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.

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.

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.

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.)

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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.

Tribune sale could mean great things for local websites

It’s official. Tribune has sold The Advocate and Greenwich Time to Gannett for 73 million.

This is great news for the websites, for which I am Senior Web Producer.

It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean and do things right. Fingers crossed.
It’s a chance to do all the things we know newspaper websites should be doing. The timing is perfect, but we’ll see if we can execute.

I promise to do my part (if I’m here ; ) ).

Will post more later.

What newspaper sites should be asking

Washington Post reports the Tribune sale of two local newspapers, where I am the Senior Web Producer.

In fact, I was the first person within the company to ever work on these sites, back in the nineties, when I volunteered to get them listed in the Open Directory, Yahoo, and Search Engines.

Back then I was (thanks to Philip Greenspun) trumpeting around the company for an idea called “community.”
You know, what they now call UGC (User Generated Content).

Personally, I feel we should go back to calling User Generated Content “community” again. It’s more accurate, and less derogatory.

But most newspaper folks would not understand what I mean by saying that UGC is a derogatory term. Because it defines the user as lesser than the site “professional.” But most people in this business would say, “yeah, they aren’t on the same level.” Most smart bloggers realize that’s just not the case.

However, when I say this, I don’t mean to devalue the work done by many “professional” journalists. Some of it is great.

Unfortunately, media is a commodity. Even good media is a commodity.

Do these companies still have something of value? Absolutely, but we live in a “hit and run” web society. I read this story in the Washington today. Tommorrow, It’s BuzzMachine that get’s my attention. Next it’s my family’s group blog, pointing out late spring lift ticket deals. After that, it’s TechCrunch, Library Clips, and CNN. You get the idea.

Back to “community” on a news site. They all thought I was nuts. Now it’s one of Tribune’s main initiatives.

A little late to the party, and I’m still not sure they fully understand it. They think community is getting people to contribute to their sites. They should be asking, “what can we contribute to the community?”

In the nineties, message boards and other community features did, in fact reside on sites. Today these features are distributed across a million sites. (I know about myspace. If they don’t open to the rest of the distributed social network, they will go the way of the old AOL. It may take ten years, but they will)

If they asked me now, where I would focus. I think I’d say “syndication” (thanks to Dave Winer). Be cog in the distributed web of information flow.

However, these news companies cling to a page view model, and a home-page-centric view of themselves, even if they are aware of all the story-level traffic they are getting.

Ajax, RSS, widgets, downloads, OPML and the rest of the trends all indicate to me that the future winners are the people and businesses that provide value in the relationships and conversations happening out there, not the ones who try to corral their “users” into a one size fits all product, that so many news sites are.

Ask not what the users can do for us, but what can we do for the users.

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?

Somewhat Frank! Somewhat Frank!

Wedll maybe there is no chanting happening for the underdog, but it’s great to Frank Gruber’s blog nominated with some heavy hitter’s like Tech Crunch for best Web 2.0 blog.

Newspapers: The empty quarter needs to be removed

Look at this post by Alex Barnett and check out the graph.

I can’t help but think that a large part of the people calling the shots in the Newspaper Industry fall into the “empty quarter” of non-adopters of 2.0 tools. This includes many veteran journalists as well as business folks.

Look at all the examples of Jarvis gives for the changing landscape of news. There is a pretty big gap between these news services and the average newspaper staff.

So the bet on whether they can transform their business before it’s irrelevant really comes down to this. Will the non-adopting group of managers be retired or replaced before it’s too late. Unless they can change themselves, but I doubt it.

That may sound harsh, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just an opinion based upon years of observation.

widgets = services = paradigm shift

Steve Rubel with a nice post that exemplifies what I mean in my earlier post about GrazrScript.

The web is no longer about the home page, or even a web page. It’s about services between individuals and companies, and the widget boom is just an indication of that coming paradigm.

And RSS and OPML are the laguage of these coming services.