March 2007
Changing my picture
My wife has long told me to get rid of the picture of me on my blog.
At Ajax World, Greg Narain said she was right.
Well, I think I will, but what does one do about all the profiles on all the sites and services around that use that picture?
Greg Narain has an answer. More later.
Streaming is dead
Streaming never really worked great over dial-up, but I guess it was better than waiting an hour to download something.
Once you have sufficient bandwith to stream things well, progressive download will work just as well.
Plus, the market changed, with the proliferance of the iPod, and people want to download and transfer their media to portable devices.
Streaming is now only a worthwhile solution for live events.
And with the timeshifting revolution that Tivo and on-demand has brought, one can even say that “Live” is dead.
So, streaming is dead.
Long live the download.
Blog good about thy enemy
Alex Barnett has a nice post on Yahoo and APIs.
What struck me about the article is that Alex, a Microsoft employee, is drumming up the competitor, Yahoo.
Now, it could be that he’s trying to give his own company a kick in the rear, or that he’s just being honest.
Either way, it makes Alex look good, and in a weird way, that makes Microsoft look good, in my mind.
So, talking good about your competition, when it’s well deserved, has benefits for your business as well.
Love thy enemy, was the Biblical creed. Blog good about thy enemy is the new path.
Hmm.
BuddyBuilder goes open source
Dave Winer asks for an Open Source twitter.
The world is welcome to the code which I created BuddyBuilder with.
I originally made it so I could blog to everybuddy.org with my IM client. 676 people have registered. A few use it regularly. I don’t actively develop it, but I could start again.
I wasn’t planning on it being an Open Source so I need to tidy up some hard coded stuff. Then it’s yours. You’ll need an XMPP/Jabber server with transports to run it, but that’s easy to do or find. I have it working with AIM, Yahoo and GoogleTalk
You can get weather by IMing mybuddybuilder, and typing weather:90210
You can subscribe to users and tags. It’s a little rough, but easily smoothed out.
If RocketBoom can’t do it, who can?
Mit Advertising Lab points out the struggle of RocketBoom:
“Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank. Advertising is not doing it. “It’s frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now,” said the daily video blog’s founder, Andrew Baron.
More evidence that Scott Karp is on the right track that content creation is no longer a business.
As I’ve said before, much of the value of old media was in the distribution mechanism, not the content, and now that distribution is free, content is a commodity.
If RocketBoom can’t do it, who can?
Right now, value is in the sites and services that enable users to do something, like share photos, network with others, or blog for free.
Perhaps these services will be commoditized some day as well.
That’s when the Cluetrain will have arrived. When nothing stands in between the buyer and seller, the speaker and spoken too.
Are Blog Trees the next gen discussion groups?
Yahoo sent this out to Yahoo Groups users:
Dear Yahoo! Groups User:
Starting March 26, 2007, you’ll notice a few changes when you log into
your Group.- In the past we have allowed group owners to customize their home
pages using IFrames (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFRAME). In order
to better protect our users against online threats (learn more about
online threats here: http://security.yahoo.com/), we can no longer
support IFrames. If you currently use IFrames to display another web
page on your group’s home page, it will no longer appear. See the
Yahoo! Groups Team blog (http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team) to
learn what HTML tags are allowed to help personalize your group
description.- The Yahoo! Answers module will be turned on by default on all
groups. This change will happen over several days, so you may not see
the module right away.You may recall that we originally introduced the Answers module last
year to offer groups another source of useful information. In
response to your feedback, we have been working with the Answers team
to ensure greater relevance and quality of results that appear in the
module, to the point where we now believe it makes sense to default
the module back on. We’ve put a lot of effort into mapping each group
to a relevant topic on Answers. However, as a moderator, if you don’t
think the module is appropriate for your particular group(s), you
continue to have the option to change the content of what’s displayed
in the module or to switch the module off completely.- We have increased spam protection for group owner email
(groupname-owner@yahoogroups.com) addresses.Some of you are already aware of an improvement that became available
last month, but it bears repeating.- By popular demand we increased file and photo storage limits to 100
megs each. You told us that the old limits weren’t enough, and we want
to let you know we heard you loud and clear!As always, you’ll find more information about these latest Groups
changes and other Groups news on the Groups Team Blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_teamThe Yahoo! Groups Team
No big deal, but in an age of letting the user have what they want, it seems that they are constraining and controlling.
Perhaps the time is ripe for the next generation of discussion groups. Something along the lines of Blog Trees.
I’ve got more to post on this. Very soon.
We the journalists
Dave Winer points to Ian Betteridge, who says of journalists:
They have to understand the beat that they’re covering, preferably better than anyone in the industry under the level of vice president.
Well, I don’t agree with the premise that Vice Presidents are automatically more knowledgable than other workers.
But even in this case, wouldn’t you rather read the VP’s blog than the journalist’s story?
Ajax World Day 2
Steve Rubel just gave a nice talk called the me2revolution, about widgets, ajax and syndication. In other words, how to get your content or message out to where the users are, since he gives the page-view about three years before it’s dead as a meaningful metric. Couldn’t agree more.
I tried to get him to say pay-per-action mght be the future, but he still belives in ad-based content, though he seemed warmer to sponsorships.
Also, I knew he couldn’t get through the talk without a mention of Twitter. His point there was about news feeds that people are creating for Twitter, like Dave Winer’s NYTimes feed. If you don’t create it or at least enable it, others will, so there is no place for not being aware of these technologies.
It was a tough call between Steve’s talk and Adam Sah’s Google Gadgets.
Earlier, Bret Taylor of Google spoke about the challenges of Ajax. He concluded that despite all the negative aspects, it is and will be the way developers create web applications going forward. he also highlighted somenice toolkits for creating ajax applications, and of course Google Web Toolkit was on top of the list. It did look interesting though.
Next up, Google is doing a demo, and then Gregory Narain looks to be taking Stowe Boyd’s place to talk about Social Applications.
A few of the other bits of talks I’ve seen have been a bit about marketing Ajax as a whole, but if you’re here, I can’t imagine you need to be convinced of that.
Looking forward to Andi Gutmans on PHP and Ajax.
Tom Morris says buy a book and forget the conference.
Newspapers need to come out of “hiding”
A recent Scripting News comment by someone named Matt (not me) brings up an interesting topic we’ve been discussing at our local newspaper website, http://stamfordadvocate.com.
Matt points out that Dave Winer shouldn’t fault the reporter for a misleading headline, because it is written by the editor and the reporter has no say.
He’s right. That’s usually true.
The problem is, that’s probably an area where newspapers need to adjust the way they work. As Scott Karp puts it, they need to decide what kind of publisher they are.
You see, what the newsroom folks call “editorial process,” means that many levels of filters and processes are applied to stories to ensure correctness, as well as fill the needed space.
Every editor must admit that they have cut parts of a story due to lack of space despite it having weakened the story. Sometimes cuts are made to strengthen an article too.
In general, these processes are not a terrible thing, whether they work all the time or not. But they aren’t necessary for something to be good journalism.
In an online world however, it could cause problems because of the immediate feedback loop, as in the case of Dave Winer and the NYTimes reporter.
No one ever said to themselves, “That New York Times editorial process got it wrong.”
They say, “That stupid reporter got it wrong.”
Now that we have come to want (and expect) the news writers and creators to answer our accusations of innacuracy, the MSM can’t hide behind the shield of “editorial process.”
As I see it, they have two choices. Either they don’t use reporters names, or loosen up on their editorial policy.
They won’t accept either. The first because of ego, and they second. . .well, for another type of ego.
You see, that would make them bloggers . . . and human.
The value of online advertising
Update:I re-read Scott’s post and think I may have mis-interpreted it. I think he is saying the flaw is in the way the ads are sold, not online advertising itself, to which I agree. (Could be the Black and Tans. I’m Italian, but my mom says we are all Irish on St. Patrick’s, so I have a Guiness and some Corned Beef to celebrate too.)
–
I’m usually on the same page as Scott Karp, but not today.
Maybe it’s because I’m snowed in and it’s St.Patrick’s (Black and Tans), but what he calls a flaw of online adverting, I call a fix to a flaw of traditional advertising.
First of all, it’s not only Yahoo and the big boys getting premium rates for page views. As the producer of a couple local newspaper websites, I can say that our page-views are worth much more than $1 per a thousand.
It’s true that national advertiser can sometimes get that CPM, but it more like $4 to $18 per CPM and that doesn’t include the text ads we have on the page. Nor does it take into account that each page-view serves 2- 4 display ad impressions. And some pages are sponsored also.
All in all, I’d estimate that our cost per reach is lower than our in-print advertiser cost per reach, but not that much lower.
The fact is, I don’t think either rate is as valuable as the cost, so we are in agreement that pay-per-click is bringing down the the total value of a page view.
But that’s exactly what we want, as an industry. Wha?
Like Scott says, it’s about knowing who your users are. The value of an ad is in what value it delivers to the advertiser, not in what perceived value any salesperson can convince the advertiser that a particular buy has.
And, like I’m sure Scott knows, the internet is best at bringing the margin between cost and value together, to zero in some cases.
It’s not a flaw, it’s a virtue.
I guess that means that high traffic does not equal a business model. Popularity is not enough, though huge popularity is still enough for the time being.
I think that’s just because we are in the huge transition. We now value things by the old model, “perceived and estimated value.” We soon will value them by the new model, “true value.”
That’s where Doc’s VRM will play a large role, as well as gestures and intention.
I see VC’s as the ones placing faith in page-views, moreso than web 2.0 companies. Most Alot of them are aiming right, I think.
Who can’t resist the allure of high traffic, though.