David Card faults Google for providing a search engine without a lot of help for users. I didn’t have any trouble creating a custom search engine for a site where I’m a domain expert and integrating the results within my site’s templates, but David has touched on a general problem with Google’s efforts.
Documentation is spotty at best and the tools are designed for hard-core techies. I’ve been using Google Analytics for about a year, and I’m still learning interesting and useful things that I can do with it. I’m also discovering that many of the statistics don’t mean what I thought they did. I would love to make more use of Google Maps in some personal projects, but Google’s tools are too programmer-oriented and I haven’t had the time to seek out more polished third-party tools for map integration. Google Base feels like something you could do lots of fun stuff with, but I’m going to need more than an API to get me started.
In our most recent survey of online consumers, we found that about a quarter of the US online population is now creating its own content and the percentage of bloggers has more than doubled. When anybody can be a Web producer, it’s critical to provide tools that are both powerful and simple. Your core customers are now talented and curious amateurs and no longer programmers looking for an API. And perhaps you shouldn’t be depending on the kindness of strangers to serve your best customers.
Widgetbox gets this right with good-looking, well-presented tools that can be implemented without a lot of head-scratching. A big part of their strategy is to provide distribution to large sites looking to tap into the market of amateur Web producers who just want to solve a problem or have some fun. I wish Google made it this easy to get started with their tools.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Month: October 2006
Categories
Wal-Mart's Blog Wart
The recent exposure of the Wal-Mart blogging hoax perpetrated by Edelman Public Relations has been a public humiliation for the agency, the client, and the phony bloggers. In his blog, Richard Edelman says, “This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s.” He continues:
Let me reiterate our support for the WOMMA guidelines on transparency, which we helped to write. Our commitment is to openness and engagement because trust is not negotiable and we are working to be sure that commitment is delivered in all our programs.
This incident brings to mind a similar incident in my community. Representatives of a developer’s PR firm were caught “astroturfing” a local mailing list. In that case the president of the PR firm took a different position, claiming, “I don’t know what the ethical standards of a chat room are.” A good rule of thumb is that the ethical standards of a “chat room” are the same as in your living room.
I’m have a report coming out on consumers’ trust in various online media. Right now, consumers’ feelings about consumer-created content are ambivalent. Blogs and public forums are not as trusted as branded media — even company sites. That’s a pretty clear signal that the potential damage to your client’s reputation by this kind of behavior is much greater than any possible gain.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review says that, rather than paying a billion dollars for the troubled Los Angeles Times, that the local zillionaires who want to buy it should start their own news-gathering organization instead. “Why offer a million dollars per reporter for the Times?”, he asks.
He’s on to something. There has never been a better time to start a news organization. Why, at a time when the entire concept of the newspaper is in flux, would anyone want to invest in such an enterprise, when they can have more influence over the agenda with a startup? Especially if you have a billion to spend. That’s what Phil Anschultz is doing with the Examiner, creating a national chain of free newspapers. That’s what Ted Turner did with CNN.
Everybody seems to be after a piece of this market, and I’m sure that everyone would have a different opinion about how to go about it. There’s more than one correct answer. My take: Los Angeles is a city of neighborhoods that are themselves entire cities. Each “neighborhood” is only marginally served by the LA Times product. If you focus on the low-hanging fruit, you could come up with a dozen or more communities that need and can support a real paper that focuses first on community news, and secondarily on the common coverage that unites Los Angeles.
And since you’re designing it from the bottom up, you should design it with the Web as your primary news platform and a print edition as your marketing and advertising vehicle. This is a strategy that has real economies of scale on the business side (production, ad sales, circulation). The only editorial economies would be on the share city and county coverage. This is a model that could also rock the Orange County Register in its home market, which is just as diverse as Los Angeles.
Just to be clear: This is nothing like the current wave of free tabloids, which seem to view the Web as unnecessary competition to their core business. And these online sites would be produced by professional journalists, not by amateurs or consumers. Although they would be invited to contribute. This is a model that is working in some communities today, but I don’t believe has been done in a major metro market.
The kind of bottom-up network is described probably doesn’t appeal to the heavyweights who want to own a prestige title like the Los Angeles Times. It’s probably going to take a scrappier millionaire to make it happen. Someone who likes the idea doing journalism more than the idea of owning a newspaper. Someone more like Charles Foster Kane, only less fictional.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.