Idle Thoughts

As newspapers are beginning to shut down the world over, people have begun seriously considering the impact of a world without them. While many of the services provided by newspapers are replicated by bloggers and other new media entities, there is one service which is all but nonexistent in web-based news - investigative journalism.

News without investigative journalism is a dangerous prospect: investigation keeps people honest. If news came exclusively from bloggers whose verification procedures often involve nothing more than a quick web search, it would be a very simple operation to keep information from the public.

Seth Godin wrote an interesting post commenting that investigative journalism only makes up a fraction of the cost of producing a newspaper, and could be supported in the absense of the rest of the product. He suggests that it might be government funded as a public good, or as a not-for-profit entity.

Both of these suggestions trouble me greatly. Government funded media can easily turn into propaganda. I can’t think of a situation where I would consider it acceptable for a government to control, or have any influence in, the news. Even if started with the best of intentions, censoring the news would likely prove too tempting an offer to pass up in some situations - even the most honest of people have something to hide.

Not-for-profit news is a less threatening suggestion, but I see that it faces two problems. Firstly, it would forever be at the mercy of philanthropists or donors. While there may be no shortage of money for such a valuable service, I see any system dependent on others’ generosity unstable, and this in particular is far too important a service to leave up to chance.

On top of this, people can go to great lengths to cover up stories. For investigators to uncover them, no expense must be spared in their research. Profit-making enterprises have an enormous advantage in this area, as they must succeed in breaking news in order to maintain their existense. It is the single most important aspect of their production: new advertisers can be found, but if nobody’s reading, the paper goes under. Not-for-profit newspapers would continue to be supported regardless, as philanthropists and donors would consider them important, reducing their burden to produce valuable news.

It looks as though newspapers don’t have long left, but someone must find a way to make a profit from investigative journalism. Alternative methods of funding compromise its efficacy, and nothing in news is so important as effective investigation.

Wyatt Old Media

Any new technology will eventually have social elements arbitrarily grafted on, it’s the way of today’s web. To an extent, this makes sense; people are becoming more social, and want to share most of what they do online, but it’s important to consider the way in which social elements are implemented.

Social feed readers have been around for almost as long as RSS, usually allowing users of a particular feed reader to discuss a post amongst themselves. This isn’t a particularly user-friendly system of commenting because it isolates the commenters from the primary discussion - the one occuring on the blog. This brings me to my point:

Feed reader comments are implemented this way because it is almost impossible to integrate with blogs. Everyone uses a different commenting system, not all blogs provide a feed of comments or otherwise make their comments accessible, and none that I know of provide the ability to comment from a third party site.

Ideally, a feed reader would display all comments for a post, along with a comment form to allow the reader to join in without leaving the page. Unfortunately, for such a feed reader to ever become a reality, there would have to be no more than a few comment standards, preferably just one, used by the vast majority of sites.

This standardization of commenting systems is gradually becoming a reality with services like Disqus and IntenseDebate, but these offer no extended functionality; they would need to provide the ability to post comments from a third party site to enable such an idealized feed reader.

This may seem like a lot of trouble, and it is, but it would be very beneficial to all concerned. Users would be able to add their comments, and read others’, without having to visit every individual site, and blogs would gain more comments by feed subscribers, who are likely among their more devoted followers, adding value to their stories.

This isn’t likely to occur for some time yet, but it would only take one platform creating a standard to kick start the change. WordPress, I’m looking at you.

Wyatt APIs, Blogs, Feed Readers, RSS

I was just reading this post complaining about the overuse of the term “social media consultant”. And Michael is right, people are very eager to pronounce themselves thus, but I think there’s more to it than simple egotism or self-promotion, I think they have a point. I think his titular assertion is true, everyone is a social media consultant.

Promotion via social media isn’t terribly difficult - time consuming, but not difficult. As self-styled gurus say ad nauseam, the trick is to ‘join the conversation’. And that is the only trick. People don’t want to be advertised at, they want to interact with a company, and more importantly, with a person. They want help with their problems, but only when they ask for it. And they want help from someone they trust, so companies need to give themselves a face, a reputation. They should communicate for communication’s sake, even when it doesn’t help their business. Because it does help their business.

People tend to be puzzled by the fact that companies can’t work out how to use social media to their advantage, because it is so simple to anyone who uses it without an agenda, it doesn’t seem to be knowledge at all, but common sense.

If companies would just listen to someone, anyone, about how to interact with users, they would quickly learn how to properly leverage social media, because every one of us is a social media consultant.

Wyatt Marketing

It seems a week doesn’t go by without me hearing about a new microblogging service. Very likely, there are a dozen others I don’t hear about. But every time I see one I think, ‘haven’t we been through this before?’

It reminds me of the heyday of social networking sites, when every man and his dog would build a new site with a minor tweak in the hope that it would rise to the top. This culminated in the creation of Ning, a service designed to build such sites for you.

While some niche social networking sites have achieved modest success, for the most part, they don’t work, because it’s just too much trouble to maintain your identity across so many sites. Such services can easily be replicated within Facebook, for example, with a group or an applicaton on the Facebook Platform.

The need for niche microblogging sites, however, is even less apparent than the nonexistent one for niche social networking sites. With the exception of a few services (like Yammer, which is designed for corporate use, and Pownce, which allowed sharing of various media in conjunction with text, and is dead now anyway) these services are just Twitter clones centered around a particular topic.

There are all sorts of ways to handle this within Twitter. Hashtags allow messages to be tagged as relevant to a particular discussion. There are third party extensions which allow conversations to be tracked. Using another site is unnecessary, and any new service is going to have to rebuild its community.

Eventually, though, it’s going to come down to the fact that no-one is going to keep sending messages through multiple microblogs, because it is tiresome. Once people get past the novelty of all the different sites, they’re going to settle on one. And it’s going to be Twitter.

Wyatt Microblogging

It is an unwritten rule of social media that all sites must provide free access to their API. The theory goes that a user should have full control over their content and how it is displayed, since they were the ones who generated it in the first place.

For users, this is fantastic - they can access their content in any way they want.

For third parties, this is fantastic - they don’t have to build their own communities, instead tapping into thriving ones.

The trouble is, it cripples the initial service. The two cornerstones of startup monetization are advertising and premium features. Advertising is outright impossible - no-one’s going to use an API which delivers ads interspersed with the content. Features, while possible to build, will have to compete with the myriad third parties accessing your API, and generally providing their services for free.

The odd thing about this situation is that the answer is so obvious, and yet ignored - it doesn’t make sense to provide free access to your API - it’s a service companies would willingly pay for. Much more so than users for premium services, or for advertisers for ads.

While charging for API access would put a significant dent in the number of third party applications built on top of your service, it would mainly kill the weaker services, the ones which offer no real benefit to the user. If a service is truly useful, it should be able to build a business model around its offering.

Companies got into this mess because they were too considerate of providing a great service, at the expense of a business model. In fairness, it can be very beneficial to a company to provide a free API - more applications mean more features, and a happier user base. At some point, however, customer satisfaction must take a back seat to profit or the company ceases to be a company at all, but rather a charity.

Wyatt APIs

CES is killing me.

I subscribe to forty feeds. Most of them are social media or technology blogs, and every single one of them feels the need to help spread the word on the latest gadgets on display.

In the past two days, I’ve accumulated fifty nine posts about the Palm Pre. It’s a great phone, and I was very excited to read the first post. But that’s all I needed. The other fifty eight were, by and large, a waste of my time.

This is an extreme example, but it’s a problem I face constantly. Because all of the blogsI read report on similar industries, there is a good deal of overlap between them. It’s a problem, however, with a seemingly simple solution: a semantic feed reader.

There are a number of attempts to solve this problem, but they’re all overthinking it. Voting systems and other attempts at socializing the system are unnecessary - all that’s needed is keyword matching. After I read an article on a particular product or topic, all articles that come in within the next day or two on the same topic are filed away in a ‘more info’ archive, sorted by keyword.

This isn’t to say it would be an easy product to build, but far more complex semantic systems exist, so why not this one?

Please, somebody, build me a semantic feed reader!

Wyatt Feed Readers, RSS, Semantic Web