Dec 13th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
It looks like just another Valleywag rumour about some high-level departures at AOL — four senior executives that got the chop, according to Valleywag editor and Gawker Media founder Nick Denton (a former business journalist at the Financial Times in London). But like many blogs, all the action is in the comments section, where Jason Calacanis, ex-Netscape editor and ex-Weblogs Inc. founder, gives Nick some advice.
First, Jason says the rumour is “99% false,” because all four couldn’t possibly have been let go all at once. He then posts three more comments in quick succession — four comments in all, in about 20 minutes — at which point Nick comments, and says that another tipster has told him that two of the four are not leaving, a third is “on some lists” but doesn’t appear to be leaving either, and one is definitely out. This leads Jason to define the Nick Denton school of journalism approach:
1. Post a rumor as fact (”oops… did I forget to source that one?!”)
2. Let everyone respond to the fishing expedition/get the traffic
3. Place an “oh, I guess I was wrong” in the comments long after folks have read the headline and moved on to the next lie.
Nick then admits that he should have made it more clear the post was a rumour. At which point, Jason says: “Now that you have reports that this is not true, and you admit you misrepresented the truth I have to ask the question: why wouldn’t you correct the story above? You were a real journalist at one point right? I mean that seriously.” And then he adds:
I know you’re a gossip and porn publisher now, but you well know that when you make a mistake on a blog you correct it in the post. Frankly, I think you are making a huge mistake by playing these games. You have a lot of good insights as a business person and if you stopped trying to trick folks I think Valleywag would become worth reading.
So far no response from Nick. Want some more back and forth between Jason and Nick, this time about conflicts of interest between Nick and those he is writing about? Look no further.
Update:
It turns out that, accusations of gossip- and porn-mongering aside (can you monger porn?), Nick was pretty close to the mark and Jason was out to lunch.
Dec 13th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
If anybody is in a position to help Wired magazine think about new media and the “long tail” theory, it’s the magazine’s editor Chris Anderson, who just finished publishing a book called The Long Tail. Chris, who has obviously thought a lot about these kinds of issues, has a great two-part post up about how he wants to change Wired magazine’s website, now that the print magazine and the web service are once again part of the same company.
The first part is an overview of how the media landscape has changed, and how people’s expectations have changed, structured in a “then and now” format, including:
THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers goes next. Portals rule.
NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. “De-portalization” rules.
and
THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.
NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.
And the second part of the post deals with how to change a magazine and a website to better reflect some of those changes in attitude. Chris deals with six things that he says a truly “transparent” and interactive media organization would do — and the possible benefits and downsides of those approaches — including:
Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal “about” pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions. Encourage anyone who wants to blog to do so. Have a masthead that actually means something to people who aren’t on it.
and
Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they’re commenting on? Why not publish all letters to the editor as they’re submitted (we did that here), and let the readers vote on which are the best? We could promise to publish the top five each month, whether we like them or not.
and
Let readers decide what’s best. We own Reddit, which (among other things) is a terrific way of measuring popularity. Why should we guess at which stories will be most popular and give those preferential treatment? Why not just measure what people really think and let statistics determine the hierarchy of the front page?
Well worth a read for anyone interested in the future of online media. Some things Anderson says he’s not sure will work (wikis for stories, for example, which Wired has experimented with) but thinks should probably be tried anyway. I wish more editors would think about that kind of thing. There’s more commentary about the piece at Rex Hammock’s blog, at Publishing 2.0 and over at the Bivings Report
Update:
Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0 magazine — who recently asked all of his writers to start blogging (and who I’m pretty sure used to write for Wired) — has posted a bit of a rebuttal to Chris’s piece, in which he says that publishers of print magazines are going to have to decide which is more important, online or print, because telegraphing what your cover story is going to be doesn’t really work for print mags. Thanks to Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 for pointing to Josh’s post, and for writing one of his own.
Dec 13th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
At The Guardian, technology blogger Bobbie Johnson is engaging in a little bit of “crowdsourcing” by asking readers who come across interesting stories to send them to the newspaper by using the del.icio.us social bookmarking tool. He has set up a delicious account called Guardianista, so that anyone can sign on and save links to that account. But he also points out (prompted by a reader) that existing users can add The Guardian to their network, or can tag links with “for:Guardianista” in order to send them to Johnson.
Incidentally, you can do the same thing for me too — if you see something interesting, just tag it with “for:mathewi” and I will see it. Or you can always email it.
Dec 13th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
From the great Inside The CBC blog by Tod Maffin comes the story of a reporter looking to file a piece for CBC TV from Grand Manan (which for those who don’t know is an island off the coast of New Brunswick in Atlantic Canada), only to find that she was running out of time — and no way to upload her story. So Catherine Harrop figured: Why not just do a video-cast using MSN Messenger? Which she did, and the report went on the air within the hour.
Dec 11th, 2006 | Social Media | No Comments
Maybe it’s just meant to be “Digg-bait” (as Nick Denton at Valleywag likes to call it), but Jason Clarke of Download Squad has a long post up about Digg and how it is destined for failure. As Jason mentions in the post, Download Squad is part of AOL, which owns the revamped Netscape — a site that was essentially modeled on Digg — so perhaps it’s an elaborate corporate hit-job. I thought Download Squad was all about cool software, but maybe I was wrong.
In any case, Jason’s criticisms are not really all that new. As far as I can tell, his two main points are: 1) Digg’s audience is full of mouth-breathers and low-foreheads who just pile on and flame each other, and digg down things they don’t agree with. And 2) Digg’s traffic, a kind of “flash crowd” that can shut down even the most robust hosting service in a matter of minutes, consists of window-shoppers who come quickly and leave quickly, and if they sign up for something they never actually use it.
Jason says that the Digg community is “rotting from the inside out,” and that “the sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming.” As with many other critics of the Digg model, or social media in general — including Nick Carr and Andrew Keen, as well as newcomers Andy Rutledge, who I’ve written about here, and Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal, who I’ve written about here — the argument is that the wisdom of crowds doesn’t exist.
The problem with the whole concept of taking advantage of the “wisdom of crowds” is that crowds have no wisdom. Microsoft Windows is an example of an operating system written using the wisdom of crowds… and don’t get me started on the majority of large open-source efforts.
As a commenter rightly points out, the Windows crack is a gigantic red herring. Any problems at Microsoft have little or nothing to do with the wisdom of crowds, and everything to do with corporate hierarchy and centralized decision-making. If anything, they could use a little more Digging. And as for the traffic problems, it’s true that Diggers flood in and then disappear, leading some to wonder how much value they actually bring with them. But couldn’t we say that about Web traffic from plenty of other sources too, like TechCrunch for example?
In conclusion, Jason says:
Social media sites are an unproven phenomenon… I predict that in the near future sites will start to attempt to block digg as a referrer, since getting a link from digg will simply cost them money. And over time I believe users will tire of the constant negativity that characterizes digg… unless digg can find a way to clean up their collective act.
Does Digg have flaws? Sure it does. And so do plenty of other social media sites. But I think Jason (for whatever reason) is being way too negative. What do you think?
