Category: Analysis

Newspapers are giving away half their archive revenue to database vendors, according to Peter Krasilovsky at Borrell Associates.

I can see why this serves the need of the vendors, but I don’t see how this serves either the reader or the publisher.

The disservice to the reader is obvious. It means that they can’t count on your content being available to them over the long run. It also means that they can’t count on links to your site from blogs and other sites to remain active.

The disservice to the publisher is less obvious, since they are getting what looks like free money. What are the costs and what do they lose?

• It’s generally not free to get the information into these databases, nor to keep it there. How much overhead (both hard and soft) is associated with this activity?
• Stories in archives are not indexed by Google. No one can find them unless they come to your site to do it. Are you sure they’ll be able to find you?
• As blogs and other personal recommendations become more important, you’re losing all the traffic they represent.
• You also lose something less intangible–the credibility (expressed in terms of Google PageRank) that comes from lots of links.
• You’re losing potential advertising revenue. Even if you’re not selling out your ad space yet, this will be an issue in the near future.

Google is a better way to search your site than your proprietary search engine (which are designed for fielded data and searches by professional librarians). Over time, blogs and other web sites will build up an infrastructure of links, references, and context that will improve the quality and access to information on your site. Links and the context that surrounds them are superior to any metadata that you or your database vendor can add to your information.

Google is able to search a billion pages in virtually no time at all. How fast is your database, and does it really do a better job of delivering relevant stories?

Print publishers should consider that online-only publishers have not succumbed to the temptation of paid archives. What do they know about online archives that you don’t?

Lockergnome has a great article on why RSS is a superior to email publishing. [Thanks, PaidContent.org!] What’s great (and unusual) about the article is that it is written from the perspective of the user: here are ten reasons why your readers will demand that you make your newsletter available via RSS.

These advantages are indisputable. But RSS is not the best medium for communicating all messages. It’s great for headlines, but not for essays.

I don’t think this essay addresses the forces (e.g. inertia, the mental overhead of new software platforms, single interface for all communications) that will keep email vital for years to come.

The preferred strategy should be to give your customers a choice.

It’s apparently time for everyone to think about wikis.

I was inspired by Matt Haughey’s “CSS wiki zen garden” to try setting up a wiki for one of my sites. I had no idea how difficult and confusing this would be.

I entered this mission with clearly-defined goals:

• I wanted a site where my readers could easily create and update pages. Sounds like a wiki!
• The software needed to be (really) easy for a Unix doofus like me to install. UseModWiki took me about 15 minutes to install and configure, but it was downhill from there.
• The site’s design needed to be consistent with the rest of my site. that means I need to use CSS and to include a navigation bar. Navigation turns out to be a special challenge.
• I didn’t care whether the software was based on Perl, PHP, or Python, since I don’t understand any of those languages well enough to modify the software. But that also means the package can’t require me to modify its code to get something done.
• The pages need to based on templates that can be modified by someone who knows HTML and CSS.
• It would be cool if the software supported search, an index page, and RSS.
• I’m not sure if I should care whether the software stores pages in MySQL, a built-in database, or a big pile of text files in a directory. But, as far as I can tell, there is no way to move pages from one wiki package to another. I suppose the markup is so simple that one can manually move wikis with even hundreds of pages.

Like most simple plans, mine ran into some harsh reality.

I’m not sure anyone knows how many wiki programs there are and I haven’t been able to find a comprehensive list. Wikis manifest some of the worst aspects of open source software. Everyone has their own package because everyone thinks they can do it better, their preferred language is superior, or that they should be in charge. And because wikis are so simple, it appears that anybody can write a wiki package.

Wiki authors should talk to Ben and Mena Trott about how to create templates. The wiki templates I have seen are programs that contain HTML markup, and not HTML pages that call program macros.

Because wikis date back to the earliest days of the Web and because they are based on a doctrine of extreme simplicity, and probably because there are so damn many of them, they have largely ignored everything we’ve learned about building Web sites in the last near-decade. Their accomodation of CSS is weak. They typically don’t support tables, even for tabular data. Their notion of content management is all over the map. And they don’t support any navigation other than inline or generic navigation links [Home, Edit, Recent Changes].

Try finding information about wikis using Google. One problem is that, unlike weblogs or web sites, most wikis have the word “wiki” in their name, so it’s difficult to separe pages about wikis from the wikis themselves. It’s like searching Google for “home page”.

Navigation is at the heart of my problem . Unfortunately, most information about wikis is stored on wikis, and most of it consists of links to the same pages, most of which are waiting for wiki users to update them with useful information in lieu of placeholders. Even when I can find a site with useful information, like Choosing A Wiki, once I begin following links, I soon become lost in a way that I don’t on most modern Web sites. . Even the vaunted Wikipedia is a hopeless maze of twisty passages.

Can anybody point me to enough information to find a wiki package that meets my modest criteria?

Online publishers are wondering whether RSS is going to replace email as a means of distributing headlines.

This is understandable, as email newsletters are increasingly being thrown out with the spammy bathwater and publishers are casting about for a way to replace the audience they’re losing.

I don’t understand why anyone is talking about RSS as a replacement for newsletters, instead of as a supplement. Granted, everyone makes the obligatory note that email isn’t going away any time soon and that RSS is still in its infancy. But the normally reliable Dan Gillmor and Steve Outing both jump to the conclusion that this is a solution to the email problem, instead of an opportunity in itself.

We’re still confusing the Web with the Internet.

Until we understand that the Internet can and should support multiple file formats and protocols, we’re going to continue to think that Javascript menus and Flash belong on Web pages, that Web pages belong in mailboxes, and that RSS is going to “replace” email as a publishing medium.

RSS should replace email as a way to deliver headlines and links, with no real useful content, to your readers. RSS makes it possible for smart, busy people to browse dozens of news sites in the time it would have taken them to review a couple.

Newsletters should be readable and useful in themselves. If they aren’t, you’re not using them effectively. And, if your web site is nothing more than a newsletter, why not send the whole thing to the reader, instead of making them come to you?

It’s easy to forget that less than five percent of Internet users are reading blogs and those are the current RSS audience. The good news is that there is indeed a network effect driving the adoption of RSS by publisher and readers. Within a couple of years, most serious online news readers will be using RSS.

Thinking about RSS as a replacement for email newsletters doesn’t begin to address its potential. It’s what “push” could have been, without the overhead of Internet bubble business models and publishers’ attempts to control what their readers saw.

I challenge online publishers to come up with more innovative and useful applications of RSS than delivering headlines or replacing existing newsletters.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of deregulating industries is the promotion of innovation. Industries that are gearing their strategies to the regulatory and antitrust environment, the argument goes, are unable to focus on serving their customers.

However, too-powerful corporations can stifle innovation in plenty of ways. The motion picture trust tried to keep independents from producing unauthorized movies. The independents moved to Los Angeles and became the establishment. If AT&T hadn’t been broken up, it’s unlikely that we would have the consumer Internet as we know it today. Currently, the access monopolies are trying to keep us from accessing standard network protocols (SMTP, FTP, etc.) in order to keep consumers in a walled garden.

Freedom to innovate is a constant theme of Microsoft’s lobbying against antitrust enforcement. Freedom for whom? Freedom for Microsoft, surely. But what about the millions of consumers and independent developers who want to modify their computers in ways that contradict Microsoft’s strategy? Who’s fighting for their freedom to innovate? Microsoft isn’t.

Intellectual property law is becoming a threat, rather than a spur, to innovation. SCO’s lawsuits agains the Linux community doesn’t promote innovation, nor does the RIAA’s desperate rear-guard action against file-sharing, or the proliferation of software patents, or the DMCA’s regulations agains reverse-engineering and information sharing. What’s ironic is that IP is government-created fiction that has nothing to do with liberty. It makes private property of ideas and enforces its rights with government force.

I don’t oppose the idea of intellectual property, but I do oppose the hypocrisy of demanding “freedom to innovate” while using government guns to limit your competitors’ freedom to innnovate.

I’m convinced that reading Ayn Rand at too young an age causes brain damage. For a large part of my life I believed I could have been a libertarian, but my love of liberty made it impossible.

I don’t understand how you can simultaneously believe that the coercive power of democratic government is a potential force for evil that must be reigned in (which I do) and believe that the coercive power of big corporations is a force for good that must be unleashed.

I don’t understand how you simultaneously believe in that the chaos of the Internet is what makes it great (which I do) and believe that deregulating the access monopolies will improve the Internet.

I don’t understand how you can believe the Bill of Rights is the most important part of the Constitution (which I do) and turn our communications, personal information, schools, privacy, and bodies over to entities that are not bound by the first, fourth, or fifth amendments.

I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t believe that an essential function of government is to protect the weak from the strong.

After a week of listening to the NPR/Slate co-production “Day to Day“, I have to say that I don’t get it.

When I first heard the show, I thought, “What is this and why are they doing it?” When I heard the multiple credits to Slate salted throughout the show, things became more clear. NPR already does two or three hours of this kind of stuff, and “Day to Day” just seems forced.

When compared to the freshness of “This American Life”, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, or even “Talk of the Nation”, “Day to Day” reminds me of those clip shows the network magazines make for the airlines.

I suppose it’s a milestone of sorts, as the first online publication repurposed for radio. But if you believe you were put on this earth for a purpose, it’s probably wasn’t for repurposing.

It also makes me realize how far online publishing has to go. It’s still mostly repurposed print material. Individuals are already producing sites that are as exciting as “This American Life”, but with the possible exception of Salon, no one’s doing it on large scale.

Maybe it’s simply beyond the abilities of corporate media to produce anything that lively, intelligent or engaging. But I’d certainly like to see to big media companies use a little more imagination in their online products.

Date.com used to rely on direct email marketing for the bulk of their new users.

Now, it turns out that spam filters are wrecking their marketing efforts:

“A year ago, I would have said e-mail was critical to our business,” said Brad Shapiro, vice president of sales and marketing at the Toronto-based company. “We were sending over 100 million prospecting e-mails a week. But a lot of those e-mails weren’t getting through or the response rates were too low. Now we’re sending out 60% less.”

Let’s face it, nobody is sending out 100,000,000 legitimately-sourced emails a week. These guys are stinking up the Net with spam.

When will the direct marketing industry finally get the message that defending spammers is not in their best interest, and cut sleazeballs like Date.com loose? Using Congress to put the entire nation on opt-out status with every company in the world isn’t going to do them any good if their messages can’t make it through the filters.

It’s hard to believe the following isn’t parody.

The Scion story is interesting. Toyota’s customer base is aging rapidly and their cars don’t appeal to the twenty-somethings depicted in the VW and Mitsubishi ads.

Apparently, these new cars are inexpensive and designed to be cheaply customized. This is a great concept, but the way that they explain it on their site is remarkable for its obscurity.

The overall theme of the site is clumsy double-think: don’t confuse your identity with brands (“In this brand-heavy world…We want to be recognized as unique beings who revel in the freedom of expression. “) and instead express yourself by customizing your Scion ( “the re-appropriation of mass culture…the challenge and the successes of keeping it real”):

In this brand-heavy world,we are constantly inundated with messages about what to wear, where to go and how to be. However,we know that independent thought doesn’t come from picking and choosing an identity from a series of prefab selections. Although we may like some of the individual elements of what’s available, on the whole we would rather be able to mix and match, choose those pieces that support our distinct qualities as independent creatures. We want to be recognized as unique beings who revel in the freedom of expression. SCION (the car company and the magazine) recognizes the value of the individual and the remix, the re-appropriation of mass culture, and it will focus on the struggle, the challenge and the successes of keeping it real.

The idea of the remix has become more common and now can be applied to entire identities, from music to fashion, from technology to art. The lines have been blurred. The opportunity for independence is vital. We are now active participants in the process, tricking out the smallest details, tweaking the characteristics to fit our lifestyles. By changing color palettes, textures and soundscapes, we can be recognized by our peers for who and what we are.

The tragic truth is that modern popular culture is indeed about keeping it real by wearing, drinking and driving what the cool kids are wearing, drinking, and driving.