links for 2006-11-30
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So, is this peanut butter? Or is the lack of yahoo! branding on the page actually really, really smart?
Dadblog is currently sleeping. See my wide-awake blog here
More on Chelsea, “the most hated football club in the world”
There is so, so much great stuff in Michael Henderson’s elegant destruction of Chelsea that it’s hard to know where to start, but here’s a sample:
In the mephitic world of football, which attracts so many people of exceptional venality, Kenyon stands out as possibly the most absurd figure of all. Not bent, not nasty in the way that others are; just absurd. For all his talk of world domination the former sportswear salesman from Stalybridge is little more than a highly-paid errand-boy, sent on missions by a mysterious, easily bored Russian, for the benefit of a manager who labours under the misapprehension that he is Count Bismarck, and the Premiership represents a map of Europe in 1870.
How much higher can the hatred of Chelsea ratchet itself? Just how despised will they become? I picture the day when Chelsea show up at Old Trafford - and the crowd turns its backs on them. I picture Abramovich rotting in a tiny little cell in Moscow. I picture Kenyon applying for a job at Dagenham and Redbridge. I picture Mourinho taking Portugal to the final of the World Cup, and losing 5-0 to a rampantly stylish England (OK, quite far-fetched that one).
And then I wake up, and they’ve ground out a 1-0 win at the Reebok. Bastards.
Of news, brands and business models
Spent an interesting couple of hours last night at a seminar organised by Polis, which is a new initiative led by the London School of Economics to examine the impact of networked and digital media on journalism and ethics. One of the nicest things was running into Richard Addis, who back in the day commissioned my first ever piece of paid-for journalism - a now-laughable op-ed on an idea of Prince Charles to give awards for community service. Richard’s now running a consultancy, ShakeUp Media, and he and his partner Ryan gave an interesting kick-off to the session, outlining the 10 new rules of media. My transcript of these is:
- Search will be revolutionised by having networks that understand individual needs
- Everything will be personalised - and here Richard added the nice word “devastatingly”
- Individuals are the new brands
- Mass markets are dead
- Users - and their involvement in news - are here to stay
- The town crier is back, and he’s digital
- Forget schedules. Everything is on-demand
- The best things in life are free
- Prepare for “vastband”
- The all-in-one device will arrive
I enjoyed this presentation, and it did exactly what it was intended to: spark debate. But what was interesting was the way the debate went in its own direction, to cover the following areas:
- How do we pay for good journalism? What’s the business model?
- What is the proper role of the BBC?
- What is the role of “news brands” in networked media?
- How do we not leave behind those who aren’t connected to fast networks: the old and the poor?
I heard lots of good stuff around these questions, but I heard lots of alarming stuff too. The alarming stuff included a lorryload of resentment towards the BBC (which was seen as killing off innovation in commercial media), a rather complacent attitude towards the importance of established media brands (several people seemed to think that these brands could help people “find their way through” the assumed morasse of rubbish which many on the panel took to be the core material of online media), a total unreadiness to respond to evidence-based product development and reporting (one delegate praised a piece of Channel 4 documentary not because of its high ratings or great user feedback, but because she’d attended an invite-only of the media great and good the following day and half the table had watched it), and a continuing low-level resentment towards things that sounded “technical”.
On the plus side, the very clever Anne Lapping brushed aside the issues of business models for online news by pointing out that this had always been a problem: that newspapers had had to branch out beyond news to create vehicles for advertising which then generated the revenue which could continue to fund news. I thought this was a profound and important point, and one which cuts across the unhelpful fatalism which seems to infect people when they try to figure out how to “make money from news.” Do something else as well, is the answer.
And, behind that, there was a continued determination to protect good journalism and news-gathering as an unalloyed social good. I think that while we continue to have people who think like that, there will always be good journalism and strong news reporting. I also think that the Net makes those things easier, not more difficult. We’re only partway down the road of figuring out why that is, though. There’s lots more talk of business models to come yet.
links for 2006-11-29
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Some notes (presumably from Denton) on how TechCrunch might or might not be making money.
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Interesting. Has Google ever actually shut down something before? And how related is this to the success of Yahoo! Answers?
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Battelle asks the question. And nobody seems to know.
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NewsTrust allows people to rate third-party sites and then organises it appropriately. Little bit clunky, and extracting waaaay too much value from the original provider for my taste.
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“The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations.”
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Valleywag, feeds and Google
This is probably more about personal ineptitude than business conspiracy, but why is it that when I click on the feeds for Valleywag, I get redirected to a Google Reader page? There’s no Google reader elements in the link as far as I can see, so this looks like Gawker policy. But it does mean that, for some reason, I can’t add the Valleywag full-text, ad-supported feed to Netvibes (although the excerpt one seems to work). Any ideas?
UPDATE: As usual, this is down to personal idiocy. I had Google Reader as the default Feed reader in Firefox settings (thanks, Jeremy G, for the comment). Doh. Still can’t sign up to the full-text Valleywag feed though.
links for 2006-11-28
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Interesting summary of the “aggregation and packaging” opportunity
links for 2006-11-27
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London Maps. At the British Museum. Till early March. Get down there.
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Looks neat and useful. Another reason not to install Photoshop unless you really are a graphic artist.
Spy murdered in the media village
Couple of slightly grumpy-old-man remarks, but here we go.
Remark 1: does anyone out there care quite as much about the obviously tragic murder of Alexander Litvinkeno as the “quality” media seem to? The story has been everywhere, top and front of mind, for over a week now. 46 stories on Guardian Unlimited, 59 on TimesOnline, and 9 pages of the stuff on the BBC. Now, everyone likes a cloak-and-dagger story, but this seems a little bit over the top. Is there a danger here that journalists have slightly misjudged the appetites of their audience? And shouldn’t a story where so little is known attract less material, not more.
Remark 2: Actually, probably not, because Radio 5 on Sunday morning just demonstrated that, in the absence of a hard, quantifiable fact, news coverage just expands to fill the vacuum (I was reminded of the law that says work will expand to fill the time available). I was waiting for the cricket score. What I got was endless, pointless, groundless speculation about whether John Reid was going to stand for the leadership of the Labour Party. The consensus seemed to be that he hadn’t announced if he was standing, but he would wait and see before deciding (this was given the smoothly mediaesque description of “keeping his powder dry”). I mean, come on. I could have phoned that report in from a quick scan of the morning’s newspapers. And this took up about 15 minutes of national airtime. Next time, guys, just say “he hasn’t decided yet” and switch to the original 12 inch of Blue Monday or something. We’ll all have a much better time.
links for 2006-11-25
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“But if the company is already big and broad, like Yahoo, the chances are that some division in the company is already competing with the new opportunity–or wishes it were. Dreams of synergy produce gridlock.”
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“As the table indicates below one of Yahoo’s advantages is the distribution of its visits over several properties, where Google has over 87% of its top 20 visits in home page and image search visits.”
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Interesting variation on digg - submitted links around what look like editorialised (and achingly hip) topics. Digg meets meme. Deme?
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Zadie Smith on reading
By Christ, Zadie Smith is smart. This from Orange Crate Art:
But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.
I think Boing Boing may have carried this too - haven’t been reading this for months (but, now that DRM is dead, maybe I can go back in there). But isn’t that beautiful? And, as an aside, isn’t it amazing that this came from an interview on an American radio station? Presumably Orange Crate transcribed it and then released it into the world for us all to live with. Marvellous.