David Card faults Google for providing a search engine without a lot of help for users. I didn’t have any trouble creating a custom search engine for a site where I’m a domain expert and integrating the results within my site’s templates, but David has touched on a general problem with Google’s efforts.
Documentation is spotty at best and the tools are designed for hard-core techies. I’ve been using Google Analytics for about a year, and I’m still learning interesting and useful things that I can do with it. I’m also discovering that many of the statistics don’t mean what I thought they did. I would love to make more use of Google Maps in some personal projects, but Google’s tools are too programmer-oriented and I haven’t had the time to seek out more polished third-party tools for map integration. Google Base feels like something you could do lots of fun stuff with, but I’m going to need more than an API to get me started.
In our most recent survey of online consumers, we found that about a quarter of the US online population is now creating its own content and the percentage of bloggers has more than doubled. When anybody can be a Web producer, it’s critical to provide tools that are both powerful and simple. Your core customers are now talented and curious amateurs and no longer programmers looking for an API. And perhaps you shouldn’t be depending on the kindness of strangers to serve your best customers.
Widgetbox gets this right with good-looking, well-presented tools that can be implemented without a lot of head-scratching. A big part of their strategy is to provide distribution to large sites looking to tap into the market of amateur Web producers who just want to solve a problem or have some fun. I wish Google made it this easy to get started with their tools.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Wal-Mart's Blog Wart
The recent exposure of the Wal-Mart blogging hoax perpetrated by Edelman Public Relations has been a public humiliation for the agency, the client, and the phony bloggers. In his blog, Richard Edelman says, “This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s.” He continues:
Let me reiterate our support for the WOMMA guidelines on transparency, which we helped to write. Our commitment is to openness and engagement because trust is not negotiable and we are working to be sure that commitment is delivered in all our programs.
This incident brings to mind a similar incident in my community. Representatives of a developer’s PR firm were caught “astroturfing” a local mailing list. In that case the president of the PR firm took a different position, claiming, “I don’t know what the ethical standards of a chat room are.” A good rule of thumb is that the ethical standards of a “chat room” are the same as in your living room.
I’m have a report coming out on consumers’ trust in various online media. Right now, consumers’ feelings about consumer-created content are ambivalent. Blogs and public forums are not as trusted as branded media — even company sites. That’s a pretty clear signal that the potential damage to your client’s reputation by this kind of behavior is much greater than any possible gain.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Dismantling the newspaper from the outside in and the bottom up
Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review says that, rather than paying a billion dollars for the troubled Los Angeles Times, that the local zillionaires who want to buy it should start their own news-gathering organization instead. “Why offer a million dollars per reporter for the Times?”, he asks.
He’s on to something. There has never been a better time to start a news organization. Why, at a time when the entire concept of the newspaper is in flux, would anyone want to invest in such an enterprise, when they can have more influence over the agenda with a startup? Especially if you have a billion to spend. That’s what Phil Anschultz is doing with the Examiner, creating a national chain of free newspapers. That’s what Ted Turner did with CNN.
Everybody seems to be after a piece of this market, and I’m sure that everyone would have a different opinion about how to go about it. There’s more than one correct answer. My take: Los Angeles is a city of neighborhoods that are themselves entire cities. Each “neighborhood” is only marginally served by the LA Times product. If you focus on the low-hanging fruit, you could come up with a dozen or more communities that need and can support a real paper that focuses first on community news, and secondarily on the common coverage that unites Los Angeles.
And since you’re designing it from the bottom up, you should design it with the Web as your primary news platform and a print edition as your marketing and advertising vehicle. This is a strategy that has real economies of scale on the business side (production, ad sales, circulation). The only editorial economies would be on the share city and county coverage. This is a model that could also rock the Orange County Register in its home market, which is just as diverse as Los Angeles.
Just to be clear: This is nothing like the current wave of free tabloids, which seem to view the Web as unnecessary competition to their core business. And these online sites would be produced by professional journalists, not by amateurs or consumers. Although they would be invited to contribute. This is a model that is working in some communities today, but I don’t believe has been done in a major metro market.
The kind of bottom-up network is described probably doesn’t appeal to the heavyweights who want to own a prestige title like the Los Angeles Times. It’s probably going to take a scrappier millionaire to make it happen. Someone who likes the idea doing journalism more than the idea of owning a newspaper. Someone more like Charles Foster Kane, only less fictional.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Are you ready to be aggregated?
One of the most important things Web publishers can do to prepare for the future is to disaggregate their sites. It’s time to think of each story — and not your website — as your main product. This is the best way to reap the benefits of links from bloggers and aggregators.
It’s clear that not everyone has gotten the message. Last week, I was featured on the local TV news. I ran a story about the segment on a local news site that I maintain, so my readers could check it out. All I needed to do was to link to the story on the station’s website. That turned out not to be so simple.
The station uses a content management system provided by a supplier to TV stations. Their site had no links to individual segments or landing pages for the segments, because each clip was launched in Windows Media Player by a Javascript. I wasted about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to link to the story before I gave up.
I thought I had solved the problem by calling the reporter, who gave me the webmaster’s name (he had no contact info the website), and calling the (hard to find) main switchboard at the station and asking for the webmaster. He told me how to structure the link.
Even is if the link worked — and it turned out to be a bum link — this is one news organization that is not ready to be aggregated.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Online tail wags print dog
The Guardian is launching a print edition that is a product of their website, rather than the other way around. G24 is a 12-page A4 pdf that can be downloaded and printed by the reader. It is updated every fifteen minutes with information from the Guardian’s site. The Guardian’s goal is to reach the lunchtime and commuter audiences. It can’t hurt that readers use their own paper (or their employers’) to print the thing.
The idea of a automatically-updated pdf edition is pretty cool. The Guardian has already announced tha they are no longer holding stories for their regular print edition.
There’s a lot to like about this model, and G24 has some interesting potential as an advertising vehicle. At the Media Giraffe conference last week, I’ve begun hearing online publishers say, “Our online edition is for our readers, but we do a print edition for our advertisers”. The physicality G24 should come as a comfort to many of them.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Netscape's big news
It’s exciting to see a social news aggregator from a major media company, and the new Netscape beta is a bold step in that direction.
I agree with David Card that it’s an aggressive implementation of current thinking in social news coupled with some new ideas — notably the use of editors. I also agree with him that the current implementation is something of a mess visually. It manages to be cluttered even though its information density is really low. Simplicity is more than a design cue of Web 2.0. It’s a hallmark of the new Web culture and a major visual trend in its own right.
The success of the project hinges on whether social news works for vague demographic groups. Digg.com’s take on daily news would serve an unmet need in the news marketplace, if they can keep a coherent audience identity as they grow. But the typical Netscape.com homepage user is (a) average and (b) passive. Can Netscape harness the interests of average, passive folks to produce a front page that is more compelling to other average folks than the ones produced by the editors at CNN, USAToday, and Yahoo?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Enjoying synchronicity
I’ve been using a couple of applications to synchronize my use of the web lately and I’m really enjoying it. As someone who uses Windows for work and a Mac for everything else, this is a particularly challenging problem.
Google Browser Sync synchronizes multiple copies of Firefox across computers. It keeps track of cookies, passwords, bookmarks, history, and window status from one session to the next, and makes it a lot easier for me to keep track of what I’m doing on the Web. It has the incidental advantage of remembering the state of the browser the last time I had it open on the same computer. I know there were some other efforts to do this, but Google put it on a lot of people’s radar and is the reason I tried it. Personally, I find this to be the single greatest improvement in the browsing experience since the invention of tabs.
To manage my RSS reading across systems, I’ve been using Bloglines. It works really well, but it is kind of homely and I really missed using Net Newswire on the Mac. I finally decided to try using Net Newswire in concern with News Gator online, which allowed me to sync my subscriptions between the application on the Mac and the website on the PC. I’ve been very happy with this solution as well.
What’s interesting is that, of course, the idea and reality of sychronization have been around for years. Yahoo does a pretty good job of syncing with Outlook, for example. But both of these implementations are notable for their simplicity and utility, and the fact that they unify the experience on my Mac and my PC. And I want more just like them.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Are you having fun yet?
On Monday, I participated in a panel discussion that perhaps the most fun I’ve ever had in front of an audience. With several people who had run online news operations at one time or another — Bob Cauthorn (SFgate.com), Merrill Brown (MSNBC.com), and Lisa Stone (BlogHer) — we discussed what we’d do if we were the publisher of a medium-sized newspaper. One of the groundrules was not to criticize the industry, but to offer useful suggestions.
I’m not sure I heard anything radically new, but what I did hear was an emerging consensus on what news operations should do next: rededicate ourselves to local news, change the newsroom culture, get replace editors who can’t change, seek honest paid circulation, provide competitive customer service to advertisers, keep startups at arm’s length from the core property, and more.
What I began to understand is that while the coming decade is going to be filled with pain for news organizations who can’t change, it’s also going to be a lot of fun for those who are forcing change on the industry.
I’m beginning to wonder if one test of the validity of a strategy (necessary but not sufficient) is whether you’re excited to come to work in the morning while you’re implementing it.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Is synergy strangling Sony?
I’m reading the New Yorker article on Howard Stringer’s struggles with Sony that David Card and Michael Gartenberg have already recommended.
The author seems to bought the proposition that poor communication between the silos is what is strangling Sony. I’m wondering if the opposite is true. It looks to me like the pursuit of false synergies may be at least as big a problem.
Did Sony’s ability to put its film assets behind Blu-ray encourage them to get into a format war they’re likely to lose? Did Sony’s ownership of vast reservoirs of music encourage them to launch their less-than-successful SACD high-definition audio disc? Did it commit them to a DRM strategy that not only knocked them out of the portable music player market, but convinced them to pursue a their disastrous rootkit project? Has Sony’s commitment to its proprietary Memory Stick format made its cameras, computers and MP3 players a little bit less attractive? Will Sony’s strategy of developing its own super-microprocessor for Playstation lock it into a unwinnable long-term competition with Intel, compel it to put its own expensive chips into commodity products where they don’t belong, and turn it into the Silicon Graphics of consumer electronics?
If Sony had not been able to marshall these corporate resources to support doomed platforms, would they have been forced to engage the kind of give-and-take with their customers and suppliers that makes free markets work?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Why I'm holding out for an Apple mobile phone
My Sony Ericsson T616 is competent and usable, but it’s starting to fall apart after a couple of years of hard use. I’m not terribly excited by my options. The only thing that keeps me from just going ahead and getting (a not terribly exciting) RAZR is that I’m holding out for Apple to release a phone.
Long rumored, never confirmed, the possibly apocryphal Apple mobile phone seems like a certainty to me. I don’t cover mobile phones for Jupiter, so I’ve got no inside information. But how could they not do it?
- Mobile phones are encroaching on iPod. The technology to make a mobile phone a music player for undemanding consumers is getting small enough and good enough that iPod’s advantages over music phones are narrowing quickly. Apple’s rapid product life cycle shows they understand the nature of this threat. iPods are getting so small that the only way to make them usable is to incorporate them into some other device.
- Apple needs a network for iPod. Even if mobile phones weren’t evolving into a threat, there’s money to be made by allowing users to connect to the iTunes store whenever they’re bored. There’s also money to be made from iPod users who don’t have easy or regular access to a computer.
- Apple can cut a good deal on a network. Apple can get a good deal on network access, and can achieve critical mass in a reasonable period of time. Don’t think we won’t dump our current cell carriers overnight to use an Apple phone.
- Apple can create the phone we all want. This is the company that re-invented the MP3 player, after all. Even with a few years to study what they did, the industry is still scratching their heads and asking, “How’d they do that?”
- Apple can add real value to a network. The only thing that consumers hate more than their cheap, trashy, hard-to-use mobile phones is the company that provides the service. Don’t we all crave the simplicity of iTunes’s pricing structure from our mobile carrier?
- Apple owns its distribution network. The mobile phone industry may be the only business with lousier distribution network than Detroit. Apple has the end-to-end control necessary to break through the noise and clutter of fake promotions, dishonest bundling, and cheesy retail that characterize the mobile phone market.
- Apple needs another hit. In iPod, they built a new company that is now bigger than their computer company in a few short years. How much longer can they sustain their growth rates with their existing product lines?
Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.