everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Yahoo hoovers the dark web

    Big news. Yahoo has quietly launched a beta service which allows you to use the Yahoo engine to search content that normally sits disaggregated behind proprietary subscription walls. Some of you may recall the old Northern Light service which attempted to do the same but never was able to convince the larger aggregators to play. KeepMedia tried the same model and hoped to use the clout of the Borders Books brand to bring the magazine publishers directly to the table but has since faded from view. When I last talked to representatives from KeepMedia, they were more interested in the potential of their service as a place to sell targeted ad inventory.

    This time it seems that the attractiveness of Yahoo’s collective query traffic was just too good to resist and they currently offer a unified search box for the FT, WSJ Online, Forrester, and more. Yahoo Search Blog says that the big aggregators Factiva, Gale, and Lexis-Nexis are on the way in the coming weeks as well. The Factiva and Gale collections have been open to non-subscriber queries for some time now via the Microsoft Office 2003 Marketplace but because it was hidden away in a little Research Pane off of Office 2003, it never had a chance to test the Free Search > Become a Subscriber to Read the Article, model at scale. Yahoo will now test that model in spades.

    Don’t misunderstand me. Yahoo Subscriptions will never replace the power and benefit of the specialized search interfaces that aggregators such as Factiva have built for their core customers. But Yahoo will introduce a whole new class of customers to the value of searchable, archived publications that have, to date, been mostly limited to the Information Professional.

    Gary Price brings up a good point and asks what will happen when a unified search of premium content and free web content presents the stark economic contrast of the $2.95/article vs. free on the web side by side in the same search results. Look for intense downward pressure between all three main aggregators as they fight to offer the most compelling package to attract these new subscribers. The New York Times already fired the first shot with their TimesSelect plan. The one vendor that can offer both the NY Times and WSJ as well as the rest of their collection for the best price will lock in the lion’s share of the revenue from the Yahoo channel. This price war will be great for the consumer but rip shreds from the margins of the aggregators as they try and come up with the most attractive pricing.

    You can be sure that Google will follow in Yahoo’s footsteps soon enough (while huming "anything you can do, I can do better") and maybe even MSN and Ask will play the game once the model has been established. All this activity is going to expose the aggregators to the full force of the wild and fickle world of internet consumer business models in which they have little experience.

    Right now it’s a dead heat between Factiva, LexisNexis, or Gale to win the race to be the primary benefactor of Yahoo’s consumer search engine traffic. My guess is that the winner will be the vendor that can offer the most comprehensive collection of content (unfortunately, meta-data is irrelevant for the keyword searches coming from the typical Yahoo searcher) with a subscription model that is both economically attractive and easy to purchase.

    Some things that will quickly put one of these vendors in the lead are:

    – integration with all major credit cards and PayPal. Bonus if you can tap into Yahoo’s Small Business billing system.
    – persistent URLs that allow bloggers to point to specific articles deep within the database. 
    – a sense of community. Build in screens to entice subscribers login and see things such as the most popular (linked and viewed) articles and other exclusive features.
    – strong relationships with content providers that allow flexibility with pricing. It will take some time to settle on a model that works for the consumer and is sustainable for both the aggregator and publisher.

    The race is on. May the vendor with the longest tail win!

    Additional commentary by:
    John Battelle
    Paid Content
    Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra
    John Blossom

  • Zuppa, good for the soul

    Zuppa (564 4th St, San Francisco, 415.777.5900), an Italian restaurant around the corner from the Six Apart office, opened its doors today. Ginevra has been following their progress closely as they transformed the grey, bunker-like structure into an airy SOMA enoteca. After chatting up the head chef (which she confessed that she had thought was the general contractor), she scored invites for the Six Aparters to come to their opening to sample their food. We were the first in the door and were encouraged to try all their dishes so we could give the kitchen a dry run.

    Wine was poured liberally and we availed ourselves of their menu which ran from smoked hams and salami to olives and mozerella. Everyone enjoyed the mussels in wild garlic, Jason’s wild beans & homemade pasta looked wonderful and I enjoyed a hearty meal of roast pork and beets.

    But the nicest thing about the evening was the time to chat away from the office with all my work mates. It was great to catch up on what everyone is up to and sit around a big long table like one big happy family. We really don’t do that enough and as the office gets bigger, it gets harder and harder to organize such gatherings. Thank you Ginevra for organizing and thank you Zuppa for hosting us and stuffing our bellies with such delicious food!

    Thanks to sis for the picture above. More photos of the evening over at Kokochi.

  • KRON TV blogger meetup

    On Saturday, I headed over to check out the KRON4 Blogger Meetup. I was not sure what to expect but who could turn down the offer of free food and interesting conversation? I think all of us there would agree that we would have liked to have more structure to the afternoon but KRON achieved its objective to introduce themselves as the first local TV station to "get it" and break down the wall between Big Media and the grassroots movement that local bloggers represent. Terry Heaton, the televsion consultant who launched the collaboration between bloggers and Nashville television station WKRN, is working with sister station KRON4 here in San Francisco to blend the hyper-local snippets of local bloggers into their news. Terry’s efforts in Nashville have resulted in the very well received, Nashville is Talking aggregator site,

    I think Terry summed up their motives best when he said, (I paraphrase) "We don’t want to dictate from above but support from underneath." KRON has already committed to building their own aggregator of local blogs and Terry said that KRON will be inviting selected bloggers on television to share their views of local events. If KRON follows the WKRN lead, we’ll see KRON supporting selected local bloggers with ads and sponsorship and more get togethers & conferences.

    My favortite comment of the afternoon? Being introduced by Terry to the General Manager of KRON, Mark Antonitis, "Hey Mark, here’s Six Apart, these guys are like the NTSC of the blogging world."

    Flickr Photo Set

    KRON News Story

  • GPS Moblogging, another first

    Two years ago, my sister was moblogging with full GPS support (click Location Info) in Japan on Tokyo Tidbits. Now, a full two years later, her boyfriend has cobbled together several services and a bluetooth-enabled GPS device which talks to her Nokia 7610 phone to do the same thing.

    Ah progress.

  • TypePad Enhancements

    Everything TypePad gives a taste of some of the cool new features coming down the pike for all you TypePad users out there. Comment & TrackBack Moderation, TypeKey Integration, and the ability (this one’s for you Buzz!) to select the format of TypePad’s comment notification email messages.

  • Grokker & Data Visualizaiton

    I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a sucker for whiz bang tools that change the way we look at things. When it comes to search, I’m always on the lookout for a better way to scan a text listing of search results. While there have been many attempts at this (remember some of the early data viz attempts by Alta Vista?) I always ended up going back to relevance ranked text search results. Nothing can really beat the speed with which the mind can process text on a page.

    Grokker.com is the latest attempt to make searching more efficient through the use of data visualization. They’ve been around for a while with a client side version of their graphical user interface and they’ve been showing off their front end to Yahoo Search since early May. After being reminded of Grokker by a post from Steve Goldstein, I thought I’d give it another whirl.

    Conclusion? After 10 minutes of playing around and trying out different searches I’m not convinced that this is going to bring any extra value for me. I think that a generic search does not lend itself well to this type of presentation. The clumping of similar results into a sphere that you can explore may be helpful if you’re searching on a really broad concept (i.e. "polish") and do not know where to begin but as soon as you have a set of results focused enough to scan through them, the visual representation breaks down and is less efficient than plain text. Grokker tries to overcome this with the text preview box but the slight time delay makes it more frustrating than effective.

    I am usually pretty tuned in to how I want to search on something and how to construct that search. Call me an old command line guy but I know better than to search on a single, ambiguous word and expect results that will be relevant. It’s much better for me to try out a couple of examples with liberal use of the browser’s back button than to wait for an AI program to "grok" my result set for me.

    This is not to say that data visualization is all fluff – it can be very powerful  when applied in specific situations. I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte and all the great work being done around the Google Maps API in combination with other data overlays (real estate listings, crime in Chicago) is clearly preferable to a text representation of the same data. Likewise, Blogpulse is trying to represent blog posts over time which is a great initial step towards representing  search results over time. In each of these cases, the application of data visualization is effective because the data is already focused enough so that the graphical representation of that data is effective. In general search, there are too many questions about the base data that undermine the impact of the graphical presentation to make such an interface an effective way to navigate search results.

  • NYT puts their best behind a gate

    TimesSelect, a new package being launched by nytimes.com in September, will restrict access to some of the best known columnists to only those with a subscription key. For either $49.95/year or free with a home-delivery subscription to the print newspaper, readers will get an account to TimesSelect which will give them unfettered access to the likes of Krugman, Friedman, and Dowd.

    It’ll be interesting to see if keeping these writers behind the subscription wall will lead to a drop off of references to their material on blogs and, as some claim, a drop off in their ability to set the agenda for the day.

    Perhaps. In an interview on paidcontent.org, Martin Niesenholtz says their looking to also launch an affiliate network of sorts to drive people to nytimes.com and hopefully sign up for a subscription of their own.

    We also hope to roll out an affiliate program so the long tail can create a revenue stream for itself. If you’re a blogger who uses a lot of Times Op-Ed content in your blog you can continue to (by subscribing to TimesSelect)… and, through an affiliate network, extend that to their base and they can make money on the backend off that. We think the blogosphere needs more revenue streams.”

    It’ll be a delicate balance but if they do it right, they might be able to recreate that economic model that works so well for them in print. One reason to get a paper such as the New York Times is to get their editorial perspective on the events of the day and share them as a point of reference If you’re a blogger that enjoys amplifying these perspectives to your readers and drive your readers to also sign up for the online edition or home-delivery, then you should be able to subsidize your own subscription.

    It remains to be seen if the demographics of their readership is still right for this balance to play out online. Is a Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd enough of a draw or has the curve shifted to the point where people are already drawn away towards some of the newer writers of the day that are not going to be drawing a paycheck from an established brand.

    This September the wall will go up and we’ll see if the Times’ magnetic pull can draw others inside and make it a sustainable business for the Times and its affiliates.

    Opinion pieces have their most value immediately after they’re published (when the piece is fresh and original) for about a day or two and then once again, several months later, when they serve as a a useful reference point for historical perspective. These same pieces have their least value in the in the time between, say after they’re a few days old until 3 months out.

    Restricting access during the period when these pieces are the most valuable will drive subscriptions to TimesSelect. It makes less sense to keep these pieces under lock and key throughout the time when people are mildly curious to see what all the fuss is about and have the time to sample a frequently referenced article without having to commit to an annual subscription. I would prefer to see the program re-jigged so that TimesSelect members get first dibs on grokking the perspective of the day but after 48 hours the doors are open for any and all up until the 3 month mark when they drop back to a view which restricts non-subscribers to only the first few paragraphs.

    This new system would allow nytimes.com to extract maximum value from the work of their best authors (in order to keep their far-flung bureaus open for business) while also providing grist for the bloggers and general public to amplify and discuss stories in the public realm for a good three months. Open access to popular pieces for a three month period would help move low cost advertising inventory and allow for the fence-sitters to properly experience the quality of the Times’ news stream should they later decide they want to get access to this stuff prior the 48 hour embargo for non-subscribers.

    Call it Kennedy’s Rolling Window of news & perspective. The cheap seats only let you see what’s directly in front of the window while subscribers get to see not only what’s coming down the pike but also dig back and review what’s gone by. Each time you see a story fly by that you wish you could have read sooner or wanted to read later, you’ll be fingering your credit card and thinking about the value of that $49.95 subscription.

  • Six Apart is Hiring

    We’re looking for someone local (San Francisco) to help out with some of the volume of inquiries (seems like everyone wants to know what a blog is these days. . . ) we’re getting. Interested parties, click here for the listing.

  • Favorable Review of TypePad

    The Associated Press has done a review of several hosted weblog services including Microsoft’s Spaces and the recently launched Yahoo 360. TypePad comes out on top,

    Unfortunately, none of the five free or semi-free services satisfies
    me fully, and which one you choose depends on the specific features you
    value most.

    To get them all, you must pay at least $4.95 a month to subscribe to TypePad. It pretty much has everything I could ask for. . .

    Full text of the review here.