Content Wise

Notable Links: July 10, 2009

• NYTimes.com: European Publishers Call on E.U. to Protect Copyright - They want better control of—and the chance to generate online revenue from—search engines’ and aggregators’ use of their content.

• Poynter.org: YouTube Launches Reporters' Center to Foster Citizen Journalism - and to facilitate collaboration between citizen video journalists and mainstream news organizations.

• MediaPost.com: Mag Bag: 279 Mags Fold In First Half of '09

• Manolith.com: The Story (so far) of Twitter - An illustrated history of Twitter; it stops short of the recent Iranian demonstrations, but captures other milestones.

Twitter as Publishing: Tim O'Reilly's Take

Tim O'Reilly runs a successful and innovative company that covers technology through many platforms: books in print, books online, Web sites, Webcasts, and real-world conferences. He also thinks of Twitter as a form of publishing, but not in the way that most conventional publishers might.

Rather than spewing headlines or self-promoting, O'Reilly suggests that publishers use Twitter and other social media for "curating and amplifying" the voices of the communities that they serve.

Sure, it's about aggregating and distributing content, but according to O'Reilly the driving motivation should be, as they like to say around his company, to "create more value than you capture." O'Reilly outlined his philosophy—or is it a clever business strategy?—at the recent 140 Characters Conference.

Here's the video of his 15-minute talk. (You might want to duck out for a cup of coffee during the 1 minute and 50 seconds of intro.) The O'Reilly Radar blog also has a written transcript.

Social Media & Site Redesign: Get Your MagsU Slides Here

I had a great time chewing over various aspects of Web publishing with all the smart, friendly folks at the MagsU magazine conference in Toronto on Monday. Thanks to everyone who took part in the sessions.

As promised, I've posted download-able copies of my presentations, "Tapping the Power of Social Media" and "10 Steps to a Successful Web Site Redesign." Help yourself.

And if any of those tips lead you in interesting directions, please jot down a comment here so we can all keep learning from each other.

Publishing Headed for the Toilet?

As implosions and cutbacks continue to rattle our industry, you can now keep track of the body count via a Twitter feed called The Media Is Dying.

Created by an anonymous public relations employee, and previously accessible only to selected viewers, it reports on media layoffs and personnel changes in updates of no more than 140 characters at a time. Unfortunately, the tiny size of these "tweets" doesn't make the news any easier to take.

And if you had any doubts about publishing being headed to the toilet, a new cell phone app will dispel them. Sit or Squat is a Web-based collection of user-generated reviews of public restrooms around the world. The site recently added mobile applications that, tying into the global-positioning abilities of iPhones and Blackberrys, help users on the go (who need to go) find nearby facilities with good reputations.

Actually, it's a pretty clever combination of user content and mobile technology to create practical, "have-to-know" information. The New York Times Bits blog reports that the Web site registered more than a million page views last month and that 25,000 people have downloaded the iPhone app.

It's Hard for Brands to Make "Friends" on Facebook

Today's New York Times Digital Domain column describes the challenges and offers cautionary tales in using social media to promote brands:

When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”

When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.

The Times report discusses in detail Procter & Gamble's attempts to use Facebook to promote Tide, Crest Whitestrips, and other products.

Crowdsourcing the Presidential Vote With Twitter

Among the coverage of yesterday's remarkable presidential election is yet another remarkable application of the microblogging platform Twitter: a sort of nationwide team-based journalism exercise to report on potential problems at polling places.

The Twitter Vote Report project enlisted a slice of that very large crowd of folks who cast their ballots on Tuesday to monitor moods, wait times, irregularities, and many other indicators of how the voting process went.

Volunteers sent in field reports via their Twitter feeds or by texting on cellphones and other mobile applications. Vote Report invented a few "hash tags" for the occasion to facilitate the concise updates: "#votereport" to tag the message as an official field report, "#good" for no problems, "#wait" to report delays in getting into a booth, "#machine" to signal trouble with voting machines, and so on. (For more details on the hash tags, see Vote Report's explanation of how to participate.)

Various Web-based tools, some pre-existing and some created just for this project, enabled viewers to tune in to and follow the ups and downs all over the country. It was pretty amazing to watch the national flood of "tweets" in real time.

At a more local level, here, at right, is what a query for our neighborhood zip code turned up on Twitter Search. (How'd we miss the bake sale?)

Sporadic peeks at Twitter Vote Report yesterday suggested that despite isolated missteps, for the most part the voting went smoothly. We may hear more as folks pore over the streams.

But regardless of what the effort turned up, it's how the project tackled this reporting job that should interest Web publishers. Once again, social media and crowdsourcing point in some tantalizing directions.

What can your crowd help you report on?

Social Media May Be Better Than RSS for Engaging Audiences

The appeal of RSS feeds (or Web feeds) still seems limited to a geeky slice of the online audience. Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion has a succinct analysis of a new Forrester Research report on trends in RSS use.

Some highlights:

RSS adoption among consumers is at 11% up from just 2% of users three years ago...

Here's the kicker, though. That might be all she wrote for RSS' growth track...

Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehicles that bring content you care about to you.

Twitter Stars on TV News

The microblogging tool Twitter now has its own television show, sort of.

CNN's wired anchor guy Rick Sanchez is doing a daily newscast (3 p.m. Eastern time, noon Pacific) that features tidbits generated by his audience via Twitter and other social and mobile media. Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion and Craig Stoltz at Web 2.Oh Really? have the details.

Personally, we've got a love/hate thing going with Twitter. By getting users to answer the question "What are you doing," it pumps more personal grunts and groans into the ever-raging mudslide of mundane musings on the Web. And yet, we've found it can be a handy way of glimpsing the activities of family, friends, and colleagues. (Michael's feed is at http://twitter.com/mgoldsf. Susan's is dormant at the moment.)

Perhaps more intriguing, people keep trying to use Twitter to commit actual journalism and online marketing, something that all publishers should be exploring. We did a tiny experiment in team Twitter coverage of Stanford's magazine and book publishing course in June; we'll try it again more seriously for the upcoming workshop on Web publishing.

Checking Sanchez's Twitter feed just now we see he has more than 15,000 "followers" and is tracking 13,000 feeds. Say what you will about the quality of his show. It looks like he claimed a big-time presence for CNN in the "Twittersphere" and found a promising new conduit to the audience.

Glimpses of the Future of Publishing

Four stories surfaced in the last week or so that suggest some answers to that nagging question in our industry: What is the Future of Publishing?

Squint, and you might see the vague outlines of what magazines and books may turn into in this increasingly multi-platform world.

1. The Industry Standard is back—with an online betting pool.

The magazine that chronicled the Internet explosion and then fizzled along with it in 2001 has been reborn, not in print but on the Web only. Its centerpiece is a prediction market, using ersatz "Standard Dollars," that aims to tap the wisdom of the Standard's crowd of expert readers and commentators.

If the market becomes a reliable trend-spotter for the tech industry, this could be a killer app. True, that's a big "if." Whatever happens, we think it's a creative attempt at an online extension for a brand that many believed had petered out. (Check out PPX, another magazine-related prediction market, at Popular Science's site; it covers "the future of science and technology." Simon & Schuster set up its own market, Media Predict, to spot ideas for books, recordings, and other media products that are likely to succeed; we wrote about it last year.)

More details on the Industry Standard's market and comments from Derek Butcher, vice president and general manager, are at Tech Crunch and the New York Times.

2. Here comes a unified, multi-platform book delivery system.

Writing about Amazon's plans to purchase Audible, Brad Stone at Bits thinks this is a real possibility:

"How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then switch back to the printed page?"

3. Cell phones are reading magazines.

Wired, Billboard, and Car and Driver have all recently published bar codes within the pages of their magazines in an effort to kick start their "mobile initiatives." Why? It's much easier to get cell phone users to tune in to related material if they don't have to manually type in those pesky Web addresses. Car and Driver's efforts are among the most ambitious so far, as Joanna Pettas reports at FolioMag.com:

"Car and Driver published more than 400 barcodes in its annual Buyer’s Guide in late December. Each car in the guide had a corresponding barcode linking to a microsite with pictures, reviews and a link to the full road test..."

4. And now, a platform to publish physical objects.

Three-dimensional printers—something in the neighborhood of Star Trek's transporter or replicator—have been used for a while now by aerospace and race car engineers, doctors, and artists. So reports materials scientist Mark Miodownik in the Independent.

As the technology continues to grow more sophisticated, it's not hard to envision the emergence of companies that enable their customers to "print out" a whole variety of physical objects: call them 3-D publishers. All right, maybe you have to squint a little harder to see it. But that's what they told Gutenberg, isn't it?

Tagging & Social Bookmarking Explained

Tagging and social bookmarking are handy tools that enable users to re-organize the Web for their personal use. They also provide an effective way for publishers to tap into the Web's viral marketing power.

But for people who don't already do social bookmarking and don't know about services such as del.icio.us, tagging can be a tough concept to grasp. Here's a simple, straightforward explanation in the form of a low-tech video from the folks at Common Craft Productions.

Common Craft also has great quick-and-dirty videos that demystify RSS feeds, blogging, and other key elements of Web publishing.