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Software defined radio lets radios be all things to all technologies. A GPS unit that could reconfigure itself to use the latest technology, or a GSM phone that could transition itself into a CDMA phone.
Author Archives: Kevin Anderson
links for 2006-12-21
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Stop just trying all kinds of things, says online journalism prof Mindy McAdams. “What works on the Web? YouTube, Craigslist, MySpace, etc. Why? Because we get to do stuff. We can play. We can contribute.”
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New media “is changing the world because it is allowing truly egalitarian access to the media for the first time ever,” wrote Lance Duston for a newspaper in Maine. Not because of underlying technology that should be incorporated into newspapers.
links for 2006-12-19
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Suw: Clay Shirky takes a skeptical look at Second Life. But is SL doomed because the press love big numbers? No. If anything a smaller community if what it needs right now.
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Suw: It’s addictive. At first you wonder why anyone would use it, but then you do, and then you get addicted. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Shiny, shiny tools won’t save you from trolls
Last week, Meg Pickard, who works with community at AOL Europe, came round to have a chat. She talked about creating and managing communities. I was going to write about her comments because they were just so damn good, but like a lot of people, I’m currently digging out from a blizzard of holiday cheer and Christmas parties so am catching up with blogging.
There were so many gems in what she had to say, and I’ll highlight just a few:
- “Is this a community or just people who have something in common?” she said. Brilliant, I say. Your readers/viewers aren’t a community. Don’t throw blogs and social networking tools on your site and expect a ‘community’ to form. Your audience represents a lot of different communities – geographical, interest-based, activity-based, etc. But, just because they have your channel, newspaper, website in common, doesn’t make them a community.
- “Community is off-line as well as online,” she added. Websites who don’t use off-line events to bolster their online communities are missing a trick.
- “Good communities need participation by users and by YOU,” Meg said. Too many news sites are looking to community as a silver-bullet technical solution. They seem to think they just need to add some blogs and bingo the next BoingBoing or add some social networking tools and they are on their way to becoming the next MySpace. No, the biggest change is getting out there on your own websites and mixing it up a bit.
- Moderation is a big issue. “But who is moderating it? Do you let your users moderate each other?” she said. Do you give them voting tools like Digg? Do you let them hide things they don’t want to see? She said that moderation rules should focus on making the sure the comments, photos and video are ‘safe and appropriate and not whether they are ‘good’ and on topic’.
It was a great presentation from a digital native who not only looks at these spaces with the eye of a trained anthropologist but also from someone who lives in these online communities with her Flickr groups, Last.Fm stream and her own online projects.
But let me just touch on that last point: Moderation. It’s often one of the overlooked issues with community. My second online news job, 10 years ago, was with Newhouse Newspapers’ Michigan Live, and part of my job, as with all of the online journalists on staff, was policing our forums when our ‘fuck filters’ failed. Community was never a build it and they will come proposition. I have had to build up a few online communities, and it takes work. And once they have a critical mass, they can still be overwhelmed by trolls.
When I first joined the Guardian, someone on Comment is Free said that by trolls I only meant someone who I didn’t agree with. No, that’s not a troll. Trolls are folks who delight in breaking things. The BBC calls them WUM – wind-up merchants. But they can wreak havoc in online spaces, and the answers aren’t simple and they aren’t wholly technical. Looking through my RSS feeds, I noticed the most recent example of an news site that has succumb to trolling: The Arizona Daily Star, with an explanation from Executive Editor Bobbie Jo Buel on why the site had to delete comments. Ryan Sholin has a great write-up, and I’ll quote liberally from his second of three points:
…that is a damn fine commenting system they’re running over there: It’s got the Digg-ish thumbs up/thumbs down function I’ve been wanting to see. It’s got the Slashdot-esque threshold I agitated for a long time ago. The paper has a clean, well-designed registration page, and users must be registered to post or rate comments. I want this commenting system. Seriously. What sort of CMS are you guys running and is the commenting system built into it, or is it an add on?
I agree. The Daily Star has gone further than most newspapers in building a commenting system with a lot more intelligence than standard forums or blog software. (And like Ryan, I’m curious as to what software you’re using, feel free to e-mail me as well.) UPDATE: I just found out that the software is Bakomatic from Participata.
And as for the staff and managers at the Daily Star, don’t worry. You’re not alone in having an outbreak of trolls. It happens to everyone. I hope you don’t pull down your comment feature. You’ve put a lot of work and thought into it. Good luck, and a little unsolicited advice:
- Get some community managers in there.
- Don’t run one-half of a Skinner box. Don’t just poke the commenters with cattle prods when they misbehave, also give them some cheese when they are good neighbours in your community.
- See Meg’s comment above. The community needs participation from users and from you and your staff. Join with your users in making it your (you and your commenters’) community.
When people ask me how blogs are different from forums, I say, “The blogger sets the tone”. I sort of joke when doing blog training for journalists that if you write a post like a pompous ass, people will respond accordingly. I’m only half joking. Yes, the technology will help you manage the comments and help foster the community, but unless you look at your content as well, you’re going to be fighting a losing battle against the trolls.
Technorati Tags: community, journalism, moderation, trolls
links for 2006-12-16
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That’s hardly surpising, but the study says “The most popular category of user-generated content is phone-to-phone photo messaging”. Is sending a MMS social media? Or rather is messaging social media?
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Davy Sims notes a 2006 Mediascope study that shows that “social networking via VoIP, IM and online forums will continue to drive internet growth as the medium becomes a more ingrained part of the consumer’s lifestyle.”
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Gartner Research says: “Community involvement varies, with fewer than 2% of all Internet users acting as frequent contributors, between 10% and 15% contributing occasionally and more than 50% lurking, reading or watching what the communities are discussin
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Chris Vallance riffs on my post ‘Feed the Geeks’ and goes on to say that we all are geeks of one kind or another, with ‘genuine enthusiasm and passion about a subject’.
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A look at some of the licencing and monetisation services out there for blog content.
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MIT has developed a system that would allow people to locate anyone in the 20,000 member MIT ‘community’ to find each other on campus. Engadget called a ‘stalker app’. Reuters called it ‘social networking in the real world’.
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Peter Kann – a Pulitzer-winning journalist, is chairman of Dow Jones – writes how the press needs some mending in the Wall Street Journal. Pessism, sensationalism, lack of context are just a few problems that need fixing.
links for 2006-12-15
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Greensboro News & Record editor John Robinson gives his wish list for 2007. I hear ya John. I’d like more participation, better delivery by our technology and more experimentation.
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“Describing the posts simplistically, Anderson wants to not only show readers what’s behind the curtain at Wired, but let them help control the wizard.”
links for 2006-12-14
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Paul Gillin says that ‘near-total collapse of the American newspaper industry as we know it is inevitable’. The business model is broken and the one that replaces it – ‘the emerging economics of the blogosphere’ – are ‘far more cost-efficient.
Feed the Geeks
Last week, my good friend Chris Vallance was asked in a radio interview: “What is a geek?” After the interview, he asked me how I would have answered. I thought about it for a while.
A geek is someone who talks about technology as much as most men talk about football.
I am the first to admit that I’m a geek, and I’m proud of it. I’m a geek about all my passions whether it’s food, wine, backpacking through the mountains or journalism. I revel in the minutiae of anything I’m interested in (but hopefully don’t bore to tears anyone who happens to talk to me about them). But almost everyone has their personal passions, some are just more socially acceptable.
Most mainstream media organisations are following mass media strategies when it comes to blogs. They are producing general interest news blogs in spades because journalists think that everyone is interested in news, and a very narrow definition of news at that. They are pushing large numbers to blog on mega-blog sites without understanding that blogging is personal publishing where blog readers develop strong ties to the blogger. In the age of social media, it’s good to remember that people develop relationships with people, not brands, organisations or ‘content’.
Not unsurprisingly, mass media organisations are still focusing on the mass. They are still focusing on the ‘rat’s ass of the long tail‘, as Mark Cuban calls it. Andy Kessler quotes Mark as saying in an e-mail exchange:
…in a long tail universe, the cost to crawl up the tailto the rat’s ass is more expensive than the production.
Andy Kessler, as part of a series of posts on Media 2.0, goes on to advise: “Go horizontal.” I couldn’t agree more. Feed the geeks, and by that I don’t mean just the people who are passionate about technology. Feed the foodies, the wine officianados, the travel buffs, the video gamers, the greenest thumb gardeners, the DIYers, you name it. A blog is an inexpensive, lightweight content management system that lowers the barriers to entry and speeds development. Blogging will allow media organisations to target niches that would be impossibly expensive in print. And a good blogger can connect directly with their audience in ways that print can’t and build a loyal community.
At a recent new media event I was lectured by the managing director of a major UK media company about blogging and told that my job was to bring eyeballs to advertisers. Memo to self: Avoid old media execs who have had too much to drink.
But it’s a mistake to think that blogs are about the old-fashioned concept of ‘sticky eyeballs’. There is a business model to blogging – if used strategically and not just as a technological solution to allow comments on traditionalcontent.
As Paul Gillin says in an article about the troubles facing the American newspaper industry, “This new medium (blogging) is far more cost-efficient than the ones it will replace.” Google’s AdSense tied search to ads so that people who were searching for something would find related ads. Niche blogs do the same thing. Someone coming to a wine blog is already interested in wine and wine-related products. Just as tech advertisers do better on BoingBoing than on general interest sites, wine advertisers will find a more interested interest on a wine blog than they would a general news and information site. It’s a sound advertising model, and there is a sound business model behind blogging.
Want proof? Under heading of: “It’s not just a hobby – some small sites are making big money. Here’s how to turn your passion into an online empire”, Paul Sloan and Paul Kaihla wrote in Business 2.0:
Denton won’t discuss financial details, but industry experts estimatethat Gawker Media will bring in as much as $3 million in revenue thisyear. Gawker Media’s average CPM is between $8 and $10; CPM rates onGoogle AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated atanywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks.
But media organisations won’t succeed in the age of blogging with a mass media strategy focused on bland, broad-based blogs where there is no ‘there’ there. Instead, news organisations can grow the business by targetting passionate niches in their audience. If you don’t, there are lots of passionate bloggers out there who will.
technorati tags:media, blogging, businessmodels, niche
links for 2006-12-13
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I’m so glad that I didn’t bother going to Loic’s conference this year. Looks like it was a bit of a disaster.
links for 2006-12-11
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It’s not user-generated content. It’s self-expression. Jon Pareles writes: “Terminology aside, this will be remembered as the year that the old-line media mogul, the online media titan and millions of individual Web users agreed: It demands attention.”
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A blogger who writes in French and English questions Technorati’s methodology and its view of the internet. Important questions here and some answers from Technorati.
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Simon McGarr and his fellow bloggers spend a weekend reading the papers in Dublin, comparing where each one gets its stories and the quality of the resulting paper. Pie charts illustrate just how little journalism is involved, and how reliant on PR the pa
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Simon McGarr and co’s opinions of their weekend newspaper reads, concentrated over one weekend
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Pretty shoddy-looking press release touting Edelman tool that seems itself to miss the point that social media is done by real humans, not a process that can be automated. Accusations of idea being nicked from SHIFT Comms in the comments.
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News sites need community. Community needs strategy. Rich Gordon has some excellent ideas.