Author: Barry Parr

Newspapers are in danger of losing the recruitment market for good. Steve Outing does a good job of interviewing researchers who have looked at this market, laying out the issues, and suggesting strategies.
Clearly, the quality of current offerings, including those from market leader Monster.com, is poor. And CareerBuilder hasn’t delivered the quality and business opportunities that newspapers need.
In the housing slump of of the eighties, the San Jose Mercury News lost a lot of real estate classifieds, just as you’d expect. But in the housing boom of the nineties, that advertising didn’t return. The advertisers had found more efficient and less expensive ways to sell houses. When the Bush recession is over, I doubt that newspapers will ever see recruitment classified linage return to their peak levels. Their big advertisers were already weary of the treatment they were getting when the Web became an option.
Unless newspapers can deconstruct the recruitment classified business, all that will be left of the recruitment advertising business will be ads for telemarketing jobs and work-at-home schemes.

“Don’t focus on making or building or managing anything called “a community.” Foster good and energetic conversation. Give it a place to happen. Let the network know about your network. Invite interesting and outspoken people. Let community happen if it’s meant to. If the juice is there, people will stick around and make it interesting.” This is part of a great note on Mitch Ratcliffe’s site.
Cliff was one of the key people in building The WELL, the “place” most people think of when they talk about online community, whether they know it or not. I was a lurker on The WELL in the early 90’s and most of what I learned about the Internet and online community came from the conversations and meta-conversations that took place there.
Community is still happening all over the Net, often in unexpected places. To my knowledge community has never been a commercial success, despite all the lip service paid to it during the Bubble.
I’ve learned a lot more about my physical community from a local mailing list than I have from the local newspaper, and the people I met there inspired me to get involved in a (local) political campaign for the first time in my life.
I don’t think anyone could have guessed that community could evolve among thousands of individual web sites, each of them a virtual monologue, but web logs indeed coalesce into communities. Dave Winer deserves a lot of credit for creating and empowering that community, and for creating by example the nature of the conversation that happens there.
Surprisingly, there are still a lot of communities on Usenet. It wasn’t that long ago that when reporters referred “the Internet”, as in “What does the Internet think of Jerry Garcia’s death?” they meant Usenet. Google deserves our gratitude for rescuing Usenet’s archives from the ashes of Deja News and for creating a usable Web-based interface for new postings.
I used to call “community” the Big Lie of the Internet, mainly because of the way that people who didn’t understand what it meant intended to harness it for commercial purposes.
Creating a community is still the hardest thing to do on the Web, or anywhere else.

The Poynter Institute (“a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalism”), which hosts a lot of important content about media, just redesigned its web site. It looks nice.
I wish they hadn’t dumped clear and obvious URL’s (http://www.poynter.org/medianews) for obscure URL’s that were clearly designed by a programmer (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45).
But I cannot believe they broke all their links in the process. Any links to eMedia Tidbits on this site are now worthless. Any items that contain those links are a lot less useful than they were yesterday. Big chunks are missing from our conversation.
You would think that after screams of pain about the way that Knight-Ridder’s redesign damaged the Web by destroying historical links that Poynter would have known better.
Making something irretrievable is another way of destroying it.

What if your local telephone company charged you differently for different kinds of calls? Suppose they charged a percentage of orders you place with your broker or Land’s End or QVC? Or maybe charged you more if you use a modem? How would that make you feel?
If that sounds invasive, why do we put up with it from our wireless carriers?
While they seem to have given up (for the time being) their dream charging vigorish on Web transactions conducted over cell phones, they’re still desperate to discriminate between voice and data and charge differently for them.
This doesn’t make sense. On digital systems, voice and data are both transmitted as bits. And it’s not obvious, once you think about it for even a moment, that data uses any more bandwidth than voice. Digitized full-duplex voice takes a lot of bandwidth for the entire conversation. The typical online connection (email and web browsing) contains a lot of idle time and the high-bandwidth bursts are probably a lot shorter.
The most likely bandwidth-hogging applications are file downloads and streaming media. These are easily dealt with by charging by the minute, just as you would for long, intensive voice conversations.
There is no excuse for metering wireless digital connections by the byte.
But there is a reason: the wireless carriers spent too much money for spectrum and G3 hardware in anticipation of gouging us. It’s time to allow them to fail.

Jeremy Zawodny agrees that URL’s matter. He says they should be short and guessable. URL’s that aren’t are usually the result of developer laziness.
He then goes on to tell the story of a long thrash at Yahoo about how a certain URL should be formed. I’ve been in similar discussions and they rapidly get tiresome. But I’m glad someone’s taking the time to do it.
We have standards for Internet ad formats, why can’t we have them for URL’s?