everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2004

  • Google as a Gateway

    Adam Penenberg writes in Wired that there is a very real financial incentive for the NYT web site to continue to hide its stories behind a subscription wall. A $20 million/year all-you-can-eat royalty agreement with Lexis-Nexis is an awfully hard arrangement to tear up. John Battelle noodles on this idea a bit more and ponders when the attraction of differentiated revenue from individuals, finding stories on their own via Google and other search engines, will outweigh the guaranteed revenue stream from L-N. He also adds:

    What revenue stream accounts for the lion’s share of search’s margin? Advertising. That’s a one legged stool ready to tip over. As the search giants become more and more media companies, they must develop subscription services, and because users won’t want to pay for something they already believe is free (searching) search engines will have to figure out a way to become middlemen to paid content. After all, they own distribution, so they should become…distributors. Were they to execute this service in a scaled and elegant fashion, it might be viewed as a benefit – in many cases, subscribers will get more content for less than they were paying in the past (that’s the benefit of volume).

    Searching for the New York Times – Wired

    Google as a portal to premium content? Haven’t we been there before? One comment to John’s post points out that this has been AOL’s model for the past 10 years. Yahoo has continually tried to push premium services and could easily bundle in targeted content. Northern Light also blazed this trail but flamed out after a failure to bring together enough content.

    There are many ways to get to content and Google is the current flavor of the month. Of greater demand is having a single account that aggregates access fees to each site for a reasonable monthly fee. Why pay nytimes.com and wsj.com separately when you’d rather pay a single bill for unfettered access to these sites and more? Yes, Google has the distribution network but PayPal or American Express might be a better player for a unified subscription account. After setting up unified subscription fees, the next step is working with each of the major content vendors on feeding RSS feeds of their content to the major search engine vendors so that their content begins to move up in the rankings. Portions of the proceeds of the subscription fees could then go to each of the search engine vendors, paid out as a proportion of the amount of traffic they drive to the payment vendor for signup. $40/month sounds about right – we’ll call it a “global media press pass.”

    UPDATE: Cory cuts to the chase

    The NYT’s registration system and expiring pages have doomed them to google-obscurity. Wired News argues that they’ve gone from being the paper of record to a Web-era irrelevancy, and all to protect a Lexis-Nexis agreement and to bring in two to three percent of the digital division’s profits.

    Unlinkable NYT doomed to google-obscurity – boingboing

  • Little “t”

    Encho-sensei

    I’m in Tokyo for the week catching up with the family who has been here for the past month and a half. Earlier in the year, Izumi negotiated with a local kindergarten to see if we could send Tyler (5) to their school for June and July while Japanese schools are still session. I had gone to a Japanese kindergarten when I was Tyler’s age and it did a world of good for my ability to pronounce Japanese so the logic was that it would help Tyler as well.

    To a large part, it’s been successful. Tyler has fit right in and learned a little Japanese to boot. I’ll post pictures when I return and can upload them from my camera. He’s off today for a two night trip to the mountains to pick blueberries with his classmates which is a wonderful way to finish out his experience.

    The school is affiliated with a Christian church in Denenchofu, about 15 minutes away by car. For the past two mornings, I’ve been walking Tyler to school after getting dropped off halfway by Izumi’s mom on her way to work. Tyler leads the way, explaining all the things he sees on the way to school. As we approached the school on Monday, he pointed down the road to his school, signposted by the, little “t” as he described it. It took a while for me to figure out what he was talking about but then I saw it. The little “t” he was talking about was the Cross, up on top of the building. I had internalized the symbol so much I didn’t see it for what it is, a little “t.”

    Tyler with his Japanese school teacher

  • Gary interviews Gary

    I’m on a plane to Tokyo for a week of time with the family but wanted to post links to a conversation between Gary Price and Gary Flake, Principal Scientist & Head of Yahoo! Research Labs so that I can read it later.

    Part One
    Part Two
    Part Three

  • Rip-cord

    Today I announced my resignation from Factiva. I’ve been contemplating a move for several months now and the starts aligned in such a way to open up a door for me (thanks Mie!) at Six Apart, the folks who put out the software that allows me to create this site. I’ve had a good run with Factiva, starting in 1996 with a stint at Dow Jones based in Tokyo, the birth of a Factiva, relocation to the Princeton headquarters, and a two year run at managing the flagship product, Factiva.com. Everytime things got a little boring, Factiva always managed to find something interesting for me to sink my teeth into. A lot of thinking went into this decision and it’s become clear to me in this process that an incremental change of job title is not enough and it’s really time for me to shift gears and jump into a new company.

    I made the decision last night to accept Six Apart’s offer and while waiting for my boss to get off the phone so I could tell him of my decision, I strolled down to the credit union to close my account. I was grilled by the teller there for my reason’s to close down the account:

    “Why do you need to close your account?”

    “I’m transferring (me not wanting to break the news before telling my boss)”

    “A lot of people keep their accounts even if they are located elsewhere”

    “I’m, err, actually transferring to another company.”

    “That’s ok, you can even get your new company to deposit their paychecks here, I just want to inform you of your options.”

    “Um, that’s ok, I’m actually going to be quite far away.”

    “That’s not a problem, we have electronic. . .”

    “No, really, that’s not necessary. I just want to close out the account. . . “

    “OK then, but you know there’s a $5 charge to close your account. Good luck to you.”

    Today was a day of telling selective people the news – after the first few, it became easier and easier to broach the topic. I feel like a skydiver who has just pulled the rip-cord and now am reaching terminal velocity for what I hope will be a safe landing – GERONIMO!

  • Tyler’s Dinosaur

    Tyler’s Dinosaur

    Three things came together to bring this picture online.

    • Tyler had the idea to draw a picture of a dinosaur
    • my parents had to buy a digital camera
    • my parents had to learn how to upload & email a photo

    Success!

  • Lego Spiderman

    Last weekend Dav mentioned that he was so impressed with the quality of the animation these days that he thinks we’ll see animation films will represent a greater percentage of movies released each year. Once you have the models done, much of your upfront costs go down. No actor’s strikes to deal with either.

    In what can only be called a milestone for “brickfilms,” stop action films based on Lego characters, BoingBoing.net points to this amazing rendition of Spiderman 2.

  • San Francisco for the weekend

    With the family away it seemed like a good time to get away for a quick trip out to the left coast for the long weekend. Beautiful weather, fun times, and random photos from the weekend.

  • Oops!

    The New York Post jumped the gun on their morning edition and picked the wrong horse for the Democratic Vice Presidential nomination on their cover story. The offending file was quickly removed from their web site but not soon enough for Reuters to pick it up and get a comment from the Post’s rival across town, the Daily News.

    Media sources said the News sent a case of champagne to Post editors and a note, “Congratulations on your front page. Have a nice day,” with a smiley face. The barb refers to a Post advertisement near the Daily News building showing improved circulation figures, with the words “have a nice day” and smiley face

    Meanwhile, my sources in the Blogsphere scooped the popular media with this mention on a US Airways forum:

    John Kerry”s 757 was in hgr 4 pit tonight John Edwards vp decals were being put on engine cowlings and upper fuselage. :up:

    I think there was a story on how the AOL Time Warner merger almost broke early because someone in the copy shop that printed up the signs for the press announcement almost leaked the story to the press. It was squelched but only just in time.

    How rumor becomes reality – some operations are better at fact-checking than others.

  • The Independent on Search

    Charles Arthur, who writes for the UK paper, The Independent puts the Search conundrum in plain English,

    Yet it’s strange that it’s a lot easier to find something on the web than on my desk; and easier to find something on the web than on my computer. You would think one would store the things that are most important in the closest, most accessible locations; after all, you don’t leave your wallet and car keys at the bottom of an unlit stairwell locked in a safe while keeping your entire wardrobe within arm’s length.

    Instead, Google, halfway around the world, is the default for a lot of the horsework, looking up phone numbers, checking facts, finding references…. But why do we let computers make our lives hard for us? Partly because we”ve let them remain stupid. The graphical user interface, with its metaphors of “files and folder and desktop”, has remained unchanged since 1983 when Apple introduced it with the Lisa. . .

    I believe it was Bill Gates who once admonished his developers that it was ridiculous that it took longer to find a file on a local hard disk through Windows than it did to find a document among billions on the open web via Google. This became the rallying cause behind including a SQL based file system for Longhorn.