Month: December 2006

Categories
Analysis Media

I said what?

So, I finally get quoted in Romenesko, everybody’s favorite old-school journalism blog — and it’s something I’m pretty sure I didn’t say:

Newspaper pages of the future will look like web pages
Investor’s Business Daily
That’s Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr’s prediction. “What a newspaper might come to look like is a printed digest of what’s online,” he says. The American Press Institute’s Vickey Williams tells Doug Tsuruoka: “The newsrooms that are successful in the future will move faster and be more outwardly focused on news consumer preferences and less risk-adverse than they are today. The successful newsroom will anticipate rather than react to change.”

I went back and talked to the reporter, and it appears he was asking about design and I was talking about content. Of course, newspapers are going to seem less fresh to anyone who’s been on the Web in the last 24 hours. But I don’t think they’re going to take their design cues from the Web. Newspaper websites already take too many design queues from the print edition, and they need to diverge from print.
We’re in for a period of innovation as newspapers try to figure out what they should look like when all the news they print is already (or should be) online. Multiple changes in ownership, cost-cutting, declining circulation and ad pages are going to force newspaper editors and designers to rethink what a newspaper is. And they’re going to come up with more than one answer. I’m not prepared to say right now what the results will be, but I’m willing to bet it won’t look like a Web page.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Categories
Wireless

Deadly synergies

I’m still obsessed the ways that pursuit of synergies that turn out to be dyssynergies is almost always a deadly mistake. So, I enjoyed Julie Ask’s Jupiter blog entry about the difficulty of buying unbundled data service for an unlocked cell phone.
Here are three elements that are bundled together (the handset, voice service, and data service) in a way that makes it impossible for the customer to get what she needs. The only reason someone even had this conversation is that the person in question was a mobile analyst who had access to a cool gadget, and knew what question to ask. Unfortunately, the answer to her question was “No”.
Confusion, forced choices, and high penalties for choosing the wrong plan will cause consumers to buy more than they need and pay more for it than they should. But in the long run, you can’t base a business on confusing your customers out of their money.
The current structure of the industry makes it possible the carriers to pursue these “synergies”. But the natural consequence is that their consumers are not the only ones who are confused about what business the mobile carriers are in.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Categories
Analysis Media

Video is still duct-taped to most news sites

I’ve been visiting a lot of news sites and looking at video in preparation for a report on podcasting I’ve just completed and an upcoming report on best practices. It’s not surprising how rough a lot of the video is on non-TV news sites. But I was surprised how inconsistent we are about the way that we offer video to our readers.
Usually there’s a dedicated section for video on the site. Often, but not always, it’s linked to the individual story. Sometimes remarkable videos are hidden inside a special package for a particular story.
It’s often unclear whether the video linked comes from in-house, an affiliated TV station, or a wire service — until you start the video.
Sometimes we let the user choose the format (QuickTime, Windows Media, or Real) on the first click, sometimes we ask for them to choose a format after the link, and sometimes we don’t give them a choice.
Sometimes we use a screen capture to link to the video, sometimes a photo, and sometimes we just use a headline or the word “VIDEO” and sometimes an icon. Or some combination of the above.
Worst of all, your chances of getting a reasonable, permanent URL for any video clip, or even a reliable landing page, is pretty much a crapshoot. This continues to be a huge problem, and it’s especially troubling since video benefits so much from viral sharing.
The sheer variety of the way we link to video and promote it on our home pages is a good indication of how immature this technology is. We’re in a stage of experimentation, and producers feel it’s still too early to even steal good ideas. The lack of consistency keeps video adoption lower than it should be. A good resolution for 2007 would be to steal more ideas for designing online video into our sites.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Categories
Search

Ask City bets big on its users' sophistication

Generally, I’m reluctant to take on the marketing-speak associated with a new product launch. But when Ask.com described Ask City to me as “an application rather than a website”, it really helped me understand what they were trying to do.
The application they’ve created works well at connecting events and businesses in geographical context. They’ve tied everything together in an application that really does make it possible to plan an evening’s dinner and entertainment, including reviews, tickets, and reservations.
Local has been the application of the future for what seems like forever. AOL and CitySearch and Microsoft generated a lot of excitement with their big investments in national networks of local sites in the summer of ’96.
But Jupiter’s research shows that consumers’ use of local sites has not increased significantly in the last five years. An entire generation of sites have been created in the years since the bubble burst and the vast majority of us have not really changed we use the web to navigate our communities.
It’s not surprising, since the sites are not really all that new. The big guys’ local sites may be too influenced by their core business. Yahoo’s local services look like a portal, but feels unfinished and underpopulated. Google’s local services are about local search, which is a on-strategy but not compelling. Microsoft’s local sites are generic front-ends enhanced with CitySearch listings and yellow pages listings. And the yellow pages companies seem to be focused on creating snazzy Web 2.0 versions of their big, yellow books.
Ask City is something new. It brings together a lot of the elements I’ve been looking for in a local site, and does a good job of integrating them: mapping, events, movies, tickets, restaurants, and tools for linking them all together. This doesn’t just feel like a local extension of their core brand, or a bunch of InterActive Corp. products slapped together in search of synergy.
There are a lot of good ideas in Ask City, and it’s going to take us all a while to learn how to use it in our daily lives. That makes it a pretty big bet on the sophistication of their customers.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.