I’ve Said Too Much

More on the Google AdSense moving into display ads story, this time from John Battelle’s Searchblog:

Google Image Ads: The Wide SkyScraper and Other Units: In case any of you were wondering what the specs are for Google’s new CPM-based image ads, here they are:

We will show the following ad sizes (see examples) on content sites in the Google Network:

* Banner: 468 x 60

* Leaderboard: 728 x 90

* Inline Rectangle: 300 x 250

* Skyscraper: 120 x 600

* Wide Skyscraper: 160 x 600

hat tip: Gary.

Is this a little tipping point? From Micro Persuasion:

Chris Pirillo spots Google AdSense ads in this blog’s RSS feed.

Very cool, and looks pretty good in NetNewsWire, although the Adsense box exceeds the width of the windown. Now I need to try it out on my own feeds. One result might be making it easier for publishers to track use of their RSS feeds - let Google do it for them! And obviously this kind of monetisation is exactly what RSS has been waiting for.

If you need convincing that work on the article page of a website is now more important than work on the front page, take this quote from

The Article Page: New Kingpin of Online News?, a Steve Outing piece on article page design. The example is The Globe and Mail, who redesigned their article pages last year to make them easier to use and link to more stuff:

“So, did this design change make much of a difference? Frame reports: ‘Literally overnight daily page-views increased by more than 25%, from about 2.3 million pageviews a day to 3.0 million pageviews a day. That works out to about one extra pageview for each daily unique visitor to the site.”

Wow. And you have to say that what they’ve done isn’t rocket science, just good, sensible clear layout.

Well, at least Google things so:

Google readies banner offerings | CNET News.com: “Google’s program, called Site Targeting, is being introduced in test form on Monday, but will be rolled out to all advertisers in the next two weeks, Keane said. Advertisers will be able to target ads not only but Web site, but also by category, such as wine enthusiasts. Google will target ads by scanning Web pages for their content.”

The banner ad is back!

A headline has just popped up on Guardian Unlimited’s scrolling news ticker. It looks exactly like this:

‘Blair can’t be trusted’ - PA

To me this seems to encapsulate a problem which most news media are only now beginning to tackle - the problem of context. It seems to me that the PA (and by extension Guardian Unlimited, so mea culpa) are relying on an awfully sophisticated reading public to parse that headline as “somebody has said Blair can’t be trusted, according to the Press Association” rather than “the PA thinks Blair can’t be trusted.”

For decades, journalists and the people responsible for selling newspapers have exploited the rather odd convention that putting something in “quotes” is shorthand for saying “we didn’t say this, so don’t blame us if it isn’t true.” Most egregiously, this happens a lot with court reports, and in London at least bleeds into the streets themselves as these headlines appear on posters to promote newspapers (I saw one last week that said “Au pair killed babies, court told”). While the environment was paper and street advertising, that was sort of OK.

But now, as news media get exploded into millions of tiny pieces and feeds into many different formats, it seems to me that we should be being a lot more careful. When I put a headline on a web news story, I’m not putting it on a single web page which I control: I’m putting it on other people’s web pages, in their RSS readers, in their email in-boxes, on their mobile phones, into their electronic programme guides, maybe even into their ears in the form of audio files. How would the phrase “‘Blair can’t be trusted’ - PA” sound on an iPod?

It sounds a simple task, doesn’t it, to turn text content into something which can be used in multiple environments? In fact, it’s incredibly difficult - we’re breaking apart most of the hard-learned conventions of news reporting which the newsreading public understand and are comfortable with. It’s more than writing a shorter headline for a mobile phone screen - it’s about creating new conventions and shorthands while keeping the news itself interesting and vibrant. It’s going to be an awfully interesting few years for sub-editors, I reckon.

From The RSS Weblog:

This post is interesting: How Industry Standard Handles Its Feed Ads:

The Industry Standard handles its feed monetization issues smartly. A screen clip of its appearance in Bloglines is at right. At the top of each day’s feed is a list of article headlines and single-sentence summaries, as compiled each day at
del.icio.us. Readers wioshing to avoid feed ads can click over
to the site on a story-by-story basis. Below that summary follows complete feed posts with embedded display ads on the right side. For the last five weeks two ads have alternated in the rotation.

I’m thinking a lot about monetising and tracking RSS feeds at the moment. Smart solutions like this seem to me to be very much the way forward.

From Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment:

Lovely thoughtful post from Scott Rosenberg on how No reader is an island - essentially on how knowledgeable bloggers in the outside world are making life for the generalists in news rooms really, really hard:

Until recently, each reader who saw the holes in the occasional story he knew well was, in essence, an island; and most of those readers rested in some confidence that, even though that occasional story was problematic, the rest of the paper was, really, pretty good. Only now, the Net — and in particular the explosion of blogs, with their outpouring of expertise in so many fields — has connected those islands, bringing into view entire continents of inadequate, hole-ridden coverage. The lawyer blogs are poking holes in the legal coverage, while the tech blogs are poking holes in the tech coverage, the librarian blogs are poking holes in the library coverage — and the political blogs, of course, are ripping apart the political coverage in a grand tug of war from the left and the right. Within a very short time we’ve gone from seeing the newspaper as a product that occasionally fails to live up to its own standards to viewing it as one that has a structural inability to get most things right.

As a former trade journalist, I really feel the truth of this. Rosenberg’s answer to the problem is to get the newsroom to raise its game; proponents of participatory journalism will probably say “throw the doors open to the world, let ‘em in!” And in the real world, it’ll be a combination of the two.

Wow. I’ve just read Seth Goldstein’s essays on Media Futures, and am sitting here quivering slightly at the avalanche of ideas he puts across. In a wide-ranging but intellectually right overview of Web 2.0, he summarises entire zones of thinking on APIs, tagging, advertising and participatory media. For me, his strongest point is that the Internet is being “alchemised” by its users, as they use it:

Ironically, [Joshua Schachter's] citizenship in finance is useful here as it relates to the experience of George Soros, who almost 20 years ago wrote about his concept of reflexivity in the Alchemy of Finance. Soros claims that one’s understanding of a situation changes the situation, and that the secret to his investing success was understanding his (and other investors’) impact on what had otherwise been seen to be efficient markets.

This is consistent with what I see happening online, where meta-data (information about information) is creating significant economic value, from the many millions of Google and Overture keywords to the emerging class of Flickr, Del.icio.us and other tag-driven systems. Our browsing, clicking, searching and tagging behavior are the base metals which alchemists like Josh are turning into precious datastores.

But I hesitate to quote any one single thing. It’s well worth your time reading the whole damn thing.

From PaidContent.org

NYTimes.com’s RSS Feeds Drive 5.9 Million Pagviews In March: “: An interesting factoid in the press release by NYTimes.com, announcing record online traffic for March: RSS feeds generated 5.9 million pageviews on the site in March, which represents a 342 percent increase year over year and a 39 percent increase from February’s 4.3 million pageviews. The sections that were most popular among RSS feeds included: Washington and Business…”

There are some very interesting points in Tom Curley’s speech to the AP Annual meeting, including an acknowledgment by the AP CEO that, whatever we may wish or like, the user is now in control, and the news that AP is planning a specific “multimedia service for 18-35 year olds” - I can’t remember a content provider saying so explicitly that younger people don’t read, they watch and interact. But I thought this extended quote was particularly interesting:

After a century and a half, AP is shedding its telegraph model of content delivery for a database model, the project at the heart of eAP.

With the arrival of the eAP database, you will have easier access to the full spectrum of our text, photos, graphics, audio and video. Members will be empowered to search, select and customize the reports they want to receive from AP. The old fire-hose method of delivery will be retired, in favor of custom access to the database.

And then:

The new Web browser view dramatically improves on the one we offer now. Rather than separate, reverse chronological rundowns of text, photos and graphics, you’ll see story-centric displays of multiple media types, all related to the same event.

In a second phase, we’ll integrate the new AP viewer with your newsroom workflow, so that you can easily move content into your production systems for print, broadcast and online.

That will require the development of new formatting and tagging standards with a Web-based interface that we will be sharing with you and your production equipment vendors over the next 18 months. We believe that these changes will translate into measurable production efficiencies in your newsrooms.

For instance, we intend to tag all the important people, places and things in the text, so you can link additional resources to them — stock prices and charts for public companies, statistics for athletes and profiles of the rich and famous.

As a cooperative, we have the opportunity to set the standards for how this tagging gets done, just as we did for print formatting decades ago, and we look forward to working through it with you.”

Interesting. Firehose to tagged database seems an interesting analogy for Web 2.0 itself, doesn’t it?

Fascinating post from Matt McAlister on Infoworld’s adoption of tags as navigational aids:

“Today we launched a new design for the article pages on InfoWorld.com. We are going through the site section by section and making upgrades based on the home page redesign we recently launched. But what may seem mostly cosmetic on the outside is actually a significant shift in the way we operate.

What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display. “

What makes the post really interesting is McAllister’s comments on Infoworld’s existing “old school” taxonomy:

Of course, there’s still a need for structured tagging, and we will continue to tag in ways that enable us to create new sections of the site and to help advertisers optimize their marketing campaigns. We built a lot of functionality into the site that is dependent on tagging in a normalized way that would evaporate if we moved completely to freeform tags.

For example, we have advertisers who want to reach people interested in storage products. There are probably 10 different ways to target storage on the site with different kinds of marketing including contextual targeting, behavioral targeting and lead generation programs. Eliminating a high level structure to our tagging would mean that our freeform tags would have to be incredibly precise at all times.

All good stuff indeed. And something else - there seems to be more and more use of del.icio.us and Flickr and their ilk as the taxonomic juice for websites. I don’t know anything about the Infoworld relationship with del.icio.us, but it does seem like a new kind of service is being provided here. Folksonomic ASP, anyone?

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on the story that Associated Press are thinking about chasing Google News for scraping their news headlines:

“In this new world of distributed media, if you’re not aggregated, you’re nowhere.

The prior law was: If you can’t be scraped and then found via a search engine, you’re nowhere. The idea that media can or should control presentation and distribution is over. Toast. Control has passed to the public, and search engines, aggregators, browsers, and the internet are their tools of presentation and distribution. Media have lost control. The flow in the pipe has reversed. So go with the flow, mediamen, go with the flow.

And there are more pigs in this pipeline: If a site does not have RSS, it soon won’t be seen by many, for example. Google is trying to turn video into a searchable medium and TV stations will be fools if they don’t put up their media with metadata to be found. Radio listeners are now demanding on-demand content thanks to the precedent of podcasts and radio stations should follow the examples of WNYC and the BBC and pod’ their stuff.

Media must figure out how to embrace all these tools of consumer control.”

All right and all true (and, as Jarvis points out, another wire service, Reuters, is adamantly not going after Google News). But there is a real issue here. To me, there’s no doubt that there’s a disconnect in the fact that Google can make ad dollars out of other people’s content. Sure, there is a trade-off - links for ad revenues, if you will - but that trade-off is, at the moment, based on a nod and a wink. And billion dollar companies can’t do business on a nod and a wink. At some point, Google News’ relationship with the parties that provide it with content is going to have to be regularised.

It’s fair to say that Rupert Murdoch’s recent “conversion” to digital media has caused a fair bit of consternation among other media owners, because it’s certain that News Corp’s essential resignation from the digital sector (for practical purposes) in the late 1990s left the field a lot more open than it would otherwise have been. If News Corp is planning a major return to the digital table, it’s going to make things more difficult for the rest of us.

Which makes Rupert Murdoch’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington on April 13, 2005. It’s a pretty incredible document. My summary of it would be: Murdoch is getting far better advice about digital media than he was, and he’s moved a long way, but he’s still a figure who thinks about control in an inappropriate way for this new age.

Nonetheless, Murdoch claims to understand that the control issue has changed:

I come to this discussion not as an expert with all the answers, but as someone searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language. Like many of you in this room, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They’ll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband internet access.

He goes on to say:

[Younger users] want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle. Think about how blogs and message boards revealed that Kryptonite bicycle locks were vulnerable to a Bic pen. Or the Swiftboat incident. Or the swift departure of Dan Rather from CBS. One commentator, Jeff Jarvis, puts it this way: give the people control of media, they will use it. Don’t give people control of media, and you will lose them.

But I think Murdoch begins to lose the plot when he makes assertions like this:

We in this room - newspaper editors and journalists - are uniquely positioned to deliver that news. We have the experience, the brands, the resources, and the know-how to get it done. We have unique content to differentiate ourselves in a world where news is becoming increasingly commoditized. And most importantly, we have a great new partner to help us reach this new consumer — the Internet.

He also goes on to say:

Today, to the extent anyone is a destination, it’s the internet portals: the Yahoos, Googles, and MSNs. I just saw a report that showed Google News’s traffic increased 90 percent over the past year while the New York Times’ excellent website traffic decreased 23 percent. The challenge for us - for each of us in this room - is to create an internet presence that is compelling enough for users to make us their home page. Just as people traditionally started their day with coffee and the newspaper, in the future, our hope should be that for those who start their day online, it will be with coffee and our website.

To do this, though, we have to refashion what our web presence is. It can’t just be what it too often is today: a bland repurposing of our print content. Instead, it will need to offer compelling and relevant content. Deep, deep local news. Relevant national and international news. Commentary and Debate. Gossip and humor.

Oh the agony in those words to the extent anyone is a destination! There’s a world of old media pain in that statement. But really Murdoch is talking about trying to make his websites “destinations”, places which people go to instead of other places, where success is linked to “stickiness” and “time on site” and the like.

To me, this is a bit of a 1998 view of the world. It’s a portal view. It says nothing about how News Corp publications will be “part of the Web,” how they will respond to other content providers. It’s still, in many ways, a “closed” content model. Murdoch does talk about “supplementing” News Corp coverage with blog content, but you don’t get the sense he really means it.

Which isn’t to say this view of the world is wrong, or that News Corp hasn’t moved a huge distance with this speech. It has. But the speech still feels like the words of someone catching up. Catching up fast, but still catching up. When Murdoch does something genuinely innovative and risky online - like he did with satellite television in the UK or network television in the US - that’s the time we’ll really have to start worrying. And judging by his speech, I think he’s already moving towards a vision of what that “something risky” might be: a news site with full multimedia, aimed at a broadband audience and intended as a “destination,” something which combines all News Corp’s assets into a single digital gateway. In other words, a portal. In other words, AOL.