Andrew Lark

Carr + Disney = Back to the Future...

Carr points to and illuminates some of the thinking coming out of Disney on the future of media:

The whole idea of participative, or citizen, media is an assault on the power of big brands to determine what people read and watch and listen to. Tokens of central, paternalistic, commercial control, brands lie at the very heart of the traditional power of the so-called mainstream media. Sweeney is saying that media brands, which have seemingly lost some of their power recently, will ultimately triumph on the web. The future will end up looking like the past - only more so. Faced with the welter of online media choices, "consumers" will flock to trusted brands to "help them navigate the digital world." Same as it ever was.

I'm not so sure. At the end of the day, content will triumph over brand. That will work in the favor of some content creators - such as the NYTimes. I don't think it will work so much for those in the entertainment market where loyalty is much more fleeting. I'm not likely to migrate to big brands as much as I am brands that are relevant (YouTube vs. Disney). And I don't care if those brands are individuals blogging (like Nicholas), blogmedia (I read Engadget more than CNet), or focused feeds from traditional media...

What is really exciting about Disney's announcement is that they are finally - if somewhat incompletely -- understanding that we are on-demand, time-shifting maniacs. I'm still stumped as to why I can only watch TV on the broadcasters schedule. For instance, I can get channels for the region I am in (PST), on their schedule. What I actually want though is all the EST programming on a PST schedule - and both for purposes of Tivo. I want several episodes of Lost back-to-back. Same for 24. The fact that they are beginning to enable me to run my own viewing schedule is a good sign.

If The News Release Is Dead...

Why did Warren Buffett and Business Wire's Cathy Baron Tamraz ring NYSE's opening bell to signal the start of trading on the world's largest equities exchange? Both were "celebrating" Business Wire's recent acquisition by Berkshire Hathaway. Warren's no slouch.

FourDocs

Picked this one up via Veer. Gool idea from Britain's Channel 4 - FourDocs, "the place to upload, watch and learn about documentary. Anyone can upload a FourDoc, it just has to be fact-based and 4 minutes long."

Here's one about a French toy store, and anothere one on abseiling (rappelling).

Very participatory.

Yahoo...

Both Steve and Stowe speak to this story on Yahoo in which they say it's not their goal to be #1 in search:

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

No surprise there. Yahoo's "life engine" brand positioning gets more to where they are going. Arguably, they've done a better job than Google of integrating the entire web 2.0 suite. And that's how I use them. My customized portal is of as much value to me as the utility of Google. Frankly, none of Google's products other than search have wowed me. Google Earth was like fun for a day. But I've found the reverse to be true for Yahoo!

I'm not about to make any declarative statements about giving up on Yahoo!. What is telling is the relationship between the CMO and Google vs. Yahoo - at least the CMO of a start-up. I look at Adsense every couple of days. They suck my marketing budget up like an out-of-control Dyson vacuum cleaner. And of all the marketing vendors they are the only one to demonstrate a very real, automated correlation between investment and results. Yahoo simply isn't there with them.

What is catching my attention as a CMO are all the other search options coming my way - companies like SLI Systems and Eurekster for instance. We tend to always view the battle as being between giants. More than often innovation happens at the edges of the market - that's how Google snuck-up on Yahoo and I have no doubt that Google will inevitably be challenged by upstarts.

So, even if my thesis holds true, it will be interesting to see how they monetize the life-engine position in the future. Google's competitive weapon isn't just the utility of search, but all so the utility of their advertising engine.

Disclosure: Yahoo! is a customer of LogLogic where I am CMO.

Another Media Disgrace

The NYT reports that the ex-chief of HealthSouth (he claims unknowingly) paid for positive coverage:

Throughout the six-month trial that led to Richard Scrushy's acquittal in the $2.7 billion fraud at HealthSouth Corp., a small, influential newspaper consistently printed articles sympathetic to the defense of the fired CEO.

Audry Lewis, the author of those stories in The Birmingham Times, the city's oldest black-owned paper, now says she was secretly working on behalf of Scrushy, who she says paid her $11,000 through a public relations firm and typically read her articles before publication.

It's just stunning that this kind of stuff keeps happening without any kind of ability for censure by industry bodies - both media and PR. I'm sure there are as many frustrated journalists as there are PRs who are sick of having their profession tarnished by this kind of behavior.

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?

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.

Pegasus News Launches First Site...

TexasGigs is up and running. Congrats to the team at Pegasus. From the site:

"Our advanced technology will deliver uniquely relevant, customized news and information to each of our readers based on where they live and what they enjoy reading most." Pegasus coverage will go down to block level and as wide as the community; among oither features, they promise downloadable dining, entertainment and city guides.

More over at paidContent. According to Steve Outing, TexasGigs will be part of the full Pegasus Dallas site (as yet unnamed) when it debuts.

The model here is a good one for corporates looking to harness alternate publishing models - here a strong editor drives the site while soliciting submissions from the public and enabling plenty of comments, chatting etc... This is very different from other models in which the blog simply exists for folks to post away to, editors be damned.

NYTimes Gets Blogospheric (Kind Of)

"A blog is nothing more than a piece of technology... We’ll use the technology our way." - Jonathan Landman, The New York Times Deputy Managing Editor

It seems there really is no such thing as an internal memo these days. Jonathan Landman - The New York Times Deputy Managing Editor - recently sent out a memo to his staff about blogging. The context here is these are a series of new blogs related to their Red Carpet site. Here is a snippet:

But our new blogs are more than running commentary. Look at Carr’s. It’s full of links to film publications and blogs and web sites. It encourages responses from readers and hopes to start a lively conversation. Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it.

It’s worth spending a little time thinking about blogs, and about ourselves. Blogs make some newspaper people nuts; they’re partisan, the thinking goes, and unfair and mean-spirited and sloppy about facts. Newspapers make some bloggers nuts; they think we’re dull and slow and pompous and jealous guardians of unearned “authority.”

It’s a pretty dopey argument. Indeed, some blogs are lousy. So are some newspapers. Some blogs reject journalism. Some practice it.

The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology. It allows people to compile thoughts, connect with others and interact quickly with readers. People can use it any way they want to. It has no inherent ethical or moral quality, though it does have its own special power.

We’ll use the technology our way. Our bloggers will have editors. They will observe our normal standards of fairness and care. They won’t float rumors or take journalistic shortcuts. Critics and opinion columnists can have opinion blogs; reporters can’t. (To quote Carr: “If the Carpetbagger delved into plot or relative quality – they didn’t turn me loose for my refined cinematic taste ? flying monkeys would come out of the ceiling here at headquarters and behead him.”) We’ll encourage readers to post their thoughts, but we’ll screen them first to make sure the conversation is civil. Some bloggers will accuse us of violating blogospheric standards of openness and spontaneity. That’s life in the big city.

We will use blogs to convey information, sometimes in conventional ways, sometimes not-so. Our notions of journalistic responsibility are perfectly compatible with spirited fun. Do we put David Carr online to be witless? Um, no. Actually, we think he’s pretty witty in the newspaper.

Blogging does impose obligations. Blogs have to be updated frequently. They have to be carefully tended. There are costs; David Carr and Damon Darlin will be spending time they could be using to write newspaper articles. Their bosses have decided that’s an advantageous tradeoff. I agree.

Most of this is pretty much true for companies embarking on blogging - especially the cost part. But in some ways the NYTimes misses the point in the same way so many companies do - it isn't about the great writer or rock star exec you've got - and whose lucid and clever opinions you are about to unleash on an unwitting public.

Blogs are about building a community and establishing dialogue. As others point out, to them it seems to still be a publishing tool (his memo refers to it as a "technology") - which at its most basic level it is, but at its most important level it isn't. His memo barely gets to this point - instead pointing to the fact that they will "screen" posts to ensure the conversation is civil. Fair enough. But how about a memo to the community you are trying build that stimulates them to participate? Rather than ask your employees for their thoughts - how about asking the NYTimes readers for theirs. They are the community.

Look At Taggin

CNET has a good story on tagging - worth a read.

Also known as "folksonomies," tagging systems are usually created by users themselves, rather than site owners, and make many online services far more accessible and useful than they had ever been before. The practice brings a social context to such resources as blogs, shared bookmarking, photography and even books.