Sunday, November 17, 2002

What Kind of Content is Worth Buying?. If we are ever going to find ways for content providers on the Internet to make money, we're going to have to figure out what it is about information that people will pay for. I'm not sure there's much there, but we owe it to ourselves to try to dope this out. Content consists essentially of news, opinion/commentary on the news, in-depth information of a practical (how-to) nature, focused research, and entertainment. None of these categories is entirely self-describing nor are they mutuallly exclusive. There are, for example, databases of focused research designed to entertain (a la Internet Movie Database. News is too freely available to entice many people to pay for it. Opinion is a trust issue: sources of viewpoints who are deemed trustworthy might be able to get someone to pay for it, but probably only devout followers. In-depth how-to stuff might draw a payment, but it's a one-time thing and probably narrowly focused and therefore of limited total market potential. Focused research has some winning players (Meta, Giga, and others) but their Internet revenue tends to be a tiny fraction of their off-line revenue. And entertainment is highly competitive; breaking in new is hard. As I contemplate this, I'm reminded of a bold venture I thought would take off like gangbusters a few years ago. A daily sports newspaper was launched with much fanfare. I was an immediate devotee. But you had to go to the newsstand every day to buy it. No home delivery. It didn't last long. Then I remembered a New York Times piece I read several years ago. The basic message was simple: Americans will not pay for information or education but they will seriously overpay for convenience. How else explain bottled water, bottled tea, individually wrapped portions of peanut butter (I'm not making that one up)? So what we need to do is to figure out how to make Internet-based content so easily accessible that consumers will pay us for the convenience of the packaging. I have no clue what that is, but it seems to me to be the right direction. Anyone know of any successes in this area? 10:38:36 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Saturday, November 16, 2002

Aggregator cum Editor...Good Idea. I like the new tack Brent Simmons is taking with NetNewsWire Lite. A seamless news browsing, commentary, blog publishing kind of tool would be way cool. (Actually, Radio already has that set of features; I'm talking about a tool that is independent of the blog technology or server.) Weblog Editing and NetNewsWire I’ve got the basics of weblog editing in NetNewsWire pro working—I’ve been using a Manila site initially, since Manila supports both the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs. [inessential.com] 12:26:51 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

How Blogs Change Site Traffic Patterns. This is an important piece for everyone interested in, involved with or affected by Web site construction and publishing, including all bloggers. Matt Haughey gives in. Matt Haughey: “I don’t keep track of post titles, I don’t think the syndication file is all that useful without HTML, and I’ve never personally found much use for a RSS reader. That all changed when a friend said she wasn’t reading my site anymore, or any sites for that matter that didn’t carry RSS feeds.” Brent’s Law of Weblogs: If you’re not syndicating, you’re not publishing. This law is descriptive, not prescriptive. RSS, or something like it, was inevitable. I used to read a couple dozen sites regularly—now I read about a hundred sites. Far more than I could ever follow in my browser. And I do actually visit the sites I subscribe to: when there’s something interesting in their feed, and it links back to the site, I go to the site. Traffic patterns are changing, definitely. But RSS is a chance for webloggers to reach an even wider audience. It doesn’t mean that the HTML version of one’s site is now irrelevant—in fact, because of RSS and newsreaders I now visit lots of sites I never used to visit. [inessential.com] 8:08:55 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Scott Rosenberg Says This is Good Stuff. Believe It. Blog worthy Steven Johnson's books -- "Interface Culture" and "Emergence" -- represent some of the most thoughtful and idea-laden writing on technoculture you'll find anywhere. Johnson, who was co-editor of the late lamented Feed as well, is now blogging away at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 8:03:16 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

I'm Trying Another New Blogging Tool. I've become so enchanted with blogging that I have been spending way too much time blogging and exploring the space. My old buddy Tim Lundeen of Web Crossing fame and my son-in-law Jeff Soule, who works for Tim, have been nudging me lately to check out WebX 5.0, a product that is still in pre-release. It incorporates blogging into a full-blown discussion board system, one that I've admired for many years. In addition to being a community server, WebX has always been a full-blown development platform. The new Version 5 is a major leap forward for the product I chose for discussion boards at Salon.com and later at CNET's Builder.com. It is eminently more customizable, supports a full-blown object model on the server side, is scriptable in JavaScript and now supports a plug-in architecture that will spawn new models for making money in community. But IT BLOGS!. And does so very nicely, including creation of RSS feed, categories, mutliple blog editors and two features I've really wanted in blogging: email signup by readers and email notification of the blog owner when comments get posted. I'm transitioning a couple of my categories over to WebX5 so I can do a legit comparison of the blogging experience between Radio and WebX. Here's the temporary home of my WebX Blog. I'll be interested in your comments. (If you go there and you really want to try this new tool before it's released, shoot me an email. I can only set up blogs for a small handful of folks on this test server, but I'd love to share the experience and get more feedback.) 10:56:44 AM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Enter Key Deletes in Radio News Aggregator. Argh!. I just found out the hard way that the news aggregator page of my Radio Web log site responds to the Enter key (which I struck accidentall while reaching for a pretzel) by deleting all checked items on the page. Bad move. I think this is browser behavior because there's a form with no text entry field, so the Enter key is doing what it's expected to do. But it just cost me about five items I had planned to write blog entries about. Gotta find a way around that one. 6:10:34 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Sunday, November 10, 2002

This program didn't work for me iBlog is a standalone blogging tool for Mac OS X. It's not a Blogger API or MetaWeblog API app. It does its own content management. It also appears to have a news aggregator built in. It's a free beta right now. It would be interesting to see a weblog created with this software. [Scripting News] I downloaded it. I tried it. After some initial problems (mine), I got it to post one blog entry. No subsequent entry would work. If anyone reading this has an idea why, I'm open to suggestions. I like the app a lot. I wish there were one like it for Radio. 9:43:08 AM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Thursday, November 7, 2002

Cool: Vectoring Blogs Based on Books. Jon Udell pointed me to this All-Consuming site where you can vector in on peoples' sites via the books they mention. 7:08:08 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

MacAddict Teaches Blogging. The November issue of MacAddict has an article on using PHP, MySQL, and someting called pMachineFree to create a blog and serve it up using Apache on OS X. I may give this a try. I learned PHP a couple of years ago and thought it was pretty cool for what it did and I'm comfortable with MySQL. Always looking at new techniques and technologies for blogging. Anyone else know about this combo or have others to suggest? 12:56:36 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Sunday, November 3, 2002

Desktop Publishing for the Connected. John Robb of UserLand has some cogent comments about computers and their historic path to helping us be more effective. He focuses near the end of his piece on Radio and similar tools that facilitate Web publishing for the masses. I like what he has to say, particularly his closing paragraph: In my view, the market opportunity for desktop publishing tools that are the equivalent of Office for the connected world is HUGE.  Every ad-hoc Web site that can be built to solve business and personal needs can likely be done better using these new tools.  However, it is being held back (not stopped, but stymied) by a monopoly vendor that has opted not to improve the browser -- arguably the most popular interface/application of all time and the best enabler of this technology.  We will get there, it will just take longer. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Maybe the way to beat Microsoft is to get people to stop using just Internet Explorer. That's the invisible lynchpin in the Microsoft Strategy for World Domination. And in that arena there are tons of better products for every platform. How about a badge icon for sites that says "Any Browser But Microsoft's" or "Best Viewed With a Browser Not Owned by a Criminal Monopoly" or something? 5:14:39 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.