Via Gruber at DaringFireball, I found myself laughing aloud at this:
Open source natural language processor that attempts to identify idiotic comments on the web — like a spam filter for stupidity.
UPDATE: Their server seems to be struggling to handle the traffic, at the moment.
Jeri Cartwright posted this at the Media Relations blog (excerpted here) regarding a recent stretch of layoffs in Utah — her home turf. Many interesting things to think about in a few short passages.
Content is still king. Talk all you want about new media, but someone has to write the content, and someone has to like the content so that advertisers will spend money to cozy up to the content. Yes, I know there’s plenty of content online. Does it serve the community and world? Or does it serve the ego of the writer?
True and true. We are in an ad-subsidized world. It would be royally great if subscription content services could compete in news distribution, but they simply do not scale.
That said, current research indicates that the burgeoning online ad sales game is taking off in spades. JupiterResearch (via CNET) recently reported that 2008 will boast 20% growth in the online advertising space while offline advertising does the Shrinky-Dink. Of course, when you look at raw numbers, there is still room to grow. Online ads represent only about 9% of total ad spending in the US, forecasted to hit 14.3% by 2013. Lots of headroom there — one could say, so much headroom that the downside is the very, very large, gaping maw of a gap between that 14.3% and the other 86% that’s in the air out there to be claimed.
And that really is the story here, more than anything else…
Granted, the Internet has given some very talented people their 15 minutes of fame. They may write well, and have enormous talent with video and audio. But do they have a compass? Can they be bought with a freebie, a pat on the back or the neighbors’ praise?
The Internet is in the process of giving rise to a new breed of journalist thanks to all these layoffs in mainstream media. This is an important shift, because it centers on the people who report the news, not the ego-bloggers and serial editorialists.
For example, take a look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Josh started the site as a personal platform for his political views. The site has turned into a news portal for political journalism supplied by a network of journalists. He’s still got the leftist blog, but the site is a destination for millions each year to keep up with left-bent political action.
Even more robust: The Huffington Post. As strange as I think Arianna Huffington is, she is openly working to create a network of solid reportage that rivals mainstream media. She’s built a network of citizen reporters around the world who are able to cover breaking news with speed and accuracy that rivals all but the biggest networks — and on that point, not for long.
If America’s great experiment in democracy is to survive, a free press (broadcast, etc), one that doggedly tracks the actions of government and the powerful, is the only protection we have from those who could evenutally undermine freedom as we have known it.
Outlets will continue to close, to re-org, to downsize. That’s the fundamental nature of change. But journalists will always be journalists, whether they are working for CNN or Arianna Huffington. They report the news. This will not change.
What will change is our base habit around news consumption, for a while. See, convergence is happening on more fronts that will impact media than just changing business models that throw a wrench in mainstream media dominance. Luckily, the end result may be more transparent than we think.
The first is technology. Right now, we can look at what is happening with media delivery systems like YouTube, Vimeo, BitTorrent and the like and build a personal broadcast system where consumption takes place more on your computer than your TV. And once it’s on your computer, it’s on your iPhone, your Blackberry, wherever. The pendulum will swing back as more and more cable and telecom operators penetrate the suburbs with their high-speed data, pulling coax in favor of fiber to the home and making those computer media streams ubiquitous across screens. The changing media hegemony is not about the decline of one TV screen in the living room. It’s about the virulent increase in the number of screens all around us, all the time.
And with more screens, comes more content. I should say, the need for more content. This should sound familiar to anyone who switched from rabbit ears to cable in the 90’s. As our technical capacity to shove signal into our homes increased exponentially, so did our need for more content to fill that signal. And so was born about 1,000 channels of nonsense to supplement the 3 channels of value on our cable bills. Those being Comedy Central, Sci-Fi, and Porn, of course, in no particular order.
What this increase in signal has done for news junkies is massive. Think about it this way…
The first Gulf War ushered in the era of 24-hour, round-the-clock cable news and catapulted the news channels from kitschy obscurity to mainstream competitor in about 48 hours. The viewing habits of your average news junky were pretty predictable: turn it on, keep it on, glue yourself to it.
New media journalism offers the same benefit to news junkies on a virtually unlimited content spectrum. Streaming news video from multiple sites, multiple freelance journalists, multiple war zones, all delivered in high def wherever your screens may be.
But the new media business model is even more interesting. A smart outlet with a good network of stringers can start subsidizing news production with direct ad contracts much more efficiently than the current model.
Things will change. Things will likely get worse before they get better. But there is a model in the offing that will at once upset the current system and offer something even better for consumers with every bit of the investigative and research talent that the best houses support today.
As it happens, as I’m writing this I’m catching up on This Week in Tech since I’ve been on vacation for the last few weeks. In TWiT 150, Leo Laporte and guests Jason Calacanis, Tom Merritt and Dwight Silverman have a fantastic discussion on just this issue — old media embracing and extending the new in reportage — it’s worth a good listen.
Courtesy of ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, “Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds“, original post at the WSJ here.
In summary, Ed Moran at Deloitte did a survey of 100 major brands that have online communities. They all suck. What does “suck” mean in this case?
Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.
This tells me a few things. First, these companies have spent WAY too much money on their community software. Part of the magic of building a community network lies in using tool that are familiar and easy to use for the largest number of people. Since the vast majority of successful communities use similar forum and photo sharing tools that are largely open source, rolling your own makes less sense, particularly for a million bucks. That is to say, go where the people are.
Second, they don’t actually have anything worth talking about. That’s not to say that they don’t have great brands, or great products. But they might not have great brands or products that inspire conversation. For example, the Purina hard-to-classify-as-“network” network has only four paltry pages of user comments. It’s just hard to talk about odor control at any length.
In contrast, Mercedes-Benz has an incredibly successful community at BenzWorld.org, offering a place for user support and discussion on the cars — even premium membership for the high-dollar owners.
The Mercedes example gets to one of the key points in the survey: offer a community only when it provides a service to the community — not to you.
Third, the survey ignores companies making great use of existing tools. Back on my first point, if you are really going where the people are, then a network on Facebook or MySpace allows you to tap into known quantities, vast numbers of connected users, on an (arguably) stable platform.
The upshot is this: in spite of the doom and gloom from Deloitte, don’t shake down the social networks just yet. We’re entering an era of connectedness unlike any we’ve yet experienced. If you know your customers — if you truly understand them — a community might be your next best home run.
Just as news continues to pour in about shrinking magazine subscriptions across the industry, MagCloud pops up to shake things up a bit. Still in beta, so publishers are by invite only, but definitely check out the service. It looks to fill a niche in industry publication that has long been empty.
I’ve been talking with my man Brad Trnavsky for what seems like years about his need for Internet Greatness. But, Brad isn’t a would-be pornographer, as far as I know, and he doesn’t have any direct connection to the Revision3 Internet Mafia Clubhouse.
He’s a sales guy. And a geek.
So about four months ago he moved from WordPress.com to Ning and launched his sales media empire, salesmanagement20.com. I’ll be damned if people didn’t start subscribing.
Today, Ning reps surprised Brad by profiling SM20 on the front page of Ning.com, and gave him a bit of love on the Ning profile blog. If you’re in the sales game, this is a site you should join. It’s highly focused and growing nicely!
Steve Jobs can do what he damn well pleases, thank you very much. If he — and team Apple — demonstrated anything in yesterday’s WWDC Keynote address, it’s that. Because frankly, they took their stage time yesterday to demonstrate a whole lot of old news, and they buried the hidden gems.
Part of the challenge was all about bad timing. In a special event months ago, Jobs took the stage and told the world that the iPhone SDK was coming, that all developer prayers would be answered, that they would have access to the iPhone core API’s, allowing the masses to write apps just like Apple does. They would just have to wait. Be patient. It’s coming.
Then, they seeded the developers. Certain developers. OK, not very many developers. Still, the applications that were teased out of the process looked good. Really good. The world was getting excited.
June. WWDC. iPhone3G has been leaked. The furor and frenzy about this next gen device is at an all time high. Devs are counting on Apple to deliver. The public is paying more attention to this developer conference than ever before. They’re tracking secret shipping manifests for boxes on the way to Apple stores. They’re lining up at the retail locations for this product that has not been announced. It’s a drumroll of a million crazed fetishists at terminal speeds.
It was an announcement for an announcement. The iPhone3G isn’t coming for another month. iPhone 2.0 firmware, another month. App Store, another month.
This challenge of timing is non-trivial, and most likely not an accident either. From the lay perspective, the market expected a punchline to this long-running joke; a release to the flood of expectation. What was announced yesterday underdelivered on those counts.
First, the next-gen phone is less than the market expected. Yes, we knew it was going to be 3G. Yes, we knew it would have GPS. Yes, we knew it would cost less. But Apple has a history of delivering so much more than expectation, of blowing away the market with things no one has thought of yet. The iPhone 3G satisfies the market. It does not blow it away. Where is the forward facing camera for handset video conferencing, for example? How did that rumor get so out of control? Where is the 32 GB model? 16 GB has been around a while in the iPhone, after all.
Second, the App Store. The keynote languished on and on and on with demos of software we’d seen, tools that developers had been discussing for months. Screenshots had been leaked. Apps are already running on millions of hacked phones. And we had to suffer through nearly an hour of old news from a platform stage architected to deliver WOW. There was no wow. (To be completely fair, the gaming apps are amazing. You should take a look at the keynote just to see what’s coming — cell phone manufacturers have been trying to reach this level of quality for a long, long time).
Third, OS X. The next version of OS X, 10.6, will be called Snow Leopard, and it’s likely the most interesting of the big WWDC 2008 stories so far. The news? No new features.
Which, of course, is not true at all. According to Jobs, it’s an opportunity for Apple to take a step back, to focus on efficiency and security, and to build in some core evolution to the OS, while keeping on a one-release-per-year schedule. It’s a truly interesting strategy, actually, and bucks a pretty well accepted gestalt that for public consumption, there must be eye-candy. Apple is betting they can change the course of things with Snow Leopard.
And actually, they’re in a great position to do it. Look at Vista, for example. Microsoft took five years to build XP’s successor and where the OS has received it’s greatest criticism is in usability. The reason for the so-called XP Downgrade Program is because the company has put so much effort into making XP actually function over the years that it does meet user expectation at this point. If you go back in time 6-7 years, you can see Microsoft faced with the same question of direction in OS development that Apple took a stand on yesterday.
Vista, as it turns out, is the result of choosing option 2.
Leopard, on the other hand, is both widely accepted as structurally excellent, and functionally elegant. Users like to use it. They aren’t actually screaming for new features. They’re content with letting Apple define what it is they need to be excited about. Exposé. Dashboard. Bells. Whistles. Whatever. Apple is banking that they can cash in on this wide-eyed enthusiasm for the OS and take a break from delivering the bells and whistles, breathe deep and focus on building something truly next gen for the Mac platform.
While they’re at it, they’ll do something really special: they’ll get the consumer public excited about core OS technology. 64-bit. Multi-threading. Multicore. OpenCL. Javascript. They’ll have people using these terms, driving discussion they don’t really understand, and setting an expectation around OS excellence in a way that others will have to emulate to address. Again.
Apple has a recent history of defining a market dialog. Yesterday, they did it again. The keynote may have been a snoozer, but the hidden gems are special. In the coming months, watch how the company frames their discussion on core technology. Watch how they make it special, interesting, compelling for all-comers.
For the record, I’ll be buying a new iPhone. I don’t care about the 3G. I don’t really care about the GPS — the current system actually works quite well for me. I need the memory. And my wife needs an iPhone of her own. When Jobs made the announcement for the first iPhone, he said they’d targeted 10 Million phones by the end of 2008. Given the announcements yesterday, I don’t think 10 million is even in the cards — they’ll top 10 million before 10/1/08.
As soon as this technology incorporates Multi-Touch a la the iPhone or Surface, it’ll be something really worth looking at. Right now, it just blows me a way a little bit.
From scientificblogging.com:
The HoloVizio is a 3-D screen that will allow designers to visualize true 3-D models of cars, engines or components. Better yet, gesture recognition means that observers can manipulate the models by waving their hands in front of the screen. The function offers enormous scope for collaboration across the globe.
Make sure to scroll down for the demo vids. They really are incredible.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/star_trek_holodeck_1_0_holovizio_3d_makes_its_debut
I caught this article by Paul Farhi on washingtonpost.com this morning covering CNN’s use of their fancy new “Magic Wall” in the on-going election coverage. The Magic Wall was developed by Perceptive Pixel, the company leading the large-format chage for the multi-touch operating system developed by founder, Jeff Han. Multi-touch is most famous for its application in the iPhone.
Typically, when you provide a link in the text for your readers, the intent is to provide a direct connection to the highlighted element. If I’m writing about Perceptive Pixel and the land-of-awesome technology they’re developing, I might provide you, dear reader, with a direct link here: Perceptive Pixel. Notice how you’re delivered directly to the Perceptive Pixel website, where you can watch a fantastic demo of the technology in action.
WaPo handles things a bit differently — and oh, so annoyingly. In the above example, if you read the paragraph leading up to the “Daily Show” link, you have an expectation that you’ll be delivered directly to the Tatton video directly on the Daily Show website. (As it happens, I couldn’t find the specific video on the Daily Show site, but I did find it quite easily on YouTube).
In my example above, if you click on the YouTube link, you’re delivered straight to the video. No fuss. But WaPo has a different idea. For every link in this article on the site, you’re taken to a page like this:
A link farm. A book of links from inside the Post, on the web, on blogs, wherever, and totally functionally useless in my effort to get more information on the specific topic at hand. If I’m looking for the specific Daily Show Abbi Tatton piece, how am I supposed to find it in a list of references titled non-specifically, “Highlights”? I’m left to presume that the only function of these pages is to serve the needs of the site, in order to drive traffic — not to serve my needs as the consumer.
To be fair, the other big mainstream media news sites have a similar practice. For example, in an article posted on today’s nytimes.com front page, “Myanmar Proceeeds with Vote, Outcome Uncertain,” there are a number of links throughout the text. The difference is in context. If I click on the link to Myanmar, I get a well formatted information portal on the nytimes.com site educating me on the country. If I click on “United Nations”, I see this:
The Times has chosen to link to the topics for which the can specifically provide more information.
Another example: the WaPo article specifically references a video available online which cannot be found within the article itself. How does the times handle such a scenario?
They embed the video right into the flow of the piece. In this article titled “Young Video Makers Try to Alter Islam’s Face“, there are several examples of outbound linking to complete the experience for the reader. On WaPo, about the only place you can hunt down the same sort of progressive linking is in the columns, where writers apparently have a bit more freedom to link out.
Your reader’s experience is all wrapped up in a number of conflicting components. They want information presented efficiently, yet they want enough to make spending the time worthwhile. In news, they want relevance, timliness, and impact, but they want it all while not appearing as though they’re being taken advantage of, even though they may, in fact, be tools. But most of all, they don’t want to be teased. Clear, direct linking on relevant topics in your own writing will help you build reputation, and keep your readers coming back to your site for more.
When I was employed by big-corporate PR, I used Google News Alerts religiously. Still do. It’s a fantastic service, constantly filtering the Google index for current news relevant to my search query and delivering it to my inbox every day. At Apollo, I was interested in news about our company, and news about our competitors, partners, and vendors. Every day I’d get slogs of data to pile through, press releases to scan, and punditry to parse.
And after the list of headlines came the list of mentions in the blogosphere; post after post of opinionated bloggers and students, some slamming the organization for one reason or another, largely for things we could do little to rectify (I lost my financial aid money, I can’t drive, the school hates me, my lemonade monkey peed in my hair, etc.). But most of the blog commentary came from conscientious, diligent writers, passionate about their cause, and eager to share that passion with the world.
Had a meeting at a new agency today — 2Plural/evive. I don’t know what their name is, actually. The letterhead says evive, and looks cool as a palindrome, but the website is 2plural, as is the moniker on their cards. A bit of identity crisis there, about which I’m sure there is a good story.
On the flip side, Joe Klegseth (pres), Courtney LeBoeuf (account manager), and Stasia Brownell (project manager), appear to be quality people in a budding quality agency. If I was looking for agency marketing and branding assistance, this is a company looking to build and extend an already impressive reputation; I’d certainly give them a holler on the short list.
Check ’em out. And thanks for the coffee and snacks!
Massive Friggin’ Annoyance Factor: All the niceties aside, why does every single marketing and branding agency have to lead with a completely bombastic Flash website? It’s heavy, ostentatious, pretentious, and it completely gets in the way of the message you’re trying to tell. 2Plural/evive is certainly not alone in this, they just come as the latest example of agentius adobus flashititus, an overwhelming need to prove to potential clients that you can deliver content in a medium that completely hides the fact that you have nothing of substance to say.
That, and if you try to visit the site in your iPhone, you’re plum out of luck.
Here is the first of four pieces I’m working on for Health Net of Oregon. The video was originally part of a four-part series on the communities that Health Net serves through their customers, intended for staggered launch in 2007. Unfortunately, it took far too long to get the four clients lined up to participate, so we were only able to complete this first one on time.
The intent of the project was spot on, however. The company was looking for a way to promote it’s own goodwill. I was — and still am — a staunch believer that the best way to frame goodwill is through the voices of your best customers: guilt by association.
Oregon Humane Society: Health Net Customer Story Part 1 from Pete Wright on Vimeo.
I don’t particularly want to comment on the quality of the production here — MS clearly put some money into this concept, which I believe speaks for itself. But if you have to make something like this to sell the act of selling your products, is that a sign that your product has jumped the shark?
Back in early February, I wrote about a wonderful presentation-cast response to a reader email that Lessig delivered on his blog, eloquently stating that he supported Obama, and why he chose to do so.
Here is another wonderful opportunity to see one of today’s great orators discussing the primary process, the disaster that the Clinton-Obama race has become — and the danger that race serves to deliver in the face of the real race, after the convention — and what Penn students and residents can do to support the cause.
“My name is Damon Wright, and I’m a business writer.”
That’s true. My name is Damon. It’s my middle name, used six years ago the hide my participation in the Apple campaign from my then-day-job. I had thought that I’d exhausted my 32 weeks of fame, but someone has just posted all the old “Switch” commercials to YouTube. Actually, not sure what took so long.
Permanent link, for those who haven’t seen it, is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umHGfSAQb-s
