Archive for March, 2006

This blog will likely be inactive during the next week while I’m on vacation — unless there’s an Internet connection where we’re staying and my blogging addiction can’t be resisted. Back in April.

I worry about local retailers. Already, physical music stores are disappearing. What’s next?

Yesterday I went into my local Best Buy, looking for a digital camcorder after doing considerable research online; I knew exactly what I wanted. The store had the model, priced at $599. I thought that was odd, since the Best Buy website sells it for $540. When I pointed this out, the sales guy said the store would match the online price.

Of course, even that’s too much to pay in these days of online comparison shopping. A Shopzilla search revealed other online retailers selling the camcorder for as low as $444 (from a “BizRate Certified” seller). I’ll buy online, though I’d be willing to pay a little bit more to buy locally and support the local tax base and local jobs — but not that much.

I walked out of the store wondering how soon that salesman’s job will disappear.

A short while back I mentioned a Pew study about online news, on which I’d gotten a partial preview that included information about website user-registration habits. The full report came out last week, so I plucked out what little additional data there was about registration.

Overall, 45% of Internet users say they have filled out a website user-registration form in order to view free content. Of those Internet users who say that they have ever gone online to get news and information, 53% say they have registered at a website. (Numbers are a few points higher for broadband users vs. all Internet users.)

First, that’s a huge portion of the online population that won’t register to get free information. That should tell news publishers that they’re missing a lot of traffic if they’re still using mandatory user registration on their websites. (I’m not anti-registration; I am pro-voluntary user registration.)

Second, there was no information in this Pew study about the accuracy of the registration data that people submit. If 53% of online news consumers do fill out registration requests, what percentage of that data is accurate? … Won’t someone, PLEASE, study this?!

Old-media thinking drives me nuts. Case in point: I just read an article that’ll run in Sunday’s New York Times, “Cubicle Dwellers’ Funniest Home Video.” (Here’s the link to the story, but you’ll need a TimesSelect paid account to read it before Sunday.) The piece talks about all the fun viral videos floating around the Internet, and mentions several specifically.

But guess what?! From the NYT piece, you can’t click to see the amateur videos. The article just points to sites like YouTube and iFilm. I guess you’re supposed to go there and search yourself.

Now, I respect the NYT Web operation greatly. I’ve been a judge in online journalism competitions many times, and voted for NYTimes.com content and the site as winners multiple times. But I find stuff like this to be so lame.

Yeah, I “understand” the thinking behind not linking off-site. But that’s “so 1990s” thinking. Just link directly to the YouTube or iFilm or whatever page that hosts the video on a story like this. It’s just silly not to offer readers that convenience.

I think this is a cool story, and I’ve been meaning to tell it. So here goes. Below is the corporate logo for my new company (which serves people who are passionate about their sports). It was designed by a medical doctor in Turkey.

The Enthusiast Group (EG) is building a bunch of websites, and for each of them we’re working with graphic designers. The corporate logo is less important, because most of our users won’t interact with the parent company. So we didn’t want to spend a ton of money on the logo. We wanted something simple; corporate looking, but not too formal.

We decided to put up a bid for this job on Design Outpost, a very cool service where graphic designers compete for jobs that clients post there. Client agrees to pay a modest fee, and designers post design sketches during the bidding period. When the client selects a winner, the designer produces final artwork.

I’m happy with what came out of that unusual process. But mostly I was surprised to learn that our winning designer is a medical doctor practicing in Turkey, who happens to love design, is good at it and does it as a (paying) hobby. What a cool world we live in where this kind of thing is now commonplace.

New West has announced a new round of financing, and leading it is a name familiar in the world of television but less so in the Internet world: Maury Povich. TV celebrity Povich is a landowner in Montana, and New West, an online media operation with presences in towns throughout the Rocky Mountain West, is headquartered in Missoula, Montana. Also in on the round are Boulder-based venture capitalist Brad Feld and John Connors, Montana native and former CFO of Microsoft (and now a VC in Seattle).

New West founder Jonathan Weber (who was visiting us here in Boulder this week) expressed his happiness on his website: “Raising money is never easy, and raising money for journalism-oriented projects can be particularly challenging, but today I’m delighted to report that we have closed the deal.”

New West “features original reportage, analysis and commentary on a wide range of topics that are central to life in the Rocky Mountain West, and enables anyone to contribute stories and photos and be a part of the conversation.” The company was formed in early 2005 by Weber, who was co-founder and editor of the Industry Standard. The company’s future plans include conferences and events, specialty publications both online and offline, custom publishing, and a regional print magazine. The company also has an indoor advertising business called Boomtown Ads.

This is one of those nice developments that brings hope for independent online news publishing.

I’m guessing that most people younger than me won’t get this joke. (Launches a video clip.)

Is this lonely kitty skit the next big viral video? Jon Fine thinks maybe. Could be; it’s bizarre and had me laughing out loud.

In recent days I’ve been seeing some pushback on the whole amateur-video/YouTube phenomenon. It’s mostly a bunch of crap, the argument goes; we’ll get tired of this eventually and go back to watching professionally produced video.

I don’t think so. Lonely kitty is the kind of stuff that people will be watching at their desks when the boss isn’t around, and discussing at coffee breaks and lunch. This trend is not about watching a bunch of worthless video clips, but about the very best of them climbing to the “top of the charts.”

What the critics probably don’t want to admit is that a couple creative college kids can sometimes come up with something that is just as good if not better than a professionally produced skit like “Lazy Sunday.” … Long live the viral-amateur-video trend.

Nick Denton’s Gawker blogging empire has some new office space in Manhattan. As reported by New York Magazine, Denton rented a storefront on Crosby Street. Gawker HQ is set to open next week.

The space, according to NYM: “A plate-glass window will let passersby view the bloggers a-blogging, there won’t be cubicles, there will be sofas, and the walls will be green. … Denton’s fantasy seems to be a sort of ersatz nineteenth-century newsroom, where readers can gossip in person instead of merely e-mailing from their Gmail accounts.”

Denton was kind enough to e-mail me some photos …

Here’s an interesting observation (admittedly anecdotal). I use Gmail, and you’ll find Google contextual text ads in individual-message view; they’re in the right column. Also on the main-inbox view as well as individual-message view are “Web Clips,” which are links to related stories, with the occasional contextual ad thrown into the rotation. It’s common to see a Web Clip be an ad in individual-message view.

I keep noticing that the top Web Clip ads catch my attention. Because they are about the topic of the message I’m reading, the ads are relevant and I often click them. The other day a colleague sent me a note about a recommended video camera — and the Web Clip ad was a retailer selling that model. I clicked the ad to find out how much the unit cost.

Now, the Google text ads in the right column of my e-mail I scarcely look at. My brain is trained to ignore that part of the page because I know that those are ads. But the top-of-page ads register and get acted on.

This fits with my past experience doing eyetracking studies. (I was project manager of Poynter’s Eyetrack III study.) People avert their gaze from things that look like ads, and the right side of a page typically doesn’t get much action. There’s a lesson here for those using Google AdSense.