April 14, 2006

Why are we getting dumber?

It's a question that Nicholas Carr poses in the comments thread to his piece on lazy thinking and the Internet, itself prompted by Andrew Orlowski's piece on the Guardian taking aim at one of his favourite targets: Wikipedia. But is dumbness actually on the increase? And is that dumbness evenly distributed? I'd say no to both.

It's easy to look at the Internet and claim all this bite-sized information is turning us into the intellectual equivalents of ADD-afflicted toddlers stoked up on tartrazine and Sunny D. But that is maybe more a sign of wishing for the stability of the, mostly mythical, good old days.

I can agree with Carr that it feels as though the Internet is dumbing us down. Never before have so many people been able to get poorly thought-out arguments and prejudice far beyond the bounds of the bar-room. And that, in reality, is the only change. In the same way that, through phishing and similar tactics, the Internet puts con artists in direct contact with an unprecendented number of easy marks, thoughts that barely qualify for the term soak through into homes as easily as material that has at least been through a vaguely critical edit. When some of those bizarre pseudo-theories end up in student theses, that is nothing more than collateral damage.

The problem is that there is absolutely no evidence for people being dumber or less able to concentrate now than in the past. In the past, there were just fewer choices on what you could spend your time on. Did it mean that people spent their time in the pub discussing the finer points of deconstructionism. Not one bit. It was, for the most part, the same diet of prejudice and assumption that now coarses through gigabit fibre-optic links. I doubt that the ratio of intelligent thought to dumbness is no greater now than 10, 50, 100 years ago. It's just a lot more obvious. And it is, unfortunately, fashionable to be dumb at the moment.

What happened to James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds demonstrates the power of lazy analysis and the fetish for easy factoids. I started reading the book expecting to hate it, and only read it because it was painfully obvious that many of the people who so often think they quote from it had clearly never touched a copy.

Surowiecki's central point - made rather long-windedly - is that diversity of thought is A Good Thing, not that crowds always give you the right answers. You cannot have just any old crowd: it has to be a diverse crowd. Without diversity, groupthink takes over. If you were to read the first few chapters - or just the analysis of those chapters - you could come away thinking that the answer to everything lay in decisions made by crowds. From there, it's not too big a leap to demand that the old elites give way to the crowd, "because the crowd knows best". Luckily, this last commonly held opinion is little more than fashion. And will get swept out of the way by the next wave of popularity. The people doing the thinking will just be getting on with that, quietly.

Posted by Chris at 04:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Truth is free. Image costs money

The minor storm over Julia Hobsbawm's Editorial Intelligence project that attempted to forge links between hacks and flacks in the UK that were stronger than most people wanted to stomach has mostly abated. And it's left me with a niggling little question: are PRs so obsessed with their own image that they will promote themselves out of a job?

Christina Odone questioned the moral equivalence between journalists and PRs at the end of a column in the Guardian on Monday. In summary, hacks go out to tell the truth; PRs attempt to hide it. This prompted a certain amount of moral outrage among PRs such as Stuart Bruce, who claimed that stories get spun as much, if not more, by the media than by PRs.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of someone buying PR services. You have two people in front of you. One comes from the Max Clifford school of PR:

We only want what is in the best interests of our clients, who pay us vast sums of money, and to achieve that we are deceitful, creative and economic with the truth, often hiding it.

The other comes out with the currently fashionable line, as spouted by people like Paul Taaffe of Hill & Knowlton, that the Internet has changed everything, that there is no place to hide the truth. You need transparency in everything.

Now, to which one do you give your money? Who needs to pay a PR when you can just 'fess up everything on your blog, if that is, indeed, all it takes to maintain your reputation? People remember for a long time the consequences for companies when their executives sound like they had their dessert wine spiked with sodium pentothal. I suspect most people will go with the Clifford school of thought. Although they might wave the transparency banner in public. To keep up appearances, you understand.

Posted by Chris at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2006

On the Internet, no-one knows you're live

When a company organises a press conference, there is always a danger that none of the press will actually turn up. What you don't expect is for none of the people at the company organising the event to attend it. At least I didn't until last Monday as I sat through the slow-motion car crash that was Luminary Micro's big splash launch.

It must have seemed like a great idea on paper. You are a small Texas startup with a potentially global market in the technology sector. What better than a virtual press conference done entirely online? No need to get on planes or get people to one or two locations. What could possibly go wrong, click, go wrong, click, go wrong...

The warning signs started early. A package arrived in the post: it was a dollar bill encased in some puzzle, designed as a teaser for the launch. Then it was a set of repeated invitations to sign up for a press conference webcast at one of three times - effectively was the second warning - on Monday the 27th March. There was the option to organise a "personal briefing" at this stage. In hindsight, that would have been the simplest and, as it turned out, the most practical option. But, despite expressing reservations to the PR trying to organise the UK side of things - on the basis that some of the webcast systems only play nice with IE6 - I thought I would give the press conference option a go just to see if it was workable.. Some companies have tried audio-conferences for launches - and they are commonplace for financial results - so the jump to a webcast was not that difficult to see.

Then the details arrived. A chat system would be used to ask and answer questions. But only the 'best' or 'most popular' questions would get answered. Not so good. But as this only turned up Monday and given the time zone difference - the European slot would start at about 7am Texas time - I decided to stick with it and then get anything answered by phone straight after the session was over.

I logged into Vcall - which was hosting the webcast - at about 12:50pm and did some transcribing while I waited. That the next window to open was titled "Luminary Micro Luanch Presentation" throughout kind of summed up how the rest of this little experiment would go.

I don't know why - as it was obvious what was going to happen next - but the penny only dropped about ten seconds into the webcast. There was nobody from Luminary actually on the webcast. At least not at the same time that any of the hacks were expected to be there. The chief marketing officer, Jean Anne Booth, came on and started presenting, describing what was going to turn up on the screen. Then there was a crossfade to her again. Yes, the whole thing was prerecorded video. The launch was so interesting that the executives could not be arsed to turn up and do it live.

Now, you could argue that, as this bit was just presentation, it should not matter that it was prerecorded. I'd say that was a fair argument but there is something about recorded, scripted events that makes me forget to take any notes. What's the point? there's going to be a recording. At a live event, even with a script in front of them, people do drop extra bits in. With prerecorded video, there is no surprise. Monday was no exception: the crossfades indicated that people were sticking rigidly to a wooden script. And I was beginning to wonder whether I had fallen prey to some sort of Situationist stunt.

Even if I felt like taking notes, it's tough to get enough for a few decent quotes if the thing is sitting there buffering away rather than actually playing. Then really strange things started to happen. Segments of video would come to a screeching halt to be replaced by completely different bits of video. Given that the entire "press conference" little more than an extended Windows Media stream cooked up days before, you would have expected the company to do it as one stream. Not in this case: the software was running to some kind of schedule and just cutting segments off when it felt like it. And sometimes it just...stopped. Bryn Parry, GM of ARM's development systems division got as far as: "My name's Bry..."

After about 40 minutes of Fabulous Fuzzivision, the proceedings drew to a close and it was time to ask questions. Now, I'd by lying if I said any confidence in this part of the proceedings, and I had mostly tuned out while preparing some copy for production. But, in the spirit of experiment and to find out if anyone really was there, I fired off a couple of questions through the chat system. And yes, there really was no-one there. I left the window up for about half an hour while I phoned the UK PR to find out whether there was a living breathing human working at Luminary that would answer questions. To be fair to them, that call was organised within 30 minutes, which was a lot faster than I expected. Then again, I guess no-one was actually tied up presenting to hacks.

But it remains a mystery as to why anyone thought doing a press conference this way was a good idea. Especially when your client is a minnow with no track record going up against 40 or so well-funded, longstanding incumbents in a market that moves very slowly. Luminary is a microcontroller supplier - that is a business that demands long-term involvement: there are no quick hits in that market. And I'll certainly be treating any future invitations from Luminary with extreme suspicion.

Posted by Chris at 09:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

Candy for everybody. OK not everybody, just the popular kids

Just in case you were in any doubt about the use of social media and similar things were just plans to separate people and companies from their money, Steve Rubel finds the silver lining in a study by ANA and Forrester into advertisers' attitudes to TV advertising as reported by Clickz. The 30-second slot is so-1990s it seems.

The argument is that dollars spent on 'traditional' advertising will go into the various forms of online media as promoted by Rubel:

Reading this study is like standing under a giant pinata that just exploded with enough candy to go around for all of us.

I'm sure the people paying for the experimentation in new media will be only too pleased to know that's how Rubel feels: they would be in the pinata getting caned by Web 2.0 types I take it (and TV companies are the kids standing to the side because they're not allowed any more sweets).

Posted by Chris at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 17, 2006

The self-imposed straitjacket

Seth Godin kicked off a round of blogger introspection (of which this post is a part, I admit it) on how things can go wrong when a blogger posts too often. This rapidly turned into a discussion in one part on the coming attention deficit crisis, which remains something of a myth - most people are ignored most of the time right now, blogging does not change that. For the other part, it became a question of how often a blogger should post, as Problogger posed it. And that is not a Zen question by the way.

Problogger Darren Rowse gave several answers. None of which were: "When you've got something to say." Which seemed the most obvious answer. But, then again, I'm not a pro-blogger: I don't have an AdSense beast to feed.

It seems that, for many people, regularity is the secret of blogging, not content. This argument is, at one level, satisfying for someone who has worked in old media for quite a while - it's all about coming out on time, everytime at the same time. Yet, it seems crazy to impose daily posting limits on a medium that is geared up to irregular posting intervals. RSS aggregators make it easy to keep up with blogs - or any form of website - that spits out stuff intermittently.

I can see how high daily post-count blogs get more hits than those that post at irregular intervals. One is simply statistical - throw enough stuff at the wall and some of it will stick there and get noticed. The other is that the one rare post from a low-frequency blog is easy to miss in a barrage of new gadgets from Engadgets or the random thoughts of a machine-gun blogger such as Robert Scoble.

I had to move the comments feeds out of one NetNewsWire group into their own group because they were overwhelming the posts. I can see the same thing happening for some of the bloggers I have currently listed in my main groups of interest because I'm always skipping past their posts - for me raising a Yogi Berra-style thought: "There's nothing to read here, there's too many posts." The comments at Problogger echoed those concerns, as kicked off by Godin. Like a lot of people, I'm culling the prodigious and staying with the selective.

Some of the blogs that came in for the most criticism were targeted blogs that have set themselves up to be comprehensive. As a result, they are trapped by their own success. Everyone with a gadget wants to be on Engadget - and so that's where they wind up. I have never known attempts to be comprehensive in media such as magazines to be successful - that is what directories are for. I cannot see the world of the blog being any different. This is where sites like Engadget maybe have to look at their publishing model and start to sweep the stuff that is dull, but useful to have around into a wiki - and keep the blog for the real news and gossip. When all you've got all the flexibility of web protocols and languages to play with, why stick with just one format - especially when that format goes a bit stale?

Posted by Chris at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 03, 2006

A few good releases

Amid all the complaints of the appalling quality of most press releases - and the weary sighs of those who have heard the call for the death of the release once too often - it is easy to forget that, in some sectors, the information content of releases has remained pretty good. These rare beasts are written tightly and plainly enough for journalists work out their relevance with a skim through instead of having to work out what each phrase might mean. Some releases are still written as though they are news stories; the problem is that, in other sectors, this good style of release has been squashed by the corporate Nuspeak nightmare that always starts: "BigCo, Inc, the leader in high-mass total solutions, announces the availability of..."

The science research sector is one of the best examples of how the release can remain useful. So much so, that after lumping AlphaGalileo and Eurekalert into the main PR feed in NetNewsWire, I realised the error of my ways and put them in their own group so I can find them without wading through the other stuff - this is despite the fact that the feeds I use are not that precise in terms of the areas that I normally cover. The signal-ton-noise ratio is plenty good enough to inspect that group regularly. The rest of the releases can flounder in the main feed.

Science releases are not all paragons of good release style but, for the most part, I have no complaints about the way information is presented by the institutions that use services such as AlphaGalileo and Eurekalert to tell journalists (and anybody else) about their research work. One important factor in this is that a good number of universities employ specialist science writers to produce the releases, which are often formatted as stories that appear on the institution's own research-news pages. Those writers can often be the named first point of contact for journalists, or at least have their details provided alongside those of the lead researcher.

I picked out after a quick trawl through the feed something that would serve as an example. I won't pretend this is a random selection but I didn't cherrypick this one to back up my points. I just wanted one that I wasn't going to follow up (although, on reflection, it is something that could fit one of the mags I write for). It actually breaks a few news-style rules, but that doesn't matter because the important thing is that it gets its point across, fast:

Computer scientist sorts out confusable drug names

Was that Xanex or Xanax? Or maybe Zantac? If you're a health care professional you'd better know the difference--mistakes can be fatal.

An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone are injured each year from medication errors, and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has been working to reduce the possibilities of these errors, such as a documented case in which a patient needed an injection of Narcan but received Norcuron and went into cardiac arrest.

A few years ago, the FDA turned to Project Performance Corporation (PPC), a U.S. software company, to ensure they don't approve the names of new drugs that may easily be confused with any one of the more than 4,400 drugs that have already been approved.

PPC looked at the problem and then, based on a tip from a professor at the University of Maryland, turned to Dr. Greg Kondrak, a professor in the University of Alberta Department of Computing Science.

"During my PhD research, I wrote a program called ALINE for identifying similar-sounding words in the world's languages. The program incorporates techniques developed in linguistics and bioinformatics," Kondrak said. "At the time some people criticized it because they felt it wouldn't ever have a practical application."

PPC analyzed Kondrak's program and felt it might help with their project. Kondrak gave them ALINE and then created a new program for them, BI SIM, which analyzes and compares the spelling of words.

PPC combined Kondrak's programs into a system that the FDA has been using for the past two years to analyze proposed drug names and rank them in terms of confusability, both phonetically and orthographically, with existing drugs...

Now, if you were feeling lazy, that is pretty much a fully formed story. There are some issues that would need following up, in reality. The number of people injured through medication errors is unsourced. It also sounds a little high for prescription drugs. However, there are a number of studies that contain that information. A medical journalist would have no problem identifying a suitable replacement figure, or to find the source for the 1.3 million (outside of checking with the author). Also, you would need to check with the FDA what stage this project is at: have drugs actually been renamed through the use of this program? However, that is not the point.

What is important is that the headline gets you in. If you are writing about IT or medicine, you know just from the headline as it appears in the list in your feed or email inbox, that this story could be for you. The first para neatly sums up the problem - you don't have to be a doctor to work out that confusable names are a problem in prescriptions. OK, you have to go to the third paragraph to get the 'what' and the 'who' of the story but, by this time, I've got an idea that this release is going somewhere.

The first quote is not wasted. It's not some guy saying how pleased he is that he is able to announce a world-leading solution. It tells you something. In this case, it gives you some history and a nice bit of colour - people thought the research had no application. Suddenly, there is a second possible angle on this story if the current top does not quite fit the bill for my magazine or newspaper. It could potentially fit into a wider feature about the demand for all technology research to have an identified application. Or collaboration: who was that professor at Maryland?

Now consider how it could have been:

Pharmaceutical naming solution helps FDA approval process

The University of Alberta is pleased to announce its collaboration with Project Performance Corporation (PPC), a leading consulting firm focusing on computer and internet e-Solutions and project delivery, in the successful delivery of a pharmaceutical naming solution for the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA).

Based on technology developed by researchers at the University of Alberta, PPC's solution is now in use at the FDA as part of a program to streamline the drug-approval process. The PPC solution analyses the names of pharmaceuticals for their differentiability from those of 4,400 compounds already available on the market.

"We are pleased to have played a key role in the FDA's program to improve the differentiability of pharmaceutical names," said (please fill in name and job title of made-up quote guy). "It demonstrates the power of collaboration between academic institutions and corporations. We look forward to other applications with regulatory agencies around the world."

PPC worked with the university for three years...

As Rolf Harris used to say as he sketched out something that always started off looking like a potato in the process of recreating some animal: "Can you see what it is yet?" Luckily, with the real version, we don't have to play guessing games. It's set out in plain English, using sentences that convey information rather than different ways of using the word 'solution'. You don't need tags, you don't need XML formatting, you just need content. But that does involve whoever is writing the release, asking the client - in this case a researcher - the kinds of questions that hacks will ask: "Who will this help?", "What's it do?", "What were the problems?" etc.

Posted by Chris at 07:07 PM | Comments (3)

February 27, 2006

Dying for some recognition

Determined that the PR industry should not escape unscathed from carnage in the world of newsprint, Tom Foremski has demanded the execution of the press release, everyone's least favourite mode of communication, unless it gets a serious makeover. In the same way that PR predates an independent press - think roaming minstrels telling tales of derring-do - I suspect PR will have an easier time of post-press communication than Foremski believes. But that does not mean that I think the release is destined for much else than as search-engine fodder.

On the subject of news, Journalists often talk of the inverted pyramid. It is the only structure you need to know about when writing news - and is best avoided for any other type of article. You get the important stuff out in the first paragraph. Everything after that is just layer upon layer of progressively finer-grained detail. Press releases rarely follow this structure. Most of them are more like icebergs. The bit you can see does not give you any idea what the story really is.

Foremski identifies the DNA of the useless release:

They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on...

I have never been particularly unhappy with this state of affairs. There is something unsettling about receiving a press release so well put together there is nothing you can do but run it unchanged short of finding a completely different story buried inside it. If spin removal is the only thing you have to do as a journalist, then life is very easy, if a bit dull. The most troublesome releases are those that promise much but deliver little. These are the timewasters. You see the germ of a story in its first paragraph but after a little analysis you suddenly realise that it's not an iceberg at all but a piece of jetsam. There is no story there, just some vague intention. You could argue the spin strategy worked, albeit temporarily. And, clearly, some stories get to print that held together before anyone realises that the underlying content does not hold it up.

Foremski's prescription is simple enough: let the substance speak for itself. Don't spin, just state. Get rid of the canned CEO quotes explaining how pleased everyone is in Company X about their latest launch. And provide a load of backup material ready for assimilation into a finished story that fits the audience profile. However, I can't see how anyone is going to abide by these new rules, notwithstanding the fact that quote sheets are used in some releases. I can't see why a quote sheet full of canned, approved quotes is so much better than having them in the release. Live interviews are always going to trump pre-canned material of this kind whatever happens - and this is where most releases fall down, as all too often the people you need to talk to suddenly get all coy.

Putting tags in releases to make things such as inter-quarter financial comparisons easier is all very well - and that can be done to some extent using XBRL today. But I can't see how PRs and their clients necessarily gain. Take a financial release, for example. These can be works of arts in their attempts at legerdemain. A rule of thumb when dealing with any financial results release is to look at the first paragraph and work out what information is missing. Nothing on profits? Oh dear, sounds like they are down. Pro-forma prominent? Extensive pumping of EBITDA results? Regular metrics not looking so healthy. But if the release can convince an observer that operating profits matter more than net profits, well, I guess you cannot blame someone for trying.

And it is what happens to today's releases that determines the shape of future releases. If some PRs get away with positive spin with no substance, they are going to keep at it. The unfortunate truth is that PR is involved in a game of follow the leader - we reached the situation we are in because people who put together the first releases using the format that Foremski decries worked. Why is the language of the release so stilted? Because people look at the releases of the market leaders and copy what they see. "Well that works, let's do that," they can muse to themselves.

Following the market leaders is a poor strategy for new entrants. They have no reputation, no-one is following them. They need to stand out. But I doubt that any PR company will move away from what works unless an alternative turns out to deliver extraordinary results. And spin is inherent in the act of putting out a release. Companies only put out bad news release if they really have to. Named executives join with a fanfare through the front door, and are ushered quietly out the back with a binbag of personal effects. PR is not a public service: it exists to portray the client in the most positive light possible. If transparency works, then PRs will use it. But many companies do reasonably well on a diet of opaque announcements. It remains up to those outside the company - whether journalists, bloggers, activists and other parties - to work out what is going on.

In the meantime, I am going to stick with my current strategy. Ninety percent of all releases are of no value to me. I don't spend a lot of time, therefore, trying to decipher them.

Posted by Chris at 07:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 17, 2006

Link love is a rotten proxy for attention

The second part of Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere, for the start of 2006, contains an interesting but, to my mind, flawed assumption about what Technorati is able to measure. Sifry's analysis looks at "how attention has been shifting in the blogosphere". He then uses measures of link love to demonstrate that shift, but only to demonstrate that, even using blog-friendly metrics traditional media has captured much of the "attention".

The New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post are out in front still, according to his metrics. But the blog Boing Boing has overtaken BusinessWeek and Forbes among others, and is beginning to trouble the Guardian. Both Boing Boing and Engadget have apparently trumped Slashdot. The metric that Sifry is using is based purely on the number of unique links made to each site from blogs that Technorati tracks. In fact, looking at the data, it's not even clear that, by his definition, the attention is shifting away from the dreaded MSM. There are fewer blogs in the top 30 from January than from August 2005 or March 2005. January's graph is a sea of blue mainstream media sites with just four red blog bars in the list.

The problem with the analysis is that, using inbound links alone does not in any way capture attention. If you compare the Techorati results with the Alexa traffic stats, you come up with a completely different list of top sites. I know there are issues with any third-party stats, but it quickly becomes clear that Slashdot merrily trounces Boing Boing for actual attention - that is, people actually looking at the site's pages. I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence recently that slashdotting is still a force to be reckoned with. Boing Boing traffic coming your way is nice, but nothing still melts servers like a popular post on the site no-one in the world of blogging wants to call a blog - even though it shares a lot of DNA. The BBC ranks much higher under Alexa than on Techorati's list, easily surpassing the New York Times for traffic.

What is clear is that the Technorati stats show something but not "a shift in attention". They simply show the sites that people are most keen to discuss online using one particular website format: that does not mean attention from a worldwide population but what remains a largely North American community. The New York Times and the Washington Post clearly collect a lot of links from political bloggers of both persuasions, alternating with praise and opprobrium. They effectively collect a two-for-one every time and benefit from early growth in North America.

Sifry has decided that the place we need to look at is in the Magic Middle, where vertical blogs can compete happily with traditional media. That makes a degree of sense, as blogs tend to have a narrow focus. But, again, using links to measure attention is going to get you nowhere. Concentrating on links makes blogs focus inwards rather than on communicating with an audience. People write stuff for what is likely to pick up a link from what remains a small proportion of the online population. The numbers that Technorati touts sound big, but any analysis of blog traffic stats reveals how much larger the potential audience for a blog really is.

Sifry's posting followed last week's about the apparent rampant growth of blogging around the world, which caused some to question whether blogging had indeed hit its peak already.

Even after taking out all the splogs it could find, the company came up with a total of 27 million blogs, up from 20 million blogs in the autumn. That 20 million from last autumn contained a number of obvious splogs, which prompted Matt Galloway to perform an analysis based on predictions made by Umbria. Because splogs looked to be multiplying faster than blogs written by people, Galloway wondered whether the real blog count was going to be on the way down real soon. Sifry stepped in to claim that the 27 million was indeed free of splogs (at least as far as Technorati could determine). Now, that indicates that blog growth over the last six months was actually faster than Sifry claimed, as the numbers from the autumn have not been adjusted - assuming that Umbria was right and they needed to be adjusted.

The curve has got to turn S-shaped at some point, although that point will be delayed by the effects of churn - people moving from one blogger site to another - and the bulking effect of dormant blogs. Whatever the trajectory of the curve, the blogging population still some way behind the online population of some 1 billion people. The open question is what is the proportion of people who are willing to launch and maintain a blog? If that number were to move much nearer to the online total, then link love might indeed become a good proxy for attention. But, right now, it is going to give very skewed results.

Posted by Chris at 10:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 04, 2006

Tell it like it is, PRWeb

Sometimes, when the red haze settles on a blogger and the rant spews forth it's a bit disappointing when they apologise 24 hours later. David McInnis, CEO of PRWeb, should really have stuck to his guns after deciding that journalists are like lemmings and went public with his thoughts:

Next, let’s not kid ourselves. There is nothing sacred or holy about journalism anymore. For goodness sake, it has been the biggest product placement network going for close to three decades now. Turn on any network morning show, if you can stomach it, and you see one product placement after another. They are largely able to get away with it because it is so carefully orchestrated. Apart from being the ultimate in product placement, journalists today seem more like lemmings chasing the same dozen stories on a given day. What happened to variety?

PR Steve Rubel decided that this may be time for another boycott. For some strange reason, Rubel thinks you should use a service based on what the vendor says about it, not whether it actually works or not. Does PR do that to you after a while? Do all those years working on the message mean the message becomes the medium?

I can see Rubel's point. In general, it's considered good business practice not to insult your customers. At the same time, when someone gives their honest opinion, it is refreshing, and better than having everyone self-censor because someone might just take offence.

McInnis need not have worried about backtracking in a subsequent post on two counts. Strictly speaking, journalists are not customers of these press-release distribution services - those are the clients and agencies. I don't much care if the service is good or bad from them. If all that the feeds contain is junk, they just get pulled out of the RSS aggregator. No complaints. No "why doesn't this work better?" calls to the company. They just go.

I have to say that PRWeb tends to be stuffed full of more junk than the two large distribution services BusinessWire and PRNewswire. I don't lay the blame at McInnis's door. In being a free service to many, you are going to get a lot of stuff that people would not bother with publicising if they had to pay real money for it. The big two, however, have the advantage of "matter of record" status for financial announcements. That makes them difficult to dump even though there is a lot of guff stuffed in between the more important releases. However, the minute I find a better way of getting that source information, all those feeds are going in the bin. On any given day, more than 1000 entries are sitting unread in the PR group in NetNewsWire. And old releases roll off the end pretty fast. I skim through that lot maybe once a day, often less frequently than that, just to check I haven't missed anything. And that is where McInnis's comments ring true.

Product placement is a large part of the output from TV, newspapers and magazines, although it is a long way from being all of it. We spend a lot of time shoehorning product launches into news-form stories, and it's not a good fit in general. The day something is "announced", you are not going to get that. All you have are the claims and, if you push a bit, counter-claims from the competition (although, courtesy of the PR filter, company spokespeople have become increasingly cagey about being publicly sceptical about their competitors' launches) and analysts.

However, the process is quite artificial. It's not news as I would care to define it. The chances are that the bigger customers have been told all about the product weeks or months in advance. Certainly, in the trade sector, one of the considerations in deciding whether to write about a product launch is to weigh up whether everybody who might care already knows about it. Then you have the arbitrary launch dates; briefings under embargo possibly weeks in advance; and in some cases PRs trying to negotiate over cover slots, prominence or position.

To a degree, this all worked in the past, because people did want to see or read this content in magazines and other media. Ideally, they wanted impartial reviews, but that kind of thing has to wait until someone has tried it out. And, frankly, the review only works for certain classes of product. You can review a word processor easily because just about anybody who can use a computer can do that; evaluating a $100 000 chip-design tool implies you have a $1m chip to design in the first place. That is where the Internet and the user-written Web comes in. People with an interest get to do their own analysis and recommendations. As journalists, we can concentrate on pulling together that kind of input with other information that companies are less forthcoming about, such as delays or problems. Old-fashioned news, basically.

Similarly, there used to be a good reason for hacks to chase the same story. Circulations never overlap 100 per cent, even though there may be high overlap in some fields, particularly in controlled-circulation media. You want to make sure you have all the important stories covered. And, of course, you always believe you have the best approach.

Again, the ability to digest news from many different source through one tool, such as an RSS aggregator, makes this behaviour much more difficult to justify. I don't think you are going to get a gentleman's agreement whereby one group of journalists will always cede a story to another because it might be closer to a story - you would never get that level of co-operation even if it was healthy. But, the changes in user preferences means that chasing exclusive stories will take precedence at most media outlets. The herd instinct is not good for webstats.

McInnis is clearly thinking ahead, having realised that direct-to-consumer company announcements will become the mainstay of his business. If you take the trends outlined above and project them onto what that means for the press release, the conclusion is pretty clear. Most releases are useless to journalists because they announce things we will never write about and, because they are distributed widely, there is no possibility of exclusivity. But there is a user community that could be interested.

PRWeb and other distributors have a problem in that the material supposedly going to the consumer is not just bland and uninteresting, but often impenetrable. The advantage of the traditional model was that journalists are prepared to translate releases in plain English - often just to work out what the company is banging on about. The consumer or blogger audience has a far lower tolerance for opaque content. That will have to change if these companies are serious about a direct-to-consumer business. But I don't expect to see innovations from the distributors for journalists on the press release side of things. It will all be for the consumer, although I have my doubts as to whether the consumers will like what they get unless PRs change their ways.

Posted by Chris at 05:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 31, 2006

You can't offer citizen journalists money without causing offence

When a union issues a code of conduct to cover citizen journalists, it is easy to predict the blogosphere's reaction. It does not take long for allegations of protectionism to surface, even when the code asks for citizen journalists to get paid, not offer up legal indemnification and have their material treated properly. That is not to say that the National Union of Journalists code of conduct for what the union calls "witness contributors" does not have its flaws. The term "witness contributors" is just one of them.

For our first off-the-cuff reaction, let's cut to citizen-media advocate Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Jarvis's knee-jerk reactions to these things are so common that it's a wonder he hasn't knocked a hole through the desk in front of him by now. His reaction is true to form: it's all about them versus us.

As far as I can tell, the NUJ code seems to boil down to one thing. Media organisations have been paying people for content (aside from letters) for a long time. Just because someone has come up a whizzy new name for a class of contributor doesn't mean they should expect to get nothing in return, their work distorted or landed with a big legal fee. People who do not regard themselves as journalists already get paid for contributions - why should the use of a term end up with them being treated differently?

Conversely, in order to ensure that the media organisations themselves don't get landed with a big legal fee, they should check out wherever possible the authenticity of any contribution. That is my understanding of point two. I can't see how the NUJ will get any media organisations to sign up for the code in the current climate, but you never know - there is always the possibility that a paper or broadcaster is going to come a cropper by using material that has not been checked out, and suddenly discover that something along these lines might have made sense.

The media have already been caught out. It is just that the contributions were not made by people acting under the moniker of "citizen journalist". But fake photographs have been successfully sold or given to the media over many years with predictable results. Piers Morgan wound up running UK hack-trade paper Press Gazette after his former employer, the Daily Mirror, decided to publish fake photos of soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq that came in from an external source. The pics were more likely to have been taken in the UK with the help of some citizen actors.

Is there a reason why a contribution from someone acting under the banner of citizen journalism should receive less scrutiny than anything else that goes into a paper or broadcast? This is, however, where point three goes off the rails. The use of professional journalists as contributors should not necessarily mean that fact-check mode should get switched off. And this point does make it look like little more than protectionism when Darwinism is perhaps a better approach. Point four asks for payment for contributors: if the work is worth the same money, the people doing it are worth the same consideration.

It is at points like this where I could live without the designation of "citizen journalist" or "witness contributors" in this area. Neither term is very helpful for describing what is likely to be a very broad field. It will extend all the way from what we today call freelancers through to people who happened to have snapped a rising star falling paralytic into a gutter outside a night club on their 3Mpixel cameraphone, and managed to dodge the minder. This is presumably where the bit about not encouraging people to put themselves at "unassessed and inappropriate risk" comes in. That's a wide range - where does the citizen end and the professional begin? Would my use of the tag "citizen" be the only thing that matters?

Emily Bell in Media Guardian argues that the code would tie the hands of the media and leave them vulnerable to a slow death from the pecking of upstarts who eschew journalists for Joe Public. Such organisations would be unable to "experiment with 'wikis' or community-built sites". This is where the NUJ should have been a lot clearer. My reading of the NUJ's code is that it is aimed squarely at people doing traditional publishing, not experimenting with community-involvement sites. I find it hard to believe that anyone at the NUJ had that in mind when drafting this. Maybe they should have and made it clear but I think the link made by Bell in this case is an over-ambitious attempt at a reductio ad absurdum.

Neil McIntosh, also of the Guardian, writes:

The trouble with taking this old rule and applying it to the new world is that it's drawn up for journalists publishing newspapers; a situation where a limited number of people act as gatekeepers to the information, where the addition of bias or inaccuracy can be sensibly monitored.

Yep. I'd say the code is indeed aimed at traditional newsrooms. I think that was deliberate. To try to pretend that anyone believes you should police a forum or a comments area in this way is just ludicrous. But it will clearly be marked out as a user area versus one produced by paid specialists.

There are those in the Web 2.0 crowd who argue that only users should produce media. The time for the old priesthood is gone; the media should simply shut up shop and go do something else. In that case, this code is completely irrelevant. However, this game has not played out yet. What is happening now in terms of trends may not be representative of the long term.

I suspect that, for some time to come, people will be paying, or having people pay on their behalf, for access to news that got checked before it went out on the wires. And there will be room for the user-generated content, as there is already. I think that is the heart of the problem for the NUJ: the media who choose to differentiate by trading immediacy for a willingness to check will have their own codes of conduct. Unless forced to by some future government-appointed press monitor, the situation is too fluid for a union's version to make much headway. However, any such individual code might not be a million miles from this one.

Posted by Chris at 09:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 18, 2006

The media comments box stays sealed

After my last post on bloggers' misuse of the word 'conversation', Sean Coon - who wanted AdAge to put comments in with journalists' columns - responded with his reasons for wanting comments to be aired in public and a question of his own:

Why do you think the majority of the mainstream media have dragged their feet in opening their online columns to allow commenting? Simon [Dumenco]'s point about antiquated publishing systems might have something to do with it, but *i feel* that editorial departments, and possibly traditional 'writers' want no part of it.

There are lots of answers to this one. One point I'd like to make first though is that sections of the mainstream media or old media, whatever you want to call them, were quite quick to put discussion forums on their sites to allow people to comment and talk about stories and columns. They were not hugely successful for the most part, which came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people in the industry.

One assumption that people outside the traditional publishers make is that journalists believe they write copy, which is edited to fit a page, consumed quietly and avidly by a hungry public that nods sagely in response before moving onto the next story. Even the most misguided hack knows otherwise. People comment on stories to themselves at the very least, talk to their friends, colleagues or neighbours about what they saw in the paper - whether it was arrant rubbish, news to them or quite interesting. Forums were meant to cater to that discussion and, theoretically had the spin-off benefit that the more that people hung around the site posting comments, the more ads they could see. Yet, the forums often turned out to be tumbleweed-strewn wildernesses despite the belief that participation should be strong.

Marshall McLuhan wrote about the participation in Understanding Media, published in 1964, just about the time that Douglas Engelbart built the first computer mouse and a year before Ted Nelson came up with the term hypertext (albeit 20 years after Vannevar Bush postulated the Memex). "The individual news item is very low in information, and requires completion or fill-in by the reader...we have discussed the press as a mosaic form successor to the book-form. The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and commands deep participation. This participation is communal rather than private, inclusive rather than exclusive."

On the one hand, you have bloggers who claim to now feel excluded from the modern press process. On the other, you have the journalists who differ in their opinions in whether they are being exclusive and what to do about it but, deep down, do not feel that much has changed in human nature. Blogging has brought a new mode of expression but it's questionable as to whether the medium has actually changed what people were doing before. Blogging lets people communicate their thoughts on what is in the news to a much wider circle. If your work colleagues or friends do not care all that much about events in Turkey covered today, you can post them on a blog and maybe find someone else who agrees or disagrees. Or just watch the webstats and find out that other people like to read about events in Turkey. In McLuhan's worldview, it marks a further extension of the human, but has it altered what people wanted to do in the first place or just given them a much more efficient way of distributing their thoughts than through a small circle of acquaintances.

But, amid this change, the news media have done nothing, absolutely nothing to stifle the debate. A quick check of Technorati's home page will generally reveal that the top stories and columns under discussion almost always derive directly from the mainstream media. In fact, there are so many places to go one has to question whether the media sites should try to kick-start comment threads on their own pages. If you look at the mags that have them, the comment threads are often lonelier places than external sites.

There are many possible reasons, and a number of them lie in the way that the media sites handle the user interface for comment threads and forums. The software packages are often incompatible with the content management systems used to post news stories, so you force people to jump, which puts them off. But some of the problem is, to my mind, structural. People want to be able to comment off-site so that they can own their part of the debate. Having the comment threads on-page often brings up questions of control and censorship - whatever happens, those threads will be moderated. Off-site, it's up to you.

I shouldn't ignore corporate inertia. Almost every company seems to have a different structure for mediating online and print products, and the IT that powers the website and production systems. A common conversation, no matter what the structure is, goes like this:

Editor - "We really need X for our site."

Person in charge of the infrastructure - "The public don't want X."

End of conversation.

I once worked in a place where the people in charge of the websites were ex-editorial but had IT responsibilities. The search function was badly messed up - to the point that we advised people to use the site-search option under Google rather than attempt to use the on-site search. Questions about why repairing the archive search was not a priority, or at least making it possible to put a Google button on the site as a competitor had done, were met with the bald response: "People don't use search for news." This was some time before Google News happened along, but I think even recent visitors from the planet Zarg might have been baffled by the response from the people in charge of running the website. The real answer was, of course, they knew it was messed-up but they did not know what to do about it, even though it was possible to come up with a business case as to why effective search was important to the site.

For adding something like comment threads to stories and columns, the business case is less clear. Editors, even if they think adding the threading software makes sense editorially, will find themselves beating their heads against a brick wall if the people in charge of the site software do not agree. And I think the business case for having comments on-page is so intangible that few would want to push it through - there are so many other things you can go after that could bring in more readers. Don't forget, each and every blog post brings in more traffic. By sending people away - albeit by default - traffic is still turning up at the door.

The issue then becomes the one of the feeling of exclusion that bloggers complain of. But do you need on-page comments from the writers, or simply a way of debating points with them? You can see that happening with a number of journalists already, using either blogs on the magazine sites or their own. More will follow if they see a benefit to the process. However, I think any sensible media organisation will do what it can to move where this market is headed rather than try to play catch-up with blogs as they are today. Second-generation intermediaries - the companies that follow Technorati - are likely to be able to bring together the sources of debate and the commenters more efficiently than is possible today.

Posted by Chris at 09:06 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

Speak up or the bloggers won't listen to you

It was inevitable that a column that described blogging as nothing special in the world of writing should open up a further bout of collective self-delusion by much of the blogging community. With a smattering of exceptions, such as Adrants, bloggers ganged up on AdAge columnist Simon Dumenco: giving him the same message many times over, that blogging is different.

How is blogging different? Why it's the conversation, they argue; it's all about the dialogue (I put the links in at the bottom to make the post easier to read). The blogging = conversation assertion stands alone as the greatest of the lies of blogging. I fail to understand why the word has stuck like a leech to this particular invention of the late 20th Century. It has reached the level where people complain about having to email and then post a blog entry because a particular site does not have comments on the same page as the article. Ask yourself, are those people after a conversation - something that can be carried out using email as well as any other two-way medium - or something else? And if it is something else, why do bloggers persist in the use of the word "conversation", other than the word gets top billing in the Cluetrain Manifesto?

In fact, blogging offers a way of avoiding conversation without offence; a method for forming apparent social connections without actually engaging with people directly. People only occasionally get worked up about bloggers not responding to comments or making corrections based on comments. If someone ignores emails, the other party is likely to get a lot more annoyed than if a comment goes unremarked on a blog. That's the thing about conversations - they demand the active participation of at least two parties. A lot of blog conservations are pretty much one-way affairs. The blogger posts something, people comment - often pointing out errors - and the blogger has disappeared, having moved onto the next post. How does this function as conversation? It does not. But it does function as debate. Why are commenters so insistent on having their opinions published if they do not believe they are engaged in a public debate or forum? Why is a private email or phone conversation not good enough? Because those people are trying to convince an audience of their position: that is surely the characteristic of a debate, not a conversation.

The distinction might seem to be pedantic. You could argue that conversation as a word is close enough to what is going on in blogging. Other words have been given bigger twists than this. But it ill serves a community to lecture commentators who are not part of the club on what blogging is or isn't when that community cannot be honest or analytical enough to understand the process in which it is engaged.

As to Dumenco's headline about blogger being a cooler name: just wait until the fashion cycle rolls round and the name is as chic as parachute pants, I guess we'll be seeing a lot more 'writers' online.

The conversationalists:

Brain of the Blogger

Ad Age Says There Is No Such Things as Blogging..But The Name Is Cool

Blogging Isn't Just Writing, It's a Dialogue

Bloggers Should Explain Blogging Technology

Blogs are (public) conversations, almost like a giant party - This post at least emphasises the public nature of commenting versus emailing.

Posted by Chris at 10:44 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 08, 2006

Wake me up when Google buys Dell

PR Steve Rubel has accused hacks of sleeping on the job, especially at weekends. Well, they probably were, but the stories he points to are not things to get you out of bed and on the horn to the senior flacks at Dell and Google over your Saturday bacon and eggs.

So, what did they not do? Just what is the collective laziness of the MSM keeping from you? Well, at the end of last week, apparently, Dell started shipping PCs with a slightly modified browser setup. The change was that Dell decided to make the default home page for browsers installed on its home PCs an iGoogle page designed for Dell customers. At the same time, Dell had installed Google Desktop. Now, there are a number of things that have happened recently that make me wonder whether we have fallen through a hole in time and we are re-running the mid-1990s. This is one of them.

For more than ten years, browser suppliers, portals and search engine providers have been convincing - or just paying - PC makers to make their wares the first thing the punter sees when they plug in their shiny new hardware and try to fire up the interweb. Since then, these deals make the news on occasion. But that is generally only when there is an indication that the deal actually changes the business dynamics of the hardware or software industries. For example, Opera's shift to shipping a free browser was made possible, in part, by sponsorship from Google. That was a change in business dynamics. But, even then, the Google involvement was a small part of the overall story.

Google hosts the web page for Dell owners on a part of the Google site designed for customised web page - not an expensive move, I suspect. That, for me, does not indicate much of a shift in how either Dell or Google goes about its business. You could make an argument for it being a finger in the eye for Microsoft - but is that a vital part of a more important story or just some commentary on the fluid nature of Internet-related deals?

Google is a hot company right now, so there is an argument for running just about any story on the deals it makes. But I think with this one, any news editor would want to know that there is more to it - if there is anything unusual about the deal - before committing someone to that story. Otherwise, it's just "PC maker tweaks software bundle". Whoop. De. Doo.

Rubel went further to admonish the PRs at those companies for not fast-tracking a release on what they just did through the approvals process. Even if there was a release prior to this change, would anybody have cared enough to do more than edit it and post it? The chances are that neither Dell nor Google planned to produce a press release. Neither company is so profligate with releases that a deal of this nature would result in one.

Could the media have 'scooped' this story? Unless hacks bought a Dell PC every week or rang Dell up every few days to ask "have you changed the software bundle?", it seems not. The general public will have one over the news media every time on stories like this because people external to the company can provide the most timely information. If they are bloggers, they will blog it. No matter what day of the week it is. If PRs think hacks are going to chase their tails on this kind of story, they need to think again. Quickly.

Posted by Chris at 07:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 06, 2006

Embossed gold lettering is tough to sell on electronic paper

To get the price of ebook readers so that they will fly off the shelves of shops and supermarkets, a cellphone or games console-like subsidy model might help. The subsidy approach is something that Irex Technologies will concentrate on - albeit not for the mass market. Irex is aiming at specialist publishers who sell subscriptions worth hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to drive initial sales. Patent services, scientific publishers and financial specialists would seem to be good candidates. Maybe technical manuals for maintenance staff will make more sense on such an ebook than on paper or a laptop.

However, it will not take long for a company such as Irex to run out of potential customers. A long-term viable market means breaking away from any form of subsidy model. For the mass market, such a model will rely on digital rights management (DRM) and it's hard to see any DRM working for the printed word where there is so much resistance to it already in audio and video. If you can see it or hear it, you can rip it despite the intense efforts of content suppliers to make hardware makers slap intrusive electronic controls on their devices.

If you cannot make people pay money every time they switch the thing on - and that's what you need to support mass-market subsidies, then the subsidy model is a non-starter. I suspect that, even if the DRM worked as its creators hoped and proved tough to crack, people would still prefer to buy non-subsidised readers as this would give them so many more reading choices. After all, who buys a DVD player that cannot be set to play DVDs from any region when given the choice?

In this scenario, copying material is trivially easy and something that will happen day in, day out. New authors will positively encourage it, embracing the Cory Doctorow doctrine that obscurity is worse than royalty protection. Mainstream publishers will argue they have the cream of the authors, but they will find it hard to justify paper-novel pricing for their biggest moneyspinners: the bonkbusting bestsellers. The ones with the gold lettering piled high at airport bookshops. These are not books people want to keep: they read them on holiday or just on the way to a holiday, then toss them because they are too heavy to bring back. One ebook means a whole pile of over-thick pulp. Disposability will equal cheap in the minds of most consumers with margins set to plummet as a result - books are not that expensive to print. The cost to publishers largely lies in the risk of commissioning, editing and then printing up a big pile of turkeys that don't even fly out of $1.99 bargain bins.

Vanity is the thing that the publishers will end up focusing on, unless they can find a way to profitably nurture popular bestsellers and get decent money without the authors just doing it for themselves. Not vanity publishing: that will have been killed off almost by the ebook revolution. This is vanity in terms of the books that people like to be seen to have read. Even if they haven't. Devotees of Irish satirist Flann O'Brien will recall the service offered to the nervous socialite of writing insightful margin notes into thick, leather-bound volumes. The books that people will continue to buy, and pay big money will be those not just for reading - if at all - but those to be displayed on a shelf. I'm not sure how you get to collect first editions of new writers in this scenario but I'm sure someone will think of a way: maybe that will be the new vanity publishing: "This one's got great reviews. Quick! Get a couple of hundred knocked up down the printers and make sure they get signed."

Posted by Chris at 10:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bye bye print

As a primarily print journalist, one question I often get asked is how long do newspapers and magazines have left? I have given the same answer for the last ten years: as long as it takes to get an electronic reader with the visual quality of paper, that weighs no more than a thin paperback, with the battery life of an alarm clock and costs tens of dollars to buy. Actually, the battery life can come down a bit: a couple of weeks is just dandy, thank you. When all those things come together, you have the effective death of mass-produced print. It's difficult to think of any reason why you would not use an electronic reader over paper with those features other than stubbornness or vanity. However, vanity is powerful motivator, so I give books - some of them at least - a much longer lifespan.

Printed paper is no more than a distribution mechanism. As Mark Cuban pointed out, it is a distribution mechanism that is becoming prohibitively expensive compared with the alternative: electronic distribution. I disagree: print has always been expensive. It just happened to be cheaper than hiring town criers or minstrels to spread your words. Oddly, printing and distributing paper media has never been cheaper (well, barring some rises in paper costs recently). Go into a bookstore like Borders and just look at the racks and racks of mags. Many of them come from small independent operations, not just big publishers with deep pockets.

Individual circulations might be declining in a number of cases, but the number of titles remains higher than 20 years ago. Maybe even 10 years ago. Some news magazines have seen circulations climb, not fall, at the expense of other titles. However, the main gainer has been online news - not a big surprise. There are many bloggers who believe this shift provides an opportunity to remake the newspaper in their own image - that the change in distribution mechanism provides an opportunity to throw out the old ways of researching and publishing stories.

For printed newspapers, brand loyalty is important. That's how you get the money. People buy your paper everyday because, in the main, they like it more than the other ones out there. With a big enough circulation, you get advertising. And everybody's happy. Online, there is no brand loyalty. Just the stories that look interesting at the time. This makes getting serious money for your product a whole lot more difficult. This is why Cuban and others suffer "an onslaught of ads, popups and intrusions". Each one is cheap: having a lot might just pay for your staff, if you're lucky. It's no surprise to find that publishers are happy to continue working in print when the trend is towards online. It might be a decline, but it can be profitable, managed decline if they play their cards right. If not, you just lost a good newspaper and wound up with a collection of old press releases.

Personally, I reckon there will be a split in online publishing. Newspapers and mags that survive the transition best will disappear behind payment screens and only a fraction will make the necessary leap. These will be operations that can break their own stories. The others will sit in a ring around these and will be mixtures of blog and mag, in various proportions. They are those that can live off Adsense and its successors.

The effect on the book market, however, might be even more dramatic.

Posted by Chris at 10:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 03, 2006

Google pollution

Om Malik reckons that the geeks are taking over Google. To soak up that quiet time before 2006 really gets going - it looks as though the working 2006 has been postponed to the 4th if out of office replies from the UK are anything to go by - he recommends googling on common first names.

Try Paul, and soon after Paul McCartney you get Paul Graham. The number three entry under Robert is, naturally, Robert Scoble. I tried Chris and Chris Pirillo came out top. Check out the backlinks and soon the reason becomes pretty clear. All of the people cited by Malik are bloggers. Graham's site does not use a conventional blog structure but it's close enough for jazz. It's not so much that geeks are inheriting Google but that famous - that is, heavily linked - bloggers geeks are encroaching on the top pages. Try Jeff and Jeff Jarvis appears at number two.

What do bloggers do? They link to stuff, and mostly other bloggers. I think I packed five such links into the last two paragraphs, so I've done my bit for their already inflated pagerank. Malik's post is only a bit of fun but it does some problems with the Google's results and the disproportionate visibility of blogs.

One is the common belief that Google is some sort of guide to the zeitgeist. Google's creators made a sensible decision to use pagerank to order search results. Citation is, for the most part, a good way of showing how important a piece of information is. It is, also, highly vulnerable to gaming, which is why splogs have been so successful at polluting Google's results. Successive tweaks to the pagerank algorithms deal with the worst abuses as they appear. But there will always be some pollution with a system that depends largely on people "playing by the rules".

The bloggers themselves have unwittingly - and on occasions deliberately - gamed the system by being so profligate with links and made it look as though bloggers are the only community with a voice on the Internet. That is a situation that cries out for a major tweak to the result-ordering algorithms before everyone starts believing that bloggers are genuinely representative of the world population. However, Google has to weigh up whether demoting blogs works for its interests: who else is going to carry Adsense content for the company?

Posted by Chris at 10:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2005

The things you can find on PR Web

PR Web is one of those press-release services that I keep wondering whether I should stay subscribed to. Its RSS feed setup is at least as good as PR Newswire's but as a free service, there is no entry barrier to posting stuff out - just as long as you are capable of using a web form. Although it's good have such a free service - nobody need be denied the ability to get their releases distributed to anyone who wants them - you have to wonder whether charging for distribution would make the service's users think a bit more about what they want to say. The net effect is that even in an environment where there is generally more bottom than barrel, PR Web is the least useful press-release service. You can be hard pressed to find a signal amid the noise, to the point that in my Netnewswire setup it does not even feature in the main PR folder.

Then, once in a while a real gem pops up that makes it at least entertaining. Take this nugget, Source of the Gravity of the Earth has been Discovered:

"Nuclear scientist Mehran Keshe says a double magnetic field provokes gravitational effects in stars and planets, like Earth. Earths center contains a small sphere filled with hydrogen, acting like a semi-fusion plasma reactor. Inside currents create a basic magnetic field which is super-imposed by the already known magnetic field of the iron core. Such double field can be replicated in man-made plasma reactors, to be used as energy and anti-gravity system in space and air crafts, but also in cars, household products and electronics which will have independent long-lasting energy generated by micro plasma reactors. [PRWEB Dec 16, 2005]"

Funny, I thought elves were responsible for gravity. My mistake.

Posted by Chris at 11:38 AM

December 14, 2005

The new way to make money from Web 2.0. Do it the old way

I am a snark-filled reporter so I could not help but write about a recent Dave Winer post. I'm beginning to wonder whether the man behind OPML is planning one of those "Who Moved My Cheese" style self-help business books that use slightly skewed views of a situation to provide apparently dazzling insights into problems that are more readily and easily explained by conventional wisdom.

Winer explains patiently to the simple reader that, with "Internet 3", the key to making money on the Internet is to send people away from your site. They will often come back, he argues. He cites Google and Yahoo's news aggregation service as examples of pages that are designed to send people to other sites and that they make money by doing this. That is true, but the key is not that they send people away, simply that people come back because what they offer is more useful than other sites.

In the case of Yahoo's news aggregation, it is easier to go there to follow two or more media news feeds than to surf each individually. In short, things that are useful tend to make money. Because of this, we can expect RSS-based aggregators to supplant Yahoo's current generation of news aggregation service. However, judging by recent acquisitions, Yahoo appears to have sussed out where the next batch of cheese is coming from.

For my next trick, I'll explain how to make money by buying low and selling high.

Posted by Chris at 11:32 PM | Comments (1)

November 28, 2005

Didn't we mention the company? Dunno how that happened

Jeremy Pepper's spidey sense tells him that a PR was instrumental in BusinessWeek running a piece on blogging, largely built around the experiences of investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein with wikis as an alternative to emails with enormous cc lists. As a PR, Pepper noticed one thing most people not in that industry would not have bothered to think about: the name of the supplier of the wiki to DRKW was missing.

In the world of wikis, this maybe should not be a surprise. Most of them are open-source, freely downloadable chunks of software that DRKW could have installed without any outside help. However, a few quick checks indicated a vendor was involved in the wiki project. The pesky hack had simply left their name out. However, that did not seem to tick the supplier off too much, judging by the way they flag up the piece on their website, found after a quick Google.

Pepper sympathised with the PR flack's situation. What was going to be top of the cuttings pile for the client was no longer such a shiny piece of placement. It's not a rare complaint from PRs - and I can understand why. It's not unusual, after you've done all the research needed for a story or feature, that some information just falls off. And, in the case of stories about companies' use of technology, the name of a supplier is often the first victim. It's not malice or forgetfulness, it's just not pertinent to the story that actually runs.

If the PR asks what happened, the hack has one or two answers to fall back on. Blaming the subs (UK jargon - desk editors in the US) is a good first attempts for the cowardly. Just telling them that the supplier of the software just wasn't pertinent to the piece is the brutal truth but can get into a long, often circular discussion. But at least it's honest.

It's whatever gets the job done that counts. If you read the piece, there is no need to mention a wiki-software supplier. The piece is about wikis versus email, not wiki supplier versus wiki supplier. So, who needs to know which wiki was involved? There are many, both closed and open source. And, right now, there is not much in any of them that really makes them stand apart, at least not from the point of view of the general business reader. Maybe the people trying to stick one up on the Intranet care that TikiWiki's documentation is about three sub-releases behind the latest version of the software or what the security of PHPWiki is like. A commercial version may likely to have the edge there (although not necessarily). But the business reader does not care about those details. Just that wikis might remove them from email hell.

As I was halfway through reading the piece, I found myself disagreeing that the piece was inevitably PR-inspired. Maybe the CIO at DRKW had popped up at a conference about social software and the story developed from there. Then I remembered my good friend, and yours, Google. I wasn't expecting the supplier to come out right at the top, but there it was at Socialtext. And it was then a wry grin cracked across my face. The company has posted great big chunks of the piece, including a mention of one of Socialtext's other clients. Halfway down, it claims: "The article goes on to describe the Socialtext wiki solution and it's [sic] benefits."

This, you will recall, is despite the name Socialtext not actually appearing in the printed copy. Maybe it did make it to the top of the PR's cuttings pile after all.

Posted by Chris at 10:37 PM | Comments (2)

November 25, 2005

You think it, we own it

Presumably as it falls in with Jeff Jarvis' view of the world that anything remixed or mashed-up by the people has to be good, the former mainstream-media editor turned citizen-everything advocate, has declared the Washington Post's decision to launch a remix page as a thoroughly good thing. Of course, he chides the WaPo for not going far enough and putting up the contents of reporters' notebooks, lunch receipts and innermost thoughts for the world's citizens to pore over and mash up as they see fit. But he sees the newspaper's effort as a "great first step" with the "perfect attitude".

I presume Jarvis has not actually read the terms of service that the WaPo has applied. The newspaper is not being entirely altruistic about offering up RSS feeds for a bit of Web 2.0-style remixing. Like the first commenter at the remix terms of use page, I understand that the newspaper would like to retain copyright. However, the third condition is perhaps pushing the idea of making the world your serf a little far. Not only do not get anything from the WaPo for doing something funky with its news feeds, "Washingtonpost.com may incorporate your ideas into future projects it develops". The commenter, quite charitably, would just like some attribution. I think the ability to negotiate terms of use with the newspaper would be nicer. On the bright side, at least the company has not demanded indemnification against any possible legal nastiness, unlike organisations such as CNN. Not yet, at any rate.

On closer inspection, even in return for giving up your first-born, you still only seem to be able to access RSS feeds. There is no direct API as yet. Gotta hand it to The Man.

Posted by Chris at 03:50 PM | Comments (3)

November 11, 2005

It's a spade, not a soil-management solution

If there is one thing that ticks off hacks, it is the buzzword-loaded language that finds its way into business presentations and releases. Some of it is material so devoid of content that you feel as though information is being sucked out of your head when you read it. So, we moan about the language with a regularity that leads PRs to collectively roll their eyes. It is not as if the Web is not short of articles written by PRs telling each other that they just cut out the claptrap. From the hack's side, this week it was Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek who publicly took exception to the word 'solution', a word that now permeates the world of business-speak. PRs responded, claiming they do all they can to eradicate jargon, but that it's hard to translate technical stuff into English, in the view of PR John Wagner, and even that, according to Tech PR Gems, some people like it that way.

Unfortunately, the PRs who commented on yet another plea for plain language claiming that they really do try to technical lingo into English have again confused jargon with the weasel words that get used to pad out press releases and presentations. And those are the bits that drive most sane people up the wall.

There is a difference between jargon, the dialects that make technology just that little bit more distant, and euphemism, the attempts to polish a turd into something shinier and more attractive. They are different, because the turd-polishing phrases turn up everywhere, not just in technology-related material. There is a simple test to work out which is which. Just try to rewrite the sentence in plain English. The euphemisms will drop conveniently out of sight. But that is the source of the irritation that most hacks have with this kind of language. It is entirely unnecessary and just wastes your time.

Take, for example:

SoftBrands’ POS (Point of Sale) solution is a complete management tool combining flexible functionality, platform stability and scalability with excellent customer support. SoftBrands provides a state-of-the-art, touch screen POS system, seamlessly integrating all front-of-house and back-office functions in one easy-to-use solution.

If you're wondering why I picked on Softbrands, the company's marketing people only have themselves to blame. I typed my least-favourite weasel words into Google - solution, functionality, platform, seamless and scalable - and their web page came out top. This particular paragraph looked to be the worst offender. However, the copy is no worse than the content of many press releases.

POS? That's jargon, clear and simple. It's tough to replace with one simple word or phrase and you need to know a bit about what they are really selling to recast it accurately, assuming you need to translate it for your particular audience. A trade audience will understand POS far better than any attempt to translate what it means into really plain English. For a consumer audience, it's the "computer that handles hotel bookings", or something similar. It won't be completely accurate but it's close enough for somebody who isn't really bothered about hotel POS systems in the first place.

However, the rest of this paragraph can certainly get the bonsai treatment. "Management tool". Ever found a computer system that wasn't some useful to management in some way. That can go. Flexible functionality? You can get it to do lots of things, presumably all hotel-related. "Platform stability". Doesn't crash. Actually, this could mean they won't change the design without telling you. Who can tell? That's the other problem with this kind of language: it's not even precise. Let's move on. "Scalability". You can run big or little hotels with it. "Excellent customer support". Why, do you also offer software with crappy customer support?

"State-of-the-art". A cliché that is a little bit old-fashioned in marketing circles this one. From this, I assume they make this POS computer out of current technology rather than some clapped-out technology. And then, the breathless sign-off: "seamlessly integrating all front-of-house and back-office functions in one easy-to-use solution". Gotta get that solution in again. So, it does stuff like take bookings from customers and makes sure the system that allocates the rooms gets updated. Stellar. Plus, it's not hard to use, they say. And it remains a computer system, just in case you got to the end of the paragraph and you were a bit confused.

In short, Softbrands says its POS computer does all the stuff you'd expect a system to handle hotel bookings and stuff to do. It doesn't crash and it has a touchscreen. "We make it out of new bits, not old bits and we take support calls without diverting everything to voicemail." (OK, I made the last bit up as I have no idea of what the company considers to be excellent technical support).

What's even more depressing is having to sit through someone talking in this kind of language. Reading has the benefit of being fast. You can tear through a release in seconds. Having this phraseology mixed in with copious amounts of Powerpoint is enough to send you straight to the window, Peter Finch-style. I have sat through a half hour of this kind of thing and found that my first question at the end was: "So, what's it do then?"

So, I have to ask if most of these words are useless, why are they there? This was the argument used by Tech PR Gems. Somebody approved this stuff. Indeed, they did.

Although they inflicted 50 more unnecessary words of text on the public, I feel a little sympathy for the copywriter on this one. They had to pad it out for a while and all they had to work with was that the company selling the POS system told them it was the dog's bollocks but had absolutely no evidence to back it up. There was no single feature the company could identify to make anyone think: "That's a bit different, I'll take a closer look". But, there's an empty Web page sitting there, and you've got to fill it with something that the client thinks puts them in a good light. Well, it doesn't say "this product both sucks and blows" in flashing 80pt letters, but that's about as good as it gets from the point of view of the reader.

The copy will have been approved by the marketing manager who probably thought that was just the thing to get sales rolling in through the door. Maybe the marketing manager is right. There could be mug punters out there who, dazzled by the loquacious promises for a POS solution, just pony up the cash there and then. In truth, the marketing manager has probably looked at everybody's else site in that market and thought, "if that's how they do it, I'd better too". That is not to say there is not one group of customer who buy into turd-polishing language lock, stock and barrel: managers.

The motherlode of this guff lies in the management-training courses and self-help that have spread like a cancer through every industry. Management gurus expound on how to leverage synergies and maximise core human resources assets to achieve excellence in the business organisation. Or rather, do what your good at and don't piss off the workforce. You can see why I'm not a top management guru.

Because gurus talk the fancy way, managers have come to believe that everyone should. It may even be worse than that, the mantras have become the message. Rather than translate the exhortations to "be excellent" - something that even Bill & Ted seemed to understand better than most people who attend these courses - they just parrot the phrases. Because, if they did translate them and think about them, they would be ringing up and demanding their money back: "You mean I paid ten thousand bucks for you to tell me to employ good people? What kind of a con is this?"

Posted by Chris at 08:03 PM

November 10, 2005

Sometimes you can't be too careful

Hacks' newspaper Press Gazette does not want to overestimate the intelligence of its subscribers. Just in case a hapless journo wants to sign up for sub with a credit card and isn't sure what all that mumbo-jumbo on the card means, the publisher has a pointer or two. Underneath the form field for card number, some text helpfully points out that the card number is made up of "the large numbers across the middle of the card".

Glad I'm clear on that one. Now just another, if you'll indulge me. The expiry date, would that be when the card runs out by any chance? I'm not sure I've got the hang of this e-commerce malarky.

Posted by Chris at 09:36 PM

When you've got a hammer...

In his search for yet another nail to whack with his mighty Bloghammer, Steve Rubel takes aim at a piece in Businessweek on the imminent death of the focus group, the market research tool that involves sitting people in a room and then asking them questions about whether they like their chocolate bars crunchy or chewy.

Apparently, marketing people are getting fed up with focus groups because they get misleading answers from them. But marketers have been fed up with focus groups for a long as I can remember. The difference now is that they have an alternative: direct contact with punters through the Internet. This is where Rubel wields his Bloghammer: "shockingly [the story] ignores monitoring blogs and other consumer channels".

Quick, call the blog police. An online article that does not mention blogs? That has to be stopped, clearly.

The article is a 1000-word piece about focus groups and the alternative offered by the Web. It's not professing to be the complete guide to technology in marketing and it has a 1000-word space to fill: focus is good when you are writing for that length. The angle in the piece is primarily about consumers providing information confidentially through the Internet to companies because they dislike the peer pressure of focus groups, which seem like scenes from 12 Angry Men in comparison.

Now, unless I've misunderstood something about blogging, it is not confidential. It takes place in a public forum, which will inevitably lead to self-censorship - which is not necessarily a bad thing when writing for an unknown audience - and peer pressure. I have no idea whether the writer considered adding something on blogging, but the confidentiality angle they used to my mind would have ruled out covering blogs and forums pretty early on during the research phase.

And let's face it, does anyone want to use blogs to do the same job as focus groups? as a company are you going to blog about some secret project have going on and then get everybody else to blog about what a great/lame idea it is? Even the seemingly endless stream of Web 2.0 companies offering controlled alpha and beta programmes ask bloggers not to er...blog about them too much.

Posted by Chris at 08:49 PM | Comments (1)

Sourcewire adds custom RSS feeds

I'm a bit late to write about this one, but I got an email from Daryl Willcox Publishing, the company behind Sourcewire, the other day. The company has gone from offering a just a set of pre-packaged RSS feeds for press releases to providing alongside a roll-your-own feed, similar to the one offered by Businesswire but not, unfortunately, PRNewswire.

One little twist to the custom feed idea that Sourcewire has added is the ability to use keywords to either filter the basic categories you have selected or pull in releases from other sectors you don't normally cover if those keywords pop up. The second option is potentially handy as it should come up with material from companies who you would normally not bother with, but who might on one occasion have something in my area that is worth covering. I'm not sure how useful this particular feature will prove to be in practice but it's worth a try.

Posted by Chris at 08:03 PM

November 01, 2005

The attention deficit pulls the mainstream nearer

When RSS first happened along, I had some difficulty working out why it was so great. OK, it told me when a website was updated but the thing that troubled me was the issue of filtering. There was no readily apparent way to filter the feeds themselves, only subscribe to ones that kind of fit my needs and unsubscribe from those with too much irrelevant junk. I still have to categorise my feeds manually in NetNewsWire rather than rely on tags or content matching to sort things into the right piles. And it does not look as though things are going to get better. More people are noticing that feed tracking is chewing up way too much time.

Blogebrity pulled a few posts together that noted the problem. Fred the NYC VC asked about the saturation point for feeds as he struggles to keep a lid on the number of feeds he subscribes to. Om Malik has apparently been chopping the list he uses down to a bare minimum. Fred has called what is happening "the looming attention crisis":

I am way past the point of saturation and I keep adding feeds. At this point, I have over 100 feeds subscribed to in various readers. And I have frankly stopped paying attention to most of them...I feel in my gut that we are facing a "poverty of attention" and something is going to give.

This is clearly not good news for Steve Gilmor, who has yet to get his attention economy off the ground. Gilmor, you may remember, was the man who wanted to kill off hyperlinks and replace them with feeds because links were no longer good blog currency. And there lies the root of the problem: financing the blog. In the same breath that some bloggers condemn the old ways of magazines and the bad old MainStream Media (MSM), they worry about how they themselves become mainstream. There is a lot of talk about the Long Tail; about how everybody has a voice. But the concerns that shine through many blogs are about building an audience, aggregating content, getting money for it. The things that the MSM has been trying to do for the last couple of hundred years. The only thing that has changed in between has been the technology.

People forget that the dreaded MSM started with changes in technology: cheap printing presses; mass-produced paper; the railways. Combined, they made it possible to shift from a world where information was relayed by word of mouth to one that was much more efficient because you did not need someone to shout in your ear every piece of news. Newspapers rapidly moved from being local scandal sheets to national institutions. Subsequent changes in technology simply increased the rate at which news could be relayed.

The web brought a few extra things. It became almost free to become a publisher. The ability to alter content online meant people could answer back and see the changes almost straightaway. Blogging has, to some extent, formalised an arrangement where readers can influence content after it has been created. This quickly turned into the "join the conversation" policy espoused by many bloggers as the saviour of society. If anything goes wrong, blog about it, talk to people, let them talk back, then talk about it some more.

Unfortunately, conversations do not scale all that well, with the result that, for the most part, we just skim over blog headlines in the feed bucket, read some of those entries, comment on even fewer and, finally, unless you are Robert Scoble, blog about even fewer. There just isn't time to do more. The result? Most blog consumption is a passive process that is not unlike the thing technology writers have been predicting for the last 15 years or so: the DIY newspaper delivered to you by your friendly PC. OK, blogs are a bit low on news and high on commentary, but the feed aggregator is not very far from what people envisaged before the blog. The difference today is that a vocal section of the blogosphere wants to get there before the dreaded MSM works out how to do it.

The problem that Fred the VC and Om Malik have, together with many others, is that they know too few feeds will give them a poor outlook of what is going on in blogland. Too many makes it too hard to get anything else done. And what about Ethan Zuckermann who wants some attention for things, such as the situation in Darfur, that tend to get little coverage in blogs or, at the moment, the MSM? Wasn't the promise of the blog to provide people with a wider purview, not a narrower one? This has long been a concern of mine ever since researchers began to describe how, one day, computer agents would fetch news that match my interests. What about the stuff I might be interested in if only I knew about it beforehand? Knocking back a list of feeds to 40 "trusted" sources seems a retrograde step for the Long Tail.

The answer? Well it's already here and you won't like it. It's the aggregator. And it doesn't work very well. There are plenty of options and they seem to be growing every day with each one claiming to do a better job of avoiding the monoculturalism that afflicts aggregators that rely on ranking mechanisms to provide top picks. Apparently TailRank is one that will let us monitor 5000 feeds without pain by ranking "blogs that YOU care about not necessarily global rankings". It will be interesting to see how that one works, but I fear it will fall into the same trap as Memeorandum and Digg. However, the aggregators will get better at ranking stuff by relevance to you and they will gradually become the new MSM, like it or not, as they stand the best chance of syndicating content from blogs to a wider audience. A bit like a newspaper, only different.

The problem is that, while they hunt for ranking algorithms that work users want rather than by using blogjuice as a proxy for relevance, the aggregators will continue to promote lengthy diatribes on political scandals that will make you wonder what the original news story was mixed in with snippets about sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.

Posted by Chris at 11:47 PM | Comments (1)

October 18, 2005

The hunt for a silver bullet

The powers that be at Google must be wondering why they ever bought Pyra Labs, the people behind Blogger. The relentless expansionism of Google has made the company the number-one target for angry bloggers who want to know why their ego feed searches are full of splog entries.

Chris Pirillo came up with some suggestions to Google. Unfortunately, as with email spam, we are getting to the situation where the cure could be worse than the disease, and have little to no effect on splogs themselves (other than forcing them to alter strategies a little). People tend to forget that spammers present a moving target.

I can't help but see problems with most, if not all, of Pirillo's suggestions simply because spammers do adapt. I've paraphrased the suggestions for brevity:

1) Employ a blog spammer. Maybe Google already does. Oh, you mean knowingly employ a blog spammer. And if you do get one, how do you know you've got a good one? Or should that be bad one?

2) Probationary period: only allow people with a track record to create more blogs. Good plan, if it were not for the case that, apparently, the spammers have been using lots of accounts to create blogs, not a few accounts spawning lots of blogs.

3) Sponsor a blogger: you need a reference to create a blog. And if a new blog goes spammy, revoke both it and the referee account. This is something that will run and run, in court. As with Ebay, Blogger account hijacking will become the new sport for keen phishermen (and women). Why use up your real accounts when you can phish one out of Little Jimmy and his blog on Star Wars puppets?

4) Flag splogs from the toolbar. Apparently now done. But that does not deal with the problems caused by false flagging. Who is to stop sploggers from flagging. Don't forget, these guys are operating with a very large number of accounts.

5) Take every experience seriously. Can't argue with that one in principle but do we know that not taking it seriously is the problem? How long does it take to alter what is already a large code base? Google engineers might be sitting on their fat arses, maybe their engineering is undermined by crypto-blog spammers (see point 1), or maybe they're just a bit overwhelmed.

6) Track bad neighbourhoods (ie link farms) and penalise Blogspot sites that start linking to them. Interesting but we could start seeing a new trend in blogbowling as well as Googlebowling. Also, it already seems that sploggers are building rings around their bad neighbourhoods and, if this were to become policy, the sploggers would simply make sure there was an insulating layer between new Blogspot splogs and the link farms they are really trying to support. For a splogger there is little point in linking straight from a new Blogspot splog to a link farm anyway, as the new splog would have sod all in the way of PageRank.

7) Reward flaggers. Flagging is it's own reward and maybe should stay that way. How many T-shirts do sploggers need (see point 4)?

8) Audit randomly with a "how's it going" question once in a while. Actually, that's not a bad one. But sploggers tend to work by probabilities rather than saying: "Oh dang! They've changed the script, knocking out 10 per cent of my bots' attempts. Better hang up the old splogging boots." Nope, they just try and get more accounts, or write scripts to account for the change.

9) Get the AdWords team to help flag 'hot' keywords. And then do what exactly?

10) No more dashes in blog names, cos sploggers like dashes. Well, there are plenty more characters in the ASCII set I'm sure they'd like to try.

Posted by Chris at 10:33 PM | Comments (2)

The hyperlink is dead, long live the hyperlink

A spat between two blogging stalwarts Steve Gillmor and Doc Searls has seen the role of the venerable hyperlink come into question. Gillmor doesn't like links. He has declared links to be dead. Searls is sceptical of the Gillmor position and wants to know why Gillmor is so greedy as to deny him, or anybody else, the benefit of a link.

In reality, the argument is less about the hyperlink than it is about one search engine's mechanism for rating pages. A search engine that has given blogs the biggest single boost than any other factor. Google's PageRank system is built on the idea that people link to pages that are important to them. If important people link to pages, then those pages must be really important. Blogs benefit greatly from PageRank because they rely so much on intensive linking. But the recent rise of splogs that have linked to high-profile blogs means that links "have been devalued", in the words of Dave Winer.

Although splogs are becoming more troublesome, does that really mean the underpinning of the Web should be thrown away and replaced with something completely different?

As an alternative to linking, Gillmor is pumping up the use of RSS feeds:

"I am specifically and overtly not linking to drive people to RSS and its fundamental time efficiency."

Fundamental time efficiency? I can agree if you only want to keep up with a relatively fixed set of sites. But most people surf through pages following a trail of links through them. RSS is not great for where you are searching for things you do not normally keep track of. Links are, however, no matter how devalued they might be in the context of a proxy used by search engines for ranking purposes.

Gillmor says he wants people to cite rather than link directly. Fantastic. And how exactly do we use those citations if they do not link directly? We have to use the one alternative we currently have to hand: the search engine. The very engine that is the main target of sploggers right now. There is another problem. Citations are fine, just as long as the citation is unambiguous enough to allow a search engine or some other intermediary to come up with the appropriate...now, what's the word? Oh, link. That's it. Now, let me think, what was the last attempt to use search technology to build dynamic links to words and phrases that could be regarded as citations? Oh, smart tags. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the world decide they were evil after Google imposed AutoLinks on web pages courtesy of its toolbar? And Microsoft did not win many fans for its Smart Tags before then.

For a self-confessed old fart, I'm surprised Gillmor has forgotten that hyperlinks did not begin with the World Wide Web; that they have a wider reach and deeper history. Ted Nelson had the idea for hyperlinks way back in the mid-1960s, about the same time that people came up with many of the ideas that are still used today in computers: mice; superscalar architectures; memory caches; and a bunch of other things. I'm not sure that a little problem with one search engine should cause an eminently good idea to get dumped. The search engine has been hit with this kind of thing before, when link farms first appeared. What did they do? They stopped trying to treat all pages as equal. They used heuristics to try to identify and penalise spammy pages. The heuristics are getting more difficult and we will reach the point where search engines might have to use some serious AI to tell blog from splog. Even humans will have difficulty with the distinction.

I see nothing in Gillmor's citation approach that is fundamentally less susceptible to spamming than the good old link. In fact, by not relying on intermediaries to handle the connection, direct links between trusted sites are far more resistant to spam. Take away the links and the spammers will simply focus on the intermediaries that rise up to take their place. Of course, using intermediaries to link content from different sites would make it far easier for Gillmor to build his attention-based economy.

Posted by Chris at 10:10 PM

October 14, 2005

Do we need qualifications to read press releases now?

I received two emails from a media researcher at PRNewswire (PRN) today wanting some supplementary information about me as a journalist. Nothing unusual in that, except that the questions go a bit further than whether I'd like to get releases by mail, email or carrier pigeon. And, apparently it is all in the aim of achieving a "better targeting of press releases".

First up: the year I started in my current role. I don't know, will PRN only send me stuff if I have been in place for one, two, maybe three years? It might help if they indicated which role they were asking about: the two emails suggest that the entries are for different magazines. Even so, the relevance of this information to PRN I have yet to work out*. But the thirst for information at PRN did not stop there.

The next bit on the email form looked like this:

Education (the most recent)
The name of the Educational establishment:

Subject studied:

Just the most recent education, you understand. No need for the full CV. Well, that's a relief. I thought for a minute I'd better just send my full CV off to PRN just so they can improve their targeting. Quite how telling them I (kind of) studied chemistry close to 20 years ago in London is going to help them work out which releases they are going to send me on electronics, I am a little unsure. Maybe I'll get taken off the electronics listings altogether and put onto feedstocks and drug design bulletins. I'd be intrigued to know which genius thought up this bunch of questions. I have asked PRN, but have had no reply as yet.

The questions didn't stop there, although they didn't go as far as inside leg measurement or sexual preference. PRN would also like to know which foreign languages I speak - which does make a bit more sense. And finally, my story-gathering preferences. Don't you worry your little heads over that PRN, just keep updating the RSS channels and I'll decide how I deal with the stuff that gets plonked in them.

* OK, I might have worked it out. It looks like PRN is putting together a journalist's profile database along the lines of MediaMap, but doing it in the most ham-fisted way possible.

Posted by Chris at 10:44 PM

October 13, 2005

No comment, no firing

In his musings, PR Stuart Bruce is surprised that PRs need to be told of the dangers of the "no comment" reply to hacks' questions.

Well, there's still plenty of it going on, although few restrict themselves to the simple "no comment". People have found slightly more imaginative ways to try to fend off the questions they'd rather not answer, even though they are not necessarily more effective. Or, there is always the run-and-hide option, which is often the most popular: "Company X did not respond to questions..." or "Company X was approached for comment but did not return calls at the time of going to press".

For reasons I can't fathom, Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion said he thought not returning calls was a better option than the "no comment" option:

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.)

It's subtle, alright. It makes you look panicky scared or just plain incompetent on top of the other claims you were otherwise going to "no commment".

I can understand that there are good reasons for reaching for the stock answer or just letting the phone ring on. As the PR hears the question, it may not be uppermost in their mind, but there will be a thought running around in there: "What's the safest thing I can say or do to avoid getting sacked?". In this context, saying the bare minimum is generally safer than volunteering information that is definitely going to lead to a P45 (or pink slip, depending on where you happen to be reading this).

You might not have made the situation any better but at least you cannot be blamed for making it worse. It has become so common to the conversation, we even seem to have degrees of it. I once had a PR argue the toss over whether she was refusing to comment, or just declining on the basis that declining sounded "less forceful". I guess refusing to comment to her meant slamming the phone down or something. And we only got to that point because she was previously trying out one of the less direct phrases that are now reaching epidemic point.

Sometimes, these newer phrases like "it was a business decision" seem to work out for the PR, as noted by Dan Janal in June on a story in which two restaurants used the same non-answer to try to avoid giving up any precious detail about closures and layoffs. Although the reporter did not look to test the response, it surely invites a comeback: "What were the non-business reasons you considered for closing your restaurant?"

It's a little like my least-favourite non-stick non-answer that is spreading like wildfire round the tech world: "We haven't made any announcement on that". This is one that seems to be used by people who have just come off a morning's worth of media training, because, in face-to-face situations they look kind of smug when they say it (in a "look at me ma, I remembered some of that training" kind of way). And people look genuinely surprised when you come back on it: "I'm aware that you haven't announced anything, that's why I'm asking the question. If you had, I wouldn't need to ask it. Now..."

Posted by Chris at 08:09 PM

October 12, 2005

Advertising? That's so Web 1.0

The issue of getting money for blogging is exercising quite a few minds at the moment, especially as some bloggers are already celebrating the imminent demise of traditional publishing: a business that depends on advertising for much of its revenue. And that is advertising that full-time bloggers would like. Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher declared IBM's policy of not booking ads on blogs contradicted a drive to increase the number of its employees who blog. If people do the same as IBM and decide not to advertise on blogs, who is going to pay for their upkeep? After all, you cannot have subscriptions as the cross-linking that has become integral to the growth of the blog collapses.

But are the bloggers themselves the cause of the advertising malaise? They decry traditional mechanisms of promotion, quoting chunks of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they go. Markets are conversations, they say. Blogs are conversations too, apparently. Therefore, the argument goes, blogs are the new marketing. They are Web 2.0 vehicles, not like the hated Web 1.0 DoubleClick-fed banner ads. So why are bloggers so insistent on getting olde worlde ads?

There is absolutely nothing conversational about advertising. It is purely a one-way means of communication. Punching a monkey does not count as conversation in my book. It certainly didn't feel good at the time (although I suspect many people would much prefer a version of that ad that involved pictures of its creators). You can see why the Cluetrain authors took issue with advertising: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it". To be fair, one of the Cluetrain authors did recant:

[David] Weinberger candidly admits that he can't even remember all of it (honesty is a clueful trait), then adds: "One thing I knew was wrong when we posted it was the thesis 'forget about advertising'. Advertising is not dead. But the thing the internet adds is the ability to undo some of the damage being done to the lower levels of our brains by advertising. We can find out in an instant if the ads are untrue."

However, if you are an advertiser, then you are likely to take the message "we are immune to advertising" reasonably seriously. Advertisers tend to like being told that the audience for a particular medium is only too happy to be assaulted with brightly coloured, loud content. It was only after popup blockers came in that some of them decided that they had gone a bit too far with some campaigns. I'm not suggesting that bloggers dump the rest of Cluetrain and start lying to people with money but the undercurrent of "hey you, sucker. Your products suck, your marketing sucks, you suck. Can I have your money please?" that permeates much of the Long Tail stuff that abounds on blogs has a corrosive effect. People stop asking "where should I advertise" and start musing "why should I advertise if advertising is so broken?". This may not be a bad thing long term if the result is ultimately better. But that is not going to help bloggers in the short term.

In demanding 'support' for their chosen medium, bloggers run the risk of turning the whole enterprise into a vanity publishing model. Advertisers, like most people, concentrate on the benefit to them not on whether they should subsidise one medium over another. This is how it should be and is, presumably, clueful. Don't do things that don't work.

The apparent silver lining in all this is contextual advertising, which does work on blogs, but there is a problem even with this for the blogger. AdSense and the like are site-neutral. That's good up to a point for the living, breathing blogger. But AdSense advertisers don't care about the quality of the sites that sent them, only the conversions, which are the things they actually measure. If a bot-driven splog is sending as many convertible clicks as a 'quality' blog, the splog wins because it is way more profitable.

Then there is the other thing about contextual advertising: it only works for situations where the context is explicit. Only the consumer has a full appreciation of what their context is. They might be reading about blade servers, but Tiddles may be moaning about not having enough food. They might be as interested in fast delivery of Whiskas as a go-faster 64-bit blade, but they aren't going to type that into a search engine. Most advertising is only vaguely contextual. It uses repetition to remind you of a product's existence, to make sure it's the one you feel warm and cuddly about when you are standing in a supermarket and cannot work out whether to buy Brand X or just the nearest one to hand. Or maybe it just makes you wonder whether you should try Product Y out.

To deal with this problem, publishers and broadcasters provide extensive demographics of their own readers and viewers. "We know our readership will consider your product because they are ABC1s with an interest in fast cars" they explain to BMW. "50 per cent of our readers keep cats" they may tell Purina, using the results of the last reader survey.

What can bloggers do about this? If they want traditional advertising money, there is not a lot they can do without doing some pretty intrusive things that will make them look like big media publishers like the New York Times. But if they want the money, they need to come up with some answers that do not involve simply asking for the revenue that currently goes into what some claim is a discredited model. Social media may provide some of the additional context that advertisers crave but the important information belongs to the consumer not to the blogger. Perhaps there is no business model other than micropayments and subscriptions. Oh dear.

Posted by Chris at 09:57 PM | Comments (1)

October 10, 2005

Secrets and rumours

Having gone over Jeff Jarvis's column in Media Guardian twice I'm still having trouble making sense of it. I think I've got to the bottom of it: his definition of the word secret is different to that of most other people. And it changes halfway through.

First, Jarvis tells us that the Internet is changing the nature of secrets. How so? Does the Internet apply some form of quantum nuttiness that makes secrets somehow not secrets anymore? I doubt that. I think he means that the ease of publishing on the Internet makes it easier to disclose things that in a paper-dominated world would remain secret or at least obscure. Apparently, "the web explodes our view of truth like a kernel of popcorn: it has given birth to a culture of transparency". I would question that. It has given birth to a culture of mass-publishing. Transparency? Yet to be demonstrated long-term. Job applicants are already finding that transparency is providing would-be employers with too much information.

However, it's the next sentence that had me scratching my head and wondering whether I had suffered a blow to the head that made my internal dictionary no longer match up with the rest of the world: the Internet "also allows citizens to say what they want without saying who they are - yes, to keep secrets". Erm...would that not make such things no longer secrets but...rumours? Keeping secrets involves not telling people things. Disclosing things anonymously does not maintain their secret status and also remains a long way from maintaining transparency.

He then starts writing about Judith Miller of the New York Times who was locked up for 85 days for trying to make it possible for someone to disclose something without saying who they are. For Jarvis, keeping the secret of the source's identity broke some unwritten rule of true journalism: "She did not immediately reveal the full story to her public - and shouldn't that be a reporter's gravest sin?" People are questioning why Miller did not go public with the source's name when the source apparently waived the privilege of anonymity a while ago. But Jarvis wants full disclosure immediately. If a journalist agrees to keep something "off the record" or "on background", that's a sin. He conveniently ignores the realpolitik of hackdom that means to get information sometimes you have to cut deals. "Off the record" is nothing more than a verbal agreement. It carries no legal weight, just an expression of some level of trust between two people. Lots of people tell hacks things off the record that are worthless as secrets or public information but, with some sources, you are going to agree and continue to agree to their anonymity because that gets you other stories that check out.

To look at Jarvis's statement on the beauty of anonymity on the Web, were the source to publish a one-time secret on as an unnamed citizen, I can only conclude that would be OK with him (and not a sin). To tell a journalist, any source would be at risk of full disclosure in Jarvis's perfect, transparent world because anything else would be a sin.

Jarvis writes that if a future Deep Throat wants to reveal a secret without fear of being caught, they can blog anonymously or just post it on a forum. In a practical sense, that is probably a safe bet given today's state of surveillance law and technology. I wouldn't bet on those loopholes being around in the future. And how much would such a Deep Throat have to post to prevent the information being seen as no more than the rantings of a wacko, a bunch of unreliable rumours? At some point, their identity becomes extremely difficult to hide because of the amount of evidence they need to provide to back up their position if they want to be taken seriously.

Posted by Chris at 11:16 PM

September 26, 2005

PRNewswire RSS: close, but the cigar is still in the humidor

Last week, PRNewswire for Journalists (PRNJ) finally got around to coming up with RSS feeds that lets journalists pick subjects they are interested in rather than have to chew on the entire output of the press-release outlet. That's good. It is, apparently, something that the company has been mulling for some time and was pipped to the post by Businesswire earlier in the summer. So intense was the private mulling been that simply to say that Businesswire had the advantage of time is heresy in some quarters (check the comments).

Now for the bad news. Unlike Businesswire, which custom cooks you a feed based on the preferences you use for the longstanding email bulletins, PRNJ has taken the approach of providing feeds based on each of the industries and topics that PRs select when they post releases. This does not sound too bad at first: you simply subscribe to all the feeds you need and let the aggregator deal with it. The problem is, many things do not fit neatly into one category and many people tick more than one industry or category for their news. If you are like me, and only want the electronics-related segments within the Technology industry category, you are liable to get a lot of dupes popping up in NetNewsWire or whatever you use as an aggregator. It's not a showstopper, but it is an irritation.

PRNJ's categories make more sense than those used by BW. So, if they could come up with a personalised feed akin to that used for the email bulletins, I'd be a lot more impressed with the PRNJ take on RSS for hacks.

Posted by Chris at 04:46 PM

September 19, 2005

Silence by agreement

Search Engine Watch has reported on the apparently bizarre idea of Google inviting media and bloggers to an event and then making the whole thing "off the record". Steve Rubel asked why invite them at all?

It's a fair point. However, there are times when not reporting what people, at least directly, can be useful. However, a lot depends on what off the record means in this instance. There are four distinct flavours that I can think of, ranging from using quotes without directly naming the person through to just keeping something secret. Meetings held under the Chatham House Rule can be useful to hacks because people speak more freely than if they know they will be quoted and named. If you just need a steer on what is going on and aim to back such a story with direct quotes from elsewhere, then this can work fine. You need to be careful about using this kind of thing directly anyway as people get careless under these conditions and say stuff freely that is just plain wrong. Mind you, that can happen even if they know they are on the record.

What is more bizarre than Google's off-the-record conference is something that older IT companies frequently inflict on hacks: the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). A favourite of Microsoft in particular, the NDA is often used to maintain compliance with an embargo. The only trouble is that if you read them, they last indefinitely not until a particular date, which makes the information technically even more useless than an agreed "off the record". That's the point where you have to wonder why anyone agrees to them.

Posted by Chris at 10:04 PM

September 13, 2005

Which timezone is Yoorp in? Is that Central or Eastern?

Yes, there are some people working in PR who still haven't got the hang of timezones. Hats off to the International Engineering Consortium, who managed to ring at 11pm at night (OK I was working after getting in from a late afternoon/early evening meeting) to ask me if I was going to their EuroDesignCon in Munich in October. As they are organising said conference, you would have thought they might have grasped by now that Munich, and indeed London, are in very different timezones to California. In fact, 11pm in the UK is getting past office hours even for US Eastern time. And Munich? It's practically a new day.

However, it seems they don't read their own website either. As I am moderating a panel session during the conference, I think it would be a reasonable assumption that I will be turning up in Munich sometime during that week.

Posted by Chris at 11:37 PM

Lego of my trademark

Among the PR bloggers, Jeremy Pepper has taken a particularly hard line on the blogger camp that regards attempts by any company to protect its trademark, or just its supply of free cardboard boxes as unacceptable symptoms of corporate greed and power.

This week, it's the turn of Danish toymaker Lego. The lovable people from Billund have been getting flak for hosting a website that asks people to call Lego bricks by their brandname and not by the untrademarked plural Legos. The domain was probably bought to prevent cybersquatters from spamming people with offers of "l0w c0st Legos at wholesell pr1c3s" or maybe just V1agra. OK, the wording could be a little better: why should Joe Public who mistyped a URL get a lecture on how a toy company likes to be identified? But I could understand the annoyance a bit more had Lego done what it normally does to the media and bung out cease-and-desist letters at every perceived misuse of its trademark.

Pepper is right in observing that Lego is keen to keep its trademark. In fact, when I first stumbled across the comments about Lego's activities, my first thought was that the letters had started going out to bloggers. Among hacks, certain companies acquire a reputation for being particularly assiduous about protecting trademarks and you make sure those names do not come up in copy where a generic alternative would do. However, you do have to bear in mind that these are companies that have kept their trademarks successfully despite having brand names that are used by the general public as generics. How did they manage this? By nailing any mag or paper the minute one of them happens to write Biro with a lower-case 'b' when the writer meant any brand of ballpoint pen, or refer to any old building bricks as Lego bricks.

In fact, Lego has been so tight on this that simply sticking them in a picture with something else would often mean a letter in the next post. This was particularly troublesome in the electronics sector as quite a few people wanted to use them to show how small a particular device was. Very often, PRs would send these pics in and they would go in the bin immediately. It meant less hassle and, let's face it, chips plus building blocks is a pretty tired visual cliché.

The interesting thing to watch is what happens when the C&Ds go out to the blogger world. Will the public taking of offence make those companies climb down and tear up their trademark forms? Or will the corporates face this one down on the basis that it's tough for anyone to get worked up over a name over any lengthy period of time? I'd wager the latter.

Posted by Chris at 11:25 PM

September 07, 2005

Never mind the quality, feel the traffic

Given a choice between two metrics, most people will take the one that is easy to measure and one that is more accurate, but difficult to capture, which one do you think most people would pick? That's right: ease of use wins. Which is why I am less surprised than the chief of search marketing firm iProspect, Rob Murray, about the results of a survey his company asked JupiterResearch to perform.

When asked how they were evaluated by their employers, 80 per cent of search marketers said their performance was tied to some search-engine marketing metric. Half of them looked for increased traffic, 40 per cent for more clicks through to their sites and just under half cited search-engine ranking. The more difficult to measure criteria, such as awareness among consumers or even actual sales - things that any advertising-related campaign should be promoting - came some way further down the pecking order.

The survey was among companies with dedicated search marketing staff apparently, which suggests that the companies involved are quite advanced in trying to get their sites up the Google and Yahoo rankings. That does not seem to make them any more advanced in working out just why they might be doing it, however. It would be interesting to know the results for a survey of clients' attitudes to external consultants: I can't imagine it will be much better. And this is not good for the health of the Internet as a whole. Narrow, non-financial metrics that are not tied directly to what the business needs are just so easy to fake. At least the search-engine people have some ways of detecting click fraud: is that level of traffic analysis happening among companies with websites?

If I had inclinations to dabble in the black-hat SEO business, I'd be ordering me some bot farms and hammering clients' sites hard. "You just want traffic? That shouldn't be a problem...how much would you like? Mild interest, a BoingBoing/Slashdot server burner or denial-of-service levels?" Similarly, the high page-rank power of blog links will only encourage the black-hat gang to step up their spam blog-making activity. And who can blame them if the metrics that companies use are so poorly structured?

Even the iProspect press release that popped up on PRNewswire has been drafted into splog-land. The top results in Technorati - in fact the only results - for it when I last looked were all from splogs designed to pump up page ranks for other sites or just generate clickthroughs via AdSense.

The sad thing about this focus on bad metrics is that it is a feature of the wider advertising space. Because the people booking the ads do not bother with difficult metrics, poor-quality media often end up squeezing the good out of the market because they focus relentlessly on the factors that advertisers use as metrics. Media that people actually see and read often suffer badly when compared on measurements that focus on narrows aspects of campaigns rather than wider results. The new techniques such as search marketing seem to be following the same old patterns.

Posted by Chris at 11:19 PM

Into the black hole: pressroom response times

A survey of online pressrooms conducted by IBM in Spain has found that, for the most part, the companies responsible are OK at publishing information like press releases. Unfortunately, the staff behind them seem to be shrinking violets with little inclination to answer even simple emails. You will need to scroll down to page 78 of the report or so to find how bad things can get and it is not pretty.

For the report, the IBM team found a reporter to go and ask the companies a few simple questions using the email address or web forms provided in the online pressroom. Seventy per cent of the companies could not be bothered to reply. French companies stood out even among this sorry lot with a 100 per cent no-response rate. Even among those that managed a reply, two out of three took three or more days to come up with any form of answer.

The survey tried to probe one or two reasons for the failure. In 8 per cent of cases, the published email address was just plain wrong. The report does not say what happened with the other 92 per cent of non-respondents but I can hazard a guess. Suffice it to say that if an online pressroom does not have named contacts with email addresses, I will often ring the company rather than type something that will probably disappear into write-only memory. That is the case even if it means using directory enquiries or some other way of digging up a useful phone number. The alternative is simply being prepared to write three messages in succession, assuming that there is sufficient time to do that and still leave time for an interview to be set up.

Posted by Chris at 10:02 PM

Old press releases never die, they hang around on websites

IBM in Spain has put together a survey of online pressrooms in an attempt to work out how many companies are doing them the right way, and how many are getting it wrong.
I found the link via PR Shel Holtz's blog who wonders why companies put up press release archives: "It’s been some 30 years since I was a newspaper reporter, but try as I might, I just can’t remember a time when I needed an old press release."

If you have been following a particular company or issue for a while, you are unlikely to need them but it is handy to have them available when you are coming to a company for the first time and you need to check when something was first announced, or trying to build something like a timeline of acquisitions for a business feature. It is also useful to see what a company said at the time of a launch a year on, when the product in question is still stuck in the lab. However, it can be handy in those circumstances to maintain your own archive just in case the company in question performs a little Stalin-style airbrushing of history on its press website. In this case, a search on 8Ks at Edgar (or its international equivalents) if it is a publicly quoted company can be more useful as those documents cannot be changed after the fact.

I only hope that Holtz is not advising clients to take down their archives: the further back the archive goes the better is the rule for me. For PRs, they might not generate coverage in their own, but for hacks, the more information we have to hand the easier it is to make sure stuff gets checked.

Posted by Chris at 09:12 PM

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 08:54 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

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

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 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 06:40 PM

August 09, 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 08, 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 02, 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 01, 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 09:36 PM

July 20, 2005

Keep their pitches where you can see them

"Outernet marketing conduit" BL Ochman called the proposal "ridiculous". And it's caused a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth from others in PR. Jeremy Zawodny's proposal to create a blacklist of flacks who effectively spam bloggers has certainly raised the temperature beyond Tim Bray's death to PR post from last week.

At the risk of repeating some bits from an earlier post, my advice to Zawodny and other people planning on an email blacklist of PRs (other than possibly reporting them under the CAN-SPAM legislation) is that you can go ahead and block them but the chances are they will simply start ringing to see if you got their pitch. And you really, really don't want that.

Some people are arguing that requests to block press releases and pitches are because PR has a credibility problem. PR does not have a credibility problem, it has an expertise problem. Most of the people from the PR side who are involved in the "conversation" on this and related subjects I think understand the problem at hand. But no amount of blogging by them is going to change what happens with the PR spammers: they don't read blogs, they just manage mailing lists. The guys at MobHappy may be onto something with their colour-coded signs to PRs but it does assume that PRs doing the pitches are actually going to stop by and read.

Because of this activity, Zawodny's post has clearly troubled some of the more blog-aware PRs because a widespread use of PR blacklists would shut off a means of communicating. All that blind pitching activity has poisoned the waterhole. But it's not the place of PRs to say that bloggers should or should not accept their pitches or releases.

Disposing of unwanted emails is surely up to the blogger. OK, if they miss out on something good, then that's just tough on them. That has always been the case. If you don't track things, they pass you by. Hacks are remain hesitant to block the email channel because you never what might turn up. And we know that blocking email will only make the phone ring more, and we need the phone to dial out, if only to leave messages for PRs who don't get back to us. Having said that, there are vast swathes of material that come from the same offenders that will never be useful.

You could see the pain in the comment from "TechJournalist" on Zawodny's post who named and shamed a shortlist of tech PR companies. If you do a straw poll on tech hacks from either side of the post, you would probably find the same names popping up time and again. I for one had a good laugh when I saw the list: a PR from one of those companies threatened to stop sending me stuff when I refused to help them with research for a proposal to a prospective client. It was quite a surreal moment. I should suggest it to refusenik bloggers as a possible way to filter their email.

Posted by Chris at 09:29 PM

July 17, 2005

The sound of the crowd

Corporations are being told to blog to counter bad publicity. It can't hurt too much as long as it's done right but I can't see corporate blogging on its own defusing situations where the public have got it in for them. It's taken a while to get around to reading through the white paper "Search is brand" published by Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser. A number of people picked up on the advice in the white paper for corporations to get blogging. But I think the advice should come with a health warning.

The white paper largely concentrates on grocery brands with Google searches used as a way of determining how badly a brand is being hit with 'negative' comments. The argument by the authors is that brands are in danger of losing control of their reputations because the first page Google brings up may contain as many as seven entries that refer to knocking copy. I actually had some difficulty replicating the results quoted by the report's authors as I initially fed the searches to google.com. I later tried google.co.uk and requested only UK pages: the results were then much closer to what the authors claimed. The UK-specific searches generally brought up more links pointing to pages containing criticism. I particularly enjoyed the one that said Dairylea is rhyming slang for wee; I didn't know that one. The searches were performed by the authors on the 6th June and I did mine today.

I need to point out that many of the brands cited by the authors are UK-centric - Bernard Matthews and Tetley, for example - and were mixed in with global examples such as Coca-Cola. Having done my searches more than a month after the authors, I cannot be sure that I saw what they saw - Google's first page for almost any search is a fluid environment. But I have the nagging feeling the authors included anything that could be regarded as negative by the company, as I found an April announcement from the Food Standards Agency about the recall of some types of Dairylea Lunchables among the other supposedly negative page references. The report claimed Bird's Eye chicken and Dairylea did particularly badly on the survey (five negatives out of ten for each search).

Weboptimiser is a search-engine optimisation company, so it should comes as no surprise that the report recommends doing things that make the company come top of search lists, particularly Google. Blogs feature prominently in the report for two reasons. First, bloggers are unhappy and on a mission. The report's authors quoted research by Delahaye, by way of PR Week I believe, that found that only 13 per cent of news coverage on the Net was negative. Who said newspapers only ever run bad news? For blogs, 23 per cent of comments (and presumably posts) were negative. Message boards were the cheeriest of the lot at just 11 per cent. That may because most message board content consists of "WTF! ROFL, LMAO, JPMS !!! ?!?!?! etc", minus the useful punctuation.

The second reason why the report cites blogs as being a brand's worst enemy is their reliance on crosslinking. You ain't nobody on the blogosphere unless you have a lot of people who put links in their blogs that point at yours. Not only does this get you top billing on Technorati and other blog search engines, it plays extremely well with Google's page-rank system. Just how powerful blogs can be for high prominence in Google was shown by the way Anil Dash's blog soared to the top of the listings for the nonsense phrase 'nigritude ultramarine' in a search-engine optimisation contest where no holds were barred, beating an unofficial FAQ page and plenty of 'black hat' search-engine optimisers.

The FAQ claimed: "Anil's site is a blog and appears to have won with the help of old fasioned blog-based Google bombing, showing that despite Google's efforts at protecting against Google bombing bloggers, the bloggers still have a significant amount of power to manipulate search engine results."

A year on, Anil's still there.

Some people have seized on the report as being a prime example of why companies should have blogs. Among them, Steve Rubel claimed the careful engineering of a blog's entries by Common Craft gave the company top billing on Google for its chosen search terms. OK, that's number one sorted out. Now deal with the other nine entries.

Or, put it another way, is blogging is the defence against blogging? Would that have helped Kryptonite or Land Rover? Let's look at Kryptonite and the New York bicycle lock. I don't dispute that blogging's accessibility through Google got the story picked up worldwide by both news media and other bloggers - which backs up the report's position on why blogs need to be considered by any company. However, I feel that it was the video of lock-picking trick in action that appeared on a blog rather than blogging per se that truly did for the lock. It turns out that this type of lock - and not just Kryptonite's - has had problems for more than ten years. Stories about cylindrical locks surfaced in the specialist press and sometimes on TV several years before the New York lock ran into trouble. It was when the videos surfaced that people realised their mountain bikes might not be tied to lamp-post outside anymore.

But, how would a Kryptonite blog help? The product design was broken. It didn't do what it was meant to: keep bicycles safe from thieves. No amount of denial via blog was going to change the situation for the company. All it could do was withdraw the product and either replace it or refund everybody. That's good old-fashioned customer relations.

The Land Rover Discovery 3 case raised by Adrian Melrose at his Smartapps and HaveYourSay blogs is a fine example of how Land Rover's PR team could have handled the problem through traditional means (like replying to emails, phone calls, letters and stuff) and headed off any news coverage before it got too bad. OK, Land Rover could have posted entries on a blog that talked about what it was doing with complaints about the Disco 3. But would that have helped in this case? Who would have linked to those entries when we know bloggers like a public fight? HaveYourSay.com does not feature as a prominent site under the plain search term "land rover", at least not yet. But it does get high billing when you add words like 'problems'. And, let's face it, if you are buying a high-value item, you want to know about any problems and, perhaps more importantly, what the company does about problems.

One thing to note is that Melrose noted that Land Rover and the company's PR knew about his blog pretty early on but chose not to respond. The company sells about 200 000 cars a year for quite a lot of money not the millions of mass-market vehicles. And its people can't reply to emails? And Melrose remained pretty positive towards the company as a whole through much of this. He wasn't sticking his head out of the window and screaming: "I've had enough and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

It will be interesting to see how these short-term campaigns affect the Google page rankings. The Land Rover campaign started only a couple of months ago, so probably has not reached its highest point in Google. A search for 'kryptonite bicycle locks' reveals that Kryptonite's own site is having difficulty holding up against pages uploaded almost a year ago.

A look at the position of Nike and the other big global brands indicates to me that the brands that have caught the attention of pressure groups and anti-globalisation campaigners have yet to suffer the full onslaught of blog-powered Google bombing. That is probably only a matter of time. And the cure proposed by search-engine optimisers may be worse than what these companies perceive as the disease. To combat Google bombing, you pretty much have to do it yourself. And there are potentially thousands of campaigners out there with access to free blogs who can outlink you. Your company could try to nick a leaf out of the link farm book and do it automatically or start trying to recruit shill bloggers. (<Dr Evil>I shall call them shiggers.</Dr Evil>) But, that is likely to make the company look even worse when found out - even if they use sponsorship to get some high-profile blogging going on - and won't combat the source of the problem.

Now, the company might determine that search position per se may not be that important to the brand, especially as you can cover maybe one or two key terms but not all of the ones that may be used commonly by consumers. It is when sales suffer that companies react. That is often too late, but it is generally the case. And if they are bothered about aspects of their image, then they really need to engage directly with the problem, not worry about search engine optimisation and setting up a bunch of corporate bloggers.

On the Internet as much as anywhere else, people are going to call you names: meatballhead, neo-Calvinist, whatever. The issue is how companies react to bad news and the methods for that have not changed radically, although the average speed of response may start going up.

And, who knows? Google may decide change its page-ranking system once more.

Posted by Chris at 09:09 PM

July 15, 2005

You can't catch anything from a PR pitch

I would say PR pitches on the whole are a good deal more sanitary than toilet seats but generally a whole lot less useful, although they can be entertaining for all the wrong reasons. The continuing backlash from bloggers complaining about having their email inboxes filled with irrelevant pitches is intriguing as it's at least a year since the first posts I can find appeared on the subject. Anil Dash arguably caught the mood of many when he described what really ticks him off as a blogger having PRs trying to get him to write about some tedious product they are paid to plug. The unfortunate truth about all this is that the situation will be the same next year. Hacks have been on the receiving end of them for many, many years. And hacks have been outing egregious examples in diary and back-page sections for about the same amount of time. And still they come.

The advantage that most bloggers have is that pitches come almost all in the form of emails. Hacks have had to put up with phone calls for years. Some of those can be truly irritating. An email pitch is easy to toss. Yes, they might get your name or sex wrong, but who cares. Do you have Nelson from the Simpsons leaning over your shoulder going "ha-ha" whenever you read those emails? Yes, they are probably irrelevant and boring. But, the delete key hasn't moved.

But, you say, surely these people should take notice of our anger? Yes, probably. But they won't. There is quite a lot of breastbeating going on among the PR bloggers over whether they should pitch to other bloggers. Some say yes, but do it right, others say no. The reality is that bloggers are seen as 'influencers' in marketing speak: it is the influencer role that makes bloggers next on the list of pitchees in this latest Internet boom. There are people who I would prefer not to send me pitches and releases, but there is no point telling them, because they won't stop, and here's why.

As a freelance hack, I have to confess I don't get as many pitches as I would as a staffer on a magazine. Some PRs get very confused over the role of freelancers, in the same way that they get confused over what should go into a pitch. Some really get confused over freelancers who are contracted to run a magazine's editorial. That's when the smoke starts to pour from their ears in the manner of a robot that's just been beaten in the logic department by William Shatner. But I still get a whole heap of irrelevant and dull stuff.

The main thing about publishing, whether it is in the form of a magazine or a blog or something else is to know your audience. You should have a good idea which stories will garner attention and which will be ignored. A lot of PRs know this; only very few know how to make use of it. It doesn't matter where it comes from, a good story is a good story. The problem is that the PRs are paid to get attention for stories that aren't any good, but are humdrum announcements. The vast majority of corporate actions have almost no effect on the rest of the world. Only the innovators and the big guns make much of a difference. Even in the hands of a master PR operator, nothing will save many of these middle-market announcements from oblivion and many who spend money on PR seems resigned to that without publicly acknowledging it. But, the PR is paid to get the word out even if the only result is to write in a report that "key messages were shared with key influencers" and that they are "unsure why the blogger/hack failed to pick up on the release". As a hack it took me years to understand why report writing was so important to PRs: the clients want to see some activity logged because clippings are so, well, difficult to find.

They don't, unless they are really good at what they do, go back to the client and say: "This announcement is so dull it put my hyperactive 5-year old, dosed up on tartrazine and hamburgers, to sleep. Haven't you got anything important to talk about?" Now, knowing that the announcement is dull but you are being paid simply to send emails and report on it, would you put much effort into getting some blogger's or some hack's name right?

Posted by Chris at 10:12 PM

July 14, 2005

Whoring for fun and profit

Tim Bray's article on The New Public Relations is interesting in a "do you honestly believe what you're writing or did you start before thinking it through?" way. It's drawn some heavy criticism already from the PR side. Tom Murphy does not see himself running beery love-ins and Stuart Bruce among others in the PR world have commented.

Some parts of Bray's piece make sense: I wholeheartedly agree that the trade press as we know it is going to see some big changes, although my personal feeling is that blogs will only play a bit part in that process and the process has already started. But I'm afraid his thinking on why the trade press is in trouble has a little too much of the philosophy that led to the publishing aberration that was the wikitorial.

Bray makes a sideswipe about whored content from journalists and analysts and how that will become transparently obvious to the avid blog reader; as if it isn't already obvious. Instead of this odious situation, Bray postulates a brave new world where corporate employees will remove the worst journalists and many of the PRs from the information food chain. Employee bloggers will carry the message to an audience hungry for their thoughts on what is going on at MegaGalactic Chips & Stents, Inc.

Bray's brave new world has the senior management telling staff what they are up to and "the people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly".

I have never been an employee at Sun Microsystems and I can't say I plan to become one. But I have worked for a few companies, large and small. And I can say with reasonable confidence that, even where a company has its entire strategy worked out - and I can count those on the fingers of my left foot - rarely does the company do a good job of communicating it to its employees, let alone anyone outside the company. I don't believe this is a problem that is isolated to publishers. Often it is down to incompetence. Sometimes, there are good reasons for lack of internal communication. Most companies announce things making sure they tell the outside world the absolute minimum about what it means. They want the element of surprise when they launch a product or service based on what they did earlier. The last thing they want is an employee giving the financial markets and the SEC a scare by blabbing the whole strategy in a blog.

OK, so you don't tell employees everything, which is what happens now. But the thing about employees is that they don't necessarily share all the values and opinions of their employer. Often, they have policies that are rammed down the throats of their workforce. Some will accept the situation; others talk to journalists on the understanding that they will not be attributed in the story that results. They will not share their discontent on a blog unless they like being sacked, sued and having their home computer confiscated in the space of a day. Oops, one down for the "blogs only contain truth" argument.

Let's look at the other side of the situation where employees and their employer do not share a common cause. Let's assume Company S has bought into a moribund market for no apparently good reason, say tape drives. Will employees conspire to parrot the claims of their employer believing that the strategy is inexplicable, wrong or misguided? Or will they find that silence is the best policy? If there is one thing people hate being more than sacked it's the ridicule of their peers. How they will love being called a corporate shill as they look around for their next job. But, let's assume everbody consumes Tim's Kool-Aid and see the massed corporate blogs as revealing the truth about a company. What happens when they go to these blogsites and see on the subject of Company S's acquisition: nothing. What will the markets make of it? "Company S stock plummets on employee foot shuffling over acquisition." That's the story I'd be running...oops, I forgot, trade journalists are an extinct species.

That's why PRs exist: they are not there just for journalists, or bloggers or Auntie Maureen down the road with Company S shares in her pension fund. They exist because the company needs someone to give the best spin on every company move, and use techniques to make that spin the position that is accepted by most of the people out there. Everybody knows they are paid to do that and you don't have to like it. But that is the point: their position to comment on what the company does, no matter what it is, is always clear. Bray should be thankful for the existing corporate blogging rules that, for the most part, ask them to stay off the corporate-publicity turf.

As an aside, Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble's tally-ho rallying call to the blogosphere claiming you aren't part of the picture unless you get in on this particular conversation is a little, erm...misplaced. It's a bit like running outside the pub, where a heated argument over whether the Gooners are going to kick the Blues' arse next season has suddenly involved more than two people, and claiming that the future of football lies within. (I'm aware I may need to provide a translation or better analogy for non-UK readers. I don't even watch that much football myself.)

Posted by Chris at 08:50 PM | Comments (2)

July 06, 2005

Experiments with RSS

One of the reasons for creating this blog was to provide a way of covering changes in the way that the press and the PR industry interact. There are a lot of PR-related blogs talking about the death of the emailed or posted press release now that RSS has arrived on the scene. But not many from the journalist's side of the fence, so this is my two pen'orth on the subject.

I have been experimenting with RSS for a couple of weeks now, so I'm well behind journalists such as Danny Bradbury in that regard, who has been using the syndication system for some time according to his web journal. Bradbury has noted one downside of using RSS: it's apparent one-size-fits-all nature. Most RSS feeds currently come from US-based operations and a common complaint among UK-based hacks is that US releases are well-padded drivel.

Some PRs in the UK like to do a bit of surgery on the releases before they send them out, whether by post, fax or email. Stuart Bruce, apparently, is one of them. Some simply don't bother to relay all of them on the basis that a good many press releases are drivel, no matter where they come from. They only process the important ones, although PR companies differ on what gets classed as important. Often, releases that are useful to me (but are bad news from the client's point of view) often don't get sent out whereas the releases about incremental improvements to obscure products are given the once over and then sent out with covering notes.

This pre-editing process means that it can take several days for a UK version of a release to appear after it has gone out on the wires in the US, although some manage to get them out at roughly the same time. Personally, the way make sure I don't miss things is to simply use the US RSS feeds and stop worrying about the padding.

But, doesn't this make the role of the UK PR for a global company a bit superfluous? I, and others, simply have to pull the relevant feeds into an aggregator and the local PRs are then out of luck.

Yes and no. The problem with RSS is that it was never designed for distributing press releases, although there is nothing in the protocol that stops anybody for using it for that purpose. The RSS model assumes that the audience for written material is larger than the number of sources, at least within a given area of interest. With press releases aimed at the media, it is the other way round. You have a large number of sources trying to aim at a small audience, the journalists working on the various news media. Those outlets will serve a larger set of readers, often providing RSS feeds from their own websites.

Potentially, journalists could end up dealing with hundreds or even thousands of individual RSS feeds to be able to cover all of the areas and companies that they need to. This is, of course, assuming that a lot more organisations pull their respective fingers out and actually do something about RSS. The reality is that the wire services such as Businesswire and PRNewswire will act as sources for much of the material that arrives by RSS feed, at least in the short term. That cuts down dramatically on the number of feeds that I need to subscribe to at the moment. The good thing about RSS is the aggregator. I use NetNewsWire and that does a pretty good job of letting me organise the feeds I need to deal with in a useful way. I have a folder that contains all the press release sources that I have identified so far. It basically acts as a super-newswire.

In there today is Businesswire's RSS feed, the one from Sourcewire, and a smattering of large technology companies such as Intel. I haven't added PRNewswire as yet. That is not because PRNewswire doesn't have an RSS feed. It is because the one it offers to hacks today is the entire output of the wire. Businesswire provides a personalised feed based on my preferences. PRNewswire has said it has a personalised system in beta, but until I can gain access to that or the company goes live with the service, the PRNewswire RSS feed is useless to me.

This is what will solve the problem for the local PRs, as long as they are able to embrace the necessary technology quickly enough. Most companies active in this field today are only providing one RSS feed for everything, from financial releases through to the most obscure product releases. Multiply that by a few hundred companies and you have something far worse than the email distribution we rely on today. For RSS to be a genuinely useful tool for journalists, PR companies and their clients will need to offer personalised RSS feeds in the same way Businesswire does now: customised through a web interface.

With personalised feeds, local PRs can continue to do what they are doing now and make use of RSS as an alternative distribution scheme to email. They will also get much better feedback on the material journalists actually want, because they will be able to see which options they select on the web form.

Posted by Chris at 11:52 PM | Comments (3)