BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: Weblogs

  • Big ass ad

    7 comments on Big ass ad
    , ,

    Sometime today (when my webmaster gets off the school bus), a big-ass ad will likely appear atop this page. It’s for a Warner Brothers movie and they came to me, which is cool. More on that later. I’m trying lots of ad things to try to learn: BlogAds, Burst, Google, Yahoo, Feedburner RSS. And today at Web 2.0 I’ll be leading a discussion on advertising in this distributed world. If you’re there, stop by. And buy an ad.

    UPDATE: Well, I’m having problems with the ad and so it may not appear after all. I’ll tell the story as soon as I know how it turns out.

  • More than facts

    2 comments on More than facts
    , , ,

    David Weinberger does a far better job than I did trying to explore the notion that facts are a commodity — once they are known:

    First, I think most of us agree that facts by themselves aren’t enough. Unless we’re looking things up in an almanac, we want facts assembled into stories. Now more than ever. I don’t know about you, but more and more, I read newspapers through weblogs….

    Second, Jeff was speaking informally, I’m sure, when he said that “anyone” can get the facts. [Yes, thank you – ed] Obviously, some particular facts are hard to dig up. Some are a pain in the tuchus to unearth but you know exactly how to get them (digging up birth records), and some require months of foot-numbing research and Yoda-like intuition (“All the President’s Men”). Some are mired in Louisiana muck, emotion, and political ambition, like the facts in the Russert case that Jeff and I were originally commenting on. So to say facts are commodities (as I have said before) is not to say that they are all equally easy to come by. But once they’ve been disclosed, they become commodities in the sense that they are low-margin entities and I don’t much care where I get them. If I want to know who Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court or who won the Sox game, there are a gazillion places I can find out. And tomorrow there will be a gazillion + 100.

    Well- said (as in, I wish I’d said it that way). We have to grapple with the notion that holding onto facts until we decide to tell the world is not going be sustainable. Facts fly.

    This matters insofar as newspapers still consider their value to be the reporting of facts. I think some papers are being forced further into this belief because of the “onslaught” of bloggers. That seemed to me to be the position of John Lloyd of the Financial Times yesterday at the Accountability conference. He defended the news media’s traditional turf by talking about objectivity vs. opinions. I took him to be saying that opinions are easy but facts are hard, and newspapers do the hard and skilled work of fact-finding. Yes, they do. But having done that, the facts then become commodities. Our shared concern is who is going to do this if newspapers can no longer afford to pay reporters. (As far as opinions being easy goes: Yes, but interesting opinions are not commodities.)

    Maybe enough citizen journalists will become skilled reporters that we don’t need professional newspaper reporters. But we shouldn’t let the promise of citizen journalism distract us from the evident fact that another key value of the news media has already devolved to the citizenry: We’re already providing the editorial judgment on which the media so pride themselves. I no longer look at the front page of the NY Times to tell me what’s important. I look at it to see what people like the editors of the NY Times think is important. I’m finding the news that matters through the Internet recommendation engine: Blogs, emails, mailing lists, my aggregator, websites that aggregate and comment on news, etc. With the growth of social filtering and whatever some genius in a garage is inventing, the Internet is only going to get better at this. While we wonder if and how citizens will replace reporters, citizens are rapidly replacing editors.

  • Advertising 2.0: An agenda for the Web 2.0 workshop

    3 comments on Advertising 2.0: An agenda for the Web 2.0 workshop
    , ,

    Here are my notes on a Web 2.0 workshop on bringing advertising into the distributed age I’m moderating Wednesday morning. Any reaction from anywhere welcome.

    The participants are: Brian McAndrews of aQuantive, Mark Pincus of Tribe and more, Chas Edwards of FM Publishing, Matt Cutts of Google, and Dick Costolo of Feedburner… plus, most important, everyone in the room. I prefer this to be an unpanel, following the model of Bloggercons.

    The question: How do we bring advertising into web 2.0: the post-mass-market, distributed-media, citizens’-media era? What metrics, tools, standards, and technology do we need? What new opportunities are there for advertisers and for publishers of all sizes and stripes? (Let’s skip the dangers for now.)

    A few buckets to serve as background and frame discussion:

    MEASURING:
    Advertisers need distributed media to provide metrics. Distributed media also have an opportunity to measure (and monetize) new assets, such as trust, influence, timeliness, interaction, engagement, and also to measure (and monetize) new behaviors, such as swarming around people and tags.
    * We need to rally round cookie sets and data reporting on the publisher side.
    * We need other tools to serve cookies and report data (i.e., RSS readers).
    * We need audience demographics and behavior.
    * We need publisher data (subject matter, demographics, content safety…).
    * We need protections against spam.
    * We need to establish trusted networks.
    All this should allow advertisers to select the “best” media, however they wish to define that — audience, demographics, influence, etc. — or allow publishers to serve the best advertising; it should increase efficiency and value for all and will support the growth of new media.

    SERVING:
    Today, it is hard for advertisers to find a critical mass of the best distributed media (will they bother to go to multiple networks or even individual sites and can those sites handle advertisers’ needs?).
    * Do we need an open-source ad call that allows both advertisers and publishers to exploit the best opportunities on an ad hoc basis? Does this require some centralized auction marketplace?
    * Do we need a network of networks?
    * Do we need a sell-side (aka publisher-driven) structure that allows publishers, rather than advertisers, to place ads.
    * We need the means to serve ads — and verify serving — in other media types — audio, video, RSS, etc. — and across other distribution channels —

    MANAGING:
    Advertisers will want to measure, act on, and audit performance. ‘Nuff said.

    TRUST:
    How will we create trusted networks of distributed media?

    AND:
    * What are the new and revolutionary forms of marketing that come from taking advantage of distributed media?
    * Do we need a trade association for citizens’ or distributed media to set standards, do research, and sell our cause?

  • Beyond porkbusters: Paramedia

    13 comments on Beyond porkbusters: Paramedia
    , , ,

    I like Porkbusters (and I’m about to hear Glenn Reynolds plug the movement on Reliable Sources). It was born the way things are online: a sudden need, a sudden inspiration clicks with a critical mass and movement moves. This is a great example of our distributed world swarming together to accomplish something. Remember: The internet isn’t a medium. It is a means.

    So how could the Porkbuster example be extended? At the MT&R fest the other day, Jay Rosen lauded the similar example of Josh Marshall having bloggers uncover the secret vote on the DeLay rule — a movement of the moment much like Porkbusters. Then Jay said he wanted to come up with another idea:

    There wasn’t time for me to explain my suggestion for a next big project in open source journalism– a blog-organized, red-blue, 50-state coalition of citizen volunteers who would read and attempt to decipher every word of every bill Congress votes on and passes next year.

    Or, in the vein of Porkbusters, start with the budget and create the wiki-annotated view of federal spending.

    All it takes is a leader to push the notion the first time and then a lot of people agreeing and willing to pitch in… and maybe a tag or a microformat to help it come together.

    This is the smart mob as a new newsroom. Not the new newsroom, mind you: another new newsroom.
    On the way into Manhattan this morning, I listened to Mitch Ratcliffe’s podcast version of this post, in which he argues that we are witnessing the growth of “paramedia.” This is parajournalism.