« Previous 15 days
|
Next 15 days »
Wednesday, March 30
March 30, 2005 06:54PM (EST)
What happens when you hit your RSS consumption limit? What
happens when you remember that you read something somewhere on
someone's blog at some point that you want to find again? How do
you keep yourself in-the-know particularly within the universe of
people that matter to you? Is it possible to train information
how to come to you in a way that works both for you and for the source?
You could argue that
RSS is creating these problems, but the fact that we have these
problems and that we would consider solving them shows tangible
progress out of the
Web 1.0 world.
Steve Gillmor has been trying to solve this set of problems for the
information industry for a long time now. He calls the solution
attention.xml, and he writes an
interesting overview of what he's trying to accomplish
with this format. The format itself will enable the industry to
solve these and other information flow problems, but the tools still
need to be built or amended to actually make the changes real.
That may take a while, but that means there's time for
media companies to start rethinking how they are publishing in order to take advantage of this new relationship with the people they want to serve.
March 30, 2005 05:28PM (EST)
Jay Rosen adds to the "
Death of the Newspaper" discussion with a rich list of proofpoints, links and interesting quotes:
Growing audiences, lower budgets. Pulling back when you should be
stepping forward. The harvesting of the newspaper's monopoly position
has apparently begun. The assisted suicide is underway. But not in
every company, or every town, which kind of makes it interesting. It
could be a great nonfiction book someday: Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die.
Though Jay's posts are almost always intriguing, I am even more
fascinated with the format of his style of journalism. He's
packaging a ton of information from a ton of sources into a cohesive
argument with a splash of his own commentary. A lot of his
articles then include notes and thoughts that he adds after the
original post, often comments directed at him. I would guess that
this kind of writing is even easier than putting together a structured,
self-contained column.
One of my favorite features of the current web analytics tools is the
click overlay which shows you where people are clicking on your
pages. Many of the best analysis can get clouded in spreadsheets
and data overload, but representing click behavior in visual ways opens
up the data from the locked doors of number-heads.
In this analysis you can see that some of the goals of
InfoWorld's recent home page redesign
have been successful already. We were trying to convey a more
obvious editorial position on a quick glance of the page while
simultaneously improving the entry points into deeper content.
According to MarketingSherpa's landing page study, "about 50% of landing page visitors bail in 8 seconds or less." This study and the
EyeTools studies are showing why simple is smarter, though I'm not sure we've fully achieved the balance between simplicity and depth yet.
Anyhow, you can see from this overlay that the visual impact of
our top story is encouraging healthy traffic. Over 15% of the
clicks here are coming from the focal point of the page. Strangely,
this
effect took a few days to mature. Right after launch, we noticed
little behavioral change. But now the page seems to be working
the way it was intended.
Another positive change is the increased
number of clicks on "Top Stories". The 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th
most-clicked links on the page are all coming from that section
today. That same position in the old design often yielded merely 2, possibly 3, of the
top 10 most-clicked links on the page at any given moment.
I was
hoping to see more clicks into our TechIndex sections (in the left
navigation). This position is clearly better than at the bottom
of the page where it previously existed. And since the overall
click total is increasing on the page, then these areas will start
getting better exposure. Again, balancing breadth and depth is
very tricky. A hopeful outcome here is that people will remember
InfoWorld's coverage expertise and connect the brand to these topics.
One annoying aspect of this report is that we're not comparing the
performance of the content that rotates on the page with the more
static stuff. So, for example, the links in the right column in
the Product Guide change constantly throughout the day. The click volume for
each of those links will be low because items don't stay there for
long. We should compare the number of clicks in that section of
the page to the other sections of the page, but we haven't set that up
yet.
We haven't fully studied the impact on ad performance just yet, but
on first glance, it looks like we're seeing about a 10% lift in
click-through rate on all the ad units on the page. As we see the
traffic continue to increase, the combination of better conversions and
increased volume is going to make the site much more efficient for
advertisers, too.
So far, the results are pretty good. Now it's time to apply these changes deeper into the site. More to come...
Thursday, March 24
March 24, 2005 01:50PM (EST)
There's been some great buzz around screencasting since
Jon Udell developed this new media format. Since
he and his blog community defined the name for it, there have been more and more references to it out there in the
blogosphere. Now, get this...when you search for "
screencast" on Google, you'll see ads appearing targeted to this term. Jon has created a market!
March 24, 2005 01:27PM (EST)
I'm at the
ABM conference on online revenue strategies
in New York and just finished listening to Geoff Ramsay of eMarketer
open the session. He seemed to feel that blogging is no threat to
existing publishing and that nobody really reads these things
anyhow. Of course, there's
data to prove this.
"A
Gallup poll conducted in December 2004 found that few Americans get
their daily dose of news from blogs. Rather, 51% reported getting their
daily news updates from local TV news, 44% said they got it from local
newspapers, and 39% got it from cable news stations. In fact, just 3%
got news from blogs every day, less than radio talk shows and broadcast
network news."
Strangely, Geoff doesn't subscribe to any RSS
feeds because, "I don't want to go out there and have to get the
stuff every day. That's the pull model. My research team
does that."
This study seems to miss the point about blogs entirely. Earlier in the presentation, Geoff showed a chart of the total time spent online by US Internet users by category of usage from a OPA, Nielsen//NetRatings report.
The report says that 40% of time spent on the Internet is for
communications, 39% spent at content sites, 17% spent buying things and
4% spent searching.
It's interesting but not surprising that
search isn't more sticky. But I wonder if the research understood
that blogging is communicating. Undoubtedly, they are unaware of
the Long Tail and the power of the Network Effect.
Blogging may not be an immediate and direct threat to the reach and
volume impression models, but if you're afraid of blogs because of
reach and impressions, then you have no idea what you're looking at
when you read a blog.
Time for some new research, guys. Blogs are directly affecting publishers. Grasping this change is critical.
Tuesday, March 22
March 22, 2005 10:08AM (EST)
Today we launched a significant upgrade to the InfoWorld.com home
page. The new layout was developed with several intentions in
mind, and we're hopeful that this new version will not only be more
useful to site visitors who are looking for news and information on IT
products and services but that people find the page interesting and
readable, worthy of a repeat visit.
The problems with the old layout included:
- Low click conversion, high exit rate
- No single focal point
- Entry points to deeper content buried on the page, if present at all
- Unbalanced ad/edit ratio
- Dense content above the fold, lackluster offerings below the fold
- Weak visibility for webcasts, white papers, research reports, custom sections and other lead generation opportunities
- Weak visibility for newsletter signup form
- Not enough exposure to key blogs, such as Jon Udell and TechWatch
- Lacking personality, not enough presence for our columns
- Underserving an audience predominantly using 1024x768 or higher screen resolution
So,
a small team of us studied various layout options, analyzed the
competition and other successful designs, and built a new page
structure. Eric Hill formulated the designs. Chris Lin
built the new page and created a new toolset for managing the content
on the page. We'll see art for the page coming from Ben Barbante
and the art team.
Now, we've created a page that hopefully solves the above problems with the following features:
- Very prominant, high energy visual attached to the main story of the moment. This will change throughout the day.
- "Top Stories" include the most important content regardless of content type,
including blogs, special reports, product reviews and columns.
- "Hot
Topics" include links to key subjects and important coverage such as
industry events, evolving story coverage, new buzzwords, etc.
- Our vast blog coverage now gets more prominant treatment including an area focused specifically on Jon Udell's discoveries.
- Columnists appear on the page as their columns are posted, alongside a headshot of the columnist
- More Product Guide content appearing, one of the strongest parts of the site
- Content
flows down the page without dramatic interruptions. This way advertising is integrated into the UI, yet
it never stops the eye from considering further browsing.
- The webcasts, research reports, custom sections, etc. appear as relevant content
- Newsletter signups are featured prominantly at the top of the page
- Wide 1000-pixel page format
We
plan to roll out elements of this upgrade to other parts of the site
soon, but we will see how this works and watch traffic patterns
closely. A big thanks to Eric, Chris and Ben, in particular, for
their dedication to this effort.
Monday, March 21
March 21, 2005 01:49PM (EST)
Traditional print media mastered the art of providing information in an
easily digestible format. However, the speed of communication
flow now
renders the morning paper obsolete the moment it goes to the printer.
Similarly,
the thoroughly edited news feature once gave us all the context we
needed to fully grasp the significance or relevance of an event in
time. Again, the connected nature of information across the
Internet now dynamically creates context and understanding far greater
than any single standalone article can offer.
Context occurs when blogs link to each other and reference sources. Context occurs when you pull a list of articles on a given topic
and choose which ones matter to you. A snapshot in time on the
Internet looks more like a reference list than a 1,000-word feature
article.
The question I've been wrestling with is how to feed
that dynamic as a publisher in a way that both serves people in need of
information and advertisers who will pay to insert themselves into that communication flow.
The search engines offer an interesting solution to that problem. Feedster and Technorati both return results from queries in RSS format which can then be used to create context on any given topic. Amazon's A9 OpenSearch product performs a similar service, and the data set, in this case, comes directly out of publishers' records. Using the result of those queries on your site
will show your readers a more comprehensive resource list than simply
posting raw data produced internally or edited news stories that want
to be standalone events.
Delicious
is taking this context a step further by giving publishers the tools to
make connections in 2 directions. 1) Publishers can create
context around their own internal content by pulling RSS feeds of
content that share a common tag. 2) Publishers can then engage in
the external dialog about a topic by connecting internal content and external content with the same tag.
Investigative
journalism is more important than ever before, but investigating is no
longer limited to journalists with special access to sources. Reporting transparency becomes more and more important to readers
as they begin to fact-check stories for the major media outlets.
Rather than stand alone in the ivory tower, publishers need to create
open links amongst their readers and build context out of those links
to tell stories that matter.
Tuesday, March 15
March 15, 2005 01:59PM (EST)
Several months ago, somebody introduced me to
del.icio.us. It was positioned to me as a "
bookmark manager", a label that once meant frivolous dotcom business idea to me. And then
Jon Udell began
singing its praises which is frequently an indicator of something important. On a recent visit at the
InfoWorld headquarters, Jon showed several of us once again why this type of product matters. I still didn't get it.
Over
the weekend, however, while the baby was sleeping in the early Sunday
morning hours, I ventured into del.icio.us and began playing with some
ideas, applying them to The Standard web site. The results were much more powerful than I thought they would be. Here's what's happening so far:
Articles,
blog entries, whatever all get tagged with freeform keywords via the
del.icio.us popup tool added to my browser. It takes about 15
seconds per article.- Links are added to appropriate words within
each article pointing to a new template on the site, passing a tag to
that template. For example, an article about Yahoo will now link the word "Yahoo" to a template on The Standard.
- The
new template will display the collection of articles tagged with the
keyword that was passed to it. For example, the template may
receive a request with the keyword "Yahoo". The page will then pull all the articles with that keyword tag and display them on the page.
- Now,
perhaps the most interesting part...the page will also display all the
links that other del.icio.us users have stored under the same
tag. For example, the Yahoo page will show both the articles that
The Standard has tagged and all the articles that the universe of del.icio.us users have tagged with the word "Yahoo".
- Finally,
all the collections of articles have a corresponding RSS feed.
So, for example, if you wanted to know what The Standard or even the
world was collecting in a bucket called "Yahoo", you could follow that conversation by subscribing to that RSS feed.
I've
really just scratched the surface here. There's a lot of power to
this thing that I'm not sure I fully grasp yet. One thing that I
really like is that taxonomies so often become outdated the day you
create them, not to mention a giant resource drain with all the
meetings and revisions and implementation costs. News evolves so
quickly that you shouldn't be locked into a closed hierarchy. So,
this way I can intelligently tag and display all the rich content on
this site, regardless of the type of content, as the stories we're
covering evolve over time. That gave me the ROI incentive to dive
into this, and then I discovered deeper value which I'll share as new
examples appear.
If this works, I'll detail a how-to
on the steps that got me from there to here. You'll likely notice
some errors on some pages still. Hopefully, those won't be
difficult to fix.
Jeffrey Veen offers a how-to for displaying del.icio.us content on your web site. And Jon Udell offers a really cool screencast showing step-by-step how he uses del.icio.us
with his own content. He also starts to uncover the power of this
technology in terms of the connections that start to happen between
people.
The semantic web seems far-fetched on several levels, but
I'm suddenly buying in to the idea that we can create it, that it might
exist some day afterall. More to come...
Monday, March 14
March 14, 2005 04:35PM (EST)
Susan Mernit introduces RSS and compiles a good set of best-practices for media properties
pursuing the RSS train in her article on Digital Edge:
RSS feeds
come in many varieties, from full-text feeds that reproduce an entire
article and sometimes even the photos to headline/digest feeds that
provide the story headline along with the first 50 or so words of the
story, or that offer just the headline alone (readers have to click
back to the originating site to get the entire piece.) Readers can then
pick up the feeds from either the article page (which carries a little
XML/RSS tag), the publisher’s RSS page, (see CNN’s page ), or a site like My Yahoo or Bloglines,
which offer content directories where readers can search for and select
feeds. No matter what the process, the end result is that the headlines
and digests of articles are viewed in the reader’s newsreader, a
customized browser that downloads and displays RSS feeds.
Friday, March 11
March 11, 2005 12:59PM (EST)
Marc Pincus of
Tribe.net labels the current trend toward human network effects on the Internet the
PeopleWeb.
He talks about several forces that will dynamically build this
ecosystem including people's affiliations, credibilty, self-selection,
etc.
Google's forte has been normalizing disparate information that didnt
necessarily intend to be found. the peopleweb will be much more about
people wanting to be found. if people choose to semantically organize,
then the act of aggregating them and sorting relevance will be a
trivial task, quickly commoditized and performed by any service.
Strangely, I stumbled across this headline from the San Jose Mercury News via
JD Lasica: "
A cross between Netflix and Napster ... It's Peerflix".
(I find it amazing that parallel thoughts somehow emerge from the sea
of interesting stories and events happening every day.)
Peerflix
members shop for DVD's and trade them amongst other members.
Peerflix collects a transaction fee, but the trade then happens between
the buyer and seller.
Peerflix facilitates the trading with its
Web site and a sophisticated e-mail alert system. Users publish
``want'' and ``have'' lists on the site, and the company tries to find
matches. Users pay Peerflix 99 cents each time they acquire a movie
from another user. There are no monthly fees or costs to join.
The role of the new media company, in my mind, is to connect people via
a trusted environment. The connection might be information
exchange like Slashdot. It might be transactions like
Craiglist. As the PeopleWeb builds itself, the opportunities to
facilitate those connections increases. And the guys at Peerflix
have demonstrated yet another brilliant way to enable a network of
conversations. Well done, Peerflix!
Thursday, March 10
March 10, 2005 11:59AM (EST)
According to
TNS Media Intelliegence, Internet
advertising grew more than any other sector from 2003 to 2004 at over
21%. The
worst-performing sectors were BtoB magazines and radio.
Internet advertising showed the strongest gain, followed by outdoor, cable TV and national syndication.
Wednesday, March 9
March 9, 2005 05:05PM (EST)
I've been enjoying what the guys at
Make have been coming up with since their recent launch.
This post
made me laugh. I'm not sure I actually want to know what my dog
gets up to when I'm not watching, but when I come home to find garbage
strewn about the flat, I do wonder what the madness is like during the
parties he has by himself.
Tuesday, March 8
March 8, 2005 01:39PM (EST)
Mark Glaser
dives into the mechanics of the About.com operation and the value of
the deal for New York Times Digital. Former IDG staffer Peter Horan offers up some
interesting perspective on how the two operations may work together and
why nobody could replicate About.com for the purchase price of $410 million:
"For the past 18 months, we've been serving all the users cookies, and
we build the page dynamically based on the cookie we see coming in. You
may think it's no problem to recreate this. But if the Times and other
folks that were in the [buyout] process really thought that they could
recreate this that easily, they would not be stepping up to pay a
premium. Oh, and by the way, there's the execution risk. Over the next
three years, what are the odds that you're going to do this well and
wind up in the same spot?"
The cost of replication seems to be the driving force behind the purchase price.
John Battelle
noted that NYT probably wanted to get into micropublishing for a long
time but that its culture was not prepared to make the
commitment. $410 million is a pretty big commitment. Of
course, cash is much easier to throw at a problem than high paid
executives, long meetings, strategy sessions and valuable tech staff resources.
"About provides the Times a platform to explore microcontent without
having to - necessarily - extend the Times' brand to everything. And as
I've told anyone who will listen to me, I think microcontent is key to
winning in the Web 2.0 publishing world. When publishing folks from
mainstream newspapers tell me that blogging is far too small to
possibly impact their businesses, I often ask this question: Would you
rather have scores of microsites with a combined revenue of $15
million, profits of $3-5 million, and a double digit growth rate, or a
newspaper group with revenues of $50 million, profits of $5 million,
but declining growth?"
March 8, 2005 01:19PM (EST)
Big congrats to
Mark Jones and the
Computerworld Australia
team for their impressive innovations. Ad-supported podcasting
will help legitimize this burgeoning new online media format for the
bigger publishers who have a lot to offer in this space.
"I have no idea how the blogosphere will react to the fact we have a
sponsor. From my perspective, there's no question that we need to
experiment with sponsorship models. I've attempted to find the balance
between giving our sponsor visibility while respecting the
blogosphere's advertising intolerance. Does it work? Let me know."
Monday, March 7
March 7, 2005 02:25PM (EST)
The
AutoLink debate seems more like the catalyst for venting
frustration in a perception shift than a real complaint about the
technology. Google was once the enabler of open market
conversations, a doorway to a future where innovators could circumvent
the establishment on the way toward improving the world we live in. But there's
something about this new feature that changes all that.
Product launches such as Orkut, Gmail, Image Ads, and Google News all
stripped away the once-thick varnish of credibility and trust that
Google commanded amongst the digerati. They bought closed
software tools companies like Blogger and Picasa. And then Google went
public. The true intentions of the company's founders became
obvious to everyone. They want to be rich! How rude!
From
Tim Bray:
Suppose some bright developers in a garage somewhere are cooking up
some new, dramatically better, online mapping application. If AutoLink
maps became the default way of doing things, they’re stone-cold dead.
Sure, they’ll just call up the Googleplex and ask to be on the options
list with Yahoo Maps and Mapquest. Ha. Ha. Ha.
From
Steve Gillmor:
Over and over incumbents are walking up to the light at the end of the
tunnel and saying, "Looks like a train." If Google leverages its scale
to create new inventory around links, the net effect will be to incent
competitors to route around it. Just as Google destabilized Office by
creating the world’s fastest (and free) spell checker, reference tool,
and pizza delivery service, so too will a craigslistian series of
competitors destabilize Google if they are stupid enough to persist in
refusing a conversation with the very beta-testers who are their
partners.
The company's Do-No-Evil mantra then read more like a laughable
reverse-psychology trick or 1999 marketing ploy. Craig Newmark
suddenly looked like a saint, and Google was merely one product launch
away from turning its core supporters into rebel forces in the fight
against evil corporations.
From
Doc Searls:
Google is, no doubt, completely revolutionizing the advertising
business. But they have a lot of work to do on the other side of the
consumer/customer split. They need to start treating consumers as
customers. They need to see that markets are not just conversations,
but relationships as well.
It couldn't be clearer from their own statements that Google has
monolithic intentions: "Google's mission is to organize the
world's information and make it universally accessible and
useful." The difference between Google and the CIA is that Google
let's everyone see what is in their database.
Fine. They are doing an incredible job of building an information
services powerhouse with a river of revenues to distribute and
impressive products that do impressive things. Stockholders and
advertisers should be very pleased. Consumers should marvel at
what Google offers.
From
Jason Kottke:
If you're against AutoLink because you think Google is becoming too
big, they're evil, they're abusing their power, or they bought another
blog company instead of yours, then that's fine. Just be up front about
why you're upset. It's a trust issue. Do you trust Google's software to
do what it says its going to do and not take advantage of you? If the
answer is no, don't use it. But if you're saying that Google should not
provide this feature at all and that consenting adults in the privacy
of their own homes can't choose to use the feature themselves, I don't
think that's a good deal for the users. As content providers, let's not
try and reach into our readers' computers and dictate what they can or
can't do with the copies of our content that they've downloaded for
their personal use.
Should consumers of Google products trust that Google is providing any of these services
primarily for
the user's benefit? Don't believe it for a second. Those
days disappeared long ago. It's time to get reacquainted with
Google and understand it for what it is today...a fast-growing capitalistic enterprise competing
for
world domination.
UPDATE: Walt Mossberg
takes a stand against AutoLink with the argument, among several, that
there is "nothing to stop Microsoft from adding a feature to Internet
Explorer
that would replace the ads on a Google search-results page with ads
sold by Microsoft's MSN service." Micropersuasion's
Steve Rubel emphatically agrees, "Let's face it, Google is to the Web what Microsoft
is to PCs - the operating system everyone uses to search." We're all courtside in a fantastic battle of the titans.
March 7, 2005 12:48PM (EST)
From
AdWeek:
The "Subservient Chicken" site, which is still
active, has garnered about 14 million unique visitors and 396 million
hits to date...The "Chicken Fight" Web site,
which was live for only three months, garnered 750,000 unique visitors
and 17 million hits, according to the company.
March 7, 2005 12:43PM (EST)
From
San Jose Mercury News (reg.):
Unbeknown to many users, craigslist is a
for-profit company, with yearly revenue that some have estimated at $7
million to $10 million. The privately held company doesn't charge
individuals for posting ads, only employers for job listings.
Newmark himself is an iconoclast. He's very accessible to users,
often takes public transit around San Francisco and preaches ``nerd
values,'' defined as: ``Make a comfortable living, then make a
difference.'' His latest interest is ``citizen journalism,'' aimed at
getting the public more involved in reporting and disseminating news.
March 7, 2005 12:33PM (EST)
From
MediaPost:
Eyeblaster will unveil today a new video ad
format, dubbed "VideoStrip," which allows video to be played in a small
banner ad--and, if the user desires, expanded into a full-size.
Friday, March 4
March 4, 2005 12:58PM (EST)
Admittedly, I don't fully understand what
Jon Udell
is doing with his investigations into his home-brewed XML search
engine. But I'm certain that he is opening up a method for
improving the nature of search.
The big search engines are dependent on keyword matching. There's
a world of context around each question I need answered when I search
Google that I never think to leverage because I can't. PageRank
was a huge step toward better search, but it's now apparent that we can
go further.
Jon shows us that we can search for topics within universes that we can
define and rank results based on the value we give to the sources
rather than the value Google gives to the sources. You can begin
to
answer questions like:
"What is the unique set of items about
TOPIC X from all of the feeds subscribed to by people whose thinking
about TOPIC XI trust?"
He built a
search engine for himself that does this among other things with his own set of RSS feeds.
Thursday, March 3
March 3, 2005 04:07PM (EST)
From
Joho the Blog:
The
NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones
in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories
exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the
newspaper of broken links. So, starting
in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages,
each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its
archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia
resources. [NOTE: They are not opening their archive. The
content will likely be descriptions created for the Times Index; you'll
still have to pay to see articles in the archive.] Topics that get
their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban
Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these
topic pages. And — the Times must hope — these pages, with their big
fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google's rankings.
March 3, 2005 01:50PM (EST)
Unfortunately, or fortunately for Slashdot, Olga Kharif of BusinessWeek
didn't dive very deep into a very provocative question
in this report. What
impact will Slashdot have in a future of blogs? It's the tip of
the iceberg in a bigger question about blogger disintermediation, but
it's an interesting case to watch as the Slashdot community is both
very active on the site and also likely to publish their own
blogs. Will they continue to do both?
"Slashdot's growth is still healthy, but it, too, faces a more crowded
online news world, with competition from look-alikes such as Geek.com
and Gizmodo as well as blogs kept by individuals, such as Sun
Microsystems' President Jonathan Schwartz. Slashdot says its traffic multiplied six
to seven times in four years, but Internet traffic has more than kept
pace, doubling every year. And scores of blogs have seen even more
dramatic growth. 'In aggregate, they might be taking away some of the
visits,' says Bill Tancer, an analyst at online measurement company Hitwise in Redwood City, Calif."
March 3, 2005 01:04PM (EST)
Interesting to see that
Friendster has partnered with MovableType on a
blogging effort. They are offering a Friendster-skinned version
of TypePad for registered Friendster members. Combining explicit
relationships between members with blogging could create some
interesting possibilities. Again, it seems to me that the piece
missing from the search phenomenon is the connection between
people. It may be implicit with tags and trackbacks, but there is
a lot of room for explicit relationships to help in the online
journey. This announcement is a very interesting step toward that
end.
Wednesday, March 2
March 2, 2005 12:52PM (EST)
BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis compares the
disintermediation of the classifieds business
to the impact of citizen's journalism on the news business.
Craigslist single-handedly eliminated a market of as much as
$65 million
by creating a more efficient online market. The best part is that
Craig didn't take the money but rather improved efficiencies so that
the market evaporated out of the hands of the newspapers.
Jeff envisions, "a distributed future when buyers and sellers won't need to come
to a centralized marketplace but, instead, will sit out there,
anywhere, on the internet waiting to be found by some specialized
successors to Google that put them together."
I agree and would just add that media companies should be watching for
ways that they can add value to this chain of events. Maybe
Craigslist is too anarchic for a particular exchange I want to
make. I will turn to media brands that specialize in that kind of
transaction. I might even pay for content, services or
transactions that help facilitate serving my need.
Tuesday, March 1
March 1, 2005 06:02PM (EST)
As
John Battelle points out referring to this excerpt from the recent
Wired article
on Yahoo's 10th anniversary, the network effect everyone hyped in the
'90's is starting to become reality. Search might be the most
tangible application of the ideal "web", but the real power behind all
the parts and pieces working together in one organic system is going to
be the influence of people.
Media properties that figure out how to plug the people they serve into
this system or how to lubricate the system itself will find revenue via
that connection. Revenue may be in the form of advertising
products and services like Craigslist or via transactions like
eBay. Branding is a little trickier, but it may work by
influencing the methods of connection through the system or by
filtering out the unwanted or wasteful connections.
I suspect Yahoo, Google and even Amazon will start pushing harder on
ways to engage their audience into deeper, more active relationships
with eachother. Note that
Yahoo now touts how much time their site users spend on their domain compared to Google.
March 1, 2005 01:08PM (EST)
LinkedIn now claims over 2 million users to its business-oriented
social networking tool. I would assume that this is beyond the
critical mass needed to turn the tool into something that can drive
revenue for the company, but they've wrestled with how to make that
happen for a long time now. Their secret sauce may be in the
recruiting market which is where they plan to start charging.
CNET reports
that they now plan to introduce $95 job posting fees. Their
competitors, including Friendster, Tribe, Orkut and Ryze, all seem to
avoid user-driven fees. Though Friendster seems to have found
some real power in the advertising model...not surprising with over 16
million registered members.
March 1, 2005 12:07PM (EST)
The
Keynote roster for this
conference looks pretty solid:
- IDG Welcoming Remarks by Bob Carrigan, CEO, ComputerWorld
- Alexander Hungate, CMO, Reuters
- Martin Nisenholtz,
SVP-Digital Operations, NYTCO
- David Winer, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law
- Susan Butler, Billboard Magazine Senior Writer & Entertainment Law Weekly Editor
- Phil Holden, Director of MSN Global Business & Product Management, MSN
- Doc Searls, Senior Editor, Linux Journal
Digg