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

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)

Ad Hoc groups are key to media dying

Kent Newsome and Tom Morris both opine about how Techmeme and Techcrunch have become less satisfying than going directly to the sources themselves.

Well, yes those sites have become media themselves and we all know that media is dead.

I like Kent’s idea that the Techmeme algorithm is actually working so well that it’s exposing a Web 2.0 flaw:

Maybe the Techmeme algorithm has deduced that all of this Web 2.0 stuff is really just the media business in some new form. If you have no product to sell, what are you? If your primary or only revenue source is the sale of ads, what are you? You’re not science. You’re not a seller of goods. You’re media. You’re the new TV. A million pages of user generated content broadcasting your AdSense banner over the new air.

I also have to give Kent a hand for referencing Mike Brady. It’s an interesting reference since that popular show was about ten years past the era when it should have succeeded. That type of humor should never have been popular by the late sixties and early seventies, yet it was.

Likewise, mediation should be dead, but it’s alive and well at these sites. Why is this?

Well, I still don’t think we have the tools to manage our own information consumption. Lots of people have been talking about them, but not too many delivering.

Tom is right when he says:

If you are in the media business, you need to fully grok the consequences of AdBlock and BitTorrent. You don’t have to like the consequences, but I imagine most of you haven’t even understood the full consequences of a system whereby anyone can share anything with anyone else without seeing any adverts in the process.

The only problem is we still need a whole new generation of software to help us manage and find information that we like.

A major part of that new software or services is social. For now we have just come to rely on a few bloggers that we trust, but this means we get a lot of junk and miss some important stuff too.

I think applying VRM to news and information will help produce some new tools that gcan deliver the information we need when and how we want it.

Also, I’m still thinking that ad hoc group creation, moderation and subscription will also revolutionize blogging in such a way that that we can slip in and out of conversations, file sharing, and marketplaces fluidly and instantly.
A kind of Share Your OPML writ large.

Identity is the first step toward that end, and then a spec to allow adhocracies to form. It’s not so difficult and SSE might play a role.

There has to be a simple way for people to form groups, and a relatively simple way to develop web applications that use this power.

Until then, we rely on trusted people and services, and some of these become like old media themselves even if spun in a new way.

A new type of newspaper site

I have officially accepted a position of Web Development Director with The Hour newspapers in Norwalk, Connecticut.

The company is locally owned by a trust, a much different scenario than the Tribune owned The Advocate, where I previously held the postion of Senior Web Producer.

The current sites are in great need, and the company is hoping I can bring them up to modern standards.

Hopefully the scenario will offer me the opportunity to make the sites a model for other newspapers of all sizes.

I expect to use many of the ideas you folks have given me to formulate a modern strategy that includes consideration of VRM, Attention, Gestures and syndication.

OPML will be an integral tool building these newspaper sites and services, as will the concept of River of News.

I also plan to use open APIs from other services like Twitter and Flickr and Grazr, to integrate these services into other communities.

Similarly, I’ll try my best to expose whatever services we can offer through the use of APIs.

There are great opportunities out there for media companies that are willing to do things right, and I’m hoping this will be a chance to do just that.

Google Office vs. Microsoft is not the question

Richard MacManus asks whether Google is being genuine when they say their Web Office is not in competition with google.

Well, I think they are genuine because this is a completely new market, and definedly different than the one Microsoft controlled. This is an Attention market, not a software market.

That said, they are in competition with Microsoft, since Microsoft realizes that they need to convert their business model to this new market as well. If they don’t adapt their Office strategy, they will fail.

It seems to me that everyone that is relevant on the web is competing for a new type of market. The Office aspect is just one sector.

Memerank ™ is the key to relevant live web

Marcelo Calbucci has a great idea that I think can even be made betterif we insert some attention metadata.

By focusing on affinity groups instead of mass popularity, we can extract the most meaningful news from the live web, rather than the just the most popular and the ones that popular bloggers link to (often the same).

Links are truly dead with a sophisticated algorithm that could do this.

I’m going to label it memerank ™ and use it on a share your OPML like project I’ve been playing with over at http://dev.glistn.com

I think the results could be interesting, but I’m curioous to know whether it will produce results that readers would want. I think it will.

Technorati/Ogilvy announce partnership

Ogilvy and Technorati announced a partnership at Always On Media centered around conversational marketing.
“Geeks are too linear,” says Peter Hirshberg, chairman of Technorati.
So they bring in Ogilvy.
They correctly recognize the power shift to the customer (Hirshberg calls them consumers. . .bad).
“Where’s the fire”, a feature launching on Technorati tomorrow, sounds like a Digg type.
I love Technorati, but these announcements raise an eyebrow. Sounds like they are desparate to come up with a business model. Anything!
They should turn it into a VRM/Attention clearinghouse. Now that would be a modern business model.
Ogilvy?

Pageviews aren’t dead, it’s CPM that’s dead, and VRM is born

A lot of talk lately about how page-views are dead.

Greg Yardley suggests a solution but it looks like he’s missing an important point.
It’s not just about widgets and “share” of the page, it’s the fact that a well-built Ajax application may now substitute a rich interface for what was tens or hundreds of page requests.

So now how do you calculate a CPM? By the number of clicks on a page? (I guess Ajax will report this data back to the server)

Are advertisers going to buy into the fact that a click that delivers new data to the page makes their ad on that page worth two impressions? Doubtful.

Do we need advertising engines that deliver ads in time based or action-based way so that one HTTP request can deliver more than one ad if the user is interacting with the page for an extended period? Maybe.

Or do we need to rethink advertising in general and admit that interruption based advertising is dead in general? I’d say so.

Which is why pay-per-click is so popular and why pay-per-action will continue to grow. No doubt.

By the way, it’s not just Ajax that’s causing this death of the page-view. It’s widgets, as Greg suggests, and RSS, and syndication of other sorts that make modern web marketing almost impossible to track effectively.

What can be tracked, as always, is the effectiveness of a campaign ROI, which methods like pay-per-action help immensely.

So what’s left to do in a pay-per-action world? Attention, Gestures and Intention are the gold that needs to be mined in order to create more effective marketing.

Using that gold will help us direct relevant offers to willing individuals. What could be better than that?

We can’t do it alone. CPM is one-way marketing, and one-way is dead in all things web.

That’s where VRM comes along. It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and it refers to a new generation of tools on the way that allow the customers to assist in the marketing relationship.

Some will resist this loss of control at first, because what’s better for the customer doesn’t seem to equate to better for the vendor. But that’s wrong because the marketplace is not an equation, it’s a relationship.

A marriage doesn’t only get better for one of the spouses as the relationship grows stronger. It gets better for both.

Page views aren’t so dead as CPM is. Long live VRM.

Links WERE dead: A gesture proof

Over the past year on the Gillmor Gang, Steve has contended that a lotta things are dead, among them, links.

I can’t really speak for Office, but I always took Steve to mean that the future of Office was death, and I also thought that’s where he was heading with links.

Nay.

I’ve come to realize that links aren’t going to be dead, but they have been, even before Steve started talking about them. He was just observing current phenomenons.

Let me prove it.

1. Everyone will probably agree that the blogosphere would be hard, if not impossible to use without SPAM filters.

2. There are two common methods of filtering out blogosphere SPAM (there are three, really but we all know that visual/manual filtering doesn’t scale well with our attention e.g. email)
The two methods are using data from the collective intelligence, and algorithmic detection and often a combination of both.

3. Using collective data and an algorithm to determine the value of something is analagous, if not actually what using gestures are all about.

Conclusion: Links in a distributed social network like the blogosphere are useless without a gesture filter. A link can be a useful tool. Links as a value exchange are useless.

So, all along, even the mighty Google has been using gestures to decide which links have value and which don’t. The game has been over for a while.

In a nutshell, links are useless without gestures, but gestures don’t need links.

One final note: If you are reading this, you have used implict or explicit gestures to come to the conclusion that either the link to this post had value, or that the RSS URL had value. Period.

One final final note: Technorati uses links, no? Yes, but they also filter out Splogs, so the links already have a certain gesture value. I bet you can imagine a more sophisticated blog ranking system that not only took into consideration links, but context and behavior to determine what was up.