I’ve Said Too Much

Google are now offering interactive ads inside RSS.

Like a lot of people in the news business, I’ve been following the travails of the Ventura County Star and its problems with commenting on articles with some interest. For those who haven’t been, in a nutshell this is what has happened: the Ventura County Star opened up comments on its articles with very little protection, and was later swamped with trolls and comment abuse. They were forced to shut the comments down before opening them up again with the following changes (this from assistant managing editor John Moore’s blog).

VenturaCountyStar: All comments are routed through our online registration system. A script attaches the registered name to the comment. It also allows us to identify the email address that was used in registration. (And thanks to our friends at our sister newspaper Naples Daily News for doing this for us.)

That allows us to contact via email anyone who files objectionable comments. If they persist, we can block their registration in addition to blocking their IP address.

If we send them a warning and find their email is phony, then we ban them for violating the Terms of Service.

It also creates a self-regulating factor for many of us. By forcing people to use registered names (which should be their real names), we invoke the “Mama’s listening” rule: Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want your mother to hear.

We’ve also attached a basic profanity filter which will allow comments to be posted, but replaces the growing list of profanity with asterisks.

And we are encouraging, imploring and, yes, empowering readers to police themselves. We’re asking them to contact us immediately if they find objectionable posts. And we are still investigating the model of volunteer moderators (maybe not as extensive as Slashdot).

When I first read that, I admit a big part of me screamed “well, duh!” But that’s an unneighbourly point of view. Moore’s points are very valid to everyone thinking about opening up comments on articles, but even doing all these things and more still requires a leap of faith. If you make the choice to allow unmoderated comments on articles, even with all of these caveats, you are increasing your risk of legal exposure. Let’s be completely honest about that. Making that leap requires a sophisticated and adult internal conversation between legal and editorial teams, and a full and frank acknowledgment of risk. Once you’ve got that, you can start worrying about how you do it. But I don’t often hear a frank discussion of the risk among advocates of participatory journalism, probably because newspaper lawyers don’t blog, but journalists do. It’s still a long bumpy road we’ve got to travel.

Interesting story on Nokia’s web gameplan from Business Week:

Nokia’s Newest Is No Cell Phone: Called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, it’s about the size of a paperback book and designed specifically for browsing the Web and checking e-mail via a home or hot-spot Wi-Fi network. And where Wi-Fi isn’t available, it can still access the Web by using a cell phone equipped with Bluetooth wireless technology.

NEW TERRITORY. The new product is the first Nokia (NOK ) personal communications device that doesn’t contain a cellular radio. It’s part of a major strategy shift that began in 2004 when Nokia rejiggered its product organizations into four groups to attack new markets %u2014- an effort that’s just starting to bear fruit.

The Internet Tablet, which weighs about 8 ounces, includes a 4.13-inch-wide touch screen and can recognize handwriting. A virtual keyboard appears on the screen, and users navigate with a stylus. Nokia says it will be available during the third quarter.

The thing about these new forms of device is that they either bomb (Newton) or explode (iPod). There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground. Personally, I think this could explode. Combine it with some kind of photo viewer and ebook reader, and it could really explode. Maybe we should think of it as a “server control and viewer for the household.” I get to see what’s on my server (or on a Web server, if I’m connected to the Web) without firing up a laptop.

From Matt McAlister, a very interesting post about how RSS is disintermediating websites, and how this is sooo similar to the way the Web disintermediated some other media back in the 90s:

I’m certain these arguments were among some of the same arguments used to declare the end of print publishing as we knew it back in 1998. A paranoid would begin finding ways to make sure his or her business is able to protect his or her assets. Many people did just that during the boom, and many of those people are still in business or are even flourishing since the crash. An opportunist would start looking for ways to let customers define how his or her business can help them better. Many of those who played aggressively during the boom with risky models focused on adding value for their customers have created huge barriers to entry for old media.

I think this is spot on. We’re investing in RSS because the momentum behind the platform is such that any media owner with a serious interest in being found in the digital realm needs to invest in it to keep its audience. But at what cost? Might it be better to not invest in it at all? I don’t think for a minute that the answer to that is “yes.” I just think it’s interesting that more people aren’t asking the question or attempting to answer it. It’s all about faith again.

This from Cnet:

Media | Web visitors tossing cookies | News.blog | CNET News.com: Web analysis company WebTrends says that blocking cookies has increased fourfold since January of last year. That may sound like good news for consumers–no more Big Brother watching what you’re doing or bothering you with ads you don’t care about.

Not quite sure I can accept a figure as accurate as “increased fourfold since January.” Measuring cookie resistance is notoriously hard to do, and it’s also something which the Web industry (at least in the UK) is only now starting to face up to. Personally, I don’t know what the answer is to this: there’s no doubt that people are getting more “sophisticated” in their use of cookies, which at the moment means they’re either deleting them often or refusing to accept them from some or all sites. But I wonder if there’s something of a Hegelian dialectic in here (forgive me the fanciful philosophical digression). First comes ignorance of cookies (thesis). Then comes fear of them (antithesis, where we are now). Then comes knowledge and understanding (synthesis), where users are fully aware of cookies and their purpose, and clearly understand the contract between the website publisher and the themselves.

What might this contract look like? Well, it would need to make clear that, even on the Web, some things just can’t come for free. Advertising needs to be targeted, e-commerce needs to be generated, businesses need to track their businesses. Cookies are needed for all these things. If you want this stuff, you’re going to need to accept cookies to receive it.

Problem is, web browsers are spectacularly bad at explaining cookie behaviour to users. Until someone comes up with a really neat way of explaining what cookies are doing, inline, users are always going to veer towards caution. Which means they’re going to be turning cookies off and deleting them.

From PaidContent.org:

WSJ.com Appoints New “Free Editor”: : (via FishBowl NY) The Wall Street Journal Online is getting serious about opening up more content to attract more subscribers, or at least be smart about it. It has appointed Carl Bialik, one of its former staffers and now a freelancer to be its free-content editor…

Over the last few months, WSJ.com started selectively opening up a few of their stories each day, to get more linkage from bloggers and also use it as a way to showcase their content to get more subscribers. WSJ.com editor Bill Grueskin explained it to us: “The list has grown tremendously since the election and now includes a wide swath of bloggers, along with other sites that want to be alerted to our free links. In fact, it has gotten so big that we have decided to provide a more contextual and targeted approach, with lists of recipients sorted by content. So, for example, once this is fully in gear, a tech blogger will get tech links of the day and won’t wind up sifting through links to stories on politics or the economy (unless she or he wants to). And we wanted to have a smart, web-savvy editor oversee it.” Hence Bialik’s appointment…

So there you go - you can have your cake and eat it too. Less facetiously, this will be an interesting experiment. Can subscription media sites “game” the Googlesphere?

This is very interesting:

LookSmart rolls out syndicated products with Furl.net: Furl allows publisher audiences to: quickly archive documents that are essential to them while using their own naming for topics, store the text as opposed to just the URL, and to access their web-based archive from any computer. Plus, Furl allows users to search for links to content across a member network and build associations between other individuals who share a passion. By encouraging friends, family and associates to visit their archive, members evangelize a publisher’s site through their personal relationships.

This seems very smart, at least because del.icio.us would never do it in its current incarnation. But the announcement is unclear on a clear thing: if a publisher were to white label Furl, would it be able to limit its “member network” to just its own users, or would it be the entire Furl community? It seems to me it would be a powerful thing to say “other Guardian Unlimited users” linked to something as well as “other Furl users.”

The biggest news of the day by far, so need to post something on it, but the NY Times putting its top commentators and “some news” behind subscription is a pretty straightforward deal, really, as can be judged by the fact that everyone who’s commenting on it is right, really. Yes, it’s priced low enough not to be a major disincentive, and yes, an archive potentially going back to 1851 is a pretty good product for less than 50 bucks a year (or free with a newspaper subscription). And yes, it’s sensible for the NYT to be considering secondary revenue streams in anticipation of a maturing advertising model.

On the other hand, people are right when they say it may cut commentators off from the linking-blogging-conversosphere, and the commentators may at some point in the future walk away because of this (although I have to say that, right now, that seems like wishful thinking from bloggers with a rather over-inflated sense of self-importance). And clearly the NYT is going to suffer from some degradation of its Web footprint. But I’ve always thought it was pretty remarkable how well the NYT does in terms of Pagerank etc. with registration in front of it; in this context, subscription doesn’t seem to me to be a major leap. The leap from non-registration to registration is bigger.

So, what do I think? I think newspapers have to do these kinds of things. We’ve experimented with our own subscription products at Guardian Unlimited, and we’ll continue to do so, because it’s the right thing to do. And I believe the NYT when they say they’ll see how it goes. No hidden agenda, just a deep breath and a lots of toes in the water. Fair enough.

I missed this nice post from Zeldman at the Daily Report, in which he points out the need for imposed structure alongside a tag soup:

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report: We who make websites must strike a fine balance between guiding our users and allowing them to lead us. We listen but we also synthesize and invent. We conduct user research but we interpret the results. We ask what users want but we decide what they are really telling us - and we, not they, determine how best to fulfill the needs they didn’t necessarily realize they were articulating.

This from an interesting interview with Feedburner on clickz.com:

Lessons from the Cutting Edge: RSS Advertising : One general theme from Feedburner’s testing will be of special interest to publishers: click-through rates from RSS feeds back to sites are decreasing. The company says this is happening across all the feeds it manages.
“If RSS popularity continues to increase, and it becomes less and less a vehicle for driving site traffic but more and more its own content-viewing medium, that presents an interesting situation to publishers,” Dick said.

Probably a more likely explanation is that people are adding more and more RSS feeds to their readers, but don’t have any more actual time to click through to full websites. So an individual site’s proportion of their attention is going down. But I think what Dick says about RSS becoming a “content-viewing medium” in its own right is really interesting. What’s the balance between keeping the “rapid read” capacity of RSS, and just mimicking the browser? In fact, what’s the point of RSS becoming just another web browser? And are we going to end up putting as much junk into RSS feeds as we’ve put onto websites, so something else comes along and replaces it with the original stripped-down purity of RSS?

From Poynter E-Media Tidbits:

New Article-Page Approach at NYTimes.com: Recently I wrote about the need for news websites to redesign their article-level pages, to accommodate the modern-day fact that large percentages of visitors no longer enter sites via the home page. We’re seeing some of this in action now.

At NYTimes.com, company spokesperson Kathy Park reports on that site’s recent article-page redesign (example), meant not only to provide new navigation options on individual article pages, but also to offer roomier text spacing and more flexible layouts.

Notable changes to article pages include: a “Go to Section” navigation aid at the top of the page that drops down when (…)

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My tuppence ha’penny on this: I can see what they’re trying to do, but I don’t particularly like it, either aesthetically (it’s all a bit of mess) or functionally (for instance, the mouseover dHTML section navigation doesn’t degrade at all gracefully when JavaScript is turned off, and I think they’ve been too zealous in removing section navigation).

From Poynter E-Media Tidbits:

Computer Journals Cap Top 10 Digital Edition Circulations: More than 100 U.S. magazines, twice the number from a year ago, now count significant numbers of digital editions among their circulation figures, according to the auditing firm BPA Worldwide. Here are the top 10 as of December 2004.

1. eWeek: 65,000 among 400,100 circulation (16.2%)
   
2. Computer Weekly: 40,065 among 139,817 (28.7%)
   
3. Microsoft Certified Professional: 39,092 among 119,092 (32.8%)
   
4. NASA Tech Briefs: 31,179 among 190,428 (16.4%)
   
5. Electronic Weekly: 16,853 among 43,498 (38.7%)
   
6. EDN: 16,397 among 134,025 (12.2%)
   
7. ECN: 16,324 among 126,020 (13.0%)
   
8. Computing: 15,000 among 115,000 (13.0%)
   
9. SD Times: 13,997 among 51,481 (27.2%)
   
10. Foreign Policy: 13,804 among 103,589 (13.3%)

It’s (…)

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For something so potentially system-changing, I think Feedster’s page promoting its RSS ads network is a little, um, low key. Anyway, have signed up, and we shall see.

So, the BBC have gone live with BBC Backstage. It promises to be an API, but at the moment it’s only a means of promoting the fact that the BBC has a “reuse” policy for its headlines, and that it has a range of RSS feeds which people can use to create new products based on BBC links. There will be an API (no real details as yet), but at the moment this is really just a shell for future experimentation.

Nothing at all wrong with that, of course. And it really does show a breadth of ambition and applied resource which, for this particular overstretched BBC competitor, is at once awesome and infuriating.

What I do have a bit of a problem with, of course, is the breathless welcome for this initiative in some circles. I cannot, for example, agree with Ben Hammersley’s excited statement that:

Those businessmen with a plan to take on the BBC News can now do so, but they needn’t spend millions building a network of bureaux and correspondents. Instead they can take the BBC news content itself and innovate and add value to the way it is presented, analysed, contextualised and so on. There’s actually more of a business opportunity here now, than there has ever been. By opening up its content, the BBC hasn’t only helped preserve itself, it’s created a entirely new industry.

Nice idea and everything, but here’s the reality: you are explicitly forbidden from doing this by the Backstage terms of service. You can’t redistribute BBC content; only the BBC can do that. And Backstage is an ideal way to encourage distribution of BBC content around the world (a fundamental tenet of the BBC’s public service charter) but click on a link and you’re back on a BBC page to look at the full content. The simple fact is that the BBC is not distributing full-text content by RSS; only headlines and snippets (this is even true of Backstage’s own RSS feeds). As the BBC itself has said, it expects 10 per cent of its website traffic to be coming from RSS by the end of this year. In other words, RSS is justa another effective way of building audience and traffic, and Backstage is a very good way of getting BBC RSS feeds out into wider communities.

So does this change the world? No. Is it a smart thing to do? Absolutely. Will anyone make money out of this other than the BBC? Not a hope. Does this take us into new areas? Potentially, but not yet. Is digital media the, like, most amazing place to be right now? Oh yes.

From editorsweblog.org:

Incentive to invest in your newspaper’s website:

A new survey done by Nielsen/NetRatings done for the Newspaper Association of America found on YahooNews shows only increasing numbers for newspapers’ websites readerships. From February to March of this year, unique audience grew 9%, page views by 38%, pages per reader 27% ad time per reader 6%. Overall, newspaper website traffic jumped 3.1% year on year, 44 million readers, or 29% of all internet users, consulting newspapers’ online versions. President of the NAA’s New Media Federation, Eliza Wing, commented that these readers are usually younger, educated, ethnically diverse, and employed. “Not only do newspaper reach a vast audience (online)… these are very loyal users, connected to their local news site and to the information, including advertising that appears there. The newspaper online audience presents an enormous opportunity.” The data of the Nielsen survey is not all that surprising, one example being that the number of visitors to the New York Times website exceeds its print circulation.

Yes, but is it a vast new audience? And how many of them are still reading the paper?

From editorsweblog.org:

US: why young people don’t read the newspaper:

We all know that younger generations are not reading newspapers. But has anyone gone to the source to ask why? Greg Gatlin of the Boston Herald recently paid a visit to an American college to talk to a journalism class, but ended up asking them about their own media habits. His findings were somewhat surprising. It’s seems that younger people aren’t allergic to newspapers so much as they; 1. don’t want to pay for it, and 2. demand more convenient access. Most students don’t apply to a newspaper unless required by their classes, and even then they find them inconvenient because they are usually forced to walk to the bookstore to pick it up. Essentially, American college students, a cherished demographic, ask themselves, “Why pay for something that I can only pick up by walking all the way across campus when I could get the same product on my computer for free five seconds after I roll out of bed?” Realizing this, newspapers are targeting campuses. Some universities now pay for the paper to be distributed on their campuses and others have the paper sponsored by outside organizations. Still, it seems that newspaper classifieds may never come back, as the large majority of students said that when it comes to looking for a job they turn to the internet. And as so far as appeal goes, younger people still find newspapers lacking. They want their news to be “more opinionated, fun, colorful, and (engaging).”

Source: Boston Herald

Colourful, engaging, opinionated, fast and free. Hmm.

This is well thought-through and interesting:

Digital Web Magazine - Web 2.0 for Designers: “In Web 1.0, there were two stages to visual Web design. In the early years, designers used tricks like animated GIFs and table hacks in clever, interesting and horrible ways. In the last few years, CSS came into fashion to help separate style from structure, with styling information defined in an external CSS file. Even so, the focus was still on visual design%u2014it was the primary way to distinguish content and garner attention.

Enter the Web 2.0 world, which is not defined as much by place and is less about visual style. XML is the currency of choice in Web 2.0, so words and semantics are more important than presentation and layout. Content moves around and is accessible by programmatic means. In a very real sense, we’re now designing more for machines than for people. This may sound like we’re in the Matrix, but in the words of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, “Web 2.0 is about making the Internet useful for computers.”

What does this mean for Web designers? It means designers have to start thinking about how to brand content as well as sites. It means designers have to get comfortable with Web services and think beyond presentation of place to APIs and syndication. In short, it means designers need to become more like programmers. Web 2.0 is a world of thin front ends and powerful back ends, to paraphrase Bezos.

(Via SiliconBeat.)

News on developments on RSVP, a pretty cool technology that streams text content to mobile phones one word at a time. Not seen it in action myself, but I’ve been told by colleagues that it really words.

Mobile reading with BuddyBuzz:

When BJ Fogg was head of U.S. research at Casio in the late 1990s, he wanted to use a technology commonly used for speed reading to deliver content to watches and other devices.

Casio never embraced the idea. But Fogg is getting a second chance. Now director of research and design at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, Fogg is leading a research team that is testing the same technology - known as RSVP - to easily present large amounts of text on tiny mobile phone screens.

This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. His researchers have an entrepreneurial hunger, Fogg says. The lab’s created a public service called BuddyBuzz that anyone with the right mobile phone can use. And the team is studying the commercial feasibility of the technology.

‘We think there’s definitely commercial potential for delivering text content to mobile phones and we’re exploring some of those options,” he said. ‘There are members of the team who would love to spin this out to a company.”

(Via PaidContent.org.)

Yahoo Finance’s BMW3 Campaign: Goes Too Far?: Yahoo Finance has a new twist on advertiser integration: for the new BMW 3 campaign on the site, it is turning on the ‘e’s in the section titles into ‘3′…which in turn link to BMW’s site for the new car (works cross-browser)…

Ask me, and I think this is pushing it: I, for one, am not a proponent of messing with the story/information/editorial flow, which is why I have warned against using tools such as IntelliTxt (Forbes.com tested it last year, among others…)

Anyway, the counter argument is that Yahoo Finance is not editorial, and it is just information, and commerce info at that. As a marketer, this is a dream integration, for sure.

Having seen the ad myself, it seems like an OK idea badly executed. Clicking on the 3 takes my off the site and into BMW’s site - I think it should just open a pop-up or something but leave me in the page. Interesting, though…

Backfence.com has officially launched in Washington. On first pass, the design is interesting: it’s very 37 Signals style, bold colours and uncluttered page layout. Very nice. As others have pointed out, the self-service advertising model is another feature. There are three types of advertising: display (with a cool “build your own” system), classified (free to individuals, with upsells, and paid-for for businesses) and yellow pages (again, free for local businesses, with upsells).