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August 23, 2005

RSS gets the 'influential' seal of approval

One minute, a piece of research on RSS has people scrabbling around to work out why a data format based on XML is not more popular. The next? RSS is the bee's knees. As long as you are one of those important member of the movers and shakers community. If you are an influencer, you are almost certain to be a keen RSS subscriber, according to RSS marketing company Nooked.

Apparently, Nooked asked 200 or so individuals from the media if they used RSS "to collect information for analysis, news & reports and/or determine their future plans for adopting RSS as an information gathering & tracking tool". The breakdown was: 25 per cent journalists; 15 per cent analysts; 45% bloggers; with the remaining 15 per cent 'interested parties', whoever they might be. Of that lot, Nooked said 87 per cent use an RSS reader or news aggregator to keep up to date on content. And they were heavy users, although in my limited experience that goes with the territory. You tend to keep adding and grouping them until you find the things you don't use and kill them off. According to Nooked's figures, 40 per cent of participants are consuming between 20 and 50 individual feeds. More than 15 per cent consuming more than 200 RSS feeds.

I spent a while wondering where the journalist and analyst sample base came from as most of the hacks I know do not make much use of RSS, if at all although they are warming to the idea as their email databases get ever fuller. The bit that made me wonder was the sales pitch made by Nooked at the end of its little blog piece. "All respondents highlighted the fact that finding RSS feeds is a problem," said the company. "The question will no longer be 'do you have an RSS feed?', but 'where can I find your RSS feed?'." Wait for it, here's the real message: "The Nooked RSS Directory is one example of a business resource for finding feeds; a comprehensive source to enable journalists to monitor."

OK, that sounds eminently sensible. An RSS search engine. The question is, has anyone at Nooked actually tried to use their own search engine to find an RSS feed? Using Nooked, I did not even find obvious feeds that I already have logged in Netnewswire. I found Googling with variations on the search terms 'RSS', 'press release' and 'electronics' or 'technology' a more useful way of identifying companies with RSS feeds. An RSS directory is a fine idea, but it is going to have to be a lot more effective at identifying corporate feeds if it is to be of any use to journalists in particular, especially those who are a bit further behind than Nooked's special set of influencers.

Posted by Chris at 8:54 PM

August 18, 2005

Manually editing HTML and other indignities

It's SiliconValleyWatcher day at this blog. I happened by Tom Foremski's post calling for journalists to get their hands dirty with HTML and learn to speak geek after putting together the earlier post on enterprise IT. His argument is that it's a new world where luddite hacks can no longer ignore Web programming in order to do online journalism. We need to dump Word and its habit of littering text with hidden formatting and embrace the world of the text editor.

That is true to a degree today. I barely use Word for anything more than its outliner and I have to swap to TextEdit, MarsEdit or something else to work with HTML tags. But, seriously, do we really have to expect to work with warmed-over SGML for the forseeable future? I don't mind dumping Word, but the idea of entering tags by hand for years into the future gives me the cold shivers.

In the 1980s, I learned how to use Monotype and Compugraphic photo-typesetters. They too were tag-based systems (not SGML mind) and demanded a lot of attention to where those tags went. Just a few years later, those companies were getting thrashed by Linotype which had wisely thrown in its lot with Apple and used Macs as the front-end. The desktop publishing era arrived and people stopped using tags.

Now we are in 2005, and we are still stuck with manually inserting HTML or XML tags to do any Web copy. Is it me, or is that just plain mad? We don't need to learn those tags, we need to get better front-ends that allow the correct tags and links to be generated just by highlighting things and dropping links into the copy.

I can see the point of getting our hands dirty with blogs and wikis and stuff, but not to the point of having to become web programmers per se. I've learned Perl and other languages to help get to grips with what can be achieved with Web pages, but I see all that as purely a stopgap while the content-management folks get their house in order.

Posted by Chris at 11:13 PM

Enterprise IT vendors to find excitement in their demise

A few weeks, Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher complained about how dull the subject of enterprise IT has become. John Gallant, editorial director of Network World, who is involved with the forthcoming Vortex conference in the US, disagreed with Foremski's analysis: that enterprise IT is going to see some major shifts and is therefore far from moribund. Exciting? Maybe not exciting in a "get in on the ground floor and cash out soon" sense. To be honest, it's more a bloodbath waiting to happen.

Having been researching a forthcoming piece on service-oriented architecture (SOA) for Information Professional (don't expect to find the article there just yet), I can see Foremski's point. Trying to pick apart the guff the vendors come out with, I think it's a miracle anybody can make sense of what the vendors are trying to sell. The market figures for various bits of enterprise IT are not encouraging for anyone planning to invest in a vendor in many of its sub-markets. And that is where the problem lies. Enterprise IT has been sliced and diced into progressively smaller chunks by some of the analyst companies, which each group of vendors ending up in ever more obscure product sectors.

This endless division of a large market runs counter to what the users themselves are up to. I worked out quickly that to do anything sensible on SOA you have to more or less ignore the vendors and go straight to the users, unless you find articles explaining the fine differences between enterprise service buses and integration servers compelling. Years of marketing conditioning have resulted in vendors having to have some niche that they can head, even if nobody cares much about the subdivisions. That makes the enterprise IT somewhat tedious to report and does little for the perception of vendors among users.

The desire for segmentation does not go to the heart of the enterprise's problem. Almost all big companies have a large selection of broadly incompatible systems bought over the years. They would like to glue them together with as little fuss as possible. The Web has made it possible for them. I don't believe in magic bullets, so it was a bit of a surprise to find one technology turning up again and again.

Web services is quietly transforming enterprise IT as users realise they can buy a few bits and pieces that let them access software buried on a mainframe from more or less anything fitted with a browser. Not only that, once that initial connection phase has been dealt with, they can start to bolt a layer of software onto the front that lets them package different server applications and offer them to third parties or customers. The problem for the enterprise IT vendors is that much of this work has to be done by the customer or by a service company, such as CSC or IBM. Packaged software does not fit neatly into this environment although there are gaps that the software can fill.

The emphasis is more on breaking up the packaged software into components that can be offered up to users separately, as individual services. As the users do this, they are finding that they have a lot of duplication in what they run. Gradually, they are going to reduce this additional fat and align the system around a few core components. That is not good news for vendors, unless some of them decide to live with lower licence revenues and fully the embrace the idea of turning their offerings into components and glueware in order to displace more expensive incumbents.

The trouble is that, right now, many of the software companies keep plugging away at a business model devised 20 or 30 years ago, pretending the packaged software business is alive and well. They just want to sell users something big, shiny and new, not just some glueware for the old bits. At the same time, the service companies have cottoned on to things such as open-source frameworks for providing the glue. That is cheap after all.

Foremski used the example of enterprise IT to describe how the Fortune 500 companies will fall prey to 'new rules' companies. But many of those big companies are not paralysed by their systems. They are getting hold of what it takes to update their systems. Some will inevitably make a mess of it but many others will make the transformation work. The whole Web services setup has given them a better escape route than what the same technology does for those 'new rules' entrants. The people desperately in need of the new rules are the IT vendors using a technology and marketing strategy straight out of the 1980s and 1990s where it was OK to confuse your customers because you were going to tell them what to do anyway. Now, those customers are going to be getting their own back and licence fees are firmly in their sights. Microsoft's decision to aim at the medium-sized companies for much of what it is doing looks to be a much safer bet.

Posted by Chris at 10:04 PM

August 17, 2005

Links? Phooey. Eyeballs, that's what advertisers want.

ClickZ has reported that the Feedster 500 list of most influential blogs is of "dubious value as an evaluation tool for media buyers". Well call me surprised. A list made up largely of inbound links from blogs with some other factors rolled in does not satisfy advertisers? The surprising bit was that the concern was because the list does not rank blogs "according to niche or topical focus". Steve Rubel says it "sounds like an opportunity for somebody else". It is indeed an opportunity but not based on a metric that is more important to bloggers than anybody planning advertising spend.

Inbound links are easy to measure and give a reasonable idea of how bloggers view other blogs. But that is a poor metric for something that advertisers actually care about, unless they just want to reach active bloggers. There is probably a reasonable correlation between inbound links and visitors. But what advertisers really want to know about is traffic. How many people look at each page? Or, if it were possible, how many people look at this page are looking to buy a consumer durables with a value of $1000 this month? Here's an idea. Why don't bloggers simply make that information available instead of complaining about how inaccurate Alexa is and the flaws in lists based on blog 'influence'?

Boing Boing, for example, puts up its stats in Awstats form. I appreciate not everyone can use the same approach but getting bloggers who care about this to provide stats in a reasonably raw form would go some way toward demonstrating what sort of traffic each one gets, if advertiser friendliness is what they want to demonstrate.

Traffic data can be faked, but the odd spot check here or there would help keep the playing field level. I'd be interested to hear why traffic data should be kept secret. I don't plan to have advertising on this blog but I would have no objection to ponying up the data if it were possible to make sure none of the data released publicly could be used to identify an individual visitor.

However, I would be even happier if advertisers stopped trying to measure random variables on the way to a sale and simply analysed whether campaigns worked or not using actual sales. That might stop advertising agencies chasing awards and focus their efforts on things that work, rather than measuring other aspects of a campaign because that is the easier way to analyse a campaign. It's like the habit of PR companies chasing up whether hacks have received each press release. Who cares? What matters to them really is whether any of that work translated in column inches. But, apparently, that is harder to measure.

Posted by Chris at 10:20 PM | Comments (2)

August 16, 2005

People can understand RSS and still not like it

Nielsen NetRatings has come up with some research on the use of RSS among blog readers and the findings have troubled some posters, such as Steve Rubel.

People are getting perhaps a little too worked up about the findings, seemingly believing that not having RSS take-up will develop into a problem for blogs and that this research points to an ease-of-use problem. It's OK, you can stick with the orange logos and cryptic syndication messages: the problems are obscurity and lack of need.

In the Nielsen study, 11 per cent of blog readers said they use RSS to keep up with postings. The others didn't use RSS (or Atom) for a variety of reasons. But only 16 per cent said they did not understand RSS. Close to a quarter said they understood RSS but chose not to use it. Half said they had not heard of RSS at all.

Most of the hand-wringing is over the 66 per cent who do not understand RSS. I would have expected a larger number to be honest. The figure that interests me is the 23 per cent that chose not to use it. This points to a way of users managing blogs that runs counter to what bloggers believe they should be doing. Rather than choosing a discrete set of bloggers they monitor via a feed aggregator, they are presumably surfing to sites directly. Why would they do that? As Robert Scoble pointed out, they probably don't have a large collection of sites they want indexing.

That 25 per cent probably use Boing Boing, Fark or Engadget or one of the other big blogs as shared indexes to find stuff then just go surfing around. There is probably a good proportion buried in the other categories who would choose to use blogs in that way. As RSS support becomes a standard feature of browsers, maybe more people will use it. But I wouldn't get too worked up about ease of use. Once you've figured out what the orange logo is for and whether to left- or right-click on it, it's easy to remember.

However, I did decide to scrap the logo as I didn't feel it made life any easier for people. Browsers like Safari 2 pick up on the presence of the feeds directly and littering the page with three near identical logos for the different formats didn't make a lot of sense. Sometimes just having a description is just as good.

Posted by Chris at 11:28 PM

Another day, another top blog list

Feedster has produced a top 500 blog list, an act that has triggered another round of conversations. They tend to split along the lines of "hooray, a list to kick Technorati's butt" or "why can't people stop doing these lists?"

Unlike the recent ComScore survey, Jason Calcanis likes this list. But, then again, Engadget comes top of the list. Presumably no problems with the methodology for Calcanis in this instance. Jeff Jarvis has taken pot shots at the list and its inevitable concentration on populist blogs. For him, the world of blogging as seen through these lists is all a bit too big-old-media.

I can see Jarvis's point. If blogs were set up as a more intimate way of publishing, glorying mass-market sites seems a bit strange. It all threatens to turn the blog industry into another form of mass media. But that is happening anyway: the top-blog lists do not help that transition nor hinder it. Money will drive media companies towards mass-market blogs, not lists. And money comes with large groups of people.

Despite the best efforts of Internet pioneers to develop forms of communication that favour narrowcasting, a large section of the public continues to gravitate towards mass-market approaches. That's why media companies are able to make money. Doing things at an individual level is expensive. One person talking to many is much cheaper. Luckily for publishers, people like to be able to sit back and be entertained or informed rather than engage in direct conversation with everyone who wants to tell them something.

Even as it becomes easier to serve narrow, specialist audiences, sites are popping up that use the power of the crowd to homogenise the Internet. Take Digg. This "Slashdot killer" asks people to vote for posts they like and ignore ones they don't. So the only stuff you see featured is that which is popular. At this site, people like what other people like. And, for some people, homogenous view of what the Internet has to offer is better than the slightly more personalised view that supposedly detracts from a site like Slashdot.

Yes, lists will favour mass-market blogs. But they will be called mass-market blogs for a reason.

Posted by Chris at 10:42 PM

August 14, 2005

Redesign complete (more or less)

One crash course in cascading style sheets (CSS) has made it possible to dump the default templates supplied by LivingDot and MovableType and go for my own on this blog. Changing the design was only half the reason for doing this as I needed to learn a bit more about how MovableType itself worked. Having used a couple of Perl-based site-management systems in the past, it turned out to be quite straightforward. But, then again, I haven't tried to do anything fancy in PHP yet.

There are still a few rickets in the design when it comes to how it renders on different browsers. This was designed on a Mac, so works best in Safari. Firefox has a little problem with the size of the search box, which presumably can be overcome with a quick hack. I had to change the design for IE 5.2 for the Mac as the original design ran into the one bug in the renderer that has no workaround. D'oh. Opera seems to be happy enough with the CSS except for a problem with handling underlines in the headline links in the left-hand panel.

The look is slightly different on IE for Windows - this seems to be down to the way that Microsoft messed up the box model in CSS. The problem only affects the link boxes at the left-hand side so the text alignment is a little off, but I have made no attempt so far to use hacks to make the designs match up. Given that none of the versions of IE that I tried (including IE 5.5 for Windows) didn't leave chunks of text busting out of boxes in bizarre ways, I'm considering myself to be quite lucky. Then again, it is only a two-column design at this point, so there isn't that much that can go wrong.

I'm trying to keep the overall design very simple and clean. I'm not a big fan of sites that litter links all over the front page. You're just asking people to get lost in the structure. Instead, I'm inclined to put a blogroll and similar stuff on a dedicated page. Right now, I can't see a good reason to have a forest of links in a column with no explanation of what they are for.

The banner image underneath the logo by the way is a small stack of DVD-R disks shot with a macro lens and then oversaturated in Photoshop. Once cut out, the image just happened to have the right shape and had the benefit of forming a vague link to both the media and technology.

Posted by Chris at 5:48 PM

August 13, 2005

CNN's policy for citizen journalists in full

Well at least the broadcaster doesn't want your first-born. Following on from the earlier post about the Chartered Institute of Journalists' complaint about the poor treatment of mobile-phone snappers by news organisations, I ran across the full agreement used by CNN in July for anyone wanting to submit material about the recent hurricanes and it's quite something.

The terms of use read:

Children under age 18 must have a parent or legal guardian's written permission to submit their videos/photos/audio and such permission must accompany the videos/photos/audio or they will not be considered.

Employees (and their immediate families and household members) of CNN and its parent, subsidiaries, divisions, and affiliated entities are not eligible to submit videos/photos/audio.

CNN has the right to edit and/or alter any submission. CNN reserves the right not to use the video at all and/or to use as much or as little of the video as it chooses.

By submitting your videos/photos/audio, for good and valuable consideration, the sufficiency and receipt of which you hereby acknowledge, you hereby grant to CNN a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, distribute and otherwise exploit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of CNN's programming or the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without making payment to you or any third party. You represent and warrant to CNN that you have the full legal right, power and authority to grant to CNN the license provided for herein, that you own or control the complete exhibition and other rights to the materials you submitted for the purposes contemplated in this license and that neither the materials nor the exercise of the rights granted herein shall infringe upon or violate the right of privacy or right of publicity of, or constitute a libel or slander against, or violate any common law or any other right of, any person or entity. You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless CNN, its parent and affiliated companies, its and their licensees, successors and assigns, and each of its and their officers, agents and employees from all liabilities or losses, including, without limitation, reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of or related to CNN's exercise of the rights granted herein. This license shall be governed by the laws of the State of Georgia.

I love the bit about employees and family not being allowed to submit their pics - is there a prize at stake here? And the demand that anyone submitting needs to be over 18. Recovering legal fees from a minor could be tricky I guess.

I'm not a lawyer but the line about "neither the materials nor the exercise of the rights granted herein" would seem to indicate that, whatever CNN does with this stuff, it's your fault if they get sued. I'd be interested to hear an alternative meaning for this line.

I have seen one contract like this in my working life, and gave it a seriously wide berth. And I don't think it had the "exercise of rights" line in it. If news outlets really want citizen-journalist reports, they are going to have to drop some of those demands.

Posted by Chris at 12:51 PM

Citizen-journalist bloggers in knickers-in-twist shock

Bloggers writing on citizen journalism have been getting worked up over a letter sent by the Chartered Institute of Journalists (CIJ) to the UK magazine Press Gazette and published a little over a week ago. However, the bloggers downstream have been quoting each other rather than looking at the letter itself. And so the comments have been getting steadily less about what the CIJ said but their own prejudices on the issue.

I'm not a CIJ member and have never planned to be: it is not an organisation that, I'm afraid, I have never taken very seriously. I have only ever met one person who claimed to have joined the CIJ and that was about ten years ago. Most UK hacks who are a member of any journalists group join the National Union of Journalists. But that did not stop the writers of the letter raising a couple of good points. Then the game of Chinese whispers started.

Selective quoting - you don't have to be a professional journalist to do it - means that what started out as a criticism of the policies of TV stations and online news outlets got construed as a condemnation of citizen journalists within a few days. It did not take many layers of commenting for the original point to have been lost. Curiously, some seem to have read at least the news story based on the letter in Press Gazette. And still they got confused.

Eric Dauster in his Blogola claimed: "The UK Press Gazette received a letter from the CIoJ calling the use of pictures following the London bombings as 'totally unacceptable' and 'bordering on the irresponsible'." Not quite. The CIJ correspondents actually said: "The use in newspapers, and on television, of pictures by amateur photographers who have been at the scene of a major news story has always been acceptable." That would imply that the CIJ had no problem with people sending cameraphone snaps of the aftermath of the bombings.

What the CIJ people were complaining about were the exhortations by programmes such as ITV's London Tonight to "go out and get news pictures" so that viewers could "feel a part of the exciting world of newsgathering". The writers asked: "What happens if a viewer is seriously injured while taking part? Will ITV be there to pick up the pieces and pay the medical bills?" The short answer is no, they won't. The NUJ for its part has been running campaigns to get newspapers to take better care of freelancers working in war zones who often get left on their own when something goes wrong. There are dangers for people taking photographs at home. The police often demand pictures of violent demonstrations to identify suspects. The result has been that freelance and staff photographers have been the targets of violence themselves at demonstrations. Somebody just popping along to an anti-globalisation demo with the expectation of being a citizen journalist for the day might find that out the hard way if it turns nasty. Getting roughed up by a bodyguard or bouncer might be the only reward some wannabe celeb snapper might get.

The issue of reward was actually the main thrust of the letter, not danger. The CIJ went on to criticise the outrageous rights grabs that broadcasters in particular tried to use, "playing upon the lack of knowledge of copyright law by the average mobile-phone snapper". All of the organisations cited said they not only wanted to use the pics for free, but that they expected syndication rights as well. CNN's demands were particularly egregious, according to the CIJ:

"You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless CNN, its parent and affiliated companies… from all liabilities or losses, including, without limitation, reasonable attorney's fees."

Yes, that's right. If anybody who objects to the use of the picture for news purposes by CNN decides to sue, you get to pay. And what do you receive for your rap-rod snap in exchange for the right to fork over thousands in lawyer fees to CNN? Zip. Nada. Zilch.

However, that little nicety was missed by a number of bloggers. Monique Van Duseldorp writing for Poynter Online on citizen journalis, claimed the CIJ "was condemning the trend and all those promoting it". Bizarrely, she said the letter was sent in response to the pictures taken of the arrest of two alleged bombers by a member of the public and sold for a cool £65 000 to two news outlets. The letter was published on the 4th August, which was several days after the arrests, but it made no mention of the arrest pictures. However, Press Gazette is a weekly and the letter could have arrived some days before it was published.

As the photographer of the two guys on a Stockwell balcony had been paid for handsomely, I find it unlikely that the CIJ writers had those pictures in mind when penning the letter. Van Dusseldorp pointed to two news stories in Press Gazette but not the letter itself. To be fair one story cited the arrest pictures as marking a watershed in citizen journalism and then mentioned the letter, but the two were not directly linked in the copy.

Jeff Jarvis on BuzzMachine seized on Van Dusseldorp's comments, claiming the CIJ had suffered a "hissy fit" and that its comments were "journalistically offensive". By this time, the link to pictures had died. Jarvis was commenting on citizen news-gathering in general, implying that the CIJ's objections over dangers and payment were patronising. "Well, we're all big boys and girls and we can make those decisions." That's true enough, or at least it should be. But in some circumstances, standing and taking a picture paints a big target on your back. Many experienced news photographers have had enough cameras broken to understand where the risks lie.

However, after Jarvis, there was another layer of indirection. Citizen journalism advocate Dan Gilmor spared no more than two lines on the subject:

"Jeff Jarvis points out the absurdity of a journalists' group urging news orgs not to ask for citizen's input on news events. Ridiculous."

Yes Dan, you're right. It's ridiculous. It is indeed tough to write a news story if you don't have anyone to tell you what happened. If that was what the letter said, then it would be a great comment. However, it is completely irrelevant to the CIJ's original points. Reading the letter itself might have been a good start to that post.

That is not to say that all bloggers simply seized upon each others' words in a flurry of trackbacks without actually bothering to check the source. To his credit, Dick O'Brien clearly did read the letter and criticised Jarvis for his knee-jerk reaction on the Back Seat Drivers blog.

People with cameraphones are clearly getting wise to the free-pic grab. A lot of people have remarked on the move to set up Scoopt, as a dedicated citizen journalist's picture agency. It is a fine idea as it makes it easier for people to get pictures syndicated. But budding photojournalists should be aware that a number of the traditional picture agencies are not averse to using new people, as long as their pictures are good.

It is not as if using amateur pictures, and paying for them, is anything new. Newspapers and broadcasters have been paying for pictures - including grainy, faked-up UFO shots - for years. Scoopt's own front page shows footage from the Concorde crash in Paris from five years ago. The only change is in the readier availability of tiny, half-decent cameras that happen to be embedded in phones. This whole area will settle down quite quickly as the idea of fair value for exclusive pics comes back. However, don't be surpised to hear stories of celebs' bodyguards confiscating cameraphones at private parties; people might even have to start leaving them at the door in exclusive clubs.

Posted by Chris at 10:51 AM | Comments (1)

August 11, 2005

Wanna top blog? Pile those entries high and do it cheap

Earlier this week, ComScore published a report claiming that 50 million Americans surfed to a blog sometime during the first quarter. There has been something of a hoo-hah over the details of the figures, particularly from Jason Calcanis at Weblogs who wanted to know why report sponsor Gawker Media featured so prominently. But the rumpus over which sites came top of the blogs should not affect what was apparent in the figures and not just ComScore's claim that blogs now threaten mainstream media. The report listed 20 or so top sites and they had a lot in common. However they did not seem to have much in common what the blogerati think blogs should be doing.

The real winners in the top 20 were the aggregators, some of which are mainly there for people to comment - such as Slashdot - or are more collections of links to other stuff, such as the Gawker Media sites, which annotate links to other material with a few funny asides thrown in for good measure. Blogcritics and the political blogs buck that trend, although the political blogs do depend on news sites for supplying much of the material they quote. Far from threatening mainstream media, these sites are promoting it.

Even with the compulsory sign-up policy still in place, the New York Times gets liberally linked. All that linking is perhaps why the paper's publisher is not getting too worried about losing readers who don't like the policy and perhaps not realising that BugMeNot is making a nonsense of its page-view tracking. But, as it costs a lot less to have somebody post a link to a site and write a pithy comment about a story than to write the story itself, clearly there is some goodly profit to be made. In the short term at least.

The curious thing about the rise of the aggregators is that it runs counter to one of the trends the Internet is meant to impose on every business: disintermediation. We seem to have more and more layers going up in between original content and the reader, not fewer. Now, this may be a temporary phenomenon. In the early days of the Internet, we were promised the support of intelligent agents that would read the newspapers for us and deliver only what we wanted to see. They would provide a thin interface between the user and thousands of potential information sources.

It's going to take a few years for agents to get to the level where we choose to use them rather than rely on the selection and editing skills of a human, so we can expect the aggregator sites to be around for a while. RSS might spread the traffic around a wider selection than the top 20, but the aggregator programs that pull feeds together are nowhere near being good enough to filter effectively on behalf of the user.

We can expect the aggregators to hang around for a while, then. However, given that aggregator blogs are comparatively simple and cheap to set up and run, you have to wonder whether the traditional media companies are going to sit around and watch them take their ad money away. This is where the media companies are getting it wrong now. They are launching blogs in an attempt to engage with the audience with even more original content, on the advice of the blogerati, when they could be raking in the cash by taking a leaf or two out of the aggregator's book. In one way, they have had a go: the Ananova service, now owned by Orange, was launched by the Press Association (PA) during the Internet bubble. Ananova provided direct links to copy from PA, the pooled-copy provider to the UK daily newspapers.

Posted by Chris at 10:15 PM

e.e. cummings is alive and well and working in pr

It took me several seconds longer than I cared to spend on this press release when it came in because I couldn't work out why the spam filter hadn't caught it. Then I realised it wasn't actually spam. Well not proper poker spam anyway, unless PRNewswire is branching out into new business areas to fill the gap left by Scott Richter. Entourage flashed this up while I was doing an phone interview:

"boxtonic win six figure totesportcasino account"

And that was how it read on the email. Haven't these people heard of capital letters? They help make sentences easier to read. Or consistency for that matter:

"Totesportcasino.com has appointed online marketing specialists boxtonic to compliment the existing in-house Marketing team. boxtonic has been handed a brief to increase brand awareness and recruit online for totesportcasino.com using creative and targeted marketing activity. The campaign will start with an intensive search engine awareness campaign."

I know I should really be asking Boxtonic this, but what does search engine awareness mean? Does that just mean filling in the Google form or are these things now classed as AI? And are they really just being paid to say nice things to the Tote's marketing team?

Posted by Chris at 6:40 PM

August 10, 2005

Time-travelling tickets

I got a promising email this morning from a ticket agency promising me that it was ready to dispatch tickets for The Pixies, who are playing at the end of the month at Alexandra Palace. The tickets were going today and the company added they would be turning up courtesy of SMS: the company responsible for delivering a large proportion of the credit cards issued by banks to people living within the circle described by London's M25 motorway.

Normally, discovering that anything is being delivered to you by SMS is enough to make you wish credit cards never expired. You can sit in all day waiting only to find out that the people with the cards can a) ride a bike and b) read a map. But they seem unable to find the right door or even the doorbell if they can manage to get to the door. Letting them 'try' twice and then having them return it to the bank so you can pick up the card from a nearby branch is often the best bet. But no such problem this time. The tickets turned up Monday. Now that takes some doing.

Posted by Chris at 9:44 PM

August 9, 2005

Truth's the blues but lies have fun

There has been quite a debate in blogworld about the difference between bloggers and journalists. One of the latest arguments comes from David Berlind at ZDnet who put both on a continuum between fact-checking everything and fact-checking nothing. For some, it is truth at all costs; for others, the odd lie is not a problem.

As the Internet extends its reach, bloggers and journalists are getting lumped together. And I don't see much of a problem with that, although it is going to cause some chaos in the short term. Right now there are some obvious differences, but they are gradually disappearing. There is a good argument that journalists seek out new sources for exclusives, but so do some bloggers. Conversely, a good many stories that appear on news websites are largely quoted from other, possibly competing sources. And the bloggers who comment on stories are doing much the same thing as newspaper columnists, just with more hyperlinks and, on average, smaller audiences. The difference, it would seem between those two extremes of truth versus spin, is one of credibility.

Credibility is something that concerns bloggers very much, it seems, given all the arguments over whether Technorati classifies the top 100 correctly, or whether journo-bloggers should have their phone calls or emails answered by PRs. Grassroots Media, which includes Dan Gilmor among its number, came up with the idea of getting bloggers to put "honour tags" on their posts to identify to readers what the blogs are meant to achieve. Their dream was a self-regulating network of bloggers who would do exactly what their tags said.

None of these things will do much to distinguish one writer from another one in the long term, which is just as well. Link farmers were hardly going to attach HonorTagPokerSpam to fake entries in their bids to hit the top of the Google rankings.

All that counts is what audience has chosen you. Notice that I did not write, the audience you choose. People write things to get read. They might be happy to know that only one person will read the text while they are alive or unhappy that only 10 000 happen by the blog in a month. But they cannot do much to achieve their chosen aim except to try to write things that get them an audience they are comfortable with.

Credibility as measured by the ability to report facts is important in many cases, but it is not necessarily the route to success in either blogging or journalism. Many surveys have pointed to increasing distrust in the stories that newspapers carry. Yet people continue reading them. True, circulations have dropped off but at nowhere the rate you would expect if people felt that what they were reading was of no value. They might not believe stories, but they continue to read. Part of this you can put down to the human need for gossip and rumour. Columnists and bloggers who pander to that can expect to do as well if not better than those writers who fact-check assiduously, just as long as they are entertaining. It is only if they start to get things badly wrong or misread their audience that things will go sour.

The same goes for Technorati's ratings. If people find that its top 100 does not give them what they want to read, they will go and find some other rating system. Natural selection will ensure that audiences continue to get the media that they deserve (and secretly want). And writers, of whatever form, will be there to serve up the raw material.

Posted by Chris at 12:22 AM

August 8, 2005

The perils of the journalist blacklist

Press officers can do some boneheaded things. But top of the list has to be blacklisting reporters or magazines in response to a story you don't like. Actually, that should be in second place. First place is making it clear to all and sundry that you blacklisted somebody. Google's director of public relations David Krane apparently told CNET that the company would not talk to reporters from that organisation for a year. Krane at least managed a no comment for the New York Times when the paper checked but the damage is now done.

The company might as well have painted a big target on its corporate back. If the company thought the story was wrong, it can complain and get a correction if the error is black and white. It can sue and see what happens. It can publish a statement declaring what it sees the situation to be. To effectively make public the fact that it is prepared to blacklist, the company has declared that none of the above techniques were going to work. So, the only conclusion is that an allegation in the copy was not only true, it was unanswerable. It's not even as if the sanction of the PRs refusing to answer journalist's calls is actually worth that much. Presumably Google believes itself to be too big to be ignored. It would be difficult to ignore the company, but does that mean that a blacklisted organisation is just going to stop trying? I don't think so, especially as the company issuing the blacklist decree has just told everybody where its worries lie.

If you take away the ability to talk to the company's appointed representatives, journalists are going to go elsewhere. There is nothing like finding out you are on a blacklist to spur you on: it's far better than just being ignored because you are not deemed important enough by the PR strategy for that week.

There is always plenty of material tucked away in 10Ks, 10Q and similar financial reports. Sometimes, the juicy stuff turns up in someone else's financial reports: it's strange where you find what were meant to be off-balance sheet transactions. And don't forget the role of staff who may be unhappy with some aspects of a company's business. All that the blacklisting company removes is the chance for good news to be written about it by the offending outlet (unless such an item is genuinely newsworthy).

So, what happens when a juicy nugget turns up and you try to fact check? You ring the PR, who you know won't return the call. There is a potential, if unlikely problem for the journalist in that the company may seek an injunction blocking publication. But it's hard to see a judge being sympathetic to an injunction after being told that a PR did not try to respond to the fact check. And in today's environment, it would be hard to get an injunction before the story appeared online, having given the PR at least a few minutes to respond.

Steve Rubel has pointed out that not returning calls is no longer an option in today's environment anyway. I disagree. Not returning calls is still an option, it's just more dangerous for the PR. However, I was more surprised by this assertion:

I even learned long ago to let calls from certain reporters go to voicemail if necessary. This forces journalists to write such-and-such “didn't return calls” as opposed to “didn't comment.” (It's subtle, but it sounds better.)

I'm afraid not. The former makes the company look either arrogant or incompetent. The latter just means the reader can interpret the claim that lies before the no comment in any way they like. It doesn't necessarily cast the company in a bad light. Now, refusing an interview, that's something else...

Posted by Chris at 11:17 PM

August 4, 2005

If it wasn't for other people, I'd get some work done

Email overload is worrying a lot of people, not least the people that run Microsoft. It is even being used to drive the direction in which Office is being pushed, according to comments made at the company's recent shindig with financial analysts. At the meeting, Chris Capossela said the company is concerned about emailing eating into sleep time and that the company is doing something about it. Exactly what is unclear, but it's probably got an orange logo and is spelt R.S.S.

Having helped to make people permanently contactable, Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research pointed out that more whizzy new communications technology is not going to solve the problem and that helping to separate work life from home life is something that companies should focus on.

I've got a great email productivity tip: don't read it. Or, if you are Bill Gates, get someone else to do the reading for you.

However, ignoring things only works for certain classes of email. If it's really important (or rather someone else thinks it's really important) whoever sent you that email is going to ring you, or IM you, or Skype you. Tomorrow they may load the personalised RSS feed they created for you with messages screaming: "WHY ARE YOU IGNORING MY EMAILS???" Changing communications formats is not going to help the situation all that much. And adding new formats is probably going to make matters worse before it gets better.

Tom Foremski pointed out that there are now too many conversations he wants to have. Blogging has meant we can talk to many people simultaneously but with none of them overhearing each other, except after the fact. And only if they go looking. So, it looks like RSS is not the weapon the email-overloaded need. It's just the CC email born again.

Last week, we saw poor Robert Scoble beating out the flames around the bush fires his spat with The Register's Andrew Orlowski ignited. Unfortunately, he seemed to be using a petrol-tipped beater as the more he pleaded his innocence of sending an email, the more some people doubted him. So, he posted more and more comments before finally taking a break and perhaps realising that possessing proof of something is not the same as being able to demonstrate it to someone else who cannot see it. It was perhaps the counter-example that his blog-book with Shel Israel, Naked Conversations needs rather than being one of the examples of how blogging can help extinguish negative publicity that the current draft contains.

Other blog-related conversations are going to be more enjoyable than Scoble's recent and unfortunate experience. But they all take up time.

In most jobs, you can't do without other people. It certainly doesn't work well for journalism. Obtaining stories does tend to involve talking to people in whatever form they like unlike you like subbing press releases. And I have yet to meet anybody who really enjoys subbing press releases. But there are going to be conversations we have to ignore, if only to make sure we get enough sleep. Holding the conversation in RSS or some other form of XML isn't going to do that job.

Posted by Chris at 9:41 PM

August 2, 2005

Click fraud: it's yer money they're after

Research conducted by the US-based Marketing Experiments Journal and Clicks2Customers, together with South African specialist Incubeta, has claimed that fraud on the pay-per-click ads used by Google, Yahoo and many others - and which pepper many blogs - is reaching close to 30 per cent on some campaigns. The trouble is, the higher levels of click fraud tend to be for the ads that attract the higher payment rates every time they get clicked. According to the research, one user of pay-per-click advertising lost out to the tune of more than $15 000 over the period of just 10 days. Joe Holcomb, formerly of Blowfish Blowsearch, questioned whether the techniques used could identify click fraud but has indicated similar percentages in his own research.

When things such as adwords arrived on the scene, advertisers must have thought: "At last, we have a way of measuring response rates and paying only for ads that work". Now, they are probably wondering whether that many living, breathing human beings actually do the clicking, or whether all those pages they serve at the destinations of the clickthroughs are simply getting hoovered up by script-driven bots.

The two companies behind the report acknowledge they need to do more work to truly identify fraudulent clicks with any certainty. But there were some myths they could help lay to rest with their research. One test, using a bogus Adsense campaign based around the words "duarf kcilc" to avoid disrupting other campaigns pretty much settled the issue of whether a competitor down the road could disrupt someone else's campaign. They could, but they would have to be a lot more sophisticated than just sitting at their desk and hammering on your ad all day. They would have to cloak their identity.

The second part of the study used a tool from Incubeta to study the IP logs from three Adwords users. This is the study that picked up the 29.5% suspected fraudulent clicks. This was for a campaign in the legal field that cost up to $2 per click. The cost to that advertiser for those clicks was calculated to be $15 394.50. Cheaper campaigns netted fewer fraudulent clicks: less than 10 per cent apiece for the two sub-30 cent campaigns tracked by Incubeta.

There is some movement in the middle market over pay-per-click ads, it seems. Holcomb claims that Blowfish decided to take the issue very seriously as it could prove a competitive advantage. However, I can't help feeling that the pay-per-click field is still heading for more trouble. Click fraud may not be easy to automate - the pay-per-click engines are a moving target when it comes to detection. But, assuming that the fraudsters are profiting directly from the operation by diverting money from campaigns to sites they operate, it looks like this one might just turn out like spam. For any protection mechanism that can be automated, an attack can also be automated.

For the moment, the fraudsters are perhaps being too greedy for their own good, siphoning off money at a rate that is readily detectable if not easily demonstrable to the pay-per-click engine companies. As the detection mechanisms improve, I can't help feeling they will just improve their cloaking measures, widen their scope and throttle back the click bots they control to the point where they make enough not to be seen easily, but continue to raise the cost of using pay-per-click ads.

There might be a silver lining to this for traditional publishers, especially in the badly damaged controlled-circulation trade sector, who have been missing out because advertisers have drifted off to use more measurable means of promotion. OK, pay-per-click remains a tiny part of the overall ad market, but it has been growing fast and has made advertisers wonder what they can track. If their measures are no longer working, advertisers and their agencies will have to go back to the old-fashioned methods of doing proper market research before and after campaigns, and taking notice of what people read and watch rather than what gets clicked. But I'm getting dangerously into wishful thinking territory. And that rarely works out to be the way things go.

Posted by Chris at 11:02 PM | Comments (1)

August 1, 2005

Websites contain many things, but not the answer to all questions

An irritating trend has started with PRs as some have decided that dealing with enquiries from pesky hacks is all too much trouble. The default answer among a growing number is to respond to any enquiry with a phrase along the lines of: "It's all on our/our client's website." And more hacks are getting ticked off with it.

One thing these PRs don't seem to have realised is that a good many hacks have embraced the web as a first-instance research tool when putting together the background for a feature. We know where the website is and we have a pretty good idea what's on it in general. There are a good many otherwise technophobe editors who have an excellent grasp of how to get the most out of Google searches. But the web cannot provide more than a part of what's needed. That's why we're ringing the press office: we need something else.

The first reason for ringing is the one that causes most irritation: the fact-check. This may come as a surprise to many but stories do get fact-checked. It can be simple stuff like, how many people work at the company? Where is its HQ? These are things that news editors and chief subs want on every story because that's house style. Making someone dig around a website - for information that may not actually be there - when they are on a deadline is not the way to make them happy. Especially when it is the sort of information the PR should have at their fingertips.

I've had the situation where the question was about whether the company was planning to appeal a legal judgment against it. I was told the response was on the website. There was, indeed, a response there: to a completely different case. I rang back in, got someone else who was about to tell me, "If you go to the we...", before I cut them off and told them exactly what was there and what wasn't. "I'll get back to you," came the not unexpected reply. It was better than the first answer they tried.

The second reason for calling is the interview request. Ideally, the hack will have someone in mind when asking for an interview and will probably call that person directly unless the company operates one of the increasingly bizarre etiquette schemes that demands that everything goes through central PR. But, it's often the case that you don't know who is the best contact for a given subject at the company. So, you ring the PR because you need someone to interview. You don't want to be fobbed off with the excuse that everything you need is on the website. You can't quote a website. You can't ask a website whether "leveraging synergies" means "doing things we're good at": you need a living, breathing human being for that. And the funny thing about websites is that they are often wrong, out of date and inconsistent.

So, if you like to see wrong, out-of-date or inconsistent information appearing about your employer or client, stick to the website defence.

Posted by Chris at 9:36 PM