I didn't know the Russian phrase for "Group hug, people!" So I just stood in the back and spread out my arms.

I showed them some of the very basic tools to promote your content – the simplest being the blast e-mail alert to people you’ve signed up on a subscription list.  A couple of people in the class were already up on Twitter, and I sang that particular gospel, as well as the advantages of setting up Facebook groups or using the same functionality in the Russian equivalent, which is a Classmates.com-alike.

As always, the skill level in the audience was very uneven. Some people were way out in front of the pack, others seemed to be lost. I tried to deliver a wide variety of tools to hit everyone. I got just a couple of hours to do some very basic tourism after this session.  The scale of the construction going on here is truly awe-inspiring.

It's pretty chilly here; not snowing yet, but it's thinking about it - thus the heavy clothes. Also, behind me is the new Presidential Palace.

Last Friday, I conducted a training session for the reporters attending the Online News Association’s national conference to demonstrate how to build the basic skills needed to cover a breaking news event using mobile phones.

That sounded rather cold & stilted.  Let me re-phrase:

I created a scavenger hunt (which, if you want to be picky, is technically an Alternative-Reality Game (ARG)) to be the spoonful of sugar to entice the journalists into using their phones to cover a “breaking news” event that I had designed beforehand.  I have put a full description of what the basic steps are to create a mobile training session like this up on our main Artesian Media site.

The lucky winner of the "Alaska Canned Moose." Like I said at the time, this is the kind of persistence and ingenuity that won Brazil the Olympic Games that very morning...

The conceit was that a visiting national candidate has had her pet moose (gee, I wonder who that could be based on?) escape into the hotel. I then doled out clues that led the reporters on a scavenger hunt where they had to use their phones to interact with both the real and virtual worlds. I drew on my short experience designing D&D computer games (my agent in the 90s got me a couple of commissions writing game modules, but none of them were ever used – trust me, it’s a Hollywood thing).  I tried to make the training experience challenging enough that the reporters would stick with it to the end to unravel the puzzle of what happened to the poor beast, and to collect a (somewhat) valuable prize.

My aim was to get the journalists going through this training to use ten basic skills:

1. Use Twitter and Twitpic
2. Take a picture with their cellphone cameras, and then use a wireless connection to email that picture into a CMS (I used Posterous, because it’s the simplest open-source blogging tool I’ve found recently – posting there is as simple as sending an e-mail.)
3. Receive an e-mail message on their phone, and act on it
4. Watch a video on Flickr, and follow up on a story lead contained in the video
5. Browse Facebook, and find information on a social-media profile
6. 6. (The next five skills were deleted because of limited time and uneven bandwidth at the hotel.) Write a two-sentence news summary of events and post it to a WordPress blog
7. 7. Use GPS to navigate to a location
8. 8. Create a photo gallery, and geo-tag the photos
9. 9. Stream audio/video live to the internet, and then upload the same local recording to a podcast/vodcast directory
10. 10. Transmit/share files with another reporter’s mobile device

All these were taken from examples of real-world news events, and the various skills the journalists had to have to cover the news live & in-person, using only the tiny (yet increasingly powerful) mobile phone. Unfortunately, once I got to the Hilton in San Francisco, I quickly learned that I was going to have to scale back my training a bit.  Quite a bit, in fact.

Twitters from that ungulate-obsessed madman, The Mooseinator.

The effects of having more than 700 of the most internet-savvy journalists in the world in one place – and then adding the mobile-phone crazed USC college students who had made the road trip to watch their team play Cal – overloaded the hotel’s internet connection.  I could barely send/respond to email through the hotel’s wi-fi system, and I quickly found out that despite San Francisco’s rep as the epicenter for all things cool & new in digital technology, the 3G cellphone coverage in and around the hotel was abysmal.

ASIDE: I have never had so many dropped phone calls in my life. Maybe this was due to the overloaded cell zone & the usage of all the journos & college kids. But even at night, I found myself wandering my hotel room with my new iPhone held apart from my body like some kind of cell signal dowser, hoping to strike a pose that would allow me to complete a call without having the person on the other end start screaming “What? WHAT? YOU’RE BREAKING UP!!!”  Either all the people whining about AT&T have a point – which is probable, considering the amount of chatter on the web about them – or the new iPhone 3Gs is a great handheld computer and a lousy phone. Which also seems (sigh) likely. All I know is that I had the iPhone 1.0 on this same AT&T network all over the world (Colombia, Moscow, Kiev, Amsterdam, Costa Rica, Mexico), and I didn’t have problems like this.

Back to the subject. With the fragile connectivity at the hotel, I had to scale back the plans I had made, so that I didn’t have frustrated crowds of journalists howling at the ceilings and shaking their phones at hotel staff (although that might have made a cool scene for an ad for some new mobile company).  While I knew that everyone likely to attend my session would have a smartphone and would probably at least have some skills in how to use it, I whittled away some of the more advanced features that are not common to all phones. Given more time and resources, I could certainly make these things work, which would really take the experience to the next level.

Nerd alert: The basic skill set needed to set up a training session like this is pretty much the same one it takes to be a great dungeon master (DM) in the dice-based Dungeons & Dragons game.  You have to set up a framework where you allow your players to use their ingenuity and improvise enough so that they feel like they’re the ones telling their own story – but also controlled enough so that you can lead them from step to step towards the set-piece goals you have established beforehand.

The first thing that I did was to post a handwritten clue in an unused conference room next to the ONA registration desk.  This was a stand-in for a confederate – I was hoping to have someone there to play a recorded statement that I had on a little digital voice recorder, basically telling the reporters “I’m sorry, but we don’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”  Hey, I was going for the verisimilitude.

The next step was to have a couple of people over in the corner giggling over a picture on their phones of the moose on the loose. Again, the hotel was uncooperative.  Seeing as how they’re located in “The Tenderloin,” maybe they had other problems on their mind.  See Dave Mitchell’s excellent blog post “Country Mouse in the Big City” to read about some of our adventures as we tried to leave the hotel on Saturday night (they involved drunked brawling, drug ODs in the bathrooms and SFPD cops circling a handcuffed pursesnatcher).

I had to make do with a foamcore sign on which I posted the link to the Twitter account of someone in the hotel who was an eyewitness to the moose wandering the grounds.

The contestants then had to navigate to the Moose_inator Twitter feed and click on the Twitpic link to see the picture of the place where the next clue was located. Their next task was to go there and upload their own photo of the pool to the Posterous CMS (standing in for the CMS of their paper/TV station/website).

The beast seems to be taunting us, carefree and grinning...

After they uploaded their own photos, they then got an email with a link to the Facebook page of the Moose Inator, who claimed to have  shot a video of the moose in the hotel. I was going to put it up on YouTube and Vimeo, but found that the hotel’s wifi system was clamping down a bandwidth throttle on the video sites.

Flickr was streaming without a hitch, so I put the video up there, with a message at the end of it to come and meet me in the CityScape bar atop the hotel.

By the way, I really put a lot of work into fleshing out the character of the Moose Inator on Facebook. so take a few seconds to click around and look at all the photos that I uploaded, such as this one.

The photos were shot in our backyard here in Los Angeles, but the videos of the moose in the hotel were shot the day of my presentation, using the video camera functionality on my new iPhone 3Gs.  It’s not the greatest video in the world, but it’s low-bandwidth and it was fairly easy to edit using Premiere Pro CS3.

I’d also like to extend a special shout-out to Sony-Ericsson for sending me their cutting-edge smartphone, the C905a. This little beauty comes with an 8.1 megapixel camera, which I used to good effect in setting up this training exercise. If the bandwidth had been a little less iffy, I think I would have tried to do a live video feed using Qik or Kyte from the site.

Channeling the spirit of Lord John Whorfin, grinning and taunting, "Laugh-a-whila you can, monkey boy!"Actually, The Moose Inator tends to issue odd permutations of classic Melville lines, such as "From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last chaw of Copenhagen at thee!"

It’s late and I’ve got a lot more post-processing to do on the photos, so here’s just a couple of the images that I shot.  The video of the discussions can be found at This Week in Startups.

Before the lights were adjusted, standing on the platform over the audience made the speakers look like they were either making a dramatic entrance - or having their identities concealed in some "60 Minutes" tell-all segment.

The energy of the old VIC was certainly present – a little too much, as techies on the make back at the bar made it a little hard to hear the speakers at the time. This, despite the overt threat by organizers to find the yapping networkers and toss them out.

Anyway, here’s Calacanis discussing what the future of social media sites is going to look like, and what smart companies should do in the next couple of years to try to adapt to the increasing pace of innovation.

As I said in an email to Nye, Jason would probably be secretly pleased at the whole Citizen Kane-esque imagery here. And then, of course, he'd feel conflicted about it and make a self-deprecating joke.

One of the more interesting areas of discussion – particularly since I just got back from Costa Rica – centered around virtual currency as being “the next big thing.”  Certainly seems that way in places like Costa Rica, where you’re getting an increasingly large, tech-savvy and connected labor force.  A lot of people either work in the internet gambling industry there – or have relatives/friends that do.  The speed of internet connections in San Jose – and even out in the jungles on the Pacific side – stunned me. I’ve had much worse connections in the small town U.S.A.

One of the things that has stuck in my head the last week or so has been the stories coming out about how spammers are getting around the Captchas by simply hiring dirt-cheap human labor to fill in the blanks on the pages to stuff spam onto our hard-constructed sites.  I’m not sure what the next step in trying to get rid of the spam is going to be – Calacanis lamented how from the very first days of blogs, spam started becoming a problem, and it has kept pace with our attempts to try to get rid of it.  Now it’s starting to get into the social networking world (viz today’s Phishing attacks on Twitter), where the level of trust that we have for our social circle is going to make the impact of a malicious click that much heavier.

Page design at Rue89.com looks a little like what splatters on the side of the carny Tilt-a-Whirl after you load it up with a buncha 10-years olds who've spent the day eating cotton candy and mystery meat hotdogs. I think the boxes up & down the sides are supposed to be clickable ads, but they were inert when I tried them... (click for larger)

The illustration here is of a new French news site that is apparently taking off at Rue89; I can’t decide whether the chaotic design is totally off-putting, or intriguing because it basically violates every rule of page design.  Also, I can’t hear the word “Rue” in a title without flashing to “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Or some B-movie villain twirling a moustache and chortling, “You’ll rue the day, Rex Manly!”

As a bonus, this week I’ve broadened the focus a bit to include some big-picture thinking from some of the unusual suspects; Doc Searls has a post wherein it is posited that what we think of right now as the internet is just a finger pointing in the direction of what this thing is actually going to grow into.  Which should fuel a couple of late-night dorm-room debates, if nothing else…

Jeff Jarvis comes out in favor of doing the exact opposite of erecting paywalls, and dubs it “Hyperdistribution”  http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/08/25/hyperdistribution/ In a nutshell, it’s the idea that news organizations have to splash their content all over the web to try to make up for the lower ad rates by compensating with larger audiences. Nut graf: “I have stood in and before no end of conferences when I or someone else recalls what that student said in The New York Times said a year ago: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Waiting for her to come to our site won’t work – and it especially won’t work if, once a peer links her to our site, she finds a wall. No, we have to take news to her.”

PaidContent.org says that “The Future of News is Scarcity” http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-future-of-news-is-scarcity/ and that the mistake newspapers are making is that they are focusing on

A new take on the "trust/verification" function of news organizations.

the wrong problem. Instead of trying to come up with ways to preserve the content model that has worn out, he says that “every abundance creates new scarcities and this is where the news industry must go to make money in the 21st century. The scarcities created (and enabled) by abundant news are interesting stories, thought provoking analysis, conversation and community, and trust/verification. (snip) The successful news company of the future will have to take all this on board and deliver it with a radically lower cost base than this industry is used to.”

From the BBC, an article about what the music industry can teach television (and perhaps newspapers) about fighting with the internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/08/what_can_music_teach_telly.html Sample thoughts of what lessons to draw from the fight the RIAA has waged against its users: “Music biz teach TV? Greed, backwards thinking and lack of respect for the end consumer.” And “How to alienate its customers by treating them all as likely criminals.” One of the links will take you to this page, laying out the numbers of piracy of popular TV and movies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8224869.stm

Over at Media Bullseye, they reference Star Trek villains, in a piece entitled “The News Aggregator-Borg: Resistance is Futile”

Does this mean Arianna Huffington is going to start sporting external cyborg prosthetics? 'Cause that'd be cool...

http://mediabullseye.com/mb/2009/08/the-news-aggregator-borg-resis.html The author, Robert Quigley, is the social media editor for the Austin American-Statesman, and is considered one of the smarter New Media thinkers around.  He says that journalists should take the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to aggregating content in & around the web, pointing to the success CNN had in covering the attacks in Mumbai and unrest in Iran as examples of using the power of aggregation to shape & expand coverage.

Y Combinator, the startup incubator that has a heavy-duty track record, is calling out for business models to pave the way to “the Future of Journalism”: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html Y Combinator has a strong history of funding companies like Reddit, Omnisio and Zenter, and they are looking to dump money on anyone who thinks they have a realistic business model to support news production.  The RFS (“Request for Startups”) is being issued because, according to them, ” Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time. ”

Many people have pointed to the success of Amazon’s Kindle as proof that the future of news & newspapers lies in e-reader and portable devices like that. However, just as many people point out that Amazon demands 70% of the subscription revenues, which is spurring a lot of competitors.  Slate magazine has an article about how to compete with the Kindle http://slate.com/id/2226503 Basically, just look at what all the would-be competitors to the iPod did – and do the exact opposite. Key point: “The service matters more than the device itself. Every time I dismiss the Zune, Creative Zen, or some other MP3 player as an also-ran, I get letters from loyalists who insist that their gizmo far outshines the iPod. Sometimes they’re right-but what they miss is that the iPod isn’t a standalone device. It’s part of a music-delivery ecosystem, the most important feature of which is iTunes.”  Basically, the article lays out what publishers will have to do if they really want to deliver content to e-readers and make a profit.

In that vein, Editor & Publisher asks “Will E-readers Help Save Newspapers?” http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004007001 It appears that the

I tried to look at this on the Kindle. Not so good.

USA Today is hanging a great deal of hope on e-readers, along with a lot of other leading publishers. Nut grafs: “What’s interesting about e-readers is that they will most likely resemble the best aspects of print. The missing link, however, is the advertising model. (snip) Without advertising, newspapers stand very little chance of making any meaningful revenue from the e-reader platform.”  The article goes on at length to address many of the technological, social and business obstacles standing in the way of just eliminating the costs of paper distribution in favor of sending Quark page layouts to a Kindle-like device.  Oh yeah – and here’s a link to the announcement of the Sony device http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6685746.html

At the Knight Digital Media Center, the possibility of establishing “membership options” to charge for news is dissected: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/rather_than_a_pay_wall_consider_membership_options/ This borrowed somewhat from Mark Cuban’s suggestions (covered last week) to build a “News Junkie” membership which offers multiple services.  The ASNE chat that this comes out of is located here http://208.88.72.149/tabid/122/Default.aspx (you do need to be a member or paid subscriber to see this – and yes, I recognize the irony inherent in all that).

Speaking of Cuban, he’s off on another unlikely crusade – this week, he’s decided that the internet has been “dead and boring for a while now,” and that two new technologies WebHooks or PubSubHubBub are going to CHANGE EVERYTHING!!!! (emphasis his) http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/25/the-internet-is-about-to-change/ If you can get past the jargon (i.e. “Cloud-based distribution hub”), there might be something there. I’d be interested to see if he’s got any money invested in these, he’s banging the drum so hard. To me, it sounds like just another variation on “push”

Why do these wireframes look like the Tinkertoy stuff I made when I was 6?

technology, where a publisher crams information down the pipe to subscribers before it makes it available on the website. Me? I prefer the AP news alerts I’ve set up on my iPhone. For free. If you’re interested, Impact Media has a slightly more measured description of PubSubHubbub http://www.impactmedialtd.co.uk/blog/internet-news/what-is-pubsubhubbub/

If you’ve got the time for a “think piece” about what the long-term solutions to the revenue problems faced by companies trying to migrate their analog businesses to a digital platform, check out Doc Searls (one of the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”) in “Thinking outside the Internet box” http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/08/28/thinking-outside-the-internet-box/ Here’s the Keanu Reeves “Whoah!” moment: “I’ve written often about how hard it is to frame our understanding of the Net. Now I’m beginning to think we should admit that the Internet itself, as concept, is too limiting, and not much less antique than telecom or “power grid “The Internet” is not a thing. It’s a finger pointing in the direction of a thing that isn’t. It is the name we give to the sense of place we get when we go “on” a mesh of unseen connections to interact with other entitites.”

Another “deep thought” piece comes from Fast Company, setting out “Three Possible Economic Models” for the digital future: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/three-possible-economic-models-part-ii This is not directly related to the paid content debate, but it’s some interesting thinking on what kinds of companies are going to be viable in 10 years or so.

A piece on MinnPost talks about how the Journalism Online project launched by Steve Brill to such fanfare, perhaps … overstated … the number of newspapers that have signed on. http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2009/08/19/10972/star_tribune_not_part_of_online_fee_venture Apparently, the Star-Tribune and Pioneer-Press have not, in fact, signed up.

This is a post from last week that I’ve just gotten around to including – Alan Mutter writes “Why aren’t we paying for news?” http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-arent-we-paying-for-news.html Be sure the check out the comments section – there are notes there from some papers that recently either went behind, or emerged from paywalls. In the article, Mutter blames fear of change as the reason that everyone is talking about paid content, but very few people are actually doing it – yet. “Publishers can’t figure out how to charge for content without throttling their web traffic and the online advertising that comes along with it. (snip) Individual publishers are afraid to move unilaterally to begin charging for content but also unable to coalesce as a group around a common philosophy and platform for doing so.” Part 2 of Mutter’s epic trilogy is here: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-stops-publishers-from-charging-for.html And he winds it all up with: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-publishers-can-make-web-content-pay.html

Journalism.co.uk takes on the issue of free vs. paid content by stating that “Free is just another cover price” http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/08/

In the little time I've spent here, I actually quite like this scrappy little paper. Damn shame Rupert kicked it to the curb...

27/comment-free-is-just-another-cover-price/ They dissect the real reasons behind the demise of Murdoch’s thelondonpaper freesheet, and conclude that “thelondonpaper isn’t closing because the model

was flawed, but because News International either couldn’t make it work in the current economic climate or was unwilling to give a paper, still in its infancy, the time it needed to become commercially viable.”

The Newspaper Innovation blog writes at greater length about thelondonpaper, and whether this is really the death knell for the freesheet model http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/index.php/2009/08/24/freesheet-no-longer-viable-model-and-other-myths/

For readers interested in what’s happening with the whole “let’s regulate that crazy, dangerous internet” debate in Europe, the European Journalism Centre has a long post up about all the laws being debated around The Continent that might affect journalists http://www.ejc.net/about/blog/media_laws_spur_summer_debate_autumn_actions_likely/ The proliferation of laws designed to criminalize filesharing shows that RIAA and MPAA lobbyists are still very much on the job.

King Kaufman gets a little lathered up by the column in the LA Times that I linked to last week, writing that “We must kill press freedom to save it” http://open.salon.com/blog/future_of_journalism/2009/08/25/we_must_kill_press_freedom_to_save_it Somehow, I don’t think that managing editors are going to be going around holding up a Zippo to the printing presses anytime soon, but OK, he’s upset. In fact, about halfway through he gets into an imaginary conversation, which quickly turns into what the Brits call a slanging match. Viz: “Have you met the people, Tim? I hear they’re lovely once you get to know them. They’re the ones who have been saying for years, with their actions, “If you charge us for online news, we will abandon you. We do not support newspapers or anyone else charging for online news except for news that’s highly specialized.”  King’s basic point is that by trying to form a consortium to crush internet competition, the news industry is in fact acting against the public interest, rather than for it.

Trying to get users off their asses, to participate? Well, hot-button issues like the "Skank" blogger case are a good way to start...

In a slightly more constructive piece, Dan Gillmor, one of the authors of We the Media, announced that he is launching Mediactive, a site dedicated to getting the audience more involved in the news, but transforming them into “active users” rather than “passive consumers.”  The announcement piece is here http://mediactive.com/2009/08/24/moving-along-mediactive/

The Nieman site has a piece up on how the New York Times is monetizing its journalists by offering online courses in the Knowledge Network, to be taught by Times columnists http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/newspapers-find-a-new-way-to-monetize-their-journalists/

Two journalists are attempting to sell “kits” that would allow recently laid-off journalists to establish hyper-local news sites http://www.jiltedjournalists.com/News.html The effort is being called Dailytown.com, but the kits don’t seem to offer much beyond what a savvy online journalists could do with a custom WordPress install.

Interesting experiment – reminds me of WindyCitizen.com.

A couple of French startup web-only news sites called Rue89 and Demotix, are experimenting with multiple unconventional revenue streams,

but agree that “paid content is a dead end” http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/03/04/the-future-of-online-journalism-according-to-rue89-and-demotix/

And finally, just for reference, the Columbia Journalism Review sets out the difference in value between a print and an online reader – a print reader generates about $709 a year, while an online reader only generates $46 http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/post_11.php

Just a quick late-night hit while I prepare to shoot an interview tomorrow at KCET.

I’ve spent much of the last couple years of my life trying to come up with case studies, strategies, training programs, tools and mash-ups of all the aforementioned, all aimed at illuminating a clear pathway for the newspaper industry to follow to save itself from “The Crisis.”  My last big project was the Audience Planbook for the NAA, which was supposed to lay out a step-by-step process to building new businesses that take advantage of the technological innovations that have changed the way we get news.

I’m not so delusional and narcissistic as to think that I have some revealed, holy wisdom that can turn around the momentum of a massive, multi-billion dollar industry by myself.  But I had hoped that maybe my voice, along with the voices of those who I recruited (shanghaied? hoodwinked?) into writing chapters in the Planbook for me, would spur some kind of change.  This hope has grown harder to sustain in the last couple of months.

And then there’s a straight brass-knuckles shot to the chops like this, on the Xark! blog:

What will these media executives do when that reality hits them?
When these debt-burdened chains, stripped of journalistic talent by a
decade of profiteering, their web traffic reduced by 60 percent by
their paid-content follies, their pockets emptied by the cost of the
proprietary paywall systems offered by Journalism Online LLC and other
opportunistic vendors, what will they do?

Will they buck up and
go back out into the fray with fresh ideas and leadership? Or will they
fold, casting bitter eulogies to their own imagined glories as they
exit the stage?

The chances of them adapting well to another
failure are dubious. Remember, these are the same people who have acted
as if there were no other options, even when those options were
practically gift-wrapped for them. As if Newspaper Next never happened. As if commerce hubs and C3 and all the interesting, exciting ideas that are practically everywhere today do not exist.

They don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. And in many cases, they’re literally paid not to get it.

America’s
journalism infrastructure – from corporate giants to non-profit
foundations like the American Press Institute and the Newspaper
Association of America – is funded by dying companies. So when you hear
about efforts to save newspapers (and, by extension, journalism),
understand that answers that don’t return the possibility of double-digit profits and perpetual top-down control aren’t even considered answers. They’re not even considered.

They’ll do anything to survive… so long as it doesn’t involve change.

Click on over and read the rest of the piece. And then go to the comments section – because the action is always in the comments – and check out the long, impassioned note from someone trapped in a sinking newsroom.

Do not count me – yet – amongst those who hope that, well, now that it’s (allegedly) become clear that newspapers are fated to die, then let’s just get this over with.  I still think that they can turn things around – the recent LA Times excellent Mapping LA project is a great step towards building the kind of hyperlocal database and information exchange network that could take off and fulfill all those dreams about the possibilities of digital local coverage.

While I am all for the development of the new content & biz models touted in Xark!, I don’t think they are ready – yet – to step into the line of fire and take over in collecting and distributing the information that we need to be able to function effectively as a society. Hell, as a civilization.

The anger in the screen on Xark! is palpable, and I will cop to feeling it on more than one occasion.  But I am not yet ready to give in to it. to throw in the towel and just lean back and toast marshmallows over the flames.

…and yes, I know, I don’t have the excerpts and such that made the other videos interesting to watch. But I figure if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably already pretty interested in what this guy has to say.

Excerpts to come…

mmm

Battelle says he stayed up late one night (visions of the mythical college dorm room & heavy inhalation) to come up with this heavy information and interface theories, and worked up this speech to try to describe where he sees the future of the web going.

If what he said above is right, then there is about to be another evolutionary stage, and the current titans of search (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.) are going to be replaced by The New Hot Thing.  He seems to be hanging his hat on “conversations” which sounds pretty good to me – the human urge to connect & trade information is one of the strongest forces on the web.  I’m just not entirely convinced that the Facebook/MySpace paradigm is at all viable.  We’re been waiting a while now for anything remotely resembling a business model to emerge, and the latest news is that Google’s shareholders are starting to get a bit bent out of shape about subsidizing the world’s inconsequential home videos, and that Emperor’s Missing Wardrobe-type questions are starting to get asked about the 1/2 billion a year burn rate.

Money quote:

YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals. YouTube is adamant that ultimately they’ll find an advertising solution that will enable the ungainly behemoth to reach profitability. Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem likely.

Battelle’s take on where all this is headed is pretty complex, and not all that out of line with things that you’ve probably heard before.  This is only the first part, so stick with it – it gets more rewarding as we go along.

Here’s some teaser quotes to get you to click over and watch the video – please excuse the camera movement, but Battelle kept pacing around on the stage, and I had to either go so wide that focus was a problem, or track him, making the camera movements a little jerky.

Every publisher is now a marketer … you have to engage the audience in a conversation … if you don’t know how to do that, you’ll die.  That’s it. It’s over.

I call this the conversation economy.  It’s kind of a sequel to the search.

The three-bump theory of how man interacts with technology … as Eric Schmidt is fond of saying ‘25% of GDP is fine with me.”

We all give Apple credit, but basically we know that Windows won.  I call this the “hunt and poke” interface … that’s way better than learning a foreign language like FORTRAN.  That’s also called the “I’m lost in a foreign country interface.”

We started having conversations at scale with our customers.  All of a sudden every customer could talk to every company, and nobody was ready for the conversation. But around the turn of the century, we started to develop that interface, and that interface, I argue is search.  This is the first time we have ever been able to have a conversation in our own natural language with a machine.  People don’t see search that way, but I do.

Curmudgeons skip directly to 7:50 or so, for the juicy bits. If you are in a crowded place, please allow at least 10 feet of safety space in all directions for when your head explodes.

This is the first part of the rather incendiary keynote speech by Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo.com, at the OMMA Hollywood 2009 conference. The keynote’s title is “Advertising, Riots, Twitter, Facebook and the Depression,” and in it, Calacanis cheers the death of newspapers and “Old Media,” and lauds paid search as the “most powerful advertising medium ever created.”

Not coincidentally, Mahalo is a paid search company.

Along the way, Calacanis also trashes social media advertising, showing screenshots of drunken parties to “prove” that all advertising on this platform is unwelcome, intrusive and doomed to die.

Highlights:

“Gosh, newspapers didn’t see this coming, did they? I mean, the newspapers were reporting on their own demise for a decade. And they still couldn’t change it.

It’d be as if you’re the Titanic and you haven’t even left port yet.  And they’re like, “By the way, there’s a lot of icebergs to the north.” And you’re like “OK, thanks.” A day later, it’s “Icebergs are still there.”

They’re like, “Full speed ahead! To the icebergs, as quick as possible!”

They did nothing. They deserve to die. Don’t cry for newspapers, it’s great that they go out of business, because new things can take their place that are better. Much better.

(snip)

Don’t cry for journalism.  Rejoice, because a new journalism is being built, today, as we speak. And it’s going to be better than the last one.

(snip)

“They deserve to go away. Goodby, good riddance.”

The keynote was obviously designed to provoke a reaction (more than one conference attendee muttered “linkbait” after listening), and it certainly did that, as every other session after this opened with the panel trying to refute Calacanis’ claims. I’ll post John Battelle‘s rather more measured keynote tomorrow.

I have a few reactions to this, and I’ll post some more with the other three videos in this series.  But to start with, the notion that newspapers did nothing at all about the internet is absolutely false.  The industry has tried to engage with online since before there was an internet (you’ve probably all seen those videos from San Francisco, showing the early paper over video screen tech of the 80s). The problem is, that the battlefield on which newspaper have been trying to engage has shifted radically.  First, it was the fight between portals – Prodigy vs. CompuServe vs. AOL.  Then it was Netscape vs. Internet Explorer. Yahoo vs. Google. Facebook vs. MySpace.

Newspapers are a $50 billion a year industry, with tremendously expensive production and distribution infrastructure, grown up over centuries.  If the Tribune chain had just splashed kerosene over the presses back in ’92, and declared in the flickering light that they were shifting every penny over into becoming a competitor to AOL … well, they probably still woulda wound up about where they are.  But along the way, there would have been tremendous dislocation – millions of readers not getting information.  Millions of readers turning to competitive print products that would have made billions.

So the newspaper industry has tried incremental solutions. Right up to this point, where, as we see in Seattle & Denver (despite what Jason sneers at, there are plenty of people who want to read what he dismisses as “boring” stories about local government, taxation, schools and crime) the papers are being forced to migrate to the web under conditions that are nothing short of brutal.

It’s all very well and good to talk about the exciting news products that are “being built today, as we speak.”  But I know many of the people that work at these small, struggling web news outfits. They are up against the wall, just trying to keep the broadband bill paid.  They are not going to be able to devote thousands of man-hours to digging through documents and making connections, and going out and doing original research (i.e. interviewing people to get things that are not archived on the magical, all-seeing web). Maybe this will be solved someday – but it ain’t the case today, and that’s when we need it.  We need this kind of enterprise reporting, or this country is going to implode, because society is angry at the economic collapse, and nobody’s really been able to dig deep enough to explain it. At least, not in a way that holds up & makes sense for more than a month or so…

If I sound like a bit of a curmudgeon here, well, it’s hard to watch this and not get a bit grouchy. I agree with Jason on the broad points – that Big Media has sinned, and is paying the price; that ad dollars are shifting to where the consumer eyeballs are, and that this trend is only accelerating.

But dude? Less of a gleeful grin.

But – two items this week converged (yeah, there’s that word) to illustrate one of the powerful, emerging lessons about New Media.  It’s one that I learned years ago, when I first rode a couple of dot-bombs all the way down into the crater.

Big site traffic numbers do not necessarily mean big money.

First, let’s hear from apostate blogger Dennis the Peasant, who was one of the founders of Pajamas Media until his partners chucked him overboard a couple of years ago.  The news this last week that PJM was no longer going to write fat checks to its bloggers was met with screams of rage from said suddenly unfunded right-wing bloggers (and joygasms from left-wing bloggers who had long derided the PJM checks as “wingnut welfare” – a POV now seemingly shared by said wingnuts’ former employers).

So Dennis had schadenfreude & Cassandra-vindicated moment, in which he flipped off the camera & did a Snoopy dance.  And then, he got around to some actually interesting stuff about the economics behind blogging:

The thought in everyone’s mind is If only I can get enough traffic I can make money. If I have the traffic the advertisers will pay for access to it.

Everyone assumes site traffic is the key to blogger riches.

And, everyone is wrong. It is that simple.

(snip)

… what we discovered seemed to suggest we were sitting on a goldmine: Large household incomes, very well educated, disposable
income out the blowhole… what we assumed advertisers wanted.

Well, by January of 2005 Roger and Charles had disappeared in a cloud of pure bullshit, and there I was, left waiting to hear about the
“new model”, the “new partners” and “the new” what not… Being the curious sort, I arranged for a friend of mine to introduce me to the
managing partner of a small, but prestigious, advertising firm in Columbus. I packed up our survey statistics and headed to a luncheon
engagement that I assumed was going to convince this guy I was on to something.

Well, I spent 20 minutes explaining our idea and the business model as I envisioned it, and then, as the capper, whipped out the survey
statistics and showed them to him. He looked at them for a moment, laughed, and then threw them down on the table in front of me.

“Worthless,” he said, smiling.

DtP goes on to talk about something that New Media folks take for granted, but that Traditional Media people still have problems wrapping their heads around. See, newspapers, radio, TV, billboards, direct mail, etc. etc. — they all base their ad rates on the pure numbers of eyeballs on their content.

While have a big audience is nice, in web terms it can actually be more of a hindrance than a help.

Which is where Facebook comes in. Today it celebrates its 5th birthday. And it is hemorrhaging money from every orifice, with no clear business model in site. (Here’s an interview the BBC did with founder Zuckerberg last fall)

The perennial question for Facebook has been how to monetise the site and cash in on its 150 million users who critically spend more than two hours each day on-site. Analysts Neilsen compared that figure to the 90 minutes users spend hanging out on MySpace.

As the pressure mounts on the Facebook team to make money, the job becomes harder amid the present economic downturn.

(snip)

the clock is ticking fast.

“At some time the economic model has to grow with the rest of the firm.

“Investors will want a return on their money and in this market, investing in vapour can be very difficult. Their time is up for doing this without making money.

“They need to develop a business model soon before they find their funding sources start drying up,” warned Mr Enderle.

The Facebook Advertising page, like its obvious model Google AdSense, tries to make it easy for an individual or small-biz owner to buy an ad. Contrast that with all the hoops you have to jump through to buy an ad in traditional media.

The numbers that came our recently show that Facebook has among the lowest click-through scores on the web – 400 clicks for every 1 million page impressions. This has not gone unnoticed. The pro-Facebook & social media mavens claim that the demographic information that has been amassed by Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc., is going to pay off with highly targeted ads that garner higher CPMs. And they have an easy-to-use frontend that is quite obviously modeled after the AdSense DIY concept.

Facebook’s experiment with tying ads to your personal information was, however, a disaster. And critics have started pointing out that maybe Facebook doesn’t know all that much about you…

And the stories are starting to come out about how desperate they’re getting – despite the impressive raw traffic numbers, time spent on site, and user engagement indices — all numbers that media companies try to pay attention to.

I can tell you from my experience with a succession of dot-bombs, big page traffic without the proper monetization scheme is actually a detriment to your survival. Especially in the video space.

While bandwidth charges are a small fraction of what they were even six years ago, they still rack up quickly.  And if you have a million people watching a 10 meg video on your site (as can happen if you get a viral hit), and your monthly service contract with your hosting service starts charging you after, say, 250 gigs … well, work the numbers.

1,000,000 users x 10,000,000 megs downloaded = 10,000,000,000,000 (10 terabytes aka 10,000 gigs) of page traffic, just for that video.

Depending on your contract, your site will either crash and you’ll have to wait a month or whatever before you can bring it back up … or they just act like a cabdriver and flip down the little flag and start the meter running.  At the end of the month, just like with a cellphone company when you go over the minutes, you get charged up the wazoo.  Say it’s a $.10 a gig, the way DreamHost does it.

10,000 – 250 = 9,750 gigs

9,750 x .10 = $975 overage charge for the month.

Now, there’s no way that Facebook is paying that much for its bandwidth – economies of scale and all that.  BUT.  The bandwidth still does cost.

DtP makes the point that 400 dedicated readers in a well-defined niche space, such as photography, beat the hell outta 40,000 drive-by users in an amorphous mob. Advertisers will want to reach those 400 people, because they know them, know what their interests are, and know that the ads served to them are going to the right people.

General interest sites, however … well, let me put it this way.  Check out the sode aisle in the supermarket next time you’re there.  Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Coke with Splenda, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Black Cherry Coke, Coke Blak, Regular Coke, No-Caffeine Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Caffeine Free Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke with Vitamins.

Each of those products exists because there is a niche out there that wants to drink them. Why would Coke want to waste its ad dollars for health nuts that want a soda that has vitamins and that they can delude themselves into thinking that is “good for them” … on a site that has an audience of cigar-smoking red-meat-eaters?

The advertisers have had to fragment their products. Those fragmented products have to be marketed just to the people who are going to buy them, or they are not viable.  That means that the platforms that those products advertise on have to be similarly well-defined.

The root of the problems with mass media isn’t that there isn’t interest in the information – it’s that the advertising money is shifting away to places where the audience is better defined & targetable.

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