Howard Owens

Reuters has a story about Six-Apart creating new blogging tools that allows for private content. Like that's a big deal. Buzznet has given members the ability to hide content for years. WordPress.com has the ability to create private blogs. Six-Apart maybe doing it differently (maybe even better, I don't know), but that doesn't make it revolutionary.

[tags]blogging, privacy[/tags]

The new feed is here (using FeedBurner)

For those of you arriving at HowardOwens.com via a specific link to an article or section, those URLs no longer work.  Fortunately, you didn't get a 404 error. Instead, you arrived on the home page.  The  WordPress search (search box on the upper right of the page) seems  to work pretty  well, so I recommend trying it to find what  brought you here in the first place.

So, the domain switched over ... how do you like it?

I've got to figure out why the new RSS feed isn't working.

Ever since the Blackboard went down, I've been telling any local writer who will listen -- start a group blog, start a group blog, start a group blog.

Here's a great example of what an alternative press group blog can be: Colorado Confidential.

Why waste money on print pub that will do no more than than feed your ego because you get to see your byline in print, when you can more effectively serve the alt-news audience online?

[tags]bakersfield, blackboard, alt-press[/tags]

In order to quickly and easily move my blog rolls over to WordPress, I needed to convert the HTML to OMPL. Here's a handly little tool I found that easily converts HTML to OMPL.

Advantage new media: Paper-product media is the fourth largest industry in producing green house gasses.

Cool. I successful importanted my posts into Word Press. Stage one of the migration to WP is done. While I'm not going to host at WordPress.com, the archives are there now.

I woke up this morning thinking about Wegman's.

I don't know why.

And I know why I then flashed on a local Rite-Aid.

Rite-Aid or Walgreen's aren't exactly Walmart, but they are a long way from the drug stores as I knew as a kid. They offer a lot more choice.

And then there is Wal-mart, and the way K-mart and Target have been forced to transform themselves to keep.

And then there is the Internet.

Consumers today demand choice. They want choice in what is available and choice in how they get it.

And then I thought: Newspapers need to transform themselves into the big box stores of community information.

That's not a new philosophy for me. It's just a different way of saying it. And I say it fully aware of all the implications and nuances of the metaphor.

I'm thinking about converting this blog to WordPress.

Why?

I built this entire blog from scratch using ColdFusion and MSSQL. That was four years ago. Blogs have evolved a lot since then and I don't have time to evolve my own software. There are a few features I wish I had that I don't, such plain-text name URLs, tags, trackbacks, etc. I think WordPress has a better comment management system, too.

The change would be profound, though. All the sites that link to current URLs -- those links would be broken. All the ways that I'm indexed by Google, et. al would change. I assume the search engines would be eventually catch up, and that my page rank (7/10) would not change, but I don't know.

Once I change, it would be hard to go back.

I assume I could switch to a hosting service that would still give me FTP access to a server for additional file uploads, which I tend to use a bit, but I'm not sure yet.

Also, the URL of my RSS feed would change (but there would be more options available to RSS users), and that will be hard to effectively communicate to everybody getting RSS from this site now

A lot to think about ... anybody have any feedback?

I started thinking about this last night when I set up a friend's new blog in WordPress and was jealous of all I saw. My wife wants a blog now (maybe, sometimes), and it would be easier to set it up for her in WP, so I might as well move over myself ... maybe. It's going to take some work to get my archives moved over. There is no easy import path. I need to transform my archives into either one giant RSS feed or into a file that mimics a MoveableType output file. So who knows when I'll have time to do that.

Steve Outing makes a compelling case about why a newspaper Web site, as soon at it hears something that people in its audience are going to want to know about, they should publish it.

Even if you, as a news editor, decide that this threat at a local high school is not earth-shattering to the whole community -- or you don't want to publish prematurely for fear of inducing panic -- it is INCREDIBLY important to the couple thousand families with kids going to the school. My wife and I had to decide whether to send my daughter to school or not on the 18th based on very little information.

Faced with a need for information, the obvious place to turn is the local daily newspaper or local TV news outlets and their websites. But the evening of the 17th, the professional journalists were of no help.

If newspapers want to remain relevant in the Internet age, then I think that they've got to figure out how to be useful in instances like this. A segment of the Boulder community desperately wanted information now, not the next morning. Newspapers need to learn how to better collect it and deliver it.

My daughter had some information. Know where she got it? MySpace and Instant Messenger. Fairview students spent the evening of the 17th posting gossip and news about whether or not they were going to school on each others' MySpace pages. And they IM'ed each other. I watched this in action on my daughter's computer.

Was the information accurate? Much of it about the actual threat, probably not. Was it gossip? Much of it, probably. But it's all anyone had that evening.

The Web isn't about breaking news. It's about continuous information. You report stuff as it happens or as you learn it. Even incomplete information is better than no information.

The new corporate Web site for GateHouse Media Inc. is up and running. It includes a map of all GateHouse properties and a stock ticker widget (as of today, GateHouse is a publicly traded company -- GHS on the New York Stock Exchange).

Does anybody remember WaveShift? It was Andy Beal's company years ago. They brought us SportsHuddle and YourTown.

Back in about 1997, when I was starting out RVClub.com, I wanted a search engine for just RV-related Web sites. Back then, searching Alta Vista or RV-related stuff was atrocious. A common search would return results that had nothing to do with recreational vehicles.

My interest in a niche search, if you can call a directory listing search, began with East County Online when I built a Yahoo!-like directory of all the east San Diego County Web sites I could find.

But getting at actual search -- that was beyond my meager reach. It took more server horsepower and programing than I could muster.

Right around this time, HotBot had a customizable search widget that allowed you to input a few URLs and search just those URLs, but it was buggy and incomplete.

Then Andy Beal rescued me -- for a time. WaveShift had a beta going of a niche search engine and RVClub.com became a beta test site. I fed him about 50 URLs and visitors to RVClub.com could search just those RV-related Web sites.

The beta lasted about a year, and then WaveShift dropped the product.

Until Planet Discover came along a couple of years ago, I wasn't aware of any niche/local search alternatives. Yet, I thought there was a crying need for such an ability. Even as good is Google is (and it's way better, for example, on RV-related searches than the 1997-era search engines), it still doesn't help a person with a passion for a particular interest drill down on that interest on a repeatable basis. As the Web gets bigger, specialized search becomes more important.

And there are more vendors entering that space.

Now enters Google with Google Custom Search. Here's the New York Times story.

My question is, what took them so long?

Of course, this is bad news for companies filling this vendor space.

And think about the now defunct WaveShift -- they were doing hyperlocal before hyperlocal was cool, plus Andy Beal at least saw a glimmer of the coming of specialized search before anybody else. Apparently, not enough newspapers bought their products, though.

Sometimes, I wonder why I didn't become a doctor.

When I was very young, I told my mother, "I want to become a doctor." Of course, mom knew I wasn't a big fan of school, but I think this was meant to encourage me: "You know, doctors have to study hard all the time. School doesn't stop after you graduate. There are medical journals to read, and textbooks, so you keep up on all the latest research."

"I don't want to do that," I said.

So what did I do instead? I got into the new media game, where things are always changing and there's always one more research report to read. And you have to keep up or risk becoming obsolete and irrelevant, if not an outright quack. I think I have about five reports piled on my desk right now ... there's always something new to learn, and you can't ever learn it all ...

I've created a video about our house. Really, it's a commercial for our house. Our house is sale (for those who don't know).

I shot it with a Sony CyberShot. The video really shows the limitations of the camera for video -- does great on some things, but not so well on others. It doesn't like outdoor shots where it must focus on a lot of objects, which is very apparent in both outside shots in this video.

Here's the question -- do I include the video on my House For Sale page, or will the ugliness of the outside shots give a bad vibe to potential customers?

This was my first project ever in Final Cut Pro. It is also the first movie I've ever converted to Flash. Mindy McAdam's video-to-Flash tutorial in that regard came in right handy and timely.

If you're going to have an RSS feed, give me the whole feed.

There are a number of bloggers I like (and some other news sources) that only offer teasers in their feeds, and if you want to read the whole article, you are forced to click through. I understand the importance of driving traffic to the Web site, but it fundamentally tries to change the nature of the Internet, which is all about user control.

1. Give me the whole article, and then I'm more likely to read the whole thing. If I read the whole thing, I'm more likely to link to it (good for you). I might like you as a blogger or as a news source, but I need something mighty compelling to entice me to click through.
2. Most bloggers, and much of modern journalism, isn't written in tightly crafted inverted pyramid form, with all the five W's and H right in the lede. Most posts unfold in a more conversational fashion, so your teaser isn't likely to contain enough compelling information to entice a click through.
3. You're hiding your light under a bushel. Many of your readers probably are not bloggers, but they probably are just as disinclined to click through without sufficient reason as I am. From them, you're not looking for links, you're looking for fans, for regular readres. However, if your best insights are hidden from view for a large portion of your audience. And if people aren't continually exposed to your great mind, they'll forget what drew them to your content in the first place. They'll lose interest in you.

Ancillary to all this is: Write complete sentence headlines as much as possible. This is especially important for headline-only feeds, but all feeds need good subject-predicate explanations of what a post/story is about. This is not only good SEO, it's also better for people scanning an RSS feed looking for something to worthwhile to read. For those people using RSS readers that jumble a bunch of feeds together, it's vital.

John Jones, one of my favorite bloggers (a great writer), fresh from his apparent spat with N.L. over the whole Elitist Press thing (which I found more humorous than harmful, though if you're directly involved, I can see how you'd get emotionally wrapped up in it), has taken down his blog.

I take this as rather sudden, so I don't know what precipitated it. Just last night John was calling me about something related to his blog -- sounded like it was an ongoing concern last night, but a minute ago I got an e-mail from him that alerted me that something was up.

Even before I opened his blog, I suspected John was hinting that he wasn't blogging any longer -- I told him in reply: Don't stop. If you want a career as a writer, a blog these days is essential.

I've stopped blogging a couple of times. Both times it was a mistake. You can say breaks are good, and while they might refresh and help you re-envision your blog, traffic never recovers to its former state.

My friend Matylda Czarnecka has a story and video on the Bakersfield.com real estate site about my neighborhood, College Heights. It's my favorite neighborhood in Bakersfield. I like it better even than Oleander, and certainly better than anything in the Southwest.

This piece is a good example of the kind of content newspaper sites should be creating for verticals. It isn't news, but it isn't fluff either. It's not traditional advertorial, where some advertiser gets shallow promotional copy. No Realtor, for example, is mentioned at all. But for somebody looking for housing in Bakersfield, it's a chance to learn a little about a neighborhood. It can help lend stickiness to a vertical, strengthen the brand, and lead to the kind of return visits that eventually generate clicks and leads for advertisers. It will help preempt competitors, or at least ensure that the newspaper vertical is a strong part of the competitive mix.

You can see how content is being played on the vertical by visiting the RE home page.

Very attractive and well executed Hollywood Reporter redesign. On-target comments by Lost Remote.

Nick Carr has a post arguing against Lawrence Lessig attempt to create a new Web 2.0 dogma. That's all very interesting, but I want to address this portion of his post (which I already did in Carr's comments):

They fooled themselves into believing that Web 2.0 was introducing a new economic system - a system of "social production" - that would serve as the foundation of a democratic, utopian model of culture creation. They were wrong. Web 2.0's economic system has turned out to be, in effect if not intent, a system of exploitation rather than a system of emancipation. By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few.

I agree, somewhat, that Web 2.0 has helped create an efficient means to use non-compensated labor for content creation. I disagree completely that it's free or exploitative.

It's not free because somebody pays for the pipe, and the site infrastructure and all that goes with setting up and running a Web site. The basic YouTube site wasn't expensive to build, I'm sure, but it wasn't a weekend hack either. Beyond that, YouTube's telecom bill must be huge (for some idea of the bandwidth being consumed, read Om. I've heard $2 million a month, but I can't find a supporting link now.

It's not exploitative because the content producers get something out of the deal, too:

• They get a chance to express themselves (sometimes the end in itself);
• They get a chance to share their creation/work/ideas with a broader audience -- an audience that on their own, they could probably never afford to reach;
• They have a chance to practice their craft in front of a real audience, and maybe learn something and improve;
• They have a chance to have their work, if they're good enough, rise in stature to the point that it might actually lead to monetary gain;
• Even if they do not realize financial gain, they might benefit from psychic pay (and for some, that's enough) that they expressed ideas or provided entertainment that was of some benefit to some portion of the audience.

All of that, to me, is of some economic value. The content producer has not uploaded something and gotten nothing in return. Far from it.

The economic exchange goes something like this: The Web 2.0 company makes the initial financial outlay, takes the business risk associated with starting a new venture, and then opens to the doors to potentially legions of content producers to post content at no direct cost to the producer. The content producer realizes some portion of the gains outlined above. In exchange, the Web 2.0 company, bearing the entire burden of the financial risk, is given an opportunity construct a business model that leads to financial success.

That seems like a fair trade to me. Fair, balanced, equal. And if it weren't, in a free market, it would never work.

Blogger Rich Hailey was given unfettered access to the Knoxville News-Sentinel newsroom, and he's blogging about it.

Before I get started, I have to thank Michael Silence for getting me in the doors, and Editor Jack McElroy for allowing me complete access to his newsroom. 'Go where you want and write whatever you want,' is what he said to me. We'll see how serious he was about that when I get back from Vegas and send him an expense report.

He even sat in on budget meetings.

Now, that's openness and transparency.

At the end, Hailey hits on a theme I've hammered on for a few years: Newspaper sites need to be more like blogs:

I talked for quite a while with Jack Lail, Managing Editor/Multimedia about how online newspapers would compete with free news aggregators already out there. His response was that people came to the internet looking for original content, and somebody had to be able to provide it. And as Tom Chester mentioned, one of the things that drew international attention to some of their stories was the frequent updates that kept the story fresh and current.

Original content, frequently updated?

That's blogging, folks.

And that, it is. (Via Jack Lail)

Brand matters more in cyberspace than it does in real space. I think that's what Scott Karp is saying. Of course, brand has long been recognized as an important business driver, but online, where top of mind is so important, and companies in some segments so nascent, the better brand identification often wins out.

Wikipedia is a purely academic exercise, right? It's enriching the the collective intelligence of the world through collaborative creation, right?

Sure. I don't doubt it.

But I'm also not surprised that the most popular search have to do with sex.

Here's a very cool collection of YouTube-related tools, including some apps to enable you to download and save video from YouTube (and Google Video).

Here's a prediction.

First, we had Internet Bubble 1.0, and it burst with a bang. Some say we're now in the midst of Bubble 2.0. For the sake of this post, I'm going to agree.

But Bubble 2.0, inflated by the hype over Web 2.0, which isn't entirely hype (unlike 1.0), will die more with a whimper than a bang, because, first off, there are more stable and popular 2.0 sites than there were 1.0 sites, because Bubble 3.0 is already starting to inflate.

What is Bubble 3.0? Mobile, and more specifically, mobile video. Within a year, maybe two, mobile video will be exploding (it's already picking up steam).

Here's the rub: Publishers will have just a hard time making money with mobile video as they have with digital text publishing. Why? People want their content to be free, and commercial free, and there will be plenty of publishers/producers (there are already some) who will to provide free content. There will be plenty of deep pocket producers willing to invest heavily on content in order to attract eyeballs with the hope of gaining audience share. There might be more of a market for premium content in mobile space than on the Web, but that will be select and few. And the most popular content for a long time will be short clips, best suited for watching while waiting in line at the store or riding, or riding on a train or waiting for a plane, etc. People generally won't use mobile as a substitute for television, except where convenience is a factor. This is both the opportunity and challenge for news producers.

Here's an interesting citizen's media project I haven't noticed before (looks like it's been around for not quite a year): Associated Content. They claim to share revenue with content producers and claim more than a thousand members. I came across the site because an article popped up in one of my feeds.

If you're in Bako tomorrow (Sunday) and want to see our house, come on by between 1 and 4 p.m.

Do you think you can't afford our house? You should talk with us. If you can qualify for a loan (and I know a whiz of a mortgage guy), you can buy our house -- no money down, no closing costs.

Check it out.

More great press for Rob Curley -- an article in FastCompany that should be required reading.

Folo on Ed Jagels vs. The Bakersfield Californian: Bakersfield.com has "featured coverage" on its home page today. The feature includes links to several past stories that Jagels has previously criticized. Editor Mike Jenner responds, noting that Jagels has so far failed to provide any facts or proof to support his allegations. And in contrast to Jagels lack of transparency, TBC has opened a blog item inviting reader comment.

I'm not hear to defend TBC, but until Jagels produces some evidence and becomes more transparent and open about the process, he's getting no sympathy from me. There's an old saying, never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel. Online could be the great equalizer for Jangels, but he's totally mishandling the opportunity.

One thing leads to another, and I find this three-year-old essay by Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. It's all about what we used to call virtual communities -- made possible by the net's innate connectivity and democratization of expression -- and now encompasses concepts as divergent as Usenet and social networks.

Anybody who has experienced Usenet understands how groups can kill themselves -- unfettered, one-man-one-vote, anarchy is unworkable over time and space. Shirky touches on that, but his essay is really a primer on how to set up an online community.

First, there are three patterns of group participation that work against the benefit of the group:

1. Sex talk -- ideal chatter that subconsciously pulls against the cohesiveness of the group. (In my experience, it's not necessarily about sex, or even flirting, but I've seen that, too.)
2. External enemies. Shirky uses the example of Microsoft in an open source forum, where substantive conversations devolve into MS bashing. (I've seen this in journalism groups (ownership the usual target) and in the RV groups I've run a wide array of external forces.)
3. Religious veneration. This has nothing to do with going to church on Sundays, and everything to do with creating sacred subjects that if questioned lead to flame wars.

These three forces are what make structure essential to any group, online or off. A key factor about forums, comments on stories, blogs, that newspaper managers miss is the need for formal structure, rules and a visible guardian (and eventually elevation of group members to moderator roles) of the structure.

I love this bit about why the technology of virtual communities has evolved the way it is -- why blogging now, or example:

So the first answer to Why Now? is simply "Because it's time." I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

I will kick myself for the rest of my life: Why didn't I envision Web logs in 1997? I remember sitting at a dinner table with a group of SPJ leaders at the SPJ national convention that year and we were talking about the future of the Web. We all agreed, the Web had the power to unleash a new era of the pamphleteer. My idea was it would be self-publishing along the lines of Geocities, but with better and stronger sense of self-branding. You would still have to know HTML. But one long, reverse chronological scroll of a person's thoughts and words that you just typed into a Web browser and submitted -- I totally missed it. The first time I looked at a blog, it was a V8 moment.

In conclusion, Shirky offers three things we must accept, and he's absolutely right:

1. You cannot completely separate technical and social issues. Technology and social patterns push and pull together.
2. Members are different than users. Vibrant communities need both, but members are the reasons groups exist.
3. The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. Protect and nurture the core, the central vision of the group that motivates the core, even if it is unpopular with a vocal number of users. Social communities are not one-man-one-vote institutions.

In the course of the essay, Shirky also hits on the importance of anointing core users with status and trust. The failure to do this is why so many newspaper-run communities have failed -- they tend to be nothing more than undifferentiated masses of people with no identity. Identity is the fabric of a community and without it, communities fail to coalesce.

As they say, read the whole thing.