Howard Owens

Nick Carr makes an interesting comparison in 2006 top search terms for Google, Yahoo! and AOL.

So if you're running a newspaper.com site, do you optimize for Google and try to reach younger dweebs because you need online to grow your young audience, or for AOL and score better with your natural, older audience?

Bill Blevins added a bunch of internet-based applications to his del.icio.us feed. Here's the ones that look the most interesting to me:

• HipCal
• gOffice
• LiTha-Paint
• Dropload
• Omnidrive (There's also Jungle Disk)
• Xmail Hard Drive
• Jinzora (there's also MP3Tunes)
• Zoho
• Gliffy
• Phixr

I also found out about AjaxPresents today.

Now I just need time to play with some of these.

UPDATE: Cool and related, Vixy, which allows you to save onto your hard drive video files from video sharing services, such as YouTube. As a test, I saved this Nick Lowe video. (via newteevee.com)

BrookfieldNow.com was created by Journal Interactive, carries the beta label, but seems incredibly well conceived and executed. I've yet to see it get any press or hear anybody talk about it. It seems to have an incredible amount of community-generated content. Great design, too.

UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I did some more exploring and uncovered the hub site with links to more community sites.

When I gave my 2006 new media awards, I excluded, for reasons of conflict of interest, Bakersfield.com.  If I were to add a category, however, and give an award for best house ads, Bakersfield.com would have to win.  The current campaign for the new recruitment vertical, "find a job that rocks" is great. Previously, they posted some very well done and entertaining video ads featuring members of the staff. Most house ads are pretty dreary -- and probably shouldn't be run at all -- but what Bakersfield.com is running of late make them fairly worthwhile.

I don't normally go for these tagging, viral blog posting games. But I've watched over the past several days as highly respected people, such as Jeff Jarvis, Greg Sterling and Amanda Congdon got swept up in the madness, and maybe with a little envy that I hadn't been tagged.

I've been tagged by Jay Small of all people (come on, Jay (or John), I thought you were one of the cool kids on the block?) Well, I guess I have to play along ... never could resist peer pressure.

Here are five things you may not know about me.

1. In high school, I was briefly a member of Demolay. I joined because Demolay members where the first friends I made at my new school in ninth grade (mid-year transfer).
2. My nickname in the USAF was "Showtime" because the base I was stationed at didn't have HBO on the cable system.
3. Just before college, I lived 18 months of my life in a 1957 Fleetwood travel trailer (think the Lucy and Desi movie, The Long, Long Trailer).
4. I bought my first guitar for a dollar at a swap meet in Spring Valley, Calif. I was probably 10 or 11. I never learned to play it, and my friend Mike Traxler got mad at me one day and smashed it to pieces. It was a red, electric guitar -- one of those off brands from the 1960s that are highly collectible now (maybe).
5. My first AOL screen name (which I still own, but never use) was pd4wrds (paid for words). (I just checked that e-mail account for the first time in probably four or five years ... lots of spam, and I'm still getting the BONG Bull e-mail newsletter there, which I probably haven't read in 10 years.)

So many people to tag, so little time ... Nick Belardes, John Jones, Matt Welch, Lucas Grindley and Will Sullivan.

UPDATE: I was also just tagged by Peter Krasilvosky.

Interesting SEO development for newspaper site managers: Google starting to punish reciprocal links.

Many newspaper sites and companies own multiple domains and often cross link as a matter of course (with no or little consideration for the SEO implications). If what is being reported about Google's algorithm is true, this practice could be detrimental to SEO efforts. A lot depends on how the algorithm categorizes and recognizes a reciprocal links. Not all cross links are created equal.

Paul Gillian opens a provocative article:

The near-total collapse of the American newspaper industry as we know it is inevitable. Anything newspapers could have done to stop it should have been done years ago (Slate recently wrote that newspapers saw this coming in the mid-70s). All the social, demographic and economic trends are lined up against the industry. Over the next decade, there will be agonizing rounds of layoffs, consolidation and bankruptcies. It will be painful to watch, but it will be a necessary process for the industry to reinvent itself.

His piece will make traditionalists uncomfortable, and his speculation may be extreme, but there is an essential truth in his vision of the future of journalism that must be considered. Read the whole thing.

Six or seven months ago, I began to think about life without television: could I do it? I think I could. I don't watch much TV anyway. The main thing I'd miss would be easy access to Chargers and Padres games.

Robert Lemos, writing for Wired, chronicles how he and his family literally cut the cable line and went broadband for a month.

He went in a completely different direction than I've considered. Lemos tried to replace as much regular programming as possible with iTunes downloads. In my concept, I'd fill the time without TV with other pursuits online, including watching, if I felt like it, random clips on YouTube and other video sites. I might keep up with the best bits from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report through YT. And I might seek out interesting stuff of a full length variety through Google Video or other sources. I might find some video blogs to suck in through RSS and make them a regular habit, if I felt like it. Why this approach and not Robert's? Because I believe that's how future no-TV broadband content consumers will approach video news and entertainment.

I bet there are already people doing it.

Dan Pacheco writes about the launch of Bakomatic 2.0. The improved upload features sound pretty slick.  On registration, I'm not clear if he's talking about on any particular site or in general, but what he describes still sounds like too high of wall for just reading stories (if I'm reading him right).  Registration should be tied to participation, not passive consumption. Also, it's incorrect to say that Google News had any problem with the previous registration system. Bakersfield.com stories appeared in Google News just fine before. All-in-all, it's nice to learn about the progress of Bakomatic. Thanks for sharing, Dan.

Andy Dickinson offers practical tips for newspaper video.

Jack Lail tells us about a new newspaper video blog.

John Battelle returns to musing on Packaged Goods Media vs. Conversational Media. I think bifurcating media in this way is a fascinating world view and holds some promise for helping us see through the glass a little less darkly.

When I read traditional media interpretations of "user generated content" (last weeks New York Times piece proclaiming 2006 the year of "You Media" comes to mind), I feel extremely dissatisfied. These pieces focus on the wrong thing - they judge Conversational Media by the standards of Packaged Goods Media, then find themselves smugly satisfied that CM doesn't measure up. However, it's clear that CM is here to stay, so writers from the PGM world struggle to make it fit their worldview. "Now we have to figure out what to do with it," The Times piece sniffs. "Ignore it? Sort it? Add more of our own?"

A line clearly written by someone who doesn't engage much in the world of Conversational Media. But that's OK. I'd never argue that CM makes PGM irrelevant or that folks who don't participate in CM are somehow better or worse than folks who do. But that's not the point. The point is that people find the process of engaging in Conversational Media fulfilling in its own right. Tens of millions of us love following the conversations on our favorite blogs, reading and participating in community-driven sites or social networking services. And where tens of millions of people go, profitable business models follow.

This relates to mode of thinking about digital media that I've been trying to fix my own mind on. The way I use the web -- and I suspect a lot of other people do, too -- runs counter to how PGM media people think. The point isn't to be sticky. The goal is to be part of the flow of participation, a voice in the conversation. We are all just participants in a grand, large, and noisy mega-super-store of ideas, pictures and words. Web sites, in the way PGM people might think of them, do not exist. They are just pixels on a screen that can be consumed or ignored at will. The mindset that says I must own the consumer or the user experience is a mindset that is doomed to failure. You cannot wrap content in a nice, neat, tamper-proof package and say "look, but don't touch." That world is dead and gone.

Many newspaper site publishers are thinking along the lines of: "how can I move the conversation to my site?"; rather than realizing media is already part of the conversation and we need to learn how to be polite conversationalists.

This also related back to what I've been writing about sharing the past week or so. The better we share, the more polite we are as cohorts in conversation. Ten years ago or so, the big buzz phrase was, "content wants to be free." We all took that as, "you can't charge for your content online." But the truth is, free doesn't mean only an absence of payment, it also means freedom from control.

John Hagel suggests that Yahoo in particular, but even Google, MSN, Amazon and Ebay, has lost its way, lost its focus.

For established players, I think there are two essentials to a good business strategy: Start with the customer/end user and understand your competitive advantage. Only then will innovation be productive.

Guy Kawasaki has added a job board to his blog -- for $49 you can get a "top jobs" type of listing on the right rail of his site.

I have a highly-qualified readership of people with entrepreneurial, evangelistic, and technical backgrounds that should appeal to companies trying to kick butt...at least that’s my assumption.

For Guy, that's a pretty safe assumption. And it started me thinking, there are other blogs with industry-specific, specialized audiences and those blogs could also add job boards. And then I thought, I wonder if there is an opportunity to create a service for bloggers to sell and manage job ads. Then I read this in Guy's commments:

Interesting to see all high profile bloggers adding a job board.

I haven't seen any other high profile bloggers with job boards, but then maybe I don't read enough high-profile bloggers. I'd like to know if Guy is using a vendor for this service, or if he built and manages it himself?

The other aspect here is it seems logically that we'll see more bloggers add job boards. There has been a strong trend toward aggregating recruitment listings (Indeed and Simply Hired, for example), but for better paying jobs, targeted placement makes more sense. But then if there are a bunch of small niche sites posting jobs, even in the same field, how does a job seeker find all the postings? And on the flip size, what is the expense tolerance for employers? How many times will they dish out $50? There still seems to be a place for aggregation, but especially on the placement side -- and maybe the model isn't flat-fee, but pay-per-response.

UPDATE: The next RSS feed I switch my attention to after this post is Business Pundit, who tells us about JobCoin.

UPDATE II: There's another implication for blogs and media related to this development: More ways for bloggers to make money, and for those with large enough audiences, to become financially indepedent (meaning, no day job). We'll probably see new businesses launch in 2007 that seek to match advertising with blogs. It's not just AdWords and BlogAds anymore.

UPDATE  III:  At dinner, I told my wife about this post and as I talked, I realized something else significant about this development:  It's another step in the stairway of disruption.  Consider, blogs at first made no money, but the audience grew. Then bloggers started making donations and a few, such as Andrew Sullivan, did well for themselves.  Then at about the same time, along came AdSense and BlogAds.  Now bloggers are moving deeper into newspaper space by accepting recruitment ads.  And think of this, too, this isn't craigslist-for-free ads.  For years I've argued that nobody really thinks blogs could be a real threat to newspapers, but if a clear economic model begins to solidify, so that the best bloggers can make money providing alternative media, it presents a much deeper (though not necessarily fatal) threat to traditional media.

Steve Bryant of the Hollywood Reporter has an interesting post: If I can't reuse your media, then your media is useless.

Back in the 90s, utility meant links. If I could link to your content, then that content mattered to me and mattered to the people who read what I was writing. In the digital world, that content became useful.

But in the last two to three years, the very idea of useful content has changed. These days, people who've grown up with digital media are beginning to expect more than linking. As we've seen with YouTube, they want to appropriate the content. And as we've seen with mashups, they want to reuse and repurpose the content. Everybody wants to be part of the content creation life cycle, whether they were the ones to do the original creation or not.

I wonder what he and others, in this light, would think of my contention that professional journalists can't, in good ethics, explicitly allow remixes, such as through Creative Commons, because of the risk that remixes will change the meaning or context of news. Journalists have an ethical obligation to accuracy and fairness and while in the digital age is is harder to control how our content is used, we still need to retain some rights to how news content is used.

Previously: Creative Commons: Share and Share Alike

(via King Leonard).

Michael Bazaley heard my plea for more journalists to blog and has entered the fray. His blog is full of new media goodness.  Bazaley is senior online editor for the San Jose Mercury News.  In the "small world" category, his parents live across the street from me.

In the not getting it category is Alan Mutter, who responds to his critics by not quoting or linking to them and addressing their remarks directly.  Instead, he just restates his old arguments.  I recommend Mr. Mutter read some literature on disruption.

Previously: The pros and cons of the 24-hour news desk.

Dan Pacheco seems to be spending a lot of time worrying about Second Life. And Reuters, of course, has set up shop there. I want to be as progressive and forward thinking as the next guy, but is this really good use of scarce new media resources? I mean, what's the future of Second Life? Sure, it's a popular web site and it might get you a little more brand exposure, but will it really lead to more traffic and greater participation on your web site? OK, greater participation with your brand, maybe (and only maybe), but segregated from where you really need to aggregate audience as a basic fundamental business model.

And Second Life is a product with no guarantee of survival (as popular as it is today). What if it's just a fad, or the technology gets so fundamentally broken as to be useless, or a competitor disrupts and swamps SL? Doesn't all that proprietary investment in SL goes down the bit drain? Risk is inherent in business, and especially in web business, but it needs to be risk that makes sense.

Second Life is not likely to become a platform or transcend the web in any way that bodes well for long-term ROI.

Building a media property on Second Life just feels more like playing than pursuing a business strategy. Now if you could get Second Life users to do something creative and organic with your content and brand for you, with little work, energy, investment on your part, now you might be on to something. But making it a focus of development? I can't see it right now. I can think of a lot better things to do with my business time.

There are so many things for digital media companies to do and mobile is crying out for attention -- I'd deal with those priorities before wasting mental energy on SL.

Tell me if I'm wrong. I'm not a Second Life user, so maybe I'm missing something. Maybe someday I'll get an SL account, get involved and retract everything I just said, but for now, consider me skeptical of the business or audience development value.

UPDATE: Flying home tonight I thought just a bit more about this post. First, I think I should make this clear: I have nothing against SL. If I had more time, as a hobby, I could see myself really getting into it. It is the kind of thing that can interest me. Second, I'm not sure I've been clear enough about looking at this as a business decision and how to manage resources. That's the main point I'm trying to get at. I think experimentation is good and necessary, but it needs to be smart, balanced experimentation with clear objectives. Third, I can't believe SL will ever be more than a niche vertical. I can't believe that for most media comanies it will ever grow enough virtual audience to generate direct revenue. But again, I'm open to evidence that I'm wrong.

(Disclosure: I used to work with Dan.)

The Arizona Daily Star is struggling with comments on stories. Recently, the trolls have come out in mass. That is exactly what will happen without monitoring and policing. A newspaper site simply can't post comment links and then let things run on their own. It takes time and effort to have quality user participation. The only answer/solution is to create a new FTE position and hire somebody to manage things. Removing comments, not having them, is not an option. The second part of the answer is to tie comments into user profiles and create some peer-to-peer accountability. Of course, I've been through this before. (via Danny Sanchez)

Robert Niles tips on eight mistakes "by new online publishers." I'm not sure it's just new, but it's a great list. I agree with all eight, but more some than others. My favorites are 1 (doing it for the money), 3 (not being humble), 5 (telling the world what you're doing before doing it) and 6 (throwing money at your site).

Lost Remote reports: People now spend more time with the internet than they do with newspapers.

That should scare a few people.

Amanda Congdon's 15 minutes of fame has been extended indefinitely. She's now video blogging for ABCNews.com. Great move by ABC and good for Amanda.

Her old Rocketboom fans will approve, I think. Stylistically, it's similar enough and gives Amanda's quirky personality plenty of room to roam. It's still webby in its un-TV like willingness to be less polished, seemingly more spontaneous (even if it isn't) and not try to polish and scrub every joke. The clunkers remain (which helps define the personality and make it more human). Actual production values are probably actually improved (though Rocketboom was pretty darn good in this regard). Her and her producers are opening up the show to a wide range of user participation. Amanda is getting lots of feedback from viewers -- mixed reviews (why do people object to the hair flipping? It's her trademark and she can do it if she wants to, I say).

Nits: The video opens in a pop-up window, which is OK (at least it runs in an embedded Flash player), but from there there is no RSS feed or iTunes link or other subscription options. I'm no fan of preroll, but on longer video preroll might be ok. The main problem here is that the ads are just repurposed TV spots, which means they're lame, boring and not very webby (and too long).

UPDATE:  Amanda leaves a comment and I respond.  In her comment, she leaves a link to her own blog.  I left my comment before following the link.  A small mistake. She addresses my issues and she's actually encourage the blogosphere to post criticism about ABCNews.com UI and interaction issues so that ABCNews.com gets the message.  So  I guess I did a useful thing with this post.

In a post about radical transparency (a topic I previously touched on), Jeff Jarvis writes:

Believe it or not, I almost think that last one may go too far. There is still a role for authorial responsibility. That doesn’t mean control — yes, by all means, show us the corrections and suggestions, but then do the work to verify and edit.

Which reminded me of what I wrote yesterday:

If I had another piece of advice for publishers considering CC (Creative Commons): Don’t allow remix. News organizations have ethical obligations to accuracy and fairness not to explicitly allow people to change the news. You need to preserve the right to prohibit people from changing the meaning of the content.

The overlap of an idea here is that no matter how open you are to social media (or whatever you want to call it), there is still some point at which to draw the line between authoritative reporting and completely open, anything goes content creation -- if you're a media company.

At least, I think so, but is that just me and Jeff Jarvis still unable to shed the skin of our former journalistic selves, or just a line in the sand of compromise that no journalist should cross?

In this post, Mindy McAdams complains that her post on craigslist got more traffic than her post on mobile data. She makes a valid point: Newspaper people should be looking forward, not backward.

But her craigslist post is just so darn interesting.

Also, it highlights how far behind newspaper sites are in relating to young readers. Yes, we should be looking forward more (and I'd argue that mobile video is every bit if not more important than mobile data), but we also need to fix our sites, and McAdams post is a great insight into what it might take to do that.

Finally, I added the Creative Commons badge to my site. I've been geeked out about CC for a while because it is so perfect for the digital media age, an era where there is true economic value in sharing. In fact, in the present era, failure to share is detrimental to a publisher.

I started thinking about evangelizing a bit for CC when I read Mark Glaser's piece on CC in October.

Publishers should consider using CC on the web. At every newspaper I've ever worked at, we got calls from people asking if they could freely use our content (homeowners associations, churches, families wanting to share) and we had to field those calls and answer those questions. Of course, for non-commercial use, we always said yes. An explicit CC removes the need for people to ask.

And when you're sharing, and you're requiring a link back to your site, you're helping to spread the word about your publication.

Some publishers may be afraid to take this step because they think they are giving up copyright, but they're not. CC is a license. You don't surrender copyright (or even really control) at all. Here's what the CC faq says on the subject:

A Creative Commons license is based on copyright. So they apply to all works that are protected by copyright law. The kinds of works that are protected by copyright law are books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other audio & visual recordings, for example. ...
Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work. They do not give you the ability to restrict anything that is otherwise permitted by exceptions or limitations to copyright—including, importantly, fair use or fair dealing.

If I had another piece of advice for publishers considering CC: Don't allow remix. News organizations have ethical obligations to accuracy and fairness not to explicitly allow people to change the news. You need to preserve the right to prohibit people from changing the meaning of the content.

In the spirit of the New York Times adding social bookmarking to its stories, I thought it was about time for howardowens.com to do the same.

You have to be way more of a snob than I can possibly handle not to think that a little polka once in a while is fun. Don't laugh -- I've met a few people in my peer group or there abouts who appreciate a little Jimmy Sturr (who's won more Grammys than Madonna) or Frank Yankovic (one of the legends of the genre). My wife, with more time on her hands than Tivo choices decided the Big Joe Polka Show was a good option for the evenings entertainment last night. Today, she wrote about it and you'll entertain yourself to read it.

Andy Dickinson writes about training print journalists to write, shoot and edit better video. Amongst all the talk of lighting, framing and interviewing, writing still remains important. As print journalists get deeper into video, writing and story boarding will play a vital role in quality online video.

The stories came out, on average at between 3-400 words. The script, I told them, should be a minute - around 150 words. This caused horror. We were wasting 200 words.

We shouldn’t forget that words are a print journalist’s primary means of expression. We often lose sight of that in the accuracy, clarity and brevity driven ethos of the newsroom where the tight-writer is top of the class. We emphasise the concept of filling space, counting letters and words to make sure we don’t bust a headline. But the reality is that, if the information is there, space will be made for the longer piece.

In TV, even if the information is there, we still have finite amount of time, less on the web, and it isn’t likely to be 400 words worth. That makes script writing practice a vital issue. Not for the tone or the style, but to ease the pain of restricting the use of one of a print journalists most treasured tools.

A prediction for 2007 from Motley Fool:

I predict that within the year, YouTube will prominently sort videos geographically. It will help give the site more of the localized social-networking flair it currently (and surprisingly) lacks. It will also help inspire more local-minded e-commerce.Why aren't folks generating leads on YouTube to sell their homes or cars? Yes, searches for "cars for sale" and "homes for sale" generate about 300 entries apiece but many of those videos are several months old. That's chump change for a site that's growing by 65,000 uploads a day. Paying for listings or going through Craigslist is so 2005.

Keeping it local won't be all about buying and selling, of course. Innovative camcorder-wielders will be able to create their own brands with area reviews and critiques. It will be easier to get noticed on the local level over the landing page shuffle.

So, will newspaper.com sites sit ideally by as this happens? I imagine most will.

I've said it before, preroll is the pop-up of video.

Here's Fred Wilson on the topic:

Pre-roll ads are going the way of popups and other intrusive ads. They won't be around in a couple years. And the online video services that use them to monetize their audience won't be around either.

Because the thing you have to understand about digital media is its pervasive and abundant. There is always somewhere else to get the same thing. Digital is write once, read everywhere. Digital media is like a virus. It spreads like crazy.

Do your advertisers a favor and get your advertising models in line with users -- advertising as a seamless part of the experience, nothing intrusive or annoying.

The web is all about sharing. More newspaper sites will get that in 2007, but many won't.  The New York Times does.