May 25th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
I have a lot of respect for Doc Searls — he’s been at this whole blogging/social media thing a lot longer than I have, and he is a thoughtful and sincere guy. He also sent me a high-res copy of some of his sunset photos after I saw them on his blog, and for that I am grateful. But I still think his latest post about newspapers and what to do with them (which sprang from a recent WSJ opinion piece by Andy Kessler) is totally wrong.
Okay — maybe not totally wrong. I think he is right that some people will always want to hold a paper in their hands, just as some people want to hold books, or listen to radio plays. But the number of those people is dwindling. As I mentioned on my friend Kent Newsome’s blog, I think Doc would probably like to return to a happier time when newspapers ruled the world. So would I. But that’s not happening. And to say that newspapers should charge people for the news and give away their archives is — sorry Doc — one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. Almost as dumb as the guy Jeff writes about here.
Would it be nice if we could go back to those days? Sure it would — but we can’t. I’m sure the record industry would like to keep overcharging people for CDs full of crap too. That ship has sailed. If you restrict access to your content some people will pay for it, but the vast majority will go away and never come back. That’s not much of a business model.
Update:
Doc has responded to some of his critics (including yours truly) in a post here, and admitted that I… er, we are right 
Please read that and his comment below.
May 25th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
From an opinion piece by Andy Kessler, one-time Wall Street hedge-fund manager and all-around smart guy:
In the meantime, rather than just charge for content, I’d be licensing every type of newfangled software and Web service until I could come up with a tight community of interest around my newspaper, local or national.
Don’t just start the discussion, keep it. This means comments, reviews, personalized newsfeeds, social networks of like-minded readers, whatever. Give advertisers a little “link love” so they don’t stray to generic search engines. Google, Microsoft and others dropped over $10 billion to buy online ad-delivery companies in the last few weeks alone.
The value is there: Newspapers aren’t in the printing business, they’re in the ad business.
May 25th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
A rousing vote of confidence in Sirius Satellite Radio from CEO Mel Karmazin (link via I Want Media):
NEW YORK (AP) — Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. CEO Mel Karmazin sought to allay shareholder concerns at the company’s annual meeting Thursday, saying he was just as disappointed as other investors in Sirius’ lagging stock price. Compared to rival XM, however, he said: “We suck less.”
May 24th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
The Wall Street Journal had a bit of scoop in the “user-generated content” area today, with the news that Lucasfilms is re-launching StarWars.com on Friday, with a massive library of fan films, and some online video-editing tools from Eyespot that will allow fans to mash-up clips (more than 250 in all) from all six of the movies and mix in their own content. For a Star Wars fan and/or aspiring filmmaker, this is a pretty huge deal.
As the WSJ story points out, Lucasfilms isn’t quite opening itself up completely to the fan-film phenomenon — the submissions will be monitored by Eyespot’s software for nudity and other bad things (so forget about the “Leia slave-girl” mashups you’re thinking about, boys) and just to be extra sure, they will all be watched by a team of human filters in Costa Rica (why Costa Rica? Who knows). Fans will also be restricted to using the clips and music that Lucas provides, which some fans are upset by. At the same time, however, it’s easy to understand how a filmmaker like George Lucas — who is notoriously control-oriented — would feel just a tad nervous about allowing his creations to be altered and mashed-up without any restrictions whatsoever. I think he actually deserves some credit for giving it a shot (and as John Murrell at GMSV notes, it’s also enlightened self-interest). It will be interesting to see whether we can find another fan creation that’s as good as Chad Vader: DayShift Manager.
May 23rd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
According to Ars Technica, Google says
there is no truth to the
recent story in Scotland’s Sunday Herald about the search engine cutting deals with news sites
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 clipped from arstechnica.com |
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