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Posted 1:32 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The DVD Cracking Code in Haiku
Norbert Specker on free speech and free code
Steve Carlson in his NowEurope newsletter reports on a strange twist in the DVD decoding battle. Ever since a Norwegian group had the code posted, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been fighting to shut down Web sites offering the DeCSS code. A crossover move now links "Free Code" to "Free Speech." An anonymous poet has described the DeCSS algorithm in the form of a haiku poem and surrounded it with comments on politics, legal issues, and science. We don't assume to be intimately familiar with the legal turf, so we don't know if the DVD-Haiku might pass as free speech.
Posted 9:46 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
When Ignored, Shout?
Vin Crosbie on banner ad sizes
Almost all consumers say they ignore Web site banner ads; most say they consider the ads a nuisance. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, ad click-through rates have declined from 8% in 1996 to a mere 0.25% this year.So, the IAB has introduced larger banner ad formats in hope of revitalizing online advertising. Why larger ads? Ad industry executives say that the old sizes got so standardized that consumers weren't clicking them, and advertisers say that they can't get consumers' attention with the smaller ads.Those rationales collapse when examined. If standardized sizes led to fewer click-throughs, then introducing another set of standardized sizes can't solve that problem. As for advertisers needing more prolix messages to get consumers' attention, haven't pithy and concise messages always been the ad industry's most effective tools? In essence, the IAB is introducing more intrusive ad sizes that will further displace from the screen the non-ad content that attracts consumers to those Web pages. If consumers didn't like the smaller banners, they will hate larger ones. These larger sizes will be a temporary boon to publishers who — at a time when rates for smaller banners are collapsing — will be able to charge more for the larger size, but consumers' reactions ultimately will hurt online advertisers and the publishers who carry the larger ads.
Posted 1:01 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Hypertext Without Hyperview
Norbert Specker on hypertext journalism
Mindy McAdams released an online paper on why hypertext journalism is a serious form of journalism. The arguments are all very valid and I should think worth discussing. However, the paper (itself built in hypertext form) reveals the main problem with hypertext journalism: It needs a better visual display of text fragments within the document in order to allow readers to orient themselves. In this example, once you click on one of the offered hyperlinks, the only means of orientation is a hierarchical link list on the right — reinforcing precisely the linear organization that hypertext journalism is trying to avoid. How, then, to display textual information so it allows for a different, intuitive, multilevel perspective? Conceptual maps are a possibility to offer an additional view. An interesting company in that field is antarti.ca, led by XML co-inventor Tim Bray. The Landscape of the Internet approaches the vastness of textual information through the metaphor of a map.
Posted 11:55 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What Webbies Can Learn From Oprah
M.J. Rose on books and the Web
In her National Post article, "Hurray for Oprah Books," Carrie Snyder writes about the power of talk-show diva Oprah Winfrey when it comes to selling books and how the critics are saying the wrong things about her. But content folks might find the article especially worth reading because of what it tells us about communication. As you read the description of how Oprah takes a book and then turns the life of the author, the themes, times, and physical places in the book into segmented entertainment, replace the word TV with the word Web. It made me start thinking along some interesting avenues.
Posted 11:43 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Navigating Non-linear Spaces
Rich Gordon on video games and journalism
I suspect some Tidbits readers will find this a stretch, but I find myself fascinated by the question of what new media journalism might be able to learn from video games. As "new media" becomes more multimedia, and as display and navigation devices evolve, I believe journalists will have the opportunity to create compelling (and immersive) "information experiences" — games or game-like environments where people learn and are informed as they are entertained. One of the fundamental issues developers of these kinds of journalism are going to have to confront is how much to put the user in control and how much to lead them through content in a linear path. Non-linear storytelling is, to me, one of the unique attributes of new media — and is something every Web developer wrestles with in designing online content and navigation. "Stories on a Rail: What good is storytelling in an action game?," from FEED, addresses this issue nicely in an assessment of a new video game called Oni (which I haven't played).
Posted 11:36 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
IOC Opens Winter Games to Net Journalists
Katja Riefler on press credentials
Good news for online sport journalists: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) made the decision to grant press credentials to some Internet journalists for the 2002 Winter Games. According to David Aikman, a member of the IOC's Internet task force, the organization has accredited 15 sports sites, including Sportal Network and Sports.com in the UK and Sport24.com in France. In the USA, Yahoo Sports got the nod. Aikman said sports sites in Germany and Estonia were also included, as were sites "on all continents." Read the full story at The Standard.
Posted 7:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Have We Sunk That Far?
Steve Outing on Web traffic
A press release from Bloomberg hit my e-mail inbox today, touting the fact that the company's Bloomberg.com Web traffic had increased 4% in the first quarter of this year when measuring monthly unique users, according to figures just out from @Plan. Wow. The Web world is really depressed if those kind of traffic figures are worthy of a press campaign. It didn't seem all that long ago that Web publishers were consistently reporting gains of 50-100% a month.
Posted 12:52 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Soft-core Content Success Story
Steve Outing on adult content
Danni Ashe is a former stripper turned Internet content mogul, who used her body to attract a large crowd of ogling online users willing to pay for her site's soft-porn content. As the The Standard reports, Danni's Hard Drive is continuing to thrive as an online content business despite the dot-com downturn that has killed off or weakened so many others. Ashe is another demonstration that smaller content companies that eschew venture capital money can make it through these "hard times" and even prosper. And this has been said before: The online pornography business should be watched by mainstream content purveyors to see interesting pay-for-content models that perhaps can be applied outside of the sex arena.
Posted 10:36 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Envisioning Information
Norbert Specker on adding visual dimensions to reporting
Edward R. Tufte wrote his book Envisioning Information in 1990 and it is the last in a trilogy with the other titles, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations. For designers he is a familiar name, but I have found that not to be so among content executives. Here are three beautiful books that give many new insights on what has been called "The Pictorial Turn," a main trend in information and content design. Envisioning Information is a must read particularly in view of the design challenges the new displays offer — but also as a strategic insight. (The most successful launch of a magazine in Germany after the war, FOCUS, is widely attributed to its superior use of infographics.) In a world of information overload, mastering information design will set you apart. As Wired put it: "The book is a knockout."
Posted 9:54 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Guide Me, and Integrate
Andrew Nachison on lessons from the city guide craze
A few years ago city guides were all the rage. Microsoft's Sidewalk terrified local newspapers fearful of losing their franchises on local entertainment listings and information, and we saw a stampede of Sidewalk knock-offs produced by newspapers, many with technology partners like Zip2 and Citysearch. As it turned out, Citysearch, teamed up with Ticketmaster, was the challenger to watch. Microsoft bailed out of the business by selling Sidewalk to arch rival Ticketmaster-Citysearch (TMCS) in 1999.Fortune magazine has a good read on what happened next at TMCS — a company that was profitable online in 1997. "By the end of 2000, TMCS, which had been a stable little operation before it went public, was hemorrhaging cash. In two short years it had built up a cumulative operating loss of $337 million." Note the the internal struggle about dot-com spinoff vs. integration with the offline brand. In this case, the spinoff plan proved disasterous. The company has returned to the concept of integrating its online and offline operations.
Posted 3:42 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Future Hard Disk Design May Squelch Content Sharing
Norbert Specker on content protection
The 4C group bands together IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba. In the eternal quest to stop the "Napsterization" of content, the group is proposing changes in the standard for hard disks. This in turn would allow for copy protection to be incorporated into PCs, set-top boxes, digital VCRs, and personal stereos. The technology is said to effectively prevent the digital copying of audio and video. Such describes Andrew Thomas in the Independent, and we certainly agree on his take that "if the technology exists to protect record company profits, it will be used." For a full account read his story.
Posted 2:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Advertising Advice
Jade Walker on online newspapers
Want to keep the dot-com version of your newspaper thriving? Perhaps you need to market your advertising to a younger audience. Newspapers have been so focused on signing advertisers who cater to the wealthy that they've completely missed an entire market of online readers — Generation Y."This is the first generation that doesn't need us. They don't read newspapers," Brent Baker, the dean of Boston University's College of Communication, says. "If you bring people into this new media world as children, do you really think they'll go out and buy the New York Times?" Baker also says that this group of Internet users (all 40 million of them in the USA) have spent their entire lives reading the news online, and they're not about to switch back. These readers have no interest in getting ink-stained hands, nor do they plan to wait 24 hours to get breaking news.
Posted 2:10 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
ESPN Launches Anti-ESPN Ad Campaign
Paul Grabowicz on advertising
At first glance, kathicam.com seems like just another vanity Internet site with a Webcam — this one featuring a young woman complaining that ESPN.com is more popular than she is. Turns out it actually is a marketing ploy by ESPN to drive traffic to its online sports site. The New York Times describes the ad campaign.
Posted 11:48 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Secret to Mobile Content
Steve Outing on wireless content
MforMobile has a worth-reading article on mobile content, "The Mobile Internet: New Medium, New Content." This excerpt sums up a key point about content for mobile devices: "Rather than scraping content and functionality from the Web and attempting to force it through other channels, mobilising existing Internet content then is about selecting the functionality required for the specific platform and transforming it. This suggests that maximum exploitation of the wireless space can only be achieved by developing content specifically for that medium." In other words, shovelware doesn't work. It doesn't work on the Web — and even more so it won't work in the wireless space. Think original!
Posted 11:19 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'That's My Author! You Can't Have Him!'
M.J. Rose on digital book rights
There's a new lawsuit in the publishing industry over electronic rights and it looks like it's going to be a big one. RosettaBooks, a small electronic publisher with big plans, recently began releasing e-only versions of classic fiction. Now Random House is suing Rosetta for copyright infringement even though RosettaBooks has contracts with the authors involved. There are issues that are quite important at stake here. Random House is claiming that it built these authors' reputations, and that entitles it to rights not spelled out in any contract.In the Reuters article "Styron, Vonnegut E-Books Spark Random House Lawsuit," Gail Appleson reports that the lawsuit alleges that RosettaBooks copied works by "enormously popular Random House authors" William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert B. Parker without the permission of the world's largest English-language publisher. (Also, here's a New York Times article on the dispute.)
Posted 10:58 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Orwellian Correction?
Andrew Stroehlein on online ethics
How do you post corrections online? MediaGuardian, part of the GuardianUnlimited group, ran a story on Andrew Neil, publisher of both The Scotsman and Sunday Business here in the UK. Neil took issue with the MediaGuardian piece, noting, among other things, that figures regarding price increases were wrong. This spat caught the eye of the BBC Radio 4 media program, The Message, but when Neil appeared on the show, the figures on the MediaGuardian site were suddenly correct. Neil called MediaGuardian's online correction without mention of the original error "Orwellian," and more than one UK paper is now examining how online copy should be corrected.
Posted 10:51 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Media Walks Tightrope on Disclosing Personal Information
Paul Grabowicz on privacy
The San Jose Mercury News has a story about journalism organizations being pitted against privacy groups on whether personal information in federal court records should be put on the Internet. This comes as media companies try to assure suspicious Web site visitors that their personal information won't be disclosed to outsiders. Will the public buy both arguments?
Posted 10:47 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
One Up, One Down for SportsLine.com
Steve Klein on sports content
SportsLine.com will be providing content for Virginia-based Nextel Communications' users who subscribe to the carrier's wireless Internet service, according to Carl Corry of CBS MarketWatch. Nextel will promote its phones and service through sponsorship in SportsLine.com's March (call it anything but Madness) Mayhem and NFL areas. However, Asiacontent.com and SportsLine.com have dropped plans for a network of Web sites in Asia and will kill two Sports.com sites in the region. Asiacontent launched Sports.com sites in South Korea and Singapore last summer.
Posted 1:24 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
How Much Did You Say a Word?
Steve Klein on Internet freelancing
Dakota Smith has a humorous account (we still have a sense of humor, don't we?) in SiliconAlleyReporter.com about a Manhattan chapter of the Editorial Freelancer's Association panel, "The Webbed Future: What's in Store for Freelancers?" Said David Wallis, CEO of Featurewell.com: "There was a brief golden age when Web writers were getting paid well and receiving worthless stock options." Writes Smith: "But enough about the salad days ... The 50 or so people that turned up, an older, mismatched-looking, slightly bohemian crowd, arrived to hear soothing words about how the dot-com downturn is just a temporary blip, while $2-a-word days lurk around the corner. The message: Don't count on it. With low pay, a dearth of creative outlets, and contracts that rob writers of electronic rights, freelancing for the Web is about as lucrative and rewarding as setting up shop on the F train with a pair of maracas and an empty coffee cup."What sells? Topic-focused articles for niche e-zines, according to Wallis. What pays? Reselling articles for a percentage of the profits. Where to go? Job board sites that offer freelancing opportunities like Content-Exchange/mediabistro, journalismjobs.com, and staffwriters.com. How can I get attention? E-mail is preferable to paper pitches; mention mutual friends/contacts you and the editor have in your pitch; and don't use virus-prone attachments. How much can I expect? 50 cents to a dollar a word. Salad days, indeed.
Posted 6:15 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Size Counts for Online Sports Sites
Steve Klein on sports conent
The big guys just keep getting bigger. Media Metrix reports that ESPN.com had more than 217 million page views in January. SportsLine.com sites had more than 67 million. ESPN.com generated 5.9 million unique users in January, a 10% increase from 2000. SportsLine.com attracted 4.5 million unique users; CNNSI.com had 1.951 million. Users spent an average of 41.5 minutes on ESPN.com in January compared to 22 minutes for CNNSI.com and 15.2 minutes for SportsLine.com sites.
Posted 4:09 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Terminal Opt-Out
Vin Crosbie on content business models
The Silicon Alley Daily e-mail newsletter in March will attempt to force its 43,000 subscribers to accept a separate weekly e-mail from advertisers. The subscribers' only recourse otherwise will be unsubscription. The e-pub will charge its advertisers a US $250 CPM to reach those subscribers. I term this new business model terminal opt-out; it forces newsletter subscribers to be spammed in exchange for receiving entirely separate editorial content.There are two physical world analogues for this innovative new business model: Imagine if the advertising inserts from your daily newspaper weren't inside that edition, nor were they delivered at the same time of day. Imagine if in exchange for receiving information you desired by telephone, you were forced to receive telemarketing calls at other times from other companies.
I believe that the forced spamming in this business model will ultimately aggravate most of the e-newsletter's subscribers. However, it will meanwhile be sustainable simply because this particular publication doesn't yet have any direct competition. This is a business model that will be sustainable only for publications that have no real competition. Ask yourself if yours is one?
Posted 3:58 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Germany's Local Governments Turn to the Net
Katja Riefler on government content
Is there anything like a digital bureaucracy yet? German local governments are taking a second try. Right now of around 14,000 cities and municipalities, only 2,500 have a home page. 80% of those pages are merely "shop windows" that list services and office hours; 20% enable the user to download forms or accomplish such tasks as making an appointment for city workers to pick up a household's old furniture. Now, federal, state, and local governments have announced plans to set up a general Internet portal called deutschland.de, which will offer a package of administrative services. A Web portal summarizing services available online at the national level is scheduled to be operating by the time the CeBIT computer fair begins on March 22.
Posted 12:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Interview With the Father of Blog
Steve Outing on weblogs
Blogger is a (very) popular tool for creating weblogs — and I use it for the E-Media Tidbits group weblog that you're reading now. WriteTheWeb has an interview (first of three parts) with Blogger creator Evan Williams, which discusses the significance of weblogs as a new publishing form. Williams didn't really grasp the importance nor predict the popularity of Blogger at first.
Posted 11:50 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Panhandling Increasing on the Web
Steve Outing on content funding
It's getting so that surfing the Web is like walking a downtown street: Panhandlers are everywhere. This really seems to have taken off since Amazon.com recently debuted its "Honor System" voluntary payment service, which any Web site/publisher can use to collect user contributions. (I solicit voluntary payments from users of Content-Exchange.com via the Honor System. Admittedly, the amounts are very modest — but every little bit of revenue helps.)Troika Magazine is the latest free content site to start begging for money. Its approach is to pop up a small browser window on top of the Troika home page that makes a polite pitch to the reader to contribute money to maintain the quality of the webzine. The approach to the site user is that this is a voluntary subscription payment. Troika asks its users to mail in a check, though; it doesn't use Amazon.com's system.
Posted 5:46 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
ABCNews.com, ABC.com Hit Hard
Steve Outing on content layoffs
In the latest (of a long string) of content layoffs comes ABCNews.com and ABC.com, which were hit hard in Internet layoffs announced by Disney. It's the usual story. The cuts were made in the name of future profitability. And more cuts could still come later. Inside.com reports.
Posted 3:43 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'Amazoning the News'
Kerry Northrup on Web news
What if Amazon did news? How would its highly user-driven, "customers who bought this also bought..." approach adapt to coverage of, say, an NBA game or the appointment of a Cabinet member? Is there something that online news vendors could learn from arguably the most successful (barring recent developments) online vendor of just about everything except news? Authors llen Kampinsky, Shayne Bowman, and Chris Willis have played this mind-game and even generated some possible samples. They start from the common declaration that "storytelling on the Web demands its own vocabulary and strategies," but wind up at some unique ideas. My favorite: Reader rankings that result in the notice, "This story popular with 25-35 aged women in Southern California."
Posted 12:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Will Internet Content Never Pay Off?
Steve Outing on content revenue models
So muses Andrew Stroehlein in his column for InternetContent.net today. Perhaps because the Internet started off as a non-commercial endeavor, today we're fighting against the nature of the medium as we all try to figure out how to get people to pay for content. This sounds like a funny thing for someone in Andrew's position (editor-in-chief of InternetContent.net) to suggest — but he closes the column with the hope that he's wrong, and a call for ideas.
Posted 11:51 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Whither the Portals?
Rich Gordon on the future of search engines
A couple of years ago, online news sites thought they figured out what they were doing wrong: they weren't enough like Yahoo! So many of them — including sites from Cox Interactive Media (Access Atlanta), Knight Ridder RealCities (miami.com), and Tribune Co. (sun-sentinel.com) — redesigned and refocused their content to be more like portals. Among the changes: a lot more headline links and an emphasis on search capabilities. Now the dot-com shakeout — especially stagnating online ad revenue — is raising questions about the future of the portals. A couple of takes on the subject: "The End for Search Engines?" (part one of two by Danny Sullivan, a former newspaper reporter who runs Search Engine Watch) and "The Great Portal Payoff: Matching Internet Marketing to Consumer Behavior" (from Booz Allen Hamilton; PDF file).
Posted 11:44 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Subtle Differences in Far-flung Newsrooms
Kerry Northrup on newsroom organization
There is a fascinating similarity in newsrooms around the world — creating a massive pool of great innovations and insights that too many editorial managers overlook. Newspapers in most countries use some form of the same Anglo-Franco editorial organization of chief editors, section editors, subeditors, and journalists. Germanic newsrooms tend to be the most different. Titles certainly vary from one place to another — copyeditors in the USA vs. subeditors in the UK, for instance. But it makes sense that the newsflows are comparable since the kinds of news being covered, as well as the tools used and the products produced, are all of a genre. Online newsrooms are even more of a feather internationally, having been born at about the same time.The first Meeting Point International Summit on Newsroom Experience (March 8, at the University of South Carolina, USA) is intended to tap this potential groupthink by bringing together some of the leading news managers from across the globe to discuss the challenges they are facing, explain the visions they are pursuing, and pass along the lessons they are learning in dealing with the age of media convergence. Represented will be newspapers from around the globe. (For information, contact USC's Susan Hipp, susan.hipp@usc.jour.sc.edu.)
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