Archive for the ‘New Media’ Category

From Mobile to Media: Two Quick Shots

Friday, March 5th, 2010

It sounds like a joke, or a scene from a TV (or perhaps YouTube) skit about our wacky modern world – shoppers inside a store using their smartphones to look up product information or comparison shop. Especially when it is a wine merchant, some snark is hard to resist.

But it is a hot new trend, says Bill Siwicki at Internet Retailer, and the merchants are jumping onto it. As usual there is a big generational divide; a quarter of mobile phone users under age 45 used their phone while shopping in a store; fewer than one in 10 older users did so.

Middle-aged fogie though I am, phone-a-friend (or product review site) while shopping makes a lot of sense. The only reason we weren’t doing it before is that we didn’t have the right gadgets. And now we do.

On another front, we all know that newspapers are hurting, and they do not suffer in silence. A whole genre had emerged decrying the death of newspapers and worrying about the future of news.

The worries won’t be eased by a new Nielsen survey reported at SFGate.com (the San Francisco Chronicle website). Internet users, especially in North America, are a tough sell when it comes to paying for news content.

But the same study shows that people are a good deal more willing to pay for movies, music, and games (and professional quality video, but not the user generated kind). The Kindle shows that they will also pay for books.

It seems that people are willing to shell out for content they regard as individually distinctive. If you want a particular song, or a particular book, you’ll pay for it.

The problem for newspapers is that people usually don’t care about a news story for its own sake – its sparkling style or dramatic mood – the way they care about a book or movie. They just want the news, and understandably regard widely available information as a commodity.

No, this does not lead me to a magic solution, but understanding the source of the challenge is a decent place to start.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Tech Execs Committing Truth

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

In an article unfortunately not directly available online, Roben Farzad of Business Week talks about ‘AT&T’s iMess.’ That is all you need to hear to know the basic story. iPhone users love their iPhones, but they hate AT&T and are quick to say so.

Analysts are paid to commit truth, and Rich Doherty of telecom market research firm The Engineering Group has some embarrassing truth for AT&T, ‘I’m not aware of any company in this country that has had so aloof a stance toward quality of service.’

I get my landline and broadband from AT&T, and have no problem with them. But I have none of the warm and fuzzy feelings I have toward my computer or software. Bandwidth is a classic commodity good, without distinctiveness, something you only notice when it isn’t available or reliable. But it can’t be good for a company when the only buzz it is getting is about bad service.

In other news, people talk about having thousands of tunes on their iPods, and they can’t have bought them all from the iTunes Store at 99 cents a pop. Lee Gomes at Forbes lets the cat out of the bag. Content piracy remains pervasive – and in fact the industry depends on it.

People find music to play on all those iPods. And Gomes cites one representative from a computer maker that produces high end home theater setups, who admits that they are used mainly for viewing illegally downloaded movies.

Also in Gomes’ sights, ’some newspaper publishers’ – read Rupert Murdoch – who complain about Google. People don’t need Google News to read stuff lifted from Rupert’s rags; there are a million gossip and political blogs happy to provide it. And if they didn’t, how many readers would pay for it?

The underlying truth is that we have no problem paying to use the Internet. Mobile or landline, we pay every month, and only complain if the service is bad. What we won’t do, except in exceptional cases, is pay a second time to see particular content.

And yes, my implied stance here, which is that of most Internet users, creates an impossible business model. But if content is king, the customer is emperor, and the users will likely win in the end.

Also the article is worth reading just for the wind-up quote from William Watkins, former CEO of disk drive maker Seagate, about the content his products are used to store. ‘We’re not changing the world,’ said Watkins. ‘We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap–and watch porn.’

Of course, that is a way to change the world, too. It worked for a tech entrepreneur named Johannes Gutenberg.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media | 2 Comments »

The Paradox of Social Media

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

A column about coming Internet trends in Mashup magazine, by co-editor Ben Parr, brought me face to face with a curious paradox.

The coming Web will be media-centric, he suggests, with ‘text-based interactions’ dwindling. But, adds Parr, social media will be its largest component. When you go online in a few years, he says, ‘most of the time you spend will be to connect with your friends.’

It is easy to hum along and nod to either one, but do they quite go together? Sometimes, yes, and there is nothing new about that. Entertainment and socializing have gone together since we did them around the cave fire. Now we can just do it at a distance, and mobile.

But usually we end up doing one or the other. We get to talking and the music fades to background, or we sit back quietly to listen to the music.

Now that we can have gadgets that let us do both, of course we will want both. But there is still a subtle paradox. The social part of social media is basically about chatting, whether it is voice or text.

Sure, we can send videos back and forth, but someone will have to make the videos. Most of us can’t come up with that many clever things to do with our iPhone cameras. (Or, in the enterprise world, send each other enough PowerPoint presentations that are actually worth the time.)

So whether we immerse ourselves in media alone or with friends, when we do it we’ll be communing first and foremost with … content creators. Who, for quality content, will mostly have to be paid one way or another.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media, Social Media | 2 Comments »

SEO Spam: Riding For a Fall?

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Internet users might soon be fed up enough to demand action against search engine optimization (SEO) spam. But they probably won’t have to, because the search engines will take action for them.

Once before at TecTrends Monitor I looked at the SEO business, and a second look is prompted by a new piece on Demand Media by David Carr in the New York Times.

The story is again about astonishing output – five times more YouTube videos than any other source; a million articles floating around online. And the remarkable, semi-automated way it is produced, with search algorithms spitting out topics (mostly in the how-to genre) for ’sharecropper’ writers and videographers who then grind out content in bulk.

A number of firms have jumped into this business, and AOL may be about to join them. The problem is that much if not most of what is produced this way is junk, produced in haste by people who don’t know or care much about the subject, but know how to crank out boilerplate text filled with search terms.

A  search fail described by the always useful Farhad Manjoo at Slate illustrates the problem. During a recent scandal the top search result for a celebrity plus mistress’s pictures rewarded salacious searchers not with the pictures, but merely an illiterate SEO spam ‘news’ article crammed with text repeating the celebrity’s name and ‘mistress’s pictures.’

This works, in a nutshell, because Google (and Bing) have not yet figured out how to identify this sort of junk and filter it out of search results. Just give them time, because SEO spam detracts from the quality of their product, namely good search results.

Search engine algorithms aren’t going to be literary critics in the foreseeable future. But linguists will probably be able to work out the pattern and density of keywords that marks spam or semi-spam, not substantive text, and adjust search results accordingly. Which will be the end of the SEO spam business.

The bottom line here is that usable work has to be created by and for humans, not with automated shortcuts. And while many labors of love can be had online for free, the rest you have to pay for, and pay enough to get coherent results, not SEO spam or other kinds of junk.

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Posted in New Media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | 4 Comments »

iPad: The First Reviews Are In

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Apple’s new iPad comes fully customized: There is a review for every taste, from Rave! to Bah, Humbug! For Slate’s Farhad Manjoo the iPad is ‘the computer I’ve always wanted.’ To Adam Frucci of Gizmodo it has ‘backbreaking’ shortcomings, and after listing eight things to hate about the iPad he added three more.

Rachel Mets of Associated Press declares that the iPad is more than just a bigger iPod Touch. Meanwhile Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle says, ‘You mean it’s a big iPod Touch? Basically.’ Which, Kim adds, is just fine.

As noted previously in this blog, there is a long back story to the iPad, an industry fascination with devices – call them slates, tablets, or now presumably pads – that are bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop. Michael Malone of ABC News calls it a Holy Grail quest, even speculating that this size corresponds to a deep rooted human impulse going back to the first data processing technology, the Sumerian clay tablet.

Opinions on the iPad may be all over the map, but digging a bit under the surface reveals a pretty consistent underlying topography. Love it or hate it, the reviewers identify much the same strengths and weaknesses. The differences in opinion come from how they weigh them.

The iPad is not ‘a computer.’ It runs a version of the iPhone operating system, and like the iPhone it completely hides the file structure from the user. If you like simply using a functionality with a minimum of fuss that is a plus; if you like knowing where your content is, and being able to move it, this hidden-ness will be a minus.

Likewise, all reviewers seem to agree that Apple has not solved the keyboard problem. If you only expect to use it to send the occasional instant message or tweet, this won’t be an issue, but if you want to write paragraphs, this is probably not the device for you.

Put another way, based on the early reviews the iPad is a good device for consuming online media while on the go – reading the news or an e-book, surfing the Web, watching video, and the like. But for interacting with online content – playing with it, mashing it up, creating it – the iPad’s limitations are more serious, perhaps fatally so.

In short, if you wish your iPhone had a bigger screen, the iPad may be what you are looking for. If you wish your laptop were lighter and easier to carry, it probably is not.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

iSlate?

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Update: As it turns out, it’s the iPad. Isn’t that awfully close to ‘iPod?’ Farhad Manjoo raves about it at Slate, but even he admits that it isn’t suited to typing much more than a tweet. Does it matter? We’re about to find out.

[Original post]

Steve Jobs knows what I am thinking: Does the world really need a tablet computer? The idea has been around forever in geek years. Jobs’ former nemesis Bill Gates predicted in 2001 that tablets would be the most popular type of PC within five years.

We are still waiting for them to break the 1 percent barrier, but the wait could be over tomorrow, when Apple is expected to make the public launch of its tablet, rumored (by Slate magazine) to be the iSlate.

So, does the world really need a gadget that is too big for your pocket or even your purse, but too small to have a true keyboard? Steve Jobs knows that my opinion doesn’t matter, since I’m not a mobile device user and don’t own iAnything. I’m not the target market.

The consensus seems to be that no, there really isn’t much market out there for a tablet computer – but Apple will probably manage to create one. I have to agree with the conventional wisdom.

The Apple mystique has always eluded me, but there is no doubting that it exists. The iPod transformed music listening, and the iPhone is transforming the way we think about smartphones, so no one will be surprised if Apple also transforms the way we think about tablet PCs.

They have a rare talent for guessing what consumers will like, and they certainly have everyone’s attention. I wouldn’t want to bet against them.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media | 3 Comments »

Murdoch versus Google: The Future of Content

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

A column by Richard Morgan in The Deal reports on a recent Australian TV interview in which Rupert Murdoch railed against free online content, and threatened to delist all his newspapers’ content from Google.

This was throwing red meat to blogs and forums, and the uproar was as predictable as it was entertaining. Rupert Murdoch is not a beloved figure, best known for hard edged politics and less than highbrow journalism. If the New York Post vanishes from my Google results I won’t miss it.

In contrast, unless you are a publisher or a rival search engine, what’s not to like about Google? We use it constantly, it gives pretty good results, and we don’t pay a dime. Even the ads are unobstrusive.

All the same, of course, Murdoch has a point. Whatever you think of his content, quality content is expensive to produce. And as a content creator myself I’d certainly like to be paid for mine.

But Murdoch also says ‘we shouldn’t have had it free all this time,’ and here he is wrong. If online news content weren’t free, for the most part we wouldn’t be paying for it – we simply wouldn’t be reading it. (There are exceptions for specialized content, as from Murdoch’s own Wall St. Journal.)

I read online news much the same way I read print magazines at my local library branch or Barnes & Noble. I’ll grab half a dozen magazines and thumb through them, reading any interesting articles, then toss the issue aside.

Online, it’s a series of Firefox tabs I work my way through, but I’m no more loyal to the sources I’m reading online than to the stack on a library table. My ‘loyalty’ goes to the library, or to Firefox, not the publications they make available.

When Salon, Slate, and the NYT tried to put content behind a subscription wall I simply went elsewhere. So did most of their readers, which is why the paywalls were abandoned.

But I still subscribe to a dead tree paper that thumps onto my driveway every morning, just as I buy books even though I could check them out of the library.

For this reason the uproar of publishers over Google Books also strikes me as wrongheaded. I use Google Books regularly. But it doesn’t replace book buying, it replaces the library/bookstore easy chair (and Interlibrary Loan for books not readily available). The excisions forced by publishers are as needless as they are annoying.

Print, I suspect, is far from dead. As the column linked above notes, 48 percent of American adults still read a print paper, and subscriptions are holding up surprisingly well.

This does not solve the problem of online content. Perhaps advertisers will realize that there is more to ads than click-throughs. (They pay plenty for TV ads, and no one clicks on those.)

In the longer term, I suspect we will evolve toward channels of content.

For books, a spectrum running from Google Books to the Kindle to hardbacks. For periodicals, perhaps, a spectrum from online to ’streaming’ print to the dead tree local paper.

Information does not want to be free, it wants to be accessible. And that is what the market, technology, and culture are gradually working their way through.

Update: An article I just came across in The Economist reports a study confirming what I called the lack of loyalty in online reading. But they gave it a better name, primly – or perhaps tartly – referring to British online news readers as  ‘shamelessly promiscuous‘ about where they go for content.

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Posted in New Media | 4 Comments »

If Content is King, Where’s My Crown?

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Following the tech press is always instructive, frequently entertaining, and sometimes alarming. An October article by Daniel Roth in Wired, ‘The Answer Factory,’ falls into that third group.

No writer likes to hear that the divine spark of creativity can be automated, particularly if this innovation is associated with low paying work, but that is exactly what Demand Media has accomplished.

The technology itself is pretty clever. Demand Media hunts through ‘long tail’ search terms, the sort that Google sells cheap. Then it feeds them through a ‘Knowledge Engine’ that determines what other search terms they are connected with, creating a sort of tag cloud.

At this point humans are brought in to arrange the jumble into prospective titles for articles or videos that, according to the algorithm, have a potential audience out there. (Mostly how-to’s of one sort or another.) Finally Demand Media hires writers or videographers to produce an article or video that fits the title.

The work is low paid, but there is a lot of it (and Demand Media pays, quickly and reliably). One videographer has ground out a staggering 40,000 videos – in all, the company has some 170,000 videos on YouTube. In one typical day he shot ten kayaking instructional  videos in a couple of hours, earning $20 for each.

Should I be offended or worried by this intellectual assembly line? I’m not. The technology is pretty cool, and it is giving a lot of writers and videographers some steady income. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The articles and videos are not the greatest, but that merely points out an ancient adage that the Internet has not completely changed: By and large, you get what you pay for. And King Content isn’t the first king to have to skimp on the crown.

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Posted in New Media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | 2 Comments »

TecTrends Reporter on New Media: We’re All Social Now

Monday, September 14th, 2009

At TecTrends we go through the tech and business press because you don’t have time to. We pull out the most interesting and noteworthy items, and our writers concisely and readably summarize the essentials. Each month we bundle these summaries of  key articles together for a range of major industries in the high tech sector, from Medical Research and Green Technologies to Social Networking and Cloud Computing. Each is indexed by company, product, and search term. These compilations are TecTrends Reporters.

The August TecTrends Reporter on New Media is one of them, summarizing and indexing 26 noteworthy articles relating to some aspect of new media. TecTrends Reporter tells you in a nutshell what the trade and business press is saying now about new media.

We choose the most useful articles, but our software determines the printing sequence. Glancing at the contents page my eye was caught by a fortuitous sequence of titles:

The New Maelstrom of Social Media
Everyone’s Social (Already)
You’re Not Social (Enough)
All (Almost) on the Internet

Together they have a Delphic quality. If you could tune in on the collective buzz of everyone who follows technology, and distill it down, this is what you would hear. Then, as with the oracle, you’d have to make sense of it. But that is what TecTrends Reporters are for.

Everyone has discovered social media. One author grumps about ‘Digg and the Me Generation,’ but businesses are finding an unexpected side effect to the spread of social media: People are talking about them and their products, and they have a chance to join in the conversation. The article just ahead of the quartet I listed, ‘The New Interaction of Social Media’, takes up the theme of using social media to engage with customers. This theme continues with the middle pair of the quartet, ”Everyone’s Social (Already),’ while ‘You’re Not Social (Enough)’ looks at one firm that is fostering its own internal social network.

The last of our quartet, ‘All (Almost) on the Internet,’ is not about social media but the spread of freely available online information, in this case, high quality scientific information. This is on the bright side of the other big story in the world of media:

What is going to happen to print? The first article, ‘The Future of Reading’ looks at another interesting bright side: Many authors are finding that making their books available online helps them sell more print copies, not fewer. Online release triggers online discussion, and the discussion brings in more readers. But newspapers are struggling to cope with the world of online free news. One title, ‘Papers Try to Bridge Print, Web Revenue Gap,’ tells the story in a nutshell; the article describes some of the ways papers are trying to make online content pay. Another article also tells its story up front; ‘Internet Paid Content: Back to the Future?’ (Perhaps, says the author, but first the content providers need to learn what people are willing to pay for.)

It isn’t all social media and print. These are the themes dominating current discussion of new media, but other discussions are going on, and TecTrends Reporter looks in on them. ‘Web 2.0 and the Law,’ looks at the implications of Web 2.0 technology for law enforcement. Another article has a title too long to blog, but shows how application programming interfaces (APIs) can serve as a marketing tool to extend the reach of messages and product information.

Overwhelmed by the mass of industry and tech news? Subscribe to TecTrends Reporters to stay on top of the trends.

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Posted in New Media | 2 Comments »