Churbuck.com

WASHINGTONIAN: Washington BUZZ

The avalanche continues …. 

Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod – New York Times

David Carr reaches for the futurist’s bong and take a big hit before exhaling the perennial b.s. that some ultra-portable, disposable, fold-it-and-stick-it-your-pocket device — aka Digital Ink, Digital Paper — will save the beleagured world of print.

In today’s (Monday’s) New York Times — my favorite day of the week because it’s when the Times devotes a few column inches to new media — the obituary is written for the newspaper business. Carr says that if there were only the equivalent of an iPod-like device for print, something so intuitively fantastic that one out of ten Americans would rush out and buy one, then voila!, the industry would be saved the way the iPod saved the neo-Jurassic music industry from a lifetime of lawsuits against bewildered parents who’s kids were siphoning off the entire Sony Music catalogue on the home Dell.

Carr misses the point but comes close to it. Early in the column he correctly talks about "companion media", stuff that you can half-way tune into while consuming other media.

The reason the iPod and podcasting and satellite radio and other aural media are surviving is the fact that you can listen to something while you do something else. I can listen to the Gillmor Gang on my Nano while driving to work on Route 128 and still operate a motor vehicle. I can read a good-old-fashioned book while listening to music. I can’t read a book while driving, so I’d have to consider an audio book. Can’t read and watch TV (but I can keep a little attention on something like CNN or C-Span). Actually, I can’t do email and listen to a podcast — if my attention is on writing replies I can’t exactly process what the speakers are saying. I can listen to Johnny Cash when writing email.

The fixed commodity is time and print is a 100% focused medium. You can’t read and operate heavy machinery. Sorry, but the most portable, inexpensive, battery-efficient piece of "digital paper" — even with a heads-up display or neural-cerebral-cortext plug is not going to save newspapers.

"Consider if the line between the Web and print matter were erased by a device for data consumption, not data entry – all screen, no baggage – that was uplinked and updated constantly: a digital player for the eyes, with an iTunes-like array of content available at a ubiquitous volume and a low, digestible price."

 Sorry, there is an iPod for print and it is called RSS. The time-shifting, "push" delivery of syndicated content to the reader of your choice is where the shift in text has occurred and will accelerate. Putting a micro-payment system in front of it isn’t going to change anything. The print industry needs to wake up to the disturbing news that it ain’t about moving off of paper to glass anymore, that their own web efforts are severely threatened by a fast shift away from the decade old page-view, eyeball model to one of attention, distribution, mark-up, mash-up, tagging and manipulation.

Old Media’s Lame-Duck Days

 Jon Fine comments at BusinessWeek about the new world order in new media, correctly pointing out in this current climate of Dot.bomb 2.0 M&A fever that a company like MySpace couldn’t have become MySpace if its new owner, News Corp., had tried to launch it.

"If acquiring bits and pieces isn’t budging the stock price, what will? It’s extremely difficult for an old-media player to build a serious new-media asset. There are established competitors. There are generational issues. (Myspace would not have become myspace had it been launched by News Corp.) And there are the quarterly numbers that Wall Street demands — when it’s not whacking the moguls for being too dependent on mature businesses. To move the needle right now, you need something massive. You need, for instance, to buy Yahoo. Of course, today it’s too late to buy Yahoo. Today, Yahoo buys you. Assuming, that is, that Yahoo thinks its business sense can cross the generational divide. Or that it’s even worth the bother."

The beta release of Cnet in late September marked a significant return of the "map of the market" model pioneered by SmartMoney in the 1990s. While there was some discussion within IDG about the graphical metaphor as an option to replace the existing model of "related links" or "more-like-this" text boxes that most news sites display adjacent to their stories, I feel the gimmick is just that — a gimmick — but one that presents some challenges as publishers attempt to induce their users to linger during their sessions and consume more pages per visit, the leading indicator of that Web 1.0 metric — stickiness.

In brief — an information map is a cartographic technique where the relationship and value of a piece of information (size, popularity, significance) is indicated by an icon’s size, color, and connection to related pieces of content. Think of the maps of the United States that exaggerate the size of the state according to its contribution to a vital statistic. I made such maps at Yale in the 70s in one of my all-time favorite courses, Concepts of Cartography (or ‘Maps for Saps", as the gut-seekers dubbed it), in the Yale Computer Lab, programming punch cards to show the relative tonnage of cargo entering and exiting American ports.

Iconic relativity is a great technique — in theory — and has been extended to aural cues, such as assigning different tones to traded securities, colors for their "heat" or volumes, etc.  None of them seem to have extended very far beyond the initial user interface infatuations of the 90s.

Spatial indicators of informational relationships are common, but not very widely accepted. Jerry Michalski shows one on his site, eg.

While Cnet should be commended for reviving its two related link solutions, I’d like to know how the algorithm is tweaked to insure that popularity doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy, ie. promoting the most viewed story as the largest rectangle in the map will induce others to visit the page, further pushing the ranking of the content.

My buddy Mark Cahill at Reel-Time IM’d me at 6:30 last night to tell me the site had been hacked and hijacked by a worm. First time that has every happened to me, so I took down the offending page — just a text message telling me some pin-head "owned" me — emailed the ISP’s sysadmin, and learned it was an idle version of Drupal that needed to be patched. Patched it is, and back we go.

What really is hammering me is spammers forging churbuck.com return addresses to their outgoing bumf. The resulting bounces are keeping my spam filters busy. Doubtlessly this is putting me on all sorts of blacklists, but there’s nothing I can do.

I advocate finding a spammer, chaining them to a table and every evening doing a live webcast where a millimeter of them is shaved off with a deli meat slicer, starting with the bottom of their feet.  

Things that set me off:

1. Flavored coffee: "Hazelnut Raspberry Irish Creme" — this is not coffee. This is poison. This is the potable equivalent of bad cologne. There is one true coffee and it’s name is Peet’s French Roast.

2. Luggage on wheels:  get out of the Barca-Lounger and carry your own bag like a man. If you stop in the jet-way to extend the #$%$# retractable handle I shall keep on charging forward and kick you.

3. The revival of the dot.com bubble. Web 2.0, Web 1.0. Social-anything. We’re careening right over the cliff again.

4. Henry Blodgett’s rehabilitation. The guy was a trade-reporter hack who was peter-principled into a stock analyst gig, had his 15-minutes of fame, talked out of both sides of his mouth, and is back, reborn as a blogger with a big foot-noted disclaimer. Go away. 

5. Xenon Headlights: like staring down a landing B-52. The lumination equivalent of a rolling middle-finger.

5. Web 2.0 M&A frenzies. The breathlessness with which the Webblog Inc. acquisition by AOL — that shining paradigm of online mediocrity — was greeted by the insular world of bloggers looking for financial redemption ("You see, our model DOES pay") overlooks the fact that Calcanis’s empire is based on AdSense revenues. While he makes Google rich, he somehow achieves a 12X multiple so AOL can buy some traffic. This is all driven by Media 1.0 dinosaur fears of being left, yet again, at the kiddie table.  There are a lot of Web 1.0 vampires rising from the crypt trying again to find that "liquidity event" in the sky.

6. Indignant new media screams about getting their scoops ripped off by the MSM. Get over it. Plagarism is the American way.  

Venture funds return to Net – The Boston Globe

The "Google Effect" in Boston-area VC. Sort of akin to the Microsoft Effect in the early 90s — if the entrepreneur can’t convincingly cast the strategy out from beneath the shadow of the industry behemoth, then don’t bother asking.

 I ran into the "Outlook Effect" in the winter of 2004 while raising funds for a startup focused on collaboration web-services for the SMB market. Every VC had a short-sighted Outlook obsession. How long before they shift that to an AJAX obsession?

The Google-Factor paints most decisions in my media world these days, but intuitively I have to agree with IDG CEO Pat Kenealy’s cynical assessment that Google is to 2005 what AOL was to 1999 — a looming behemoth that will be replaced by another looming behemoth as surely as it will snow in January in Framingham. 

"But when entrepreneurs come calling at venture firms these days, foraging for money to bankroll Internet start-ups, they can expect to be grilled about their approach to the fast-growing Google, which boasts a market value of about $90 billion and more than $7 billion in cash."

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Advertising 2.0: An agenda for the Web 2.0 workshop

Jarvis in on a Web 2.0 panel this morning and posts the discussion agenda

"Advertisers need distributed media to provide metrics. Distributed media also have an opportunity to measure (and monetize) new assets, such as trust, influence, timeliness, interaction, engagement, and also to measure (and monetize) new behaviors, such as swarming around people and tags. * We need to rally round cookie sets and data reporting on the publisher side. * We need other tools to serve cookies and report data (i.e., RSS readers). * We need audience demographics and behavior. * We need publisher data (subject matter, demographics, content safety…). * We need protections against spam. * We need to establish trusted networks. All this should allow advertisers to select the “best” media, however they wish to define that — audience, demographics, influence, etc. — or allow publishers to serve the best advertising; it should increase efficiency and value for all and will support the growth of new media."

Ning Developer Documentation

Marc Andreesen’s new thing, Ning, has opened its doors. I played around for a while and liked the concept — essentially a Php, CSS, XHTML playground for building social apps. "Hike Around the Bay Area" sort of things. I signed on for a developer’s account and will mess around with importing the open-source bike ride format off of this blog.

:: Spark Capital ::

Paidcontent sheds some light on the launch of Spark Capital, the $260 million Cambridge VC firm that took an ad out in Monday’s NYT.

"Founders: Dennis Miller, who was executive VP responsible for production and original programming for TNT from 1990-95; Todd Dagres, who notably backed Akamai while a partner at Battery Ventures; and Santo Politi, former president of new media at Blockbuster, who was responsible for figuring out how to move the video-rental giant into digital-broadcasting and VOD services. Other partners include Paul J. Conway, former chief financial officer at Charles River Ventures, and Bijan Sabet, previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Charles River.  "

Smart team with strong heritage. CRV is one of the top tier Boston-area VCs. 

MediaPost Publications – Papers Take A New Pass On Pass-Along, Data Reveals Total Readership – 10/04/2005

When I first got sucked into the world of publishing metrics in the mid-90s I was amused by the concept of "pass-along," that completely speculative measure of how many people read a dead-tree publication.

"IN AN EFFORT TO PROVIDE better usage data for advertisers, the Newspaper Association of America Monday launched a new initiative to show advertisers that newspapers’ reach exceeds the number of papers they sell. The semi-annual study, called the Newspaper Audience Database (NADbase), counts the average number of people who read the 100 largest newspapers in the country on a given weekday. Rather than providing circulation data–the usual currency by which newspaper advertising is bought and sold–the NAA study also incorporates "pass-along" data, which refers to the number of people projected to read each copy"

I  remember asking the circ director at Forbes if that meant a copy of a mag moldering in the waiting room of a dentist was the most valuable in the world, he laughed, and said most of those magazines were complimentary gifts by the publisher to the doctor for just that reason.

Which gets me back to my ongoing rant about the lunacy of metrics in the dead-tree world versus the over-weening specificity of online. Agencies and clients seeking left-handed Latvians at 3 am feel empowered to demand and get quantitative insights into a site’s traffic logs, while the print world continues to depend on specious syndicated research, porous audience research, and flaky circ numbers that would make Enron’s balance sheet more dependable than the Table of Elements.

Here we sit, in the most measurable medium in the history of media, and people wonder why newspapers are going to hell. It comes down to metrics.

Internet News Article | Reuters.co.uk Online ad spending in Britain surged 62 percent to more than 490 million pounds in the first half of 2005, the Internet Advertising Bureau said on Monday. According to a study carried out by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the IAB, online advertising has surpassed outdoor ads by market share, 5.8 percent to 5.1 percent, as more marketers have moved their advertising budgets online. Online ads surpassed radio by market share last year.

My Weblog: /My Life

Jim Forbes — one of the greatest pitbulls of tech reporting and former co-producer of Demo — launches a blog.

Wired 13.10: The Trend Spotter

 Great profile of tech book publisher Tim O’Reilly.

 

"Yet O’Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing -company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million -computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow. O’Reilly books tend to colonize entire sections at Borders and Barnes & Noble, their distinctive cover design as recognizable as the Tide circle on a box of detergent or the Apple logo on the lid of a PowerBook. In serif type over a glossy white background, there is the title, often- naming a computer language or protocol familiar to codeheads and gibberish to everyone else (JavaServer Faces; Essential CVS; Using Samba, 2nd Edition). The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals."