Month: October 2002

RSS aggregation is push done right. Remember push? I wasted six months of my life, despite my better judgement and protestations, working on it.
Why does RSS look like a winner?

• It’s decentralized. You serve your own pages and don’t need anyone’s permission to do it.
• It’s HTML-based. You don’t have to worry about proprietary formats.
• It’s lightweight. No one is moving lots of graphics or attempting to “change the online (or desktop) experience”.
• It’s grassroots. One of the reasons for the explosion of interest in weblogs is that RSS aggregation makes it possible to for readers to scan sites for interesting items in the tenth of the time it would take to read the same sites in their browsers.
• It gives power to the reader. The premise of push was that publisher would have more control of your online experience. RSS aggregation makes it possible for the reader to control his own experience.

In other words, RSS aggregation (we need a better word for it) is everything that push was not.

Advertising giant David Ogilvy made the most persuasive case against billboards. His simple thesis was that advertising should represent a bargain between the audience and the advertiser: “I’ll subsidize this news/information/entertainment/event for you if you’ll agree to accept some advertising from me.”
Billboards violate this bargain. There is no bargain. The audience is forced to view the ad and receive nothing in return.
The NY Times says that Nike and ABC have been defacing public sidewalks with advertising. IBM did this awhile back in the US and Australia. The worst excess of the dot-com years in San Francisco was a boat that towed a billboard on San Francisco bay–defacing on the most beautiful views on earth with their commercial message.
UPDATE 10/26:Microsoft is defacing public streets. You’d think having control of most people’s desktops would be enough.
It’s time to re-read Ogilvy. His belief in intelligent communication with the audience and establishing a bargain with them is sorely missed in the current marketing climate.

Atomfilms.com, BMW, and AOL are all producing video for the Web, and USA Today is hailing it as evidence of “renewed interest in watching original entertainment on PC screens” and that “consumers are willing to pay for things now.”
First, this is evidence that the dream of turning the Web into TV persists in certain corporations, not among users.
Second, it’s evidence that consumers are still unwilling to pay for the privilege of having this done to them. Both BMW and AOL are giving the content away as a premium to grab consumers’ attention. It’ll be interesting to see if we’re willing to take it for free.

A Letter to FCC Chairman Michael Powell: Support “Fail Fast” makes a compelling case for letting big telcos fail. They’re victims of their own poor strategy and witless management, and they won’t be missed. To prop them up is to condemn us all to a future of poor technology, continued monopoly practices, stifled innovation, and massive public expense. It would also be a betrayal of the administration’s avowed commitment to free enterprise, perhaps the only traditional GOP value the Republican party still espouses.
The site also features a lot of great links to information on what end-to-end networking is and why it should be the future of telecommunications.

AOL expects ad sales to be down 41% from last year, despite the fact that the overall ad market is recovering and that their biggest competitors are increasing their online ad revenues. In the third quarter, the online advertising is up 15%, ESPN.com is up over 10%, WSJ.com up 24%, Yahoo is up 22%, and the NYTimes.com is up 30%. Lower prices and the opportunity to reach people at work are among the reasons cited.
AOL is down because they are no longer able to muscle big advertisers and aspiring brands into buying big packages. No doubt they’re also compensating for some of their earlier absurdist accounting. The Washington Post has an excellent article about AOL/TW’s failure to achieve synergy, and how many executives in the two companies doubted it was possible.
The good news is that this may signal a more subscriber-friendly AOL in the future as they come to realize who’s really paying the bills.

There’s article on poynter.org about the Akron Beacon-Journal’s new PDF edition, comparing it favorably to the BJ’s crappy Knight-Ridder-created website. The author’s take is that if you don’t have the resources to produce a great web site, maybe you should sell PDF’s to your readers.
PDF is great for electronically distributing documents created for print, but that’s about it. Because it was designed for translating print documents, it has none of the benefits of real HTML. Adobe denies Acrobat is still a roach motel, which data enters but cannot escape. They now prefer to think of it as a “big container for doing things.” Oh, I see.
Publishers like PDF because it gives them the illusion of control over the presentation and distribution of their content, coupled with the apparent cheapness of printing to file, instead of distributing off a content management system. But it does not compensate the reader for everything he loses. And what’s the point of a cheap, controllable production system that your readers don’t want?