mathewingram.com/work

Well, it happened again. I was going to write a blog post about the new Google Maps feature that lets users write reviews of businesses, but I left it too late and had to go off to a dinner thing, and by the time I got back that bugger Scott Karp had said the exact same thing that I was going to. I swear, if it isn’t him doing that then it’s Mike Masnick from Techdirt.com. If they weren’t such nice guys I would push them in front of a bus or something.

In any case, the point is well made by Scott: adding user reviews to Google Maps makes sense from a certain standpoint, since it adds value to the map info and adds another layer of content to (hopefully) provide stickiness. But it is also lacking any kind of social element, which is something that Yelp.com — or a similar Toronto service called OurFaves.com, which was started by my friend Candice Faktor — have in spades.

Why would someone want to contribute a review to Google Maps when there’s no community? And how is anyone supposed to judge the believability of the review when there’s no social context the way there is with Yelp and OurFaves.com? Someone said they didn’t like the “If you build it, they will come” mentality — they much preferred the “if they come, you should build it” approach.

Google seems to be leaning more towards the former than the latter, and Scott is right — building community and using social tools is not something they have proven to be particularly good at.

I’m kind of glad that Andrew Dubber — a professor of music in Britain — got threatened by a record industry executive for writing about downloading on his blog, because otherwise I never would have come across his New Music Strategies blog and that would have been a shame. He posts a lot of smart things about the music industry, and his latest post is no exception: it’s called 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, and while I usually hate the “10 Things” style of list, this one is a keeper. His list includes:

3. Opinion Leaders Rule: We know the importance of radio and press. There are now new opinion leaders who will tell your story with credibility. You need to find out who they are — or better yet, become one of them.

6. Web 2.0: Forget being a destination — become an environment. Let your customers tag and sort your catalogue. Open up for user-generated content. Your website is not a brochure — it’s a place where people gather and connect with you and with each other.

8. Cross-promote: Your online stuff is not a replacement for your offline stuff, and nor does it exist independently of it. Figure out how to make the two genuinely intersect.

11. The Death of Scarcity: Understand that the economics of the internet is fundamentally different to the economics of the world of shelves and limited stock. Know that you could give away 2 million copies of your record in order to sell a thousand.

20. Forget product — sell relationship: The old model of music business is dominated by the sale of an individual artefact for a set sum of money. iTunes is still completely old school. The new model is about starting an ongoing economic relationship with a community of fans.

I encourage you to read the entire thing.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has a great post about how newspapers can work with aggregators and the distributed ecosystem of the Web, instead of just moaning about how Google and Yahoo are stealing their business, as Tribune owner Sam Zell and others like to do from time to time. Scott nails it when he says that:

The problem that newspapers and other traditional media brands have is that they still see branding as a function of controlling the distribution channel, rather than branding each unit of content that must now live and survive on its own in a disaggregated online media ecosystem.

Using aggregators and search wisely can make a big difference, Scott points out, using the New York Times “Topics” pages as an example. Putting together pages of content that match what people are searching for is a good way of making the rest of your publishing entity that much more appealing. And Scott notes that this works for his site as well.

Publishing 2.0 gets 73% of its traffic from search and referring sites, which include aggregators like Techmeme. Some of my content is also syndicated in full text on Seeking Alpha, Yahoo, and Digital Media Wire (with links back to the site, which yield significant traffic) — this is anathema to the traditional media mindset.

But the result, he says, is that his RSS and email subscriptions keep growing, and so is his brand — by effectively leveraging search, and by giving his content away.

I think I may have linked to Jeff de Boer’s incredible artistic creations before, way back when I had a blog called A Complete Waste of Time, but it’s definitely worth linking again — these tiny suits of armor for cats and mice are incredibly detailed works of art, made from steel and copper and silver. Awesome. And he’s from my former home town of Calgary, Alberta to boot.

Well, well, well. After six years — and the last couple of those facing mounting criticism of his efforts in the corner suite — Hollywood transplant Terry Semel is out as chief executive officer of Yahoo. To add insult to injury (although he remains non-executive chairman, which means he’s hardly hitting the bread lines) the share price of the Internet portal jumped by more than five per cent in after-hours trading after the company announced the news. Yahoo is going back to the future for a CEO: co-founder and Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang becomes the new chief executive. Yang has a blog post about it here. He says that Semel:

“Refocused the company on key strategic priorities, and in so doing, helped Yahoo! increase our revenues nearly nine-fold from $717 million in 2001 to $6.4 billion in 2006; boost our operating income from a loss in 2001 to nearly $1 billion last year; and create more than $30 billion in shareholder value during his tenure.

He helped grow our audience from 170 million to more than 500 million users globally, and he oversaw the expansion of our base of talented employees from 3,500 to nearly 12,000.”

This has to make Eric Jackson feel pretty good — he put together a Web-based protest group (mentioned by the Times UK and Wired, among other places) that got a significant amount of support from disgruntled shareholders, and took its criticisms to the Yahoo shareholders meeting. My friend Paul Kedrosky, who has been predicting this move would come, live-blogged the conference call.

I guess the pressure is on Jerry Yang now — although I’m sure his $2.2-billion net worth should be a comfort either way. Valleywag has a comprehensive “corporate obituary” on Semel and his reign here — and also points out that Jerry Yang is no Steve Jobs. Ouch. Painful but true, I suspect. Mike Arrington has a different take on the news at TechCrunch: why so sudden? Yahoo could have announced his retirement, etc. and taken its time. Instead, he is just gone and Yahoo turns to an old standby. That is a little odd.

“I come not to bury Facebook, but to praise it.” — loosely paraphrased from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

There’s no question that Facebook is the hottest thing going in social networking right now, and the launch of the Facebook F8 Platform has made it even more important as a model of what is possible for such a network. At the same time, however, I think that there’s also a troubling element to the site, which is that Facebook is to some extent a walled garden. Dave Winer writes about it here, Jon Udell hints at it here, and so does Dabble DB co-founder Avi Bryant here. Others have also written about the same kinds of issues here, here and here.

Obviously Facebook isn’t a walled garden in the same sense that America Online was way back when, or Prodigy or Compuserve or any of those other services. In fact, the F8 Platform launch ties Facebook into all sorts of Web services such as Flickr quickly and easily, which is a great feature and one I have written about before and likely will again. And yet, the reason Facebook did this is so you will spend more and more time on Facebook, and that is less and less time you spend on the regular Internet. Why can’t I have all the same features that I get with Facebook but without having to log in and click here or there everytime I do something?

In a way, we already have many of the attributes of Facebook: we can provide status updates through Twitter, we can chat through email or comments or GTalk or MSN Messenger or whatever — instead of Facebook’s irritating “wall-to-wall” feature, where you get an email telling you someone sent you a message, then you have to click and login, then leave a message, then they get an email, etc. Why can’t I just get the damn message?

In a sense, those kinds of irritations are a symptom of the larger issue, I think. We — and by “we” I mean bloggers, etc. — have all sorts of plugins and widgets that let us integrate Flickr and the MyBlogLog social network app and Last.fm song preferences and so on, and otherwise connect with people. Why do we need Facebook? Is it that we need the protection of the “limited profile” and the “click to add friend” process? I don’t know the answer. I’m just asking.

Update:

In light of all the coverage that I and others have been giving iLike for signing up more than 3 million users for their Facebook app, it’s worth noting Paul Kedrosky’s words of caution on that front.

I missed this the other day, but my friend Scott Karp had a great, in-depth look at the New York Times and its advertising revenue picture — trying to sift through the various financial tea leaves and figure out in dollar terms (as opposed to percentage terms) just how much the Grey Lady’s print revenue has been declining, and how much its online revenue has been increasing, and whether the latter is enough to offset the former.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but according to Scott’s math — which looks fairly comprehensive to me (although I am an English major) — the answers are a) a lot, b) somewhat and c) not even close. Part of the problem with trying to do what Scott did is that the Times, much like other newspapers, doesn’t like to break out exact numbers for either its newspaper revenue declines or its online revenue increases, which may have something to do with the fact that “online is growing by 20 per cent” sounds a whole lot better than “grew by $3-million,” especially when your print revenue sank by almost ten times that amount and your top line is about $483-million. Steve Boriss at the Future of News has some thoughts on Scott’s detective work.

Note:

The title of this post, for anyone not familiar with Alice in Wonderland, refers to the chess game in that book, in which the Red Queen says “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”