MediaSavvy

I was listening to a story about yet another stolen election in some faraway country on NPR and I wondered if political corruption in nominal democracies is having an effect on voting in the United States.
All markets are international. Including the market for voting equipment. If you were selling voting equipment to a typical third world government, would absolute security and reliable audit trails be considered a feature or a bug? Could you justify selling an unhackable version in your home market and a hackable version overseas? Would you want to maintain twice as many SKU’s, one set hackable and one not?
I’ve looked around a little bit and I can’t find any information on the size or potential size of the global market for voting equipment. But I’m beginning to wonder if the potential of selling voting equipment in undemocratic countries is affecting the quality of the equipment manufacturers are willing to sell us here.
I don’t know of anyone who has written about this. Perhaps someone should.

I love Yahoo. I think they’re good people and they have a terrific product that they’re making better every day. But Google is beating them at their own game.

Yahoo owns Overture, which arguably invented keyword advertising, the online ad segment with all the momentum right now. I am buying ads for a small regional site at five cents each on Google, with no monthly minimum. Yahoo will sell me those same keyword clicks for ten cents and a monthly minimum of $20.

Yahoo owns the number-two webmail service (after Microsoft’s Hotmail) and it’s very good. Until recently, Yahoo mail offered its users 2 megabytes of storage for free. Google announces (and still has in beta) a webmail service that offers 1,000 megabytes of storage for free. Yahoo responds by raising their limit to 100 megabytes, more than enough to keep their existing customers, but only 10% of what Google is offering.

Yahoo and Google are both great companies and I’m happy with my relationship with each of them.

But keeping your costs low is key to success on the Web, and I think Google has figured out something about keeping their costs low that even Yahoo (whom I’ve always thought of as cheapskates) can’t seem to approach.

Should we be worried about Yahoo?

When I built Coastsider, my goal was to make the design, and the underlying markup, as simple as possible. I wanted to do the layout with CSS only — no tables.

Tables brought back too many memories for me of the original News.com site, which was a twisted mass of nested tables designed to over-determine how the site looked on the reader’s computer.

Right before releasing Coastsider, I decided I was unable to assure the site would look right without a basic three-column table layout. I held my nose and added the table. But at least I wasn’t nesting my table.s

Today, I came across an intractable problem that forced me to nest a second table inside my layout. I’m sure the problem is that I don’t know CSS well enough to fix this without nested tables. But I’m out of ideas and out of time. Nested tables beat the alternative, which looks awful.

News sites have been wringing their hands about whether blogging is journalism and whether newspapers should let their reporters blog.
They’re missing the most important point about blogging. Suddenly, millions of their readers now have better-managed web sites that are better integrated with the Web than any online news Web site.
I’m not saying that the Tribune Company should rush out and buy WordPress for their newspapers. But the blogosphere has evolved into a sophisticated network that online publishers should emulate and build upon. I’ve been discussing the elements of this network in this series:

• RSS feeds put your headlines on readers’ desktops, especially the most influential 1% of Web users — the people who can drive traffic to your site. Don’t worry that you can’t control it or measure it. Trust people to find you.
• Comments let your reader participate directly in the reporting process, amplifying, correcting, and just blowing off steam. Letters to the editor and separate bulletin boards now seem absurd.
• Archives should no longer be in a separate database. Your Web site should be your archives, which should be free and open to anyone who wants to read or link to your news. Why shouldn’t readers be able to search your archives using Google? Think before you answer that question.
• Trackback points to people who point to you, creating context for every news story you publish, and giving back traffic to people who are pointing their readers to you.
• Your community should be the focus of your site. And you should be integrating your site with bloggers and other sites in your community.

Blogs have changed the way people use use the Web and the way they create Web sites. The online news industry has the most to learn and the most to gain from thinking like bloggers. Whether news sites blog, or whether they accept blogging as journalism is immaterial.

I’ve been pretty tough on newspapers’ Web sites for the last week or so. But newspapers actually do a pretty good job compared to the typical television broadcaster. A little later, I plan to write about why publishers are so much better equipped than broadcasters for the Web.
For now, let me say that Fox News just redesigned their site, and the result is godawful.
Supposedly, it’s designed to be “high bandwidth”, but all I know is that it performs like a pig on my DSL line. And by “pig,” I don’t mean Babe. I mean a big, fat sack of lard.
To be fair, Fox News Channel isn’t exactly the most elegant stop on the TV dial, either.
But…oh, the humanity!
With its pseudowindows swimming in a blue background; its pop-up menus that don’t work on a Mac; its jumble of news with ads with promos that make it impossible to tell who paid whom for what; the “Fox Connect” window where the ad cannot be separated from the content; its obviously ghost-written “blogs”; a creepy above-the-fold file photo illustration of the Supreme Court looming like an evil presence; its spammy text ads for viagra, diets, and offers to “crush old age”; and its bright-yellow bigger-than-Fox’s-logo terror Alert Status, the Fox News Web site looks like a porn site without the tits.

Every blog is part of multiple communities. MediaSavvy is part of the online publishing, news, telecom, and Web theory communities. You can tell by looking at the list of blogs (the blogroll) on my nav bar. I link to those guys and many of them link back to me.

Now, imagine a newspaper Web site with a blogroll. Jonathan Dube says newspapers should give community members blogs on their site, but he doesn’t say that newspapers should promote local weblogs that they don’t host.

The typical newspaper web site’s home page is a roach motel: readers can enter, but they can’t get out, unless they click on an ad. Some news stories may provide a few relevant links in a news story, but it feels like noblesse oblige.

I could make a compelling argument that newspaper publishers should support local bloggers for the karma alone, but why bother? I know most publishers are less interested in karma than in cash. And most publishers would make more money if they shared the wealth of their traffic with local bloggers.

On the Web, karma translates into reputation really quickly. And reputation is the old-fashioned word for the Holy Grail of nineties marketing — branding.

A newspaper may be a dominant media brand in its community, with boxes on every street corner and a wad of newsprint plunked on a third of the doorsteps every morning. But what is its share of its community’s Web diet? I don’t know what things are like in your home market, but here in the Bay Area, the big three newspaper publishers are competing with a host of free dailies the do a better job of covering individual communities than they do. By associating yourself with a constellation of neighborhood and community bloggers, most online newspapers could serve their community better.

And why on Earth would any publisher want to host blogs? Why put up with the liability, support headaches, creeping editorial responsibility, and general managerial overhead? That’s so ten years ago! That’s why God gave us Tim Berners-Lee. Anybody can create a Web site. And the (minimal) hassle of setting up a blog filters out the folks who’d never maintain a site in the first place.

If newspapers are going to survive, they’re going to have to get local in a hurry. Why is the A section of most newspapers national and international news and the B section local news? That’s backwards. And local news is even more important on the Web. People are going to the local daily for local news. And they should be going there for other links to the community.

On the Web, focus matters. And newspapers should be focusing their site on local news. When I built Coastsider, I worked hard to link to lots of local sites. This was as much about necessity as strategic vision. But I also know that this is going to come back to me in reputation, audience, and revenue. Every newspaper in the US should be aware that this kind of online community building is already taking place in their home markets. They either can surf this wave or be swamped by it. There is no other option.

On the Web, more even than real life, your reputation is your fortune. It’s the source of your network and the your network is the source of your customer base. Branding on the Web isn’t about advertising. It’s about reputation. It is your karma. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon have translated good karma into big money and there’s no reason why newspapers can’t do the same.

Be a good neighbor: Think locally. Act locally.

Until newspapers embrace trackback, they’re not really part of the Web.
Weblogs aren’t powerful because a handful of A-list bloggers are influencing their loyal dittoheads. Weblogs are powerful because they’re part of a web of their own where millions of individual bloggers are pointing to stories — amplifying, clarifying, or debunking them. The size and complexity of this web-within-the-Web is staggering.
The power of all these links is multiplied by the power of trackback, which links a story back to any story that links to it, as long as both stories are on sites that support the trackback protocol. Trackback is the most original and important innovation that blogs brought to the Web, and is the last one that newspapers are likely to adopt. When you read a story, you know who’s pointing to it and what they’re saying about it. Trackback creates the kind of context and metadata for each story that you can’t buy at any price.
Trackback also provides accountability that comments cannot. You can’t get a trackback link unless you have a site that supports trackback and you’re willing to disclose your identity (or at least one of them).
Trackback is so good and so well accepted that it’s a requirement for weblog software. It should be a required feature for content management in general. Trackback solves the problems of the one-way nature of Web links and is especially useful for news stories.
Trackback is powerful, and it can be merciless. When SixApart announced its licensing terms for Movable Type 3.0, its users condemned the license on their sites, and linked to the announcement. Hundreds of trackback links to these negative stories festooned the announcement and created a network of dialog and feedback. SixApart had the nerve (or the good sense) not to interfere with the process, and eventually things calmed down a little. They banked some karma by leaving those trackbacks in place — karma that will stand them in good stead as they turn Movable Type into a for-pay product.
If they’re going to succeed on the Web, Online newspaper publishers are going to have to let go of the paralyzing fear that somebody, somewhere is going to make a little money from pointing people to their content.

Weblogs have revolutionized web publishing. The act of blogging itself isn’t all that revolutionary. But blog software developers have put powerful weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens. The Pentagon calls this asymmetrical warfare.
One unnoticed aspect of the revolution is that anybody can have searchable archives on their site. As soon as a story is published, it has a permanent URL and it keeps that URL even after it is moved off the home page. Users can follow offsite links to the story, or search the archives to find it on the site. In other words, the site is the archive.
Newspapers make a false distinction between their site and their archive. After a couple of weeks, they remove stories not only from their home page, but from their Web site. The original URL is broken, and readers who followed a link to the story are invited to search the paper’s archives for it and pay money to get a look at it.
Newspapers don’t even understand what URL’s are for. Many of them actively oppose “deep linking” to stories, or tacitly support the link-to-my-homepage-or-don’t-link-to-my-site element by their silence. After all, who even thought we needed a term for “deep linking”? It should be called linking.
They don’t understand that links from interested outsiders add even more value to their news by creating dense and useful meta-information that they couldn’t buy even if they wanted to.
Bloggers add value to old news with commentary, context, community, links, inbound traffic, and Google cred. With online advertising (especially search-related advertising) growing explosively, the value of having stories permanently accessible on your site far outweighs the trivial incremental revenue that comes from selling your archives.

Every year, newspapers hold conferences about online news and they invite the people who run Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and other geeky community sites to speak to them. They listen raptly to tales of how to build community online. And then they go back to their home markets and continue to dump their news on the Web.

I know of no US newspaper that lets its users attach comments to news stories — something nearly every does. If you want to comment on a news story, you’re going to have to put a pointer to it somewhere (on your blog, on a community site, on a static page) and put your comments somewhere else. No one can reply. No one can provide their opinion. No one can provide their insight from direct experience of the story.

Nobody who reads the story on the original site will be able to find your comment, because newspapers don’t support trackback (more on that later). And people who read your comments won’t be able to read the original story after it is moved to archives, usually about two weeks.

Free content management software is so competitive that it’s hard to find a package that doesn’t offer a pretty good facility for adding comments to individual posts, and most are moving in the direction of (optional) user registration. What that means is that there are literally millions of web sites run by regular human beings that welcome comments from readers.

Newspapers demand registration and acceptance of advertising email as a condition for reading their news, but none use those registrations to create a community.

It’s hard to find a better example of how newspapers still treat the Web like a broadsheet.

Note: Jonathan Dube’s piece “101 ways to improve your news site” addresses some of the issues that I’ve raised in this series. But he doesn’t address trackback.