Murdoch has Dow in his sights

But so far his US$5 billion offer has been rejected. No doubt that won't be the end of the story.

It may be that the Dow Jones' internet properties are the main attraction to News as The Oz reports today, but it's interesting that this comes at a time when Rupert Murdoch has assembled senior editorial staff at his California property to map out the future of News Corporation's online news delivery.

"It's really focused on what the newspapers are doing online and how they adapt to the new world," News Digital chief executive Richard Freudenstein said of the conference.

The subtext being that the newspapers need to do a better job of digitising their businesses. Video is a major focus, and getting journalists to work across multimedia formats. But more than that developing new commercial models is a major challenge, one that needs to go hand in hand with refined editorial approaches.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has its own view on what life as a Murdoch-owned paper would be like.

Oz Gawker-like blog launches

This was signposted back in February and launched a week or so ago. Crikey has a polite review with relevant background.

It's an interesting experiment, but the real reason for posting today is that I just noticed a reasonably significant feature on the Australian Defamer site. Back in February Paul Montgomery raised the obvious question about a licensing exercise like this: why wouldn't you just go straight to the original?

Well, guess what? You can't. The link to the "US edition" at the top of the Australian page points straight back to the same (Australian) page. What's more, type the URL to the US edition straight into your browser and you bounce right back to defamer.com.au.

Are they paranoid? Or shall we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a mistake? I've emailed the editor and we'll see what she says.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo, the Australian partner site to Defamer, doesn't feel the need to restrict its readers from accessing the US edition.

Weirdness.

Update: Redirect quietly corrected

Well, no reply from the editor but strangely enough the re-direct has been fixed. (And no, it wasn't my imagination in the first place. I tested it on two machines.) So, how about that? Let's assume it was an innocent mistake and not an attempt to keep Australian audiences from going straight to the source.

Now we can all see how much copy is being duplicated.

More doom and gloom for newspapers

More news on the problems with newspapers. The latest patient, apparently, is the San Francisco Chronicle. The problems are not new, and neither is the debate. Doc Searls recaps. Scott Karp reckons it's a problem of a lack of imagination from newspapers. And he's right, but that's sort of stating the obvious, really. Dave Winer, I think, puts it best:

"[T]he MSM guys love to hear Jeff Jarvis's message of gloom and doom, but feel threatened by my prescription for embracing the new media, a message of hope, of finding new relevance for the skills and experience of professional journalists."

iRack and iRan

OK, I'm on a bit of a Youtube bender here, but this is pretty funny. MadTV's take on Steve Jobs' product presentations: IT theatre as social commentary ...

Cold Chisel - Standing on the outside

It's Sunday, so no media industry stuff - lets get into some music. In fact, I think I might start doing a bit more of this ...

Cold Chisel were a great Aussie band who broke up in 1983. Here's a clip of my brother-in-law's band with their version of the Chisels' Rising Sun for a soon-to-be-released tribute album.



I remember seeing the Chisels a number of times at Festival Hall in Melbourne (OK two all ages gigs, I was only a kid), shows that are still up there with the best I've ever seen. The LTE boys have nailed this song beautifully.

And here are some of the other Aussie artists on the album talking the Chisels' songs and legacy.

Changing media

Roy Greenslade and Jemima Kiss are covering the Guardian's Changing Media Summit. Unfortunately, Greenslade's blog doesn't use tags so the posts will likely drop off the page soon, but until then ...

Kevin Anderson and Suw Charman are also covering the conference. (Now why doesn't Anderson blog this event for The Guardian, given he is their blogs editor?)

The problem with content

Scott Karp asks: Is content still a business? (ie. content creation.) And concludes that content aggregation and distribution is really the only media business left.

His conclusion is based heavily on the problems being faced by the music industry, specifically around CD sales.

Problem here, I think, is that this is more a format issue than a content creation issue, per se.

Wheat or weed?

As a country music fan ... gotta love this: Stephen Colbert interviews Willie Nelson.

Where are the wikis on news sites?

Despite the LA Times failed experiment back in June 2005 the potential of wikis for news sites has always been there. As was pointed out many times, the problem was largely the choice of editorial material and subsequent lack of oversight.

But since then no one has been willing to follow the LA Times example and give it another shot.

Jimmy Wales makes the obvious point that "The LA Times experiment with a wiki really pretty clearly failed because it didn’t bother to first cultivate a community of users".

I've always thought that a wiki could work really well properly directed at, for example, a fans' view of their sporting club. The history of, say, Collingwood Football Club as written by its supporters would be a great read. The Wikipedia version is OK, but a bit sterile. If an Australian news site could get its act together to encourage Magpies or Rabbitohs fans to tell their stories through a wiki you could get something really powerful working.

Same goes for local history. The old whaling town of Port Fairy on the Victorian coast has a page managed by its historical society and an entry in Wikipedia. Both are unsatisfactory, but a news site could encourage small regional and suburban communities to tell their stories via a wiki. Over time this would develop into great content, as well as being a great way for building engagement with the news brand via a community service.

As Wales says, "if [news sites] think of a segment of the community that it isn't serving well and which it can't serve well because the economics don't work out then this new method of production means they can actually provide a new service."

Blowing up the Web 2.0 bubble

So, we're definitely in a bubble. The evidence?

"According to VentureOne, a research firm, nearly $500 million in venture- capital money was pumped into social-media companies in the first nine months of 2006. [...] As in the last bubble, sites blossom out of nowhere and quickly fade. The average user of Xanga, the buzzy social-networking site of the early Aughts, spent 15 minutes on the site in December, down from around an hour and a half in October 2002. Friendster, the massively VC-funded social-networking service whose demise is being hurried along by the more free-wheeling MySpace, topped three hours per user last February, only to drop to a quarter hour in December."

Right. Well, I suppose that does it then.

Problem is, the rest of the piece is more or less opinion based around the author's observations of a select number of web sites.

I love The Atlantic, but it's really very conservative on new media.

These earlier social media sites, like Friendster and even Myspace, are, I think, too narrowly focused on specific types of functionality, eg.: video sharing, bookmarking links, sharing music, photos, blogs, and customising RSS feeds into a personal page. The "whatever" features Hirschorn refers to.

And they often have a pretty horrid user experience, or the set up process is incredibly complicated. That's no problem for the teenage, geeky types, or the older long time web user, but it's not very attractive to the general user.

So in broadening out the application of social media the user experience needs to become simpler, more mainstream, if you like. And the offering needs to become more practical. Which it inevitably will. In other words there needs to be a good mix of useful functionality and meaningful community interaction, with professionally produced content alongside user generated content. As this happens the use of social media sites will expand, not contract.

In commercial terms, all of this needs to be underpinned by an opportunity to transact. Users need to be able to easily evaluate and ultimately purchase the products advertised within that social space.

The three elements are:

1. Content - professional and user generated
2. Community and interactivity - honest engagement and real, practical functionality
3. Commerce, or transactions - the next gen social media site enables a market place for commercial clients to connect directly with users.

As a business model it's more commercially robust than slapping display ads on static pages, even if they do have a comment box at the foot.

Another aspect of the current social media hype is non-related businesses thinking they can get on the bandwagon. Hirschorn refers to Doc Marten's new social networking site Freedm2.com. That strategy didn't work for Walmart. And I suspect it won't work for others like Nike, either, despite their CEO's confidence at the recent WEF. Nike as a social networking community just doesn't do it for me.

It all seems a bit narrow. Sure, it's a good thing that companies want to engage more with their customers, but I don't think it that has to be, or even can be, via a social networking strategy.

You have to approach these things as publishing ventures, not just add-ons to existing businesses. They need to operate successfully in their own right, and users are pretty good at sniffing out frauds.

The key as far as timing goes, is the commodification of technology, the boom in web based applications, and the rise in online populations via broadband uptake and better awareness of the web and the concurrent migration in advertising dollars. These are significant differences from the situation in the lead up to April 2000.