MiniMediaGuy

Please click again . . .

2005-09-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Because I have moved to minimediaguy.org.

Look for me . . .

2005-09-22T07:25:00.000-07:00

In my new place.

Not More Metrics (here)!

2005-09-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Haven't you heard that I've moved.

Change of scene

2005-09-09T05:17:00.000-07:00

Look for me at MiniMediaGuy.org!

Look for me . . .

2005-09-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

at this new link!

I've Moved!

2005-09-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

Same MiniMediaGuy, different location. Please follow the link!

I've Moved

2005-09-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

Same MiniMediaGuy, different location. Please follow the link!

Aggregation: It's the Zeitgeist

2005-09-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

Just a quick question before I start a long weekend early — how do people learn in a networked world? George Siemens, a Canadian educator, has advanced a notion called connectivism that provides a conceptual framework for what changes when institutions are supplanted by ad-hoc teams. Let me thank unmediated.org for bringing the theory of connectivism to my attention. I noodled around and found a biography for George Siemens and an interview with him that will give you the flavor of his ideas. The piece referenced on unmediated had to do with Siemens’ observations on the breakdown of the old media gatekeeper system: “I no longer read newspapers or watch the evening news. I used to go to one source of information to get a thousand points of information. Now, I go to a thousand sources of information to get one point of information. I have become the filter and mediator.” This observation is reminiscent of the newsmaster concept that was floating around the web some months ago (if you haven’t seen the Googlezon (EPIC) video, take a five minutes to amuse yourself with a sci-fi "documentary" on how the Net swallows newspapers). And just this morning unmediated pointed to a related discussion about how top bloggers are becoming what are called newshubs -- tour guides of a sort in a world awash with information. Interesting times. I’ll post again Tuesday. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

The Dept. of Homeland Software?

2005-09-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I speculated that local news was the best content market (include niche or affinity groups as well) and suggested that localized news could be the bread and butter of citizen journalism. I ended on this note -- we need to invent a way to make local sites pay at least a partial income. Here are some thoughts as to how. For arguments’ sake, let’s imagine that the citizen journalism site of the not-too-distant future is anchored around a column, or blog. It would presumably be the audience magnet. Around this blog would be arranged other feeds and inputs – a cartoon, photo or artwork for a quick laugh; the lead paragraph from other blogs on the same theme with links to more; news feeds, culled from mainstream media and delivered via RSS or through an affiliation with Topix; useful links to info resources relevant to the site’s theme (Peoria-at-a-Glance, or Guide-to-Food-Preservation). Think of this as a personal portal, a lens on the world that the “editor” shares with others. In recent blogs I noted how Dave Winer’s OPML would enable web publishers to grab other pages and, assuming templates or other software modules appear out of thin air, pour parts of that content into one of these imaginary personal portals. The end result could be an interesting destination. It could even draw enough traffic to create a supplementary income for the portal editor. At least that's my hope and expectation. But if the agglomeration of content helps to draw an audience, shouldn’t front page revenues be shared with the various contributors? I say yes, and offer this simple starting point as a framework for computing the shares – for each input record the area of the screen set over to it; record the time of each unique front-page visit and any click-thru activity that occurs while each constituent element is in place; divide total revenues or page-views achieved during each publishing period (which would change any time a constituent element changes); divide any revenues received during that publishing period by the area devoted to each element; apportion the pro rata share to an account for each contributor; tabulate these shares by week or month, and issue payments upon certain thresholds. In short, make a business out of sharing content instead of assuming that we are all tenured academics who post stuff for the greater good and our personal glory (think about it: Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and its predecessor, the NSFNet, were both academic constructs supported by academic money and labor; Web 2.0 has no such sugar daddy.) But where do I put this request? I can’t even paste a traffic counter into my Blogger profile (officially, my traffic is zero, which means not even I read my blog!). Perhaps some person with technological smarts (who is also not reading this) can point me to where such an accounting software already exists. Or if it is a novel request, then put the idea where it is likely to get constructive feedback or a prototype effort that could be tweaked and improved. It's way past time to put the new publishing modes on a path toward economic sustainability. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Going Local

2005-08-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

There are two great floods in the news today, one in New Orleans and the other a deluge of media coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Pardon me for saying this is not an innovation, only saturation. Decades ago people would have sat glued to the radio. Today they're glued to the computer screen. True, new media offers new ways to help the survivors. But the more important, and perhaps unexploited power of new media is to enable us to get more information about what is happening in our backyards and on topics of interest to us, and not in being innundated by events a continent away. Thanks to an Anonymous poster for putting this thought in my head, and for pointing me to a lovely article on local coverage in Online Journalism Review. Today's posting must be briefer than usual. I've backed myself into a corner and have to rush out. So let me summarize as quickly as possible how OJR writer David LaFontaine put together some great ideas on how local coverage may be the unexploited niche in publishing -- and urge you to go there for details. He started with a focus on the Point Reyes Light, the plucky little Northern California publication that won a 1979 Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of Synanon. Faced in 2004 with a financial crisis, the Light asked readers for help and they said: we'll pay more. Wow! But why should that surprise us. I can get more than I cared to know today about Katrina but if there was a flood down the block, where would I go to learn more? The OJR piece connects this print example to some of the online efforts that seek similarly to drill down into communities, quoting former mainstream media executive Bob Cauthorn and newsman-turned-entrepreneur Mark Potts, a co-founder of Backfence.com. "National news? Piece of cake. Anywhere, everywhere. I can get Pope coverage pretty much anywhere," Potts told OJR, which goes on to write: "Potts and his investors are betting that . . . a site that tells you how to find a good local plumber, what the Little League schedule is, and what the City Council is doing to try to solve the traffic problem could be a real force." Exactly what I've been thinking of late, and with one addition that I hope to add in future posts -- how does a person go-local with some hope of earning at least supplementary income if not creating a replacement job. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Putting Politics in Command

2005-08-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia is an Internet treasure, a publicly-composed encyclopedia kept constant by volunteers, and embedded with links for further research. It is my first destination on many new topics. Given its success, I've wondered whether it might be a template for what Dan Gillmor christened citizen media (aka citizen journalism). So I read with interest a 13-page essay entitled, “Wikipedia as a learning community: content, conflict and the ‘common good’.” The essay was written by Wikipedian Cormac Lawler, who is studying for an advanced degree at the University of Manchester. While I enjoyed his essay and am awed by Wikipedia itself, my short, brutal assessment suggests that its governance is not applicable to citizen journalism because the cataloging of knowledge requires a different intellectual temperament than the acquisition of new information -- which is, or should be, the throbbing heart of journalism. But I have jumped the gun and failed to offer a précis of the essay by Lawler or, as he is known inside the Wikipedia community, Cormaggio. Wikipedia had 2 million articles in over 200 languages at the time of Cormaggio’s writing in 2005. Co-founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales had receded into the background, allowing the group to organize itself and create its own ethos, conserving his founder’s prestige for rare intercessions if and when conflict threatens the core function. And conflict, Cormaggio writes, is central to the learning that occurs inside the Wikipedian community: “Conflict arises for many reasons in many guises, whether through differences of culture, ideology or belief or simple misunderstanding . . . These conflicts often spill over into flame or edit wars, sometimes with little or no discussion on potential solutions, but simple deadlock.” But such conflicts are obviously resolved and Wikipedia functions, to the benefit of us all. I wish I knew more about the composition of the user base: its numbers, whether it functions under the 80-20 principle (that 20 percent of the contributors do 80 percent of the work), and from whence its membership is derived. My sense is that the core group is comprised of academics, who perform this role out of mix of professional pride, public service and a desire for peer recognition. But this is an inference from Cormaggio’s essay and not an explicit finding. Some empirical data about the community would have been helpful. In any event, my quick journalistic take – arrived at by reading the essay last night and waking early to pound out this rant before I race off to a meeting – is that the Wikipedia model is inapplicable to journalism. “Wikipedia is . . . building a learning community where leadership is distributed and in so doing creating a new kind of academic community,” Cormaggio writes. And there's the nub. Journalism is not an academic undertaking. It is, or at least it should be, an irreverent, inconsiderate, in-your-face confrontation with powers that would like nothing better than to obscure their workings from people who might object. Journalism is short, sharp and rude when need be. Even in this Internet Age, when publishers can theoretically pour out words and images ad infinitum, journalism must boils the most complex fact-sets all down to a headline. Because journalism is the discovery of that which is new. And sometimes it has got to smack you –- or the powers that be -- upside the head just to get attention. So while I am grateful for the existence of Wikipedia, and the time that its participants spend in its composition, I do not think it is a template for what I hope will be the next Net-spawned revolution of citizen journalism. I like to think in terms of movie metaphors. They’re probably the one cultural reference that cuts across classes and even nations. And, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t see “Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf” meets “The Front Page.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Kudos for J-Learning

2005-08-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

There is a saying in the martial arts: when the student is ready the teacher appears. In that spirit, last week I came across a desperately needed resource: an easy-to-read guide on how to build websites for online community journalism. The site is J-Learning.org, and it’s a free offshoot of the University of Maryland’s J-Lab. Let me tell you a little about both. The blurb publicizing the J-Learning site is succinct: “This how-to digital handbook offers 20 chapters and 60 subsections of basic skills training on how to plan a community news site, build it, use the latest off-the-shelf software to add online features, and then market it and track users. It was created for citizens’ media projects, small-market news organizations and journalism new-media programs.” The J-Lab is an interesting outfit, a group of university folks with do-good money to spur community journalism in new media formats. I’ve mentioned them in past blogs, such as when I noted their October 24th “Citizens’ Media Summit, and on another occasion, some prizes they’ve handed out to reward novel experiments in community media. This latest project, a collaborative effort with some folks out here in California, could not have arrived at a better time for me. I’m planning a real web page to allow me to practice some of what I’ve been observing and preaching about new media. I've never been terribly swift on the technical uptake. But in the new age, to be a publisher means having HTML running in your veins. The J-Learning material is written for people like me – communicators forced to learn some Internet plumbing. Having now gushed without artifice or reservation let me now make some suggestions that might make the site even more useful. (If any of these are things that have already been implemented and I have simply been too stupid to notice them, please point that out to me and I will point that out here.) Would it be possible to create a PDF version of the entire site? Or to otherwise enable folks to print out entire sections? (I find it easier to read paper than LCDs, and also want it as reference to share with others.) As for print outs, a page format designed for a 3-ring binder seems the way to go. Office supply stores sell pre-punched paper. I got some last week and manually printed out the sections of interest so I could read on the train, etcetera. Finally, a 3-ring format takes into account that stuff will change and pages will be updated, and since the J-Learning site is creating a newsletter, there is already a built-in system for alerting users of new information – and an easy way for them to insert the new page. Let me pass on two other references, written for non-tech types, while I’m at it. “The Unusually Useful Web Book,” by former HotWired executive June Cohen lives up to its name. It’s not meant to be read so much as referenced but things I’ve looked up I’ve been able to grasp. Finally in the free-AND-fabulous category, let me steer you to The Internet Digest, an e-zine created by Florida publisher Mario Sanchez. I’ve never met Mario and know zilch about him – other than that he seems to have much to teach, and concisely, on subjects such as web design, search engine optimization, and so on. Visit his archives and download to your heart’s content. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Shorts, Woes & Mysteries

2005-08-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

This week kicked my butt. Fortunately the workaday portion is over and an old Aikido training buddy found and passed on a few interesting bits, including an item about Amazon.com creating an iTunes-like service to sell short stories. Since he is too shy to take a bow by name, let me thank MysteryGuy for pointing me to a news article about a service that will let readers download shorts for 49 cents.

"Amazon Shorts will help authors find new readers and help readers find and discover authors they'll love," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's vice president of digital media. "We hope that by making short-form literature widely and easily available, Amazon.com can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work."

I looked for but could not find information on how authors could get shorts listed with Amazon. (They may have a plethora of short printed material broken out of the works of established authors.) However, its publisher’s guide site does seem to be soliciting audio shorts. Interesting. MysteryGuy also pointed me to the journalists at Technology Research News, who run a clean, info-packed site, yet lament that they have been:

“publishing original news stories for over five years, but . . . have yet to find a way to cover our costs. We are fairly popular and well-woven into the fabric of the Web; we have over 200,000 unique visitors per month, we are well represented in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results, and we are regularly slashdotted and pointed to by Wired News, other media sites and countless weblogs.”

The excerpt continues:

"We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition, selling white-paper-like reports through our site and resellers, supplying other media sites with our content through a newswire, selling subscriptions to an off-line electronic edition through a reseller, collecting fees from Lexus Nexis and other online databases, and carrying Google's Adsense advertisements. Most recently we have begun a PBS-like fund drive. That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough. Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers."

Sobering thoughts for anyone who aspires to make online publishing into a day job. I’m still searching for a self-supporting business model. Toward that end I took a long walk last night with my friend Tom Foremski, the former Financial Times reporter turned blogger at SiliconValleyWatcher.com. We hiked around San Francisco’s Presidio and caught the sunset over Alcatraz. We talked about some of the same business ideas as the Tech Research folks, and so their admissions are all the more meaningful. Shy of giving away all the particulars on which Tom and I might collaborate, our sense is that free information published over the web must be the lure to money-capturing enterprises such as consulting or compilations – monthlies or quarterlies – that package information already gathered. Packaging, Tom says, is the key. To which I would add, convenience, especially for information aimed at busy professionals. And that suggests audio delivery of capsule info. (Note that Amazon will accept such for its audio shorts program but not print shorts. A market signal?) Tech Research News seems to have tried some of these tactics. How come they aren’t working? Are there simple fixes to boost revenues? Publishers need to share tips and tricks. Add that to the to-do list: find or build such sites. Thanks, MysteryGuy! Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Mass Media: Take Two

2005-08-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

Good writing is such a delight as I was reminded while reading the Hollywood Reporter piece earlier this month in which Diane Mermigas outlines the financial funk of old media, and lays out three broad rubrics for its renaissance: hire new blood, take more risk and embrace interactivity. Thanks to Rafat Ali’s Content for pointing me the Mermigas’s column, entitled “Balancing new media with old expectations,” as well as two subsequent bits that I will riff off today. My take is that mini media have a stake in mass media angst. Their mega-brethren are in such a panic about the future that their checkbooks are open. Old media purchases of new media venues will fuel the startup scene, for both good (VCs will fund smart business plans) and ill (VCs will eventually overreact and fund stupid business plans). Of course these latter thoughts are my opinions, and should in no way impugn the deft way in which Mermigas chides one current in media-land – the division of mass media and Internet firms, that had been united only recently, (ala AOL-Time Warner), in the hopes of creating properties with the allure of a Google or a Yahoo. (The cynic in me notes that only a few years ago we were advised of the synergies of such combination, but the scientist in me knows that fission and fusion both produce tremendous amounts of energy which, in mergers or breakups, emanate out in the form of fat fees for investment bankers and accelerated stock vesting for the execs.) The remainder of Balancing column is, in my opinion, a wise set of prescriptions for mass media self-revival without this fission/fusion thing, which you read in full if run or work for a big media company. In a more recent column, entitled “Landscape changing for broadcast licensing,” Mermigas zeroes in on television and notes that “For the first time, consumer consumption of all television is expected to decline over the next five years by about 0.8%, compared with a forecasted 7% growth in consumer consumption of the Internet because of broadband migration.” (Think about the deceleration effect after 50 plus years of growth.) Here is the money quote from Mermigas's Landscape column:

“In a world of diffused content offerings and fragmented viewing, the onus is on network-affiliated broadcasters to innovate and produce unique content from their local resources and connections that cable, satellite and other distributors will want enough to pay for. They can only partially rely on the appeal of broadcast- and cable-network generated programs on a fading promise of exclusivity.”

Finally, in case you haven’t seen it, I direct you attention to the Wired Magazine with Jon (Daily Show) Stewart on the cover, and several stories inside along these lines of whither goest television. Wired asks Stewart about his infamous encounter with fit-to-be-bowtied pundit Tucker Carlson – which exemplified the new mediascape because far more people saw that bit online than via the original broadcast. “It was huge, phenomenal viral video,” Wired said, to which Stewart replied, “It was definitely viral. I felt nauseous afterward.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

DRMscape

2005-08-23T23:08:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week Sun Microsystems unveiled an open source digital rights management system. Will it pick up steam or get crunched between proprietary rivals and that portion of the Web community that abhors copy protections? CNet filed the story on the initiative, which Sun President Jonathan Schwartz announced Sunday at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit. Sun calls its initiative Dream, for DRM everywhere available. Schwartz sounded a populist note:

"Now it's no longer simply about engaging a few corporate interests. The open-source community is all about engaging the planet . . . Dream DRM solution will bypass the InterTrust and ContentGuard and MPEG LA patents, so that when your child grows up they won't have to pay a buck to watch a home movie."

Great line, but is this open source or Sun’s attempt to build a coalition? Perhaps they’re the same thing but I wonder if DRM has the pull that drags open source efforts along. I just went on Technorati to see what were the hot searches. Pat Robertson’s remarks about Hugo Chavez were top of the charts. But discussion of the Ajax technologies were number three. Hard to imagine DRM getting that kind of buzz. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

People Who Live in Glass Houses

2005-08-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I blogged effusively about a new software architecture called OPML that Dave Winer is promoting as a tool for assembling web publications on the fly. I woke up this morning even more exited about the potential of this open source development project, so let me throw a few more words at a point Dave made in his talk — that content creators had to work hand-in-glove with tech folks in order to put these new publishing ideas into practice. At least that’s what I heard, though I admit to the possibility of selective perception, because I had driven from my home to the presentation site preoccupied with the thought that distributed computing had failed to live up to its promise. You may recall that once upon a time computing meant the mainframe, which lived in a glass, air-conditioned house. One of the big knocks on glass-house computing was that people had to line up and ask the programmers to create whatever utilities they needed to do their work. Distributed computing promised to push programming power down into the organization and enable departments and teams to roll out applications on their own. Spin forward a decade or two. I work inside a distributed environment. But the problems of administering the 500 or so desktops in my organization have become so aggravating that the systems folks have de-distributed the power. When I wanted to install Google toolbar on my desktop, I had to call systems. I lacked the authority to alter my desktop (though, truthfully, I am not that swift on the technical uptake and sometimes require hand-holding even for simple tasks). So, anyway, I head into Dave’s talk with these thoughts in the back of my mind — that wannabe publishers, like myself, may not have the technical smarts to use the existing tools and, even worse, should we envision some useful function for which no software currently exists, there is no line in which we could wait until the developers get around to building our app. And then Dave turns the tables and says OPML developers want the content gang to get involved in shaping the system. A perfectly timed challenge so far as I'm concerned. Now I just have to find the time and the entry point to put my shoulder to this particular wheel. Meanwhile, it occurs to me that there is at least one template for collaboration between content and programming folks. Earlier this year, word guy J.D. Lasica and tech guru Marc Canter launched OurMedia — a sort of depot and meeting ground for indy video and other content folks. That site is built around an open source community building software called Drupal. I’m sure there are other examples that don’t occur to me at the moment. And I have to cut out now because I’m actually sitting down with a software guy in a little while to spin out some ideas and I have to pull together my presentation -- without help from systems :) Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, your’re Mini Media.

Small Websites, Loosely Joined

2005-08-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

Saturday night I saw a software demo that, I think, offers an easy way to assemble content, created by disassociated individuals, into a whole greater than the sum of the parts. The software is called Outline Processor Markup Language or OPML, and the demo was presented by computer guru and gadfly Dave Winer. Among the 100 or so folks who saw the demo at the Hillside Club in Berkeley were Microsoft chief technology officer Ray Ozzie and the company’s uber blogger Robert Scoble. I said I think OPML will allow content creators to assemble pages on the fly because that’s what I gleaned from the 90 minute or so demo where Winer, mustering all his patience, tried to bridge the gap in understanding between the likes of Ozzie (who launched Lotus Notes), and reluctant technologists like cybersalon hostess Sylvia Paull, who spoke for me when she opened the session with this remark: “I’m not into computers, I’m into people. The only reason I use computers is because they help me communicate with people.” So given the limitations of my understanding let me tell you what I think I heard. Let’s say a whole bunch of people on the Web decide to download, further develop and implement the OPML code, which is available under open source license. Assume that over time they make a wide variety of Web content available though OPML (I don’t understand the spins and feeds, but conceptually I envisage OPML as some sort of hook that allows stuff to be grabbed and reintegrated into some other Web construct). Now let’s take it a step further and assume that you're a Web publisher. Your passion is fresh fruit and produce and you have created a pretty good site around those topics. Now you aspire to put together a food page. But you don’t know about meat, fish, the grains, macrobiotics, and etcetera. So you visit the OPML search engine (backed by Jim Moore, a VC with the new $100 million RSS fund) and find sites that plug the gaps in your knowledge. You grab the OPML hooks in those pages and somehow weave them into your site (does code need to be built here?) and now you have the page: All You Wanted To Know About Food But Couldn’t Have Assembled Before OPML. Although Winer answered many question (I asked more than my share considering there were 99 other people in the room) he begged off trying to predict where OPML would go. “I’m out of that business,” he said at one point. He seems to be trying to escape the rap that he is difficult to work with on projects like RSS, another of his brainchildren. (One incident during the demo exemplified Winer’s personality and makeover. The demo was projected on a large screen at the front of the room, but the people in back complained the type was too small to read. They badgered Winer to enlarge it. This he was initially reluctant to do because he was showing the demo on a small screen laptop and enlarging the type made it harder for him to see what he was doing. After a minute or so he relented, made the type bigger and sent a titter through the room with this quip: “Never let it be said that I’m not cooperative.”) In any event, I think OPML is one of the tools we need to create citizen media, the movement heralded by newspaper reporter turned blogger Dan Gillmor. (Dan’s brother, tech columnist Steve Gillmor, attended Winer’s Staurday night demo and, in advance of it, has written of Microsoft’s interest in OPML.) The title of this post is an homage Small Pieces Loosely Joined, the book that suggests the revolution implicit in the Web is the ability of formerly disconnected, individually weak units to coalesce into a more powerful wholes. Winer himself invoked the R-word at Saturday night’s presentation in Berkeley which, he observed, drew a larger audience than all three prior presentations in Boston, New York and Toronto, “I want it to start revolutions,” Winer said at one point. “It sounds kind of grandiose but that’s what I want it to do.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Just Lemming Alone!

2005-08-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

Our lives are ruled by numbers. Unemployment rates, interest rates, the pop chart, the best-seller list and the whole yaddy yaddy ya. Computers can count anything and anything counted assumes a greater significance. In that spirit let me draw your attention to an index that promises to track the browsing patterns on 100 Internet news sites in real-time – putting a finger on the pulse of public attention. Paid Content pointed me to the Boston Globe article that introduced this news-tracking index created by Akamai Technologies. Think of Akamai as the place where publishers outsource the delivery of content. Akamai deploys the servers and storage caches and creates a network that is supposed to handle a huge surge of traffic without crashing. In the industry jargon, Akamai is a “content delivery network” (I gave a quick overview of the CDN space and its players in a previous posting entitled “Digital Teamsters.”). I can only guess that someone at Akamai realized that, since the company was already tracking the traffic flows of big sites like CNN, MSNBC, Reuters and the BBC, it merely had to aggregate and publish the data to create a lovely graph that would show peak interest news events such as the London terror bombings and the Michael Jackson verdict. The Globe article offered this quote from Akamai president and chief executive Paul Sagan, a former broadcast journalist and media executive: "It's not commercial. It's purely because we think it's interesting... One of the things you'll be able to see is what kinds of events drive people to turn on their browser to news.” Elsewhere in the article, Globe writer Robert Weisman paraphrases industry experts as suggesting that “Editors and programmers potentially could focus content on topics of consistent interest . . . while advertisers could target their messages in parts of the world, and at times of the day, where news-related Internet traffic was highest.” And Akamai will naturally get a mention, or an elevated profile relative to its CDN competitors. Bravo! Having now saluted the idea, I can’t help but recall an anecdote that I heard while I was attending journalism school at Columbia University back around 1991. The school had arranged for one its alums, Michael Rosenblum, to come in and talk to the class about the emerging field of solo video journalism enabled by the rapid price drop and performance boost of hand-held vidcams. If memory serves me well, Rosenblum told us how he had gone into the office of a TV network executive, ready to preach the gospel of go-anywhere-on-the-cheap video journalism, when suddenly the exec shushed him and took out a stopwatch. Only then did Rosenblum notice the three TV sets on the wall opposite the execs’ desk – each set tuned to a different network. A few heartbeats later the exec shouted, “Six seconds!” and clicked the stopwatch – then bid Rosenblum to begin his pitch. I think Rosenblum told that story to illustrate the old media worship of the scoop. Being first, however briefly, is the hallmark of success. Being first and forcing the competition to chase your story -- well, it doesn’t get any sweeter than that. But that was old media nonsense. This is new media, and the Akamai index shows us how we’ve outgrown that silly fixation with firstness. Nowadays attention matters. We can track it, count it, use it to shape future decisions on which stories to play. No need for us to exercise judgment, to push a story because we think it demands attention. That would be a "hidden agenda." That, we wouldn't want. Better to stay smack dab in the middle of the herd, where it's safe. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

It's the network, stupid!

2005-08-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to find a pointer on unmediated.org that directed me through Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs blog to an essay by IBM strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger on the potential, perhaps even the inevitability, of cooperation in a networked age. I use “inevitable” guardedly. It makes me sound like a commie which I’m not. I’m not even a starry-eyed idealist. It’s tough to be starry-eyed in middle age, when the eyes start to go. Even so I get a swell of hope when I find an IBM guy titling an essay “The Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation” and populating it with words like these:

“Collaborative innovation is a serious mode of economic production that has arisen because the Internet and related technologies and standards now permit large numbers of individuals to organize themselves for productive work, in a decentralized, non-market way.”

Later in the essay, Irv – no disrespect intended but his last name is a mouthful – cites Yale law professor Yochai Benkler and Berkeley political scientist Steven Weber, both of whom have studied the Open Source software movement that has arguably produced the world’s most successful collaborative commercial projects.

“Professors Benkler and Weber address the questions of what motivates people to work together as a community for the common good with no direct fiscal gain, as well as how such communities organize and manage themselves. They also point out, though, that these new, collective approaches do create wealth, do create value, and are, in fact, viable business models that can coexist in a fruitful economic way with more traditional business models. We don't yet know all the ways in which this new, dual-track marketplace is going to evolve -- any more than people in the 18th century could foresee the full future impact of industrialization. But I think we have enough evidence already to say with some confidence that open approaches are not a flash in the pan or a flavor of the month.”

When I read thoughts of this nature I wonder whether there is something – if inevitable is too strong a word, then implicit – in Internet technology that conjures up collaboration. The answer has to be yes. To steal a phrase, “It’s the network, stupid!” What's good for computer software should also be good for media. Today media firms are factories that acquire information, entertainment and policy inputs, and pump out tangible or intangible products. In every media the economics underlying the old factory model are crumbling. New metaphors are arising to describe the nature of media in a networked age, starting perhaps with the Cluetrain Manifesto. More recently Dan Gillmor has articulated the notion of citizen journalism or grassroots media. Both are great ideas. But so far I have not seen how they pay the bills. Pardon me for being so crass as to ask: can cooperative media become an economically viable system as well as a socially desirable goal? In my ruminations I have gone back to the farmer cooperatives of the American west to speculate – in a series of postings entitled Food for Thought One, Two and Three – that perhaps such models could work for media. At least that’s my hope. And herein lies the power of the Internet age when it comes to lifting ideas off the ground. Even if you’ve got a bad idea, a brain-dead stupid notion, chances are that there is at least one other equally misguided node out there on the network. And how else can we discover the good ideas except by advancing -- and trashing -- the bad ones? Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Unreal Estate

2005-08-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

A recent market research report says that while overall spending on real estate advertising has been sluggish, the online share is growing so fast that it is poised to overtake the newspaper spend by 2009. That assessment comes from Borrell Associates which, in a clever business strategy, offers a free download of the $995 report’s executive summary. According to the summary, Borrell projects that overall real estate ad spending will grow 2.2 percent this year to a projected $11.4 billion. The online component is now $1.8 billion or 16 percent of the total. “Online advertising spent per home sold has already reached $210, more than one-third of the newspaper ad spend . . . Paid listings on real estate search pages have exploded. Competitors are paying well over $1 for a single click – and as much as $6 in some cities.” There aren’t many other details in the summary, but I think these guys have a smart strategy. Every business has tire kickers – people who ask a zillion questions and never spend a cent. In my case all I wanted to know was the cost-per-click, to help create a realistic cash flow projection. That's not worth a grand to me. But as a thank you I spread the word -- and maybe it reaches a newspaper publisher or big online site that is willing to spend what would amount to a couple of days worth of sales calls to make the entire team smarter. The Borrell tactic is a lesson that all online businesses should heed -- figure out how to give some away and sell the rest. One last note about real estate. Unless you’ve living under a rock (financed on a no-down, one percent, variable rate mortgage, perhaps) you’re aware of the debate over whether we’re in a housing bubble and if so when it will pop. No need to add words to that discussion (though I can’t resist linking to the housing bubble t-shirt that a colleague mentioned the other day). The question for this blog is what happens to real estate ad spending when the market cools, whether abruptly enough to make a “pop” or slowly and gradually in the hoped-for soft landing. Will the online share shrink as advertisers return to the tried and true print media? Or will the flow of dollars – even if diminished – moving from print to electronic media accelerate as online proves that it can deliver more bang for the buck? I certainly don’t know. The question only just occurred to me this morning. I did a quick search to see if I could find out what happened to real estate ad spending back in 1989, which is when the last big correction occurred (at least here in California. But the search yielded no answer. But before I sat down to do a cash flow that included real estate spending, I would want some idea what happened when the last housing cycle turned down. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Assessment, Potential, Angst

2005-08-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

I serve three items today: a sobering look at RSS penetration, a pointer to a web-casting report, and some journalistic ennui. I pretend no unity of message (although the headline betrays the unpublished novelist in me). Truth be told, however, these are simply the ideas I spotted and could compress into the space and time allotted to my mini media persona. Thanks to MediaPost for pointing to a Nielsen//NetRatings survey of 1,000 blogospherians, conducted in June, that suggests only 11 percent of blog readers use RSS. Apparently its name – Really Simple Syndication – is a bit of a misnomer. Only 4.9 percent of blogospherians turn on RSS themselves, according to the survey. Another 6.4 percent accept feeds from Web sites that aggregate and pass on RSSed materials. The vast majority of respondents express varying degrees of bewilderment or difficulty in using RSS. (Shame on me for being in this category: RSS sending and receiving are on my to-do list – along with a blog roll, a real web page, Creative Commons licensing, etcetera.) Viewed in a positive light, the report suggests it is still early days for RSS. So long as I’m on the subject, Bay Area residents mark your calendars: Dave (Mr. RSS) Winer will be hosting a Cybersalon on Saturday, August 20 at 7 pm at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. The topic is OPML, which is described as a way to share “RSS feeds and other online subscription data.” (Details.) One final note on the Nielsen//NetRatings survey. If you download the PDF you will be rewarded with data on the fastest growing blogs (MiniMediaGuy still misses the cut!) and the ad dollars-per-impressions paid by big media buyers. The latter figures can be used to compute a rough cost per thousand, useful in creating cash flows. Moving on to webcasting, today’s Paid Content referenced a recent study by Broadband Directions of video initiatives at 75 cable TV networks and pointed to a free webinar today. If you want to sign up do it ASAP – the event occurs 10 am (PST) today. I don’t know if the briefing will be available later. Finally, I will simply point to the August 14 lament posted by New York University Professor Jay Rosen, author Press Think (which recently enjoyed its one millionth visitor since September 2003). The posting is entitled, “Things I Used to Teach That I No Longer Believe,” and it is inspired by a panel bearing the same title held at a recently concluded conference of college journalism instructors. You can guess the tenor of the discussion. Read it if you can resist the impulse to feel depressed. Personally, I have little energy to spare on hand-wringing. Every minute and every ounce of strength must go into learning the tools – like RSS – that will allow people like me – people like you, perhaps -- to create small examples of the sort of media that we wish existed. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Identity Crisis

2005-08-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

An article in The Economist, synopsized by Paid Content, suggests that Yahoo isn’t as clear on its strategy as is Google, because Yahoo keeps creating unique content while Google seems focused on scraping, searching and selling content produced by others. My own opinion matters little or not, nor is it particularly well-informed, but in the blogosphere, every bloghard is entitled to share. I wish I could have read the entire Economist piece, but a stern message on my screen said “This is premium content” and I am not a subscriber. Fortunately, Paid Content provided a link to the MIT press release about the event that provided the basis for the magazine’s analysis: “Students from MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School,” explained Paid Content, “acted out teams from Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN, and had to discuss various strategies and scenarios. Google came first, Microsoft second, AOL/Time Warner third, and Yahoo fourth.” This scholarly smackdown was grist for the Economist’s mill. I’ll gloss over Microsoft and AOL-Time Warner. Despite their market mass they lack new media momentum, and are more likely to be followers than leaders of whatever is to come. But which of the new media giants should mini media types be following? Paid Content, delivering the thrust of the Economist piece, writes: “Google is a technology firm . . . (while) Yahoo sees itself as a media company.” Paid Content also noted “the conflict of whether Yahoo is a guide (to Web-wide content) or is trying to create a walled-garden experience with its increasing emphasis on original content. In the end, the (Economist) concludes, Yahoo has old media plans for the new-media era.” And here is where my ignorance of the full article may prove my undoing because I wonder why would that be a bad thing? Do we have to throw out the old world, and abandon its forms and wisdoms to build something new? I don’t think that is the spirit of change in the current age. Change is evolutionary: new technologies offer innovative ways to solve old problems or create new possibilities. It should be no surprise, nor shame, that some old ways are preserved. That’s not to say Yahoo hasn’t got problems. For months I have followed Paid Content report on the hiring of a succession of seasoned media and new media execs. Yahoo has been creating a new media Shangri La in Santa Monica (home of Paid Content founder Rafat Ali). Hire a bunch of executives. Put them in proximity to each other and a certain amount of bickering is inevitable. It may even be necessary and useful because we are on new ground, and therefore experimentation and failure are to be expected. But when I checked Yahoo’s financials (on Yahoo finance, my one-stop-shop for such stuff) the stock chart looks good, the profits are huge and the management is bold. I’m thinking here of the AliBaba investment, which may look like a distraction to some but which I see as the continuation of Yahoo’s view – expressed in a Dec. 1, 2004 presentation at Stanford by Yahoo CFO Susan Decker (see page 24 for a picture) – that web companies must be global. None of this diminishes my admiration for Google, a money-making machine with two core competencies – algorithmic powers of search and an awesome selling ability. Advertising accounts for something on the order of two percent of GDP by some estimates (click here and search for "Over the last decade"), and Google has positioned itself relative to advertising dollars as the whale is to plankton. Still as a content creator, I wonder whether even so magnificent an enterprise can continue to hold at arms length that which its users ultimately seek? For now this remains a philosophical question because I can see no reason why Google should not ingest an ever larger share of advertising dollars without lifting so much as a flipper to keep the content coming. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Disintermediate this.

2005-08-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading an interview with the founders of Topix.net, the site that uses algorithms to deliver local news customized to zip code level – and links this content to contextual ads that go beyond word matching to guess at the meaning of stories – all without editors or salespeople. This posting is my condensation of a fascinating conversation between Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser and Topix executives Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles. Here’s a quick intro for those not already familiar with this Palo Alto startup. Topix was launched in January 2004. Its algorithms scan more than 10,000 news sources and decide what locale (or topic) each story is about. It serves this up this localized content through its own web site and also delivers news feeds to America Online, Ask Jeeves and Citysearch. (This morning I popped onto Topix, punched in my zip code, and learned that the California Highway Patrol was planning to put extra speeding patrols on my normal commute route.) This localization capability and other algorithmic inventions recently prompted three media companies to buy a 75-percent stake in Topix that valued the company at about $64 million. Not bad for a site that grossed about $1 million in its launch year, and now gets about 2 million unique visitors a month, according the OJR report. I was fascinated by Skrenta’s comments on advertising and highlight them here, after noting that there is much else in the full story that I have chosen to overlook. Topix bootstrapped itself and thus had to focus on revenue generation. “Because we were working on the advertising with the content from Day 1, we realized that 50 percent of the content that people want in the newspaper is commercial content,” Skrenta said. So while the firm’s underlying technology has to do with analyzing content and targeting it to geographic or social niches (“Our Gay & Lesbian channel is our No. 1 feed on My Yahoo,” Skrenta said.) its ad-focus appears to have yielded insights and innovations. “What we've found is that the ads on the front page, nobody clicked on them,’’ Skrenta said. Topix has relied upon Google AdSense (“Google has 400,000 advertisers,” Tolles said. “We have zero salespeople.”) But using pure AdSense led to some silly mismatches of ads and stories. Skrenta referred to “the famous case . . . when the New York Times' site had a story on a suitcase of body parts that washed ashore in New Jersey, and Google was showing luggage ads beside it.” So Topix has used algoritms to minimize such gaffes and maximize the rate at which people clicked on ads (in new media, the rule is no click-e, no pay-e). Part of the improvement had to do with analyzing what sort of stories a given reader had looked at in the past -- and serving future ads based on that past behavior. Here are two excerpts from Skrenta: “What we found was we started to pour in our categorization technology to the Google [AdSense] ads that were on our site, and it started working a lot better. We doubled the clickthrough rate on them. But beyond that, it made our site look better. Improving the quality of the advertising improved the quality of the entire product . . . What we did was look at the cookie and see what pages they visited on Topix. . . . And it worked pretty well, and we expanded that, so half or a third of the ads you see are relevant to something else you've looked at and not to what you're looking at.” In closing, these guys are cooking up some incredible stuff. True, they seem not to like human beings, or at least journalists, if we still qualify as members of the species (OJR: So are you ever going to add human editors, or are you categorically rejecting them? Skrenta: We could. But as technology people, it's kind of an admission of failure.) But how can I argue with these guys? Their company is worth $64 million, and last time I checked, BlogShares had valued MiniMediaGuy at just under three grand. Besides, Topix saved me money today. I gotta rush off – but I know now to take a different route. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Death of a Salesman?

2005-08-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Google is testing a system that seems designed to marry two powerful ad-serving technologies into an even more potent way to direct relevant commercial messages to a given web site. According to a report in MediaPost, Gokul Rajaram, a group project manager for Google’s AdSense program, said the system under development will allow publishers “to submit demographic and psychographic data about their audiences” so as to better target ads and improve response rates. MediaPost says the new Google pilot program started about a month ago. “Many of the signals that Google will be using are demographic,” MediaPost reports, adding that “Rajaram said that publishers (will) also (be) supplying other indicators, such as information they know about their visitors' other interests.” It sounds to me as if Google is attempting to blend contextual and behavioral ad matching. In the past I’ve tried to highlight the differences between these two approaches, but a quick example here may suffice. An article about the Lord of the Rings might draw a contextual ad for Rings books, movies or action figures. A behavioral ad match might note that Tolkien fans tend to visit online role-playing games, and place an ad for a new game alongside the content. Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein told MediaPost that the latest Google move is a bid to stay ahead of competitors like Yahoo, which recently launched a publisher network that also seems to allow some blending of contextual and behavioral ad placement. Here is an excerpt from the MediaPost story on Yahoo’s move:

“A music site publisher might know that the site's audience is interested in travel. That publisher will be able to go into a user interface and tell Yahoo! to serve travel ads to his site, or to specific pages within his site. This feature raises the question of whether the ads are still "contextual."

I say: “Context, schmontext.” Publishers want ads that deliver results for their advertisers and revenues to themselves. Call the technology whatever you like. Having said that, I know there is some reticence to put the “behavioral” tag on ad-serving software because that implies publishers and advertisers are tracking people’s behaviors. Well, aren’t they? What is the Amazon suggestion engine but a facility that tracks past behavior and suggests future action? What I find more interesting, in light of these continuing improvements in automated ad-matching, is the extent to which algorithms can replace the old-fashioned salesperson. Certainly for a small publisher, the ability to gain any revenue without a personnel expense is attractive. For larger publishers, these automated responses can deliver baseline revenues, which can be used to hire a salesforce. As I noted in a July posting, Weblogs, Inc. principal Jason Calacanis told Online Journalism Review he “derives the majority of his income from display ads sold directly to advertisers.” Because an algorithm can be liked. But I don't think it can be well liked. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

HBO on Steroids?

2005-08-10T08:07:00.000-07:00

Unlike Chauncey Gardener, I don’t particularly like to watch, but even my un-hip eyes can see the evolution occurring in television -- the most recent example being the impending launch of Veoh, a peer-to-peer network designed to distribute independent video content. Thanks to Paid Content for heralding this San Diego startup and reporting that it “will launch its software in beta later this month.” Veoh is the brainchild of Dmitry Shapiro, who was founder and chief technologist of Akonix Systems, a security management startup in San Diego. This serial entrepreneur hails from Russia and studied economics at Yale before putting theory into practice in San Diego. The Veoh web site lays out this capsule business model: “Veoh does not charge content producers to broadcast their content, and allows them to specify if they would like to offer that content for free or for a fee. Veoh derives revenues from taking a percentage of the fee, or advertising wrapped around the free content.” A new blog launched to build community around the site offers a whimsical explanation of the company name. (Business tip: Weeks ago, San Francisco Bay Area video maven Mary Hodder clued me in as to the why of all these weird names. They come without the baggage of prior connotations, so startups fortunate enough to get attention define their own identity.) Paid Content tempered its hopeful pre-launch buzz with the caveat that Veoh would have to differentiate “itself from the likes of OMN, OurMedia.org, BrightCove, DTV, and others fast crowding into the field” of P2P video distribution. (Another aside:JD Lasica, executive director of OurMedia, has a new book out called DarkNet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation.” Speaking of the copyright wars, I came across a bit via the Informitv newsletter that I interpreted as a sign of possible rapprochement between the studios and the indies. Mitch Singer, head of digital policy at Sony Pictures Entertainment, apparently told of group of interactive TV experts in LaLaLand that the video industry would be foolish to repeat the mistakes of the music industry and fight download culture instead of looking for a way to co-opt and coexist with it. The newsletter quotes Singer thus (abbreviated and rearranged by me by use of ellipsis): “There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to look back at this time and we’re going to see the internet was the most important tool for the distribution of content to the home . . . and (that) we’re going to end up find(ing) that peer-to-peer is the technology . . . Quite frankly I’m ashamed to say that most of the time we view this as a threat . . . but you can’t stop technology.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media