Andrew Lark

Gathering

Content aggregation sites are popping up everywhere. In short, they do little more than assemble others content and enable you to triangulate off read it (in other words - determine how hot the content is and what you should be paying attention to). The latest being Gather. Gather is like a big chat room without the chat. Instead of chatting, you write and post. Others read. And the more they read, the more money you make. You can leave comments if you are a member. Others include Newsvine.

Jim Manzi is behind Gather and had this to say in the Boston Globe: ''No longer must I accept much of my content from what I have called the Literary Industrial Complex, that group of concentrated media organizations with their small elites and self-reinforcing arbiters delivering my news and information 'top-down,' ". He has written moreon this over at Gather.

Ah, yeah Jim. If they are so evil and unnecessary, why choose to announce your venture in the Literary Industrial Complex and not in your own blog? Actually, where is your blog mate?

Looking at Gather, I'm not sure their cluttered design and jamming of content into the limits of the browser is any improvement on conventional news sites. And if I am going to read the thinking of ordinary people I'm (personally) more likely to read, well, Blogs than a site like Gather.

I also wonder how this will influence PR going forward - at what point do the PR Pros start looking at the more prominent writers (the best paid) and target them as a core element of programs. Assuming that Gather can gather readers, you can pretty much bet on that happening. At which point, I wonder how Gather will gather its writers and manage the editorial quality.

Kareem suggests that revenue sharing won't hook bloggers. I'm with him. This is a conversation for me (and indulgence).

Techcrunch covers this as does Mathew Ingram. Steve thinks there is a Web 2.0 crash coming. He is as right on that as predicting the Sun will come up tomorrow. Steve is also right that unless they plug into the ecosystem they will fail. Information is a commodity in the Web 2.0 market and commodity markets depend on creating convenience for the buyer. No Adsense = much fewer sales. No tags (external, not just internal) = fewer readers. Much fewer readers.

To this point, Gather is a very closed ecosystem. Their opportunity was to make it open. Tag not just Gather content but all content. Enable trackbacks and show who is linking and commenting outside of the site. This is more akin to Yahoo or AOL than a blog.

Whether Gather succeeds or not is pretty much a crap-shoot - although I am sure they have a more determined sense of the outcome. What matters is that they are innovating, testing new models, learning and adapting. Those that don't will die. The rest learn.

Remember WebVan?

What You Pay Is What You Get...

I can't imagine a better job to pay good money for than one involving things like the ticketing process an Airline has at the airport - a job description including things like "load, unload, and transport mail, luggage, and freight" (remember the recent Alaska incident); de-ice & anti-ice application; "perform air-start and ground power unit functions when necessary"; and... "ensuring the Captain is aware of any hazardous materials loaded on the aircraft and proper paperwork is completed..."

OK, so how much would you pay someone to do this job. Well. Frontier recently ran an ad in which the hourly rate is, wait for it, $10.16 an hour.

This is as much a marketing as a business problem. If you are going to put people in critical customer-facing roles, you need to pay them accordingly. And lets cut the crap about how strained the Airlines are these days - United, which continues to cut staff and their pay, managed to pay it's executives $19 million in bonuses in a quarter where they lost $277 million.

If these airlines want to grow, of which a key element will be stand-out customer service, they need to pay to play.

And Oh, I'm definitely not flying Frontier.

On The PR Week Awards

Constantin has a great post on the PR Week awards and the presence of blogging. Good to see the GM Fastlane blog getting the recognition it is due and congats to the team at Eastwick for their nomination in the PR Innovation category.

Participatory Communications is slowly coming of age. It is amazing to think that it was just one year ago that one of the first major conferences for communicators was taking place.

Stowe's Got A New Blog...

Take a look...

Media Building Blocks

Russ has an interesting post (thanks Rod) along the lines of "why doesn't all this stuff work together". About the only thing the IT and communications industry seem to have collaborated on are the connecting cables and network standards (I know there is more, but, really....).

"...That’s really what we didn’t see at this year’s CES. We saw more boxes, and more services and more DRM (.gvi? Are you fucking kidding me?), but nothing to ease the actual problems associated with home media for consumers."

Damn right! I buy a new modem, that doesn't work with my DSL modem. My lovely Apple monitor won't work with the wife's Dell. It works with my Sony. I must have about nine operating systems for things that matter in my house. I'm scared to go near the stereo system - that took on a life of it's own long ago. And now the fireplace guy says the fireplace comes on all by itself because the "logic in the controller box is corrupted". For heavens sake!

The company that makes this simple, really simple, will win. Apple did it with the iPod (I can't tell you how many days I spent on getting my 'Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox" to sync with Windows...). With any luck, they'll do it in the living room next. We don't need another massive Plasma TV thing... we need simplicity.

The New Journalist/ism

In case you missed it, the new journalist/ism is upon us. Powered by wifi and blog-engines, journalists like Dan Farber over at ZDNet are hammering out stories live from announcements. They are breaking a few rules along the way - commenting on what 'competitors' are saying - in this case Shankland, opting for speed over gramatical accuracy, and capturing the essence of the event.

This has been going on for a while now - Farber's peice on ZDNet today just bought it home for me.

If you are in a non-technology industry and see this happening in your trade rags and elsewhere I'd love a few other examples.

Reuters Blogging

Reuters debuted blogs last week. Total miss by me, thanks to the FH team for flagging. So far lots on CES but little else.

I Don't Recommend: Belkin

I purchased one of their new, super cool routers on Saturday from Best Buy. It doesn't work.

This is no cheap router. It's one of the Pre-N, MIMO routers. It doesn't work. I spent just over an hour on the phone with John in the Philippines. when I asked his name he sounded like he was plucking one out of thin air - he also refused to give me a last name.

His parting suggesting was I download new firmware. Done that. Still doesn't work. So now I 34 minutes into another call to the Philippines. Oh... here's Ronald... He wants me to do everything that John had me do. Is still doesn't work.

What a lousy product - three hours of trying to get a very basic install done. What lousy customer service. I'll never buy another Belkin product and I recommend you don't either.

And as for companies that outsource their customer service to companies that operate under the cloud of fake anonymity - don't do business with them.

The Year In Media Errors

This one is too good to miss...

Still Emailing Hacks? Feed Them!

Charles from the Guardian explains why he isn't reading emails anymore.

Feeds matter:

So I’m not going to read things that are obviously press releases because the possibility of it just being annoying or irrelevant is too great; I’m going to go to my aggregator instead, because I’ve chosen every feed there for its potential interest.