vanderwal.net

The Future of Newspapers

A state of the newspaper industry article in today's Washington Post tries to define what people want from newspapers and what people are doing to get information.

Me? I find that newspapers provide decent to great content. Newspapers are losing readers of their print versions, but most people I know are new reading more than one paper, but online. The solutions I see from my vantage are as follows.

Ads

The articles rarely have ads that relate to the stories, foolishly missing ad revenues. The ads that are available are distracting and make for an extremely poor experience for the reader. News sites should ban the improperly targeted inducements that rely on distracting from reading the article, which is the reason the person is on that web page. The person has an interest in the topic. There are monetary opportunities to be had if the news outlets were smart and advertisers were smart.

How? If I am reading an article on the San Francisco Giants I would follow and may pay a little something for an ad targeted to this interest of mine. I like to buying Giants tickets, paraphernalia, a downloadable video of the week's highlights, etc. If I am reading about an airline strike a link to train tickets would be a smart option. A news article about problems in the Middle East could have links to books by the journalist on the subject, other background books or papers, links to charitable organizations that provide support in the region. The reader has shown an interest, why not offer something that will also be of interest?

We know that advertisers want placement in what they consider prime territory, the highly trafficked areas of the site. Often this is when the non-targeted ads appear. This is an opportunity to have non-targeted ads pay a premium, say five to 20 times that of targeted ads. The non-targeted ads have to follow the same non-disruptive guidelines that targeted ads follow. This is about keeping the readers around, without readers selling ads does not make any sense.

Archives

One area the news site are driving me crazy is access to the archives. The news sites that require payment to view articles in the archives are shooting themselves in the foot with this payment method and amount required to cough up to see an article that may or may not be what the person interested is seeking. The archives have the same opportunity to sell related ads, which in my non-professional view, would seem like they would have more value as the person consuming the information has even more of an interest as they are more than a casual reader. Any payment by the person consuming the information should never be more than the price for the whole print version. The articles cost next to nothing to store and the lower the price the more people will be coming across the associated advertising.

Blogging and personal sites often point to news articles. Many of us choose whom we are going to point to based on our reader's access to that information at any point in the future. We may choose a less well written article, but knowing it will be around with out having to pay extortionist rates to see it is what many of us choose. Yes, we are that smart and we are not as dumb as your advertisers are telling you. We, the personal site writers are driving potential ad revenues to you for free, if you open your articles for consumption.

Loyalty

Loyalty to one paper is dead, particularly when there are many options to choose to get our news from. We can choose any news source anywhere in the world. Why would we choose yours? Easy access, good writing, point of view, segment coverage (special interests - local, niche industries, etc), etc. are what drive our decisions.

I often choose to make my news selections to include sources from outside my region and even outside my country. Why? I like the educated writing style that British sources offer. I like other viewpoints that are not too close to the source to be tainted. I like well researched articles. I like non-pandering viewpoints. This is why I shell out the bucks for the Economist, as it is far better writing than any other news weekly in the U.S. and it pays attention to what is happening around the world, which eventually will have an impact to me personally at some point in the future. I don't have patience for mediocrity in journalism and the standards for many news sources have really slipped over the past few years.

News sources should offer diversity of writing style and opinion of one source will attract attention. The dumbing down of writing in the news has actually driven away many of those that are willing to pay to read the print versions. Under educated readers are not going to pay to read, even if it is dumbed down. Yes, the USA Today succeeded in that, but did you really want those readers at the loss of your loyal revenue streams?

Loyalty also requires making the content available easily across devices. Time and information consumption has changed. We may start reading an article in the print edition (even over somebody's shoulder and want to follow-up with it. We should be able to easily find that article online at our desk or from our mobile device. Integration of access across devices is a need not a nicety and it is not that difficult to provide, if some preparation is done with the systems. Many of us will pull RSS feeds from our favorite news sources and flag things for later consumption, but the news sites have not caught on how to best enable that. We may pull feeds at one location, but may have the time and focus to read them at another location, but we may not have the feeds there. Help those of us that are loyal consume your information in a pan-medium and pan-device world that we live in.

Feed On This

The "My" portal hype died for all but a few central "MyX" portals, like my.yahoo. Two to three years ago "My" was hot and everybody and their brother spent a ton of money building a personal portal to their site. Many newspapers had their own news portals, such as the my.washingtonpost.com and others. Building this personalization was expensive and there were very few takers. Companies fell down this same rabbit hole offering a personalized view to their sites and so some degree this made sense and to a for a few companies this works well for their paying customers. Many large organizations have moved in this direction with their corporate intranets, which does work rather well.

Where Do Personalization Portals Work Well

The places where personalization works points where information aggregation makes sense. The my.yahoo's work because it is the one place for a person to do their one-stop information aggregation. People that use personalized portals often have one for work and one for Personal life. People using personalized portals are used because they provide one place to look for information they need.

The corporate Intranet one place having one centralized portal works well. These interfaces to a centralized resource that has information each of the people wants according to their needs and desires can be found to be very helpful. Having more than one portal often leads to quick failure as their is no centralized point that is easy to work from to get to what is desired. The user uses these tools as part of their Personal InfoCloud, which has information aggregated as they need it and it is categorized and labeled in a manner that is easiest for them to understand (some organizations use portals as a means of enculturation the users to the common vocabulary that is desired for use in the organization - this top-down approach can work over time, but also leads to users not finding what they need). People in organizations often want information about the organization's changes, employee information, calendars, discussion areas, etc. to be easily found.

Think of personalized portals as very large umbrellas. If you can think of logical umbrellas above your organization then you probably are in the wrong place to build a personalized portal and your time and effort will be far better spent providing information in a format that can be easily used in a portal or information aggregator. Sites like the Washington Post's personalized portal did not last because of the cost's to keep the software running and the relatively small group of users that wanted or used that service. Was the Post wrong to move in this direction? No, not at the time, but now that there is an abundance of lesson's learned in this area it would be extremely foolish to move in this direction.

You ask about Amazon? Amazon does an incredible job at providing personalization, but like your local stores that is part of their customer service. In San Francisco I used to frequent a video store near my house on Arguello. I loved that neighborhood video store because the owner knew me and my preferences and off the top of his head he remembered what I had rented and what would be a great suggestion for me. The store was still set up for me to use just like it was for those that were not regulars, but he provided a wonderful service for me, which kept me from going to the large chains that recorded everything about me, but offered no service that helped me enjoy their offerings. Amazon does a similar thing and it does it behind the scenes as part of what it does.

How does Amazon differ from a personalized portal? Aggregation of the information. A personalized portal aggregates what you want and that is its main purpose. Amazon allows its information to be aggregated using its API. Amazon's goal is to help you buy from them. A personalized portal has as its goal to provide one-stop information access. Yes, my.yahoo does have advertising, but its goal is to aggregate information in an interface helps the users find out the information they want easily.

Should government agencies provide personalized portals? It makes the most sense to provide this at the government-wide level. Similar to First.gov a portal that allows tracking of government info would be very helpful. Why not the agency level? Cost and effort! If you believe in government running efficiently it makes sense to centralize a service such as a personalized portal. The U.S. Federal Government has very strong restriction on privacy, which greatly limits the login for a personalized service. The U.S. Government's e-gov initiatives could be other places to provide these services as their is information aggregation at these points also. The downside is having many login names and password to remember to get to the various aggregation points, which is one of the large downfalls of the MyX players of the past few years.

What Should We Provide

The best solution for many is to provide information that can be aggregated. The centralized personalized portals have been moving toward allowing the inclusion of any syndicated information feed. Yahoo has been moving in this direction for some time and in its new beta version of my.yahoo that was released in the past week it allows the users to select the feeds they would like in their portal, even from non-Yahoo resources. In the new my.yahoo any information that has a feed can be pulled into that information aggregator. Many of us have been doing this for some time with RSS Feeds and it has greatly changed the way we consume information, but making information consumption fore efficient.

There are at least three layers in this syndication model. The first is the information syndication layer, where information (or its abstraction and related metadata) are put into a feed. These feeds can then be aggregated with other feeds (similar to what del.icio.us provides (del.icio.us also provides a social software and sharing tool that can be helpful to share out personal tagged information and aggregations based on this bottom-up categorization (folksonomy). The next layer is the information aggregator or personalized portals, which is where people consume the information and choose whether they want to follow the links in the syndication to get more information.

There is little need to provide another personalized portal, but there is great need for information syndication. Just as people have learned with internet search, the information has to be structured properly. The model of information consumption relies on the information being found. Today information is often found through search and information aggregators and these trends seem to be the foundation of information use of tomorrow.

vanderwal.net RSS Feeds now Optimized and aggregated by FeedBurner

We are now providing a consolidated feed of the main blog RSS feed, our vanderwal del.icio.us feed, and vanderwal Flickr feed in one vanderwal.net Feedburner feed. You ask about the feed of our Quick Links? Currently, it is not included in the Feedburner feed, but we have optimized that active feed with Feedburner also at, vanderwal.net Quick Link FeedBurner feed.

If you like the feeds the way you have been getting them you can still do so. Lately the Quick Link and del.icio.us feeds are being updated more frequently as they take much less time to post to. These are just snippets of things I am interested in coming back to or have found of interest and have not found the time for a full blog entry.

We are considering replacing the Quick Links with our del.icio.us feed at some point in the not too distant future. Tell us what you think.

Quick Links in the Side Bar is not Optimal

Paul wants to "set up one of those link-sidebar thingies again" for his quick link list. Actually I am finding those the side link lists, like mine cause problems for folks tracking referrer links back and for search engines. Context of the links is helpful, but so is being able to find the date and page where these links came from. The way Paul is doing his quick links now works well. I was able to point directly to these links, the links he make have context, even if it is only a list of links.

Quite similar to the Fixing Permalink to Mean Something post the other day, the links in the side bar are temporary. I find links from Technorati back to my site from some poor soul looking for what comment and link vanderwal.net had placed. These links do not have a permalink as they are ever rotating. I have received a few e-mails asking where the link was from and if I was spamming in some way.

Why do I have the quick links? I don't have the time to do a full or even short write-up. I clear my tabbed browser windows and put the items I have not read in full in the Quick Links. Some things I want access to from my mobile device or work to read the info in full or make use of the information. Other things I want to keep track of and include in a write-up.

The other advantage of moving the quick links into the main content area is they would be easier to include in one aggregated feed. I know I can join my current feeds, but I like the sites that provide the feeds in the same context as they appear on the site as it eases the ability to find the information. This change will take a more than a five or ten minute fix for my site, but it is on my to do list.

Back and Digging Out

Coming back from six plus days of being untethered from the net I found I had 1117 unread RSS feeds. This is worse than my personal e-mail stack, which was just over 550 (I get to my work e-mail stack tomorrow, which averages about 80 e-mails per day). The RSS feeds really threw me as I was not expecting it to have snowballed like that.

There were a few things I was wanting to follow that I knew may pop their heads up while I was away so I followed these on my Treo 600 on Google News and del.icio.us aggregator. I was able to find most of what I was looking for and do a quick read and then e-mail an annotated link to one of my personal e-mail accounts. I did find some things on del.icio.us that I just copied into my del.icio.us bookmarks so I could come back to them later.

I got far less done on the writing front as my son was along for the vacation, which made it a real family vacation and not the usual working vacation with the laptop on my lap on the front porch when I am not playing in the waves. No, I would not say I am rested, but I do have more wonderful memories of a great summer get away. Our time schedules shifted to a 10 month-old's eating and sleeping schedule. When we drifted to our normal shore vacation schedule we had a cranky kid, which only took two days to convert to a vacation fully focused on the kid. We met many wonderful new people, stayed in a different B&B, and found a new restaurant to add to our favorites.

I am now ready for the last two days of the week and to start responding to e-mail tomorrow. I am also ready to tackle my writing assignments that are well over due. My laptop is also fully updated with OS and software updates that make it really sing, too bad Windows updates never make the machine perceivably faster.

Now Delicious

Time has been very thin of late. In the past six months or so started noticing an increasing number of links from del.icio.us and started pulling the feeds of some folks I like to follow their reading list into my site feed aggregator. I had about four or five del.icio.us feeds in my aggregator (meta aggregation of other's meta aggregations - MetaAg MetaAg). This past week I was taking medicine that tweaked by sleep patterns so I had some free awake time after midnight and I finally set up my own vanderwal del.icio.us feed.

I like having the ability to pull [meta] tags aggregations that others have used, like security, which is a great help during the day at work. I can also track some topics I keep finding myself at the periphery and ever more interested in as they tie to some personal projects.

I did consider something similar with Feedster, but it was down for updating recently when I had the tiny bit of time to fiddle with setting something up. By the way, Feedster is now Standards-based (not fully valid, but rather close) and it loads very quickly (most of the time).

Tantek Mulls Contact Info Updating

Tantek mulls a means to keep contact info upto date. This should be much easier than Tantek has made out. This could be as easy as publishing one's own vcard that is pointed to with RSS. When the vcard changes the RSS feed notifies the contact info repositories and they grab the vcard and update the repository's content. This is essentially pulling content information into the user's Personal InfoCloud. (Contact info updating and applications are a favorite subject of mine to mull over.)

Why vcard? It is a standard sharing structure that all contact information applications (repositories understand). Most of us have more than one contact repository: Outlook at work; Lotus Organizer on the workstation at home; Apple Address Book and Entourage on the laptop; Palm on the Cellphone PDA; and Addresses in iPod. All of these applications should synch and perfectly update each other (deleting and updating when needed), but they do not. Keeping vcard field names and order constant should permit the info to have corrective properties. The vCard RDF W3C specifications seem to layout existing standards that should be adopted for a centralized endeavor.

What not Plaxo? Plaxo is limited to applications I do not run everywhere (for their download version) and its Web version is impractical as when I need contact information I am most often not in front of a terminal, I am using a Treo or pulling the information out of my iPod.

While Tantek's solution is good and somewhat usable it is not universal as a vCard RDF would be with an application that pinged the XML file to check for an update daily or every few days.

Quick Link RSS Feed

We have added a Quick Link RSS Feed for this site. It is also available from the vanderwal.net XML page. Yes, the plethora of links there today are related to testing, well at least some of them.

Rael on Tech

Tech Review interviews Rael about rising tech trends and discusses alpha geeks. This interview touches on RSS, mobile devices, social networks, and much more.

RSS on PDAs and information reuse

Three times the past week I have run across folks mentioning Hand/RSS for Palm. This seems to fill the hole that AvantGo does not completely fill. Many of the information resources I find to be helpful/insightful have RSS feeds, but do not have a "mobile" version (more importantly the content is not made with standard (X)HTML validating markup with a malleable page layout that will work for desktop/laptop web browsers and smaller mobile screens).

I currently pull to scan then read content from 125 RSS feeds. Having these some of these feeds pulled and stored in my PDA would be a great help.

Another idea I have been playing with is to pull and convert RSS feeds for mobile browser access and use. This can be readily done with PHP. It seems that MobileRSS already does something like this.

Content, make that information in general, stored and presented in a format that is only usable in one device type or application is very short sighted. Information should be reusable to be more useful. Users copy and paste information into documents, todo lists, calendars, PDAs, e-mail, weblogs, text searchable data stores (databases, XML respositories, etc.), etc. Digital information from the early creation was about reusing the information. Putting text only in a graphic is foolish (AIGA websites need to learn this lesson) as is locking the information in a proprietary application or proprietary format.

The whole of the Personal Information Cloud, the rough cloud of information that the user has chosen to follow them so that it is available when they need that information is only usable if information is in an open format.

Bray's escaping for RSS

Tim Bray discusses escaping characters in RSS feeds

RSS offers Web content without a connection

I am happy that RSS changed by Web reading habits as the past to nights with limited Internet access I was able to crack open NetNewsWire and caught up on some reading from the 93 feeds I currently pull in. I have always been curious why some folks would post only titles of articles in RSS or RDF feeds and not even a short summary or teaser. Now this really frustrates me as I only could read titles, some which were intriguing and could have warranted me putting them in a "to read" status, but instead I ignored them and jumped to items that offered summaries or full content.

Tantek on handrolling weblogs and hand built CMS

Tantek discusses Jeffrey Zeldman handrolling his own RSS feeds (as well as his own site). Tantek also discusses those who still handroll their own weblogs as well as those that have built their own CMS to run their blogs. This was good to see that there are many other that still build their own and handroll (I stopped handrolling October 2001 when I implimented my own CMS that took advantage of a travel CMS I had built for myself).

Parse RSS even if it is wrong

Parse RSS at All Cost by Mark Pilgrim what is required to parse RSS properly. More importantly Mark points out that as more RSS feeds are created the feeds are being poorly created. Then Mark instructs how to build a parser that will be a little more forgiving of poor markup.

RSS feeds are very Clue Train friendly it seems

Not long after I posted my RSS disconnecting the creator and the user comments it started sinking in that it really does not matter. We it does to some part, but from a user's perspective the RSS allows a quicker more efficient method of scanning for information they have an interest in and easily see from one interface when new content has been written. I use other's blogs and digests to find information to post for my own reflection and to use as jumping boards to new ideas.

Yes, the interaction between creator and user is important, but it is not as important as getting informtion out. I began thinking that the whining about the lack of interaction on my part was rather selfish and very contrary to the focus I have for most information, which is having the abiltiy to access, digest, add to, or reformulate the information into another medium or presentation that will offer possibly better understanding.

I was self-taught in the values of the Clue Train so when I heard about it for the first time I was supprised so some large degree that the manifesto had resonance and turned on a light for many people, for myself and some others, I guess we drank the cool-aide early, as we thought this was the way things were or should be from the beginning of electronic information and a truely open community where information flows freely. Yes, the RSS/RDF/XML feed is a freer flow of information and puts the choice of the information consuption in the user's hands.