Inflection Point: November 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Mobile payments begin...

paidContent reports that O2 is running a trial of a new mobile payments system in London. Nokia 6131 handsets using Near Field Communications technology will allow 500 lucky people to use their mobiles to pay for up to £10 worth of tube, bus or tram travel, coffees at Coffe Republic, booze at Threshers and a number of other things. The trial ends in May 2008.

Technorati tags: mobile, ecommerce

Consolidation or separation?

Jeff Jarvis reports that he has changed his mind about separation of editorial teams.

I was on the side of separation at the beginning of the web and for good reasons. At Advance, where I used to work, we set up separate online operations to make sure that what was made for the web was appropriate to the web (not just a PDF of a newspaper) and to assure that the web gained its own value (and wasn’t just given away to advertisers as value-added). That worked.

However, pointing to the work that the BBC has done consolidating its newsroom to produce radio, TV and web content, he says now he's converted. "It's inevitable".

Technorati tags: TV, media convergence

Site vs. Network

There's a debate brewing on Michael Arrington's TechCrunch blog about the merits or otherwise of networks rather and websites.

But Glam isn’t really the largest women’s site on the Internet - not by a long stretch. Rather, it’s a collection of a few sites that they own that generate some page views, plus a big ad sales team that sells ads for 600 or so other blogs and websites. In August the company claimed 19 million monthly visitors, but just 3.4% of them (654,000) actually visited Glam.com. The company will lose about $3.7 million this year on $21 million in revenue....says Arrington.

Jeff Jarvis takes issue.

But I’ve been arguing to big media companies that they need to become networks themselves. Google is a network. Who cares how large its site is? What matters is its reach on sites all over the internet.

Google grew by building a network. So did Glam. I say that is a model for survival and growth among media companies. Local newspapers, for example, should be building hyperlocal networks of local blogs; with them, they can expand coverage and reach in ways that were never possible when they depended only on staff.

Food for thought.

Update: Jeff has posted a lot more detail on this argument here.

Technorati tags: blogging, networks

User Generated Content vs journalism

A few weeks ago Darren Rowse of ProBlogger was asked to contribute a column to an Australian magazine about
the threat to journalism posed by User Generated Content. He was asked to argue for the threat while Phil Mclean, group executive editor at the publishier Fairfax took the opposing view. This question, as always, is not black and white, but Darren does a good job of laying out the arguments.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Beatblogging - the future of journalism?

BuzzMachine has an interesting post about beatblogging. It's well worth a read. Could this be the future of journalism?

I think beatblogging can get journalism back to its essential mission, discarding the distractions brought on by the means of production and distribution to which the journalists once had exclusive access. The role of the journalist becomes clearer, even purer: They organize information for communities and communities of information. And that is an active verb. Curating is part of the role and that’s almost passive: finding and gathering and presenting the best of what people are already doing.

Guardian in front

BuzzMachine reports that Guardian Unlimited now has a bigger audience online that the New York Times. According to Nielsen/Netratings the Guardian recorded 18.4m users in October compared to 17.5m for NYTimes.

Data drives DMGT

paidContent reports that the financial results of DMGT point to success of the data acquisitions compared to the conventional old media assets. The shares have yet to catch up with the news.

Second chance with Second Life?

eWeek reports on experiments in a Japanese university where paralyzed people learn to control avatars in Second Life. Electrodes attached to the scalp can pick up electrical charges associated with brain activity and this can be interpreted by a computer to manipulate an online persona. eWeek suggests paralyzed people could one day be able to shop or do business or socialise just by thinking about it - in cyberspace.

Google to store data?

CIO Insight reports that Google plans to launch a service to store users' data quoting a report in the Wall Street Journal - the so-called Gdrive.

According to the story users would be able to house files they would normally store on personal computers—such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images—on Google's computers. Files could then been accessed through the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when users sign on using a password.

The report says Google plans to provide some free storage, with additional storage allotments available for a fee.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Digging WSJ

Kevin Rose, Digg founder, annouces on his blog that the Wall Street Journal has added Digg buttons to its articles. Any articles submitted using the Digg buttons will be able to be read without subscribing. Seems like a great way of promoting premium content through a really powerful promoter.

Flickr - 2bn and counting

Flickr has just chalked up its two billionth photo.

Single point of failure

Steve Rubel points out on his Micro Persuasion blog an outage on TinyURL, a five-year-old service which offers small, easy to handle URLs which replace to long URLs full of ?s and so on. He points out the vulnerability this implies as more and more sites are using the service as a convenience to users. What happens when all those URLs stop working?

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Facebook users rise up

Facebook users in their thousands have signed a petition to protest against Facebook's new ad network Beacon. The system automatically tracks what users are buying on affiliated sites and displays the information on Facebook home pages. However, users are worried that Beacon is an opt-out not opt-in service.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li has even deeper worries, as she points out in this post. The cookie-based approach means activity on one PC can be ascribed to an individual wrongly - and that could be quite damaging, she argues.

Friday, November 09, 2007

How to get Sitelinks

ProBlogger has an interesting post about Google Sitelinks, those additional links which sometimes appear under the main site link on the top result of a Google search. Apparently, as yet, there is no way to tell Google what or if to create links as it is done by algorithm. You can now remove links which you think are inappropriate.

Top blogs

Bloglines has produced its list of the 1,000 top blogs in the blogosphere. Top of the list is Slashdot, followed by Dilbert and Engadget. The criteria are a bit hazy but they say at the heart of the ranking is how many active subscribers a blog has. And, by the way, if you look down the list, the definition of blog looks a bit loose, too.

Friday, November 02, 2007

Google pageranks crash

There's a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a change to the Google algorithm which has resulted in a large number of sites' page ranks falling several points. Google isn't officially commenting.

MySpace joins

MySpace, the world's largest social network, has given a huge boost to Google's open social network platform by saying it will join, according to eWeek. The move is intended to combat Facebook's growing dominance of the social application development space. Google's initiative aims to allow all applications to work interoperably on all platforms.

Such lists will not reduce the number of ads that people see online, but they will prevent advertisers from using their online meanderings to deliver specific ad pitches to them.

AOL will try to persuade consumers that by parting with some personal data they will find more relevant, appealing ads than by remaining anonymous.

Technorati tags: advertising privacy

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