I’ve Said Too Much

The pace of web development being what it is, sometimes a big watershed day can pass and you barely notice. So let me pause for a moment and point out that we’ve done two exciting, disruptive things today which potentially hold big implications for the future.

Thing 1: We announced today that Ricky Gervais, all-round comic genius and modern renaissance man, will be doing a series of 12 podcasts for us. We’re distributing the podcast and marketing it as a GU product, he’s putting the actual audio together (with his two sidekicks Stephen and Karl). It starts next week. It’s going to be huge.

Thing 2: It’s been in the works for a long while, but today we also soft-launched our news reader, Guardian Unlimited Newspoint. It’s a branded RSS reader which comes pre-loaded with our RSS feeds, with the capacity to add further feeds from a recommended directory, or manually by adding the RSS URI. Only works on Windows at present (we’re working on a Mac version), but I think it’s pretty cool - certainly the best delivery of a branded RSS reader I’ve yet seen. I’d love to know your thoughts.

So, as of today, we’re a broadcaster and a syndication platform. And to think, 10 years ago we were just a newspaper.

I’ve been sceptical here a couple of times about the explosion in enthusiasm for APIs and mashups. My line previously has been that the revenue case is somewhat opaque: it seems to be based on a combination of two main factors:

1. Everyone is doing it. Why don’t we?

2. Getting our links out there will drive traffic to our site, and thus make more sense of whatever business model it is we’re currently signed up to.

The latter one I get, totally. The former one is just a bubble waiting to happen (or already happening, depending on your view). Take, for instance, Google Maps. Brilliant technology, brilliantly applied, the world is a far, far better place for having it. Really, it is changing the face of the planet. But Google is a business. And when someone mashes up their maps with Craigslist classifieds, what does Google get out of it, directly? What do they put in their internal powerpoints to justify it? Brand recognition? Presence? Ubiquity? Because it isn’t revenue.

The thing that sparked these thoughts was this: a map of US sex offenders which overlays data on sex offenders on Google Maps and allows you to see whether there are sex offenders living in your neighbourhood. Now, I won’t get into the wrongs and rights of this, other than to say it seems very, very wrong to these European, Guardian-reading eyes (I was kind of alarmed that the initial reaction on digg.com seemed to be “wow, kewl, there’s a sex offender living next door to me). My point is: what does Google think about it? Would Google ever build something like this itself? And how, given Google’s reach, can it possibly keep an eye on everything that’s being done with its APIs?

If you haven’t read it yet, check out Jack Shafer’s hilarious imagining of Google’s demise. He sees the big G being squeezed between a resurgent News Corp., an aggressive Amazon and an insatiable Wall Street. Much of it is flat out mad, but interestingly mad. The one bit I really disagree with is the idea that News Corp. would create some kind of super “internet within the internet”, what Shafer calls “RupeWeb”, but in his analysis of how newspapers might respond to the challenge, and how Amazon might have more bite than anyone imagined, I think he’s spot on.

Google raised the bar in the last 24 hours by ripping value out of two completely separate industries in the same day - classifieds (Google Base) and analytics (Google Analytics). Haven’t played with Analytics much yet, though from what I can see it’s got amazing functionality and will make free stats systems like Sitemeter (which I use) pretty much redundant. Also I was surprised that the Analytics terms of service doesn’t seem to give Google the explicit right to use the data for its own purposes, even in the aggregate, but I’m no lawyer (they may not need this explicit right under American law, I guess), and the overall Google privacy policy appears to apply to Analytics as well.

Google Base is more disruptive. I think recruitment advertising will stay away - job ads need to get more customisable and flexible, and the nature of Google Base means it’s difficult to do that. For sale ads, though, could well disappear into the Google maw, though the last three years have seen so much value ripped out of that business (Craigslist, Gumtree et al) that Google’s move may just confirm a trend.

Here’s one future for Yahoo News: news headlines from Gizmodo. Y’s signed a non-exclusive distribution deal with Gawker to put content from Nick Denton’s firm into its media pages. I’ve been expecting this for a long while - it makes perfect sense, and is in many ways a throwback to the old days when Yahoo gobbled up distribution deals with content partners all over the shop (including Guardian Unlimited), under the old formula “content for traffic.” The advent of RSS and AdSense/Overture has breathed new commercial life into that model, and the degree of comfort that entrepreneurs like Denton have for broad, lightly-held distribution models means more of these deals are likely. I think it’s particularly interesting that Denton’s initial reaction to the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal was that it was really premature. This deals sheds quite a lot of light on what he meant by that, I think. I don’t know, but I’ll bet he’s going to be chasing massive distribution (and thus audience) for quite a while yet, and didn’t want to get locked into one platform too early. Smart.

Good post on where’s the innovation in site design?, including this:

As my friend Dale Peskin tells it, most people think of newspapers as being like Walter Matthau — the perfect image of a grumpy old man. Why, then, would anyone want to A) design their news website to look like a newspaper; and B) use the same format and even the exact same content as the newspaper? (Maybe nytimes.com can get away with it because its brand is so powerful.)

But what will the next generation of news sites look like? I’m not sure. While I like a few elements of each of the above designs, I don’t know of any newspaper site design that’s good. And that’s a problem because our site, spokesmanreview.com, is way overdue for a redesign, and it would be a whole lot easier to steal someone else’s design than to come up with our own.

Our web staff has argued at length this week over what role the “repurposed print content” should play in our redesign. One argument is that the “shovelware” is yesterday’s news and because it’s the only part of our site that requires a subscripton, it should be segregated into a “premium” sidebar spot. Another argument is that the print content is the best journalism that’s being provided by our news staff, so it should have the most prominent display. A third argument is that, in the future, what now is “repurposed print content” actually will appear first on the web, and we need to design for a true, 24/7 news and information site.

Difficult, isn’t it? I would agree with the assertion that there aren’t enough well-designed newspaper sites, and would add that newspaper websites haven’t done enough to exploit the fluid information architecture of the Web - we’re still stuck in a language of sites and sections, desperately trying to find something more flexible but terrified of throwing out the baby with the bathwater - in this case, the strong association users have with newspaper sections like sport, business, arts and comment.

Do you know of any newspaper sites that have cracked this? Answers on a postcard - or at least in a comment.

He doesn’t need the publicity from me, by Simon Waldman (my boss) spoke at the Beyond the Printer Word Ifra conference in Madrid this week. Poynter has a couple of articles about it: here and here.

Needless to say, I agree with all of it!

It’s been a while since I ran my del.icio.us bookmarks through a visualiser, and the results are instructive. No surprise to find I’m obsessed with advertising (we are an advertising-supported site, after all), but I clearly haven’t kicked my Yahoo habit, nearly five years after leaving them. And blogs and rss both score more highly than newspapers. Clearly this is something I don’t want to have to think too hard about right now…

I wonder how the younger me, the old journalist me, would react to this map?

In a post about Rupert Murdoch’s comment on Microsoft and Google, Om Malik says this:

Google’s game plan. No need for coherence as long as you can attach advertising to it. Or as I like to say, a company that makes profits one page-view at a time.

I love that. It may be glib, but it also expresses a real truth - and one which may have answered my question about the value of APIs, if I get time to give it enough thought….

Smart and more disruptive than you could possibly imagine: BBC News media to your desktop as an RSS feed.

I presented at the Factiva Forum 2005 London back in mid-October, and they’ve put a page about it with links to my presentation. The presentation doesn’t make a huge deal of sense, as I’ve been going for the “oblique imagery with copious notes” PowerPoint style recently, but you probably get the idea. I did a similar presentation to this one at Ad-Tech in early October (although there I spoke about Attention as well as participation, community and feedthink).

Following my post earlier this week about not getting ahead of the curve, which discussed my distress at finding that two entirely unscientifically-grouped bunches of young people hadn’t heard of blogs, comes this survey from Pew: One in Five Teens Have Own Blogs

Nearly three in five school-age teens with Internet access have created online content, including Web pages with artwork, photos and stories - and about a fifth have their own blogs, which also allow friends and other readers to create feedback postings.

You say potayto, I say potaato.

I must admit that, at first glance, I was slightly underwhelmed by mightyv, which is the first winner of the BBC Backstage competition to build products based on the BBC Backstage APIs. At first glance, it just seems to be a more accessible version of the BBC’s existing TV listings service - kind of like the accessible version of the the Odeon’s website which a chap built (and which Odeon have subsequently ripped off, rather successfully, I think). The only thing I thought about it was that it showed how usable sites can be when they’re designed by one or two guys and not a committee of people with different agendas.

But playing with it a bit more, its true greatness came to light. It lets you tags programmes, and add them to your personal schedule, and even import them into iCal. It lets the community rate things. It has all the participatory goodness a site like this should have. It’s very, very good.

But what I’m really interested in, I suppose, is this: what happens next? Or, to ask the same question another way, how does the BBC benefit? On one level, mightyv has some lovely ideas which, I’m sure, the Beeb would like to copy - but the Beeb’s got an awful lot of very good ideas people of its own, and I’m sure they must have come up with something a lot like this by now. I’m kind of assuming (and this is cheeky, because I don’t know) that the only reason the Beeb wouldn’t produce something like mightyv is structural - they can’t make it happen for internal technical, architectural or even political reasons. Or, even more simply, it just isn’t a priority for them.

Of course, it may be that just having this innovation going on around it, fed by the Backstage feeds, is enough to make changes happen inside the Beeb to get these things delivered. But that seems a small reason to do something as profound as creating an API to your data. I guess what I’m asking (and the same question applies to Google and Yahoo and all the other bleeding-edge API-pushers) is: why are APIs such a good thing? What, in simple terms, is the point?

This is one of those “I know it’s good, I feel it’s good, I just don’t know why it’s good” things….

I’m a little late in shouting about it, but our new search engine has now emerged from public beta.

Why did we invest in a new search engine? Well, we’ve got a big public archive (every article published since 1999), we hadn’t updated our search engine since 1999, and, frankly, we thought we could do a better job on our own stuff than Google or Yahoo can. We know when things were published, we know where they came from and, crucially, we know where they sit in our content hierarchy. Google and Yahoo can only guess at all that stuff.

So now there’s a new browseable function, allowing people to drill down their results to see them by site, section and sub-section, as well as date and original publication source (think eBay for news).

The software behind it is from Endeca. We’re very happy with it, and will be embedding it even further into the site in the coming months. For now, we’re just happy to be proudly wagging our very long tail….

UPDATE: I really can’t believe that I misspelled “permanence” in the title of this post when I first posted it. Sheesh.

Wow. If you didn’t think relevance was going to be important to writers going forward, you should probably read this statement by a bunch of NZ Herald columnists whose columns just went behind a paywall:

Unannounced and without any reference to us, around September 21 the Herald introduced a pay-to-view section on its website which it called Premium Content.

All our columns were corralled in the section, inaccessible even to us unless we wanted to pay to see our own work.

All of a sudden we’d been dubbed premium writers but we felt like premium mushrooms - kept in the dark but not even fed any bullshit. We were told nothing.

It then gets even more interesting, as these writers seem to be inching towards a statement of the economic value of their “relevance” - they start to argue that if they’re not going to get traffic, audience and feedback, they want hard cash instead:

Unfortunately, may of us signed contacts allowing our columns to be used on the old, free website. We argue that the Herald has made a major material and unilateral change to our contracts by charging for website access but they deny this.

In one message to us they said, “your primary constituency remains with the print edition.”

Well, they may conveniently think so but our readers say different. How come our feedback has dried up since people had to pay to read us online? It does rather suggest we’ve got a very big online readership.

Apparently, we’re supposed to be happy with a pay rate dating from print-only days because, according to one argument they put to us, we get “intangibles” such as the exposure of a regular column in the Herald.

Well, you can’t buy bread with intangibles. And none of our contracts say that part of our reward for writing for the Herald is these unquantified intangibles.

I don’t know anything about the NZ Herald decision, which I’m sure was driven by thought-out business reasons. But this reaction is the clearest expression I’ve yet seen of how web-savvy journalists are beginning to value their direct, online audience. It used to just be about page views - writers would be interested in a number as an index of the relevance of their content. Now, for a growing number of writers, it’s about contact, feedback, interfacing, community. Very interesting.