This past week I came across two conversations in the realm of tech that had me sort of wondering how some journalists miss out on conversations about what's going on within their own profession. The one that caught my attention today was Marshall Kirkpatrick's How We Use Twitter for Journalism"--which seems to focus just on what's being said among the tech folks about the uses of Twitter....who seem to be just a little removed from some of the conversations going on within their own profession on the use of Twitter....
Conversations about Twitter's application in journalism happen often in Poynter's E-Media Tidbits column. At E-MT we've been discussing not just the use of Twitter--incl. its use by the U.K. govt--but also of other tools like Zemata and CoverItLive with regularity. We Tidbits folks enjoy finding new apps and "test driving" them on a regular basis.
So, it's really a no-brainer (to those of us at E-MT anyway) that journalists might use Twitter. The questions for Twitter's use arise when it comes to local journalism, and whether or not Twitter's infrastructure can be updated fast enough so that it can keep up when there are big emergencies. Not to mention whether or not the adults in the local community have the "bandwidth" to be bothered with Twitter. (Note: yours truly often plays "devil's advocate" and is rarely one to be all rah-rah. Heck, *somebody's* got to be the slow-adopter's advocate ;-) )
The other out-of-the-loop piece came from Jim Kersteller at CNet in his praise for "citizen journalism" outing suspected Mac cloner Psyster--which then degenerated into one of those "why don't newsrooms try open-sourcing?" conversations...
Thing is, the Psyster story was broken by longtime journalist Charles Arthur in the Guardian.
Yes, it was nice that a couple of Gizmodo readers who live in Miami went to check it out, and it was very nice that CNet got 117 comments to their story on it--but the story wasn't broken by "citizen journalists"....and I'd daresay that a bunch of comments with loads of kibitzing among the crowd on their own community issues doesn't necessarily qualify as "citizen journalism"...
The thing that got me was that Kersteller seemed not to know that the journalism community's been experimenting with "open source" reporting for the past year, with Assignment Zero (which I worked on) and now with Off the Bus and Beatblogging.org among other projects that are taking place all across the country....
So, it's not like we haven't heard of "open source journalism" and it's not like it hasn't been tried--it's just that the tech journo community seems to be a little out of touch with what's going on in other parts of the wider world of journalism...
Honestly, from my vantage point--where I'm traversing journalism and tech and marketing regularly--I see where the conversations about tools are fractured and disjointed. It leaves me a sense of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing--when the right should be helping the left. How can we have any rate of adoption on tools (as well as ethics) if the disparate parts of the universe within the Internet aren't fully aware of what's going on outside of their own little bell jars? It seems, to me anyway, that we have to open the doors up on these conversations--stop just bringing in the pundits who theorize to conferences and bring in the people who are building and working with the tools. And, perhaps, we need to dampen down so much of the noise in this space and try to help folks turn up the signal. I have no idea how that could be accomplished. Noise is attractive. Noise gets pageviews. Noise gets attention. But noise doesn't always give any new information.
Noise is sometimes just shameless self-promotion...
When what's needed are better conversations outside of the bell jars...
Note: Perhaps Kirkpatrick is aware of other conversations but has to couch them in the manner acceptable to his "crowd"--yet it makes me wonder if it may be necessary for journalists to think outside their community-box in order to highlight what's happening in the wider world. Esp. as worlds converge....
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
We were all beautiful and tragic once...
For some of us, creativity springs from a very dark place. People tend to think we're "weird" or that we're overly dramatic. Not so. The thing is, inside, there's this place where we know there is something special--and to get to it, we have to walk through terrible darkness. It is not a pose nor a gothic affectation. Ian Curtis was one of us. This a.m., while hanging out online, I found out about Control--the U.K. biopic on Curtis by Anton Corbjin.
And I am reminded of my own dark places where my creativity dwells. They haven't gone away--those places--as I've gotten older. I've just chosen not to open those doors as often. And sometimes I misplace the directions for how to get to them. I hope that I haven't permanently misplaced those directions.
Music, though, sometimes provides the sound-map to those destinations.
Here's the trailer for Control:
And I am reminded of my own dark places where my creativity dwells. They haven't gone away--those places--as I've gotten older. I've just chosen not to open those doors as often. And sometimes I misplace the directions for how to get to them. I hope that I haven't permanently misplaced those directions.
Music, though, sometimes provides the sound-map to those destinations.
Here's the trailer for Control:
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
New, Intersting Newsroom Convergence
After watching this recent NewsHour report on the changes at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a friend and I got talking about "newsroom convergence"...which got me thinking that there's more going on when it comes to "newsroom convergence" than turning one's online newspaper into a multi-media news outlet. The convergence has to involve every aspect down to the way business is done in small papers as well as huge ones that beat the FCC's cross-ownership rules. Check these out:
Lee Abrams: Tribune Will Be an 'Oasis of Creativity': So, it's not just Sam Zell offending the sensibilities of some employees that's going to change things--it's also the appointment of Lee Abrams to Chief Innovation Officer.(although I am sort of scared that one of Abrams' credentials is said to be giving Howard Stern his first major market job.) In this interview, Abrams has an idea about convergence of Tribune companies:
Gee, that *kinda* makes sense, doesn't it? Not to mention that it's something I see going on with local TV stations that offer text versions of news stories--although not adding anything new--and what goes on with many of the NYTimes little videos. I'm thinking specifically of the David Pogue stuff which seems to be mostly entertainment, while the articles are far more in-depth.
Newspapers Confront the Enemy Within and would you believe that "enemy" is, yes, THE ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT!! The newsroom fears loss of objectivity and independence, the advertisers grumble that the newsroom doesn't get how to make money. They're both right--which means they need to bridge the cultural divide and start working together (as Louis Hau's piece points out):
Not to mention that today Senators debate the future of the web in hearings today....where folks like Justine Bateman and Patric Verrone (president of the Writer's Guild)testified....
Want to know what Justine and some other indy filmmakers think of the Internet:
Don't you just *love* (to death!) that guy who says everything on the Internet's like "writing on a bathroom wall"?
(hat tip to Tech Daily Dose for that one)
Disappointingly, though, is Steve Outing's How to Create Killer Niche Websites Without Hiring which, again, forwards an idea that the people have to get involved in the production of news--on the newspaper's site--in order for the newspaper (esp. local) to survive. While Outing showcases two unique examples, I'm really rather horrified by most of it. To me, it's the same old "how can we monitize UGC?" and "how can we make people into responsible journalists?" thing that, IMO, isn't necessarily what the people want nor expect from their newspaper. (actually, we'd just like reporters to get the story right--not have to write it ourselves.) Outing's article also brings up the potential of paying contributors on what they make from advertising. Um...see above...and talk to some of the Gawker folks on that one...
Frankly, monetizing UGC probably won't make big bucks in the long run--for the folks contributing nor for the paper. Perhaps better solutions to the problems in and with newspapers have to come from converging the formerly separated parts of a corporation. Whether those parts are the editorial and ad departments or if it's the newspaper/tv/radio parts of a huge media corporation, the news industry as a profit-making business should look to how other businesses converge internally to make profits happen without trying to get freebies from the people (or is it "content" from the "user generators"?)
Just my $.02
Lee Abrams: Tribune Will Be an 'Oasis of Creativity': So, it's not just Sam Zell offending the sensibilities of some employees that's going to change things--it's also the appointment of Lee Abrams to Chief Innovation Officer.(although I am sort of scared that one of Abrams' credentials is said to be giving Howard Stern his first major market job.) In this interview, Abrams has an idea about convergence of Tribune companies:
This company owns TV stations, newspapers and Web sites -- and they're all operating separately. There should be some way in which the television station offers the real quick story, the newspaper gets in more detail, and then the Web site really gets into the story in tremendous depth. But now they're working independently with each other. These could be our super news brands, if we put them all together somehow.
Gee, that *kinda* makes sense, doesn't it? Not to mention that it's something I see going on with local TV stations that offer text versions of news stories--although not adding anything new--and what goes on with many of the NYTimes little videos. I'm thinking specifically of the David Pogue stuff which seems to be mostly entertainment, while the articles are far more in-depth.
Newspapers Confront the Enemy Within and would you believe that "enemy" is, yes, THE ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT!! The newsroom fears loss of objectivity and independence, the advertisers grumble that the newsroom doesn't get how to make money. They're both right--which means they need to bridge the cultural divide and start working together (as Louis Hau's piece points out):
Many editors tend to believe that page views are the most important driver of revenue: more clicks, more bucks. But, Brownrout [former ad exec at the LATimes and others]argues, it's the utility of the content being offered that presents the greatest opportunities...
Not to mention that today Senators debate the future of the web in hearings today....where folks like Justine Bateman and Patric Verrone (president of the Writer's Guild)testified....
Want to know what Justine and some other indy filmmakers think of the Internet:
Don't you just *love* (to death!) that guy who says everything on the Internet's like "writing on a bathroom wall"?
(hat tip to Tech Daily Dose for that one)
Disappointingly, though, is Steve Outing's How to Create Killer Niche Websites Without Hiring which, again, forwards an idea that the people have to get involved in the production of news--on the newspaper's site--in order for the newspaper (esp. local) to survive. While Outing showcases two unique examples, I'm really rather horrified by most of it. To me, it's the same old "how can we monitize UGC?" and "how can we make people into responsible journalists?" thing that, IMO, isn't necessarily what the people want nor expect from their newspaper. (actually, we'd just like reporters to get the story right--not have to write it ourselves.) Outing's article also brings up the potential of paying contributors on what they make from advertising. Um...see above...and talk to some of the Gawker folks on that one...
Frankly, monetizing UGC probably won't make big bucks in the long run--for the folks contributing nor for the paper. Perhaps better solutions to the problems in and with newspapers have to come from converging the formerly separated parts of a corporation. Whether those parts are the editorial and ad departments or if it's the newspaper/tv/radio parts of a huge media corporation, the news industry as a profit-making business should look to how other businesses converge internally to make profits happen without trying to get freebies from the people (or is it "content" from the "user generators"?)
Just my $.02
Monday, April 21, 2008
Crowdsourcing? Consumer Advocacy? But don't necessarily call it "Citizen Journalism"
Apparenlty, over last week there was something of a tech watcher brouhaha over what CNet claimed to be a Mac clone maker, Psystar. Lots of people got on their keyboards and started looking up Pystar. CNet's article got 117 comments relating to the Psystar story. Others who weighed in were Charles Arthur at the Guardian and bunch of folks at Gizmodo
This lead CNet's Jim Kersteller to declare all this hubbub a victory for citizen journalism:
Uh....earth to Jim....
Let's take a closer look at what happened with the 117 comments on Tom Krazit's original story: it appears that a lot of people were really interested in hearing about this and did their own quick Google searches on the company name. Along with constructive comments are a number of the usual CNet kibitzing with wonderfully humorous headlines like "Is Pystar pronounced shyster?" and "Let's all stop hyperventilating, shall we?"
These great little comments can be seen as a kind of crowdsourcing. But hardly "citizen journalism"--
And then a couple of Gizmodo readers decided to check out a few things, just to see if Psystar had the Miami location claimed in the info the Guardian found...(btw, the Guardian article was written by a professional journalist-see the comments...)
Well, I can definitely say "Cool!" Some Gizmodo readers were available and wanted to check out what was what. Maybe, as a stretch, this is a kind of "citizen journalism" but...
Is it maybe even a form of consumer advocacy--where the potential consumers of the product went to ferret out a potential fraud?
So, this whole thing could be a good case for the power of crowdsourcing--perhaps crowdsourced consumer advocacy. But is it "citizen journalism"??
IMO, I'm getting very, very weary of folks like Kersteller, who obviously hasn't kept up with what's been going on regarding journalism and citizen involvement in journalistic projects like Assignment Zero or Off the Bus or kept up with Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing blog before thinking that they're seeing the future and that only if newspapers would just take a look at what the Gizmodo folks did...
Further, there are some paradigms going on right now for people adding to stuff through comments (like on CNet)--it goes on to some degree over at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, albeit behind a paid wall, so don't bother to look. And it goes on to some degree over at Masslive.com in their Forums...
But is this "citizen journalism"--or is it folks conversing and sharing information, in a crowdsourcing model, to uncover more about something....
And then is *any* online uncovering of some issue (consumer fraud, etc.) automatically qualify the kibbitzing and commenting and actions of a few a form of "citizen journalism"??
I took a further bit of umbrage at Kersteller's suggestion that newspapers just ought to rely on the citizens to do their reporting for them. Argh! It's one thing when a bunch of computer geeks (who follow Gizmodo) have the time to get their knickers out of a bunch by investigating something like a potential Mac clone shop--or when local folks want to add what they're observing about, perhaps, an accident or fire. It is a completely different animal to advocate that all local reporting should take this model as Kersteller advocates.
It's one thing to channel the enthusiasm of tech geeks--another to say to the citizenry "sorry, we can't do the local reporting, it's your job now." One is specific and directed--the other is expecting free labor to keep a failing business model afloat with potentially free or drastically underpaid labor.
Then again, given recent articles in local papers about two friends' local businesses, which got everything wrong, one might be lead to believe the citizenry might do a better job...
But maybe it's not that we want the citizenry to do the reporters' jobs. Maybe it's more that we want the reporters to get the story right.
And if they're not--then fire the editors who are perhaps becoming those one too many cooks in the broth....
Just my $.02
This lead CNet's Jim Kersteller to declare all this hubbub a victory for citizen journalism:
But there's one thing we know for sure: Citizen journalism has played a major role in ferreting out the Psystar story. And with that involvement, we're getting a better understanding of how mainstream newspapers can work with folks who aren't trying to make a living off gathering the news but are interested in telling the world what they know.
Uh....earth to Jim....
Let's take a closer look at what happened with the 117 comments on Tom Krazit's original story: it appears that a lot of people were really interested in hearing about this and did their own quick Google searches on the company name. Along with constructive comments are a number of the usual CNet kibitzing with wonderfully humorous headlines like "Is Pystar pronounced shyster?" and "Let's all stop hyperventilating, shall we?"
These great little comments can be seen as a kind of crowdsourcing. But hardly "citizen journalism"--
And then a couple of Gizmodo readers decided to check out a few things, just to see if Psystar had the Miami location claimed in the info the Guardian found...(btw, the Guardian article was written by a professional journalist-see the comments...)
Well, I can definitely say "Cool!" Some Gizmodo readers were available and wanted to check out what was what. Maybe, as a stretch, this is a kind of "citizen journalism" but...
Is it maybe even a form of consumer advocacy--where the potential consumers of the product went to ferret out a potential fraud?
So, this whole thing could be a good case for the power of crowdsourcing--perhaps crowdsourced consumer advocacy. But is it "citizen journalism"??
IMO, I'm getting very, very weary of folks like Kersteller, who obviously hasn't kept up with what's been going on regarding journalism and citizen involvement in journalistic projects like Assignment Zero or Off the Bus or kept up with Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing blog before thinking that they're seeing the future and that only if newspapers would just take a look at what the Gizmodo folks did...
Further, there are some paradigms going on right now for people adding to stuff through comments (like on CNet)--it goes on to some degree over at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, albeit behind a paid wall, so don't bother to look. And it goes on to some degree over at Masslive.com in their Forums...
But is this "citizen journalism"--or is it folks conversing and sharing information, in a crowdsourcing model, to uncover more about something....
And then is *any* online uncovering of some issue (consumer fraud, etc.) automatically qualify the kibbitzing and commenting and actions of a few a form of "citizen journalism"??
I took a further bit of umbrage at Kersteller's suggestion that newspapers just ought to rely on the citizens to do their reporting for them. Argh! It's one thing when a bunch of computer geeks (who follow Gizmodo) have the time to get their knickers out of a bunch by investigating something like a potential Mac clone shop--or when local folks want to add what they're observing about, perhaps, an accident or fire. It is a completely different animal to advocate that all local reporting should take this model as Kersteller advocates.
It's one thing to channel the enthusiasm of tech geeks--another to say to the citizenry "sorry, we can't do the local reporting, it's your job now." One is specific and directed--the other is expecting free labor to keep a failing business model afloat with potentially free or drastically underpaid labor.
Then again, given recent articles in local papers about two friends' local businesses, which got everything wrong, one might be lead to believe the citizenry might do a better job...
But maybe it's not that we want the citizenry to do the reporters' jobs. Maybe it's more that we want the reporters to get the story right.
And if they're not--then fire the editors who are perhaps becoming those one too many cooks in the broth....
Just my $.02
Friday, April 18, 2008
The Future Nature of the PR/Journalist Relationship
Occasionally I get email on really worthwhile projects that strike at one of my own interests, and here's one: At Bournemouth University, Adam Abu-Nab, an undergrad who's doing work focused on P/R, has undertaken a very interesting research project. He'd like to find out what you think about the relationship between Journalism and P/R as it relates to Web 2.0. Adam describes what he's doing as follows:
Adam also has a blog, Fast-Forwarding PR/Journalist Relations
and also has a mailing list, which can be subscribed at abunab at gmail.com.
If you've got a minute or two, take Adam's survey--I'm actually quite curious as to what he's going to find!
I am conducting fresh research into the PR/Journalist relationship and
the changing effects Web 2.0 has had on relations. This ranges from
the very current use of Twitter as a newswire to the advent of Social
Media Newsrooms.
I would be very grateful if you could spare a moment to air your
opinions in this survey on the future nature of the Journalist/ PR
relationship. The results of which I hope you find informative in
developing more effective communication with your PR contacts:
Click here for the survey:
http://s-2a4d6-41504.sgizmo.com
This is to be crossed with PR perceptions so I'm aiming for results
which are advantageous for both parties for future communications. All
interesting findings (including the best comments) will be released
into the blogosphere for discussion (already have over 50 PR bloggers
involved and a growing Journalist contingency!)
Adam also has a blog, Fast-Forwarding PR/Journalist Relations
and also has a mailing list, which can be subscribed at abunab at gmail.com.
If you've got a minute or two, take Adam's survey--I'm actually quite curious as to what he's going to find!
Friday, April 11, 2008
Nine Hundred and Twenty Five Comments about Cannonballs on the Side of a Road
Sometimes when I read the NYTimes I come across rather unique situations in online interaction that remind me of the richness of interaction within the walls of online NYT. Errol Morris' NYT blog post--Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg (Part 1)--the opening salvo of a complex discussion on Roger Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" photographs (yes, *that* "valley of the shadow of death"--Charge of the Light Brigade...)
I had no idea there were 19th century photographs of this particular place, let alone that one of the photographs was more than likely staged for dramatic effect (see the second one with the clearly displayed cannonballs). Then again, I'm not an aficionado of photography....
My preferred leisure-time intellectual pursuit (some may call it "leisure time mental masturbation) is usually on film, and it was Morris' post on continuity breaks in film, whether and why we notice them or not, and the phrase "Play it again, Sam" that got me actually looking at his blog (yes, it was Woody Allen, not the flashbacks in the film, that make us remember that phrase vs. the original....)but I digress...
Thing is, there were 925 comments to Morris' post on the Fenton photographs. There's no interaction from Morris--as there really isn't any need for additional interaction on his part. The people leaving those 925 comments are genuinely interested not just in what Morris is saying about the Fenton photos, but are sharing expertise.
It is not that they are necessarily formal "experts"--although some may be. But it's that they have something to share, something to say, some "expertise"....
There is much criticism that blogging is bringing about a multitude of "experts" on this or that. Yet I think this is a false notion, as it isn't about the ego-driven ideal of being THE EXPERT. Even Morris isn't the sole "expert" on these photos. He never presents himself that way. What he does is share thoughts, discussions with others about photos, quotes from books. What he does in this essay--the kind of essay that blog format can easily carry--is share with others who aren't sitting in a classroom, and inviting them to share what they know as well.
It is an invitation to conversation. Not an expert pontification.
As I sat listening to E.L. Doctorow the other night at a lecture he gave at Western New England College, I got to longing for intellectual discussion and academia, and thinking how, unless you position yourself correctly in the right social circles, intellectual discussion can be hard to come by in the workaday world. Inside, I long for a place where I can indulge in the kinds of dialogue that many folks call "mental masturbation"--and that makes me very happy when that "mental masturbation" is about film.
Maybe there are others who long to--or just like to--share their thoughts and knowledge, expert or not, on things like the Fenton photos....
925 comments on some photographs that lots of people don't even know about.. That's a lot of people who want to share thoughts, opinions, expertise. Maybe it's not that sharing these thoughts will lead to being considered an expert. Perhaps there is something in sharing expertise for the pure joy of connecting to others and not to be the sole expert that is, in part, why a heady essay like Morris's could gather up 925 comments.
And why there might be enough people interested in posting 925 comments in the first place.
Andrew Keen likes to bemoan the loss of the expert due to fragmentation of culture on happening because of the Internet. And while in some ways there is a fracturing of common cultural experience, there are also pockets where folks who may have felt isolated can gather and share experience. They do not have to be experts--and maybe it's the idea of the expert that's a construct going by the wayside--but they can be a rarefied group of people who gather just for the sheer joy of discussion....discussion that doesn't prove a point or change the world. Discussion that is stimulating, beyond the mundane stuff of daily life makes daily life worth living (for some of us anyway). Discussion that engages the brain and stimulates the soul....
Maybe it's just the open discussion among adults on heady topics--discussion that isn't presided over by an expert charged with the task of shaping minds--that freaks out people like Keen (and perhaps lots of the newspaper establishment as well.)
Maybe it's not that discussions are "uncivil"--maybe it's just that there are so many people who want to have discussions about so many things that gets the experts and others all jumpy and nervous about what's happening in online conversation...
I don't think it freaks out people like Errol Morris though. He seems to embrace the medium. His blogging, while long, is pretty good. I think he gets it. And, more than likely, in a variety of ways, so do the people who left the 925 comments...
I had no idea there were 19th century photographs of this particular place, let alone that one of the photographs was more than likely staged for dramatic effect (see the second one with the clearly displayed cannonballs). Then again, I'm not an aficionado of photography....
My preferred leisure-time intellectual pursuit (some may call it "leisure time mental masturbation) is usually on film, and it was Morris' post on continuity breaks in film, whether and why we notice them or not, and the phrase "Play it again, Sam" that got me actually looking at his blog (yes, it was Woody Allen, not the flashbacks in the film, that make us remember that phrase vs. the original....)but I digress...
Thing is, there were 925 comments to Morris' post on the Fenton photographs. There's no interaction from Morris--as there really isn't any need for additional interaction on his part. The people leaving those 925 comments are genuinely interested not just in what Morris is saying about the Fenton photos, but are sharing expertise.
It is not that they are necessarily formal "experts"--although some may be. But it's that they have something to share, something to say, some "expertise"....
There is much criticism that blogging is bringing about a multitude of "experts" on this or that. Yet I think this is a false notion, as it isn't about the ego-driven ideal of being THE EXPERT. Even Morris isn't the sole "expert" on these photos. He never presents himself that way. What he does is share thoughts, discussions with others about photos, quotes from books. What he does in this essay--the kind of essay that blog format can easily carry--is share with others who aren't sitting in a classroom, and inviting them to share what they know as well.
It is an invitation to conversation. Not an expert pontification.
As I sat listening to E.L. Doctorow the other night at a lecture he gave at Western New England College, I got to longing for intellectual discussion and academia, and thinking how, unless you position yourself correctly in the right social circles, intellectual discussion can be hard to come by in the workaday world. Inside, I long for a place where I can indulge in the kinds of dialogue that many folks call "mental masturbation"--and that makes me very happy when that "mental masturbation" is about film.
Maybe there are others who long to--or just like to--share their thoughts and knowledge, expert or not, on things like the Fenton photos....
925 comments on some photographs that lots of people don't even know about.. That's a lot of people who want to share thoughts, opinions, expertise. Maybe it's not that sharing these thoughts will lead to being considered an expert. Perhaps there is something in sharing expertise for the pure joy of connecting to others and not to be the sole expert that is, in part, why a heady essay like Morris's could gather up 925 comments.
And why there might be enough people interested in posting 925 comments in the first place.
Andrew Keen likes to bemoan the loss of the expert due to fragmentation of culture on happening because of the Internet. And while in some ways there is a fracturing of common cultural experience, there are also pockets where folks who may have felt isolated can gather and share experience. They do not have to be experts--and maybe it's the idea of the expert that's a construct going by the wayside--but they can be a rarefied group of people who gather just for the sheer joy of discussion....discussion that doesn't prove a point or change the world. Discussion that is stimulating, beyond the mundane stuff of daily life makes daily life worth living (for some of us anyway). Discussion that engages the brain and stimulates the soul....
Maybe it's just the open discussion among adults on heady topics--discussion that isn't presided over by an expert charged with the task of shaping minds--that freaks out people like Keen (and perhaps lots of the newspaper establishment as well.)
Maybe it's not that discussions are "uncivil"--maybe it's just that there are so many people who want to have discussions about so many things that gets the experts and others all jumpy and nervous about what's happening in online conversation...
I don't think it freaks out people like Errol Morris though. He seems to embrace the medium. His blogging, while long, is pretty good. I think he gets it. And, more than likely, in a variety of ways, so do the people who left the 925 comments...
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Some Newspapers Can't Quite Get That Link Thing...
According to Jack Shafer, some of our major newspapers are starting to get all link-happy, but the links aren't adding to reader experience:
Jack notes that this strategy is meant "for the publisher to serve another page of ads and to optimize search engine results."
Guess that's one answer to the conundrum of how to get web pages to generate more income for ya. But this strategy is not about readers, and giving any of us good information connected to the story.
Which is why people hyperlink in the first place!
Jack also points out the annoyance of mouse-over pop-up ads. I'd like to add annoying animated ads right next to text, that spring to life as soon as the page is fully loaded--which cannot be stopped and then, in some cases, continue the animation for the entire time on the page.
It's worse than a little kid getting in your face while you're trying to read the paper. At least the kid is (a)cute in most cases and (b) not trying to sell you something.
Still, another annoyance of Jack's is what he refers to as a "mixed-link strategy," where one never knows if one's going to a page inside the site or outside the site--unless you mouse over it and check the status bar first. I've gotten pretty used to this, so it's just part and parcel and why, with certain pubs like Valleywag, I rarely bother with the links.
Yet what newspapers haven't figured out about the mixed-link strategy is that it will eventually damage them with Google--as was noted back in October when so many newspapers and blog networks were demoted by Google because the bots saw them as link farms.
Yes, if you link too much to your own stuff, Google will think you're a link farm. So, link out and link often :-)
And while many new and old print journalism folks just can't seem to get the old link thing, Jack notes that Frank Rich (of all people! go figure!) is doing pretty well by linking out to stuff all over the place.
Thing is, I'm not sure that most reporters have the luxury of linking outside to competition. Rich is a well-respected veteran, and I'd bet that the NYT gives him a bit more latitude (or cuts him a bit more slack) because of it. Would they allow this for their other reporters and bloggers as well? (note to self: go check this on the NYT blogs, which seem to be getting all sorts of raves all over the place.)
What Jack doesn't know about is the The Daily Hampshire Gazette, a small local paper that is not only behind a pay wall, but isn't particularly hyperlinking to anyone. Than again, if you're a walled garden, what difference does Google make to who and how many readers you get daily? It still seems like an eventually self-defeating web business strategy to me...
However, in the case of big papers, they should always be working to raise their page rank as well as get eyeballs. And there are lots of ways of doing that...
So, while big papers like WaPo and NYT might eventually get that their automated links will turn both readers and Google away from them, and allow their reporters (not just bigtime columnists) to link out to sources, I wonder what might happen on the hyperlocal level? I bet if I did the research, I might find a local paper or two that has a decent link strategy--but that doesn't say much for our papers of record, who should be linking out to information as much, or more, than linking in or linking to junk.
Then again, it raises the question: what's the purpose of a newspaper anyway? To make sure democracy keeps going, or to serve up the coolest ads?
Makes me wonder....
Almost any Washingtonpost.com or Nytimes.com news story demonstrates the sites' link-happy tendencies. A good example of the Washingtonpost.com's overkill is this Page One story from Monday about the alleged budget crunch faced by some states. In the first 95 words, the story links Illinois, Cook County, Michigan, New Jersey, California, and San Fernando Valley to Washingtonpost.com landing pages containing general news, video, and audio about those places. No thinking human would ever add these links—obviously, a human has programmed a computer to automatically insert them.(some links omitted)
Jack notes that this strategy is meant "for the publisher to serve another page of ads and to optimize search engine results."
Guess that's one answer to the conundrum of how to get web pages to generate more income for ya. But this strategy is not about readers, and giving any of us good information connected to the story.
Which is why people hyperlink in the first place!
Jack also points out the annoyance of mouse-over pop-up ads. I'd like to add annoying animated ads right next to text, that spring to life as soon as the page is fully loaded--which cannot be stopped and then, in some cases, continue the animation for the entire time on the page.
It's worse than a little kid getting in your face while you're trying to read the paper. At least the kid is (a)cute in most cases and (b) not trying to sell you something.
Still, another annoyance of Jack's is what he refers to as a "mixed-link strategy," where one never knows if one's going to a page inside the site or outside the site--unless you mouse over it and check the status bar first. I've gotten pretty used to this, so it's just part and parcel and why, with certain pubs like Valleywag, I rarely bother with the links.
Yet what newspapers haven't figured out about the mixed-link strategy is that it will eventually damage them with Google--as was noted back in October when so many newspapers and blog networks were demoted by Google because the bots saw them as link farms.
Yes, if you link too much to your own stuff, Google will think you're a link farm. So, link out and link often :-)
And while many new and old print journalism folks just can't seem to get the old link thing, Jack notes that Frank Rich (of all people! go figure!) is doing pretty well by linking out to stuff all over the place.
Thing is, I'm not sure that most reporters have the luxury of linking outside to competition. Rich is a well-respected veteran, and I'd bet that the NYT gives him a bit more latitude (or cuts him a bit more slack) because of it. Would they allow this for their other reporters and bloggers as well? (note to self: go check this on the NYT blogs, which seem to be getting all sorts of raves all over the place.)
What Jack doesn't know about is the The Daily Hampshire Gazette, a small local paper that is not only behind a pay wall, but isn't particularly hyperlinking to anyone. Than again, if you're a walled garden, what difference does Google make to who and how many readers you get daily? It still seems like an eventually self-defeating web business strategy to me...
However, in the case of big papers, they should always be working to raise their page rank as well as get eyeballs. And there are lots of ways of doing that...
So, while big papers like WaPo and NYT might eventually get that their automated links will turn both readers and Google away from them, and allow their reporters (not just bigtime columnists) to link out to sources, I wonder what might happen on the hyperlocal level? I bet if I did the research, I might find a local paper or two that has a decent link strategy--but that doesn't say much for our papers of record, who should be linking out to information as much, or more, than linking in or linking to junk.
Then again, it raises the question: what's the purpose of a newspaper anyway? To make sure democracy keeps going, or to serve up the coolest ads?
Makes me wonder....
Sunday, April 06, 2008
If Blogging Doesn't Kill You, The Conversation About It Might...
Okay, so I'm probably going to get called a tasteless cheeky monkey for that headline--but ever since the NYTimes article In Web World of 24/7,Writers Blog Till They Drop there's been such a hubub in the blogosphere that one can barely keep up with the commentary without totally blowing up one's browser...
It's been fascinating watching all the hoo-had, and folks saying the article was link-baiting (it wouldn't be if people didn't get their knickers in a bunch and just let it slide) or that it was tasteless because it was perceived to make light of the deaths of Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant (not to mention Om Malik's heart attack), or that it was just too much hype by an outsider observer of a hype filled world...
Seriously, though....was the article really any more hype-a-riffic than those "you can be a blog millionarie!" articles that were in BusinessWeek and New York Magazine over the past few years??? Those articles that made it look as if only the lazy and untalented were not making their millions at blogging.
And that was never the case. It was just wicked seriously hard to get one's voice heard, let alone the requisite click-throughs and networking connections to begin to get the contracts that would translate into making respectable self-sustaining income from blogging. And most of the people who did make that money had backgrounds in something other than blogging...still, some of them struggled at first too...
Blogging, early on, wasn't necessarily meant to be a self-sustaining, career or empire building thing. I don't think anyone thought it would become some sort of industry all on its own.
Some people made it into that, while others (your Humble Narrator included) have managed to make something from it...
That doesn't mean it's not stressful. In fact, I've found it, at times, to be stressful to the level that the Times article portrayed it (and my recent kidney stone operation may have been a result of that stress.) I've been up till the wee hours on projects; going sleepless because someone was demanding something that I knew, deep-down, was thoroughly unreasonable (but they wouldn't believe me); or was working way too many contracts in order to make that reasonable, self-sustaining income. I gained weight, too--only about 15 lbs though.
But I found that other folks working on start-ups also gained weight. So the weight wasn't from blogging, inasmuch as it was from the fact that the blogging was related to start-ups and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
So, in all the hoo-ha and, in some cases, denial that there could *possibly* be any stress related to blogging, there were a few posts that made great sense:
Henry Blodget says that it's a lot like being part of start-ups...and he's right. I know this from comparing notes with start-up folks in other fields. Our stress--and weight gain--is similar....
Doc makes an important comment that there's a difference "in kind between writing to produce understanding and writing to produce money, even when they overlap. There are matters of purpose to consider, and how one drives (or even corrupts) the other."
There's also an excellent comment to Doc's post from Trudy Schuett who notes the wild disparity in pay rates for blogging...this is something I've experienced, and read about, and have even heard from experienced writers, some of whom are being low-balled for online work that's been more intensive than print work they've done for the exact same publications...
Matt Ingram has a decent commentary on the matter, as does Renee Blodgett who obliquely notes that the insanity's gotten a bit worse since the whole social networking thing....
And danah boyd has some very important thoughts on how workaholism is rewarded by corporate culture
Also see great "chill out" messages from Om Malik and Paul Glazowski at Mashable! who gives us a non-star's perspective, which I could so relate to...
So, yes, blogging can be stressful, like starting lots of other kinds of business, esp. like tech start-up businesses--and there are lots of logical reasons for that. It's hard to have perspective on success, too, because we don't hear much from the grunts like Paul and myself and lots of others who are doing o.k. with this whole blogging thing, possibly in spite of the stress and in spite of what others thought we could do with this blogging thing (going into blogging as a career = going into acting as a career...) The industries that are looking to blogging to save their failing business models don't want to hear about the grunts--they want only the hype of the superstars.
But are we even grunts? Or maybe it's that we've reached a certain level of success that's ok for us. I'm sure I'll never be Mike Arrington, or Xeni Jardin, or any number of superstars you can name on any day. But have I made something out of nothing? Have I turned a profit over the past two years of my consulting business? Have I contributed, in some small way to changing things, even though lots of local people have no idea what I do for a living?
You betcha!
And maybe that's not a bad place to be....
It's been fascinating watching all the hoo-had, and folks saying the article was link-baiting (it wouldn't be if people didn't get their knickers in a bunch and just let it slide) or that it was tasteless because it was perceived to make light of the deaths of Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant (not to mention Om Malik's heart attack), or that it was just too much hype by an outsider observer of a hype filled world...
Seriously, though....was the article really any more hype-a-riffic than those "you can be a blog millionarie!" articles that were in BusinessWeek and New York Magazine over the past few years??? Those articles that made it look as if only the lazy and untalented were not making their millions at blogging.
And that was never the case. It was just wicked seriously hard to get one's voice heard, let alone the requisite click-throughs and networking connections to begin to get the contracts that would translate into making respectable self-sustaining income from blogging. And most of the people who did make that money had backgrounds in something other than blogging...still, some of them struggled at first too...
Blogging, early on, wasn't necessarily meant to be a self-sustaining, career or empire building thing. I don't think anyone thought it would become some sort of industry all on its own.
Some people made it into that, while others (your Humble Narrator included) have managed to make something from it...
That doesn't mean it's not stressful. In fact, I've found it, at times, to be stressful to the level that the Times article portrayed it (and my recent kidney stone operation may have been a result of that stress.) I've been up till the wee hours on projects; going sleepless because someone was demanding something that I knew, deep-down, was thoroughly unreasonable (but they wouldn't believe me); or was working way too many contracts in order to make that reasonable, self-sustaining income. I gained weight, too--only about 15 lbs though.
But I found that other folks working on start-ups also gained weight. So the weight wasn't from blogging, inasmuch as it was from the fact that the blogging was related to start-ups and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
So, in all the hoo-ha and, in some cases, denial that there could *possibly* be any stress related to blogging, there were a few posts that made great sense:
Henry Blodget says that it's a lot like being part of start-ups...and he's right. I know this from comparing notes with start-up folks in other fields. Our stress--and weight gain--is similar....
Doc makes an important comment that there's a difference "in kind between writing to produce understanding and writing to produce money, even when they overlap. There are matters of purpose to consider, and how one drives (or even corrupts) the other."
There's also an excellent comment to Doc's post from Trudy Schuett who notes the wild disparity in pay rates for blogging...this is something I've experienced, and read about, and have even heard from experienced writers, some of whom are being low-balled for online work that's been more intensive than print work they've done for the exact same publications...
Matt Ingram has a decent commentary on the matter, as does Renee Blodgett who obliquely notes that the insanity's gotten a bit worse since the whole social networking thing....
And danah boyd has some very important thoughts on how workaholism is rewarded by corporate culture
can't help but wonder if all of this is leading us down a dangerous path. The young and highly motivated turn into self-competing workaholics, often fueled by stimulants - legal (e.g., coffee), illegal (e.g., cocaine), and prescription (e.g., Provigil). Older folks and those who want to "have a life" look at this insanity with horror and back quietly away trying not to startled the hopped up beasts.
This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't playing into professional culture more broadly. Increasingly, only those bent on workaholism are valued as employees. Those who don't push it to extremes are disregarded as lazy in many industries. There is pressure to work 24/7 and there are plenty of folks who take this seriously, even if it's not in their best interests let alone the rest of society's. I get so ravingly mad at my (primarily male) colleagues who work 14 hour days even though they have small children that they never see. It's one thing to be a workaholic as a single 20-something; it's another thing to be a workaholic as a parent. I get to see the flipside of that one - teens starved for attention, desperate to please in the hopes of being given attention and validation.
Also see great "chill out" messages from Om Malik and Paul Glazowski at Mashable! who gives us a non-star's perspective, which I could so relate to...
So, yes, blogging can be stressful, like starting lots of other kinds of business, esp. like tech start-up businesses--and there are lots of logical reasons for that. It's hard to have perspective on success, too, because we don't hear much from the grunts like Paul and myself and lots of others who are doing o.k. with this whole blogging thing, possibly in spite of the stress and in spite of what others thought we could do with this blogging thing (going into blogging as a career = going into acting as a career...) The industries that are looking to blogging to save their failing business models don't want to hear about the grunts--they want only the hype of the superstars.
But are we even grunts? Or maybe it's that we've reached a certain level of success that's ok for us. I'm sure I'll never be Mike Arrington, or Xeni Jardin, or any number of superstars you can name on any day. But have I made something out of nothing? Have I turned a profit over the past two years of my consulting business? Have I contributed, in some small way to changing things, even though lots of local people have no idea what I do for a living?
You betcha!
And maybe that's not a bad place to be....
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Sam Zell goes all crowdsource on the Trib
Update 8/1/08: In Sam Zell's Deal From Hell BusinessWeek points out that things might not be going all that great at Trib for a plethora of reasons. So much for the crowdsourcing :-(
Imagine that! Sam Zell--who's taken much heat from the journalism establishment--has gone and done something truly unique: he's "crowdsourcing" the Trib newsroom to get the best ideas for moving the Trib forward.
Who better to come up with suggestions than his own newsroom! Zell sez about "IdeaBank"--the place where he wants peeps to contribute:
As well it should be!
Zell's also done such revolutionary stuff such as get rid of net-nanny style filters on reporter's computers--"do not see how a member of the Fourth Estate, dedicated to protecting the First Amendment, can censor what its own employees and partners can see," said Zell on the matter--as well as desire to sell under performing properties like NY Newsday...
But The Valley Advocate which was held by Hartford Courant companies, a subsidiary of the Trib was sold to Newspapers of New England, Inc in Dec '07, in part (from what I understand) due to its under-performance...
So the sell-off of under-preforming Trib properties shouldn't be all that shocking (that is, unless you hadn't heard about the smaller ones like the V.A.)
Overall, Zell seems to really be shaking up the establishment. And I'm really glad to see it! Most of us know that the business model for journalism--and the way that the journalism business has been treating its newsroom--has been shot for awhile. With the "IdeaBank" Zell appears to actually want to know what his journalists are thinking and what they might want to do to keep the thing afloat. Who better to ask than the folks who are in the trenches daily? Certainly makes better sense to ask them than a bunch of disconnected business consultants....
Besides, we all knew you could conceivably crowdsource your newsroom for ideas, but who was going to be the one to *actually* do it first? Certainly wasn't going to be one of the entrenched. Can't wait to see what Zell does next....
Just my $.02
Imagine that! Sam Zell--who's taken much heat from the journalism establishment--has gone and done something truly unique: he's "crowdsourcing" the Trib newsroom to get the best ideas for moving the Trib forward.
Who better to come up with suggestions than his own newsroom! Zell sez about "IdeaBank"--the place where he wants peeps to contribute:
Most importantly, I want to convey that this is not some lighthearted initiative. I expect you to participate. Make deposits. Make withdrawals. Review the ideas to determine how you might adapt them to your business unit. And, managers, by reviewing and analyzing these ideas, you dramatically increase the probability of their viability.
So, be prolific. The future of our company is literally in your hands.
As well it should be!
Zell's also done such revolutionary stuff such as get rid of net-nanny style filters on reporter's computers--"do not see how a member of the Fourth Estate, dedicated to protecting the First Amendment, can censor what its own employees and partners can see," said Zell on the matter--as well as desire to sell under performing properties like NY Newsday...
But The Valley Advocate which was held by Hartford Courant companies, a subsidiary of the Trib was sold to Newspapers of New England, Inc in Dec '07, in part (from what I understand) due to its under-performance...
So the sell-off of under-preforming Trib properties shouldn't be all that shocking (that is, unless you hadn't heard about the smaller ones like the V.A.)
Overall, Zell seems to really be shaking up the establishment. And I'm really glad to see it! Most of us know that the business model for journalism--and the way that the journalism business has been treating its newsroom--has been shot for awhile. With the "IdeaBank" Zell appears to actually want to know what his journalists are thinking and what they might want to do to keep the thing afloat. Who better to ask than the folks who are in the trenches daily? Certainly makes better sense to ask them than a bunch of disconnected business consultants....
Besides, we all knew you could conceivably crowdsource your newsroom for ideas, but who was going to be the one to *actually* do it first? Certainly wasn't going to be one of the entrenched. Can't wait to see what Zell does next....
Just my $.02
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Congratulations BlogDigger!
When I read this a.m. that BlogDigger would be acquired by Odeo I thought this to be absolutely fantastic for Greg Gershman's little blog search engine that could....
I had a brief back and forth with Greg back in '05 and could see some promise. Watching Greg's little project grow and change over the past 2-plus years has been fun (yes, I didn't write about it, but I watched for sure) and it's truly great to see it go on to bigger things.
And I agree with Greg's post--to see tech blossom in D.C. would be great. It's a big country--let's start migrating the innovation a little more from the Silicon Valley!
Congrats again Greg! :-)
I had a brief back and forth with Greg back in '05 and could see some promise. Watching Greg's little project grow and change over the past 2-plus years has been fun (yes, I didn't write about it, but I watched for sure) and it's truly great to see it go on to bigger things.
And I agree with Greg's post--to see tech blossom in D.C. would be great. It's a big country--let's start migrating the innovation a little more from the Silicon Valley!
Congrats again Greg! :-)
Monday, March 17, 2008
If You Haven't Already Heard....Cool Links 3/17/08
So, I've been pretty sick with an un-removed kidney stone* for the past 10 days or so , which has seriously limited my ability to sit at my desk for periods of time that would allow me to write some cool blog posts. Instead, I'll pass the links along so you can write your own cool posts:
Web creator rejects net tracking (BBC)--Tim Berners-Lee doesn't like Phorm. Neither do I. And stop trying to tell me that behaviorally-targeted ads are good for me. Not if I don't know you're following me....
Boston.com teams with Google for local search(Kelsey Group Blog)-- Boston.com’s mission is to move away from “newspaper.com” toward becoming the aggregator of local community content, notes VP of Product Bob Kempf. The site has taken several concrete steps to get there, including local news outreach, crawls for local events, multimedia search, and perhaps most importantly, business listing search (i.e., Yellow Pages). Well, now *this* is interesting stuff! It goes on: Boston.com also appreciated the ability to use Google to build out a tiered list of searches that any newspaper would want to have; a “white list” for pure listing lookups; a “gray list” for in between searches, such as place names; and a “black list” for inappropriate searches, such as tying merchandise ads to a news story on a murder in Worchester.
On a business basis, the deal with Google gives Boston.com a chance to make money on reselling the CPM at higher rates and also from local AdSense ads that appear alongside the searches, says Kempf. It also provides new inventory to sell around the search box — not dissimilar to what newspapers have always done, selling mortgage ads around real estate listings and other content. So, there's a new-ish, or updated, business model. But should all papers partner with Google? Will Google soon be saying "all your news belong to us!"
Eliot Spitzer's bank turned him in to the IRS (NYNewsday)--Question: what do former NYGov. Eliot Spitzer and deceased ganster Al Capone have in common? Both were gotcha'd! by the IRS! Ain't life funny? But I coulda told Spitzer to watch those transactions--this is a long story that will precipitate a blog post soon...
The Washington Post's Plan to drag the editing process into the 21st century(Slate)--when it takes 12 freakin' editors to put one one story, you've got a problem in your newsroom. I thought the reason one went into journalism or got a job writing for a paper was because one could actually write. I wonder if there's some internal distrust in newsrooms--of management for reporters' abilities to write a story--that's one of the many roots of the current problems with journalism. Twelve editors! With twelve editors on my butt, not only would my spelling be better, but my prose would be completely lifeless!
Think about it ;-)
*it will be removed in the near future, if my ureter will cooperate and expand enough so they can get in with the laser and blast the little bugger. All I can say is that the near future isn't near enough!
Web creator rejects net tracking (BBC)--Tim Berners-Lee doesn't like Phorm. Neither do I. And stop trying to tell me that behaviorally-targeted ads are good for me. Not if I don't know you're following me....
Boston.com teams with Google for local search(Kelsey Group Blog)-- Boston.com’s mission is to move away from “newspaper.com” toward becoming the aggregator of local community content, notes VP of Product Bob Kempf. The site has taken several concrete steps to get there, including local news outreach, crawls for local events, multimedia search, and perhaps most importantly, business listing search (i.e., Yellow Pages). Well, now *this* is interesting stuff! It goes on: Boston.com also appreciated the ability to use Google to build out a tiered list of searches that any newspaper would want to have; a “white list” for pure listing lookups; a “gray list” for in between searches, such as place names; and a “black list” for inappropriate searches, such as tying merchandise ads to a news story on a murder in Worchester.
On a business basis, the deal with Google gives Boston.com a chance to make money on reselling the CPM at higher rates and also from local AdSense ads that appear alongside the searches, says Kempf. It also provides new inventory to sell around the search box — not dissimilar to what newspapers have always done, selling mortgage ads around real estate listings and other content. So, there's a new-ish, or updated, business model. But should all papers partner with Google? Will Google soon be saying "all your news belong to us!"
Eliot Spitzer's bank turned him in to the IRS (NYNewsday)--Question: what do former NYGov. Eliot Spitzer and deceased ganster Al Capone have in common? Both were gotcha'd! by the IRS! Ain't life funny? But I coulda told Spitzer to watch those transactions--this is a long story that will precipitate a blog post soon...
The Washington Post's Plan to drag the editing process into the 21st century(Slate)--when it takes 12 freakin' editors to put one one story, you've got a problem in your newsroom. I thought the reason one went into journalism or got a job writing for a paper was because one could actually write. I wonder if there's some internal distrust in newsrooms--of management for reporters' abilities to write a story--that's one of the many roots of the current problems with journalism. Twelve editors! With twelve editors on my butt, not only would my spelling be better, but my prose would be completely lifeless!
Think about it ;-)
*it will be removed in the near future, if my ureter will cooperate and expand enough so they can get in with the laser and blast the little bugger. All I can say is that the near future isn't near enough!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Blogrolls: Resurrection and Re-Vamping
A short time ago, Fons Tuinstra, one of my Poynter.org colleagues, posed the question Do Blogrolls Still Matter? As many of the folks who answered Fons--and I have to agree--they do....
A couple of reasons why: First, they help readers find new and interesting blogs....
Second: they help us acknowledge folks who are important to our little corner of the blogosphere. They let people know who some of our connections happen to be.
Blogrolls are nice things. Blogrolls are community-building things. Blogroll *are* indeed still important.
If we keep them up.
Over the next couple of weeks, in between some new gigs like posting on the conversation hub for Supernova 2008 and my mulitple schizo-brain-making consulting gigs and my kidney stone surgery (gee...think I do too much?) I will be re-vamping the sidebar of this blog to link back to many of the great bloggers I know in the marketing 'sphere and they hyperlocal 'sphere and some who are just, well, regular readers and always there (you know who you are.) I've felt kind of weird for awhile that I haven't acknowledged so many of the cool marketers I know, and felt that there was no reason for me do be so doctrinaire and not link to them. And the hyperlocal 'sphere has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 6-9 months--so much so that both deserve their own sections on the blogroll. The others will just pop up in the categories already there.
You'll see them when I put them in.
I wish I could start it tonight, but I just took a percocet for some muscle spasms, and I'd hate to keel over mid-blogroll....
I'll also be putting up a post when there's been a *big* change....
Stay tuned :-)
A couple of reasons why: First, they help readers find new and interesting blogs....
Second: they help us acknowledge folks who are important to our little corner of the blogosphere. They let people know who some of our connections happen to be.
Blogrolls are nice things. Blogrolls are community-building things. Blogroll *are* indeed still important.
If we keep them up.
Over the next couple of weeks, in between some new gigs like posting on the conversation hub for Supernova 2008 and my mulitple schizo-brain-making consulting gigs and my kidney stone surgery (gee...think I do too much?) I will be re-vamping the sidebar of this blog to link back to many of the great bloggers I know in the marketing 'sphere and they hyperlocal 'sphere and some who are just, well, regular readers and always there (you know who you are.) I've felt kind of weird for awhile that I haven't acknowledged so many of the cool marketers I know, and felt that there was no reason for me do be so doctrinaire and not link to them. And the hyperlocal 'sphere has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 6-9 months--so much so that both deserve their own sections on the blogroll. The others will just pop up in the categories already there.
You'll see them when I put them in.
I wish I could start it tonight, but I just took a percocet for some muscle spasms, and I'd hate to keel over mid-blogroll....
I'll also be putting up a post when there's been a *big* change....
Stay tuned :-)
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Do You Know Who's Googling You?
Update 4/21/09 at ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick reports on Google Profile
a service whereby people can go in and alter their google results. But, as Kirkpatrick points out, do we really want to give Google more information about us then they already have?? and it's not going to help us track who's searching our identities online anyway. So, we just have to get used to the fact that we're really not going to know exactly who's searching our names daily. And, even if we could find that info out, how much of our privacy might we be willing to give up for that info? IMO, I'm fine with paradoxes and mysteries in life.
Update 4/30/08If you want to know what kinds of stuff you've put online can be found by Google or any other search engine, go to this most recent post
Most of us don't think about who might be searching us online. Most of us don't even bother to Google our own names to find out what might come up in search. The thing is, most employers, most people who meet us at networking events, and lots of folks who get wind of us one place or another are certainly searching our names and finding out all sorts of stuff online. Some of it might be right, some of it wrong, and some of it they shouldn't be seeing at all. So, tonight at 7pm, I'll be doing a talk on e-Networking and online profile at Bay Path College out here in Longmeadow, MA. This talk is free and open to the public...
I'm very pleased that Bay Path is giving me this opportunity and that they recognize that their students, if not prepared, might end up losing opportunities with never knowing the reason why. I was more convinced of this after hearing John Bell from Ogilvy mention during a panel at We Media Miami that Ogilvy routinely looks at Facebook profiles--for both headhunting and applicant screening.
Yet it's one of those factors that's not mentioned--and I'm sure no human resources person is going to tell you that you weren't the ideal candidate because of that drunken puking picture on Facebook....
That's not the way human resources does things.
Actually, I'm pretty horrified that a routine legal background check is no longer the only means an employer might use to find out information about an applicant. I'm sickened that they feel a need to go rummaging around in the underwear drawers of our social media profiles--something most of us are under the impression are private. But, if we allow those profiles (as well as our blogs, etc.) into search, then we're putting them out there as public info. It all seems like a nasty game of Gotcha!: when it comes to search and the Internet, many employers know how to exploit the ignorance of potential employees.
Many of my Silicon Valley insider friends feel that, if there's a critical mass of personal information out there, eventually employers won't care about the degree of personal information they find. Well, thing is, Internet life moves faster out in the Silicon Valley, and there are pockets, like where I live in Western Mass, that aren't going to change their conservative ways any time in the near future (when you might need a job.)
Better to know what's going on--know what employers are doing, and how to leverage social media to help you get a job, not disqualify you from it.
See you tonight in Longmeadow!
Update Mike Ho's article Should you research job candidates at social networking sites? notes that of a recent survey by the Society for Human Resources Mgt, rought 20 percent of those companies answering the survye admitted that "they had disqualified at least one candidate based on information that was found" on social networking sites. And while there may not currently be any suits against companies for not hiring someone due to their soc. networking profile, the chances are this is because H.R. departments either outsource the research or simply won't tell you that they were indeed poking around in there. How can someone sue if they're never told the truth??
a service whereby people can go in and alter their google results. But, as Kirkpatrick points out, do we really want to give Google more information about us then they already have?? and it's not going to help us track who's searching our identities online anyway. So, we just have to get used to the fact that we're really not going to know exactly who's searching our names daily. And, even if we could find that info out, how much of our privacy might we be willing to give up for that info? IMO, I'm fine with paradoxes and mysteries in life.
Update 4/30/08If you want to know what kinds of stuff you've put online can be found by Google or any other search engine, go to this most recent post
Most of us don't think about who might be searching us online. Most of us don't even bother to Google our own names to find out what might come up in search. The thing is, most employers, most people who meet us at networking events, and lots of folks who get wind of us one place or another are certainly searching our names and finding out all sorts of stuff online. Some of it might be right, some of it wrong, and some of it they shouldn't be seeing at all. So, tonight at 7pm, I'll be doing a talk on e-Networking and online profile at Bay Path College out here in Longmeadow, MA. This talk is free and open to the public...
I'm very pleased that Bay Path is giving me this opportunity and that they recognize that their students, if not prepared, might end up losing opportunities with never knowing the reason why. I was more convinced of this after hearing John Bell from Ogilvy mention during a panel at We Media Miami that Ogilvy routinely looks at Facebook profiles--for both headhunting and applicant screening.
Yet it's one of those factors that's not mentioned--and I'm sure no human resources person is going to tell you that you weren't the ideal candidate because of that drunken puking picture on Facebook....
That's not the way human resources does things.
Actually, I'm pretty horrified that a routine legal background check is no longer the only means an employer might use to find out information about an applicant. I'm sickened that they feel a need to go rummaging around in the underwear drawers of our social media profiles--something most of us are under the impression are private. But, if we allow those profiles (as well as our blogs, etc.) into search, then we're putting them out there as public info. It all seems like a nasty game of Gotcha!: when it comes to search and the Internet, many employers know how to exploit the ignorance of potential employees.
Many of my Silicon Valley insider friends feel that, if there's a critical mass of personal information out there, eventually employers won't care about the degree of personal information they find. Well, thing is, Internet life moves faster out in the Silicon Valley, and there are pockets, like where I live in Western Mass, that aren't going to change their conservative ways any time in the near future (when you might need a job.)
Better to know what's going on--know what employers are doing, and how to leverage social media to help you get a job, not disqualify you from it.
See you tonight in Longmeadow!
Update Mike Ho's article Should you research job candidates at social networking sites? notes that of a recent survey by the Society for Human Resources Mgt, rought 20 percent of those companies answering the survye admitted that "they had disqualified at least one candidate based on information that was found" on social networking sites. And while there may not currently be any suits against companies for not hiring someone due to their soc. networking profile, the chances are this is because H.R. departments either outsource the research or simply won't tell you that they were indeed poking around in there. How can someone sue if they're never told the truth??
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Tagged on the 4x4 Meme (thanx, Marianne!)
Needless to say I've been working far too hard on my multiple projects these days and really *need* to lighten up...so it's great that my friend Marianne Richmond tagged me on the lots-o-fun 4x4 Meme...here goes:
4 Places I've been
Bar Harbor, ME--one of my most favorite places on earth. Hotel rooms with no internet, no phone and no tv! talk about getting away from it all...
Raleigh-Durham Airport--if you end up getting stuck in an airport, this one's not too bad.
The Guggenheim, NYC--more than a museum...it's an experience.
Las Vegas, NV--the grown-up Disneyland. Can't wait to get back there!
4 Jobs I've had I've never had a glamour job, just crummy jobs. Now, I don't have crummy jobs--I've got strange jobs.
Lingerie Sales (not too long ago...)
Freelance writer (abeit briefly and with much sturm und drang)
Secretary (was not very good at this)
Math Tutor (Algebra and Statistics. Seriously. I used to be able to do it, now I'm not so sure)
4 Favorite Foods
Tamales--it's like polenta, only different ;-)
Donuts--mmmm....doooonnuutts....
B.L.T.s
Brussels Sprouts (go ahead, laugh. they're great with butter! don't knock them till you try them)
4 TV shows I DVR
I don't DVR anything. I don't think I ever recorded anything on my VCR either. It's never been *that* important to me. But there are 4 shows I watch regularly--mostly for the men--#4 doesn't count in that department. We all know Clinton's gay.:
Nip/Tuck (Julian McMahon is the George Clooney of TV. just wish he'd quit shaving the chest hair.)
CSI Miami
CSI Las Vegas
What Not to Wear
Ok...now I have to tag four folks myself. Of my most-serious blogroll, I'm thinking of Amy Gahran, Tom Bruno, Madison Guy (whose moniker I always want to turn around and call him Guy Madison after the 50's actor...) and Dawno who hasn't been posting regularly, and could use the nudge :-)
4 Places I've been
Bar Harbor, ME--one of my most favorite places on earth. Hotel rooms with no internet, no phone and no tv! talk about getting away from it all...
Raleigh-Durham Airport--if you end up getting stuck in an airport, this one's not too bad.
The Guggenheim, NYC--more than a museum...it's an experience.
Las Vegas, NV--the grown-up Disneyland. Can't wait to get back there!
4 Jobs I've had I've never had a glamour job, just crummy jobs. Now, I don't have crummy jobs--I've got strange jobs.
Lingerie Sales (not too long ago...)
Freelance writer (abeit briefly and with much sturm und drang)
Secretary (was not very good at this)
Math Tutor (Algebra and Statistics. Seriously. I used to be able to do it, now I'm not so sure)
4 Favorite Foods
Tamales--it's like polenta, only different ;-)
Donuts--mmmm....doooonnuutts....
B.L.T.s
Brussels Sprouts (go ahead, laugh. they're great with butter! don't knock them till you try them)
4 TV shows I DVR
I don't DVR anything. I don't think I ever recorded anything on my VCR either. It's never been *that* important to me. But there are 4 shows I watch regularly--mostly for the men--#4 doesn't count in that department. We all know Clinton's gay.:
Nip/Tuck (Julian McMahon is the George Clooney of TV. just wish he'd quit shaving the chest hair.)
CSI Miami
CSI Las Vegas
What Not to Wear
Ok...now I have to tag four folks myself. Of my most-serious blogroll, I'm thinking of Amy Gahran, Tom Bruno, Madison Guy (whose moniker I always want to turn around and call him Guy Madison after the 50's actor...) and Dawno who hasn't been posting regularly, and could use the nudge :-)
Friday, February 22, 2008
Facebook for Kids? Not If Marketers and Spammers have their say about it
At the BeeB, Roy Cellan-Jones (their tech blogger) took a look at the latest drop in UK Facebook users and suspects that "most of the over-25 age group will now find they can live without it. That still leaves a large core audience, but one that Facebook may find slightly harder to sell to the advertisers on whom its future depends"....well, I guess Roy didn't see this little tid-bit in MediaPost about Facebook allowing marketers to "create more dynamic profile pages through new tools including custom versions of Flash animation and HTML..."
But that's not all: Facebook Pages--the name for the new branded pages--will now allow "fans" to upload photos (be careful--you could end up in a vodka ad!) and has installed settings so that alcohol-related products can block underage users (over-age users be careful! you could end up on a vodka ad!) See Inside Facebook for more...
Yet an even bigger problem looms in social networks, regardless of whether it's home to kids or not: security from malware adware and other targeted attacks. As reported in InfoWorld security experts fear that soc. networking sites provide the perfect vehicle for these kinds of attacks (and more Internet nasties.) And these experts aren't talking just LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace (where Alicia Keys' site was horrifically hacked)--they're thinking, too of eBay and PayPal as well.
But it's not just companies--we have to protect ourselves as well. As I observed once you get into any number of soc. network, you may have a very difficult time getting out. Now, I guess our neglected, useless and abandoned profiles it could, unbeknown to us, hacked and used as a vehicles for spreading all kinds of bad crap.
Another reason to keep wicked vigilant about where you post a profile and why you should always keep track of all those profiles.
Note to self: try to get neglected profiles removed from "dead" social networking sites!!
Another note: MediaPost, one of my favorite online pubs, recently went "social." I am extremely disappointed by this, as I really see no need for me to develop a profile on MediaPost's site. Yet I love reading their articles and occasionally like to post a comment. I'm in a quandry about this--and am becoming even more concerned over online publications that feel this desperate need to become social networks. Further, with Facebook's new announcement, I'm feeling more and more like my social network profiles are just as much a target for marketers as they might be for malware developers. I hate to see marketing take all the fun out of social networking, but I would be surprised any more if it eventually did.
But that's not all: Facebook Pages--the name for the new branded pages--will now allow "fans" to upload photos (be careful--you could end up in a vodka ad!) and has installed settings so that alcohol-related products can block underage users (over-age users be careful! you could end up on a vodka ad!) See Inside Facebook for more...
Yet an even bigger problem looms in social networks, regardless of whether it's home to kids or not: security from malware adware and other targeted attacks. As reported in InfoWorld security experts fear that soc. networking sites provide the perfect vehicle for these kinds of attacks (and more Internet nasties.) And these experts aren't talking just LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace (where Alicia Keys' site was horrifically hacked)--they're thinking, too of eBay and PayPal as well.
"There are more than 150 million active Web sites worldwide and MySpace has something like 200 million pages; that speaks to the challenge facing these companies to secure themselves and there's no way for any security vendor to crawl all those URLs and put them in a database to use white listing or blacklisting," said Dan Nadir, vice president of product strategy at ScanSafe, a provider of hosted security services.
"We're already seeing extremely complex, well-designed attacks on these sites where there is a lot of content modification aimed at tricking the end user, with people trying to put malware on their own pages or someone else's," he said. "Companies need to realize that it's not just about malware being on porn sites or free screensaver pages anymore. Social networking is where the activity is heading, and companies need to wake up and protect themselves."
But it's not just companies--we have to protect ourselves as well. As I observed once you get into any number of soc. network, you may have a very difficult time getting out. Now, I guess our neglected, useless and abandoned profiles it could, unbeknown to us, hacked and used as a vehicles for spreading all kinds of bad crap.
Another reason to keep wicked vigilant about where you post a profile and why you should always keep track of all those profiles.
Note to self: try to get neglected profiles removed from "dead" social networking sites!!
Another note: MediaPost, one of my favorite online pubs, recently went "social." I am extremely disappointed by this, as I really see no need for me to develop a profile on MediaPost's site. Yet I love reading their articles and occasionally like to post a comment. I'm in a quandry about this--and am becoming even more concerned over online publications that feel this desperate need to become social networks. Further, with Facebook's new announcement, I'm feeling more and more like my social network profiles are just as much a target for marketers as they might be for malware developers. I hate to see marketing take all the fun out of social networking, but I would be surprised any more if it eventually did.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Why There are More Jobs in Marketing, Less Jobs In Media
Earlier this week, Ad Age reported that one in four media jobs had disappeared since 2000, which is a 15-year low for media employment. Ad Age claims that the growth in media employment is going on in marketing and there's good reason for this:
Having knocked around the media/new media landscape as a freelancer for the past two years, I agree with reporter Bradley Johnson's assertion--and know a little of the reason why there's all this growth in one place and decline in another. Johnson notes that even though ad and p.r. agency employment is still below their 10% and 11.5% respective growth rates in 2000, ad/marketing services have added 106,000 jobs with "marketing consulting accounted for nearly half (48,200) of those gains."
I'd hedge a good bet that a lot of those marketing consulting jobs are in the realm of internet and, more recently, in social media marketing. As Facebook continues to be front-page news, and many companies begin to or desperately desire to jump on the social media bandwagon, they are finally starting to turn to social media consultants to help them understand what's going on as much as get something started. The savvy marketing agency or p.r. agency will begin to hire social media consultants (and some have done so already) and there is lots of forming and merging of companies that leverage social media going on right now (the creation of The Conversation Group and the merger of MarketHum and Foghound into Beeline Labs as two examples I know of...)
Media, on the other hand, esp. newspapers, appear to not want to hire outside consultants. It is also, more than likely, more difficult for a newspaper or publisher to launch a social-media experiment, as some companies do.
The ethos regarding various forms of social media experimentation is to fail early and get out, thus keeping the cost of the social media campaign fairly low for the client. Unfortunatley, managing client expectation in social media campaigns has the potential to be a bigger bear than one can imagine--esp. when consultant must pussyfoot around facts of the social media space. Companies have a hard time accepting that their product or service may be completely rejected by the social media space. They are often blinded by the success stories and want what those guys got. That may not be possible with many products or services, given the people who populate the social media space--their needs, their perceived roles as "consumer advocates" or their actual positions as quality sources of information within their niches governs the ways in which they will, or won't, accept a marketing plan from a social media firm.
Some companies that might be impatient to stimulate positive "buzz" about their product might even pay for blog posts or other positive word of mouth. This flies in the face (just a bit) of the idea of all this positive buzz bubbling up from the grassroots. It's kind of like "astroturf"-- if no one's disclosing, how does one know if a happy endorsement from a particular group of bloggers for a particular product is real or if they received anything from coupons to cash payments for their endorsements. Endorsements, as in blog posts, aren't the same as carrying ads for products--although some folks believe them to be the same thing. How odd...it's kind of like saying it's fine to possibly mislead your friends about a product as long as you're getting something for it....
So, newspapers and publishing houses can't do what lots of other products and services do--launch an effort for a short period of time and learn from the failure (or pay for a post.) Rather, they have to come out of the gate with a plan that must do something to help stimulate revenue as well as create connections with their reader/customer base.
Which is an extremely difficult thing to do, esp. when there is animosity/fear towards the reader/customer which comes about thru a mis-understanding of the variety of communication customs and mores that have developed over the 10 plus years of communication across the Internet. Readers, when posting online, can easily be perceived as "those people" or "Internet people" and not readers of a newspaper. The newspaper folk fail to realize that their readers can be just as "incivil" online as someone from another city miles away(who probably isn't interested in causing trolly mischief on an out of town paper's message board...)
The other problem is that newspapers *are* the companies that *need* social media/marketing consultants. But they don't have the money to pay what the average social media marketing consultant can earn from a product or other service providing company.
Newspapers are now scrutinizing results from grant-funded experiments in "new media." Often, they are taking meticulous notes on what works (or doesn't) with hyperlocal, or crowdsourcing, or hybrid "pro/am" projects. Sometimes they hire the folks who've worked on the experiments, sometimes they buy the app or site that's been generated, other times they take the ideas, have someone in-house analyze them, then try to replicate them in-house, all with the belief that they already have the talent to do it right.
But often the newspaper's in-house talent doesn't understand the social mores of the internet any more than some of the clients of soc. media marketing firms (or the marketing firms that try to grow their own soc. media experts.)
So, perhaps Ad Age, if they wanted to understand what's going on with newspapers, should have looked at the explosion of grants going on right now for new media...
The thing is, grants pay far less for the same kinds of work, if not more, than the social media consultants can make from a company with a strong desire to do something in the social media space. In media, it's as if someone else must foot the bill, and you, the developer of the project, must do it as something of a service to the greater good of media (esp. newspapers.)
Therefore, when it comes to demonstrating job-market growth, it's easy to see how the marketing sector, esp. among marketing consultants, is showing growth, while media, esp. newspapers is showing a decline. Newspapers rely on (to quote Blanche DuBois) "the kindness of strangers" willing to give time for grant money, while corporations, which have a diversity of products and perhaps a bigger profit margin, are willing to experiment with social media. This is not to say that marketing always does the right thing--they, too, may weigh legacy marketing experience over social media experience when hiring. But they hire and pay well. Not unlike newspapers, where there is no hiring, but a lot of grants being given out.
Is it then fair to say that there's really *no* growth in newspaper job creation and lots of growth in marketing job creation? Not really, if the grant-funded projects are not factored into the equation, and the turnover/failure rate isn't factored into marketing job creation. But, then again, the grant-funded projects aren't necessarily paying as well as if they were "real" media outlet jobs, should they be considered the same as the jobs created in the marketing sector?
Something to think about....
Update Another aspect to media hiring is subcontracting, which doesn't figure into employment figures per se. So, a media company may have hired a number of different groups or contractors, but none are considered employees in the sense that Ad Age might consider them. The layoffs, however, may outpace the contract hirings, so even if measured, there may not be a significant increase in hiring.
Further reading HipMojo has an excellent post on Why Most VC-Backed, Ad-Supported Companies Are Doomed to Fail: I must say: I am baffled with how much many VCs are neither realistic nor knowledgeable with the bulk of their advertising assumptions. Not only are the assumptions off, but they seem to fail to realize the psychology and dynamics that go into play with how ad sales work. The competitive nature and subjective method to the madness is generally unaccounted for. Or, alternatively, the challenges and complexities of building sales streams are wildly underestimated.
Here's the reason behind the disparity: Marketers still invest in marketing, but they have options far beyond paid media: digital initiatives, direct marketing, promotions and events, just to name a few. That creates more opportunities for consultants to help define strategies.
Having knocked around the media/new media landscape as a freelancer for the past two years, I agree with reporter Bradley Johnson's assertion--and know a little of the reason why there's all this growth in one place and decline in another. Johnson notes that even though ad and p.r. agency employment is still below their 10% and 11.5% respective growth rates in 2000, ad/marketing services have added 106,000 jobs with "marketing consulting accounted for nearly half (48,200) of those gains."
I'd hedge a good bet that a lot of those marketing consulting jobs are in the realm of internet and, more recently, in social media marketing. As Facebook continues to be front-page news, and many companies begin to or desperately desire to jump on the social media bandwagon, they are finally starting to turn to social media consultants to help them understand what's going on as much as get something started. The savvy marketing agency or p.r. agency will begin to hire social media consultants (and some have done so already) and there is lots of forming and merging of companies that leverage social media going on right now (the creation of The Conversation Group and the merger of MarketHum and Foghound into Beeline Labs as two examples I know of...)
Media, on the other hand, esp. newspapers, appear to not want to hire outside consultants. It is also, more than likely, more difficult for a newspaper or publisher to launch a social-media experiment, as some companies do.
The ethos regarding various forms of social media experimentation is to fail early and get out, thus keeping the cost of the social media campaign fairly low for the client. Unfortunatley, managing client expectation in social media campaigns has the potential to be a bigger bear than one can imagine--esp. when consultant must pussyfoot around facts of the social media space. Companies have a hard time accepting that their product or service may be completely rejected by the social media space. They are often blinded by the success stories and want what those guys got. That may not be possible with many products or services, given the people who populate the social media space--their needs, their perceived roles as "consumer advocates" or their actual positions as quality sources of information within their niches governs the ways in which they will, or won't, accept a marketing plan from a social media firm.
Some companies that might be impatient to stimulate positive "buzz" about their product might even pay for blog posts or other positive word of mouth. This flies in the face (just a bit) of the idea of all this positive buzz bubbling up from the grassroots. It's kind of like "astroturf"-- if no one's disclosing, how does one know if a happy endorsement from a particular group of bloggers for a particular product is real or if they received anything from coupons to cash payments for their endorsements. Endorsements, as in blog posts, aren't the same as carrying ads for products--although some folks believe them to be the same thing. How odd...it's kind of like saying it's fine to possibly mislead your friends about a product as long as you're getting something for it....
So, newspapers and publishing houses can't do what lots of other products and services do--launch an effort for a short period of time and learn from the failure (or pay for a post.) Rather, they have to come out of the gate with a plan that must do something to help stimulate revenue as well as create connections with their reader/customer base.
Which is an extremely difficult thing to do, esp. when there is animosity/fear towards the reader/customer which comes about thru a mis-understanding of the variety of communication customs and mores that have developed over the 10 plus years of communication across the Internet. Readers, when posting online, can easily be perceived as "those people" or "Internet people" and not readers of a newspaper. The newspaper folk fail to realize that their readers can be just as "incivil" online as someone from another city miles away(who probably isn't interested in causing trolly mischief on an out of town paper's message board...)
The other problem is that newspapers *are* the companies that *need* social media/marketing consultants. But they don't have the money to pay what the average social media marketing consultant can earn from a product or other service providing company.
Newspapers are now scrutinizing results from grant-funded experiments in "new media." Often, they are taking meticulous notes on what works (or doesn't) with hyperlocal, or crowdsourcing, or hybrid "pro/am" projects. Sometimes they hire the folks who've worked on the experiments, sometimes they buy the app or site that's been generated, other times they take the ideas, have someone in-house analyze them, then try to replicate them in-house, all with the belief that they already have the talent to do it right.
But often the newspaper's in-house talent doesn't understand the social mores of the internet any more than some of the clients of soc. media marketing firms (or the marketing firms that try to grow their own soc. media experts.)
So, perhaps Ad Age, if they wanted to understand what's going on with newspapers, should have looked at the explosion of grants going on right now for new media...
The thing is, grants pay far less for the same kinds of work, if not more, than the social media consultants can make from a company with a strong desire to do something in the social media space. In media, it's as if someone else must foot the bill, and you, the developer of the project, must do it as something of a service to the greater good of media (esp. newspapers.)
Therefore, when it comes to demonstrating job-market growth, it's easy to see how the marketing sector, esp. among marketing consultants, is showing growth, while media, esp. newspapers is showing a decline. Newspapers rely on (to quote Blanche DuBois) "the kindness of strangers" willing to give time for grant money, while corporations, which have a diversity of products and perhaps a bigger profit margin, are willing to experiment with social media. This is not to say that marketing always does the right thing--they, too, may weigh legacy marketing experience over social media experience when hiring. But they hire and pay well. Not unlike newspapers, where there is no hiring, but a lot of grants being given out.
Is it then fair to say that there's really *no* growth in newspaper job creation and lots of growth in marketing job creation? Not really, if the grant-funded projects are not factored into the equation, and the turnover/failure rate isn't factored into marketing job creation. But, then again, the grant-funded projects aren't necessarily paying as well as if they were "real" media outlet jobs, should they be considered the same as the jobs created in the marketing sector?
Something to think about....
Update Another aspect to media hiring is subcontracting, which doesn't figure into employment figures per se. So, a media company may have hired a number of different groups or contractors, but none are considered employees in the sense that Ad Age might consider them. The layoffs, however, may outpace the contract hirings, so even if measured, there may not be a significant increase in hiring.
Further reading HipMojo has an excellent post on Why Most VC-Backed, Ad-Supported Companies Are Doomed to Fail: I must say: I am baffled with how much many VCs are neither realistic nor knowledgeable with the bulk of their advertising assumptions. Not only are the assumptions off, but they seem to fail to realize the psychology and dynamics that go into play with how ad sales work. The competitive nature and subjective method to the madness is generally unaccounted for. Or, alternatively, the challenges and complexities of building sales streams are wildly underestimated.
Monday, February 11, 2008
"Sticky" Social Networking Profiles May Not be Just a Facebook Problem
So, in its ever up-to-the-trendy news reports meant to make us think about digital life, the New York Times had a whiny little piece on all those disgruntled Facebook users who can't fully delete their profiles from Facebook....Meanwhile, totally missing Ed Sussman's announcement of FastCompany going the social networking route, calling it some form of "social journalism" in order to try to monetize all the UGC they're going to amass in profiles and blog posts and comments....Which begs the following question:
Should I be worried about whether or not all those profiles--not just my Facebook profile--will be stickier than gum (or something worse) on the bottom of my favorite new sneakers?
Now, I've been asking the "how many?" question for awhile--and I hadn't really thought much about the stickiness factor but in the ever-expanding field of social networking, this could have some long-range consequences...not to mention that we don't really know the true motives of those setting up the networks.
Being a curious sort, I decided to check out four of my incomplete or inactive soc. networking profile--on Bloggoggle, Classmates, Gather, and Doostang-- to see if I could fully delete them. I checked my profile on a social job-seeking network Bloggoggle which has been around since '06(and I've supposedly been a member there since Feb of '06.)
And I guess I'm still a member because I can't delete my profile from the site.
I might be able to delete it if I emailed the Bloggoggle guys, but I shouldn't have to. I should be able to press "Delete Me" or something to that effect, and I should be vanished. Bloggoggle, however, does not appear to be desiring to use my UGC or monetize me in any way, so I consider them *relative to other social networks* as rather harmless.
Recently on Classmates.com, I'd filled out my profile, including a rather innocuous pic--and within a week, attracted a stalker who couldn't keep himself from signing my guestbook and sending me email signed "stay sweet" and "cya!"
Honestly. I'm 47. And so are you. So don't sign your email "cya!"
For the first time, I got totally scared of someone online. I took down *all* my info and emailed the Classmates folks to reduce my profile from Gold to Free. Which they did within a 24 hour period (although they weren't able to refund me for the part of my Gold membership that I wouldn't be using because of jerkweed...)But I will still be checking my credit card statement to make sure that I don't get invoiced for any more Classmates charges.
I also went over to Gather.com, where I didn't find any quick delete button for my profile--just another "customer support" email addy. Gather has lots and lots and lots of explainations of *every* *single* aspect of its site, almost ad nauseum and so much so that I gave up trying to figure out how to delete my profile pic--because I couldn't get past all the stupid-stupid (not stupid-simple) explainations about images and publishing images and why I want to publish images over there....Gather's Terms of Service were also no help when it came to figuring out how to get out of Gather....
And then I went to Doostang--"where talent lives" (gee, I thought that was Bloggoggle...) After logging in--and I had to dig out my index card with my login information to find out what my login could be--I found that Doostang has a feature to email jobs on Facebook, and seems to be relatively active. In many ways, if I bothered to fill it out, my Doostang profile would be a lot like my LinkedIn profile, with no more of a guarantee that I'll find a job through a Doostang contact any more than I would through a LinkedIn contact....
And while there are *plenty* of options for upgrading my Doostang membership, there's no clear and obvious way for me to delete my Doostang profile.
Just like all my other profiles.
So, what does all this inability to easily delete one's profile mean to me. Well, it must be just bad customer service....(Craig Newmark might think the same thing too...)
Seriously. I'm their customer--free or not. And I should be able to delete my information without having to email someone and get my deletion approved.
Really--it's beginning to feel like it might be easier to get divorced in here than it is to get rid of an old social networking profile.
Is there anything we might be able to do about this? I doubt it. Not until enough of us get really peeved about it. And are we peeved about it? Not really. Not yet. Because not enough of us have suffered any consequences from it.
Further nonsense: Bill Gates on Facebook is like a fish riding a bicycle...did anyone bother to ask Gates about his A Small World profile and if he's got a burning need to get rid of that one too? oh, come on WSJ! Gates ain't "people" like the rest of us Facebook users. Not by a long shot. So why should we care what he does with his profile?
And because you asked, here's acct. deletion instructions from Brandee Barker @ Facebook: "There are two different ways to remove your information from Facebook. The first is to deactivate an account. Once a user deactivates the account, his or her profile becomes inaccessible on the main Facebook service, and the data is kept by Facebook only to allow easy reactivation. The second option is to delete the profile altogether. When a user deletes his or her profile, personal information -- such as name and all email addresses associated with the account -- is deleted from Facebook servers. If a user decides to join Facebook again, he or she would need to create a new profile. We are working to better explain the simple deactivation process, and to ease the deletion process for those who want their personal information removed from our servers. Additional information can be found on the Facebook help page at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=5"
Also take a gander at Google's Privacy Policy (or lack thereof and what it does to your gmail (thanx, Steph)
Meanwhile, Brian Oberkirch tells businesses Really, we don't want to join your social network... and he's right...
And as I recall I was able to delete my MySpace account (yes, I had one) awhile back without a hitch. Guess they're overloaded with UGC over there...
Now, I've been asking the "how many?" question for awhile--and I hadn't really thought much about the stickiness factor but in the ever-expanding field of social networking, this could have some long-range consequences...not to mention that we don't really know the true motives of those setting up the networks.
Being a curious sort, I decided to check out four of my incomplete or inactive soc. networking profile--on Bloggoggle, Classmates, Gather, and Doostang-- to see if I could fully delete them. I checked my profile on a social job-seeking network Bloggoggle which has been around since '06(and I've supposedly been a member there since Feb of '06.)
And I guess I'm still a member because I can't delete my profile from the site.
I might be able to delete it if I emailed the Bloggoggle guys, but I shouldn't have to. I should be able to press "Delete Me" or something to that effect, and I should be vanished. Bloggoggle, however, does not appear to be desiring to use my UGC or monetize me in any way, so I consider them *relative to other social networks* as rather harmless.
Recently on Classmates.com, I'd filled out my profile, including a rather innocuous pic--and within a week, attracted a stalker who couldn't keep himself from signing my guestbook and sending me email signed "stay sweet" and "cya!"
Honestly. I'm 47. And so are you. So don't sign your email "cya!"
For the first time, I got totally scared of someone online. I took down *all* my info and emailed the Classmates folks to reduce my profile from Gold to Free. Which they did within a 24 hour period (although they weren't able to refund me for the part of my Gold membership that I wouldn't be using because of jerkweed...)But I will still be checking my credit card statement to make sure that I don't get invoiced for any more Classmates charges.
I also went over to Gather.com, where I didn't find any quick delete button for my profile--just another "customer support" email addy. Gather has lots and lots and lots of explainations of *every* *single* aspect of its site, almost ad nauseum and so much so that I gave up trying to figure out how to delete my profile pic--because I couldn't get past all the stupid-stupid (not stupid-simple) explainations about images and publishing images and why I want to publish images over there....Gather's Terms of Service were also no help when it came to figuring out how to get out of Gather....
And then I went to Doostang--"where talent lives" (gee, I thought that was Bloggoggle...) After logging in--and I had to dig out my index card with my login information to find out what my login could be--I found that Doostang has a feature to email jobs on Facebook, and seems to be relatively active. In many ways, if I bothered to fill it out, my Doostang profile would be a lot like my LinkedIn profile, with no more of a guarantee that I'll find a job through a Doostang contact any more than I would through a LinkedIn contact....
And while there are *plenty* of options for upgrading my Doostang membership, there's no clear and obvious way for me to delete my Doostang profile.
Just like all my other profiles.
So, what does all this inability to easily delete one's profile mean to me. Well, it must be just bad customer service....(Craig Newmark might think the same thing too...)
Seriously. I'm their customer--free or not. And I should be able to delete my information without having to email someone and get my deletion approved.
Really--it's beginning to feel like it might be easier to get divorced in here than it is to get rid of an old social networking profile.
Is there anything we might be able to do about this? I doubt it. Not until enough of us get really peeved about it. And are we peeved about it? Not really. Not yet. Because not enough of us have suffered any consequences from it.
Further nonsense: Bill Gates on Facebook is like a fish riding a bicycle...did anyone bother to ask Gates about his A Small World profile and if he's got a burning need to get rid of that one too? oh, come on WSJ! Gates ain't "people" like the rest of us Facebook users. Not by a long shot. So why should we care what he does with his profile?
And because you asked, here's acct. deletion instructions from Brandee Barker @ Facebook: "There are two different ways to remove your information from Facebook. The first is to deactivate an account. Once a user deactivates the account, his or her profile becomes inaccessible on the main Facebook service, and the data is kept by Facebook only to allow easy reactivation. The second option is to delete the profile altogether. When a user deletes his or her profile, personal information -- such as name and all email addresses associated with the account -- is deleted from Facebook servers. If a user decides to join Facebook again, he or she would need to create a new profile. We are working to better explain the simple deactivation process, and to ease the deletion process for those who want their personal information removed from our servers. Additional information can be found on the Facebook help page at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=5"
Also take a gander at Google's Privacy Policy (or lack thereof and what it does to your gmail (thanx, Steph)
Meanwhile, Brian Oberkirch tells businesses Really, we don't want to join your social network... and he's right...
And as I recall I was able to delete my MySpace account (yes, I had one) awhile back without a hitch. Guess they're overloaded with UGC over there...
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Google's Social Graph API: New House, Same Neighbors
So, there's lot's o'buzz this fine saturday morning on Google's new social graph API (in a post titled URLs are People too....and as I read thru Brad Fitzpatrick's post, all I could think of is that engineers really need to get out more and learn about people....
You see, Goog's new API is just another way to port your peeps from one network to another....and, if people truly are getting burnt out from social networking, as the comScore stats hinted at, then maybe part of that is because they're just not meeting anyone new....
Let's look at it: there are all these nifty little social networking thingamabobs that try to sell us on how they're better than the others. Twitter is better than Facebook because it's updates in real time. Facebook is better than LinkedIn because you can let your business buddies and causal friends know what kind of music you like and if you're looking to hook up. LinkedIn is better than Plaxo because you can put in recommendations and not have to go thru crappy-assed Outlook.
But when it all comes down to it, it's not that they make our social lives better--it's that they're just competing against one another in some kind of weird personal information land-grab.
So, rather than giving us an opportunity to meet other people, because now other people are either "predators" or identity theives or whatever (and none of these platforms gives us any *real* way to interact with one another--Twitter being just a series of declarative statements about ourselves) what Goog wants us to be able to do is take whomever it is with us wherever we go.
So, we essentially change our social "neighborhood" and our "house" (look at my new profile page!) AND we can take all our neighbors with us!
Hmmm...when people are getting bored and tired of social networking, and with this new API, doesn't it seem to be that what we are doing is taking all our info from one place to another, giving it to some other software development company, never knowing how they're going to eventually use this info to make money for themselves, and NEVER improving how we actually socialize on the 'net.
We are not being social. We are rarely, if ever, networking in the space provided (that's done before we add someone)
We are only learning new software.
The only writings on the whole thing that have made some sense from a software Silicon Valley perspective were Nick O'Neil's where makes a comment about Goog's trying to "out open" Facebook (never know) and Andy Beard who talks about Goog shooting itself in the foot 3 years ago with nofollow.
But all of this is just software talk anyway. Nobody's really talking about what people really think and feel about social networking (it's fucking boring if all you're doing is taking everybody with you from one place to the next) and tiring (if all you're doing is taking everyone with you from one place to the next.)
And that's because nobody who's developing this stuff knows a darned thing about people. All they're caring about is moving around information and beating one another at the social networking game.
So, I'm sorry Brad, but URls aren't people. People are people. and all your graphs and crapola aren't going to make our live any more convenient or better. It's just one more thing I have to sign up for and learn if I want to keep up with the "cool kids."
snore.
post script there's also, I'm sure, a very dark side as to what Goog might do with all our social network info if it's all maintained by one Giant. That's what's really kinda scary about this.
You see, Goog's new API is just another way to port your peeps from one network to another....and, if people truly are getting burnt out from social networking, as the comScore stats hinted at, then maybe part of that is because they're just not meeting anyone new....
Let's look at it: there are all these nifty little social networking thingamabobs that try to sell us on how they're better than the others. Twitter is better than Facebook because it's updates in real time. Facebook is better than LinkedIn because you can let your business buddies and causal friends know what kind of music you like and if you're looking to hook up. LinkedIn is better than Plaxo because you can put in recommendations and not have to go thru crappy-assed Outlook.
But when it all comes down to it, it's not that they make our social lives better--it's that they're just competing against one another in some kind of weird personal information land-grab.
So, rather than giving us an opportunity to meet other people, because now other people are either "predators" or identity theives or whatever (and none of these platforms gives us any *real* way to interact with one another--Twitter being just a series of declarative statements about ourselves) what Goog wants us to be able to do is take whomever it is with us wherever we go.
So, we essentially change our social "neighborhood" and our "house" (look at my new profile page!) AND we can take all our neighbors with us!
Hmmm...when people are getting bored and tired of social networking, and with this new API, doesn't it seem to be that what we are doing is taking all our info from one place to another, giving it to some other software development company, never knowing how they're going to eventually use this info to make money for themselves, and NEVER improving how we actually socialize on the 'net.
We are not being social. We are rarely, if ever, networking in the space provided (that's done before we add someone)
We are only learning new software.
The only writings on the whole thing that have made some sense from a software Silicon Valley perspective were Nick O'Neil's where makes a comment about Goog's trying to "out open" Facebook (never know) and Andy Beard who talks about Goog shooting itself in the foot 3 years ago with nofollow.
But all of this is just software talk anyway. Nobody's really talking about what people really think and feel about social networking (it's fucking boring if all you're doing is taking everybody with you from one place to the next) and tiring (if all you're doing is taking everyone with you from one place to the next.)
And that's because nobody who's developing this stuff knows a darned thing about people. All they're caring about is moving around information and beating one another at the social networking game.
So, I'm sorry Brad, but URls aren't people. People are people. and all your graphs and crapola aren't going to make our live any more convenient or better. It's just one more thing I have to sign up for and learn if I want to keep up with the "cool kids."
snore.
post script there's also, I'm sure, a very dark side as to what Goog might do with all our social network info if it's all maintained by one Giant. That's what's really kinda scary about this.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Facebook Figures Drop: Are WeTaking Our Balls and Going Home?
The Register reports today on a disturbing, yet totally predictable, trend: engagment in social networking sites is declining. Chris Williams sums up the comScore figures thusly:
Creative Captial read the comScore report and posts a nifty chart o'figures to explain it all...
Chris chalks all of it up to people getting bored with social networking--IMO, it's more about people getting bloody well tired (and in the old-fashioned, literal sense of the word) with having to chase around all the various social networkings and applications and other stuff, and *THEN* trying to keep up with all the conversations going on all over the place...
AND USUALLY AMONG THE SAME PEOPLE!!!
We're social networking all over the place, but we're not necessarily making new acquaintances--which was a big part of the "fun" of the old web. We're oftentimes just porting one group of friends from one network to another. Sure, when changing from LinkedIn to Facebook, we *might* add some folks to one that might not be on the other--but for many adults, there may be little distinction between friends on one network or another.
Even among young people I know, some will have a distinction between their Facebook friends (the preppies) and their MySpace friends (their "weird" friends) and will toggle between networks, but rarely meet new people online.
After awhile, even young people--who we *all* know are *so* much better at this online stuff then us old farts who've been here for well over a decade or more-- find it a real pain-in-the-ass to keep going between two or more social networking sites.
Yes, living a "double life" can be kind of tiring--no matter what your age...
And OpenID's not a *bad* idea--but maybe we're just over the whole thing anyway...(see Mashable's! highly unscientific poll and this great discussion of the subject at WiredJournalists and a post by Karen Christensen of the Berkshire Publishing group on the same thing--heh, go figure...guess that social networking burnout thing's kinda common...)
And not only are we not meeting anyone new, we're also not having any kinds of conversations, not exchanging much in the way of real information, not learning anything all that new, not even contributing to a particular body of knowledge (unless you consider contributing to marketers' stats contributing to a body of knowledge.) We're just sort of passively following various streams of our friends' thoughts....
Then again, what the figures *don't* show is a possible distrust of the web. Perhaps many people are heeding calls to watch out where you go online, and to not spread yourself too thin, lest you lose track of all that info about you that's out there.
Sometimes you have to pick your social networks as much as you have to pick your friends...
Perhaps forgetting-where-you've-been-lately is what happened to Arlington, OR mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, who's recall was prompted by MySpace photos that show the mayor in a black bra and panties posing on a fire engine...
Brings a whole new meaning to the term "being hosed...."
They Mayor sez the photos shouldn't count because they were taken before she was elected....in true Pee Wee Herman "I meant to do that!" speech.
Then again, we *do* kinda consider past records of candidates when we vote for them. By her logic, Rudy Giuliani's two divorces and kid troubles shouldn't have made a difference in his low turnout in Florida--but I'd hedge a bet that they did...
So, you can never be too sure about what you put online, who might hold it against you, etc. And if you're just too darned tired or totally forget about all those profiles on all those social networking sites out there, you never know when one might come back and bite you in the ass...
Literally and figuratively...
Then again, maybe in the whole social networking scheme of things, we're figuring out that the best kinds of interactions end up being the ones we have face to face.
Just a thought...
The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007. December could perhaps be forgiven as a seasonal blip when people see their real friends and family, but the trend was already south.
The story year-on-year is even uglier for social networking advocates. Bebo and MySpace were both well down on the same period in 2006 - Murdoch's site by 24 per cent. Facebook meanwhile chalked up a rise, although way off its mid-2007 hype peak when you couldn't move for zeitgeist-chasing "where's the Facebook angle?" stories in the press and on TV.
Creative Captial read the comScore report and posts a nifty chart o'figures to explain it all...
Chris chalks all of it up to people getting bored with social networking--IMO, it's more about people getting bloody well tired (and in the old-fashioned, literal sense of the word) with having to chase around all the various social networkings and applications and other stuff, and *THEN* trying to keep up with all the conversations going on all over the place...
AND USUALLY AMONG THE SAME PEOPLE!!!
We're social networking all over the place, but we're not necessarily making new acquaintances--which was a big part of the "fun" of the old web. We're oftentimes just porting one group of friends from one network to another. Sure, when changing from LinkedIn to Facebook, we *might* add some folks to one that might not be on the other--but for many adults, there may be little distinction between friends on one network or another.
Even among young people I know, some will have a distinction between their Facebook friends (the preppies) and their MySpace friends (their "weird" friends) and will toggle between networks, but rarely meet new people online.
After awhile, even young people--who we *all* know are *so* much better at this online stuff then us old farts who've been here for well over a decade or more-- find it a real pain-in-the-ass to keep going between two or more social networking sites.
Yes, living a "double life" can be kind of tiring--no matter what your age...
And OpenID's not a *bad* idea--but maybe we're just over the whole thing anyway...(see Mashable's! highly unscientific poll and this great discussion of the subject at WiredJournalists and a post by Karen Christensen of the Berkshire Publishing group on the same thing--heh, go figure...guess that social networking burnout thing's kinda common...)
And not only are we not meeting anyone new, we're also not having any kinds of conversations, not exchanging much in the way of real information, not learning anything all that new, not even contributing to a particular body of knowledge (unless you consider contributing to marketers' stats contributing to a body of knowledge.) We're just sort of passively following various streams of our friends' thoughts....
Then again, what the figures *don't* show is a possible distrust of the web. Perhaps many people are heeding calls to watch out where you go online, and to not spread yourself too thin, lest you lose track of all that info about you that's out there.
Sometimes you have to pick your social networks as much as you have to pick your friends...
Perhaps forgetting-where-you've-been-lately is what happened to Arlington, OR mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, who's recall was prompted by MySpace photos that show the mayor in a black bra and panties posing on a fire engine...
Brings a whole new meaning to the term "being hosed...."
They Mayor sez the photos shouldn't count because they were taken before she was elected....in true Pee Wee Herman "I meant to do that!" speech.
Then again, we *do* kinda consider past records of candidates when we vote for them. By her logic, Rudy Giuliani's two divorces and kid troubles shouldn't have made a difference in his low turnout in Florida--but I'd hedge a bet that they did...
So, you can never be too sure about what you put online, who might hold it against you, etc. And if you're just too darned tired or totally forget about all those profiles on all those social networking sites out there, you never know when one might come back and bite you in the ass...
Literally and figuratively...
Then again, maybe in the whole social networking scheme of things, we're figuring out that the best kinds of interactions end up being the ones we have face to face.
Just a thought...
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Creating Community for NewsTrust
Blogging here's been a bit light lately, and some of that has to do with my new position as Community Developer for NewsTrust...What's NewsTrust?? It's a non-profit, non-partisan social news platform--very different from sites like Digg and Reddit in that it not only aggregates a great number of articles from a wide variety of news sources (not just links to them), but what it asks from participants is a little bit more than just whether or not they think the story is cool or they like the person who's reviewed it....
Oh, yes, there are news story reviews by people--that's the social part (hence: social news.) But what's asked of NewsTrust members requires a bit of media literacy (one of NewsTrusts aims is to promote media literacy) No, one doesn't have to be a former journalist, journalist in training, academic or any other certified smarty-pants to be part of NewsTrust. But, if you're concerned with what's going on with the news, think about what you're reading, whether or not stories are high quality journalism or just a bunch of opinion-mongering, and want to contribute to a bit more serious discussion and rating of news stories from mainstream and alternative publications, then you might want to consider joining and contributing to NT...
I've even made it easy for ya by providing a widget in the sidebar displaying stories that are just *waiting* for your $.02....
Along with hiring me, NT has also brought on David Cohn (one of my partners-in-crime from Assignment Zero) for the role of Contributing Editor. I liked what David had to say about NT and how it's different from other social news sites:
"Rating a story on NewsTrust is not a game - it is an act of journalism because it is a way to determine, socially, what the most accurate, reliable and trustworthy account of a news event is."
Indeed!
Actually, I'm pretty lucky to be teamed up with the guys at NT. Last year at We Media Miami, I met Executive Director Fabrice Florin and award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Rory O'Connor, who's part of the NT management team. Being one of those people who doesn't run out and google someone shortly after meeting them (in hopes of finding out how important that person might be), I had no idea who these guys were--which gave me the chance to just hang out with Fabrice and Rory (and a few other people) and find out about NT. I kept in touch with both of them through the year, and when Fab called and wanted to talk with me about taking on a role with NewsTrust, I was surprised (but then again, kinda thought it might happen.)
When it was suggested that I'd be working on building the community over there, of course I wanted to do it! As I said to Fab, "well, I wouldn't be talking with you if I wasn't interested." (I'm not one to waste people's time--mine or theirs. blowing smoke doesn't help anyone.)
For me, a site isn't "social" unless there's some kind of interacting--and honestly, so many paradigms for interacting online are horrifically masculine. There's lots of popularity rating and ranking and sometimes not so subtle ways of proving to the crowd that one is either Top Dog or Girl With The Most Cake. Is that important? Not really IMO. Sometimes it isn't about being the most popular (aren't we supposed to leave that behind in High School?) inasmuch as it is being able to contribute something insightful to a community.
The short-term goal is social--but the overall, long-term intention is to contribute to something greater than one's own ego....
And, in the grander scheme, that's what NewsTrust is trying to do--build a community that will become a trusted group of folks who know where quality journalism resides on the web. Through our reviews and comments, we can be part of the news in a new way...
I've got lots of ideas for building the NewsTrust community--including opening up for some spirited cross-talk(in a future app,) better interaction through the new NewsTrust blog (which launched yesterday) and on the Facebook group...
And as for this blog--yes, I'll still be blogging here :-) (as well as having other announcements in another week or so--busy me!) But take some time and come over to NewsTrust and see what we're up to. Come, and be a part of the news!
Monday, January 07, 2008
Is it Blogging--or Chasing Popularity--that's Hazardous to Your Health?
First, let me say that I wish Om Malik a speedy recovery from his Dec. 28th heart attack at 41. Yikes! But for some silly reason, Dan Fost at the NYTimesseems to think that it's only bigtime bloggers like Om that could possibly get so stressed as to have a heart attack...
Well, Dan, get a clue. It's lots and lots of bloggers who get stressed--esp. about popularity and rank and all that stuff--esp. if you're trying to build some kind of career out here that is in some way linked to your online presence.
Which is why I'm totally against the idea of making journalists earn their keep by their pageviews....(which started becasue Penelope Trunk, someone who writes for an entertainment portal and not a news organization, got canned....)
Seriously...nobody understands the ratrace of online journalism/publishing/etc. better than bloggers. And I'm talking bloggers of *all* levels who desire to earn something from their blogging--whether it's creating a publishing empire, or income directly from their blogs, or furthering their careers through their blogs. Keeping popularity as well as creating content *daily* (if not several times a day) is a lot of work,....
Not to mention that, sometimes, popularity is contingent on *who* you are as much (sometimes if not more) than the quality of your writing....
Sometimes, too, popularity has something to do with on how quickly you can pounce on a link, if others see you as an expert or not, on who's willing to give you a lead, on how much hype you're willing to swallow as well as generate for yourself....
With so much riding more personality than on prose, is it any wonder that someone out here was bound to have a heart attack??
Is it any wonder that making reporters pay more attention to personality than to journalism is a bad idea?
just a thought.
Well, Dan, get a clue. It's lots and lots of bloggers who get stressed--esp. about popularity and rank and all that stuff--esp. if you're trying to build some kind of career out here that is in some way linked to your online presence.
Which is why I'm totally against the idea of making journalists earn their keep by their pageviews....(which started becasue Penelope Trunk, someone who writes for an entertainment portal and not a news organization, got canned....)
Seriously...nobody understands the ratrace of online journalism/publishing/etc. better than bloggers. And I'm talking bloggers of *all* levels who desire to earn something from their blogging--whether it's creating a publishing empire, or income directly from their blogs, or furthering their careers through their blogs. Keeping popularity as well as creating content *daily* (if not several times a day) is a lot of work,....
Not to mention that, sometimes, popularity is contingent on *who* you are as much (sometimes if not more) than the quality of your writing....
Sometimes, too, popularity has something to do with on how quickly you can pounce on a link, if others see you as an expert or not, on who's willing to give you a lead, on how much hype you're willing to swallow as well as generate for yourself....
With so much riding more personality than on prose, is it any wonder that someone out here was bound to have a heart attack??
Is it any wonder that making reporters pay more attention to personality than to journalism is a bad idea?
just a thought.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The New York Times is Full of Crap! (mostly....)
So, this late Sunday morning, I'm renewing an old Sunday morning ritual: reading the New York Times while watching something on TV (today it was Words and Muisc by Jerry Herman...) In the last century, I'd read the old inky paper version of the Times--now, it's the slick and annoyingly busy digital version that I get on my laptop.
Above the brave new electronic fold, we're not too bad.
The ads are part and parcel for online content, so I don't find them too distracting.
At least there are no dancing aliens/zoot suiters/impossibly fit disco women like in those ubiquitious low cost mortgage ads....
It's when I get below the fold that I'm greeted--kinda but not really subtlely--with a dazzling array of multi-media news:
I can get a video of John McCain in New Hampsire (with a link to more "multimedia"), or a slide show of 36 hours in Melborne Australia, or a wedding video of a handsomely white couple, as well as another slide show on party girl Kelly Washington (wow...that's a story I don't want to miss....)
I have to go below the below-the-fold to get to the list of other news stories and sections where I might find news. The online New York Times is really something of a quadruple-fold as it takes four full screens for me to see only a fraction of the dazzling array of content held within the NYT digital version...
Should I be impressed or overwhelemed? Neither? Both? Although I wonder how much this version would weigh, and then cost, if it were in print. I can see at a cursory glance that I'll hardly have enough time to peruse the entire thing--and if I did, I'd get a serious case of dry eye from staring at my laptop screen for hours on end...
Wandering over to the Technology Section, I find that it's very easy to get Pogue'd to death over here. There's Podcasts of David Pogue, and videos of David Pogue (if you're not careful, they will play in sequence, without stopping). Yeah, there are a bunch of articles by a bunch of other probably important tech journalists....
Technology at the NYTimes is full of multimedia Pogue. And I don't know, really, what to make of Pogue, as he seems so much like so many of the over 30 tech guys I know: kind of boyish, slightly immature, making lots of money...
Beyond Pogue (who truly tries to amuse as well as inform) is the
"Technology Headlines from Around the Web" a kinda widget powered by the NYTimes own Bloggrunner aggregator.
Funny, I thought Bill Keller hated blogs.....
Then again, lots of the blogs that are aggregated on Blogrunner are the blogs of other newspapers or magazines, with a few token A-listers thrown in for the heck of it. I guess blogs are OK if they're blogs by the people you believe should be writing blogs--mainly other journalists or folks who are popular enough that you can't ignore them....
Going back to the NYTimes main page, I'm takes by the headline for A User's Manual for Seat 21C by Wayne Curtis, which is by far the best (as well as most hysterical) description of life in the cheap seats of any air carrier you can think of. Yes, these seats are a sardine's nightmare, and Curtis captures this quite welll...
What I don't get, though, is how the NYTimes has created Jet Lagged, the section Curtis' piece appears in, as a blog. Why? What's the point? Yes, the readers get to chime in at the bottom of the entry/opinion article, but there's really no interaction except among themselves.
What the Times has done, essentially, is put their Forums in with their opinion pieces and called it a blog. Unlike the Forums (where I spent a good portion of my social life from '98-01) where your comments would show up in real time, all comments to said "blog" are held for moderation.
Yes, maybe this is a good idea when people don't need to "register" in order to leave a comment. Then again, when there's no interaction on the part of the author of the post, I begin to wonder if the author of the post even cares about what the people are saying in the comments.
Which makes me think: Does anyone really care what's said in the comments on *any* of the NYTimes "blog" posts?
When you post a comment to the average blog, penned by the average, un-MSM affiliated and more than likely independent blogger, you can bet that the comment is being read, and more than likely means something to the blogger.
Still, when I looked at the sidebar to read the profiles of the folks contributing to Jet Lagged, I got that same unease when I first saw the Huffington Post's list of bloggers--these are all people who can publish in any other medium they so choose. What, then, could "blogging" possibly mean to any of them?
In other words, seeing "blogs" on the New York Times, which are merely substitutes for the old-fashioned op-ed pages with filtered comments, doesn't necessarily give me the warm fuzzies about the NYTimes beginning to understand blogging.
Then again, maybe they don't need to. Maybe, for them, a pseudo-blog is a way for them to get free user-generated content, in the form of comments, which then gets monetized via ads that are already in place on the blogs.
Should we, then, be more careful about leaving comments on sites like the NYTimes, IF our comments will become the UGC that they may help them generate more revenue?
Well, I don't know if there's a need to boycott comments on the NYTimes site, esp. if they aren't doing much else than allowing them to stand as is. Comments as on the article/"blog" post about rich American women paying poor Indian women to be surrogate mothers create a deeper understanding of the issues presented and are very valuble, even if the author isn't doing any cross-commenting herself.
Yet to me, the Times is being somewhat insincere, given Keller's position on blogs. His publication is using populist new media tools for its own ends. What, then, is the Times creating? A group of 'good' bloggers because they are learned journalists? Are they teaching old dogs new tricks? (probably not if there's no author responses to the comments...)
Still, it seems that, right now, in a time of massive upheaval in the worlds of journalism and media, the New York Times, like many of its counterparts, is filling its site with as much crap as possible--perhaps to see what resonates with its various and sundry readers. "Throw it on the wall and see what sticks," I guess would be the way of explaining the method to all this content-generating madness.
Sometimes, though, all this content becomes distractions--rabbit holes where readers can tumble down and have trouble escaping: like when I ventured over to the Fashion section's "in Motion" blog and couldn't find my way back no matter how many times I clicked the Back button--"there's no place like Homepage....there's no place like Homepage..." And it was kind of annoying to have to go back to the status bar and type in the homepage url again. Then again, I don't know if that was any worse than a continual loop of David Pogue videos....
If anything, all the new multi-level, multi-folded, multimedia New York Times is an entertainment experience. It's not as much news inasumch as it is a lot of fluff that probably guarantees that you'll stay on the site longer than you might if it were just chock full of stuffy old news. If you stay on the site longer, you might click on an ad or two. Maybe. And generate some income.
Maybe though, I just like my content simple. Give me a well-written article, like What is it about Mormonism? from the magazine section, uncluttered with any slide shows or additional multimedia explaining John Smith or the Mormon Tabernacle, and I'm pretty much satisfied (although they do have a link to some multi-media of Mitt Romney.) I don't need to be entertained at every step of the way, and I'm perfectly capable of searching for more information if I want it. I also don't need a podcast of writer Noah Feldman reading the article to me, as I'm perfectly capable of reading it myself (something the Times has done with other pieces that became "hot"--it's kind of like overkill, actually. I appreciate journalists for their ability to write well, not necessarily to be compelling personalities in multimedia presentations.)
And maybe I don't really like opinion pieces with comments being called "blogs." Perhaps if it's a blogging cms that's being used, well, I've got no choice but to accept that it's a blog in the most mechanical sense of the word. But if there's no interaction, then what's the point?
In that department, newspapers have a very long way to go...
So, yes, the New York Times if full of crap--crap that may mean nothing in the future, crap that may work to dumb-down lots of folks who should be reading rather than watching their news, lots of crap that isn't necessarily helping journalists communicate better with readers (no "creating conversation" here, except among ourselves), and lots of crap that might be totally unsearchable to future generations looking to research information on the '08 Iowa caucuses.
Then again, maybe it needs all this crap to survive...
Let's see if this NYTimes can endear itself and renew my old multitasking Sunday ritual...
Above the brave new electronic fold, we're not too bad.
The ads are part and parcel for online content, so I don't find them too distracting.At least there are no dancing aliens/zoot suiters/impossibly fit disco women like in those ubiquitious low cost mortgage ads....
It's when I get below the fold that I'm greeted--kinda but not really subtlely--with a dazzling array of multi-media news:
I can get a video of John McCain in New Hampsire (with a link to more "multimedia"), or a slide show of 36 hours in Melborne Australia, or a wedding video of a handsomely white couple, as well as another slide show on party girl Kelly Washington (wow...that's a story I don't want to miss....)
I have to go below the below-the-fold to get to the list of other news stories and sections where I might find news. The online New York Times is really something of a quadruple-fold as it takes four full screens for me to see only a fraction of the dazzling array of content held within the NYT digital version...
Should I be impressed or overwhelemed? Neither? Both? Although I wonder how much this version would weigh, and then cost, if it were in print. I can see at a cursory glance that I'll hardly have enough time to peruse the entire thing--and if I did, I'd get a serious case of dry eye from staring at my laptop screen for hours on end...
Wandering over to the Technology Section, I find that it's very easy to get Pogue'd to death over here. There's Podcasts of David Pogue, and videos of David Pogue (if you're not careful, they will play in sequence, without stopping). Yeah, there are a bunch of articles by a bunch of other probably important tech journalists....
Technology at the NYTimes is full of multimedia Pogue. And I don't know, really, what to make of Pogue, as he seems so much like so many of the over 30 tech guys I know: kind of boyish, slightly immature, making lots of money...
Beyond Pogue (who truly tries to amuse as well as inform) is the
"Technology Headlines from Around the Web" a kinda widget powered by the NYTimes own Bloggrunner aggregator.
Funny, I thought Bill Keller hated blogs.....
Then again, lots of the blogs that are aggregated on Blogrunner are the blogs of other newspapers or magazines, with a few token A-listers thrown in for the heck of it. I guess blogs are OK if they're blogs by the people you believe should be writing blogs--mainly other journalists or folks who are popular enough that you can't ignore them....
Going back to the NYTimes main page, I'm takes by the headline for A User's Manual for Seat 21C by Wayne Curtis, which is by far the best (as well as most hysterical) description of life in the cheap seats of any air carrier you can think of. Yes, these seats are a sardine's nightmare, and Curtis captures this quite welll...
What I don't get, though, is how the NYTimes has created Jet Lagged, the section Curtis' piece appears in, as a blog. Why? What's the point? Yes, the readers get to chime in at the bottom of the entry/opinion article, but there's really no interaction except among themselves.
What the Times has done, essentially, is put their Forums in with their opinion pieces and called it a blog. Unlike the Forums (where I spent a good portion of my social life from '98-01) where your comments would show up in real time, all comments to said "blog" are held for moderation.
Yes, maybe this is a good idea when people don't need to "register" in order to leave a comment. Then again, when there's no interaction on the part of the author of the post, I begin to wonder if the author of the post even cares about what the people are saying in the comments.
Which makes me think: Does anyone really care what's said in the comments on *any* of the NYTimes "blog" posts?
When you post a comment to the average blog, penned by the average, un-MSM affiliated and more than likely independent blogger, you can bet that the comment is being read, and more than likely means something to the blogger.
Still, when I looked at the sidebar to read the profiles of the folks contributing to Jet Lagged, I got that same unease when I first saw the Huffington Post's list of bloggers--these are all people who can publish in any other medium they so choose. What, then, could "blogging" possibly mean to any of them?
In other words, seeing "blogs" on the New York Times, which are merely substitutes for the old-fashioned op-ed pages with filtered comments, doesn't necessarily give me the warm fuzzies about the NYTimes beginning to understand blogging.
Then again, maybe they don't need to. Maybe, for them, a pseudo-blog is a way for them to get free user-generated content, in the form of comments, which then gets monetized via ads that are already in place on the blogs.
Should we, then, be more careful about leaving comments on sites like the NYTimes, IF our comments will become the UGC that they may help them generate more revenue?
Well, I don't know if there's a need to boycott comments on the NYTimes site, esp. if they aren't doing much else than allowing them to stand as is. Comments as on the article/"blog" post about rich American women paying poor Indian women to be surrogate mothers create a deeper understanding of the issues presented and are very valuble, even if the author isn't doing any cross-commenting herself.
Yet to me, the Times is being somewhat insincere, given Keller's position on blogs. His publication is using populist new media tools for its own ends. What, then, is the Times creating? A group of 'good' bloggers because they are learned journalists? Are they teaching old dogs new tricks? (probably not if there's no author responses to the comments...)
Still, it seems that, right now, in a time of massive upheaval in the worlds of journalism and media, the New York Times, like many of its counterparts, is filling its site with as much crap as possible--perhaps to see what resonates with its various and sundry readers. "Throw it on the wall and see what sticks," I guess would be the way of explaining the method to all this content-generating madness.
Sometimes, though, all this content becomes distractions--rabbit holes where readers can tumble down and have trouble escaping: like when I ventured over to the Fashion section's "in Motion" blog and couldn't find my way back no matter how many times I clicked the Back button--"there's no place like Homepage....there's no place like Homepage..." And it was kind of annoying to have to go back to the status bar and type in the homepage url again. Then again, I don't know if that was any worse than a continual loop of David Pogue videos....
If anything, all the new multi-level, multi-folded, multimedia New York Times is an entertainment experience. It's not as much news inasumch as it is a lot of fluff that probably guarantees that you'll stay on the site longer than you might if it were just chock full of stuffy old news. If you stay on the site longer, you might click on an ad or two. Maybe. And generate some income.
Maybe though, I just like my content simple. Give me a well-written article, like What is it about Mormonism? from the magazine section, uncluttered with any slide shows or additional multimedia explaining John Smith or the Mormon Tabernacle, and I'm pretty much satisfied (although they do have a link to some multi-media of Mitt Romney.) I don't need to be entertained at every step of the way, and I'm perfectly capable of searching for more information if I want it. I also don't need a podcast of writer Noah Feldman reading the article to me, as I'm perfectly capable of reading it myself (something the Times has done with other pieces that became "hot"--it's kind of like overkill, actually. I appreciate journalists for their ability to write well, not necessarily to be compelling personalities in multimedia presentations.)
And maybe I don't really like opinion pieces with comments being called "blogs." Perhaps if it's a blogging cms that's being used, well, I've got no choice but to accept that it's a blog in the most mechanical sense of the word. But if there's no interaction, then what's the point?
In that department, newspapers have a very long way to go...
So, yes, the New York Times if full of crap--crap that may mean nothing in the future, crap that may work to dumb-down lots of folks who should be reading rather than watching their news, lots of crap that isn't necessarily helping journalists communicate better with readers (no "creating conversation" here, except among ourselves), and lots of crap that might be totally unsearchable to future generations looking to research information on the '08 Iowa caucuses.
Then again, maybe it needs all this crap to survive...
Let's see if this NYTimes can endear itself and renew my old multitasking Sunday ritual...
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