Posts about google

Shooting red herring in a barrel

May 30, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Neil Henry, a journalism prof at UC Berkeley, sets loose a school of red herring in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed lamenting the layoff of a quarter of the edit staff at the paper and throwing blame at Google. I’ll go after just that fish. Says Henry:

I see a world where corporations such as Google and Yahoo continue to enrich themselves with little returning to journalistic enterprises, all this ultimately at the expense of legions of professional reporters across America, now out of work because their employers in “old” media could not afford to pay them.

First of all, I don’t see how Google is directly making a fortune off news. It has no ads on GoogleNews. Yes, it includes headlines now in its universal serach results and there are ads on those pages. But those headlines all link directly to the journalistic institutions that produce them. They should only wish that Google would put more headlines on that page.

Second, these companies actually help news organizations: Yahoo pays syndication fees for the content it runs. And Google is far and away the most productive means of sending audience to news sites. Even more than Drudge.

Third, it’s up to the news sites to then make the best of that audience. One way to do that is to put Google ads on the page. That’s how About.com brings in tens of millions of dollars a year: Google sends it traffic and sells targeted ads on the pages where they arrive.

Fourth, it’s our own damned fault in publishing — and next, broadcasting — that we have handed over the advertising marketplace to Google. We can sell better targeting around people and not just words. But if we sit back and do nothing as an industry, Google will next take over local retail advertising. So we need to get off our asses and build a competitor.

Fifth, I sympathize, of course, with the people who are being laid off but I also say that the Chronicle, the LA Times, and other newspapers that are moaning woe is me are at fault for not long ago seeing that this was coming and reorganizing around their new post-monopoly reality and new collaborative possibilities. Don’t blame Google for your bad management.

Henry continues:

Indeed last week, at a conference on the state of American newspapers at Stanford, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer reportedly made this argument quite clearly. She said simply: “We are computer scientists, not journalists.”
While that may be true, the time has come for corporations such as Google to accept more responsibility for the future of American journalism, in recognition of the threat “computer science” poses to journalism’s place in a democratic society.

How about considering the immense possibilities that “computer science” (why the quotes) brings to both journalism and democracy? He goes on:

It is no longer acceptable for Google corporate executives to say that they don’t practice journalism, they only work to provide links to “content providers.” Journalism is not just a matter of jobs, and dollars and cents lost. It is a public trust vital to a free society. It stands to reason that Google and corporations like it, who indirectly benefit so enormously from the expensive labor of journalists, should begin to take on greater civic responsibility for journalism’s plight. Is it possible for Google to somehow engage and support the traditional news industry and important local newspapers more fully, for example, to become a vital part of possible solutions to this crisis instead of a part of the problem? Is it not possible for Google and other information corporations to offer more direct support to schools of journalism to help ensure that this craft’s values and skills are passed on to the next generation?

So it’s a pitch. Give j-schools money. Oh, I’d love to see some Google money come to my school (and I have a few proposals I can send their way) but I don’t think they owe us reparations. Hardly. One more:

Is it not possible for these flourishing corporations to assist and identify more closely with the work of venerable organizations, such as the Society of Professional Journalists, in support of their mission and to preserve this important calling? I like to think such things are possible. Meantime, I can’t help but fear a future, increasingly barren of skilled journalists, in which Google “news” searches turn up not news, but the latest snarky rants from basement bloggers, fake news reports from government officials and PR cleverly peddled in the guise of journalism by advertisers wishing only to sell, sell, sell.

Or you could decide how to bring those damned bloggers into your fraternity and work together. You could be looking for new business models for news that take advantage of these new possibilities. You could be finding new efficiencies in newsrooms and among all those who do indeed make money off the work of journalists — like truck drivers. You couuld be looking to the future, not the past and you could be looking within to find blame for why news organizations are in this mess.

Far be it from me to be Google’s apologist; they don’t need me. And note well that I believe we need to find more ways to compete with Google. But they’re only doing their job. And we in journalism should be doing ours.

YouGoogle

May 25, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I just found the official Google channel on YouTube. It appears to be three months old but they just uploaded lots of stuff within the last day or so. Here’s the amazing Marissa Meyer explaining universal search:

More fascinating stuff there.

Reach out and Google someone

May 25, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis

In the last two days, I ended up reconnecting with two dear friends with whom I’d lost touch — my fault in both cases — and I’m so happy I did. One of them I had tried to find in Google for sometime but she left no apparent shadow there; my shadow is long and so it’s through Google that she found me. I sat in a friend’s office two days ago and she got a call from a 30-year-ago lost boyfriend who said that Google was kinder to her than him. That sounds tantalizing. In generations to come, you’ll have your archive of FaceBook pages and the links that make up a life. It’ll be far harder to lose people. For my generation, we risk never reconnecting. But I’ll tell you that it’s also nice to find them. So go Google an old friend tonight.

PDF: Eric Schmidt

May 18, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Google’s head, Eric Schmidt, is talking with the New York Times’ Tom Friedman at PDF.

Schmidt says the most obvious use of the internet in politics is as a truth detector: We can look up what politicians have said and we can refute fact.

He also says that voters will become much less likely to believe the first thing that comes at them because there is so much more coming. This is the model of news going forward as it becomes more universal and instantaneous.

Friedman quotes a friend who says that a young George Bush would never get elected today — no, not for the obvious reason — because if there would have been cell phone cameras and pictures of his wild days at Yale. Friedman says that when people our age go for jobs, we present our resume: our proxy of ourselves. Now that identity is online and out of our control. Schmidt says that he thinks there should be a law allowing us all to change our names at 21: everything before is erased.

I think there is also an issue of mutual assured destruction: Let he who has nothing embarrassing searchable on Google cast the first stone.

Friedman also tells a story that in essence makes us all politicians, all public figures: He was at an airport newsstand and a woman thought he cut in front of her and she snarled, “I know who you are.” He says today he’d buy the woman’s magazine hoping she wouldn’t go blog the episode, creating a reputation for that rude guy from the New York Times.

Friedman tells the story of how in a recent Bahraini election voters used Google Earth to take pictures of what was behind the walls of the palaces and estates of the ruling family. Schmidt says the government tried to shut down Google Earth but there was a backlash and they had to turn it back on again, all of which only drew more attention to it. Online, as in the White House, the coverup is worse than the crime.

(Crossposted from PrezVid)

WWGD: What has Google done?

May 17, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Today’s announcement that Google is changing its search to integrate video, photos, text, and news with results that used to list just text on web pages is, I think, more significant than it at first seems.

This promotes other media to the exalted rank of text. And it tells publishers that they’d damned well better do the same. This is the mark of true agnosticism coming to media: You should be using whatever media best communicates information in the form the user wants.

Oh, publishers are trying. That was one of the rationales behind the Guardian’s home-page redesign last week: They want to serve video. And those publishers are scrambling to make it. But I think we’re still putting too high a wall around each medium. One thing I’m starting to learn doing the PrezVid blog is that one can use different media strung together to tell a story: text, then an embedded video, then an original video, with links all about. It’s not having text here and video over there and audio up there. It’s about using all the tools appropriately at all times.

So once again, even as we make our own articles, we should be following Google’s example and asking WWGD.

Next, this announcement throws a heavy monkey wrench into many a publisher’s SEO strategy. Until now, you structured your pages and metadata in certain magical ways and — if you were hip — got yourself linked a lot by linking out a lot and — voila — you rose into Google heaven. Now you have to figure out how to put some Google helium into your videos and photos and news headlines — all of which can now appear on the blessed search-result page.

And you also have to figure out what people get when they click on those things: where are your brand, your ads, your links? If you distribute your stuff onto more sites out there — if your video becomes a hit on YouTube and on bloggers’ embeds — does that get it higher on Google? What does this do to destination and portal strategies?

Big media people should be reaching for the gin tonight.

* * *

Make that a double:

For Google’s pages also include maps. They’re local. Very local. Like the ads. Search on Mexican restaurants in Hoboken and you get web pages and the map with listings and much more: details the business can update, reviews, links. As of now, you won’t find an ad for Baja Mexican — but that won’t be long in coming. Look at Google’s FAQ for its local business ads. Here’s how to target to regions and cities.

So if you’re a local newspaper, you ask WWGD and what’s the answer? I’m not sure. But I think you need to have better distributed as widely as possible — across a large network of very local trusted brands (read: neighbors’ blogs) with better advertising performance and service. The more local you are, the better. The better known and trusted you are, the better. The more complete you are, the better. The more searchable you make your world, the better. The more addictive you are, the better. And then you’d better do everything you can to have your ads be found via Google whether they are on your site or others’ because not everybody’s going to come to you just because they used to. (See the smartest media quote of the year.)

* * *

Bartender, another please.

But, of course, this isn’t just about traffic and retail and directory ads. It’s about classifieds. Remember them? See today’s announcement that Boston.com and its former mortal enemy and now partner, Monster.com, are coming out with their joint job channel in June. Says PaidContent: “The move also reflects the increased competition for revenue from online classifieds, as typified by the dozen entities involved in the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, which began as co-branding with Yahoo’s HotJobs, and rival CareerBuilder, owned by Gannett, the Tribune Company, McClatchy and Microsoft, which purchased a minority stake in it earlier this month.”

What it really represents, I say, is not just the further collapse of newspapers’ hold on classifieds but the crumbling of classifieds as a form of advertising itself. The monsters are huddling together for warmth. With better search, we’ll be able to find each other, buyer and seller, without having to go to a centralized marketplace.

It won’t be long before we see classifieds coming up in Google searches. In some ways, we do now. Search for new homes in Tampa and you’ll see ads next to that map.

So WWGD? Well, I think the best opportunity is to target not words but people. If you know that lawyers in New Jersey read this New Jersey law blog, then you have a better chance of reaching people who work in the field. You have a relationship — or rather, that blogger does and you want a relationship with him. If you know that neighbors in Montclair read this blog — and they do — then you have a place to put house and restaurant ads you sell, if you’re in a network with that blogger (who can also sell ads on your pages, by the way). But can you afford to start blogs for every town and job description in your state? Of course, not — especially not now. But it’s in your interest for them to exist. So you need to support them. How? Well, for starters, sell ads for them and promote them and figure out what else you can do for them. That’s what Google would do. Hell, that’s what Google is doing.

: LATER: Matt Law, a veteran of About.com who knows whereof he SEOs, adds in the comments that I rushed past one important impact of this:

It’s not just an issue of getting more of their “multi”media stuff to show up in the listings. They now have to worry about how all this new stuff pushes their regular web page rankings further down the page.

More sand

May 7, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Jason Fry in the Wall Street Journal writes an excellent column summing up the suicidal impulses of the association of Belgian newspapers — and others — who try to shut off Google and think they are still in a position to make media’s rules.

These disputes are about money, of course — the newspaper groups think Google’s making some off their efforts, and they want a piece. But more broadly, Copiepresse objects to the idea that Google and other search engines should set the rules for linking, contending that such standards should be set by copyright laws, not technological standards. That’s a bid to turn back time and declare a do-over on the basics of search engines — a quixotic effort that flies in the face of the reality of how content is consumed today, and one in which Copiepresse has inadvertently lined up against its papers’ own readers.

Whether or not content creators like it, this is the age of fragmentation. In industry after industry, consumers are voting with their feet against old methods of packaging and distributing information. They want to pick and choose what’s of interest to them, without having to pay for or wade through what isn’t. That change, midwived by technology, has shaken or shattered content companies’ business models. It’s made everything they do more risky. And it’s stripped them of power they once enjoyed, forcing them to work with new companies and industries that somehow got to set the rules. Faced with such a situation, it’s understandable that content creators are angry. But the chance to set the ground rules passed some time ago, and it’s high time for content creators to realize that and adjust.

After reviewing the internet-induced upheaval that has struck music and television, he says:

The only surprise would be if newspapers were any different.

In moving online, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, each of which often stands on its own. Once, readers encountered articles by reading the paper a page at a time. Now, such readers are being supplanted by voracious online consumers who get their news in any number of unpredictable ways.

That’s a critical insight I rarely see in print but one that blogs understand because, as Meg Hourihan said in the dawn of blogging, the atomic unit of media is no longer the publication or the section or the page or even the article but the post: the nugget of information, the thought, the notion. That is what is really being disaggregated: the old unit of media itself.

I have no idea how you’re reading this column. Maybe you found it on the Online Journal’s home page or the technology page. Maybe you saw it because it includes Google’s stock symbol, or it hit your newsreader via an RSS feed. Maybe you followed a link from a blog, Google News or Technorati. . . . I can’t control any of that and wouldn’t want to — like any writer, the most-important thing to me is to be read. If the Online Journal started directing readers who followed third-party links to this column to the home page and left them to find their way from there, I’d be furious — because I’d be guaranteed to lose readers who got lost. And if WSJ.com said they were doing that because there were ads on the home page but not on this article, I’d not so gently suggest hiring a competent Web designer instead of suing search engines. . . .

Ultimately, what content creators face isn’t new technology, but a sea change in consumer behavior. Consumers don’t want to go back to watching TV at set times, buying albums or reading newspapers page by page. Trying to make them do so using laws that haven’t kept up with technology will fail. . . . At its heart, the Web is driven by users, not publishers. Whatever pain that causes content creators, opposing that fundamental idea became a revanchist fantasy long ago.

Well said. The problem for the controllers of media is that they still want to be and think they can be in control. But the obvious rule of nature is that we will be in control whenever we can be and we will cede it only unwillingly, only by necessity. So the key is to find out how to succeed by enabling us to do what we want to do. That is what the technology companies — Google, Facebook, et al — do. How can media companies do likewise? WWGD?

At the Murdoch clambake in Monterey, I tried to suggest that the real lesson these media men and women should learn from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is that he delivered enabling technology to the people and millions used it. How do we build news so it gets used? How do we succeed at that? How do we exploit Google?

Demonizing us

March 13, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’ve been reading Viacom’s boneheaded $1 billion complaint against YouTube. Viacom complains about YouTube but, in truth, they’re complaining about their own viewers. They whine about theft but, in fact, they’re whining about recommendation, about their audience finding them more audience. Viacom is trying, singlehandedly, to turn the TV industry into the music industry. They are trying to spread stupid. From the complaint, notice what they’re really complaining about is their fans (my emphases):

Defendants actively engage in, promote and induce this infringement. YouTube itself publicly performs the infringing videos on the YouTube site and other websites. Thus, YouTube does not simply enable massive infringement by its users. . . .

Because YouTube directly profits from the availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos and send notices to YouTube demanding that it “take down” the infringing works.

Uh, their complaint there is with the law.

In the meantime, YouTube profits handsomely from the presence of the infringing works on its site.

Not yet.

And even after it receives a notice from a copyright owner, in many instances the very same infringing video remains on YouTube because it was uploaded by at least one other user, or appears on YouTube again within hours of its removal. YouTube has deliberately chosen this approach because it allows YouTube to profit from infringement while leaving copyright owners insufficient means to prevent it.

I’ll requote the guy from Morgan Stanley below: You can’t obstruct markets. You have to anticipate them. You need to go with the flow.

At last week’s Online Publishers Association, Betsy Morgan of CBSNews.com, said that when an infringing clip goes up on YouTube, they take it down and then replace it with a noninfringing, official copy, which has the added benefit of enabling the conversation to cluster around one rather than many copies of the same event. That’s smart. I guess when Viacom and CBS split up, CBS got the IQ.

Google conquers Britain

March 6, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Telegraph reports that Google is on track to become the UK’s No. 1 company in advertising revenue.

The company’s UK advertising revenues jumped by 83pc in the past year, hitting $1.6bn (£821m) in 2006, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It means that Google has now overtaken Channel 4, which earned £775m, and makes it the country’s second-biggest advertiser after ITV, which recorded £1.63bn worth of spending in 2006, but is expected to record a drop in revenues for 2006 when it files its latest figures on Wednesday.

The news is the latest sign of the rapid shift away from traditional forms of advertising to the internet and other more dynamic media.

And you thought Microsoft was scary.