Everybody is managing editor

John Byrne has a post about how those of us who read news online do not have a favorite news organization. That is certainly true of your humble servant. I have favorite reporters. I even have favorite sections of certain news publications. But I don't have a favorite publication.

I have an RSS reader with feeds from all my favorite reporters, bloggers, etc. I suspect others are the same way.

Every time I go anywhere, I always ask people what their favorite source of technology news is. I am struck by how often they tell me that they simply have a handful of Google News Alerts on the topics that interest them the most and read whatever comes up that day. Press releases are considered very reliable, readers are interested in what companies say about themselves.

Readers have been empowered by the Internet and news organizations have yet to come up with the right business model to profit in the new environment. Those of us in public relations must hope they find a profitable model soon.

The method in Murdoch's madness

I wrote off Murdoch's latest threats to remove News Corp feeds from Google News as so much blather until I read Boing Boing:

So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is "We have Rupert Murdoch's pages!" will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal.

The problem with the deal to give Google the exclusive right to index MySpace is that it cheats the users whose postings create the value of MySpace. If I am a musician who is obliged to give my music away for free on MySpace to presuade fans to come to my concerts, I want the widest exposure possible. As Google is by far the largest search engine, I might overlook this limitation, or I might not. I might find a place to post my music that was visible to as many search engines as possible. Murdoch simply does not understand the online economy.

Edit -
Looks like Microsoft will to oblige NewsCorp.

From customers to community

I am reading Chris Anderson’s insightful book, Free, and am stuck by the repeated references to community. Those of us who spend a significant amount of time online are conscious of the importance of building community, whether it is as simple as comments on blogs or as complicated as building an international network of user groups. Communities build and sustain markets in a way that nothing else can.

It is not a new phenomenon; there have always been hobbyist groups. It is simply that the Internet has given communities an opportunity to thrive as never before. Success in marketing communications will more and more be defined by the ability to cultivate communities.

Cloud Computing, open source, and business models

From a comment on the Slashdot discussion of Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source:

resistence is futile

unless your product is targeted at such a small subset of users that noone in the OSS world would bother to create a competing product there will always be some geek out there willing to dedicate all their spare time to create something that will compete with your product... for free. What proprietry vendors need to do is charging for software as a service and provide support packages that the OSS world don't bother to do.

In a world of Software as a Service and Cloud Computing, where the developer charges for the initial work and usage, the role of intellectual property in guaranteeing a return on investment will diminish.

Links for cloud computing

I am going to write a proper post about cloud computing; but until then here are some good links:

The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics

Cloud Computing's Impact on Digital Marketing - Trends to Watch

Using LinkedIn for business research

Secrets LinkedIn can tell you about your customers

One of the frustrating things about an open-source business is you don't generally know who is using your software. The paid customers you know, of course, but generally this represents a small fraction of the total user base. ...

... Today I found a new way. LinkedIn. What do I mean? And is this only something for open-source vendors?

I was searching for potential sales engineers, and initially did the standard searches: People in Chicago or Austin with Documentum, FileNet, Sharepoint, Java, etc. in their profiles.

Dense though I am, it eventually dawned on me to search for the word "Alfresco" in the LinkedIn database. What I found surprised me.

First, I discovered a wide range of people with Alfresco experience. Some are existing Alfresco customers and partners, some are employees. But a significant percentage include potential customers and partners.

Think about that. Wouldn't you rather hire someone that already knows your code? Wouldn't you rather engage a partner that has already done implementations of your software? Of course you would. LinkedIn can help.

I would never have thought of that. I am sure LinkedIn is being used for all manner of interesting research. I would like to thank the two individuals who sent me an invitation to join LinkedIn. At first I did not understand the value of it; but I think a LinkedIn profile is almost expected, the same way a website is expected.

Small business and the neutral net

The Baltimore Business Journal reports on the fight over net neutrality. The interesting thing about this article is that it makes clear the importance of the neutral net for Web 2.0 companies and small business generally. Your humble servant is quoted.

Bad news for hacks is bad news for flacks

Exclusive: Charting 4-Year Circ Plunge at Major Papers

NEW YORK In just four years the top newspapers in the U.S. have collectively lost about 1.4 million copies in daily circulation, E&P has found. But since the reported numbers come out every six months, the overall decline for individual papers may not hit home for many. Each fall off is usually in the low- to mid-single digits -- but it sure adds up.

In an atmosphere like this editors and reporters will take fewer chances on less than box office stories. It will become harder and harder to place clients.

A bad sign. A very bad sign.

Unsolicted commercial email blues

The End of Spam Research

One leader in the field declares that the basic parameters of spam fighting are all set and real research is over.

Anti-spam research isn't really all that old, as security research fields go, but it may have hit the end of the line. A thread in the mailing list of the Internet Engineering Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) argues that all the basic questions have been answered.

Phillip Hallam-Baker, CTO of VeriSign, argues that, "It is now accepted that there are two approaches to stopping spam, filtering out the bad stuff, making it easier to identify the good stuff."

There is a third way

Nothing in this writer’s research has explained why VISA, Mastercard, et al, tolerate spammers. Without credit cards spamming would not be possible. So why do these companies traffic with such operators? We need to make this a customer relations issue.

Privacy = Security

New Study Points to Consumer Privacy Fears: Identity Theft, Stolen Credit card Info Reaches Record Levels

The Identity Theft Resource Center, for instance, listed more than 125 million records reported compromised in the United States last year. That's a sixfold increase from the nearly 20 million records reported in 2006. Data breaches often result from lost or stolen computer equipment such as laptops, though the single largest breach was a case of online hacking. Early last year, TJX Cos. disclosed that a data theft had exposed tens of millions of credit and debit cards to potential fraud.

Poor business practices are a security vulnerability.

Lack of privacy is a security vulnerability.

The Auto Industry

Matthew Gross

for the same amount of cash as a new Corvette, you can buy this all electric roadster, which, glad to say, is made in America.

Concerning entrepreneurship

Via Brian Wynne Williams we discover top 10 myths of entrepreneurship. My favorite:

Venture capitalists are a good place to go for start-up money. Not unless you start a computer or biotech company. Computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars, and seventy-two percent of the companies that got VC money over the past fifteen or so years. VCs only fund about 3,000 companies per year and only about one quarter of those companies are in the seed or start-up stage. In fact, the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower.

Even if you have a computer or biotech company, there may be a better source of seed capital.

March of the aggregators

Contec Adds Three New Mobile Publishing and Distribution Deals

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, Jan 4, 2008 (Marketwire via COMTEX) -- Contec Innovations Inc. (TSX VENTURE:BUZ) has signed three new mobile content publishing and distribution deals involving its BUZmob(TM: 104.18, +1.14, +1.10%) mobile publishing service. Over 200 content publishers covering dozens of topic categories - including news, sports and finance - now use BUZmob as their mobile publishing service. Contec's new partners are EIN News, Blogdigger and BlogNetNews.

The money is in the aggregators.

What to get your entrepreneur friend for Christmas

Why Epiphanies Never Occur to Couch Potatoes is now available for shipping. Amtower was kind enough to give me a review copy and I can say it is unlike any business book I have ever read.

As the housing crash metastasizes into a larger economic crisis, I predict there will be a huge backlash against cynicism and cheap trick marketing. This book will speak to that longing for sincerity, the conviction that business is about providing value for money and not some illusionist sleight of hand.

Note -
available for immediate shipping: Altas Books
shipping soon, but not in stock:
Amazon
Borders

Standards as a business strategy

Team “OpenSocial” To Take Facebook Down

It is being reported that Facebook may not be allowed the clout they have been receiving recently after all. Tomorrow, Google will begin heading up an alliance of social networks that will begin opening up their sites to outside software developers. This group will introduce a common set of standards for this practice, according to The New York Times.

The group includes Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. Since it opened its site to outside developers last spring, Facebook has had over 5,000 small programs built to run on its site.

The plan was supposed to be unveiled at a Google party tomorrow night, but people briefed on this, let the New York Times know about it and Google confirmed to the publication.

An anonymous source said to the NY Times “It is going to forestall Facebook’s ability to get everyone writing just for Facebook.” OpenSocial as the platform will be known is “compatible across all the companies,” according to that same source.

This is a good example of the use of standards to acquire market share.

I don't understand why the source for this article was anonymous. What was the point of the leak? Just to show off?

Apple and the federal market

Apple and the Enterprise

On the other hand, Apple's Federal and Enterprise sales teams get very little support from the mother ship now that Steve is back at the helm, so to an extent I can understand his frustration. Personally though as an investor (long AAPL), a consumer, and a software geek, I think it's nit-picking.

Apple's turnaround under Steve's guidance has been one of the remarkable in the history of the computer business. Apple continues to astound the world with revolutionary products like the iPhone, its profit margins are the highest in the industry, and the company is making money hand over fist.

I think that part of the reason for Apple's revival is the very thing that Mr. Sabotta complains so angrily about. Unlike its competitors, Apple has studiously avoided the Enterprise space, which features razor-thin margins, and large, powerful customers who want a hand in determining technical product direction. The latter leads to a design-by-committee approach to technology platforms that at the end of the day serves no one well, especially the poor users.

The federal market certainly features razor thin margins. Not only that, the sales cycles are measured in years rather than days; so not only are the margins thin, the cost of selling is high. However, the federal market is stable. In recession years your federal sales will keep you alive. It is well worth cultivating.

Tom Foremski needs to get over himself

One of the advantages of being a Potomac based flack is not having to worry about Tom Foremski.

In his column lamenting the demise of Drama Queen Train Wreck blog, he expresses dismay that PR doesn’t have the decency to follow the news media into financial distress.

It seems that the gentleman who has taken Silicon Valley and disruptive technology as his stated area of expertise has not heard of this thing called Google News Alerts. Google News Alerts comes in two flavors, news, and comprehensive. The first will give you every mention from traditional news sources, including press releases, the second is the same but includes blogs and social tagging sites.

More and more people are getting news based on key words, not sources. Every day they are scanning articles based on key words, without regard to source. It is no longer necessary to place an article to reach these readers, it is merely enough to put it on a news release wire service.

To serve our clients we need to place their stories in credible, independent media. But to suggest that PR is not adapting, well, that is someone who has not been paying attention to what we have been doing.

Is Google’s practice of penalizing paid links a restraint of trade?

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google

More and more, I've been seeing people wondering if they've lost traffic on Google because they were detected to be selling paid links. However, Google's generally never penalized sites for link selling. If spotted, in most cases all Google would do is prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing PageRank. Now that's changing. If you sell links, Google might indeed penalize your site plus drop the PageRank score that shows for it. ...

...Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That's a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.

With traditional sources of advertising drying up, it is crucial that news organizations be able to tap into online advertising revenue. Considering that Google earns tremendous wealth by aggregating content from online news organizations, it is outrageous that they would use their power as the premiere search engine to discourage advertisers from patronizing news organizations.

Whither open source

Keith Casey has an excellent discussion on the problems posed by GPL3. Clearly Stallman has decided it is all or nothing and may very well get nothing.

I had the privilege of seeing Stallman speak. He is emphatic that living in freedom means using free software. Having looked at the controversy over the voting machines and assorted spyware controversies, I am not sure Stallman is wrong.

On the other hand, companies want to be paid for their work. How can you provide for that in the absence of copyright?

One thing I do know, software is too important to leave to the techies and this is a discussion we all need to follow.

Paying for content

Pay-for-blogging site raises questions

Denver-based Associated Content was formed in 2004 and received $5.4 million in funding from SoftBank. It bills itself as a "user-driven information portal" and content provider, licensing content to other online publishers. The articles are "optimized for discovery and revenue generation," according to a news release on the company Web site. In other words, they're designed to be easy to find on Google through various search optimization techniques used by many publishers, not just people accused of gaming search results.

The company asks bloggers to write on the subjects of their choosing and accepts text, video and audio. Contributors can be paid based on the quality of the article and keyword optimization.

If I understand this, writers are essentially writing to attract machines, search engines in this case, and are compensated on the basis of their ability to generate ad revenue. This strikes me a sweat labor for content providers.

The advertorial business model of PayPerPost, where a writer advertises their willingness to serve as a copywriter for a price that the writer sets, seems fairer to content providers.

There is a place for these kinds of services, but they do not replace the need for regular news organizations. This gets back to what I was talking about in my article for The Daily Dog:

News costs money. Good reporters require salaries and benefits. Blogs don't produce that.