-
Kevin: Colleague Neil McIntosh has a killer quote about journalism: “I struggle to think of another industry that views its premium product as something akin to a nasty cough syrup – necessary, good for your health, but irredeemably foul-tasting.”
Author Archives: Kevin Anderson
Is Google hijacking newspaper website traffic with new search?
From the Twittersphere, Robert Andrews pointed me in the direction of this post by Martin Belam, Google hijacks traffic from newspaper site search. Martin as always makes some good arguments on why this might be a threat to newspapers.
Whilst Google has dressed this up as being for the benefit of users, it does have some significant implications for the newspapers involved, and has the potential to dent their revenue. … By allowing people to do site searches whilst still on google.co.uk, Google is potentially reducing the number of page, and therefore advert, impressions that these newspapers may be getting. In fact, not only that, but Google is effectively hijacking the advertising that can be displayed by newspapers against search queries on their own site.
I agree that this might negatively impact newspapers’ revenue both in terms of display adverts and also when the newspapers themselves (including the folks that pay my wage, the Guardian) insert text adverts alongside their search results.
Where I might disagree is Martin’s argument that it negatively impacts user experience. He says that Google’s position is that they can provide search better than the news sites. Well, the sad truth is that whether it’s information architecture or search, most news organisations have been very slow to improve these parts of their services. Some news and media organisations have forced their users to use Google because their own search is unusable. They still are making the unmissable, unfindable.
I also see a number of newspapers forcing their users to follow a print paradigm that their drive-by readers may not be familar with. I guess it’s useful for newspapers to allow people to filter their knowledge based on authors, section and branding. It’s useful for those people who are familiar with those things, but increasingly, I believe that many people coming to a site from some random link on the internet aren’t familiar with those things and wouldn’t find that type of filtering useful and may find site architecture based on those considerations baffling. It’s sad that in 2008, we’re still building news sites for us and not our audiences. News editors can’t see the forest from the dead trees and build sites based on their print reading behaviours and their intimate knowledge of their desk structure instead of information needs of their audiences. When you look at online audiences for national or international titles, the great majority are not going to have any familiarity with your print product. Using print product paradigms as a basis for site architecture is a mistake.
Hey maybe I’m an edge case. Or maybe not. (Go to about 2:35 in the discussion of The State of the News Media 2008 by On the Media.) I only read physical newspapers when I fly. I rarely buy newspapers, and my news consumption is a lot more promiscuous. I don’t believe that any news source provides me with the complete picture so I fill in the blanks on my own.
links for 2008-03-31
- Kevin: It’s time for news organisations to move more boldly. “By moving far faster than conventional media are moving now, accelerating into a space-race urgency to revolutionize their content and business.”
- (tags: journalism change urgency)
The world according to newspapers
Note from the creator of these maps: Colours indicate the same thing. However, a country can appear in red if it’s in the top 10% but still shrink, as the top 3 countries concentrate most of all media attention. Note from me: Clicking on those buttons launches hi-res images in their own windows.
As an American who now lives in London, but has worked for British media for just shy of 10 years, I have more than a passing interest in how the world sees the US and how my fellow Americans see (or fail to take much notice of) the rest of the world. After moving to London three years ago, things that I thought were particularly American characteristics I now see as part of human nature. I thought it was a particularly American problem, and particularly a problem of American media, to look inward. But all countries and the media that serve them do this to a certain extent.
We all see the world through our own cultural lenses. We all understand the world through our own place in it, centered in the culture we most identify with. That cultural centre might be a place, a country or a group of people. For instance, I see the world through the cultural lens of the global geek collective I feel a part of.
This visualisation was posted on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog and was cross-posted from L’Observatoire des Médias by Nicolas Kayser-Bril. I found one of Nicolas’ comments on the Online Journalism Blog really interesting:
The model I’ve used shows that a country is less covered as it’s further away from London. Each 100km lead to a country’s getting 1.9 less articles per year in the Daily Mail, 2.3 in the Guardian (provided you take S Africa, ANZ out of the sample, they skew the data).
The publication most global in its coverage was The Economist. Their readers are often global citizens, moving from country to country with multi-national companies or for various branches of the United Nations. They need a quick overview of our increasingly globalised world.
I lived in Washington DC for more than seven years, and I’ve lived in London just shy of three years now. Capitals sit in a position above their countries and, relative to the power of the country, also above the rest of the world. It’s a privileged and often myopic view. It’s global in the sense that all roads lead to Rome. The media centered there cast their gaze around the world from this vantage point, and their gaze never falls far from their perch. However, it’s not just Africa that gets ignored but also less fashionable parts of their own countries.
Technorati Tags: global, London, media, Washington
links for 2008-03-24
-
Kevin: This post is correct that traditional media should be all over ‘social media’ but aren’t. However, I think that registration is only part of the problem. Traditional media also don’t understand the conversational nature of social media.
links for 2008-03-19
-
Kevin: Jay Rosen says, ‘According to Wolf Blitzer’s instant analysis, Obama’s speech boils down to a “pre-emptive strike” against attacks still to come. In fact it was a speech aimed right at him and other makers of political television.’
Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody at RSA
This is a paraphrase of Clay’s talk at the Royal Society of Arts.
Clay Shirky, here comes everybody: the power of organising without organisations.
It was chaired by Nico Macdonald, a principal of Spy.
You can find a biography of Clay a shirky.com and wikipedia, Clay interjects. “Wikipedia has done a better job,” he said.
We have reached an age when this stuff is technologically boring enough to be socially interesting.
It’s not about gee-whiz adoption that we can do x. The book in one bullet point:
Group action just got a lot easier.
HSBC last year decided a great way to recruit new students is with interest-free overdrafts. Accountants called them back said it wasn’t such a good idea. HSBC counted on switching is hard, and however mad the individuals are, there will not be any kind of serious response.
They hadn’t counted on Facebook. To HSBC’s horror, thousands of people joined. Out of no financial information, the students began sharing information. They wrote up incredibly detailed instructions. If you want to switch to Barclay, here is how to do it.
This got the attention of the newspapers. The organisaitonal advantage that HSBC had is now ended. The students co-ordinated a real world protest.
HSBC: We didn’t know you would be upset. Obvioiusly, we’re a customer service agency.
This didn’t happen because the customers were upset. This happened that customers were upset and they were co-ordinated. They could talk to each other. They recruited the students when they were at school and changed the terms in July when they are dispersed. They knew exactly what they were doing. This would have worked in 2005.
Increasingly, publishing is for acting. Once you put people in touch with each other, you create social value on top of that media value. Now customers have ability to leverage high organisation.
Everyone remembers flashmobs. It was the pole sitting of 2003. Toronto pillow fight. New York, go to Central Park, and join together and all make pigeon noises. Bill, the creator of flashmobs, was making a critique of hipster culture.
In 2006, a developer created a page on Live Journal in Belarus. Let’s all go to central square and eat ice cream. But black clad security appeared and grabbed them. It was illegal to carry out group action in October Square. They hit on flash mob as way to co-ordinate despite the govenment-stated goal of preventing this from happening. This is media leading to collective action. They didn’t just bring ice cream. They also brought their cameras. They documented.
Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream
In high-freedom environments, these things are deployed for frivollous reasons. Time-wasting. Twitter, this is mainly banal. Egyptian activisits experimented with Twitter to pass along information on who was in custody. Tools, (such as) flash-mobs as a hipster thing have a very differet flavour in Belarus.
One of most frustrating things about publishing, you deliver manuscript and it takes the company six months to hit print. There are s many stories he wanted to include. His last example was such a story. In Palermo in 2004, stuck up stickers that said (rough paraphrase) ‘an entire people who pay money to the mafia (pizzo) is a people without dignity’. People say what else can we do. The problem here isn’t just the mafia is pulling money out of the Palermo economy. Everyone knew that. The problem was the difficulty and danger in opposing the mafia.
They allowed business to stand up together. If you were a single business people standing up, it would be dangerous. When entire group stands up, then harder to target. Much better chance to stand up if they do it as a group. The people are really suffered. If you only want to patronise businesses, customers can anonymously check on businesses not doing business with mafia via a website. They took businesses and average people leverage against the mafia.
Small well organised core versus a large dispered population. The batttle before this has been very unequal. We’re at the beginning of experimenting with the imbalance of power. The ability to share with others is remaking the world. We know this. Collective action where the fate of the group affects the individuals as a whole.
This effort forms the experimental wing of political philosophy.
Is large action best taken on by the state? Communism is the extreme answer to that question. Is it best taken by individual action? Libertarianism is the extreme answer to that question. What is the best instituion? The answer is not instituion but platform. If people can co-ordinate themselves, then people can organise themselves.
Media is moving from a source of information to a site of action. In US Constitution, freedom of speech and freedom of gathering are separate freedoms.
All of these developments are not entirely good. This is not a revolution that will lead us entirely well off.
I used to be a cyber-utopian. I remember the moment I stopped thinking about that. A student of his came and talked to me. She was the community manger of YM, and she was managing the online bulletin boards. Shut down health and beauty boards. We couldn’t get pro-anorexic girls to shut up. If you find yourself feeling hungry, clean up. They shut down their boards, and the girls moved elsewhere.
This isn’t a side effect. This is the internet. This is a case where it’s not an improvement to society, it’s also a challenge. We will have new negatives as well as new positives. The internet lowers the cost of failure. We can fail more and learn more. How can we pull out the good stuff and learn to react to the bad stuff?
Nico: What are the historical parallels?
Clay: All of these examples, it is being used by people who want to stop happening as opposed to people who want new things to happen. The places where real social scale things happening are often short-term, ad hoc and single issue. Anyone who has been in a consumer society can feel this anger bubbling up when we’re given a chance to respond. This is a light-weight structure for people to decide that they want to be identified as a group.
Creative Commons dismantle the goals of copyright by using the tools of copyright. We need to do this with respect to corporations. If we allow people to come together in socially more stable ways that don’t require institutional models, then we’ll see longer term social engagement. We can get past the protest phase.
Nico: Are we trying to re-define political problems in terms of this social and IT tools?
Clay: I do agree with premise. When you find anything that works well, you want to apply it to everything. That is what our way of trying out things.
Sourceforge. 75% of these projects are failures. Zero downloads. Success for most of the rest modest. Then far end, millions of downloads. This is the open source model.
You sprinkle failure on everything and see what works.
Wikitorial and LATimes. Editorial product of individual voice. You need to make sure that failure is public. Open source is very easy to see what doesn’t work. The paper doesn’t cover failure well.
Failure can be a benefit as long as we can all learn from them.
Anytime you lower the cost of doing something, you lower the cost of trying something and lowers the cost of the number of meetings you need to have. In a world where you don’t have to get permission of anyone to try new stuff.
Nico: Campaign is now Zucker-mail where in my day stood on a corner with CND badge and argued with people.
Question from audience: Facebook and HSBC, there are a lot of different tools. What are the next big tools?
Clay: Email. Boring-est answer. The thing to bet on. It’s not a revolution not when behaviour adopts new tools but new behaviors. It’s not about novelty but ubiquity. If you are looking for social scale change, it’s adoption.
What is going on in Flickr is crazy because now your mom is using it.
Dan McQuillan : Wael Abbas shut down account. Commercial inerest of current platforms. (Notes from me: The human rights activism community responded to this quite strongly, and YouTube restored his account. But he had to re-upload the videos.)
Clay: Certainly, worst collision, Yahoo betraying Chinese dissidents. French sued for selling Nazi memorabilia. Yahoo said it was a US company, but when Chinese gov’t came, they said we’re a Chinese company.
Berkman (Center for Internet and Society at Harvard) has done work on how to go to non-commercial platforms.
Roland from NESTA: Is pain in change and opportunity greatest in public or private space?
Clay: That’s such an interesting quesiton. You can see advantages of each. Public is already operating on subsidy model. Gov’ts and NGOs have historically defended themselves from public and constituents.
One of advantages of customer. Inaction. If stop going to store, the store cares. But if you stop voting, then the state doesn’t mind so much.
Native advantage is how public sector has taken to defend itself from the public.
Pat Kane: How is different from socialist philosophy? Leisure time facilitate this??
Clay: It’s about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Lots of these things are at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The social goal is to increase the amount of time people have to give over to things they care about.
Digital divide has focused on wires. But biggest part of digital divide is permission for participation. Give people a sense of permission to participate (actually a reason to participate).
Another question from a person at RSA: As users become more sophisticated, what does it take for critical mass on virtual platform?
Clay: Back when I was a cyber-utopian and thought we’d all be float-y video heads in a video world in the 1990s, all friends were virtual friends because there were so few people on internet. Now, I realise the big reward of online relationships is real world meet ups.
Travel and communication are complements. If you want to support a virtual institution, have a real world meetup. IT guys asked what social tools they could deploy to get people talking: Plane tickets and beer. Start by catalysing groups. It will fertilise virtual collaboration.
Another question from a guy working on reputation mgmt system (Clay says growth industry). He set up a blog to complain about his botched kitchen install and got thousands of pounds in a refund, he says to the cheers in the audience. Are we in a world where everyone is single issue driven?
Clay: Single issue leverage. People are fantastically good at committing identity to groups. At high school, it became a group when you gave a name. It’s like with a girlfriend when you talk about relationship as if third person. Some structural need to support that kind of density and social leverage. Don’t think get out of special interest an single-issue motivation. Bring as many groups into conversation as possible and you will see larger and longer lived groups. interesting to see if see consumer group rising out of the HSBC student Facebook group.
Some of this is time and new institutional frameworks that reward long-term commitment.
Question from audience: Social exclusion. To the few much has been given. (Basically, it was a question on whether and how these tools can be used to counter social exclusion.)
JP who works for BT and writes the blog Confused of Calcutta : I was thinking about a mash up between what you are saying and what Kevin Kelly said in his answer to the Edge question: What have you changed your mind about? If you kept cost of repair as low as cost of dev then you avoid tragedy of commons. Wikipedia. Cost of repair to damage low. Before cost to repair high, Cost to damage low.
Clay: Tragedy of commons, sheep on commons. Everyone motivated to feed their sheep as much grass as possible and it destroyed the commons.
Openness creates value. Value creates incentive. Incentive has nothing to do with value. That encourages spammers.
Social software is the stuff that get spammed.
Bottom up is never enough in the long haul. Eventually, you run into the governance problem. You immediately run into the problem, who gets to guard the guardians. The tools are good enough that we’re not running into problems of technology but age old problems. Such as: Who guards the guardians?
You have to deal with constitutional crises. Almost no one is good at designing for groups.
Social exclusion question. That is the most depressing thread of social research. Duncan Watts and Robert Putnam are finding that social density gives access to social capital. It has so much to do with like-to-like cluster. Only a handful of individuals who bridge those gaps. If I address social exclusion, I wouldn’t address the bulk of groups. I would find people who are bridging. I would find people who know people who ive in council housing but also know someone who lives in Belgravia.
Every social system has imbalance in use of tools. Find natural bridges and strengthen them rather than building new bridges.
links for 2008-03-18
-
Kevin: Ewan McIntosh says that if you’re designing new kit or a new web service: ‘It’s vital that you have an audience in mind, an understanding of what might be possible, and the ability to change your plans frequently without sacrificing the integrity o
-
Kevin: PEJ’s State of the News Media 08: “The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.”
links for 2008-03-15
-
Kevin: Guardian’s Jemima Kiss talks community at SXSW: Ben Brown “But if there’s not a host of the party, then there’s no party. Someone has to be initiating stuff and moderating.”
links for 2008-03-14
-
Kevin: ReadWriteWeb provides the master list for visualation tools. Essential either for representing data or for exploring large sets of data.
-
Kevin: From the Media08 conference last week, George Eby Mathew realises how the newsroom has changed forever. “The bloggers were faster in getting word out ..than traditional reports”
-
Kevin: I missed Richard McManus’ presentation at Media08. Mr ReadWriteWeb gave a great overview of trends: What’s Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond.