Friday, October 23rd, 2009
links for 2009-10-23
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Suw: A bunch of ideas for how to get the best out of LinkedIn.
Interview series:
at the FASTforward blog. Amongst them: John Hagel, David Weinberger, JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott, and many more!
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Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
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Suw: Twitter statistics in glorious technocolour infographics. Says I tweet twice as much as I used to… not sure that can be right!
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Suw: Salesforce plugin helps businesses monitor Twitter for customer complaints and to address them in a timely manner - and we all know time is of the essence on Twitter. Sounds like a good idea.
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Suw: I just took at look at Co-Tweet and it really is a very good tool, one I'll be recommending to my clients. I don't use Salesforce, so hard for me to test their plug-in but has to be a no-brainer for Salesforce users.
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
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Kevin: Alan Mutter has a pretty scatching post on the 98-page Columbia University report on Restoring American Journalism. "The annual sales and number of jobs associated with the media industry are not sufficiently large to make them a priority for a federal bailout during this period of unprecedented economic distress. The federal investment in improved rural broadband penetration contemplated in the stimulus package would give consumers a greater choice of information than a handout targeted to a limited number of defined news organizations. Assuming for the sake of discussion that a handout were in the offing, who would choose which news media to support?"
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
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Kevin: The Postcode Paper looks quite a bit like Everyblock on paper. "It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics." They see it as "a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time."
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Kevin: Dave Winer shares some lessons from the hyperlocal project, InBerkeley.com. He says: "I thought we could apply the same approach that worked in bootstrapping weblogs, RSS and podcasting for a local site. One or two people start writing about their personal experiences. A small audience develops. Debates, discussions follow. More perspectives. At every step you invite people to participate. You always ask for the people who used to be called the audience to become full participants. That's how the idea scales. As I said, it worked for blogging and related technologies. Permalink to this paragraph
Instead, what happened at InBerkeley.com is that the people thought we were running a news organization, and they did stories the way reporters do them. That can't possibly work, imho — for the same reason the news industry is in crisis."
Saturday, October 17th, 2009
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Kevin: A nice overview by Ken Sands of changes in site navigation and social network integration by US news sites. Ken makes some great points when he says: "Even the best designed newspaper Web site home pages suffer from what I call "linkorrhea." With so many newsroom constituencies to serve, designers typically end up linking to several stories from every section of the printed paper, as well as linking to Web-original content such as blogs, slideshows and videos. Add in multiple ad spots and the home page looks more like Times Square than, say, Google, the epitome of simplicity."
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Kevin: Mathew Ingram with the Globe and Mail in Canada discusses 'walking the walk' of transparency after removing an article that he and his editors thought breached some of their editorial guidelines. Matt explains why they did and why they explained it: "My argument was twofold. By not responding, I argued that we were ignoring a conversation in which we should be taking part. And by removing something without explaining why, I argued that we were effectively breaching our trust with readers, in however small a way. While an editor slamming his own organization might be damaging to our brand, I argued that the trust of our readers was also a key part of our brand, and that we had to do everything we could to maintain it. That, I think, is the fundamental purpose of being open and honest in the first place." It's a great argument for transparency.
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Kevin: I'm still getting my head around Google Wave. I think it can be a powerful collaboration tool, but I've still yet to have my aha moment with it. Like all tools, I need to figure out what it's good for and see if it fills any unmet needs that I currently have in the tools that I use.
However, my current scepticism about it aside, here is a great list of tools and gadgets for Google Wave.
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Kevin: "CIOs who don't make the transformational jump from that old model to the new one of aligning IT with their companies' customers are hurting their companies and stunting their own careers." I write a lot about technology in the course of my work and think a lot about technology and IT in the course of my work, and I think there is a lot of value in this. In terms of news organisations, I'd have to say that from the website to the IT, too much technical focus tends to be put on internal needs that do not deliver value to audiences.
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Kevin: "Google Webmaster Tools has just launched a “labs” section, where you’ll find new features that may be early in the development cycle and not quite as robust as the rest of the tools. The features available so far are Fetch as Googlebot, which lets you see exactly what Googlebot is served when it requests a URL from your server and Malware Details, which shows you malicious code snippets from your site if it’s been flagged as containing malware."
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Kevin: "From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and clickthrough rates. (”You should follow me on Twitter” produced dramatically better results than the less moralizing, “Follow me on Twitter.”)
So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the one that everyone sees."
Friday, October 16th, 2009
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Last week we asked a simple question: How will you use Google Wave? Over 600 responses later, we're sending Wave nominations to the people who had the best use cases. Here are a few.
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
links for 2009-10-15
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Kevin: Paul Bradshaw gives an excellent list of plug-ins for journalists for WordPress. He highlights plug-ins that easily pull in other feeds and embed iFrames easily. Postalicious looks like a great plug-in to automatically publish links from a number of bookmarking services. I'll definitely be checking out the WP Web Scraper. That looks very powerful.
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Kevin: Must read post for journalists about comments. " KNS reporter Jamie Satterfield has taken a the innovative (for the news industry) to walk amongst the trolls. She has posted some 50 responses to comments on those stories in an effort to help readers understand more about the case.
To borrow Scripps' mission: Satterfield is shining light in an area of the Web site where rumor and opinion runs wild. And perhaps not surprisingly, when users see that a reporter is responding to their questions, they take notice. It cuts the riffraff and raises the level of discussion. "
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Kevin: Legislation to save newspapers comes at a cost says Jack Shafer of Slate: "It weakens the enterprises that are rising from below to compete with them to deliver advertising and, yes, deliver news." 'New people with fresh ideas' are going to take media in a new direction.
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Kevin: James Cridland looks at the various content management systems and the build vs buy versus free discussion, although he's not going to completely tell all in this post. Instead you have to come listen at the Radio at the Edge conference. It is a nice overview of some of the development, mostly in the UK, of CMSes and the technology behind them.
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Kevin: Dan Blank gives a great list of lessons on building media revenue streams. If there is one lesson from the Great Recession is that many media companies became too reliant on a single, business-cycle sensitive revenue stream: Advertising. Without a diversified business, they are fully exposed to the ups and downs of the economy. Taking lessons from B2B publishing, he lists a number of possible routes to new revenue streams. One of my favourites: "Promise High Value that Solves Problems".
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
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Kevin: "Presenters from the non-profit journalism world gave some interesting insight into how the model works and, in some cases, doesn't."
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Kevin: Rick Edmonds at Poynter attempts to quantify the decrease in US journalism spending. "By my back-of-the-envelope calculations (see below), newspapers have, just in the last several years, reduced their spending on journalism by about $1.6 billion annually." Rick also looks at some of the non-profit and new media efforts that have moved in to take the place of the declines in traditional newsgathering.
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Kevin: "The New York Times' Research and Development Group, a team of 13 full-timers, has spent nearly four years reviewing the newest technologies and gadgets for use in spreading news — and advertising — while also digging deep into audience and reader data, habits and trends"
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
links for 2009-10-10
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Kevin: "When the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases the latest numbers on Oct. 26, it will show that USA Today's circulation fell 17% to 1.88 million for the six months ending September 2009, a drop of about 390,000 copies. The decline could also threaten USA Today’s position as the No. 1 newspaper in the country by circulation." It was expected due to price increases and a 40% decrease in business for "hotel partners", basically papers handed out for free.
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Kevin: Nice piece from the Independent's Editorial Director for Digital. One quote that jumped out at me was this: "Murdoch has never shown any real understanding of the attention economy of the web, of the promiscuity of news consumers who cares more for the subject matter than the logo at the top. There is no brand loyalty on the web – especially not if you make your content difficult to find, and you charge people to read it when they’ve done so."
Anyone with digital experience knows this to be true, and Murdoch's continued reverance in the industry is from its past, not its future. -
Kevin: Very good info graphic showing mass layoffs by industry in the US by sector. The hit to manufacturing is especially apparent. One thing that is fascinating is the spike in unemployment in the construction industry but not the real estate industry.
Friday, October 9th, 2009
links for 2009-10-09
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Kevin: Yang-May Ooi looks at Google's Sidewiki. She says that businesses always are nervous about blogging because they don't want the negative comments. She takes a different point of view from media reviews of Sidewiki and says that businesses need to pay attention to this tool. "My own view is that whether Sidewiki in its current form stays or goes, the trend is towards an open-source approach to commenting and discussions and we will be seeing more public, free-for-all (in all sense of that phrase) spaces for everyone and anyone to throw in their tuppence worth."
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Kevin: "When longtime newspaperman and Web entrepreneur Alan Mutter started his blog, "Reflections of a Newsosaur," in 2004, he did so on a lark — thinking that he'd just experiment and learn about the technology. But after posting a few thoughts about the state of the news industry and the coming wave of new media, and then posting a few more, and then a few more, he was hooked. In the five years since, his blog has become a staple in the media world, a regular voice in the ongoing conversation about how the the media will somehow monetize content and save quality journalism."
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Kevin: Headshift's Robin Hamman looks at the law surrounding marketing, PR and transparency. "Just about everyone I speak to in marketing and PR these days is talking about using blogs and social networking services to engage directly with consumers and other audiences, with many actually doing it - blogging or tweeting for the brands they support. However, before you go down this route, or try to enlist bloggers and social networkers to do it for you, there are several little known laws and regulations you should be aware of," Robin says.
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Kevin: Is your site ready for success? It's not just about having the servers in place but also about social functionality design. "At the Future of Web Apps conference Kevin Rose (Digg, Pownce, Wefollow) gave a cool presentation on the top 10 down and dirty ways you can grow your web app." In terms of social, Kevin Rose urges people to engage, connect and interact with your community.
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Kevin: Good tips from Alison Driscoll on how to set up a Facebook group. Events, messages and adding keywords to improve search will all help in creating a successful group.
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Kevin: "This chapter is part of a new book, 'Playing Footsie with the FTSE?' edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble, a collection of 20 articles by leading journalists and academics that asks why leading financial journalists and commentators failed to predict the biggest economic crisis in 70 years." I might just buy this book. I think the hindsight is not necessarily 20/20 when it comes to journalist failure to foresee the financial crisis and write credibly about it. There were many writers in the business press raising warning flags. The problem is that general interest newspapers and magazines didn't spot it. I read an article in Bloomberg magazine in July 2007 warning of the danger of CDOs. Still this book might be interesting as a post-mortem and better ways to cover the complex world of international finance.