The blog Xark has come up with a list of reasons that comments don’t work on newspaper sites (for which you can also read “magazine community sites”) and some suggestions on how to fix the problem. The main reason for failure is lack of engagement/understanding from the journalists, it seems, and the main way to fix the problem is to focus on it, take responsibility and embrace the two-way architecture of the web. Sound advice…
Technorati Tags: news, newspapers, comments
It’s Sergey Brin’s turn to write the annual Google Founders Letter, a traditional part of Google’s annual report. If you have some spare time it makes a great read, reflecting on the past decade and looking forward to some of the developments which Google believes will come in the next 10 years. These include AI, automatic machine translation and embedded search. Well worth a read.
Technorati Tags: Google
The Root of the Matter posts a very lucid account of a lecture on the future of journalism given by Emily Bell, head of digital content at the Guardian. Emily, who is now also a visiting professor at University College Falmouth, said there were clear pointers to the future:
Her other thought was that journalism will never show a profit – it has been subsidised in the past and this will continue. Oh, and people will never pay for news. Not sure I agree in a B2B context, but she’s probably right for the mainstream media.
Technorati Tags: future, media, news, newspapers
There has been a lot of hype created around the Wolfram/Alpha search engine – brain-child of Stephen Wolfram, inventor and academic. The promise is that the Wolfram/Alpha search engine will provide answers not just links to articles which might provide answers. Will it work? The site is not generally available but Wolfram did showcase his new baby at Harvard University the other day. The new search engine has been called, predictably enough, a Google-killer and Google does seem to have been rattled enough to release it’s own new approach to structured data to coincide with the briefing. The verdict, though, was mixed. This, from ZDnet was typical. I do think, however, that we are about to see another lurch forward toward the web of data. Watch this space.
For some reason I’ve found myself reading E H Gombrich’s A Little History of the World and I was struck by this particular passage on the ascendency of the Greeks:
Now unlike the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, these noblemen weren’t interested in preserving the ways of their ancestors. Their many raids and battles with foreign people had opened their eyes and taught them to relish variety and change. And it was at this point, and in this part of the world, that history began to progress at a much greater speed, because people no longer believed that the old ways were best. From now on things were constantly changing.
There you have it: the birth of the innovation culture.
Technorati Tags: innovation
Thought-provoking and self-explanatory presentation by John Pettengill of Razorfish about the mobile web and why it deserves far more attention than it is getting. Well worth stepping through the 128 (!) slides.
I was reading The Observer’s story this morning about how ITV mishandled the opportunity from Susan Boyle’s video. The thrust of the piece was that the video in all its forms – on YouTube, ITV.com or on the BBC – was now over 100 million views and rising and yet ITV has failed to capitalise fully from advertising potential around the global phenomenon. The reason? It has been unable to negotiate a suitable deal with Google, according to the article…
Part of ITV’s reluctance to agree a deal with YouTube could be because it wants to maintain the traffic to its own website. There is also speculation that it is trying to strike too hard a deal, using Boyle’s unique position as a bargaining tool for a better share.
Another explanation could be ITV chief executive Michael Grade’s public loathing of YouTube, which he has branded a “parasite” living off TV shows and content created by the commercial broadcaster.
Last week Michael Grade announced he was standing down as CEO of the stricken broadcaster. It occurred to me that this was probably the end of an era. There was a time when the gifted superstars of broadcasting could be relied upon to ride to the rescue of TV channels which had lost their footing. Grade’s departure after less than two years, proves that is no longer the case.
The internet moves very fast and success happens wherever it happens; ITV’s response to the Susan Boyle phenomenon seems to have been 1. to be have completely taken by surprise by the speed of events and 2. determined to stake their claim to what was there’s “by rights” – i.e. a sizeable share of any advertising spoils and exclusive rights to the traffic. ITV, headed by Grade, just don’t understand the internet (consider Friends Reunited which had an enviable head-start in the UK social networking space and has now been put up for sale.) Maybe a change of managerial outlook will serve the broadcaster better?
The thing that strikes you most about the traffic in Mumbai apart from the sheer quantity and chaos of it all, is the endless noise of car and scooter horns tooting incessantly.
A great article from The Silicon Valley Insider uncovers the secrets of Amazon’s approach to customer reviews. How do you make sure the most useful reviews bubble to top? And how do you make it easy to see the negative and neutral reviews, as well as the good ones? These are the questions Amazon wrestled with an the post shows how elegantly Amazon came up with a solution. Worth a read.
Technorati Tags: Amazon, reviews, user experience
