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Friday, February 11, 2005
Deja vu again 
| | I don't see many of the early adopters using the LA Times or any other papers' RSS reader, we'll stick with our NetNewsWire or Bloglines. But we're not who the papers are after, they want the other 97% of net users. For many net users their first introduction to RSS will be via a newspapers 'new subscription service' (RSS to the rest of us). I assume that many of the papers will make some mention of RSS, but for the most part they will come up with a catchy name for their news readers. Users will not even know they are using RSS. Ask a tech novice what ISP they use and you may get a blank stare, ask them what online service they use and you'll get an answer. |
| | He also asks some questions: |
| | Are the recommended RSS feeds paying a fee to be listed? Who gets the advertising revenue? Does all of it go the paper? This sounds like a good topic for a follow-up post. More soon. |
| | Imagine putting your best news, with links to pages with your ads on it, in the right column of a River of News style aggregator with all your competitors' news on it (and weblogs of course, thank you). Now the readers no longer need to go to your competitors' home pages, you've just given them an incentive to come to you to get news from them. |
| | I think news-org aggregators will succeed if they're run by editorial people, not by advertising people. Readers come to papers for editorial, not advertising. And the editorial folks could add enormous, and unique, value to the news stream that flows in from the blogosphere. On the other hand, if these aggregators are more about capturing eyeballs than about informing readers, they'll fail, just like all those doomed projects Josh remembers from back in the '90s. |
Remembering home
The experience of no advertising
| | Blog posts are becoming the copy and images that catch our attention - a complex mix of issue, personality, skill, the technology of distributed networks, and link strategy. Some prominent Internet leaders such as John Battelle, Ross Mayfield, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Mitch Ratcliffe and a wide range of others have offered some sort of opinion along the lines that blogging represents the future of online publishing, or 'social' publishing, or citizen media or the 'new' news network. |
| | Bloggers are the new journalists and the new copywriters .. writing from their heads, hearts and guts in a new way, a less objective but often more honest level of critical thinking perspective that offers us useful facts, analyses and understanding. We then get to engage with the ideas, and think about what we believe and what we want to do with the information. |
| | If blog posts are the copy and images then contextual ads (which will become increasingly granular and useful because they will be more and more closely related to the content of individual blog posts), are the ways a reader's attention is attracted, obtained and then in the context of the online advertising business, monitised. This makes the notion of 'sell-side' advertising both more real (because - eventually - it won't be tolerated and won't perform as advertising unless it's honest and authentic and works) and more feasible (applications are appearing that will make this do-able). Sell-side means this thought in an advertising target's head ... "I'll use advertising if it actually means something to me and offers me something useful". |
| | This emerging dynamic very much begs the issue of how advertisers will also get increasingly granular feedback from bloggers about the what's-my-experience-and-what-do-I-want-to-know aspects of the advertising. |
| | Why is this happening in the blogospere ? Because increasingly people are finding out ways of building up trust and credibility whilst carrying on or out some kinds of exchange of value .. whether it's referrals to others and ways to tap into other networks, or by acting as 'information pivots' not unlike the old railroad turntables in train yards, pointing seekerfs of knowledge to other destinations, or by connecting and then building communities for advocacy, distribution, influence or activism. |
| | On the one hand, John makes the best case I've seen yet for something I still don't plan on doing: accepting advertising on my blog. Clearly, advertising will become as integral to blogs as it is to every other periodical publication. On the other, I hear the sound of Agent Smith in my head saying, Hear that? That is the sound of inevitability. |
| | Kinda brings out the Neo in me. Here goes. |
| | First, I don't write this blog for anybody but myself and my readers. By that I mean, it's not a "medium" for advertisers, or anybody other than my first person singular self. There's not only nothing between you and me; there's nothing behind me, either. There's you and me, not you and somebody behind me (which would make me a medium, no?). Certainly not economically. John makes this distinction clear to me when he writes people are finding out ways of building up trust and credibility whilst carrying on or out some kinds of exchange of value. If I'm building up trust and credibility here, it's most definitley not so I can cash in on it, or "exchange value" for it. This isn't to say that I'm not in the marketplace, by the way. It's to say I'm not selling anything here. That rotting blogroll over there on the right (gotta clean that up one of these days) isn't about an "exchange" of anything. It's about two other forces that also play in every marketplace: conversation and relationship. "Monetizing" those forces is a good thing in most cases. We wouldn't have markets without it. But not in all cases. This here is one of them. |
| | I used to think having a blindness about who's advertising one's blog was a Good Thing: a perfected form of the "Chinese wall" between editorial and advertising in newspapers and magazines. Now I realize that the wall itself can be a distraction. It says This blog is not by me alone, and Somebody else is doing business here. |
| | Note that I'm not saying advertising on blogs is a Bad Thing. On the contrary, I think it's good or even necessary for many blogs. I look forward to seeing it on IT Garage one of these days. It's just interesting to me that I'm feeling increasingly comfortable not having other parties involved in this blog. Turns out it's good to have one blog that's ad-free, so I can continue to tell the difference. |
| | Second, I have a problem with John's "less objective but more honest" characterization of what bloggers do when they report news. Go read When everyone is media, no one is. There Dave nails an uncomfortable fact about "objective" professional reporting: Any reporter who won't criticize his employer, also won't criticize his employer's competitors, because they could be his next employer. There are exceptions. Columnists of the Jimmy Breslin school will bite any hand, including those that feed them. But those exceptions don't disprove the rule. All of us have topics, and people, we protect. There are places we don't go. Dave's point is that reporters play a role that is — in at least one large way — no more objective than anything you'll read from the stand-alone, free-range journalists whose pubs are blogs. |
| | Third, I gotta go public with a bristle at the E-word: "experience." It's the new "content," which in turn was the new "eyeball" in its day. |
| | Over the last year we've been hearing more and more about the "experience" of reading, listening, and otherwise absorbing the stuff we demean by calling "content" unless there's no better word (which does happen, though less often than you'd think). |
| | I dunno about you, but reading for me has never been an "experience." Nor has experience ever been something that's "delivered." Sometimes reading is just reading. If you call it "experience," are you talking for yourself or somebody else? Just wondering. |
Third degree
| | Turns out these were friends of friends of a friend. Seems to be more of that happening lately. |
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