MiniMediaGuy

Please click again . . .

2005-09-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Because I have moved to minimediaguy.org.

Look for me . . .

2005-09-22T07:25:00.000-07:00

In my new place.

Not More Metrics (here)!

2005-09-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Haven't you heard that I've moved.

Change of scene

2005-09-09T05:17:00.000-07:00

Look for me at MiniMediaGuy.org!

Look for me . . .

2005-09-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

at this new link!

I've Moved!

2005-09-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

Same MiniMediaGuy, different location. Please follow the link!

I've Moved

2005-09-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

Same MiniMediaGuy, different location. Please follow the link!

Aggregation: It's the Zeitgeist

2005-09-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

Just a quick question before I start a long weekend early — how do people learn in a networked world? George Siemens, a Canadian educator, has advanced a notion called connectivism that provides a conceptual framework for what changes when institutions are supplanted by ad-hoc teams. Let me thank unmediated.org for bringing the theory of connectivism to my attention. I noodled around and found a biography for George Siemens and an interview with him that will give you the flavor of his ideas. The piece referenced on unmediated had to do with Siemens’ observations on the breakdown of the old media gatekeeper system: “I no longer read newspapers or watch the evening news. I used to go to one source of information to get a thousand points of information. Now, I go to a thousand sources of information to get one point of information. I have become the filter and mediator.” This observation is reminiscent of the newsmaster concept that was floating around the web some months ago (if you haven’t seen the Googlezon (EPIC) video, take a five minutes to amuse yourself with a sci-fi "documentary" on how the Net swallows newspapers). And just this morning unmediated pointed to a related discussion about how top bloggers are becoming what are called newshubs -- tour guides of a sort in a world awash with information. Interesting times. I’ll post again Tuesday. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

The Dept. of Homeland Software?

2005-09-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I speculated that local news was the best content market (include niche or affinity groups as well) and suggested that localized news could be the bread and butter of citizen journalism. I ended on this note -- we need to invent a way to make local sites pay at least a partial income. Here are some thoughts as to how. For arguments’ sake, let’s imagine that the citizen journalism site of the not-too-distant future is anchored around a column, or blog. It would presumably be the audience magnet. Around this blog would be arranged other feeds and inputs – a cartoon, photo or artwork for a quick laugh; the lead paragraph from other blogs on the same theme with links to more; news feeds, culled from mainstream media and delivered via RSS or through an affiliation with Topix; useful links to info resources relevant to the site’s theme (Peoria-at-a-Glance, or Guide-to-Food-Preservation). Think of this as a personal portal, a lens on the world that the “editor” shares with others. In recent blogs I noted how Dave Winer’s OPML would enable web publishers to grab other pages and, assuming templates or other software modules appear out of thin air, pour parts of that content into one of these imaginary personal portals. The end result could be an interesting destination. It could even draw enough traffic to create a supplementary income for the portal editor. At least that's my hope and expectation. But if the agglomeration of content helps to draw an audience, shouldn’t front page revenues be shared with the various contributors? I say yes, and offer this simple starting point as a framework for computing the shares – for each input record the area of the screen set over to it; record the time of each unique front-page visit and any click-thru activity that occurs while each constituent element is in place; divide total revenues or page-views achieved during each publishing period (which would change any time a constituent element changes); divide any revenues received during that publishing period by the area devoted to each element; apportion the pro rata share to an account for each contributor; tabulate these shares by week or month, and issue payments upon certain thresholds. In short, make a business out of sharing content instead of assuming that we are all tenured academics who post stuff for the greater good and our personal glory (think about it: Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and its predecessor, the NSFNet, were both academic constructs supported by academic money and labor; Web 2.0 has no such sugar daddy.) But where do I put this request? I can’t even paste a traffic counter into my Blogger profile (officially, my traffic is zero, which means not even I read my blog!). Perhaps some person with technological smarts (who is also not reading this) can point me to where such an accounting software already exists. Or if it is a novel request, then put the idea where it is likely to get constructive feedback or a prototype effort that could be tweaked and improved. It's way past time to put the new publishing modes on a path toward economic sustainability. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Going Local

2005-08-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

There are two great floods in the news today, one in New Orleans and the other a deluge of media coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Pardon me for saying this is not an innovation, only saturation. Decades ago people would have sat glued to the radio. Today they're glued to the computer screen. True, new media offers new ways to help the survivors. But the more important, and perhaps unexploited power of new media is to enable us to get more information about what is happening in our backyards and on topics of interest to us, and not in being innundated by events a continent away. Thanks to an Anonymous poster for putting this thought in my head, and for pointing me to a lovely article on local coverage in Online Journalism Review. Today's posting must be briefer than usual. I've backed myself into a corner and have to rush out. So let me summarize as quickly as possible how OJR writer David LaFontaine put together some great ideas on how local coverage may be the unexploited niche in publishing -- and urge you to go there for details. He started with a focus on the Point Reyes Light, the plucky little Northern California publication that won a 1979 Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of Synanon. Faced in 2004 with a financial crisis, the Light asked readers for help and they said: we'll pay more. Wow! But why should that surprise us. I can get more than I cared to know today about Katrina but if there was a flood down the block, where would I go to learn more? The OJR piece connects this print example to some of the online efforts that seek similarly to drill down into communities, quoting former mainstream media executive Bob Cauthorn and newsman-turned-entrepreneur Mark Potts, a co-founder of Backfence.com. "National news? Piece of cake. Anywhere, everywhere. I can get Pope coverage pretty much anywhere," Potts told OJR, which goes on to write: "Potts and his investors are betting that . . . a site that tells you how to find a good local plumber, what the Little League schedule is, and what the City Council is doing to try to solve the traffic problem could be a real force." Exactly what I've been thinking of late, and with one addition that I hope to add in future posts -- how does a person go-local with some hope of earning at least supplementary income if not creating a replacement job. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Putting Politics in Command

2005-08-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia is an Internet treasure, a publicly-composed encyclopedia kept constant by volunteers, and embedded with links for further research. It is my first destination on many new topics. Given its success, I've wondered whether it might be a template for what Dan Gillmor christened citizen media (aka citizen journalism). So I read with interest a 13-page essay entitled, “Wikipedia as a learning community: content, conflict and the ‘common good’.” The essay was written by Wikipedian Cormac Lawler, who is studying for an advanced degree at the University of Manchester. While I enjoyed his essay and am awed by Wikipedia itself, my short, brutal assessment suggests that its governance is not applicable to citizen journalism because the cataloging of knowledge requires a different intellectual temperament than the acquisition of new information -- which is, or should be, the throbbing heart of journalism. But I have jumped the gun and failed to offer a précis of the essay by Lawler or, as he is known inside the Wikipedia community, Cormaggio. Wikipedia had 2 million articles in over 200 languages at the time of Cormaggio’s writing in 2005. Co-founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales had receded into the background, allowing the group to organize itself and create its own ethos, conserving his founder’s prestige for rare intercessions if and when conflict threatens the core function. And conflict, Cormaggio writes, is central to the learning that occurs inside the Wikipedian community: “Conflict arises for many reasons in many guises, whether through differences of culture, ideology or belief or simple misunderstanding . . . These conflicts often spill over into flame or edit wars, sometimes with little or no discussion on potential solutions, but simple deadlock.” But such conflicts are obviously resolved and Wikipedia functions, to the benefit of us all. I wish I knew more about the composition of the user base: its numbers, whether it functions under the 80-20 principle (that 20 percent of the contributors do 80 percent of the work), and from whence its membership is derived. My sense is that the core group is comprised of academics, who perform this role out of mix of professional pride, public service and a desire for peer recognition. But this is an inference from Cormaggio’s essay and not an explicit finding. Some empirical data about the community would have been helpful. In any event, my quick journalistic take – arrived at by reading the essay last night and waking early to pound out this rant before I race off to a meeting – is that the Wikipedia model is inapplicable to journalism. “Wikipedia is . . . building a learning community where leadership is distributed and in so doing creating a new kind of academic community,” Cormaggio writes. And there's the nub. Journalism is not an academic undertaking. It is, or at least it should be, an irreverent, inconsiderate, in-your-face confrontation with powers that would like nothing better than to obscure their workings from people who might object. Journalism is short, sharp and rude when need be. Even in this Internet Age, when publishers can theoretically pour out words and images ad infinitum, journalism must boils the most complex fact-sets all down to a headline. Because journalism is the discovery of that which is new. And sometimes it has got to smack you –- or the powers that be -- upside the head just to get attention. So while I am grateful for the existence of Wikipedia, and the time that its participants spend in its composition, I do not think it is a template for what I hope will be the next Net-spawned revolution of citizen journalism. I like to think in terms of movie metaphors. They’re probably the one cultural reference that cuts across classes and even nations. And, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t see “Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf” meets “The Front Page.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Kudos for J-Learning

2005-08-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

There is a saying in the martial arts: when the student is ready the teacher appears. In that spirit, last week I came across a desperately needed resource: an easy-to-read guide on how to build websites for online community journalism. The site is J-Learning.org, and it’s a free offshoot of the University of Maryland’s J-Lab. Let me tell you a little about both. The blurb publicizing the J-Learning site is succinct: “This how-to digital handbook offers 20 chapters and 60 subsections of basic skills training on how to plan a community news site, build it, use the latest off-the-shelf software to add online features, and then market it and track users. It was created for citizens’ media projects, small-market news organizations and journalism new-media programs.” The J-Lab is an interesting outfit, a group of university folks with do-good money to spur community journalism in new media formats. I’ve mentioned them in past blogs, such as when I noted their October 24th “Citizens’ Media Summit, and on another occasion, some prizes they’ve handed out to reward novel experiments in community media. This latest project, a collaborative effort with some folks out here in California, could not have arrived at a better time for me. I’m planning a real web page to allow me to practice some of what I’ve been observing and preaching about new media. I've never been terribly swift on the technical uptake. But in the new age, to be a publisher means having HTML running in your veins. The J-Learning material is written for people like me – communicators forced to learn some Internet plumbing. Having now gushed without artifice or reservation let me now make some suggestions that might make the site even more useful. (If any of these are things that have already been implemented and I have simply been too stupid to notice them, please point that out to me and I will point that out here.) Would it be possible to create a PDF version of the entire site? Or to otherwise enable folks to print out entire sections? (I find it easier to read paper than LCDs, and also want it as reference to share with others.) As for print outs, a page format designed for a 3-ring binder seems the way to go. Office supply stores sell pre-punched paper. I got some last week and manually printed out the sections of interest so I could read on the train, etcetera. Finally, a 3-ring format takes into account that stuff will change and pages will be updated, and since the J-Learning site is creating a newsletter, there is already a built-in system for alerting users of new information – and an easy way for them to insert the new page. Let me pass on two other references, written for non-tech types, while I’m at it. “The Unusually Useful Web Book,” by former HotWired executive June Cohen lives up to its name. It’s not meant to be read so much as referenced but things I’ve looked up I’ve been able to grasp. Finally in the free-AND-fabulous category, let me steer you to The Internet Digest, an e-zine created by Florida publisher Mario Sanchez. I’ve never met Mario and know zilch about him – other than that he seems to have much to teach, and concisely, on subjects such as web design, search engine optimization, and so on. Visit his archives and download to your heart’s content. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Shorts, Woes & Mysteries

2005-08-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

This week kicked my butt. Fortunately the workaday portion is over and an old Aikido training buddy found and passed on a few interesting bits, including an item about Amazon.com creating an iTunes-like service to sell short stories. Since he is too shy to take a bow by name, let me thank MysteryGuy for pointing me to a news article about a service that will let readers download shorts for 49 cents.

"Amazon Shorts will help authors find new readers and help readers find and discover authors they'll love," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's vice president of digital media. "We hope that by making short-form literature widely and easily available, Amazon.com can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work."

I looked for but could not find information on how authors could get shorts listed with Amazon. (They may have a plethora of short printed material broken out of the works of established authors.) However, its publisher’s guide site does seem to be soliciting audio shorts. Interesting. MysteryGuy also pointed me to the journalists at Technology Research News, who run a clean, info-packed site, yet lament that they have been:

“publishing original news stories for over five years, but . . . have yet to find a way to cover our costs. We are fairly popular and well-woven into the fabric of the Web; we have over 200,000 unique visitors per month, we are well represented in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results, and we are regularly slashdotted and pointed to by Wired News, other media sites and countless weblogs.”

The excerpt continues:

"We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition, selling white-paper-like reports through our site and resellers, supplying other media sites with our content through a newswire, selling subscriptions to an off-line electronic edition through a reseller, collecting fees from Lexus Nexis and other online databases, and carrying Google's Adsense advertisements. Most recently we have begun a PBS-like fund drive. That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough. Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers."

Sobering thoughts for anyone who aspires to make online publishing into a day job. I’m still searching for a self-supporting business model. Toward that end I took a long walk last night with my friend Tom Foremski, the former Financial Times reporter turned blogger at SiliconValleyWatcher.com. We hiked around San Francisco’s Presidio and caught the sunset over Alcatraz. We talked about some of the same business ideas as the Tech Research folks, and so their admissions are all the more meaningful. Shy of giving away all the particulars on which Tom and I might collaborate, our sense is that free information published over the web must be the lure to money-capturing enterprises such as consulting or compilations – monthlies or quarterlies – that package information already gathered. Packaging, Tom says, is the key. To which I would add, convenience, especially for information aimed at busy professionals. And that suggests audio delivery of capsule info. (Note that Amazon will accept such for its audio shorts program but not print shorts. A market signal?) Tech Research News seems to have tried some of these tactics. How come they aren’t working? Are there simple fixes to boost revenues? Publishers need to share tips and tricks. Add that to the to-do list: find or build such sites. Thanks, MysteryGuy! Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Mass Media: Take Two

2005-08-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

Good writing is such a delight as I was reminded while reading the Hollywood Reporter piece earlier this month in which Diane Mermigas outlines the financial funk of old media, and lays out three broad rubrics for its renaissance: hire new blood, take more risk and embrace interactivity. Thanks to Rafat Ali’s Content for pointing me the Mermigas’s column, entitled “Balancing new media with old expectations,” as well as two subsequent bits that I will riff off today. My take is that mini media have a stake in mass media angst. Their mega-brethren are in such a panic about the future that their checkbooks are open. Old media purchases of new media venues will fuel the startup scene, for both good (VCs will fund smart business plans) and ill (VCs will eventually overreact and fund stupid business plans). Of course these latter thoughts are my opinions, and should in no way impugn the deft way in which Mermigas chides one current in media-land – the division of mass media and Internet firms, that had been united only recently, (ala AOL-Time Warner), in the hopes of creating properties with the allure of a Google or a Yahoo. (The cynic in me notes that only a few years ago we were advised of the synergies of such combination, but the scientist in me knows that fission and fusion both produce tremendous amounts of energy which, in mergers or breakups, emanate out in the form of fat fees for investment bankers and accelerated stock vesting for the execs.) The remainder of Balancing column is, in my opinion, a wise set of prescriptions for mass media self-revival without this fission/fusion thing, which you read in full if run or work for a big media company. In a more recent column, entitled “Landscape changing for broadcast licensing,” Mermigas zeroes in on television and notes that “For the first time, consumer consumption of all television is expected to decline over the next five years by about 0.8%, compared with a forecasted 7% growth in consumer consumption of the Internet because of broadband migration.” (Think about the deceleration effect after 50 plus years of growth.) Here is the money quote from Mermigas's Landscape column:

“In a world of diffused content offerings and fragmented viewing, the onus is on network-affiliated broadcasters to innovate and produce unique content from their local resources and connections that cable, satellite and other distributors will want enough to pay for. They can only partially rely on the appeal of broadcast- and cable-network generated programs on a fading promise of exclusivity.”

Finally, in case you haven’t seen it, I direct you attention to the Wired Magazine with Jon (Daily Show) Stewart on the cover, and several stories inside along these lines of whither goest television. Wired asks Stewart about his infamous encounter with fit-to-be-bowtied pundit Tucker Carlson – which exemplified the new mediascape because far more people saw that bit online than via the original broadcast. “It was huge, phenomenal viral video,” Wired said, to which Stewart replied, “It was definitely viral. I felt nauseous afterward.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

DRMscape

2005-08-23T23:08:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week Sun Microsystems unveiled an open source digital rights management system. Will it pick up steam or get crunched between proprietary rivals and that portion of the Web community that abhors copy protections? CNet filed the story on the initiative, which Sun President Jonathan Schwartz announced Sunday at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit. Sun calls its initiative Dream, for DRM everywhere available. Schwartz sounded a populist note:

"Now it's no longer simply about engaging a few corporate interests. The open-source community is all about engaging the planet . . . Dream DRM solution will bypass the InterTrust and ContentGuard and MPEG LA patents, so that when your child grows up they won't have to pay a buck to watch a home movie."

Great line, but is this open source or Sun’s attempt to build a coalition? Perhaps they’re the same thing but I wonder if DRM has the pull that drags open source efforts along. I just went on Technorati to see what were the hot searches. Pat Robertson’s remarks about Hugo Chavez were top of the charts. But discussion of the Ajax technologies were number three. Hard to imagine DRM getting that kind of buzz. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

People Who Live in Glass Houses

2005-08-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I blogged effusively about a new software architecture called OPML that Dave Winer is promoting as a tool for assembling web publications on the fly. I woke up this morning even more exited about the potential of this open source development project, so let me throw a few more words at a point Dave made in his talk — that content creators had to work hand-in-glove with tech folks in order to put these new publishing ideas into practice. At least that’s what I heard, though I admit to the possibility of selective perception, because I had driven from my home to the presentation site preoccupied with the thought that distributed computing had failed to live up to its promise. You may recall that once upon a time computing meant the mainframe, which lived in a glass, air-conditioned house. One of the big knocks on glass-house computing was that people had to line up and ask the programmers to create whatever utilities they needed to do their work. Distributed computing promised to push programming power down into the organization and enable departments and teams to roll out applications on their own. Spin forward a decade or two. I work inside a distributed environment. But the problems of administering the 500 or so desktops in my organization have become so aggravating that the systems folks have de-distributed the power. When I wanted to install Google toolbar on my desktop, I had to call systems. I lacked the authority to alter my desktop (though, truthfully, I am not that swift on the technical uptake and sometimes require hand-holding even for simple tasks). So, anyway, I head into Dave’s talk with these thoughts in the back of my mind — that wannabe publishers, like myself, may not have the technical smarts to use the existing tools and, even worse, should we envision some useful function for which no software currently exists, there is no line in which we could wait until the developers get around to building our app. And then Dave turns the tables and says OPML developers want the content gang to get involved in shaping the system. A perfectly timed challenge so far as I'm concerned. Now I just have to find the time and the entry point to put my shoulder to this particular wheel. Meanwhile, it occurs to me that there is at least one template for collaboration between content and programming folks. Earlier this year, word guy J.D. Lasica and tech guru Marc Canter launched OurMedia — a sort of depot and meeting ground for indy video and other content folks. That site is built around an open source community building software called Drupal. I’m sure there are other examples that don’t occur to me at the moment. And I have to cut out now because I’m actually sitting down with a software guy in a little while to spin out some ideas and I have to pull together my presentation -- without help from systems :) Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, your’re Mini Media.

Small Websites, Loosely Joined

2005-08-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

Saturday night I saw a software demo that, I think, offers an easy way to assemble content, created by disassociated individuals, into a whole greater than the sum of the parts. The software is called Outline Processor Markup Language or OPML, and the demo was presented by computer guru and gadfly Dave Winer. Among the 100 or so folks who saw the demo at the Hillside Club in Berkeley were Microsoft chief technology officer Ray Ozzie and the company’s uber blogger Robert Scoble. I said I think OPML will allow content creators to assemble pages on the fly because that’s what I gleaned from the 90 minute or so demo where Winer, mustering all his patience, tried to bridge the gap in understanding between the likes of Ozzie (who launched Lotus Notes), and reluctant technologists like cybersalon hostess Sylvia Paull, who spoke for me when she opened the session with this remark: “I’m not into computers, I’m into people. The only reason I use computers is because they help me communicate with people.” So given the limitations of my understanding let me tell you what I think I heard. Let’s say a whole bunch of people on the Web decide to download, further develop and implement the OPML code, which is available under open source license. Assume that over time they make a wide variety of Web content available though OPML (I don’t understand the spins and feeds, but conceptually I envisage OPML as some sort of hook that allows stuff to be grabbed and reintegrated into some other Web construct). Now let’s take it a step further and assume that you're a Web publisher. Your passion is fresh fruit and produce and you have created a pretty good site around those topics. Now you aspire to put together a food page. But you don’t know about meat, fish, the grains, macrobiotics, and etcetera. So you visit the OPML search engine (backed by Jim Moore, a VC with the new $100 million RSS fund) and find sites that plug the gaps in your knowledge. You grab the OPML hooks in those pages and somehow weave them into your site (does code need to be built here?) and now you have the page: All You Wanted To Know About Food But Couldn’t Have Assembled Before OPML. Although Winer answered many question (I asked more than my share considering there were 99 other people in the room) he begged off trying to predict where OPML would go. “I’m out of that business,” he said at one point. He seems to be trying to escape the rap that he is difficult to work with on projects like RSS, another of his brainchildren. (One incident during the demo exemplified Winer’s personality and makeover. The demo was projected on a large screen at the front of the room, but the people in back complained the type was too small to read. They badgered Winer to enlarge it. This he was initially reluctant to do because he was showing the demo on a small screen laptop and enlarging the type made it harder for him to see what he was doing. After a minute or so he relented, made the type bigger and sent a titter through the room with this quip: “Never let it be said that I’m not cooperative.”) In any event, I think OPML is one of the tools we need to create citizen media, the movement heralded by newspaper reporter turned blogger Dan Gillmor. (Dan’s brother, tech columnist Steve Gillmor, attended Winer’s Staurday night demo and, in advance of it, has written of Microsoft’s interest in OPML.) The title of this post is an homage Small Pieces Loosely Joined, the book that suggests the revolution implicit in the Web is the ability of formerly disconnected, individually weak units to coalesce into a more powerful wholes. Winer himself invoked the R-word at Saturday night’s presentation in Berkeley which, he observed, drew a larger audience than all three prior presentations in Boston, New York and Toronto, “I want it to start revolutions,” Winer said at one point. “It sounds kind of grandiose but that’s what I want it to do.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Just Lemming Alone!

2005-08-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

Our lives are ruled by numbers. Unemployment rates, interest rates, the pop chart, the best-seller list and the whole yaddy yaddy ya. Computers can count anything and anything counted assumes a greater significance. In that spirit let me draw your attention to an index that promises to track the browsing patterns on 100 Internet news sites in real-time – putting a finger on the pulse of public attention. Paid Content pointed me to the Boston Globe article that introduced this news-tracking index created by Akamai Technologies. Think of Akamai as the place where publishers outsource the delivery of content. Akamai deploys the servers and storage caches and creates a network that is supposed to handle a huge surge of traffic without crashing. In the industry jargon, Akamai is a “content delivery network” (I gave a quick overview of the CDN space and its players in a previous posting entitled “Digital Teamsters.”). I can only guess that someone at Akamai realized that, since the company was already tracking the traffic flows of big sites like CNN, MSNBC, Reuters and the BBC, it merely had to aggregate and publish the data to create a lovely graph that would show peak interest news events such as the London terror bombings and the Michael Jackson verdict. The Globe article offered this quote from Akamai president and chief executive Paul Sagan, a former broadcast journalist and media executive: "It's not commercial. It's purely because we think it's interesting... One of the things you'll be able to see is what kinds of events drive people to turn on their browser to news.” Elsewhere in the article, Globe writer Robert Weisman paraphrases industry experts as suggesting that “Editors and programmers potentially could focus content on topics of consistent interest . . . while advertisers could target their messages in parts of the world, and at times of the day, where news-related Internet traffic was highest.” And Akamai will naturally get a mention, or an elevated profile relative to its CDN competitors. Bravo! Having now saluted the idea, I can’t help but recall an anecdote that I heard while I was attending journalism school at Columbia University back around 1991. The school had arranged for one its alums, Michael Rosenblum, to come in and talk to the class about the emerging field of solo video journalism enabled by the rapid price drop and performance boost of hand-held vidcams. If memory serves me well, Rosenblum told us how he had gone into the office of a TV network executive, ready to preach the gospel of go-anywhere-on-the-cheap video journalism, when suddenly the exec shushed him and took out a stopwatch. Only then did Rosenblum notice the three TV sets on the wall opposite the execs’ desk – each set tuned to a different network. A few heartbeats later the exec shouted, “Six seconds!” and clicked the stopwatch – then bid Rosenblum to begin his pitch. I think Rosenblum told that story to illustrate the old media worship of the scoop. Being first, however briefly, is the hallmark of success. Being first and forcing the competition to chase your story -- well, it doesn’t get any sweeter than that. But that was old media nonsense. This is new media, and the Akamai index shows us how we’ve outgrown that silly fixation with firstness. Nowadays attention matters. We can track it, count it, use it to shape future decisions on which stories to play. No need for us to exercise judgment, to push a story because we think it demands attention. That would be a "hidden agenda." That, we wouldn't want. Better to stay smack dab in the middle of the herd, where it's safe. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

It's the network, stupid!

2005-08-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to find a pointer on unmediated.org that directed me through Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs blog to an essay by IBM strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger on the potential, perhaps even the inevitability, of cooperation in a networked age. I use “inevitable” guardedly. It makes me sound like a commie which I’m not. I’m not even a starry-eyed idealist. It’s tough to be starry-eyed in middle age, when the eyes start to go. Even so I get a swell of hope when I find an IBM guy titling an essay “The Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation” and populating it with words like these:

“Collaborative innovation is a serious mode of economic production that has arisen because the Internet and related technologies and standards now permit large numbers of individuals to organize themselves for productive work, in a decentralized, non-market way.”

Later in the essay, Irv – no disrespect intended but his last name is a mouthful – cites Yale law professor Yochai Benkler and Berkeley political scientist Steven Weber, both of whom have studied the Open Source software movement that has arguably produced the world’s most successful collaborative commercial projects.

“Professors Benkler and Weber address the questions of what motivates people to work together as a community for the common good with no direct fiscal gain, as well as how such communities organize and manage themselves. They also point out, though, that these new, collective approaches do create wealth, do create value, and are, in fact, viable business models that can coexist in a fruitful economic way with more traditional business models. We don't yet know all the ways in which this new, dual-track marketplace is going to evolve -- any more than people in the 18th century could foresee the full future impact of industrialization. But I think we have enough evidence already to say with some confidence that open approaches are not a flash in the pan or a flavor of the month.”

When I read thoughts of this nature I wonder whether there is something – if inevitable is too strong a word, then implicit – in Internet technology that conjures up collaboration. The answer has to be yes. To steal a phrase, “It’s the network, stupid!” What's good for computer software should also be good for media. Today media firms are factories that acquire information, entertainment and policy inputs, and pump out tangible or intangible products. In every media the economics underlying the old factory model are crumbling. New metaphors are arising to describe the nature of media in a networked age, starting perhaps with the Cluetrain Manifesto. More recently Dan Gillmor has articulated the notion of citizen journalism or grassroots media. Both are great ideas. But so far I have not seen how they pay the bills. Pardon me for being so crass as to ask: can cooperative media become an economically viable system as well as a socially desirable goal? In my ruminations I have gone back to the farmer cooperatives of the American west to speculate – in a series of postings entitled Food for Thought One, Two and Three – that perhaps such models could work for media. At least that’s my hope. And herein lies the power of the Internet age when it comes to lifting ideas off the ground. Even if you’ve got a bad idea, a brain-dead stupid notion, chances are that there is at least one other equally misguided node out there on the network. And how else can we discover the good ideas except by advancing -- and trashing -- the bad ones? Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Unreal Estate

2005-08-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

A recent market research report says that while overall spending on real estate advertising has been sluggish, the online share is growing so fast that it is poised to overtake the newspaper spend by 2009. That assessment comes from Borrell Associates which, in a clever business strategy, offers a free download of the $995 report’s executive summary. According to the summary, Borrell projects that overall real estate ad spending will grow 2.2 percent this year to a projected $11.4 billion. The online component is now $1.8 billion or 16 percent of the total. “Online advertising spent per home sold has already reached $210, more than one-third of the newspaper ad spend . . . Paid listings on real estate search pages have exploded. Competitors are paying well over $1 for a single click – and as much as $6 in some cities.” There aren’t many other details in the summary, but I think these guys have a smart strategy. Every business has tire kickers – people who ask a zillion questions and never spend a cent. In my case all I wanted to know was the cost-per-click, to help create a realistic cash flow projection. That's not worth a grand to me. But as a thank you I spread the word -- and maybe it reaches a newspaper publisher or big online site that is willing to spend what would amount to a couple of days worth of sales calls to make the entire team smarter. The Borrell tactic is a lesson that all online businesses should heed -- figure out how to give some away and sell the rest. One last note about real estate. Unless you’ve living under a rock (financed on a no-down, one percent, variable rate mortgage, perhaps) you’re aware of the debate over whether we’re in a housing bubble and if so when it will pop. No need to add words to that discussion (though I can’t resist linking to the housing bubble t-shirt that a colleague mentioned the other day). The question for this blog is what happens to real estate ad spending when the market cools, whether abruptly enough to make a “pop” or slowly and gradually in the hoped-for soft landing. Will the online share shrink as advertisers return to the tried and true print media? Or will the flow of dollars – even if diminished – moving from print to electronic media accelerate as online proves that it can deliver more bang for the buck? I certainly don’t know. The question only just occurred to me this morning. I did a quick search to see if I could find out what happened to real estate ad spending back in 1989, which is when the last big correction occurred (at least here in California. But the search yielded no answer. But before I sat down to do a cash flow that included real estate spending, I would want some idea what happened when the last housing cycle turned down. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Assessment, Potential, Angst

2005-08-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

I serve three items today: a sobering look at RSS penetration, a pointer to a web-casting report, and some journalistic ennui. I pretend no unity of message (although the headline betrays the unpublished novelist in me). Truth be told, however, these are simply the ideas I spotted and could compress into the space and time allotted to my mini media persona. Thanks to MediaPost for pointing to a Nielsen//NetRatings survey of 1,000 blogospherians, conducted in June, that suggests only 11 percent of blog readers use RSS. Apparently its name – Really Simple Syndication – is a bit of a misnomer. Only 4.9 percent of blogospherians turn on RSS themselves, according to the survey. Another 6.4 percent accept feeds from Web sites that aggregate and pass on RSSed materials. The vast majority of respondents express varying degrees of bewilderment or difficulty in using RSS. (Shame on me for being in this category: RSS sending and receiving are on my to-do list – along with a blog roll, a real web page, Creative Commons licensing, etcetera.) Viewed in a positive light, the report suggests it is still early days for RSS. So long as I’m on the subject, Bay Area residents mark your calendars: Dave (Mr. RSS) Winer will be hosting a Cybersalon on Saturday, August 20 at 7 pm at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. The topic is OPML, which is described as a way to share “RSS feeds and other online subscription data.” (Details.) One final note on the Nielsen//NetRatings survey. If you download the PDF you will be rewarded with data on the fastest growing blogs (MiniMediaGuy still misses the cut!) and the ad dollars-per-impressions paid by big media buyers. The latter figures can be used to compute a rough cost per thousand, useful in creating cash flows. Moving on to webcasting, today’s Paid Content referenced a recent study by Broadband Directions of video initiatives at 75 cable TV networks and pointed to a free webinar today. If you want to sign up do it ASAP – the event occurs 10 am (PST) today. I don’t know if the briefing will be available later. Finally, I will simply point to the August 14 lament posted by New York University Professor Jay Rosen, author Press Think (which recently enjoyed its one millionth visitor since September 2003). The posting is entitled, “Things I Used to Teach That I No Longer Believe,” and it is inspired by a panel bearing the same title held at a recently concluded conference of college journalism instructors. You can guess the tenor of the discussion. Read it if you can resist the impulse to feel depressed. Personally, I have little energy to spare on hand-wringing. Every minute and every ounce of strength must go into learning the tools – like RSS – that will allow people like me – people like you, perhaps -- to create small examples of the sort of media that we wish existed. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Identity Crisis

2005-08-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

An article in The Economist, synopsized by Paid Content, suggests that Yahoo isn’t as clear on its strategy as is Google, because Yahoo keeps creating unique content while Google seems focused on scraping, searching and selling content produced by others. My own opinion matters little or not, nor is it particularly well-informed, but in the blogosphere, every bloghard is entitled to share. I wish I could have read the entire Economist piece, but a stern message on my screen said “This is premium content” and I am not a subscriber. Fortunately, Paid Content provided a link to the MIT press release about the event that provided the basis for the magazine’s analysis: “Students from MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School,” explained Paid Content, “acted out teams from Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN, and had to discuss various strategies and scenarios. Google came first, Microsoft second, AOL/Time Warner third, and Yahoo fourth.” This scholarly smackdown was grist for the Economist’s mill. I’ll gloss over Microsoft and AOL-Time Warner. Despite their market mass they lack new media momentum, and are more likely to be followers than leaders of whatever is to come. But which of the new media giants should mini media types be following? Paid Content, delivering the thrust of the Economist piece, writes: “Google is a technology firm . . . (while) Yahoo sees itself as a media company.” Paid Content also noted “the conflict of whether Yahoo is a guide (to Web-wide content) or is trying to create a walled-garden experience with its increasing emphasis on original content. In the end, the (Economist) concludes, Yahoo has old media plans for the new-media era.” And here is where my ignorance of the full article may prove my undoing because I wonder why would that be a bad thing? Do we have to throw out the old world, and abandon its forms and wisdoms to build something new? I don’t think that is the spirit of change in the current age. Change is evolutionary: new technologies offer innovative ways to solve old problems or create new possibilities. It should be no surprise, nor shame, that some old ways are preserved. That’s not to say Yahoo hasn’t got problems. For months I have followed Paid Content report on the hiring of a succession of seasoned media and new media execs. Yahoo has been creating a new media Shangri La in Santa Monica (home of Paid Content founder Rafat Ali). Hire a bunch of executives. Put them in proximity to each other and a certain amount of bickering is inevitable. It may even be necessary and useful because we are on new ground, and therefore experimentation and failure are to be expected. But when I checked Yahoo’s financials (on Yahoo finance, my one-stop-shop for such stuff) the stock chart looks good, the profits are huge and the management is bold. I’m thinking here of the AliBaba investment, which may look like a distraction to some but which I see as the continuation of Yahoo’s view – expressed in a Dec. 1, 2004 presentation at Stanford by Yahoo CFO Susan Decker (see page 24 for a picture) – that web companies must be global. None of this diminishes my admiration for Google, a money-making machine with two core competencies – algorithmic powers of search and an awesome selling ability. Advertising accounts for something on the order of two percent of GDP by some estimates (click here and search for "Over the last decade"), and Google has positioned itself relative to advertising dollars as the whale is to plankton. Still as a content creator, I wonder whether even so magnificent an enterprise can continue to hold at arms length that which its users ultimately seek? For now this remains a philosophical question because I can see no reason why Google should not ingest an ever larger share of advertising dollars without lifting so much as a flipper to keep the content coming. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Disintermediate this.

2005-08-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading an interview with the founders of Topix.net, the site that uses algorithms to deliver local news customized to zip code level – and links this content to contextual ads that go beyond word matching to guess at the meaning of stories – all without editors or salespeople. This posting is my condensation of a fascinating conversation between Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser and Topix executives Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles. Here’s a quick intro for those not already familiar with this Palo Alto startup. Topix was launched in January 2004. Its algorithms scan more than 10,000 news sources and decide what locale (or topic) each story is about. It serves this up this localized content through its own web site and also delivers news feeds to America Online, Ask Jeeves and Citysearch. (This morning I popped onto Topix, punched in my zip code, and learned that the California Highway Patrol was planning to put extra speeding patrols on my normal commute route.) This localization capability and other algorithmic inventions recently prompted three media companies to buy a 75-percent stake in Topix that valued the company at about $64 million. Not bad for a site that grossed about $1 million in its launch year, and now gets about 2 million unique visitors a month, according the OJR report. I was fascinated by Skrenta’s comments on advertising and highlight them here, after noting that there is much else in the full story that I have chosen to overlook. Topix bootstrapped itself and thus had to focus on revenue generation. “Because we were working on the advertising with the content from Day 1, we realized that 50 percent of the content that people want in the newspaper is commercial content,” Skrenta said. So while the firm’s underlying technology has to do with analyzing content and targeting it to geographic or social niches (“Our Gay & Lesbian channel is our No. 1 feed on My Yahoo,” Skrenta said.) its ad-focus appears to have yielded insights and innovations. “What we've found is that the ads on the front page, nobody clicked on them,’’ Skrenta said. Topix has relied upon Google AdSense (“Google has 400,000 advertisers,” Tolles said. “We have zero salespeople.”) But using pure AdSense led to some silly mismatches of ads and stories. Skrenta referred to “the famous case . . . when the New York Times' site had a story on a suitcase of body parts that washed ashore in New Jersey, and Google was showing luggage ads beside it.” So Topix has used algoritms to minimize such gaffes and maximize the rate at which people clicked on ads (in new media, the rule is no click-e, no pay-e). Part of the improvement had to do with analyzing what sort of stories a given reader had looked at in the past -- and serving future ads based on that past behavior. Here are two excerpts from Skrenta: “What we found was we started to pour in our categorization technology to the Google [AdSense] ads that were on our site, and it started working a lot better. We doubled the clickthrough rate on them. But beyond that, it made our site look better. Improving the quality of the advertising improved the quality of the entire product . . . What we did was look at the cookie and see what pages they visited on Topix. . . . And it worked pretty well, and we expanded that, so half or a third of the ads you see are relevant to something else you've looked at and not to what you're looking at.” In closing, these guys are cooking up some incredible stuff. True, they seem not to like human beings, or at least journalists, if we still qualify as members of the species (OJR: So are you ever going to add human editors, or are you categorically rejecting them? Skrenta: We could. But as technology people, it's kind of an admission of failure.) But how can I argue with these guys? Their company is worth $64 million, and last time I checked, BlogShares had valued MiniMediaGuy at just under three grand. Besides, Topix saved me money today. I gotta rush off – but I know now to take a different route. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Death of a Salesman?

2005-08-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Google is testing a system that seems designed to marry two powerful ad-serving technologies into an even more potent way to direct relevant commercial messages to a given web site. According to a report in MediaPost, Gokul Rajaram, a group project manager for Google’s AdSense program, said the system under development will allow publishers “to submit demographic and psychographic data about their audiences” so as to better target ads and improve response rates. MediaPost says the new Google pilot program started about a month ago. “Many of the signals that Google will be using are demographic,” MediaPost reports, adding that “Rajaram said that publishers (will) also (be) supplying other indicators, such as information they know about their visitors' other interests.” It sounds to me as if Google is attempting to blend contextual and behavioral ad matching. In the past I’ve tried to highlight the differences between these two approaches, but a quick example here may suffice. An article about the Lord of the Rings might draw a contextual ad for Rings books, movies or action figures. A behavioral ad match might note that Tolkien fans tend to visit online role-playing games, and place an ad for a new game alongside the content. Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein told MediaPost that the latest Google move is a bid to stay ahead of competitors like Yahoo, which recently launched a publisher network that also seems to allow some blending of contextual and behavioral ad placement. Here is an excerpt from the MediaPost story on Yahoo’s move:

“A music site publisher might know that the site's audience is interested in travel. That publisher will be able to go into a user interface and tell Yahoo! to serve travel ads to his site, or to specific pages within his site. This feature raises the question of whether the ads are still "contextual."

I say: “Context, schmontext.” Publishers want ads that deliver results for their advertisers and revenues to themselves. Call the technology whatever you like. Having said that, I know there is some reticence to put the “behavioral” tag on ad-serving software because that implies publishers and advertisers are tracking people’s behaviors. Well, aren’t they? What is the Amazon suggestion engine but a facility that tracks past behavior and suggests future action? What I find more interesting, in light of these continuing improvements in automated ad-matching, is the extent to which algorithms can replace the old-fashioned salesperson. Certainly for a small publisher, the ability to gain any revenue without a personnel expense is attractive. For larger publishers, these automated responses can deliver baseline revenues, which can be used to hire a salesforce. As I noted in a July posting, Weblogs, Inc. principal Jason Calacanis told Online Journalism Review he “derives the majority of his income from display ads sold directly to advertisers.” Because an algorithm can be liked. But I don't think it can be well liked. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

HBO on Steroids?

2005-08-10T08:07:00.000-07:00

Unlike Chauncey Gardener, I don’t particularly like to watch, but even my un-hip eyes can see the evolution occurring in television -- the most recent example being the impending launch of Veoh, a peer-to-peer network designed to distribute independent video content. Thanks to Paid Content for heralding this San Diego startup and reporting that it “will launch its software in beta later this month.” Veoh is the brainchild of Dmitry Shapiro, who was founder and chief technologist of Akonix Systems, a security management startup in San Diego. This serial entrepreneur hails from Russia and studied economics at Yale before putting theory into practice in San Diego. The Veoh web site lays out this capsule business model: “Veoh does not charge content producers to broadcast their content, and allows them to specify if they would like to offer that content for free or for a fee. Veoh derives revenues from taking a percentage of the fee, or advertising wrapped around the free content.” A new blog launched to build community around the site offers a whimsical explanation of the company name. (Business tip: Weeks ago, San Francisco Bay Area video maven Mary Hodder clued me in as to the why of all these weird names. They come without the baggage of prior connotations, so startups fortunate enough to get attention define their own identity.) Paid Content tempered its hopeful pre-launch buzz with the caveat that Veoh would have to differentiate “itself from the likes of OMN, OurMedia.org, BrightCove, DTV, and others fast crowding into the field” of P2P video distribution. (Another aside:JD Lasica, executive director of OurMedia, has a new book out called DarkNet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation.” Speaking of the copyright wars, I came across a bit via the Informitv newsletter that I interpreted as a sign of possible rapprochement between the studios and the indies. Mitch Singer, head of digital policy at Sony Pictures Entertainment, apparently told of group of interactive TV experts in LaLaLand that the video industry would be foolish to repeat the mistakes of the music industry and fight download culture instead of looking for a way to co-opt and coexist with it. The newsletter quotes Singer thus (abbreviated and rearranged by me by use of ellipsis): “There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to look back at this time and we’re going to see the internet was the most important tool for the distribution of content to the home . . . and (that) we’re going to end up find(ing) that peer-to-peer is the technology . . . Quite frankly I’m ashamed to say that most of the time we view this as a threat . . . but you can’t stop technology.” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Misinterpreting McLuhan

2005-08-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan made what would become his most widely repeated utterance in 1964 when he said "the medium is the message." While that observation has profound implications for sociologists, it is a useless, even dangerous mantra for publishers whose business is predicated on the belief that the message is the message -- and that they can make money by bringing certain messages to particular audiences. What brings this to mind are a couple of bits I ran across – notably a Business Week article on how big media podcasts have shaken up podcast pioneers. But before I launch into my schtick, let me pay deference to McLuhan. A fuller explanation of his insight can be found in an essay written by McLuhan scholar Mark Federman, who began his own analysis by quoting the original remark, made in the opening of his book Understanding Media: "In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in an operational and practical fact, the medium is the message, This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs . . . " Wikipedia describes Understanding Media as "a pioneering study in media ecology. In it McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study . . . (and) postulates that content had little effect on society – in other words it did not matter if television broadcasts children’s shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example – the effect of television on society would be identical." Who can argue with the first part of that observation in light of the phenomenal potential of peer-to-peer activity enabled by the World Wide Web? I take exception to the second point, but not here and now because that would open a values debate that is re-argued, with little hope of conclusive proof, with each new medium. Most recently, for instance, New York Senator Hillary Clinton has raised the specter of violent content in video games. Publishers should not be oblivious to such debates, nor to the wider implications of the media ecosystem in which they hope to flourish. But if they hope to establish businesses then the navel-gazing and hand-wringing must take a back seat to finding audiences who will, in some way pay, for the content they hope to deliver. That was the message of the Business Week article entitled Podcasts: David vs, Goliath, which describes how some pioneer talkers have been blown away by the advent of big media podcasts. But Business Week also noted that two folks from Georgia, Derek Colanduno and Robynn McCarthy, have been able to generate an audience around a "sci-fi and science news" podcast. Wow, what a concept. Niche audience values quality content. (Science may be a ripe niche. I came across an Associated Press article that said 450,000 people watched NASA’s webcast of the space shuttle launch, compared to 175,000 who watched on the July 2 peak of the AOL’s Live 8 concerts.) So the medium is the message. And the message is the message. But how can the message be monetized? That’s the question that keeps me awake nights. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media (Note: I am entering this from an alien computer which has thwarted my effort to insert links. I'll figure this out and fix it later when I get back to familiar equipment. DONE!)

Nickled & Dimed

2005-08-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

Several times I've blogged about getting paid for online publishing, first summarizing the failures of past micropayment schemes, and later noting how Visa and other players seemed to be inching toward such systems. When getting paid for creativity came up at a dinner recently, I learned about a reverse concept called microrefunds -- an as-yet-unrealized system in which all content would carry a charge, but in which browsers could opt not to pay for any individual item they felt excessive. This unusual notion was introduced to me by online publishing pioneer and Electronic Frontier Foundation chairman Brad Templeton -- whose idea it is. Here are what I take to be the key points of Brad's essay. "When people pay a flat fee for unlimited access, they start thinking of the resource they are accessing as free," Brad writes. Instead of charging an upfront subscription fee, however, which might be a disincentive to going further, he suggests that publishers announce the opposite policy, that all content carries a charge. "I suggest reversing things, so that paying for something is the default, and not paying requires special action," he writes. "As long as payments are small and predictable, or clear and manageable, they could just be made automatically as media are downloaded or played." A little further down the essay, Brad makes some suggestions about implementation: "(T)he idea of developing a set of tags which define some prepared licence rights could work here. This could be combined with tags describing price rules for those various rights, including costs for download, per-use costs, per-use cost caps (ie. 4 cents per play, but no charge after 20 cents is paid) and broad descriptions of the classes of works. One could even charge for a "lifetime relationship" or an annual fee -- You pay the artist $3/year and get everything she produces each year that you stay a fan." Although there are some good ideas here, including the tag stuff above and the notion, which Brad makes explicit, that people can refuse to pay for any charge they deem unwarranted -- a guaranteed refund -- I find the microrefund approach far less plausible than micropayments. And subscription the most likely model of all. Let's begin with the notion of getting a bill containing scads of itty bitty charges. Does reviewing it sound fun or fair? Not to me, even though I actually go through my cell phone bills on occasion (I've begged and browbeaten my family NOT to use costly directory assistance, and I point out any such charges in the vain hope they will cease and desist.) The notion of going through a content bill, or bills if I visit multiple microrefundable sites, sounds to me like a 21st Century torture. And some people will want to go beyond the act of vetoing objectionable charges. They will want to object to the publisher -- and that requires either setting up an apparatus to deal with the objections, or eternally pissing off those who are not able to satisfy their ire by unloading it on a human being. No, the only way I can envision payments -- and, in deference to Brad I am willing to grant that it could be entirely my lack of vision -- is by turning viewers into subscribers with an all-you-can-eat charge. Either that, or waiting for a workable micropayment scheme, which I simply choose to believe will become feasible. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media P.S. Brad has a good page summarizing responses to the copyright crisis which is worth a read.

The MMO Gap

2005-08-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

A recent report from GameDailyBiz blew my mind. A Chinese government agency has apparently announced plans to spend the equivalent of $1.8 billion to stimulate the development of dozens of online games and online gaming companies. Thanks to Rafat Ali's Paid Content for pointing me to the GameDailyBiz report, which itself cited the publication Shanghai Youth as the ultimate source of this news. According to GameBizDaily: "The Shanghai Youth recently reported that the 15 billion Yuan would be spent to speed up video game development centers in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, as well as in the Sichaun province," and included a comment from an official of what is called, in English at least, the Press and Publication Administration of China (PPAC). That agency would seem to be to source of the investment but that is not made explicit. MondoTimes contains a link to the Shanghai Youth home page, and if your browser accepts simplified Chinese characters -- and you can read them, you can check this out first hand. Meanwhile, let's accept GameDailyBiz at face value when it reports, citing no source, that: "Of China's 1.3 billion citizens, over 500 million live in cities, which allows them cheap online access via Internet cafes. Of those 500 million, only an estimated 22.8 million played an MMO in 2004, indicating significant room for growth. Those 22.8 million spent over $500 million on online games that year, which indicates how incredibly large the market is likely to become, as more Chinese enter the online arena." I recently became interested in what are often called massively multiplayer online games or MMOs in the course of writing an article about the economics of these virtual worlds. The featured online environment was Second Life, created by Linden Lab. Once upon a time I read the novel Snowcrash. Second Life is in many ways an eerie embodiment of the online metaverse that was the core concept of that novel. Among the things I learned in the course of reporting that story was that South Korea -- perhaps the world's most heavily wired nation -- appears to have the largest single concentration of gamers. So something is brewing in Asia in regards to the metaverse. If you're interested in the economics, politics and sociology of these MMOs, visit the TerraNova blog. I got some flame notes from the direction of a blog called BrokenToys that seems to be populated by hard core gamers. My interest in China goes way back. In the Navy I fell in love with Asia and China in particular. I studied Mandarin in college and, but for a fateful choice, I would have finished my senior year at Chinese University of Hong Kong, with the intention of becoming a China correspondent. Instead I ended up a middle aged reporter with a focus in technology. Hence my particular interest in this peculiar news. Here is a nation coming into its own, that is at once trying to crack down on everything from Falun Gong to critical emails, and yet it is pumping money into virtual worlds. I would say incrutable but if this bipolar behavior didn't make perfect sense to this former student of China -- which has long tried to accept Western technology while rejecting western values. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Firefox, Mozilla & New Business Models

2005-08-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Since its official release in 2004 the Firefox browser, open source brainchild of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, has spread with astonishing speed, generating about 75 million downloads and amassing a market share approaching 10 percent. This week the Foundation said it is forming a for-profit subsidiary to make ot easier for this loosey-goosey operation to do business with straight-laced corporations. In so doing, Mozilla has launched an experiment at the intersection of the non-profit and for-profit worlds. Official word of the change came in the August 3rd issue of mozillaZine, along with this assurance: "While the Mozilla Corporation will be a for-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is keen to stress that it is not selling out. The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary." The philosphical underpinnings of the move are best explained by new Mozilla Corporation president Mitchell Baker, formerly the "chief lizard wrangler" in the pre-incorporated order. As Mitchell wrote in her blog: "Non-profit law is reasonably well understood for traditional non-profit organizations like museums, universities and the traditional style of charities. But organizations like the Mozilla Foundation, which develops and distributes consumer software, are new in the non-profit world and the application of nonprofit laws to their activities is a developing area. We've found that this uncertainty makes responding to Mozilla Firefox's success very complex. It is difficult to know what relationships with commercial organizations make sense for a non-profit or how to structure them. It is difficult to know what activities the non-profit should and shouldn't engage in." In retrospect, Mitchell telegraphed the move in a June 1 posting entitled Technology and Nonprofits that contained these hints: "I had lunch yesterday with Jim Fruchterman. Jim leads the BeneTech Initiative, a non-profit high-technology organization dedicated to building sustainable technology initiatives that address social problems. . . Talking with Jim is always great. He's got great experience with the organizational issues that affect a non-profit. . . . Jim is also experimenting with different ways of generating funds to sustain these technological projects since traditional models don't fit. And of course he's thinking about how to generate funds and remain true to the mission of the project." Reporter Michael Bazeley wrote a thorough news account of the change for the Mercury News and John Paczkowski added some background on his Good Morning Silicon Valley blog. I would add just two thoughts. First, it would be naive not to mention that Mozilla has powerful corporate friends. Would AOL or Google shed a single lizard tear if this cool-and-groovy-browser caused further aggravation for that outfit up in Redmond? How, or whether, such considerations played into the Mozilla reorg I cannot say but the competition between Mozilla and the monopolist -- and the certainty that there is a corporate peanut gallery cheering on the rebel browser -- must be acknowkledged. Second, and without any cynicism, I am hopeful that the reincarnated lizard will teach us all new tricks about doing business in this Internet age. There is no activity that is more useful, satisfying and creative than bringing people and resources together to build a company. But many people have a negative image of business because they equate it with Big Business and strip-mining and all sorts of excess. If we can create businesses that are large and global without being rapacious, what a thing that would be! Finally, I've just gotta blog this 'cause if you don't blog something like this, why bother blogging. A few months back, while teaching a feature writing course, one student proposed a story (alas not finished in the class) about the software maven at an Internet browser startup whose hobby was performing aerial leaps of the sort that circus performers do. In the months to come we shall all see if Mitchell Baker can truly fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Older Teen Girls Gather While Boy Hunt Online

2005-08-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

There is now statistical corroboration for what parents of teens must have known or suspected -- girls aged 15 to 17 tend to spend more online time in search and email tasks while boys in the same cohort lead in the pursuit of blasting, hewing and generally playing online. That is one finding of a report entitled Teens and Technology that was released recently by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. If you're not already familiar with Pew, the project has sponsored a long list of scientifically valid surveys on online behavior, politics and religion. This report on teens confirms what must surely be the general understanding that young people have woven electronic gadgets, communications and online tools into their lives. Parents may want to scan the report, and educators will be interested in this and an even newer companion report from Pew entitled The Internet at School. I want to extract a few thoughts from the overall Teens & Technology report that I deem of interest to current or potential publishers. Most notably is the finding that junior high seems to be the time of awakening for online use. "While about 60 percent of the 6th graders in our sample reported using the Internet, by 7th grade it jumps to 82 percent who are online," Pew reports, "climbing steadinly before topping out at 94 percent for the eleventh and twelfth graders." The girl-boy comparisons, more fun than enlightening perhaps, are best grasped by glancing on the chart on page 37 of the PDF version of the report. More important than the differences, however, are the similarities -- teens of both genders are avid instant messengers, tend to get news online, shop for goods and information and generally embrace new media. I was struck with the finding (page 21) of the prevalence of avatars by teen in the course of instant messaging. This would seem to open a whole new area of identity definition -- or crisis. But that's just my inner-dad in me talking I'd best leave such ruminations to the psychologists and sociologists and get back to business. In that regard I wish the report had more detail on online games, in which I've only recently become interested, never having been much for games myself. Though I used the boy-girl game divide as a silly headline grabber, the more serious observation is the pervasiveness of these virtual pasttimes. Pew reports that 76 percent of teen girls and 86 percent of teen boys play online games. That statistic leaves me with this, as yet, unanswerable question -- are the kids showing us the future of media? Here's what I mean. It is now funny and anachronistic to think that the early television broadcasters sat at desks and performed if they were radio personalities who happened to be in front of a camera. Eventually television invented a new visual grammar and today we have super slowmo, and weather maps and the whole magilla. What if old media farts like me are making the same mistake in a different way? Maybe we are assuming that media is something we create and put out there, and then pat ourselves on the back if we manage to deliver it via podcast or send it to a mobile device. But instead of being cool, maybe we're playing the fool. Maybe the next media is a group sport, a giant game, a collaborative effort, and a remix culture is emerging that will make all our centralized production efforts look as lame as the first television personalities. Come to think of it, I ought to ask my teens. After all, don't they know everything? Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Don't Just Sit There!

2005-08-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

I came across a marketing study from the United Kingdom that examines why there is, as yet, a low rate of interaction with interactive television in the British Isles. The report summary that reached me via the Informitv newsletter suggests that consumer education could persuade more viewers to press the red button that toggles interactive content. Those who shell out $800 for the complete report, entitled Passive2Active, will presumably learn the tricks of the trade. But you can enjoy my somewhat jaundiced analysis here, for free. Informitv neatly summarizes the main findings. There are two groups, roughly equal in size for statistical purposes, who are either "dedicated interactors" or "bitter ad haters." In addition to those groups, roughly half the total sample, exist three other cohorts with neat marketing names: unimpressed pragmatists, apprehensive stargzers and unengaged passives. How can this troika of interactive refusniks be reached? Informitv quotes BBC interactive TV maven Emma Somerville: "The BBC has a major role to play in educating audiences and the industry as to the benefits of interactive TV." The report is the work of Zip Television, a British firm that appears -- I only discovered them this morning and am writing off a superficial analysis of their website -- to be part advertising agency, part technology provider for interactive applications. Zip works with a consortium of advertisers who believe in the value of interactivity and appear willing to support it. Zip provided some additional details about the study on its website, including this excerpt that addressed the opportunity that would exist if only more viewers would interact: "2 key clusters, representing 52% (8 million) of Sky Digital’s viewing audience, are ripe for exploitation given correct targeting and messaging." Such verbiage may be the language of business, but it makes me feel like someone is out to strip-mine my wallet. I get the image of bright people sitting around a polished conference table brainstorming how to train TV viewers to press the red button much as Pavlov once conditioned dogs to salivate by ringing a bell. Oh, well, it may work. There are some natural targets for interactivity that tap into basic human impulses. A cursory web search turned up a Guardian story about an interactive gambling show called Challenge TV where -- later today should you find yourself in the UK -- you could interact with a show called Takeshi's Castle. A blurb on the Challenge TV schedule says: "Comedy game show voiced by Craig Charles in which Japanese star Takeshi Kitano plays the lord of a castle fortified with giant games. Contestants vie for a cash prize by attempting to storm the castle and defeat Takeshi." Those of us in the colonies can only hope that interactivity one day insinuates itself into the highbrow fare that we have come to associate with British television. For instance what if the red button came on during Rumpole of the Bailey, letting viewers hit She Who Must Be Obeyed with a jolt of electricity whenever she gives the old hack a hard time for drinking Chateau Fleet Street. Or during episodes of Prime Suspect, viewers could be asked: should Helen Mirren undo another button on her silk blouse. Press the red button for yes, yes, yes! One last thought. I found another interesting bit on this morning's search of things Britsh and television. There exists in the UK a group called New Media Knowledge that appears to help wannabe content creators. According to the site: "Whether you're a freelancer just starting out or the director of your own company, we provide the knowledge you need to realise your creative and commercial potential . . . Since we began as New Media Knowledge in 1998, we have been supported by the University of Westminster, one of the UK's leading educational institutions for digital media." Sounds suspiciously socialist to me, but then who am I to judge. I don't even own a powdered wig. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Digital Teamsters

2005-08-01T07:34:00.001-07:00

Content is easy to create. Cost effective delivery (and collecting payment for same) remains the challenge. Today let me pretend to get technical by referencing an article from Streamingmedia.com the discusses content delivery networks. I will also link to resources I used to help me get a grasp of CDNs. Web managers may get more out of this than pseudo-techhies like me. Thanks to Paid Content for pointing me to the article entitled, Commoditization and the Future of Content Delivery Networks (Part One). Writer Geoff Daily provides this definition to launch the piece: "CDNs provide a scalable means through which content publishers can get their assets onto the Internet without having to pay for, set up, and tend to a series of servers . . . Traditionally, a CDN consists of a network of geographically distributed servers with a suite of services and applications built around managing various aspects of delivering digital media online." The thrust of the article is how CDN vendors differentiate in this commoditized environment. All I need to know on that score is that if I ever need to negotiate for CDN services, I can make the competing salesteams sharpen their pencils. CNDs listed in the article include: "Limelight Networks, a CDN for the media and entertainment industry; Akamai, which cemented its size advantage by its recent acquisition of number-two Speedera; Mirror Image (which, Geoff says, "has tried to stay ahead of the curve through development of its content targeting"); and VitalStream. One other paragraph from the article struck me. Geoff quoted Kris Alexander, product manager for the Akamai Media Delivery division, as saying: “The three major things that we keep hearing from the market other than scalability and performance are how do you store and manage the growing number of digital assets, how do you protect those digital assets through the management of licenses, and how do you gain access to more detailed, granular analytics about how consumers are using those digital assets.” I found another resource on CDNs, maintained by Lehigh University professor Brian Davidson. It contains a longer list of CDNs (though it may not be up to date), and some tutorials about caching that went over my head but might help a webmaster climb the learning curve. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Remix Culture British Style

2005-07-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

As I peek at media developments around the world, many of the interesting experiments in broadening participation in media are taking place outside the United States, such as a BBC program that allows Web developers to use its content in non-commercial ways that build on the original fare. The Informitv.com newsletter described the BBC initiative thus: “The BBC says it is committed to using open standards that will enable users to find and repurpose BBC content in more flexible ways. Suggested applications include: combining schedules with other web services; introducing a social element, such as rating or voting; or creating alerting systems.” Contact the BBC Backstage program for more information. Meanwhile, in the United States, the University of Maryland’s J-Lab has identified five noteworthy examples of media experiments that use the Web to gather citizen input or extend the usefulness of information by, for instance, posting crime reports on a publicly viewable map. They’re some good ideas and worth a look. Finally, an an unrelated topic, in scanning Paid Content this morning, I saw a note about a new principal joining Corante, a blogging company that gets far less attention than Gawker Media or Weblogs Inc. I read the Corante announcement on the arrival of marketer Francois Gossieaux, and also read Gossieaux’s blog entry on why he made the move. “Corante is not your typical publishing company,” he wrote. “Instead of hiring writers and publishing content, we connect readers with experts. And in this day and age of scarce reader attention span and information overload that is exactly what people are looking for.: I read all this because I don’t understand the Corante approach or business model, and still don’t. But I assume that is because their approach is too new to fit into the existing pigeonholes, and thus all the more interesting. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

The Optimist

2005-07-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

Kevin Kelly has long been among my favorite prophets of modernity, one of that crazy gang of Northern California WELL-heads who've contributed so much to cyber culture. I first noticed his work in the late 1980s when he was at Whole Earth Review, and followed his words when he became a founding editor of Wired Magazine in the early 1990s. Thus I read with delight, and yet not without some dissent, his We Are The Web essay in the current Wired. It celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Netscape IPO as the claxon of the Web evolution, and describes the marvelous ways in which it has connected millions of people, creating the pathways for a global consciousness, "a new type of thinking -- part human and part machine -- found nowhere else on the planet or in history." Yet even as I smiled at his many trenchant observations, particularly the opening anecdote in which he described meeting that mad genius Ted Nelson, who alpha-tested hyperlink by scribbling notes on index cards which he cut-and-pasted together, I have always felt that Kelly hailed from the techno-optimistic side of the spectrum. Kelly tends to see the world and the future at a 30,000 foot flyby. And while his tech-amplified powers of observation make many of his insights keen and true, insofar as they go, I've always felt they glossed over the pain that I, perhaps because of the surly circumstances of my own life, see all too often in the faces of those who live with us in what the Chinese used to call interesting times. Yet who can doubt that society stands at an inflection point. "The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge," Kelly writes. "At its heart was a new kind of partcipation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing." Later Kelly cites some of the phenomenal, unforeseen developments, such as eBay, which we now take for granted. "We have an open global flea market that handles 1.4 billion auctions every year and operates from your bedroom." The Web has enabled an even greater and more fertile explosion of self-expression. "In fewer than 4,000 days," he writes, "we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people." We have created, Kelly says, "the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption." And that is where I begin to differ. Because while the Web has surely set us on a path to sharing, the fruits of human endeavor remain divided in a grossly unequal fashion. Whether you look at the distribution between the developed and the developing world, or the stratification within our own society, there is neither rationality nor fairness in the system -- either new or old. On a global scale perhaps things are equalizing. Outsourcing may be lifting the Indian and Chinese, and if this hits our working and middle classes there may yet be some good come of it. But is it my imagination or are the rich getting richer than even their greediest dreams? We hear that we live in an Ownernship Society, an Opportunity Society, and if my only input were Kelly's essay, I might imagine that we were on our way to the next stage of human development. But there keep occurring these nagging events in my own life that cause me to view the world with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Take last night for instance when unionized journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle -- where I have worked since 1990s -- voted overwhelmingly to ratify a five-year agreement that strikes me as less a labor contract than a surrender document. But shame on me for criticizing that in which I played little or no part. For while my colleagues were wrestling with bad and worse, I was voting with my feet, having a drink with my friend and journalist-turned-blogger Tom Foremski, talking about the crumbling business models that are today's mass media. Yet it is from that crumbling model that I have thus far derived my pay, my health plan and all the other support structures that have not yet been architected into the sharing system that is rendering content, and so many other goods, more widely and cheaply available. I don't know where all this ends, either for the world or for me. I do know that I'm a darn site less optimistic than Kelly. In fact, this morning I feel a deep sense of shame. We all have myths about ourselves, and a central element of the Tom Abate myth began on the streets of Brooklyn some 40 years ago, when one of the new kids in the Catholic grammar school that I attended, a fellow Italian-American, was set upon by some of the Irish boys who predominated in our neighborhood. It was not deadly stuff, just playground bullying, but I saw this walking by and, without much thought, because I could not let a paisan go down, I ran across the street and launched myself into the air sideways against the pack, who scattered, as surprised as I was by the tactic. Ever since, I don't know that I've ever backed down from a fight. To the contrary, I have sometimes been more belligerent than would have been wise or necessary in any given circumstance. But last night I let my paisan go down without so much as the benefit of my company. I refused to make the decision that was foredained. And this morning, I feel as mini as I've ever felt in my entire life, and my eyes fill with tears. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Tubes, Tunes & Tears

2005-07-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

I woke up today to read a kickass column by Hollywood.com's Diane Mermigas, who says TV networks can reinvigorate their revenues by repackaging content and delivering it to daytime audiences via desktop and mobile means. Her advice for mass media moguls applies in spades to mini media startups. Thanks to MediaPost for steering me to Mermigas's column, which is chockablock with revenue estimates and a valuable read for startups that have to live and die by these new, emerging markets. For anyone in or near that space (I'm thinking about folks like Bay Area media maven Mary Hodder, Mermigas's insights won't be news -- tomorrow's video successes will be the firms that find ways "to be paid for providing their most popular content to all digital broadband venues -- from cell phones and video game consoles to streaming media on any Internet-connected device." But Mermigas makes good points as to why soaps or sports delivered to mobiles or at-work computers should be worth more because the content reaches a better demographic than daytime stay-homes. (Although I shudder to think of the productivity hit and wonder how long before corporate sysops learn to screen out the interruption). But forget that curmudgeonly comment, and focus on what Mermigas writes: "upward of 850,000 MLB.com (major league baseball) subscribers watch baseball games on their computers even though many of the games occur during work hours. Telemundo had about 600,000 unique users watching its soap operas online in March." I have blogged along similar lines myself, though my concern is whether small producers are allowed into the distribution channels and get a fair deal. On that note let me switch to tunes. I read a hopeful bit that goes like this -- Apple Computer used to pay independent music producers less for iTunes downloads but that appears to have changed and now they get equal treatment. So writes Good Morning Silicon Valley columnist John Paczkowski, who cites a blog posting by Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby the online music store. Tune-makers who want to learn more about Sivers should read the LA Weekly profile that was also pointed to in the column. I just started reading Paczkowski's posts. They seem concise and informative. Now let me weep for the staff of WiredNews.com, which has been riffed according to a CNet report. I have (or had?) friends there. Time to reach out and see if I can help. Of course I'm in a tenuous position myself. It may be a great age for users to content, but for content creators every day seems to bring a new kick in the teeth. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

The Last Word

2005-07-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

I am infatuated with new media but my first love is print. I was delighted when the current issue of Paid Content pointed me to an EContent Magazine article that surveyed tools print publishers can use to distribute content over the Web. This posting is a brief syopsis a piece by EContent writer Ron Miller, so if the print-to-web shift interests you, do read the original. That article, by the way, is now a year old so some of the information is a bit dated (there are, for instance, references to MacroMedia’s FlashPaper development that don’t take into account its acquisition by Adobe). Adobe and its ubiquitous PDF format are central to the article. Miller notes that since Acrobat debuted in 1993, Adobe has distributed “more than a half billion” copies of its free Acrobat Reader, which allows document receipt and display with the art and layout intact. The article notes that Adobe’s thrust, with regard to the publisher’s version of Acrobat, is to put “PDF on a Java-based platform and provides a way to build in business logic and XML hooks into a PDF document, making it possible to move information from a PDF into a workflow or to distribute data to databases.” As for the reader, Adobe wants to build in “digital rights management (DRM)” to give publishers greater control over what uses can be made of the content after delivery. (Since the piece is a year old, some of this may already have occurred.) The EContent piece notes some of the alternatives (again this piece was written before Microsoft made rumblings about challenging Adobe). Miller writes: “most publishers want to use the power of the Web, while preserving some of the look and feel of traditional media. This has resulted in a number of approaches from vendors such as Zinio and NewsStand, which use a reader to download and view publications, or NXTbook, which incorporates the look and feel of a traditional page-turning publication delivered via a Web browser.” EContent points readers to “Frank Gilbane, publisher of the Gilbane Report, a publication that focuses on content trends” who cited the emergence of RSS as a distribution format but said it was only just being noticed by users. Gilbane told EContent, “Most people don't even know what it is, and those that do often don't appreciate the potential.” That statement was made a year ago, and much has happened since then to raise the stature of RSS, but in a funny way and with mild calibration, I think that statement still rings true. I will return to print-via-web as I notice other developments. I am particularly interested in production methods to pull down stuff out of archives to print customized books or magazines, and will be particularly alert for developments in that realm. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Post-Enlightenment

2005-07-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

My relaxations include listening to books on tape while taking long walks. Over the weekend I was enjoying a fabulous rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Listening to this rich and beautiful tale made me think about the differences between oral storytelling and the linear print tradition that supplanted it. Now we have hypertext (a concept that turned 60 years old this month). Does hypertext unify the oral and linear traditions? And how does all this affect our thinking? Perhaps you’ve read Tolkien and, even if not, you’d have to have been buried in a hole (not a hobbit hole, obviously), to have missed at least the movie version of this tale of good and evil, heroism and treachery. So I can bypass the review and get to the difference between oral and print traditions, print being easiest to understand because you are caught in its spell of one-word-after-the-other-leading-to-some-point. Print – or rather mass printing and literacy -- are the 500-year-old legacy of Gutenberg. Before Gutenberg, storytelling was a performance art, a non-technological peer-to-peer phenomenon to use a modern reference. The oral tradition was not only P2P, it was custom-made. The words were not always exactly the same. As National Geographic noted in an article about the oral antecedents of Tolkien’s trilogy, the story was not a manufactured commodity. It had a variability that reflected the abilities of the story-teller and that person’s interactions with the audience. Print changed that. Words weren’t exactly carved in stone. But they were impressed on paper and thus on minds in a very specific way. The diffusion of knowledge made possible by the spread of books had many, many consequences, the most positive of which was that long period of scientific and social advance called The Enlightenment. So let’s fast forward to hypertext, a word coined in the 1960s, but presaged in a July 1945 article by Vannevar Bush, the man who was quite arguably also the godfather of the military-industrial complex. But let me not digress. We live hypertext. We can link anything. I’ve written previously about the power of writing in hypertext. But my own thinking is too linear. I can’t help myself. I used to be a bookworm. Now I’m a writer. But walking around this weekend with Tolkien’s blend of print and oral story echoing in my ears, I wondered how thinking will change when the young people, growing up with the option of ingesting information in a linear or eclectic way, start taking over the world. This global Internet, and its many forms of communication and community, represent a historic inflection point. Looking back I know that much grief followed Gutenberg as well, specifically, the long wars over religion that were tied to translations of the Bible. Now we see beheadings publicized on the Internet and read reports of terror attacks and learn about groups claiming credit on Web pages and I wonder if this social upheaval is déjà vu all over. A glimpse into the mirror of Galadriel would provide some hints, but my understanding is that the elves have lost their magic. Oh, darn. We'll have to muddle through as best we can. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

OldBillionaire.com

2005-07-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

Should I puke until my stomach aches, or put on my Italian silk suit and go money-hunting? Those are the only ways I know how to react to the news, which came our earlier this week, that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation will become the new owner of teen hotspot MySpace.com, assuming that Intermix Media, which is MySpace’s parent firm, accepts Murdoch’s $580 million buyout offer. I could say that I withheld commenting on the deal until now while I carefully considered my words. But the truth is I only read about the news yesterday. And my own words put the lie to the careful consideration bit. About the best I can offer in the face of a deal this monumentally pathetic is this compromise -- how about if instead of vomiting I merely vent? But before my bile gets the better of me, I should at least point you to one of the news reports on the deal, or the insider interview that Paid Content got with Ross Levinsohn. He is president of newly-formed Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division that will oversee MySpace if the deal is consummated. That laudatory write-up includes this observation: “when the deal closes in about three months, Fox (Interactive Media) will nearly double its (Internet) traffic by adding 27 million-plus unique users for roughly $21.48 a piece.” Details like that confirm that if you’re a well-behaved new media startup, you should be shopping yourself around because the Fat Checkbooks are open. Of course there have been earlier such deals, of old media buying new media. And Rupert insinuated that he was looking to buy some cool stuff in a speech he delivered in April before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. That MySpace.com is cool, I have no doubt. A few weeks ago I was working with a couple of dozen young people, from age 15 through the mid-30s. All they talked about was MySpace. We were supposed to be putting out a student newspaper together, but very often when I peeked over a shoulder to see what was being done, the kids were diddling around with their MySpace accounts. One of the teenaged boys gave me a tour. His screen was filled with flirty messages from girls hailing. As I checked out the screen, I recall seeing a box that could be checked for “wife-swapping.” That, in combination with the age-segmentation feature, struck me as a rather interesting utility. The graphic artist in our group, a musician in his 20s, said he used his MySpace account to post some of his original music, and it helped him land performance gigs. In that regard he’s dead center of what seems to be the deal’s most attractive feature to Murdoch. As Forbes.com put it, “The tunes . . . are what drew the attention of the News Corp. chairman and chief executive. According to a New York Times report, a slew of bands, including R.E.M. and the Black Eyed Peas launched new releases via MySpace.” So why am I so worked up about this deal? I guess it’s because the trend seems to be that popular new media will simply be absorbed by old media, which does nothing to solve the problem of concentrated ownership. Even without this sort of acquisition, Web media are stratifying into the Big Few and the millions that don’t matter, as I have lamented earlier. So a deal like this is not surprising. It simply makes me sad. There. At least I got it out of my system. Now I feel better. See you Monday. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Patents & Ads & Time, Oh My!

2005-07-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

A trio of items caught my eye today, beginning with a CNet article on the perennial debate over whether patents aid or inhibit innovation, particularly in the realm of technology. Patent debates are a recurring theme in American business history, but the issue has sharpened in recent years as these 20-year-legal monopolies have been applied to software, Internet and biotech developments. In “Staking a Claim,” CNet’s Michael Kanellos brings this debate current in what struck me as an interesting and thorough examination of whether patents are allowing little guys to protect ideas and gain funding for startups, or whether they are being misused by large companies and patent mill firms. This is a subject I’ve covered in the past, and two things strike me as important. First, the trend seems to be toward extending patents to new areas. I was among the reporters who covered the 1993 fracas over the Compton’s Multimedia Patent. It was eventually reversed but while the anti-patent forces won that battle, they seem to be losing the war. Part of the reason, I think, is that the federal courts were reorganized in 1982 so as to create a special circuit that hears appeals on patent trials. This special circuit has generally strengthened and extended patents, allowing, for instance, the patenting of human genes. Arguments could be and have been made that patents in some areas are counterproductive, particularly as regards software and Internet processes, where ideas can spread with viral rapidity and where IP laws may be anachronistic. But the federal courts seem so far persuaded that patents continue to perform their function, as spelled out in Article One, Section Eight, of the U.S. Constitution, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Moving quickly to advertising, the mother’s milk of media, a New York Times article highlighted a debate among the ad buyers who indirectly underwrite most content – does their spending produce results, or is it money wasted and how do they discern the difference? This angst is being worked out in a forum called the 2005 Marketing Accountability forum, and while we may despair of hearing a definitive answer, the Times articles suggests that old media have more to fear from this debate than new media, which allow greater measurement of click-thru and the like. However, as I’ve written in the past, I’m not so sure click-thru rates tell the complete story online. I think advertising in any medium is likely to have a subtle and accretive effect rather than a directly measurable stimulus-response loop. But it’s difficult these days to argue with numbers, and new media have numbers coming out the wazoo. Lastly and most puzzlingly is a finding by the Online Publishers Association, which tracks how much time Internet users spend each month pursuing activities in four various online categories: e-commerce, content, communication, and search. The association was pleased to report that browsers spent more time perusing content in June than in previous months, and less time engaging in e-commerce or search. Communication, though, still accounts for the largest single block of time spent online (41.3 percent for commo versus 36.9 percent for content, followed by e-commerce at just under 18 percent). But when I checked out the association’s index, which listed the raw figures, I was puzzled. Search accounted for just 4.3 percent of online activity in June as measured in time, yet I have seen elsewhere that search firms are getting something on the order of half of all the advertising dollars being pumped into cyberspace. Now I have always heard that “time is money.” But in this instance it’s obviously not. Perhaps not all time is created equal. Or it may be that too much in advertising is being lavished on search, click thru numbers notwithstanding. But I wouldn’t worry. There’s probably a patented algorithm in the pipeline that will straighten all this out. (Note: Paid Content pointed me to the patent and ad items; MediaPost alerted me to the Online Publisher announcement.) Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Mix'n'Match

2005-07-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

Funny how the mind works in a hyperlinked Web. One moment we're searching for this, then we trip across that, and suddenly a distraction becomes a fascination. It was just such a train of . . . can I even say thought . . . that led me to a brief essay that expressed the tension many of us feel between the desire to share what we know, and the pressure to control, profit or merely get credit for our work. The focused mission that launched me on this diversion was an exploration of Remix Culture, the emerging practice of grabbing bits of this and that to make new whole that are presumably greater than the sum of the parts. That search led me to the nexus of alternative copyright, Creative Commons, and ultimately to Opsound.org, an experimental site for audio artists. And that’s where my thought engine got derailed in reading what Opsound artist Sal Randolph had to say about mix’n’match culture: “There is a tension between our need to be able to use cultural elements freely and the desire to make a living off of the kinds of value that are made by creativity and innovation. This isn’t only true for artists. The phenomenon is much broader, across all of our cultural knowledge, from science and technology to folklore and custom, games and sports. In a strange paradox, as technology multiplies our interconnections and access to each other’s contributions, it also motivates content owners towards restriction and control.” Randolph alludes to open source software, which evolved around the general public license, and the new media ferment that has been catalyzed by the copyleft licenses, and observes that these are crucial (but preliminary steps) “in the creation of a social consensus (another sort of social technology) that we all have a stake in a common culture which has been collectively authored.” That struck me as a deep and interesting notion, one that seems at the same time hopelessly idealistic yet temptingly plausible. One glance at the prime time television would suffice to depress. Yet at the same time there are quite obviously arising the tools that allow ordinary people to create works to amuse or inform each other. This could allow us in the not-too-distant-future to return to what I imagine to be the past. Before electricity people played pianos or fiddles or simply told stories. Industrialization and specialization squelched that. It was more efficient for most of us – who, after all, have limited talents in these regards – to outsource entertainment and information, freeing us to focus on whatever core competencies we might enjoy. I say that but it doesn't mean I like it. I fancy Robert Heinlein’s observation that specialization is for insects. Yet we live in a specialized world. At least those of us who enjoy the pleasures of hyperlink that is one of the sweetest honeys of our hive-like global economy. What a conundrum. Some few of us may rediscover the joys of self-expression, while many billions more could live comfortably for a month on what I pay for broadband access. I don’t know whether to clap or weep, so I guess I'll just go to work. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Training Daze

2005-07-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

We hear a lot these days about citizen journalism, people taking media into their own hands to inform and entertain one another or to express themselves. What sorts of training will citizen journalists require and where will they get it? I’ve been thinking about that in light of the conference that will be held in San Antonio the second week in August by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The Association appears to be populated by college journalism instructors, the same folks who turned out people like me – card-carrying mainstream journalists. A quick look over the conference schedule shows sessions on a gamut of topics ranging from the unique concerns of college professors (there seems to be a panel on the trials and tribulations of a being a dean) to topics more sympatico with this blog (like the session about citizen journalism hosted by New York University professor Jay Rosen). As we enter new territory, it must be apparent that the old training ways do not necessarily apply, at least not in the forms in which it is now packaged. True, aspiring citizen journalists would be wise to learn the rudiments of libel law, and they would be advised to get a dose of ethics as it applies to communicating ideas. But they are not going to get four year college degrees in order to pick up this knowledge. Are night classes available? It is also quite likely that some of the current norms will be rejected by these new, grassroots communicators. The elusive notion of objectivity, for instance, would seem alien and contrary to media initiatives that spring from an activist conviction. Aside from the likelihood that some of today’s journalism values may be, or at least seem, anachronistic, new production skills are certainly required, and it is not clear where these will be taught. Will the technologists of new media come from computer science departments? Or will they be wannabe communicators with the patience to patch together computer code? Or a combination of these and other sources? Our current training apparatus is geared to graduating content producers who will be plugged into some media enterprise in which everything from the desks to the computer networks to the sales, distribution and paychecks are handled by a hierarchy. Citizen journalism would flatten that hierarchy to one or perhaps a few. So are citizen journalists already media polymaths? Or will they need to acquire new skills and form partnerships to gain the skills they are unlikely to learn? I wish I had some answers but I’ve just started thinking about these questions, so perhaps you’ll think about it with me and we’ll talk more at some later date. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Juxtaposition

2005-07-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

I have no advertising in this blog but I am trying to learn more about it. Today I’ll focus on a few bits about contextual advertising – placing ads alongside relevant words (dog food ads near dog story.) An article in Online Journalism Review notes that contextual ads sometimes create embarrassing matches, like the massage service whose ad ran alongside a news article about police raids on alleged sex parlors. That isn’t a problem unique to new media. Mismatches occur in newspapers. I’ve heard chuckles in the newsroom when it’s discovered, often after the fact, that an embarrassing story has run alongside an ad. Ad pages are laid out prior to news pages and I don’t know whether news layout people look at the juxtapositions. The two big contextual programs are Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s ContentMatch. OJR notes that, unlike Google which relies upon word-matching technology, Yahoo has “a staff of more than 100 editorial people” to minimize placement gaffes. Jennifer Slegg, author of the JenSense blog, told OJR about another Google shortcoming. It indexs web pages monthly. Slegg told OJR that “writing a single entry about popcorn right before the (Goggle) bot visits can result in popcorn ads for about a month” even if that’s the only time in the month the word was mentioned. Contextual ad programs, says OJR, work best on focused commercial content. A travel site will do better than a general news site. Again, no surprises. It’s the same way in old media. Newspaper lifestyle sections are chock a bloc with ads. Don’t let these minor problems obscure the fact that contextual ad-matching programs are a great for beginning publishers who don’t have a sales force. For instance, Jason Calacanis old OJR he used contextual ads to “jumpstart” Weblogs, Inc. But, he added that he “derives the majority of his income from display ads sold directly to advertisers.” Heed the lesson. Start with the auto-placement programs. But use the money to hire a salesperson. The publisher who doesn’t sell his or her own content is missing the majority of the ad revenues that could be had. On a separate note, I think these auto programs turn off many advertisers. They’re too complex. For instance, Search Engine News recently reported a “simplification” of Google’s AdWords programs (by which advertisers bid for words). I read the piece but am not sure how the old program worked or how the new program differs. That may be why there is a cottage industry in helping advertisers choose words to buy. While I’m on the subject I found a survey article in Media Post that named several contextual ad vendors. I don’t think the list is complete but it’s a start. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Mid Year Review

2005-07-15T04:44:00.000-07:00

I have an early breakfast with a mentor and friend this morning, and another tight deadline before then. But let me take a few minutes to reflect on what I’ve been doing since I began this blog at New Years and some of what I've learned since then. Mini media is what I call the creative community taking advantage of cheap computers, powerful software and broadband distribution. Some of these folks are satisfied with self expression. I am not. I want to find or create market systems in which small producers can earn a living from selling their works. Most of the money flowing into the Web today comes as advertising, and most of this goes to a few large sites. We need markets designed to give small producers a better shake. I've outlined some of these ideas in three blogs entitled Food for Thought (I, II and III). I’ve thought about payment systems, or micropayments to use the lingo of the net. Conventional wisdom says people won’t pay for Web content. That may be true. But as far as small producers are concerned, I don’t think the Web is where they’ll make their money. They may not be able to draw enough traffic. However, they can use the Web to attract an audience, and then sell other things – for example, compendiums of their works in the form of personalized magazines. Media is manufacturing. Creativity is essential to fashioning media products. But the business is in making and selling multiple copies. Expect that to be a continuing theme. We hear a lot about multimedia. I think the better term would be multimodal – take a basic idea and produce different versions, perhaps even in different media – such as using a short podcast to tease to a longer work. Give content away for free, but charge for customization and convenience. I had the glimmerings of an idea recently about creating media malls as physical focal points for mini media producers. I want to think more about that in the months ahead. I have to remind myself to learn more about RSS. And I think podcasting is more than a fad. Audio delivery of knowledge is at the early days of a long, strong secular trend. Above all new media should be delivered in short, sharp bursts. The Web is all about word-of-mouth. Make products brief and easy to pass. And remember that media is a habit. To make it habit-forming, deliver it on schedule. See you Monday! Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Tube Town

2005-07-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

The doings of Big TV have little bearing on mini media dreamers like me but there’s so much ferment in television that I can’t resist a few comments, starting with CBS’s plan to create the Public Eye, a sort of ombudsman blog, as part of its re-launch CBSNews.com. Verne Ververs, who will play that internal watchdog role, will have his work cut out in defining his independence and restoring trust. After MediaBistro’s TVNewser mentioned the who and what of Public Eye, Rathergate.com picked up that report and said: “Blog patrons can smell a phony a mile away . . . If “Public Eye” turns out to be a sham, people can always get the skinny about CBS from (us).” USA Today reporter David Lieberman put CBS’s moves into context in an excellent analysis that looked at similar big media forays into the web world. Three thoughts jumped out at me: Comcast chief operating officer Stephen Burke said web users "want short, five-minute clips that are educational or entertaining," not traditional longer fare; Web video makes sense for short shelf-life news and sports and “esoteric” (niche?) content; and transmission costs for streaming video are down to 9 cents per viewer, per hour. In other TV news, Paid Content editor Rafat Ali laments the lack of attention being given to newly-issued set of draft directives from the European Information Commission which apparently thinks audiovisual media — whether broadcast, broadband or mobile — need rules governing “decency, accuracy, impartiality and more.” Ali writes: “These rules pitches EU against UK's media regulator Ofcom, which favors more liberal rules for online players and believes that traditionally strict broadcast regulations should not be extended to the Internet.” Ali pointed to stories on this in the London Times and International Herald Tibune but wants more fuss before the public comment period ends in September. The title of the EU directive begins, “Television Without Frontiers.” Apparently, however, this does not mean television without limits. Finally here in the good old U.S.A., I clipped a bit that said the National Association of Broadcasters is ready to go along with Congress, which TV stations to shift to digital broadcasting by 2009 and quit that analog stuff. The news bit mentioned the “windfall (the government) is expected to reap when it auctions off unused frequencies.” Are all those old channels going back out on the auction block? Is that a business opportunity for TV entrepreneurs? Or is analog on its way to extinction? Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

This & That

2005-07-13T06:42:00.000-07:00

Here’s a non-shocker: 18-24 year olds are most influenced by new media, according to BIGresearch. The Ohio-based survey firm based its finding of age-related media use on 14,000 interviews. Taking a sample that size allows BIG to make statistically significant observation on sub-groups, by age, inside the overall sample. BIG’s press release summarizes the findings. Most are in keeping with what you would expect. Young people adopt new media more readily. What did surprise me, however, was the ubiquity of instant messaging — even among older folks in my age bracket. I don’t use IM, but 58 percent of my cohort does. In the Smart Mobs book and web site, online pioneer Howard Rheingold argues that camera-enabled cell phones give people enormous new powers to become news photographers, among other things. His prescient observations were borne out in the recent terror attacks in London. A July 8 report in the New York Times tells how London resident Chris O’Donovan photographed the aftermath of the bombings that occurred near his home. “By the end of the day,’’ wrote Times reporter Louise Story, “Mr. O’Donovan had taken about 40 photos, most with his Nokia cell phone.” The article (registration required) goes on to say that O’Donovan posted a number of his photos on Flickr.com, as did many other amateurs on the scene. In a quick visit to the Smart Mobs site, I note this lament from a professional TV photographer and blogger, who wonders how long specialists like him will be needed. The same thought has occurred to me. Are my days as a PWDJ numbered? Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

. . . No Stinking License

2005-07-12T07:23:00.000-07:00

Eric Raymond is the author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” the 1997 essay that Wikipedia calls “the manifesto of the open source movement.” Today I think media need an open source revolution – a sharing of techniques in the public domain – to build a marketplace for small-scale content producers. But how can open systems encourage private profit? That’s the sort of thing Eric thinks about, which is why I recently read an interview several times geekier than my usual fare to grasp Eric's unorthodox views on that icon of open source, the general public license (GPL). First, here’s a quick primer. Open source refers to software developed in public, by volunteers. The source code – the actual working magic – is available for anyone to use and modify. According to Wikipedia, the general public license requires that improvements to open source code must be re-licensed under the GPL – the intention being that refinements will be tossed to the public, to be used by regular folks or improved by other code-writers. The June 30 interview in OnLamp.com, was intended to let Eric explain why he recently suggested the GPL is unnecessary. “Many people will view this as a heresy,” he tells the interviewer. “It’s part of my job to speak heresy in ways other people might feel afraid to do.” Apparently Eric believes that open source is such a superior development system that it doesn’t need to force developers (through GPL) to toss their improvement back into the public domain. Open source derives its superiority from the fact that so many developers scrutinize alterations that bugs are discovered faster. If developers cheat, and do not put improved versions back into the public domain, they give up access to this community of troubleshooters. And presumably they'll get buggy code. “My current belief is that the free market will do quite a good job of punishing defectors on its own,’’ Eric says. I’m not sure I agree or that I know enough about software development to venture an opinion. But as I've written before, Web media need to embrace open source methods. That means we're going to face the same issues as the software folks. How to create free and open systems that encourage and rewards private effort? How to prevent proprietary freeloaders from hijacking public efforts? If I had answers I would share them. All I can offer are these questions and an observation. People who create content are bound to be more fractious than software engineers. At least software engineers share professional norms. Content creators may have little in common as regards their beliefs, backgrounds, even training. It's inevitable that open source publishing efforts will schism. Like-minded cliques will peel off from the main effort and go their own way. Perhaps they'll come up with techniques that can be adopted back by the main group. Perhaps they'll just put out buggy content. Either way, Eric's observations about the market being the best disciplinarian is particularly appropriate in publishing. Ultimately, you have to believe the best ideas will win. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Blogging for Dollars

2005-07-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Technology Review recently published a piece on the business of blogging that focused on Jason McCabe Calacanis, chief executive of Weblogs, Inc. Since launching Weblogs in January 2004, Calacanis and his partner, Brian Alvey, have built a network of 80 blogs. I have extracted some germane points, given my focus on business models, but by all means read the original to get the full story. According to Tech Review, Calacanis and Alvey decided it might be impossible to scale up a blog. The style is so personal how could you add a second voice? And without additional voices, how many blogs could hope to get the hundreds of thousands of page-views per month necessary to generate real advertising revenues? So, writes author Andrew Madden, their solution “was to assemble a large network of bloggers who together would generate a river of traffic.’’ Tech Review goes on to note that Weblogs generates upwards of $1,000 a day in Google Adsense revenues alone, and broke the $2,000 a day barrier in May. The article quotes Calacanis, writing in his own blog, as saying that the AdSense revenues flowing in remain “much, much less than we write to our team in checks every month (think 75+ bloggers and 10 full-time staff.” (The article goes on to say that most Webloggers are writers-for-hire averaging $500 to $600 a month, rather than people with an ownership interest in their blog, the notable exception being Peter Rojas, principal of Engadet.) Here is a revealing section, quoted directly from Tech Review: “According to Calacanis, the majority of the company's revenues come from direct ads, which currently command a CPM rate (cost per 1,000 impressions) of between $4 and $12, whereas network ads generate between $1 and $4 CPM . . . (but Calacanis says) . . . to pique a direct advertiser's interest, a blog's traffic must exceed one million page views per month.” Network ads equate to Google AdSense and its rivals. Direct advertisers are sponsors who are sold on the site, much as advertisers today buy newspapers, radio or television. The way I read Calacanis's blog entry, and the Tech Review article together, while Google revenues aren't covering all of Weblogs' expenses, the firm is earning more money from direct sales anyway. So is Weblogs profitable? My guess would be yes. So while it's been said that content is king in this new media world, I think sales remains emperor for life – and that the winner will always be the team with the best salesforce. (Note: I recently blogged about a new network being launched by John Battelle, and made reference to Calacanis is a previous posting some time ago.) Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Who is Always Right?

2005-07-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

While searching for an old letter, I found an April 1997 article in which New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell analyzed the process of innovation. He focused on HDTV showing how, rather than being discovered in a “Eureka!” moment, the technology was pushed by government policy. But it was a different point that caused me to clip the article and reference it now. Gladwell also mentioned a web company that relied on beta testers to refine a software tool. “Customers,” he wrote, “are no longer the passive recipients of innovation. In many ways they are the engines of innovation.” In the margin of the page I wrote: Why not in publishing? The question reflected my sense then, and to some extent now, that publishers do not pay sufficient attention to what customers could tell them. And if this suspicion is correct, then content manufacturers are missing the boat. Product upgrades, driven by customer feedback, may be the defining characteristic of new media. The novelty is not a particular media type such as podcasting or videoblogging. The revolution is about feedback, a concept closely tied to customization. Regular readers may recall that I have likened content production to intermodal transporation – suggesting that our job is, first, to get a customer’s attention and then to figure out what types of information that customer wants, and how they want this delivered. A real life example of how this is already being done will illustrate the point. Riding home from work last night with my carpool buddies, I heard a fascinating science tale on National Public Radio, about a sea creature that spins complex and sturdy glass structures much as a spider weaves a web. At the end of the report the announcer said I could find pictures on the NPR website. Of course! NPR is not simply in radio. It is in the audience-gathering industry. And having gotten my attention, and lured me to the web page this morning, NPR offered me easy ways to get downloads of future research stories, All Things Considered reports, or pieces done by Nell Boyce, the reporter who did the sea creatures piece. This is the sort of customization that all media must embrace. But it is only the first step of listening to the customer. When working on complex pieces these days, I find that the first published version gets echoed through specialized web sites and mail lists. Weeks or months later, I get feedback from people who are deeply interested in and better informed on the topic than me. Incorporating that feedback into future reports is an audience-builder – and probably a public good. Listening to the customer has its dark side, namely pandering. I suppose if we just counted hits, we would run endless stories about Paris Hilton (or at least pictures) and forget about the state budget or the war in Iraq. But pandering may be a problem specific to mass media, which has lowest-common denominator considerations. New media are niche media. And in these smaller content communities, the customer may indeed always be right. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Fasten Your Seat Belts

2005-07-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

My older son was gloating when he showed me the Doonesbury cartoon that mocks bloggers by saying: “If the market really valued what you have to say, wouldn’t someone pay you for it?” It’s a question I have asked myself. So I’m hyper-alert to changes in the all-content-must-be-free mindset, such as a recent Business Week online article entitled “Here come the iTunes of News.” The article noted that Yahoo and Google have started offering searchers a way to look inside the “vaults” of publishers that charge for content. These publishers, which include market research firms, and big info-clearinghouses like Lexis-Nexis and Factiva, are selling articles ala-carte. Business Week notes that, unlike music which sells for 99 cents a download, the market has not yet set the price for a dollop of content. Even so, writes Business Week’s Sarah Lacy: “If this trend evolves, it could lay the groundwork for something Web watchers have talked about since the dawn of the commercial Internet – the age of micropayments.” Lacy quotes Yahoo Search vice president Eckart Walther as saying: “We already have the micropayment infrastructure and user registration data. All the pieces are right there.” I was pointed to the Business Week article by a bit in (the ironically named free-zine) Paid Content. “Don’t hold your breath,” was Paid Content editor Rafat Ali’s reaction to the article. Being a wishful thinker in this regard, however, I connected that Business Week article with a month-old blurb that I also noticed in Paid Content. It pointed to a new European venture called Digital Payments that claims to “be a first, enabling retailers to manage consumer payments on digital sales channels including digital television, the Internet and mobile phones. Consumers will be able to pay by Direct Debit across these channels for the first time in the same way as they use a credit card.” Now I’ve written about technology long enough to know that there are many steps between promise and delivery. And even if the system works, there’s no guarantee customers will change their free-downloading ways and use this or any other service to pay for content. But there are precedents for pervasive changes in behavior. Take automobile seat belts. Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara introduced them to U.S. cars in the 1950s, but it is only in recent years, and after the passage of mandatory seat belt laws, that people began to routinely buckle up. Let’s hope it doesn’t take 50 years to change habits about paying for content. Nor do I think it will. Things are supposed happen faster in Internet time. I think the speeup rate is about seven-fold speedup. Meanwhile, do follow Rafat Ali's advice and breath while you're waiting. As for eating, the Doonesbury cartoon had some good things to say about the nutritive value (and affordability) of cat food. Fortunately for my voracious teenager, I have so far managed to put better meals on the table. Of course, I'm a PWDJ, so I may not be forced to eat pet food while I wait for the micropayment puzzle pieces to fall into place. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Sotto Voce, Not

2005-07-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

Multimedia pioneer Marc Canter is a giant man with an operatic build and, as I learned last night, at least some stage experience in that tragicomic art. He spoke at a dinner about his vision for a free, open source Web infrastructure upon which private businesses would be built. He also said that one of his endeavors, the free video storage site Ourmedia, has attracted 27,000 users in under four months. I’ve observed Marc, on and off, for more than a decade, and mention the opera bit because it explains a lot about this large, loud and, I think, brilliant personality. His passion for open source solutions is a recurring theme. I attended only a couple of sessions at the Web 2.0 conference in 2004, but one of my recollections was Marc holding forth about open ware. Others might, less charitably, describe his speaking style as a rant. Indeed, if I were ever to meet Marc around a big mahogany conference table I might have it bolted down, lest he grab it and shake it, like a pinball player using body English. But that's not a criticism because I like Marc. He is the sort of character beloved by story tellers like me. Besides, I think he’s absolutely right when he says future Web development must occur on an open foundation. At Tuesday night's salon dinner co-hosted by East Bay television archivist Jeff Ubois, Marc talked about several elements of this emerging foundation beginning with Drupal, a community-building software with a Linux-like story. Drupal was developed by the Belgian programmer Dries Buytaert (playing the catalyzing role of Linus Torvalds). Ourmedia, which Canter launched with blogger JD Lasica, uses Drupal as its organizing software. Marc said there might be about 1,000 Drupal sites worldwide, and perhaps half as many programmers. (Marc shared a table with Identity Woman, who is using Drupal to build other community sites, and she lamented about the lack of regular release dates from the freeware programmers. A scheduled August meeting in Oregon may resolve some of these issues.) Marc also spoke about Ajax, which is apparently the name for a collection of existing technologies that can be used together to make a Web page more interactive. Here’s what I gleaned. Today Web pages do a lot of fetching; when you click, electrons have to make a big round trip to and from the server. The Ajax tools apparently allow designers to embed executable modules (like Java code) in the body of the page. These executables reside in memory. So when the person clicks, the electrons need only go as far as the computer bus. At least that’s the way I think it works, and as for what designers will do with Ajax, I suppose we’ll find out. Marc made a larger point, about how these and other tools (such as digital identity registries) would enable people to have multiple personalities in cyberspace. He has a whole vision of so-called Digital Lifestyle Aggregators – different online personalities I guess. But I won't go there. That’s too sociological and I’m too conservative. I figure one personality per customer but, hey, that’s just me. Where Marc makes the most sense is when he insists that the basic foundations of Web applications should be open in one way or another. They can be truly open source, as in making the code available as is the case with Drupal. Or the sharing can be partial, such as when profit-motivated players like Amazon create applications with open APIs that other applications can be built upon them. Remember. The foundation is the Web, and beneath that, the Internet protocol. Every proprietary firm or application built on top of those free layers depend on the interoperability of the freeware that lies below. Freeware is the goose that lays the golden egg. If Web 2.0 developers are not careful to build a new freeware layer we will kill the goose. And that would be a tragedy of operatic proportion. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Sweat Equity Media

2005-07-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

Trying to shake off the lethargy of the 4th of July holiday weekend, I came across this inspirational comment by Excite co-founder Joe Kraus: “There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one.” Thanks to Paid Content for pointing me to Joe’s blog, Bnoopy. As he explains in his first post Bnoopy was the code name for Excite when he and some Stanford colleagues launched it a little over a decade ago. Excite soared for a time but ultimately crashed. Now Bnoopy is the forum where Joe shares lessons learned the hard way as he tries to get some altitude for his new startup, JotSpot. (Its FAQ describes JotSpot as a platform for building wikis to facilitate online collaborations.) “Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch; JotSpot took $100,000,” Joe writes in his “great time to be an entrepreneur” post. He attributes this 30-fold reduction to cheaper hardware, free and robust open source applications, the ability to work with talented people anywhere in the world, and the ability to target advertising and promotion dollars through innovations such as keyword searches. In an earlier post, Joe suggested that success, in the current Web environment, depended on finding and serving niches rather than mass markets. “Think about how to serve millions of markets of dozens instead of dozens of markets of millions,” he wrote. (That reminds me of what Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty told me in an interview in 1995, when I wrote about their sale of Global Network Navigator to AOL. As I recall, they said something like: the Web is a thousand $1 million opportunities.) To round out Joe’s advice, I found this nugget in yet another Bnoopy entry. Startups must set goals they can measure. These goals should be relative to the competition. Success is not simply launching this or that product on schedule. The effort must be timely and competitive. Inspired? Well, here’s another thought from me. Everything I’ve seen and learned about Silicon Valley suggests that honest failure is common. It’s almost necessary and expected when trying new things. Learning from failure is the art. In this light, it's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because there's never been a better time in which to fail. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Follow the Money (to RSS)

2005-07-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

A new $100 million venture capital fund has been launched to promote startups in RSS, or Really Simple Syndication -- a technology for delivering electronic subscriptions directly to a user's inbox. So reports Tom Foremski, who leads the business reporting team at SiliconValleyWatcher. In an item dated June 30, Foremski, a veteran tech journalist formerly with the Financial Times, wrote: "This reminds me of years ago when Kleiner Perkins launched a $100m Java fund in 1996. It is milestone for RSS and its use." His piece offers a quick introduction to the principals, John Palfrey, director of an Internet think-tank at Harvard, and Jim Moore, an authority on business ecosystems. Palfrey blogged about his move into investing. Foremski's report included a quote in which Moore likened the Internet to "a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons." Moore went on to say, "the participants in this exchange of information are capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action. The evolution of these communities has already had a profound effect on the media, professions and enterprises." RSS has long been on my list of things to learn more about. Today I looked around for primers on both the technology and its implications. The implications are clear. RSS drops the newspaper on the driveway -- electronically speaking. J.D. Lasica gives an explanation with examples in a 2003 article in Online Journalism Review. On the technical I chose a few primers that seemed reasonably current and readily comprehensible. The Christian Science Monitor offers a tutorial that starts with the basics: how-to sign up for a news reader (the technology that the user employes to request and receive RSS feeds. Web publishers who want to use RSS to deliver content should read the Utah State Government tutorial compiled by Ray Matthews. Written for a non-tech audience, it is full of links to the technical information needed to add RSS publishing to a site. Danny Sullivan put together a good how-to in April 2003 for Search Engine Watch. So is RSS the next big thing? More likely it's the current big thing and I just haven't wrapped my mind around it. This report by Foremski, a friend and colleague for years, tells me it's time to catch up. (Note: I'm taking off for the July 4th weekend, so the next time I'll be in this space will be Tuesday.) Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

The Right(s) Stuff

2005-06-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

After sharing my pollyanna assessment of the Grokster ruling the other day, I thought I'd do something useful by revisiting the topic of digital rights management -- that is, securing content against unauthorized copying while creating easy ways to enable authorized uses. Think of DRM as an envelope sealed by (teenage magician) Harry Potter. Once Harry puts a message into a DRM wrapper -- be it text, multimedia or software -- the enclosed material knows by whom and under what circumstances it may be opened: only by people who pay a specified amount in precise way, or only four times, or whatever. (Harry delivers by owl; I prefer broadband.) If you want to get up to speed on DRM (or need a refresher) visit the Wikipedia entry. The American Library Association also has an excellent primer that contains links to interest groups that either want to preserve or change the status quo. If you're looking for a group generally in opposition to things as they are, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I also found some interesting stuff from the Cato Institute that takes a libertarian view -- while the status quo needs shaking up, market mechanisms (like Harry Potter envelopes), rather than government rules, are the way to go. Those seeking a totally different approach to copyright have gravitated to the Creative Commons. This organization, started by attorney Lawrence Lessig, has created a set of graduated protections for content. Imagine a scale one to 10, where one allows unlimited copying and 10 means no copying without prior permission. There is a range of options in between, such as free copying so long as you include a link to the source. The Creative Commons has become the nucleus of a worldwide effort to build new customs and laws that would be truly magical. Calibrated copyright protections, working in conjunction with micropayment systems, are among the missing links in what we have to build -- a new media ecosystem that will coexist with the old order. In this regard, the Creative Commons is pursuing an evolutionary strategy toward change. It is building an alternative order, without necessarily being hostile to the status quo. This approach makes intuitive sense, not just in this context but in every aspect of life. Pour your energy into building what you want -- minimize the wasted effort of trying to tear down what you don't like. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy 'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

An Hour a Day Makes the Adverts Pay

2005-06-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

Today I’ve reached across The Pond -- British slang for the Atlantic -- to recapitulate the results of a survey suggesting that B2B websites are better advertising vehicles than print magazines. Among noteworthy findings, the survey found that business decision-makers spent “almost an hour per day online for work purposes,” and “more than half (54%) had bought a product . . . as a result of seeing advertising on a B2B website.” The survey was sponsored by the UK Association of Online Publishers, which conducted telephone interviews of 300 “business decision makers” in January. Though not wishing to be rude, the small sample size and self-serving nature of the survey require that the results be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that a B2B website, linking specialized news and targeted advertising, would make for a superior response and if I were selling ads, I'd have no hesitation in showing these results to a potential sponsor. Before I continue, let me thank Paid Content for pointing me to an article posted by the UK web publisher Netimperatives. Since the UK site did a fine job of summarizing the results, I’ll suggest you bounce back over the pond, after you finish reading this, to drill down into the survey. Meanwhile, let me point out something nifty that I noticed on this, my first visit, about how Netimperatives packaged the info. The first link from Paid Content pointed me to a Netincentives synopsis. A link in the synopsis pointed me to a longer article on the same survey. This tactic of creating low, medium and high-value versions of the same information reminded me of tiered-pricing notions advanced by thinkers such as UC Berkeley info-economist Hal Varian. Sure enough, some digging around the Netincentives site led me to offers for a free email newsletter (weekly or daily editions) and an annual paid subscription. I chose the free weekly to determine how useful future offerings may prove – before I clutter up my email with their daily spew, or spend 99 quid ( that’s pounds sterling in Yank-speak) for the premium offering. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Thank You for Letting Me Share

2005-06-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

Many opinions will be written today, arguing that the Supreme Court decision on Grokster is good or bad. I see no point in another such outburst. The justices have said copyright holders can sue technology firms that aid and abet illegal file sharing. It is the law. But the law is not the future. And the future belongs to those who not only allow but reply upon file sharing in their business models. And that’s not just me talking. In fact it’s a higher authority than The Nine. The entire fabric of the Internet is implicitly whispering “share.” There has never been a medium like the one through which these words are reaching you. The Net enables us to form spontaneous connections with people of like mind, whether down the street or around the world. These can be casual exchanges or lasting collaborations. Forty years ago, the Canadian scholar, Marshall McLuhan, called the world a “global village.” The term described the ways in which print, radio and television, tied disparate peoples closer together than ever before. The Web turns the global village into a global room, in which we keep bump into kindred spirits accidentally, perhaps through the use of a search engine. That’s how I found Joe Gratz, a law school graduate living in San Francisco. He provided links to the decisions and some of the news reports. Next time I’m curious about intellectual property rights, who would I turn but my new buddy Joe – who I’ve never met. The other thing about this global room is that when we do find someone or something we like, we pass it on – as I did above. The ethos of the Web reminds me of a folk song entitled “Magic Penny.” Writing about love, songwriter Malvina Reynolds writes: It’s just like a magic penny Hold it tight and you won’t have any Lend it, spend it, and you’ll have so many, They’ll roll all over the floor. Substitute information or entertainment for love and I think the same concept applies. Now I’ll be honest. I don’t yet know exactly how people – especially me – will turn this magic penny media distribution system into larger denominations. My current favorite dream is to get invited to do lucrative speaking and live performance events. I could tell jokes and stories, and sing. (Although the wisenheimer who sits in front of me at work insists that I’d better not quit the day job until I add plate-spinning to the routine.) So please don’t hold it against me if I don’t see the precise shape of the future. But I think you can see for yourself that the present is not like the past. So as Bob Dylan has said: For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a changing Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media P.S. Please share this will all your friends. Well, maybe not with all your friends 'cause that would be spam, and there's others laws against that!

PWDJs

2005-06-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

Call it wishful thinking or rank speculation, but there’s a buzz that Google is gearing up to create some sort of (micro?) payment system for content. If true, this could help solidify the commercial basis for citizen media, a movement that seems to be populated mainly by PWDJs – that is people with day jobs. Thanks again to the indefatigable Rafat Ali for pointing me to the posting in which John Battelle carefully fanned the tiny ember of fact that has dribbled out about Google’s electronic payment plans. Or as John called it in his own (slightly adapted) words: “the Google e-pay system in the wings (that has been) the subject of much speculation and a tiny bit of confirmation in the last 10 days.” I’ve written at least once or twice before about micropayments – that is, collecting small amounts for content and/or services. And in those posts I’ve quoted prominent naysayers and proponents. My own feeling is that content must develop some value in cyberspace or else we are creating an environment that places absolutely no value on disciplined thought and creativity – except as fly paper for eyeballs. So it heartened me to see ClickZ columnist and web entrepreneur Kevin Lee write: “Good content is increasingly hard to find . . . (and suggesting that browsers) would pay for access to their favorite song lyrics or $.01 to read today's Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh blog post . . . Paying for music, video, and other content from a stored value payment system that processes low-value payments without huge transaction costs will happen. It's no longer a question of if, but when and by whom.” Which brings me back to Google and its growing clout. A recent MediaPost article, summarizing advertising market research by Outsell, Inc., noted that GOOG and rival Yahoo! “generated $6.5 billion in total revenue last year, compared to a total of $60 billion by the 10 largest companies (Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Gannett, Pearson, Tribune, Reuters, McGraw-Hill, VNU, Wolters Kluwer, and the Daily Mail and General Trust).” The same article went on to note that “when it comes to new revenue, Google and Yahoo! also have generated $4 billion--the same amount as the 10 largest companies combined.” So if Google does create a payment system for content, it could be a boon for independent creators. At this stage however, this is only conjecture and so I remain a PWDJ (in the singular that’s person with a day job). Speaking of which, let me get to it! Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Personal Digital Libraries

2005-06-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

My eyes popped as I read a scholarly essay, written by a British librarian, exploring what it means to have so many people, storing so much in the way of pictures, stories, data and memorabilia, in digital form. The essay focused on technical and legal issues. But this digital shoebox phenomenon has an implicit business dimension. Thanks to Neal Beagrie of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library for writing, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he lays out a premise that is both obvious and profound – as we sock away gigabytes of digitalia, we create the challenge of preserving, protecting, and sometimes simply finding that bit we know that we once stored somewhere. Or, as Neal says: “Individuals have always used physical artifacts as external memory and reference aids. Over time these have ranged from personal journals and diaries, to photographs and photographic albums, to whole personal libraries of books, serials, clippings and off-prints . . . As personal collections shift from paper and analogue formats to hybrid and increasingly digital formats, personal digital collections are emerging.” New collection technologies raise new issues. Will the data format become obsolete and irretrievable? Will your hard drive crash and wipe out a lifetime of memories? “It is telling,” writes Beagrie, “that research on digital data loss has suggested that a substantial amount of personal data is not backed up and that, on average, 6% of data held on all PCs is lost each year (more for laptops and mobile devices because of the higher incidence of theft).” That made me wonder, how big is the opportunity for a backup industry, and is it possibly something that could evolve on a cottage or neighborhood scale, or is this a market that the Googles and Yahoos of this world have already staked out. (In a note of regional pride, I would point out that Neal calls the Northern California startup, Ourmedia.org, “the first . . . service to explicitly offer long-term preservation as well as hosting services for personal and community content.”) Okay, so you find storage and backup boring. How about what happens when a person dies without divulging the password to a database, as occurred when a Norwegian archivist went to that great data farm in the sky without letting anyone know how to get into a digital collection representing four years' work. “The case achieved world-wide publicity after . . . (authorities) . . . made an international appeal for hackers to help identify the password,” Neal writes. “It only took hackers five hours to crack the code and unlock access to the database.” (Of course, given the international attention, you knew this already. Here in San Francisco, the episode briefly drove the Michael Jackson trial off the front pages.) The essay also acquainted me with the concept of a “Generation C,’” that cohort of young people who take it as a God-given fact that people were created with portable communication devices that also snap pictures. (I remember one time, several years back, taking my second child, now 12, to a movie theatre, and having him tap me on the shoulder to ask if I could pause the screen and take him to the loo, aka potty.) In any event, do read the original which is full of useful information, and sans the colonial snarkiness. I found the essay fasciating because I’ve been trying to convince myself that the “business” in new media is the manipulation and manufacturing of content – not merely its delivery via broadband, an opportunity beyond the reach of Mini Media types anyway. I have thought the prime opportunity in this regard will be the creation of media artifacts. Neal’s essay dwelled more on the software and network-level implications of this digital shoebox phenomenon. It may be that the physical expression and the electronic accessibility of digital memorabilia will represent business opportunities of equal magnitude. But lest this difference cause any further friction between the English-speaking peoples (there is that whole Blair memo), let me concede in advance that, of course Neal knows better. He’s British. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Fuzzy Media

2005-06-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

I’m currently working with about two dozen high school and college students, in a program meant to give them a crash course in print and multimedia journalism – a gig that may be teaching me more than I’ve been able to pass on to my young charges. Last night, for instance, I sat in on a lecture in which San Francisco State University professor Andrew DeVigal offered these budding journalists a glimpse of where multimedia may be heading – toward game-like displays meant to provide not just information, but a dose of the experience, and toward a new style of non-narrative content buffet from which viewers can consume as much or as little knowledge as they wish. That may sound vague, but as a former sailor I’ve stood watches at sea, and I know that objects on the horizon always appear fuzzy. DeVigal keeps a website where he points to examples of what he means by cutting edge multimedia, and last night he offered some object lessons to our young students – some of whom will one day bring those objects on the horizon into focus. I know that what stuck in my mind was when DeVigal pointed us to a USA Today production called Dugout Dilemmas (requires Flash to view). As the title suggests, the site casts the viewer in the role of a major league baseball coach, posing situations such as runners on first and third, two outs, team down by two runs, power hitter up, do you tell him to swing for the fences or single to drive in the run? So imagine a room full of hormone-activated teens, tired at the end of a long day, and they’re all “lecture, lecture, yawn, yawn’’ – until the game comes on and they’re suddenly engaged. ‘Nuff said? Now baseball isn’t a topic that floats my boat, but what if this technique were applied to “Saving Social Security?” It would be a complex task – and by that I mean both the real-world problem and the act of modeling it in a game. But how better to involve people in a problem high on the national agenda. In the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration talked up a national health plan, the Markle Foundation created just this sort of “what-would-you-do” game around that issue. But in that pre-web era, the game had to be played on CD-ROM and that required what boiled down to a series of political Tupperware parties. I don’t think that effort went far. But the web would allow us to turn this game concept into a public policy version of eBay. And what if local media, using local programmers, started gaming local problems. Would that be journalism? The other things that wowed me out of DeVigal’s 90-minute lecture was a glimpse of the Theban Mapping Project (requires Flash to view). I would describe it as an online encyclopedia from which you can browse as little or as much as you’d like to know about one of the most important Egyptian archaeological sites. There is some introductory material but the site is meant to be explored as a self-guided tour. It is therefore not an attempt to convey information in a narrative style, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Rather it is a new information construct. You can spend hours there if you have a deep and abiding interest, or get a 10-second dose if your Egyptology has been satisfied by any of the many mummy movies set in Thebes. One last point. DeVigal pointed to the website of Noah Brier as a place where he goes to keep an eye on trends in this developing field, so I’ll just pass on that reference before I run. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Not all Fun and Games

2005-06-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

On Monday I mentioned the Supernova conference in San Francisco and this morning I dropped in (virtually-speaking) to read about computer game-play both as a market (per capita spending of $108 annually) and as a social phenomenon (no surprise to this parent of two teens). The per capita spending figure was offered by Stanford communications professor Byron Reeves, as reported by the well-known blogger JD Lasica. He was reporting on a panel called Connected Play that featured Raph Koster (Sony Online), JC Herz (Joystick Nation), Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab), and Dennis Fong (Xfire). (My note: I’m pretty darn sure that the per capita spend was all video games and not just the connected, i.e. online, variety.) I snipped this quote from JD’s account: “Society and media underestimate the importance of games to today's generation,” said Koster. “Games to today's kids are having as big as impact as rock 'n' roll, TV and radio to previous generations. That's the world now, the game world. "You non-gamers, you're the dinosaurs." That may be a bit of an overstatement, but possibly not by much, judging from the amount of time I see my own and other kids playing games. Literary and political types embrace the interactivity of the web as organizing tools. But it makes sense that play appeals to a larger demographic (ditto for sex and dating). JD reported another factoid (from Reeves’s talk) that struck home: “350,000 people are playing WarCraft at any one time.” (That estimate includes my 16-year-old son, whose dinosaur parents are forever trying to pry him away from keyboard and screen.) JD’s account offered a few words and a photo of Linden Labs’ Philip Rosedale, but a far more revealing account of its game, Second Life, can be found in a recent edition of the East Bay Express, a free weekly newspaper. To summarize a lengthy and fascinating article, thousands of people are exchanging real money to buy the game currency that is used to purchase the virtual artifacts that players create and exchange in their Second Life. So I can see that gaming is an important and growing segment of the new media marketplace. Nevertheless I have a somewhat saurian view of the genre. To me it’s like watching sports. Both are popular activities, but I get more satisfaction out of cleaning the garage. My disdain for virtual games is influenced by my reading of Snow Crash, the science fiction novel in which author Neal Stephenson paints a dystopian view of two sick worlds, one real and the other virtual. Meanwhile, in the face of technological, social and demographic trends beyond my control, all I can do is be the Tyrannosaurus Dad, who sees the late-night flicker of the WarCraft screen and roars: “Turn off that computer, now!” Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Anointed

2005-06-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

Information is plentiful. Attention is scarce. That’s why FM Network – the startup announced by John Battelle and funded by web and media luminaries – is destined to lead the new cohort of content creators wherever they may be going. FM Network is short for “federated media,” according to Paid Content, where I first noticed John’s newest venture. He is, of course, well-known in technology and media circles, particularly in the San Francisco area, where his biography on the UC Berkeley J-school website notes his founding roles at Wired, the Industry Standard, etcetera. John recently announced that he had angel funding (money given under less onerous terms than is provided by venture, or as is sometimes joked, vulture capitalists). And what a choir of angels indeed! In his own words: “I'm proud to announce that FM has . . . an extraordinary lineup of investors. Omidyar Network led the round, with The New York Times Company and Mitchell Kapor, Andrew Anker, Mike Homer, and Tim O'Reilly also participating.” The Times needs no introduction. Omidyar Net is the for-profit, non-profit foundation of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The other investors are movers and shakers. They provide more than cash. They bring credibility. Paid Content reports that “Battelle hopes to launch FM with 10-20 tech-related blogs including Boing Boing and his own SearchBlog and that he is only inviting "high-quality, high-authority" blogs into the network. He's not trying to launch blogs but looking for established authors. The relationship won't be exclusive and bloggers will retain their own IP -- and, I would guess, liabilities.” It sounds like John intends to aggregate like sorts of content in one place, hoping to draw traffic on the strength of his reputation and following, and to compound that with the reputations and followings of the federated blogs. This strikes me as the virtual-world expression of the Media Mall concept I blogged about recently, though I was talking then more of local (i.e. geographic) communities than of location-independent communities of interest such as technology. Given that FM will exist online, its user interface – the opening page that greets visitors – will be crucial to its function. I look forward to seeing how FM will provide one door thru which to enter 10 or 20 sites (without pissing off the site that feels it has the worst location); and whether it will add value on top of this mix of content – for instance, a look down into what the Federation members are saying. Much of this will be new, exciting and frustrating to the participants, and instructive to onlookers. Good luck! (I had wanted to say more about similar (and not) efforts, from Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Tom Foremski, Corante, Pajamas Media, and 9rules, to mention a few, but the baby woke up crying this morning, and now she’s on my lap crying for attention – as are we all!) Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

Containment

2005-06-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

I missed the opening third of the panel discussion on citizen media held Sunday night at the Hillside Club in Berkeley (I plead Father’s Day!). The portions I caught, however, offered encouragement that more inclusive media are emerging. How do we make do-it-yourself media self-supporting? Panelist Dan Gillmor was at his honest best when he said, “There may not be a business model here. We’re not certain of this.” Dan literally wrote the book on citizen media (“We the Media”). He is a former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. His current project is the for-profit site Bayosphere. It is a work in progress (Dan is soliciting assistance if you have the time and inclination). His quote notwithstanding, I’m sure Dan has a plan to make Bayosphere pay its way; I took his remark as a realistic admission that there may not be pots of gold (or paychecks) at the end of this particular rainbow. Joining Dan on the panel was Becky O’Malley who, together with her husband Mike, revived the Berkeley Daily Planet as an alternative newspaper for the college town with its own political orbit. Becky (and I’ll tell you a back-story about her in a moment) made an interesting comment about economic sustainability and community journalism, saying they may not be mutually necessary. She cited one Berkeley community, the Le Conte neighborhood, that had about 1,500 people signed up for its newsletter! How many blogs draw such traffic? Her remark reminded me that my neighborhood in San Leandro has a successful (though not quite so well-subscribed) newsletter (edited by my wife, Mia Ousley, who started an email discussion as an adjunct). These efforts keep people informed and develop a sense of neighborhood but there’s no money in them. Peter Merholz, author of the Beast Blog (a compendium of items relevant in the East Bay region of San Francisco) was the third panelist and probably one of the best living proofs of what is meant by citizen media. Peter said he started putting stuff online because he enjoyed doing it, and because he knew how. (If he mentioned anything about commercial potential or lack thereof, I missed it.) Nevertheless, the Beast is useful; it was in his blog that I found a brief mention when Becky revived the Planet. And with that incestuous reference, let me tell you my back story about Becky which, trust me, leads eventually to a point apropos of this blog. Becky and I share a mutual friend, Indiana University journalism professor Carol Polsgrove. The whys of our associations are not relevant. Becky and I simply have this bond, so when I saw her name on the panel list, I thought: “Yes, I can race back from an event with my Sacramento in-laws in time to catch this.” Nor was it just Becky who I wanted to see. Sunday night’s panel was the latest in a series of cybersalons that I’ve been attending for years. I’ve grown to like the people who attend. They’re friends, acquaintances, kindred spirits on at least a few topics of mutual interest, even if we’re not likely to have family picnics together. I’m beginning to think that media and community are a linked pair, much as neutrons and radiation – you’ve gotta have both to achieve critical mass. The question is: can the containment system be built to harvest useful energy. I took a stab at that question with a two-part blog about Media Malls. I'll return to that thought when time permits. (Two last notes. At Sunday night’s event I learned that Kevin Werbach is holding the Supernova 2005 conference on digital media, etcetera in San Francisco this week, and there is a free email newsletter for those who cannot attend. Also I have partially restored the linking ability that I lost (and complained about) last week, but I’m not sure what happened nor am I satisfied with my fix.) Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Video Marketplace

2005-06-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

While visiting a friend last night, I watched the documentary "Control Room" on a cable video-on-demand channel, The 85-minute show depicted the Iraq war as seen and reported by the Arab-language news channel Al-Jazeera. Watching it on demand gave me a sense of the opportunities in video publishing in the post-network era. (Note: If you follow this blog, you know that I have been unable to paste links into my copy for several days. That problem has followed me to Sacramento, where I'm using my buddy’s Mac – suggesting that my difficulties are not caused by my Toshiba laptop. Blogger Support, if one can even use such a term, has yet to reply to my plea for help. So please forgive my inability to provide the extensibility that I would like to offer through the selective use of embedded links,) The video itself was gripping -- very spare in its production details, using titles over images to introduce the piece, and allowing the imagery itself to provide the "shock and awe" value. (A search for "Control Room Al-Jazeera" will take you to the official movie site, and a place for a free download.) But I don’t want to dwell on the content. I see a business opportunity – video on demand is going to make cable providers hungry for content. That was one of the themes that came through in a recent presentation by Advertising Age editor-at-large Joe Garfield. It was entitled: "The Chaos Scenario: What happens if the old media/marketing model collapses before the new model is built?" In a June 7 article referencing that presentation, MediaNews reporter Wendy Davis writes that Garfield "predicted that the challenges (of this emeging media landscape) will include a dearth of inventory, with publishers unable to create content fast enough." Later, Davis writes: "Garfield also stressed that online content still needs to be created, and that it's not yet clear where the money for this endeavor will come from--especially because there's no Web equivalent to television's "upfront market" that can finance programs before they're available to consumers." Dearth of content. Lack of mechanism to finance works for hire, Sounds like a market opportunity for someone. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini

Father's Day, Humbug!

2005-06-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

Interested in Citizen Journalism? If you reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be in the area Sunday night, try to visit the Hillside Club in Berkeley, for what promises to be an interesting panel, including Dan Gillmor, Becky Malley, Peter Merholz, and possibly Craig Newmark. (Note of apology: for the second straight day, Blogger refuses to accept embedded links. Normally I write in Word, then paste the finished piece into Blogger. Wednesday it started stripping out links. I cannot even insert links when I write directly in the Blogger draft mode! In an effort to serve me better, Blogger Support urged me to RTFM. That didn’t work. So I continue, as best I can in vanilla text mode.) Dan is author of We Media, the manifesto and guide to citizen journalism. Becky is editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet (which I know has a print edition; I wonder about its online presence?) Peter, I learned from the Wikipedia entry on him, apparently coined the term blog. And the Craig of Craigslist needs no further introduction. The program runs from 6 pm to 8 pm, at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, in Berkeley. Citizen journalism has been a recurring interest with me and I will attend with the same question that animates this blog (if indeed it has any life!) – how can we make this stuff pay for itself and create jobs. I continue to collect and read material in this realm, and toward that end Mark Graham of iVillage recently pointed me to an eContent Magazine article on the topic. (I don’t think the text is online so in this case my link-lessness matters not.) One tidbit in the article was novel. In a reference to the Northwest Voice,a citizen journalism project serving residents near Bakersfield, California, eContent says the Voice “uses iUpload blogging software, which provides a simple form for participants and back-end editorial control for the editorial staff.” This latter point is important because public discussions can draw a nasty element that drives away the more temperate folks. Now I must run. I had to cut short my alleged vacation. Duty called. Of course, bless duty for paying the bills! Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Extra: Blind lead Blind to Payday!

2005-06-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

(Note: I know not why, but none of my links nor formatting would paste from Word into Blogger today, and rather than infuritate myself with wondering why, I simply post this crippled version, shake my head and walk away!) Two days of excellent discussion in Paid Content failed to find a simple answer to a beguilingly simple question: “What is a media company today?” But the exercise exposed me to a site – unmediated.org – which seems like a great resource for small producers in what I like to call the Mini Media realm. The dialog occurs in the June 14 and June 15 editions of Paid Content. (For reasons unbeknownst, I could not access the permanent link this morning, so to read the original, please use Google advanced search, type in the title (above) and append Take One; then repeat the procedure with Take Two. Sorry!) When Paid Content editor Staci Kramer posed the question to the e-zine’s readers, the responses were understandably all over the map. Media firms are breaking out of their old silos and converging on the Web. Newspapers, television and radio stations all produce content in multiple forms. For instance, the San Francisco Chronicle (where I work when not on vacation, as I am today) started in print shortly after the Gold Rush, began one of the first newspaper web sites (SFGate.com) more than a decade ago, and today lists a string of podcasts and mixed audio/photography offerings on the Podcast Directory. So what is a media company today could boil down to this: firms that manage to make money. One of the voices that popped up to answer the question was that of Eli Chapman, a co-founder of Unmediated.org, which appears to be a gathering spot for the tools, techniques and people that are making Staci’s question so difficult to answer. I am frankly embarrassed to have only now discovered Unmediated but, after all, I began this blog with the presumption that I had much to learn and, so far, I have been right. One of the tidbits that caught my attention was an Unmediated Q&A with Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan, the creative duo behind the Googlezon video clips.(If you’re not familiar, they’re pseudo-documentaries that postulate a Google-centric media universe within a decade; the Q&A contains link to the originals.) Thompson and Sloan are at the cutting edge of whatever is happening with media, and Sloan’s closing quip suggests they’re mystified: “What I wanna know,” he says, “is when are we gonna start getting PAID? (Hey, would anybody buy an EPIC t-shirt?)” What a liberating admission! I have asked the exact same question in this blog, and have suggested that we’ll be forced to give away content and earn our keep by selling artifacts like t-shirts and personalized magazines. So when I hear guys like these express bewilderment about business models, three thoughts come to mind. First, if they sell a Googlezon t-shirt, I will buy it. Second, thank God for my day job! And third, I’m on vacation, so it’s time I started to act like it. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Media Minutemen

2005-06-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

I’m back from a weekend in a lovely Redwood park near San Francisco, a trip too brief to offer much rest, but long enough to distract me from “the conversation.” I did, however, return for a purpose that bears on my interest in new media business models – to wit, if we’re heading into the era of citizen journalism, will out media minutemen want or require training? What brought this to mind were back-to-back meetings yesterday. The first was with a dozen folks who will be running a two-week journalism workshop for high-schoolers, Afterwards, I taught the final class in a 10-week feature-writing course populated by two dozen adults with varied experience in journalism. I’ve seen relative newbies make astonishing progress when exposed to the techniques of story-telling. One woman handed in her final feature last night with the words, “Here’s the day’s spew.” Turned out to be an 1,800-word piece that she’d started writing after lunch. I only read the top but it started well. I was impressed. I don’t know how you write, but I’ve rarely nailed down 1,800 words in five or six hours! Will citizen journalists benefit from training? Absolutely. Even pros need refreshers. Will they seek it? Consider human nature; those who most need instruction will be the least likely to seek it, but those who want to improve will benefit enormously. Should training be required? Absolutely not. The First Amendment, like the Second, presumes the widest possible freedom. People have a right to shoot themselves in the foot, in the literary sense, even if this occurs for lack of formal training. We already have a well-ordered militia in ournalism. It’s called mainstream media, and there are many, myself included, who feel these well-trained folk are doing a poor job of defending the public’s right to know. Where will citizen journalists get training? Good question. I wonder if the education industry is alert to this new market for people who need short courses on everything from techniques to ethics to technology. Let me pause here, because the question just occurred to me and I simply don’t know. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Rebel TV

2005-06-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

What if you could make television shows on your desktop and send them out over the Internet? We are about to find out if I understand the upshot of a new software tool based on BitTorrent.

The tool set is called Broadcast Machine. It was released by an outfit called the Participatory Culture Foundation.. That foundation is either related to or spun off from Downhill Battle, which describes itself as “a non-profit organization working to break the major label monopoly of the record industry and put control back in the hands of musicians and fans.”

Regretfully, I have just revealed everything I know about these topics. But do bear with me while I explain why I'm blown away by the potential behind this – and what I am sure are similar efforts as yet unknown to me.

My first media job in 1975 was running a closed circuit television and radio station aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the Pacific Fleet. I was an enlisted man. My television station was, for its time, a marvel of miniaturization. But that meant videotapes – most of the programs I broadcast came in this format – were inch-thick reels. The live camera I used to do news broadcasts weighed about 90 pounds and was literally bolted to the bulkhead (aka “wall"). A control panel routed the various video inputs through coaxial cables to 15 or 20 television sets in the enlisted and officer quarters that reached our ship’s crew of 350. How we got television programming in the middle of the Pacific was a marvel in the pre-Blockbuster-NetFlix-satellite-television era.

Our ship would pull up alongside another ship that had come from port with our mail and other supplies, including those one-inch videotapes. The ships would come alongside, about 100 feet apart as I recall, and rig the equivalent of steel clotheslines between each other. They would then cruise along at the same precise speeds, passing stuff back and forth. The Navy calls this process underway replenishment. It’s quite a sight to behold.

Anyway, all the crew cared about was getting football games and other sporting events, which arrived two or three or four weeks late, on videotape. I could never understand the fascination. They already knew the score. But I had my biggest audiences during games (talk about market research – I could leave the station while the hour-long tape was running itself, walk through the berthing quarters and literally count noses!)

Given this I-used-to-walk-ten-miles-through-the-snow perspective, you can understand my amazement at the ease of production and delivery. On the other hand, given that I've witnessed one slice of the demographic glued to the tube, watching beefy brutes tackle one another in a contest whose outcome was already known, I question how much of today's civilian audience is hungry for alternative content – and, if so, how all this guerilla content will be paid for.

Before I forget, I learned about Broadcast Machine through Informitv.com, which is somehow involved in all this new-fangled TV stuff. I signed up for their email newsletter because I found their writing bright, tight and informative, as exemplified by the following segment that ended their report on the BM announcement:

“The question is,” said Informitv.com, “will Broadcast Machine users want to support “non-corporate creativity and political engagement” and other substantial non-infringing fair uses, or simply to download the latest hit television programs? No doubt the corporate copyright lawyers are already sharpening their quills in anticipation.”

(P.S. I’ll be camping until Tuesday or Wednesday. See you then!)

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Learnng to think in Hyperlink

2005-06-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been blogging for about six months now after more than 30 years as a professional writer in the linear medium of print. Professional means I got paid. Linear means every written work, from start to finish, was self-contained. What-you-read-was-all-you-got. So now this old dog is trying to learn a new trick – how to insert useful digressions into a written work by using hyperlinks.

Of course, one of the first things any writer learns is that, when think you’ve had a brainstorm, there’s a good chance that someone else has had it first. That was the case when I used terms like “hyperthinking” and “hyperwriting” to search for this concept in cyberspace.

Sure enough, Doc Searls, who is well known in blogging circles but who may be unfamiliar to newcomers, once delved into this area in his own folksy way by asking his readers whether “they appreciate(d) the linky way I write?” John Waterson responded and Doc posted John’s reply – from which I have snipped this double-edged bit: “Good links should open up the conversation; they should present participants in the discourse with options which they can follow up on, if they so choose.” But, John warned, they can also stifle conversation when and if they present “an obligation that must be fulfilled if you want to keep up.”

A New Zealander named Matthew Thomas also wrote a thoughtful do’s and don’t of links that also marveled at the wonderful new tool of digression which I have discovered through blogging: “This is the true beauty of hypertext,” he wrote. “If someone wants to explore a particular idea, they can jump mid-sentence into a linked document, returning to the original at their leisure — or not at all.”

I must say that the “or not at all” bit worried me. After all, I’m not getting paid for this. I’d at least like to get read.

In looking for how to craft links so as to add information value without losing readers, I came across Kairosnews, a scholarly forum to help “hyperwriters . . . master a new process that includes electronic links, visual images, sound, animation, and other forms of data within a single digitized writing space.”

And the English Department at the University of South Florida offers an introductory course on blogging that would be of particular interest to teachers – and contained this nugget that should be heeded by all denizens of the blogosphere: “Blogs gain power over time, showing how the writer’s (or writers’) mind (or minds) works. Over time, bloggers become known for being informative about a topic or set of topics. Bloggers attract readers by researching their topics, by providing evidence for assertions, and by creating a tone and persona that readers find informative or entertaining.”

Given all this wisdom on the topic, what can an old print hack contribute to the grammar of hyperthinking? Perhaps the discipline of writing short and tight – because even if there exists an infinite amount of space to be filled with our words, links or whatever, who has time to follow them! And perhaps I can offer the occasional amusement.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

(Note: I removed an expired link and a reference from the end of this piece. Dec. 15, 2005)

Blogger or Blog-air?

2005-06-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

There may be lies and damn lies but at least The Numbers Guy has saved us from the pseudo-statistical inflation of the blogsphere. Instead of 31.6 million blogs, an estimate that many, like me, have unquestioningly referenced, Wall Street Journal Online columnist Carl (aka Numbers Guy) Bialik says there may be more like 3.5 million active blogs – if “active” is defined as a posting in the last 30 days. And, he suggests, far fewer than a million bloggers do it daily.

Thanks to Staci Kramer at Paid Content for pointing me to Bialik’s column, which is worth reading in its entirety, as I will only summarize a few points here.

Bialik writes that when BlogPulse researcher Natalie Glance studied activity in January, she found that “the typical active blogger posted an update just once every 10 days.” Elsewhere he writes that, at a recent blogging conference, Technorati chief executive David Sifry estimated that “daily volume is 800,000 to 900,000 posts.” Bialik notes that BlogPulse, “which says it has more blogs in its index, counts only between 350,000 and 450,000 posts a day -- and that number has held steady for about a year, even as the total number of blogs has accelerated.”

But the real thrust of Bialik’s commentary is that counting blogs is beside the point. It’s traffic and readership that matter. And here the message is similarly deflating – blog reach seems to be exaggerated.

He asked ComScore Media Metrix to look at the April traffic for 13 prominent blogs, by counting their unique visits. “Just five met the company's minimum threshold for statistical significance of about 150,000 monthly visitors,” Bialik writes. “Media and gossip site Gawker had the most, with 304,000 unique visitors. The others that cleared the cut: Defamer (287,000), Boing Boing (250,000), Daily Kos (212,000) and Gizmodo (209,000) . . . By point of comparison, comScore says the New York Times's Web site had 29.8 million unique visitors in April.”

Bialik presumably offered that last comparison as a reality check, but it coul be stood on its head. The Times is over a century old. These blogs are barely out of their virtual diapers. I wonder what the comparisons will look like in a few years – or whether incumbent media will simply acquire the top blogs and extinguish any distinctions between the new and old media.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Narrowcasting and IPTV

2005-06-07T07:59:00.000-07:00

I need to learn more about two related phenomenon, narrowcasting and IPTV. Narrowcasts define themselves by contrast to broadcasts. The former is targeted, the latter less discriminate. IP stands for “internet protocol” – chopping a transmission into bits, sending out its parts electronically, then reassembling the whole at its destination. Sending television to niche audiences sounds like a big new opportunity.

For a concise summary of IPTV, including links for further exploration, read the entry at Answers.com. My one-sentence synopsis would be – with the ability to chop up video and deliver it via the Internet, television programs (an anachronistic phrase!) can be sent anywhere, even handheld devices.

Narrowcasting is the kindred concept – and though it may have slightly different meanings depending on who is using the term, the simple fact it is becoming possible to target video to small audiences. I am sure we will learn in time whether it is possible to make money in narrowcasting, as firms are already popping up to become the consolidators and deliverers of video narrowcasts. To start learning the names of these firms, I found an Associated Press article posted by Wired News. Oakland Tribune reporter Francine Brevetti (a colleague in the Northern California journalism community) recently wrote two related articles, one on IPTV in general, and the other on Akimbo, one of the emerging narrowcasters. A website called Internet Protocol Television seems to track developments in this arena.

At this point that’s all I know about IPTV. It isn’t much so I wont ramble on much longer, except to say that, having written about the tech industry for 20 years, I think this phenomenon is in the early stages of a long-lasting and fundamental shift, that could decentralization the distribution of video and will almost certainly revolutionize the nature of programming. Today we consume TV in 30 minutes chunks (allowing time for commercials). That is an artifact of the need to maintain a broadcast schedule. What happens in a narrowcast world? Well, over the next 10 or 15 years we’ll find out, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this – as I learn other things I think worth saying.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Being Mouthy

2005-06-06T08:12:00.000-07:00

Today I want to remind myself that sales and, by extension, advertising, rely on word of mouth referrals. The Internet is the ideal word of mouth (WOM) medium because it is easy to pass on recommendation (or warnings). But the examples that occur to me involve dispersed communities of interest rather than compact communities of locale. Thus I wonder: can small publishers localize WOM to create a tool to woo local advertisers to the Web?

A recent Wired News article focused a new trade group, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, provided an overview of the phenomenon in the context of Web media, and related it to kindred concepts like viral marketing.

Another piece in Wired News celebrated the do-yourself campaign to spread Firefox, the freeware browser, citing “users so loyal they devise their own DIY promotion ideas” notably the Funnyfox series of short video clips.

More recently, a Media Post article re-emphasized the importance of referrals and suggested there were three levels of reference-makers: “social influentials, who have large networks of connections to other consumers; category influentials, who are well-informed about a certain product category; and brand influentials, who are strong advocates for or against certain brands.”

All of this is interesting if you’re a large corporation trying to manage consumer perceptions or a startup trying to create a community of interest around some notion (as in Move On) or product. But can the Web be used to develop word of mouth for local advertisers?

Many articles, like this piece from ClickZ or CNet item discuss how difficult it has been to get local advertisers to jump onto the Web. Big Web sites can live without the support of these small, local companies. Small Web publishers may absolutely depend on local advertisers – and the lack of success of the search engines may create an opportunity for publishers and marketers astute enough to make the Web-wide word of mouth magic work in the local context.

So what is the sine qua non of the successful viral campaign – creating short, sharp images or thoughts that people want to pass along the item to friends and associates.Word of mouth is about sharing. The Web makes that easy. Small publishers with a local focus merely need look into their communities to find the inside jokes and cute images that help create community – then link some local advertiser to that shared mindset. For example, if the objective is to get the local pet shop to advertise, how about encouraging customers to send in their digital images for a Pooch of the Month contest (be sure to make provisions to scan hard copy prints for customers who take pictures on film; and then there’s the Feline community to consider).

If word of mouth is a powerful Web tool, then it should be exceptionally powerful at the local level – and most accessible to small publishers who observe globally then act locally.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Media Malls II

2005-06-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I suggested that small, independent media creators should congregate in malls, built around a shared space to hold receptions or run training classes. Today I want to continue making the case that new media may need an old-fashioned retail presence.

Several months ago I was introduced to a San Francisco startup called Memento Press. It is a retail store that shows people how to turn their photographs into books, calendars or other printed keepsakes – and then makes these artifacts for them. Memento’s founders know that web-based firms offer the same service. In fact they’re former web executives. (I apologize for not having more info but I’m traveling and my paper file on this is at home. I did find a reference (if you follow the link scroll to the bottom) that confirms my recollection that Memento co-founder John Litwin used to be an executive with Ofoto and BabyCenter. Litwin apparently wrote a case study about BabyCenter’s that contains some ideas germane to this discussion.).

I don’t know how Memento is doing, nor does one example validate the notion of a media mall. But I am encouraged that seasoned web execs see the value of going retail.

What I don’t know about malls could fill a book (though I will try to learn). But I do know they generally require an anchor tenant. In the media world, print shops are an obvious example. Another possible anchor, with more “new media” appeal would be a store to turn old films and videos into family documentaries or business presentations. People are already doing this as hobbies or stand-alone businesses. For some operators it will make sense to get a retail presence, to draw customers and get business out of the garage.

Who else might populate a mall? Every town and community has advertising agencies, public relations firms , photographers and other professionals who live and die by media. These professionals are going to become more, not less necessary in the era of e-commerce. Just look at the cottage industry that has grown up around teaching firms how to get the most of their search term bidding. Many small businesses don’t even know what they need to know to stay competitive. Creating a media mall will help educate these potential customers about new services they need to flourish..

So far I’ve talked mainly about how a media mall would recruit customers by creating a destination for media services and expertise. But there is another value to aggregating small media firms – they will all need robust networking and data systems, and I find it hard to believe that these small operators will have all the expertise they need to maintain these systems. Therefore, I envision that the media mall would also provided network administration, data storage and recovery services. These could be arranged on a sliding scale depending on use. (Mentioning this makes me think of another potential anchor tenant – a hosting service with the ambition of creating e-commerce web sites for local small businesses. If the mall attracted web designers there would be a synergy between the host -- which would operate all the gear – and these designers, who would recruit the small business clients, design their sites and hold their hands.

I have lots more to learn. I have no idea what the market is for retail space, nor do I understand the process of leasing and sub-leasing. But I think there’s something here. You hear a lot of talk these days about media ecosystems. What is an ecosystem? An environment that facilitates certain processes. That’s how I see the media mall.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Media Malls I

2005-06-02T08:12:00.000-07:00

Businesses tend to cluster. Buyers like to shop in business clusters. That explains the popularity of food courts, antique districts, farmers’ markets and shopping malls. I think it makes sense for small media producers to create "malls" for printers, web designers, videographers, photographers, newsletter editors, and all the other specialists who produce content. This notion struck me a few days ago and in thinking it through, a picture began to emerge. To understand my vision (fantasy?), I should tell you that this idea struck me while I was attending the 40th birthday party of a neighborhood friend. The party was held at our local coffee shop. There must have been three dozen adults and two dozen children milling about. In this public venue, the party had become a community event. That’s when it struck me that media build communities. Or perhaps communities form around media. Either way, small-scale or amateur media producers who aspire to become professionals, need ways to encourage community formation. It's not all going to happen online. The best communications medium is no medium. It’s face-to-face. That’s why the central feature of my fantasized media mall is a meeting hall or party room capable of holding five or six dozen people. That would be enough space to hold a reception or screen a video, or set up tables for a weekend workshop to teach Photo Shop for, say, $250. This party place would be shared by mall renters. Tomorrow I'll talk about these possible renters. Today I simply want to argue that we need a new distribution channel for small scale media. We already buy mass media though existing channels. We subscribe to cable. We buy mass produced CDs and DVDs at retail chains, though that business model is under attack from both legal and illicit downloads. And we have also purchased custom-made media, generally through face-to-face transactions. In the past such purchases might have included the PTA newsletter, the business brochure, or the calendar with the kids’ photos on each month. Technology is making it possible to create new types of custom-made media. We can make small batches of hardcover books. Filled with family photos, they make wonderful keepsakes. Videographers can create low-budget documentaries, possibly for distribution via DVD – and perhaps pay the rent by giving this treatment to wedding productions. So we are moving into an age of custom media. What better way to alert people that new things are possible than to create the media mall where they might visit one day to get a quote on their PTA newsletter and see something new to them – like the gold embossed 50th anniversary photo book that some other person had made for their parents. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Seoul Man

2005-06-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

Dan Gillmor, the former San Jose Mercury news columnist turned citizen journalist, defined particpatory news-gathering and outlined its guiding principle at the World Editors Forum conference that was held recently in Seoul. I will excerpt portions of Gillmor's speech below. But first let me note that South Korea is home to what may be the world's most successful experiment in participatory media -- Ohmynews. This is citizen-driven news operation that, some observers say, influenced the outcome of South Korea's last presidential election. The World Editors Forum, a Eurocentric organization, published a special weblog from the conference, which will give you some of the who's-who and what-was-said of the event. Gillmor's speech touches on themes he explored in his book, "We the Media" -- part-reportage on the changes in media production and consumption, and part-manifesto in celebration of those changes. Media, says Gillmor, are undergoing "an evolution from the lecture model, to which we in mass media have become accustomed in the past century, to something closer to a conversation . . . the former audience can now become part of the journalism process, whether by communicating with professional journalists or, increasingly, producing their own content . . . If we accept the idea that we are moving toward a more conversational system, then we must remember that the first rule in having a conversation is to listen." Gillmor notes that not all bloggers are journalists; some merely wish to create shared, personal diaries. But for those bloggers who wish to produce news, he urges four basic rules: be thorough (in reporting); be accurate (in making factual assertions); be fair (in presenting the complexity of events); and be transparent (in disclosing any bias or perspective that may influence your presentation). "Money is not the major push behind citizen journalism,'' says Gillmor. "It is the entirely human desire to tell each other our stories, to help each other navigate through this complex and often insane world." But, he adds: "This doesn't mean that citizen reporting should always be an exercise in volunteering. We must develop sound business models to support new media forms. They are coming." I look forward to seeing more as Gillmor puts some of his ideas into practice at Bayosphere, an evolving tech-based participatory journalism experiment in his home (and mine!) the San Francisco Bay area. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain't Mass Media,

Citizen John Paul II

2005-05-31T07:27:00.000-07:00

I’m slowly getting back into the groove after a long, feng shui sort of holiday weekend. One of the items I cleaned up was an article that I’d clipped to my bulletin board but had never read. The article contained excerpts from a letter written by Pope John Paul II not long before his death, in which he outlined some thoughts that sound like an endorsement of citizen media.

I clipped the article from The Guild Reporter, the official paper of the Newspaper Guild (union), of which I am a member. This morning I read the entire papal commentary, in which John Paul II advanced a good news, bad news message about the power and reach of modern media.

“The world of communications . . . is capable of unifying humanity and transforming it into – as it is commonly referred to – a global village,” he wrote, adding: “The communications media have acquired such importance as to be the principal means of guidance and inspiration for many people in their personal, familial, and social behavior.”

But what if the media propagate values inimical to religious faith – or to faith of any sort? “In an age such as ours,” wrote the deceased pope, “there exists the conviction that the time of certainties is irretrievably past. Many people, in fact, believe that humanity must learn to live in a climate governed by an absence of meaning, by the provisional and by the fleeting.”

Given this likelihood that mass media will be, at best, indifferent to those who would preach faith, Pope John Paul II urged “individuals in the Church community particularly gifted with talent to work in the media.” Elsewhere he writes, “Do not be afraid of new technologies! . . . The Internet not only provides resources for more information, but habituates persons to interactive communication.”

In addition to urging people to make their own media, the papal letter calls “attention to the subject of media access . . . If the communications media are a good destined for all humanity, then ever-new means must be found – including recourse to opportune legislative measures – to make possible a true participation in their management by all.”

Interesting notions, and remarkably like other secular critiques of media.

Of course this was not a secular critique but an unabashed exhortation to Catholics to use media to spread their faith. Pope John Paul II issued his letter on January, 24, 2005, on the feast of Saint Francis de Sales who, I learned, used the newly-minted printing press to issue pamphlets in defense of church beliefs in the 16^th century, thus earning the designation of the patron saint of journalists.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Intermodal Media

2005-05-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I noted that the 2002 Economic Census categorizes the Information industry as a manufacturing endeavor, and argued that we should view media in the same light. I ended by tossing off the remark that media should also be thought of as multimodal. By that I mean that a publishers, especially Mini Media types, will no longer produce in print or broadcast or web formats. Instead, they’ll dispense content in different forms – web pages, podcasts, video clips, print vehicles – whatever is convenient for their customers and makes them a buck.

It is obvious that the old silos for selling information are breaking down. Newspapers, radio and television stations have web sites. They’re experimenting with new delivery systems to repurpose their info-wares and attract new audiences.

It follows that new media firms, created from the ground up, should start with the assumption that their audience is their business – their business is not the publishing modalities they use to reach that audience.

The way I see it, a blog or a website is a low cost customer attraction platform. It’s relatively cheap place to paste information, and if you attract hits, well, there are also web-advertising systems that can offer some revenues based on the traffic they draw. But for most sites it isn’t much. By some accounts, most bloggers are making $50 a month from ad traffic, and only the biggest sites reach $5,000 a month in ad revenues.

Niche publishers, therefore, should not expect to support themselves from online ads, even though they will probably have a free, online presence. Instead they may find it makes sense to create special low-run print magazines that contain more detailed information than that available on their web sites, or merely gather a month’s worth of postings into a convenient form of reference. (As I argued in a previous posting, not only does technology makes it possible to produce low-run magazines of high quality; I also think there we can sell advertisers on combined print-web ad campaigns.)

Likewise, other media forms such as podcasting may be used to cement the bonds of loyalty between the audience and the site, or attract new viewers. (I came across an essay by marketing maven Shelly Palmer that made exactly this point but there’s no easy link to it.) Or maybe emails or RSS feeds or PDF files are the better ways to get out whatever words or images your business sells.

The point is to think about new media businesses in a systematic way: as a target audience, which presumably wants certain forms of information, entertainment or data, delivered in a variety of ways, each supported by some revenue stream – or else consciously served up for free in a bid to gather traffic for some compensable product or service.

When I thought about the term “multimodal media” I actually had in mind the transportation industry. Nowadays most cargo travels in containers that can be easily moved from ships, to trains to trucks, as appropriate. It turns out that transportation gurus use the term “intermodal” to describe this expectation that cargo will have to move through different conveyances to reach its destination. Substitute media for cargo and I think the same expectation applies in this new era of publishing.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Media is Manufacturing

2005-05-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Every five years the U.S. Census Bureau collects data from businesses in much the same way as it counts noses every 10 years. Data from the most recent Economic Census of 2002 are now available. In the sector titled Information, government statisticians detail the number, size and sales of all variety of media establishments. Their definition of “information” firms is instructive, because it reminds us that making media is an exercise in manufacturing.

“The information sector (sector 51) comprises establishments engaged in the following processes: (a) producing and distributing information and cultural products; (b) producing the means to transmit or distribute these products as well as data or communications, and (c) processing data.”

Under this heading the Census lumps every form of enterprise from newspapers to broadcast stations to Internet publishers. I'll look at some of these individual segments later but for now, if you accept that media is manufacturing, the question arises: What is different about making media now?

First there is the issue of scale. The size of the enterprise required to make media, and the size of the batches of “information and cultural products” have both shrunk. People can now do on desktops what it took large organizations to previously accomplish. Mass audiences have also fragmented into niches. I call this phenomenon Mini Media. Call it what you like, I think scale is the primary difference between media manufacturing today and in the past.

Second, I would add interactivity. The potential for instant feedback is a characteristic of web-based publishing enterprises, and one that offers them a competitive advantage over pre-existing mass media. Interactivity creates new ways to make media. You may be familiar with the self-defined concept of user-generated content. In the old days, this meant letters to the editor. Nowadays people are creating and sharing videos and other media. Clever firms can leverage this viewer-added-value to create what I think of as a Tom Sawyer business model. You remember how Tom suckered his neighborhood pals into whitewashing a fence by making it seem like fun. Generally speaking, manufacturing may be regarded as dull but making media has sex appeal that can be used to advantage.

Scale and interactivity, taken together, create a third novelty of the new media-making environment – customization. Technology allows us to create personalized media products. My Yahoo is an obvious example in Web publishing. But technology also makes it possible to produce small and even single copies of physical media artifacts such as books or magazines. Music lovers think nothing about creating personal play lists on portable listening devices. Small and large publishers alike must embrace customization and personalization in order to succeed.

When I think of scale, interactivity and customization as a group, they suggests a fourth characteristic that distinguishes today’s media-manufacturing environment. I call this multi-modal publishing. Fleshing out that concept will take a few words, and I’ve reached my self-imposed time and length limit today. (This is, after all, a hobby blog.) I’ll complete the thought tomorrow.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Not More on Blogs!

2005-05-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

If you want a primer on blogging, with a guide to the top online commentators, download a free copy of the Trust “MEdia” white paper published by Edelman, a global public relations firm and Intelliseek, a market research firm with a specialty in blog analysis.

In truth, the report is not entirely free. A brief email registration process is required, offering by example a clue as to why it has become common to give away content – and that is to gain attention, either to sell advertising or to recruit potential clients for a service.

I just downloaded the white paper myself and am not prepared to summarize it other than to say that it is aimed at decision-makers who know that blogs are a big deal, but aren’t sure whether to regard them as a threat or an opportunity.

The press release accompanying the report carries an endorsement from David Weinberger (his bio is a hoot), a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. (The manifesto boils down to this: two-way communication via the Internet is creating real give-and-take “conversations” that are replacing the old-world model of broadcasting messages from a single point.)

Anyhow, Weinberger, speaking in perfect press release-ese says: “The Edelman/Intelliseek white paper does an especially good job explaining blogging as not just another opportunity to spout one's 'message' but as a way of entering into genuine conversation with and among one's customers.” (Does that sounds a little clue-less, or is it just my ear?)

Meanwhile, The Pew Internet Project released a report in early May that further emphasized how blogs have the potential to influence public opinion. After conducting two surveys of Internet users (emphasis added), Pew found that “9% of internet users now say they have created blogs and 25% of internet users say they read blogs. Another way to render these numbers is to note that 6% of the entire U.S. adult population (internet users and non-users alike) have created blogs. That’s one out of every 20 people. And 16% of all U.S. adults (or one in six people) are blog readers . . . The number of adult readers of blogs is about 40% of the size of the talk radio audience.”

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Cities of the Mind

2005-05-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

The May issue of UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine is a paean to editor Clay Felker, whose exploits in the magazine trade are praised by writers Tom Wolfe, Ken Auletta and Gloria Steinem, among others. Is Felker’s experience in the 1960s through the 1980s relevant to wannabe media entrepreneurs today?

I read my issue of California Monthly on the train home last night, but if you’re not a card-carrying Cal alum, you may have to wait a while before the current issue is posted. Meanwhile, even if you are not familiar with Felker – who made his reputation by founding New York magazine in the 1960s – what his famous protégés say about his editorial style is revealing.

“Before each of us went out on a story,” Auletta writes in Cal Monthly, “he instructed us to be sure to answer two questions: Why are things the way they are? How do things work? He knew if we answered those two questions the piece would succeed.”

Steinem, among the first names in feminism, says Felker helped bring forth Ms. magazine “by giving birth to its preview issue in the pages of New York.” She paints Felker as a demanding editor and recalls how he skewered her first draft of a story on the then-new contraceptive pill by telling her: “You’ve performed the incredible feat of making sex dull.”

Wolfe was vice-president of New York in 1968 when Felker re-launched the magazine as a standalone pub (it had previously been a Sunday supplement in the defunct New York Herald Tribune). He write how Felker risked everything at the outset of his independent publishing career by running a story that risked the loss of “90 percent of the magazine’s advertising.”

The following excerpt from the Duke University magazine (which, also, at one point profiled Felker, an alumus) tells more about that article:

“In a story called "La Dolce Viva," writer Barbara Goldsmith profiled a model who was part of Warhol's "Factory" crowd--which she portrayed as an environment obsessed with drugs and sex--and who starred in Warhol's soft-porn movies. The profile ran in the fourth issue of the magazine. It included a full-page Diane Arbus photo of a naked, anorexic-looking Viva sprawled on a shabby velvet couch. In her quotes, Viva came across as frighteningly servile to Warhol's whims; she even compared him to Satan in the eternal hold he exerted on his followers. "I'm nude because Andy says seeing me nude sells tickets," she told New York. "It's hard to believe. I think I look like a parody, a satire on a nude, a plucked chicken."

Writing in Cal Monthly, Wolfe explains how Felker narrowly contained a rebellion by the magazine’s financial backers – and reveals that it was Goldsmith, the author of the provocative piece – who had loaned Felker the $6,500 he needed to acquire the New York name after the demise of the Trib!

What does this praise for Felker – who is lionized by UC Berkeley because he helped establish a magazine writing program on campus – have to do with today’s publishing environment? Wolfe sums it up when he talks about the Felker’s “vision of New York as the city of ambition . . . and his insistence on in-depth, reporting—saturation reporting.”

In short, he defined a community in geography and spirit. Today place may be less important, though not necessarily so. Or perhaps there are simply more places to define, communities built only of shared interest and perspective, communities waiting to be defined by editorial vision and served by a range of media formats beyond those available to the editors of Felker’s day.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Citizen Media in Flames

2005-05-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

Technology has given ordinary people the ability to make media, and many of us would like to help other citizens realize that potential. In light of that dream consider the sad fact that one newspaper had to shut down an open comment forum after it was swamped with hateful remarks.

A Media Center post pointed me to the Ventura County Star’s announcement that, four months after giving readers the ability to post live, unmoderated comments to stories published on its website, the paper was turning off that spigot. The problem, said the paper’s editors, was that “very quickly, race became the common theme on many of the topic threads. Whether it was a school award or a crime, it seemed that the comments quickly devolved into a discussion of race and immigration . . . The viciousness of the comments began to escalate.” The Star first tried to moderate the comments and tone down excessive or defamatory remarks, but “with comments posted on dozens of stories, it ate up much of our day,” and so it pulled the plug.

I haven’t thought about the nasty factor in a while but that doesn’t mean it has gone away. Many years ago I moderated a chat forum during an early incarnation of SFGate.com. My forum dealt with technology and the Internet. The Gate forums were shut down, years ago, in one of the site’s reorganizations, partly I’m sure to save money (forum moderators received a small monthly stipend) but also because the experiment was, I regret to say, largely a failure. The posters turned out to be a relatively small group of people. No general conversation among the broad base of readers ever occurred. On rare occasion I had to moderate some shrill exchanges. But these were all on tech topics – Mac-versus-PC fans. Tame stuff compared to the general passions that might be ignited if topics of general community interest were thrown open for comment.

Such arguments used to be called flame wars. A cursory search on the topic turned up a brief and insightful analysis of why people flame. “I would like to think that most of us actually do seek after truth,” author Timothy Campbell writes, adding, “It is for this reason that I think it is helpful to learn to spot how other people get into silly arguments ... and then learn to spot this tendency in ourselves.”

While we try to exercise self-control, it is incumbent on anyone who hopes to create a public forum to recognize that, whatever the topic or niche, heat is hiding just below the surface. And it will be our responsibility to channel and control those given to passion outbursts so they do not inhibit speakers who favor more temperate remarks.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Being Where?

2005-05-20T08:16:00.000-07:00

If you want to find Americans, look for the flicker of their television screens. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American watches 2.57 hours of television a day, making it the third most popular activity du jour after sleeping (8.57 hours per day) and working (3.69 hours daily). The last figure contains what the BLS calls “work-related activities," presumably griping.

The report, the America Time Use Summary, came out last September. Judging from the press release (which uses the word “new”), it appears to be the first such government-sponsored look at how we manage our time.

Am I the only one who missed the study when it was released during last fall’s presidential election? I only recently learned of the study’s existence after noticing a blurb online that referenced the TV factoid. This morning I decided to track down the report. BLS published a chart from which I extracted the figures used above. It seems that we, like the character portrayed by Peter Sellers in Being There, have become a nation of people who like to watch.

In order to maintain the proper ratio between watching and working, and generally preserve the statistical balance, I suppose I should blog a few words on the business item that had been my designated topic before I digressed – how to generate subscriptions, a topic discussed at length in Paid Content’s coverage of a conference devoted to that subject.

I rooted around the conference coverage without finding any lightning bolts. Among the items that caught my attention, Dorian Benkoil reported on a seminar that offered a few don’ts (don’t offer free trials without asking for a credit card, and don’t publish author’s pictures with offers, because it will hurtsales as often as it will help).

Online marketing maven Anne Holland (aka MarketingSherpa) provided a fact-filled summary of the conference which is worth reading. I also signed up for a couple of her free newsletters (and, as expected, got pitched to buy content which I didn’t today but may eventually – which is, of course, the whole point of offering freebies).

Okay, so let's take stock of today's blog. I’ve watched (or talked about watching), worked (or at least pretended to). What does that leave? Griping, I suppose. But I remembered to take my meds this morning and feel soooo much better as a result. Besides, it’s Friday!

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

VoiceofSanDiego.org

2005-05-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

A retired venture capitalist and a newspaper columnist in his 80s are the standard-bearers for the non-profit media startup VoiceofSanDiego.org. A kindly profile in Online Journalism Review asks whether the new webzine is “a well-funded anomaly or one of the early pioneers in a nonprofit news revolution?”

Paid Content’s Staci Kramer pointed me to OJR, which gave this low-down on the startup. It began last spring when San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Neil Morgan got a pink slip on his 80^th birthday - after 50 years on staff. Retired venture capitalist Buzz Woolley contacted Morgan to suggest they launch a new news outlet, says OJR. I infer that Woolley (whose current interests include K-12 philanthropy) recruited former L.A. Times and Sacramento Bee reporter Barbara Bry to serve as editor-in-chief, and earlier this spring VoiceofSanDiego.org was heard.

OJR details the website’s journalistic aspirations, which I will not reiterate here. I noticed few details about business plans, however. The Voice mission statement says it will “rely on a combination of individual donations, corporate sponsorships, foundation grants and advertising.” It’s not as if the team is run by business-averse newsies. Prior to joining Voice, Bry was involved in two Internet startups; one went public, the other was acquired. So I am perplexed by the lack of an ad sales push. Whatever Bry’s business plans, they are not obvious to me.

I did note that the Voice site seems to be organized around a set of software tools offered by Kintera, a publicly-traded San Diego firm that specializes in helping non-profits do fundraising. The Kintera tools include a payment processing module. Is Voice gearing up for a subscription campaign? That’s just a guess. In any event VoiceofSanDiego bears watching. (Or is that listening?)

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Free (Unlimited Time) Offer

2005-05-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

A Chicago Tribune article earlier this month offered a lighthearted look at life as a series of subscriptions – to movie services, health clubs, music downloads, etcetera. It was an entertaining read that made me wonder: why then does conventional wisdom hold that there’s no way to charge for emerging media content such as blogs, podcasts and whatever else people are dreaming up?

Thanks to Rafat Ali’s Paid Content for pointing me to the Tribune article (quick and painless e-mail registration required for access).

To encapsulate that piece, people subscribe for services or goods they like because it makes consumption easy and eliminates the stress of having to make a purchase. The Trib quotes University of Toronto marketing professor Dilip Soman: "Once you've made that commitment, it's now a part of your monthly payment stream. It's not a lot of money, and it's often charged directly to your credit card. So the pleasure of the experience seems, psychologically, free."

Okay, so back to why-can’t-Mini-Media-types charge for content? I see three possibilities.

First, they produce the electronic equivalent of your least-favorite in-law’s political rants, or your neighbor’s vacation slide show.

Second, they’re willing to give it away (Have you signed up for MiniMediaGuy’s FREE, all-you-can-read, May special? Of course, I ran the same special in April and will probably extend the offer into June, so there’s no need to rush.).

Third, small producers don’t have access to the systems or technologies that would make it easy for viewers to subscribe – even if they had content worth buying. (Previously, I suggested that Mini Media producers would have to give away an electronic taste of their goodies, and sell physical artifacts that add value or create an identity for which people are more conditioned to pay.)

Payment issues get into a technical morass. I’ve blogged on those topics once or twice before, so I won’t gnaw on that old bone again today.

But I do believe that easy payment systems will be deployed -- and before the blogosphere starve for lack of cash or attention – and that smart, small producers will learn how to package content in ways that induce payment.

More importantly, people a whole lot smarter than me agree. (If you haven’t already seen it, check out the Googlezon bit). The central argument is this – the world is flooded with information, but much of it lost in the noise. In that environment, clarity should command a premium.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Farewell, Editor!

2005-05-17T08:20:00.000-07:00

Behavioral targeting should allow web publishers to deliver customized content and advertising by inferring what you might want to read or buy based on what you’ve already done. Some online firms are racing to deliver on this promise. Others say go slow. Is behavior the promise or the pitfall?

I won’t settle the issue in this post any more than I did in a previous posting that touched on the same topic, but two recent developments highlight the differing views.

Claria Corporation, a behavioral marketing firm, recently announced a product called PersonalWeb, saying it “will enable website publishers and content aggregators . . . to dynamically provide their audiences with personalized Web content, based on a broad spectrum of users' browsing behavior.”

At roughly the same time, the online newsletter MediaPost reported that Matt Freeman, chief executive of the interactive agency Tribal DDB advised caution in how behavioral targeting is employed, lest consumers lump this tool into the same category as spyware.

There is no indication from MediaPost’s report that Freeman was speaking about, nor was even aware of, Claria’s news. But his message highlighted the sensitivity of using browsing behavior in marketing or publishing. "How we do it will make all the difference," Freeman is quoted as saying.

Claria says it is already “serving tens of millions of consumers and more than 1000 Advertisers to date” with two behavioral offerings, the GAIN Network and BehaviorLink. PersonalWeb appears to offer the promise of allowing publishers to pour content into web pages, customized on the fly, by some analysis of recent browsing activity. The press release offers this example:

“If a user recently was researching retirement plans, spent time reading about mp3 players, was looking into travel to France, and viewing skiing sites, a Web site publisher could use PersonalWeb data to dynamically build a unique page for this individual user. Instead of showing generic common-interest content, the publisher could present reviews and offers from financial institutions, mp3 player reviews and discounts, and an article on skiing in the French Alps with links to tour companies.”

A separate MediaPost article alerted me to the Claria development. That article noted how PersonalWeb might change the very notion of “editing” insofar as it pertains to the selection and display of online content. Here is a snippet from MediaPost:

“The feature raises the question of how much control news publishers are willing to cede about the articles that are displayed on the landing page,’’ the article said, going on to quote a New York Times spokeswoman on the possible downside of personalization: "One benefit of the current format is that readers like to see the editorial judgment of our editors and reporters," said the spokeswoman.

What a shock it would be to editors and writers (like me) if browsers preferred to see only what they wanted – assuming that a set of computer algorithms could sleuth out their preferences.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Suddenly Great?

2005-05-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

About three dozen people gathered this weekend at the scenic Presidio, a former Army outpost at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge, to figure out how to popularize the notion and the practice that people should create and share, not merely consume, media.

Citizen media is the broad name for this movement. JD Lasica, cofounder of Ourmedia and an organizer of the conference, has listed the attendees and written a summary of the discussion. I have excerpted a couple of items of interest to me, and added links to other efforts or resources in this realm, so unless otherwise noted, the following is simply my condensation of JD’s post.

Chris Tolles with the San Jose startup Topix said: “If you create something of interest and collect an audience, you'll make money. The question has been raised: Why would someone participate in a citizen’s media effort? What's the motivation?”

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive among other things said: “We haven't cracked through the consciousness of much of the creative community yet. Ourmedia is really bottom up, but we're still missing the activists, the documentary folks, they're not putting their stuff online, why? It's a puzzle.”

Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, part-manifesto, part-guide to citizen media, announced the soft launch of a new citizen media enterprise, Bayosphere, a site that will apparently center on the San Francisco Bay Area and its technology industries.

In a similar vein the conference was attended by Mark Potts and Susan DeFife of Backfence, a new community media site that has debuted in the Virginia suburbs of metropolitan Washington, D.C.

One of the upshots of the weekend event was to plan for a larger gathering, perhaps under the auspices of a university. (In searching around this morning I noticed that the University of Maryland’s J-Lab is planning a “Citizens Media Summit” for October 24.)

Some other resources to better understand or create citizen media include a good overview in Online Journalism Review, and the Citizen Media Monitor and an accompanying list of initiatives.

Much work and disappointment lies ahead, and probably more than a little conflict, envy and bitterness. Creating something new isn’t easy. Creating something new that requires the participation of large numbers of people is tougher yet. But ultimately re-inventing media is one of the most important things in which any of us could participate. By coincidence, this morning I pulled a little saying out of a tin of uplifting quotes that my wife got me as a Christmas gift. Think of them as one-a-day-vitamins for the spirit. Today’s quote was from the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus: “No great thing is created suddenly.”

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Professional Blogging?

2005-05-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

I began this week with a tongue-in-cheek oxymoron (Intelligent Television?), so why not end on a similar note by mentioning the BlogNashville conference organized under the auspices of the Media Bloggers Association. A CNN report said the two-day event, which drew more than 300 bloggers, “was heavy on teaching techniques used by journalists. . . (such as) . . .how to access and analyze government statistics.”

Attendees include political blogger Glenn (Instapundit) Reynolds, citizen journalism activist JD (Ourmedia) Lasica and tech guru Dave (Scripting News) Winer, who apparently provoked a debate on the panel at which he spoke (shocking all who know of Dave – not).

My reference to the oxymoronic overtones of “professional blogging” was not intended as a slap at the blogosphere – which would certainly be foolish given that it might offend an estimated 31.6 million bloggers. Instead I want to think about the various meanings of "professional."

Sometimes we use the word to describe a standard of excellence, and the Nashville conference was intended to counter the condescension, prevalent in mainstream media, that bloggers are just opinionated blowhards with no respect for facts. (Though, honestly, with more than 30 million folks pounding keyboards as a hobby, you’re bound to find plenty of evidence of that.)

But amidst that noise some blogs stand out by virtue of their very clarity, such as one I tripped over this morning, in which Elise Bauer writes: “What is a blog, anyway? It's just a website. A website that is extremely easy to update with fresh content. A website that has built in capabilities - the ability to comment for example - for interacting with its readers. A website that has a personal voice.” As far as I’m concerned that’s a perfectly “professional” explanation. (FYI, you will find beaucoup information about the weblog tools market in one of her recent posts, and it was this entry, which popped up in a search, that allowed me to find her.)

So in my mind, the difference between the professional and non-professional writer is not necessarily that one is better than the other, but that one gets paid and the other has a hobby. Both types are surely welcome in the blogosphere. This is, as we like to say, a free country.

But so long as this is remains a hobby medium, where posters rely on day jobs (as do I, and as does Nashville conference organizer Bill Hobbs), then the blogosphere will represent what we might call the Blanche Dubois business model. You remember her parting line from Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.”

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Knockout Media

2005-05-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

Yahoo continues to evolve into the very model of the modern major media, the latest evidence being its deal to air a special webcast-only version of The Contender, the reality TV show where tough guys beat each other to evoke winces and howls from couch potatoes.

So what if this is a bit low brow for your tastes. This is brand extension and cross-platform marketing as it will be widely practiced because, in an age of audience fragmentation, when media find a niche they will fill its every crevice. (Thanks to Gavin O’Malley of Media Post for reporting on this and also mentioning that Yahoo and Mark Burnett (originator of both Contender and Survivor) will renew their current TV-web link around The Apprentice.)

Anyhow, I usually try to restrain myself from gushing over mass media doings, but this impressed me. Besides, I did find a related Yahoo development that is useful to all of us – a reminder that online publishers should not (if they can possibly help it) write advertising contracts that pay only for click-throughs or for transactions that are completed online.

“While consumers are using search engines to research financial services, many of those who convert to bank customers do so offline, according to a new report by Yahoo.” That’s how Media Post reporter Wendy Davis starts a story that will provide all the details on how many people were surveyed and what percentage opened what type of account online and how many performed the transaction over the counter (“38 percent of those who opened savings accounts did so in person”).

Online publishers will have to convince advertisers to give them some credit for page views, or perhaps come up with creative ways to induce consumers to mention whatever online advertisement prompted their action.

Finally, since you may be wondering: what do I think of Contender? Well, not much. It pains me to think that there is an audience for such fare, and that clever media people will dream up new ways to cater to such appetites. But the conundrum of a free society is that we often do not approve of how others choose to express their freedom. Oh, well.

Besides, I heard an uplifting thought at a conference for home-schooling parents that my wife dragged me to a few years ago. The speaker, whose name I can’t recall, mentioned that when Shakespeare was producing his plays, he had to compete with less savory entertainments. This morning I found a credible reference that said the theatre in which Shakespeare staged many of his famous productions “was in the 'sporting district' of Greater London, an area full of establishments accommodating pastimes condemned by the authorities, including the theatre, cock-fighting, bear-baiting and drinking in taverns.”

So if you aspire to produce content that appeals to the better angels of our nature, keep your chin up. Or is better to tuck it into your shoulder? I’m not sure. Tune in to The Contender for pointers on how to avoid taking one on the chin in the contest of ideas.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Pajama Party

2005-05-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

For argument’s sake, let’s say that bloggers as pontificators who work in their pajamas, and assume that they'd like to earn enough from their writings to buy some street clothes. If so, then the new-launched and aptly-named advertising service Pajamas Media may be the answer to their pecuniary and sartorial dreams.

Thanks to Darren Rowse, writing in WebProNews, for pointing me to the open letter which reveals that Pajamas Media will be “working in two areas - aggregating blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service.”

The letter is written by New York author Roger L. Simon, whose works include “The Big Fix,” the offbeat detective yarn made into the movie starring Richard Dreyfuss. His collaborators in Pajamas Media include Mark Danziger, who contributes to the group-blog Winds of Change, and Charles Johnson, of the eclectic Little Green Footballs (apropos of my comment in yesterday’s blog, Johnson sells t-shits at $20 a pop to help support his site.)

I was not familiar with these bloggers before I peeked behind their pajamas, so to speak, but my cursory examination suggests they represent the spectrum of political commentators and probably want to build a network with an even greater diversity of views.

Danziger’s comments about Pajamas Media resonated with my own focus on business models. While he said much of the planning for this new network had to be carried on in private, he offered these insights which I will excerpt below in an abbreviated form:

“As someone who writes business models the way other folks do grocery lists,” says Danzinger, “(I believe) in the power of the Internet to disintermediate . . . middlemen in the economy (who) really do three things - they help you find things, they buffer supply, and they catalog information.”

He goes on to say: “Two of those three things are done better by information services, and one of them is done better by the manufacturer . . . And the questions will be how to build useful interfaces between that world and the highly structured world of advertisers, media consumers, and blog novices while respecting the dynamic nature of the blogs themselves.”

Interesting. I wish he and his collaborators well. Here’s one other useful bit from his post: “If you're a blogger and interested in signing up to Phase I, which will be - in simple terms - an ad network, send an email to join-(at)-pajamasmedia.com and you'll hear back about some next steps.”

One snarky note in closing. In his open letter, Simon writes: "With respect to advertising, we do not wish to go into competition with Henry Copeland's BlogAds (the political ad service that boomed during the 2004 election). That seems like a bit of poetic license, not a credible business plan. But, hell, what would I know. I'm just some guy sitting here in my pajamas.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Post-Network Media

2005-05-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday’s post about Intelligent Television, reminds me of a recent white paper entitled Television networks in the 21^st Century. It discusses audience fragmentation and suggests ways for mass media to respond. I think those same lessons apply to small producers, or mini media, to use my parlance.

The paper was written by the media group at Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm. It came to my attention via Paid Content.

The authors note that mass audiences are dissolving into niches, creating what they call “the aggravation of fragmentation.” At the same time “demand for content in all forms of media is way up,’’ citing cable subscriptions and DVD revenues as two examples of increased spending on video. They postulate that the emergence of the Internet Protocol for Television will create new broadcast revenue streams by enabling the delivery of content-on-demand via cable or DSL networks. (I’ll come back to this in a future post but meanwhile this trade newsletter offers a starting point for research.)

The paper’s intriguing suggestion is that networks broaden, deepen and lengthen their relationship with viewers: broaden by using new channels (i.e. portable devices), deepen (by offering services), and lengthen (by offering physical products to complement shows). I suppose this means “I Survived Survivor” t-shirts” and “So you wanna be an Apprentice” job fairs.

So I say if mass media is going to employ these techniques, then why not mini media as well? A small producer who creates a show that builds a following might sell t-shirts to harvest revenues from viewers. They’re easy to produce in small lots and people like to wear them. The same is true for bumper stickers, buttons and posters. We may be living in a niche world, but we’re not living in it alone. People wear to wear the insignias of the groups to which they belong. Use that to your advantage.

Likewise, once you create a media identity and draw an audience, it may lend itself to a conference or a gathering. If you can identify a sponsor who wants to reach your affinity group, you may have a business model.

I’m not suggesting any of this is easy. I’m sure it’s a relentless cycle of hard work and disappointment. But media seem to be headed toward free content. That’s what media baron Rupert Murdoch suggested in a recent speech. When I blogged about it, I suggested that content was flypaper designed to catch eyeballs. I was referring to advertising. Perhaps I need to enlarge my horizons. How about five bucks for a bumper sticker that says: “I’m Big on Mini Media?”

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Intelligent Television?

2005-05-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Television is not an oxymoron. Rather, it is a production company funded by foundations or hired by libraries to make non-fiction documentaries. Founder Peter Kaufman recently delivered a speech that was something of a tease. He extolled open content and hinted that at business models to be built around it – beyond “get a grant” -- without actually revealing any. So while not immediately useful to Mini Media types working in video, his speech made some interesting observations about non-fiction publishing and pointed to several initiatives of interest to those who live in the reality-based world.

Thanks to Paid Content for steering me to the speech, which Kaufman delivered at the launch of the Creative Archives – another story all in itself, a project that aims to make certain audio-visual material produced in the United Kingdom freely available, in digital form, to residents of that nation.

In any event, preaching to this choir, Kaufman said: “in publishing, music, television, film, art, software, and technology, there are business cases—simple business cases, and sophisticated business cases—that support the economic wisdom of providing certain sectors of society, and sometimes the public as a whole, with materials, intellectual property, knowledge, and know-how for free.”

What those business cases might be, Kaufman did not reveal. But he did say that “Intelligent Television is launching this May a year-long study on the economics of open content,” funded by the Hewlett Foundation. Added Kaufman: “I will be able to say more in a few months.”

(A recent conference, also funded by the Hewlett folks, is a repository of information on open content. In his remarks, Kaufman also mentioned the National Audio Visual Conservation Center, a project led by the Library of Congress that already houses some three million recorded sound items and one million moving image items and is expected to open in 2007.)

Judged by his own remarks, Kaufman directed his speech at librarians, archivists, foundation officers and media people. “Almost all of us here are all in the business of nonfiction,” he said.

That is the takeaway for the Mini Media community. Most information products are produced to explain what we need to know. While entertainment may get all the glamour, media’s bread is buttered by training, self-improvement, education, history, news and all the other sorts of information that we look for when, for instance, we’re shopping for a new car. Making ourselves useful may be the best way to make money. I’ll look for more on this score when Kaufman releases the results of the study he mentioned in his speech.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Go-Go Media

2005-05-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

Given the ferment in mobile media, I want to pull together some technical, licensing and legal developments, beginning with Nokia’s plans to introduce a mobile phone with a hard drive.

MocoNews lays out the details in a recent post: the device will have a hard drive capable of holding 3,000 songs and “supports a range of music formats including MP3, M4A, AAC and WMA.” In advance of that announcement debate had already begun over whether music-enabled cell phones would kill Apple’s iPod, a notion which Paid Content threw out there on the same day on which it pointed to a report that number-two cell phone maker Motorola was planning to release a phone capable of playing iTunes.

I’m not going to waste a word worrying about the fate of hardware vendors. The more the merrier so far as content creators are concerned. Instead, I stand, slack-jawed, in the face of these and other developments in the mobile realm – notably the emergence of powerful, hand-held gaming devices such as the PSP (Surely you saw that Sony has contracted with AtomFilms to offer “free downloadable video content” for its walkabout media player?).

So, to borrow a phrase, it’s mobility, stupid.

I direct that remark to myself, the print dinosaur who only joined the online party in 2005. I am apparently one of 10 million new bloggers to have logged on since the start of the year! That estimate comes from a recent survey which places the total number of blogs just above 30 million. (On a parochial note, the report’s authors say blog fever began became contagious after Northern California tech guru Dave Winer got Harvard University to back the Bloggercon 2000 conference.)

Now, five years later, the restless frontiers of media and technology seem to have leapt off the desktop and onto the handhelds, leaving us late arrivals word-smiths eating dust. Oh, well.

Meanwhile, back at the cutting edge, the law (in the form of self-regulation) is racing to add a semblance of civilization to the mobile content gold rush. Thanks to Paid Content for pointing out that cellular companies are working on mobile content ratings to help parents ensure that the kiddies don’t download the naughty stuff. “Our job is to provide choice and provide control,” Cingular vice president Jim Ryan is quoted as saying.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Upstart Media

2005-05-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot of talk these days about citizen media – individuals or small groups taking the news into their own hands. There’s a lot of action as well. Against this backdrop, ten local groups were each awarded $12,000 grants in April to launch or continue citizen media sites.

The grants were awarded through the New Voices program of the Institute for Interactive Journalism. The grant program runs through 2006, so I guess there will be a new round of seed money offered next spring. I blogged about the current competition in February but was not among this year’s 243 applicants.

The winners are an eclectic in every way but I note that at least four of the 10 plans had a strong audio component. KRFP News, for instance, is a low-power FM station in Moscow, Idaho. The Hartsville Messenger is an effort in South Carolina that will include training citizen journalists to produce audio. A site called kaPow aims to create a hip-hop portal in Philadelphia. Loisaida Speaks will start training young women on the Lower East Side of New York in podcasting.

The other grantees may plan similar audio efforts, but those examples were enough to corroborate my own notion that listening, rather than reading or watching, is the growth area when it comes to absorbing media. Video certainly won’t go away but I think shows will get shorter or go away and turn into bits. And writing will remain the foundation of knowledge. It may be a failure of imagination on my part but I cannot imagine anything that replaces the clarity of linear thought as expressed through the written word.

But when I think as a businessman in search of an expanding market, and as a communicator who wants to make the info-product easy to absorb, it occurs to me that fastest way into a person’s brain is to whisper into their ears.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Money (and Belated Thanks)

2005-05-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

Advertising is the chief source of revenues for most Web publishers, and though I think that will change, I want to discuss an article about the response rate that online retailers are getting from net ads. Their experience provides benchmark numbers for small publishers trying to project realistic cash flows (as well as helping small e-retailers comprehend pay-per-click ad pricing).

I’m relying on a recent piece in Internet Retailer. It reports on a survey of 250 online retailers. The survey found that four out of ten retailers are now getting a better response to their ads now than they were a year ago. Another 23 percent said response rates were about the same. That suggests – though it was not stated explicitly – that more than a third of the respondents saw a decrease in response rate.

The key concept to understand is conversion rate: how many of those who see an advertisement click on that ad. The article said 70 percent of respondents had conversion rates of two percent or better. Two percent is considered the norm. (Again I infer that 30 percent had response rates below the norm.) Nearly half of the retailers surveyed had conversion rates above three percent. A third of the respondents reported click-through rates of four percent or better.

Publishers can use these numbers as follows: if you know how many page views you generate, multiply this number by the two percent response rate to estimate how many billable clicks you should expect. To arrive at revenues is more difficult because the pay-per-click rates are so varied. (I’m sorry but I don’t have a current average at hand.)

E-tailers can use these metrics to start learning the pay-per-click bidding game. Before you try, however, study this primer from ClickZ and follow the links for further research. Errors can be costly. A recent CNet article says “millions of U.S. merchants . . . lack the time or energy to master the game of Internet promotion.”

Let me shift gears.

I want to thank Dana Blankenhorn, author of the Moore’s Law blog, for his flattering note about my work as MiniMediaGuy. This blog started as a New Year’s resolution. I love the research and writing but am utterly baffled by the technical aspects of this craft, such laying trackbacks and creating blog rolls. I will learn these tricks eventually, but my time is limited by job and family responsibilities. Meanwhile, I remain all the more grateful that this seasoned writer and blogger has looked past my inadequacies at the thoughts and ideas I am trying to express here.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Napsterized News

2005-05-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

Two news industry executives from E.W. Scripps have proposed the creation of “a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service” to compete with the Associated Press. Their article, published in Online Journalism Review, is more a trial balloon than a fully-fledged proposal but it’s certain to cause a stir.

Thanks to Andi Silver (of AndiLinks) who sent me the OJR piece after having read my three-intallment blog entry, Food for Thought, in which I called for the creation of media cooperative.

In contrast to my Joe Blogger dreams, however, Scripps executives Bob Benz and Mike Phillips are guys with the juice and the backing to make something happen. Scripps is also a chain that traces its history to the days when daily newspapers were the upstart medium. Nearly a century ago Scripps helped launch United Press International to compete with the AP. So there’s a deep back story to their OJR piece that will be known to their fellow news industry execs.

Of more importance to Mini Media types, however, is how Benz and Phillips see the world: “From blogs to open-source journalism to free newspapers, a wave of unpaid information is sweeping paid information off the media beach,’’ they write. “As content loses value, expert editing and customer-driven bundling are becoming the tools for building audience. And audience -- not content -- is the news industry’s value proposition.”

The last point is profound. In the media evolution occurring now, those who command attention will rule. Incumbent media may seem like dinosaurs today. In time, however, I think they will adjust their cost structure, reduce in-house staff and expense, and become conduits for user-generated content. I say this as one who works in media, likes what he does, and appreciates the salary and the benefits. Yet I begin to appreciate how buggy whip makers must’ve felt.

I scanned the OJR piece for clues as to how the Scripps guys would pay for all the groovy content that folks would bring to their media pot-luck. “Sharing,” they suggest, “would be governed by a karmic balance. The more you make available to the network, the more you can take out. An organization with a karmic deficit would have to true up by paying a surcharge.”

Okay. So when it comes time to pay my mortgage I just tell Citibank to debit my karmic balance?

Of course not! Because the Scripps plan wasn’t meant to address the needs of content creators like me. Instead it proposes a federation of feudal lords. That’s not meant to disparage the idea, because it might work and it might be an important step toward where ever media are migrating, just as the Magna Carta was a way station on the road to representative government.

But just as that agreement was a ways away from where we are today, the Scripps idea is a ways away from where media needs to go – and that is to a place where content, and its creators, have worth and value. Otherwise, the people who make media will hold out their bowls like so many Oliver Twists and say to the distributors with cracking voices, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Web Grammar (Occasional Thoughts)

2005-05-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

Writing about Web comics two weeks ago, I used a phrase that went something like this: Internet publishing is about short, sharp, powerful bursts intended to convey a point, arouse an emotion, or elicit a reaction. Hardly a unique realization but one that touches one of the core attributes of the Internet – this medium makes it easy to share material with others of like mind. So when we package stuff in ways that are easy to share, we leverage the Web.

The best known example of this trend is the illicit sharing of music files. But the strength of the underlying technology is elegantly explained in a recent Reuters article: “Peer-to-peer, or P2P, software allows users to connect directly to each others' computers, bypassing the powerful servers that underpin much of the Internet. Web pages, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and other material usually stored on servers can thus be made public directly from a user's hard drive.”

The article went on to spotlight P2P applications outside the music realm, including Shinkuro, which enables the creation of secure collaborative groups that include (and therefore exclude). “High-school teachers in Washingtonhave turned to Shinkuro to develop lesson plans,’’ the article noted, adding, “Two online standards-setting bodies, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, have developed agendas and other material with Shinkuro.’’

Wikis are another collaborative environment, but they operate, I think, more from an egalitarian presumption that all comers will be allowed to join and on an equal footing.

These and similar technologies enable people to tap each other on the shoulder, share information and complete tasks. So if the novelty is in the ease of sharing without regard to physical proximity, it follows that when we create material for the Web, one guiding rule should be to make that material easy to share.

With regard to writing, the form of communication with which I’m most familiar, this would make conciseness and usefulness prime virtues. In searching for the phrase “grammar of the Web,” I came across an interesting comment in this regard: “writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. People read differently . . . jumping from one piece of content to the next. People are more action-oriented on the Web. They get online to get something done.”

Following that comment by Web designer Gerry McGovern led me a list of 10 rules for Internet writing – many of which seem equally appropriate to the creation of audiovisual content. Make the stuff easy to digest and, by extension, easy to pass around, because when material finds a friendly mind it doesn’t want to simply rest there. It wants to Move On.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Silly Stuff

2005-04-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

Let me cap off a rough week with some passing thoughts on some items stacked up in my “to blog” file, beginning with a scholarly tidbit from London arguing that email distraction shaves 10 points off a person’s IQ, more than twice the damage inflicted by smoking cannabis.

Thanks to MediaDailyNews for pointing me to a brief article on VNUNet.com that says researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry studied 1,100 volunteers to find out what made them goofier – the constant distraction of reading and answering emails, or going one toke over the line.

Cyber-distraction purportedly trumped cannabis. “This constant shifting of concentration makes the brain more tired and less focused, and causes the temporary IQ fall-off,” wrote VNU reporter Iain Thompson. I did a quick search to find a second source on the study but found nothing. An item like this would be called a “brite” in the newspaper biz, a story meant to raise a smile rather than to inform. And if it sounds too silly to be true, well, it probably is. But why let facts stand in the way of a good story?

Speaking of the newspaper biz, author Adam Penenberg recently wrote a piece for Wired News on the soul-searching going on at New York University, where he is an assistant journalism professor, about how to better prepare students for the media of the future. “In our classes, we discuss wikis and Wi-Fi, and invite bloggers and online reporters to share their experiences with us,” he writes. “We debate "citizen journalism" and journalistic ethics. We encourage creativity, but not at the expense of clarity.” New York University is also home to Jay Rosen, whose PressThink blog offers insightful commentary on new media.

Did I day new media? Well, shame on me because, as Jim Meskauskas notes in a recent commentary for MediaPost’s Online Spin, Web-based media are no longer “new” at least in the sense of being weak or untried. He cited a survey which found that “the Internet had a daily reach of 51 percent” exceeding that of magazines, which “only had a daily reach among general audiences of 42 percent.” I looked for the original study but all I could find was a lengthier article in MediaWeek that added details. Now I don’t know whether I’m losing my search skills (probably distracted by answering emails) or organizations are forgetting that one of the newest things about new media is the ability to lead people to the complete and direct information.

As long as I’m venting, let me take exception to a snarky comment in Paid Content noting that some “websites, especially consumer websites, are launching print magazines.” I’m miffed because I recently suggested that it made sense to pair print and online publications. So I felt miffed when Paid Content introduced its item by saying, “this thing (print offshoots of Web media) comes and goes in phases.” Of course, I was unaware of that this tactic had been tried and abandoned several times before until Paid Content pointed me to an article on the topic in MediaWeek. Is there anything more annoying than having to rethink a pet idea in the light of evidence to the contrary?

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Side Doors

2005-04-28T06:35:00.000-07:00

Today I want to add a few thoughts about drawing traffic to small Web sites, following up on the notion I advanced yesterday, that many visitors are drawn to sites by search pages that bring them past the home page. In short, people are finding sites they wouldn't normally visit. Yesterday's blog talked about the tactics big publishers are using to keep visitors inside their site once they arrived. So if site visits are occurring serendipitously, are there ways to aid that process alolng? I'm not qualified to discuss search engine optimizatioh, a separate art with many gurus, Instead I'm thinking out loud about what might make people spend a little more time on a site, or come back for more, once they stumble across it. My first thought is that every aspiring destination -- and that's what publishers should want to be -- should try to support a daily editorial cartoon appropriate to its target audience. This should be a featured item, visible when traffic arrives at the home page and, given the likelihood of side door visits, an item that flows to inner pages, pehaps as a small graphic that can be enlarged with a click. This may seem like a frill but think about life from the viewer's side of the computer screen. People are busy. When they visit a site they are grazing and restless. If your site can deliver a chuckle for a few seconds of attention, that may help you get remembered. If cartoons are hard to come by in your niche, or seem inappropriate to your material, would periodic photos accomplish much the same purpose of offering a quick visual surprise? Another traffic building tactic that occurs to me is the creation of regular features: every Monday summarize the conferences in your niche; every Friday recap big developments in the prior week; every Wednesday profile some person or product. Create regular islands of useful content. Whatever you can think of that is relatively easy to gather and yet valuable when assembled in one place. You are trying to make your site habit forming. Structure should help. Finally, something else I have yet to do in this hobby blog -- provide a link list or blog roll, or access to other data that makes your site a convient bookmark on somebody else's page. They remember that if they want to find such and such piece of information, the quickest way is by going to your site. When you start to create that sort of mind-presence then your site has developed a solid audience. I know that all of these are suggestions I need to follow myself, and that this post is even lamer than usual. I am traveling and using borrowed equipment, and have to run momentarily (or the dog will eat my homework). Be back tomorrow, from home, where my newly purchased Web page development package (SJ Namo toolkit) sits unopened on the desk of my home office, taunting me to follow my own advice. It's enough to make a MiniMediaGuy feel, well, even smaller. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

(No One At) Home Page?

2005-04-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

A majority of visitors come to big news sites by clicking on links that bring them directly to some story, bypassing the home page – and any advertising attached thereto. An excellent article by Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing documents the trend and suggests designs that can redirect visitors to other pages on-site. I want to add a few thoughts on how small publishers should factor this behavior into their page planning, and perhaps use this bypass behavior to their advantage.

“With home-page visits at most news sites coming in at between 25% and 50% of total vists,” web designers are coming to understand that every article should be presented as a gateway to the site, rather than as a destination, Outing writes. He notes that at CSMonitor.com (the Christian Science Monitor) “only 23% of its visitors' sessions (come) in via the home page.” The article quotes CSM’s Joel Abrams as saying "a shockingly high percentage of those sessions that start on a story end on that story."

Visitors brought to individual stories by “deep links” may bypass registration requirements. Outing points to a 2002 article in Internet News about how some publishers argued that deep links constituted copyright infringement, a claim which courts have generally pooh-poohed.

Outing suggests that, rather than fight the trend, Web designers acknowledge that visitors will enter their sites through side doors, and redesign their article pages as mini-home pages – walking the line between larding up the page with so much stuff that its loads slowly, while providing enough navigation links to encourage visitors to go elsewhere within the same site.

Outing’s favorite example of this was the Toronto Globe & Mail which presents articles alongside links to related pieces and clickable navigation tools. He quotes Globe & Mail website manager Angus Frame as saying:

“We turned every story into a mini hub . . . Literally overnight daily page-views increased by more than 25 percent, from about 2.3 million pageviews a day to 3.0 million pageviews a day. That works out to about one extra pageview for each daily unique visitor to the site.”

Outing’s article focused on Editor & Publisher’s constituents in the daily news biz, but its lessons seem to apply equally to small publishers. In fact I find it encouraging that visitors are being drawn to content by links. It suggests that viewers may judge content on its merits, rather than on its pedigree. Of course, all things being equal, branded content will have more credibility for now.

But if a visitor arrives at a small site in pursuit of some bit of knowledge, and finds the article well done, that’s a potential convert. By all means make sure the page layout suggests that there are other interesting bits to be found here, and offer easy ways to subscribe to periodic updates.

Of course, given my pathetic ignorance of HTML, I have no idea how easy or difficult it is to create templates that would accomplish such ends. If anyone can point to small sites that provide good examples of this, or can explain how much effort would be required, that would be most helpful.

Let me close today by thanking Paid Content for pointing me to Outing’s article. Tomorrow I want to pursue this thread further by suggesting how small publishers can use this side-door entry trend as a traffic builder.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Level Playing Field

2005-04-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

Google’s plan to offer advertising based on impressions, in addition to clicks, gives a potential boost to small publishers that have developed a strong editorial focus. It gives them access to the same sort of advertising support currently enjoyed by newspapers and other media that get paid to deliver audiences -- not keywords.

Online Media Daily’s version of the story focused on Google’s reasons for the changes (the search engine will also accept flashier ads). I’ll look at this from the publisher’s view.

Getting paid for impressions means publishers can expect to collect a fee for every thousand visits to their site. This might be $2 to $20 per thousand, often referred to as $2 to $20 CPM (rough estimates). Publishers who get paid for clicks only collect a fee when a visitor clicks on an advertisement and follows the link to the advertiser’s destination. Pay-per-click rates range from a few cents to many dollars per click, depending on what is being advertised. Last time I looked in fall 2004 (for a business plan that I have since buried) the average pay-per-click rate was about 40 cents. And the click-through rate ranged from 0.5 percent to 2.5 percent (how many visitors per hundred clicked, thus triggering payment).

Much has been written about click fraud, “the practice of skewing pay-per-click advertising data by generating illegitimate hits,” as Wired News put it in one article. Again, that is a problem for Google and its advertisers. I have other concerns.

Click-through models force Web publishers to meet a higher standard of advertising performance than competing media. A radio station gets paid based on the size of its audience, and draws advertising based on the nature of that audience, which is linked to its programming. Ditto for newspapers and television. In the click-through world, Web sites must send audience members jumping through hoops to get paid.

If Google’s move toward impression advertising sticks, it will reward Web publishers for becoming brands that deliver content that draws a predictable following. CNet’s report on Google’s move quoted Kevin Lee, president of the search engine marketing firm Did-It: "Clearly, this is an attempt to get at brand advertisers." (CNet also offers a synopsis of how Google’s program, Site Targeting, will work.)

Large branded media sites are in the best position to capitalize on Site Targeting. But small publishers may be able to get a bigger share of the ad dollars being spent. Say you have a wine lovers site, and you notice that a big wine label is placing impression ads through Google on Big Media Sites. Do a little guerilla selling. Figure out who at the wine label makes or influences the advertising decision and get your content before them. It can all be done with e-mails. All the advertiser would have to do is divert a little bit of money your way to make a big difference.

Finally, I wonder if impression ads and click through models can be combined. After complaining that click through payments are unfair, it may seem hypocritical to observe that online advertising can be different than print or broadcast. People can interact (they don’t do so often, but they can). Is it possible that Web publishers can offer a hybrid ad model: a low base rate for the impressions that fuel the basic content engine (and give the advertiser visibility), and a second payment for that fraction of visitors who follow the link that says “click here for special savings today.”

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Self-Correcting Media?

2005-04-25T07:35:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I corrected an earlier post that had confused two people with the same name. A good corrections policy helps small publishers by giving them some protection against lawsuits while bolstering their credibility. We can handle our own sites easily enough. But is there a technical way to notify readers and thereby actively correct errors propagated by our work?

My mistake involved a posting on emerging audio networks, specifically a reference to a non-profit group called the Real Public Radio Network formed by Scott Converse. I confused that person with an information technology professor of the same name. An anonymous comment alerted me to the error about a week ago but I only slowed down to correct the entry on Sunday.

Before doing so, I happened to read a posting by Sam Whitmore that referenced a prior note by Jonathan Dube. He had complimented Business 2.0 for correcting an error in plain sight – striking over the erroneous copy and making the fix visible – rather than rewriting the original post as if the entry had never been wrong.

That seems like a good idea. It allows readers to know the magnitude of the error as well as the correct information. I adopted the same approach though in a less elegant fashion (I didn’t know how to overstrike the text). In the future -- though I hope my correction will be few -- I will try this: fix the wrong sentences or paragraphs in the body of the blog and put an asterisk at the end of the line to reference the error, which I will place at the bottom of the posting.

Correcting errors can be a first line of defense against lawsuits. I’m not sure it’s an ironclad remedy, but if you get a valid complaint about libel or invasion of privacy, correcting the offensive material may solve the problem – or at least demonstrate your intent to act reasonably should the aggrieved party file suit. (Note: if you are correcting a false and defamatory statement, amend my suggestion in the previous paragraph and simply strike the wrong material and leave a note at the bottom of the page saying you have removed an error. Add a sincere apology.)

Okay, so we can do online what traditional publishers do in print. But can we do more? Can we track down people who’ve gotten the wrong poop and set the record straight? I may simply be exposing my technical ignorance, but I imagine it could be done like this.

What if interested readers left a marker on a site saying “ping me if you have follow ups on this topic.” A correction would be one form of follow up. So would a subsequent posting on that topic. RSS might be the vehicle to accomplish this. Rather than subscribe to the entire blog, people could limit their interests to themes. I don’t know if this would be practical, as it would require that publishers imprint individual postings with some unique marker. (Confession: my tech knowledge is so weak I still haven’t figured out basic RSS.)

My technical embarrassment aside, if there is a way to send out correction notices to readers, I’d like to know it. And if there isn’t such a utility, it seems worth inventing as a way to improve the credibility of e-publishers. Currently cyberspace has a reputation for unreliability as compared to traditional media. If e-publishers can create systems to actively correct misimpressions or misinformation, they could turn the tables on print or broadcast publishers who would have no comparable way to make their media self-correcting.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Le Funny Pages

2005-04-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

Memo to self: for a glimpse at the likely future Web publishing, learn more about is and has been happening with Web comics.

I’ve been collecting odds and ends on this topic, including this lovely entry from Paid Content that bounced off a BoingBoing post about the French Web site and community, Gnomz, that now has an English-language offshoot where people can sign in, turn on their creativity, and ‘toon out.

There is sooooo much comic activity in the cyber realm that a dilettante like moi needs roadmaps like Yahoo’s directory page to point the way. Even my tourist-like stumblings disclosed a nascent trade organization, the International Comic Arts Association. But is it the only or the first such group, or did it rise out of the composted detritus of a struggle amongst competing factions of comic-dom that annihilated each other in pointless and bitter internecine conflict? I don’t know.

What I do know, or perhaps it's more accurate to say I suspect, is that Web comics are electronic heirs to those trailblazers of niche culture, the print Zines that flourished (still flourished?) in the recent past when the copier and fax machine were state-of-the-art in distribution.

I know even more certainly, because my eyes do not deceive me, that comic sites are visually powerful and organized in ways that can teach us things about Web design and layout. Take, for instance, Broken Frontier, a comic portal which I visited to learn a little more about Mike Bullock, who wrote about the comic trade organization referenced above.

I think Web comics may exemplify what Internet publishing seems to be about: short, sharp, powerful bursts of whatever form of communication is chosen to convey the point, arouse the emotion, or elicit the desired reaction.

Web comics may be a lowest common denominator art media form without necessarily being lowbrow. When I was a Navy sailor in the Philippines nearly 30 years ago, I saw comic novels published in Tagalog. More recently I see them being read in Spanish on the sidewalks of metropolitan San Francisco. To find evidence of comic popularity I need look no further than my living room couch, where my sons love to read book-form collections of strips like Boondocks. Hell, I’ve been known to pick up the Cartoon Guide to Genetics or Physics or for a quick brain dump on genes or quarks.

I came across a review of a short tract called The Rise of the Graphic Novel. The review suggested the book was only a primer on the topic rather than the last word. And there’s a convenient closing note because the same is true for this post.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media