I’ve Said Too Much

I knew vertical searching was big, but I didn’t know how big until I saw this: Worksheet, an Excel plug-in which downloads vacancies from indeed.com into an Excel spreadsheet so it looks like you’re working when you’re actually job-hunting. I can’t work out if that’s genius, insanity or terror-inducing or some combination of all three.

Decent overview of the problem of cookie deletion from the NY Times (registration required), which lays the problem out without ever really answering it:

Spyware Heats Up the Debate Over Cookies - New York Times: “I don’t think cookies should be out there at all,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group based in Washington, “but the good news here is that consumers are at least becoming more sophisticated about the appropriate use of cookies.”

Eric Peterson, the analyst who wrote the Jupiter report, pointed out that most of the deleted files were so-called third-party cookies placed on the computer by a company other than the one operating the site the user was visiting. Most publishers rely on outside companies like DoubleClick and Atlas to send ads to the user’s computer and track the effectiveness of campaigns.

Antispyware programs often leave in place first-party cookies, which can save users the inconvenience of having to log in to a news site each time they visit, but remove third-party cookies, the main target of users’ ire. Some people say they think that total anonymity is the way to go.

For what it’s worth, I think this is a user interface problem. Cookie management has always been well and truly hidden inside a browser’s menus, which only encourages users to think it’s something “techie” and complicated. And decent explanations of what cookies actually are are few and far betweenn (for what it’s worth, here’s ours).

Like lots of issues to do with online marketing, I think this is all about an implied contract between a web publisher and a user. The contract reads something like this: “In return for providing you with content, I will put advertising alongside that content. In order to do that effectively, I need to use technology fairly and effectively, which means you let me put a cookie on your machine. Here’s how your privacy is protected, and here’s how my business is protected.” The key problem is that no-one, and I mean no-one, has been able to come up with a usable interface for describing that contract to users as they are using the service. Crack that, and you crack the cookie “problem”.

Business Week has published a good summary of News Corp’s recent forays into Web media, including this quote:

“Our strategy is quite simple,” Murdoch said. “News Corp. at its core is about content. The Web at its core is about personal choice. What we are aiming to do is combine the two, and in the process redefine the meaning of [an] Internet vertical.”

The company’s presence in such “verticals” as sports, news, and entertainment creates an enormous amount of content. Over the next few years, users will be able to customize it by using tools from acquisitions such as Scout and MySpace. Scout will enable so-called citizen journalists to file and share reports on things that are important to them, such as local high-school sports games.

Murdoch suggested the company will acquire additional tools in the areas of advanced search, e-mail, customization, accessibility, or even voice communications. “Users will be able to personalize their experience to take advantage of the vastness of the Internet as a whole,” he said.

That’s the first genuinely intelligent thing I’ve heard from Murdoch’s lips on this (assuming of course this is what he said, and that BusinessWeek isn’t just putting words in his mouth). Until now, the News Corp pronouncements have either been obvious or baffling (and that included, for me, the MySpace acquisition). This starts to make sense: as Yahoo! moves from providing tools to adding its own content for those tools to manipulate, News Corp. starts to move in the other direction. When they meet in the middle things’ll get really interesting.

Jason Calacanis’ spectacular dissection of Comscore’s recent report into the blogs audience has highlighted for me the real difficulty of comparing panel-based data with website metrics. We see this here time and again: panel-based reports almost seem to be describing a different world to the one we’re seeing in our usage reports.

It seems to me that panels are good at providing the “soft” stuff that advertising agencies love: specifically, demographics on audience, data like mean household incomes. This is the meat and drink of the advertising world, and the cold page view and unique user figures that webheads like me thrive on is an empty vessel without it when talking to a potential advertiser.

Where panels seem to go horribly awry is in anticipating the unique usage patterns of major websites. Huge amounts of user activity on big websites is distributed among users who may only visit the site once in any given month, and none of this activity gets recorded by a panel survey. It’s as if the panel is describing one type of audience while completely ignoring the other. I think this is a major problem for panels: how do they describe the audience that visits my website via Google to read one article on an obscure subject and then goes away again? Because the long tail dictates that all those single-page visits add up to a great big bucket of viable ad inventory.

So, on the one hand, it’s great to see the kind of demographic research which Comscore has done here (and, to be fair, this is the research that Nick Denton highlights in his post on the subject called, appropriately enough, “Blog readers are sexy”, which is exactly the kind of assertion panel-based research gives you permission to make). They should just have been a little more circumspect in their use of web metrics. I mean, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that, in the real world, Gawker doesn’t really have a bigger audience than Slashdot, does it?

Just to echo Neil’s comments in welcoming Jeff Jarvis to the pages of the Guardian, in a fine column on newsrooms and new media which encapsulates all the ideas he’s been expressing on buzzmachine for so long. :

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Hacks must get with the program: * Return to newsgathering. Journalists want to make news; that is why they obsess about scoops and exclusives and waste effort putting their stamp on the commodity news everyone already knows. Why else would we send 15,000 journalists to political conventions where nothing happens? The only way for newsrooms to grow is to learn the lesson of 7/7 - that witnesses can record and report - and be open to the news that communities create. We should aggregate all the news that’s fit to repeat.

I love that phrase “aggregate all the news that’s fit to repeat.”

There’s a well-researched and full interview from Online Journalism Review that has lots of interesting stuff about the plans to integrate the offline and online news teams at the New York Times. What I’ve found particularly interesting about the debate around this has been the fairly widespread assumption that the Web side of NY Times is somehow “taking over” the print side. But if you read between the lines in this piece, it’s pretty clear that the print side is driving the change at least as much:

GrayLady.com: NY Times explodes wall between print, Web: “I’m constantly hearing from people in the newsroom who have ideas for cool things we could do on the Web,” Keller told me. “But under the divided operation, all we could do was lob ideas over the transom. Not that the people at the Web site were reluctant to do it. They had other priorities. It was becoming a source for frustration, and I felt that if we were really going to embrace this thing and own it and tap into the creative energy of all these smart people who are filled with ideas that we ought to be in the same place — physically, administratively, in every way.”

That seems to me to be the nub of this story: the potential for transformation of the existing print news team, rather than a fairly simplistic reverse takeover or something. The fact is that the NY Times offline news team is a lot bigger than the online team, and the way that the integration will start to happen is a lot more about inserting the online team into that larger team, for instance:

OJR: [Len] Apcar told E&P that online people would start moving to the newsroom even before ‘07. With the recent print layoffs, is there an image of print people leaving and digital people taking their place?

Keller: You mean did we drop the neutron bomb to open up space to move these people in? No. The actual physical merger, the complete merger, won’t happen until spring of ‘07. We’re still tinkering with the floor plans, but we expect the digital producers and editors and software developers — all the people we expect to do this — to be contiguous with people who do the print paper.

Until then, we’ll do a few things. In each major news desk, they have an empty seat where we can pretty much right away move in a producer or editor from the Web sitting at each desk. The other thing is the copy desks, which have a lot of space contiguous to the main news desk. They usually start work at around 3 in the afternoon. So in the mornings we could bring in as many people as we want for the first half of the day, which is the time when stories are being hatched.

Also in the piece: Martin Nisenholtz flagged more investment into the excellent NY Times multimedia reports, and also flagged up an RSS aggregation platform under the NY Times. Watch that space.

From Reuters:

India adds 2.49 million mobile users in July | Reuters.co.uk: NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India’s booming wireless sector, the world’s fastest growing major mobile market, added 2.49 million new users in July, taking the total number of customers to 60.366 million, industry bodies said on Tuesday.

The Cellular Operators’ Association, representing nine carriers offering mobile services based on the widely prevalent Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication, said 1.954 million customers signed up for its services.

Overall, GSM carriers had 46.874 million customers at the end of July, up 4.35 percent over June.

So why do I spend my days talking about media on a PC?

This announcement from Quigo:

Quigo Announces Private Label Version of Pay-Per-Click Platform Developed for Local Newspaper Publishers; Newspapers Find AdSonar the Best Way to Capture Local Advertising Dollars, Own the Advertiser Relationship: Quigo Technologies Inc., a leading provider of search marketing and advertising tools, today announced several agreements with the online divisions of American newspapers, including Newsday (a Tribune company), Media General, Scripps Howard and Media News Group. The contracts collectively call for over 130 newspapers across the country to install private label versions of the AdSonar Exchange on their Web sites, turning each site into an auction marketplace where ad placement is up for grabs.

Amongst many others, the online versions of Newsday, the Houston Chronicle, the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, the Oakland Tribune, and the Memphis Commercial Appeal have started offering biddable PPC advertising, and all are reporting renewed interest from local advertisers to place their message next to local content, in front of local readership.

With Google also offering AdSense in banner slots, this is starting to feel like the beginnings of a fundamental shift. Jeff Jarvis certainly thinks so.

From Fred Wilson’s blog, where he’s discussing his VC investment in vertical jobs search provider Indeed:

A VC: Indeed: We are a believer in what some of us are calling “sell side advertising”. That’s the idea that advertisers will put their ads on the Internet for anyone to find and display. And if the advertiser gets clicks back, they will pay for the clicks.

Job search is one of the first places that sell-side advertising is going to happen because most employers already put the jobs they are currently looking to fill on their web sites. Those jobs are the “sell side” ads. Indeed and others are crawling the Internet, grabbing those “ads” and displaying them.

It just makes so much sense. Most large employers have HR systems in place which allow managers to automatically post open positions to the web. Those systems then take the incoming applications/resumes they collect on their web sites and process them into the hiring workflow.

This makes a lot of sense to me, as does the fact that Indeed does a great job of organising the “vacancysphere” in the same way that Topix.net does with news. As many people have said, there’s a lot of juice in aggregation. What I don’t get, though, is how Indeed will compete with Yahoo, which, as I’ve said before, has embraced exactly the same model in the same way. It seems to me that the portals are now very much alive to the potential of their power as aggregators - as you’ll realise straight away if you customise your own Google News RSS feed.

I’m experimenting with adding Overture ads into the RSS feeds for this blog, so bear with me. I’m using Feedburner to deliver the ads.

And if you have any thoughts on their appearance, and on advertising in RSS in general, I’d be interested to hear them.

And, finally, I’ve added my del.icio.us feed into the main feed for this blog, again using Feedburner. Once more, any thoughts on this greatly appreciated.

From Wired’s August issue:

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It’s there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn’t everyone?). I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.

Why aren’t we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone’s scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn’t enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.

I’m sure you’ve already read Kevin Kelly’s genuinely extraordinary overview of the Web past, present and future in the current issue of Wired. But if you haven’t you really should. It’s the kind of thing that’s going to be appearing as quotes in Powerpoint presentations for the next decade.

And he also introduces a new phrase I haven’t heard before but like a lot: messy media.

Well, it’s been a while since I posted anything here. To be honest, that’s because no one single thing has fired my attention in such a way to generate a post, but it’s probably worth summarising the random things which have interested me, if only as a means of getting back into the groove on this blog (if you’re interested in tracking what I note on a daily basis, my del.icio.us feed is here).

start.com and Google front page: both of these feature beautiful interfaces for feed tracking. These screens, and Jarvis’ post on “feedthink”, have just confirmed for me the whole underpinning of digital consumption which has been in place for, ooh, about five years now (!) is shifting around us. Which leads on to….

Ads in RSS. Will Yahoo!’s entry into contextual advertising move the whole ads in RSS conversation on? Because I’m still getting the feeling that this market isn’t so much untapped as virtually ignored… And Google isn’t exactly helping by trying to patent some of the key technology behind it.

But RSS is clearly growing at great guns. Denver Post have launched their own RSS reader, a customised version of NewsGator, and I’m told apocryphally that there were 25,000 downloads in the first few days.

Newsroom changes. The NYT’s memo on newsroom integration has, of course, sparked conversations here at the Guardian. No detail on what the conversations are as yet, but I found this contrarian view about integration very interesting.

Om Malik seems to be starting a one-man campaign to raise awareness on spamming in the blogosphere, pointing out both the apparently lunatic growth in blogs and the gaming of tags on Technorati. While I don’t necessarily agree with him, I do think the momentum to date behind tagging and “blog web services” powering things like Technorati has depended to some extent on the goodwill of the users in the community, and that now these systems are attracting marketing dollars a tragedy of the commons may ensue (though I do agree a cornucopia of the commons may be just as likely). And I’m also interested that Jason Calacanis and Yahoo! seem to be separately gunning for Technorati, in that they both perceive a need for robust and wide-ranging indexing of blog conversations.

TV broadcasting continues to fragment, with the news that the BBC is now streaming its news programmes live online, and that Champions League broadcasters must now show matches live on the Web as well. However, their decision to stream the content in narrowband format to non-UK users is just a sidestep away from the elephant that’s still lingering in the BBC’s room: the fact that this content is paid for by British licence fee payers but consumed by everyone worldwide. Can the BBC become a genuinely global content provider and still keep the licence fee? The jury’s still out.

E-paper continues to terrify me and excite me, and there have been some interesting developments in Japan and (ahem) Scotland.

So lots going on all over the place. Oh, and we’ve launched a beta of our new search engine. Check it out, and give us feedback. And Fox did some big deal which got a little bit of coverage. I’m not even going to try to analyse that one, other than to ask: if you’re worried about being in a bubble, can you really be in one?