April 14, 2006

Why are we getting dumber?

It's a question that Nicholas Carr poses in the comments thread to his piece on lazy thinking and the Internet, itself prompted by Andrew Orlowski's piece on the Guardian taking aim at one of his favourite targets: Wikipedia. But is dumbness actually on the increase? And is that dumbness evenly distributed? I'd say no to both.

It's easy to look at the Internet and claim all this bite-sized information is turning us into the intellectual equivalents of ADD-afflicted toddlers stoked up on tartrazine and Sunny D. But that is maybe more a sign of wishing for the stability of the, mostly mythical, good old days.

I can agree with Carr that it feels as though the Internet is dumbing us down. Never before have so many people been able to get poorly thought-out arguments and prejudice far beyond the bounds of the bar-room. And that, in reality, is the only change. In the same way that, through phishing and similar tactics, the Internet puts con artists in direct contact with an unprecendented number of easy marks, thoughts that barely qualify for the term soak through into homes as easily as material that has at least been through a vaguely critical edit. When some of those bizarre pseudo-theories end up in student theses, that is nothing more than collateral damage.

The problem is that there is absolutely no evidence for people being dumber or less able to concentrate now than in the past. In the past, there were just fewer choices on what you could spend your time on. Did it mean that people spent their time in the pub discussing the finer points of deconstructionism. Not one bit. It was, for the most part, the same diet of prejudice and assumption that now coarses through gigabit fibre-optic links. I doubt that the ratio of intelligent thought to dumbness is no greater now than 10, 50, 100 years ago. It's just a lot more obvious. And it is, unfortunately, fashionable to be dumb at the moment.

What happened to James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds demonstrates the power of lazy analysis and the fetish for easy factoids. I started reading the book expecting to hate it, and only read it because it was painfully obvious that many of the people who so often think they quote from it had clearly never touched a copy.

Surowiecki's central point - made rather long-windedly - is that diversity of thought is A Good Thing, not that crowds always give you the right answers. You cannot have just any old crowd: it has to be a diverse crowd. Without diversity, groupthink takes over. If you were to read the first few chapters - or just the analysis of those chapters - you could come away thinking that the answer to everything lay in decisions made by crowds. From there, it's not too big a leap to demand that the old elites give way to the crowd, "because the crowd knows best". Luckily, this last commonly held opinion is little more than fashion. And will get swept out of the way by the next wave of popularity. The people doing the thinking will just be getting on with that, quietly.

Posted by Chris at 04:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Truth is free. Image costs money

The minor storm over Julia Hobsbawm's Editorial Intelligence project that attempted to forge links between hacks and flacks in the UK that were stronger than most people wanted to stomach has mostly abated. And it's left me with a niggling little question: are PRs so obsessed with their own image that they will promote themselves out of a job?

Christina Odone questioned the moral equivalence between journalists and PRs at the end of a column in the Guardian on Monday. In summary, hacks go out to tell the truth; PRs attempt to hide it. This prompted a certain amount of moral outrage among PRs such as Stuart Bruce, who claimed that stories get spun as much, if not more, by the media than by PRs.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of someone buying PR services. You have two people in front of you. One comes from the Max Clifford school of PR:

We only want what is in the best interests of our clients, who pay us vast sums of money, and to achieve that we are deceitful, creative and economic with the truth, often hiding it.

The other comes out with the currently fashionable line, as spouted by people like Paul Taaffe of Hill & Knowlton, that the Internet has changed everything, that there is no place to hide the truth. You need transparency in everything.

Now, to which one do you give your money? Who needs to pay a PR when you can just 'fess up everything on your blog, if that is, indeed, all it takes to maintain your reputation? People remember for a long time the consequences for companies when their executives sound like they had their dessert wine spiked with sodium pentothal. I suspect most people will go with the Clifford school of thought. Although they might wave the transparency banner in public. To keep up appearances, you understand.

Posted by Chris at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2006

On the Internet, no-one knows you're live

When a company organises a press conference, there is always a danger that none of the press will actually turn up. What you don't expect is for none of the people at the company organising the event to attend it. At least I didn't until last Monday as I sat through the slow-motion car crash that was Luminary Micro's big splash launch.

It must have seemed like a great idea on paper. You are a small Texas startup with a potentially global market in the technology sector. What better than a virtual press conference done entirely online? No need to get on planes or get people to one or two locations. What could possibly go wrong, click, go wrong, click, go wrong...

The warning signs started early. A package arrived in the post: it was a dollar bill encased in some puzzle, designed as a teaser for the launch. Then it was a set of repeated invitations to sign up for a press conference webcast at one of three times - effectively was the second warning - on Monday the 27th March. There was the option to organise a "personal briefing" at this stage. In hindsight, that would have been the simplest and, as it turned out, the most practical option. But, despite expressing reservations to the PR trying to organise the UK side of things - on the basis that some of the webcast systems only play nice with IE6 - I thought I would give the press conference option a go just to see if it was workable.. Some companies have tried audio-conferences for launches - and they are commonplace for financial results - so the jump to a webcast was not that difficult to see.

Then the details arrived. A chat system would be used to ask and answer questions. But only the 'best' or 'most popular' questions would get answered. Not so good. But as this only turned up Monday and given the time zone difference - the European slot would start at about 7am Texas time - I decided to stick with it and then get anything answered by phone straight after the session was over.

I logged into Vcall - which was hosting the webcast - at about 12:50pm and did some transcribing while I waited. That the next window to open was titled "Luminary Micro Luanch Presentation" throughout kind of summed up how the rest of this little experiment would go.

I don't know why - as it was obvious what was going to happen next - but the penny only dropped about ten seconds into the webcast. There was nobody from Luminary actually on the webcast. At least not at the same time that any of the hacks were expected to be there. The chief marketing officer, Jean Anne Booth, came on and started presenting, describing what was going to turn up on the screen. Then there was a crossfade to her again. Yes, the whole thing was prerecorded video. The launch was so interesting that the executives could not be arsed to turn up and do it live.

Now, you could argue that, as this bit was just presentation, it should not matter that it was prerecorded. I'd say that was a fair argument but there is something about recorded, scripted events that makes me forget to take any notes. What's the point? there's going to be a recording. At a live event, even with a script in front of them, people do drop extra bits in. With prerecorded video, there is no surprise. Monday was no exception: the crossfades indicated that people were sticking rigidly to a wooden script. And I was beginning to wonder whether I had fallen prey to some sort of Situationist stunt.

Even if I felt like taking notes, it's tough to get enough for a few decent quotes if the thing is sitting there buffering away rather than actually playing. Then really strange things started to happen. Segments of video would come to a screeching halt to be replaced by completely different bits of video. Given that the entire "press conference" little more than an extended Windows Media stream cooked up days before, you would have expected the company to do it as one stream. Not in this case: the software was running to some kind of schedule and just cutting segments off when it felt like it. And sometimes it just...stopped. Bryn Parry, GM of ARM's development systems division got as far as: "My name's Bry..."

After about 40 minutes of Fabulous Fuzzivision, the proceedings drew to a close and it was time to ask questions. Now, I'd by lying if I said any confidence in this part of the proceedings, and I had mostly tuned out while preparing some copy for production. But, in the spirit of experiment and to find out if anyone really was there, I fired off a couple of questions through the chat system. And yes, there really was no-one there. I left the window up for about half an hour while I phoned the UK PR to find out whether there was a living breathing human working at Luminary that would answer questions. To be fair to them, that call was organised within 30 minutes, which was a lot faster than I expected. Then again, I guess no-one was actually tied up presenting to hacks.

But it remains a mystery as to why anyone thought doing a press conference this way was a good idea. Especially when your client is a minnow with no track record going up against 40 or so well-funded, longstanding incumbents in a market that moves very slowly. Luminary is a microcontroller supplier - that is a business that demands long-term involvement: there are no quick hits in that market. And I'll certainly be treating any future invitations from Luminary with extreme suspicion.

Posted by Chris at 09:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

Candy for everybody. OK not everybody, just the popular kids

Just in case you were in any doubt about the use of social media and similar things were just plans to separate people and companies from their money, Steve Rubel finds the silver lining in a study by ANA and Forrester into advertisers' attitudes to TV advertising as reported by Clickz. The 30-second slot is so-1990s it seems.

The argument is that dollars spent on 'traditional' advertising will go into the various forms of online media as promoted by Rubel:

Reading this study is like standing under a giant pinata that just exploded with enough candy to go around for all of us.

I'm sure the people paying for the experimentation in new media will be only too pleased to know that's how Rubel feels: they would be in the pinata getting caned by Web 2.0 types I take it (and TV companies are the kids standing to the side because they're not allowed any more sweets).

Posted by Chris at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 17, 2006

The self-imposed straitjacket

Seth Godin kicked off a round of blogger introspection (of which this post is a part, I admit it) on how things can go wrong when a blogger posts too often. This rapidly turned into a discussion in one part on the coming attention deficit crisis, which remains something of a myth - most people are ignored most of the time right now, blogging does not change that. For the other part, it became a question of how often a blogger should post, as Problogger posed it. And that is not a Zen question by the way.

Problogger Darren Rowse gave several answers. None of which were: "When you've got something to say." Which seemed the most obvious answer. But, then again, I'm not a pro-blogger: I don't have an AdSense beast to feed.

It seems that, for many people, regularity is the secret of blogging, not content. This argument is, at one level, satisfying for someone who has worked in old media for quite a while - it's all about coming out on time, everytime at the same time. Yet, it seems crazy to impose daily posting limits on a medium that is geared up to irregular posting intervals. RSS aggregators make it easy to keep up with blogs - or any form of website - that spits out stuff intermittently.

I can see how high daily post-count blogs get more hits than those that post at irregular intervals. One is simply statistical - throw enough stuff at the wall and some of it will stick there and get noticed. The other is that the one rare post from a low-frequency blog is easy to miss in a barrage of new gadgets from Engadgets or the random thoughts of a machine-gun blogger such as Robert Scoble.

I had to move the comments feeds out of one NetNewsWire group into their own group because they were overwhelming the posts. I can see the same thing happening for some of the bloggers I have currently listed in my main groups of interest because I'm always skipping past their posts - for me raising a Yogi Berra-style thought: "There's nothing to read here, there's too many posts." The comments at Problogger echoed those concerns, as kicked off by Godin. Like a lot of people, I'm culling the prodigious and staying with the selective.

Some of the blogs that came in for the most criticism were targeted blogs that have set themselves up to be comprehensive. As a result, they are trapped by their own success. Everyone with a gadget wants to be on Engadget - and so that's where they wind up. I have never known attempts to be comprehensive in media such as magazines to be successful - that is what directories are for. I cannot see the world of the blog being any different. This is where sites like Engadget maybe have to look at their publishing model and start to sweep the stuff that is dull, but useful to have around into a wiki - and keep the blog for the real news and gossip. When all you've got all the flexibility of web protocols and languages to play with, why stick with just one format - especially when that format goes a bit stale?

Posted by Chris at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 03, 2006

A few good releases

Amid all the complaints of the appalling quality of most press releases - and the weary sighs of those who have heard the call for the death of the release once too often - it is easy to forget that, in some sectors, the information content of releases has remained pretty good. These rare beasts are written tightly and plainly enough for journalists work out their relevance with a skim through instead of having to work out what each phrase might mean. Some releases are still written as though they are news stories; the problem is that, in other sectors, this good style of release has been squashed by the corporate Nuspeak nightmare that always starts: "BigCo, Inc, the leader in high-mass total solutions, announces the availability of..."

The science research sector is one of the best examples of how the release can remain useful. So much so, that after lumping AlphaGalileo and Eurekalert into the main PR feed in NetNewsWire, I realised the error of my ways and put them in their own group so I can find them without wading through the other stuff - this is despite the fact that the feeds I use are not that precise in terms of the areas that I normally cover. The signal-ton-noise ratio is plenty good enough to inspect that group regularly. The rest of the releases can flounder in the main feed.

Science releases are not all paragons of good release style but, for the most part, I have no complaints about the way information is presented by the institutions that use services such as AlphaGalileo and Eurekalert to tell journalists (and anybody else) about their research work. One important factor in this is that a good number of universities employ specialist science writers to produce the releases, which are often formatted as stories that appear on the institution's own research-news pages. Those writers can often be the named first point of contact for journalists, or at least have their details provided alongside those of the lead researcher.

I picked out after a quick trawl through the feed something that would serve as an example. I won't pretend this is a random selection but I didn't cherrypick this one to back up my points. I just wanted one that I wasn't going to follow up (although, on reflection, it is something that could fit one of the mags I write for). It actually breaks a few news-style rules, but that doesn't matter because the important thing is that it gets its point across, fast:

Computer scientist sorts out confusable drug names

Was that Xanex or Xanax? Or maybe Zantac? If you're a health care professional you'd better know the difference--mistakes can be fatal.

An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone are injured each year from medication errors, and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has been working to reduce the possibilities of these errors, such as a documented case in which a patient needed an injection of Narcan but received Norcuron and went into cardiac arrest.

A few years ago, the FDA turned to Project Performance Corporation (PPC), a U.S. software company, to ensure they don't approve the names of new drugs that may easily be confused with any one of the more than 4,400 drugs that have already been approved.

PPC looked at the problem and then, based on a tip from a professor at the University of Maryland, turned to Dr. Greg Kondrak, a professor in the University of Alberta Department of Computing Science.

"During my PhD research, I wrote a program called ALINE for identifying similar-sounding words in the world's languages. The program incorporates techniques developed in linguistics and bioinformatics," Kondrak said. "At the time some people criticized it because they felt it wouldn't ever have a practical application."

PPC analyzed Kondrak's program and felt it might help with their project. Kondrak gave them ALINE and then created a new program for them, BI SIM, which analyzes and compares the spelling of words.

PPC combined Kondrak's programs into a system that the FDA has been using for the past two years to analyze proposed drug names and rank them in terms of confusability, both phonetically and orthographically, with existing drugs...

Now, if you were feeling lazy, that is pretty much a fully formed story. There are some issues that would need following up, in reality. The number of people injured through medication errors is unsourced. It also sounds a little high for prescription drugs. However, there are a number of studies that contain that information. A medical journalist would have no problem identifying a suitable replacement figure, or to find the source for the 1.3 million (outside of checking with the author). Also, you would need to check with the FDA what stage this project is at: have drugs actually been renamed through the use of this program? However, that is not the point.

What is important is that the headline gets you in. If you are writing about IT or medicine, you know just from the headline as it appears in the list in your feed or email inbox, that this story could be for you. The first para neatly sums up the problem - you don't have to be a doctor to work out that confusable names are a problem in prescriptions. OK, you have to go to the third paragraph to get the 'what' and the 'who' of the story but, by this time, I've got an idea that this release is going somewhere.

The first quote is not wasted. It's not some guy saying how pleased he is that he is able to announce a world-leading solution. It tells you something. In this case, it gives you some history and a nice bit of colour - people thought the research had no application. Suddenly, there is a second possible angle on this story if the current top does not quite fit the bill for my magazine or newspaper. It could potentially fit into a wider feature about the demand for all technology research to have an identified application. Or collaboration: who was that professor at Maryland?

Now consider how it could have been:

Pharmaceutical naming solution helps FDA approval process

The University of Alberta is pleased to announce its collaboration with Project Performance Corporation (PPC), a leading consulting firm focusing on computer and internet e-Solutions and project delivery, in the successful delivery of a pharmaceutical naming solution for the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA).

Based on technology developed by researchers at the University of Alberta, PPC's solution is now in use at the FDA as part of a program to streamline the drug-approval process. The PPC solution analyses the names of pharmaceuticals for their differentiability from those of 4,400 compounds already available on the market.

"We are pleased to have played a key role in the FDA's program to improve the differentiability of pharmaceutical names," said (please fill in name and job title of made-up quote guy). "It demonstrates the power of collaboration between academic institutions and corporations. We look forward to other applications with regulatory agencies around the world."

PPC worked with the university for three years...

As Rolf Harris used to say as he sketched out something that always started off looking like a potato in the process of recreating some animal: "Can you see what it is yet?" Luckily, with the real version, we don't have to play guessing games. It's set out in plain English, using sentences that convey information rather than different ways of using the word 'solution'. You don't need tags, you don't need XML formatting, you just need content. But that does involve whoever is writing the release, asking the client - in this case a researcher - the kinds of questions that hacks will ask: "Who will this help?", "What's it do?", "What were the problems?" etc.

Posted by Chris at 07:07 PM | Comments (3)

February 27, 2006

Dying for some recognition

Determined that the PR industry should not escape unscathed from carnage in the world of newsprint, Tom Foremski has demanded the execution of the press release, everyone's least favourite mode of communication, unless it gets a serious makeover. In the same way that PR predates an independent press - think roaming minstrels telling tales of derring-do - I suspect PR will have an easier time of post-press communication than Foremski believes. But that does not mean that I think the release is destined for much else than as search-engine fodder.

On the subject of news, Journalists often talk of the inverted pyramid. It is the only structure you need to know about when writing news - and is best avoided for any other type of article. You get the important stuff out in the first paragraph. Everything after that is just layer upon layer of progressively finer-grained detail. Press releases rarely follow this structure. Most of them are more like icebergs. The bit you can see does not give you any idea what the story really is.

Foremski identifies the DNA of the useless release:

They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on...

I have never been particularly unhappy with this state of affairs. There is something unsettling about receiving a press release so well put together there is nothing you can do but run it unchanged short of finding a completely different story buried inside it. If spin removal is the only thing you have to do as a journalist, then life is very easy, if a bit dull. The most troublesome releases are those that promise much but deliver little. These are the timewasters. You see the germ of a story in its first paragraph but after a little analysis you suddenly realise that it's not an iceberg at all but a piece of jetsam. There is no story there, just some vague intention. You could argue the spin strategy worked, albeit temporarily. And, clearly, some stories get to print that held together before anyone realises that the underlying content does not hold it up.

Foremski's prescription is simple enough: let the substance speak for itself. Don't spin, just state. Get rid of the canned CEO quotes explaining how pleased everyone is in Company X about their latest launch. And provide a load of backup material ready for assimilation into a finished story that fits the audience profile. However, I can't see how anyone is going to abide by these new rules, notwithstanding the fact that quote sheets are used in some releases. I can't see why a quote sheet full of canned, approved quotes is so much better than having them in the release. Live interviews are always going to trump pre-canned material of this kind whatever happens - and this is where most releases fall down, as all too often the people you need to talk to suddenly get all coy.

Putting tags in releases to make things such as inter-quarter financial comparisons easier is all very well - and that can be done to some extent using XBRL today. But I can't see how PRs and their clients necessarily gain. Take a financial release, for example. These can be works of arts in their attempts at legerdemain. A rule of thumb when dealing with any financial results release is to look at the first paragraph and work out what information is missing. Nothing on profits? Oh dear, sounds like they are down. Pro-forma prominent? Extensive pumping of EBITDA results? Regular metrics not looking so healthy. But if the release can convince an observer that operating profits matter more than net profits, well, I guess you cannot blame someone for trying.

And it is what happens to today's releases that determines the shape of future releases. If some PRs get away with positive spin with no substance, they are going to keep at it. The unfortunate truth is that PR is involved in a game of follow the leader - we reached the situation we are in because people who put together the first releases using the format that Foremski decries worked. Why is the language of the release so stilted? Because people look at the releases of the market leaders and copy what they see. "Well that works, let's do that," they can muse to themselves.

Following the market leaders is a poor strategy for new entrants. They have no reputation, no-one is following them. They need to stand out. But I doubt that any PR company will move away from what works unless an alternative turns out to deliver extraordinary results. And spin is inherent in the act of putting out a release. Companies only put out bad news release if they really have to. Named executives join with a fanfare through the front door, and are ushered quietly out the back with a binbag of personal effects. PR is not a public service: it exists to portray the client in the most positive light possible. If transparency works, then PRs will use it. But many companies do reasonably well on a diet of opaque announcements. It remains up to those outside the company - whether journalists, bloggers, activists and other parties - to work out what is going on.

In the meantime, I am going to stick with my current strategy. Ninety percent of all releases are of no value to me. I don't spend a lot of time, therefore, trying to decipher them.

Posted by Chris at 07:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 17, 2006

Link love is a rotten proxy for attention

The second part of Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere, for the start of 2006, contains an interesting but, to my mind, flawed assumption about what Technorati is able to measure. Sifry's analysis looks at "how attention has been shifting in the blogosphere". He then uses measures of link love to demonstrate that shift, but only to demonstrate that, even using blog-friendly metrics traditional media has captured much of the "attention".

The New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post are out in front still, according to his metrics. But the blog Boing Boing has overtaken BusinessWeek and Forbes among others, and is beginning to trouble the Guardian. Both Boing Boing and Engadget have apparently trumped Slashdot. The metric that Sifry is using is based purely on the number of unique links made to each site from blogs that Technorati tracks. In fact, looking at the data, it's not even clear that, by his definition, the attention is shifting away from the dreaded MSM. There are fewer blogs in the top 30 from January than from August 2005 or March 2005. January's graph is a sea of blue mainstream media sites with just four red blog bars in the list.

The problem with the analysis is that, using inbound links alone does not in any way capture attention. If you compare the Techorati results with the Alexa traffic stats, you come up with a completely different list of top sites. I know there are issues with any third-party stats, but it quickly becomes clear that Slashdot merrily trounces Boing Boing for actual attention - that is, people actually looking at the site's pages. I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence recently that slashdotting is still a force to be reckoned with. Boing Boing traffic coming your way is nice, but nothing still melts servers like a popular post on the site no-one in the world of blogging wants to call a blog - even though it shares a lot of DNA. The BBC ranks much higher under Alexa than on Techorati's list, easily surpassing the New York Times for traffic.

What is clear is that the Technorati stats show something but not "a shift in attention". They simply show the sites that people are most keen to discuss online using one particular website format: that does not mean attention from a worldwide population but what remains a largely North American community. The New York Times and the Washington Post clearly collect a lot of links from political bloggers of both persuasions, alternating with praise and opprobrium. They effectively collect a two-for-one every time and benefit from early growth in North America.

Sifry has decided that the place we need to look at is in the Magic Middle, where vertical blogs can compete happily with traditional media. That makes a degree of sense, as blogs tend to have a narrow focus. But, again, using links to measure attention is going to get you nowhere. Concentrating on links makes blogs focus inwards rather than on communicating with an audience. People write stuff for what is likely to pick up a link from what remains a small proportion of the online population. The numbers that Technorati touts sound big, but any analysis of blog traffic stats reveals how much larger the potential audience for a blog really is.

Sifry's posting followed last week's about the apparent rampant growth of blogging around the world, which caused some to question whether blogging had indeed hit its peak already.

Even after taking out all the splogs it could find, the company came up with a total of 27 million blogs, up from 20 million blogs in the autumn. That 20 million from last autumn contained a number of obvious splogs, which prompted Matt Galloway to perform an analysis based on predictions made by Umbria. Because splogs looked to be multiplying faster than blogs written by people, Galloway wondered whether the real blog count was going to be on the way down real soon. Sifry stepped in to claim that the 27 million was indeed free of splogs (at least as far as Technorati could determine). Now, that indicates that blog growth over the last six months was actually faster than Sifry claimed, as the numbers from the autumn have not been adjusted - assuming that Umbria was right and they needed to be adjusted.

The curve has got to turn S-shaped at some point, although that point will be delayed by the effects of churn - people moving from one blogger site to another - and the bulking effect of dormant blogs. Whatever the trajectory of the curve, the blogging population still some way behind the online population of some 1 billion people. The open question is what is the proportion of people who are willing to launch and maintain a blog? If that number were to move much nearer to the online total, then link love might indeed become a good proxy for attention. But, right now, it is going to give very skewed results.

Posted by Chris at 10:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 04, 2006

Tell it like it is, PRWeb

Sometimes, when the red haze settles on a blogger and the rant spews forth it's a bit disappointing when they apologise 24 hours later. David McInnis, CEO of PRWeb, should really have stuck to his guns after deciding that journalists are like lemmings and went public with his thoughts:

Next, let’s not kid ourselves. There is nothing sacred or holy about journalism anymore. For goodness sake, it has been the biggest product placement network going for close to three decades now. Turn on any network morning show, if you can stomach it, and you see one product placement after another. They are largely able to get away with it because it is so carefully orchestrated. Apart from being the ultimate in product placement, journalists today seem more like lemmings chasing the same dozen stories on a given day. What happened to variety?

PR Steve Rubel decided that this may be time for another boycott. For some strange reason, Rubel thinks you should use a service based on what the vendor says about it, not whether it actually works or not. Does PR do that to you after a while? Do all those years working on the message mean the message becomes the medium?

I can see Rubel's point. In general, it's considered good business practice not to insult your customers. At the same time, when someone gives their honest opinion, it is refreshing, and better than having everyone self-censor because someone might just take offence.

McInnis need not have worried about backtracking in a subsequent post on two counts. Strictly speaking, journalists are not customers of these press-release distribution services - those are the clients and agencies. I don't much care if the service is good or bad from them. If all that the feeds contain is junk, they just get pulled out of the RSS aggregator. No complaints. No "why doesn't this work better?" calls to the company. They just go.

I have to say that PRWeb tends to be stuffed full of more junk than the two large distribution services BusinessWire and PRNewswire. I don't lay the blame at McInnis's door. In being a free service to many, you are going to get a lot of stuff that people would not bother with publicising if they had to pay real money for it. The big two, however, have the advantage of "matter of record" status for financial announcements. That makes them difficult to dump even though there is a lot of guff stuffed in between the more important releases. However, the minute I find a better way of getting that source information, all those feeds are going in the bin. On any given day, more than 1000 entries are sitting unread in the PR group in NetNewsWire. And old releases roll off the end pretty fast. I skim through that lot maybe once a day, often less frequently than that, just to check I haven't missed anything. And that is where McInnis's comments ring true.

Product placement is a large part of the output from TV, newspapers and magazines, although it is a long way from being all of it. We spend a lot of time shoehorning product launches into news-form stories, and it's not a good fit in general. The day something is "announced", you are not going to get that. All you have are the claims and, if you push a bit, counter-claims from the competition (although, courtesy of the PR filter, company spokespeople have become increasingly cagey about being publicly sceptical about their competitors' launches) and analysts.

However, the process is quite artificial. It's not news as I would care to define it. The chances are that the bigger customers have been told all about the product weeks or months in advance. Certainly, in the trade sector, one of the considerations in deciding whether to write about a product launch is to weigh up whether everybody who might care already knows about it. Then you have the arbitrary launch dates; briefings under embargo possibly weeks in advance; and in some cases PRs trying to negotiate over cover slots, prominence or position.

To a degree, this all worked in the past, because people did want to see or read this content in magazines and other media. Ideally, they wanted impartial reviews, but that kind of thing has to wait until someone has tried it out. And, frankly, the review only works for certain classes of product. You can review a word processor easily because just about anybody who can use a computer can do that; evaluating a $100 000 chip-design tool implies you have a $1m chip to design in the first place. That is where the Internet and the user-written Web comes in. People with an interest get to do their own analysis and recommendations. As journalists, we can concentrate on pulling together that kind of input with other information that companies are less forthcoming about, such as delays or problems. Old-fashioned news, basically.

Similarly, there used to be a good reason for hacks to chase the same story. Circulations never overlap 100 per cent, even though there may be high overlap in some fields, particularly in controlled-circulation media. You want to make sure you have all the important stories covered. And, of course, you always believe you have the best approach.

Again, the ability to digest news from many different source through one tool, such as an RSS aggregator, makes this behaviour much more difficult to justify. I don't think you are going to get a gentleman's agreement whereby one group of journalists will always cede a story to another because it might be closer to a story - you would never get that level of co-operation even if it was healthy. But, the changes in user preferences means that chasing exclusive stories will take precedence at most media outlets. The herd instinct is not good for webstats.

McInnis is clearly thinking ahead, having realised that direct-to-consumer company announcements will become the mainstay of his business. If you take the trends outlined above and project them onto what that means for the press release, the conclusion is pretty clear. Most releases are useless to journalists because they announce things we will never write about and, because they are distributed widely, there is no possibility of exclusivity. But there is a user community that could be interested.

PRWeb and other distributors have a problem in that the material supposedly going to the consumer is not just bland and uninteresting, but often impenetrable. The advantage of the traditional model was that journalists are prepared to translate releases in plain English - often just to work out what the company is banging on about. The consumer or blogger audience has a far lower tolerance for opaque content. That will have to change if these companies are serious about a direct-to-consumer business. But I don't expect to see innovations from the distributors for journalists on the press release side of things. It will all be for the consumer, although I have my doubts as to whether the consumers will like what they get unless PRs change their ways.

Posted by Chris at 05:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 31, 2006

You can't offer citizen journalists money without causing offence

When a union issues a code of conduct to cover citizen journalists, it is easy to predict the blogosphere's reaction. It does not take long for allegations of protectionism to surface, even when the code asks for citizen journalists to get paid, not offer up legal indemnification and have their material treated properly. That is not to say that the National Union of Journalists code of conduct for what the union calls "witness contributors" does not have its flaws. The term "witness contributors" is just one of them.

For our first off-the-cuff reaction, let's cut to citizen-media advocate Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Jarvis's knee-jerk reactions to these things are so common that it's a wonder he hasn't knocked a hole through the desk in front of him by now. His reaction is true to form: it's all about them versus us.

As far as I can tell, the NUJ code seems to boil down to one thing. Media organisations have been paying people for content (aside from letters) for a long time. Just because someone has come up a whizzy new name for a class of contributor doesn't mean they should expect to get nothing in return, their work distorted or landed with a big legal fee. People who do not regard themselves as journalists already get paid for contributions - why should the use of a term end up with them being treated differently?

Conversely, in order to ensure that the media organisations themselves don't get landed with a big legal fee, they should check out wherever possible the authenticity of any contribution. That is my understanding of point two. I can't see how the NUJ will get any media organisations to sign up for the code in the current climate, but you never know - there is always the possibility that a paper or broadcaster is going to come a cropper by using material that has not been checked out, and suddenly discover that something along these lines might have made sense.

The media have already been caught out. It is just that the contributions were not made by people acting under the moniker of "citizen journalist". But fake photographs have been successfully sold or given to the media over many years with predictable results. Piers Morgan wound up running UK hack-trade paper Press Gazette after his former employer, the Daily Mirror, decided to publish fake photos of soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq that came in from an external source. The pics were more likely to have been taken in the UK with the help of some citizen actors.

Is there a reason why a contribution from someone acting under the banner of citizen journalism should receive less scrutiny than anything else that goes into a paper or broadcast? This is, however, where point three goes off the rails. The use of professional journalists as contributors should not necessarily mean that fact-check mode should get switched off. And this point does make it look like little more than protectionism when Darwinism is perhaps a better approach. Point four asks for payment for contributors: if the work is worth the same money, the people doing it are worth the same consideration.

It is at points like this where I could live without the designation of "citizen journalist" or "witness contributors" in this area. Neither term is very helpful for describing what is likely to be a very broad field. It will extend all the way from what we today call freelancers through to people who happened to have snapped a rising star falling paralytic into a gutter outside a night club on their 3Mpixel cameraphone, and managed to dodge the minder. This is presumably where the bit about not encouraging people to put themselves at "unassessed and inappropriate risk" comes in. That's a wide range - where does the citizen end and the professional begin? Would my use of the tag "citizen" be the only thing that matters?

Emily Bell in Media Guardian argues that the code would tie the hands of the media and leave them vulnerable to a slow death from the pecking of upstarts who eschew journalists for Joe Public. Such organisations would be unable to "experiment with 'wikis' or community-built sites". This is where the NUJ should have been a lot clearer. My reading of the NUJ's code is that it is aimed squarely at people doing traditional publishing, not experimenting with community-involvement sites. I find it hard to believe that anyone at the NUJ had that in mind when drafting this. Maybe they should have and made it clear but I think the link made by Bell in this case is an over-ambitious attempt at a reductio ad absurdum.

Neil McIntosh, also of the Guardian, writes:

The trouble with taking this old rule and applying it to the new world is that it's drawn up for journalists publishing newspapers; a situation where a limited number of people act as gatekeepers to the information, where the addition of bias or inaccuracy can be sensibly monitored.

Yep. I'd say the code is indeed aimed at traditional newsrooms. I think that was deliberate. To try to pretend that anyone believes you should police a forum or a comments area in this way is just ludicrous. But it will clearly be marked out as a user area versus one produced by paid specialists.

There are those in the Web 2.0 crowd who argue that only users should produce media. The time for the old priesthood is gone; the media should simply shut up shop and go do something else. In that case, this code is completely irrelevant. However, this game has not played out yet. What is happening now in terms of trends may not be representative of the long term.

I suspect that, for some time to come, people will be paying, or having people pay on their behalf, for access to news that got checked before it went out on the wires. And there will be room for the user-generated content, as there is already. I think that is the heart of the problem for the NUJ: the media who choose to differentiate by trading immediacy for a willingness to check will have their own codes of conduct. Unless forced to by some future government-appointed press monitor, the situation is too fluid for a union's version to make much headway. However, any such individual code might not be a million miles from this one.

Posted by Chris at 09:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 18, 2006

The media comments box stays sealed

After my last post on bloggers' misuse of the word 'conversation', Sean Coon - who wanted AdAge to put comments in with journalists' columns - responded with his reasons for wanting comments to be aired in public and a question of his own:

Why do you think the majority of the mainstream media have dragged their feet in opening their online columns to allow commenting? Simon [Dumenco]'s point about antiquated publishing systems might have something to do with it, but *i feel* that editorial departments, and possibly traditional 'writers' want no part of it.

There are lots of answers to this one. One point I'd like to make first though is that sections of the mainstream media or old media, whatever you want to call them, were quite quick to put discussion forums on their sites to allow people to comment and talk about stories and columns. They were not hugely successful for the most part, which came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people in the industry.

One assumption that people outside the traditional publishers make is that journalists believe they write copy, which is edited to fit a page, consumed quietly and avidly by a hungry public that nods sagely in response before moving onto the next story. Even the most misguided hack knows otherwise. People comment on stories to themselves at the very least, talk to their friends, colleagues or neighbours about what they saw in the paper - whether it was arrant rubbish, news to them or quite interesting. Forums were meant to cater to that discussion and, theoretically had the spin-off benefit that the more that people hung around the site posting comments, the more ads they could see. Yet, the forums often turned out to be tumbleweed-strewn wildernesses despite the belief that participation should be strong.

Marshall McLuhan wrote about the participation in Understanding Media, published in 1964, just about the time that Douglas Engelbart built the first computer mouse and a year before Ted Nelson came up with the term hypertext (albeit 20 years after Vannevar Bush postulated the Memex). "The individual news item is very low in information, and requires completion or fill-in by the reader...we have discussed the press as a mosaic form successor to the book-form. The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and commands deep participation. This participation is communal rather than private, inclusive rather than exclusive."

On the one hand, you have bloggers who claim to now feel excluded from the modern press process. On the other, you have the journalists who differ in their opinions in whether they are being exclusive and what to do about it but, deep down, do not feel that much has changed in human nature. Blogging has brought a new mode of expression but it's questionable as to whether the medium has actually changed what people were doing before. Blogging lets people communicate their thoughts on what is in the news to a much wider circle. If your work colleagues or friends do not care all that much about events in Turkey covered today, you can post them on a blog and maybe find someone else who agrees or disagrees. Or just watch the webstats and find out that other people like to read about events in Turkey. In McLuhan's worldview, it marks a further extension of the human, but has it altered what people wanted to do in the first place or just given them a much more efficient way of distributing their thoughts than through a small circle of acquaintances.

But, amid this change, the news media have done nothing, absolutely nothing to stifle the debate. A quick check of Technorati's home page will generally reveal that the top stories and columns under discussion almost always derive directly from the mainstream media. In fact, there are so many places to go one has to question whether the media sites should try to kick-start comment threads on their own pages. If you look at the mags that have them, the comment threads are often lonelier places than external sites.

There are many possible reasons, and a number of them lie in the way that the media sites handle the user interface for comment threads and forums. The software packages are often incompatible with the content management systems used to post news stories, so you force people to jump, which puts them off. But some of the problem is, to my mind, structural. People want to be able to comment off-site so that they can own their part of the debate. Having the comment threads on-page often brings up questions of control and censorship - whatever happens, those threads will be moderated. Off-site, it's up to you.

I shouldn't ignore corporate inertia. Almost every company seems to have a different structure for mediating online and print products, and the IT that powers the website and production systems. A common conversation, no matter what the structure is, goes like this:

Editor - "We really need X for our site."

Person in charge of the infrastructure - "The public don't want X."

End of conversation.

I once worked in a place where the people in charge of the websites were ex-editorial but had IT responsibilities. The search function was badly messed up - to the point that we advised people to use the site-search option under Google rather than attempt to use the on-site search. Questions about why repairing the archive search was not a priority, or at least making it possible to put a Google button on the site as a competitor had done, were met with the bald response: "People don't use search for news." This was some time before Google News happened along, but I think even recent visitors from the planet Zarg might have been baffled by the response from the people in charge of running the website. The real answer was, of course, they knew it was messed-up but they did not know what to do about it, even though it was possible to come up with a business case as to why effective search was important to the site.

For adding something like comment threads to stories and columns, the business case is less clear. Editors, even if they think adding the threading software makes sense editorially, will find themselves beating their heads against a brick wall if the people in charge of the site software do not agree. And I think the business case for having comments on-page is so intangible that few would want to push it through - there are so many other things you can go after that could bring in more readers. Don't forget, each and every blog post brings in more traffic. By sending people away - albeit by default - traffic is still turning up at the door.

The issue then becomes the one of the feeling of exclusion that bloggers complain of. But do you need on-page comments from the writers, or simply a way of debating points with them? You can see that happening with a number of journalists already, using either blogs on the magazine sites or their own. More will follow if they see a benefit to the process. However, I think any sensible media organisation will do what it can to move where this market is headed rather than try to play catch-up with blogs as they are today. Second-generation intermediaries - the companies that follow Technorati - are likely to be able to bring together the sources of debate and the commenters more efficiently than is possible today.

Posted by Chris at 09:06 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

Speak up or the bloggers won't listen to you

It was inevitable that a column that described blogging as nothing special in the world of writing should open up a further bout of collective self-delusion by much of the blogging community. With a smattering of exceptions, such as Adrants, bloggers ganged up on AdAge columnist Simon Dumenco: giving him the same message many times over, that blogging is different.

How is blogging different? Why it's the conversation, they argue; it's all about the dialogue (I put the links in at the bottom to make the post easier to read). The blogging = conversation assertion stands alone as the greatest of the lies of blogging. I fail to understand why the word has stuck like a leech to this particular invention of the late 20th Century. It has reached the level where people complain about having to email and then post a blog entry because a particular site does not have comments on the same page as the article. Ask yourself, are those people after a conversation - something that can be carried out using email as well as any other two-way medium - or something else? And if it is something else, why do bloggers persist in the use of the word "conversation", other than the word gets top billing in the Cluetrain Manifesto?

In fact, blogging offers a way of avoiding conversation without offence; a method for forming apparent social connections without actually engaging with people directly. People only occasionally get worked up about bloggers not responding to comments or making corrections based on comments. If someone ignores emails, the other party is likely to get a lot more annoyed than if a comment goes unremarked on a blog. That's the thing about conversations - they demand the active participation of at least two parties. A lot of blog conservations are pretty much one-way affairs. The blogger posts something, people comment - often pointing out errors - and the blogger has disappeared, having moved onto the next post. How does this function as conversation? It does not. But it does function as debate. Why are commenters so insistent on having their opinions published if they do not believe they are engaged in a public debate or forum? Why is a private email or phone conversation not good enough? Because those people are trying to convince an audience of their position: that is surely the characteristic of a debate, not a conversation.

The distinction might seem to be pedantic. You could argue that conversation as a word is close enough to what is going on in blogging. Other words have been given bigger twists than this. But it ill serves a community to lecture commentators who are not part of the club on what blogging is or isn't when that community cannot be honest or analytical enough to understand the process in which it is engaged.

As to Dumenco's headline about blogger being a cooler name: just wait until the fashion cycle rolls round and the name is as chic as parachute pants, I guess we'll be seeing a lot more 'writers' online.

The conversationalists:

Brain of the Blogger

Ad Age Says There Is No Such Things as Blogging..But The Name Is Cool

Blogging Isn't Just Writing, It's a Dialogue

Bloggers Should Explain Blogging Technology

Blogs are (public) conversations, almost like a giant party - This post at least emphasises the public nature of commenting versus emailing.

Posted by Chris at 10:44 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 08, 2006

Wake me up when Google buys Dell

PR Steve Rubel has accused hacks of sleeping on the job, especially at weekends. Well, they probably were, but the stories he points to are not things to get you out of bed and on the horn to the senior flacks at Dell and Google over your Saturday bacon and eggs.

So, what did they not do? Just what is the collective laziness of the MSM keeping from you? Well, at the end of last week, apparently, Dell started shipping PCs with a slightly modified browser setup. The change was that Dell decided to make the default home page for browsers installed on its home PCs an iGoogle page designed for Dell customers. At the same time, Dell had installed Google Desktop. Now, there are a number of things that have happened recently that make me wonder whether we have fallen through a hole in time and we are re-running the mid-1990s. This is one of them.

For more than ten years, browser suppliers, portals and search engine providers have been convincing - or just paying - PC makers to make their wares the first thing the punter sees when they plug in their shiny new hardware and try to fire up the interweb. Since then, these deals make the news on occasion. But that is generally only when there is an indication that the deal actually changes the business dynamics of the hardware or software industries. For example, Opera's shift to shipping a free browser was made possible, in part, by sponsorship from Google. That was a change in business dynamics. But, even then, the Google involvement was a small part of the overall story.

Google hosts the web page for Dell owners on a part of the Google site designed for customised web page - not an expensive move, I suspect. That, for me, does not indicate much of a shift in how either Dell or Google goes about its business. You could make an argument for it being a finger in the eye for Microsoft - but is that a vital part of a more important story or just some commentary on the fluid nature of Internet-related deals?

Google is a hot company right now, so there is an argument for running just about any story on the deals it makes. But I think with this one, any news editor would want to know that there is more to it - if there is anything unusual about the deal - before committing someone to that story. Otherwise, it's just "PC maker tweaks software bundle". Whoop. De. Doo.

Rubel went further to admonish the PRs at those companies for not fast-tracking a release on what they just did through the approvals process. Even if there was a release prior to this change, would anybody have cared enough to do more than edit it and post it? The chances are that neither Dell nor Google planned to produce a press release. Neither company is so profligate with releases that a deal of this nature would result in one.

Could the media have 'scooped' this story? Unless hacks bought a Dell PC every week or rang Dell up every few days to ask "have you changed the software bundle?", it seems not. The general public will have one over the news media every time on stories like this because people external to the company can provide the most timely information. If they are bloggers, they will blog it. No matter what day of the week it is. If PRs think hacks are going to chase their tails on this kind of story, they need to think again. Quickly.

Posted by Chris at 07:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 06, 2006

Embossed gold lettering is tough to sell on electronic paper

To get the price of ebook readers so that they will fly off the shelves of shops and supermarkets, a cellphone or games console-like subsidy model might help. The subsidy approach is something that Irex Technologies will concentrate on - albeit not for the mass market. Irex is aiming at specialist publishers who sell subscriptions worth hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to drive initial sales. Patent services, scientific publishers and financial specialists would seem to be good candidates. Maybe technical manuals for maintenance staff will make more sense on such an ebook than on paper or a laptop.

However, it will not take long for a company such as Irex to run out of potential customers. A long-term viable market means breaking away from any form of subsidy model. For the mass market, such a model will rely on digital rights management (DRM) and it's hard to see any DRM working for the printed word where there is so much resistance to it already in audio and video. If you can see it or hear it, you can rip it despite the intense efforts of content suppliers to make hardware makers slap intrusive electronic controls on their devices.

If you cannot make people pay money every time they switch the thing on - and that's what you need to support mass-market subsidies, then the subsidy model is a non-starter. I suspect that, even if the DRM worked as its creators hoped and proved tough to crack, people would still prefer to buy non-subsidised readers as this would give them so many more reading choices. After all, who buys a DVD player that cannot be set to play DVDs from any region when given the choice?

In this scenario, copying material is trivially easy and something that will happen day in, day out. New authors will positively encourage it, embracing the Cory Doctorow doctrine that obscurity is worse than royalty protection. Mainstream publishers will argue they have the cream of the authors, but they will find it hard to justify paper-novel pricing for their biggest moneyspinners: the bonkbusting bestsellers. The ones with the gold lettering piled high at airport bookshops. These are not books people want to keep: they read them on holiday or just on the way to a holiday, then toss them because they are too heavy to bring back. One ebook means a whole pile of over-thick pulp. Disposability will equal cheap in the minds of most consumers with margins set to plummet as a result - books are not that expensive to print. The cost to publishers largely lies in the risk of commissioning, editing and then printing up a big pile of turkeys that don't even fly out of $1.99 bargain bins.

Vanity is the thing that the publishers will end up focusing on, unless they can find a way to profitably nurture popular bestsellers and get decent money without the authors just doing it for themselves. Not vanity publishing: that will have been killed off almost by the ebook revolution. This is vanity in terms of the books that people like to be seen to have read. Even if they haven't. Devotees of Irish satirist Flann O'Brien will recall the service offered to the nervous socialite of writing insightful margin notes into thick, leather-bound volumes. The books that people will continue to buy, and pay big money will be those not just for reading - if at all - but those to be displayed on a shelf. I'm not sure how you get to collect first editions of new writers in this scenario but I'm sure someone will think of a way: maybe that will be the new vanity publishing: "This one's got great reviews. Quick! Get a couple of hundred knocked up down the printers and make sure they get signed."

Posted by Chris at 10:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bye bye print

As a primarily print journalist, one question I often get asked is how long do newspapers and magazines have left? I have given the same answer for the last ten years: as long as it takes to get an electronic reader with the visual quality of paper, that weighs no more than a thin paperback, with the battery life of an alarm clock and costs tens of dollars to buy. Actually, the battery life can come down a bit: a couple of weeks is just dandy, thank you. When all those things come together, you have the effective death of mass-produced print. It's difficult to think of any reason why you would not use an electronic reader over paper with those features other than stubbornness or vanity. However, vanity is powerful motivator, so I give books - some of them at least - a much longer lifespan.

Printed paper is no more than a distribution mechanism. As Mark Cuban pointed out, it is a distribution mechanism that is becoming prohibitively expensive compared with the alternative: electronic distribution. I disagree: print has always been expensive. It just happened to be cheaper than hiring town criers or minstrels to spread your words. Oddly, printing and distributing paper media has never been cheaper (well, barring some rises in paper costs recently). Go into a bookstore like Borders and just look at the racks and racks of mags. Many of them come from small independent operations, not just big publishers with deep pockets.

Individual circulations might be declining in a number of cases, but the number of titles remains higher than 20 years ago. Maybe even 10 years ago. Some news magazines have seen circulations climb, not fall, at the expense of other titles. However, the main gainer has been online news - not a big surprise. There are many bloggers who believe this shift provides an opportunity to remake the newspaper in their own image - that the change in distribution mechanism provides an opportunity to throw out the old ways of researching and publishing stories.

For printed newspapers, brand loyalty is important. That's how you get the money. People buy your paper everyday because, in the main, they like it more than the other ones out there. With a big enough circulation, you get advertising. And everybody's happy. Online, there is no brand loyalty. Just the stories that look interesting at the time. This makes getting serious money for your product a whole lot more difficult. This is why Cuban and others suffer "an onslaught of ads, popups and intrusions". Each one is cheap: having a lot might just pay for your staff, if you're lucky. It's no surprise to find that publishers are happy to continue working in print when the trend is towards online. It might be a decline, but it can be profitable, managed decline if they play their cards right. If not, you just lost a good newspaper and wound up with a collection of old press releases.

Personally, I reckon there will be a split in online publishing. Newspapers and mags that survive the transition best will disappear behind payment screens and only a fraction will make the necessary leap. These will be operations that can break their own stories. The others will sit in a ring around these and will be mixtures of blog and mag, in various proportions. They are those that can live off Adsense and its successors.

The effect on the book market, however, might be even more dramatic.

Posted by Chris at 10:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 03, 2006

Google pollution

Om Malik reckons that the geeks are taking over Google. To soak up that quiet time before 2006 really gets going - it looks as though the working 2006 has been postponed to the 4th if out of office replies from the UK are anything to go by - he recommends googling on common first names.

Try Paul, and soon after Paul McCartney you get Paul Graham. The number three entry under Robert is, naturally, Robert Scoble. I tried Chris and Chris Pirillo came out top. Check out the backlinks and soon the reason becomes pretty clear. All of the people cited by Malik are bloggers. Graham's site does not use a conventional blog structure but it's close enough for jazz. It's not so much that geeks are inheriting Google but that famous - that is, heavily linked - bloggers geeks are encroaching on the top pages. Try Jeff and Jeff Jarvis appears at number two.

What do bloggers do? They link to stuff, and mostly other bloggers. I think I packed five such links into the last two paragraphs, so I've done my bit for their already inflated pagerank. Malik's post is only a bit of fun but it does some problems with the Google's results and the disproportionate visibility of blogs.

One is the common belief that Google is some sort of guide to the zeitgeist. Google's creators made a sensible decision to use pagerank to order search results. Citation is, for the most part, a good way of showing how important a piece of information is. It is, also, highly vulnerable to gaming, which is why splogs have been so successful at polluting Google's results. Successive tweaks to the pagerank algorithms deal with the worst abuses as they appear. But there will always be some pollution with a system that depends largely on people "playing by the rules".

The bloggers themselves have unwittingly - and on occasions deliberately - gamed the system by being so profligate with links and made it look as though bloggers are the only community with a voice on the Internet. That is a situation that cries out for a major tweak to the result-ordering algorithms before everyone starts believing that bloggers are genuinely representative of the world population. However, Google has to weigh up whether demoting blogs works for its interests: who else is going to carry Adsense content for the company?

Posted by Chris at 10:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2005

The things you can find on PR Web

PR Web is one of those press-release services that I keep wondering whether I should stay subscribed to. Its RSS feed setup is at least as good as PR Newswire's but as a free service, there is no entry barrier to posting stuff out - just as long as you are capable of using a web form. Although it's good have such a free service - nobody need be denied the ability to get their releases distributed to anyone who wants them - you have to wonder whether charging for distribution would make the service's users think a bit more about what they want to say. The net effect is that even in an environment where there is generally more bottom than barrel, PR Web is the least useful press-release service. You can be hard pressed to find a signal amid the noise, to the point that in my Netnewswire setup it does not even feature in the main PR folder.

Then, once in a while a real gem pops up that makes it at least entertaining. Take this nugget, Source of the Gravity of the Earth has been Discovered:

"Nuclear scientist Mehran Keshe says a double magnetic field provokes gravitational effects in stars and planets, like Earth. Earths center contains a small sphere filled with hydrogen, acting like a semi-fusion plasma reactor. Inside currents create a basic magnetic field which is super-imposed by the already known magnetic field of the iron core. Such double field can be replicated in man-made plasma reactors, to be used as energy and anti-gravity system in space and air crafts, but also in cars, household products and electronics which will have independent long-lasting energy generated by micro plasma reactors. [PRWEB Dec 16, 2005]"

Funny, I thought elves were responsible for gravity. My mistake.

Posted by Chris at 11:38 AM

December 14, 2005

The new way to make money from Web 2.0. Do it the old way

I am a snark-filled reporter so I could not help but write about a recent Dave Winer post. I'm beginning to wonder whether the man behind OPML is planning one of those "Who Moved My Cheese" style self-help business books that use slightly skewed views of a situation to provide apparently dazzling insights into problems that are more readily and easily explained by conventional wisdom.

Winer explains patiently to the simple reader that, with "Internet 3", the key to making money on the Internet is to send people away from your site. They will often come back, he argues. He cites Google and Yahoo's news aggregation service as examples of pages that are designed to send people to other sites and that they make money by doing this. That is true, but the key is not that they send people away, simply that people come back because what they offer is more useful than other sites.

In the case of Yahoo's news aggregation, it is easier to go there to follow two or more media news feeds than to surf each individually. In short, things that are useful tend to make money. Because of this, we can expect RSS-based aggregators to supplant Yahoo's current generation of news aggregation service. However, judging by recent acquisitions, Yahoo appears to have sussed out where the next batch of cheese is coming from.

For my next trick, I'll explain how to make money by buying low and selling high.

Posted by Chris at 11:32 PM | Comments (1)

November 28, 2005

Didn't we mention the company? Dunno how that happened

Jeremy Pepper's spidey sense tells him that a PR was instrumental in BusinessWeek running a piece on blogging, largely built around the experiences of investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein with wikis as an alternative to emails with enormous cc lists. As a PR, Pepper noticed one thing most people not in that industry would not have bothered to think about: the name of the supplier of the wiki to DRKW was missing.

In the world of wikis, this maybe should not be a surprise. Most of them are open-source, freely downloadable chunks of software that DRKW could have installed without any outside help. However, a few quick checks indicated a vendor was involved in the wiki project. The pesky hack had simply left their name out. However, that did not seem to tick the supplier off too much, judging by the way they flag up the piece on their website, found after a quick Google.

Pepper sympathised with the PR flack's situation. What was going to be top of the cuttings pile for the client was no longer such a shiny piece of placement. It's not a rare complaint from PRs - and I can understand why. It's not unusual, after you've done all the research needed for a story or feature, that some information just falls off. And, in the case of stories about companies' use of technology, the name of a supplier is often the first victim. It's not malice or forgetfulness, it's just not pertinent to the story that actually runs.

If the PR asks what happened, the hack has one or two answers to fall back on. Blaming the subs (UK jargon - desk editors in the US) is a good first attempts for the cowardly. Just telling them that the supplier of the software just wasn't pertinent to the piece is the brutal truth but can get into a long, often circular discussion. But at least it's honest.

It's whatever gets the job done that counts. If you read the piece, there is no need to mention a wiki-software supplier. The piece is about wikis versus email, not wiki supplier versus wiki supplier. So, who needs to know which wiki was involved? There are many, both closed and open source. And, right now, there is not much in any of them that really makes them stand apart, at least not from the point of view of the general business reader. Maybe the people trying to stick one up on the Intranet care that TikiWiki's documentation is about three sub-releases behind the latest version of the software or what the security of PHPWiki is like. A commercial version may likely to have the edge there (although not necessarily). But the business reader does not care about those details. Just that wikis might remove them from email hell.

As I was halfway through reading the piece, I found myself disagreeing that the piece was inevitably PR-inspired. Maybe the CIO at DRKW had popped up at a conference about social software and the story developed from there. Then I remembered my good friend, and yours, Google. I wasn't expecting the supplier to come out right at the top, but there it was at Socialtext. And it was then a wry grin cracked across my face. The company has posted great big chunks of the piece, including a mention of one of Socialtext's other clients. Halfway down, it claims: "The article goes on to describe the Socialtext wiki solution and it's [sic] benefits."

This, you will recall, is despite the name Socialtext not actually appearing in the printed copy. Maybe it did make it to the top of the PR's cuttings pile after all.

Posted by Chris at 10:37 PM | Comments (2)

November 25, 2005

You think it, we own it

Presumably as it falls in with Jeff Jarvis' view of the world that anything remixed or mashed-up by the people has to be good, the former mainstream-media editor turned citizen-everything advocate, has declared the Washington Post's decision to launch a remix page as a thoroughly good thing. Of course, he chides the WaPo for not going far enough and putting up the contents of reporters' notebooks, lunch receipts and innermost thoughts for the world's citizens to pore over and mash up as they see fit. But he sees the newspaper's effort as a "great first step" with the "perfect attitude".

I presume Jarvis has not actually read the terms of service that the WaPo has applied. The newspaper is not being entirely altruistic about offering up RSS feeds for a bit of Web 2.0-style remixing. Like the first commenter at the remix terms of use page, I understand that the newspaper would like to retain copyright. However, the third condition is perhaps pushing the idea of making the world your serf a little far. Not only do not get anything from the WaPo for doing something funky with its news feeds, "Washingtonpost.com may incorporate your ideas into future projects it develops". The commenter, quite charitably, would just like some attribution. I think the ability to negotiate terms of use with the newspaper would be nicer. On the bright side, at least the company has not demanded indemnification against any possible legal nastiness, unlike organisations such as CNN. Not yet, at any rate.

On closer inspection, even in return for giving up your first-born, you still only seem to be able to access RSS feeds. There is no direct API as yet. Gotta hand it to The Man.

Posted by Chris at 03:50 PM | Comments (3)

November 11, 2005

It's a spade, not a soil-management solution

If there is one thing that ticks off hacks, it is the buzzword-loaded language that finds its way into business presentations and releases. Some of it is material so devoid of content that you feel as though information is being sucked out of your head when you read it. So, we moan about the language with a regularity that leads PRs to collectively roll their eyes. It is not as if the Web is not short of articles written by PRs telling each other that they just cut out the claptrap. From the hack's side, this week it was Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek who publicly took exception to the word 'solution', a word that now permeates the world of business-speak. PRs responded, claiming they do all they can to eradicate jargon, but that it's hard to translate technical stuff into English, in the view of PR John Wagner, and even that, according to Tech PR Gems, some people like it that way.

Unfortunately, the PRs who commented on yet another plea for plain language claiming that they really do try to technical lingo into English have again confused jargon with the weasel words that get used to pad out press releases and presentations. And those are the bits that drive most sane people up the wall.

There is a difference between jargon, the dialects that make technology just that little bit more distant, and euphemism, the attempts to polish a turd into something shinier and more attractive. They are different, because the turd-polishing phrases turn up everywhere, not just in technology-related material. There is a simple test to work out which is which. Just try to rewrite the sentence in plain English. The euphemisms will drop conveniently out of sight. But that is the source of the irritation that most hacks have with this kind of language. It is entirely unnecessary and just wastes your time.

Take, for example:

SoftBrands’ POS (Point of Sale) solution is a complete management tool combining flexible functionality, platform stability and scalability with excellent customer support. SoftBrands provides a state-of-the-art, touch screen POS system, seamlessly integrating all front-of-house and back-office functions in one easy-to-use solution.

If you're wondering why I picked on Softbrands, the company's marketing people only have themselves to blame. I typed my least-favourite weasel words into Google - solution, functionality, platform, seamless and scalable - and their web page came out top. This particular paragraph looked to be the worst offender. However, the copy is no worse than the content of many press releases.

POS? That's jargon, clear and simple. It's tough to replace with one simple word or phrase and you need to know a bit about what they are really selling to recast it accurately, assuming you need to translate it for your particular audience. A trade audience will understand POS far better than any attempt to translate what it means into really plain English. For a consumer audience, it's the "computer that handles hotel bookings", or something similar. It won't be completely accurate but it's close enough for somebody who isn't really bothered about hotel POS systems in the first place.

However, the rest of this paragraph can certainly get the bonsai treatment. "Management tool". Ever found a computer system that wasn't some useful to management in some way. That can go. Flexible functionality? You can get it to do lots of things, presumably all hotel-related. "Platform stability". Doesn't crash. Actually, this could mean they won't change the design without telling you. Who can tell? That's the other problem with this kind of language: it's not even precise. Let's move on. "Scalability". You can run big or little hotels with it. "Excellent customer support". Why, do you also offer software with crappy customer support?

"State-of-the-art". A cliché that is a little bit old-fashioned in marketing circles this one. From this, I assume they make this POS computer out of current technology rather than some clapped-out technology. And then, the breathless sign-off: "seamlessly integrating all front-of-house and back-office functions in one easy-to-use solution". Gotta get that solution in again. So, it does stuff like take bookings from customers and makes sure the system that allocates the rooms gets updated. Stellar. Plus, it's not hard to use, they say. And it remains a computer system, just in case you got to the end of the paragraph and you were a bit confused.

In short, Softbrands says its POS computer does all the stuff you'd expect a system to handle hotel bookings and stuff to do. It doesn't crash and it has a touchscreen. "We make it out of new bits, not old bits and we take support calls without diverting everything to voicemail." (OK, I made the last bit up as I have no idea of what the company considers to be excellent technical support).

What's even more depressing is having to sit through someone talking in this kind of language. Reading has the benefit of being fast. You can tear through a release in seconds. Having this phraseology mixed in with copious amounts of Powerpoint is enough to send you straight to the window, Peter Finch-style. I have sat through a half hour of this kind of thing and found that my first question at the end was: "So, what's it do then?"

So, I have to ask if most of these words are useless, why are they there? This was the argument used by Tech PR Gems. Somebody approved this stuff. Indeed, they did.

Although they inflicted 50 more unnecessary words of text on the public, I feel a little sympathy for the copywriter on this one. They had to pad it out for a while and all they had to work with was that the company selling the POS system told them it was the dog's bollocks but had absolutely no evidence to back it up. There was no single feature the company could identify to make anyone think: "That's a bit different, I'll take a closer look". But, there's an empty Web page sitting there, and you've got to fill it with something that the client thinks puts them in a good light. Well, it doesn't say "this product both sucks and blows" in flashing 80pt letters, but that's about as good as it gets from the point of view of the reader.

The copy will have been approved by the marketing manager who probably thought that was just the thing to get sales rolling in through the door. Maybe the marketing manager is right. There could be mug punters out there who, dazzled by the loquacious promises for a POS solution, just pony up the cash there and then. In truth, the marketing manager has probably looked at everybody's else site in that market and thought, "if that's how they do it, I'd better too". That is not to say there is not one group of customer who buy into turd-polishing language lock, stock and barrel: managers.

The motherlode of this guff lies in the management-training courses and self-help that have spread like a cancer through every industry. Management gurus expound on how to leverage synergies and maximise core human resources assets to achieve excellence in the business organisation. Or rather, do what your good at and don't piss off the workforce. You can see why I'm not a top management guru.

Because gurus talk the fancy way, managers have come to believe that everyone should. It may even be worse than that, the mantras have become the message. Rather than translate the exhortations to "be excellent" - something that even Bill & Ted seemed to understand better than most people who attend these courses - they just parrot the phrases. Because, if they did translate them and think about them, they would be ringing up and demanding their money back: "You mean I paid ten thousand bucks for you to tell me to employ good people? What kind of a con is this?"

Posted by Chris at 08:03 PM

November 10, 2005

Sometimes you can't be too careful

Hacks' newspaper Press Gazette does not want to overestimate the intelligence of its subscribers. Just in case a hapless journo wants to sign up for sub with a credit card and isn't sure what all that mumbo-jumbo on the card means, the publisher has a pointer or two. Underneath the form field for card number, some text helpfully points out that the card number is made up of "the large numbers across the middle of the card".

Glad I'm clear on that one. Now just another, if you'll indulge me. The expiry date, would that be when the card runs out by any chance? I'm not sure I've got the hang of this e-commerce malarky.

Posted by Chris at 09:36 PM

When you've got a hammer...

In his search for yet another nail to whack with his mighty Bloghammer, Steve Rubel takes aim at a piece in Businessweek on the imminent death of the focus group, the market research tool that involves sitting people in a room and then asking them questions about whether they like their chocolate bars crunchy or chewy.

Apparently, marketing people are getting fed up with focus groups because they get misleading answers from them. But marketers have been fed up with focus groups for a long as I can remember. The difference now is that they have an alternative: direct contact with punters through the Internet. This is where Rubel wields his Bloghammer: "shockingly [the story] ignores monitoring blogs and other consumer channels".

Quick, call the blog police. An online article that does not mention blogs? That has to be stopped, clearly.

The article is a 1000-word piece about focus groups and the alternative offered by the Web. It's not professing to be the complete guide to technology in marketing and it has a 1000-word space to fill: focus is good when you are writing for that length. The angle in the piece is primarily about consumers providing information confidentially through the Internet to companies because they dislike the peer pressure of focus groups, which seem like scenes from 12 Angry Men in comparison.

Now, unless I've misunderstood something about blogging, it is not confidential. It takes place in a public forum, which will inevitably lead to self-censorship - which is not necessarily a bad thing when writing for an unknown audience - and peer pressure. I have no idea whether the writer considered adding something on blogging, but the confidentiality angle they used to my mind would have ruled out covering blogs and forums pretty early on during the research phase.

And let's face it, does anyone want to use blogs to do the same job as focus groups? as a company are you going to blog about some secret project have going on and then get everybody else to blog about what a great/lame idea it is? Even the seemingly endless stream of Web 2.0 companies offering controlled alpha and beta programmes ask bloggers not to er...blog about them too much.

Posted by Chris at 08:49 PM | Comments (1)

Sourcewire adds custom RSS feeds

I'm a bit late to write about this one, but I got an email from Daryl Willcox Publishing, the company behind Sourcewire, the other day. The company has gone from offering a just a set of pre-packaged RSS feeds for press releases to providing alongside a roll-your-own feed, similar to the one offered by Businesswire but not, unfortunately, PRNewswire.

One little twist to the custom feed idea that Sourcewire has added is the ability to use keywords to either filter the basic categories you have selected or pull in releases from other sectors you don't normally cover if those keywords pop up. The second option is potentially handy as it should come up with material from companies who you would normally not bother with, but who might on one occasion have something in my area that is worth covering. I'm not sure how useful this particular feature will prove to be in practice but it's worth a try.

Posted by Chris at 08:03 PM

November 01, 2005

The attention deficit pulls the mainstream nearer

When RSS first happened along, I had some difficulty working out why it was so great. OK, it told me when a website was updated but the thing that troubled me was the issue of filtering. There was no readily apparent way to filter the feeds themselves, only subscribe to ones that kind of fit my needs and unsubscribe from those with too much irrelevant junk. I still have to categorise my feeds manually in NetNewsWire rather than rely on tags or content matching to sort things into the right piles. And it does not look as though things are going to get better. More people are noticing that feed tracking is chewing up way too much time.

Blogebrity pulled a few posts together that noted the problem. Fred the NYC VC asked about the saturation point for feeds as he struggles to keep a lid on the number of feeds he subscribes to. Om Malik has apparently been chopping the list he uses down to a bare minimum. Fred has called what is happening "the looming attention crisis":

I am way past the point of saturation and I keep adding feeds. At this point, I have over 100 feeds subscribed to in various readers. And I have frankly stopped paying attention to most of them...I feel in my gut that we are facing a "poverty of attention" and something is going to give.

This is clearly not good news for Steve Gilmor, who has yet to get his attention economy off the ground. Gilmor, you may remember, was the man who wanted to kill off hyperlinks and replace them with feeds because links were no longer good blog currency. And there lies the root of the problem: financing the blog. In the same breath that some bloggers condemn the old ways of magazines and the bad old MainStream Media (MSM), they worry about how they themselves become mainstream. There is a lot of talk about the Long Tail; about how everybody has a voice. But the concerns that shine through many blogs are about building an audience, aggregating content, getting money for it. The things that the MSM has been trying to do for the last couple of hundred years. The only thing that has changed in between has been the technology.

People forget that the dreaded MSM started with changes in technology: cheap printing presses; mass-produced paper; the railways. Combined, they made it possible to shift from a world where information was relayed by word of mouth to one that was much more efficient because you did not need someone to shout in your ear every piece of news. Newspapers rapidly moved from being local scandal sheets to national institutions. Subsequent changes in technology simply increased the rate at which news could be relayed.

The web brought a few extra things. It became almost free to become a publisher. The ability to alter content online meant people could answer back and see the changes almost straightaway. Blogging has, to some extent, formalised an arrangement where readers can influence content after it has been created. This quickly turned into the "join the conversation" policy espoused by many bloggers as the saviour of society. If anything goes wrong, blog about it, talk to people, let them talk back, then talk about it some more.

Unfortunately, conversations do not scale all that well, with the result that, for the most part, we just skim over blog headlines in the feed bucket, read some of those entries, comment on even fewer and, finally, unless you are Robert Scoble, blog about even fewer. There just isn't time to do more. The result? Most blog consumption is a passive process that is not unlike the thing technology writers have been predicting for the last 15 years or so: the DIY newspaper delivered to you by your friendly PC. OK, blogs are a bit low on news and high on commentary, but the feed aggregator is not very far from what people envisaged before the blog. The difference today is that a vocal section of the blogosphere wants to get there before the dreaded MSM works out how to do it.

The problem that Fred the VC and Om Malik have, together with many others, is that they know too few feeds will give them a poor outlook of what is going on in blogland. Too many makes it too hard to get anything else done. And what about Ethan Zuckermann who wants some attention for things, such as the situation in Darfur, that tend to get little coverage in blogs or, at the moment, the MSM? Wasn't the promise of the blog to provide people with a wider purview, not a narrower one? This has long been a concern of mine ever since researchers began to describe how, one day, computer agents would fetch news that match my interests. What about the stuff I might be interested in if only I knew about it beforehand? Knocking back a list of feeds to 40 "trusted" sources seems a retrograde step for the Long Tail.

The answer? Well it's already here and you won't like it. It's the aggregator. And it doesn't work very well. There are plenty of options and they seem to be growing every day with each one claiming to do a better job of avoiding the monoculturalism that afflicts aggregators that rely on ranking mechanisms to provide top picks. Apparently TailRank is one that will let us monitor 5000 feeds without pain by ranking "blogs that YOU care about not necessarily global rankings". It will be interesting to see how that one works, but I fear it will fall into the same trap as Memeorandum and Digg. However, the aggregators will get better at ranking stuff by relevance to you and they will gradually become the new MSM, like it or not, as they stand the best chance of syndicating content from blogs to a wider audience. A bit like a newspaper, only different.

The problem is that, while they hunt for ranking algorithms that work users want rather than by using blogjuice as a proxy for relevance, the aggregators will continue to promote lengthy diatribes on political scandals that will make you wonder what the original news story was mixed in with snippets about sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.

Posted by Chris at 11:47 PM | Comments (1)

October 18, 2005

The hunt for a silver bullet

The powers that be at Google must be wondering why they ever bought Pyra Labs, the people behind Blogger. The relentless expansionism of Google has made the company the number-one target for angry bloggers who want to know why their ego feed searches are full of splog entries.

Chris Pirillo came up with some suggestions to Google. Unfortunately, as with email spam, we are getting to the situation where the cure could be worse than the disease, and have little to no effect on splogs themselves (other than forcing them to alter strategies a little). People tend to forget that spammers present a moving target.

I can't help but see problems with most, if not all, of Pirillo's suggestions simply because spammers do adapt. I've paraphrased the suggestions for brevity:

1) Employ a blog spammer. Maybe Google already does. Oh, you mean knowingly employ a blog spammer. And if you do get one, how do you know you've got a good one? Or should that be bad one?

2) Probationary period: only allow people with a track record to create more blogs. Good plan, if it were not for the case that, apparently, the spammers have been using lots of accounts to create blogs, not a few accounts spawning lots of blogs.

3) Sponsor a blogger: you need a reference to create a blog. And if a new blog goes spammy, revoke both it and the referee account. This is something that will run and run, in court. As with Ebay, Blogger account hijacking will become the new sport for keen phishermen (and women). Why use up your real accounts when you can phish one out of Little Jimmy and his blog on Star Wars puppets?

4) Flag splogs from the toolbar. Apparently