Wordle test

I've never used the free wordle Web site before, it looks pretty neat. No login necessary.
It makes a text frequency map in an artistic way and shares it online. Cut and paste any text into the site and it analyzes each word, then displays a jumble of the words. The size of each word is relative to its frequency in your text. I just wish it had interactivity where the user could click on each buzzword in the Wordle and see the context of each instance of the word.

Rubicon Project - next gen ad placement

Another high tech company poised to eat newspapers' lunch - the Rubicon Project, talked about here by the LA Times.
By using this dot com's technology, clients get much more relevant ad placements on their web sites, better tied to the content on the sites.

The heart of it is here:

The firm specializes in an arcane technology called ad optimization, which addresses a major leak in the online rowboat: About three-quarters of ad inventory (places where ads could go on Web pages) goes unsold by publishers. To fill those spaces, publishers turn to ad networks, whose automated systems try to approximate the right kind of ad for the particular audience, based on the page content -- fishing-boat ads for "Field and Stream," for instance -- the viewer's geographic or demographic information, or his or her previous online behavior, what's called the click-stream. The more cogent and relevant the ads are to the user, the better the return on investment for the advertiser.

Rubicon does this ad optimization really well, and thus they're ranked the 3rd largest advertising company in the world in terms of reach, behind only Google and Yahoo!, according to this story.

The best thing papers can do, perhaps, is index their content as best as possible to let the machine intelligence of Rubicon Project, news aggregators, and other whizz-bang Internet companies associate the content with the audience that seeks it.

Layoffs through the eyes of a craftsman

Yesterday I posted a video on TimesDispatch.com about a man, Eric Flail, who was laid off from a local tech company called Qimonda recently. Now he has to move out of his house - a three-story commercial building in Petersburg that he's renovated by hand - and sell everything. He has a glass-half-full take on it though, which I thought was really interesting. After all, he's planning to move to Hawaii where his brother lives and work as a maintenance man for a resort/yoga retreat. So it could be worse I suppose.
It's also a chance to see how well this embedded link feature works from my company's web site.

Clay Shirky: 'You're gonna miss us when we're gone!' has never been much of a business model

Internet consultant Clay Shirky wrote a great summary of why newspapers are in this financial dilemma and can't dig their way out.

To quote directly:

"Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

He then goes to say that though newspapers serve a useful civic purpose, that of the governmental watchdog, that benefit won't prompt millions of people to step forward and subscribe, or be a sustainable business model.

"Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to District Attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. "


I agree with him. Newspapers long ago lost the opportunity to become the online news aggregators that Google, Yahoo, Newsvine, and myriad other sites have become. The fact that Google is serving ads on its Google News site, making money without paying the content creators it is displaying, shows that this distribution model could work. But as Shirky notes, the newspaper industry chose to build walls around its content rather than experiment with the brave new world of the Internet.

Here's what newspapers fail to acknowledge: the maxim "If you build it they will come" does not apply to the online world. They relaxed in their hegemony. They had a lock on the print medium. Buy a multimillion dollar printing plant, feed it dead trees all day, and create a spidery web of delivery routes - that's an expensive endeavor. Only a few folks in any media market could afford to set this up. It's why newspapers had enjoyed such high profit margins. But surprise surprise, the Internet comes around and lets anyone publish multimedia content - for zero cost in some cases - and destroyed the hegemony enjoyed by newspapers.

The newspapers execs needs to remember that they deal with two things: the creation of content (stories, photographs, graphics, etc) and the vehicle for delivering that content (the processed dead trees that arrives at your doorstep each day). When we say newspapers are dying, it's really the vehicle that's on the operating table. But the jobs that create the stories can - and must - survive. A bunch of journalists need to learn how to tell their stories in ways beyond text on a page. And then someone needs to figure a way to pay them sustainably. How? As Shirky says, nobody knows.

Seattle without a newspaper

NPR affiliate KPLU in Seattle has an article that nicely summarizes the quandary we're seeing in print media.
With the Post-Intelligencer on the brink of extinction, this article talks about the revenue model for the generic newspaper, subsizided heavily via advertising, and the fact it's unsustainable.

It makes the point that the legwork for the stories that matter (in a civic sense, the capital J journalism stuff) is done by reporters, sitting in council meetings, sifting through the back hallway chatter, following facts and sources over time, and bringing to light some story.

It notes that you can't just redirect the resources of the newsroom to the web site, because the web site doesn't make enough money for even 10 percent of the staffers as the legacy (dead tree) product.

Here's a quote from Seattle Times Director of Content Cory Haik on what people seek out online:
"Entertainment: tons of money," she says. "People click on those stories, those display ads are making money. Not so much necessarily for, say, something like the meat and potatoes like local news. People aren't necessarily that interested."

The article makes a point that journalists could do well as bloggers, investigating stories while sharing how the sausage is made during the reporting process, creating a transparent process that engages readers. That transparency and willingness to bring joe public into the action, are crucial ingredients of success.

I always thought news outlets would do well by partnering with local public schools, and I don't just mean giving them free newspapers. By engaging people when they're young, you hook them. You have to get people interested and involved in local politics, state politics, everything. Creating an attentive audience would do more for readership than paying them to read or watch.

Targeted content within websites and LinkedIn

After passing it off for the longest time, last week I made a profile on LinkedIn, the social networking site for professional networking.

On Linked In, I went to a group that I'm a member of, the Online News Association, and I followed a story link to a story page on the New York Times about AOL reformulating itself after realizing that being a dial-up portal wasn't going to cut it in the 21st century. I noticed that the right-hand content rail displayed a list of NYTimes stories tailored to my industry (media), and it said, "Powered by LinkedIn."

Pretty interesting. It's standard that those content areas (we call 'em content wells at the Times-Dispatch) dynamically call up related stories to the one you're reading in an effort to keep readers on the site and increase interaction and page views. But I haven't seen one that targets user demographics quite like this before.

The Times grabs a cookie that LinkedIn stored on my computer that lists my industry and job function. Then it displays an RSS feed linked to a category that the Times associated with my industry and job.

Here's a pretty page with the partnership outlined:


The FAQ says no personally identifiable info is transmitted or given to the Times, but who knows? They do allow you to opt out.

I don't know how long this feature has been active, but it's pretty interesting. Lots of issues here, like privacy, targeted advertising, and site stickiness.

You gotta hand it to the Times, though, for experimenting with new partnerships to make their sites more user-friendly and rich.

Hyperlocal websites - what newspapers should become?

Lost Remote, a TV-centric blog on new media, lists several hyperlocal web sites in New Jersey and Washington.
These hyperlocal sites (generally speaking) are the next-generation portal sites. Portal sites, as far as I can remember, were jumping-off points across the Internet with all the news and info you'd want all in one convenient place. AOL had one, Yahoo does, Google does, heck every newspaper in the U.S. has one.

It goes without saying that they don't really work. How could you possibly include everything every user wants? How much of it needs to be human-compiled versus aggregated by machine?

Google comes closest, IMHO, with its customizable homepage. Mine has news feeds from queries like "Richmond, VA."

Anyway, the hyperlocal web site hopes to gain readers and repeat visitors by offering info on specific communities or even city blocks. Local crime, local civic events, local sports, local restaurant reviews, local things to do, local weather, you get the idea. Content is submitted by Joe Sixpack in Internetland, and could be anything from a yard sale to a fundraiser to baby pictures. User interaction and feedback, in the form of "votes" on each story or item, comments, and posts, is ubiquitous.

The New York Times has started several of these, called The Local.
In contrast to some other sites, the Times has deployed actual reporters from its staff to add content, which you might assume boosts the quality of the reporting. (Assuming that even matters anymore)

How do these sites make money? Maybe they don't, but advertising from local businesses would make sense. My question is: how do you offer quality info without paying people for it? I've seen lots of sites where the entries or "stories" are basically PR pieces, self-advertisements. If you're encouraging user submission of content, but not giving people money for what they do, what incentive would they have to give it to you? How does the viewership grow?

Perhaps the delivery vehicle needs improvement. A lot of this hyperlocal stuff would be better on a mobile platform. I can see a good use for whipping out an iPhone and using an app to find restaurants near where I'm standing, with impartial reviews, and patron comments. It's so useful.

But that service is not a hyperlocal web site, it's a service that might tie into a hyperlocal site's database. I don't know how to make a hyperlocal site work right, but there's a good chance they do a better job at localizing things, or at least presenting them in a more accessible way, than the newspaper.

Free training

Amy Webb, a journalist-turned-consultant who's got a very tuned eye towards the future, just announced she's offering a free training session for journalists. It's designed for people who've been laid off, to help them get realigned to a changing job market, but I might do it anyway. I went to a session she ran at the Online News Association 2008 convention, it was really eye-opening.
It's at 3pm eastern online and by phone.

There's also a ONA-sponsored webinar on data visualization that I'm going to watch for sure, at 2pm same day. That's 30 bucks if you're a Joe Sixpack but free if you're an ONA member. I can't remember if I've paid dues this year yet. Days when the office pays for professional memberships are long over, I'm afraid.

Sustainable online media outlet?

I'm gonna have to keep an eye on minnpost.com
They're a small nonprofit online media outlet, and the friendly competition at the Minneapolis News says minnpost ain't doing so hot. But heck, in this economy who is?
Minnpost's top leadership hail from newspapers, so I think their guiding philosophy might be a little too dead-tree-centric. I don't know where they got the idea for the masthead but that color scheme and banner is pretty ugly. The stories seem of typical newspaper-length. That means, probably too long for the web. And the multimedia isn't presented as strongly as I'd like to see for a web-only outlet.

But that's only from a cursory glance in one sitting. I haven't compared coverage from minnpost.com to the Star-Tribune, (which declared Chapter 11 in January), the Pioneer Press, and other news outlets that folks may get their news and info from, but I'm wondering:

-What sets Minnpost's content apart from the rest? What is it's style? For it's own sake, I hope the reason isn't that it's the only nonprofit purely-online periodical in the area.

-How do online visitors interact with Minnpost.com? How long do they stay on the site? How many times a day do they visit? Do they use the RSS feeds? How lively are the discussion boards under the stories? In short, why would people use minnpost.com at all?


These questions, I think, any online news outlet would have to answer profoundly well in order to survive among the shouting masses of online content. (I'm not saying minnpost can't answer these questions well, I just don't know the geographic area and the web site yet)

Also interesting is this article's summary of minnpost's financials. The top boss says of his $1.35 million budget this year, he projects to pull in about 25% of it, or about $300k, in advertising. From the story: "We've been averaging more than $16 per 1,000 impressions, and I believe that is quite high in the market," [founder Joel] Kramer says.

I honestly don't know how well that $16 per 1,000 impressions stacks up, so I'll be looking for stats from other operations to compare.

The rest of the moolah is a combination of grant money and, since it's a nonprofit shop, donations from viewers like you. Donations make up about 38 % of the budget.

And Kramer notes the strategy that increased the site's web traffic the most: "Having interesting, lively content with a lot of frequency by the same writers, that's really what's made the most difference."

Hmmm, sounds like, oh, I don' t know, a BLOG. That's not meant to be a criticism at all. It's just a validation of the blog format as a vehicle for news delivery.

Let's see (and hope) that this nonprofit news outlet can find its stride and prove that its revenue model can work, and possibly even be cloned elsewhere.

E-paper on the horizon

This interesting article from Fortune goes into the e-paper possibilities for publishers. Tech makers are on the horizon with products that look like a thin sheet of plastic, but are flexible and display images and text on them. The Amazon Kindle is one example, but it's not flexible. Once the technology is ironed out, and the cost to buy an e-ink reading device is palatable to consumers (Fortune says $200 is the magic number), publishers may jump on board and license out their content for distribution. But author Michael Copeland writes:
"No one yet has figured out the perfect business model. Under one scenario publishers would license their content to an e-reader seller, such as Plastic Logic or Amazon, or to a wireless provider like AT&T (T, Fortune 500) or Verizon Wireless (VZ, Fortune 500). These companies would sell and manage the wireless e-readers and offer customers bundles of content the way a cable company does. You could buy subscriptions to individual magazines and newspapers or bundles of content on entertainment, sports, or business - or both. "

He continues:
"When the next generation of e-readers first hit the market, they will cost as much as $800. Will a customer be willing to buy a device that could download only the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and other News Corp. properties? Probably not. That means any print publisher that gets into the e-reader distribution game will have to offer an open system in which you can download any magazine or newspaper. A publisher that wants to control distribution will need to sign licenses with competitors that in all likelihood would rather be offering their own e-reader catalogs. Prepare for a battle royal."


If the question is: how do I make money distributing my content to an e-ink reader?
My answer is: you won't, not without creating an alliance between all content providers in existence.

The information you 're offering would have to be so locked into the medium's format that consumers could only get it through you. That's not true with anything online. Text is free. Photos are free. Video is free. Info is free. With rare exceptions like Consumer Reports, no one is charging the end user for receiving content online.

So e-ink won't compete with the paper, it competes with the Internet as a whole, and a content delivery vehicle called the computer. Locking your content so a reader needs to subscribe to your Kindle-like device means nothing if people can also get it on a computer or iPhone.

So the differences between e-ink readers and next-generation computers will shrink too. The next computer may have a touch-sensitive e-ink membrane keyboard, a flexible e-ink screen, built-in Internet connectivity, speakers, a webcam, and USB ports. In short, the computer will kill the e-ink reader.

Uncloaking now

In my first post on this blog ever, over three years ago, I said the point of doing this in the first place was to practice my writing and aggregate what George Carlin called brain droppings.

In that mindstate of November 2005, I also called the mere ownership of a blog presumptuous, and bluntly, a form of masturbation. The image I culled to mind then, as now, was of a jazz musician playing with his back to the audience, so swathed in his own brilliant improvisation that the only fair review would call the performance an act of musical masturbation.

But I digress. In 2005 I was not as wise to the direction the Web 2.0 winds were taking us. Sharing one's thoughts in a blog is really a way to connect ideas with those of other people, and forge links through cyberspace. Those links are the most important thing. They drive eyeballs to your web site and your ideas and observations, and more importantly weave an invisible yet omnipotent fabric throughout the millions of computers folded into the Internet.

If you think of any news story, any fact in that story, as a node or pinpoint, than each node can be connected to many others through details in the story. A followup story contains more nodes, referenced to the first ones, and so on, in a gigantic network. Linking data over time is one of the most basic things we can do as journalists. Heck, this is how historians make a living too. Google makes a shiny penny indexing content (nodes) throughout the Internet, and connecting the most relevant nodes to your search results page. It has algorithms that determine the importance of a given node by the number of connections it has and the importance of the connected nodes.

Now, after I hit the "PUBLISH POST" button on this blog entry, I will make this blog visible to Google and other search engines for the first time. Before, I didn't really care if anyone saw these words, so the blog was invisible online. You could find it if you typed in the URL, which I gave to friends, but that's about it. Now, as an experiment to myself, I'll see what happens as I take this thing public. To make this a true blog rather than an online repository of notes from my head.

Quite possibly nothing will happen. But maybe it'll spur me to blog more often, and add widgets to pimp this page out, and take a stab at some HTML and javascript snippets, and see where the brave new world of Internet publishing takes me.

Yahoo ads on target?

It's a shame that newspapers didn't see targeted advertising coming around the bend - why else are they partnering with Yahoo and letting Yahoo do it for them?

Clearly it's better to offer ads on websites based on the user's behavior and interests, rather than a shotgun-at-the-side-of-the-barn approach of whoever shells out the bucks gets a display ad on the homepage. But what if papers had pooled their resources years ago, created some online technology that was shared by the collective, that let them offer targeted advertising on their sites? I suppose it would have had to be flexible with whichever content management systems papers use, but if Yahoo is doing it, it is possible.

Yahoo clearly does search better than the online staffs at any paper, but that just means it's all the more important to have expertise in the search engine area. Why don't media companies have the ability to easily track users as they navigate their web sites, and show ads based on things they are more likely to click on or read or search for? Why do they need to outsource it to Yahoo?
We're old hands at selling advertising, even to targeted market segments, based on zip code or other demographic data. But apparently we're late on the bus as far as slicing and dicing demographic groups of online readers.

The larger issue, of course, is how do you make money online by offering news content? Perhaps one question is: what kind of news content would people actually pay for or advertisers line up in droves to be associated with? I think the type of news product that newspapers are used to doing, e.g. text-heavy stories of 200-1200 words, with some photographs and occasional graphics, is only somewhat valuable online. Shorter is better, it seems, and images, graphics and video content play better to the eye.

But that's really for another post. I need to find other stories about these Yahoo partnerships...