Publishing

2005-01 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

COMMENT 2005-01. Weblogs, also called blogs, are an important development on the Web, and marketers have been watching them and thinking about them a lot for some time now. The metrics of a weblog's success are harder to define than for simple page view count or print exposure, which uses the traditional "eyeballs" paradigm. A weblog is about influence, and rapid collaboration.

Advertisers are beginning to be involved with weblogs, and corporate PR departments are using weblogs to present a human face or a particular message to their markets. Weblogs easily generate RSS feeds of their new posts, which allows any individual author to be on a par technologically with newspapers and major publishers.

RSS stands for "really simple syndication", and is essentially the ticker-tape model of information delivery, in the format of headlines, with and without accompanying abstract-summaries.

The largest obstacle to adoption has been the need to have an RSS reader or aggregator on your desktop (similar to the old need to have a newsreader to read the newsgroups). This obstacle is yielding to online services such as Bloglines and now Yahoo! that ping the sources you select and gather (and notify you about) the latest feeds for you to read at your convenience in your Web browser.

Web browsers and email applications are the obvious desktop clients to incorporate the technology seamlessly very soon. With so much information displaying continually, and with so little time available, the "ticker-tape" model that RSS offers is rapidly becoming the most viable method of staying abreast of developments that concern you.

Advertisers want to embed their ads in RSS feeds, and search companies want to divine the contextual relevance, and various enabling and measuring technologies and third-party services are arising to allow all this to happen.

The twin phenomena of headline-delivery and weblog communication are sometimes difficult to perceive as a unified event, because all the many pieces of it are still coming together. By the time it becomes very visible to the mainstream, it will have already happened, and many spaces currently open will be filled. We advise the website owner, content publisher, and marketer to explore these phenomena now.

January 2005. The ad network BURST! Media has introduced a weblog channel for advertisers, offering 22 weblogs in its network that deliver 9 million page views monthly. More weblogs are expected to join the network.
-source: BURST! Media

January 2005. The Village Voice is redesigning its website to enhance its ability to update daily. In its print version a weekly publication, the online version will move to a daily model. The plan will increase advertising impressions.
-source: The Village Voice Online

January 2005. In a continuing trend of consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers turning away from traditional offline media in favor of aggressive Internet campaigns, print magazines may be at the most risk for displacement. Houshold information as provided by newspaper home sections, and especially womens magazines, is yielding by a factor of 2:1 to search engines, CPG brand sites, and portal home channels. Publishers should develop their online involvement through sponsorship and search engine marketing (SEM).
-source: JupiterResearch

December 2004. Newspaper classifieds, while growing, are losing share to online job marketplaces, which are growing faster and driving costs down through competitive price wars. Online job-market revenue and volume growth will continue to outstrip print for the foreseeable future.
-source: Corzen, Inc.

October 2004. Pheedo, an advertising network serving ads in RSS feeds, has acquired Blogsnob, a free ad exchange network primarily for weblog authors. The company will merge the two technologies into one integrated platform serving ads in weblogs and RSS feeds. The new offering - Pheedo SimpleAd Exchange - gives one interface for creating and tracking an ad campaign across both weblogs and RSS feeds.
-source: Pheedo

September 2004. Over two million weblogs exist. More than half of them are in English. More than 30 different crawlers currently index them.
-source: National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education - blogcensus.net

COMMENT 2004-11. Other sources cite far larger numbers of Weblogs, but how many are actively maintained is not certain. Some estimates say there are as many as ten million weblogs active. See blogcount.com for some of the more raw information being evaluated and annotated.

September 2004. Yahoo has added the ability for its MyYahoo subscribers to read RSS feeds in the Web interface.
-source: Yahoo!

September 2004. The New York Times online now generates almost two million page views per month with direct click-throughs from its RSS feeds.
-source: NYTimes.com

September 2004. LookSmart has acquired Furl.net, a free, public archiving service that allows users to save on Furl servers a copy of any Web page they care to add to their collections. Furl makes it possible to "republish" these collections via email broadcasting, RSS feed generation, weblog integration, and simple link publishing. Each user currently has 5 Gigabytes of storage. The service will remain free, monetized by contextual ads initially from Google, eventually from LookSmart itself.
-source: LookSmart

July 2004. Messagecast is expanding its multi-channel delivery system to include RSS feeds. Currently its LiveMessage service delivers instant messaging (IM) communications and relays them to the end user via desktop IM, or mobile phone short message service (SMS), or email, acording to the user's choice. The conversion and relay model bypasses the current adoption obstacle of requiring separately installed technology to read RSS feeds.
-source: MessageCast, Inc.

July 2004. Feedster, a search engine specializing in RSS feeds, will begin serving Overture contextual ads in its Web-based results.
-source: Feedster

COMMENT 2004-07. RSS stands for "really simple syndication", and is essentially the ticker-tape model of information delivery, in the format of headlines, with and without accompanying abstract-summaries.

2004-03 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

NOTE 2004-03. The following item is included to illustrate the general environment within which journalistic and personalized publishing is growing on the Web.

March 2004. A new study of American media finds that journalism is changing in a momentous way, and this has profound consequences for what we know. General media circulation continues in serious decline, as audiences fragment into more specialized news consumption. The media conglomerates invest more in telling news than in collecting it, and stories recycle through the 24-hour day with no additional facts presented. The study concludes that the public detects this change in news media, and doesn't like it - a measure of distrust in institutional news has arisen.

The State of the News Media 2004, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is produced by The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a group drawn from several sources that promises an annual review of American journalism.

The 500-page report is reproduced in a web site:
http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/

A 38-page executive summary is available as a PDF file, easily clickable from the site, here's the direct URL:
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/execsum.pdf

Highlights from the report:

Journalism is in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television.
Journalism and audiences are fragmenting, this has consequences for what we know, how we are connected, and our ability to solve problems.
Fox, CNN and MSNBC all pick five or so stories each morning, then recycle the same information throughout the day. Only 5 percent of stories on cable have new information, while two-thirds of stories repeat the same facts over and over.
There is much more raw data newsgathering, with less double-checking of facts, and putting those facts in perspective.
Competition to traditional media now include weblogs and specialized daily reports. Only three out of eight media sectors are seeing audience growth: ethnic, alternative and online media.
Quality news and information is more available than ever before, and in greater amounts so are the trivial, the one-sided and the false. The consumer willing to drill down to original sources is likely better informed now, but currently this activity is sporadic and unaided.
During this fragmentation and redistribution of interest, the usefulness of, and the need for, the discipline of journalism is greater now than ever before.

COMMENT 2004-03. The web site contains an excellent menu system that we commend to the attention of all owners and designers. The site's architecture makes navigation through a huge amount of information exceedingly easy. Worthy of an award, in our opinion.

February 2004. Forty-four percent of US Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating weblogs, and sharing files. Twenty-one percent have posted photographs to websites, reflecting the low cost of digital cameras and the technological ease of online album creation.
-source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

2004-01 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

January 2004. Contrary to the old fear of losing circulation to the Web, newspapers are experiencing a net gain in readership because of their online versions. The print and Web version of a periodical are really one version rather than two, and extend the reach of each part across the two channels. Similarly (although less certainly yet), radio audience is down, but webcast audience is increasing.
-source: The Media Audit

February 2003. More than 60 percent of companies that have deployed website Content Management (CM) solutions still find themselves manually updating their sites. CM software embodies vastly more functions than users typically learn to employ. Site operators should not try to publish "look and feel" changes through CM systems, but should program this templating into the server or with the scripting language. CM systems should probably become thinner and tooled more to specific tasks.
-source: Jupiter Research

COMMENT 2004-01. Our experience agrees. It can take a surprisingly large amount of time to rework content in a website, even when you're good at it. Updates by the website owner are best managed in simple and rapid strokes or not at all. We can now provide our clients with the means to update specific portions of their webpages themselves manually from their own computers. Yet even a procedure comparable in ease to, say, changing paragraphs and pictures in a word processor page requires valuable working time. With anything more complicated, outsourced webmaster service, or modest investment in custom scripting, remains more economical.

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