THE BROWSER: YouTube sees user rebellion - May. 3, 2006
"A bitter Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle says that he was kicked off YouTube two months ago. Weinberg chronicles his dissatisfaction with the free (and reportedly money-losing) service, ultimately deciding that he has only one thing left to do: "Ruin YouTube" by systematically reporting all of the site's traffic-generating but copyright-violating videos. Microsoft's (Research) Don Dodge, who formerly worked at Napster (Research), adds a been there, done that post to the fray, noting sagely: "User-generated content is very difficult to manage and control.""
ya think?
The big Digg rig | CNET News.com
"People are trying to basically take advantage of Digg by artificially promoting a story with fake diggers or some other methodology of link swapping," Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson said.
Reading The Presence of Magazines on the Internet --The Bivings Report I find it a bit shocking the Bivings group counts features, as if features were somehow equal to quality (excuse me, Web 2.0 features!) This report could lure magazines into the kind of moronic featuritis software has been prey to.
"it should be recognized that magazines have taken on a more effective general strategy than newspapers when it comes to the Internet. Instead of replicating printed content online, as newspapers do, magazines have made efforts to publish unique, Web specific, and easily digestible materials on their websites. "
I'd like to know how "effective" was measured-- I saw no sign of quantitative comparing of circulation, revenue, etc., as relating to strategic feature choices.
I guess I shouldn't take too seriously a report that, when you download the word doc, track changes and comments are still there.
"I think that general-interest magazines may well be fated to fade away. General-interest anything is probably cursed. For the truth is that interest never was as general editors and publishers thought it was, back in the mass-media age. Old media just assumed we were interested in what they told us to be interested in. But we weren’t. We’re proving that with every new choice the internet enables."
"While you were away eating turkey, the tech geniuses behind Eyebeam and the Huffington Post launched BuzzFeed, a sort of hybrid--a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n roll--news site that's edited by humans but powered by algorithms."
"Magazines, on the other hand, still have very high walls between their writers and readers. The writers and editors enjoy the illusion that they do something no one else can. The readers, then, have only one job: to consume the product."Posted by christina at
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from paidContent.org.org: The Economics of Content
"Morgan Stanley Investment Management is ratcheting up the pressure on the Sulzberger family to boost the New York Times Co.’s flagging stock price. The Wall Street firm, which owns 7 percent of the NYTCO stock, wants shareholders to vote on a proposal at next year’s annual meeting to dismantle the dual-class stock system that keeps the Ochs-Sulzberger family in control—and to separate the job of company chairman and publisher of the New York Times, according to the WSJ and AP."
When I was first looking for a lawyer for Cucina Media, I was lucky enough to be introduced to John Montgomery. In our first meeting, he talked about why corporations can act against their mission, and what to do about it. It seems that (and excuse my oversimplification) the bylaws of most corporations make the corp responsible to the shareholder. This sounds logical, right? Well, that shareholder can then sue if the corp acts against the shareholder's interest, and shareholder interest often being entirely about increasing shareholder value (these days meaning stock price) means the company is obliged to do what ever gives the stock a pop.
But Monty also explained to me that you don't have to use a boilerplate for your bylaws; you can make the company responsible to the shareholders and somebody else. This could be
If you find the quote above boring, or irrelevant, let me tell you... watching the struggle the LA Times has gone through to improve profitability and increase shareholder value... well, you can improve profitability two ways: increase revenue or cut costs. Revenue cannot grow indefinitely; that means at some point you must cut costs. The greatest cost a business carries is the staff.
Unless of course, profitability is not your only driver. At which point a corporation can actually start taking a long view on important matters.
Your assigned reading:
I'll expect a 200 word report by monday.
from The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town
"On Kean’s page there has been a long-running take-it--out-put-it-back-in duel concerning a video of the candidate shunning an antiwar activist whose son is stationed in Falluja. Menendez supporters write up the incident on Wikipedia, under the heading "Refusal to meet with military families."Kean supporters, in response, add a few sentences about how the incident was a setup, orchestrated by the Me-nendez campaign. "
Wikipedia, long held up as proof of what is possible if you trust the crowd now illustrates that not all topics are equally suited to the wikipedia approach: the "truth" is changing every second.
"Let’s stop being prey, let’s start being predators. Think like a venture capitalist, think like a start-up. There are opportunities here but if you look at Craigslist and Yahoo and Google and cry in your beer, you won’t get anywhere. Start looking for opportunities to attack and start looking for opportunities to do it in a calculated way, in a business-like way."
-- Bob Benz, General Manager of Interactive Media, Scripps Newspapers, United States
Okay, it has been a bit of time since weblogs inc was snatched up by AOL, turning Jason Calcannis into the mover and shaker he always dreamed of, but as more and more traditional publications seek ways to incorporate blogs, let's look at the rarely viewed dark side (even more amusing because I'm blogging about it!)
Four Problems with Blogs
Quality Let's be honest here: What blog delivers good, fact-checked correct-spelling-grammar-proper completed-thoughts every day the way a newspaper or magazine does?
Consistency Friend of mine is a food maniac. One day she was having a crappy day, and she went to a favorite blog to read about produce, or sauteeing, or other cheering topics. That was the day the blogger had to put her cat to sleep.
Blogs are reflections of the whole person, no matter how focused they are on a single topic. I remember getting a sad comment on this blog saying "I liked this blog better when it was about design." and I thought, dude, I'm sick of design.
Constancy How many times have you read on someone's blog "sorry I haven't' posted for awhile"... .
Passivity While occasionally some blogs have featured "guest bloggers" a blog is almost always me talking to you. Or a closed group talking to you.
So I'll take half a second to define "problem" because none of these things are problems when you accept that a blog is the public diary of a single person to friends, family, colleagues or even fellow travelers. But these are problems if you are an advertiser, and if it's a problem for an advertiser, it's a problem for any blogger who wants to go pro.
Quality: what does it do to your brand to be seen next to profanity, or radical positions?
Consistancy: how can you guarentee relevence when you don't know when a blogger is suddenly going to go apesh*t over a president's policy change?
Constancy: it's just too big a hassle to chase blogs with small audiences, especially if they are going to burn out regularly.
Passivity: Switching costs are nothing when the audience isn't involved.
Right now we're seeing a few "pro" bloggers who are changing the nature of blogs by adding editors and keeping things consistent. But are these really blogs anymore, or simply the equivalent of a newspaper column with a shorter word count?
User-generated content is an anathema to most quality advertisers (take a tour thorough Myspace to see who is comfortable with advertising on user-generated content.... and don't forget not to click on "Your PC is infected!") One has to wonder how Federated Media and its ilk will be addressing this issue.
Without advertiser or other revenue, blogs remain in the hobbiest state, unable to hire editors, fact checkers, or even assure time to keep publishing regularly. Readers must continually hop from blog to blog as one ascends and another descends.
Right now there is a race to address these issues. Some entrapreneurs are trying to agregate then use the crowd behavior to rate, others are focusing on adding quality controls in order to be advertiser friendly, and the bloggers themselves are working on experiments from tipjars to sponsorships. The ordinary voice is too interesting and too real to ignore, but how to sustain it, grow it and provide for it is a mystery so far.
Once upon a time, publishing (especially newspapers) had a really nifty model. They could serve the public interest and bring useful, educating and entertaining content to the general public by funding it with a simple combination of subscriptions, classifieds and advertising. They even got to the point where they felt comfortable not only giving the public what they wanted, but what the public needed.
Then, slowly for some (but very suddenly for publishers who boasts 150+ year runs) the money wandered off. The classifieds went to places like Craig's list, Match.com and Hotjobs. The web made readers feel that paying for content was unnecessary. Advertisers were already being seduced by TV's rich and sexy messaging.
Knight-Ridder moved to San Jose, in hopes of scenting which way the wind would blow from next; New York Times took a page from Innovator's Dilemma and spun out a digital company to take advantage of the new medium. But still they struggle to hold their place. Kids today just don't like blackened fingers...
The platform is still slipping. Content creation, in particular, is in danger. Sites like Digg, blogs, metafilter and others make their name by pointing at other's work, and adding in the bias of choice (mock the right, jeer the left.) Will the web soon be a series of links pointing to links, half-baked ponderings and opinionated garbage like what you are enjoying now?
I'm surprised how often I see the word "versus" in email. Photoshop vs. illustrator, personas vs. ethnography, email address vs. username, and blogtools vs. CMS. When I was a freshman in art school, I learned a useful word: dichotomy. It was years later I learned phrase "false dichotomy" and I'm wondering how many people have yet to learn it. In particular, I'm thinking of those working in new media/participatory media/social media.
I keep reading how blogs will make traditional publishing irrelevant. I also read how traditional publishing already provides a reliability and consistency that will show blogs to be merely a fad; the geocities of our time. And just over a year ago (I know because my domain registration notice just came) I sat down with friend Lars and added the word false to that particular dichotomy by thinking up PublicSquare.
A dichotomy is defined as "a division into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities."
1. Almost everybody talks about blogs and big media (usually thinking about New York Times or Fox news, depending on who has annoyed you most recently). But publishing is currently taking the form of a continuum, from blogs to big media, with wikis, jotspot, writerly, writeboards, scoop and many others filling in the space between one maverick vomiting up ideas to a group refining raw facts into something palatable.
2. Mutually exclusive: Bloggers are adding editors, Om Malik for example, and newspapers are adding-- nay, forcing-- reporters to blog. Drupal has blog modules and articles modules and the difference is slight.
3. Contradictory. um. yeah. How contradictory are these two writing forms? When I was looking at them recently, they both depended on one thing for success: a person who can consistently write, and write well. Of course someone who writes every day, but only on their cat's antics and their hair challenges is an aspect of the blog, but is this person really making Arthur Schultzberger tremble in his shoes? A journalist and a (successful) blogger are much of a muchness, except one gets fact checked and edited.
Where revolution is truly happening in my opinion is in the birth of collaborative publishing tools that enable new behaviors in writing, often children of the wiki family. Where blogger and other blog platforms were simply (though certainly impactfully) ways to make writing significantly easier, and came form a long line of tools form the printing press to the electric typewriter to microsoft word. They are all technology to get technology out of the way.
But wikis, writerboard, slashdot and scoop are all trying to get groups to be smart together, to write together and they give birth to a new kind of writing *and* giving voice to one-hit-wonders of authorship.
More on this coming soon... .