This is a 3-D animated tag cloud to promote the Adobe MAX conference here in LA; but I think they might want to regulate this a bit more, because some of the user-chosen tags are getting a little ... pungent. [...more]
I stumbled across this today while poking around at the new Adobe products, trying to decide whether it’s worth it to upgrade to CS4 for the new features in Premiere Pro and Photoshop, or to just hang on to CS3.
Anyway, this is a 3-D animated tag cloud to promote the Adobe MAX conference here in LA; but I think they might want to regulate this a bit more, because some of the user-chosen tags are getting a little … pungent. Hey. That’s pretty good. Maybe I’ll go there and add “pungent” to the mix…
I’m not sure if you can geo-anchor the text; if not, having “PORN” appear about where Chatsworth is located, is a stroke of serendipitous genius… (click to embiggen)
At some point, we're going to figure out that the copyright laws actually are more of a hindrance to the creators of intellectual property like this, than they are of a help. It took George Lucas a couple of decades to learn that the best way to communicate with his fan base was not via "cease and desist" letters, but through actually talking with some of the amateur fimmakers who felt so touched by his art that they wanted to make their own art so they could keep playing in his wonderful sandbox.
Just as newspapers are having to learn that they don't own the news anymore - as if they ever really did - so too are TV and filmmakers going to have to learn in the years ahead that they don't really "own" content that connects with, and inspires the audience in the way that the LOTR franchise so obviously connected with, and inspired these filmmakers. Check out this article for more on the prosumer impresarios. [...more]
I’m feeling a little New Media biz overstimulated, a result of spending the weekend at BarCampLA, and then segueing directly into the Digital Hollywood conference. Apparently, you can get too much of a good thing … if by “Good Thing” you also include in that little Venn Diagram:
Marketing directors who name-check “Minority Report” more than once per panel session when asked to ruminate on “Whither Advertising?”
VCs desperate to invest in anything with the word “mobile” in it (hey – my cat is mobile when she prowls the yard, hunting crickets, with a strong social aspect as she tries to catch the sparrows that twitter at her – the line forms to the right for those ready to dump $3M in Tier One Angel Funding on us)
Angry movie/TV producers, eking out a living from creative projects 15 years out of date, desperately searching for someone to write them a check to produce the script that every agency in town has rolled their eyes at
DRM technology salesmen who “guarantee” that their solution will prevent the video industry from following the music industry down the toilet (but who go silent when asked what major releases, specifically, can you not find on Pirate Bay?)
having to park in the “overflow” lot at the Santa Monica Civic Center, thus making we walk past the Rand Corp. headquarters repeatedly, thus probably landing me on a list of those to be rounded up & waterboarded by Information Retrieval Services and Michael Palin, sometime in the near future
So the weekly round-up of the best/funniest viral videos on the web is little delayed this week.
First, one that was sent to me because it stars a distant relative – Don LaFontaine aka “The Voice” aka “That Guy in the Movie Trailers Who Always Says ‘In A World…’ ”
The Five Biggest Voices in Hollywood – All in a Limo
This is a few years old, but I’m posting it because it’s funny, it gathers together the best voices in Hollywood with a pretty decent storyline, and because Don was The Man. I can kinda do an imitation of his voice, and I have done so for many of my indie-film friends who want a sarcastic Don LaFontaine-esque big scary voice to underline the over-the-top aspect of their parodies.
Best lines: Don: “Nick Tate …”
Nick: “…a voice sixty-five million years in the making.”
Don: “Ominous.”
John Leader: “Mysterious.”
Nick [line delivered with a smirk as the camera does a close-up]: “Hung like a horse.”
OnionTV: Trekkies Revolt Because New Movie Isn’t Cheesy
This is worth watching if for no other reason that it reminds you how transparently awful 60s-era sci-fi was. A while back, I watched the DVDs of the original series on a friends gigantor home theater, and was shocked to see how bad the makeup was, how the alien-world backdrops were clearly visible painted walls, and how everyone was sweating under the hot lights, even the Red Shirts (probably because they’d had a couple of stiff drinks over lunch to make them properly enthusiastic as they yelled “AAAgggh!” while off-camera prop artists chucked rubbery tentacles at them.
Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat
OK, this is one of those strange web videos that goes viral every once in a while for reasons that passeth all understanding. I’ve been seeing it crop up on all the video-sharing sites, and blogs are starting to embed it on their pages. Including this one.
I’m guessing that the dingbats over on 4Chan are somehow behind this one, and that there is some strange cosmic significance to the cat doing the Paul Schaeffer schtick, but I don’t really have time to delve deep down into it. Or it’s just random & st00pid, and the point is that there is no real point, and we should all go back to reading our Sartre.
I can’t embed this here, so click on the link above, or go the the page “The Hunt for Gollum” to check this out.
The sidebar on Daily Motion claims that this film was made for less than $5,000, and the end credits make it clear that nobody was paid to appear in this film, nor is anyone making any money out of it. This is pure fanfic – and a strikingly good example of that. The costumes and the travel budget to the various woods & gardens that they used for sets in this film alone would add up to far more than $5K.
Somebody loved this movie.
I hope that Peter Jackson, New Line’s assignors & HarperCollins just let this one be. If they’re smart, they will. This film is not a copyright infringement. Well, it kinda is … but what it is really, is a brilliant piece of marketing for all the fans of the LOTR trilogy, to keep them engaged with Tolkien’s world. And yeah, the acting is a little stiff at points, and the pointy ears on the elf-chick are not good, but for all that, this is an enjoyable cinematic experience.
At some point, we’re going to figure out that the copyright laws actually are more of a hindrance to the creators of intellectual property like this, than they are of a help. It took George Lucas a couple of decades to learn that the best way to communicate with his fan base was not via “cease and desist” letters, but through actually talking with some of the amateur fimmakers who felt so touched by his art that they wanted to make their own art so they could keep playing in his wonderful sandbox.
Just as newspapers are having to learn that they don’t own the news anymore – as if they ever really did – so too are TV and filmmakers going to have to learn in the years ahead that they don’t really “own” content that connects with, and inspires the audience in the way that the LOTR franchise so obviously connected with, and inspired these filmmakers. Check out this article for more on the prosumer impresarios.
Kudos, guys. (And howinhell did you get all those people in the end credits to sign up to slave away for you for no $$ whatsoever?)
This is a huge hit over on DailyMotion, and some real effort went into making this. I think that some of the early shots are "machinimation" from the various LOTR videogames.
Dirty Sexy Money
And last in the lineup is the NSFW entry, which shows what our money gets up to in its spare time.
This is apparently an ad for banks in Germany, and it shows the US Dollar getting busy with the Pound (that hussy!) who is apparently quite the little tramp…
The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic). There's a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular - they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile. It's the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans. It's a human voice. The voice that says, "Well, y'know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he's a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away..."
It's the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us. The one that doesn't feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said "objectivity." The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit - because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary. [...more]
Last week at the International Symposium of Online Journalists in Austin, I presented a series of viral videos to make the point that the national discourse is no longer “owned” by what we think of as professional media. It may seem like a trivial point, when compared to the other nuclear meltdown-level emergencies of declining advertising, lack of a sustainable business model for the future, declining audience share, sky-high debt loads, etc. – but I believe that adapting ourselves to this new environment is the first step towards resolving these other problems.
I asked the audience how many of them "got" the central image here, and could put it into its viral meme context.
Over at the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles makes a compelling and far more comprehensive argument about why the whole concept of ownership of the news & the national conversation has been toxic to the mainstream media’s efforts at retaining its audience share.
Another point that I tried to make was that it is OK to use humor in your reportage, now and again. The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic). There’s a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular – they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile. It’s the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans. It’s a human voice. The voice that says, “Well, y’know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he’s a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away…”
It’s the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us. The one that doesn’t feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said “objectivity.” The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit – because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary.
[And yeah, I know, my much-promised blog post about the effects of fear in the media on all of us is still in the works. Forgive me.]
So for all of you trapped in office cubicles, or just in need of a bit of diversion at the end of the week, here are the top viral videos:
To quote Michael Corleone: “Everytime I think I’m out – they draaaaag me back in!” I just got done with a Big Scary Article for the NAA about charging for online content. I’ve marinated myself in all sorts of arcane data about how to make money from online content, whether or not publishers are being [...] [...more]
To quote Michael Corleone: “Everytime I think I’m out – they draaaaag me back in!”
I just got done with a Big Scary Article for the NAA about charging for online content. I’ve marinated myself in all sorts of arcane data about how to make money from online content, whether or not publishers are being forced to charge for content or are doing it because they are angry and unwilling to make the fundamental changes to adapt to the New Media environment, etc. etc. Basically, a whole bunch of business theory that makes me sound like a Web 2.0 dweeb, spouting buzzphrases like “Freemium is a viable long-term marketing strategy, but a short-term disaster if you need to make crushing debt-service payments,” and “Big Media brands must leverage their local trust networks to sign up small advertisers.”
“As consumers and advertisers increasingly turn to digital media, we must create formats and programs that support and sustain the differentiating aspects of our businesses,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, founding chairman of the OPA, and senior vice president, digital operations, The New York Times Company. “Agencies must be given the tools to build brands on the Web and publishers must provide the formats for their advertisers to thrive, while balancing the needs of their users.”
The proposed new advertising units are:
The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.
I have mixed feelings towards these things. As a web publisher myself, I am in favor of anything that delivers real value to advertisers, since if advertisers get value, then they’re much likelier to direct fat stacks in the general direction of indie weasels like me.
However, as a web surfer, the idea that sites are going to have annoying “Fixed Panels” that follow me as I try to scroll through the page … well, have you ever gone to a MySpace page where the background is busy and annoying, and all the content scrolls across it, increasingly impossible to read? It’ll be like that. The Fixed Panel is going to judder and jerk as you use the scroll wheel, and if you’re a person who has multiple tabs open in your browser, well … hope you’ve upgraded your RAM and you have at least four cores going in your CPU to handle all the load.
The XXL Box is a bit more promising. If an ad is actually visually appealing, and it is delivering information about something that I’m interested in, then I would consider it to be part of the content of a page. If it has page-turn capability, and can also display a short video clip, well, that might be amusing.
Hard to ignore, I’ll give you that. But at the time, I was using Yahoo as my default email address. The ad slowed things down so much that I switched over to Gmail. This, despite the fact that I know that Google is scanning all my email messages and indexing everything I write, or that is written to me.
I was serenaded by this group last night on a riverboat restaurant here in Kiev. My friends here took us out for a big traditional Ukrainian dinner, and started plying me with this deadly local concoction made of vodka, honey and hot peppers. It’s designed to hit your stomach, and warm you up in the [...] [...more]
I was serenaded by this group last night on a riverboat restaurant here in Kiev.
My friends here took us out for a big traditional Ukrainian dinner, and started plying me with this deadly local concoction made of vodka, honey and hot peppers. It’s designed to hit your stomach, and warm you up in the winter. It had just started snowing when we got here, and looking out the window, I saw huge heavy flakes floating down to disappear into the dark, slow Dnieper River. Chunks of ice, broken free from the mass far upriver, kept floating by on their way to the Black Sea. With this music in the background, it felt somehow timeless…
So yeah, it’s campy and melodramatic. But as the song goes on, you start to see the changes come over the faces of my dinner companions. I don’t know what they were singing about, but it must’ve been heavy.
Eugen, the dean here at the Digital Future of Journalism school, explained to me that traditional Ukrainian songs are all tragedies, drawn from their long and heartbreaking history.
“The potato harvest fails, so to support his family, the man goes off to fight in the Tsar’s wars,” he said. “He knows that there is small chance of him ever coming back alive, and his wife knows this is probably the last time she sees him in this world. So they sing of their love for each other, and he embraces his children goodbye. It’s like Ukrainian bluegrass, or country and western. Where the man has no money, no job, his pickup truck is broke, his wife left him and his dog just died. That kind of thing.”
I'm on an internet connection here that is a bit iffy, so I'm going to experiment with a gallery plug-in that may or may not get me marked as a spammer, as well as uploading the shots. So bear with this experiment, and there should be more eye-candy goodness as the week progresses. [...more]
I’m still groggy from the flight over – I got on a plane at 12 noon on Friday, and got off at 7 p.m. Saturday. In between, I got stuck in the middle seat on all three flights. And in each case, the good folks at Northwest managed to put the three biggest guys on the plane all in the same row. I am convinced that that is done just so that they can then watch clandestine surveillance footage and laugh their asses off, as three big guys all try to contort themselves and not elbow each other.
The fog, wet pavement, and industrial setting made me feel like I was in some kind of remake of "The Third Man."
The assignment here is to teach a group of newspaper reporters how to shoot, edit and post video. I’m also going to take a morning to teach them about some of the emerging ad models on the web, since so many of the problems attendant to online video have to do with the uneven schemes for monetizing this kind of content.
I’m on an internet connection here that is a bit iffy, so I’m going to experiment with a gallery plug-in that may or may not get me marked as a spammer, as well as uploading the shots. So bear with this experiment, and there should be more eye-candy goodness as the week progresses.
Schipohl Airport is starting to become familiar to me.
Aerial view of fallow Dutch fields. (click to see larger)
Schipohl Airport is starting to become familiar to me.
The fog, wet pavement, and industrial setting made me feel like I was in some kind of remake of “The Third Man.”
As part of my ongoing experiment in coming up with a coherent content strategy, I offer up a week’s worth of fun and/or interesting videos that I’ve come across. It’s been a real rollercoaster of a week: Started out with the fear that Bush would figure out some last, triumphal way of screwing up on [...] [...more]
As part of my ongoing experiment in coming up with a coherent content strategy, I offer up a week’s worth of fun and/or interesting videos that I’ve come across.
It’s been a real rollercoaster of a week:
Started out with the fear that Bush would figure out some last, triumphal way of screwing up on his last day in office
Felt pride, relief, hope and a growing sense of “what the hell just happened to us all?” during the Inauguration
Felt sick in the aftermath as it turned out the economic meltdown wasn’t going to give us a break, no matter what
Even sicker when Xeni Jardin championed a documentary about how the U.S. tortured innocent people through depraved intermediaries
Anyway. Here’s a couple of things to lighten things up -
OK, this is childish, and an advertisement to boot, but the only other thing I saw like this was Jim Carrey’s dancing eyebrows in “Me, Myself & Irene”:
This gem from the Vancouver Film School that shows off 1) the 3D animation-fu of the creator, and 2) a deep-seated psychological fear of uncontrolled facial hair
Next, this is a movie trailer for a film being distributed by Ted Perkins, a friend of mine. It’s not a chucklefest, but the photography is beautiful, and I gotta give Ted a shout-out:
This is kind of a rip-off of the famous scene from “Fisher King,” but I love it anyway. The thing to pay attention to is how many people are using their cellphone cams to take pix or video of the flashmob. In the future, we’re all going to be self-contained news gatherers – in much the way that Twitter has turned us all into terse Telegram-style news alert generators, the coming 4G phones will make us all part of a constant info-web.
Next, this somewhat creepy talking baby shows us all the outtakes from the Super Bowl adstravaganzas that we AREN’T going to see this year … and more in future blog posts about the coming ad meltdown that is coming into focus…
aaaand finally, the winner of the week, with almost 700,000 views since Tuesday:
…and now, as a break from the heavy news about New Media & the near-constant anger & backbiting going on over whether or not civilization as we know it will survive another aggregate circulation decline… Here’s a reminder that creativity and innovation still exist, and are being used to make beautiful things. Relax and enjoy: [...] [...more]
…and now, as a break from the heavy news about New Media & the near-constant anger & backbiting going on over whether or not civilization as we know it will survive another aggregate circulation decline…
Here’s a reminder that creativity and innovation still exist, and are being used to make beautiful things. Relax and enjoy:
Packing up for the trip back down to LA, but couldn’t let these little tidbits from the CTIA pass without at least acknowledging them. 1. Yahoo is trying to drum up some support for its Blueprint mobile platform. They claim that it’s going to allow users to achieve the Holy Grail of mobile/web content – [...] [...more]
Packing up for the trip back down to LA, but couldn’t let these little tidbits from the CTIA pass without at least acknowledging them.
1. Yahoo is trying to drum up some support for its Blueprint mobile platform. They claim that it’s going to allow users to achieve the Holy Grail of mobile/web content – tying together all our virtual identities with its oneConnect application. It’s been said, over and over (AND OVER) again that the first company to figure out how to provide the one-stop platform for social media interactivity over cellphones, is going to be the next Google (if Google itself doesn’t snarf up that space as well). The dream is that oneConnect (or whatever) becomes the way to keep up with what your friends on Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, MySpace, YouTube, etc. etc. are doing, and a way to post constant updates on where/what/why/with whom/teh awesum!1!/go away now/overload to all the places where you share your life’s experiences with the world.
Leaving aside for the moment the sneaking suspicion that aggregating all our identities through one company’s pipe may not turn out to be such a bright idea, the software is apparently generating the skepticism already.
I’d like to see Yahoo manage to pull this off; like many others, I’m starting to get more & more uneasy about Google’s unchallenged dominance, and I’d just as soon they not have complete control over what I do, see, say & hear, as well as knowing who I’m doing said communicating with/near/for/against.
Moving on.
2. Pointroll is wowing the attendees at the CTIA, offering easy(ier?) ways of taking rich media ads and porting them over to the mobile platform. Their demo of interactive ads on the iPhone, done through and with USA Today, has publishers and advertisers pondering if the time has actually come to start migrating the TV ad spending over to the phones that the 14-24s are actually using, paying attention to, and carrying with them everywhere.
The Google content network encompasses hundreds of thousands of
websites, including premium publishers and long-tail niche sites.
Google and PointRoll worked together to ensure that the ads served to
the Google content network meet Google’s policies and specifications.
After completing Google’s certification process, PointRoll’s
sophisticated targeting technologies can now optimize the breadth of
Google’s sites and categories, matching advertisers’ messages to the
users who find them most relevant.
Again, nice hype. But in light of the struggles that Google has had with Android, I remain skeptical that they have managed to so quickly solve all the problems with serving mobile ads in anything like a timely manner. I just think that there’s still too much market fragmentation to be able to claim that this One Size Fits All app will reach a mass audience.
To backup my point, allow me to quote a piece in the paper today: one of the problems many sites are running into is that about 25% of web users are still limping along with Internet Explorer 6.0.
(Pause to allow veteran web developers to spit, vomit, scream, make the two-fingered “sign of the devil’s horns” to ward off evil.)
IE 6.0 is widely recognized as the shittiest web browser ever inflicted on the public. It was launched in 2001. Since then, Microsoft has bugged users to upgrade, remove, kill, quash, forget, shred, this browser. The fact that a quarter of users in the U.S. still view the web through its Funhouse Mirror interface shows that 1) A large proportion of the public continues to employ legacy technology no matter how Christawful it is, 2) these folks ignore new technology, no matter how much better it is, for fear that upgrading will somehow cause them a problem, and 3) any tech solution based on the assumption that people will be running the latest&greatest hardware and software is doomed to die like like a possum wandering onto the Indy 500 speedway.
3. Millennial Media is competing with PointRoll to serve multimedia ads to the mobile market. And we’re going to have to stop here, because it’s time to load up the Conestoga wagon and head back to LA.
The exact numbers are somewhat fluid, but most analysts agree that only 1-5 people out of every thousand that visit a UGC site will actually contribute something. That works out to between 0.1 and 0.5% That is a very small group to base the success of your community site on. Small, fragile, fickle and easily [...] [...more]
The exact numbers are somewhat fluid, but most analysts agree that only 1-5 people out of every thousand that visit a UGC site will actually contribute something. That works out to between 0.1 and 0.5%
That is a very small group to base the success of your community site on. Small, fragile, fickle and easily discouraged by trolling and flaming.
you shouldn’t expect too much online. Certainly, to echo Field of
Dreams, if you build it, they will come. The trouble, as in real life,
is finding the builders.
I come to this question because of a recent screed by Paul Gillin on Newspaper Death Watch, micturating on the idea that newspapers should be concerned with building a community. Gillin is skeptical about communities (H/T to Amy Gahran at Poynter for bringing this to my attention) because, he says, “the question came up about what publications can do to build community.
I responded that they can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try
because, with few exceptions, readers aren’t a community.”
This is just thoroughly, thoroughly wrong, utterly self-defeating.
Failure to build community is one of the many reasons so many
newspapers are in so much trouble right now. Yeah, the Internet this
and the economy that and television blah blah blah, but don’t overlook
“failure to lead.” Far too many newspapers have either intentionally
abandoned or simply lost interest and wandered away from the mission.
[snip]
Community doesn’t scale. I’ve previously written about the Dunbar Number.
Each of us has hard-wired limits, so don’t go looking for nationwide
“USA Today” community around general news. That’s clearly the wrong
place to look.
Because of the scale issue, community flourishes in the niches, and
geography happens to be one. But as I’ve said before, this whole notion
of “hyperlocal” seems to be sailing over most journalists’ heads. Or
beneath their noses.
Oh yeah. Yelvington says that when you do research, you find that newspaper readers are seeking some kind of connection. Since, to my knowledge, newspaper readers are, in fact human beings, rather than thin-sliceable demographically segmented consumerbots, yeah, that would follow.
So here’s my research. It was my first story for OJR, and still the foundation of a lot of my thinking about what newspapers + New Media are capable of, and why the old-school values that we’ve lost along the way are the keys to survival.
The nut grafs from the interview I did with Bob Cauthorn are as relevant today as they were three years ago, when I first did them:
Looping back to Point Reyes, what you see there, and I do think
there is a metaphysical story in there – not metaphysical as in magical
– but deeply emotionally compelling. And that’s why I’m delighted that
you’re bringing this story to light. Because what this tells you in no
uncertain terms, with a kind of heat and passion that I wish existed in
the normal newsroom, that our public wants us to succeed.
Our
public wants us to survive. Our public wants us to thrive. Our public
wants newspapers that matter. Our public is leaving us because we are
chasing them away with a stick.
Folks, the core purpose of a newspaper is to allow a community to have a discussion with itself.
The Light survived because it was such a part of its community that the whole town banded together and refused to let it die. The ongoing saga up in Point Reyes only proves this point – since Mitchell sold the paper, it has strayed from its purpose of providing the community with a place to have a conversation with itself. The community has reacted like an organism, stricken with a particularly noxious infection; it has isolated the Light and formed antibodies (the West Marin Citizen) to combat the toxic intruder. Feel free to chime in the comment section with your own similes involving raw sewage, surgical waste, etc.
So here’s how I tie this together. The reason that so many newspapers are getting things wrong is that they seem to expect to just set up a “Community” section and have every reader show up and eagerly start shoveling stories, photos, videos, etc. into their CMS. Oh, if only. Newspapers, as Yelvington noted, have been bought up by “giant, faceless corporate chains” which has cost them their connection to the community, and thus their position of leadership in the community’s conversation with itself. Which is why our civic sense of decency has become necrotic & foul.
The problem, as I see it, is that newspapers haven’t quite gotten that even on the most successful UGC site, the percentage of people actually contributing content is miniscule. The commenters (latter-day letters to the editor) run about 10%. And to even get that, you have to:
Actually reach out to the readers – make them aware your community site exists.
Care about them – as more than just stats that allow you to gouge advertisers for more money.
Know what they care about, and what they want to see.
Give them a good reason to respond and reward them when they do something right.
Have provocative content – rather than he-said she-said stories that make the corporate lawyers happy.
Have sysops, board leaders and wizops that monitor the conversations and spice things up when they get moribund.
And … aw hell, just read the goddam Cluetrain Manifesto again. It tells you how to do this far more eloquently and effectively than I ever could.
It’s not time to dismiss “Community Building” as yet another Web 2.0 consultant meaningless buzzword. Community is the frickin’ core mission of the newspaper – or indeed any local media. It’s just that to do so, newspapers are going to have to disaggregate, along the lines of what Bakotopia has done; split into niche groups that allow people to actually talk to their neighbors about things that are geographically significant/interesting/infuriating/delightful. You know – the way that newspapers used to do, before they got so self-important, pretentious and serious…
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
I just got done with a Big Scary Article for the NAA about charging for online content. I’ve marinated myself in all sorts of arcane data about how to make money from online content, whether or not publishers are being forced to charge for content or are doing it because they are angry and unwilling to make the fundamental changes to adapt to the New Media environment, etc. etc. Basically, a whole bunch of business theory that makes me sound like a Web 2.0 dweeb, spouting buzzphrases like “Freemium is a viable long-term marketing strategy, but a short-term disaster if you need to make crushing debt-service payments,” and “Big Media brands must leverage their local trust networks to sign up small advertisers.” 
all our virtual identities with its 
r of users in the U.S. still view the web through its Funhouse Mirror interface shows that 1) A large proportion of the public continues to employ legacy technology no matter how Christawful it is, 2) these folks ignore new technology, no matter how much better it is, for fear that upgrading will somehow cause them a problem, and 3) any tech solution based on the assumption that people will be running the latest&greatest hardware and software is doomed to die like like a possum wandering onto the Indy 500 speedway.
