Steve Outing notes that the bottom has dropped out of newspapers’ employment classified business. Every category of advertising, including other classified categories, are up. But employment classifieds are down 23% — a sickening drop that goes right to the bottom line.
It may already be too late to save this business. When employment recovers, employment classifieds will not.
Cable operators don’t want to be required to offer impartial access. They say they “have no intention of blocking access to content”, despite existing contracts which permit forcing pop-up ads on users and permit differential access to preferred sites. In an unintentionally chilling statement, they continue:
“Regulation of the sort proposed by Amazon.com that purports to prohibit restrictions on such access would inevitably be used to thwart legitimate business practices and arrangements [emphasis added. Implications: alarming] that have nothing to do with blocking access to content. These efforts would deter investment and innovation [emphasis added. Interpretation: figleaf for doing nothing] in the provision of high-speed Internet services.”
Access monopolies must be treated as common carriers.
The Digital Divide has been bridged by libraries and schools , according to Arbitron and Edison Media Research. The report includes a lot of information on streaming media users as well.
When you look at Internet use at home and work, The divide is small, but significant. 48% of Hispanics and 6% of African Americans have Internet access at home or work compared with 70% among whites.
When you include school and library access, 75% of the total population has access to the Internet compared with 74% of African Americans and 65% of Hispanic Americans.
These numbers are interesting in light of eMarketer’s recent assertion that US Internet penetration will peak at 80%. Their conclusion seems about right, but their line of reasoning doesn’t prove it.
We have a few more details on ComScore Media Metrix’s recent restatement of their at-work measurements, thanks to the Internet Advertising Report.
First, ComScore acquired Media Metrix’s sample, but not its software. Second, ComScore was combining two samples collected by very different means (telephone and email recruitment), and combining two very different measuring systems (end-user and proxy server based) at the same time it was expanding its sample.
Without the tracking software, ComScore incorporated its own server-based measuring system with the November 2002 release of Media Metrix 2.0.
In addition to the 50,000 home Internet users recruited via Random Digital Dial sampling methodology, Media Metrix 2.0 expanded its measurement panel to 120,000, including 35,000 samples of at-work and university users.
No wonder there were some problems with their numbers.
I’ve tried to avoid political and personal posts on this site, mainly because I’m trying to focus it. But current events are so pressing that I don’t believe it’s a moral decision not to declare yourself. I don’t know whether we should attack Iraq or not, but I do believe that we have subverted the Constitution before and after the last election and in the months following September 11, 2002.
In any event I found the following thought-provoking and insightful.
Less then 10% of this page from the San Jose Mercury News contains news. (click for a full-size view: I lightened the non-news elements for greater visibiliity). The remainder is advertising, logos, navigation, house ads, and unchanging content (e.g. the stock chart).
I was pretty tough on Jakob Nielsen’s awful pie chart showing how much space each page element occupies. But he’s right to raise this issue. Jay Small raises this issue in his newsletter, taking on all the mandatory elements that bubble up from various parts of the publishing enterprise. Meanwhile, Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman says you must be able to deliver your content in multiple layouts, and that this should be a necessary feature of any decent content management system if you’re going to communicate what’s new about the news.
Ross Rader is right. Our current tools for producing content are inadequate for creating proper quotes, apostrophes, and other punctuation. This stuff should not require my attention to be correctly.
I have already confessed I’m using stupid (non-curly) quotes on MediaSavvy. I looked at SmartyPants and thought it was cool, until I contemplated installing a Moveable Type plug-in and modifying all my templates. Besides, I don’t believe the tags are the place this stuff should be fixed. I want my tools (this month it’s BBEdit, NetNewswire, and Moveable Type) to deal with this stuff natively. We’re not there yet.
I also agree that, in the larger scheme of things, this aesthetic consideration is a pretty small gripe. What’s amazing is how good (and cheap) these tools are.
The normally indispensible Declan McCullagh is just plain wrong when equates the move to require the labeling rights-impaired media and electronics wiith the move to require copy impairment be built into media and electronics.
To justify his claim that it’s always wrong to involve the government in a crusade for rights, he trots out experts from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Apparently the American Enterprise Institute was busy this morning.
I don’t know of labeling is a good idea or not (it seems like a step in the right direction), but Declan’s argument is unconvincing. The beauty of requiring labeling of copy-impaired products is that it imposes no obligation other than telling the truth and give consumers the opportunity to exercise their own judgment about whether to buy them. That sounds like a market-oriented solution to me.
Today, Comscore confessed that its numbers for last fall are wrong. The principal source of the problem was its estimate of at-work use. At-work use is notoriously difficult to measure.
But the Times hints at a bigger problem with web site ratings: what are they for?
When advertisers are paying by the exposure, or even the click or the sale, is it really important which site is number one?
When advertisers are (properly) more focused on response than branding, and when its so easy to test a campaign on the Net, is it really important what the demographics of a site are?
The Times tells us some alarming things about differences between the services:
Web advertising must be conducted like direct marketing and not like broadcast. Overreliance on ratings is malpractice.
Daring Fireball makes the case (if one needed to be made) for gracing the Web with real typography and the use of such non-ASCII characters as curly quotes and em dashes.
Proper typographic punctuation is 400-year-old news. That it’s considered exotic, or even non-standard, on today’s web is embarrassing. The solution isn’t for everyone to limit themselves to the same character set used on 1970’s-era VT-100 terminals. The solution is for software developers to write smarter software. Every day more web sites are starting to use smart punctuation, making sites that don’t — and the software behind them — look bad.
I haven’t been able to meet my typographic ideal yet with MediaSavvy, but it’s a medium-term goal for this site, once I get the content and focus where it needs to be. But, after reading The Elements of Typographic Style (an amazing book), I’m ready to polish this site’s design.
The 400 years of typographic tradition have (unconsciously) conditioned our readers to conventions that we flout at our peril.