Author: Barry Parr

Required registration: worth the paper it's printed on?

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The Atlanta Journal Constitution carried a story saying that a lot of news sites, with the exception of USA Today’s parent Gannett were moving to required registration. Now, USA Today says it’s testing registration, asking for gender, zip code and year of birth.

How reliable is this self-reported data? I lie on site registrations unless there’s a compelling reason to tell the truth, and I’m not alone. A friend of mine tries to get this fellow Safeway customers to trade discount cards with him simply so he can dirty up their database.

On a lot of sites, the most populous zip code is 90210. That might be a good way to test the quality of a registration database. Divide the percentage of the Internet population that’s in 90210 by percentage of the site’s population whose zip code is 90210 and multiply the result by 100. The closer a site’s index is to 100, the higher the quality of its self-reported demographics.

Any advertiser that accepts self-reported demographics on required-registration news sites is guilty of professional malfeasance.

Why don't more Americans use mobile phones?

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US residents are a lot less likely to use a mobile phone than the people in any country in Europe, according to Telephia (via Emarketer).

Emarketer thinks this is because (1) land line phone service is cheap in the US and (2) GSM is widespread in Europe. I wonder if it has anything to do with the atrocious marketing and pricing by US providers. Whatever you think of the Baby Bells and the people who regulate them, they have created a system as simple and cheap as our mobile system is expensive and complex.

If Michael Powell gets his way, our land line service will look more like our mobile service.

A micropayment solution?

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Ron Rivest has come up with a new way to handle micropayments.

By paying every Nth randomly-selected payment at N times the amount of the transaction, he says he can reduce the overhead of lots of little transactions to a single transaction. It’s also significantly less complex than some earlier solutions.

That seems to be pretty cool. I’m less sure of the advantages over simply aggregating transactions and clearing them in bulk. Also, it doesn’t seem to address the inherent behavioral issues of micropayments.

Finally, while selling music on the net seems to be an ideal application for micropayments, I’d hate to start a company whose success depends on waiting for the recording trust to do it right.

Do not adjust your set

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Apparently Tivo is now automatically tuning in the Discovery channel when it’s turned on. This reminds me of the way that hotel room TV’s take control when you turn them on.

Combine this with Tivo’s ability to update its own software, download unrequested programs to your hard disk, and upload information about how you use your TV, and you begin to wonder how much control you’ll have over your media use in the future.

[Thanks, Adam Greenfield!]

I don't understand this Google/Blogger thing

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I have no idea what Google gets from buying Blogger that they couldn’t get for free. Judging from the response, I’m not alone. Blogging will never be a mass-market phenomenon (Blogger has 200,000 active users). The protocols that underlie blogging are so open that there are no obvious technical synergies. Giving preference to Blogger customers would throttle Google’s golden-egg-laying goose.

Dave Winer says it’s Google can offer blogging to their enterprise customers, but it’s not clear to me why that adds value to Google’s enterprise services. Mitch Ratcliffe says “The acquisition of Blogger gives Google a channel to put its automated searching capabilities into people’s hands…[it] also raises Google’s potential to reshape the Net by focusing on how links are made and managed.” But I don’t understand why they have to own Blogger to do that. Three years from now, Blogger will be a neglected subsidiary–not a strategic asset.

There are plenty of interesting grass roots efforts to make sense of blogspace, but we haven’t seen anything yet from the masters of extracting information from links. Buying Blogger seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Trouble in UserLand?

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At the low end, Google/Blogger’s combination of ease of entry, low price (free), simplicity, brand, and distribution is unbeatable.

At the high end, Moveable Type’s combination of power, reliability, low price (free), and reputation is very strong. And Ben and Mena Trott seem to be positioning themselves for a breakout with MT Pro. If only it were less intimidating to install.

Radio UserLand increasingly occupies the troubled middle ground that marks strategic doom for most companies.

It seems to me that more and more of my must-read blogs are on MT. This week, the number-two Manila site moved to Moveable Type. Radio seems more and more like a kludge every day. I’d be very interested to know what the conversion rates are for these tools. I’d bet few are converting from MT to Radio or Blogger, but lots of people are going the other way.

I don’t mean to disparage Blogger, which I genuinely admire. On the other hand, using Radio made my head hurt.

How do you evaluate content management software?

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Reviewing software, especially enterprise software, intelligently is virtually impossible unless you’ve had a chance to use the software, possibly for months, in a reasonably realistic environment.

A friend of mine, a really sharp engineer, used to write a software column for a highly respected (non-IT) trade magazine. He got tons of marketing-speak from vendors. But he didn’t have the resources to determine whether any of the stuff actually did what it was supposed to do as well as it was supposed to do it. The main reason the column existed was so that ad sales people could call on software vendors and tell them, “Yes, we write about software.”

The truth is that unless you have frank information from real users, it’s nearly impossible to understand how a particular package will work in your environment. Even then, it’s a crapshoot. Especially when you’re talking about something as complex, raw, and organizationally dependent as content management software.

One reason Walt Mossberg seems so brilliant is that he actually uses the stuff he writes about and tells the truth without worrying about his or his employer’s relationship with the vendor.

A company without synergy

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Why is USA Interactive doing well? Well, they’re not trying to establish synergy among their properties. And they are all in a business that works well on the Web: bringing people together and making markets. Their properties include Expedia, Hotels.com, Match.com, Ticketmaster (which includes CitySearch). No wonder they’re smug.

OK, so there’s a lot of synergy between Expedia and Hotels.com. Real we’re-in-the-same-business synergy.

Some of the markets they’re interested in include [online] classified [ads], financial services, and we’ve looked at real estate. Rumored takeoever targets include Google, Overture, Cruise.com, MovieFone (now part of AOL’s synergistic house of cards), and Overstock.com.