Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

12.07.06
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links for 2006-12-07

12.06.06
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Journalism.co.uk: Readers’ Revolution panel on MyMissourian

UPDATED: On Monday evening, I had to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to help me find Skempton Hall at Imperial College and managed to be only slightly more than fashionably late – good for a party but maybe not so good for a panellist for a discussion. The topic was the Readers’ Revolution, various ways in which media consumers have also become media producers.

Clyde Bentley of the University of Missouri – who I had the pleasure of meeting at Poynter’s Web+10 last year, talked about the hybrid web-to-print MyMissourian project. And Robin Hamman, a friend and former colleague at the BBC, was speaking about his Manchester blog project (I’ll post about Robin’s presentation tomorrow). I talked about what I call newsgathering in the age of social networks and also ways in which the Guardian is moving community and participation from the edge to the centre of our digital strategy.

Clyde was already speaking when I arrived. After giving an overview of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the Missouri Method, he talked about the media landscape that media organisation find themselves in. According to Netcraft, there are now 101,435,253 sites.

We’re fighting for attention.

Now, I hear media leaders say that this is why brand and quality are even more important in the age of the Attention Economy. I disagree. I think relevance trumps industry-defined measures of quality, but Clyde will touch on that.

Clyde may be a professor, but he understands the economics of media, which I think more journalism students need to get to grip with as they enter the job market (and it’s a tough market out there for new grads or even old hands). The most valuable voices in journalism today are passionate about journalism and realistic about the numbers.

Last month, I heard executives from the Washington Post and the New York Times talk about how they are focussed on growing their online businesses as quickly as possible to make up as revenue tails off from the print business. But the numbers, as they stand, are sobering. Online journalism is not enough to meet the shortfalls as newspaper
revenue falls. Clyde said:

The money isn’t there. Revenue is 5.41% , only about $1.9m for newspaper revenues online versus the print revenues. … Plot line of online revenue versus print
revenue doesn’t meet soon. We are not making enough money to turn off
the presses in my lifetime. We need an interim strategy.

UPDATE: I asked Clyde the source of those figures. Too many slides going by my sleep-addled brain at that point. The figures are from the Newspaper Association of America. It represents expenditures for online advertising in newspapers only. Clyde said: “Our initial research shows most of the overall online advertising is for messages that do not support editorial content — corporate sites, click-throughs from other commercial sites, free-standing ads, etc.” And there is not a major shift from print to online, yet. Clyde said that the shift was a bit more than 4% last year.

The citizen connection is about easy blogging and social networking. Clyde added: “Money is going online; it just isn’t going to support journalism.”

Initially, they drew a fiscal blank. How about a hybrid of citizen journalism and their own? “Web and print. Users with journalists. News and fun.”

MyMissourian.com was born. It is a site that anybody can participate in. It’s not hard news.

Inspiration came from OhMyNews, started by a radical leftist journalist. It has changed the face of Korea. Dean Mills, the dean of the prestigious school of journalism at the University of Missouri, recognised the potential and asked us to move quickly. MyMissourian.com was proposed in May 2004, and launched in October 2005.

It didn’t go over too well initially, Clyde said. Critics complained: “People are ripping you off. They are going to flood it with commercial messages.”

But they had done their research before launch. They wanted to give the voice to the voiceless, and allow non-journalists to set the agenda. And, they knew that they were going to make money.

They proposed to allow citizens to gather stuff online – photos and stories – and use that material in a print product to pay the bills.

All US newspapers have a TMC product, a total-market coverage product. With circulation dropping, they send TMC products free to non-subscribers. The vast majority, 88% of US newspapers, have a free product. Pre-print advertising, not classifieds, account for 25% of our revenue. But then there is driveway rot. Free-sheets sitting unread, rotting on the driveway. (Or tube-stop rot here in the UK with the blizzard of free newspapers.)

The print edition of MyMissourian launched in October 2005. It allowed them to use of the efficient advertising pattern of print. The print MyMissourian has Increased their readership by 28,000 households. They have 900 or writers who contribute to the site and, therefore, to the print edition. People are more interested in MyMissourian because they help create the site and the newspaper.

Is there a future for journalists? Yes, both professional and citizen journalists, but the job of professional journalists is changing, Clyde said. It is now more about guiding people to content and covering stories from a different way. Journalists should invite the public to the table.

Many editors are concerned about errors, credibility and libel. The arguments: How do you deal with issues of decency, commercialism, literacy and banality?

They looked for simple, logical solutions. As for banality, Clyde said, “Banality? Journalists are poor judgements of what or who is stupid.”

For the MyMissourian community, they laid down four simple rules:

  • No nudity
  • No profanity
  • No personal attacks
  • No attacks on the basis of race, religion, national origin or gender

The site meant the end of ‘no’ when it came to what they could cover. “We don’t say: ‘No won’t cover your event’, or ‘No, we can’t run your youth baseball story’,” he said.

The citizen journalists write about personal memories, faith of all kinds (“Journalists hate covering religion because it’s not matter of logic. It’s a matter of faith,” he said). We enlist senior photogs, older members of the community, and give them disposable cameras.

This is gut level journalism. Some people just want to share their recipe. They’re planning on releasing a cookbook just based on the recipes that people have shared.

You know what’s not popular? Politics. It’s less popular than Clyde and his colleagues had predicted. Religion
is far more popular than we predicted. And pictures of dogs, cats, even
rats trump most copy.

And the bottom line is that that it cost less than $1000 in new costs in a year and a half.

The cultural issues

Suw and I often say that the cultural issues are more challenging than the technical ones. And Clyde said that this has been hard on journalism students. “They want to write, not guide.”

Many of his students were at a loss at how to cover non-news topic like Little League. And I was fascinated when he said that few students are well prepared to work with the public. Journalists are basically shy people.

The lessons from their hybrid experiment:

  • Use citizen journalism to supplement not replace.
  • UGC isn’t free.
  • Online attracts the eager, but print serves the masses.
  • Give people what they want, when they want it and how they want it.
  • Get rid of preconceptions of what journalism is.
  • Every day people are better ‘journalists’ than you think.

Next, they want to integrate blogs with print.

It’s a very interesting model, and it’s the kind of creative, ‘hybrid’ thinking that is needed to reconnect journalism with readers, viewers and listeners. It reminds me of a talk I recently heard. We live in an ‘and’ world, not an ‘or’ world. Although I’m a strong advocate of online journalism, I recognise that strength lies in new combinations of the strengths of online and traditional media. Creative and organisational tensions will exist, but I’ve convinced it’s where the opportunities lie. The challenge is helping inspire the change.

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11.23.06
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PodCastConUK 2006: Podcasting and the Citizen Journalist

Neil McIntosh, Chris Vallance and Suw Charman sat on a panel last Saturday talking about citizen journalism and podcasting. Apart from knowing and liking everyone on the panel, I like how moderator John Buckley kept a tight lid on the prepared talks so that this was more of a conversation rather than the panel talking at the assembled podcasters.

Suw started off by burying the ‘us versus them’, journalists versus bloggers and podcasters old yarn. Suw and I are really tired about this false dichotomy. Instead, she tried to frame the question this way: “How can we support journalistic endeavours?”

She asked the audience: “Who here has never blogged a fact?” Only one hand went up in the back.

Chris added a great disclaimer saying that no one should ask him about BBC policy because in the BBC eco-system, “I am just above pond life.” Chris might be low in the BBC hierarchy, but he is doing some of the most forward-thinking work with citizen media anywhere in the BBC.

Chris and I helped launch the Pods and Blogs show on 5Live in April 2005, when I came to the UK to do some work on a blogging strategy for the BBC. I was in London, and Chris in LA. We worked together using e-mail, IM and Skype. He asked whether people would like to hear three pundits on the Iraq war or the voices of soldier-bloggers, Iraqi bloggers and others on the Iraq war, and said that that was where citizen journalism has an advantage over traditional radio – the opportunity for previously unheard voices to be able to tell their stories.

Chris said that podcasting had really opened his eyes to doing new things in radio. Knowing Chris, he’s both a great advocate for podcasting and new technology while also being a huge fan of traditional speech radio. He has seen how podcasting can open up a world of voices to improve traditional radio journalism. During the midterms, he put out a call for citizen journalists, and he
received not only text submissions for the blog but also audio clips,
one of which he played during the panel. He received the clip ahead of the US midterms from a podcaster that really demonstrated some of the divisions amongst US voters.

He rejected the ethos of crowdsourcing, saying that this isn’t about getting as much out of your audience as you can just to cut costs, but stressed that this was more about collaboration. Most of mainstream broadcasters are now frequently asking people what they think, but Chris said that this was only a small step. Podcasting allows a way for all these wonderful voices to be heard.

Chris stressed that this was a cultural shift for broadcasters more than anything and added that broadcasters needed to rethink their definition of news, making it more expansive than pundits and experts.

Neil, the head of editorial development at the Guardian, doesn’t really like the term citizen journalism, and he said that he felt a bit like an imposter being on the panel. He admitted that the Guardian news site is more interactive than Guardian podcasts. (That’s on my to do list when I get back from a couple of weeks of leave.) Neil said that citizen journalism was promoted by former journalists and academics who wanted to get on the conference circuit, and he said that while bloggers and podcasters pointed out things that journalism needed to do better, it was journalists’ responsibility to sort out these problems. He didn’t see citizen journalism as a solution to those problems.

The questions from the assembled podcasters began with one about fact-checking and the quality of information from citizen journalists, specifically about a rumour started by a podcaster that had been picked up by a tabloid. After a few questions from Neil, we found out the tabloid was The Sun, and that the podcaster in question was actually the guy who had asked the question. He made up a rumour about Doctor Who that a character was coming back.

Suw said that most media outlets are relying on a traditional paradigm of trust rooted in their brand. For instance, she said that the BBC rely on their brand, and say, “We are the BBC, and we have trust.” It’s led to arrogance, and it’s led to sloppiness like the podcaster described. She speaks to journalists in her role as executive director of the Open Rights Group, and after the article comes out, she sees her words quoted back to her incorrectly.

I would add that journalists worth their salt understand that they are only as good as their last story, and that credibility is something earned and all too easily lost these days. Over-reliance on trust in the brand of an organisation is an invitation to disaster. It can breed complacency amongst staff. Individual members of staff must understand that trust in the brand is everyone’s job.

As Suw often says: “Your brand won’t save you now.” And she questioned the question about fact-checking:

How can we progress citizen journalism when there is no fact-checking? …That’s the wrong question. How can we progress journalism and fact-checking?

Another question from the audience was about the changing relationship with the audience, a smart audience that can assess information in a very savvy way.

Neil said that it’s faintly depressing thing when you know a lot about an issue that you read an article that doesn’t quite get it right. And he said that even he has been misquoted in press trade publications.

Suw said that there are patches where the media has respect for their audience, but she said that many in the media treat their audience in the Points of View paradigm, a programme where Barry Took and then Ann Robinson would condescendingly read out letters from the audience, often attributed to Angry from Milton Keynes.

Many in the media believe that their audience is insane or only give feedback when they are pissed off. But that belief allows them to dismiss the views of their audience and keep the audience at arm’s length.

Chris said that comments and feedback have always been important to radio. He spoke to Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles about the difference between traditional feedback and what goes on with podcasts. Dave felt that it was one of power. In the past, the radio presenters always came from a position of power relative to their audience, now there is equality between podcasters that allows them to have a genuine conversation.

Culturally, Suw said that this was about niche content, and she called on a re-definition of news. News is not all about current events. She wishes that there was better hyperlocal content.

I’m spotting a trend here. Both Chris and Suw have called for a redefinition of news. Chris wants to bring in other voices. Suw thinks that news is more than current affairs. I remember shortly before I left the BBC, one of our presenters had contacted a blogger in Indonesia about a ‘news’ story. The blogger said that no one in Indonesia was talking about that story that had gripped the international media. Everyone in Indonesia was actually talking about some popular song.

I often joke that the only people who are generally interested in news
are journalists and maybe politicians. Most people have a range of
interests and personal passions.

I wonder, in this post-scarcity age with respect to information, why the agenda can sometimes still be so narrow? We can cover so much more, and work with our audience to expand the agenda. But as the amount of information increases, we also need to develop much better tools to help people find their way through this information.  

Back to PodcastConUK and another question from the audience: If you listen to the comments, do you focus too much on a vocal minority? That’s a good question. Participation models usually show that only a fraction of our audience currently participate, although that participation occurs on several levels.

The conversation ended on democratisation of media, based on a question from Ewan Spence. Ewan said that we were in a golden age, a renaissance, but as we emerge from the industrial age, but “we are fucking it up”, screwing up the planet through our shortsighted ecological mismanagement. Suw commented that the one thing that was different now to past renaissances was that now we have democratised media, this is a renaissance of the people, not simply a change in power from one elite to another. And that it was this democratisation that gives her hope that we might help turn the tide.

The key thing, I think, is the change in culture and the change in relationship between journalists, podcasters and the people formerly known as the audience: More voices, a broader agenda and more collaboration.

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11.15.06
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Exploding the blog myth

I really shouldn’t take the piss out of a British media icon, but in this case, it’s just too inviting.

Jeff Jarvis pointed out something in the Indy, in which they asked a bunch of British media heavyweights about the future of newspapers. Jeff pointed to Piers Morgan as someone who gets it and to the BBC’s John Humphrys, presenter of the Today programme, as someone who doesn’t. Jeff pulls out this quote from Mr Humphrys’ statement on why he thought it was preposterous to conceive of a society that functioned without newspapers:

And sooner or later we will explode the blog myth. The idea that you can click on to a few dozen blogs and find out what’s going on in the world is nonsense. It’s fun but that’s all it is. …

OK, let me explode the blog myth, not the myth that Mr Humphrys thinks will be uncovered but the myth that he and several others propagate about blogs:

  1. Myth number one: Most bloggers write about news.
    As my friend Say Na in Nepal points out: 37% of American bloggers want to write about their lives and experiences, compared to 11% who write about politics. She’s writing about a Pew Internet and American Life study. The report says:

    Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog.

    …most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

    The news media provides disproportionate coverage of political and news blogs because that’s what they are interested in. They cover news, not the intimate details of people’s lives.

  2. Myth number two: Bloggers just want to become journalists or pundits
    Again, as the study found out, most bloggers write for a small audience of their friends and family: “Most bloggers do not think of what they do as journalism.” They write for the pure love of self-expression, not for recognition or money. Mass media doesn’t really understand the motivation of most bloggers because they can’t understand publishing for a small audience for no money. (And in some ways, it’s one of the reasons why most mass media blogs suck. Most bloggers write about and are interested in their personal passions and interests, which is slightly anti-thetical to general interest publications like newspapers.)
  3. Myth number three: Blogging is all opinion
    This is such a common yarn, but unfortunately, this view itself turns out to be only uninformed opinion. First off, see myth one. Most people are just writing about their personal experiences. Of course it’s their opinions. That is totally the wrong yardstick with which to assess blogs.

    But more than that, it’s just flat out wrong. One of the blogs that I read when I want to know about what’s happening in the US Supreme Court is ScotusBlog, which is actually done by the Supreme Court practice of a law firm. It’s great niche coverage.

    Dr Jeffrey Lewis writes, along with a number of other experts, the very interesting Arms Control Wonk blog. NKZone is a great blog that provides some excellent coverage of North Korea including translations of North Korean defectors’ stories, which are common in the South Korean press but rarely translated into English. I’m sorry, but that’s coverage that’s hard to find in the mainstream media.

But really the biggest myth is that these shifts in media consumtion are all about blogs. Blogs are just one of the little pieces of social software that knit my life together. Flickr, instant messaging and Skype help too. I often say that my network is my filter, and whether it’s on friends’ blogs, via e-mail or via IM, I’m constantly getting a feed of information that is more relevant to my life than the crap that passes for ‘authoratative comment’ – as Simon Kelner Editor of The Independent called it. What a load of self-important tosh.

Mr Humphrys admits to ‘being an old fart’ and still loving his news in print. I’m sorry, news on paper, non-time shifted radio/TV and, to be perfectly honest, radio presenters like Mr Humphrys don’t really have much of a place in my information diet. By the time Mr Humphrys has let his first guest get a word in edge-wise, I’ve already skimmed a dozen feeds – some news, some blogs – in my RSS reader. On the Tube, I read through the headlines and some stories in the New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post and The Guardian on AvantGo before I’ve gone three stops. Try struggling with all the print versions of those papers on the Tube, or better yet, try buying them at your local news stand in London.

Mr Humphrys might be suprised to find that for someone who reads and writes blogs, I value information over opinion. I agree with Kevin Marsh, editor of the BBC College of Journalism, that media opinion really has a shrinking market. I can think for myself, and I don’t need some celebrity commentator telling me what opinion I should have. Comment will be free; but information to help me make personal, professional or political decisions might be a going concern.

11.12.06
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Blogging isn’t a publishing strategy

It’s become a new mantra for me: Blogging isn’t a publishing strategy; it is a community strategy. That simple statement drives a lot of my thinking. I’ve always railed away against what we used to call ‘shovel-ware‘ back in the dot.com boom. It was simply shoveling your content onto the web. It was a stop-gap, not a strategy.

But I see the same mistake being replicated with blogging. Newspaper publishers and broadcasters often fall into the trap of trying to understand new media behaviour through old media paradigms. Podcasting becomes another distribution channel, and blogging becomes another publishing platform. Adding comments to the bottom of stories or columns is a step, but it’s missing the point. It’s treating blogging strictly as a publishing tool, not as part of a broader community strategy.

My question has been for 10 years: What can we do on the internet or other digital platforms that we can’t do in newspapers or on TV? What is the real opportunity here? Is it republishing more content that we already publish somewhere else?

I’m not saying that it’s a mistake to allow comments on the bottom of articles or columns. But that doesn’t change the fact that simply allowing comments on static content isn’t taking full advantage of blogging. It’s is treating blogging as a content-management system that allows comments. If that’s your goal, just adapt your content-management system to accept comments.

Recently, Shane Richmond of the Telegraph wrote: What is the point of newspaper blogs? in response to Andrew Grant-Adamson’s post, which questioned whether newspapers were blogging simply to get snaps from the kids (Bob Cauthorn was a little more adamant that newspapers needed to get a clue and stop blogging, which I disagree with). Andrew wondered if blogs were just content that got lost on the cutting room floor and didn’t make it into the paper.

I agree with much of what Shane wrote. My only quibble with Shane’s post is one of emphasis. I would move interactivity or engagement right up to the top. Yes, blogs allow us to focus on niches. Yes, websites in general and blog in particular promise a bottomless newshole that we can fill with additional content.

But it’s the engagement that really matters. And as Scoble says, from a business standpoint, an engaged audience is more valuable commercially than the drive-by surfers. It’s hard to measure, and Scoble rightly calls for a new metric. We used to call it stickiness, how much time people actually spend on your site. But this is even more than stickiness. This is about people actually doing something, not simply consuming content. I remember in BBC meetings about the blog pilot project, we decided that we wanted to measure how engaging or interactive blogs were. It was more than the number of comments or the traffic.

What happens when you view blogging as a community strategy rather than simply a publishing strategy?

  • Comments and other forms of participation are highlighted as well as the blog posts written by your own writers.
  • The site is designed to encourage participation on several levels.
  • The site is designed to allow like-minded participants to find each other.
  • The content must change to suit the nature of the site because its purpose has changed. What makes good content in a newspaper doesn’t necessarily make sense in a space created for participation.

That next-to-last point is key. Shoveling newspaper content onto the web was always a stop-gap, not a strategy, and it continues to be. For the last point, I leave it to Dan Gillmor who said this as he stepped aside from his citizen journalism/community project Bayosphere:

Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)…

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Blogged with Flock

11.01.06
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Is Flock the ultimate blogging tool for journalists? Almost.

I first used Flock last year after meeting Chris Messina in Paris. He was working to get the word out about the read/write browser at the time. I really liked the idea, partially because it just makes sense as a concept. With blogs, photo-sharing sites Flickr and social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, it makes sense to have a support for these social tools on the browser level.

I have to admit. I downloaded it in December, wrote one blog post and quickly decided that it wasn’t ready for prime time. The tools didn’t work as advertised. I couldn’t even get it to work with my Flickr account, and it made life more difficult not easier.

That was then. This is now. A few weeks ago as I was looking for an RSS reader and other blogging tools to make life easier for my new colleagues at the Guardian. I downloaded Flock again. It’s now my default browser at work. The RSS reader alone is pretty good. RSS is the most under-utilised technology for jourrnalism bar none. For journalists wanting to use RSS, Flock is definitely worth a download (and this article is worth a read). It’s not as full-featured as NetNewsWire, but it’s damn good.

And from a blogging standpoint, it’s better than Sage, my favourite RSS plug-in for Firefox. If you see a post in your feed reader you want to blog, just click the blog button and up pops a window for a new blog post.

I actually like the uploader tool for Flickr photos better than Flickr’s own tool, although truth be told I haven’t used the Flickr uploader in a few months. But even more than the uploader, I like the fact that with a click, I can create a new blog post from my Flickr photos. I can easily see the pictures of my Flickr friends, too, which is a nice feature for personal use.

It has all the search functionality of Firefox and more. You can also set it to search your local history. It has all of the search plug-ins from Firefox.

OK, that was the good. Now for the bad, or at least the work in progress. I liked the spell checker because as you well know if you’ve read Strange for a while, I really benefit from a good editor. However, I discovered just yesterday that it puts span tags around the words it questions or changes. Well, initially, I just saw all the span tags and wondered WTF? It was only after a quick Google that I discovered it was the spell checker that was spawning the spans. It doesn’t look like a new problem, blog posts about it since the summer. I hope it gets fixed.

Suw downloaded Flock after finding Firefox 2.0 broke her can’t-live-without session saver plug-in. Here are her impressions:

I am finding that it isn’t behaving well when posting to a blog either – it just sits there and tries to post without ever completing the action (even though it does post). As you say, minor but annoying.

I also have a problem with the behaviour of their search bar – the sub-menu comes up whenever you click in the search area, instead of when you click on the G, (which is Firefox behaviour) meaning that when I am trying to select all by triple-clicking, it doesn’t work so well.

I have to admit, I am still liking Firefox better than Flock, but determined to still give it an honest trial

The HTML code is not entirely clean. I’m just looking at the source code of this post. The code definitely needs a tidy up.

But it’s getting there. Beginning bloggers could definitely do worse, and journalists who find Movable Type or WordPress’s interface daunting or difficult will find it much easier. It’s come a long way in the last year. I’m hoping that development continues and the bugs and quirks get ironed out.

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Blogged with Flock

10.22.06
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Monaco Media Forum: Irrational Exuberance 2.0? Not really.

In January 2005, I went to the Web+10 conference at Poynter in Florida (for the full monty, go here for the audio). Poynter’s Howard Finberg asked what our fears were now 10 years into this real-time experiment of online journalism. I said: Irrational Exuberance 2.0.

Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan used the term back in the 1990s. He first used the term in 1996, but I remember it being thrown around in the dot.com boom. As the Wikipedia entry says:

It had become a catch phrase of the boom to such an extent that, during the economic recession that followed the stock market collapse of 2000, bumper stickers reading “I want to be irrationally exuberant again” were sighted in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

As I asked on the Media Guardian’s blog, Organ Grinder: Is GooTube the sign of another internet bubble? I have a personal interest in this. I covered the dot.com boom for the BBC, and I remember in the late 1990s, everyone wondered why I didn’t head off across the Potomac to the Dulles tech corridor and AOL to make my millions or better yet to Silicon Valley. I didn’t because I could see the handwriting on the wall in 1999. It was more than the damn Pets.com sock puppet. I remember when dot.com companies launched a round of funding simply to pay for multi-million Super Bowl ads. I knew that there were speculators tacking on dot.com to their name simply to float on the market. I knew there was something of the tulip craze to it, and I knew that by 1999, most of the companies that were launching were derivative or trying to be the first entrant in a market without understanding the market they were entering.

I knew that stability at the BBC was worth more in the long run than ephemeral paper millions that would be gone tomorrow in the chorus of ‘Sell, sell, sell’ on the trading floors of Wall Street. However, along with the cyber-snake-oil-salesmen in the late 1990s, the crash wiped out a lot of good companies and a lot of good people and slowed, or in some cases, stopped online news development. I often say that after the crash, of the people who I knew in online journalism, only a fraction – possibly less than 10% – still were working online.

And it boiled my blood that I heard the odd news exec say after the crash: See we told you the internet was just a fad. And even if they didn’t say it, they decimated their online news operations. I remember in 2002, after an interview that I produced for the BBC with Peter Jennings about 9/11 how he led us on a tour of their online operations. He was honest and heartfelt in his respect for these online journalists at ABC and said ‘The Mouse’, ABC’s new owners Disney, were downsizing the department. I don’t really want to see that again.

It heartened me today to hear venture capitalist Pip Coburn put the current wave of digital activity in perspective. Google paid $1.65 million in an all stock deal for YouTube. But back in the boom, network equipment maker JDS Uniphase paid $41 billion for an optical networking company. They later had to write-off $38 billion of the deal. He says that he’s much more excited about what’s going on now. “Real value is being created,” he said.

And I’d have to agree with him. Internet innnovation is far broader and more distributed than it was. That doesn’t mean that we’re in a ‘New Economy’ where the old rules don’t apply. We’ll have other downturns, other waves where speculation outpaces innovation and other crashes, but no one will ever write the internet off as a fad again.

Related Links: Pip Coburn’s excellent post from 2004, The Internet After The Crisis. Fascinating look back and forward.

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10.22.06
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Monaco Media Forum: Peer-to-peer grows up

It looks like the industry is finally getting over its fear of peer-to-peer. Programmers and network operators understand the elegance of peer-to-peer. There was always a business paradox with centralised digital content distribution. The more successful you are, the higher your bandwidth bills are. But with peer-to-peer, every consumer becomes a distributor.

It was really interesting to see peer-to-peer companies trying new business models. Companies like Kontiki are setting up a legal peer-to-peer business, and Warner Brothers is launching a P2P service in Europe.

In Monaco, I met one of the developers behind Azureus. I’ve used their free BitTorrent Client. Azureus has now developed another service that uses its own seed servers in a legal BitTorrent distribution network. This allows companies to distribute high-quality video, huge files, without insanely high bandwidth costs. That’s the beauty of peer-to-peer. Seed servers help distribute the files. The distribution happens on the public internet, the files are stored not on central servers but on the customers personal computers. From the demo, it looked like BBC America is one of their clients.

AllPeers embeds peer-to-peer technology in the browser and allows people to distribute content directly to a group of friends. It is also using a system of micro-payments to allow musicians, movie makers and other artists to distribute their content, easily and cheaply. AllPeers makes a commission on the micropayments.

But I’m just having a brainstorm here. I have to look into how this works, but I’m wondering if I could use something like AllPeers to send video back to base when I’m in the field? They say that communications is encrypted with standard SSL, but I wonder how secure the file transmission is? I probably will have to do a little more research before I try to run this by our IT people.

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