winer
One of the more interesting sessions at NetJ so far was the session on revenue.
“How do we make money with journalism?”
There were a few people in the crowd that pointed out that the old model of advertising was dying. Jay Rosen brought up Doc Searls’ VRM movement, though he didn’t explicitly call it that.
Dave Winer made a good point in the hallway that advertising is actually growing but we are in a transitional phase.
I also met Scott Karp from Publish2
But most of the crowd was still caught up in the idea that the model was to grow page-views and populate billboards.
It certainly is a dillemma. The choice before all media companies can be put succinctly:
Cash in today and be extinct tomorrow or plan for tomorrow and hope you are not extinct before the sun rises.
Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m going to build a new system to act as the CMS of the new newspaper sites.
Since I’m doing so, I may as well choose the technologies that I feel most confident with.
In this case the web pages will be built with PHP and Apache, and the database will be Postgresql. These will all run on FreeBSD.
Why build instead of using Drupal or Joomla? It is a tough call, but I have yet to see a CMS that isn’t story centric, or even more importantly, “site centric.”
Yes, you can achieve a great degree of “community” with a lot of CMS’s out there, especially with a blogging platform like Wordpress, which I seriously considered for many good reasons.
But the future, IMHO, is in distributed systems, and I don’t see anything that is built specifically with that in mind.
I’m basing the system on RSS 2.0 and all of the data that will be treated as atomic units, whether it was created by a staff reporter or photographer, a site visitor, or it comes from another system or site entirely.
If it sounds like an aggregator, well it is, but it’s a very smart aggregator, because I don’t mean to suggest that we won’t be displaying our original content with some prominence. But that’s just one view of the content. OPML will be the skeletal structure that suports the multiple views. We may even try to implement checkbox news. ; )
You see, it’s based upon a feed-centric view of items, so if the feed is from the editorial department and has a category of sports, we know what it is.
If the feed is from elsewhere, we know what it is.
Ultimately this is based upon a web-centric view of things, not a company-centric.
Also of note, is the idea of groups, or groupings, as Stowe Boyd might more aptly describe them. AdHocracies, is the way I’ve put it in the past. Stowe hinted at this some time back with his blog trees idea.
The concept here is that a feed, or a blog and its items are a thread of expanding contributions. I’ll be using SSE to help that along. Two-way news is something I’ve been ineterested in for a while, but have yet to hammer down.
Greg Narain told me (at Ajax World) that it was too complicated and I agree that is an issue.
The only way this can work is if it’s transparent to the people using it. It’s just got to make sense from a user interface perspective right off the bat, or it won’t fly.
I know. Good luck.
A lot of this decision was based upon the ideas that the projectvrm folks have been throwing around lately. In addition to a distributed approach to the content, we’ll be supporting OpenID and other distributed identity ideas like XRI/inames. (like =matthew)
Lastly, along the same lines as VRM, is the idea of user attention data, but It’s way too early to tell in what ways we can make that useful. But i think we will.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was reading Dave Winer’s post about HTTP servers built into products like stereos and printers.
Imagine what it would be like if everything had a web interface. Complete interop.
Your cell phone’s browser could double as the entertainment remote and the thermostat, preheat your oven and warm up your car. I’m sure you can even think of better ideas than that.
It makes me think that there is a future for Java again, this time as the cross-platform HTTP server that runs equally well on your cell phone and on your refrigerator.
But then again, you never know with Java.
Feb 07 2007 11:42 am |
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A few weeks ago a bunch of us met in NYC and Dave Winer led a discussion abouta bunch of cool topics including Ukranian food. I was having trouble with my recorder so I only have a small snippet of poor audio, but if you can overlook that, it actually is one of the most important points made during the night.
And it’s even more appropriate now, after the Apple iPhone promotion.
Dave Winer on Patents
Jan 12 2007 06:23 pm |
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It’s funny how quotes can deceive.
Dave Winer quoted Mike Arrington about Daylife and I thought the quote was a positive one.
I though it meant that Daylife left out all the garbage you find at typical newspaper sites.
Turns out Mike meant leaving out RSS feeds. That’s not good.
RSS (and OPML) is more important to me than HTML. I think that trend will grow. Will that become a truth for the mainstream soon? I don’t know, but IE7 will certainly push it in that direction. No?
Just for that, the Old Media Doomsday Clock may be making a shift back a minute or two in favor of Old Media. Wow!
Stay tuned.
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