Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Content aggregation sites are popping up everywhere. In short, they do little
more than assemble others content and enable you to triangulate off
read it (in other words – determine how hot the content is and what you should
be paying attention to). The latest being Gather. Gather is like a big chat room without
the chat. Instead of chatting, you write and post. Others read. And the more
they read, the more money you make. You can leave comments if you are a
member. Others include Newsvine.

Jim Manzi is behind Gather and had this to say in the Boston
Globe: ”No longer must I accept much of my content from what I have called
the Literary Industrial Complex, that group of concentrated media organizations
with their small elites and self-reinforcing arbiters delivering my news and
information ‘top-down,’ ". He has written
moreon this over at Gather.

Ah, yeah Jim. If they are so evil and unnecessary, why choose to
announce your venture in the Literary Industrial Complex and not in your own
blog? Actually, where is your blog mate?

Looking at Gather, I’m not sure their cluttered design and jamming of content
into the limits of the browser is any improvement on conventional news sites.
And if I am going to read the thinking of ordinary people I’m (personally) more
likely to read, well, Blogs than a site like Gather.

I also wonder how this will influence PR going forward – at what point do the
PR Pros start looking at the more prominent writers (the best paid) and target
them as a core element of programs. Assuming that Gather can gather readers, you
can pretty much bet on that happening. At which point, I wonder how Gather will
gather its writers and manage the editorial quality.

Kareem suggests
that revenue sharing won’t hook bloggers. I’m with him. This is a conversation
for me (and indulgence).

Techcrunch covers this
as does Mathew
Ingram. Steve
thinks there is a Web 2.0 crash coming. He is as right on that as predicting
the Sun will come up tomorrow. Steve is also right that unless they plug into
the ecosystem they will fail. Information is a commodity in the Web 2.0 market
and commodity markets depend on creating convenience for the buyer. No Adsense =
much fewer sales. No tags (external, not just internal) = fewer readers. Much
fewer readers.

To this point, Gather is a very closed ecosystem. Their opportunity was to
make it open. Tag not just Gather content but all content. Enable trackbacks and
show who is linking and commenting outside of the site. This is more akin to
Yahoo or AOL than a blog.

Whether Gather succeeds or not is pretty much a crap-shoot – although I am
sure they have a more determined sense of the outcome. What matters is that they
are innovating, testing new models, learning and adapting. Those that don’t will
die. The rest learn.

Remember WebVan?

TexasGigs is up and running. Congrats to the team at Pegasus. From the site:

"Our advanced technology will deliver uniquely relevant, customized news and information to each of our readers based on where they live and what they enjoy reading most." Pegasus coverage will go down to block level and as wide as the community; among oither features, they promise downloadable dining, entertainment and city guides.

More over at paidContent. According to Steve Outing, TexasGigs will be part of the full Pegasus Dallas site (as yet unnamed) when it debuts.

The model here is a good one for corporates looking to harness alternate publishing models – here a strong editor drives the site while soliciting submissions from the public and enabling plenty of comments, chatting etc… This is very different from other models in which the blog simply exists for folks to post away to, editors be damned.

“A blog is nothing more than a piece of technology… We’ll use the technology our way.” – Jonathan Landman, The New York Times Deputy Managing Editor

It seems there really is no such thing as an internal memo these days. Jonathan Landman – The New York Times Deputy Managing Editor – recently sent out a memo to his staff about blogging. The context here is these are a series of new blogs related to their Red Carpet site. Here is a snippet:

But our new blogs are more than running commentary. Look at Carr’s. It’s full of links to film publications and blogs and web sites. It encourages responses from readers and hopes to start a lively conversation. Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it.

It’s worth spending a little time thinking about blogs, and about ourselves. Blogs make some newspaper people nuts; they’re partisan, the thinking goes, and unfair and mean-spirited and sloppy about facts. Newspapers make some bloggers nuts; they think we’re dull and slow and pompous and jealous guardians of unearned “authority.”

It’s a pretty dopey argument. Indeed, some blogs are lousy. So are some newspapers. Some blogs reject journalism. Some practice it.

The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology. It allows people to compile thoughts, connect with others and interact quickly with readers. People can use it any way they want to. It has no inherent ethical or moral quality, though it does have its own special power.

We’ll use the technology our way. Our bloggers will have editors. They will observe our normal standards of fairness and care. They won’t float rumors or take journalistic shortcuts. Critics and opinion columnists can have opinion blogs; reporters can’t. (To quote Carr: “If the Carpetbagger delved into plot or relative quality – they didn’t turn me loose for my refined cinematic taste ? flying monkeys would come out of the ceiling here at headquarters and behead him.”) We’ll encourage readers to post their thoughts, but we’ll screen them first to make sure the conversation is civil. Some bloggers will accuse us of violating blogospheric standards of openness and spontaneity. That’s life in the big city.

We will use blogs to convey information, sometimes in conventional ways, sometimes not-so. Our notions of journalistic responsibility are perfectly compatible with spirited fun. Do we put David Carr online to be witless? Um, no. Actually, we think he’s pretty witty in the newspaper.

Blogging does impose obligations. Blogs have to be updated frequently. They have to be carefully tended. There are costs; David Carr and Damon Darlin will be spending time they could be using to write newspaper articles. Their bosses have decided that’s an advantageous tradeoff. I agree.

Most of this is pretty much true for companies embarking on blogging – especially the cost part. But in some ways the NYTimes misses the point in the same way so many companies do – it isn’t about the great writer or rock star exec you’ve got – and whose lucid and clever opinions you are about to unleash on an unwitting public.

Blogs are about building a community and establishing dialogue. As others point out, to them it seems to still be a publishing tool (his memo refers to it as a “technology”) – which at its most basic level it is, but at its most important level it isn’t. His memo barely gets to this point – instead pointing to the fact that they will “screen” posts to ensure the conversation is civil. Fair enough. But how about a memo to the community you are trying build that stimulates them to participate? Rather than ask your employees for their thoughts – how about asking the NYTimes readers for theirs. They are the community.