Nov 21st, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Yet another in a long (and I mean long — we’re talking a decade or so) line of depressing declines in newspaper advertising levels, as detailed in a release by the Newspaper Association of America and in this Reuters story. And just to add insult to injury, Alan Mutter of Newsosaur notes both on his own blog and at Silicon Alley Insider that it’s even worse when you take inflation into account. I bet Alan is a lot of fun at parties.
As the Reuters story notes, there is some good news — while regular print advertising fell by 10 per cent in the third quarter, online ads rose by about 21 per cent. That’s good, right? Sure. Except for the fact that online advertising only amounted to about $770-million, and traditional newspaper ads accounted for more than 10 times that amount or about $10-billion. That’s a pretty dramatic gap, as Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has pointed out before — something he calls the “10-per-cent problem.”
Nov 20th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
BusinessWeek magazine has a piece about user-generated content and how it’s old and busted now — people really want professional content, apparently. As proof that “one after another,” video sites are turning their backs on UGC and going steady with the pros instead, BusinessWeek gives us one example: Mania.tv, which recently refocused and got rid of the user-generated part of its model, which apparently never really drew that many viewers.
Of course, it’s possible that Mania either didn’t approach that part of its business properly, or didn’t bother looking for the diamonds in the UGC rough — or maybe people were too busy uploading their stuff to YouTube and DailyMotion and Metacafe. It’s tough being third or fourth to the party, as a number of commenters have pointed out on Lost Remote.
The thing that really bugs me about the BusinessWeek article is that there’s this false dichotomy between high-quality professional content and low-quality UGC crap. It’s not that binary, I would argue. It’s more like a spectrum, with professional content on one end, and as you move down the scale you get lower quality, until there’s your brother-in-law singing karaoke.
Is there a lot of UGC crap that only someone’s mother would watch? Sure there is. But there’s a lot of garbage produced by “professionals” that gets foisted on people through traditional media too, whether they want it or not. I’d take some half-decent UGC over that any day.
Nov 20th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Nick Carr points to a piece by Jaron Lanier in the New York Times, wherein the virtual-reality guru with the wacky dreads talks about how he has changed his mind about the whole “information wants to be free” thing and would just really like to get paid, thank you very much. Maybe the virtual-reality guru and experimental musician/filmmaker business isn’t paying off any more and Jaron needs the rent money.
In any case, (as Nick himself points out), what Jaron suggests is virtually impossible. In fact, his rant might as well be entitled “I Want To Put the Genie Back in the Bottle Please.” Information of all kinds has breached the wall and is hurtling in all directions, unable to be contained — or not for long anyway — or metered or subjected to a toll approach. That’s a fact. One hopes that Jaron hasn’t been advising the music industry (and he clearly hasn’t been talking with Rupert Murdoch).
On a related note, author Harlan Ellison has a similar rant about getting paid, which you can watch on YouTube. It seems that Warner Brothers wanted him to contribute to some kind of DVD — for nothing! Can you imagine the gall?
I think Harlan Ellison has written some amazing science fiction, and I am a huge fan, but after listening to his rant on YouTube, I get the impression that if he were a musician, he would charge you for singing Happy Birthday at your kid’s party. In fact, if you happened to pass by his apartment on your way somewhere and heard him singing in the shower, he would probably want to charge you for that too.
It’s ironic that Ellison’s rant is on YouTube, where it is free — and where I saw it and got at least a little value out of it. If it had been on a DVD somewhere, I would never have seen it. Does Harlan get any value from me seeing it on YouTube? He might someday, theoretically. But Harlan wants cash in his pockets right now. He doesn’t want to build a relationship with me as a reader, or any of that New Age crapola.
Tell you what, Harlan. I’ll keep my money to myself, and you keep your rants to yourself. And that goes for you too, Jaron.
Nov 19th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
That headline is meant as a joke, by the way. But like many jokes, it has some truth at the center of it. Do I like to see my posts linked to on Techmeme? Sure I do — and I get the sense that Fred Wilson does too, even though he’s a fantastically rich and well-respected venture capitalist who presumably has lots of other things that make him feel great about what he’s doing. And I think Dave Winer likes to see himself on there too, even though he has a kind of love/hate co-dependent relationship.
I think Fred makes a good point about the site drawing more from other places — places that aren’t really blogs in the strict sense, in that they aren’t written by a single individual. But is that a bad thing? I’m not sure it is. I suppose it would be if you were used to a Techmeme that consisted mostly of your friends, which I think Fred (and probably Dave) are suggesting it used to be. But isn’t that a little like the guy who has a great mountain view from his house, and then complains that all these new people are moving in and wrecking it? Why shouldn’t they get some of that view too?
Not a great analogy, maybe. But I think Fred is overstating the case a bit too. Jeff Jarvis is still on Techmeme regularly, and as a headline post plenty of the time. Rex Hammock is on there plenty too. Calacanis might not be, but only because all he seems to write about lately is Mahalo and (occasionally) fat-blogging. But maybe all those FOFs (friends of Fred) aren’t there as much — and I think that’s okay. We’re getting some new bloggers that are adding new points of view, like Ashkan at WatchMojo and Allen Stern at Centernetworks and ParisLemon and The Last Podcast.
Are we getting USA Today and places like that too? Sure we are — because blogs and media are blending. And that’s as it should be. Blogs aren’t just for the geeks and blognoscenti anymore. Is that going to boost the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio? Perhaps. But there’s more signal out there too. And yes, Techmeme is going to encourage people to “game” the system to try and push their posts up. So what? Don’t click on them. There’s still lots of great opinions and ideas out there — more than there ever were, in fact.
Nov 18th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
So lots of people probably know by now (at least if they read Techmeme) that Amazon is launching an electronic book-reading gizmo called the Kindle on Monday, and there’s a gigantic cover story about it in the latest issue of Newsweek magazine. Speaking of which, the Kindle will apparently be a magazine and newspaper reader too, letting you read publications that you’ve downloaded using its built-in wireless connection.
First things first — I think that Bezos is right to emphasize the wireless aspect, which is based on a cellular-style service that Amazon is calling Whispernet. Previous e-book readers had to be hooked up to the PC or a cradle of some kind in order to download new books via the phone line and so on, but being able to buy and download them almost instantaneously will add a whole other dimension (I realize that the iPod has managed to succeed without that ability, but then I think music is different from books in a whole bunch of ways).
The second thing that hit me was the part where Steven Levy says that users will be able to download books, newspapers and magazines, and will even be able to “subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.” That one made me do a double-take. Pay a monthly subscription fee to read a blog? Either Levy and/or Bezos have been smoking something, or they have found some magical way to get people to pay for something that has historically been free.
I’m trying to think of a blog that I would pay money to read, and nothing is really coming to mind — not even Engadget or TechCrunch or Boing Boing. But that line of thinking raises the inevitable question: if a blog like Engadget is pretty much as good as a magazine (which I think it is), then why would people pay for one but not the other? That can lead you in one of two directions: charge for the blog, or don’t charge for anything. We know which one Jeff has chosen — but is it the right one?
