little).

The two services Udell and Doc Searls point to are IdentityCommons and Sxip Networks.

Both, in different ways, aim to empower me to assert facts about myself and to control the syndication of that data. In the case of IdentityCommons, I buy this service directly, licensing a permanent i-name through which I co-ordinate the activities of identity providers and service providers. In the case of Sxip, the service is free to me as an individual — it’s the identity providers and service providers who pay a licensing fee.

Udell points out that both of these services make explictit mention of DNS as being analogous to their service - the idea being that there is some central repository of individual identity to which people register their identities for use by third parties. He also argues that, if this becomes the case, a far better system of governance than currently exists for domain names is going to be needed.

Personally, I can’t see how any third party could “govern” something as personal and controversial as individual data. I still kind of prefer a “standards” model which I remain in control of - so, if I want my data to be available to other parties, I make it available in an environment I control (say, my website or my blog) in a standard format which third parties can then use. If I don’t have that environment, I can purchase “identity hosting” with a third party, in the same way I purchase web space. But I don’t “register” this identity with anyone but the third party that wants to use it. Why the need for a middleman?

This only serves to prove how much less I know about this than Udell, I know. It is a fascinatingly complex problem.

JD Lasica has a very interesting write up of the American Press Institute Media Center three-day seminar on Emerging Technology, Business and Policy. Lots of good stuff in there, but here’s a few highlights:

From Feedster: use your “offsite audience” by “using lightweight structure (offer some part of all content as xml; offer the mechanics for accepting same). Be the center of an ecology (content, technology). Specialize and integrate (next generation of big dotcoms are all web services; combine the best features of each for your syndicated audience). Use open source software whenever possible.”

“Rafer also invited Buzznet, Socialtext and Pubsub to join Feedster in putting together a 2- to 3-page whitepaper on how the Associated Press (or other entity) could offer Little League scores and highlights, culled from volunteer citizen journalist-bloggers, across their network of client papers and websites.”

Lasica also asked a very relevant question from the floor: How do you turn newspapers from a publication into a conversation? He got three answers:

Ross Mayfield: Give users a chance to built upon your product. Give people the freedom to remix your content — to take it in new directions — by tagging your material with a Creative Commons license.

Bob Wyman: One roadblock is that you can’t find the conversation about your story on the media site itself. What you need is a button or listing of comments about this story, so that “you suck the entire Internet into your local paper as the environment in which to talk about the paper.
They can be blog entries, videocasts, audiocasts, so that the paper once again becomes the focal point of your community.”

Jim Kennedy: Let the readers continue the discussion begun in the story by conversing with the sources.

There’s also some good stuff in there about my alma mater Yahoo!, including the revelation (well, I think it’s a revelation) that one per cent of their traffic is now coming from RSS. And remember, this is a site whose main services in terms of page views are Mail and Chat. That is amazing.