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Kevin: An interesting interview with Chris "Long Tail" Anderson at Der Spiegel. Anderson seems a little peeved at times during the interview, but his message does come through. "Yes. It's all about attention. That is the most valuable commodity. If you have attention and reputation, you can figure out how to monetize it. However, money is not the No. 1 factor anymore."
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Kevin: This was my read of the whole AP 'DRM' debacle. The hNews microformat allows them to track the news, but it won't 'protect' their content. As Ryan Singel points out: "As a means of improving indexing and search, this approach works just fine. As a shield against unauthorized use of content, however, it is easily thwarted. Indeed, it is designed to detect unauthorized use under conditions a content thief would be unlikely to use: Simply cutting and pasting AP content will remove all underlying code (as an overly ambitious aggregator might). So will re-typing it (as a commenting blogger might)." They would probably better publishing all of their content as PDFs if they really want to lock down their content
What's really sad is that the AP has shown how technically ignorant it is on so many levels with this episode. hNews doesn't provide a 'container' for news, and they can't explain how it 'protects' content because it doesn't.
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Kevin: Fair use dead in the EU? Possibly. "The copying and reproduction of just 11 words of a news article can be copyright infringement, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled. Europe's highest court has said that a clippings service's copying could be unlawful."
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Kevin: A thorough guide to use Flickr's API. APIs are relatively easy ways to use web services. It's not as difficult as it might sound, and guides like this will help even non-programmers, like me.
Social filters have replaced professional ones
Chris Anderson, of Long Tail and now Free fame, is obviously getting peeved at the questions he’s getting from journalists. He says as much in this interview at Frank Hornig at Salon.com. Probably the most important line in this rather tedious interview is when Anderson says:
I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don’t go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We’re tuning out television news, we’re tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it’s just that it’s not like this drumbeat of bad news. It’s news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it’s been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn’t matter is not going to get to me.
[From Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter? | Salon News]
Like Anderson, I have developed filters to tune out much of what is in the media. A few years ago journalists were decrying the loss of the all (self-)important gate-keeping function that they said they performed. I got to a point where I thought that if that is what journalists think is their unique selling point then they’re doomed because they are doing a lousy job of determining what is really important.
I spend a lot of time sifting through, while ignoring, much of the garbage produced by media to find a few, small nuggets of information that are useful. I can afford to do that. It’s my job. Not only can I not imagine most people doing this, I think they stopped quite a while ago. They realised that the signal-to-noise ratio was so low that they were better served by just tuning out.
I can ignore most of the childish nonsense that obsesses the mainstream media. Honestly, if it weren’t my job, I would pay to filter out much of this noise. I don’t need to read the professional trolls aka columnists who try to tell me what I should be outraged about. I can figure that out for myself, thank you very much. I do pay for insightful analysis. Most of what obsesses the media is remarkably juvenile, and as the media’s fortunes have waned, they have becoming annoyingly shrill in trying to reassert their role in society. Watchdogs? Defenders of democracy? I wish. Mostly of the media operate as little more than professional gossips and hypocritical scolds.
For the last several years, I have said that the network is my filter. Through blogs, social bookmarking services like Delicious, Twitter and even simple things like email newsletters, I am passed incredibly relevant and high quality information. It’s not that I think professional journalists are superfluous. I just find that social filters are providing an extremely valuable service in recommending the best, most relevant information available.
We’re coming to an economic point where we as journalists have crossed a Rubicon where we can’t do more with less, we’re simply going to have to do less. We just don’t have the resources to create redundant content that provides little value to our audiences. We need to start looking to ways to filter the best information. We need to do it soon. We’re running out of time. Our audiences ran out of patience long ago.
links for 2009-07-29
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Suw: I'm going through citation hell at the moment, trying to tidy up all the half-written citations in my report. Looks like Zotero might well help me sort out the mess!
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Kevin: Umair Haque writes an open letter to 'newspaper magnates'. It's well worth a read. Just a taster: "20th century news isn't fit for 21st century society. Yesterday's approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It's time for a better kind of news.
A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche." -
Kevin: My Guardian colleague and journalistic hacker Simon Willison lists a number of tools that non-developers can use to create mash-ups, visualisations and other data-driven web projects. It's a good starting place if you're looking to create a data project but don't know where to start. We'll be using these at the Guardian at our second internal Hack Day.
links for 2009-07-28
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Kevin: "Total revenue shot up 22% over the year-ago period. Much of the growth came from international expansion of its education publishing, but online revenue at FT Group also contributed."
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Kevin: A new project in the US 'focused on 'helping newspapers identify a strategy to survive its midlife crisis.'"
Some ideas:
• "Focus on taking market share from existing customers in the local market. Yellow Page directories are particularly vulnerable right now, NP 2015 notes.
• Keep the focus on increasing Internet revenue to push up multiples. Investors value Internet revenue 10 to 20x as much as revenue from print. (Keeping print is an imperative, however)
• Break down ad sales teams by specialists. Sales people should be category experts — like say those who concentrate on consumer packaged goods — who can sell across all channels." -
Kevin: Patricia Handschiegel makes an incredibly important distinction in her post looking at website traffic numbers and possibly highlighting why lots of traffic doesn't necessarily mean a successful business: "What a lot of companies are secretly finding out is that traffic does not mean there is an audience, at that at the end of the day, the audience is where the value is. Boasting giant page views and unique visitors means very little when those you are driving to the site are not sticking around, using it or returning."
links for 2009-07-27
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Kevin: Steve Dennen at comScore Voices writes: "These trends demonstrate the challenge for newspapers to more deeply engage online with the growing number of consumers who do not get any of their news information from the print or online editions of their newspapers. Beyond looking for approaches that will attract these consumers to their own sites, the newspapers must explore alternative ways – including using social media or distributed content as potential distribution models – to reach this audience as the Internet becomes the preferred medium for news consumption. By continuing to evolve their services in a way that aligns with their consumers’ preferences, they may be able to identify alternative ways to offset the revenue lost from their declining print channel."
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Kevin: The criticicism of the Associated Press continues to roll in. Scott Rosenberg writes: "“A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now. But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use of headlines as links. In other words, it sounds like A.P. is pulling the pin on a legal Doomsday Machine for news and information on the Web — claiming that there is no fair use right to link to articles using a brief snippet of verbiage from that article, or the original headline on the article."
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Kevin: Josh Karp, founder of The Printed Blog, provides this excellent advice about starting a business, content or otherwise: "It's really important to strike a balance between product development, or available functions, and revenue generation. You want to develop the smallest amount of functionality you need to generate the maximum amount of initial revenue. We focused too much on the product, and not enough on proving that we could make money, and that was a big part of our downfall."
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Kevin: Paul Bradshaw highlights two posts comparing Associated Press' plans to add content protection to the failing effort of the Recording Industry Association of America to protect content through litigation and fighting music consumers.
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Kevin: Hat tip for this to Cyberjournalist.net. Scott Porad, part of the team behind the LOLCat site, I can haz cheezburger writes: "Previously I addressed the misconception that user-generated content is free. To make user-generated content work, Cheezburger expends significant cost to sift through all the user submissions to find the best quality content. However, including this expense, content costs us less to acquire and is undoubtedly of higher quality. This fundamental win-win is the promise of crowd-sourcing and user-generated content."
links for 2009-07-24
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Kevin: "My answer to the beat reporter was that she should reassess what she does to figure out how she can best serve the audience. It could be that writing two or three stories a day is the answer. Or blogging may provide a way to develop a closer relationship with that audience. The digital revolution is less about adding multimedia tricks than it is about reinventing the role of the journalist."
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Kevin: "The New York Times is the latest to report Q2 profits mainly due to cost cutting. And like Gannett, McClatchy and Media General, and Journal Communications executives with the New York Times said the chilling ad revenue losses are starting to subside a teeny-tiny bit."
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Kevin: "Certainly, U.S. newspapers are in a mature industry with low growth potential once recovery from the recession occurs. Most companies will performance reasonably well after the recovery, but certainly some companies will have difficulties because of imprudent strategies and choices. Nevertheless, the industry as a whole will still remain in place producing revenue for many years to come."
links for 2009-07-23
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Kevin: "More than 70 major companies, academic institutions and high profile technologists have launched a campaign to educate US government agencies about the benefits of open source technology."
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Kevin: Ryan Sholin writes: "What do you call your readers now that they’re participating actively in the creation and curation of unbundled media?
Do you call them a community?
Better yet, what makes an online “community” and how can local news sites foster an environment that makes that more likely?"
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Kevin: "Morris and its auditor, Deloitte & Touche, have warned they are uncertain if Morris can continue as a 'going concern.'" That's really all that needs to be said. Another newspaper company failing in the US?
links for 2009-07-22
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Kevin: There is a bit of contradictory information in this post, but it appears that UK blogging network Shiny Media has gone bust (gone into administration). What is more interesting in this post is the contention that Shiny never got $4.5m in funding and never retracted the information. Something doesn't read right here, but it sounds as if things have been rotten in the state of Shiny for a while.
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Kevin: A communications lawyer looks at some of the proposals that have been floated recently in the US in order to keep newspapers afloat including outlawing linnking; allowing newspapers to become non-profits; changing copyright, tax or antitrust laws; or mandating the Automated Content Access Protocol. In the end, Jeffrey Neuburger concludes: "As the debate rages over both the root causes of traditional journalism's economic troubles and possible legal solutions, the online world marches on."
links for 2009-07-21
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Kevin: ReadWriteWeb has another take on Altimeter Group's study of social media and brands. "A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers."
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Kevin: From TechCrunch "Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million."
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Kevin: Slate tries to determine whether newspaper or web readers are better informed. Definitely something to watch.
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Kevin: Juan Antonio Giner writes: "When you see thinks like this you recover the faith in creative and innovative story-telling as one of the main assets to deliver the news to a new generation of readers."
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Kevin: My colleague Martin Belam writes about how the media in the UK are burying their own bad news. It's a post well worth reading. Martin writes: "With the impact of digital distribution, and the effect of the economic downturn, we have more than enough reasons to think that the news industry is dying. Treating our remaining paying customers like children who haven't learnt to use Google yet makes us look like we have a collective death wish."
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Kevin: Washington Post news magazine Newsweek has a paid newsstand circulation of just 67,000 copies a week. That's in a nation with 300m people (the US). Mark Potts writes, "It's a little hard to see why—especially in an age of real-time online news—The Washington Post Co. is keeping Newsweek alive. Readers (and advertisers) just don't seem to care."
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Kevin: Condé Nast has hired McKinsey to help it "develop new perspectives" on how to generate money. The New York Observer has a memo from Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend on the "considerable and complicated task, forcing us to rethink the way we do business in many instances and incorporate efficiencies in every step of our process".
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Kevin: News monitoring service VMS estimates that the value of the TV news, daytime talk show, magazine and newspaper coverage of Twitter was worth $48m. Twitter received 2.73bn impressions bersus 63m for Microsoft's Bing search engine. For comparison, the value of the media coverage for Bing came in at just $573,834. Fascinating and a bit scary.
Outcomes and examples
For my Carnegie UK Trust report on the use of social media in civil society, we want to include a list of “outcomes”, i.e. possible results of using social media (provided that you do it right, of course!). We’d also like to pull together some very short examples – from charities, NGOs, unions, mutuals, co-ops, etc. – that illustrate these outcomes, where we can. Of course, there aren’t necessarily enough examples out there, but it’d be good to try and find some.
Here’s our preliminary list of outcomes:
- Social media helps to engage with segments of the population that traditional marketing may find it difficult to reach.
- Social media enables conversations to take place, which facilitates the co-creation of knowledge.
- Social media improves the relationship between an association and individual supporters, as well as between supporters.
- Social media allows information to rapidly ripple through a community, thus enabling quick and effective mobilisation online and offline.
- Social media provides platforms for dissent by allowing people to express discontent or highlight abuses of power.
- Social media strengthens offline communities, and offline events strengthen online relationships.
- Social media improves the transparency, governance and accountability of organisations, which increases trust in those organisations.
- Social media brings about financial benefits by helping organise direct and indirect fundraising.
- Social media, used internally, helps improve the effectiveness and efficiency of organisations and enables flexible staffing and volunteering.
- Social media helps create highly responsive and less hierarchically governed civil society associations.
Do you have any more key outcomes that you think we’re missing? Any of these that you disagree with? And, most importantly, do you have any examples that would illustrate these?