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Posted 5:17 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Creativity (Not Size) Matters
Steve Outing on online advertising
I just experienced what I think is a brilliant piece of online advertising. If every online ad was this well conceived (pardon the pun), Web advertising would be doing great. What this is is an interactive Flash animation for a condom maker, in the guise of a game that you play to estimate the size of a man's (ummm) private parts. SizeHimUp is touted as a way for a woman to guess how "big" a guy is, by entering such data as hand, shoe, and nose size. Once the data's all in, the ad estimates size and recommends a particular condom. (The game carries a disclaimer that scientists find no correlation between penis size and that of noses, hands, and feet.) Superb marketing that's entertaining and funny. Bravo. (Thanks to Sex News Daily publisher Jeff Laurie for pointing out this ad.)
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Posted 4:50 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Hang In There, TinyURL!
Steve Outing on online business models
A website I find to be indispensable at times is TinyURL, a free service that allows you to take a long URL and turn it into a short one. (E.g., here's a TinyURL to my most recent Editor & Publisher column: http://tinyurl.com/10vq.) The service appears to have no business model, so I asked TinyURL creator Kevin Gilbertson for some reassurance that his service won't disappear when high usage starts to result in serious bandwidth use and costs. Here's his response: "Actually, donations (via PayPal) have been much more than I have expected and have covered the expenses for the site. I do have some ideas of things to add to the service and then charge a membership fee just for the extras, but I'd like to keep the service as it is, free to use, and so far it's worked quite well."
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Posted 1:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Librarians On Call
Steve Outing on a resource for reporters
For journalists without the luxury of having a staff news librarian to consult, SearchDay had a good suggestion yesterday: The U.S. Library of Congress offers an Ask a Librarian service online. Just type in your question on a Web form, and a staff librarian will try to find your answer. (In some cases, your question will be forwarded to other librarians participating in the QuestionPoint global collaborative reference service.) The downside to this free service is that it can take up to five days to get back an answer. But as the SearchDay article points out, there are hundreds of other "ask a librarian" services available on the Web, including at local libraries — and they may be faster. (Here's a locator for such services.) Small news organizations without the resources to staff an internal library can certainly benefit from these free services.
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Posted 11:37 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
User-Generated Wireless Content
Rich Gordon on the mobile future
On TheFeature.com (an interesting site I didn't know about until now), John Geirland wonders whether user-generated content can be as powerful in the wireless world as it has proven to be on the wider Web. He describes some interesting applications already in place, including Virgin Mobile's Youth Phone, which allows customers to rate music, and a Los Angeles company that has created a tool enabling people to create a cartoon character to deliver their mobile messages. Geirland also acknowledges the limitations: (1) mobile devices are mostly a tool for one-to-one communication; (2) people pay for their "bits" in the wireless world, so they don't want to get a lot of garbage; and (3) display devices are very different (color vs. black and white, screen sizes, etc.). But his basic premise is worth contemplating. It seems clear that the wired Web is more powerful as a many-to-many communication tool than as a one-to-many publishing system. The Wireless Web may prove to be the same.
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Posted 4:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
E-mail as Trespassing
David Carlson on Internet law
Talk about a fascinating lawsuit. Ken Hamidi is being sued by Intel, his former employer, for trespassing — with e-mail. Hamidi was fired by Intel in 1995, and he reacted by criticizing the company in thousands of e-mails he sent to his former co-workers. Intel sued him, and now, the California Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether unwanted e-mail "is a form of electronic trespassing, as Intel contends, or an expression of free speech," the Wall Street Journal reports. Intel already has won three rounds in court, but the Journal reports that the ACLU, the EFF, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce now have filed friend of the court briefs on both sides of the case."At issue is whether an unwanted, unsolicited e-mail can be actionable as a form of trespass," the Journal reported Wednesday. Hamidi supporters contend that an Intel victory could mean anybody could be sued for trespass just because of the presence of an electronic signal. "The soul of the Internet is at stake here," his lawyer is quoted as saying. I'm not sure whose side I'm on. I never thought I'd oppose any kind of free speech, but I could do with a lot less spam in my inbox.
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Posted 2:36 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Content Is King
Carla Passino on the phenomenal success of InstaPundit
I chanced upon InstaPundit's traffic report yesterday (there is a link to it from the bottom of the home page) and was shocked to discover that it gets nearly 27,000 user visits per day. Although I knew it to be one of the most popular weblogs, I simply did not expect its success to be so staggering. What's more, InstaPundit is a one-man show. University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds updates his blog constantly throughout the day — but he has hardly spent a minute (or a cent) to publicize it. "I'm as surprised as anyone at the amount of traffic I've gotten," he says. "I e-mailed stories to journalists I mentioned. I posted links to InstaPundit on Slate's 'The Fray.' And I altered my signature line for Slashdot postings to include a link to InstaPundit. That's basically it. No PR agent, no big PR plan, and most definitely no PR budget." Call it the revenge of editorial over marketing.Reynolds puts his success down to a mix of frequent updates, heavy linkage to other sites, "and the fact that my views are quirky enough that people don't always know what to expect." It is the links that make the difference, in his opinion. "There's a tendency in Big Media journalism to try to keep readers on your site by minimizing outbound links. I do the opposite: I actively try to drive traffic to other sites as part of my effort to build up the Blogosphere. But I think it's repaid itself with more traffic. There may be a lesson there." Instapundit's stats now compete with some established media outlets.
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Posted 2:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Publisher Cooperation Fails, Again
Norbert Specker on online business models
Versum is an online classifieds cooperative between a dozen German publishers. It was founded in March 2000 and will be liquidated by the end of this year. After many of the first partners announced their withdrawal, WAZ and Holtzbrink tried to save the project. (Source: Netzeitung, in German.)This is only one in a long line of failed online cooperative efforts between publishers around the world. Cooperatives that tend to lack the full trust of all partners suffer from hesitant/weary execution, and seldom win. To be fair, very often a key impediment is the harmonization of the various and vastly diverse legacy systems of the partners, which eats more resources and takes more time than anticipated. But there is also the inherent conflict — in most cases living within the representatives of the partners — of the common goal (to win the online classified space in Germany in this instance) and the particular goal (to strengthen the online position of each publication).
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Posted 12:15 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
History Repeats Itself
David Carlson on the media business
Remember "printers," the men and women who ran the linotype machines, made up hot-type pages and later did paste-ups in cold-type printing plants? Vin Crosbie's item yesterday, called "Adapt to Newsroom Innovations or Be Phased Out," reminds me of what happened to composing rooms (not to mention the railroads). In the late 1980s, when pagination was looming, I was the "back-shop editor" at the Albuquerque Tribune (New Mexico) — the last pair of eyes that approved pages to go from composing to plate-making. One day I overheard the foremen going among the printers to ask if they knew how to type. The next day there was a notice on the composing room bulletin board offering free typing lessons — and release time — to all who were interested. Few of them were. One guy told me, "I'm a printer, not a typist. I have a trade." Guess where he is now? Unemployed. He made the same mistake the railroads did — they thought they were in the railroad business instead of the transportation business.
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Posted 11:49 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Merrill Brown: From Free to Fee
Steve Outing on an online pioneer
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that former MSNBC.com editor Merrill Brown has accepted a new job, as senior vice president of RealNetworks' consumer unit (which sells subscriptions to audio and video content). The new job of course keeps Brown in new media and content, but represents a major shift in that MSNBC.com has been dedicated to giving away its news and content, while RealNetworks' focus is on charging for subscriptions.
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Posted 11:15 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
An Interesting Correction Technique
Steve Outing on fixing weblog mistakes
In an item on his weblog yesterday, Adrian Holovaty used a corrections technique I haven't seen used much. In the item "Wednesday's lunchtime links" (last paragraph), he lined through part of a sentence (so you could still read what the item said when originally posted) and then corrected it immediately after the line-through text with new wording. It's not a bad technique for a weblog, especially, when a correction becomes necessary not long after initial posting. (If the correction is made a day later or beyond, I'd still recommend posting a separate item.)While we're on his weblog, I'll note that Holovaty (who is assistant database editor and product developer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's website) periodically posts website reviews — focusing on the technical and design aspects of news websites. Today he reviews LJWorld.com, the site of the Lawrence Journal-World (Kansas).
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Posted 7:04 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
And The Winner Is ...
Katja Riefler on online election campaigns in Germany
On September 22, Germans will elect a new "Bundestag," the lower house of German Parliament, and therefore decide on the new chancellor. The Internet is getting more important in campaigns this year. All the parties, for example, offer high quality and permanently updated websites — and now online is also going to challenge TV. Prior to the chancellor candidates' big TV debates, the portal sites Freenet.de and AOL Germany on August 16 (at 7:30 p.m. Berlin time) will host a one-hour live discussion between Franz Müntefering (SPD) and Laurenz Meyer (CDU) — both secretary general of their parties — as video and audio stream live. Users can ask questions and vote on who has the better arguments. Since broadband access is still not very widespread in private homes in Germany, one of the most interesting questions is whether this new offer will be accepted by a substantial number of users. The video will stay available on the portal sites.
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Posted 2:31 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The News in 3G
Steve Outing on wireless journalism
Joachim Bamrud has written an interesting analysis of the direction that 3G technology for wireless devices is taking, "The News on 3G," for TheFeature.com — focusing on what broadband wireless, tiny color screens, and cameras built into phones will mean for journalism in the years ahead. Disclaimer: I'm quoted in this article. By the way, TheFeature.com is an information and news source and community website covering the mobile Internet. Despite being owned by manufacturer Nokia, its editors and writers are given editorial independence. That appears to be the case with this piece, which is balanced and lacks a discernible corporate bias.
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Posted 1:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Being Paid to Blog: What a Concept!
Steve Outing on weblogs
Nick Denton, former Financial Times correspondent and founder of Web news aggregator Moreover, has been turning his talents of late to figuring out how to make money from weblogs. A first stab is a commercial weblog called Gizmodo, which Denton and Pete Rojas (a writer for Red Herring, Wired, and The Guardian) are producing. Gizmodo is "a vertical blog devoted to superskinny laptops, spy cameras, wireless wizardry, and all manner of other toys for overgrown boys. All gadgets, all the time," explains Denton. Rojas is the principal writer; Denton serves as publisher.Denton: "Pete is, after (Poynter's) Jim Romenesko, one of the first paid bloggers. Imagine, getting paid to blog: everybody's dream job until they realize they have to post six times a day, and can no longer just head off to the beach at a moment's notice." Denton says he doesn't yet have the answers for how Gizmodo will make money. "All I know is that weblogs are a compelling form, gadget addicts are all online, and it's easy to plug into Amazon's electronics store" (to receive commissions on referral sales).
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Posted 1:05 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Bridging the Digital Divide
Carla Passino on British Telecom's mini broadband initiative
The information gap between broadband-enabled British cities and access-starved countryside may soon be bridged, reports the BBC Online. Put under pressure by rural lobbies like Broadband4Britain, British Telecom (BT) will launch a pilot scheme to supply ADSL connections to rural areas across the country.BT, which had previously maintained that it would be too expensive to offer ADSL to phone exchanges with fewer than 200 customers, will roll out a pared-down version of the technology suitable to small towns and villages. The experiment will be partly funded by a group of corporate sponsors and will last for six months, after which the telecom giant will decide whether to offer the service on a permanent basis.
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Posted 12:59 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Adapt to Newsroom Innovations or Be 'Phased Out'
Vin Crosbie on the future of journalism.
Journalists unable or unwilling to adapt to newsroom innovations risk being "phased out," Kerry Northrup tells the European Press Network's EPN World Reporter electronic magazine. "A lot of people who are journalists today simply cannot be journalists tomorrow. They can't grasp the changes in how people get and use news and information. They won't adapt to thinking in terms of multiple media rather than being concerned only about their personal area of specialization. They are media bigots, for want of a better term, insisting past reason that print is print, broadcast is broadcast, Web is Web, and never will they mesh." Northrup is executive director of the Ifra Centre for Advanced News Operations and leader and founder of the NewsPlex "Newsroom of the Future" project.
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Posted 12:36 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Blogging and Syndication
Rich Gordon on distribution of weblogs
I just saw a blurb about Blogcritics.com, "a sinister cabal of the Web's best writers on music, books, and popular culture miscellanea — updated continuously." The site is a good jumping-off point for blogs on a variety of subjects, but even more interesting than the site is the way it is apparently put together. The site seems to be aggregating weblogs that produce a Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed — a simple XML format that was invented by Netscape several years ago as a way of powering its My Netscape service. Under AOL's ownership, Netscape has backed away from RSS. But now, as Jon Udell writes at Byte.com, there are a variety of tools available for you to assemble a personalized package of content from sites that produce RSS feeds. One of them is Web-based — Newsisfree.com — others are software applications for your PC. For a publisher, RSS is a relatively easy way to distribute headlines and short summaries with links to full articles on the originating site. Is your site producing an RSS feed? If not, you probably should. (For a good introduction, check out the RSS section on Webreference.com.)
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Posted 12:45 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Europe, Take Back the Web!
Norbert Specker on the global Internet
Bill Thompson (who set up The Guardian's New Media Lab in 1996) offers a substantial rant on why Europe should take back the Web. He wishes to start a debate about putting cyberspace firmly back into the realm of national borders and the respective national laws — and rather clumsily smashes some china along the way. (See some discussion on kuro5shin.) Speaking of China ... its agreement with Yahoo! shows that this integration of national borders is already happening. Many aspects of Thompson's article echo former Electronic Frontier Foundation president Tara Lemmey and her belief that eventually we might not have only one Internet, but many.
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Posted 12:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Magazines Reversing 'Net Hype, or Not?
Amy Gahran on media attitudes
At the end of the August 6 MSNBC review of Bamboozled by the Revolution (John Motavalli's new book recounting how big media companies dealt with the Internet during the '90s), reviewer Michael Rogers notes how some big media have swung radically in the opposite direction of Internet hype. He notes that the print brochure for this fall's American Magazine Conference (AMC) does not mention the word "Internet" once. That may be true, but the brochure for AMC 2001 didn't mention the Internet either. And AMC 2000 apparently didn't pay much attention to new media, as well. So perhaps this is more indicative of ongoing disdain for new media among magazine-industry bigwigs than a reversal of Internet hype.
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Posted 12:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Better Editorial Cartoons
Steve Outing on multimedia content
Editorial cartoons, among my favorite parts of newspapers, are changing with the times. A great example is San Francisco editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore, who is producing some great animated cartoons, available at his website. The Web, of course, gives editorial cartoonists additional tools to work with, to push forward their craft. (Thanks to Mark Rayner for the pointer.)
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Posted 11:45 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Old Media Hanging On .... to Old People
Norbert Specker on media usage
A second reading of the study by the Institute for Demoskopie (Allensbach), and adding the organization's statistical yearbook, allows for a secondary reading of the positive trend reported here yesterday. It reveals the dark side of losing the next generation. The question "Did you read a newspaper yesterday?" was put to 14-29-year-olds. In the eastern part of Germany, more than 70% said "yes" in 1991; in 2002 that figure was under 50%. In the western part of the country, the reduction is from 75% in 1991 to 53% in 2002. On the question to 14-17-year-olds on where they look if they want to know more about a particular topic, the newspaper appears in 37% of the answers, the Internet in 52%.
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Posted 6:50 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Yahoo! Censors Net for China
Amy Gahran on Internet censorship
According to PC World, Yahoo! recently decided to sign the Internet Society of China's public "Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry." Article 9 of this pledge commits Yahoo! to "monitor the information publicized by users on websites according to [Chinese] law and remove the harmful information promptly," and to avoid "establishing links to websites that contain harmful information." Furthermore, this pledge applies to all Web content, not just the content of Chinese sites. Yahoo! was not required to sign this pledge as a condition of serving the Chinese Internet market.Human Rights Watch has been active on this issue. Full information (including correspondence with Yahoo!) is available on its site. Human Rights Watch notes that "the Internet Society of China is the major professional association for the Internet industry. While the ISOC is called a 'non-governmental organization,' all such groups are at least partly linked with a larger government work unit (danwei) that is responsible for their activities. In the case of the Internet Society of China, that work unit is the Ministry of Information Industry. As a rule, China's 'non-governmental organizations' are funded directly by the government through the work unit system, and often function as think tanks for state policy."
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Posted 6:42 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Intentional Typos
Steve Outing on the down side of spam filters
Anne Holland is getting desperate to stop the spam-filter desecration of her e-mail newsletters. The publisher of ContentBiz and a bunch of other opt-in e-mail newsletters has started adding intentional typos into her editions before they are sent to subscribers — words like "s^pam" and "f^ree." That's because ISP and corporate spam filters have been blocking sizable numbers of deliveries of her newsletters. She and her writers frequently write about e-mail and spam, so her content often contains words that trigger an increasing number of spam filters. Holland explains in her ContentBlog weblog that since introducing the typos, the rejection rate has fallen from about 3% to 1%. (Note: those numbers were not arrived at scientifically.)While I understand Holland's frustration over this issue, resorting to intentional typos is a drastic measure. That ISPs' behavior is dictating what words e-mail publishers can use is maddening.
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Posted 4:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Europe, Not North America, Now Home to the Most Online Users
Vin Crosbie on Internet usage
Europe has eclipsed North America as home of the most online users, the Nua Internet Survey announced today. Nua calculates that 9.3% of the world's estimated 6.234 billion people have online access. Among these 580.8 million online users (up from 407.1 million in December 2000), Europeans now account for 185.8 million, North America 182.3 million, and Asian and Pacific island countries 167.9 million. Nua believes that the Internet penetration rate in the U.S. is now close to the saturation point, but that the number of Europeans and Asians going online is fast increasing. The country with the greatest Internet penetration at the end of May was Iceland with 69.8% of its population online. Sweden is next with 64.7%, followed by Denmark (60.4%), Hong Kong (59.6%), the U.S. (59.1%), the Netherlands (58.1%), the UK (56.9%), Norway (54.4%), Australia (54.4%), and Canada (52.8%). Internet access in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa lags far behind other geographic regions. Nua notes that France alone has more Internet users than does the whole of Africa and the Middle East.
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Posted 12:27 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Taste of the Future
Steve Outing on wi-fi networks
Blogger Kevin Werbach reported over the weekend on his experience of finding an open wi-fi network at Denver International Airport. (That is, a wireless network allowed him to get broadband Internet access on his laptop while waiting in the terminal.) Turns out that AT&T was running a free trial, so there was no cost. Eventually, such wi-fi networks in public places likely will carry an hourly fee. So remember to bring your laptop's wireless card when you travel.This is significant because as wi-fi becomes ubiquitous in public places, a sizable new broadband-capable audience opens up. This trend will be good news for Internet publishers. Bored travelers stuck in airports will soon be surfing CNN.com instead of watching the CNN Airport Network. That'll be a big improvement in the traveling life.
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Posted 11:48 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Media Trends in Germany
Norbert Specker on old media hanging on well
The renowned Institute for Demoskopie (Allensbach) has released new numbers regarding news consumption in Germany. On the issue on where people fulfill their information needs, TV remained the No. 1 information source with 73% (up from 67% in 1999). Newspapers gained as well with 61% (up from 58% in 1999), and the Internet is used by 29% (up from 9% in 1999). The Institute concludes that initial concerns that newspapers will be repelled by the Internet were unfounded. Rather, they complement each other.
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Posted 11:41 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Staff Gets the Credit
Steve Outing on WSJ.com's scoop
Listening to NPR's Morning Edition radio news program on the drive to my office today, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the announcer report on a "story from the Wall Street Journal online edition." While online news entities are often credited with breaking stories, it's not often that you hear a website of a major news organization credited directly. Usually the story is: "The Wall Street Journal reports," whether it originated in print or online first. It's nice to hear the website get credit when it's due.
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