AR&D Reinventing Local Media

When you do a lot of traveling, you expect to fully experience the roll of the dice that comes with bad weather. Monday night, I was stranded in Charlotte with no fresh clothes, no toiletries, and no way home. The motel was, well, yuck (and I had to pay for it).

Now, I’m en route New York City and stuck in New Orleans, because there are t-storms in the Big Apple. I’m in a little coffee shop with free WiFi, so things could be worse. They tell us 5pm for departure, but we’ll see.

This should be an interesting trip. Underneath a stack of clothes on my bed is my cellphone, so I’m, ah, incommunicado for a few days. This should be fun. My phone, of course, is also my connection with what I view as my “life.” I’m shaking already.

More to follow. Adventure awaits. Oh boy!

UPDATE #1. It’s 4pm now, and the flight is delayed further. What a cluster foxtrot! The plane that’s supposed to take me to LaGuardia is a flight that goes from Toronto to NY to New Orleans. The first leg was cancelled, so they’re allegedly replacing the “crew and equipment” in NY. Assuming that happens, I’ll leave here around 9pm, which will put me in NY around 1am for a 9am Friday conference. Whoo boy.

If the flight is eventually cancelled, it’s a rental car return to DFW.

And so it goes…

UPDATE #2. It’s 10:30pm, and I’m back in Dallas. Flight to New York was cancelled. No way to get there in time for the conference. Shit.

Here’ the link to the latest newsletter. Today, Steve and I look at the iPhone and offer our analysis. There’s also some fascinating information from Bear Stearns on the power of aggregation. Enjoy.

I’ve been graciously invited to participate in a brainstorming panel in New York on Friday sponsored by the RTNDF with assistance from the Carnegie Corporation and the meeting host Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. It’s a pretty lofty panel that includes some biggies in broadcasting and the web, including my friend Jeff Jarvis.

The topic is fascinating: what can broadcasters do to better their 2008 election coverage and include their audience? Here’s the way conference organizer Deborah Potter put it:

RTNDF has a new initiative called Digital Elections: Using New Media to Engage Your Audience. Our goal is to create a project that will enable RTNDF to help local stations use their digital resources to better inform and engage their communities, in an interactive way, during the 2008 election. By bringing so many bright minds together, we expect to use what we glean from this meeting to shape this important project.

Executives will be there from NBC, CBS, Gannett, Hearst-Argyle, Scripps, Univision, Nexstar, Public Radio and more.

So what should I contribute? What do you think I should tell this group? How can we use the web to better tell the election story and to involve users in the process?

I spent a lot of time watching TV this week and noticed that we talk a lot about brands these days. During the CBS coverage of the PGA tour this weekend, we got to view super slow-motion golf swing footage compliments of the “Konica Minolta BizHub Swing Vision Camera.” CompUSA probably doesn’t sell that one.

But what’s worse is we’re actually using the word “brand” as if it’s something you hear in every day language. This is the arrogance of marketeurs.

While the Boston Red Sox were beating up the Atlanta Braves, the announcers noted an enormous number of Red Sox fans in the audience. “What a powerful brand they have,” said one guy. I almost spewed. It’s a bloody baseball team, you idiot!

How about these beauties from commercials I’ve seen this week?

“Tee off with the brands you want from Academy Sports.”

“Watch your favorite Wrigley’s brands tear up the track this weekend.” (I kid you not!)

Of course, the marketeurs can bring themselves to use the word, because we — the targets of those brands — are CONSUMERS of brands (that’s what they’re taught in the good schools). We have no other purpose in life. Consumers are passive participants in this “targeting” process, and Madison Avenue now doesn’t even think it has to be clever. All it has to do to put us in our place is toss out the word “brand,” and we’re supposed to behave like we know what that really means.

“Brand” is apparently a substitute noun, and, well, it seems to works everywhere.

Let’s go down to the old brand and suck down a few brands. Man, that chick’s wearing my favorite brand. Mmm, that smells like her best brand. Oh my, that brand is something else. Give me a pack of my brand. What’s YOUR brand, man? Hey, what do you think of my new brand? Is that your brand in your pocket or mine?

I’m going to drive my brand to get some brands from a brand with lots of brands, wrap myself in one or three brands, put a brand on my wrist, in my mouth, over my ears, on my head, and settle down for a nice quiet evening with branded entertainment while filling my head with unwanted messages from a hundred other brands.

Gosh, I’m tired.

I apologize to regular readers for offering only a few observations this past week. I’ve been down and out with diverticulitis, and I’m still not 100%. I’m getting older, and I need to pay better attention to the signs my body sends me. I let this go too long, and it has knocked the crap out of me.

It’s a particularly nasty malady, but the treatment is worse. I’m taking two antibiotics — one twice a day, the other three times a day. These are very powerful meds and are REALLY hard on the stomach, which is why you’re supposed to take them with food. Of course, that’s the last thing you want to do with diverticulitis, which requires a liquid or bland diet, neither of which will ease the stomach pain. One begets the other, and soon you’re just exhausted from all the nausea, gas, discomfort and diarrhea.

This is why God made vanilla malts.

I’m losing the sense of immortality that’s a favorite side dish of youth. It’s a sweet and tasty delicacy, which is why it’s hard to give up. Comes with the territory, as they say. And so it goes.

Here’s the latest edition of our Media 2.0 Intel newsletter. Enjoy.

This is one of the reasons I love news aggregators. Here’s a piece from this morning’s Google News:

I’ve been busy these last few days, and I actually decided to take Father’s Day off. Hence, I’m a little behind on my writing.

Here are some things I think are important:

Milestone: NBC Universal has changed the name of NBC Universal Television Studio to Universal Media Studios. This is smart on a number of levels (which I’ve written about in the past), but the most significant is the message it sends internally. We are no longer television stations; we’re local media companies, and the sooner we begin using that language, the quicker we’ll find ourselves evolving.

YouTube has launched a re-mixer for certain videos. The application allows users to unbundled and rebundle the videos to create their own versions. Photobucket, which was recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, has similar functionality, and the early analysis suggests that Photobucket’s is much better. This is another concept that could (and should) be easily adopted by local media companies.

Shelly Palmer offers the provocative suggestion that local television — in medium and small markets — will go the way of radio stations. They’ll be stripped down and automated to achieve the highest return on investment for the owners “with most of their revenue coming from the use of their new government granted digital spectrum.” This is a chilling thought and one that doesn’t bode well for local broadcast content, but (as if we needed one) it’s another reason to be aggressively pursuing Media 2.0.

Over at Lost Remote, my business partner Steve Safran writes of a new Pew Poll reported in Atlantic Monthly showing Americans’ knowledge of news events hasn’t grown since the advent of 24/7 cable news with one exception:

The most knowledgeable Americans were those who got their news from the Web sites of major papers and those who watched programs like The Colbert Report or The Daily Show; they correctly answered 54 percent of the questions about current affairs, while regular viewers of local TV news and network morning shows got only about 35 percent right.

Steve points out that this could simply be that viewers of the shows need to have awareness of events in order to get the jokes, but the study should raise a few eyebrows.

Finally, another newspaper sports department was threatened by the NCAA for blogging during a live college world series game. This time, it was The Oregonian, and the blogging was taking place from their offices in Portland while watching the games live on ESPN. In the words of the immortal Frank Barone, “Holy Crap!” A week ago, a Louisville Courier-Journal reporter was tossed from the press box in Louisville for doing the same thing. The only way this can be completely enforced is if sports teams or associations ban all cellphones or PDAs from their games, and that’s not about to happen. Somebody’s going to take this to court, and the ruling could have profound implications for all sports.

Now that Ma Bell has been put back together, it’s wishing to reinstate itself as the dominant player it used to be. The company is trying to sneak its way to top dog status by garnering exclusive arrangements with major players like Apple, and now its involved in a new, seditious attempt to harness the web and police the behavior of its own customers.

The latest effort involving the web has stirred up a hornet’s nest of negative reaction, especially from those who wish to keep the internet free (like, everybody?). A Los Angeles Times interview with AT&T senior VP James Cicconi reveals that the company is working with movie studios and record companies to create and implement anti-piracy technologies at the network level. As Geoff duncan of Digital Trends News writes, this is a first.

The announcement…opens a host of technical, ethical, business, and consumer privacy issues the company will have to deal with even assuming it can develop the type of technology it envisions. In essence, AT&T would assume the role of “copyright cop,” deciding what content can and cannot traverse its networks.

AT&T apparently believes that by engineering a network which is “safe” from digital piracy, the company will gain an upper hand in negotiations and distribution deals with movie studios and record labels as the digital media juggernaut continues to accelerate. If AT&T can make the argument that offering digital media on its network will not contribute to digital piracy, the company may be able to leverage exclusive deals from content providers and possibly charge a premium for distributing media over its network.

Sounds all nice for corporate friends, but what about you and me? I mean, who wants their ISP snooping on their online activity, except those from the same old world of command-and-control?

Doc Searls doesn’t like it a bit, saying “AT&T, please go to hell.”

If I were an AT&T customer today, and I had any other choice of service provider, I’d drop AT&T like a bad transmission. In fact, if you’re an AT&T customer, I suggest you do exactly that. If you can.

Dave Winer has similar thoughts.

If there were a death penalty for corporations, AT&T may have just earned it.

David Weinberger’s assessment is even more pointed.

Putting a cop in the middle of the network and making available content not accessible by other networks means that if the AT&T says it’s offering Internet connectivity, it’s lying.

The Internet is a set of protocols that ensure that bits will be moved across networks (inter-networking) without giving special privileges or control to the carriers.

And Duncan Riley at TechCrunch calls AT&T “American Tracking & Takedown.”

There’s something very, very wrong when a company starts conspiring against its users. Perhaps the days of the customer being always right have passed? Certainly there will be many AT&T customers who will soon (be) looking for internet access from alternative providers

Of course, I’m in agreement with this, and I have AT&T internet experience to back it up.

AT&T is trying to build itself on the products and services of others. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, but they offer nothing original. They bought Cingular and now will be the exclusive dealer of iPhones for five years. That alone will keep me from buying one (and I don’t think I’m alone). I’m a Verizon guy.

My apartment complex in Grapevine, Texas has an exclusive deal with AT&T to provide phone, “cable” and internet. The cable comes from DirectTV and Verizon lines provide the DSL. DirectTV would be fine, if I had my own dish, but when the signal is spread out over hundreds of units, all kinds of little annoyances come into play. I’m also not a big fan of DSL, and I’ve had my share of problems.

AT&T “works” only when it is a monopoly, and that’s what it wants once again. Otherwise, people flee the scene like doves scrambling to get away from a Red Tailed Hawk. I’m moving in another couple of months, and the fact that my home entertainment and communications is tied to AT&T is — believe it or not — a big reason why.

I wonder how many of their “customers” are in such forced arrangements.

NBC is announcing the creation of a new online business that’s the coolest idea to date using the web to bring a network’s news brand to young people. According to the New York Times, the network is spending $10 million to develop “iCue,” which is intended as a supplement to Advanced Placement high school courses in three subjects: American history, government and English.

“We recognize when we look at our broadcast platforms that teenagers don’t get their news from there,” said Adam Jones, chief financial officer for NBC News, who has helped lead the project. “They’re either online or they watch Jon Stewart or ‘The Colbert Report.’ We’ve always talked about trying to find new ways to reach our future audience.”

The project will have its detractors, including those who will say that NBC is not the type of organization that should be teaching our children. The subjects chosen will bring out the critics, because they deal with politics and government.

In a conference room at NBC News headquarters yesterday, a consultant, Alex Chisholm, co-director of a game and education research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave an online tour of a prototype of the site. It included a segment from “NBC Nightly News,” reported by Pete Williams, about the detentions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The segment was then used to supplement discussion of the Geneva Conventions, an element of an A.P. course.

There was also black-and-white film from NBC archives of firemen turning hoses on civil rights protesters, and video of Tom Brokaw late on election night in 2000 explaining it was anyone’s guess who had won the presidency. Students and teachers would be provided with discussion questions and opportunities to share their answers through the site’s social networking forums.

“Selfishly we’re looking to create a long-lasting relationship with these students,” Mr. Jones said. “Philosophically, though, we realize these are the voters and decision makers and employers of tomorrow.”

That just won’t go over well with conservatives in the U.S., who already think public education is too liberal and that NBC represents a liberal point-of-view as well.

The network promises there will be no ads during school hours, but the plan is to offer advertising otherwise.

Despite the potential problems for NBC and various school boards around the country, I think this is a smart move by a media company to create a heretofore unthinkable project well outside its core competency. While some big newspapers and magazines have worked with schools in the past, this is a first for television.

Here’s the latest edition of AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter. Enjoy.

Behavioral targeting is the path for local media companies who want to leapfrog their competitors in the online advertising space. Most companies are slow to move in this direction for many reasons. One, they just don’t understand it. Two, it requires building a local network of websites. Three, there’s no demand for it from local advertisers (yet). And four, nobody else is doing it (yet). That last one is the greatest barrier to progress that I encounter on a regular basis in my work.

A new report from eMarketer may accelerate growth in the space. Behavioral Targeting: Advertising Gets Personal projects significant growth over the next few years.

The $1 billion that eMarketer projects for behavioral targeted ad spending in 2008 represents only 11% of the US display, rich media and video market. With the greater attention paid to overall ad targeting, however, and the rising focus on brand messages online, this market will nearly quadruple by the end of 2011.

Behavioral’s share of total online ad spending will grow from 2.6% this year to 8.4% in 2011, and its share of display and rich media spending will grow from 8.9% to 25.8%.

But those numbers could actually be low, if the local media industry moves aggressively into this area. It begins with the creation of local online verticals and the building of a network of local sites. I tell clients that this should occur in two phases: build your own network first and then work to include other sites in the market. And this, of course, assumes the ability to serve this type of advertising, too.

Behavioral targeting is the Holy Grail of online advertising — whether it’s video or display — because targeting brings with it higher rates. If you are serious about growing an advertiser-supported business online, you need to be proficient in this area.

iVillage had a 46% year-over-year display ad revenue gain in the first quarter, which has to make the folks at NBC happy. If they can maintain such rapid growth throughout the year, they’ll be looking at annual revenue approaching $150 million–50% more than last year’s $100 million, according to Gavin O’Malley at Online Media Daily.

Much of this growth likely comes from NBC’s purchase ($600 million) of the site last year and the subsequent network marketing that came with it. This is textbook television Media 2.0 strategy. It recognizes that revenue growth is in online verticals and uses its airtime to promote them. This is the new “third value” of television airtime.

iVillage is the top women’s site on the web and one that survived the bubble days to achieve that position. It was a smart purchase by NBC.

At the local level, niche communities like these are just waiting to be birthed, (and are being birthed, e.g. O8sis by Belo here in Dallas), but there’s really only room for one per topic per market.

You’d think that would create a sense of urgency among local media companies, huh?

We climbed in the car and drove to the Frisco CompUSA store yesterday with $300 gift card in hand. Maybe it was just me, but the red shirted staff was exceptionally friendly and helpful.

Several people waited on us and treated us very special. My family suggested there was a photo of me in the back with instructions to be extra friendly, but who’s to say? The manager did wave goodbye as I walked out the door.

I even bought a 2-year extended warranty ($25). The camera had been reduced in price to $229, so we got it, a 1-gig memory stick and the warranty for $307. Yes, I gave them another $7 and was happy and satisfied to do so.

As you can see from Ashley’s smiling face, we opened the box inside the store and made sure there was a camera inside. She spent the entire drive home taking pictures, so I know it works.

All’s well that ends well. Thank you, everybody.

This is my review of Andrew Keen’s book, the cult of the amateur, how today’s internet is killing our culture. It is a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality.

Let’s get something straight up front: our culture is most certainly evolving. Hell, it’s been the subject of this blog and my writing for the past five years. I say this, because Keen represents the (wonderful) world of pragmatism, which is the epitome of the modern culture. Hence, it’s understandable that he would view the internet as killing HIS world. That said, I think the subject needs an airing, and Keen is trying to give us that. The problem is that his prose is so filled with condescension and venom that it’s nothing more than emotional weeping. And if you took all of that out of the book, it would be about ten pages long.

I’m serious when I say the book is a tough read. It’s tough, because the mind’s search for substance is always confronted by extremism, emotion and haughty disdain for anybody who doesn’t meet his professional “standards” or think as he thinks. I can’t count the number of “Holy Craps” I uttered while working my way through the pages. And I think this is a big problem for a man who’s trying to ask some legitimate questions.

Here are just a few of my objections to Keen’s form of argument:

In the very beginning of the book, he says what it is, “It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.” He paints the problem as pragmatism versus the pejorative “digital utopians.” Whether he’s on YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia or another other place with a Web 2.0 tilt, he searches for the most outrageous examples to make his point.

Folks, if we’re going to have a discussion about this, we need to find some common ground on which to argue. I can show examples from each of those places that are the opposite of the riff-raff that Keen finds, so what’s the point of such extremism?

Ignorance. Egoism. Bad taste. Mob rule. In other words, these are things opposing voices wish to enable. How absurd. He’s fond of the old saw about monkeys and typewriters, often referring to those of the participatory age as such. Again, how do you argue with a man who’s calling you an ignorant, egotistic, boorish monkey? And more importantly, how does one with a reasonable mind listen to the arguments of one who uses such prose?

My biggest complaint with the book, however, is its black/white, win/lose, right/wrong, all-or-nothing perspective. In this he fails his argument and belies his own ignorance. His is the extreme view, not the views of those he labels utopians. I know many of the people he attacks in the book, and not one of them has ever expressed the cultural significance of the digital age from such an extremist stage.

Was Michael Powell being utopian when as FCC Chairman he stated that “application separation” was the single most important paradigm shift in the history of communications and that it would change things forever?

Jeff Jarvis has apparently agreed to debate Keen online, but it’s not a debate that’s winnable. Keen is so extreme, that his assumption of the middle is yanked far over to his end of the balance beam, so where is one to go to bring it back? He even throws in the sexual predator issue to support his fear mongering. What, I ask you, does that have to do with the personal media revolution? As if Keen’s love of rules and regulations has ever protected children from such.

“The cult of the amateur” is nothing more than a can of neatly stacked red herrings, and that doesn’t make for a debate at all.

A dear old friend of mine wrote this week expressing concerns similar to those stated in the book, so I want to try and discuss Keen’s central focus — that the personal media revolution will destroy Hollywood, the professional press and the advertising industry, thus collapsing our economy. To get my full take, you’d have to read everything that’s available in the archives of this website, especially the essays. I have no utopian views of the future, although I believe I have a little more faith in people than does Keen.

He believes the mainstream press and its methods for gathering and presenting the news is worth saving. This assumes that it’s dying, which it is not. It may seem like it from Keen’s perch, but just because something “could” happen doesn’t mean that it’s “going” to happen. Is the professional press worth saving? Of course, and who would argue otherwise? Its absolute grip on information, however, is not worth keeping, because today’s press is all about corporate greed and making money.

The public intuitively knows this, which is why Gallup’s annual measurement of trust in the institution of the press has been steadily sinking for decades. So the press is being reformed from without. What’s wrong with that?

Keen argues that his “cult of the amateur” is killing the copyright industry. Again, this assumes an all-or-nothing scenario, which I just don’t buy. What is under attack is Hollywood’s absolute grip on defining and nurturing the arts, because, again, it’s all about money. How is Hollywood, for example, about creativity, when the best it can do is produce sequel after sequel. Same with the publishing and music industries. The quickest path to profit is to repeat the blockbuster, but in so doing, it weakens all of the arts.

As to the economic argument, we all need to be momentarily concerned, because the copyright industry is America’s largest export. We entertain the world, which is why the industry maintains such favor on Capitol Hill. But again, this is purely a matter of big corporations who control all of entertainment in the name of profit. It has nothing to do with talent, creativity or Keen’s favorite, taste. Let me quote Powell again, “I have no problem if a venerable institution disappears tomorrow, as long as that value is distributed elsewhere in the economy.”

So it is about money, and it is about it being shifted away from institutional power to other places in the economy, namely the pockets of new power players. This may be a concern for professional institutions, but it is not a direct concern for our economy. Keen directly challenges Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” as economic mumbo-jumbo and cites examples of bloggers along the long tail that aren’t making any money. He then uses this to make the case that advertising will collapse absent a mass marketing paradigm and that the professional press will collapse, because nobody will pay the bills.

This is hogwash. Advertising, like media, is an institution undergoing change. The road may be rough, but it is not going to collapse. And there is tremendous money to be made in the information business, although perhaps not in the manner that Keen prefers.

He views the aggregation of content as theft and evil, and he routinely insults the integrity of young people, making sweeping statements about their eyeballs being drawn to what he views as nonsense instead of traditional forms of entertainment.

I have always been concerned that forms of entertainment are our biggest export, but this is a question that’s bigger than Keen’s use of it. We really have to decide as a nation if this is truly in our best interests.

Let’s go back to the last big cultural change, the time when modernism first came on the scene. Those of the ruling elite at the time shouted similar themes, essentially that the worship of rationalism and the human mind would replace the worship of God (through the Roman church). However, modernism didn’t destroy faith; it simply helped us evolve as human beings and move our faith from that which is blind to that which is understandable. In the same way, postmodernism questions the ruling elite of today and demands that we rethink assumptions. It will no more “kill” modernist views of the press than modernism killed premodernist views of religion.

So it’s not an all-or-nothing thing, and we shouldn’t approach it with a spirit of fear.

Keen is obsessed with the idea of truth, and that the road to truth is through science and study. Professional experts, in his view, come closer to truth than those who haven’t followed that which has come before, and this explains his indignation toward anyone who might claim gifts or inherent skill or talent. This is textbook modernism.

The postmodernist, however, looks around and sees institutional failure, which is the price of living in the culture that Keen wants to save. The postmodernist sees the American dream as reserved for the few or the fortunate, because the modernist culture protects its haves. Follow the numbers. With every year that goes by, the gap between the haves and the have-nots increases. Wealth is in the hands of the relative fewer, and pomos ask if this isn’t really a failure.

Technology that was created to serve the institutions now is in the hands of everyone, so yes, depending on your perspective, there is very much a cultural war underway. Media is only the most visible aspect, but every institution is threatened.

Since I first began writing about this, a quote by Leonard Sweet (hardly a digital utopian) has graced the top of my pages: “Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: reinvent yourself for the 21st century or die! Some would rather die than change.”

Andrew Keen would rather die than change.

Shelley Palmer asks if there’s room anymore for three network evening newscasts in a wonderful piece on Katie Couric. It’s a great question (the answer is no), but there is a real gem within the piece that I want to talk about a bit.

Usually the last organization to do something ends its life with virtually 100 percent market share. Buggy whips are the example most often used. (I don’t have any statistics on the last full-time factory dedicated to buggy whip manufacturer to go chapter 11, but I’m sure they were the “best practices,” most competitive, most popular manufacturer in their business.) However, the last evening newscast to be canceled will not have 100% share, not even close … it will go off the air the moment someone figures out a way to make more money or draw a bigger audience in that time slot. I wonder when that will be?

Great point. So the last one standing in such a scenario isn’t the winner at all, and I think this is truly the case with television and especially local television.

That’s because the winner in the current race will be one who seizes the top new media revenue position, and that could easily be the last-place station in any market. They have the least to lose by going all-out with innovation, whereas the tendency of the market leader will be to attach everything to their brand. This is a dangerous position, although I realize that statement is highly counterintuitive.

As Shelley rightly points out, if you’re going to play the television game, you’d better be able to put a lot of people together in one place and at one time. That’s the broadcasting model.

It is not, however, the model of the web. Google is the brand leader here, where aggregation and context are king. I would argue that, by default, Google is the brand leader at the local level as well, for no one differentiates between global and local online. This is why I say there is such an incredible opportunity at the local level to develop communities around local information. But those communities must represent the whole community, not just the brand of a local media company that lives in the mass audience world.

It would be smart business for the local media companies in any market to combine their resources in creating such a community, because if this doesn’t happen, outsiders will make it happen. The local companies developing the community could then duke it out for eyeballs within a known universe, which is exactly what they do in the traditional media “space.” But by combining resources, they can then put up a real defense against the enormous threat of outside pureplay companies.

We must never forget that local ad dollars is the prize here, not bragging rights about who’s number one. Those dollars are flowing in one direction, and most media companies are not in that path.

This is why we all need to watch what Adrian Holovaty does with his $1.1 million grant from the Knight foundation. He’s creating an aggregation and distribution system called “Every Block,” which he told Poynter is designed to bring together many databases of local information.

“The concept of aggregating local information is not new, but I think our particular implementation will be, because we’re focusing on a wide variety of information that doesn’t tend to be available in a one-stop-shop format.”

Holovaty has a great reputation as a local information creator. His first was ChicagoCrime.org, a mash-up of crime data from the Chicago police department and Google maps.

Assuming he accomplishes this, what will be our response? Will we all try to duplicate it and shout “Mine’s better than yours?” Google will just create a widget or buy Holovaty’s company to make the application available to their users and strengthen their position in the local advertising space.

“Network television is a zero-sum game,” writes Shelley. “You can’t win unless someone else loses.” He goes on to note, however, that second place isn’t really a loser in network TV, because they can still make tons of money. This is true, because television works in a world of scarcity, and even last place has value in such a world.

But the web is a world of abundance, not scarcity, which is why aggregation — not content — is the correct business position to occupy. The way to create scarcity is within niches, and unless and until local media companies view “local” as a single niche, we will hand the keys to our markets to those who already see it as such.

The zero-sum game for us online is global versus local. Like the Borg, Google moves forward assimilating everything in its path. Fight them, we must.

As a person who studies and writes about applied postmodernism, I find absolutely fascinating a Wall St. Journal article today called “Growing Up in Public.” Writer Jason Fry offers concerns about regrets that young people today will have in years to come when people can learn anything they want about someone via the web. Saying they are “blithely unaware of the consequences,” Fry points to a story that says “a quarter of human-resources decision makers had rejected job candidates because of personal information found online.”

This is a textbook illustration of the conflict between modernism and postmodernism.

But Fry rightly concludes that “Before Netters” and “After Netters” (”netters” referring to the internet) are different people, and that today’s HR manager will one day be replaced by one a little more forgiving of the public personas that accompany young people growing up.

I think Before Netters like me are the ones who seem out of step, leading lives that seem hermetic in comparison with those who grew up in cyberpublic. For better or worse, decrying what kids reveal on some MySpace successor will soon seem as painfully out of it as grumbling that teenage boys and girls shouldn’t use the telephone to chat unsupervised.

Take whatever side you like in that debate, but it won’t matter — the world will change and render the argument moot. It’s done so before: Those who saw the telephone as a destructive force in communities might have had — and might still have — a point, but technological changes have left them on the fringe of society. And keep in mind that no commentor in the history of the world ever went broke worrying that today’s kids are immoral swine.

This is very insightful of the shifts in trust and connectivity in the age of participation. As I often remind people, be careful in looking at the new through old eyes, because we really are in the midst of a vast cultural change in the west.

That’s not to say that we won’t traverse some bumpy and rocky roads along the way, but it’s a path we all need to be on. We need to rethink just about everything.

NOTE TO THE WSJ: You’re shooting yourself in the foot with your video player. The pre-roll ad came up quickly, but the video I clicked to see never did. Nice.

Brittney Gilbert suddenly resigned yesterday as writer of the popular Nashville community blog, Nashville is Talking. I have more thoughts about this than I can say, but a few things require my comment. I was, after all, the creator of this site and concept. I believe Brittney was the first person paid by a local media company to be a full-time blogger. It’s sad that she’s leaving.

First of all, Brittney said she was resigning because she couldn’t take the nastiness of certain commenters anymore. In this sense, the bullies won. Brittney is a fine and sensitive young woman, despite her biting wit and prose. She notes that this has been coming for a long time, although everybody associated with the site was shocked.

While we can all talk about how ugly comments can get, they are a part of life in the democratized web world (just as they are in the real world). The community tends to police such, but it can get to you, if you’ll let it.

In her final post, she credits Mike Sechrist, Steve Sabato and myself with giving her this chance in life. I no longer consult for the station. Mike left a month ago, and Steve was fired shortly after Mike left. In other words, Brittney lost her support base, and while that’s not been mentioned as a reason for her departure (except by Rex Hammock), I have a hard time believing it didn’t play a role here.

It’s one thing to take criticism from an occasionally angry mob; it’s quite another take it without superiors watching your back and providing encouragement. WKRN’s web efforts have been pioneering, but not everyone is cut out to be a pioneer (something about the occasional arrows). There’s nothing “wrong” about that; it’s just life.

Her final post sprouted a flame war in the comments between members of the community who were antagonists and those who came to Brittney’s defense, and a thorough study of those comments — and the “final straw” issue — would make a great project for some journalism program. I added my two cents, because of references by some that Brittney “represented” the editorial process of WKRN-TV, an assertion I find self-serving.

…let me add that efforts to tie this blog to the output of WKRN’s news department benefit only those who seek to use the affiliation as a hammer in making their position come out on top. This is not a mainstream media outlet, and it never has been. It doesn’t operate by the same rules, and it doesn’t have to.

Members of both sides of the public debate have manipulated the “rules and traditions” of the mainstream press to give our country a bad case of irritable bowel syndrome. Walter Lippmann’s social engineering of a century ago has produced a culture void of argument, and this is what the personal media revolution is bringing back.

Those who wish to hide behind the “press isn’t supposed to be that way,” wish to have their cake and eat it, too. We can either argue or we can’t, but you don’t have a right to say only you can argue.

This website was an experiment in not only social media but also in shining a light on the many voices that make up the Nashville blogosphere. Brittney was required to walk a fine line here — to fully engage ALL voices, which she certainly seems to have done and at the same time maintain a certain distance. That some are unable to tolerate certain voices is sad not only for this experiment but also for the First Amendment.

Nashville is Talking will continue in some form, although it may end up in the hands of the community itself. Katherine Coble, herself a terrific blogger, has temporarily taken over for Brittney.

I know a lot of companies are trying to find ways to incorporate the local blogosphere into their plans and strategies, and there are many lessons we’ve learned from this experiment. I’ll likely write much more about that some other time.

My business partner Steve Safran and I are often asked to demonstrate models of what “works” in terms of online television. Here’s a terrific model that came back into my focus during the CompUSA business: CNET TV.

This is a terrific model of online television. CNet knows its audience and serves them original programming in a slick environment that is filled with choices and extremely user-friendly. No “repurposed” video here; it’s all customized for the niche they serve.

And I’ll tell you what, it’s pretty darned good, too.

In a headline that needs to be seen to be believed, Online Media Daily says “Consumers like 30-second Pre-Rolls, OPA Study Finds.” OMG, where to begin?

Upon reading the story — and one with a better headline at PaidContent.org — the truth is revealed. 30-second pre-rolls are “more effective” than shorter ads, more effective for the advertiser. This is a sophisticated study that the Online Publishers Association did with the Online Testing exchange and the findings are well worth noting.

However — and this is a big “however” — following its conclusions will certainly conflict with user preferences, and that’s a huge mistake in the online world. Why did a Microsoft study a few years ago conclude that 7-12 seconds was optimum for pre-rolls? Why is Google about to give us 3-second pre-rolls via YouTube? Why are they experimenting with variations of pre and post-rolls?

Because the user is in charge online, not the publisher.

And here’s the deal, folks. If you think your content is so hot that people will sit through a steady diet of 30-second pre-rolls, you are absolutely deluded. They have no choice in a broadcast paradigm (oops, there’s TiVo), but where they have a choice, they’ll flee from it.

Let me repeat an old theme here: mass marketing is about manipulation — doing anything in the name of getting heads in a crowd to turn. It’s an art, and it is a science. And people are sick to death of being chased by master manipulators. Hence, the world wide web and the personal media revolution.

Online video is the growth engine of advertising revenue, and marketers everywhere are trying to find static formulas that will assure their future employment. It won’t work on the internet, because micro marketing is the game here. It’s just not a mass marketing environment, and rather than trying to drag it back into the MM world, we’d all be better off developing new models that begin with the end user’s perspective.

This study offers valuable insight, but my recommendation is to proceed with extreme caution. As Starcom’s Rishad Tobbaccowala said, people are “god-like” in the age of participation, and we would be smart to remember that.