Where Upendra Shardanand posts occasionally.
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
In the spirit of RFK challenging basic assumptions of our markets, Umair Haque’s Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution. I have nothing to add, go read it.
P.S. I’d add “Organizing the world’s press” to the list.
One of Daylife’s hopes is that by making available a platform for building newsware, we help support, even if in a small way, some more creativity and innovation around new news user experiences. There hasn’t been a ton of innovation around news online (especially as compared to other categories, like shopping) in the past decade. In part because it’s a lot of work to manage the data and analysis – which is where Daylife comes in – we can do some of the back-end heavy lifting, and let folks far more creative than us go nuts.
We have a Developer Challenge running, and some of the early entries are hot. Check out the video for Newsflash, by Guus Baggermans, a gesture-based interface for people to triangulate their own truth.
Super-cool, Guus!
We’re thrilled about this piece by Jon Fine.
Image via Wikipedia
The great problem facing modern man is that the means *by* which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends *for* which we live… The real problem is that through our scientific genius we’ve made of the world a neighborhood, but through our moral and spiritual genius we’ve failed to make it a brotherhood.
And this was pre-web. Shout out to our good friends at Meetup.
The newspaper is not a transmission of facts or truth. Rather, it is a form of drama.
There is a lot of conversation about link economies, and particularly the AP’s linking guidelines.
In a link economy, the implied transaction is that bloggers, aggregators, and others get to excerpt a story, and in return, link to that story, driving traffic to the original content creator.
(Sidebar: I want to specify that we’re talking just about the link economy around news articles. Linking to a news piece is different than linking to, say, Travelocity. If Google links to Travelocity, a user *has* to follow the link to get any value from Travelocity. News articles are different. Those links most often consist of headlines with excerpts, from which the user gets part of the story and gains value even without a click.)
The question is, is that transaction fair?
It is incredibly difficult to answer that question in real economic terms, so maybe it’s the wrong question to ask.
But it’s clear that a lot of publishers often don’t *feel* it’s fair. In fact, they feel hurt.
So what can they do about it?
Establishing policies to try to force things to be “more fair” isn’t a durable solution. Is there some scenario where things can fall into a natural equilibrium? What positive actions can publishers take to affect the balance?
Part of the answer may lie in the art of the storytelling itself.
In the traditional inverted pyramid news article, much of the value of the article is in the headline and the first paragraph. That makes it hard to link to the article and *not* give away a good chunk of value.
So one question is: what can a publisher to do *pull* more traffic through that link? How can they create a link that doesn’t give away a big chunk of the value of the page it links to, a link that is truly a taste of what’s to come?
Some ideas (nothing that hasn’t been said before elsewhere on the web):
I always applauded the experiment Kevin Sites and Yahoo! did with In The Hot Zone. I’d love to see more journalists experiment with how they tell stories, and what stories are in the first place, as Kevin did.
P.S. – I laughed when I saw this. The extreme way to make people follow a link: make it really hard to cut and paste. (via laughingsquid). All the text is an image!
A friend e-mailed after reading this post, “Are you saying sites using [some form of newsware] will be as common as [sites using] AdSense?”
Yes. Why not? Let met stretch the AdSense analogy further.
Advertising is only as common as the content that makes ad inventory possible. What if there were a service that helped publishers add fresh content (and therefore ad inventory) to their sites, as AdSense does for ads? It would have to be:
1) As easy to add as AdSense. Only “web skills 101″ required. (And if it were that easy, as I argued, all kinds of sites that you never imagined as news outlets would become such, just like all kinds of sites that you never imagined running ads started doing so thanks to AdSense.)
2) Make the matching easy. AdSense works because publishers don’t have to manually pick out ads, and advertisers don’t have to pick the sites. It does the matching for you – that’s the only way it scales. Similarly, a ContentSense service (Daylife or equivalent) would need to be intelligent and be able to place content based on context as well as the publisher’s wishes.
3) Allow for real customization. This is one requirement that departs from AdSense. Having the same web experience for an ad unit is ok (if not preferred) for AdSense. For a content web-experience, a publisher has to truly be able to make it their own to build an audience. A ContentSense platform has to allow the publisher to make the experience match their voice, their brand, their feel, whether they are using an experience out-of-the-box or inventing applications.
4) Sites don’t have to pay for it. At Daylife, we’re really happy (and our investors more so!) that we have a service that publishers find valuable and pay real money for. But, to really be as ubiquitous as AdSense, the service would have to be free for publishers.
Google says to publishers, “We’ll give you the ads.” A true ContentSense solution says, “We’ll give you the ad inventory.”
Pipe dream? Maybe. We’ll see.
