David Card asks if tagging is “the new, new thing or meme that runs out of steam in 6 months?“. I agree that tagging is moving against the tide of the net. The informal creation of metadata through linking is one of the great unsung assets of the Web, at least among its primary beneficiaries in the publishing business. But it works because it’s in the linker’s self-interest to create meaningful links.
In a game of tag, no one wants to be the one doing the tagging. Tagging requires a little extra unnecessary effort that most folks are not only unwilling to make, but aren’t prepared to learn. The net depends on the altruism of the few and the indifference of the many.
But I’m really going to miss those cool-looking, pointless, tag clouds.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Another metaphor bites the dust
After two years of experimentation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is no longer changing the layout of its pages depending on the day. They called it “dayparting”, borrowing a term from TV advertising. This was perhaps not the best pool in which to fish for metaphors.
Good theory, and we saw some gains in traffic early on. But, two years of hard-won experience made it clear that we can’t be all things to all people all the time. People might want to play games or shop or read celebrity gossip, but they weren’t coming to our site for that (well, maybe for the gossip).
SeattlePI.com is, first and foremost, a news site.
Terry Heaton has a good analysis why this doesn’t work, focusing on the fact that readers don’t come in via the home page any more, an idea I explored in our Future of News report.
The big aha! in the story is their realization that they’re a news site. But they’ve only implicitly acknowledged the real lesson in their conclusion.
Meanwhile, we’ll stick with the news-oriented layout that we’ve been using between midnight and 1 p.m. on weekdays. We’ve redesigned it a bit for the Seattle Seahawks’ history-making playoff run (which, hopefully, will last beyond tomorrow). Interest in the team is at an all-time high — at least, among our users — and we wanted to make it easier for people to find all of our Seahawks content when they come to the site.
They are, first and foremost, a local news site.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Why Google's radio play is an improvement
I’ve been skeptically bored by Google’s dabbling in brokering print advertising. There are too many reasons why it seemed like a poor fit. The lead times on print are excruciatingly long by Twenty-first Century standards, publishers hate brokered advertising, publishers who don’t have enough ads can print a smaller product to maintain their ad/edit ratio, and most publishers don’t want advertisers to know what a small percentage of the rate card most of their competitors are paying. Ad rates could collapse like a house of cards if they were exposed the way that Google exposes its own rates.
Radio (and TV) advertising presents few of these problems. The biggest advantage to Google-style ad sales for broadcasters is that a minute of airtime that goes unmonetized will never be monetized. That’s why unsold airtime is already brokered. This will be a watershed year in local advertising for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and host of smaller players. Broadcasters are an important element in local advertising. And, while publishers are still handcrafting their products, broadcasting is an increasingly automated business.
There are a million ways in which Google could fail. But the upside, both in inherent potential and in the potential to outflank their competitors, is enormous. That’s reflected in the way the deal is structured, with a billion dollar payoff for dMarc if they pull it off.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
A little bit of Beijing right here at home
Microsoft is now censoring US-based blogs that might (OK, probably) offend the Chinese government.
MSN is censoring Michael Anti’s blog, which has been irritating Beijing for some time. Microsoft’s excuse–“Most countries have laws and practices that require companies to make the internet safe for local users”–doesn’t square with what they did. They are censoring Michael Anti not in China, not in packets bound for China, but in America for Americans.
The Internet has always lived under the shadow of corporate censorship. So far, it still possible to find spaces where we can be free. But the noose has also been tightening for some time. In this case, we have one of the largest corporations anticipating the needs of one of the world’s most repressive governments, and taking care of business before it’s even asked to do so.
The problem isn’t Microsoft, although they do seem to be pretty forward-thinking in this regard. The truth is that Google, despite its understandable desire not to be evil, will be confronted at some point in the not-too-distant future to perform an act of pure evil or its shareholders will find a management who will. You can take that to the bank. Literally.
Corporations are amoral. Corporations are made up of people, but they are not people. Their only imperative is to maximize shareholder value. That can be a pretty good system as long as you recognize its limitations and plan accordingly.
A media tragedy
Today’s West Virginia mine tragedy is also a media tragedy. And it is yet another illustration that newspapers are often out of date by the time they reach us. In this case, the mistake is well-known and was publicly corrected before most of us read it. But newspapers are full of stories that their readers can find in more current and often more complete versions online.
Jay Rosen uses this as an occasion to look at what newspaper should take responsiblity for. But it makes me wonder: what’s a newspaper for?
We’ve known for a while that newspapers are unsuited to covering breaking news. This is a mistake that editors and publishers are doomed to repeat until they rethink their role in the community.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Houston Chronicle drops registration
Hearst’s Houston Chronicle dropped mandatory registration Monday as part of a redesign of its site.
It will be interesting to see how dropping the registration requirement will affect the use of, and links to, its news stories by bloggers and others on the Web.
Registration data has to be a lot less useful in selling advertising than it was in the old days. Advances in behavioral targeting have made the kind of primitive demographics captured by registration to seem awfully primitive. Then, there’s the fact that Internet advertising has become a lot easier to sell in the last couple of years.
But, I’ve long considered the fact that only one industry (newspapers) requires registration to read its content to be prima facie evidence that registration is a bad idea.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
What's a newspaper company worth?
The general lack of enthusiasm for buying Knight-Ridder, either the whole company or the individual papers, is making me wonder whether the company’s stock is properly priced after all.
To justify the cost of buying the company for more its current price, you’d have to either cut costs or increase revenue. No big newspaper company is going to achieve any special cost-cutting advantages without dramatically changing their business model. For another media company (or any other company) to do this would be to incur huge risk of failure with little upside potential.
The market seems to be saying that newspaper companies are doing a pretty good job of managing the decline of their core products. Keeping these companies as pure plays may be the best way for us to manage our portfolios.
The big question remains. Can newspaper companies create the next-generation news services that the Internet audience demands, or will they remain cash cows for someone else’s big ideas?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
RSS isn't even an ante anymore
My reaction to Microsoft’s Live.com site was similar to my reaction to Google’s new toolbar. The ability to display RSS feeds on a page or a widget isn’t enough to get you into the game anymore. I’m about as excited by that as I am about the ability to add a clock or the weather to something.
One thing is clear from live.com: the Spartan look of Google will soon become as ubiquitous as the information-intense look of Yahoo was in the late nineties.
The big news is that RSS is going to be everywhere and it’s going to continue to get easier for ordinary users to display headlines wherever the like without knowing how they’re doing it. We’re all going to have to become aggregators. And we’re all going to have to get better at writing headlines.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Apple's new iPod is not about video
Apple’s new iPod is not so much a video iPod, as it is an iPod that happens to play video. They’ve added a bigger screen and 50% more storage, and taken away a third of the size from their base iPod, making it an extremely attractive upgrade to a well-loved product.
Not many people are going to buy one of these to play videos, but plenty of people will buy them. In other words, video adds no value to the new iPod.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Who owns your online identity?
These days, your name’s top Google results are an important part of your identity. I just discovered that stories from a community news site that I operate are the number one or two result when you Google nearly every elected official in the community, as well as the editor and publisher of the local newspaper.
How did I beat out the local paper of record? I focused on making my site friendly to search engines. The local paper, by comparison, has stuck its archives in a database that is apparently impenetrable to spiders.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.