Driving traffic (that doesn’t want the ride)

November 14th, 2011

The new Pew study revealing that media companies use Twitter almost exclusively for spreading links to their own content comes as no surprise.

…mainstream news organizations primarily use Twitter to move information and push content to readers. For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.

Back when Twitter first came along, I predicted that media companies would immediately become big users, because they could easily see it’s one-to-many functionality. It’s what we know and what we practice. The strategy became:

1. Get a lot of followers
2. Feed them breaking news and weather
3. Feed them promotional content
4. Feed them stories, many stories
5. Put a link in everything

Twitter is a terrific notification system, so it’s hard to blame media companies for this practice, but it points to a serious weakness that media has today: its mission can’t help but come across as hypocritical. What appears to be one of disseminating information and being society’s watchdog is actually a commercial mission to make money. There’s nothing inherently evil about that, but think about it. If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web. When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else.

Using Twitter this way is easy, but it’s also lazy and sells short a tool for newsgathering and news dissemination. When I talk to clients about Twitter, the stumbling block question is always “How many people do YOU follow?” The answer is simple — none or very few. This means that Twitter is to them, in fact, nothing more than a notification system.

However, some individual employees of news organizations use Twitter in a myriad of ways, including to participate in its unique discussions. These employees seem aware of the new reality that their personal brands are everything in the world that’s ahead, so they participate in social media. These smart people may include links to their work as well, but that isn’t necessarily the sole purpose of their accounts. It gets very tricky for some media companies when they try to control the personal accounts of employees, because they cling to the notification system paradigm and the ethical (and profitable) mechanism of an opinion-less stage.

Twitter is also very useful on mobile device, so the practice of only spreading links — that then lead to a fully-packed website and not an HTML5 landing page — is ultimately self-defeating. This is a different playing field with different rules, and we risk our own relevancy by insisting that it’s best used to drive traffic to our advertiser-fed websites.

And nobody ever asked to be driven to such a place in the first place.

Posted in Technology, Twitter, Unbundled Media, Uncategorized | 3 Comments » |

Think “Landing Pages,” Not Websites

November 11th, 2011

Here is the latest in my ongoing essay series, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

Think “Landing Pages,” Not Websites

The mobile web era has ushered in a new way of viewing media of all sorts – the landing page. The growth track is unmistakable. More and more people are accessing our content by mobile links, and our attention needs to be where that interaction takes place. Mobile landing pages include all of the touch and swipe attributes of the devices on which they’re consumed, and we need to be considering this from a strategic perspective instead of just another way to display content from a centralized location.

Posted in Culture, Reinventing Local Media, Technology | 1 Comment » |

Media 2.0 101: The technology beat isn’t optional

August 3rd, 2011

I’m going to leave the world of technology for a bit today to talk “about” the world of technology, because I think media companies are missing a big, ongoing story, simply because we’re a part of it. An entirely new media industry has birthed, blossomed and produced fruit within the last 15 years, and its coverage area has expanded to the point where mass media companies have no choice but to get onboard. I’m referring to tech media and its grip on information about the most amazing phenomenon of the new age.

We view technology only as a way to make our jobs easier, but that’s a little like putting electric lights on a ship designed to hunt whales for the lantern oil industry. Technology is far more than “our” tools; it’s the biggest story to come along since the printing press, yet we somehow manage to either completely or mostly ignore it.

This is vastly oversimplified, but tech media began as a way for certain geeks to inform other geeks about innovations in technology that might interest them. This spawned an immense field of geek celebrities, such as Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Nick Denton and a host of others, and produced some real winners in terms of new media companies, like TechCrunch, Gawker, and thousands of specialized blogs. Tech media is also producing hybrid news and information models, like Duncan Riley’s The Inquistr, an eclectic blend of news that shouts “relevance” to its audience. The Inquistr includes sports stories, celebrity gossip and other mainstream items, which is to say that it crosses over into more of a mass media model with a proclivity towards technology.

News about technology now impacts people far beyond its original intent. And as we watch device after device and technology after technology cross the magical 50% threshold in terms of consumer adoption, it’s crystal clear that the demand for this kind of news and information is headed up, up, up. Do I buy from Apple or Microsoft? Is the iPad worth Apple’s restrictions? And what about my smartphone? What to believe, is the issue, and, even more importantly, who to believe.

Technology is a beat that moves with the speed of light, leaving magazines that used to own the niche struggling in the collective dust of online organizations that are nimble, fleet-of-foot, flexible and adaptive. Even its TV commercials emphasize the point that today’s state-of-the-art is tomorrow’s relic. And then there’s the money involved. Telecoms spend a fortune trying to hook customers into this contract or that one, because so much is at stake. Cable and satellite TV companies are on edge, as TV is now delivered “over the top” (OTT) directly to consumers. News is available at the fingertips of anybody, and traditional media companies are on the wrong end of innovation.

This has all led to what I view as an industrywide ignorance about what’s taking place, and this is fatal in terms of delivering news and information that’s relevant to people. What’s relevant? Technology! And yet, we don’t consider it to be our task. This has to stop, because there really is a lot at stake for readers and viewers and potential readers and viewers in this arena.

What kinds of HDTVs, for example, do TV station engineers use and why? Don’t you think that knowledge might be something that those shopping for HDTVs might want to know? What about cameras, etc? My colleague, Ken Elmore, produces a weekly segment for our newsletter called “Tools of the Trade,” and every week I say to myself, you know, everyday people would be interested in this, too.

Why are we so silent about a beat that impacts so many people in so many ways? I think it’s because we’re smack dab in the middle of it. We’re being disrupted by it, and our need to play defense blinds us from the common sense we need to aggressively go after this kind of news and information. We need to spend time studying the comments of stories posted in tech media, or spend a day just looking at comments of Robert Scoble’s massive following on Google+.

The lions of the tech industry — people like Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google — make enormous impact whenever they open their mouths, and yet I’d wager you’d find that most people in a typical newsroom don’t know who they are. New product launchings are BIG news, and covered by tech media with the same enthusiasm and resources of a Presidential news conference. And rightly so!

Where are we during these events? We’re getting video of the traffic accident up the street or interviewing some poor victim of a horrible tragedy somewhere else. Why? We ignore what’s important to people in the name of doing things as we’ve always done them. This makes no sense.

If you want your local media company to find relevance with the people you hope to serve, you’re going to have to start viewing their lives from their perspective and not your own. Technology is THE story today, so much so that many very smart people are calling this “the second Gutenberg wave” or something similar. Imagine that? It’s an actual turning point in the history of the West, and we’re nowhere to be found in covering it while it’s actually happening.

Gutenberg got a similar treatment back in the 15th Century from the Roman Catholic Church, because only THEY could publish the Bible. Wouldn’t you know that an upstart group of people would actually USE Gutenberg’s invention to swat such nonsense into reality. The same thing is happening today, only we have the chance to be smart about it rather than end up in the waste heap of what’s left behind.

Technology IS the news in the 21st Century. Please. Jump in with both feet.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Journalism, Technology | 2 Comments » |

Why I’m abandoning TechCrunch and Techmeme

July 28th, 2011

I’m separating myself from two old friends today, and it’s pretty painful. TechCrunch and Techmeme have both served me well over the years, keeping me informed on the cutting edge of news in the tech sphere. I can honestly say that these two websites have played a major role in my knowledge level, and I will miss them.

However, I can’t keep up with either. My RSS reader is overwhelmed with the stuff they crank out, most of which, frankly, is completely useless reading.

There is this belief in media that more is better. More produces more page views, and page views produce revenue, and so it goes. But this strategy disrespects customers, because I simply don’t have the time to keep up. And rather than stare at 100 unread items a day from each, I find myself simply marking them all as read and moving on.

Twitter is more than capable of keeping me connected with what’s really important.

I’m not sure if there’s an answer. Perhaps if Michael Arrington would personally oversee a specific RSS feed of “important” content, I would subscribe to that, but as of this morning, I’ve dropped both of these sites, along with The Inquistr, from my RSS reader.

Maybe it’s a sign of changing times. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that time is the real scarcity in the life of any consumer today, and tactical revenue maneuvers designed to capture more of that scarcity cannot possibly win in the long run.

Farewell, old friends. Farewell.

Posted in Blogging, Disruptions, Technology, Twitter | 4 Comments » |

A curious birthday indeed

July 10th, 2011

It’s official. I’m an old fart.

My family is out of town celebrating the birth of our grandson, Caden, so I’d planned to spend a relaxing day at home Saturday writing. I know it’s technically “work,” but it’s also my passion, so it sounded like a good idea. We had planned a Skype session from the hospital later on, and I was looking forward to that.

I fired up my HP dv6t (Karen works for HP), and Microsoft informed me that it was downloading and installing Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which is a bunch of little things put together in one package. Fine. It happens all the time. My day began its torture after the restart. I could not access the Internet. I could send and receive email, but I couldn’t access the Web to save my life.

I called Time Warner first and spent some quality time with a fine man from Manila who spoke perfect English. We tried everything. He tried everything. I got out my HP netbook and tried that. Bingo, it worked. “It must be a problem with HP,” was the conclusion. He gave me their number. Alan, another nice guy from the Philippines took my call. Before I could speak with him, though, he had to check my warranty and told me it had already expired. I would have to buy a service contract before he could even talk to me. I explained that the computer was purchased by my employer with the stipulation that I bought an extended warranty, and that I had certainly done that. Nope. No record. “If you can give me the order number, I can verify it,” Alan said.

I’m now starting to get angry, because Karen is the only person who could find such a document, and she’s in Vir-fucking-ginia. I’d have to find the receipt later and ask for a refund.

After some unkind comments, I spent $100, and Alan began walking me through things. He asked if I had a back up of my important stuff, which didn’t sound good. Our efforts took forever and accomplished nothing. At one point, however, after some background Windows program had run, Microsoft informed me that it needed to reload SP1. Fine. Maybe they screwed something up the first time, so I thanked Alan and got down to business.

The reinstall went smoothly and the two error messages I’d received after the original restart disappeared. I was joyful and suddenly able to get online. Victory!

But it was slow as molasses! I mean dail-up slow. I did Speakeasy tests and determined I was getting about 4 megs down and a half a meg up. It seemed much slower, however. Everything on the computer seemed slow. I grew impatient, so I went back to the netbook and repeated the Speakeasy tests. Same results, so I called Time Warner back.

This time, it was Rose in Manila. It took forever. I had to put my phone on the charger. She did some tests and finally found something. Then, she told me she’d have somebody out to fix it on Wednesday. That’s right, Wednesday, as in 5 days away.

I got a little more angry. How a company like Time Warner — whose very lifeblood is its customers — can treat people like this is all the evidence you need in order to accept that something is terribly wrong with our culture and its economy. I yelled at her and demanded to speak to a supervisor.

She said I should speak with the “local” office, which made my eyes light up. Then, she transferred me. I was now speaking with Mae in El Paso (hardly local). May felt compelled to have me start at the beginning, which really infuriated me. She was a sweet thing, but she kept wanting me to try things I’d already been through, including hardwiring to the modem. That bloody well didn’t work. She insisted that Time Warner was sending a signal to me, something I already knew.

She apologized but said Wednesday was the soonest. I hung up and yelled at the dogs.

My wife called. I yelled at her.

Then I called my friend Richard Andrews, a computer repair guy who has helped me out in the past. He could sense my anxiety and said he’d be over as soon as he could. The guy lives in Keller. I live in Frisco. It’s about an hour’s drive.

Richard arrived about 7:30 p.m. and said he’d never seen such a thing. His first thought was to uninstall SP1, which took about 30 minutes. Bingo, everything went back to normal. He then hid the update, so that I would never install it again, and went his way. It cost me a few bills, but I was happy to pay. Richard went above and beyond with me, and I couldn’t help think that this is the way all those who service the industry need to behave. I guess that’s why his business is booming. If you live in the DFW area, you simply won’t find anybody better.

Geek friends reading this will say, “I’d have uninstalled SP1 right away.” Good for you. I was simply unable to put 2 and 2 together and come up with that solution. After I got back online, I researched the problem, and, lo and behold, I’m not alone.

Windows 7 is a great improvement beyond its predecessors, but Microsoft is still Microsoft. Damn them!

So I’m 65 now, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this particular birthday. Maybe that’s what this was all about anyway: Life tapping me on the shoulder to remind me of my own powerlessness in the overall scheme of things. The most important thing about my birthday, after all, was that the circle of life twitched, and new life came into mine just one day earlier. I missed my Skype session, but that’s tiny in comparison.

Kinda puts things in perspective, eh?

Posted in Personal, Technology | 2 Comments » |

Goodbye, Google; hello, Google+

July 6th, 2011

By now, you most likely have heard about Google+, Google’s new entry into the social networking phenomenon. I was fortunate enough to get an early invite, so I’ve spent the last week playing in the application. I think this has the potential to reshape Google’s entire business in ways that will be very, very hard to ignore. It all begins with the name, Google+. It’s not merely a new application, it represents a complete shift in the company’s strategic thrust. It’s THAT significant.

Check your company’s analytics, and you’ll see that, in 99% of cases, Google is the top referrer of eyeballs to your website. Why is that? It’s all about search, and Google owns search. Everything they do is important in that regard, and while most people are comparing G+ to Facebook and/or Twitter, I think that misses the point. Google+ is far more than “just another social network” or a “Facebook killer” (yeah, right), because it incorporates all that is Google.

My search results, for example, are now personalized and presented within the plus framework. I like this very much, because the first organic result often reveals the website most recently visited by me that addresses the search query. This is incredibly useful for those “I read that somewhere” searches.

The two things I find most intriguing for news are both found in the service’s Android app (an iPhone app is coming, but I don’t know if it contains the same abilities as the Android app). One, I can set it so that any picture I take is immediately and automatically uploaded to a folder on my G+ account. This type of application — where a picture I take on earth is automatically distributed to the cloud — is game-changing for the real-time news industry, and I fully expect to see similar applications applied more broadly to the news business. However, G+ is first out-of-the-box with this, and it is powerful. Next will be video. You can count on it. Try to imagine online news with this feature. It will be amazing.

The second Android function involves the information stream of Google+ itself. Since every one you “follow,” gets placed immediately into a circle of your choice (friends, family, coworkers, etc.), you can choose what stream to follow at any given time. It’s a great way to use connectivity, and the infrastructure is all drag-and-drop simple. You can deliver posts to any group as well, including making them “public,” where anybody can see them. This is significant, for it mimics Twitter in that sense.

The mobile app allows you to make your location known to Google (it’s off by default) and then read a stream of posts “nearby.” This has staggering implications for spot news coverage, where geolocation is important. Want witnesses, photos, video? No hashtags necessary, if you’re on location, for if everybody’s using G+ (a big question), a simple swipe of your Android phone gives you everything automatically. This is another innovation that will expand beyond Google, but the reality is that it is Google that brought this to the table.

Jeff Jarvis admitted yesterday that his school, City University of New York (CUNY), is going to have to begin teaching Google+ in its journalism program, and I certainly agree. His views of G+ include many thoughts about its application for news, and I recommend reading this piece.

But the most important thing to note is that Google has the clout to actually force businesses (of their own free will) into its “plus” cavern, and that is a big game-changer. Firstly, Google has announced that Google+ for business is coming, and I’m sure it will incorporate everything of Google’s already stout toolkit for businesses. Secondly, everybody will need a Google profile in order to be fairly “seen” by the search engine. What business would turn that down? It’s free.

And if businesses will use it, we need to know everything about it.

Social media consultant Jay Baer wrote this week that Google’s history is entirely built around the ranking of “Pages” on the Web. It developed PageRank to provide searchers with the best possible results. However, personal publishing via social media has changed everything.

Philosophically, Pages with more and better other Pages linking to them must be better content, and each link counts as a “vote” for that Page. But when the dominant form of expression became something smaller than a Page, and our votes of content confidence became expressed by social sharing and other behaviors that differ from “I’m going to link to this website from my website,” Google found itself trying to play web page ranking poker with less than a full deck of cards. It was trying to do a very difficult job with incomplete information.

This explains, in part, why Google had to make a move like this. The world of information is simply changing, but Baer adds that it is the integration of G+ content into its search algorithms that makes it so potent, especially for businesses. Remember, he points out, Google owns the top two search engines in the world. YouTube is number two.

Google has inserted so many tentacles into so many crevices of our digital lives, that they can compel us to use Plus via integrations and reminders in (just a starter list):

• Gmail
• YouTube
• Picasa
• Maps
• Android (the app for Plus is fantastic)
• Chrome
• Analytics
• Blogger

…Here’s the scenario I see unfolding before the end of 2011, and possibly before Labor Day. Google opens up business pages on Plus to Adwords customers. Any clicks and +1 (Google’s version of Facebook “like”) your business content receives on Plus has a direct impact on your organic search engine rankings, while your Facebook activity continues to have no impact.

Go read Jay’s article, for it’s really quite good. Then, if you don’t already have one, create a Gmail account, which will lead to a Google profile, which will lead to Plus. The company has announced that the service will be completely open to everyone by July 29th.

Most observers are writing about how Google+ will impact the news industry, and that’s important. I think its greater shock to the media ecosystem, however, is its potential to once again influence advertising, and that this is what should interest us most. It’s true that the two have always gone together for media companies, but they are increasingly disconnecting, and we must pay very close attention to what’s happening in this space.

This is why my best advice for any media company is still this: don’t leave to geeks what rightly belongs to upper management, especially sales. There’s still far too much ignorance about all of this stuff at the upper management level. Google+ will be a critical element in local advertising downstream. Will people shift from Facebook or Twitter? That’s the wrong question, for in the end, it really doesn’t matter.

Like a great many other things, it’s all about the money. Money doesn’t require mass anymore, and nobody knows that better than Google.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Google, Social Media, Technology | 2 Comments » |

The diminishing power of sources

May 6th, 2011

The Great Horizontal is Jay Rosen’s new term for the era-shifting communications disruption that J. D. Lasica first termed the “Personal Media Revolution.” I like it. It’s the ability of everyday people to use the tools heretofore reserved only for deep pockets, whereby they can communicate back “up” to media and, of course, with themselves. So low are the costs for entry today that you’ve heard me say “everybody is a media company.”

This has, of course, brought out the worst in the journalism profession, because it is their ox that’s being gored by all of this. I’ve written many times about the arrogant presumption that “real” journalism is done only by the pros, and that this amateur “movement” is simply unreliable poppycock. The ultimate demonstration of this for me came at a gathering of media thinkers in Chicago a few years ago during which a video by NBC News anchor Brian Williams was played. He “welcomed” the group by warning of the dangers of the Great Horizontal, and he did so by referring to a blog about nasal hair. There was widespread chuckling in the room as Williams mocked the content of the blog, comparing it to the “real” stuff produced by professional journalists. I was embarrassed for Williams, although he thought he was making a valid comparison.

While journalists kick and scream, there’s something incredibly significant taking place as the hegemony of the industry is disrupted. Those who really run the news — the sources — are finding it increasingly difficult to realize the results of their manipulation. This can only be good for journalism, those who practice it, and especially for the culture itself. For too long, outsiders who know the rules have applied them to their best interests, and the result is a convoluted and confused system of ethics that serves not the industry but those who use the industry to get their way. All of that is changing — and will continue to change — as the Great Horizontal marches forward.

Whether it’s the ease of social media or the more complex local blogs, those who are getting into the game have a sense of mission-simplicity that is refreshing, passionate and oftentimes very raw. These people — like the rest of the people formerly known as the audience — view with transparency attempts to control, in any fashion, the way they think and present their thoughts.

In 1990, I was news director at KGMB-TV in Honolulu. I got a magazine (The Animals’ Agenda) in the mail from an animal rights organization that contained a section called “Activist Agenda.” This particular month’s was penned by Richard Krawiec (“a nationally-published freelance writer and author of the novel Time Sharing”). It was called “Dealing With The Media: Advice From A Journalist.” This article is a veritable “how to” of media manipulation, using the rules of objectivity and common sense. It’s smart.

Try to cultivate reporters who will take a real interest in your issues. Read local publications regularly and identify writers who cover animal topics. Keep those writers informed of your activities.

Think local. Why picket a traveling circus if there’s a terrible zoo in town?

Be visible. Cook vegetarian dinners for the homeless. Do street theater. A person dressed in a costume is inherently more interesting to the media than someone sitting at a booth. But don’t overdo the tactic to the point of looking like clowns.

Most of all, be realistic. Don’t expect the writer to produce a public relations release. Criticism is all right as long as it’s offered because you’re taken seriously.

Taken seriously. That’s the mission: to be moved from Hellin’s sphere of deviancy to the sphere of legitimate debate. It happens every day in the world of professional journalism, because people with an agenda know how the game is played. This may be what professional journalism prefers, but it’s not what journalism is really all about.

Wade Roush published an interesting article this week about the end of the embargo, another manufactured “rule” of professional journalism by which those with connections, those in the know can get the most bang for the buck out of their news releases. Embargoes come from “sources,” and Roush has never been a fan.

Frustration…has led a few organizations to attack the system. In 2008, notably, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington declared “Death to the Embargo” and said that henceforth his publication would work to undermine the system by agreeing to embargoes, then breaking them at random. They’ve done this with gusto, and Arrington’s campaign has worked. Embargo promises, at least in the business and technology space I cover, are now tissue-thin. If TechCrunch—now a division of AOL—doesn’t break the embargo on a given story, someone else emboldened by its example often will.

Ah, tech media, those scruffy newcomers to the game who don’t always (rarely?) play by traditional media’s rules. They, too, are a part of the Great Horizontal, for many — if not most — of them wouldn’t have launched had it not been for the low barriers to entry offered by technology today. After all, they invented the blog as a way to communicate online, and it runs circles around the portal method preferred by traditional media.

And blogs will continue to disrupt. The Nieman Journalism Lab offered another illustration of what’s happening with an article this week appropriately titled: A place for Homicide Watch: Can a local blog fill some of the gaps in Washington, D.C.’s crime coverage? Of course they can, and I believe that local blogs will be springing up like weeds over the next ten years as the Great Horizontal continues to move forward.

And one of the neat things about blogs and bloggers is that they don’t always play by the nice-n-neat rules of the professionals. They go straight to the street without the checks and balances that we take for granted and that we rationalize are necessary for a professional press. We’re learning that a lot of that is crap, and while I’ll admit that the chaos we face is a little disconcerting, maybe we need a little chaos to rid ourselves of a world where corporations and those with money can buy influence from the press (oh yeah) and those with smarts can manipulate their way in.

Posted in Blogging, Citizens News, Culture, Disruptions, Journalism, Networked World, Technology | 1 Comment » |

Why Gawker’s (apparent) design failure matters to us

April 20th, 2011

The Atlantic is reporting today that the Gawker media sites redesign has produced a traffic loss greater than anybody anticipated. This is extremely important for local media companies to watch, because it appears to prove a point about website design that is counterintuitive to mass media thinking. Gawker is a group of highly successful blogs. Owner Nick Denton ordered a redesign in early February that changed the front page of each from the blog format to a more conventional portal appearance. Denton felt he was “moving past the blog,” but the reality is that he went backwards.

Writing for The Atlantic, associate editor Nicholas Jackson noted that the Gawker sites suffered a huge hit on traffic immediately and that the situation has gotten worse over time.

Here, a graph we put together using the number of unique visitors to the homepages of five sites in the Gawker network — Gawker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9 and Deadspin — from November through today.* The April numbers are only for the month to-date, but it isn’t hard to see, now that we’re twenty days in, how many of these sites will need a big boost to even reach March’s traffic.

*Update 11:23 a.m.: This post originally implied that the graph displays unique visitors to each of five Gawker Network sites. The chart shows Gawker’s internal statistics for unique visitors to the homepage of each site represented.

Prior to the redesign, Gawker sites presented their content in the standard reverse chronological presentation of blogs, and we have long contended that this is the format for Web news content display and distribution. Here’s what I wrote about it after Gawker made the changes:

The blog format of reverse chronological order was created of the Web, by the Web and for the Web. Traditional media types had nothing to do with it and wanted nothing to do with it. The entire back end infrastructure of the Web is designed to seek out and sort that which is new, that which is “at the top,” if you will. If you wish your work to shake hands with the Web, the Web will shake hands with that which is new, always. There is no aggregator that seeks out the “top story,” because the Web doesn’t care, and if you artificially seed your output, it will figure out what’s going on. It wants what’s new, and, well, that’s one of the definitions of “news” anyway, right?

One of the points of genius about this is that it respects the recipient of content, the customer, the user. It does this by presenting the time of day as the only filter, something that cannot be manipulated for gain by the content creator. It respects the intelligence of the user to figure out and find what’s important without the manipulating guiding hand of the editor. Traditional media has gone far by assuming that the average person needs our help in “shaping” his or her experience, to understand what’s important and what isn’t. The problem is that this has been twisted in the name of self-serving marketing and people have lost trust in our assumption. They want to decide for themselves, and a system based solely on time that allows them to do that is refreshing precisely because it’s not filtered in any way.

For more of my thoughts on this, you can look here and here.

Nick Denton is a smart guy, but he fell for mass media reasoning when he instituted these changes. He noted at the time that their best work needed showcasing that it didn’t get with the blog format. He thought people needed (wanted?) a display that highlighted their best work and top stories. This is precisely the argument we hear from clients who don’t want any part of the reverse chronological order of blog presentation.

And yet here we have evidence of the opposite, evidence we also see with regularity from clients who’ve switched to a Continuous News, blog format for their main Web page. It works, folks, because it fits with the Web and doesn’t try to force the Web into what we’re comfortable with.

Posted in Blogging, Continuous News, Reinventing Local Media, Technology | 1 Comment » |

Beware the death pronouncements

February 24th, 2011

While everybody is always on the look-out for the next great thing, there’s an equally large number of writers and observers who are quick to point out the “death” of things as well. This just adds to the confusion about what roads we should take tactically, and it’s something about which those of us at AR&D talk frequently. The problem with these forecasts is that they’re usually wrong. They make nice headlines, but the problem is those headlines are often the only thing people see. When understanding of something is limited, people often skim as much as possible to try and bring their understanding up to speed. With tech — and especially the media 2.0 world — that can be a dangerous thing to do.

This is why a New York Times article this week is getting so much attention among those who have this understanding. Like most newspaper headlines, this one probably wasn’t written by the writer of the article.

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

This headline is actually completely false, and it’s proven within the text of the article itself. Growth may be slowing, but blogs are still a growing phenomenon. To suggest that blogging is on the decline, therefore, is simply untrue, as Mathew Ingram pointed out for GigaOm:

In many ways, this “blogging is dying” theory is similar to the “web is dead” argument that Wired magazine tried to float last year, which really was about the web evolving and expanding into different areas. It’s true that Facebook and Twitter have led many away from blogging because they are so fast and easy to use, but they have also both helped to reinforce blogging in many ways.

,,,what we really have now is a multitude of platforms: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple formats. The fact that there are so many different choices means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like. So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

So now we have the “blogging is dead” meme to add to the “Web is dead” and “RSS is dead” concepts. None of these are true, and it’s why a new company called “Trove” got a reported $5-$10 million from the Washington Post. Trove, according to Poynter, is a “personalization engine” for the news.

The site, which will aggregate and personalize news from among 10,000 online sources, launches into public beta next month. It will be free at Trove.com, and on mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

The effort drops the Post into the middle of a crowded field chasing the elusive goal of news personalization. Several — LiveStand from Yahoo!, News.Me, originally a New York Times creation, and Ongo, a project the Post itself is a partner in — have been announced just within the past month.

Trove…also faces a challenge from tablet-only competitors such as Flipboard and Pulse, and older Web-based services ranging from Google News to My Yahoo!.

Two things strike me about Trove. One, it’s pretty cool. Two, it’s nothing but a pre-loaded RSS reader, just like many media companies made and threw away 7-8 years ago. Perhaps it’s the portable nature of the Web today that makes these more viable, but the technology for these kinds of applications is good old (dead) RSS. This is why I keep hammering away that we’ve got to get into real-time, RSS-delivered advertising, but that’s another story. Personalization aggregators is not a new concept, but start-ups and now traditional media players are suddenly seeing the value of the technology in a whole new way. I think it’s great.

The caveat in studying new media is to read enough from reliable sources to avoid getting trapped by headlines in the New York Times, the Wall St. Journal and other mainstream business publications. You’ll break your neck on the rocks in the shallows of their trend stories, if you jump in head first.

Posted in Blogging, Culture, Disruptions, RSS, Technology | No Comments » |

Pick one: Gawker takes a hit/Gawker is coming back

February 18th, 2011

I’m noting with interest today the reports that Gawker sites took a pageviews hit after their redesign. I’m not a big fan of pageviews as a measurement of right and wrong, but I’m a huge fan of the reverse chronological presentation of the blog format that Gawker gave up in the redesign. Here I am out there trying to encourage traditional media companies to embrace the format, and one of the original blog superstars, Nick Denton, switches Gawker around in the name of “moving past” the blog. It was confusing, to say the least, because what Denton really moved “to” is the traditional media, top-story presentation. That’s not moving past; that’s going backwards.

Let me restate some old points. The blog format of reverse chronological order was created of the Web, by the Web and for the Web. Traditional media types had nothing to do with it and wanted nothing to do with it. The entire back end infrastructure of the Web is designed to seek out and sort that which is new, that which is “at the top,” if you will. If you wish your work to shake hands with the Web, the Web will shake hands with that which is new, always. There is no aggregator that seeks out the top story, because the Web doesn’t care, and if you artificially seed your output, it will figure out what’s going on. It wants what’s new, and, well, that’s one of the definitions of “news” anyway, right?

One of the points of genius about this is that it respects the recipient of content, the customer, the user. It does this by presenting the time of day as the only filter, something that cannot be manipulated for gain by the content creator. It respects the intelligence of the user to figure out and find what’s important without the manipulating guiding hand of the editor. Traditional media has gone far by assuming that the average person needs our help in “shaping” his or her experience, to understand what’s important and what isn’t. The problem is that this has been twisted in the name of self-serving marketing and people have lost trust in our assumption. They want to decide for themselves, and a system based solely on time that allows them to do that is refreshing precisely because it’s not filtered in any way.

There are two spins on the story this week: one, Gawker’s pageviews went down when they launched their redesign and, two, Gawker’s pageviews are coming back after falling off the map, etc.

Erick Shonfeld of TechCrunch explained why the masses are abandoning Gawker:

You can revert to a traditional blog view, but the default is the “top story” view. Most people will probably never figure out how to toggle back to the comforts of the classic reverse-chron design, so they leave instead in frustration. Tweets about the redesign are more negative than positive.

Schonfeld included a graph from Sitemeter showing how pageviews fell completely off the map for the Gawker site, Gizmodo after the redesign. A nightmare.

Meanwhile, a report in Business Insider is more optimistic, citing that those who’ve remained are staying longer and clicking on more pages.

It’s too soon to say whether it’s working, but the data seems to say “cautiously optimistic.”

It’s entertaining to read the comments to stories like these, because they can be revealing. One TechCrunch commenter, for example, pointed out that if RSS is the way you’ve always consumed any Gawker product, nothing has changed. Of course, that’s because RSS is a part of the Web handshake that only recognizes what is new in a feed, as the blog format does naturally. I think that’s the point anyway.

Posted in Blogging, Disruptions, Technology | 7 Comments » |