Folksonomy

Folksonomy is a term that has come to describe the potential for user-defined tags to organically develop structure out of what might appear to be chaotic collections of information. It's putting the power to categorize everything from links to digital photos into the hands of users.

A Year to Remember in Internet News

Interesting essay on the state of online news from Merril Brown, founding Editor in Chief of MSNBC.com:

"So, while business might appear prosperous, beneath the success lies a perplexing reality. Many of the news organizations that make most Web site journalism possible, either through their dollars or the work of the journalists reporting for their traditional products, are in some combination of strategic, journalistic and financial peril. It is those organizations that make large-scale Internet news sites viable. In a world of dwindling resources, a world of falling daily newspaper readership and fragmented television news audiences, who will produce the journalism of scale and importance that informs citizens about national political campaigns and international conflict? Bloggers? Citizen journalists? The software developers who produce RSS
readers?

The answers that emerge over this decade to those questions are certain to impact the future not just of Internet news but of journalism itself."

Pre-packaged news

Hardly surprising the Bush administration are proving experts at this:

"Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production."

Free news online - the door is closing

In Monday's New York Times:

"Newspaper Web sites have been so popular that at some newspapers, including The New York Times, the number of people who read the paper online now surpasses the number who buy the print edition.

This migration of readers is beginning to transform the newspaper industry. Advertising revenue from online sites is booming and, while it accounts for only 2 percent or 3 percent of most newspapers' overall revenues, it is the fastest-growing source of revenue. And newspaper executives are watching anxiously as the number of online readers grows while the number of print readers declines.

'For some publishers, it really sticks in the craw that they are giving away their content for free," said Colby Atwood, vice president of Borrell Associates Inc., a media research firm. The giveaway means less support for expensive news-gathering operations and the potential erosion of advertising revenue from the print side, which is much more profitable.

'Newspapers are cannibalizing themselves,' said Frederick W. Searby, an advertising and publishing analyst at J. P. Morgan."

Ken Sands, online publisher of The Spokesman-Review, is quoted in the article - but in an email today he expanded on his comments:

"We're at an interesting period in the evolution of online news. Many newspapers simply put their print content online, add some breaking news and maybe a few bells-and-whistles multimedia and interactivity and call it good. Sell a bunch of online advertising and everybody's happy, right?

I don't think so. In the next few years, in my view, online news should become much more independent of that print content. If you think about it, posting a newspaper online is giving people a snapshot of yesterday's news. We should instead, give them today's news and a bit of tomorrow's news, as well as making full use of the unique attributes of the web, including: immediacy, interactivity, utility, multimedia, entertainment, archiving, aggregation and community publishing. When you truly take advantage of those attributes, you've got a much different web site.

Here in Spokane, we started on Sept. 1 charging an online subscription fee, but it's ONLY for the repurposed print content. Everything else on the web site is free. As it is now, we frequently post breaking news and have between 20 and 25 staff-written blogs (immediacy and interactivity). We have multiple databases of information (the utility function). We have video, photo galleries, etc. Is it enough web-original content to withstand the partitioning of our print content behind a subscription wall? Obviously not, as we saw our year-over-year traffic growth go from plus 42 percent to zero.

In a perfect world, I would have preferred to wait a couple of years to let the evolution proceed toward web-original content before charging for the repurposed print content. (But you can hardly blame the print circulation folks for being antsy as their numbers decline.)

I'm hoping that what it really means is that we're simply ahead of the evolutionary curve. Give us a couple of years to jack-up the web-original content and people will come for that first and foremost. Then, who cares if we charge for the print content? (Of course, we could find out that the evolution is going an entirely different direction.)

Regardless, we really have no choice but to look for a better business model. If print circulation and advertising drop significantly, there's probably no way an increase in online revenue can make up the difference.

Who's going to pay all of the reporters and editors? Maybe those of us who are left in the future will simply aggregate and edit the news that's provided by citizen journalists. I don't pretend to have all of the answers, but you can't say we aren't looking."

The growth of blogs

David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, reports they are now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. In other words, about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. He says the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 months. And it's showing no sign of slowing down.

News sites and social networks

OJR looks at the phenomenon of social networks and asks why news sites aren't taking advantage of their potential. Why indeed?

"In the last two years social networking sites mushroomed across the net, heavily fertilized by hype and the promise of six degrees of connection between socially dispersed people who shared common interests or friends. Now companies actively apply social networking principles to shift more stock and lure more clickthrus to their site."

WWW @ ten years

Video from a conference on the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web's first decade. The conference, from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, October 2004, provided a forum in which scholars and practitioners of all disciplines shared perspectives, and innovative ideas about the Web.

The vanishing newspaper

The webcast of The vanishing newspaper panel discussion. MP3 is here.

The panel featured Phil Meyer (author of The Vanishing Newspaper), Mary Lou Fulton of the Bakersfield Californian and Northwest Voice, Stefan Dill of the Santa Fe New Mexican and Tim Porter together for a discussion about the future of the newspaper business in today's digital world and beyond. The conversation was hosted by Jeff Jarvis.

What's it all About(.com)?

There's been a lot written about NYT's purchase of About.com but largely from the Times' point of view.

About.com CEO Peter Horan gives the other side of the story ... as it were.

New era for Crikey

Crikey's new owners take over today and they've sent subscribers a letter explaining the changes. Should be interesting. Here it is:

Dear Crikey Subscriber,
In a few hours we’ll be emailing you the Crikey Daily – the first edition of the daily email newsletter we’re publishing as the new owners of Crikey. We bought Crikey because we believe in its role in giving readers the “inside” story of what’s really going on in Australia. We love its edginess, its irreverence and its surprise element. We also recognise that these aspects of Crikey’s character are fragile, and our aim is to preserve them and improve on them. And we think Crikey’s role as a “clearing house” for information is incredibly important in a country where most media is pumped out by a tiny number of proprietors.

The “new” Crikey won’t be remarkably different from the old Crikey -- but there will be some differences. First, we plan to publish just one edition of the Crikey Daily each weekday -- at midday (later in the day for alertees). It will carry around 20-25 items, and we have summarised our editorial approach on the Crikey website (click on the ‘About Crikey’ button).

Crikey will now run a little more like a typical newspaper, where writers and columnists discuss their stories with editors and co-ordinate their coverage. But that doesn’t mean the Crikey ethos of disclosure, tough commentary, hot tips and inside information will change – it won’t. The same team of writers will produce Crikey, and founder Stephen Mayne will write his typically insightful business analysis and comments every day.

There will be a few new elements, which you can see for yourself later today. They’re all aimed at making Crikey just as interesting as it’s ever been, not turning it into something glitzy or fundamentally different.

We hope you like it – please tell us what you think by emailing us at
letters@crikey.com.au.
Eric Beecher
Diana Gribble
Misha Ketchell