Howard Owens

Here's Nick Carr's epiphany: Social networking is bunk.

To me this is a "tree falls in the forest argument." If most of the users on MySpace have never heard the term "social networking" would they still be social networking? The term social networking is just a description of a tool that helps people discover content and goof off. That doesn't make it bunk. It merely makes it nomenclature.

Steve Yelvington: Measurement isn't easy.

No it isn't. You need to decide what you're going to measure, how you're going to measure it, how reliable is the data, and what do the results reveal? None of that is as easy as it sounds. Each step is littered with landmines.

The tools available to any local news site manager, even in the biggest markets, are flawed. You have your Web stats, and ComScore, and Scarborough and any number of other reflective data points. But at the end of the day, you're still sitting in a big dark room wondering what you're really looking at. There are a hundred potential false positives that could send you barrelling down the wrong road.

And then there is this:

You need to understand the man that wasn't there. The biggest problem newspapers have is failure to connect with a widening segment of the local community. The best registration system, metrics system and thoughtful analyst will not be able to measure users who never visit. If you draw general conclusions about 24-year-olds based on 24-year-olds who use your website, you're making a mistake.

Panels and surveys might give you some idea of what your audience growth potential is, but those tools offer few insights into how to get that audience.

At about 5 p.m. yesterday, I was heading west on Panorama when I spotted smoke blowing up the bluffs. I figured it was just another grass fire, but after I passed through the smoke wall, I noticed a number of people were looking at something below the cliffs, I decided to stop.

At the bottom of the cliff was a car on fire. Nearby were three people who appeared to be trying to help a person on the ground.

A witness told me that he was driving west on Panorama when a vehicle that had been heading east, swerved in front of him and toward the cliff. He said the car was "going full throttle" as it headed over the edge.

Unfortunately, I don't have any further information (such as the condition of the man on the ground or whether there were more people in the vehicle) since all the local media missed the story.

Friday about noon:

Billie: "What are you going to do today?"

Me: "I don't know. I thought maybe I might drive out to California City."

Billie: "I want to visit the Borax mine."

Me: "It's already noon. If we want to do that, we probably want to spend the night in Mojave."

I then went and took a nap.

We left the house at 2:30, thinking if we made the Borax mine by 4 p.m., we would have time for the tour. If not, we would go to California City first.

On the road, we witnessed an accident. This delayed us an hour.

The only reason I wanted to go to California City was to visit the Mojave Desert Cactus Shop. Months ago, I did a Google search for nearby nurseries, and this one popped up, so I printed the map. I can't recreate the search now, but that map was wrong. There is no nursery in CC whatsoever.

So we drove around the desert. We thought we might try going to the desert tortoise reserve, but that requires dirt road driving. When we arrived back at California City, I took a different route out of town, which dumped us on a section of 58 that left me wondering -- right or left? Which way is Mojave?

I went left and soon saw a sign that said, "Barstow, 58 miles."

"Let's go to Barstow," I said.

This took us past Boron and the Borax Road exit.

We arrived in Barstow around 5 p.m. and checked into a Holiday Inn Express. After dinner, we drove down Main Street, which was once part of Route 66, and I took pictures, such as this one.

The next morning, we back tracked on 58 and I stopped to take pictures of a junk yard and a rock house I've driven past a few times, but never took the time to photograph.

At Kramer Junction, we found the cactus shop I was looking for. I bought five small succulents, which is rather pointless since I'll plant them but never see them mature. But they were cheap enough.

Next stop was the Borax mine. We saw a replica of the 20-mule team, real borate crystals, a big tire, a big rock, and a big hole.

The Borax visit was interesting because until yesterday I just thought of Borax as a cleaning agent. But boron is really the duct tape of minerals. It is used in all kinds of glass products to make them stronger; it is essential to the manufacture of fiberglass; it is used in fertilizer; it has been used in metallurgy for centuries. You can even use it to make a home made ant poison.

You can worry about oil, but what I want to know is if we ever run out of boron, what will happen to the world economy?

After learning about Borax, I fulfilled my dream of taking pictures of a joshua tree.

In Boron, we toured the aerospace museum and ate lunch.

Heading home, we saw a plume of smoke from a big fire.

Related links.

• U.S. Borax
• 20-Mule Team History
• Boron Map
• Death Valley Days
• Wikipedia on Boron

• Matchbox (same version as above)
• Glad All Over
• True Love
• Blue Suede Shoes
• Dixie Fried (not great quality)

More Perkins related (mostly later or with other people) here, including this great version of True Love with George Harrison and Dave Edmunds.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Carl Perkins.

OK Go also has a great Web site. They're pulling out all the stops on what a band can do with the Web -- e-mail newsletter, members only section, latest news, blog, podcasts, audio, video ... and I'm pretty sure they added their video to YouTube themselves (it's also embedded in their own blog).

I heard of OK Go a couple of years ago and always meant to check them out, but never quite got to it. Now, thanks to a random link on the Web leading me to their video and Web site, I'm sold. I'm going to buy their CD.

John Temple, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, has a pretty lively blog (disclaimer, if it's needed, I used to work for Scripps, the same company that employs Temple). Here he takes on E&P editor Greg Mitchell's supposed liberal bias in the guise of media criticism.

Who says a big city, MSM executive can't grok blogging?

As for Mitchell -- I interviewed him once, circa 1991, when his book Campaign of the Century came out. I won a press club award for the resulting article, in which I concentrated on what our own paper's archives said about the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign. I met Mitchell again a year or so ago at a convention.

I've met Temple once or twice, too.

Both nice, smart guys.

Does Temple have a point? Read his post and compare and contrast with this quote from Mitchell's Wikipedia entry:

In an interview June 28, 2004 with the Echo Chamber Project, Mitchell discussed the duty of news reporters to be "skeptical" and not tilt coverage either to the right or left. He cited coverage of the build-up to the United States war in Iraq as an example of skewed coverage.

He said the tone of coverage by news media "all our coverage on all subjects—is not to be partisan or not to be left or right or anything like that. But we believe in the—what should be the main principle of journalism, besides being accurate and fair, is to be skeptical—to raise questions, to not take what officials say as the gospel truth—unless it's really proven—if there's documents."

At any rate, I think the real news here is that Temple isn't afraid to be himself in his blog. Authenticity is essential to a good blog, and that is an attitude many MSM editors and reports, I think, still find uncomfortable.

He does need to post more frequently, though.

It's hot in Bako (though not as hot as it was), but that isn't stopping the local bloggers from writing long, fascinating posts.

• Black Dog on meeting a mountain lion.
• N.L. Belardes on his favorite topic, the Lords of Bakersfield
• Matildakay on the Cinema of the Lords.

I've been playing around with Alexaholic this morning. Here are some interesting (at least to me) comparison charts.

• MSN, Yahoo! and Google
• Friendster, MySpace, Facebook
• New York Times, Washington Post, USAToday, Wall Street Journal
• Los Angeles Times, SFGate.com, SignOnSanDiego.com
• CNN, MSNBC, Fox News
• Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Michelle Malkin, Instapundit
• Monster, Career Builder
• Ebay, Amazon
• Craigslist, Wikipedia
• Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket
• Digg, Slashdot
• Apple, Dell
• Match.com, AdultFriendFinder.com
• Live Journal, Typepad, Blogger

The one clear trend that jumps out at me is that sites that rely on user content are pretty much uniformly on upward trajectories, while non-user sites are either flat or in decline. The growth of older user-content sites, such as Craigslist and Wikipedia, are starting to show less rapid growth, but even the major portal sites (MSN, Yahoo, Google) are lagging in recent months while Digg, YouTube and MySpace explode.

I've heard at least one newspaper executive cite Kodak as an example of a company facing sever competitive threats from new technology and successfully reinventing itself.

Kodak's "turnaround" has even been cited in scholarly articles.

But Kodak's quarterly reports seem to be telling a different story.

The big concern is Kodak's consumer digital business, which is supposed to replace the declining film business. Consumer digital lost $79 million in the second quarter, up from a $52 million loss a year ago, partly reflecting competitive pressures in the digital camera market. ... This is a tough time for companies like General Motors (GM) and Kodak, which are trying to execute enormous transformations even as they're graded by a stock market that has become more and more impatient. But at least at Kodak the moment of truth is approaching. After years of pleading for patience, Perez is now promising Kodak will deliver its first significant digital profits in the second half. And that should pave the way for even stronger results next year, he adds, especially as those huge restructuring charges diminish.

Robert Niles of OJR interviews Kevin Roderick of LAObserved.

Scott Karp has a couple of recent posts about online video distribution -- one about users wanting their money, and one asking, who will make money online?

Boiling down what I think is the essential point here is that there is a class of content producers who create content hoping for some sort of financial gain, and those are the producers who stand to lose the most through YouTube distribution (and lose even more under the new YouTube license).

Previously, I've written about the long-term threat to YouTube, which is copyright owners insisting on enforcing their rights. This thesis focused on the assumption that it would be large media companies who could do the most damage, but also conceded that maybe large media companies would withhold prosecution of claims because of the promotional value of distribution on YouTube.

But there is another class of content producer who has legitimate economic hopes for his content, but limited means to protect his copyright.

For the purpose of this post, I want to define three classes of content producers.

1. MSM Producers. These are the big guys, including everything from The Daily Show and Colbert Report to SNL, Charlie Rose and old sitcoms. I would also include in this class content producers tied to larger concerns, such as a small newspaper producing video to supplement its coverage (though this is a very niche interest) or a retail business doing podcasts around its products.

2. Long Tail Producers. These are professional or semi-professional producers who are motivated to create entertaining or informative content not just because its fun, but because its what they do, or want to do, for a living. They fill niches and subgenres and might break through to the mainstream, but that's not where they are now.

3. Social Media Producers. These are people with a camera, or a microphone, or a keyboard who just produce because they can. They do what they can with the tools at hand with at best only a passing regard for quality. They may have dreams of viral fame, but mainly just produce stuff because they can. Falling within this category may be students of content production with aspirations of moving up into category two. Some of these producers may be very good (especially among writers), but produce for free simply because they love what they do or a topic or niche of keen interest.

If you're a category one producer, you would really be foolish to have YouTube pull your video. YouTube is just really free marketing, and you have alternative and reasonably secure channels of revenue around your content. And if you're a category three producers, then you love YouTube (or MySpace), because it gives you a chance to reach a larger audience than you could ever reach through your own personal home page.

For the long tail producer, the situation is far more complicated. It is much harder for this class of content producer to derive direct economic benefit from YouTube. The promotional value is nearly nil since every pair of eyes that watches your video on YouTube is one less pair of eyes not likely to see it on a site that generates revenue for you. And those eyes are not likely to migrate to the paying site because they know that pirated versions of your work (if its good enough) will eventually appear on YouTube. Still, YouTube is so popular right now, if you are completely unknown within your niche or genre, YouTube could launch your career.

Long tail producers play an essential role in the future of online media. We need a method and ethic that protects their rights to derive economic gain from their work. I'm not sure, however, the users who copy and distribute the work of others can ever be sold on the need for that ethic.

Also, related -- Scott Karp figures out that 3 million bloggers
want to make money.

(via Chris Anderson)

Meet WikiCars (via TechCrunch)

OK, I've made some changes to the RSS feed.

The change you should notice is that posts are now time stamped in the feed.

Part of the goal of this post is to test the feed.

If you don't get the feed, here's the link.

One consequence of the change is that old posts are all time stamped at 05:00 GMT, which messes up the order that they now appear on the site, but that will self-correct for future posts over time.

UPDATE: I'm still fussing with the feed. I just converted it from RSS 1.0 to 2.0 because of a problem I encountered. I think I've got it now, but I've got to reboot and go back to my Mac world to test in my RSS reader.

Here's a Wired post on a Colbert Report segment at Wikipedia in which Colbert skewers the notion of citizen created and voted on facts.

Like all good satire, Colbert brilliantly exposes the Achilles heel of Wikipedia -- that a lot of what people believe true is actually false, but that doesn't change reality, or, potentially a Wikipedia entry -- while also not necessarily being convincing.

And that's only because, so far at least, Wikipedia seems to be working. It also creates a bit of a straw man in that any single Wikipedia entry is not actually voted on by masses of people (in such a model, most people would be less than perfectly informed), but are generally just the pet project of a few (or less) well-informed, passionate people on that specific subject. Wikipedia is a worthy target of satire only because it is essentially good at what it does.

CNN is creating a citizen video site. They are looking specifically for regional video.

This, of course, puts CNN in more direct competition for local news.

Local news sites need to be more aggressive about soliciting citizen contributions. Submission should be easy, integrated with the primary news site, and allow for unfiltered contributions (editors, of course, decide what gets promoted to more prominent display, and inappropriate submissions are deleted -- but users shouldn't need to wait on an editor to see their submission on the site. This only serves to discourage submissions.

Such a strategy, I think, will help with lagging audience growth.

Here's a promising idea -- a news search engine publishers can integrate into their sites.

One one hand, I think something like this should be used to help users find related stories on competing local news sites. My concern is that the product isn't focused enough on local news.

On the other hand, something like this could help add stickiness to a site for those users now in the habit of going elsewhere for national and world news.

Either way, it's all in the implementation, and based on Craig Sterling's comments in the story, I'm not sure the product is flexible enough to allow site managers to launch independent strategies.

I'd like to see a demo to understand better how this tool might be used on a local news site.

To be an effective media executive today, you've got to read, read, read.

AdAge offers up a column on what several top media and marketing leaders do to stay atop the rapidly changing digital world.

Bakersfield's official motto is: "Life as it should be."

While I'm weird enough to actually like living in Bakersfield, I'm also honest enough to admit -- it ain't San Diego. It's one thing for SD to declare itself "America's Finest City." At worst, its unsupportable hyperbole, but at least San Diego is one hell of a fine town.

Bakersfield? It's unbearably hot in the summer, sooted by filthy air and more than two-thirds of the city is either filled with oil derricks, or is blighted by urban rot -- old, dilapidated buildings, graffiti, piles of trash and glassy-eyed homeless wrecks.

If this is life as it should be, I'd like to see what the city thinks is life as it shouldn't' be.

At any rate, its not just big media that gets skewered by citizen media -- it's city leaders, too. Here's a song by a local musician that makes the point: "This Ain't Life as it Should Be." (via Matildakay).

One of the smartest people in American business, Guy Kawasaki, offers his advice on the art of firing people.

For all those media companies out there wondering if they should invest more in video -- of course you should -- but if you still need more evidence, here it is.

And notice I said "media companies." It's not just newspapers that are lagging on video -- most television stations have exceptionally insufficient video offerings. They rely far too heavily on just re-purposing their news broadcasts instead of offering online-only features and additional footage.

The typical newspaper auto vertical is nothing more than re-purposed classifieds and maybe some dealer inventory.

One problem with that strategy is that the limited inventory of such a site is competing with national sites that have substantially more inventory (unless the newspaper is a Cars.com affiliate).

Now there is some research that says auto sites that are aggregators of inventory are essential to most online car shoppers.

Newspapers with auto sites that are lagging in their markets shouldn't think, "if we could only get more inventory online." They should be thinking, "how do we make our sites more engaging and useful to consumers?"

At any one time, only a small percentage of people are in the market for a new or used car, but everybody is in the market for something related to a car almost all the time -- insurance, service, parts, etc., and a lot of people are often thinking two or three years ahead for their next car purchase. Auto sites that are nothing more then inventory don't meet the needs of this audience, and therefore lose an opportunity to become a trusted brand to future auto buyers.

WSJ has an article on the Friendster patent.

The San Francisco nonprofit is running a "patent-busting" campaign to combat patents that it sees as illegitimate. "I don't think they've really come up with an innovation for finding people you know," he says.

But Mr. Lindstrom argues that Friendster's founder, Mr. Abrams, who left the company and is preparing to launch a startup called Socializr, invented something original. Two and a half years ago, you'd never heard of a social network," he says. "Jonathan Abrams did something, and suddenly this new thing existed. Maybe it doesn't seem new now, but it certainly did at the time."

When I first heard the term "social network," my thought was, "yeah, right, it's just the new buzzword for virtual community." And when I first heard about this Friendster patent, I thought, "They can't patent that. Virtual communities have been around for decades -- before there was a Web even."

But after I read the patent and understood that what they were really claiming as intellectual property was the ability to link friends together so that friends might follow a path to other or new friends, I couldn't think of a pre-Friendster virtual community that had such a feature. If there was one out there, I would like to know about, because I can't remember it or never saw it.

I think this patent has a chance to stand up.

Lee Gomes, writing for the Wall Street Journal, says the Long Tail may not be so long after all.

Chris Anderson responds.

From my perspective, even if some of Chris's details are off, the basic thesis of the long tail still rings true. Unlimited inventory does mean that a lot of stuff that had no chance of selling before can now find a market. Whether the misses ever really overtake the hits misses the point somewhat.

Steve Outing's column asks: Have we come far enough?

Outing's question is prompted by a sliver of archive from a mailing list he started in 1995 1994 called online-news. Steve is nice enough to credit me with unearthing this archive through Google, and it's true I had been on a quest to find this archive, but really -- this find was purely accidental.

But my motivation in looking for the archive is tied very much to the subject matter of Steve's latest column: Have we come far enough.

I'm not sure, however, the online-news archive is really needed to answer the question.

If you look at the newspaper industry as a whole, most newspaper sites are under performing. In some things, some sites are doing well while other sites do well in other areas, but after more than a decade of trying to get up to speed, newspapers still lag behind.

Here's where I see newspaper.com sites failing to fully tap the power of the Web, or properly react to the competitive threat:

• They are not online hub of their community. Resources and information remain sketchy if they exist at all.
• Classified sites are not often rich, compelling, community-driven experiences.
• Classified verticals lack the depth to engage and meet consumer needs.
• Newspaper.com sites are not engaging place for local citizens to meet, discuss, debate and contribute.
• Newspaper journalists are too seldom fully developing their stories for online, by skipping over multimedia opportunities.
• Where are the niche products to reach the long tail of local audience interest?
• Newspapers have more than just a commitment to citizens and readers: They owe it to local businesses to help them succeed in a digital world. So where are the compelling ecommerce sites and the full service of advertising options? Where is self-service retail advertising?
• Too few newspapers even spend a dime on outside promotion so that local readers know that the newspaper.com should be a habit.
• Too few newsrooms have grasped the basic fundamental need to keep content fresh and that all news should go on the Web first and frequently.
• And almost no newspaper has realized the need to create virtual community to serve the real community.

Some sites do some of these things, as I said. Some are making good strides in some of these areas, but at this stage of the game, newspaper.coms should be a lot further along than they are. IMHO.

Logan Molen, VP of interactive media for the Bakersfield Californian, just sent an e-mail to the NAA's New Media Federation e-mail list announcing that Bakersfield.com has hired a push technology specialist.

Good idea.

Here's Logan's description of the job:

... we've just hired our first "push technology specialist" whose job is to create strategic email newsletters, SMS and RSS services, and other mobile strategies.

I think responsibility for e-mail, SMS and RSS all fit together neatly. A specialist can keep abreast of trends and technology and ensure these key areas of present and future growth receive appropriate attention.

In a previous post, I expressed my concern that this may be the golden age of YouTube, and that those days could be numbered.

John Battelle gives fans of YouTube hope by pointing out that YouTube is basically a company nobody with deep pockets could ever buy. All of that copyrighted material on YouTube is something of a poison pill, however unintentional.

So who might buy YouTube? A major entertainment company, like the ones mentioned in the Post piece? No way. That's buying a lawsuit or ten - if Time Warner bought YouTube, how long do you t hink it'd be before competitors sued to get their copyrighted stuff off TW's new service? . . . What about a new media giant buying YouTube - Yahoo, say, or Google? Or Microsoft? Nope, nope, nope. Yahoo is a media company, and acts like one. Google doesn't have it in its DNA to run a service like YouTube (though Google, with its Switzerland like approach to content, is the best fit, in my opinion). And Microsoft? They don't need any more legal headaches over in Redmond right now.

YouTube is a great idea without a business model, which is okay if the only people it needs to support are its owners and a few employees (if that many people), along with enough servers and bandwidth to power the thing (which isn't all that expensive). At this point, they could probably throw up a PayPal donation button to cover all that.

I'm guessing, however, that YouTube does have some initial investors who would like to see a return, plus the current owners (if they're normal human beings) don't want to pass up a unique opportunity to become filthy rich.

It took a study to tell us!: "Newspapers That Attract Teens Retain Them as Adults."

Philip Meyer already showed us how that trend works.

... the idea is that newspapers should have content aimed at teenagers. The foundation estimates that only 220 newspapers across the country have special teen sections, many written by teenagers. The study also noted that roughly 800 papers carry some sort of syndicated youth content for all ages.

I might have endorsed that idea of special teen sections 15 years ago. Now, where newspapers need to be concentrating their resources on growing young audiences is on the Web.

There are two reasons: That's the media teens are adapting to, and most teens are the children of parents who never acquired the newspaper habit, which makes them much tougher to reach.

The Web opens a world of inexpensive opportunities to grow audience with a variety of products, some of which could appeal to teens very much.

Online real estate advertising, is growing faster than print. The trend is bleak and irreversible.

I still believe newspaper.coms can win in their local markets, however. It will take more than porting classifieds to the Web or even striking deals with local MLS boards. It will take full-featured portal-like sites with deep content.

Newspaper sites also need to start paying closer attention to FSBOs. Just like the net enables peer-created content, it also makes it easier to do things like sell your own house.