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Kevin: Brian Casel at Mashable has a look at five most important features in WordPress 3.0, set for release in June 2010. Those features include custom post types, menu management and multi-site capabilities. WordPress already was a very powerful blog CMS, and now it's starting to get sophisticated features that will appeal to a much wider range of online publishers.
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Kevin: A Firefox plug-in to scrape data from websites.
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Kevin: Some very interesting numbers if a very brief piece. What's unclear to me is where the table with the revenue and costs comes from. Is this a national average for US newspapers? However, what is really stunning is the fact that subscription revenue is only 3% of total revenue. That is utterly shocking. The other figure that is totally gob-smacking is that in print 52% of the costs come from production, distribution and raw materials. _52%_ That begs the question of when print will be completely economically unworkable. That day is not long off.
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Kevin: Michelle Minkoff at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits highlights a great new tool for scraping data from websites. What is scraping data? Before the days of APIs, developers and hackers would often 'scrape' data from websites. This would take data, often from an HTML table, and output the data in a useful format such as CSV that could be more easily manipulated using data tools such as spreadsheet or database software.
Minkoff writes: "It often takes a lot of time and effort to produce programs that extract the information, so this is a specialty. But what if there were a tool that didn't require programming?Enter OutWit Hub, a downloadable Firefox extension that allows you to point and click your way through different options to extract information from Web pages."
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Kevin: The New York Times asked followers of its Lens blog: "Attention: everyone with a camera, amateur or pro. Please join us on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 (U.T.C./G.M.T.), as thousands of photographers simultaneously record “A Moment in Time.” The idea is to create an international mosaic, an astonishingly varied gallery of images that are cemented together by the common element of time." It's a beautiful, simple call to action with a stunning result. As Flickr has shown, digital cameras have made amateur photo enthusiasts of us all, and we love to share our images both with friends, family and complete strangers.
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Kevin: JESSICA E. VASCELLARO writes: "Overall, Facebook.com served 176.3 billion display ads on its website over the first three months of 2010, or 16.2% of the total, said comScore. Yahoo served 131.6 billion banner ads to Yahoo users, and Microsoft served 60.2 billion, according to comScore. The data don't include ads that Yahoo and Microsoft delivered to other Web sites through their networks, a major source of revenue for each."
I'm curious whether the well documented competitive advantage in dwell time on Facebook is helping them sell advertising at premium rates, premium CPMs, or whether the dwell time is offset by low click through rates. Some people have posited that selling advertising on social networks is difficult due to people not wanting their social interactions interrupted by commercial messages.
The Wiki-fication of News: Topic Pages and collaboration
The concept of topic pages, living stories and the wiki-fication of news has been discussed for a few years now in journalism circles. However, now we’re starting to see this movement gain pace with not only examples on major news sites like the New York Times and the Spokesman-Review, a very pioneering local newspaper in Spokane Washington in the US, but also in a new breed of digital journalism start-ups.
For instance, Honolulu Hawaii-based Civil Beat (formerly Peer News), a start-up with support from the Omidyar? Foundation (of Pierre Omidyar founder of online auction site eBay)?, has recently launched with a focus five specific news beats: Hawaii, Honolulu, Education, Land and Money?. Omidyar wants to use the site to create a new kind of civic square for the 21st Century, and one of the features of the site is topic pages. For instance, they have in-depth pages on Honolulu Planning, Hawaii Student Achievement and Hawaii State Government Deficit. These topic pages are explainers that I would assume grow over time with new information. It’s not clear because much of the content is behind a paywall.
The paywall, or ‘membership’ model gives members full access to the site for $19.99 a month. I use the quotes, not necessarily to sneer, but because most people will see membership as a subscription. I suspect that the branding of it as membership is meant to highlight the community and engagement aspirations of the site. The journalists are referred to as reporter-hosts.
I might pay for a 15-day pass to explore the site a little further, but I do notice that the site has a lot of internal links but not many external links, at least from the content that isn’t behind the paywall. That might because of the very local nature of the content, it might be a strategic editorial choice or it might be the lack of internet proficiency by the reporter-hosts. It definitely is an interesting experiment, and it’s one that I will be watching closely.
Another context and community led experiment, Toronto-based OpenFile launched this week:
Structurally and editorially, the site is centered, as its name suggests, around files: topic pages-meet-news articles, focused on a particular problem or issue, that combine text, photos, video, and links — “sort of a multimedia package,” Craig Silverman (digital journalism director)? says.?
OpenFile has six core principles: Local first, always collaborate, keep tools handy, stay open, be useful and curate the conversation. They are good principles, and as Megan Garber says at Harvard’s Nieman Lab, it will be fascinating to see new media journalism maxims finally put into practice and tested. One thing that is very interesting is how editorially led this project is. The technology doesn’t appear ground breaking, although the design is pleasant and clean, but the editorial thinking is very forward looking. The key thing will be to see how this is put into practice. Not everyone take to this type of reporter-host, journalism as curation mentality natively. It isn’t something that most journalists were trained to do, and engagement is a difficult skill to train. The write up at the Nieman Lab is very comprehensive, well worth reading the full article.
Last week, I was at the European Alliance of News Agencies conference in Budapest, speaking about blogging and social media journalism. With news agencies suffering because their primary customers, newspapers, are suffering, many of the conversations had some element of revenue streams or new business models. It’s very interesting to see with OpenFile that they will be geo-tagging all of their content, something that I’ve advocated for a few years. Why would they make the effort? Wilf Dinnick, founding editor and CEO of OpenFile says:?
Because all our stories are geotagged, and we’re still focusing on local news, we will be able to deliver the major brands the opportunity to deliver advertising to very local levels?
Geo-tagging is available in many open-source content-management systems. With geo-tagging built into many camera phones and increasingly easy in digital cameras, it is now easier than ever to geo-tag content. It takes some thinking up front, but it’s a wise investment for the long term.
Designing social websites
Christian Crumlish talks to O’Reilly Media about designing social websites and the importance of play and game-like elements.
links for 2010-05-12
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Kevin: Journalism professor Mindy McAdams is taking a deep look at HTML5. Mindy is known for her excellent books on Flash, and this one in a series of posts about the new HTML standard. She's writing about the developments in the new HTML standard that will drive desktop, mobile and other device development for the next decade. She's writing for fellow educators and students, but this is invaluable for editors as well.
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Kevin: This is a summary of a James Fallows piece in the Atlantic magazine in the US looking at Google's plans for the news business. After interviewing several Google staffers, Fallow is convinced that the search giant is serious about helping newspapers. Emma Heald at the Editor's Weblog writes: "In Google's vision of making news sustainable, the first thing to note is that print is ignored. And a key element of the company's advice to newspapers is to continuously experiment."
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Kevin: A rather stunning visualisation of Twitter from Japan.
Social Media Revolution (Refreshed)
This original version of this video will be familiar to a lot of people already, but it has recently been reworked with new statistics, so it’s worth another look.
Twitter followers don’t equal influence
A few of us have been saying this for some time, so it’s good to see that Meeyoung Cha’s research backs us up! From Scott Berinato on Harvard Business Review:
Cha called her paper, “The Million Follower Fallacy,” a term that comes from work by Adi Avnit. Avnit posited that the number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless, and Cha, after looking at data from all 52 million Twitter accounts (and, more closely, at the 6 million “active users”) seems to have proven Avnit right. “Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions,” she writes.
Berinato’s interview with Cha in that post is also very interesting, and whilst some of her conclusions might just be confirming our existing gut feelings, it is very good to have some proper evidence upon which we can build.
Reading the comments to Berinato’s piece, however, leads me to think that some people are misinterpreting Cha’s conclusions. She’s not saying that social media has no use, she’s saying that follower numbers are not the right metric to measure influence (just like traffic stats for blogs don’t always correlate to their influence). The baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater.
Is Facebook dying under the weight of its own complexity?
I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook, not just because of their cavalier attitude towards their members’ privacy, but also because the UI stinks. Thomas Baekdal takes a detailed and interesting look at the reason he thinks Facebook is dying. Some key excerpts:
Facebook is really big, it has a ton of features. But, it is also turning into the worst case of complexity overload the web has seen in years. There are so many inconsistencies that it is hard to believe – or even to keep track of.
And:
On top of the complexity and inconsistencies, we have a growing problem of privacy issues. Facebook has a long track record of ignoring people’s privacy. As I wrote in “The First Rule of Privacy”; You are the only one, who can decide what you want to share. Facebook cannot decide that, nor can anyone else.
But, Facebook seems oblivious to this simple principle, and have started sharing personal information with 3rd party “partners” – continuing a long line of really bad decisions when it comes to privacy.
If you are on Facebook with a personal profile this is a must read. If you’re on it for business reasons, you might want to read it even more closely and pay particular attention to the various privacy changes Facebook have made. And on that note, the EFF has some great advice and information about Facebook’s now very confusing privacy settings and interface changes.
Cultural inertia is the biggest problem for tech adoption
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, told the Better World conference at the end of April that the main barrier to technical change is cultural inertia:
Don’t gauge the rate at which you will be an instant success by how quickly you can develop the technology,” he told would-be entrepreneurs. “I would gauge how long it takes the collective culture–any culture–to give up something, even if they are frustrated or unhappy with it, and accept something different. The rate of emotional, intellectual, cultural, and regulatory inertia of the world is very high. It used to be much lower in this country, but even that is changing.
Whilst Kamen was talking more about hardware, exactly the same problem befalls software and webs services.
This is, in part, because of the cognitive biases that we all suffer from. Joshua Porter discussed some of these at dConstruct in 2008. He explained that we value things we own “approximately three times more than is rational” – that’s ownership bias. But entrepreneurs “overvalue software that they’re offering by about three times” – that’s optimism bias.
But the net effect is that there’s a nine-times disparity between the person who is the potential user of the software and the person who’s offering the software. So there’s this huge gulf between the desire of the potential user and desire of the person offering the software.
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The initial product adoption is one of the largest problems facing almost every web-design team in this day and age. So, I think, looking at it from this standpoint, at least we know what we’re kind of dealing with. It’s a huge barrier.
So it’s not cultural inertia in the sense of people just being too lazy to think about how they can improve their experience, but a much more ingrained behaviour controlled by a set of psychological short-cuts that our brain takes without us realising.
In short: Adoption is hard and we have to think very careful about how we can overcome these barriers.
Digital brain drain at British newspapers
Emily Bell left for the Guardian to become the director of a new centre for digital journalism at Columbia University, and let me congratulate her on the opportunity. Simon Waldman, described as the Guardian Media Group digital strategy chief by the Media Guardian, is leaving to join the DVD by mail service LoveFilm.
Now at the Telegraph, the Media Guardian is reporting that Will Lewis has been forced out over a disagreement with the publisher on the newspaper’s direction. What is shocking is that Lewis had just launched a new internal digital incubator just last November, the so-called Euston Project. He was named Journalist of the Year in March for the Telegraph’s scoop on the MPs’ expenses scandal last year.
My former colleague Roy Greenslade has details. It appears that Lewis wanted the Euston Project to be a standalone business and the publisher disagreed.
Further thoughts on the effects of air travel disruption
A couple of weeks ago I surmised that the travel disruption caused by the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull might force businesses to rethink how they manage their long-distance relationships. It might, I posited, force businesses to be more open to teleworking, teleconferencing and the use of social media for geographically dispersed teams.
Eyjafjallajökull is showing no signs of stopping. A reduced ash plume combined with favourable winds and a change in the aviation industry’s policy towards acceptable ash levels allowed air travel to restart, but the last couple of days have seen Ireland and Scotland forced to close airports due to renewed ash threat. The volcano became “more explosive” with a higher, denser ash column that was swept towards Ireland and Scotland by a southeasterly wind.
I think it’s reasonable to say that we may see further disruption in the UK and across Europe as this eruption continues, so it seems like a good time to remake the point: Start planning now for your business to be affected by further flight bans, especially as the holiday season creeps towards us, increasing the risk that staff may be able to get out of the country but unable to get home. Start introducing collaborative technology now. Don’t wait for disaster to strike, but get your staff up to speed with new tools whilst you still have the luxury of not being in the middle of a crisis.
Harold Jarche points out that working online is different, and it takes some getting used to:
[I]t’s not about the technology. The real issue is getting people used to working at a distance. For instance, everything has to be transparent for collaborative work to be effective online. Using wikis or Google Documents means that everyone can see what the others have contributed. There is no place to hide.
And Ethan Zuckerman makes a great point that we don’t notice how much we rely on our infrastructure until it has gone. I like Ethan’s definition of ‘infrastructure’:
Infrastructure is the stuff we ignore until it breaks. Then it’s the stuff we’re stunned to discover we’re dependent on.
He then goes on to point out how ridiculous our dependence on air travel has become, to the point where we expect to be able to fly in, do a 20 minute conference presentation and fly home again. I’ve even done that in one single day, and it’s not fun. But, Ethan says:
It’s possible that Eyjafjallajökull could change this. If a 24 hour trip to London has a significant risk of becoming a 5 day trip to London, the calculus changes. As much as frequent travellers gripe about delays and cancellations, they’re pretty infrequent, and mass delays like the ones currently being experienced are downright rare. If they become commonplace, I personally would expect to say no to travel lots more often and do a lot more appearances via Skype and videoconferencing.
From meetings to conferences to team-building events, unreliable air travel changes how we think about long-distance travel. It should also change how we think about working over long distances, and, thence, how we work with the people who sit right next to us.
And for anyone who thinks that this is all a big fuss over nothing, here are a couple of thoughts:
Firstly, when Eyjafjallajökull erupted in December 1821, she did so in fits and starts, with two weeks of activity followed by nothing until June 1822 when she erupted again. Ash fell intermittently for months and activity continued into 1823. In June of 1823, Katla, her neighbour, erupts for four weeks. We are likely to see lulls in activity from Eyjafjallajökull, but we shouldn’t interpret that to mean that the threat is over.
Secondly, by implementing social media, encouraging collaboration and discouraging unnecessary travel your business will become more efficient, more effective and will waste less money on travel. Even if Eyjafjallajökull stops erupting, you’ll still be better off for having prioritised better collaboration practices.