Oct 11th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Pardon the interruption for an ego-related post: I taped a segment for the CBC morning radio show The Current today, which should be airing tomorrow morning (that is, Friday the 12th of October). For anyone who wants to check it out, the show starts at at 8:30. There’s more information about the show here, and a tool for finding out what frequency CBC Radio One is on in your region here.
The guest host for the show was K-OS, the rap and hip-hop artist otherwise known as Kevin (or Kheaven) Brereton. The multiple award-winning writer/singer/producer of songs such as Crabbuckit and Sunday Morning, K-OS was born in Toronto and raised in Trinidad and Whitby. Having never met him before, I didn’t know what to expect, but he was a down-to-earth guy and a generous host.
We talked about the future of the music industry in light of Radiohead’s recent “pay what you want” album news, and subsequent reports that other prominent artists such as Oasis, Trent Reznor and Jamiroquai may consider doing something similar.
The central question for the segment was whether the record industry was a group of dinosaurs, with the Radiohead news as the asteroid that would eventually make them extinct. I agreed that many of them were dinosaurs, but said Radiohead and others were more like evolution at work — like those fish with the stubby little feet who first walked on land. What they will evolve into remains to be seen.
Anyway, it was a really enjoyable interview. K-OS asked some great questions, and also threw in some of his own thoughts about the issue from his point of view as an artist. Definitely worth a listen.
Oct 10th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Dotspotter. Ever heard of it? Me neither — and I make it my business to keep track of as many Web 2.0-type new media sites as I can. Unheard of or not, the site has reportedly been acquired by CBS for $10-million (PaidContent has apparently confirmed this as well). How long has the site been around? Less than a year.
So, Dotspotter — which appears to be a kind of Digg for celebrity stories, with a user interface and site design that seems to have been designed by colour-blind gerbils — is worth $1-million for every month it has been alive. By that measure, a site like TMZ.com or PerezHilton (or Gabe Rivera’s WeSmirch.com) should be worth about $100-million — which, of course, would be insane (no offense, Gabe). And what kind of name is Dotspotter anyway?
According to the PaidContent piece, a source said the acquisition price wasn’t so much for the actual site but for the team, which includes a former Yahoo vice-president named Anthony Soohoo. So all of a sudden a crap idea is worth $10-million just because some Yahoo VP was involved? That’s genius. Maybe there’s hope for Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors.com after all.
Oct 10th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
It sure was inspirational when Time magazine editor Rick Stengel sent out that “all hands on deck” memo to the magazine’s writers back in June, telling them that they had better write for the Web or else. As Stengel put it in the memo:
“Let me make this explicit: evaluations of every Time writer, correspondent, and reporter will be based on the quality and quantity of the contributions each of you makes to both the magazine and to TIME.com.”
Bravo, I thought. Lay all the cards on the table — Time is one media entity, with both a printed magazine and a website. Well done.
It may have been rather poor timing for a call to arms, however, considering the writers’ union was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the publisher of Time, People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Money magazines. I expect the idea of tying job evaluations to web writing was like red meat.
The upshot: in return for other concessions, according to Women’s Wear Daily (which seems to have been the best source of coverage for this particular story, oddly enough), the management at Time agreed to a clause that says while employees will be “encouraged” to write for the Web, “there will no negative impact on any employee for not volunteering to do Web site work.”
In a new memo on the policy, Time said that no one will be penalized for not doing it, but hinted strongly that the “best and brightest” at the magazine do so. Oh well — it was fun while it lasted.
Update:
According to this piece in PRWeek, the union actually supported the idea of making Web and print reporters interchangeable, but that would have meant extending the union benefits enjoyed by print reporters to those who just worked on the Web, and Time didn’t want to do that.
Oct 8th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Thanks to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for pointing me to a post by Yahoo vice-president of product development Ian Rogers. In the post — entitled “Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses” — Rogers recaps a recent presentation he made about the business of digital music, and as Mike notes it is well worth reading.
The Yahoo VP — who used to run the pioneering music company Winamp, after dropping out of university for a year in 1995 to tour with the Beastie Boys — describes the early days of the digital music game, and his surprise at the combination of fear, ignorance and loathing with which the music industry greeted the arrival of mp3s and services such as Napster:
“We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.”
Fast-forward to today, and Rogers talks about how Amazon has finally created a music-download service that is actually as easy to use as a p2p network — in fact, easier. Unfortunately, he says, it has taken eight years of wasted effort and millions of dollars in legal fees:
“8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.”
As Rogers puts it — before describing the ridiculously convoluted process you have to go through to buy a track and download it through Yahoo Music — “Inconvenience doesn’t scale.” If there is one lesson the music business needs to learn, it is that. It’s true that Apple’s iTunes service has grown to a phenomenal size despite the use of proprietary DRM controls, but think of how much larger the audience for that music could be. As Rogers puts it:
“Platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web are the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.”
Oct 7th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Big news in the social-media space: MSNBC has acquired Newsvine, a pioneering news community that has been somewhat eclipsed by Digg and other sites in terms of public profile over the past year or two, but has continued to grow and prosper outside of the spotlight. Newsvine was founded in 2005 by Mike Davidson and a number of other former Disney Group and ESPN staffers, and was arguably ahead of its time in terms of design and interactivity.
I haven’t written about Newsvine in quite a while, but I was impressed by the service when I first tried it out during the beta trials last year, and I am even more impressed by how they have managed to grow and yet stay focused on their core principles — and done so while taking only $1.5-million in funding, as Mike Arrington points out. That is a model that other Web 2.0 companies would be wise to follow.
For MSNBC, the acquisition accomplishes something obvious: it allows the news site to incorporate social and community features without having to develop them itself. For Newsvine, it most likely solves the issue of ongoing funding, and gives the site a much larger community to draw from when it comes to interactivity, and more exposure for the writers that the site has developed.
Rex Sorgatz, who is not only executive producer of MSNBC.com but also the proprietor of the excellent Fimoculous blog, has some thoughts about the deal that are well worth reading. As he puts it:
“[Big media] needs fixing, now more than ever. And fixing it is about finding its roots — news as conversation, as a network, as a platform. By reconstituting media as participation, Newsvine suddenly makes news fun and engaging again.”
I have to agree with Rex, who has also worked for big media for a decade or so: big media is hard. It is resistant to change — and even when it does decide to move, it does so at a glacial pace, for a whole pile of reasons. Many mainstream news sites are trying to incorporate more social features, but it’s not something that comes easily, or instinctively. If buying Newsvine can help MSNBC do some more of that, then more power to them.
MSNBC’s story on the acquisition is here, and Mike Davidson’s thoughts on the deal are here. Rafat Ali at PaidContent says that his guesstimate of the purchase price is between $5-million and $7-million, and Richard MacManus has some perspective on the acquisition at Read/Write Web. More coverage and opinion in the New York Times, at Jeremy Wagstaff’s Loose Wire blog (where he talks about the thorny issue of compensation for “user-generated content”), at Newsroomnext and at ParisLemon.
