Can newspaper classifieds be saved?

Steve Outing asked me what the future holds for newspaper classifieds. He's behind the site ReinventingClassifieds.com, an initiative aimed at bringing experts together to revive newspaper classifieds by finding a new business model that's relevant in the Internet age. Here's the Seesmic video (my first) I made to offer some ideas.

May 12 at 07:47 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

'Future of News' at Princeton University

I'll be flying to Princeton University early tomorrow for a two-day workshop on the Future of News, put on by the Center for Information Technology Policy. The workshop will be broadcast live and can be accessed at  www.princeton.edu/webmedia on Wednesday and Thursday.

Panels are The People Formerly Known as the Audience; Economics of News; Data Mining, Interactivity and Visualization and The Medium’s New Message.

I'm on the final panel along with Markus Prior, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, and author/historian  Ed Tenner. Dan Gillmor and Eric Alterman will also be participating.

It's a busy week for conferences; here are some of the ones I'll be missing:

• Video on the Net, May 12-13 in New York.

• E&P Interactive Media Conference, May 13-15 in Las Vegas.

• The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School's 10th Anniversary Conference, May 15-16 in Cambridge, Mass.

May 12 at 02:46 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Use of social media in direct marketing

Here's an interesting chart on how often marketers use social media in their direct marketing. MarketingVox has details on a report from the Direct Marketing Association on Web 2.0 — blogs, virtual words, social networks, user-generated content, RSS feeds and wikis.

May 12 at 12:57 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Credibility on the Web

Mike Caulfield offers a deconstruction of a Washington Post columnist's attack on amateurs participating in the mediasphere.

May 12 at 01:00 AM in Citizen media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Motherhood can be mother of blogging

San Francisco Chronicle: Motherhood can be mother of blogging. Excerpt:

A decade ago, blogging and social networking largely were a means for teenagers to keep in touch with friends. Now, tech-savvy moms and dads use Web 2.0 and mobile tools to instantly share news about their wee ones, connect to other families and prepare for their role as parents.

Social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become a resource for parents to check out baby names and, later, to research potential caregivers and babysitters. ...

May 12 at 12:49 AM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Craig looks beyond the Web

NY Times:  Craig (of the List) Looks Beyond the Web. (NY Times photo) Excerpt:

There is a real Craig in Craigslist, and lately he is looking at life beyond his little list that happens to be the seventh-most-popular Web site in the United States.

It is also a site that is deeply tied up with the fate of newspapers — indeed, many in the newspaper industry blame the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, for the downturn in their classified-advertising business.

An ardently no-frills, ad-free, user-sensitive site, Craigslist has, by the estimate of its chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, generated more than 600 million free classified listings. (Though nearly all listings remain free, Craigslist has added modest fees for job listings and real estate brokers in certain big cities, and from those fees the company generates $80 million to $100 million in annual revenue. It has a staff of 25, including Mr. Newmark.) ...

In the face of this expansion, Mr. Newmark is becoming more of a public figure, capitalizing on his success to promote causes that include supporting the Barack Obama campaign and financing investigative journalism — not, he insists, to compensate for any damage Craigslist has done to the newspaper business, which he calls “an urban myth.”

Actually, citizen journalism is entirely Web-centric, and Craig's user-centric community-minded approach should be emulated by every site on the Web.

May 11 at 09:47 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

What is prime time today?

NY Times: In the age of TiVo and Web video, what is prime time? Excerpt:

In the age of TiVo and Web video, what is prime time?

That’s the number who were watching prime time television last May, a month affectionately known as “sweeps,” but have disappeared this year, according to the overnight Nielsen ratings. Each of the major broadcast networks, save for Fox, has seen its audience decline this season. ...

The more significant shift can’t be blamed on the [writers'] strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video on the Internet, and cable video on demand offerings. So while overall usage of television is steady, the linear broadcasts favored by advertisers are in decline.

The mystery, then, is what the networks should do now. ...

May 11 at 09:29 PM in Television, Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Our media have been so wrong for so long

Jamie Lyn Stahl at AlterNet: Our Media Have Been So Wrong for So Long. In his new book, E&P editor Greg Mitchell offers a stinging indictment of the media's complicity with Washington's war-marketing machine.

May 11 at 07:35 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Social media press releases

Brian Solis's guest-column at TechCrunch on social media press releases and the evolution of the dreaded press release.

May 11 at 12:20 PM in Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Moving to a Mac full-time

I used to be a Mac person back in the early to mid-'90s, starting with the old Mac Plus. That changed in 1996 when I joined Microsoft (for 20 months of full body immersion), where Macs were seen as somewhat alien and software programs were not yet compatible across platforms.

I've bought a G4 desktop and Powerbook and MacBook Pro laptops since then, but I've remained cross-platform, buying a Dell Dimension and Sony Vaio desktop for my day-to-day work since 2000.

Today, however, I've gone back to an all-Macintosh home business. The government's economic stimulus rebate check arrived today, and by this afternoon it was in the coffers of Steve Jobs -- I ponied up for a Mac Pro desktop.

Haven't set it up yet, but it looks pretty sweet: Two quad-core processors (8-core) of 2.8GHz along with a 325GB HD and a separate internal 500GB Western Digital Green Power hard drive. I do a lot of video, and I like the Mac Pro's expandable upgrade path. (There's an alarm system on the house, so don't try anything, buster.)

So long, PC-land

One reason for the switch: I'm sick to death of not being in control of my personal computer experience. I've been plagued by PC registry problems lately, and can't find my Windows XP install disk so I can do a clean reinstall (and I just won't buy it again, thank you). Every time I boot up my PC I get:

• A "Windows Explorer has encountered a problem" dialog box

• A Dr. Watson Postmortem dialog box problem.

• An NEC Display solutions Spectra View II popup that won't go away

• A Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error! dialog box

• A Uniblue Registry Booster offering to fix the 60 or so problems with my Registry (somehow, despite the fixes, it never gets fixed)

I'll miss a few things about the PC (mostly the cool little programs that are written just for the PC), but not much. So, I'm now an official Machead 24/7. Some day I'll pony up for a Windows XP disk so I can run Windows programs on Leopard OS 10.5. But not for a while. I want to see what an all-Mac experience is like.

May 11 at 12:02 AM in Computing | Permalink | Comments (3) | |

Facebook may lift its 5,000 friends limit

San Jose Mercury News: Facebook may lift its 5,000 friends limit. Excerpt:

Tech bloggers Mark Cuban, Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis are among the tiny portion of Facebook users who say they've hit the 5,000-pals wall and aren't happy about it. But lifting the limit would put Facebook at risk of becoming more like rival MySpace, said Adam Ostrow, editor of Mashable, a news blog that tracks the social networking field. Many entertainers and celebrities use MySpace as a promotion vehicle to connect with masses of fans. ...

May 11 at 12:01 AM in Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Nancy Pelosi's Flickr photostream

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has a Flickr photostream (dating back to last August. Cool. She hasn't learned about Creative Commons yet, though.

May 9 at 11:22 PM in Photography, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

NPR considers convergence for next generation of radio

At PBS MediaShift, Mark Glaser takes a look at two training programs at NPR — Next Generation Radio and the Intern Edition — and how they are including more web and interactive elements.

May 7 at 04:40 PM in Radio/audio | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Unconference on digital media

KQED is sponsoring the Un-Conference on Digital Media, Education and 21st Century Skills with Lightning Talks.

When: Saturday, May 17, 10 am to 3 pm

Where: KQED, 2601 Mariposa, San Francisco                

Why: Share something you know or have done, and learn something you didn’t or haven’t.

What it is: An unconference, where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants. Come and discuss what you know, or would like to know about new media, education, and 21st century skills.

Details: Lightning talks, short presentations given at a conference (or un-conference) by attendees. Lightning talks last only 7 minutes, allowing several to be delivered in a single period by different speakers. We encourage you to present your work, and come on up to the podium! Send requests to lrule at kqed.org

Agenda: Morning: Welcome and Opening Statement; Introduction and Interests; Lightning talks

Lunch provided. Afternoon hands-on sessions: Google Earth training (bring a digital picture of a place you love); Mobile Devices, storytelling, and place-based learning (you’ll walk the neighborhood) or suggest your own topic and lead a tutorial or discussion. Call with questions: 415-553-2192              

Also: Friday evening (May 16, 6:30-8:30 at KQED) as we celebrate our local high school digital storytellers who participated in the KQED’s 6th Annual Digital Storytelling Contest. Stories will be screened and fabulous prizes awarded.

May 7 at 12:52 AM in Digital life, Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

NY Times on Flickr

 

While I was traveling I missed this New York Times Magazine piece about the photo sharing site Flickr and some of its most popular shooters, such as Rebekka Guoleifsdottir.

May 7 at 12:43 AM in Photography, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

10th anniversary of 'Cluetrain Manifesto'

Ten years ago, four authors came together to start a new conversation about marketing. The result was a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto and with it, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger nailed 95 theses on the door of the Internet and challenged us all to wake up to a transformation underway in how companies and people engage in markets.

The Society for New Communications Research is co-hosting a full day of networking, group discussions, workshops and presentations featuring:

• Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute
• Peter Hirshberg, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Technorati 
• Giovanni Rodriguez, Partner at The Conversation Group 
• Thor Muller, founder of Get Satisfaction
• Jeremiah Owyang, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
• Deborah Schultz, independent social media expert

When: May 29, 8:30 am - 8 pm

Where: Offices of SAP
3410 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto, CA

Space is limited; price is $145 through May 10. Register online at: http://conversation.eventbrite.com/

May 6 at 11:18 PM in Books, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

You Suck at Photoshop

Josh Quittner in the May 10 issue of Time magazine writes about the clever video series You Suck at Photoshop. See the others in the series on MyDamnChannel.

May 6 at 11:00 PM in Photography | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Historic night for Obama, Dems

The headlines say it all:

May 6 at 09:42 PM in Current Affairs, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Speaking at Digital Hollywood today

I'm flying down to SoCal today for Digital Hollywood, where entertainment meets technology.

I'll be speaking at 3:45 pm on this panel at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel:

Personalized Media Platforms: Widgets, User Generated Media, News, Music & Blogs
Jim Brady, Executive Editor of washingtonpost.com
JD Lasica, Co-founder, Ourmedia
Derrick Oien, President, Intercasting
Jessica Stoner, V.P. Business Development, Pandora
Michael Jones, CEO, Userplane and VP, AOL
Leonard Brody, co-founder and CEO, NowPublic.com
Ted Cohen, Managing Partner, TAG Strategic, Moderator

I know Leonard, Michael, Derrick, Jim and Ted, so this should be fun.

Update: Actually, it was a lot of fun -- very lively and engaging, as "Ted" panels tend to be. If you're interested in some of the tidbits and takeaways from the panel, I just posted them on my Twitter feed. Not sure if the panel discussion was recorded or not.

May 5 at 12:01 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

Maker Faire photos

Here are 33 photos taken at the Maker Faire — a celebration of geeky, whimsical craftsmanship — at the San Mateo Fairgrounds today.

Scott Beale has many more here.

May 4 at 11:41 PM in Amusing, Current Affairs, Photography, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Where Twitter is heading

Dan Farber at CNET News.com on where Twitter is heading. (You do know what Twitter is, right?)

May 4 at 12:10 AM in Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Mobile: Loopt lets you know your friends' locations

Steven Levy in this week's Newsweek: Hey, I Know Where U R. Loopt lets you use a cell phone to share locations. Excerpt:

What kinds of things happen when you share locations with 40 or 50 people?

It's amazing how often you're near someone and don't know about it—not in the same restaurant, but three restaurants down. It's such a common occurrence that some nights. rather than just go home at 11, I'll drive somewhere because I know I'll find people I can meet up with.

Maybe your significant other would wonder why you're hiding.

For that very reason, there's a feature in Loopt where you can set your location to appear to the world that you're somewhere different than you actually are. If you want it to appear that you're at the library while you are really somewhere else, you could do that.

You could lie?

For your privacy. This feature came out of a conversation with the National Network to End Domestic Violence. They were saying if a battered wife turned off the feature, the abusive husband would think something's wrong, so people need the ability to look like they're somewhere that they are not.

May 2 at 10:40 PM in Mobile | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

the txting generation

Boston Globe editorial: the revenge of e.e. cummings.

Item: A new study warns that writing text messages could hurt a writer's command of standardized English.

We had to LOL when we read how txt-msg lingo is replacing stndrd english in student academic pprs. 1 casualty of da trend is uz of capital letter to start a sentence. kids feel free to lowercase everything. pnktu8n is also dissed. tchaz try to help but its often 2 l8.

new paragraphs r not uzed in txting either. kids prolly think all dis iz ok cuz even Richard Sterling, emeritus xecutiv director of the ntl riting prjct, gives it the nod. natl riting prjct is sposd 2 improve riting instruxn in americas schoolz.

"i think in the future, capitalization will disappear," he sed in the nytimes. 4 lazy students dis is 2G2BT!

a big natl study by the College Board and Pew Project on the Internet and American Life finds teenagers riting more b/c of txting but in a hybrid language with conventions of its own: call it Textlish. they don't consider it frml english but 64 percent admit it seeps into their writing at school. ...

May 2 at 10:31 PM in Amusing, Digital life, Youth culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Israel's Web 2.0 scene

Social marketing expert Ayelet Noff talks about the social media and Web 2.0 scene in Israel during this 9-minute video interview I conducted with her during our blogger posse road trip to Israel. A former New Yorker, Ayelet is a rising star in Web 2.0 circles in Tel Aviv and helped us with all phases of our trip. (Apologies for the lighting — this was the first interview I did on my Samsung hi-def camcorder.)

Watch video in H.264 MPEG-4 on Ourmedia
Watch in Flash on Ourmedia
Watch video in Flash on Veoh (with ads)

May 2 at 01:43 PM in Israel, Podcasts & interviews, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Bush-McCain Challenge

Take the Bush-McCain Challenge. Can you tell the difference between President Bush and Sen. John McCain? Take this 5-question quiz and find out.

May 2 at 01:12 PM in Amusing, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

13 ways of talking to a programmer

Lisa Williams at IdeaLab blog: Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Programmer, including specs, wireframes, mashups and code freezes.

May 2 at 10:39 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Causes on Facebook

Socialactions.com: Brotherly Love on Facebook.

Contribute Magazine has posted an interview with the co-founders of Facebook Causes, Sean Parker & Joe Green. The duo has founded a company called Project Agape, which seeks to spread the practice of micro-philanthropy through social networks. According to their website, the word Agape is ancient greek for "brotherly love, or a selfless regard for other human beings".

Facebook Causes is the first and only project of Project Agape. The application allows any Facebook user to raise money for a nonprofit or U.S. politician by posting a fundraising widget on their Facebook profile and inviting friends to join the cause.

May 2 at 12:14 AM in Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Wireless AirCard: Internet (almost) everywhere

In December I bought a Sierra Wireless AirCard 875U. It's time to tell you how the experiment is going.

What it is: The AirCard is a wireless 3G modem that you can insert into your Mac or PC laptop's USB port to gain connectivity to the broadband Internet.

Why I did it: I'd put up with Internet downtime from Comcast, my service provider, for years. Comcast is a monopoly, and acts like it. There's no DSL service in my East Bay community, and I know of no satellite service that provides true broadband speeds. So whenever the cable broadband connection went down, I was stuck for days without an Internet connection. I was also tired of going to too many coffee shops and airports only to find wifi at skyjacker rates with Tmobile. So I finally ponied up and bought the AirCard (a) as insurance when my service went down, and (b) as a handy way to jack into the Net at conferences and on the road.

Interesting angle: Last month, during our blogger posse's trip to Israel, Israel's leading wireless provider outfitted all of our Macs and PCs with ... Sierra Wireless AirCards. We were up and running in minutes, and they worked like a charm, though a bit slow on Mac X 10.4.11 (Tiger) rather than superfast 10.5 (Leopard). We blogged merrily on the bus all up and down Israel from Haifa to Jerusalem.

Lesson learned: I knew I wouldn't be using it much, so when I signed up for the accompanying AT&T Premier service, I chose a plan that assumed a ridiculously low megabyte usage per month for a price of something like $30/month plus overage charges. After using the AirCard exactly twice in the first month, -- just to check Gmail -- my first bill came to over $150!

I quickly switched to an unlimited plan of $51/month. It's pricey, for sure, but I've been using it more and more. Today, for example, while other NewsTools2008 attendees moaned about the poor wifi at Yahoo!, I bypassed the hotspot and used my AirCard. Dan Gillmor also uses a 3G USB modem, and more than a few conference-goers took notice.

Drawbacks: After traveling with the AirCard to New York, San Francisco, LA and Carmel, I've yet to find a city where AT&T's 3G network doesn't reach. (Granted, I haven't used it in the hinterlands.) So the only drawback from my perspective has been the price: $149 to $335 for the device plus $610 a year for the service plan. Still, for me, it's worth the convenience and peace of mind.

If you use a different detachable 3G modem and like it, feel free to post your findings below.   

May 1 at 11:15 PM in Gadgets | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

ReelChanges: viewer-funded documentaries

Big banner on the wall: "How can the intersection of journalism & technology serve democracy?" That's the overarching theme of NewsTools 2008, where 200 or so folks are gathered today (and tomorrow) at Yahoo! as well as Saturday at a Sunnyvale hotel for Innovations in Journalism Expo 2008. I'll post a few highlights from today:

ReelChanges

The most impressive new venture I've come across today is ReelChanges.org: viewer-funded documentaries, which launched shortly after midnight last night.

I knew of founder Hal Plotkin from his days as a tech reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now he and his small team have been "working in a cave" for the past year to open the nonprofit Center for Media Change, which just launched the nonprofit ReelChanges.org and an upcoming site, ReelChanges.com.

ReelChanges is all about audience-funded media, particularly documentaries and investigative journalism. Films already on the site include Life on the Inside, a moving behind-bars look at a wrongful conviction and life inside the nation's largest women's prison. "Our goal is to democratize the media," said Plotkin, who contrasted ReelChanges' model with the agenda of the corporate media. The site's guidelines for filmmakers are here.

Plotkin said some of the site's functionality, such as its "transactional module" for donations, is still at least 10 days away. Plotkin and team have grand ambitions for ReelChanges, with an eye on becoming a major player in the transaction journalism space, suggesting a prospective "transformation of journalism." He cited one early user's willingness to pay for a video roundup of a scrapbook convention and he could see the day when people want to pony up for coverage of an event important to their niche interests. (Think of parallels to Eventful.com, which uses the power of the crowd to entice music acts or speakers to make an appearance. Here it would be stories you'd like to see covered, a la Christopher Allbritton's audience-funded trip to Iraq or Josh Marshall's coverage of the 2004 presidential race.)

I'll be watching ReelChanges' progress and pulling for it to succeed.

Other sites worth a look

Other urls that have come up today:

• Redwoodage.com, (Think. Share. Act. Live.), what used to be called a lifestyle portal -- a site that appeals to the over-40 crowd.

• MediaRights.org, a site that "maximizes the impact of social-issue documentaries and shorts. By engaging with the MediaRights community, filmmakers reach audiences, educators and librarians bring films into their classroom, and nonprofits and activists integrate media into their campaigns."

Good news

Best bit of news I heard today was that Geneva Overholser will become the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication this fall. Congrats, Geneva!

Other folks I spotted or chatted with today: Larry Pryor, Amy Gahran, Leonard Witt, Charlotte-Anne Lucas, Jon Garfunkel, Robert Niles, Mary Hodder, Dan Gillmor, Barry Parr and many others.

May 1 at 09:19 PM in Film, Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

9 tips to improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Catching up with Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog:

9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Top tips:

1. Get inbound links and link out as well.

 Terry Heaton, senior vice president of AR&D, notes that internally linking is also important, and is something the top newspaper sites do well. “The main reason Wikipedia links always appear near the top in Google is because their Google Juice is rich with links from and to themselves,” Heaton said. “The ‘weight’ of a link is measured, in part, by the source. Wikipedia gets a ton of traffic, so a link from them is ‘worth’ far more than a link from, say, any TV station in the country. Hence, Google ‘sees’ the links and values them accordingly, which raises Wikipedia’s search results…Internal linking, therefore, always reaps SEO rewards. ...

2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front. ...

3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.

4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. ...

5. Highlight your best content on every page. ...

6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.

7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.

8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.

9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.

More from Mark:

State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting. Live-blogging a panel in Berkeley, Calif., on the future of investigative reporting.

Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who’ll See the Future?

April 30 at 10:15 PM in Media, New media, Search engines | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

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