Month: October 2005

AOL – Last of the Garden Walls Comes Down

Todd Borglund, our head of production at CXO, is fond of showing two sites to me, over and over again. One is ESPN, the other is the new AOL homepage, the "free" version that represents the end of AOL’s long-running battle to tuck content behind the walls that brought down Prodigy, CompuServe and the other proprietary online services of the 80s.

AOL has been bleeding subscribers to its ISP business at a rapid clip — I recall one news squib last winter that estimated 500,000 suscribers per month were cancelling their service and moving their business to their telco’s DSL offerings or cable company’s cable modem plan. AOL was built on racks and racks of modems, and now, with dial-up hanging on in the rural areas, something had to give in the demographic model to get people back in front of the content.

So the walls have come down.

Skip back to the late 90s, when AOL was the Google of its day, commanding massive marketing muscle during the dot.com nuttiness, asking for, and receiving $20 million marketing packages for high-velocity startups trying to amass, at all costs, all the eyes they could. Was there any more powerful force in new media? Could anyone have foreseen a time when AOL — as much a part as the cultural gestalt as any digital phenomena ever was or will be — would be replaced by something that was free? Having suffered in the land of Prodigy and CompuServe in 1994, my allergy to walled gardens hoped and prayed that the dumbing down of the Internet that AOL represented would be replaced by something less expensive, more standard, and more open. (Remember the idiotic Instant Messaging interoperability battles between AOL, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo? That towel got tossed last week.)

Then came the big  step-in-it-with-both-feet move by Time Warner in January 2000, the peak of the insanity, when Levin took off the suit, pulled off the tie, and committed one of the biggest M&A blunders of all time.

Today one wonders as Google and Yahoo and Microsoft circle AOL if they are suitors wooing a bride or vultures circling a crawling man in the desert, waiting for the inevitable? Whatever the state of AOL’s health, I agree with Todd, at least they have a nice homepage and some credible blogs after stealing Weblogs for $25 m.

Fish Wrapper Blues

At Newspapers, Some Clipping – New York Times

"Mr. Ridder, for one, said he had to "divert more resources to the parts of the business that are growing," a choice that is bad news for print. "We will not have the resources to put into the core business," he said. Mr. Singleton explained the calculation. "By 2010, we could be generating half our operating profit from online," he said. "That will cause us to add to our online resources and shift down on print. That’s bad if you’re in print and get laid off, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the paper or the industry.""

US News and World Report Throws in the Print Towel

WASHINGTONIAN: Washington BUZZ

The avalanche continues …. 

NYT – Carr “Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod”

Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod – New York Times

David Carr reaches for the futurist’s bong and take a big hit before exhaling the perennial b.s. that some ultra-portable, disposable, fold-it-and-stick-it-your-pocket device — aka Digital Ink, Digital Paper — will save the beleagured world of print.

In today’s (Monday’s) New York Times — my favorite day of the week because it’s when the Times devotes a few column inches to new media — the obituary is written for the newspaper business. Carr says that if there were only the equivalent of an iPod-like device for print, something so intuitively fantastic that one out of ten Americans would rush out and buy one, then voila!, the industry would be saved the way the iPod saved the neo-Jurassic music industry from a lifetime of lawsuits against bewildered parents who’s kids were siphoning off the entire Sony Music catalogue on the home Dell.

Carr misses the point but comes close to it. Early in the column he correctly talks about "companion media", stuff that you can half-way tune into while consuming other media.

The reason the iPod and podcasting and satellite radio and other aural media are surviving is the fact that you can listen to something while you do something else. I can listen to the Gillmor Gang on my Nano while driving to work on Route 128 and still operate a motor vehicle. I can read a good-old-fashioned book while listening to music. I can’t read a book while driving, so I’d have to consider an audio book. Can’t read and watch TV (but I can keep a little attention on something like CNN or C-Span). Actually, I can’t do email and listen to a podcast — if my attention is on writing replies I can’t exactly process what the speakers are saying. I can listen to Johnny Cash when writing email.

The fixed commodity is time and print is a 100% focused medium. You can’t read and operate heavy machinery. Sorry, but the most portable, inexpensive, battery-efficient piece of "digital paper" — even with a heads-up display or neural-cerebral-cortext plug is not going to save newspapers.

"Consider if the line between the Web and print matter were erased by a device for data consumption, not data entry – all screen, no baggage – that was uplinked and updated constantly: a digital player for the eyes, with an iTunes-like array of content available at a ubiquitous volume and a low, digestible price."

 Sorry, there is an iPod for print and it is called RSS. The time-shifting, "push" delivery of syndicated content to the reader of your choice is where the shift in text has occurred and will accelerate. Putting a micro-payment system in front of it isn’t going to change anything. The print industry needs to wake up to the disturbing news that it ain’t about moving off of paper to glass anymore, that their own web efforts are severely threatened by a fast shift away from the decade old page-view, eyeball model to one of attention, distribution, mark-up, mash-up, tagging and manipulation.

 

Old Media’s Lame-Duck Days BusinessWeek

Old Media’s Lame-Duck Days

 Jon Fine comments at BusinessWeek about the new world order in new media, correctly pointing out in this current climate of Dot.bomb 2.0 M&A fever that a company like MySpace couldn’t have become MySpace if its new owner, News Corp., had tried to launch it.

"If acquiring bits and pieces isn’t budging the stock price, what will? It’s extremely difficult for an old-media player to build a serious new-media asset. There are established competitors. There are generational issues. (Myspace would not have become myspace had it been launched by News Corp.) And there are the quarterly numbers that Wall Street demands — when it’s not whacking the moguls for being too dependent on mature businesses. To move the needle right now, you need something massive. You need, for instance, to buy Yahoo. Of course, today it’s too late to buy Yahoo. Today, Yahoo buys you. Assuming, that is, that Yahoo thinks its business sense can cross the generational divide. Or that it’s even worth the bother."

Site Maps and Spatial Guides to Text

The beta release of Cnet in late September marked a significant return of the "map of the market" model pioneered by SmartMoney in the 1990s. While there was some discussion within IDG about the graphical metaphor as an option to replace the existing model of "related links" or "more-like-this" text boxes that most news sites display adjacent to their stories, I feel the gimmick is just that — a gimmick — but one that presents some challenges as publishers attempt to induce their users to linger during their sessions and consume more pages per visit, the leading indicator of that Web 1.0 metric — stickiness.

In brief — an information map is a cartographic technique where the relationship and value of a piece of information (size, popularity, significance) is indicated by an icon’s size, color, and connection to related pieces of content. Think of the maps of the United States that exaggerate the size of the state according to its contribution to a vital statistic. I made such maps at Yale in the 70s in one of my all-time favorite courses, Concepts of Cartography (or ‘Maps for Saps", as the gut-seekers dubbed it), in the Yale Computer Lab, programming punch cards to show the relative tonnage of cargo entering and exiting American ports.

Iconic relativity is a great technique — in theory — and has been extended to aural cues, such as assigning different tones to traded securities, colors for their "heat" or volumes, etc.  None of them seem to have extended very far beyond the initial user interface infatuations of the 90s.

Spatial indicators of informational relationships are common, but not very widely accepted. Jerry Michalski shows one on his site, eg.

 

 

 

While Cnet should be commended for reviving its two related link solutions, I’d like to know how the algorithm is tweaked to insure that popularity doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy, ie. promoting the most viewed story as the largest rectangle in the map will induce others to visit the page, further pushing the ranking of the content.

Churbuck.com hacked last night

My buddy Mark Cahill at Reel-Time IM’d me at 6:30 last night to tell me the site had been hacked and hijacked by a worm. First time that has every happened to me, so I took down the offending page — just a text message telling me some pin-head "owned" me — emailed the ISP’s sysadmin, and learned it was an idle version of Drupal that needed to be patched. Patched it is, and back we go.

What really is hammering me is spammers forging churbuck.com return addresses to their outgoing bumf. The resulting bounces are keeping my spam filters busy. Doubtlessly this is putting me on all sorts of blacklists, but there’s nothing I can do.

I advocate finding a spammer, chaining them to a table and every evening doing a live webcast where a millimeter of them is shaved off with a deli meat slicer, starting with the bottom of their feet.  

Random Rantings

Things that set me off:

1. Flavored coffee: "Hazelnut Raspberry Irish Creme" — this is not coffee. This is poison. This is the potable equivalent of bad cologne. There is one true coffee and it’s name is Peet’s French Roast.

2. Luggage on wheels:  get out of the Barca-Lounger and carry your own bag like a man. If you stop in the jet-way to extend the #$%$# retractable handle I shall keep on charging forward and kick you.

3. The revival of the dot.com bubble. Web 2.0, Web 1.0. Social-anything. We’re careening right over the cliff again.

4. Henry Blodgett’s rehabilitation. The guy was a trade-reporter hack who was peter-principled into a stock analyst gig, had his 15-minutes of fame, talked out of both sides of his mouth, and is back, reborn as a blogger with a big foot-noted disclaimer. Go away. 

5. Xenon Headlights: like staring down a landing B-52. The lumination equivalent of a rolling middle-finger.

5. Web 2.0 M&A frenzies. The breathlessness with which the Webblog Inc. acquisition by AOL — that shining paradigm of online mediocrity — was greeted by the insular world of bloggers looking for financial redemption ("You see, our model DOES pay") overlooks the fact that Calcanis’s empire is based on AdSense revenues. While he makes Google rich, he somehow achieves a 12X multiple so AOL can buy some traffic. This is all driven by Media 1.0 dinosaur fears of being left, yet again, at the kiddie table.  There are a lot of Web 1.0 vampires rising from the crypt trying again to find that "liquidity event" in the sky.

6. Indignant new media screams about getting their scoops ripped off by the MSM. Get over it. Plagarism is the American way.  

 

Venture funds return to Net – The Boston Globe

Venture funds return to Net – The Boston Globe

The "Google Effect" in Boston-area VC. Sort of akin to the Microsoft Effect in the early 90s — if the entrepreneur can’t convincingly cast the strategy out from beneath the shadow of the industry behemoth, then don’t bother asking.

 I ran into the "Outlook Effect" in the winter of 2004 while raising funds for a startup focused on collaboration web-services for the SMB market. Every VC had a short-sighted Outlook obsession. How long before they shift that to an AJAX obsession?

The Google-Factor paints most decisions in my media world these days, but intuitively I have to agree with IDG CEO Pat Kenealy’s cynical assessment that Google is to 2005 what AOL was to 1999 — a looming behemoth that will be replaced by another looming behemoth as surely as it will snow in January in Framingham. 

"But when entrepreneurs come calling at venture firms these days, foraging for money to bankroll Internet start-ups, they can expect to be grilled about their approach to the fast-growing Google, which boasts a market value of about $90 billion and more than $7 billion in cash."