Category: Analysis

I’ve been thinking about my ideal mobile setup. Here’s what I want: T-Mobile’s Handspring PDA/Phone, AT&T Wireless T68i phone, and SprintPCS Vision’s $10/month unlimited wireless access for my TiBook.
See the problem? It’s bundling. Because you have to buy handsets from the carriers, it’s impossible to get what you want. Until they stop trying to “add value” to their networks by controlling how you access them, the wireless carriers will continue to be distracted from their core business and serve their best customers poorly.
I think I’m going to keep my Sprint account and add the $10 data service for my laptop and forego the PDA for the time being.

Roger Fidler was legendary when I worked at Knight-Ridder in the mid-90s. He had already been saying for a decade that tablet PC’s were coming and newspapers had better get ready.
Well, the newspaper industry got distracted by a fad called the Web and lost track of its dream of a $2,000, 3 pound, single-user newspaper-reading device. Now that Microsoft is about to bring that dream a little bit closer, Roger is ready. He is working on a specification for PDF documents that are optimized for a 10.4 inch screen.

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?

Online employment sites are a disgrace. I know a little about this business, because I built one of the earliest sites: Mercury Center’s Talent Scout.
This is the area of the greatest threat (and opportunity) for newspapers.
This is a market in flux, and cursory review of the any of the biggest job sites reveals they have not changed significantly since 1996. These sites are still far too hard to use and to customize, the job application process is flawed and there is little feeback, their databases are dirty and there is no connection to employers’ own internal or external databases, it’s too hard to get properly-formatted resumes to employers, the sites don’t learn from users’ searches and return too many irrelevant results, no one is using XML and RSS syndication to move information between job seekers and employers — and that’s just off the top of my head.
It’s hard to believe this is the biggest-money segment of online advertising.
Monster and Yahoo’s HotJobs are extemely vulnerable to new competition. But the newspapers’ own blessed partner — Careerbuilder — is out of the race, with half the market share of the number two Hot Jobs

I think I was too hard on the new report by Borrell & Associates, based on initial coverage in Editor & Publisher. I should have known better.
Steve Outing does a great job of laying out the recommended strategy in a much longer piece in E&P. It really makes a lot of sense. Highlights of Steve’s piece:

• Serve the needs of new advertisers who don’t advertise in the paper today because it doesn’t meet their needs or they can’t afford it.Three quarters of local companies don’t advertise with the local daily. Take advantage of the younger demographics of your online site to serve new advertisers.
• Change the way you match ads to readers. Gather enough information about each reader to deliver the right ads. Don’t depend simply on where the ad appears — know who is looking at the page. Delivering the right ad to the right reader requires database and analysis skills.
• Don’t simply move high-margin print classifieds to lower-margin online classifieds. Offer your advertisers new services. Invent new products to serve the needs of HR managers and real estate agents.
• Focus more on making online a success and less on preserving print. Move responsibility for online from the local publisher to the corporate president. Over time, online is going to erode the print business. But the publisher will resist this low-margin trend as long as humanly possible, starving the online operation for resources and leaving the market open to new entrants. This is the the classic Innovator’s Dilemma scenario.

I strongly recommend reading Steve’s complete article.