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Posted 3:59 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Copyright Questions
Rich Gordon on the implication of image searching
The New York Times (registration required) has an interesting article on legal questions raised about search engines that catalog images, such as Ditto.com, Altavista, and Google Image Search. A federal appeals court is considering a lawsuit by a photographer who alleges that Ditto.com is violating copyright by including his images in search results. The case doesn't have direct implications for most mainstream Web sites, who wouldn't publish another site's image without permission. But it's certainly possible to imagine a judicial ruling in this case that could affect rights important to online publishers. For instance, Ditto publishes a "thumbnail" image with a link to the full image on the originating site. How different is that from the common practice of aggregating headlines with links to the sites where the full articles appear? This case should serve as a reminder that there are a number of important and unresolved copyright questions involving the Web. For instance, contrary to what is commonly believed, it is not clear that copyright law prevents one site from presenting another site's pages inside an HTML frameset.
Posted 2:23 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Ninth Life Used Up for Cue:Cat?
Steve Outing on a dubious device
Media company Belo is writing off its $37.5 million investment in Digital Convergence and has stopped using the company's "Cue:Cat" digital scanner. The Cue:Cat is a small scanner that is given away free to consumers, who then use it to scan in bar codes on ads in newspapers in order to go to advertisers' specified Web pages. Somehow, the Cue:Cat has survived long through the Internet downturn despite a dubious concept, but perhaps this will finally kill it. Digital Convergence has gotten rid of most of its staff and is currently seeking additional funding. The problem with the Cue:Cat was obvious: Why would print readers go to the trouble of installing a device just to look at more ads? They wouldn't. They didn't. Cue:Cat ran out of lives.
Posted 2:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Sports Fans Get a Fantasy Marriage
Steve Klein on online sports content
How's this for a fantasy marriage made in heaven (and just in time for the start of the National Football League season in the U.S. this weekend)? SportsLine.com and CNNSI.com are teaming up to produce fantasy sports products. "Having recently renewed our agreement with AOL, we are thrilled to further expand our association with AOL Time Warner and build a closer relationship," said SportsLine exec Andrew Sturner. This is a marriage of product, tools, and outstanding content, which CNN/SI can provide.Sportsline.com's first products for CNNSI.com are "Full Blitz Fantasy Football," "Football Commissioner," "Football General Manager," and "Beat the Experts." SportsLine.com is also the exclusive producer of the official fantasy football games for NFL.com and AOL, the official fantasy baseball games for Major League Baseball's official Web site, and it produces an official fantasy game for NBA.com. SportsLine.com also will develop CNNSI.com's fantasy games for baseball, hockey, basketball, golf, auto racing, and the college basketball tournament.
In a related development, SportsLine.com has "executed a definitive agreement" to acquire privately held Sandbox.com, one of the leading producers of fantasy sports products on the Internet, by the end of the year.
Posted 1:25 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What SVG Means to the Web
Vin Crosbie on a momentous software release
"With SVG, Web graphics move firmly from mere decoration to true graphical information," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and father of the World Wide Web. "Scalable Vector Graphics are the key to providing rich, reusable visual content for the Web. At last, designers have the open graphics format they need to make professional graphics not only work visually on the Web, but perform as searchable, reusable Web content."
A quiet event occurred this week that perhaps will be as important to the Web as was the equally quiet initial release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993. The compelling graphics found in printed magazines, newspapers, and glossy catalogs haven't existed on the Web because HTML was never designed as a rich graphics language. A few proprietary solutions (such as Macromedia's Flash) have attempted to circumvent HTML's graphic deficiencies, but not without adding their own disadvantages. But on Tuesday the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released version 1.0 of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a rich graphics language for the Web. Based upon eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and 13 months of worldwide testing, SVG creates rich but easily transmittable interactive images and animations that display on any device — cell phones, handhelds and PDAs, personal computers — in any language, and also output to printers.
Posted 1:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No More Pay for Surfing the Web
Katja Riefler on the failure of another business model
At least in Germany the business model "Get Paid for Surfing" has come to an end. Fairad, the last enterprise that paid its users for viewing ads while surfing the Web, has stopped operations. Cyberprofit and All-Advantage had already given up earlier this year.
Posted 1:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
An Inch Wide, A Mile Deep
Carla Passino on online strategy of the FT Group
Netimperative reports today that Pearson PLC, owner of the Financial Times, has sold its energy Web site FTEnergy.com to Platts. The move follows previous sales of other FT online brand extensions. Ditching any ambitions to become a horizontal portal, the FT group has narrowed the focus of its Internet strategy on the areas where it is a market leader: International business and financial news. "Our newspapers, magazines, and online services are now all focused on what we do best providing our customers with the very best business and financial news, comment, analysis, and data," said FT Group CEO Stephen Hill. Watch for other media groups to start delivering content an inch wide, a mile deep.
Posted 1:09 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
An Online Match Made in Heaven?
Steve Klein on online sports content
What do you get when you mix the MSN Network and ESPN.com? We're about to find out now that the two online powerhouses have agreed to work together. ESPN's online sports content is now offered exclusively on the MSN sports channel and will have preferred positioning on the MSN home page. According to a press release, "ESPN.com's sports content will be uniquely integrated with MSN and will carry MSN branding and links throughout the ESPN.com site." The flip side, of course, is that "MSN services will now be available directly from ESPN.com."Said John Skipper, senior vice president and general manager of ESPN.com: "Working with an online leader such as MSN to make our content available exclusively to its vast audience is invaluable to our continued growth and leadership with fans, the industry, and the advertising community. Our experience proves that in addition to audience reach, working with multiple media properties provides a great benefit to advertisers." And the big guys just keep getting bigger.
Posted 12:53 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Coming Trend?
Rich Gordon on the demise of Monday newspapers
Journal Newspapers Inc., which covers the Washington, D.C., suburbs, has announced that it will no longer publish a Monday edition. (It has been publishing six days a week, with a single weekend edition.) Don't be surprised if this becomes a trend. If you were to break out revenues and expenses by the day of the week, many newspapers would find that their Monday editions are unprofitable. In general, advertisers don't buy on Mondays (or Tuesdays) unless they are packaged in with other days of the week. And most readers spend less time with the paper those days, too — in contrast to online news usage, which tends to be high on Mondays as people return to their offices. Can a paper decide not to publish seven days a week and still call itself a daily?
Posted 8:30 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Smaller Internet World
Steve Klein on Internet media
In yet another downsizing, Penton Media's Internet World will cut back to 12 annual issues from 22 starting in October. "The decision was driven by two factors: to better serve the needs of our readers and to shape our business for the future given the current economic conditions," publisher Phil Ripperger said. A magazine for Internet professionals, with a circulation of 225,000, Internet World has been negatively impacted by a drop in advertising (who hasn't?) the past year.
Posted 8:28 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Merging Newspaper Web sites
Norbert Specker on CanWest's former 125 Web properties
The Globe and Mail reports on the merger of 125 Web properties belonging to CanWest. The company acquired most of Hollinger Inc.'s Canadian newspapers last year and is now routing all the traffic to its Canada.com site. In a time when newspapers' online operations concentrate on local revenue as the most promising avenue, the move might cut a lot of local ties that had been labored over the last several years. In the middle term, however, a reduction to one operating platform (instead of six) and to 100 staff (instead of the budgeted 150) might make profitability easier to achieve.
Posted 8:28 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Learning Hasn't Hit Home Yet
Amy Gahran on online learning
In Wired News, Kendra Mayfield looks at where the online learning industry is today — and, generally, it is not hanging out in your living room. So far, the most successful online learning operations focus on continuing education and professional development, rather than offering courses that the general public can take at home. See: "Distance Learning Yet to Hit Home."
Posted 9:46 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Small But Perfectly Formed
Carla Passino on the phenomenal success of Friendsreunited.co.uk
The latest NetValue report on Internet usage in the UK marks the meteoric rise of Friendsreunited.co.uk, a portal that helps former school friends get in touch with one another. Despite its fairly limited budget, the site has seen its traffic increase by 458% in the last three months. Behind the success story is a basic yet effective formula: Users are free to register their details and search Friendsreunited's database of 28,000 schools, but have to pay £5 a year to contact their old classmates. Although the site has not revealed the number of its paying customers, Net Value estimates it to be roughly a quarter of the overall traffic — a whopping 130,000 people. Here is a lesson that struggling e-publishers can learn from Friendsreunited.co.uk: Target a niche, stick to a simple revenue model, keep your costs down — and presto!, the Web will be yours.
Posted 5:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Think Small, Not Big, for Survival
Amy Gahran on business models for online magazines
Today on TomPaine.com, author Daniel Gross contends that high-profile, quality online magazines like Slate and Salon have gotten their business plans backward. Rather than move toward the publicly held model, he thinks that being privately held is a far more sustainable and feasible way to go. See "Becoming LIttle Magazines: How Journalism Web Sites Can Survive.""Forget about reverse stock splits, new revenue streams, and expensive executive talent," Gross says. "You've got great publications. It just turns out that being publicly held is perhaps the least optimal way for them to be organized. Operating as a private concern will free up all the energy you spend worrying about underwater stock options, as well as precious financial resources."
Posted 1:23 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
It Happens to the Best of Us
Andrew Stroehlein on the Queen's dot-coms
For those who have lost fortunes, businesses, and livelihoods in the dot-com crash, take heart: you're not alone. As Owen Gibson points out in today's Guardian, the Queen has lost well over a million dollars in the last 18 months as shares in the online map service getmapping.com took a nosedive. Of course, she is ahead of the game, as her shares have not yet fallen to the price she bought them. But it does go to show: even blue bloods are wishing they went with blue chips.
Posted 11:13 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Leaner Rivals.com Returns
Steve Klein on online sports content
In its heyday, Rivals.com included more than 700 sites, was a top-10 sports traffic draw, and earned six-figure revenue. The sports portal has returned (it folded earlier this year despite millions of dollars in investment) following a restructuring by Nashville-based AllianceSports. There are three sections: 70 college sites, the Rivals100 recruiting site, and the RivalsHigh prep network. The site already has 15,000 subscribers for premium services at $4.95 to $9.95 a month (the lower figure for full access to a single college site, the latter for all sites). "Everyone knows that to have a really premium-quality site, you have to have a revenue stream," says Jerry Cover, CEO of AllianceSports. (So what were many of us thinking earlier?) Like too many failed portals, Rivals.com thought it was going to get by on an advertising-based model. The new Rivals is leaner, but it may have a better chance of success.
Posted 8:46 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Getting IPSs to Pay for Content
Norbert Specker on TRIC
Recently we pointed out the private initiative TRIC in Sweden, which seeks to apply group pressure by gathering content and selling it to ISPs/telcos. The argument runs something like: "Give us some of the money you make because you can offer our content to your subscribers. Or else we will forbid you to route the content that gives you 70% of your traffic through your service." (In Sweden, 17 key content providers are responsible for 70% of Internet traffic in.)I asked Birger Steen, CEO of Scandinavia Online, the most widely used portal in the Nordic countries, what he thinks of the initiative. To put the effort into perspective he painted four medium term scenarios: "1) The advertising market picks up, and hence the advertising financed models. 2) A negotiated or publicly regulated regime for 'termination fees' paid to media sites by the ISPs and telcos to finance further content development. 3) Telcos and ISPs acquire ever increasing numbers of media sites (AOL model; innovation is stifled inside telcos). 4) The industry as a whole goes into decline, with media activity adjusting to lower advertising revenues, usage concentrating on a few independent players with overall usage declining."
Everything seems to point to No. 4, which obviously is the one nobody really wants. "Hence, we believe an initiative like TRIC is very valuable. Alternatives to such an initiative would be either a concerted action by large media players without a third-party intermediating (always difficult) or regulator action (still somewhat unlikely, although it's discussed in Denmark)," Steen says.
Posted 8:32 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Gator CEO: We're Not Evil
Steve Outing on online advertising
The CEO of the company that produces Gator, the controversial Web browser software that places ads on top of other Web sites' ads, did an interview with CNET yesterday. It's a predictable defense and he rationalizes what many Web publishers believe is an inherently evil and self-destructive business model (because it undermines the ability of sites to sell advertising, and thus could damage content on the Internet). He does make the case for what his software does being legal, and if so then this sort of software could be around for a while.
Posted 11:12 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Multiple Media Usage
Katja Riefler on a new German study
The times when people concentrated on just one medium are vanishing. In already 36% of all German Internet sessions do people use at least one other medium, as the magazine E-Market reports. People at work prefer radio and daily newspapers. Their print favorites are national newspapers, computer and financial magazines. People who use the Internet at home — no surprise — watch TV on first hand. Interesting: they neither use the same channels nor the same formats than non-Internet users. They use more "serious" channels and seem to prefer news over shows. The research "Parallelnutzung des Internets mit klassischen Medien" has been conducted by the German media agency More Interactive for the second time within a year.
Posted 9:29 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Using Games to Sell Ads – and Tell Stories
Paul Grabowicz on new media journalism
The New York Times has an article on how advertisers increasingly are turning to games to get their messages across online. The most interesting example was General Motors using a game format to educate consumers about its eMotion high-tech control system in cars.Journalists too are exploring how games can be used to tell stories online. The University of Minnesota's Institute for New Media Studies is sponsoring a series of workshops on "Playing the News: Journalism, Interactive Narrative, and Games," September 13-15. And there's a good list of links to information on games at the Institute's NewMedia Networker site.
Posted 9:28 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Stand by Your Brand
Andrew Stroehlein on brand misrepresentation
Guarding your good name and reputation on the Web is an uphill struggle. Elen Lewis' feature article, "Combating the brand pirates and logo thieves," in The Guardian gives a good overview of the extent of the problem and also offers some solutions. The piece reminds us that it's not just bored hackers and petty criminals at work here; hacking a site to divert its traffic, for example, is often the work of business competitors. Lewis talks with some companies attempting to deal with the situation, but something like simple brand abuse seems pretty hard to combat when you realize that 7.5 million new Web pages appear every day.
Posted 9:25 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Browsing Adieu
Norbert Specker on search strategies
Recent statistics indicate that in the U.S., Internet users are accessing sites directly ever more often. Consequently, the use of search engines is decreasing. This seems to be a phenomenon when users are more experienced. By the same token, the average number of visited Web sites per month is decreasing — a behavior well known from the digital TV environment where the offer of hundreds of channels results, on the individual level, in the regular use of but a handful different stations.Nonetheless, search engines remain a key element in user behavior. The interesting question is: If we know what and how users ask, could we build sites that interface better? If any of you have experimented with the Google advertising program, then you know how effective this question is in regard to site traffic. An interesting study by Christoph Hölscher and Gerhard Strube of the University of Freiburg (Germany) looks at Web Search Behavior of Internet Experts and Newbies and concludes that there is "still is much room for improvement in Web-based searching." For newspaper sites that are aiming to be an information hub — and within a clearly defined geographical or topic area each newspaper probably should — the discussion and understanding of the search strategies its users employ will lead to more useful offerings. And everything indicates that in the Web environment, usefulness is the key success factor.
Posted 11:31 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Labor-less Day
Steve Outing on this weblog
In observance of the Labor Day holiday in the U.S., there will be no E-Media Tidbits items published today. We'll be back on Tuesday.
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