Posts about newarchitecture

Media on media

April 4, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’m going to be on Howie Kurtz’s Reliable Sources this Sunday (about 1045a) talking about the death of critics. Fun part: I’ll be on with Gene Seymour, movie critic at Newsday, who just took a buyout there. I met Gene way back early in his career when I started Entertainment Weekly. A lot has happened to criticism since then.

Here’s my April 2006 column playing taps for critics. Here’s David Carr’s NY Times piece on the trend, which essentially gives voice to producers complaining that they’ll get less free publicity. (But one might point out that if they advertised more in newspapers, newspapers could better afford those critics.) And here’s a comprehensive post in Filmdetail.

What this really gets down to is:
* The dire economic situation newspapers and magazines face.
* The ecology of links that makes local coverage of national beats wasteful.
* The commodification of criticism. When I started EW, I stole an idea for a feature from the Berlin city magazines Tip and Zitty, creating a critical consensus chart that converted all the pundits’ opinions into a letter grade (our conceit). The opinions and their expression didn’t vary widely. The essential consumer service here is: what’s it about, who’s in it, how is it?
* The death of one-size-fits-all media and entertainment. Just because you like it doesn’t mean I have to, not anymore.
* Above all, I believe, this is driven by the fact that we do now and have always trusted the opinions of friends over those of alleged influencers, whether those influencers are newspaper critics, TV commentators, or unfamiliar bloggers.

I’ve said before that if I launched EW today, it would not be a magazine of critics but a site of viewers, a place for peers to compare notes and recommend entertainment to each other. Entertainment should have been the first realm of news coverage to become soclal.

The lost URL

April 4, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Just wondering: Are we losing a wealth of link knowledge on Twitter because it’s all going through TinyURL and other services that truncate addresses so they’ll fit? I’d love to know who’s getting linked in Twitter but to do that, I imagine one would have to scrape and then click on and resolve every one of those proxy URLs, no? If so, this is a shame.

Comrade customer

March 31, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Peter Himler, a PR exec who blogs at the refreshingly bluntly named The Flack, just told the story of his trip to Moscow and talks with big executives there about the empowered customer online. They didn’t much take to the idea:

My presentation focused on how the changed media landscape and the empowerment of citizens as journalists have caused a major re-think in how companies engage their customers. One attendee found it incredulous that a blogger would have the audacity to denigrate a company’s reputation, as was the case with the Comcast repairman video or Jeff Jarvis’s rants against Dell. Another asked whether it’s even legal to write negatively about a company or person. I cited the First Amendment, but also referenced the lawsuit brought against two former employees by Apple for divulging trade secrets.

It makes sense that a culture with a heritage of political totalitarianism would move into a culture of corporate totalitarianism: Better living through Gazprom. But I think the internet may well cause corporate dictatorships to fall faster than political ones.

The last portal

March 31, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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With some fanfare, Yahoo today unveiled its new women’s site, Shine, with content contributions from lots of big companies including Conde Nast, Hearst, Rodale, and Time Inc. (though I find little evidence of them on the site; most of my clicks took me to stuff written by Shine staff, which doesn’t look small; others too me to snippets from magazines made to look like blog posts with lots of plugs to try to get you to subscribe). It has that women’s magazine voice: “Four ways to be good to your body this week…. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: We think you’re awesome…. Perfect, pretty, sturdy canvas bags…. How to get on your boss’s good side….”

Poor Yahoo. They could cure cancer while tap-dancing naked and I wouldn’t be impressed. They have just gone and tried to create another portals. Portals beget portals. There’s nothing new in this. Having worked at Conde Nast, I went through conversations about starting sites like this with all the other portals many times over. What’s the big?

The problem is that this is born from a spreadsheet rather than a vision. In the PaidContent report, Yahoo svp Scott Moore “explained that for the longest time, Yahoo had been developing sites focused on topics (for instance Food, Sports and others). Now, with Shine, it has started developing site based on audiences/demographics, and in this case a big one, and lucrative to advertisers.” I’ve seen and heard that tap dance before. Beware any product that starts with a demographic that’s going to excite advertisers because it has lots of brands. That’s portalthink at its saddest.

An open ad network opens for business

March 24, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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OpenX is building the start of a new, more open ad network infrastructure.

My Guardian column this week starts with a recast of my blog post about Google Ad Manager and then breaks a wee bit of news:

OpenX (nee OpenAds, nee phpAds) is putting together the elements of what I hope can become an open ad architecture that could compete with Google and create a more transparent marketplace that will support the creation of many more sites (I’ve been wishing for this for more than two years). OpenX is already serving about 200 billion ads over 30,000 sites each month with its free software. What I’ve been urging that they do is tie that together into a network that advertisers can pick and choose from for ad hoc networks of quality sites.

Today, I was told by OpenX founder and CTO Scott Switzer, they will have the first piece of that puzzle: an ID structure that will cookie users across any participating site.

Next, in the second quarter, they plan to deliver a bidding infrastructure so agencies and networks can buy ads on any of those sites. Thus an agency could put together an ad hoc network of great mommy blogs, or an existing network like Federated could augment its own sites with others sites that are using OpenX. And a site can take high-value ads from one network today and another agency tomorrow and backfill with ads from a remnant network — including, apparently, Google itself. So both the publisher and the site recognize higher value and that, I believe, is what can propel sites of any size to put together highly targeted and flexible networks that reach critical mass and offer greater quality than portals, which are merely collections of eyeballs.

And next will come a hosted ad serving service, which is now in beta; this would enable any site without benefit of a 16-year-old son and webmaster to serve ads from most anywhere.

What they’re really creating is an open ad call, since any other network or server can serve ads through OpenX. That, I believe, is the keystone to creating a new and more open ad architecture. That, I hope, is what will enable most any advertiser to place ads on most any site.

Switzer told me that they are being advised by a panel of sites, agencies, advertisers, and networks large and small.

Here’s where I hope this goes next, from my Guardian column:

Once we have an open ad network, we’ll also be able to expose data about sites and ad performance. We would establish the true value of our new medium, especially when we can track new metrics: behaviour, interest, influence, authority, the timing and spread of ideas, and so on. As an ad blogger once said: instead of measuring impressions, we’d measure the impressed. Or to twist another ad cliche: let’s stop reaching eyeballs and start reaching brains.

My hope is that an open infrastructure would encourage the creation of many new companies. Let’s start with a wealth of new content sites: niche interest blogs, hyperlocal blogs, innovative services, new, small-scale journalism. Next we’ll see new analytics companies that would help advertisers find their ideal buys. And we’d see a host of networks spring out of ad agencies and media companies to help us poor bloggers make a living.

The Guardian started such a network gathering green blogs. The Washington Post put together networks for high-value content areas such as travel. And last week in 13 US markets, CBS TV launched a network that places widgets containing news and ads – with promotions for stations – on local blogs.

So now the battle is on. Will big media brands, Google’s ad network or an open network win more of the online ad market? The stakes are growing ever bigger: last week, General Motors announced that it will move half its $3bn ad budget online. I’m just hoping that one of these networks will bring a few of those dollars on to my humble blog.

Starbucks listens – at last

March 20, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Following Dell’s Ideastorm, Starbucks has no opened a forum — also powered by Salesforce.com — where customers can make suggestions then discuss and vote on them. Starbucks, of all companies, with its loyal and opinionated customers, should have been doing this years ago. Every company should be doing it now.

If auto companies had this five years ago, we’d all have told them to force their radio manufacturers to include a damned 39-cent plug so we could hook up our iPods. If airlines had it today, we’d tell them how to get out of their customer-service mess. Why does listening to your customers sound like a web 2.0 idea? It should be a business 1.0 necessity.

Already, there are clear themes coming out in the Starbucks discussion. Many customers are suggesting — and many more are agreeing — that our frequent-sipper cards should have our regular orders embedded in them so we could swipe the card at the door, make the order, pay for it, and avoid that damned line (making that damned line shorter for everyone else). Others are also suggesting they want to do the same with their iPhones. This genius comes not from MBAs or executives but from customers. If you’ll just listen.

More customers want express lines for simple drip orders or sandwich purchases. More want employees manning the cash registers instead of running around taking orders in advance and then messing them up (well, that’s my variation on the theme). Note the underlying chorus: those damned lines.

One customer gives decorating advice to avoid the stores wearing down and looking so ratty, as so many do.

One suggests what I’ve long wanted: a drain at the cream station to drain that excess coffee. Yes, it’d be expensive to retrofit that, but shouldn’t it be part of the spec for new stores now?

Get rid of the tip jars, says one customer — but others in the comments disagreee. That’s what is great about these Salesforce storms: out of the conversation will come some measurement of consensus.

There are calls for whole wheat.

Lots want free wi-fi (which means Starbucks hasn’t done a good job of telling people that it’s coming with its switch from T-mobile to AT&T).

This customer wants softer music. It is, after all, our office.

And, of course, stop the Vente madness.

What an incredible wealth of information, ideas — and caring — from customers. All you have to do is listen.

I believe that Salesforce’s Storms are an important new infrastructure for customer conversation — a forum mixed with Digg mixed with a suggestion box mixed with a company blog. I don’t understand why companies aren’t falling over themselves to at least offer their customers this opportunity. Too often, it’s because they’re scared of what their own customers will say. Except now, they’re saying it on the web anyway. That’s the lesson of Dell and now of Starbucks.

The challenge of live search

March 18, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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As the web turns live — with broadcasters streaming and with anyone carrying a mobile phone broadcasting — the next big challenge for search will be how we can find what’s going on while it’s going on. How can we search the live web?

I’ve written here before that witnesses sharing what they see via video from their mobile phones will change the essential architecture of news. No longer will CNN tell witnesses to send things to them that they then vet, package, and present to the world. When a Qik or Flixwagon user sees live news and broadcasts it on the web, it won’t be through CNN. CNN’s challenge will be to find it and its choice will be to link to it or embed it or not. That changes the role of a news organization in the ecology of news. It might even take them out of the flow of much of live news unless they can come up with systems to find and recommend what’s happening now.

Even when dealing with known, branded sources of live broadcast, there’s a challenge. I want to see whether anyone — TV or radio network or citizen armed with a Nokia — is going to broadcast Barack Obama’s speech about race from Philadelphia today. But I can’t find that.

Google is not prepared for the live web. Google values pages that grow links and clicks over time. It understands the permanent web. Of course, that is a protean thing, a growing brain. But it’s not live. Technorati likes to think that it gives us the live web but I’d say that instead it gives us the dynamic web, the latest static pages. It also doesn’t give us live.

How can you find and value live? Looking at links will make you too late. Traffic might tell you something — why are people swarming around this video stream? — but that, too, will be unreliable and probably too late. Brand won’t be a help because the witness will almost always see and share news before a reporter can get there.

Nobody would have had any reason to know that I was on the last PATH train into the World Trade Center on 9/11 but if I’d had the phone I had now, I would have been broadcasting the news from eye-level — not from rooftops three miles away — as it happened. How could you have known that?

There will need to be a new system where, Twitterlike, he who’s broadcasting live can alert the world about what he’s sending and others — audiences or armies of interns monitoring these feeds — help the good stuff bubble up and quickly.

If this doesn’t exist, the live web’s value will be as perishable as smoke. If it does exist, we’ll probably find what’s going on — what’s news — around the present news architecture. And then we’ll have to wonder how we vet and confirm that what we see is real.

Live changes everything — again.

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Seconds after posting this, I see Dave Winer — who else? – at the start of such a structure of leading us to the live web. He Twittered: “I’m making an MP3 of Obama’s speech. I’ll publish it a few minutes after the speech is over, 15 minutes from now.”

Google Ad Manager: It’s bigger than it looks

March 14, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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The biggest news of the week — well, besides the governor-erect (hat tip to the New York Post) — was not AOL’s purchase of Bebo or Yahoo’s embrace of the semantic web (about which I remain skeptical) or certainly Lacygate. No, the biggest, most game-changing news went by without a great deal of notice and that Google’s announcement of a free ad-serving platform.

Google Ad Manager is one critical piece in creating the open network of networks where any site can take any ad and any marketer can advertise on any site. When that day arrives, we all become atoms that can attract to one molecule or another, no longer locked into one network. We start to see a truer marketplace for online advertising. We also get to see small sites gather together in large, ad hoc networks to compete with big sites — and this, I believe, will encourage and support the creation of more small sites. God’s work. Or now Google’s.

The creation of a standard ad call — which any site can use and into which any advertiser can place an ad, which in essence is what Google is doing — is the foundation of what I envisioned when I called for an open-source ad infrastructure.

There’s just one issue: It’s not open-source. And it’s Google’s.

Google’s benefits are clear: By offering free ad-serving to sites, it has an opening to be on many more sites, and when they don’t have ads of their own to serve, Google can serve AdSense and make some more money. Google also gathers incredible data about ad performance and pricing and about the sites themselves. One big problem with its program is that it doesn’t share that data with the publishers and let them use it to more efficiently serve its ads. It also doesn’t share it with advertisers and let them take advantage of a more transparent marketplace.

No, Google’s holding onto that information itself and, once again, becoming smarter than all of us. And I say that’s our own damned fault for not building our truly open ad marketplace. It’s not too late, but it soon will be.

The closest thing we have to an infrastructure for such an open marketplace is OpenX (nee Openads, nee phpAds), a free and open-source ad platform now serving ads on 30,000 sites. What’s needed — and I told CEO James Bilefeld this when I met him sometime ago — is that all those separate sites should be tied together into an open network so advertisers can pick and choose where to place their ads. The other thing it needs is standard metrics so advertisers can decide where to buy.

Now Google promises to build that cross-internet ad network with Ad Manager. And Google has the metrics — only, again, it’s not sharing. It lets sites target ads on the most basic of criteria: geography, bandwidth, browser, browser language, operating system, and domain. Whoop-dee-do. Each site can use its own information to target. But it’s the cross-site information that is exponentially richer and it’s Google that sits in the catbird seat where that is visible.

We should be able to target on so much richer information: the cross-site behavior of users (that’s the basis of Tacoda, just bought by AOL); their influence (that’s part of the sauce cooking up at 33 Across, where — full disclosure — I am an adviser and investor); their place in the timing of a conversation (meme starters, meme spreaders); their own characteristics (what do the demographics of authors tell us apart from the demographics of audience?); their authority (too bad Technorati never found a way to exploit that for bloggers’ benefit); and so on. This is about moving beyond eyeballs to brains.

But I wonder whether entrepreneurs will be able to start building some of this structure atop Google’s Ad Manager: analytics companies finding the ultimate network of soccer moms; ad agencies or media companies putting together ad hoc networks. This will create greater efficiency and thus greater value. And it will tie together a distributed community of interest into a critical mass advertisers will pay attention to: the mass of niches. And that, again, will support the creation of a new wealth of content and communication; that’s what I want to see.

On a less momentous scale, the Google move also reduces the cost of serving ads to zero and that will have benefit for sites of any size. When I worked on sites that were DoubleClick clients (which will still charge for serving as it becomes part of Google… for now) it was too expensive to serve even our own promotional ads because we had to pay DoubleClick to do it. Now sites can use their ad inventory in new and more creative ways. That, too, is a benefit of Ad Manager.

Altogether, Google is simply doing what Google does: creating a platform. That benefits all its users and it benefits Google by putting it at the center of the market. But the more closed that market is, the more it benefits Google over the users. And the more Google becomes the sole standard, the more it can successfully make it closed. So if we’re going to create an open ad marketplace, now’s the time. If it’s not already too late.