Intellectual Property, Links & Moats

Riddle me this: What do high-end furniture manufacturers and newspapers have in common? They both are terrified that the Web is ruining their businesses, so their response has been (to want) to build a big moat around their intellectual property. Yikes! are those water moccasins and alligators in those moats?

Seriously, both groups hate the Internet for what it stands for: business interruption, paradigm upheaval and an inability to figure out how to monetize the new economy -- while standing still and pouting.

Both these businesses, and you can throw in the music publishers, fashion designers, software creators and any other industry where the product (or a representation of it) can be shared digitally -- and where the distribution channel has more perceived valuable than the content itself.

Let me write that again: the distribution channel was perceived to be more valuable than the content itself. What in the world do I mean by that? Well ask Sony -- which had its tentacles into deejay playlists and decided which songs it would promote and which it would bury. Since the corporations had such a chokehold on distribution, artists and inventors were forced to virtually hand over their intellectual property – in hopes that someday their ship would come in.

If the artist’s brand begins to flourish – the power of the channel begins to diminish. The iPod democratized the music industry by allowing the brand and consumer to connect -- further weakening the channel. Despite the fact the music industry is hotter than ever -- the distributors bitch and moan -- and they should! Where else are they going to find plum jobs for merely managing reports? The benefactors now are the musicians -- and Apple!

In newspaper and magazine publishing -- the ideas now available on the Internet make the newsstand immaterial. In fashion and home furnishings the designs can be copied by knockoff artists. And both groups are up in arms and pulling up the drawbridge - and wanting to break links! But what none of these groups realize is that the brand itself is what reinforces the value of the intellectual property. Investing in the brand is what offers protections -- not moats, nor misguided suggestions by judges to disallow linking to protect thought.

There is an opportunity now for the creator to have a direct relationship with the audience. So while the channels weep and moan for being kicked off their perches, indie artists, bloggers, authors, even furniture designers are able to find ways to reap new rewards. Yes, eventually new distribution channels will evolve – although chances are the business model won’t be as ‘feudalistic’ as before; with corporations owning the intellectual property and controlling every aspect.

In the meantime, for the publishers, brand manufacturers, musicians and all other intangible creators out there -- assess what the public will value – and associate your brand with that. The money will follow.

Open Letter to Eric Hippeau

Dear Mr. Hippeau:
Kudos on the new role as CEO of Huffington Post!

Have been a huge fan of Huff-Po for almost two years now, although in the last 12 months, the site has gone from a once-in-a-while nosh to a 10-times-a-day fix. (I couldn't wait to find out what happened to Mark Sanford, really. It reminded me of the time the Atlantic City mayor went AWOL -- turned out that was just because the feds were closing in on him for impersonating a military person of importance. I, myself, was convinced Sanford ducked into rehab; the whole Argentinian affair just seemed a bit too exotic for such a vanilla-looking guy.)

In any event I read where you don't feel a need to "fix" the HP -- you merely want to grow it. And according to Ad Age -- a Venture Capitalist with a publishing pedigree -- is just the person to do it. Still this is the Digital Age, and I thought you might be open to a few suggestions from a digital media specialist who happens to be a fan.

First, I love the curator approach. And you have to wonder why all these media companies out there that own a gazillion titles couldn't have done the same thing. Oh yeah, I remember why. They didn't want anyone else to represent their news. 'Nuff said.

Second, I would like you to thank Godz & whomever found Jason Linkins. His willingness to scribe/stomach the Sunday morning bloviators has saved me so much time -- I was able to create this new blog!

And, Nico Pitney. Seriously, Pitney has a rare passion and connection with people. His coverage on Iran -- with his tenacity for gathering tweets and emails from around the globe may be the finest example of reporting today. He hasn't turned cynical -- yet. Take some of that $25 million and make sure he has enough cab fare to get to White House Press Conferences in time. The big boys won't move out of the way for him next time, now that they know a) he will really get tapped by the President to ask a question and b) and Pitney will be smart and respecting enough to ask a real grown-up question.

Now I have a few minor nits. Headlines, like today's hed: "Obey Accused of Pushing Waters." Now when I read the article, it really didn't deliver the goods. Maxine screeched "you touched me first," (which sort of suggests she broke the close-talking shield and may have touched him. Granted the thought is stomach turning, so let me get back to heds). Too often they are:

1. salacious
2. misleading
3. flat out wrong
4. all of the above

Look. There are enough scandals around that your copy writers should not feel the need to create news when none abounds. If they have a great hed -- tell them to put it in a drawer -- and wait five minutes and either Jon & Kate or David & Maxine will allow the hed to be relevant. You have one chance to make a good impression -- keep baiting with headlines and not delivering and you will pay a price eventually. Consider mining your comments, people call out when they feel they are being used as a tool.

Tagging. Now I know your writers do a great job. In fact, the beat all estimates by the scores of editors with whom I have spoken, who lament that they can't get their writers to do more than 3 tags. But maybe you need to broaden the categories for them. For instance, the tragic deaths of John Travolta's son and actress Natasha Richardson were announced under the category of Entertainment. There is something really disconcerting about seeing that word above the story of how a slight fall on the bunny hill killed a beautiful actress.

Now, I'll leave it to you whether you think that any article, video or photo that has Michele Bachmann in it should ever be on the main site, let alone categorized as Politics. Personally I believe she belongs on 23/6.

Search. I get it that you want to be the most current anthology available. However, sometimes I want to find that article that I saw on your site that I never would have found since I don't read The State, and I would like to have some chance of finding it again. The Google search is anemic, and there is so much technology out there to make it better!! (Trust me, I speak on this subject all the time. People inherently want to find things -- and search can be such an exercise in futility!)

Oh yeah, one more thing. This isn't a nit -- but a suggestion none-the-less: Have fun with your new role and continue to innovate. The rest of the media world is/should be watching.

Best regards,

Diane

PayPal for a Free & Open Media

The future of newspapers -- is not really something I lose sleep over. The better concern should be: The future of a free and open media. The media that is supposed to be the checks and balances to the government (instead of shills). With media jettisoning news creators -- read that: bonafide journalists, the question is: who will do the work? Better still: who will pay them to do the work?

The New York Times had a front cover story of a Pennsylvania VA Hospital that didn't have safeguards in place so that a rogue doctor was able to botch about 90 routine prostate procedures -- errantly putting radioactive seeds in bladders and rectums to consign his patients to a life of misery. The article ran easily 5000 words -- and probably took hundreds of hours to pull together. That's one mere example of good reporting -- and doesn't take into account the hundreds of thousands put in by good journalists all over the country safeguarding our democracy. Who will pay for this? Syndicated columnis Aaron Harber presents some very timely and well-thought out suggestions on the future of news gathering.

Let's face it, the commercialization of the media has not been a panacea. Not much is open nor free when media owners squash or skew stories because it may offend an advertiser. (You are naive if you think this doesn't happen.) Still, most of think of news coverage as a de facto right -- and expect to have people committing hours of their life tracking down the truth for us. But are we willing to pay for high quality reporting?

What is the value in the news gathering efforts -- listening for leads, reaching out to victims, researching backgrounds, interviewing countless sources -- many of whom can't keep facts straight, delving into databases -- to then sit down and right a 5000-word piece? (And that is 5000 words that follow rules of grammar -- no smilies and no abbrev.) How do we subsidize what might have been months of work for our behalf?

In watching this Iranians struggle to find the truth we can see first hand the value of news. But of course there is an intense distrust of our own media -- which may have been made worse by Vanity Fair's Matt Pressman's navel-gazing attempt to get at the "truth." The deal is there is a very good chance that our gravy train will end; that there might cease to be major corporations willing to pay staffs of people on average upwards of $50,000 a year to report on abuses and scandals. And when that happens, we may find ourselves helping to support passionate activists like Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, an Iranian emigree, who is fully dedicated to getting out news about her native country -- and who lives on the PayPal donations of others -- in the home of her parents.

"Content" is in the Eye of the Beholder

Interesting column by Burst Media's CEO and President Jarvis Coffin on the impact of ads when placed with relevant content. Burst Media is an online ad network that serves the "Long Tail-type" publishers -- the smaller, niched sites that tend to attract more passionate followers. Full disclosure, my site, Pure Contemporary has been part of the Burst network for several years. Coffin was citing a recent Conde Nast study (reported in MediaPost) that highlighted that people remember ads better if they are in viewed in conjunction with contextually-related content. And thus, Coffin states, content is king.

The study also revealed that people seemingly tend to tire of ads more quickly online than in print -- that is if they even notice them at all. (Which is a particularly nice piece of by-the-way-information to know if you have print space that you are trying to peddle!) In fact, the numbers were really not friendly to online: According to data released earlier in the year by Condé Nast and McPheters & Co., 63 percent -- of banner ads were not seen by Web users: Respondents' eyes "passed over" 37 percent of the Internet ads and "stopped" on slightly less than a third, McPheters found. The recall rate was much higher for print and tv.

Since most studies can be looked at from different angles, Coffin had an interesting theory, which I buy. He surmised that perhaps the online world is a victim of its own success: the fact that we so highly target ads that those same dang ads seem to follow us from site to site because those ads have been so tied to us as individuals and our behaviors!

I had two other thoughts as well. 1) Aside from Apple's page-dominating advertising banners, online ads are beyond ho-hum. Back in the day, ad agencies made their money creating creative -- the :30 spot and the full-color ads got the ka-chings going. Very little of those creative juices seem to be spent online. And, 2) content is king!!! But i don't take such a narrow view on what content is.




Since there is plenty of research that supports contextually relevant content increases recall, why are marketers limited to only a banner ad to market their wares? For years, the conventional wisdom has been that only media companies can produce content -- since they are the producers of news. And everyone know that news is content. But, news is not the only form of content. And this is where I drag out my soapbox and remind everyone that: If you have a website that attracts more than your mom, spouse and kids, then guess what? You are a content producer.

Not convinced? Well how about this. If a person is looking for work, the jobs listings are content. If they are looking to go out, restaurant directories -- and proximity to the reader, are now content. Looking for a flat screen tv that will fit not stick out more than 3" -- than guess what, BestBuy or Amazon are now content. All of these examples are types of content that would be traditionally categorized as ads.

Media sites and marketers need to put their chocolate and peanut butter together and make some yummy new content than can be contextually relevant to the media site's news -- and now give readers some recall that has a punch! On Pure Contemporary we offer product catalog pages -- controlled by our marketers -- that are contextually tied to real legit stories. Both the "legit stories" and the catalog pages are both considered content to our readers!!

Content may be king, in fact context may be even more kingly -- but contextually relevant content is, to some degree, in the eye of the beholder.

The 4-1-1 on Twitter as a 9-1-1 Interface

Is Twitter the new 911? My twittering debut was in December 2007 after reading a post by a Poynter Institute columnist suggested that twittering was a great tool for journalists. My opening salvo was neither memorable nor liberating, and my tweets were fleeting. I was merely going through the motions to research this new communication device akin to an ethnographer wishing to fit in with her subjects. How this would assist me in finding leads was lost to me, I certainly didn't have time to just watch responses. Further, I found it weird that total strangers wanted to follow me -- and wondered if I should be prepared to take out a restraining order.

But my attitude changed in April 2008 when an American student was detained in Egypt. With 132 characters to spare, he typed ARRESTED, and his cadre of followers sprung into action, creating a global response team that extended from the United States Embassy to the University of California Berkeley to spring the 29-year old -- who had only sent his first Twitter message a week before.

Twitter, as everyone under 35 knows, is a community-based tool that allows people to broadcast messages to their followers – 140 characters at a time. The short bursts are perfect to stay up to speed via cell phone text messages, and are the darling of teens looking to find their peeps in shopping malls.

Or so I thought. The Egypt episode was an ah-ha moment that spurred a real interest in Twittering. The power of narrowcasting was more evident. My real conversion came in May of this year when Kwanza Hall, an Atlanta councilman, saw a woman in distress and tweeted:

Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet

Since he is running for mayor his followers are many and they in turn called 9-1-1. He stated he tweeted versus calling the emergency response system, because his cell battery was low and was afraid of losing the call while on hold. Apparently, weeks earlier, a home in Atlanta had caught fire and managed to burn to the ground while witnesses listened to Musak. Unless the fire chief is Twittering, not sure how to get around this

In the state that bans gay marriage, San Francisco Mayor Gaven Newsome married Twitter with its 3-1-1 system. Three-one-one is the communciation system put in place to take the burden off the emergency system -- but still allowed the community to report things like car-eating potholes. The San Francisco call center will use CoTweet to manage and track tweets to its SF311.

At Gilbane I spoke with social media guru Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester, who is a strong believer in Twitter as an emergency response interface. "The challenge with Twitter is the network," he told me. "It isn't reliable. However, it can be a great tool to interface with a city's disaster planning and response."

The nightmares of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina exposed the frailties of communications networks and the disastrous consequences that occur in their absence. Twitter might only be in its infancy, but it has proven that any one of us is a mere 6-degrees of tweets away from help in life-or-death situations.

Semantic Metadata & Sagacious Serendipty

I sat in numerous conferences at the Gilbane conference in San Francisco last week listening to and, preparing to speak on, search. Personally I want to see this word retired, as it conjures up phrases like “…in vain,” “desperately seeking,” and images of poor Diogenes schlepping around Athens with his lamp and cynicism. Or, closer to home, the time I had to find 40 pairs of white tube socks, seamless, for a snowman project for my son’s class (during a snowstorm no less). Since that “in vain,” “desperately seeking” experience, I only volunteer to bake brownies.

But I digress. Now don’t get me wrong; I am not one of those protectionists that is against sharing content. Personally I think sharing is a good thing. What I am against is the word search itself. Because which of us wants to search anyway? I’d rather be finding things, like the $100 bill on the sidewalk outside the OTB located around the corner from my apartment. Or the brand new earring I had lost – and found – outside my car door. Find is about that Eureka! moment; that culmination of both relief and joy that comes with discovery. While search to me is futile and thankless toiling.

Public site search for the most part makes me crazy. Like the time I went to a city’s business site to look for someone – and for whatever reason was inexplicably given people with the same name located from other cities and states. Upon further digging, I “found” the person I was looking for on the site. The search tool just didn’t filter the results by the geographic location I was actually in. It just pulled people with the same name and vomited it out results. Well really, how interested are you going to be in something that was just vomited at you?

Physical-world architects have long known that site satisfaction and return visits are highly correlated. That people explore their environments encumbered by whatever stresses in their lives: are they late for a meeting? in dire need of a restroom? Do they have specific destinations in mind – or are they out for a stroll and will respond to whatever catches their fancy? The physical world uses many different types of sensory cues to guide people.

The digital world is more limited when it comes to sensory cues -- but there is a way to create a framework to allow people greater site satisfaction and discovery. The key is Metadata. As my friend Ali Rahman says, “metadata provide a big picture and a detailed view of your information. Now we are not talking about generic, run of the mill metadata. The type that says the type of file, the date created, modified, type of format and so on.A ccording to Kent State's College of Library & Information Science, that type is called Administrative Metadata.

No, the type of metadata I am talking about is more Xtreme, if you will. The academics at Kent State call it descriptive metadata, while the folks at Nstein prefer to call it semantic metadata (semdata??). It is metadata that is generated using a multi-faceted approach of computational and linguistic analysis. It not only extracts meaning from documents – but also embeds the synonyms, summary, categories, even the tone, in order to create a linguistic fingerprint. This linguistic fingerprint can then be matched against any other linguistic fingerprint – to find like pieces of content.

Having this metadata means you can create interesting ways to guide people through the site. Go back to the shopping mall metaphor: The mall maps group stores by category – such as women’s shoes -- look at the map, check where you are -- and voila! you are on your way. In the digital world, commerce sites do a super job faceting information so that a person can be guided right to the shoe they want to buy, allowing people to search by Color, Brand, Size, even Heel Height!

But commerce sites are easy – as that data is fairly structured since information is normalized and sitting in fields with headers that say “heel height.” Prose and rich media are considered unstructured, using synonyms and inferences, and as such, are much harder to correlate. Semantically analyzing and enriching content allows sites to marry content – even if those words are not explicitly used! This allows content to be packaged together so people can find what they are looking for without breaking a sweat.

Serendipity is often referred to as an accidental discovery -- but in science, serendipity is linked with sagacity which presupposes a framework that facilitates discovery. The use of semantic metadata provides a matrix of "triggers" from which people are now able to have more meaningful explorations -- leading to those highly coveted finds.

Take it from Diogenes: search just doesn’t guarantee that you will locate what you are looking for.

Reader, Visitors, Users ... Oh My!

What to call your followers? Software had users, newspaper readers, television viewers, radio listeners, then came convergence and the 'Net and we couldn't figure out what the entity that traipsed from site to site should be called. "Readers," affirmed newspapers, "Visitors" chimed broadcasters -- a term more universally adopted with the advent of Online Ads and the Unique Visitor metric. And CMS vendors, which sold software to its customers -- some of which required clients, so they could reach their users.

So it is stunning and shocking to have The New York Times, suddenly shift gears and rename its followers to the more cyberian "user." According to Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at The Times, speaking at a Ad Age's Creativity and Technology Conference, readers evoke passivity. The new consumer of the Times, with its open interface is invited to be more active, developing applications, and "using" the site.

I have an issue with Users as they sound like Takers -- and with content free, that may be apropos. On the other hand, folks that are Using, often end up paying for their addictions, so perhaps, in the end, the name change is good.