Category Archives: Innovation

02.05.08
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Oxford Internet Institute: Blogging and the US elections footnotes

It was truly a great honour to speak on Monday at the Oxford Internet Institute about Blogging and the US Elections.

It was also slightly humbling to remember the differences between journalism and academic study. Journalists are trend spotters. We paint broad brush trends we see often with a mix of anecdotes and some statistics. We aren’t necessarily held to the same level of proof as peer-reviewed research (although some might argue that bloggers are a form of peer-review).

I think it’s easy to forget about the limits of what we know considering the time constraints journalists work under. We do need to remember that correlation is not causality. I think that journalists should be more honest and open about the limits of what we know instead of trying to be oracular, as Jonathan Zittrain put it. Jonathan is a friend of ours and also the brilliant Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Institute.

I now have a small sense of what it must be like during the oral defence of one’s dissertation. Several questions interrogated various statements I made and asked me to support them with statistics not just anecdotes.

Having said that, I did do my homework. Honest. Here are some links.

1) I said that blogs have increased participation in US politics, and I mean not simply in voting but also participation in the process. I quoted a 2006 Edelman poll that said in summary:

A new survey of consumers released today in the European Parliament, revealed that nearly a quarter of the population in the U.S., UK, and France, read blogs at least once a week and of that group nearly one-third are moved to undertake some type of political action.

One of the roundtable participants asked me to clarify whether there was simply a correlation between blogging and political action, whether bloggers were more likely to be politically active or whether blogging encouraged them to become politically active.

To be honest, reading the press release, it’s unclear if the blog readers were moved to political action by blogging or simply took political action and also were blog readers. I remember the full poll being a little clearer, but I could only find the press release online. I couldn’t find the full results of the poll.

Anecdotally, I would say that tools help activists connect and therefore, previously isolated political communities were able to join together virtually and be encouraged to take real-world political action. But that still doesn’t answer the question: Correlation or causality? One student was studying political activist communities. They all seemed to use online organising tools. Did the activists use the tools or did they become activists through empowerment by the tools?

However, in preparing for the talk, I found several academic studies that indicated that blogging did indeed encourage political participation. I referred to them in my talk, but here are some other links. I found the summary of a study: “Online and Offline Activism: Communication Mediation and Political Messaging Among Blog Readers,” Homero Gil de Zuniga, Emily Vraga, Aaron Veenstra, Ming Wang, Cathy DeShano, and Dhavan Shah (first author from University of Texas-Austin; all others from University of Wisconsin-Madison). From the summary (Word document, study 3, with a PowerPoint presentation as well of this and other studies):

Political bloggers are viewed by many as lone voices, socially disconnected and working apart from the traditional mechanisms of participation. Critics assert that their audiences exist in an echo chamber, repeatedly exposed to uncritical reports that polarize but do not mobilize. This research challenges that view by examining the ways in which the members of blog audiences engage in the political process.

I also have a pre-release copy of David Perlmutter’s Blogwars. I’ve only read about a third of it. And he makes reference to other studies showing that links between blogging and increased political awareness and participation. I’d suggest taking a look at his blog for more information. He is involved in some of the research in the previous links.

2) I also talked about the YouTube effects in my talk. I wrote a post last week referring to how YouTube was becoming another political channel, allowing Barack Obama’s speeches to reach an audience that wouldn’t have been possible with traditional 24-hour-cable channels. As of writing this, his speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, which Martin Luther King once was pastor, had been viewed 600,000 times. In the week since it was posted, his South Carolina victory speech has also been viewed 600,000 times. As I wrote, Obama’s video would have been clipped by the 24-hour cable news channels. But the speech in its entirety would have been an ephemeral event forgotten in the attention-deficit news cycle. Will these videos bring new supporters to Obama? I just don’t know. I only raise the issue as a new phenomenon, and unfortunately, we probably won’t know the impact until after we have a nominee.

A student asked me if we knew anything about who had seen these videos. Were they from the US? Could they vote? I admitted that I didn’t know. Web metrics are a black art, and I don’t have access to the traffic information from YouTube.

I don’t know what impact these speeches uploaded to YouTube will have. I don’t know whether they are influencing new supporters or simply being passed around by those who already support Barack Obama. I think the impact of the viral videos like ‘Obama Girl‘ (viewed 5.7m times) or the ‘Yes we can’ mashup (viewed 1.5m times in three days) is even more unpredictable. I am sure that we’ll see some fascinating research come out of this new trend after the dust settles.

3) I mentioned a January poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project showing that 27% of those under 30 and 37% of Americans aged 18-24 were receiving campaign information via social networks.

In this regard, substantial numbers of young people say they have gotten information on the campaign or the candidates from social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Overall, more than a quarter of those younger than age 30 (27%) – including 37% of those ages 18-24 – have gotten campaign information from social networking sites. This practice is almost exclusively limited to young people; just 4% of Americans in their 30s, and 1% of those ages 40 and older, have gotten news about the campaign in this way.

A student also said that young voters are unreliable voters. They express a lot of enthusiasm, but often don’t show up when it counts at the ballot box. This has historically been true. In 2004, Howard Dean was seen as yet another example of a candidate who courted the youth vote, only to have young voters stay home.

Barack Obama has not only generated youth enthusiasm, he has also got out the youth vote. David von Drehle writes in Time:

Turnout among the youngest slice of the electorate more than doubled from 2004, when Howard Dean’s intense campaign on college campuses produced far more modest results. This was part of an overall surge in Democratic participation — but while overall Democratic turnout jumped 90%, the number of young Democrats participating soared 135%.

It’s hard to say whether this is a trend or an anomaly. Only time will tell.

(I also mentioned another Pew study of bloggers during the talk. That’s here.)

4) Another student asked: Why should the media organisations like the Guardian or BBC blog?

This was a question that I get often from a number of audiences for different reasons. Journalists don’t see blogging as journalism. Some bloggers don’t see think journalists should blog because they see blogging as something that exits as a counter to the mainstream media so they see media organisations’ blogging as an attempt to co-opt grassroots media.

I started by giving him examples of how blogging had added to the journalism I do, and I’ve blogged about that before. The student didn’t feel as if this was a reason for why the media should blog.

I gave him a couple of examples of how having a standing as a blogger and with bloggers were important in the newsgathering that I do. As I mentioned, bloggers have Googled me to find out who I am before talking to me, before agreeing to an interview. And as Matt at Blackfive did, they post their responses to my questions to give their readers a chance to see whether the journalist spun the story.

He still didn’t seem satisfied with the response. In the end, I see social media, such as blogs, as one way that journalists can reconnect with their audiences. I think that’s important for journalists because too many journalists are isolated from their audiences. They are writing for other journalists and their sources, not the audience.

I also said that it’s important because journalists still believe that quality information is enough in this world of information overload. They are still operating on assumptions based on a world of information scarcity, when they had the power of gatekeepers. They controlled what information got into the scarce pages and on scarce airtime. Now, people have so many choices for information and entertainment. The scarce resource isn’t information but time and attention. News organisations aren’t simply battling the old competition – the other newspaper, the TV station, cable news – but also new competitors, YouTube, the XBox, MySpace, Craigslist, etc. Social media allows journalists and journalism organisations to connect directly with their audiences and build a relationship with them, a mutually beneficial one.

Robert Patterson has a great description of how this works with US National Public Radio’s new morning programme, the Bryant Park Project and their use blogs and Twitter. For him, it’s like a virtual diner in the morning where there is a warm welcome, a cup of coffee and a conversation. As he says:

Wrap the content in a community.

That’s the ‘Jesus wept’ summary of social media.

Many news and media organisations see the meteoric growth of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and still stuck in the mass media mindset, they want some of those eyeballs for their advertisers. They focus on the strength of their brands and the quality of their content and ignore the quality of the connection and interaction with their audiences. They also get distracted by the technology they don’t have. Why not pose a different question. If you want to want to ‘wrap the content in a community’, what editorial steps can you take to build a relationship with your audience and build a community?

Hopefully, that answers a few of the questions with some supporting information and links.

Jonathan did ask whether a journalist had been caught out saying one thing in his or her reporting and then something less balanced, less objective in a blog. I didn’t know of any instance of this happening. Do you?

Thanks again to the Oxford Internet Institute for the honour and opportunity of speaking there.

UPDATE: A student also asked me about projects trying to garner international opinion about the US elections, seeing as the elections have such an impact around the world. I mentioned a project by Global Voices and Reuters to look at what bloggers around the world are saying about the US elections. The project launched on Tuesday, Voices without Votes.

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01.31.08
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Why re-invent the CMS wheel?

Today on Twitter, Martin Stabe, fellow journalism blogger and new media journalist, and I were having a good back and forth about content management systems. Martin is a kindred spirit: Journalist through and through and blessed/cursed with technical skills. That’s another post lurking in the back of my head, and as so often, I digress.

Martin said via Twitter:

CMS I’m using requires: minimum 18 clicks, 2 screens and 2 more popups to publish 1 story. Is this normal?

To which I responded,

but I’m sure your click-heavy CMS makes (up) in scalability what it lacks in flexibility, speed and ease-of-use. 😉 (sic)

Does this describe your content management system? How much flexibility have you given up in a false choice for scalability? Are your journalists 18 clicks from publishing? Shouldn’t it be more like three or four clicks? Journalist, sub (copy editor) and then publish?

I have a question for the journalism industry. Instead of sinking literally millions of dollars/pounds/euros into content management systems either in the form of a payment to one of the CMS companies or for bespoke development, why not take one of the open-source systems and become part of the development community?

That’s what Steve Yelvington at Morris Digital Works has done working with and extending Drupal. Today on his blog, he highlighted a developer in Belgium who has extended Drupal to integrate with Adobe InDesign to create a “web-centric CMS that drives print output“.. (A tip I also got from Chris Amico via Twitter, which should be an implicit statement about the value I find in Twitter.) As Chris and Steve point out, there is a detailed write up on the Drupal groups website. It was developed by someone who isn’t a professional programmer but a philosophy major.

Now, trust me, I have first hand experience with third-party software that doesn’t scale to cope with the high levels of traffic and interaction at a major media website. But many large media organisations have smaller sites or sub-sites, which can be test beds to develop and test open-source tools into high-volume, highly flexible content management systems. You can see the New York Times moving in this direction with not only the hiring of great journalist-programmers like Derek Willis but also a blog about their open-source projects that highlights their contributions back into the open-source community.

And the New York Times show that you don’t have to turn over your entire CMS to take advantage of open-source projects. WordPress powers their blogs, and they using open source elements in their codebase.

I think another avenue that news organisations should investigate is adapting blogging APIs for remote access for their content management systems. Not only will it add the ability to tap into a host of tools like Flock, Ecto and MarsEdit, but it also could ease remote access and publishing, allowing journalists to file at the speed of news. Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, which makes blog editor MarsEdit, told me about a post he has written about using “a standard web-editing API to an arbitrary service“.

Steve worked on the Newspaper Next project and he is a great evangelist about the process of innovation. Innovation isn’t a destination but a never-ending process.

As I quoted Steve last summer:

We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.

Apache, an open-source project, runs the majority of the world’s websites (although just barely more than 50%) With open-source development, you’re not in that process alone but can draw on and contribute to constant improvement. Robust open-source projects also have healthy developer communities rich with talent, and as Suw points out, businesses have developed to provide enterprise-level support for open-source platforms.

News organisations should not be seduced by the flashy CMS vendors at trade shows and instead investigate the disruptive innovation possible through open-source development. What are your journalists doing 18 clicks away from publishing? Getting beat by the competition.

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01.01.08
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What is an online journalist?

Craig McGill recently asked: What is an online journalist?

So what should a digital/online reporter be? Should they go out on stories alongside print reporters and basically be someone who takes video, pictures and audio soundbites and then files it back to the office? Should they also be editing that content just as a wordsmith edits his words? Or should all of that be the work of the reporter and there shouldn’t be an online tag? Said reporter then comes back to the office and crafts/edits the words and everything else? Seems like a lot of work for one person.

It caused me to think, because I have always defined myself as an online journalist, despite the fact that I was trained as a newspaper journalist and for most of my career I worked for a public service broadcaster, the BBC. Yet by 1999, just five years into my career, I had already worked in every major news medium: Newspapers, television, radio and the internet.

I will admit that my motivation for the self-definition has been, in part, an act of defiance, a professional statement to the high priests of the Church of Journalism that, despite the perceived power and importance of newspapers and television, I chose to work online. Why defiance? I made the move online in 1996. A couple of years later, when I considered moving back to newspapers, my experience was dismissed as if my work online didn’t count. Even computer-savvy journalists, even back in 1998, told me that I would have to chose between technical work and journalism. Instead I forged my own path at the BBC.

There I covered stories for radio, television and online, such as the Microsoft anti-trust trial and the dot.com boom. For years, I had a slot on BBC 5 Live talking about technology and the internet, and I covered US politics, current affairs and entertainment for the website. There wasn’t a binary decision to be made about whether to be online or be a journalist, whether to be technical or editorial – I was both. Any field journalist knows technical knowledge is a requirement for the job: If you can’t get your story, your audio and your video back to the office, the quality of the journalism does’t matter.

After the dot.com crash, I watched as many of my online journalism colleagues were laid off, their divisions gutted, downsized or destroyed. Most of them were so disenchanted with the experience that they left journalism entirely. In 2002, the BBC News website did a Q&A – the questions came from the site’s readers – with Peter Jennings in the New York studios of ABC News. After the interview, Mr Jennings took us to the online department, introduced us to the staff and showed us their work with collegial pride. He grumbled that “the Mouse (Disney)”, ABC’s corporate parent, didn’t value their work much and was cutting staff.

It’s an attitude that is still common in journalism today, even if the number of digital staff is increasing. You can see it in the responses to Craig’s question, for example, the journalists who believe that their online colleagues do little more than “type the stories up for the web”. It’s about as dismissive as Truman Capote saying that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was not writing but merely typing.

In the early part of this decade, I remember talking to university classes in the Washington DC area where I was based. They would ask how they could get a job like mine, and I had to tell the students that my job was one of a handful of editorial online positions. At that time, most online positions merely re-purposed content from newspapers or broadcasters for rather unimaginative websites. A large number of the sites that provided original news reporting for the web got wiped out in the crash. It was content on the web, not of the web, but not by choice of the journalists, rather, it was due to lack of vision by the editors and management who were so focused on the present that they never looked up to see the future.

Beginning just a couple of years ago, that changed. Broadband had reached a tipping point in the United States, western Europe and many parts of Asia. Despite the dot.com crash, people had continued to make the internet an important part of their lives. News organisations woke up from their post-crash schadenfreude to realise that the internet hadn’t died. Yes, it might have been a victim of irrational exuberence by some, and get-rich mania by others, but the medium had continued to grow and develop.

Now, some newspapers find the shoe on the other foot. The internet continues to rise as a medium and newspapers and their business are in decline.

I guess this is all a rather roundabout way to explain not what is means to be an online journalist, but for me, why the self-definition as an online journalist means more than a job description.

So back to Craig’s original question. What is an online journalist? Craig asked several people to answer the question, including Bryan Murley of the Innovation in College Media blog. Bryan said:

I see an online journalist as one more in mindset than anything. A page designer can be a good online journalist, if given permission. A photographer can be an online journalist or a stick-in-the-mud.

I would have to agree, and it reminds me of Rob Curley’s about the importance of mindset rather than skillset. You can learn to do anything, but you need to have an open mind, professional curiosity, and a passion to try new things and to learn from your experiments.

Throughout most of my career, and even still today, I have to explain that my background is journalism and not computers. I have only taken one computer course in my life, Pascal in high school, and I dropped it after one semester. Since coming to the UK, I have found an anti-technology attitude here that is alien to me. If you use a computer, the media believes that you must be a ‘boffin’ or some pasty, anti-social creature who prefers the company of computers to people. Suw has wondered if this is down to the culture within the university education system which has a history of pitting science against the humanities, and most people in the media have humanities degrees. It’s odd because you can’t walk into a newsroom and not see a computer, but computers still don’t fit into the sense of self of many journalists.

I know my way around a computer and the internet, but I don’t know much about Flash or database programming. I’m a cut-and-paste coder not a developer. I know more about multimedia than I do about developing web applications. I know much more about remote comms than most because so much of my career has been learning how to file from anywhere.

But I know what’s possible, and I know the importance of working with people who know what I don’t. I know that working with a good team can achieve not only what is possible now but redefine what is going to be possible. I know that online journalism is not a mature medium like newspapers, radio and television. It evolves constantly and is still developing forms, styles, conventions and a grammar. That is what excites online journalists. It’s blogs and social networks now, but in a few years, it will be something entirely new.

That is why, through good times and bad, I choose to work online. Yes, the naysayers and the curmudgeons annoy me. The red mist still descends when uninformed people dismiss the internet as a journalistic medium. But I have more than 10 years now of working online for two of the most successful, prestigious news websites in the world. Personally, I don’t feel the need to justify my journalistic credentials to anyone, although there are people in the profession who still ask me to do so.

But there are more innovative and imaginative people to work with now than a few years ago. There are more of us who know what the web is capable of and are eager to just get on with it. That’s why I’m looking forward to 2008. After a lot of groundwork, I’ve got a couple of projects to really sink my teeth into, to explore what is possible with some excellent partners. I can’t wait. Happy New Year!

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11.27.07
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Reuters-Nokia Mobile Journalism Toolkit and mindset

Last night, Suw and I went to Reuters headquarters in Canary Wharf for an Online News Association event. Reuters was talking about its MJT – mobile journalism toolkit (they used to call it MoJo for mobile journalism but for some reason aren’t using the term any longer). Reuters partnered with Nokia to develop the toolkit after working with the handset maker on a mobile Flash-lite application to highlight their content on the N95. Nokia is trying to understand the needs of journalists in the field and how that might drive development of special applications for consumer-oriented mobile phones like the N95. Reuters is exploring what is possible with the current generation of phones (and networks) while doing some experimentation with what types of story-telling this might allow.

The basic toolkit includes:

  • a standard Nokia N95
  • a Nokia Bluetooth keyboard
  • a Sony digital mic with a bespoke adapter for the phone
  • a special tripod
  • a solar charger
  • a Power Monkey supplemental charger

They also have slightly modified the RSS output from the phone’s production app and WordPress’ RSS intake to allow for some additional RSS elements that Reuters needs in order to handle content correctly. Video is uploaded direct to their hosting service and text goes straight to the blog platform, and an editor is automatically alerted that content has been sent for review and publication. The material can then be published to various platforms.

The discussion was lead by Ilicco Elia, Mobile Product Manager Europe; alongside Mark Jones, Global Community Editor; Matt Cowan, European Technology, Media and Telecommunications Correspondent; and Nic Fulton, chief scientist for Reuters media. Ilicco gave an overview of how Reuters and Nokia decided to work together.

Nic said that they decided to work on multi-horizon strategy, looking at what they could do right now, what they could do in the near future and aspirational things they might want to do a lot further down the line. Right now, the N95 takes 5-megapixel stills, near DVD-quality video and works on 3.5G data and WiFi networks. But Ilicco is already looking to the future:

We see in five years, HD video, extremely powerful CPUs. You might say it’s a laptop, but it will still be a personal, mobile device.

They worked directly with Timo Koskinen, the project manager for Nokia’s research centre. Matt Cowan talked about his experience with the toolkit, showing video he shot of Vint Cerf at the Media Guardian’s Edinburgh TV festival. My colleague Jemima Kiss has an overview of the experiment and talked with Matt about the toolkit for the Guardian’s digital content blog.

Before joining Reuters, Matt worked for Canadian CTV covering California. There he did work shooting and editing his own pieces, so he had experience with multimedia reporting. Matt said that he fed back his experiences directly to Nokia. The phone is a bit difficult to hold steady, which isn’t surprising – it’s not like balancing a hefty traditional TV camera on your shoulder, which provides some stability.

I’ve experienced this same problem myself, first hand, doing a video journalism project for the BBC in 2003. I used a Sony PD150, a ‘pro-sumer’ digital video camera. Doing handheld work takes practice because the light camera is much easier to shake, despite built-in motion compensation.

Other downsides:

  • unreliability of 3G networks (Ilicco said they had spoken to Vodafone but didn’t seem very pleased with response)
  • battery life, although this improving
  • it takes six hours for the solar panel to recharge the phone
  • the brutal costs for data roaming charges

Matt talked later about this would allow journalists to develop relationships with the audience.

There were slightly predictable questions about quality. One of the journalists said “cutting quality is a fancy way of saying cutting corners”. One of the shots, an opportunity shot backstage at a New York fashion show was a bit jerky, and one person asked what the point of the video was.

What I really liked from the Reuters team was this spirit of experimentation. Matt said:

I don’t think that this will change everything overnight. It is an incredibly exciting tool. It will change how we report certain stories. … It’s not ‘I’m here in front of this building, and this happened 10 hours ago’. You have immediate interaction, an intimacy. You’re in the environment.

As Howard Owens recently said after widely circulated comments from Rob Curley about the difference between mindset and skillset, having the right skills doesn’t mean that someone is open to innovation and entrepreneurial ideas. Owens calls it the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

The fixed mindset might say something like, “I got into this business to be a writer, not a videographer.” The growth mindset might say, “Video? Cool! Let me give it a try.”

And I think he puts the ‘quality’ debate in perspective:

You don’t make “quality” a religion and refuse to try new forms of reporting because it doesn’t immediately meet your quality standards. You are willing to try and fail, and keep trying until you get it right, and you don’t resent others doing the same.

There were some comments about how we would see “Bloggers doing this in a year’s time”, but as Suw said last night, bloggers have been doing this for years. I often say that keeping an eye on bloggers and other grassroots media is a good way to find inspiration for new ways to get the story. I still remember at the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles seeing an IndyMedia reporter  backing up as mounted police moved towards him. He has carrying a PowerBook with a webcam and an early wireless modem strapped on it, sending live video from the streets to the net.

But one thing that was refreshing was to hear Reuters talk about community and bloggers in such a positive way. Mark talked about Reuters’ community strategy:

My role as community editor to create a bit of identity around editorial talent and be more open to the audience. We also want to be open to the web including the the blogosphere and build networks around our journalistic expertise.

Reuters have their own blogs and their YouWitness user-submitted photo and story effort. They have invested in Pluck and its Blogburst aggregator service. They also partner with multi-lingual blog community Global Voices, including on their Reuters Africa project, and they have a carbon trading community.

And Matt said that he saw advances in mobile technology as an even bigger boon to bloggers. He knows the founder of eco-community TreeHugger who used to have to trek to internet cafes to feed his site but now can do it almost anywhere. Bloggers can “build a brand with their own thoughts.”

In 1999, I covered Hurricane Floyd as it made landfall in North Carolina for the BBC News website. I filed throughout the night, but after the storm passed, it knocked out electricity and phone lines throughout the eastern third of the state. I wasn’t able to file a number of pictures I had taken because I simply had no way to get them back to the back to base. Within months after the storm, I had a data cable for my mobile phone. As the mobile technology got better, I could do more in the field. In 2006, on a trip for the BBC’s World Have Your Say, I was able to use a 3G data card in the US to set up a mobile WiFi hotspot and keep us connected when standard communications channels failed.

Mobile technology lets journalists stay closer to the story and connected not only to our office but also to our audience. The news organisations that experiment now will be best placed to take advantage of the journalistic possibilities that ever-advancing mobile technology allows.

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06.13.07
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Mahalo Greenhouse to crowdsource search

At the NMK Forum in London, Jason Calacanis has just announced Mahalo Greenhouse, part of the recently launched Mahalo human-assisted search directory. The Greenhouse will allow the public to add search results and, if accepted by the site’s guides, get paid for them.

Mahalo launched on 30 May at the D5 conference. It’s been billed as a human-powered search engine, but it’s more of a ‘human-powered wiki’ listing search topics and links instead of encyclopedia entries like Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, Wired called it “a version of Wikipedia with advertisements“. The launch was met with much fanfare and a fair number of questions. Would it scale? Could it beat Google and its voracious algorithms? Why would it work better than Ask Jeeves or ChaCha?

A week ago, Jason asked on Facebook and LinkedIn:

What would you do next if you were CEO of Mahalo? … Wondering if you guys were me, what would you do next with Mahalo.

In response to the suggestions, they will now allow the public to submit search results on the Mahalo Greenhouse site to be evaluated by the full-time guides that site employs. Right now, they’ve got 40 full-time guides, but they expect that to increase eventually to 100.

Jason’s thinking is that Reuters, AP and DowJones employ hundreds of people to write editorial content, why not employ 100 people to curate search.

He’s not trying to compete with Google and Yahoo on ‘long-tail search’ but rather focus on curated results for the top one-third of search. This is not about being broad and deep but about being relevant and providing results for the most lucrative search terms. Right now, they have about 5,000 search terms, but they plan to eventually reach 25,000.

To scale to that number faster, they decided to use the Greenhouse to crowdsource the best links, paying $10 to $15 per accepted submission. The more submissions a part-time guide submits, the more money they make per submission.

But what is the business model, and how will it scale to paying all of those guides? The business model is advertising. Search ads are the most desired ads for a reason, Calacanis said because people are indicating an interest at a particular point in time. They have entered something that they are looking for in a search box. It is not passive and wasteful, he said, like display advertising at a bus stop or on a billboard.

In many ways, it mirrors a commercial Wikipedia. Calacanis and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have clashed over whether to include advertising to support Wikipedia, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say that Calacanis is out to prove a point with Mahalo. In a not unsubtle rebuttal to Wales, Calacanis said that if part-time guides don’t want their payment because they believe in the concept of free culture, they can donate their payment to Wikipedia. Mahalo has already earmarked up to $250,000 this year to donate to Wikipedia in lieu of pay for guides who request it.

Mahalo may sell their own ads in one to two years’ time, Calacanis said, but right now, he believes it would be a waste of time and money trying to sell ads on the site before it reaches critical mass, a lesson he learned at AOL.

But he knows that this will take time to build out the number of search terms and also to build the traffic necessary to attract advertising. “This is a big project like building the Brooklyn Bridge or Central Park,” he said, adding that he’s committed to the long term and has enough money to fund the site for five to six years. Backers include, Sequoia Capital (where Calacanis is an entrepreneur in action), Mark Cuban, Ted Leonsis of AOL, CBS, News Corp and Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and SpaceX.

Calacanis believes that Mahalo is needed because:

the internet faces an environmental crisis of spam, (search engine optimisation), phishing, adware and spyware.

The internet is becoming polluted, he said. The amount of bad information as well as good information is exploding. The internet needs curation. If nothing is done, he worries that in a few years the internet will become too difficult to navigate.

Some have questioned the value of subjective choices made by the Mahalo guides. Calacanis responds:

I would rather have a little bit of bias and debate and refine rather than have the machine get it wrong and not to get to talk back to the machine

Also, on controversial issues such as abortion or George W Bush, the site will list general information but also provide search results showing different points of view, such as pro and con, for and against.

Will they have Digg-like voting? No. Calacanis says that voting is meaningless because people often vote before visiting a site in Digg not after they have gone to the site to evaluate it.

Calacanis also wants to build in accountability for search terms submitted. People should own their words. Part time guides will have to use their real names if they want to be paid. In general, he believes that anonymity is useful in limited cases such as whistle-blowers.

Jimmy Wales is also working on a new search project possibly with some human element. The details remain vague, although Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a good interview with Wales about the project from last December. Like Wikipedia, many expect to have some human element in the search project, but all Wales said was:

Exactly how people can be involved is not yet certain. If I had to speculate about it, I would say it’s several of those things, not just community involved with rating URLs but also community rating for whole web sites, what to include or not to include and also the whole algorithm … That’s a human type process that we can empower people to guide the spider

Calacanis doesn’t see Wales’ project as a competitor. “I know that will be a disappointment for the media. It’s not a battle royale.”

In the interest of disclosure, I conducted this interview the day before the NMK forum in my role as blogs editor at the Guardian, not simply as an independent blogger. In as much, I agreed to abide by an embargo this post until the announcement at NMK.

06.12.07
by

Did newspaper companies ever build printing presses?

Today, I was sittting in the lobby of a posh hotel waiting to interview Jason Calacanis about Mahalo, the human-powered search site that he recently launched. His plane was delayed for five hours, but he was on his way. As we watched members of Motley Crue traipse through the lobby, I got to chat to Wil Harris, and we were talking about innovation and news organisations, or possibly the lack of innovation. I said it was not in the DNA of most news organisations to develop products or software. Wil put it a great way:

Newspapers never felt the need to build their own printing presses.

Why do they feel the need to re-invent the wheel? We both asked. There is Drupal, WordPress and any number of third-party software vendors.

Just look at Mahalo. It runs on MediaWiki, and Jason uses Google AdSense on a few entries already to earn some revenue. As Jason told John Battelle:

Google Adsense exists as a massive, scalable, and wildly efficient monitization engine. We’re not going to sell ads directly… we’re gonna leverage the services out there based on which ones perform best on a PER-SERP basis.

Especially for a lot of small news organisations without the development budget, there are a lot of great web services that can quickly be adapted to build sites and services and generate revenue. Why build it all over again?