May 2007
Chronicle of a newspaper site reformation
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rebuilding some newspaper sites.
If you are weak in the knees, don’t click through, because it’s pretty bad.
http://www.thehour.com
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com
http://www.wiltonvillager.com
Tomorrow, we have our first meeting and I’ve decided to take the rest of you along.
It should be fun.
Subscriber vs. Free. . .
full text feeds vs. partial. . .
traditional journalism vs. community and blogging. . .
display ads vs. collecting detailed attention and gesture data with which to empower users to control their vendor relations. . .
(well, you know)
stay tuned
Truemors is true web 2.0
Guy Kawasaki’s new startup called Truemors is true web 2.0:
All kidding aside, I wonder if web development is dead. Just hack Wordpress.
Google is like Custer. . .maybe
This quote surfaced by umair is almost as sad as the historical event it references.
No disrespect, but Custer lost the battle, but the Sioux nation lost the war. (again, no disrespect) The point is, for better or worse, Custer was on the winning side. So, yeah Google is like Custer.
newspapers need to “take one for the team”
Newspapers need to take a lesson from baseball.
It’s mid to late innings and your team is losing but you have a man on first.
You give a decent hitter a “sacrifice bunt” sign. No one likes to get this but it’s part of team play.
The hitter bunts and the infield comes charging. The runner is going and safe at second and the hitter is thrown out.
Now you have a man in scoring position. There is no gurantee that the next batter will get a hit. In fact, the chances are pretty slim.
Still, it’s a popular managerial strategy.
Newspapers have a man on first (classifieds and local ad dollars), but they are losing the big game (search and Attention). If they don’t make a sacrifice (open up), they’ll need two hits to score, and that’s a long shot to say the least.
Sometimes you need to take one for the team.
Can Second Life be Second Business?
Kent Newsome is on a roll lately.
In his latest post he rags a little on Steve Rubel for saying that he believes
. . . that 3D virtual worlds are going to become a place where people will increasingly spend time and conduct business online.
It’s a fair enough skeptical look that he presents, but in all fairness to Steve who says,
,Second Life is like Geocities was in 1998 - a big idea, but a little ahead of its time. I suspect that within a year or two robust 3D virtual worlds will eventually get far easier to use and run completely in a browser. Then they will become more mainstream.
I think there are a couple of major questions to consider.
The most important is whether these 3D worlds will ever provide a richer experience than a web-based collaboration. If not, then Kent is right.
Right now it seems is more productive to use “traditional” means of online collaboration to accomplish things.
But here is a little anecdote.
One day I knew that a conference being webcast on the west coast was happening and that I was interested. I also knew that Kosso (Koz Faraina) was simulcasting it in Second Life. So I signed on and joined a group of five or six others and it was a much better experience than watching the webcast alone.
Second Life is embryonic, but it’s the potential that has people excited, I think.
No, it’s not a viable threat to online collaboration yet. But online collaboration itself is the future of business, and when the day comes that a 3D world is as easily accesible as other online collaboration tools and provides a richer environment to do business, then it will be a place to do serious business.
It may not happen, but it’s certainly possible.
Identifiers as a platform
Drummond Reed collects some thoughts leading to (well, he says it best):
.
With XRI 2.1 and the XDI RDF model, about which I’ll start blogging much more extensively after IIW, that’s what we’ll have laid the foundation for. A semantic web where the semantics are actually in the identfiers.
Excelllent. XRI or OpenID could be used to identity resources of all kinds without even the need to access those resources beforehand. Whole services could be built on top of identifiers alone.
Is AdWords advertising?
This quote [Thanks Doc] from the academic paper written by the founders of Google is interesting for more than one reason.
The first and obvious is that it seems to stand in stark contrast to Google’s most lucrative intitiative, AdWords.
The second is that search itself is a VRMish RFP (request for proposal) at its most embryonic level.
The question, then, is whether Google sold out, or has just laid the groundwork for a new era.
G Lists and ad hoc groups
John Tropea has a couple of posts that echo one of my last posts about ad hoc groups, and I think he’s right when he says OPML is the vehicle to achieve this.
He says:
Now what I say is why do we have to go to MyBlogLog to see all this when the Recent Reader widget could be an annotated Grazr widget, like Twazr.
I’ll go one better I think. Why do you even need to go to your own site? Why not a dynamic feed in your reader? Or better yet, both.
And,
Further to this a Grazing List is an ever changing list of feeds, and this is what the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget is, a perpetual changing list of people/blogs based on these people/blogs visiting your blog site
Yup, and why not a dynamic feed based upon conversations you are in as well? Every RSS item is open and two-way, to whatever extent you wish. Comments are dead.
Lastly, he is frustrated about these services not working together and accepting the de facto standard for reading lists, OPML,
can’t I just plug in this OPML into a service, just like SYO.
I hear ya. IF we can make some progess on Identity and the use of XRI for discoverable services about oneself, I don’t think you or I should even have to upload our OPML. Just keep one file up to date and all sorts of services can use it.
Voila!, ad hoc groups based upon your Glists (Grazing Lists, Reading Lists, Listening Lists, Viewing Lists)
Starbury and VRM
The Starbury is a basketabll shoe endorsed by NBA All Star Stephon Marbury.
It doesn’t retail for $200, but $14.98.
I’m getting a pair.
The idea was partly started to try to eliminate any reason for “getting jumped” for your valuable sneakers.
It looks like the idea has legs, and NBA player Ben Wallace will also be sporting the brand on the court.
We’ve all known for some time how much markup there was on these sneakers, and I’m thinking this is indicative of a greater trend.
In this case, it might just be a marketing gimic, or an actual good gesture to help the community, but it begs the question of whether goods of all kinds can close the gap between price and cost, since most of that is controlled by the brands and the distribution channels.
With the fact that distribution of all kinds is bringing the manufacturer and the consumer closer together, whether it be news, or basketball shoes, we all know that this phenomenon is being actualized.
The next logical step is the consumers creating their own brands, wrought out of the demand side either supplying itself, or leveraging their collective demand to have the manufacturer create a product to their specs.
Enter VRM.
One aspect of VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the ability of ad hoc groups to create a collective demand, and influence the suppliers to meet that demand.
In such a case, it’s hard to see what a brand has to offer, if they are anything but an enabler in the process, much in the same way that the Wordpress brand enables me to blog, though it gets no immediate revenue from me.
The Wordpress brand however, will or might generate revenue from ancillary services, in and around the actual product.
Could it be, that in the future, Nike or Microsoft might only exist, not to sell their products, but to aggregate attention from the demand side, and facilitate a transaction.
That would seem to be where Google is headed. Wise companies might just follow.