Susan Mernit's Blog

The show went on--despite the authorities cancelling the presentation. Ethan Zuckerman tells the tale of talking truth in Tunis. A snippet:
"Our joint project, Global Voices, is all about finding ways to call attention to conversations taking place in Citizen?s media? and our first panel includes two GVO regulars, Isaac Mao and Hossein Derakshan, as well as Taurai Maduna, from Zimbabwe.

Before introducing our citizen journalists, Rebecca talks about one of the critical issues we?re focusing on for the next two days: Internet filters. She mentions the just-released Open Net Initiative report on Tunisia, demonstrating how a US firm - Secure Computing - helps the Tunisian government censor the internet. Rebecca shows us pages that are blocked by the Tunisian firewall, as well as net censorship in China (including a comparison of a Google search for Tianeman Square Massacres from within and outside China.)"

Susan says: Now this is brave-and good.

Mark's got some thoughtful comments on the Borg--oops, I meant Google:
"google base is a very msft mba approach to the world. while it makes business sense, it lacks soul. it does as little to help the community as bringing in a walmart. in fact, google feels a like walmart today. once the excitement over trying out their latest release wears off we are left with the realization that they are going to ultimately put the corner grocer (being craigslist) out of business, and suck value out of an economy not add back. and while it's a beautiful day here in san francisco, it's a sad one for me to see a company with so much promise to help the world, primarily focus on helping itself."

There's lots of good talk in the comments as well--

The Kauffman Foundation's relaunched eVenturing, a site for entrepeneurs that offers practical advice and info on finance, HR, Products and so on...accompanying blog here.
Smart Mobs: "A typical Chinese Internet user is a young male who prefers instant messaging to e-mail, rarely makes online purchases and favors news, music and games sites." AP story here.
Google celebrity maps: An API for the stars.
CNET: Taking back the Web--a special report on social media and Web 2.1 users that's worth a read.
Dan Conover: What inquiring reporters read--a solid list o'blogs.
News via Niall-- Google bought Riya--that was quick. $4o-60MM, they say.

GOOGLE4aa43038af706aad.html

Bakersfield's Dan Pacheco led the team that built the Northwest Voice participatory media platform for the Bakersfield paper's Bakotopia site. Noting changes after a recent platform and feature upgrade, Dan writes: "We're seeing a tripling of traffic to Bakotopia, and much of it can be attributed to user profiles. In the past two months, profiles have jumped from number 13 to number 3 on the list of most popular features. I see this as a reflection of the core value proposition of Bakotopia -- meeting and connecting with people who have similar interests and goals. Even more fascinating is the fact that user profiles now get more traffic than content -- which includes things like furniture for sale, musicians wanted ads, rants, reviews and the like."

Susan sez: It ain't MySpace--but it is the same impulse--clustering actions and content around core identity as an important community attribute.

"What's perhaps most interesting about the Google Base design is that it appears to have been designed from the ground up with RSS and XML at its center. One need look no further then the detailed XML Schema and extensive RSS 2.0 specification to realize that Google intends to build the world's largest RSS "reader" which in turn will become the world's largest XML database.
To faciliate this, I suspect that Google will soon announce a program whereby people can register their "Base compliant" RSS feeds with Google base. Google will then poll these feeds regularly just like any other RSS reader....(snip)... Soon, every publisher on the planet will be able to have a highly automated, highly structured feed directly into Google base."
--Bill Burnham, Burham's Beat

The American Press Institute is spending $2 MM on a year-long project that is supposed to result in a white paper that will tell newspapers how to stay afloat instead of getting sold by share holder mandate. Only it seems like most of the funds will go toward paying for Harvard Business School guru Clayton Christensen's company, Innosight, , to do consulting work with project laders Stephen T. Gray, former managing publisher of The Christian Science Monitor and former chief executive officer and editor of The Monroe (Mich.) Evening News.
According to API, the project's goals are:

• Assess the threat to newspapers in the next decade, including emerging competition
• Determine opportunities for newspapers, including implementation of available new technology
• Suggest executable new business initiatives ? products, services and strategies ? with detailed rationales
• Provide implementation guides for these business plans, addressing the management of change and risk.

Of course, seems like it might cost a lot less than $2MM if some of the folks on this team were just keeping up with blogs covering the space--Buzzmachine, Pomo Blog, Tim Porter, and this blog come to mind--or. if, as Rafat Ali said, they gave the money to some cool start-ups.
Rafat's succinct two cents: "The viability of news gathering will have nothing to do with the future of newspapers, in the future...if API was really serious this, it would have invested that $2 million in some local sites or independent investigative journalism projects, instead of trying to get a bunch of 45-year olds (even though the list is impressive) from old big media companies together and come out with a report...(snip)... If you want news gathering in the future to flourish, stop talking and pondering about it..either do it yourself, or fund those who are."

Susan sez: I wonder why they didn't just give the money to The Media Center--isn't this exactly the kind of think tank they are? (Oh yeah, I forgot, they're not at Harvard.)

Reuters reports that Gawker Media has landed a deal for Yahoo to distribute Gawker blogs (does that mean we get to see Denton and Lock in Silicon Valley sometime soon? I think yes.)
Content--labelled as commentary--from Gawker, Defamer, Gizmodo and Wonkette will supplement Yahoo's news pages, adding a flavor that will only be matched when Yahoo finally manages to create a platform to channel content from ALL of the most linked/authoritative sources in the blogosphere (and that day will come, believe me.)
Meanwhile, Yahoo's rush to compete in media and social media is admirable--it will be interesting to see if some of their vertical categories take advantage of the learning the media/news group is doing and tweak/rethink their platforms a bit to integrate some new tools (and user involvement).

Update: Priceless Denton quote from Washington Post:"Yahoo has developed a certain weird geek chic, their philosophy is just edgy enough. The key to the Yahoo deal is the wider audience out there. This is the same younger audience that responds to 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.' "

Today, Eurekster's launching Swicki, a new community search product for small publishers and bloggers that lets them create targeted searches, publish the searches as tag clouds on their sites, and lets the swickis return search results most relevant to their community's user behaviour. Swickis are cool and useful search tools that are easy to build...Some early comments and reviews at Solution Watch, SoftTech, Phil Bradley's blog, Tech Soup, Hip and Zen Pen, Allied, Browster blog, and Direct marketing news.

Some swickis to note:

• Web 2.0 workgroup
• Author Dan Brown
• Drupal swicki search
• Early Stage Venture Swicki

I've been working with Eurekster as a consultant on this product and am eager to get feedback on this early beta...And more examples of swickis to check out.

Update: Press release here. Tech Crunch story here.

"...People under 30 turn the dial -- they try everything. Looking at the Internet, when you get people sort of over 40, you find that they probably use eight or 10 sites but use them quite a lot. People under 30 use 100 sites. It was the same with television, so when you're starting, you tend to go for that younger demographic because you have a better chance of getting their attention.

....What does a portal mean? In a sense, we say we've got 30 million portals: In MySpace, everyone has their own portal. All of our sites will be tightly interlinked technologically, so you can click from one to another. I think you've got to network your stuff -- that's interesting. Half the advertising on Google, and a lot of it on Yahoo!, is coming from networked sites. You help people: If someone has a good blog on Yahoo! and there is some connection by Google, then they share in the advertising.

--News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch in The Hollywood Reporter.

Googlebase launches. FAQ here.
What does it mean?
Google's everywhere.
Check out the examples of recipe-finder, personal data mangement, cars for sale, full time jobs...
The mind boggles..or is that goggles?

It's been fascinating to me to see how the worlds of podcasting, journalism, citizen media, video upload, tagging, etc are all starting to cross. Not only are bloggers writing about an every-broadening circle of tools, they're charting an explosion in expression among 18-35's and the wired digerati. It's an amazing soup to swim in, and one in which content--cool podcasts, amazing mash-ups, wonderful blog posts--swims to the surface, only to be eclipsed by a new aggregator, a search tool, a photo manager, etc.
How to keep up?
You can't.
The explosion of expression--both content and technology--is just so rich--and sometimes, so innovative-- that not being able to look at everything, while frustrating, is a good problem to have.

"... There's a shift under way in which authority is being transferred to authors with no accountability other than to themselves and their readership. Does it matter? Should it matter? The mainstream media can look down its nose at the blogosphere, but the numbers tell a different story. More people than ever are reading blogs because of shared affinities and it's coming at the expense of print newspapers."
--Charles Cooper, Executive Editor, News Commentary, CNET

According to WWD, The NYTimes has killed a piece on the (fictional) HBO series Deadwood because they are concerned the article may be written by the equally fictional JT LeRoy. According to the Sara James piece, LeRoy (or someone who assumed that persona) told her on the phone that the Times killed an upcoming story because the paper was afraid LeRoy was a fake--and his refusal to hand over a passport, social security card or other government-issues idea nixed the deal.
LeRoy told James: "I've always played with identity and gender. I understand what [the Times is] saying, but they entered into working with me knowing that ... Just because the Washington Post came after them, why should I be forced to prove who I am? They knew exactly what they were getting when they dealt with me."

Susan sez: At what point does the TV movie follow the well-detailed exposes?

" In a Web 2.0 world, there is going to be an increasing amount of fragmentation of services that users will want and the multiple services at which they'll need to have accounts at (free or otherwise), to get them.
These won't just be from the big portals but also dozens if not hundreds of new startups that'll continue to grow, evolve and consolidate.
Think about it as a microchunking of online services. That's dozens, and possibly hundreds of user names and passwords, and log-ins and log-outs a day for every single user.
And it gets especially complicated when needing to access all these services not just via a PC, but cell phones, PDAs and any number of wired and wireless gadgets coming down the pike."
--Michael Parekh on IT--and the whole post is worth a (close) read!

AOL press release --aka survey--on IM behaviors has some notable nuggets:

• Two-thirds (66 percent) of teens and young adults (ages 13-21) say they send more IMs than emails, up from 49 percent last year.
• Teen boys (55 percent) are more likely to have parental rules about IM use than are teen girls (50 percent).
• One in three (33 percent) IM users send mobile IMs or text messages from their cell phones at least once a week. This is an increase of 14% from 2004. The figure was 10% in 2003.
• Half (47 percent) of those ages 13-21 change their away messages every day, to let others know where they are (71 percent), to list a cell phone number or alternate way to be reached (47 percent) or to post a favorite lyric or quote (47 percent).

According to the survey, the top ten markets for instant messaging are: 1. Miami, FL; 2. New York, NY; 3. Boston, MA; 4. Chicago, IL; 5. Atlanta, GA; 6. Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX; 7. Detroit, MI; 8. San Francisco, CA; 9. Sacramento, CA; 10. Tampa, FL.

Tough enough: Lichens can live in space.
NPR is podcasting, major.
Yale conference Dec 3: Regulating Search-A Symposium on Search Engines, Law, and Public Policy--convener Eddan Katz was at Berkeley with Mary Hodder.
Merc News: Google offers free WiFi to Mountain View, CA-After all, if you're leasing 1MM square feet at NASA and building housing, you need free WiFi at the train station, right?
Yahoo's Scott Gatz: " Google is replaying Yahoo?s playbook circa 1996."
Tristan Louis: Reading the Google Tea Leaves--Tristan's take on things is becoming invaluable--and this is fascinating.

"I have seen the future of media and it looks like this:

Mashed Up Blog Posts at tech.memeorandum

Mashed Up Funny Videos at delicious

Mashed Up Playlists at webjay

Here is the future of media:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it. Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner."
--Fred Wilson, VC and smart guy

(Via Definitive Ink)

" I don't think any of us really doubts that the Microsoft memos were leaked deliberately and with careful thought and planning. Both memos, Gates and Ozzie's, read as if they've been copy-edited, and every phrase meticulously constructed for maximum conjecture and obfuscation, perfect for a new takeover campaign."
--Shelly Powers, Burningbird on the "leaked" Microsoft memos

A recent Allrecipes.com and USA WEEKEND Magazine has some interesting data points about American adults and, uh, food:

• Stranded on a desert island and faced with a choice between an unlimited supply of beer and burgers or a vegetable-only diet and Angelina Jolie as a hut mate, a solid majority (61 percent) of men would become vegetarian.
• For women, the choice between unlimited chocolate or a lifetime of eating veggies with Brad Pitt is much closer. At 51 percent, Brad Pitt just wins over the unlimited chocolate.
• Bucking the national trend, 58 percent of women in the Northeast chose chocolate over Brad Pitt.
• Meanwhile, a whopping 85 percent of men in that region -- significantly more than anywhere else in the nation -- picked Angelina over beer and burgers.
• When asked to choose a popular TV show's character(s) for a breakfast companion, most people (34 percent) said they wanted to share a tropical fruit plate with the castaways from Lost.
• Over one-quarter of Americans admit they hide foods from other members of their household, with candy being the most frequently hidden food.
• Women (20 percent) are more likely to hide candy than men (12 percent), especially if they are married.
  
  

Mediaweek reports that Web portal player AOL has just anounced a deal with CBS Digital Media to distribute both video and text news content from CBSNews.com on AOL News, adding CBS to their CNN/ABC mix.
This morning MSN and the AP announced their deal; what's next?

Via Lauren Gelman: Cisco Systems and the National Center for Women and InformationTechnology on Monday announced a new Internet tool aimed at boosting the interest of women in careers in science, engineering and technology.
The release says: "The digital library is geared toward students, parents and educators. It includes tips for encouraging girls to succeed in mathematics and computing, sample lessons for teaching computing to girls, and details about technology-themed summer camps and programs for girls. While the Labor Department predicts the creation of some 2 million tech jobs in the United States by 2012, the number of women in the information technology workforce has declined by18.5 percent over eight years, according to a report by theInformation Technology Association of America. The EducationalDevelopment Center, ITAA, the Stanford University office of science outreach and Junior Achievement also have collaboratedon the initiative."

A fascinating excerpt from the leaked memos--this from Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie:
"Today there are three key tenets that are driving fundamental shifts in the landscape all of which are related in some way to services. It's key to embrace these tenets within the context of our products and services.

The power of the advertising-supported economic model.

Online advertising has emerged as a significant new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services. In some cases, it may be possible for one to obtain more revenue through the advertising model than through a traditional licensing model. Only in its earliest stages, no one yet knows the limits of what categories of hardware, software and services, in what markets, will ultimately be funded through this model. And no one yet knows how much of the world's online advertising revenues should or will flow to large software and service providers, medium sized or tail providers, or even users themselves.

The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.

A grassroots technology adoption pattern has emerged on the internet largely in parallel to the classic methods of selling software to the enterprise. Products are now discovered through a combination of blogs, search keyword-based advertising, online product marketing and word-of-mouth. It's now expected that anything discovered can be sampled and experienced through self-service exploration and download. This is true not just for consumer products: even enterprise products now more often than not enter an organization through the internet-based research and trial of a business unit that understands a product's value.

Limited trial use, ad-monetized or free reduced-function use, subscription-based use, on-line activation, digital license management, automatic update, and other such concepts are now entering the vocabulary of any developer building products that wish to successfully utilize the web as a channel. Products must now embrace a 'discover, learn, try, buy, recommend' cycle, sometimes with one of those phases being free, another ad-supported, and yet another being subscription-based. Grassroots adoption requires an end-to-end perspective related to product design. Products must be easily understood by the user upon trial, and useful out-of-the-box with little or no configuration or administrative intervention.

But enabling grassroots adoption is not just a product design issue. Today's web is fundamentally a self-service environment, and it is critical to design websites and product 'landing pages' with sophisticated closed-loop measurement and feedback systems. Even startups use such techniques in conjunction with pay-per-click advertisements. This ensures that the most effective website designs will be selected to attract discovery of products and services, help in research and learning, facilitate download, trial and purchase, and to enable individuals, self-help and making recommendations to others. Such systems can recognize and take advantage of opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell products to individuals, workgroups and businesses, and also act as a lead generation front-end for our sales force and for our partners.

The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that 'just work'..

The PC has morphed into new form factors and new roles, and we increasingly have more than one in our lives , at work, at home, laptops, tablets, even in the living room. Cell phones have become ubiquitous. There are a myriad of handheld devices. Set-top boxes, PVRs and game consoles are changing what and how we watch television. Photos, music and voice communications are all rapidly going digital and being driven by software. Automobiles are on a path to become smart and connected. The emergence of the digital lifestyle that utilizes all these technologies is changing how we learn, play games, watch TV, communicate with friends and family, listen to music and share memories.

But the power of technology also brings with it a cost. For all the success of individual technologies, the array of technology in a person's life can be daunting. Increasingly, individuals choose products and services that are highly-personalized, focused on the end-to-end experience delivered by that technology. Products must deliver a seamless experience, one in which all the technology in your life 'just works' and can work together, on your behalf, under your control. This means designs centered on an intentional fusion of internet-based services with software, and sometimes even hardware, to deliver meaningful experiences and solutions with a level of seamless design and use that couldn?t be achieved without such a holistic approach."

" The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a "services wave" of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.

We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications."
--Bill Gates , Oct. 30, 2004 in an internal memo to senior staff, via Scripting News

Yet another data point suggesting how quickly Internet video is going to become a standard--The Associated Press (AP) and MSN announced this morning that they are teaming to develop an AP Online Video Network to provide AP members with news video for their Web sites. The press release says "With the new service, AP will make AP news video available to a network of more than 3,500 AP newspaper and broadcast members in the United States. MSN will provide the video player and technology and will sell the advertising for the fully ad-supported service. AP will retain full control over editorial content in the AP Online Video Network."
The service, which will be free for members, is scheduled to launch in first quarter 2006.

Note that MSN will be selling the ads--and, persumably, either paying a rev share to AP--or paying a straight licensing fee for the content.

Matt Drudge's list of the declining circulation figures for major market papers, released Monday by the Audit Bureau for Circulation, provides an at a glance cheat sheet for a contraction the industry has been talking about (and dreading) for at least a year. The biggest losers:

• San Francisco Chronicle, 391,681, down 16.4 percent
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 362,426, down 8.73 percent
• The Boston Globe, 414,225, down 8.25 percent
• Houston Chronicle, 521,419, down 6.01 percent

One would argue that the large regional papers are especially vulnerable to both circ and advertising losses, since they lack the global cachet and national subscriber base of the NYTimes (up slightly) , the Wall Street Journal, and perhaps, The Washington Post--and they are not really able to be microlocal or fully zoned--it's just too expensive.

Will newspaper be able to extract enough revenue out of their online operations to make their current business work? Probably not--if revenue growth is going to come from online, news organization will need to adjust their businesses accordingly-the tail just can't make enough $$ to wag this big dog--or, in other words, a 30 person online operation can't support a 300-person newsroom.

So, what's next? It's reinvention time.

(Via jamesgross.com)

Update: CJR editorial goes gentle into that good night.

What has 23 live links to gossip and entertainment blogs, no comments, no timestamps and no dynamic updating? If you live and work in Dulles or the NYC AOL bubble, it's AOL's Hollywood Blogzone, the clear product of some editor's desire to obey their boss's directives to "Be cool" and "Link out."
A retreat of the old "Gossip" main page with a nod to bloggerati, HBZ feels so tired and old--it's a great example of how wanna-bes can mangle what's supposed to be a fresh,dynamic and interactive form--even with the current passion for gossip online, there is no way anyone who know how to click on a link would ever be compelled by this tired little puppy.
Susan sez: Fellas, you you bought Weblogs Inc--how about you get some counseling on this Web 2.0 thing?

Update: Yes, I am feeling a little mean this am...coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

Back in the day, I took pleasure in posting Sunday dinners I made for the family. The family is in different places this year, but I've started cooking again and last night (Sunday) I made:

• Spinach, radicchio and endive salad
• Garlic bread with oregano
• Baked potatoes with non fat sour cream
• Roasted tri-tip, Buckhorn brand (thanks, RK!)

My 19-year old, over for the night, hungry and always broke, was impressed enough to eat a ton. It was so pleasant I thinkI may take a page from Lisa Williams' family dinner and invite friends for chow next time.

As usual, Dave's onto something--Hypercamp, a blogging virtual newsroom. Works for me.

Seattle PI reporter John Cook covered the Seattle MindCamp and apparently quoted Tara Reid (oops--Tara Hunt!) out of context--reporting that she said she's into Web 2.0 for the parties and the beer, provoking outrage and hurt.
Scoble notes the misstep, Liz Lawley calls it out, and Tara sets the record straight.
This raises one of those age old questions--if you interview 20 people, quote one woman, and make her sound stupid, is that sexism--or just poor reporting?
You decide.

Susan sez: Okay, I think it's both--but the best last word comes from Adam Kalsey who says:"Not that it will make you feel any better, but Tara, you're my marketing hero. A month ago I'd never heard of Riya/Ojos or you. As a result of your blog, community building, and networking at parties, I hear about Riya several times a week."

"You can look at the evolution of search as a play in three acts. The first is the 'public' Web, where if different people type the same query they'll all get the same results. The second is purely personal search - finding a file or photo, usually on your own machine. The third is the one that we are very interested in--This is "social" or "community" searching, in which each attempt to find the right restaurant listing, medical advice site, vacation tip or other bit of information takes advantage of other people's successes and failures in locating the same information. "
--Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president for search and marketing, quoted in a NY Times article on the company.

(Note: I have modified the original paraphase of Weiner's comments in the story to make the quote flow a bit more smoothly.)

Brightcove announced today that it's hired two big agency/media shop veterans, Adam Gerber and Dina Roman, to run a chunk of the company (to recruit and work with agencies and their $$, one would think), and has teamed up with big co Publicis.
Quote of the minute from founder Jeremy Allaire: "The advertising industry is changing rapidly, and the emergence of Internet TV promises to give agencies and marketers major new opportunities to distribute brand messages and marketing content that engage consumers in ways that are impossible in traditional TV."

Food Network's launching a Web-exclusive series, "Eat This with David Lieberman" on Nov.21st. The 13-episode series visits five cities--New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Miami--and focuses on culinary trends. Three new episodes of the show will be made available on Foodnetwork.com every week. The press release emphasizes that "the concept for "Eat This With Dave Lieberman" was developed by FoodNetwork as the perfect opportunity to kick off Scripps Networks' launch into series programming via broadband."

Susan sez: Are there any big media companies left out that that don't get that ITV, citizen-journalism-style video, and podcast video are 5 minutes away from the next big thing?
Of course there are.

"Blogs and news are now on equal footing on Topix.net," says Topix CEO Rich Skrenta, who reports that Topix has added 15,000 blogs to its index, and offers an inside look at a question that intrigues the Topix guys: "Are blog posts news?"
To figure that out, Rich and co. took a look at the coverage of key categories--news, sports, entertainment, etc.--but mainstream media and blogs, decided blogs added a lot to the mix, and then crawled (he says) about 1 MM blogs to build a list of the 15,000 now incorporated into the Topix index. He's got some interesting charts and some fascinating data, including the fact that 85-90% of the daily posts hitting ping services such as weblogs.com are spam--and now visitors to pages like US News and Wierd News can see the blog posts highlighted alongside the other feeds.

"Let me make a prediction. Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news, and has created a whole new group of major companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies. At this point, the industry will then undergo its first shakeout, with the loss of perhaps several million blogs ? though the overall industry will continue to grow at a steady pace.
And, at about that moment, Forbes will announce that the blogosphere is the Next Big Thing for investors."
Mike Malone, former editor at large for Forbes ASAP magazine re Forbes' anti blogging rant.

(Via CrunchNotes)

Good speculative piece by Rick Aristotle Munarriz over at Motley Fool on what Google might acquire with all that cash they've collected. Rick's picks include
iVillage, AOL, CNET, Tivo and The Knot (what, no Knight-Ridder?) and his conclusion is that Google has the cash to buy'em all if they choose.
Would they? Who knows?
(Via memorandum)

Update: thanks, bleh.

Amazon's developed an extremely clever--but kinda strange--interface to match humans with little mundance tasks they say machines can't do. Called Mechanical Turk, the service asks you to sign up and then get paid--pennies, mostly--to do all sorts of things, like correct A9 mapping photos.
A typical task right now is for A9 and reads as follows:
"You are presented with the name and address of a business as well as a set of photos taken along the street where the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the best photo of the business that is listed."
For that, you get .03; if you do it 179 times, you get 5.37.
Amazon's estimates work so that if you have spent an hour to fulfill 1170 of these requests, you get $35.00, which means your time is worth $35 an hour if you can fulfill about 1 per second--if it takes you 5 seconds to fulfull each task, your time is only worth $6-7.00.
Amazon says that they take a slice of each transaction and that workers can transferr money to their U.S. personal bank account or to their Amazon.com account.
The most amazing thing about this, IMHO, is that the Amazon guys let the Web Services team put this up--which means they had to run some use case scenarios on what it would save them in terms of hiring freelancers or outsourcing company wide.
Yeesh.

Via BoingBoing, and almost as gross n'geeky as goatse
(More pix of the thing here (via Kottke)

Via SaurierDuval: The Museum of Modern Betas: Markus has done what any good compulsive would do and compiled a list of 200+ beta or pre-web web 2.0 style apps.
Mashable.com: Web 2.0 tools blog.
Chad Alderson: Google Map hacks collected--here and here.
Society for New Communications Research: Jen McClure launches a research group.
There is no cat: RalphBrandi's blog, almost live from NY.
Jason Calcanis: Code thieves, you suck--when imitation seems to cross the line to rip-off. Bonus: Building a weblog ad directory.

Get fired from Conde Past, write an amazing blog post, make everyone laugh--more proof here why Andrew Krucoff is going to get both the best laughs and the last one.
(P.S. Check out the hilarious comments, including one from the *real* Toby Young.)

"Saving journalism isn't about saving jobs or even newspapers. In fact, the goal shouldn't be just to save journalism but to grow it, expand it, explode it, taking advantage of all the amazing new means to gather and share news we have today.

Start with the real goals, which are informing society, keeping power in check, improving people's lives, making connections (right?) and then ask what the best ways are to do that today. After that, you can ask what the role of journalists and newspapers should be."
--Jeff Jarvis,Buzzmachine

"Newspapers and television remain the greatest producers of journalism in this country. Yet, their one-way communication models- we print and distribute, we produce and broadcast - are antiquated mechanisms to a generation that makes no distinction between the pre-Internet era and Web 1.0 or Web. 2.0. "
--Tim Porter, First Draft

There is something peversely fascinating about the idea of a big distributed services portal--like Google, Yahoo or eBay--buying Knight Ridder, a newspaper chain with a well-run--and growing-- digital media group--as the Wall Street Journal suggests in a story today. After all, the bigger newspaper groups have been pushing hard to roll their unique visitors up into large enough numbers to play meaningfully with the paid search big boys, and the eBays and Google of the world--not to mention HotJobs and Yahoo--have taken enough big, profitable bites of the classified and directory markets to know that the local distribution newspapers offer can give them a competitive edge.
And yet, on the other hand, having KR be acquired by one of these brands seems unlikely. For one thing, none of them have a practice of acquiring widely diversified holdings--most of their acquisitions have been coherent with an overall strategy and digital delivery platforms. For another, while alot of the revenue growth in the company seems to be coming from online, the dollars generated by the local papers--and the proportionate share of local media they command in their markets--is too great to dismantle--or ignore.
It's just not the most pragmatic decision--for a digitally-driven company to buy one with lots of presses and delivery trucks--and yet is offers a fascinating concept of how to fast forward to the future....after all, wouldn't the Google-ites perhaps have a fresh look at how to build a cost structure that was both distributed (they've done it on a global scale) and centralized?
And wouldn't a digital media or tech company have some fresh points of view on the paralyzing costs of operating the legacy systems and processes that keep many people employed--but make the growth margins deadly?
This is one of those wildly speculative questions to me--if KR did sell, it is unlikely (IMHO) it would go to any of these players--but I'd like to think we'd see some new approaches to systems and legacies--and a continued appreciation of the power--and responsibility--of the press--if one of these digital players did make the buy.
Susan sez: This could be interesting--or it could just die down.

MediaPost reports that Tacoda System's new targeted ad network has just added Technorati--and 199 other sites--to the network, bringing the undiplomatic, aggregated reach to 80 million uniques per month, with plans to roll up sites that will add another 10-15 million uniques per month to the Tacoda Network.
According to the MediaPost article, the Technorati sites will not serve ads, but will send data to Tacoda that will allow their system to better target those users as they move to other sites...The idea of Technorati--and other similar sites licensing their back-end data was discussed as a possible business model back in the early days of large-scale data historical data aggregators like Technorati, but not many of the new-style search companies have done these kinds of deals, to my knowledge.
Susan sez: One would think that there would some instant cash benefits for Technorati here--both in a licensing model and with a revenue share incentive. And for Tacoda, the benefits of adding these datasets are obvious.

Will iVillage's sale to a bigger player be one of the consolidation plays for this end of the year?
Reuters and others are posting reports that women's portal iVillage has--or is about to--put itself up for sale for $700MM, give or take.
The analyst quoted in the Reuters story imagines Yahoo or AOL buying the service, ideas I think are very remote possibilities--
After all, Yahoo just hired a former AOL women's channel GM to run their health and wellness portal, and I just don't see AOL making that kind of spend.
On the other hand, a media/newspaper conglomerate with some cash (are there any left?) who wants to bump up their ad inventory might be one prospect (News Corp?Viacom? Part owner Hearst?)
IMHO, Best prospect--MSN, who could afford to roll up iVillage and acquire a chunk of AOL and go to battle against the portal guys Yahoo and Google--and if they don't get AOL, iVillage could be a tasty consolation prize.

"Put the Gawker titles in a media conglomerate and they would spontaneously combust. Imagine, for instance, how AOL Time Warner would handle the X-rated party photos in yesterday's Fleshbot, or a snide report on Defamer about the latest dross from Warner Brothers, or Gawker's borderline libelous mockery of [Time Warner CEO] Dick Parsons. Without media conglomerates as targets, the Gawker titles would have no purpose. Gawker is not for sale but it is, more importantly, and in a deeper sense, unacquirable."
--Nick Denton, founder, Gawker Media, quoted in OJR

Susan sez: What do you think folks, is Gawker really unacquirable (grin)?

Shel Israel liveblogs Steve Rubel's keynote speech at The Blogging Enterprise conference in Austin, Tx, and while it's a big wet kiss of a post, it nicely captures Steve's great energy and smarts--The finale-- 4 points for using blogs to manage customers-- from Steve, via Shel:

• Find--determine which bloggers are most likely to become your company evangelists. Understand what's being said & join the conversation
• Listen--use a combination of Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket Pubsub et al. to track what matters to you. Understand the common thread, the beat on the street and take it seriously.
• Engage--show bloggers you care. Blogger complained abut not being able to find his favorite deodorant. Unilever sent him a case of the store and told him where in his neighborhood he could get more. That's engagement. That shows customers you care. "It puts you at eye level with the people you care about most.
• Empower--help people achieve something they could not do on their own. Create programs that create customer evangelists.

iMedia Connection's exec editor, Brad Behrens, did the right thing and wrote a graceful editorial/clarification about the Bill Day piece--replete with ads from Bill's company, WhenU, that they ran yesterday--and about posts Theresa Quintinalla and I wrote taking them to task.
Brad says they didn't sell the edit, they have always wanted Bill to write for them, and when they realized it looked bad, they took the ads down.
Brad goes further and says they don't sell edit, period--"...if somebody -- anybody, even a sponsor -- submits a byline for our consideration and the article turns out to be a veiled or overt commercial for the contributor's company, then we don't run it."

Brad's explanation works for me.

So does their quick response in addressing these issues.
The fact we can have this kind of dialogue--in public--is part of how the web has changed things and driven everyone to more transparency.

A recent Goldman Sachs report confirms what publishers trying to streamline operations and cuts costs already know: 2005 was the worst year ever for the industry.
Stories in E&P and MediaPost report the 2005 is ground zero for lowered ad revenues, weak classifieds, and softness across all markets and most properties.
Interestingly, 2004's Scarborough Research Report conducted for the Newspaper Association of America and the NAA's related benchmark report found that "Eight out of 10 (77.8 percent) adults 18+ in the top 50 markets are reading the newspaper over the course of a week (five weekdays plus a Sunday)." An October 2005 NAA report says "three out of four (77 percent) adults in the top 50 markets read a newspaper at least once a week, or 115.6 million readers in those markets" and "analysis also confirms the strong spending power of newspapers’ audiences by showing that in the top 50 markets nearly 60 percent of consumers with household incomes of $75,000 and above read a daily paper."
However, reading this week's dismal forecasts, one wonders which particular ostriches spent a little too much time in Pollyanna land.