MediaSavvy

It’s exciting to see a social news aggregator from a major media company, and the new Netscape beta is a bold step in that direction.
I agree with David Card that it’s an aggressive implementation of current thinking in social news coupled with some new ideas — notably the use of editors. I also agree with him that the current implementation is something of a mess visually. It manages to be cluttered even though its information density is really low. Simplicity is more than a design cue of Web 2.0. It’s a hallmark of the new Web culture and a major visual trend in its own right.
The success of the project hinges on whether social news works for vague demographic groups. Digg.com’s take on daily news would serve an unmet need in the news marketplace, if they can keep a coherent audience identity as they grow. But the typical Netscape.com homepage user is (a) average and (b) passive. Can Netscape harness the interests of average, passive folks to produce a front page that is more compelling to other average folks than the ones produced by the editors at CNN, USAToday, and Yahoo?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

I’ve been using a couple of applications to synchronize my use of the web lately and I’m really enjoying it. As someone who uses Windows for work and a Mac for everything else, this is a particularly challenging problem.
Google Browser Sync synchronizes multiple copies of Firefox across computers. It keeps track of cookies, passwords, bookmarks, history, and window status from one session to the next, and makes it a lot easier for me to keep track of what I’m doing on the Web. It has the incidental advantage of remembering the state of the browser the last time I had it open on the same computer. I know there were some other efforts to do this, but Google put it on a lot of people’s radar and is the reason I tried it. Personally, I find this to be the single greatest improvement in the browsing experience since the invention of tabs.
To manage my RSS reading across systems, I’ve been using Bloglines. It works really well, but it is kind of homely and I really missed using Net Newswire on the Mac. I finally decided to try using Net Newswire in concern with News Gator online, which allowed me to sync my subscriptions between the application on the Mac and the website on the PC. I’ve been very happy with this solution as well.
What’s interesting is that, of course, the idea and reality of sychronization have been around for years. Yahoo does a pretty good job of syncing with Outlook, for example. But both of these implementations are notable for their simplicity and utility, and the fact that they unify the experience on my Mac and my PC. And I want more just like them.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

On Monday, I participated in a panel discussion that perhaps the most fun I’ve ever had in front of an audience. With several people who had run online news operations at one time or another — Bob Cauthorn (SFgate.com), Merrill Brown (MSNBC.com), and Lisa Stone (BlogHer) — we discussed what we’d do if we were the publisher of a medium-sized newspaper. One of the groundrules was not to criticize the industry, but to offer useful suggestions.
I’m not sure I heard anything radically new, but what I did hear was an emerging consensus on what news operations should do next: rededicate ourselves to local news, change the newsroom culture, get replace editors who can’t change, seek honest paid circulation, provide competitive customer service to advertisers, keep startups at arm’s length from the core property, and more.
What I began to understand is that while the coming decade is going to be filled with pain for news organizations who can’t change, it’s also going to be a lot of fun for those who are forcing change on the industry.
I’m beginning to wonder if one test of the validity of a strategy (necessary but not sufficient) is whether you’re excited to come to work in the morning while you’re implementing it.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

I’m reading the New Yorker article on Howard Stringer’s struggles with Sony that David Card and Michael Gartenberg have already recommended.
The author seems to bought the proposition that poor communication between the silos is what is strangling Sony. I’m wondering if the opposite is true. It looks to me like the pursuit of false synergies may be at least as big a problem.
Did Sony’s ability to put its film assets behind Blu-ray encourage them to get into a format war they’re likely to lose? Did Sony’s ownership of vast reservoirs of music encourage them to launch their less-than-successful SACD high-definition audio disc? Did it commit them to a DRM strategy that not only knocked them out of the portable music player market, but convinced them to pursue a their disastrous rootkit project? Has Sony’s commitment to its proprietary Memory Stick format made its cameras, computers and MP3 players a little bit less attractive? Will Sony’s strategy of developing its own super-microprocessor for Playstation lock it into a unwinnable long-term competition with Intel, compel it to put its own expensive chips into commodity products where they don’t belong, and turn it into the Silicon Graphics of consumer electronics?
If Sony had not been able to marshall these corporate resources to support doomed platforms, would they have been forced to engage the kind of give-and-take with their customers and suppliers that makes free markets work?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

My Sony Ericsson T616 is competent and usable, but it’s starting to fall apart after a couple of years of hard use. I’m not terribly excited by my options. The only thing that keeps me from just going ahead and getting (a not terribly exciting) RAZR is that I’m holding out for Apple to release a phone.
Long rumored, never confirmed, the possibly apocryphal Apple mobile phone seems like a certainty to me. I don’t cover mobile phones for Jupiter, so I’ve got no inside information. But how could they not do it?

• Mobile phones are encroaching on iPod. The technology to make a mobile phone a music player for undemanding consumers is getting small enough and good enough that iPod’s advantages over music phones are narrowing quickly. Apple’s rapid product life cycle shows they understand the nature of this threat. iPods are getting so small that the only way to make them usable is to incorporate them into some other device.


• Apple needs a network for iPod. Even if mobile phones weren’t evolving into a threat, there’s money to be made by allowing users to connect to the iTunes store whenever they’re bored. There’s also money to be made from iPod users who don’t have easy or regular access to a computer.


• Apple can cut a good deal on a network. Apple can get a good deal on network access, and can achieve critical mass in a reasonable period of time. Don’t think we won’t dump our current cell carriers overnight to use an Apple phone.


• Apple can create the phone we all want. This is the company that re-invented the MP3 player, after all. Even with a few years to study what they did, the industry is still scratching their heads and asking, “How’d they do that?”


• Apple can add real value to a network. The only thing that consumers hate more than their cheap, trashy, hard-to-use mobile phones is the company that provides the service. Don’t we all crave the simplicity of iTunes’s pricing structure from our mobile carrier?


• Apple owns its distribution network. The mobile phone industry may be the only business with lousier distribution network than Detroit. Apple has the end-to-end control necessary to break through the noise and clutter of fake promotions, dishonest bundling, and cheesy retail that characterize the mobile phone market.


• Apple needs another hit. In iPod, they built a new company that is now bigger than their computer company in a few short years. How much longer can they sustain their growth rates with their existing product lines?

Ask.com and Bloglines have delivered a blog search tool that demonstrates some real synergy between the two divisions of the same company.
Back during Web Boom 1.0, I coined a term. “Dyssynergy” is a corporate combination that results in a net destruction of value. Back in the good old days, Lycos was a poster child for the ravages of dyssynergy. The bigger they grew, the lamer they became. We haven’t seen a lot of dyssynergies in the new boom. That’s one thing that distiguishes it from the last one.
But we haven’t see a lot of synergy yet, either.
Ask.com’s new Blogs & Feeds search, which uses information from its Bloglines Web-based feedreader, does a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. And the blogosphere is nothing if not a generous source of chaff.
Previous blog-ranking tools have focused on links as a way to determine a blog’s authority, but Bloglines has a great deal of information about what real people are reading. By harnessing that information, Ask.com has been able to get some great information on authority and provide search results that are useful and interesting.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.