BuzzMachine: Posts about guardian

Posts about guardian

.rose

June 27, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis

Identity just got more complicated. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to open up top-level domains to most any suffix we can imagine — from .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, etc. to .anything. So there will be an explosion in what we nerdily called the internet namespace.

On the one hand, this means we don’t have to all fight and scrape to grab any brand followed by a .com. But it also means there’ll be a land rush to create and sell every possible combination of words — amazon.store, amazon.book, amazon.everything (and Amazon will be faced with having to buy them all to protect its brand).
We users trying to find things could end up with an exponential rise in confusion as we try to remember more combinations of names: Where is that guy who drones on about media — jarvis.com, jarvis.pundit, jarvis.blather, jarvis.blahblahblah?

Who could win in this? Who always wins these days: Google, of course. I know many people who never bother to type in internet addresses; they find it quicker to just enter a Google search and click from there. All roads lead from Google.

Well, with more confusion in names, we’ll all end up having to search Google more often. That makes search-engine optimization even more critical as sites strive to make sure they are on the top page of search results for any relevant term. I, for example, am proud to be the seventh “jeff” on Google and I’m plotting ways to eliminate the other six. I believe that companies and brands will soon be valued not just on their cash flow and EBITDA but also on their Googlejuice.

The real limitation in namespace has been language. We have taken just about every word and pronounceable syllable in every tongue and already glued them together and tacked them onto a .com. That is why new web 2.0 companies inevitably end up with silly, made-up names these days: Dopplr, Zivity, Flickr. The internet has been killing vowels, syllables, and spaces in our languages. So it would stand to reason that this need no longer happen: Flicker.com can live peaceably beside Flicker.photo, Flicker.snapshots, even Flicker.yahoo.

But no. The truth is that when we depend on search, we will depend more heavily on unique names so those names don’t get lost in searches for common — commodity — words. So we’ll still mangle the language to create names.

Indeed, I predict that we’ll do this not just for our companies but also for our kids. For everybody needs a little SEO these days. If the internet had been around when my children were born, I shouldn’t have given them common names — Jake and Julia — but would have followed legendary rebel-rocker Frank Zappa’s example — he named his children Dwezil and Moon Unit. That way, there’d be no fight over owning DwezilJarvis.com and anyone searching for Dwezils would, I hope, find my offspring at least second on the list. Yes, in world where unique names are valued, Icelanders are screwed.

In the early days of telephones, it was assumed that we’d be bad at remembering numbers, so phone companies in some countries used words to help us recall the first few digits. KNickerbocker 5 500 became 565 500. That quaint system was dropped as phones stopped having letters printed on them and as phone numbers exploded to absurd lengths with the number of devices.

Well now imagine a world in a few weeks when you own a score of devices connected to the internet — phone, computer, TV, refrigerator, car, heating system, security system, game — each with its own unique address. Namespace will implode again. So perhaps we’ll return to the earliest system of names when John who made horseshoes in the blacksmith shop down on the high street became John Smith and that will be the Google search that finds him.

[Commissioned by and crossposted at Comment is Free; discussion underway there.]

OD on me

June 26, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis

guardian, journalism, newarchitecture

The Guardian asked me to finish off their Future of Journalism series of lectures and discussions with a talk about the 10 questions we should be asking now. Talk about intimidating. These people are asking and answering questions about the future better than any news organization I know. But I never pass up a chance to visit with folks at the Guardian, and so I went and tried to come up with my list. They videoed it and I can’t imagine why anyone with a life would watch 90 minutes of me but in case you are on a desert island with internet access (can I come?) here are parts one and two (not embeddable, sorry to say). For those with lives, here’s a blog write-up of the session. And here’s my Keynote:

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: OD on me X 3: Good god, I’ve been translated into Norwegian. By the way, other posts are going to be translated regularly into Spanish. There’s no escaping a blogger’s blather.

Guardian column: The blown-up BBC

June 16, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis

bbc, guardian, journalism, newbiznews

My Guardian column this week comes out of a tour of the reorganized BBC newsroom with its head, Peter Horrocks. Snippet:

As we stood there, one of many tours of the space was being held for online employees. “They keep asking who’s won,” Horrocks said – did TV take over because they are in TV’s space under a TV person? It had better not be that simple. If newsroom reorganisation – at any news operation – is about nothing more than shuffling desks, then it might as well be an exercise carried out on the deck of the Titanic. Later, Horrocks gave the real answer: “We’ve had to blow up BBC News to totally remake it.”

Twitter as the canary in the news coalmine

May 19, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis

guardian, newarchitecture, newbiznews, twitter, wwgd

Here’s my latest Guardian column about Twitter as news (it got trimmed in print — damned scarce paper — and so here’s my draft):

Last Monday, when an earthquake struck China’s Sichuan province, word of it spread quickly from witnesses on the shaking ground via Twitter, the mobile-and-web microblogging service where users share brief, 140-character-long updates with friends. Prolific blogger and Twitterer Robert Scoble at scobleizer.com insists he saw news of the quake on Twitter minutes before the US Geological Service posted the temblor and an hour before CNN and other news sites reported it.

Twitter is becoming the canary in the news coalmine. It stands to reason: If you’ve just gone through such a major event, you are sure to want to update your friends about it. If enough people are all chattering about an earthquake at the same time, that’s a good and immediate indication of a major news story.

Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter, the Twitter search engine Summize, and other social-media services – Flickr, YouTube, Facebook – for news catchwords like “earthquake” and “evacuation”. They hope for two benefits: first, an early warning of news and second a way to find witness media – photos, videos, and accounts from the event. This is clearly more efficient than waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over – though, of course, they will still go and do what journalists do: report, verify facts (which can be wrong from witnesses in the heat of news), package, and take their own pictures (which they then own).

These social services are also a source of witnesses for journalists to interview. After the Chinese quake, user “casperodj” reported his experience – “it did feel like the earth was going to split. literally everything was shaking” – and what followed – “CREEPY! while i’m typing, there’s an aftershock hitting!” – and the mood on the street – “the shitty concrete buildings around me are still ok though. people seem to be going back to work again” – and also told his readers when he’d gotten off the air with the BBC and Dutch broadcasters.

All this comes from a platform that does nothing more than enable anyone to tell anyone what they’re up to. But this is fundamentally new. We online citizens are living in public, revealing small details of our lives with our updates and our content. It’s in the smallness of this personal news that we can keep in touch with friends in ways we have not been able to since we lived in small towns, able to watch our neighbors’ every move. So perhaps this is not new at all but a return to the old ways: the electronic village, indeed.

London blogger Leisa Reichelt at disambiguity.com has a name for this: “Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” We get to see what our friends had for lunch and with whom, hear about their trips, see their new haircuts. The mundanity of it is the message.

“Isn’t this all just annoying noise?” Reichelt asks and answers: “There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy.”

I have speculated in this space that our new publicness and permanence online will change even friendship, as we no longer need to lose touch with old acquaintances. Just last week, I met up and caught up with my high-school sweetheart after (gulp) 33 years and that was made possible only because she Googled me.

Now it’s also become clear that this publicness and immediacy is yielding both a new relationships and new value: ways to find and report news for a start. Perhaps our chattering will also reveal our collective mood (for that, go to twistori.com and see all Twitter posts that include the words love, hate, think, and wish). Companies are now monitoring Twitter, as the smart ones have been watching blogs, to see what is said about their brands (the cable giant Comcast saw powerful blogger Michael Arrington of techcrunch.com complaining about an outage in Twitter and quickly dispatched a repairman).

When we start putting our lives online, it’s now possible to take our pulse in new ways. And that’s news. For what is news, after all, but what is happening to us?

It’s about aggregation

May 15, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis

ads, guardian, opa08

One theme that came out loud in and clear, to me at least, from the panel on the internationalization of media brands that I ran at OPA this morning is this:

Top brands with international traffic should be banding together to sell that traffic and audience as a group. No one of them has successfully and fully exploited the value of this audience now and, as Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times pointed out, each of those audiences is relatively small. But together, I say, they represent a powerful, smart readership. I’ve suggested this in the past to the UK brands: Guardian, Telegraph, Times, even the BBC outside the UK. At today’s panel, Chris Ahearn of Reuters — which just agreed to represent ad sales for the Guardian in the U.S. (full disclosure: a introduction I helped make) — said that all these brands are undersold. Of course, there’s self-interest there: Reuters would be happy to sell them. But I do think there’s potential there.

Later: From Jemima Kiss’ report (blogging from the front row):

The BBC’s sanction of advertising on its international website BBC.com was “enormous state-funded intervention in the international news advertising market”, the Guardian’s director of digital content warned today.

BBC.com was beginning to impact on international news sites as UK web publishers moved to monetise their overseas audiences, Guardian News & Media’s director of digital content, Emily Bell, told the Online Publishers Association conference in London.

“The BBC funds the biggest online news site in the world,” she said.

“It will be interesting to see how the New York Times and everyone else reacts. This is not our problem – it is everyone’s problem.

“The BBC is going to be an enormous state-funded intervention in the international new ad market.” . . .

Bell said today that advertising inventory on Comment is Free, the Guardian’s discussion site, was fully sold out because advertisers want to reach its audience of high-end, opinion formers.

Get that: ads sell out on a site with interactivity.

In season

May 9, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis

guardian

Well, you’d never see this as a promotion from an American newspaper. I just caught this tweet from the Guardian’s Comment is free, in full:

“We can’t keep fucking flying stuff around the fucking globe like their’s no tomorrow. Fuckin ‘ell! We’re fucked”

Well, it did make me click. I thought it might be about American interventionism. No, it’s a reaction to chef Gordon Ramsey declaring that out-of-season vegetables should be outlawed.

The swearing-chef extraordinaire has declared war on out of season produce, suggesting that restaurants should be fined for using, say, strawberries in February.

The Michelin-starred chef thinks that both fruit and vegetables should be “locally sourced and only on menus when in season”. Not only does the produce taste better, but it also helps to cut carbon emissions by reducing the number of miles needed to transport them.

Oh, bloody ‘ell. So just to make ourselves feel good, let’s make a bunch of Mexican strawberry farmers and Chilean asparagus farmers — not to mention truckdrivers, ship crews, port crews, and supermarket help — unemployed. Priorities, people.

Remind me not to go to Ramsey’s restaurants in cabbage season.

Guardian column: Gary Vaynerchuk

May 5, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis

guardian, retail, wwgd

My Guardian column this week about wine wizard Gary Vaynerchuk:

* * *

Before you read this, do me a favour and go to WineLibraryTV.com Be prepared for a jet engine in your face. That blast of personality is Gary Vaynerchuk, a 32-year-old merchant who has made more than 450 daily wine-tasting shows online – just him, his glass and a spit bucket.

The show, with its audience of 80,000 a day, has transformed Vaynerchuk into a cultural phenomenon. He has appeared on two of the biggest TV talk shows in the US and in the Wall Street Journal and Time. His book, Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines, comes out next week and the day he announced this on his internet show, his fans immediately pushed it to No 36 on Amazon’s bestseller list. He has a Hollywood agent. He makes motivational speeches. And he has only just begun. Gary Vaynerchuk is on his way to becoming the online Oprah.

This isn’t as simple as using online video to sell wine, though the family store is now a $60m-a-year enterprise. Vaynerchuk is also transforming retail and making it social. He has realised that a store should be a community and so he uses every tool available online – a social wine rating site called Corkd.com, his videos, his appearances on other popular online shows such as Diggnation, his ubiquitous presence on Facebook, and answering countless emails every day – to make and connect with as many fans as possible.

One day, a few weeks ago, Vaynerchuk announced on his online show that he’d throw an event for his video friends at his store in New Jersey. More than 300 people showed up. He calls himself “the social media sommelier”. “Social business,” he says, “is the future of our society.”

Vaynerchuk is on a mission. “I want to change the way that people think about wine and change the way that people do business … This is how I will be remembered.” His secret is generosity and passion. Now that may sound like a line. But I’ve witnessed Vaynerchuk in action. I’ve bought my wine at his store for a few years and watched his sales people eager to help customers find a better, cheaper bottle. I watched him at the South by Southwest conference, where he gathered instant parties via Twitter, having strangers – now friends – sample from the seven cases of wine he had shipped down. I do think this guy’s for real. Authenticity, Vaynerchuk argues, is a necessity in the transparent, social, web 2.0 world. “You’re not going to be able to have multiple personalities,” he says. “Your personal brand is now completely exposed to the world, 24/7. Everyone is media now.” This leads him to a grand conclusion: “So now good is going to win.”

See, he does sound like Oprah. And he acts like her as he constructs his empire. He says he is building – as he calls it – “brand Gary Vaynerchuk”. Online, he issues opinions, not only about wine but about life, like this: “I’d rather have a million friends right now than a million dollars. Your social equity is far greater than your financial equity.”

He even has an inspiring personal story: he came to the US from Russia at age three, a young entrepreneur who made a $1,000 a week selling baseball cards at the mall. When he had to work in the family store as a kid, cleaning shelves, he hated it until he realised that wine was as collectable as baseball cards. And now he has used his expertise, passion and personality – and the power that online gives anyone to speak to the world and make friends anywhere – to turn himself into a star.

As I left the office where he tapes his show, he handed me a copy of his book. Then he went to a “meet and greet” with a fan who just wanted to be near force Vaynerchuk. All this is possible with just a dream and a webcam.