Journalists Struggle with Web Logs
March 30, 2009
Gina M. Chen asked, “What do you think?” at the foot of her essay “Is Blogging Journalism”. You can read her write up here. My answer is, “Nope. Web logs are a variant of plain old communications.” Before I defend my assertion, let’s look at the guts of her essay is that “fear of change” creates the challenge. She asserted that blogging is a medium.
Web logs are not causing traditional media companies to collapse. Other, more substantive factors are eroding their foundations. Forget fear. Think data termites.
Okay, I can’t push back too much on these points, which strike me as tame and somewhat obvious. I also understand the fear part mostly because my brushes with traditional publishers continue to leave them puzzled and me clueless.
The issue to me is mostly fueled by money. Here’s why:
Google in Knowledge Grab
March 30, 2009
Google keeps getting on the wrong side of the UK newspapers. The Times of London’s “Google Makes a Grab for E-Books” here gives the company some of that put down jabber for which Oxford-style debaters are noted. (I debated a team from Oxford when in university. My partner and I won, but we had some mud sticking to our suits.) The Times said:
This move [Google’s deal with Sony] is merely the tip of an iceberg. Late last year Google settled a class-action lawsuit with the two most powerful authors’ and publishers’ associations in America. In exchange for a $125m (£86m) payment, the groups agreed that Google would set up and administer a publishing-rights register designed to match up new and existing electronic books to their copyright owners, and manage payments for anyone who wanted to download them. Unlike ePub, this would be a closed — and profit-generating — system owned and managed by Google. The system would effectively make Google the sole distributor — and seller — of many electronic books.
Googzilla needs to get its public relations program on track in the UK. The traditional book publishing industry may be in a death spiral, but it has the incentive to make life miserable for the laddies and lassies in Google offices.
Stephen Arnold, March 29, 2009
Yidio Update
March 29, 2009
Quite a few readers have shown interest in Yidio, the video search system I wrote about here. A reader sent me a link to this interesting post on Quantcast. The site has shown strong traffic growth in the first two months of 2009. You can view the data here. What’s interesting is that the viewers of Yidio don’t favor YouTube.com, if the Quantcast data are accurate. Frankly I had not heard of most of the sites in the “Audience Also Visits” listing; for example, tvduck.com, although the name appeals greatly to this addled goose. TVDuck seemed to be quite YouTube.com centric which begged the question, “How dependent on YouTube.com are these services.
A happy quack to the reader who pointed out that I did not mention that a videographer can make money by posting the content to Yidio. The procedure requires that the videographer provide his / her AdSense identification code. Click here for details.
Stephen Arnold, March 29, 2009
Online Economics, Ads, and Crash Landings
March 29, 2009
A number of articles have been sent to us here in the mind drainage choked goose pond in the last couple of weeks on the subject of monetizing electronic information. Our official view is that getting cash for online content requires a rethink of the available business models. The pay by the drink approach and the subscription approach don’t work very well in our experience. You can make these work if you have high value, scarce, hard to get information. Other types of information don’t have magnetic appeal so the connection between the user’s credit card and the vendor’s bank account doesn’t stick.
For a case example of how this fails as a business model, you may want to read and save Joseph Tartakoff’s “Tracking The Online-Only Seattle P-I: Traffic Down 20 Percent” here. What struck me was that without the hard copy paper acting as a sales flier, users are not going to the dead tree outfit’s online only service. Without traffic, online advertising becomes less attractive. Over time, the Seattle Post Intelligencer will realize that its online play won’t pay the bills. Without the cash to create the hard copy version, the marketing of the Web site becomes job one. The problem is that marketing is expensive. Ergo: the business models in use at this moment can be tracked casually by anyone with a yen to read news about the Seattle P-I revenue adventure.
I don’t want to quack harshly, but the glib words about online revenue underscore the lack of understanding about how online economics work in the real world. Google borrowed a useful model and now provides an example–or as the entitlement crowd of azure chip consultants likes to say–or a use case. Whatever lingo you prefer is fine, but the fact is that declining traffic means that ad and subscription models are not likely to pull this site out of a steep nose dive. Fasten your seat belts.
Stephen Arnold, March 29, 2009
Textbook Publishers under Siege
March 28, 2009
First, it was the YouTube education “collection.” If you missed that story, you can catch up here. Most of the blog pundits skip dull stuff like educational videos for good reason. Pretty dull. But if you are in the text book publishing business, the GOOG in education is an item of interest. Since I cover this topic in my new for fee study, I want to mention another force lining up to take on the dead tree crowd and its $100 plus textbooks–open source texts. TechDirt’s “Open Source Text Book Company Flat World Knowledge Gets Funded” tells the story. You can read the article here. What happens when you sweep into a mixture the Apple iTunes educational videos and podcasts and MIT’s decision to make its educational content like professors’ articles into a pile. The mixture blows up the traditional textbook business. Oh, the mixture is volatile. I hated paying big prices for my econ book which I thought was almost worthless. I learned years after Economics 101 that that book and its pricing kept one publishing company solvent for decades. Boom. Good bye.
Stephen Arnold, March 28, 2009
Connotate’s Agent Approach Explained
March 25, 2009
The Connotate Web log here offers up a transcript of Bruce Molloy’s explanation of the firm’s software agent approach. The venue was a podcast interview with an interlocutor named Mike Lippis of the Outlook Series. You can find the transcript here. The information is useful, but the best way to read it is by scrolling to the end of the post where Part One is located and then reading upwards to Part Five. For me, the most interesting comment in the transcript was:
I’ll give you 2 or 3 ways that is realized through the simple design of our software. One is Agent creation. If you have someone who’s working in business intelligence or research or an analyst or someone who wants to do price comparisons and that person wants to monitor certain, say, prices or developments or products from a competitors’ site they can very quickly and easily paint the screen, if you will, create an Agent and have that agent then available to monitor over time, every day, or every hour, every minute kind of, what’s going on. Secondly, in terms of the Library and this is, there’s a real multiplier effect here in terms of the Library. As you get people starting to share the Agents, those Agents come to represent really best practices, best ways to get information delivered, to look at it, to compare it, to mash it and as such it’s a repository of expertise that is then shared and multiplied in the organization. And lastly, in terms of output just because it’s so easy to get this output because it’s so well personalized it becomes a solution that individuals, non-technical folks in an organization can use without having to go to IT and get into a long development cycle, if it’s even possible.
A social spin on creating and sharing intelligent software. Interesting idea in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, March 23, 2009
Valley Wag on Copyright, Wikipedia, and a Dead Tree Outfit
March 25, 2009
Short take. Click here and read “Is the Los Angeles Times Cribbing from Wikipedia? Valley Wag presents snippets from an LA Times’s story and source or coincidental snippets from Wikipedia. I am no expert in legal matters and copyright, but these snippets looked similar. Maybe it is a coincidence? Maybe it is another example of the ease with which information can be located and possibly repurposed. I haven’t had an original idea or sentence in my goosely life, but I am no journalist. I am not sure what to think. I am afraid to quote an Associated Press story, but if this alleged similarity is valid, the Los Angeles Times seems to operate with some interesting methods.
Stephen Arnold, March 25, 2009
Big Media to Google, Make Us Number One Again
March 23, 2009
I enjoyed Steve Rubel’s article “Media Companies Ask Google to Favor Their Content Over Blogs” here. He presented the argument originally set forth in Ad Age and some some useful comments. For me, the most interesting was:
A neutral Google is a good Google. They should continue to deliver an algorithm that rewards the highest quality sources that have earned a following, interest and links from other sources. If the media companies don’t want Google to favor bloggers, why not just stop linking to them or use no follow tag? That may over time, erode their Google Juice. However, I suspect most realize it’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle.
Neutral? Hmmm.
However, I wanted to ask several questions. I don’t want to forget them:
- Why are the big media outfits so confident that their information should be at the top of a Google results list? When I run a query about Google or Microsoft technology, I skip big media write ups and look for solid information in technical papers or from specialist sources.
- What’s driving this proposal at this time? My hunch is that after a decade of ignoring Google and even longer hoping that online would behave like information on paper or on 1950s broadcast TV, the big media folks realize that they are marginalized. The savior is Google. Google is not a religion, so why not pay Google for placement?
- How can informed people perceive Google as objective?: Run a query for enterprise search. Who is at the top of the results list? Why is this entry at the top of the results list? Why are pointers to my Google patent search buried in the Google search results? I must admit that the notion that Google is objective is a novel one to me.
I liked Mr. Rubel’s analysis for the most part. I think his write up will spark a number of comments.
Stephen Arnold, March 23, 2009
The Guardian’s Observer Sees Trickiness in Google
March 23, 2009
I am an addled goose and my prose does not flow trippingly on the tongue. I do enjoy British humor. If I did not, I would not have been able to sustain my 25 year friendship with my British publisher.
If you enjoy the Oxbridge way, you will find some enjoyment in Robert McCrum’s “Is Google Committing Theft – or Ushering in a Bright New Age?” here.
Poor Googzilla. Its alleged copyright transgressions continue to provide ammunition to its critics. But Google gets off with a slap on its snout. Mr. McCrum targets “a pop academic” named James Boyle. He was, if I am understanding Mr. McCrum’s argument, used as an example of “a rallying cry to the Googletariat: ‘Nerds of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your urls.’
I quite like the “nerds of the world” phrase. I don’t care too much for Googletariat. I hope Mr. Boyle experiences joy when he realizes that his book The Public Domain is the focus of Mr. McCrum’s wit.
The only issue I have with Mr. McCrum’s write up is that he works for a dead tree outfit that may face some challenges that wit cannot resolve. I suppose the financial mavens at the Guardian / Observer could use Google to look for some ideas. Well, maybe not? A manual search of the shelves in the basement of Blackwell’s in Oxford would probably be more comfortable.
Stephen Arnold, March 22, 2009
Intelligenx Powers Mapaspublicar.com
March 23, 2009
Intelligenx and Publicar SA recently launched http://www.mapaspublicar.com, a new local search application that focuses on the country of Colombia. Publicar, a leading multimedia content provider in Latin America, is using Intelligenx’s search platform with advanced mapping features and Google API to serve up 3,000 points of interest (e.g., museums, hospitals, schools) and detailed information about businesses in Colombia. The new web site functions like Google Maps to search for Colombia locations, all through a Spanish language interface. It’s another step by Intelligenx, http://www.intelligenx.com, which has more than 10 years’ experience in local search advertising, to create business with more directory publishers and local search providers. The plan is to expand coverage of mapaspublicar.com to eight countries in Latin America.
Jessica W. Bratcher, March 22, 2009
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