Jan 24th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As the Wall Street Journal is breathlessly reporting, Rupert “Just Try and Stop Me” Murdoch has apparently relented on his much-discussed plans to open up the Journal’s content and get rid of the paywall, and will be keeping some subscription products (and boosting the price for them, oddly enough) while letting more stuff move outside the wall. In other words, he will be trying to have his cake and eat it too.
I know that there are a lot of smart people out there who believe that you can do both — one of them being Rex Hammock, who has been predicting for some time that Rupert would see the light and go for a mixed strategy. I would not claim to have the expertise in publishing that Rex has, but I do know one thing: the kind of content that newspapers produce, in virtually all cases including the esteemed WSJ, is either a commodity (in which case charging for it is nonsensical) or something with added value. In both cases I think it benefits the paper to release it into the wild.
Obviously if it’s a commodity then it should be free. But I would argue that it’s almost more important for the added-value content to be free as well. And here I am in violent agreement with Fred Wilson of A VC, who says that he believes Rupert has made a big mistake by keeping content locked up. As he puts it in his post on the topic:
“Here’s the deal. Digital media is not about scarcity and never will be. That’s the old media game. Online it’s about ubiquity, about being part of the conversation, about links, authority, page rank, and if you are a news organization like the WSJ - its about anchoring the discussion.”
This is the same debate that the New York Times went through, and it eventually decided to get rid of the wall. Was it not making money? No, it was making plenty of money — but that pie wasn’t growing. And it certainly wasn’t growing as quickly as the NYT’s traffic has been since it removed the wall. I think the Journal would be wise to trade the bird it has in its hand for two or three (or twelve) in the bush.
Jan 24th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Now that the sturm und drang over the latest changes to Digg’s algorithm has died down somewhat — after the villagers made it all the way to the castle with pitchforks and lighted torches in their hands, only to relent and make peace with the lords of the manor, after Kevin and Jay joined a podcast — I think it’s worth looking at what happened. I must admit that when it first bubbled up on Techmeme, I sort of wondered what all the fuss was about. So Digg tweaked the algorithm again; so what?
The reaction from top Diggers such as Dave “DigiDave” Cohn and Muhammad Saleem, both of whom I know somewhat through emails and the Twitterverse (DigiDave is involved with NewAssignment.net, among other things) was strong and swift. An “open letter” was posted complaining about the secrecy with which Digg goes about its business, the reports of “bury” bots aimed at specific posters, the lack of responsiveness to complaints, and so on. In his recap of events, Muhammad notes how quickly the issue snowballed, and also how quickly it was resolved.
My friend Scott Karp notes at Publishing 2.0 that what has been happening at Digg over the past year or so — the continual tweaking of the algorithm to try and prevent “gaming” of the site, of which the last tweak is only the most recent example — shows that a completely open social-media network is bound to fail, and I would agree. The only point I would make is that there has rarely ever been an example of a completely open network, just as there has rarely ever been a completely democratic country or a completely altruistic act. Human beings are complicated.
For better or worse (and in some cases both at the same time) Digg is a kind of living research project into “social media” and how it operates — or perhaps evolves is a better word. One day it will seem like the model for how a collaborative news-filtering engine can arise almost organically out of the primordial Internet ooze, and the next day it looks like a “tragedy of the commons”-style train wreck, or a kind of proto-democracy on crystal meth, eventually tipping over into self-parody and irrelevance. It’s like an unstable chemical soup, prone to explosion.
But it’s also probably the best real-time, experimental social-media lab we have right now, and it is fascinating to watch.
Jan 24th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Adrian Holovaty — the guy behind the ChicagoCrime-Google Maps mashup, and now the launch of EveryBlock — is a smart guy. And not just when it comes to things like coding, but in the way he thinks about media. When we think of journalism and the “news” business, we often just think about the obvious things, like the plane crashes or the Iraq war, but in your neighbourhood there’s a whole lot more than that you might consider “news,” or at least, information worth knowing. It could be a street closure, a crime wave, a local bylaw change, and dozens of other things.
Good local newspapers cover all of those things and more — but the information isn’t always easy to find. EveryBlock.com is an attempt to use the kind of aggregation and smart filtering that a search engine like Google provides, but on a smaller scale. So far, the service is still in its infancy, but the more data Adrian and his team can bring into the mix — including newspaper stories and blog posts — the more value there will be. I think it’s a great effort, as is another local service called Outside.in, and I wish we had something like it here in the Great White North.
Jan 22nd, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
As my friend Om Malik is reporting — and as founder Matt Mullenweg has confirmed on his blog — the company behind Wordpress has landed $29-million in financing, including an investment from none other than the New York Times. This sounds like a great deal for an equally great company, one whose products I not only use for this and other blogs, but have recommended to dozens of friends and coworkers as the easiest way to get online, and many of them now use it.
As Om points out, Wordpress is not only a blog platform — it has become one of the default publishing platforms for all kinds of online content, including some small newspapers. As CEO Toni Schneider notes, the hosted version of Wordpress at Wordpress.com has more than 2 million blogs and is now the number 12 site on the Internet in terms of traffic. And yet Matt Mullenweg, who I met when he came to the very first mesh conference in 2006, is as unassuming as can be — someone who just seems fascinated by what tools like Wordpress can produce.
Matt and Toni say that the funds will go to build out the company’s server network and to add new features, including (I’m assuming) the recently announced upgrade of storage space on Wordpress to 3 gigabytes. It seems clear to me that Wordpress is well on its way to becoming something much more than just another blogging engine. Well done, Matt. TechCrunch reported last fall that Automattic turned down a $200-million acquisition offer, and now I can see why.
Jan 22nd, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Since its public launch a couple of weeks ago, a new video-oriented website and community called BigThink has been called snobbish and “a YouTube for smarty-pants.” But Montreal-born Victoria Brown, who co-founded the site with her partner Peter Hopkins, told me in a recent interview that the site isn’t intended to be elitist or preachy, and stressed that anyone is free to contribute their thoughts on just about any topic, including Britney Spears.
That said, however, it’s clear that BigThink is trying to take the high road when it comes to content. Anyone who has grown even a little weary of the funny cat videos on YouTube or the coked-out Amy Winehouse videos on gossip sites such as PerezHilton may find it a refreshing change. Brown and Hopkins have seeded the site with video interviews featuring people like such as Moby, psychologist Steven Pinker, activist Aayan Hirsi Ali and Buddhist scholar (and Uma’s dad) Robert Thurman.
The BigThink site is divided into two large content groups: Meta and Physical. The videos — of which the site has more than 180 now — are done in the style popularized by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, with the subject looking straight at the camera, as though talking to the viewer. Most of the interviews are an hour long (although Ms. Brown says the site will be doing shorter, more news-focused interviews as well), but they are segmented by question and by topic, to make it easy for viewers browsing BigThink to find videos they might want to watch.
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