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Sunday, September 22, 2002
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 Sunday, September 22, 2002
started 9/24/2002; 2:29:37 AM - last post 10/4/2002; 9:57:54 AM
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Doc Searls - Sunday, September 22, 2002 
9/24/2002; 6:29:37 AM (reads: 5683, responses: 18)
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Carrying on 
| | Finally got more than a few hours sleep. Now I'm heading up to Digital Hollywood, where connectivity is zero, best I could tell yesterday. |
| | Which is too bad. I'd love to be able to report live from this thing. Can somebody please come through with cellular broadband? |
| | Always liked his beer, too. |
(S)Hotline
| | The first time I used Hotwire, I got a fine room at a fine hotel in San Diego for a pretty low price. |
| | The next time was yesterday, when I used Hotwire to book the next night in the Four Points Sheraton at LAX, a hotel it rated at 3.5 stars, for $55. |
| | After completing the booking, a Web page appeared saying a confirmation would be coming in "a couple of hours" or something like that. A few moments later (sent at 11:37pm) I got this note by email from travelnow.com: |
| | Thank you for your recent Hotel reservation request. A professional travel agent is completing your reservation. A reservation agent will contact you by email within 24 hours with your confirmation details. Below are your reservation request details. |
| | Next I got this (sent at 12:03am): |
| | There was an error in the system while processing your reservation. Please let us know as soon as possible if you would like for us to continue with your original request. |
| | I replied affirmatively. Next I got this (sent a few seconds later at 12:03am): |
| | If you wish to proceed with this request, lease advise us of your 3 digit CID number on your credit card. |
| | I sent the number and didn't hear anything after that. |
| | I arrived at the hotel around 10pm. The desk there had never heard of me, seemed barely acquainted with Hotwire, and was mystified by Travelnow.com. At length they gave me a smoking room. It stinks, but they said it's all they had. (At this pont I'm just grateful it's not on fire.) |
| | I just picked up my email, over a 28.8kbps connection (the best we can get here). It includes this item from travelnow.com, sent at 4:54pm): |
| | I am sorry, but we are unable to make your reservation as it is for checkin tonight. Please call the hotel at ... |
| | I asked the main guy behind the reception desk what he knew about Hotwire. |
| | "Lots of problems," he said. "It's a bad idea to use them." |
That'll work
| | DAMASCUS, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Syrian groups opposed to a U.S. attack on Iraq urged their countrymen on Tuesday to boycott American cigarettes, saying Arab people would not stand silent in the face of any U.S. military action. |
Meta cool
| | Still beta, but already terrific. |
But lots of cool looking folks wearing black
| | Biggest take-away from Digital Hollywood so far: almost no laptops. At one point the room was full and mine was the only laptop in the room. No wonder there's almost no connectivity at the show. What would be the point? |
| | Still, it's actually a very good show, with some very interesting debates on several panels. More about all that later (if I can find the bandwidth), after I get some sleep. |
Mmm good
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Anita Rowland - Re: Hotwire or Hotline?
9/24/2002; 12:03:19 PM (reads: 710, responses: 1)
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I'm thinking you were talking about hotwire.
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Doc Searls - Re: Hotwire or Hotline?
9/24/2002; 2:38:41 PM (reads: 739, responses: 0)
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lou josephs - Re: Sunday, September 22, 2002
9/24/2002; 6:12:30 PM (reads: 1340, responses: 15)
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Google news won't be free for long..btw..
They plan on trying to make it subscription based..
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Phil Wolff - Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 4:53:56 PM (reads: 2598, responses: 14)
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Doc - What would you be willing to do as a journalist to improve your chances of getting your story listed on Google's front page for a prime time hour? Add more links? Syndicate it to improve the number of linkbacks? Seed keywords? Add richer media? Link to competitive articles at other publications? - phil
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Doc Searls - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 5:05:02 PM (reads: 1169, responses: 11)
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I'd never thought about it. Of course, I'd never heard of Google News until a few days ago.
It would help to know their methodology.
Whatever else is going on, it's clear that more and more of Journalism is moving into the Googlesphere.
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Dave Winer - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 5:09:58 PM (reads: 1252, responses: 10)
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Same here, I hadn't thought about it until this thread.
What's a link from their news page worth??
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Phil Wolff - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 7:59:40 PM (reads: 1262, responses: 0)
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What's a link from their news page worth??
$10 by my swag. But it all depends on the traffic Google News sends.
Assume...
- a prominent link gets 1% of GN's traffic for 15 minutes (that's how often the page metarefreshes).
- GN gets 1% of Google's traffic.
So
- 150 million daily visits to Google
- 1.5 million visitors to GNews.
- 15,000 visitors per 15 minutes (about 1% of a day).
- That puts referred traffic to a top link (maybe 3% of visitors) around 450.
A really hot version of a story might survive for a whole hour, but most won't; too many choices unless you have an exclusive to source materials.
700 Feared Dead in Boat Disaster, via AllAfrica.com, was a top story on GN a few minutes ago. They have a banner ad ($8/k) and two paid button ads ($6/k). So they picked up about $10 for that one mention.
CNN had 11 mentions on a recent GN page, Yahoo 5, Reuters 3. So being a widely and deeply trusted source may increase traffic.
Aside from text ads on Google News ("West Coast ports shut until Sunday" next to "FedEx: When it absolutely, positively has to be there".), here are 8 ways Premium Google News can make money.
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Doc Searls - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 8:48:18 PM (reads: 1244, responses: 8)
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How much is a link from the news page worth? Depends on what one values, I guess.
I mean, do I want my blog to be considered a "news" page? It's more like a feature or a column page. Scripting News is more like a news page.
It does seem they make a distinction between news sites and other sites. I wonder on what basis?
How long before they do a similar service with blogs?
Back to packing boxes...
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Dave Winer - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 10:24:36 PM (reads: 1290, responses: 7)
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Sorry, I meant how much is it worth in a much more prosaic way.
How many hits do you get for a top-level item.
My guess: not very much. (At this time.)
Also: I don't have a very good feeling about this diversification. Not sure exactly where the unease is coming from.
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adamsj - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 11:03:23 PM (reads: 1319, responses: 4)
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I think where my unease comes from is that, in traditional journalism, somewhere there's an editor making decisions, one person, with the capability of ethical success (and failure) in deciding what is or is not important.
What Google News has is a sort of bastard child of democracy and market forces--code that makes a popularity rating of stories from commercial newssites. An unpopular story one editor thinks is vitally important--the Tuskegee experiment comes to mind--doesn't bubble up under this model.
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Doc Searls - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 11:25:46 PM (reads: 1327, responses: 0)
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I have unease too. More of the way we know and experience the Web depends utterly on private hands.
For better or worse (and so far it's been better, but it could get worse), Google is *not* part of The Commons. It operates in and on the commons, but is not the Commons itself. Critical difference.
Google is becoming The Directory, in a very practical way, in the Net's operating system. Or so it appears, in a practical sense.
At the moment I feel a bit like Google Island with its lovely volcano is really a giant whale. Kind of like that scene in the Munchausen movie, whatever it was. I didn't feel that way before this News tab got added, but now I do.
Maybe all we need to do at this point is take note of it. And hope that Google notes it, too.
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Doc Searls - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/28/2002; 11:26:09 PM (reads: 1334, responses: 0)
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I have unease too. More of the way we know and experience the Web depends utterly on private hands.
For better or worse (and so far it's been better, but it could get worse), Google is *not* part of The Commons. It operates in and on the commons, but is not the Commons itself. Critical difference.
Google is becoming The Directory, in a very practical way, in the Net's operating system. Or so it appears, in a practical sense.
At the moment I feel a bit like Google Island with its lovely volcano is really a giant whale. Kind of like that scene in the Munchausen movie, whatever it was. I didn't feel that way before this News tab got added, but now I do.
Maybe all we need to do at this point is take note of it. And hope that Google notes it, too.
discuss
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Jonathan Peterson - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/29/2002; 2:31:19 AM (reads: 1406, responses: 3)
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Of course the Tuskegee experiment doesn't bubble up in the modern corporate mediasphere EITHER. Something like police brutality at Portland's riots of last month seems more likely to be picked up thanks to Googlejuice.
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adamsj - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/29/2002; 1:37:10 PM (reads: 1473, responses: 0)
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I wish we'd had this discussion in time to see how Googlejuice affected the arrests at Friday's demonstrations in Washington.
My suspicion is that there wouldn't have been any effect on Google News.
Why? Two reasons:
1) Googlejuice is slow--news is fast.
2) I bet the Google News algorithms only take the weighting of news sites into account, not the sort of first-hand, ground-level reporting at which weblogging excels. In that case, the problem goes back to getting the attention of the news sites in the first place.
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adamsj - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/29/2002; 1:37:38 PM (reads: 1467, responses: 0)
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I wish we'd had this discussion in time to see how Googlejuice affected the arrests at Friday's demonstrations in Washington.
My suspicion is that there wouldn't have been any effect on Google News.
Why? Two reasons:
1) Googlejuice is slow--news is fast.
2) I bet the Google News algorithms only take the weighting of news sites into account, not the sort of first-hand, ground-level reporting at which weblogging excels. In that case, the problem goes back to getting the attention of the news sites in the first place.
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adamsj - About Tuskegee, breaking the story, and Google News
9/29/2002; 2:04:01 PM (reads: 1543, responses: 0)
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According to this story on NPR (which I'd've sworn I heard last week, but which dates back to 7/25), the reporter had a hard time getting the story printed.
The summary of the press history: To get the story on the AP Wire, an AP editor had to get one newspaper (the now-defunct Washington Evening Star) to agree to front-page it. Thereafter, the story made it onto front pages nearly everywhere, within days.
On the one hand, the herd mentality that kept the other newspapers from running the story until one ran it is a creepy reality of journalism. On the other hand, the bravery of the one newspaper that did agree to run it is also a reality of journalism.
What Google News could do is depress the ability of one newspaper to break a story like that into the national consciousness. If only one paper runs the story, well, it doesn't rise too high on the Google list, does it?
What Google News is good for is the same thing USA Today is good for--getting a quick pulse. USA Today is broader but shallower--Google News (on my first glance) is narrower but deeper. Neither one really fits what I want to see.
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henry copeland - Re: Hacking Google News?
9/30/2002; 4:30:39 PM (reads: 1276, responses: 1)
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Something to ponder: according to Google's newly-defunct Adwords program, "blog" currently gets searched for 69,200 times a month. (If this tickles you, I've posted other Adwords search tallies here and here.)
One other piece of empirical data to consider. My company serves as webmaster for a several small weekly newspapers that get spidered for News.Google. Although these publications have never yet come close to the Google's "front page," they do show up when people search for news from their obscure areas. Since last week, each paper is averaging 15 visitors a day from News.Google.
So my bet is that a front page link from Google will be worth 10 to 100X more than 450 visits, particularly if News.Google succeeds in joining the Drudge/CNN rotation that compulsive news-watchers surf.
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henry copeland - Re: Hacking Google News?
10/4/2002; 1:57:54 PM (reads: 1176, responses: 0)
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An interesting tidbit about the referral volume from Google.News. According to this report, Google.News sends 500 readers to ABCnews.com... in ten minutes.
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