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Posted 6:23 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
E-mail Publishing: One More Caution
Rich Gordon on Microsoft's "junk e-mail filters"
If you want people to receive your e-mail newsletters or mail lists, beware of the free alternatives such as Yahoo!Groups. Why? Well, for some time now, I've been wondering why Microsoft Outlook thought some e-mail newsletters sent to me were "junk e-mail." I knew Outlook was coloring messages gray if it considered them to be junk. What I didn't know was why different editions of the same newsletter sometimes were gray and sometimes weren't. Finally I checked out the Microsoft website, where I discovered (click on "Put junk mail in its place") that Outlook checks all e-mail messages against a file called "filters.txt." In this file are rules such as: "Body contains 'for free!'" Lo and behold, one of the offending phrases was contained in a Yahoo!Groups ad at the top of the grayed-out newsletter in my in-box. So by choosing a free, ad-supported distribution system, the newsletter's publisher sent me something that Outlook considered spam. It would be even worse for the publisher if I were using Outlook 2002 (instead of 2000), which makes it easy to have Outlook's "junk e-mail" automatically deleted — instead of just marked with gray.
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Posted 6:17 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
An Idea Whose Time Has Passed?
Steve Klein on residue of the dot-com bust
Back in 1999, a visit to IdeaLab, the Pasadena, California-based dot-com incubator, was the online version of going to Mecca. A small group of us from USAToday.com did just that during the summer of 1999 to look at a website building and hosting company called Homestead. It was an inspiring visit, even if many of the hopes and dreams that were created in that heady environment (remember eToys?) have since died.Now, it looks like IdeaLab has its own problems and will be heading to court following its rejection of a settlement offer in a lawsuit brought by the majority of its investors, according to a story by Ben Fritz of VentureReporter.net. The lawsuit calls for $1 billion in damages and the dissolution of the company; the settlement offer would have cost IdeaLab around $355 million. IdeaLab claims that the deal would result in a "de facto liquidation" for the company. Talk about how times have changed.
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Posted 1:34 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Kids Are All Right
Steve Outing on P2P and intellectual property
Even kids understand the concept: if content providers aren't paid, there won't be any more quality Internet content. That was the finding of a survey of kids by Scholastic, the big educational publisher, realeased this week. (Here's the press release.) Says the survey (self-selected sample, so beware), 62% of kids in grades 1 through 8 think that one should have to pay for downloading others' work off the Internet; 38% think that downloading materials should be free.Does this survey mean anything? I don't think so. The question posed was directed at opinions on the Napster (free music downloads) controversy. That debate isn't black and white. The part of the issue that simple surveys and press releases like this overlook is that publishers (of music, and also of books) have thus far not taken proper advantage of peer-to-peer publishing by creating business models where they can benefit from the huge audience to their content brought by Napster and other P2P Internet services. I don't suggest it's easy, buy P2P shouldn't be thought of as some evil bogeyman; eventually we'll figure out how to take advantage of the opportunity and not just focus on the threat.
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Posted 10:12 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Missing the Message
Jade Walker on the inaccessibility of reporters
I am a huge fan of obituaries. Although some folks think obit writing is a morbid job, I have found that such writers tend to have a knack for profiling the lives of famous people in a way that's both memorable and respectful. After reading this profile of James Janega, the Chicago Tribune's 28-year-old obit writer, I immediately wanted to send an "attaboy" e-mail. Sadly, the Chicago Tribune, like many other online newspapers, hasn't fully realized the potential of e-mail access. Web-based publications like CNet and Wired get it. But many major papers keep up that wall between the public and the fourth estate. Too bad. Those reporters could be receiving feedback on their work and tips for future stories.[Editor's note: While Janega's e-mail address is not included on pages where his byline appears, it is possible to find it by clicking the e-mail the staff link on the ChicagoTribune.com home page.]
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Posted 9:42 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Bad News for Good News Site
Katja Riefler on foreign-language editions
Unfortunately, it seems to be more than a rumor: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the well respected national daily newspaper in Germany, will stop publishing its print English Edition, which has been a supplement to the International Herald Tribune, and also its Web English Edition, FAZ.com, at the end of June. FAZ CEO Jochen Becker had already alluded to this possibility in March, because IHT had announced that it was cutting its cost contribution by 50%. 2001 has been a bad year for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — the company reported a deficit of 27 million Euro. Twelve employees of the English Edition will lose their jobs.
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Posted 3:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The State of European Multimedia
Martha Stone on new media research
The MUDIA project, a European Commission-sponsored project launched in May 2001, will release its findings about the state of the European multimedia news industry in mid-summer (in Brussels, presented to the European Parliament). Meanwhile, other related studies have been released, including two from MUDIA's partner, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, in Sevilla. Find them online at www.mudia.org.
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Posted 2:48 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Googling the Archives
Norbert Specker on newspaper archives
The Library Journal has a provocative piece by Richard Wiggins on the value and qualities (and lack thereof) of newspaper archives on the Net. After test driving various offerings, he quotes columnist Dan Gillmor with this idea: "I have a feeling that the newspaper industry would be better served by opening up the archives and Googling them (and selling related ads based on keywords entered) than charging for individual searches. That's just a feeling, of course, and I have no data to back it up." Neither do I, but I understand the feeling. (This item goes with a tip of the hat to the invariably useful Resource Shelf of librarian Gary Price.)
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Posted 12:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Toss Out Some Rocks
Steve Outing on online publishing
Here at Poynter we just finished a seminar for Online News Leaders. While much of what's said in such seminars is considered confidential, I can share some tidbits about what everyone learned from each other. Here's a common issue that affected just about everyone in the seminar: it's common for websites to keep adding and adding new features and services over the years, but never pruning what's no longer relevant or useful to users. The analogy is that you've got a bag and you keep putting more and more rocks in it, till it's eventually too heavy to carry. Something to do soon: throw out some rocks. At the least, when you add a rock, find one to throw out.
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Posted 12:31 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Gillmor Wows Chinese Journalists
Steve Outing on weblogs
The San Jose Mercury News's technology columnist and weblog pioneer, Dan Gillmor, posted a heart-warming item in his eJournal yesterday. In China to speak at a journalism symposium, Gillmor created a quickie weblog while on stage and posted an item. "Eyes went wide as people saw themselves show up on the Web (instantly)." For a nation without a free press, this instant, unedited, worldwide-access publishing environment must look shocking. Says Gillmor: "I hope I persuaded folks that the centrally planned journalism of China's recent past is not sustainable. That's not a political statement. It's just reality, and I think they saw it."
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Posted 8:54 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Census Day in Chile
Juan C. Camus on Internet access
Census Day in Chile will give the "real number" of people connected to the Internet, since the forms for the first time included questions about if you have a computer and a connection to the Internet. The Census, which is collected every 10 years, was taken on Wednesday, which was a local holiday just for this purpose.Chilean news websites took a different approach to this issue. While La Tercera chose PDF files to show the forms used in the survey, Emol presented full coverage with stories and data. But INE, the government agency in charge of the Census, went further, offering much interactive data to help online users understand and follow the survey. It included interactive maps and an e-learning module to teach people how to answer the survey.
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Posted 8:47 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
MarketWatch: An End to All Free
Steve Outing on paid online content
CBS.MarketWatch.com yesterday announced a deal to buy investment newsletter Hulbert Financial Digest and use the rating service as the anchor for a new subscription business. MarketWatch CEO Larry Kramer has been saying for some time that he intends to keep his site primarily free, but planned to begin offering premium financial-content services that carry a price tag. (Here's MarketWatch's story.) It's yet another indicator of the strength of the paid-online-content trend.
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Posted 4:32 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Of Mice and Advertisers
Steve Outing on rich-media e-mail marketing
Rich media e-mail is a promising medium for delivering one-on-one marketing messages. One that dropped into my e-mail box today is worth sharing: a marketing message from the Detroit Newspapers New Media Division touting its websites as a good advertising buy. The creative is ... creative (computer mice running through the streets of Detroit), but worth noting is the use of rich-media e-mail as marketing tool.
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Posted 1:17 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
IM ... as a Publishing Tool?
Steve Outing on instant messaging
Instant messaging applications are, of course, wildly popular, especially among the young. Most of us in the e-publishing world tend to think of IM (of which AOL Instant Messenger is the most popular application) as strictly a means of person-to-person communications. But increasingly, marketers (and to a lesser extent, so far, publishers) are using IM "buddies" as a publishing medium — to reach consumers directly. The idea of corporate IM buddies sounds kind of crazy, but people are signing up to interact with IM buddies that are actually "bots" that return content or information in a conversational manner. For more on this, I refer you to my current Editor & Publisher column, "Hav u 4gotten IM?" (I try not to use this weblog to promote stuff I've written; however, I think this topic is worth a mention here.)
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Posted 11:18 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
From Clicking to Viewing
Nora Paul on a new way of surfing
Tired of clicking through lists of links from a list of results? Click, look, close window, back to list, click, look. ... SurfGear has a solution that might be interesting for news sites looking to help browsers look through results lists more efficiently. Developer David Quimby created a mock-up of what it would look like to SurfGear through a set of stories about Jessie Ventura from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. On the suggestion of sites from loyal Online-News discussion list members, I put together this display of top sites that people check each day to keep up on new media news.Version 2 needs a way to, as the sites scroll by, earmark or set aside ones you want to visit more in depth. As Norbert Specker pointed out, it is "cool but ugly." But there is some interesting potential and at least people are thinking of ways to make moving through the increasing information muddle a little different.
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Posted 8:29 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What Did You Say?
Juan C. Camus on multimedia capabilities
The last international incident between Mexico and Cuba (explained by the New York Times) has served to show the capabilities of the Internet to give users news with a multimedia approach. The issue in this case is a phone call in which the Mexican President Vicente Fox tried to persuade President Fidel Castro of Cuba to cancel or cut short his attendance last month at the United Nations development summit meeting in Monterrey, Mexico. As the relationship between both countries has been getting worse during the past weeks, Castro recorded that phone call and, in an undiplomatic maneuver, released it to the press on Monday.Now, through many Internet websites, such as El Universal from Mexico City, you can listen to the call in MP3 format. And of course, you can read news of the case, take part in a discussion forum, and see a photo gallery about the U.N. summit.
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Posted 6:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
You'll Pay, That's a Fact
Steve Outing on paid content
The New York Times weighed in yesterday with another story about paid content models on the Web. More success stories are coming out, including WeightWatchers.com, which sold $8 million in subscriptions in the first quarter of this year. A model that seems to be winning out is for sites to create special premium content that they sell alongside free content. MarketingSherpa.com publisher Anne Holland makes a noteworthy point in suggesting that sites that adopt this model should segregate their paid offerings. You'll have far more success, she says, if you create a separate site that's the paid area — rather than mix in paid content alongside free (as Salon.com does, for example).
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Posted 3:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Let No Thought Go Unpublished
Steve Outing on weblogs
Yesterday's Media column by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz does a nice job of covering the weblog world and explaining why it's important (despite the unimportant blather that is published on many weblogs). Kurtz introduced a few new words and phrases that sum up the weblog phenomenon: "Blogorrhea": the tendency of bloggers to publish everything that comes into their minds. "Blogosphere": the rapidly expanding universe where legions of ordinary folks are launching weblogs that feature lots of reader feedback. While weblogs represent a "journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished," they also have produced "fresh, clever, idiosyncratic, real-time musings by all kinds of people whose voices would otherwise be heard only at the local Starbucks." That's not all bad.
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Posted 1:01 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Spam Filters: Love 'Em or Hate 'Em
Rich Gordon on getting your e-mails through
Sending unsolicited e-mail ("spam") has become such a common practice — and big industry — that corporate webmasters, ISPs, and Web-based e-mail services are all trying to screen out spam before it reaches your e-mail inbox. And there's a growing business in spam-filtering software. As consumers, most of us think this is good. As publishers, though, aggressive use of spam filters can block even solicited e-mails, such as opt-in newsletters. Anne Holland cites an example where the words "win a free vacation" apparently caused many newsletters to be blocked. Her MarketingSherpa site includes tips on how to avoid this problem.
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Posted 11:07 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
African Internet Robbery
Katja Riefler on access costs
Africa is closing the gap with the Western World on Internet access. All 54 countries are now hooked up, and there are an estimated 4 million subscribers across the continent. In Kenya alone, there are more than 100,000 subscribers and some 250 cyber cafes across the country, according to Kenya's Internet Service Providers Association. But as the BBC reports, the poor continent has to pay a high price. The International Telecommunications Union regulations — which ensure that the costs of telephone calls between Africa and the West are split 50:50 — are not being enforced with regard to the Internet. If you follow the calculations that the current and latent demand for bandwidth in Africa cost about US$1 billion per year, then Africa is being robbed of $500 million per year. This amount is just a small portion of what unfair trade laws by western countries cost Africa each year, as the international aid agency Oxfam claims in a report launched in Uganda these days: "The financial losses associated with import restrictions in rich countries outweigh the benefits of aid."
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Posted 8:49 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
E-books, The Saga
Steve Outing on slow adoption of a new technology
The digital revolution in some respects isn't going as quickly as you'd think. Take e-books, for instance, which have been mostly a non-starter despite some early hype. As M.J. Rose reports in her latest Wired News column, the Frankfurt E-book Awards were canceled last week, in part because of the dour state of that industry. But the awards were far from perfect, too. Rose aptly criticizes them for spotlighting e-books that were nothing more than electronic reproductions of pure-text books by big-name authors. But as should be obvious, the real promise of e-books is that they allow new forms of writing and literary presentation. The Frankfurt judges, she says, didn't seem to understand the new medium of e-books.
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Posted 3:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
New Deal: Content Plus Dial-up
Juan C. Camus on paid online content
El Mostrador is one of the few news websites to offer paid content in Chile, and it is still struggling to become profitable. In its most recent step to increase the number of subscribers, it has offered an interesting promotion. The idea is to give a dial-up connection to the Internet which includes full access to the news on the site. Every person who connects to the Internet through El Mostrador, just by dialing a number from his or her computer, has full access to the site content, and of course is able to surf the Web.It is fair to say on behalf of this business model that in Chile there is variable payment for phone communications, so you pay for every second that you are speaking on the phone or are connected to the Internet. So, if you want to offer this kind of paid subscriber model, you need a deal with the telco to share payments for using the telephone. There is no public information about that kind of deal.
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Posted 1:25 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
MasterCard Change Threatens Companies Such as PayPal
Vin Crosbie on e-commerce
"There are some things that money can't buy," says MasterCard's commercial motto. But a proposed change by that company at the end of this month could mean there will be many things that use of a MasterCard online also can't buy. According to a story in USA Today late last week, America's No. 2 credit card company plans to stop its 15,000 member banks and credit unions from processing MasterCard transactions from third-party credit card processing services — services such as PayPal and Yahoo's PayDirect. Those services are mostly used by online merchants who cannot afford to pay the credit card companies' setup and deposit fees. The proposed change would require MasterCard transactions to be processed directly from banks and credit unions.MasterCard says the change is to protect financial institutions and card holders from online fraud and identity theft. However, I wonder if it's not also a competitive move because services such as PayPal have captured a growing and lucrative online market of small merchants and auction patrons that the credit companies themselves long ago failed to realize or pursue. PayPal, which nowadays processes credit card transactions from more than 13 million online auction consumers and small Web merchants and which today is a public company with a market capitalization of $1.4 billion, is trying to negotiate a exemption from the MasterCard policy change. Visa and American Express, MasterCard's major competitors, have proposed no similar policy changes and will still accept transactions from third-party processors.
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Posted 10:38 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Asia, Europe Lead in Wireless Internet
Madan Rao on mobile communications
According to Art Feather, marketing manager for Cisco's Mobile Wireless Group, the U.S. mass deployment of 3G probably will not happen until 2006. Companies like Disney Internet Group, New Line Cinema, and Sony Pictures have seen most of their popularity take hold overseas. The U.S. wireless market is still figuring out a viable wireless business model and workable billing systems. The Disney Internet Group has 2.5 million subscribers in Japan alone, according to Etesh Mangray, director of business development. Popular Disney properties in the Asian wireless market are Disney-related games, characters, and ring tones. Ring tones for wireless devices are a multi-dollar business for EMI and other record companies.
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Posted 10:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Good Online Content Idea
Steve Outing on weblog experiments
Here's an interesting idea for online content being tried by WNYC radio's The Next Big Thing program. It's hosting a "Subway Series" — airing "those encounters and dramas that could only take place on the NYC subway." Riders with interesting stories are being asked to e-mail them in. If they pass muster, a show producer will contact them and record the story. (There's no money involved.) That's also a great concept for a weblog — where subway riders regularly submit their stories, which are vetted by an editor and then published on an ongoing basis. What great, public-generated content. News organizations willing to experiment with weblogs might want to pick up this concept or a variation of it.
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