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Breaking: Joost Turns to the Web for Help
Joost, battling for relevance in the online tv world against Hulu and others, will soon no longer require users to download separate desktop software to access the service (its existing software is based on Xul). Instead users will be able to access Joost via a small browser plugin that will continue to use Joost’s P2P technology to distribute video among users quickly.
The service launched to considerable fanfare but has fallen off the radar as of late as the company has been plagued by a shortage of content and, well, users. And as the inertia of the online video business moves away from desktop clients and to the Web, it seems Joost has finally seen the writing on the wall and will launch an online video service of its own.
It’ll be interesting to see how it fares in an already crowded lineup of offerings headlined by Hulu, Amazon, and Fancast.
Update: Screenshots here.
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NetSuite Announces Chrome Compatibility
NetSuite, a company that touts itself as a provider of solutions that can help companies run almost every aspect of their business, announced Friday that it will be the first business application provider to provide native support for Google Chrome.
According to the company, Chrome’s browser is an ideal candidate for NetSuite products. Because the browser is optimized for Web 2.0, the company’s AJAX-powered features in its products should work much better on Chrome than any other browser. NetSuite was quick to point out, though, that its products can still be used on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
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Track Hurricanes On Stormpulse
Wonder where Hurricane Ike will hit or when Tropical Storm Hanna will pass? Hurricane season has lots of people glued to the Weather Channel to catch the latest updates on developing storms. But why wait for the weatherman to tell you what is going on when you can check for yourself online? One of the best places to do that is Stormpulse. (Google Earth is another one). Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can play around with them.
You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.
Data is pulled from the National Hurricane Center and other places. The site has storm data going back to 1851, soyou can see the paths and intensity of previous hurricanes. There is even an API for embedding Stormpulse maps on other sites.
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The Great Online Advertising Divide Widens
As online advertising spending continues its meteoric rise — the Wall Street Journal is reporting a healthy gain of 20 percent in the second quarter alone — not every form of advertising is enjoying such success. In fact, as economic troubles continue, more and more advertisers are only willing to spend money on search ads and are increasingly ignoring other forms of advertising.
According to eMarketer, search ad spending will reach $10.4 billion this year, more than twice as much as advertisers will spend on display ads. More importantly for Google, search ads will represent 42 percent of all advertising spending, while display ads will account for just 21 percent of all online advertising.
With an economic downturn running amok, Google is quickly becoming one of the few companies that can actually withstand its onslaught. Because search results currently provide the best place for advertisers to spend money and realize a positive ROI, Google’s control of over 60 percent of the search market becomes even more important.
“We believe that if there were (a U.S. recession), we’ll be well positioned,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent earnings call.
Generally speaking, search ads are better targeted than display ads. And in an environment where companies have less money to go around, they need to find the best ways to utilize that cash and speak to the target audience. For now, display advertising will not be the best place to spend ad dollars and although Microsoft and others will do their best to compete, Google is still in the cat bird’s seat.
Just don’t mention DoubleClick.
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socialmedian Launches First Major Upgrade
socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.
First off, the new socialmedian will make it easier for users to get content onto the site and enable bloggers to better promote their content. Dubbed “News-Streaming,” socialmedian’s latest foray into bringing only certain content to its users is quite complex.
News-Streaming lets users filter out all the junk from the social media that they broadcast through the site. According to the company, if users want to share their Twitter feed with the community, but only want their tweets that are actually newsworthy to be collected by socialmedian, they can first input their Twitter feed and next to that, place certain keywords into the field to help the service filter out the tweets that the user doesn’t want posted. In other words, if you want to only post your political tweets to socialmedian, add your Twitter feed to the service and select keywords that may have some relevance to politics. From there, socialmedian will grab all tweets containing those keywords and post it to the site. The same goes for Google Reader feeds, Digg submissions, and Delicious bookmarks, to name a few.
To make sure all that information isn’t annoying other users, socialmedian is adding a filter feature that will let other users “turn the volume up or down” on the amount of tweets and stories making their way across the pages. Those users can choose to see all updates or only those “relevant updates” that they preset.
Part two of socialmedian’s new initiative will make it easier for bloggers to promote their material. In order to do that, socialmedian will launch a “reverse-blog widget,” which after users place their blog feed into their updates, will be featured in the clips section to the right of the socialmedian page and display the latest stories from the blog.
Taking a page out of the Digg handbook, socialmedian is also offering a page displaying the most popular stories of the day, week, and month. Instead of calling newer stories “Upcoming,” like Digg, socialmedian has two new entries called “Rising Fast” and “Hot Discussions.” Genius.
Finally, socialmedian opened up its site to make almost every page available to search engines and users won’t need to register any longer to view different pages on the site.
All in all, socialmedian’s updates seem rather logical and don’t really break the mold in any way. The site was in desperate need of improvement and it looks like it has finally happened. Now we’ll need to wait and see if its users embrace it.
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Is Cuil Killing Websites?
An anonymous tipster wrote to us this morning to tell us that Cuil, the ill-fated “Google Killer,” has unleashed its Twiceler indexing bot on websites across the globe and in the process, has brought many sites down.
“I don’t know what spawned it, but when Cuil attempts to index a site, it does so by completely hammering it with traffic,” the tipster wrote. “So much, that it completely brings the site down. We’re 24 hours into this “index” of the site, and I’ve had to restrict traffic to the site down to 2 packets per second, while discarding the rest, or otherwise it makes the site unusable.”
The Admin Zone forums are abuzz over Cuil’s overzealous method for indexing. Countless posters on the site have said that their websites have been brought down because of the Twiceler robot and one user said it “leeched enormous amounts of bandwidth — nearly 2GB this month until it was blocked. It visited nearly 70,000 times!”
Website owners are also saying that the way Cuil indexes sites isn’t scientific in any way and is actually quite “amateurish.” According to those who experienced the Twiceler onslaught, the bot seems to “randomly hit a site and continue to guess and generate pseudo-random URLs in an attempt to find pages that aren’t accessible by links. And by doing this, they completely bring a site down to where it’s not functional.”
Upset site owners contacted Cuil to see why Twiceler was hitting sites so often. James Akers, Cuil’s Operational Engineer responded to the issue by saying that “Twiceler is an experimental crawler that we are developing for our new search engine. It is important to us that it obey robots.txt, and that it not crawl sites that do not wish to be crawled. If you wish I will glad to add your site to our list of sites to exclude, but I need you to tell the site name to block as email return addresses frequently from the domains that wish to be blocked.”
Akers also claims that Cuil has seen a “number of crawlers” that pretend to be Twiceler, and site owners should consult the company’s IP addresses page to determine if it’s really Cuil causing all the trouble.
Cuil has yet to respond to a request for comment, but it doesn’t look like the pelting of sites by the company’s Twiceler bot is an isolated incident. And if it’s true that Twiceler is trying to find pages on sites that don’t even exist to simply increase the index size, Cuil should work quickly to modify the bot before it receives even more negative publicity.
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Fiorina Versus Whitman: Who Would Make A Better Vice President?
Update: McCain has chosen someone from outside Silicon Valley: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
As John McCain prepares to unveil his selection for a running mate today, Mitt Romney seems to be a favorite. But two former Silicon Valley CEOs are also on the short list, and they are both women: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Picking Romney would help McCain solidify his position with the Republican base, but it would also be predictable and boring. Picking a woman with executive experience would show that McCain is as open to change as Barack Obama.
Other women also have a shot at the VP slot, including Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But if it came down to Fiorina and Whitman, who would make the better Vice President? Both are whip-smart and have managed large organizations. Fiorina, of course, was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard and Whitman was the CEO of eBay.
Both, however, left their CEO posts during troubled times for each company (although Fiorina was forced out, while Whitman stepped down voluntarily after a decade at the helm). Looking at each one’s performance at each company, you’d have to give Whitman the upper hand. The vast majority of her years at Bay were spent overseeing its meteoric rise. (She is also co-chair of McCain’s campaign). But Fiorina (who is the “Victory Chairman” of the RNC) is perhaps more adept at the political arts, and has proven she feels comfortable on the world stage. (Listen to our recent interview with Fiorina—she certainly has a good grasp of the issues that matter to Silicon Valley).
Who would make the best VP—Whitman, Fiorina, or someone else? Who would give McCain the biggest boost at the polls?
Who Should John McCain Pick As His Vice Presidential Candidate?
( surveys)
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Lehman’s Online U.S. Advertising Forecast: Another $20 Billion In Growth By 2012 And Online Video Takes Off
I was (digitally) leafing through the latest Lehman Brothers Internet Data Book for August this morning, and came across these forecasts for total U.S. Internet online ad spending and online video ad spending.
Video ads are the hottest area of growth. Analyst Doug Anmuth thinks that online video ad spending will reach $1.1 billion this year (up 63 percent), and more than double to $2.4 billion over the next two years.
He also thinks that total advertising spending in the U.S. will go from $26.1 billion this year to $45.5 billion in 2012 (consequently increasing from 8.8 percent of total advertising spending to 13.7 percent).
Here are some tables with his estimates:
Also, to give some perspective on where online advertising is compared to TV advertising, he offers this comparison chart of the first decade of broadcast TV advertising VS. cable TV advertising Vs. Internet Advertising. The 30 percent growth rate for Internet advertising is double the rate of where cable advertising was at the same point in its history, and triple the rate of broadcast TV advertising. There, don’t you feel better already?
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Firebird Maestro 8.7 released
Follow Animal Migrations On Google Earth
Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).
Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).
Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.
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Poking Holes In The Long Tail Theory
Just because the Internet makes it possible to offer a near-infinite inventory of goods for sale does not mean that consumers will start wanting more obscure items in any great numbers. That is the conclusion Harvard Business School associate professor Anita Elberse comes to in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that takes on some of the sacred cows of the Long Tail theory.
The Long Tail is Wired editor Chris Anderson’s theory (based on an article and resulting book of the same name) that as it becomes easier to distribute a wider variety of items, consumers will venture down the long tail of the distribution curve and find the products that exactly match their interests and idiosyncratic needs. Elberse questions this notion:
Is most of the business in the long tail being generated by a bunch of iconoclasts determined to march to different drummers? The answer is a definite no.
. . . Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail.
Elberse looks at data from Rhapsody, Quickflix (Australia’s version of Netflix), ans Nielsen for songs and movies. Out of one million tracks she studied on Rhapsody, the top one percent accounted for 32 percent of all plays and the top ten percent accounted for 78 percent of all plays. Similarly, the top one percent of videos on Quickflix accounted for 18 percent of rentals and the top ten percent accounted for 48 percent of rentals. Anderson responds that she defines “head’ and “tail” differently than he would. Even so, he adds, that top one percent of Rhapsody songs is still 10,000 songs, more than what you’d find in a typical record store.
What is more interesting about the study is that Elberse cites evidence that, even given more choice, consumers still flock to the blockbuster products that make up the “head” of the distribution curve. This might be because we are all lemmings or, more likely, that taste in music and movies has a social component. We tend to like a song or movie, in part, because other people like them too. Taste doesn’t form in a vacuum. It is socially reinforced.
Even adventurous consumers who venture into the more obscure realms of inventory tend to buy more hit products than long-tail ones. For instance, QuickFlix customers who rented the most movies from the bottom 10 percent of the distribution curve only did so 8 percent of the time. The largest chunk of their consumption (34 percent) came from the top 10 percent of titles just like everyone else. (In the chart below, the red parts of the bars represent the top ten percent of movie titles, and the black parts represent the bottom ten percent. Each bar, in turn, represents a different set of customers and how their rentals are distributed among each decile of popularity). Elberse concludes:
No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought.
So does this disprove the Long Tail theory? Not exactly. (Lee Gomes’ gleeful grave-digging notwithstanding). All it proves is that blockbusters are more durable than we’d like to think, even in an age of limitless inventory and perfect search.
But to say there is no money in the Long Tail is nonsense. It is just more finely distributed and harder to find. True, there are not many businesses that have figured out how to collect it. Google is one with AdSense and search ads. Each search ad is insignificant in and of itself, but all of those obscure terms add up to billions of dollars.
Is this repeatable in other markets? Elberse herself notes that demand is being pushed down the tail. Even if they can gather up that new demand, Long-Tail businesses may not become the most profitable. The economics have changed. And Google is likely the exception rather than the new rule. But neither can that Long-Tail demand be ignored.
In the end, Elberse presents a false dichotomy. The choice is not head or tail. It’s both.
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Vint Cerf Wonders If We Need To Nationalize the Internet
Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet” and Google’s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting next to me on a panel yesterday about national tech policy at the Personal Democracy Forum. Maybe he was inspired by the presence of one of the other panelists, Claudio Prado, from Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, who kept on talking about the importance of embracing Internet “peeracy.” (Although, I should note that Mr. Cerf frowned upon that ill-advised coinage). But I think (or hope, rather) that he was really trying to spark a debate about whether the Internet should be treated more like the public resource that it is.
His comment was in the context of a bigger discussion about the threat to Net neutrality posed by the cable and phone companies, who are making moves to control the amount and types of bits that can go through their pipes. It was made almost in passing and the discussion quickly moved to other topics.
Maybe I didn’t fully understand him (I wasn’t taking notes), and he certainly is better versed in the issues at hand than everyone else who was in that auditorium combined. But nationalizing the Internet is bad idea. (I can’t believe I even have to say this). It would set a horrible precedent, would undermine confidence in the American economy, and would be difficult to pull off.
I tried to press Mr. Cerf on how exactly such a scheme would work without making Internet service even less competitive than it is today. He offered that the government could put the actual running of the service out to competitive bidding. It’s still a bad idea.
The Internet is essentially a series of agreements between owners of different networks about how data gets passed from one to the other. It is not clear what property exactly would be nationalized. AT&T’s backbone fiber network, for instance, sometimes carries Internet traffic, and sometimes carries telephone voice traffic. So if the government were to confiscate all the data pipes, they would nationalize the phone industry as well.
While nationalizing the Internet is the wrong solution, the problem it would address is very real. The ground rules for how the Internet is used need to be clarified. And that was the bigger point that Mr. Cerf was trying to make. But the government does not need to own the underlying assets that make up the Internet in order to set up ground rules that American companies need to abide by. That is what laws are for.
I have some ideas on how the government can actually do something useful here. More on that in a future post.
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Zoom, Pan, Throw: A Peek At What Firefox Mobile Could Be
Firefox Mobile, which has been seriously in the works since at last October, is finally starting to take shape. In the video below, Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, goes through some prototype concepts for the user Firefox Mobile’s user interface. Raskin, the young founder of Songza and Humanized, was hired by the Mozilla Foundation in January.
The user interface shown in the video is a working prototype and will change, but there are some worthwhile concepts—some borrowed from Apple, some borrowed from Firefox. The mobile browser is built for a touch screen and allows scrolling with a flick of the mouse like on the iPhone (although it is single-touch, not multi-touch). The need to type is minimized by displaying any number of pre-defined buttons at appropriate moments, such as “search Google”, “send email,” and “map this.”
Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
The mini Web page takes up the entire screen until you pan across to reveal the control buttons (back, forward, bookmark, page info). You can “throw” the page and zoom out to see all your open tabs/pages arranged in thumbnails like the Expose feature on Apple desktops. And you can always add more tabs or pages by clicking on a big plus button.
I like the direction this is going. (So does Greg Kumparak at MobileCrunch, who says it “rocks my face off”). Mobile browsing needs its own metaphors and vocabulary of interactions that are suited to small devices with no keyboards or poor ones. Pan, throw, zoom, one click, and you should be done.
Developers can download the open-source code, or play with an online demo.
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Internet Display Advertising Slowed In First Quarter
In the first quarter of 2008, the growth in spending on Internet display advertising slowed to 8.5 percent from 16.7 percent growth last year, according to estimates put out today by TNS Media Intelligence. Even with the slowdown Internet ad spending still grew faster than that for TV (1.7 percent), magazines (0.8 percent), newspapers (-5.2 percent), radio (-4.5 percent), and outdoor (2.5 percent). The overall growth of all advertising spending that TNS measures was flat at 0.6 percent growth over the first quarter of 2007.
TNS’s Internet numbers do not include search advertising, only display ads. The quarterly total for all Internet advertising is closer to $6 billion. But this data point is evidence that the Web may not be immune to weakness in advertising spending overall. If the industry dives into a full-blown advertising recession, many Web companies could feel the impact.
This year, TNS only provided the percentage changes. Since it provided absolute dollar values last year, I did my own math and put together the table below. In the first quarter of 2008, $2.9 billion was spent on Internet display ads in the U.S., representing an 8.3 percent share of the $35.1 billion total. That puts Internet display advertising ahead of radio ($2.2 billion), but behind newspapers ($6.0 billion), magazines ($6.8 billion), and TV ($15.9 billion). My figures are rounded, and the percent changes are year-over-year.
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Ballmer Tells the Washington Post That Print is Toast
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sat down for lunch with editors and reporters at the Washington Post and told them print will be dead in ten years:
There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.
I just hope the Post’s Website will still be around because it is a great distribution partner for TechCrunch.
But seriously, we’ve heard these predictions before. And it is easy to make them again with the print media industry suffering a major contraction as advertising dollars flee elsewhere. Just earlier this week, I was on a media panel at NYU where Vanity Fair media columnist and Newser founder Michael Wolff told Newsweek editor Johnnie Roberts:
If Newsweek is around in five years, I’ll buy you dinner.
It’s a good line, and in general Wolff was pretty much the only person I agreed with on the panel. Still, I am not so sure print is ever going away. Paper is a more enduring technology than Ballmer or Wolff would have you believe. What is endangered is the current set of business models that produce print media. If the those businesses go away, obviously so do their products. But that presumes that new print businesses won’t emerge to take their place. Maybe they won’t be as profitable and maybe they won’t have as broad a reach, but as long as there is demand for books, newspapers, or magazines somebody will figure out a way to fill it.
(You can watch more videos from Ballmer’s lunch here)
Will Print Media Still Be Around In Ten Years?
( polls)
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Add Google Reader, Techmeme, and TechCrunch Tabs to FriendFeed
Who knew Duncan Riley was such a Greasemonkey? My former colleague just made FriendFeed a lot more useful for people on Firefox. Using Greasemonkey, an add-on to Firefox that lets developers customize Webpages through the browser, he created some scripts that add tabs to FriendFeed and that make it even more of a super start page than it already is.
He got the idea from this app called FriendFeed Tabs that lets you add Techmeme as a tab. When you click on the tab, news aggregator site Techmeme appears within FriendFeed.
Duncan went further and added scripts to add tabs that show Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Netvibes, Plurk, ReadBurner, and his own version of a Techmeme tab inside of FriendFeed. He also created scripts for TechCrunch and CrunchGear. (Thanks, Duncan!) You need to add Greasemonkey to Firefox before you can install any of these scripts. But once you do, and relaunch your browser, whenever you go to FriendFeed the tabs will appear and you can scroll through the sites at your leisure.
Some of these tabs are redundant with FriendFeed itself, which lets you bring in RSS feeds and your Twitter feed, for instance. But the tabs let you access these sites and services in a more traditional view, and you can always toggle back to the FriendFeed stream. And now, for people who check more than one of these sites on a daily basis, they can simply access them all from FriendFeed. (Note: these scripts are essentially a hack, and there may be some issues, which Duncan describes in this post).
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Celebrity Baby Blog is Acquired: People.com’s Gain Is FM Publishing’s Loss
It’s nice to see blogs growing up, even if they are about babies. People.com has bought Celebrity Baby Blog, a fast-growing blog started four years ago by Danielle Friedland. She confirmed the deal earlier this week, after MediaWeek broke the story. The site has an editorial staff of 17 editors, contributors, writers, and reviewers (presumably, not all full time).
The blog is an obvious fit for People, which knows that stories about pregnant celebrities and their babies sell. (Doesn’t it seem like pregnant celebrities are on the cover of People more than anything else?). The price was not disclosed, but Friedland and staff will stay on to grow the site.
But People.com’s gain is Federated Media Publishing’s loss. With this acquisition, FM Publishing is losing yet another anchor blog from its advertising network. Last year, it lost Digg to Microsoft, and earlier this month it lost Ars Technica to Condé Nast. Now, Time Inc. (my former employer) has snapped up Celebrity Baby Blog.
Celebrity Baby is FM Publishing’s top parenting blog, and has recently started to pull in more pageviews (and thus advertising impressions) than FM stalwart BoingBoing. Since February its traffic has shot up—to 6.9 million pageviews and 720,000 unique visitors in April, according to comScore. That month, BoingBoing had more unique visitors (2 million), but fewer pageviews (3.7 million). See the chart below.
Deals like this point to the fundamental weakness of FM’s business model. When a blog in FM Publishing’s network gets big enough or gets bought, FM loses all or part of their advertising inventory. The more profitable a blog is for FM, the more likely it is to try to sell ads on its own or be taken away by a larger media company with its own ad sales force. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is also an FM partner site. They sell a portion of our ads, but we also sell our own).
That said, we hear that FM was actually very helpful in getting this deal done. It knows that its blogs can walk away at any moment (As publisher Chas Edwards told me when FM raised $50 million last month), and the only way to keep them is to deliver higher CPMs than they could otherwise get. FM also wants to be seen as the best partner for up-and-coming blogs. Generating goodwill is always a smart business practice, even if it means having to let go of a rising star.
Update: FM’s Chas Edwards got back to me. He confirms that FM helped Friedland assess the offer from Time Inc., although it did so as a favor. And although “it is not clear” what will happen to FM’s advertising relationship with Celebrity Baby Blog, he suspects that Time Inc. will take over once the current ad campaigns run out. But he says that the revenue impact of losing both Celebrity Baby Blog and the larger Ars Technica will be minimal:
We would love everybody to stay with us for life, but we realize that is not practical. In terms of a business impact, it is very minimal. No one site represents a substantial percentage of revenues.
And here are his thoughts on the importance of being a good partner, even at the end of a relationship:
I think it builds the rest of our partners’ comfort with us and the broader industry gets a better understanding that Federated Media is building almost a talent agency. We want our partners to go deep with us in a collaborative approach to building their business.
A lot of people still confuse Federated Media with an ad network. It is not just that we want to sell your ads, but we want to help you build your business and your brand. And maybe we’ll get the opportunity to participate in these exits in the future.
That’s certainly the right the attitude if he wants to keep or attract more traffic on his ad network (sorry) than will escape whenever a bigger blog graduates from FM.
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Old Media Still Needs to Get Over its Control Issues
The wonderful thing about the Internet is that nobody controls it. And if you can’t control the medium, you can’t control the message. That seems obvious enough in this age 100 million blogs, YouTube, Digg, and Twitter mania. In fact, just this morning I was invited to a Facebook group called End of Control to discuss the issues that arise as control shifts from media companies to consumers. (The group was started by author Gerd Leonhard, who is writing a book on the same subject).
Yet industries that are used to control don’t like to give it up. Old media is like that. Even in this day and age, its struggle with control issues continues. Old media knows the relationship with its audience has changed, but it is still not quite sure how to deal with it.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, let me share two anecdotes from last week. On Wednesday, I attended the Mediabistro Circus conference, along with mostly other New York media professionals. One repeated theme I noticed a few speakers bring up was that to succeed on the Web it is necessary to give up control. This was delivered as a revelation, even though industry watchers have been observing this for the past few years. Yes, the audience (gasp) talks back, and they often prefer talking to each other than simply consuming the news that media professionals decide to dole out.
I guess change takes a while to sink in. But it struck me as odd that something like this still needs to be explained. The other folks attending the conference, from what I could gather, were largely from the digital divisions of newspapers, magazines, and other broadcast media. Was it really news to any of them that to engage an audience online, you have to let them comment, vote, editorialize, and even select what stories get highlighted?
I don’t think so. But there is a difference between knowing something, and being able to do something about it—in this case changing your own ingrained habits and convincing colleagues (many whom grew up in the broadcast era) to do the same.
Now, contrast this group with the Web entrepreneurs I was hanging out with on Thursday in Toronto at the Mesh conference. Nobody needed to explain to them that to succeed on the Web they should stop trying to control the message or the audience. Maybe that’s because they are not trying to control the audience in the first place. Rather, it is the exact opposite. Some of them are too busy creating the very tools that allows people in the audience to cover events themselves and broadcast their own messages. While others have helped to build entire businesses around giving the audience more control.
One of those was speaker Daniel Burka, the creative director of Digg (and co-founder of Pownce). He noted that nobody in their right mind would start a print newspaper company today. Just look at how much money newspaper companies spend on trucks and paper and printing. The only way to pay for all of that infrastructure (not to mention the army of reporters, editors, and photographers required to create the content) is by controlling the audience and making them come to you for the news in large numbers.
But that doesn’t make any sense on the Web. Even Digg, which is supposed to bring together the best headlines from across the Web and other media sites, doesn’t pretend it can be your single source of information. As Burka put it:
This notion of One Page To Rule Them All makes no sense. Our home page is not the only home page you visit. It is a poor design decision if you think you can create a one-size fits all destination.
Not everyone in old media is blind to the realities of this new world. For instance, Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, gave one of the more enlightened keynotes at the Mediabistro conference, in which he suggested that media companies take a more tiered approach to presenting (and monetizing) content.
At the top of the pyramid would be traditional journalism, in which writers and editors obsess over every single word and image, and fight tooth and nail for exclusive access to sources on behalf of their readers. At the bottom of the pyramid would be reader comments, Twitters, and blog posts linking to the mainstream stories of the media outlet. And in the middle would be a mingling of the two, where the best comments and audience blog posts bubble up and meet with reporter blogs and group blogs.
Stories from the top of the pyramid would run high-CPM ads sold by the media company’s salesforce, while the Long-Tail comments and blog posts at the bottom of the pyramid would run Long-Tail ads from AdSense and other ad networks. As stories move up the pyramid, they would tap into higher CPM ads.
Maybe Anderson needs to flip his pyramid upside down, but at least he is thinking about bridging the world of old media with the two-way media of the Web. The implication is that the best stuff will make its way to the middle layer, and could then feed back up into the top of his media pyramid. Perhaps these audience posts and comments could be highlighted on the Website or maybe even appear in print—although Anderson didn’t go that far in his speech.
But giving up control is not just about rebroadcasting the best contributions from the audience. It’s about creating places where the best conversations can happen. Anderson certainly understands the potential and power of niche media. As a personal side project, he’s created his own Ning-powered social network called DIY Drones for aficionados of unmanned aerial vehicles. It brings in all of $400 a month in AdSense revenues, but he’s getting $7 CPMs. Best of all, he lets the community that has gathered around it contribute most of the content. (Note that DIY Drones is not part of Conde Nast or Wired.com).
“Be the tallest dwarf,” he recommends to anyone who wants to create their own niche media site.
It’s not bad advice. But can old media survive in a land of dwarfs? They tend to be awfully hard to control.
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TheRarestWords: Intriguing Semantic SEO Project from Russia
A mysterious yet intriguing project from Russia has come across our inbox. It is a search-engine optimization analysis tool for Websites called TheRarestWords. For any given URL, like Microsoft’s or Techcrunch’s, it shows you the rarest keywords on the homepage (i.e., the ones most likely to give your site some search-engine juice), other sites with related keywords, and a list of categories the site would fit under based on those keywords. For Microsoft, some the rare keywords it identifies are “silverlight,” “biztalk,” “onecare,” “skydrive, “popfly,” “ballmer,” and “ozzie.” You can try your site by going to http://therarestwords.com/YOURSITE.com.
TheRarestWords then tries to tap into crowd intelligence by letting anyone add a 100-character definition for each keyword, which could give it a semantic edge in trying to categorize each site. This could also be gamed pretty easily, but this looks to be just a Web project at this point. It could also be used to create a Wiki dictionary like Lingoz or Wiktionary, but that does not seem to be the focus of the project.
The developer is a mysterious Russian who does not want to give out his name. You can find more info on his blog and on this forum post. Mircea Goia from MyTestBox dug into it for us and reports:
The author and the sole founder – who is from Russia and wants to have a low profile for now - says it is just a hobby that was started in December 2007 and he calls it a “linguistic experiment”.
Their spider (called TheRarestParser/0.2a) started scouting the internet in May and extracted words from many websites. It looked at which one are used most often on those websites and which ones are rarely used, or not at all. For now it extracts only the words from the first page of a domain. It doesn’t go deeper than that, however the spider managed to index 20 million words from many domains.
The author wants to implement new options like:
* Trend spotting (which of the words are gaining popularity - like “django” is becoming more popular, “python” is still strong, and which are losing it like “perl”)
* Help with SEO for mom-and-dad kinds of business sites (it could be useful from this stand point, the author says)
* Auto-categorization of your sites against a big list of categories (actually, at this time it has already been implemented, but the algorithm still needs to be perfected)
The interface is confusing the first time you go there, but there is some interesting data you can pull from it. For instance, you can have an SEO fight between any two sites by typing in the address: http://therarestwords.com/vs/your-site.com/competitors-site.com. This feature shows which rare words your site has that your competitor doesn’t and vice versa.
For example, here’s TechCrunch Vs. GigaOm. This is only a snapshot of what is on each frontpage, but we are more likely to get search traffic right now for terms like “friendfeed,” “gamestop,” and “blogosphere.” While they are kicking our butts on “qualcomm,” “powerset,” and “sarcasm.” (At least that was the case before I put up this post. I really can’t let Om beat us on sarcasm).
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YouTomb: Where Videos Go to Die
Ever wonder exactly how many videos are taken down from YouTube because of copyright violations or other reasons? So did the folks at the MIT Free Culture student group. They created YouTomb to document all YouTube videos that have been taken down. It is currently tracking 177,000 videos, and counts 4,394 that have been taken down for alleged copyright violations.
For each video taken down, YouTomb records the title, description, who uploaded it, when it was taken down, and some screen shots. You cannot watch the videos on the site. But it does document what happened to them, in case any were taken down wrongfully, in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which requires that Youtube chooses to comply with by removing any videos for which it receives a take down notice). The biggest users of the take down notice ion Youtube include TV TOKYO, Viacom, Warner Bros, and World Wrestling Entertainment.
(via Google Operating System).
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The Evolution of the Press Release
Editor’s note: The press release is the least loved document in the media universe. We get way too many here at TechCrunch, and some bloggers equate them to spam. But they do have their uses. In this guest post, Brian Solis explains how the press release has evolved, and sheds some light on why it may be so difficult to kill off. Solis writes this from the perspective of a PR professional. He is Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley and also blogs at PR 2.0.
Press releases come in different flavors and serve different purposes. Well-written press releases are far from dead. In fact, when developed strategically, their opportunities, appeal and benefits are only expanding in conjunction with the groups of various influencers and consumers who rely on them for relevant information.
The disruption of the Web has splintered press releases into a variety of formats to serve different audiences and different purposes: Traditional releases for media, SEO (search engine optimized) releases for customers, and Social Media Releases for press, bloggers, and also customers.
Customer-Focused News Releases
Companies and marketers can use distribution services to complement releases written for journalists and bloggers to reach customers directly through traditional search engines as well as news aggregation services such as Techmeme.
Over the course of the last several months, BusinessWire and PRNewswire have consistently ranked in the top 100 sources for news in Techmeme’s Leaderboard.
And, according to a recent Outsell study, over 51% of IT professionals reported that they get their news from press releases in Yahoo and Google news over trade journals.
And it’s not just tech. When implemented with calls and links to action, and if they read in a way that’s compelling to people aka customers, you’ll find that they’re usually compelled to act.
The trick for this new breed of press releases is to write it as the article you want to read. Keep it clean, clear, pseudo impartial, but definitely focused on benefits for specific customers. Basically, humanize the story.
Here’s a rundown of the different formats of press releases:
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