DefinitiveInk

Good Reads for Thursday Morning

Jeff Jarvis on journalism -  Now I finally understand what he means by "citizen journalist".

John Battelle on traffic of good intent. "My new measure of a company's success is pretty simple - forget the technology, the promises, or the backers. Just look at the traffic. Is it good, and is it growing? Getting good, growing traffic is a really hard thing to do. If a company manages it, it tells you a lot. Pretty simple stuff, but there you have it.

Fred Wilson - on Bubble 2.0 . He has a bunch of very recent posts about VCing.

EVDB - An events database launches - social networking + evite + who knows it's in beta.

Marc Canter on Yahoo 360. - I've begun to play with it. My first comment has to do with the fact that if you make your blog public the url is your username.  My user name is very silly, since I made it up earlier in the week and most possible combinations of things are taken.

Arty: PostSecret - send them a postcard with a secret and it will go up on the site. Reminds me of a fluxus project. (via Kottke)

NYC becoming Atlanta meme: A daily visit to Curbed confirms my theory. The Met Life building becoming condos, the LES being razed, a HOJO's opening near the Gowanus in Brooklyn.

Funny: A mock blog and site about an imaginary communications firm. I'm linking to their page about process. (via micropersuassion)

Clarification: I'm really not looking forward to the Huffington celebrity blog. Hope my post yesterday didn't leave that impression.

Celebrity blogging

At first when I read Greg Lindsey's Business 2.0 article about Arianna Huffington's new blog I had a flashback to inside.com and got all riled up about the term blogging being misused to describe yet another online publishing venture using a blogging engine as a backend. But it seems that this is a blog of opinion only with Barry Diller sharing his favorite movies or thoughts on a political issue.  I can't say I haven't thought of putting together something similar on a different topic - in fact this makes me think I should move forward on my idea - but there is something to this that traditional publishers should think about. 

The trick is getting people to contribute on a steady basis, compensation isn't really an issue it is more about ego.  In writing the article Lindsey has gotten hold of the e-mail solicitation that Huffington sent out and there is a nice line, "There will also be times when we e-mail you, asking for your take on a breaking story or issue that seems to be in your wheelhouse of interest or expertise. Picture the greatest Charlie Rose panel ever assembled -- and we'll be able to put it together instantly."  So just a thought here but how about having guest commenters on articles?  A select group of people could be solicited for reactions to news or articles.  Suppose AO Scott reviewed a movie and under that were comments and some of those comments came from influential taste-makers? (Would that undermine or complement the reviewer's column? In a world with meta-critic and rotten tomatoes, does it really matter?) What about sports coverage? Hard news?  Think of this as an interactive letters to the editor or rather editor to the article for each piece. Or perhaps our papers could emulate what The Guardian does and blog about itself in a nearby section.  How about pulling a few blog comments onto the story page?

My name and Google search results

I've named my blog DefinitiveInk because that is what my consulting business is called but that isn't my name. I wrestled with what to call it but thought since the blog had to do with my consulting and what I think about, it made sense to name it that.  Eventually I will get off my arse and redesign the whole site so it revolves around the blog.   I may move the blog to an MT installation on my host or I may finally flatten these templates and play around with them in the process moving the DefinitiveInk site over to TypePad. My Google results are fine as well  DefinitiveInk's listings are showing up, and I see in my referrer logs that Google is spidering my site on a regular basis. I'm actually very flattered that people are reading my modest effort here especially since I haven't publicized it that much and I get a thrill at the occasional comment or trackback. The problem I'm having with Google has to do with my name.

I used to get some decent results but now I've been pushed back to page 5 or 6 and even then it is hard to tell. The Joshua Mack who shows up on those pages is not me,  instead he  is a  Christian pastor who is a right winger and who has written numerous books evil, home schooling, and other topics. Once when I was dating someone Googled me and I had to convince them that the Joshua Mack who is so prolific on the results isn't me. The other main players  on the results pages  are a basketball star, and a wealthy socialite in NY whose party invites I would sometimes get growing up.  I know that I'm not alone in this, for instance  a quick search for Steve Rubell, a very popular blogger comes up with pages filled with the former owner of Studio 54 and now hotels,  but I want my name back on top.

As those of you who  read my blog can guess the Joshua Mack who hogs the pages is not dear to my heart. I want to displace him and thrust him down into the bowels of Google so only his true believers can seek him out. So now I find myself at a crossroads. Do I rename the blog? Do I mirror the blog with one named Joshua Mack.  Do I activate JoshuaMack.com and point it here? Would simply naming it Definitive Ink/Joshua Mack do it? What is the best way? Any ideas? To kick this off I've begun an experiment where each post now says Joshua Mack for Definitive Ink. We'll see if this has any impact.

Update - It has a DefinitiveInk post now appears in the #3 position on Google with just the small change to the posting attribution. Amazing.

Starbucks and "liberals" plot to use caffeine to spread propaganda

Starbuck's is printing "liberal quotes" on its coffee cups. What's next Air America in the stores? If we deprive conservatives of Latte's will they fall asleep at the wheel? Is it really a good idea to go espousing common sense about the deficit with hot liquid in hand?  (via Kottke)

15 years ago today - warning labels appeared on records

So today the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the Grokster case. Lawrence Lessig has a choice post about the Times and links to p2p streams of all of the legal briefs associated with the case. It made me think about what history.com's on this day section might have for today. In addition to Clark Gable's marriage to Carole Lombard today is the day that music companies started labeling their records, cassettes and CDs (early for that wasn't it?) if the lyrics might be deemed offensive.  Just thought it was interesting.

On another historic note Jeff Jarvis seems to have discovered the fact that you can close caption a vlog and that in doing so can release the power of search on to the the meta-data inside. Jarvis used a service to close caption.  He apparently demonstrated this to some newspaper and television executives. Could they really have been unaware that you could close-caption video on the web? Or is it just such a neat new form? Wow,  time-code, transcripts, who knew it could work on a computer as well as on TV. Think of the synergies - we might be able to trigger events like ad text (see HGTVpro.com).  Forgive the sarcasm.  In the post or perhaps in the comments was an interesting idea to develop close-captioning software for the citizen journalist. 

Cold calling an activist

I live in Park Slope several blocks away from a very controversial proposed stadium and development slated for the Atlantic Yards.  There is a very vocal opposition to the planned development and last week  a company hired by the developer to do some push polling called the leader of the opposition who  quickly hit the record button on her tape recorder.  You can read the transcript here. I particularly like the way the pollster keeps saying OK and not reacting to the venom coming from the other side of the receiver.

yahoo 2.0

Yahoo has managed to reinvigorate itself through embracing social content applications. Om Malik has a very good post about Yahoo's recent resurgence.  (via susan mernit). The article is really a short study of how internet 2.0 applications can change the perceptions of a company.  He writes,

"Just had coffee with Gautam Godhwani, one of the co-founders of SimplyHired and he pointed out that Yahoo was an Internet 1.0 company that adapted to Internet 2.0 very quickly, embracing the open platforms and social computing phenomenon. “Yahoo changed, and changed really fast, reacting to market trends that were not favoring them,” he says. Like some of the more thoughtful in Silicon Valley, he thinks Yahoo is a more solid, a more mature company. Google in comparison is more of a young buck, running rampant. Good points, but I think in many ways what has changed is the perception of Yahoo. And that is the key point here.

These are not moves that will have a material impact on the company’s bottom line. Yahoo’s future, as far as I am concerned is in broadband and mobile."

This last part is the key. Things like having a creative commons search engine, or adding RSS and blogs, wikis, and other social apps may not have a material impact on a company's bottom line (though in some cases they might) but they can reposition a company as an astute player in the space. They can create buzz and get more people to notice and visit. I'm not sure how one quantifies the marketing impact versus the cost of implementing them but they may be the secret sauce for some larger online sites to reclaim their mojo.

First views of Yahoo 360 - social content from your firends

Charlene Li of Forrester offers a first look at Yahoo 360 - description and screenshots included. It ties in with my post below about social content and sharing content with people you know.  She writes;

"Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people. To this end, your home page on the service shows the most recent content published by people within your network. This might be a blog post, a photo album, review, or an updated profile item. This page is constantly refreshed as the people in your network update the information on their spaces. This fundamental concept of linking people through their updated “stuff” is what makes Yahoo! 360 unique – and inherently will drive usage of the service higher than traditional social networks. In essence, the content is being pushed to you by the service." (via johnbattelle)

Social Content

Bill Burnham, a VC who blogs wrote this:

"...despite all the hype about social networking, it has now become readily apparent that social networking is not an application in and of itself, but rather a by-product of other activities.  While Friendster represents the previous social networking orthodoxy of having the social network itself be the application, MySpace, and now Yahoo 360, reflect the new understanding that social networking will be just one aspect of a fully encompassing online "social environment".

I think that is right. The idea that combined online services are more of a state of mind than an application. This led me to think a bit about the term social content. It's a term that more aptly defines what I think is really going on with a shared flickr photo or a much commented on article. Of course no idea hasn't been had before so a quick Google search led me to this social sharing service tutorial post on Corante's many-to-many blog .

"Social content services have a strong emphasis on implicit social discovery. Users use these services to organize their own content for later recollection. But since the services are public, other users can peek into the collective space, and discover similar items, topics or persons. We’re going to look for opportunities in this project to stress the ‘synthesis’ aspect of social discovery; to escape from the pattern of curated collections managed and presented by one person.

I've been thinking lately about how a traditional publisher can move or  integrate their content in to a freer space  and as I wrote earlier in this post I think it has to do with mindset. It's embracing the  "synthesis aspect" and the idea that the content you produce can be used in whatever way the audience wants to make it more valuable to themselves by adding to it, sharing it, integrating it, commenting on it, and rating it.  That you are seeding a discussion and that that discussion may take place somewhere outside of your control.

 

Whose newsfeeds?

Funny I just got out of a meeting discussing RSS and checked in with Susan Mernit's blog to find a post about newsfeeds and traffic. The point being as Alan Mutter points out  that something has to happen with fees and the licensing structure of the content that Yahoo and Google are aggregating, since the cost of content creation by the sources of the  items appearing on google news are getting paid for their  supplying it. 

Google Tads

Google is  beginning to run tagged words as ads - tads= tag+ads. Clicking on them takes you to a page of ads based on that word.  37 Signals blog has a short entry , comments and a link to this in action. One can imagine these tags being put into content itself which is sort of scary. (via kottke -- who does seem to be doing an awful lot of pointing out "neat" things in the larger papers. Not sure what I expect for my small contribution but not sure it is links to articles I've read it will be interesting tosee how his "experiment" evolves over the year.)

Tell a Senator about your ailments

Maureen Dowd's column this morning has a response from a reader with an intriguing idea;

""Americans ought to send Bill Frist their requests: 'Dear Dr. Frist: Please watch the enclosed video and tell us if that mole on my mother's cheek is cancer. Does she need surgery?' ""

Or by fax, perhaps it would be a good flickr tag - Frist that could be pulled on to a special blog.

slideshow community app

A friend showed me slideroll.com. It's an interesting application that enables people to create online slideshows from their photos and share them. I'm thinking of it like a iphoto plus community. I've yet to try out the slideshow creator but it reminds me of something I read in someone's notes about e-tech and  odeo the upcoming podcast site. The post (wish I could link to it) spoke about the well designed browser based recording studio application. Both of these represent a really interesting move towards enabling users to create and share multi-media and their existence bodes well for sites like ourmedia.com.

On a similar note gnomz.com on line comic creator (via paidcontent)

Broadsheets may not only be the result of taxes

Jack Shafer in Slate  debunks the idea that broadsheets owe their rise solely to paper taxes.

Early printed and manuscript news sheets were often large to begin with, closer in size to today's magazines than to most novels. A full sheet of book paper (roughly 25 by 38 inches) folded in half two times produces a magazine format called a quarto, for the four leaves (eight pages) that result. Folded one more time, the sheet produces a book-sized format call an octavo. After the paper tax was imposed, some English octavo newspapers grew to the quarto size that had been common in early European news sheets.

If broadsheets owed their existence to a paper tax, then newspapers would have right-sized themselves to a different, optimum dimension after the British tax (a duty on paper) was discontinued in 1855, according to Barnhurst. Yet the broadsheet flourished for another century and a half in Britain before its "quality" dailies started printing in the tabloid format.

...what explains the endurance of the broadsheet myth? It isn't even plausible when you think it through: If you had been the British exchequer and a newspaper sidestepped taxes by inflating page-size, wouldn't you have closed the loophole the next day by declaring, "Publishers may print their newspapers on sheets of paper the size of a mainsail if they so desire, but it's this office's recommendation that the crown adopt a per square-inch tax on newspapers"? Yes, you would have, and the broadsheet would have expired overnight if it were not a viable format.

Scholar Kevin G. Barnhurst demolishes the broadsheet myth in his 1994 book Seeing the Newspaper, calling it "received history." No one factor explains the broadsheet's rise, he writes. Yes, the British did impose a new tax in 1712, but the "British tax on paper did not initiate relatively large newspaper formats," he writes.

 

Online Broadsheets/ Paper Tabloids

The NYT has a very interesting article about the move in the newspaper industry  towards tabloid format from a broadsheet format.  This makes me somewhat sad since if the NYT ever did this I would no longer be able to show off the folding techniques that I learned when I was younger. Truth is I read the paper online now with the exception of  the Sunday paper which I could never read and fold as one unit.

It's amazing that the form of what we think of when we think of a newspaper dates as the article points out from the 1700's when English publishers were trying to avoid paying taxes on the number of pages they published.

It's also very interesting to me that as print papers begin to look at a tabloid form, websites in general take on a broadsheet form. Take a look at the NY Post's homepage for the contrast. In print a tabloid with a big headline and a picture, and  online a menu of options, story leads, and indexes.

The article doesn't mention the Internet at all with the exception of quoting Jeff Jarvis who (of course) was a consultant on the Jersey Journal project they article is about.   Isn't circulation down because of the Internet and other news outlets? It seems to me that online sites are sort of hybrids and I wonder how long it is until we name them? News sites seem to be broadsheets with tabloid elements.
- Tabloids are supposed to have shorter punchier writing - the Internet has shorter writing - though the option to go long is always there.
- Tabloids are supposed to be more visually exciting and easier to read - the Internet can be visually exciting and is pretty easy to read, and it can be read in different formats. 
- Papers worry that advertisers won't pay the rates they did for broadsheets since their pages are half the size. Publishers argue that they have the same impact so advertisers should pay the same rates. Online advertising is measured to death with very little regard to it's "impact".

No conclusions here just pointing out some things that occured to me as I read the article. Lastly the format of web sites as we know them is changing too but  just as English publishers created the broadsheet in reaction to taxes we have created a whole universe based on technology for example, a horizontal rectangle as opposed to a vertical one.

Friday Reading

Very funny new lists on McSweeney's.

Parents increasing control of teen Internet use via filters.

Yahoo 360 Technorati's list of posts about it.  Doesn't it seem to make a lot of sense.

Lawrence Lessig opening revisions to his next book to the public via a wiki.

A list of Kindergarten homework that perhaps we should all consider doing.  For more you could also look at Learningtoloveyoumore 9click on the photo).

Mark Miller on Bush and propaganda

Mark Miller one of our leading voices on propaganda has this to say about Bush's defense of  using covert propaganda on the American people. 

As the head of the GAO says in the Reuters article about this;  "This is not just a legal issue, it's also an ethical matter," Walker said. "The taxpayers have a right to know when the government is trying to influence them with their own money."

Camus posed the question. "Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?" His point was  that everything in life is choice. Every second of every day, we are choosing, there are always alternatives. Existence, at least human existence, is defined by choices people make. Ethics too is about choices and it seems that few of the people making some very large choices on all of our behalf have that in mind when they act. There are better alternatives to winning a point than lying or basing arguments of figures that take infinity as one of the calculations.

Links for Thursday morning

Harry Shearer is guest blogging on Talking Points Memo.

Decompiling Programmer-Speak funny and true post into the secret language of programmers by Tom Evelin. My favorite is:

“What?  You wanted the results to display?  On the screen?  That’s gonna be hard.”

Translation:  Here’s a good place to bury all the slippage.  Major schedule revision coming.

Sort of disturbing yet intriguing online (flashing words and images) personality  tests -One of which is seeing if  you prefer Bush or Nixon.

So who is a journalist - Anyone who wants to be.. - Slate article

How We Went From Nowhere To Track Of The Day On Garageband.com - intersting post about how a song rose to the top of GarageBand's charts and what that means if anything.

 

Is NYC becoming Atlanta?

Is it just me or is the city perversely trying  to become Atlanta? What should we make of Commerce Bank trying to open a drive-through in Park Slope, the Time Warner Building Mall, luxury housing on the Bowery, a call for a new slogan, a bid for the Olympics, and now possibly the Superbowl?

Online News and Magazine Sites

Yesterday's NY Times article about online news raised some very interesting questions about the newspaper of the future. Susan Mernit has posted a letter from Ken Sands, the online Publisher of the Spokesman-Review one of the papers whose models the Times wrote about. In a Poynter online discussion group he wrote;

We're at an interesting period in the evolution of online news. Many newspapers simply put their print content online, add some breaking news and maybe a few bells-and-whistles multimedia and interactivity and call it good. Sell a bunch of online advertising and everybody's happy, right?

I don't think so. In the next few years, in my view, online news should become much more independent of that print content. If you think about it, posting a newspaper online is giving people a snapshot of yesterday's news. We should instead, give them today's news and a bit of tomorrow's news, as well as making full use of the unique attributes of the web, including: immediacy, interactivity, utility, multimedia, entertainment, archiving, aggregation and community publishing. When you truly take advantage of those attributes, you've got a much different web site.

I think that this is even more the case with online magazine sites. A recent  design review on designinteract.com (a publication of Communication Arts) says, " We all know that magazine sites are intended to support their offline counterparts and further their subscription base."    The site is putting up partial articles, listing the table of contents, and party photos (though as the review points out it would probably be more satisfying for the user and those in the phots if the images were captioned.) They could do a better job announcing upcoming issues and it looks like a pain to update given the paucity of content,  but I suppose as a marketing vehicle it is fine.  But I wouldn't call it a real magazine site.

A real magazine site has many of the same attributes that Sands thinks would make a good newspaper site. Done properly it can be a real partner with a print magazine and since it would be so compelling, I bet it would also be a powerful driver of subs.