Mac Slocum's Recommended Stuff and Links of Note

This is why I can’t wait to get my hands on Google Wave:

Wave takes this to the next level. It combines the notions of a process as people add and subtract and update; it has the benefit of a wiki - a snapshot of current knowledge; it can be live; it can feed a blog page with the latest; it can feed Twitter with updates; it is itself the collaborative tool that lets participants question each other.

This article may signal a long-needed change in Web advertising: Advertisers are beginning to understand — really understand — the strengths and limitations of data analysis.

Many advertisers have already jumped on the analytics bandwagon in a basic manner. Most know about page views, visits and other metrics, and they use this information to craft campaigns. The logical extension of this is to move headlong into full-on data analysis, where reams of information allow ad firms to make educated decisions and adaptations on the fly.

While I’m happy to see this happening, there’s a second component that still needs to be addressed: advertisers need to understand that Web-based audiences are inherently different than the broad-based groups aggregated by traditional media. Web audiences aren’t locked in to specific channels or mediums. They can go where they want, whenever they want. As such, people naturally form, disconnect, and re-form. A few massive channels remain (Yahoo, AOL, etc.), but that’s not the norm in the distributed Web world.

My hope is that a new wave of formal data analysis opens advertisers’ eyes to this change. Media companies can pound their chests over subscriptions and micro-payments, but advertising will continue to be a vital revenue stream for digital businesses. The sooner advertisers embrace the true nature of Web audiences, the better for all involved.

What I find most interesting about the iPhone App Store gold rush is the way Apple is combining its platforms — online, mobile, traditional advertising — to benefit the company and external…

Reason No. 4,012 to pay attention in history class:

The person who took the ad didn’t recognize the significance of the names.

I worked with Brian O’Leary on this report for nearly a year, so it’s gratifying to see it finally out in the wild. But I agree with Teleread’s Paul Biba — we need much more data and analysis to make this truly useful:

My own view of the presentation: piracy data is from O’Reilly so it is limited to technical books and a small market segment - a segment where you would expect to find piracy because of the technical expertise of the readers, thus it is unclear to me how this data translates to a mainstream publisher, if at all. It is an excellent effort and more participants are needed to make the limited data set meaningful.

More info on the report is available here.

In a brief look at GigaOm’s new research wing, Steve Rubel hits on an interesting point:

A $79 offering might be more than suitable for many more casual buyers and begin to disrupt the syndicated research market if it proves successful.

As Steve notes, reasonable-cost research — or “good enough” research — could dramatically shift the entrenched high-priced options from formal analyst firms. There might be a secondary opportunity in here as well: lower cost subscription options could attract the mid-tier/consumer-grade folks, who could then be guided on occasion to higher-priced reports. I’d certainly fall into this group: I’m not willing to risk several hundred dollars on an executive summary alone, but if I subscribed to a valuable research service I might be compelled to splurge based on my previous experience with that company.

I also think there’s an opportunity here for established media organizations to aggregate the expertise of reporters, editors, columnists and external professionals for a low-cost/high-value research service (e.g. “EveryBlock for research” … but with a fee).

Time Inc.’s Mine experiment has its skeptics, but Farhad Manjoo sees promise in this customized/aggregated print model:

Mine isn’t an echo chamber that merely reflects my narrow views. Instead, reading it is a bit listening to Pandora, the online service that serves up songs based on my musical preferences. Like Pandora—and like the best magazine editors—Mine exposed me to stuff that I liked but probably wouldn’t have sought out on my own.

I have a significant personal investment in the future of digital curation, so what I’m about to say is by no means objective: Editors are hardwired to find, filter and disseminate information, and with so much content vying for limited attention, I truly believe that a combination of editorial guidance, community interaction, and on-demand/low-cost aggregated products can lead to sustainable content businesses. A bright future is out there for people who can point the way to great material.

Jennifer Leggio offers a solid round-up of social media miscues. The full column is worth a read, but here’s what I took away from it.

• Suicide isn’t funny
• Don’t make fun of moms
• Brand managers are rarely as clever as they think they are
• There’s no such thing as a “Twinturn,” even if you say there is
• CNN should know better

Oliver Blanchard coalesces an uneasy feeling I’ve had for quite some time: most social media gurus are nothing more than wind-baggy motivational speakers:

But if you want to help your business – and I mean REALLY help your business – make sure you don’t fall into the Social Media “expert” trap: 99% of them are basically just motivational speakers with a Social Media theme. Find someone who knows how to a) measure real ROI and b) tie those metrics to engagement programs. [Emphasis included in original post.]

I’m looking forward to the death of social media hype. When all the hysteria is buried, good work and great ideas will fill the void (see “Blogging, 2000-2006”).

Anyone who’s read “The Innovator’s Dilemma” will see two perspectives in the following passage:

A New Media Age survey found this month that 77 per cent of UK regular online readers were not prepared to pay for access to news websites. A separate PwC report with the World Association of Newspapers found that consumers were more willing to pay for financial or sports coverage, but would choose free content over subscription sites “when the quality was comparable or sufficient for their purpose”. [Emphasis added.]

Perspective 1: Established media organizations are in a bad spot because the audience will always gravitate toward free content that meets the “good enough” standard.

Perspective 2 (the interesting one): New content businesses can use “good enough” free content to grab audience share from established media entities. And since new firms are unencumbered by massive overhead, they can (potentially) achieve sustainability with smaller staffs supported by lower ad rates and ancillary, built-in revenue streams (events, conferences, and the like).

David Carr cuts through the naivete of “one paywall to rule them all” thinking:

Throwing up a big content wall would satisfy a visceral need on the part of journalists to have people pay for their work, but it would be a bet-the-company move at a very perilous time for media companies, including, yes, The New York Times. As it is, the company will use all levers — paper and digital, consumer and advertising, cost and investment — to maneuver very carefully through complicated waters.

Internet revenue is out there, but it must be aggregated from hundreds of sources: advertising, subscriptions, affiliate relationships, conferences, consulting, mobile, etc. Sustainability will come from the combination of appropriately scaled organizations (i.e. way smaller) and successful management of these myriad revenue sources. A tough task, no doubt, but this is the reality we face.

This should be interesting …

The owner of the Mercury News says the answer is to end the free ride online. It is a decision labeled risky by former Mercury News online editor Michael Bazeley. “There’s an expectation, particularly among the younger generation, that when you go online, most of the information you’re going to get is going to be free with few exceptions, and this idea of re-training people to think now they have to pay for this content, I think, is a risky proposition,” said Bazeley.

Assuming the Mercury News is still around in six months, I hope they’ll share results from this effort. Specifically, I’d want to see page views and unique users before and after the switch. And if they’re feeling transparent, the industry would benefit from an advertising vs. pay-to-read revenue analysis.

Via @jeffnolan, @burtherman, @mathewi

Fundamentally, I agree with the following …

True e-book value is created by friendly and extensive navigation and search capabilities, graphics, tables, references and notes, indexing and appendices. Even greater value will be created when the reader can manipulate content and share it easily with others.

… but the whole idea of stand-alone e-books is flawed. Digital content is not defined by its container. The values noted in this passage are inherent in Web material, yet you never see the e-book discussion transform into a Web content discussion. I would much rather create a Web package, with all the built-in sharing and multimedia features, then create a static book (digital or otherwise).

The sooner we get baseline analytics standards for all Web content — not just video — the sooner we’ll see full maturity of Web-based advertising. Analytics ambiguity is one of the prime reasons why online advertising hasn’t found its footing.

Amazon is opening the Kindle up (sorta) to bloggers. While I have my doubts about the size of the Kindle market, this is one of those “why not?” programs:

Under the new program, Amazon will pay registered bloggers 30% of its subscription fee – pretty low, considering that Apple gives iPhone developers a 70% cut on sales of software applications for the device. So that’s about 60 cents per reader, per month, for the most expensive blogs.

Excellent piece that correctly separates the strands of journalism and opinion. Journalists sometimes fool themselves into thinking that everything they do is vital to the nation (or the world), but real journalism — the stuff that’s valued and protected — is investigative work. Rehashing entertainment nuggets or pontificating at length via the Interweb (something I know a thing or two about) is not worthy of government subsidies or pledge drives or iTunes-esque payment methods.

I realize “investigative” is an arbitrary and open-ended concept, but if journalism businesses must scale back to their core — if they must find their essential footing in the digital world — then I believe salvation lies in the things journalists do better than anyone else: dig, source, report and reveal. That is worth saving.

This piece focuses on the top-down vs. bottom-up approaches of design, but some of the insights apply to citizen journalism as well.

I’ve always believed that the best Web-based content efforts involve equal portions of top-down editorial decisions from trained journalists with bottom-up insight from the community. Alone, neither method is particularly useful, but together you see a symbiotic relationship form between content, community, feedback and editorial experimentation. This is why the Web is so profound; no other platform has this feedback loop built in.