Archive for June, 2006

This week I posted an ad on the Denver Craigslist looking for some part-time contract marketing help. I must say, I’m impressed with the response I received — 21 so far, which I’ve whittled down to seven candidates that look very promising. The bulk of the responses came in within 24 hours, with a few stragglers within two days.

I was quoted by a reporter recently, on a story about Craigslist’s expansion, as saying, “Newspaper classifieds are dead to me” personally. When I need something, it’s now typical that Craigslist meets my needs well; I don’t need to explore other alternatives like (paid) newspaper advertising. That Craigslist ads are free is a bonus, but I’d gladly pay Craigslist a reasonable fee because I know I’ll get a good outcome from placing an ad on the Denver site. (The prospect of Craigslist charging for anything but a tiny number of categories is extremely remote.)

Anyway, the point is that Craigslist works well, and continues to work well. I often hear from naysayers that because the site is free, categories get so overrun with junk that the site doesn’t have the quality of newspaper classifieds. Sorry, but I don’t see evidence of a problem yet — and the Denver site is very busy and popular.

An amusing aside: Reading through resumes is sometimes good for a chuckle. There was the applicant who got so detailed in the Education section that she described her graduation — from elementary school.

A combination of too much work plus computer problems (old PC acting up, and now making the transition to a new laptop) has left no time for blogging, hence the inactivity here in the last week.

So for now, I’ll just point you to my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, “How to Make Your Website More Conversational.” I offer a bunch of advice and tips about how to get your readers more involved in media sites — to write more comments, submit more content, etc. I hope you find it worthwhile.

Craigslist added another 100 cities this week, bringing the total coverage for the free-classifieds company to around 300 cities. Craig & company are, in the U.S., getting down to smaller communities now.

This means that a new wave of newspaper publishers now get to freak out about the Craigslist threat to their classifieds business model. I got a call from a reporter at the Roanoke (Virginia) Times today, wondering what might happen now that Craigslist has arrived there. I was impressed that the Times was willing to assign a story about Craigslist’s local entry; some newspapers prefer not to give Craig any publicity.

As I told the reporter, a new Craigslist in a community will take some time to build a user base, so immediate panic isn’t called for. But if and when Craigslist does catch on, then the local newspapers need to adapt. More free ads for certain categories is an obvious logical reaction, with money coming from premium upsells to free ads and contextual paid advertising surrounding the free classifieds.

Thinking of my own behavior, I told the reporter, “Newspaper classifieds are now dead to me.” That is, when I have something to sell or buy (up to and including cars), I no longer even think about my local newspaper classifieds. Craigslist in my market (Denver-Boulder, Colorado) is so widely used and works so well — at least, it has for me, multiple times — that I no longer need newspaper classifieds. They’ve been replaced by something that works better.

Apparently this is a common occurrence. A friend today repeated what happened to me earlier this year. The domain on one of her websites expired, because her spam filter was intercepting the notices sent by her domain hosting company and she didn’t realize that she needed to renew.

My situation wasn’t that bad; while one of my domains did expire, no one else tried to grab it and I simply paid the bill and was back in business after only a day of interrupted e-mail. My friend fared a bit worse: a domain squatter appeared to have grabbed her domain the moment it expired (today). Fortunately, paying her bill got her back in business. Still, seeing another company’s content on your domain is a scary thing.

Lesson: Don’t rely on e-mail reminders from your domain hosts. Compile expirations on all your domains and set up automatic calendar reminders to renew a few weeks before the dates. Or at least set up “whitelist” filters to allow all mail from your hosting company.

We’re trying something new on YourMTB.com: It’s this contest promotion done in conjunction with Spenco Cycling. The idea is that Spenco and YourMTB.com are giving away 10 pairs of the company’s new mountain biking gloves to registered users of YourMTB.com. To get the gloves, our users have to be among the first 10 people to post a note about why they need or deserve them, and they must agree to post a product review of the gloves on YourMTB.com after they’ve had some time to use them.

I think it’s great that Spenco was willing to give this a try. (We came up with the idea and pitched it to them.) They’ll get 10 honest reviews of their product. So there’s some risk that they could get a bad review. And if one of the glove recipients posts a negative review, Spenco has agreed not to ask us to take it down.

I really like this form of marketing. A handful of bikers are happy about getting a free product; the company gets some testimonials that it can use. We’ll see how this turns out, but I suspect the risk of a bad experience for Spenco is small. If a company has a good product and has faith in it, then it should be safe to seek consumer reviews. If your product sucks, well, then don’t try this.

This is an experiment, but I’d like to do more of these. We’ll see how it goes!

New York Times star columnist Thomas Friedman was interviewed at the Webby Awards for Mediabistro.com. Check out what he says about TimesSelect, the paid service of NYTimes.com that puts his popular column behind a paid subscription wall.

The short version: “I hate it.” Longer version: Watch the video.

I’ve long been a fan of animated editorial cartoons — but there are so few of them. The great Mark Fiore stands out as the best still, in my view. But there are indications that a new wave of animated editorial cartoons is coming.

A new entrant is Mike Shelton of the Orange County Register in California. He just started doing animated cartoons and has posted a few.

I can’t say that they do much for me. Shelton’s still editorial cartoons seem wittier and more powerful than his first animated attempts (though I’m no fan of his punch lines, which take a right-wing stance). I suspect that’s an indication that animated cartoons are not easy to pull off well.

I really like this quote, spotted in the MediaPost Video Insider column, “Four Ways to Improve Your Online Video Ads“:

“The thing to realize is, interactivity is not just the icing on the cake when you’re dealing with the Web — it is the cake. People watch TV, but they use the Internet.”

I’d have to say that this is the premise upon which my new company is being built.

(And BTW, a decent corporate site is coming soon. We’ve been focusing on the company’s public sites, like YourMTB.com, so EnthusiastGroup.com hasn’t gotten designed yet. Soon.)

I have to say, I don’t really get it with MySpace. Why is it SO popular? It doesn’t seem deserving of its millions and millions of users. No, I’m not talking about why its brand of social networking is a hit. I get that. It’s just that MySpace seems so, well, lame in many ways.

I went to the site yesterday and had forgotten my password. Asked the site to send me my password, then waited … and waited … and it finally showed up an hour later. Most competent sites manage to fulfill a password request in seconds, not minutes. … And on the e-mail containing my password was this footer:

©2003 MySpace.com. All Rights Reserved.

Umm, this is a site that Rupert Murdoch paid more than a half billion dollars to acquire and it can’t even do basic stuff right like get the correct year?

More MySpace irritations from when I’ve used the site: 1. Content and ad blocks that fairly regularly show up blank (probably due to overloaded servers); 2. the flashing banner ads that go on your personal page by default; 3. the difficulty in finding other people you know (I find its search functionality to be really poor); and 4. how many users’ profile pages extend wider than normal screen width.

Most of my complaints are stuff you might expect from a small beta site. How does MySpace get away with such poor performance and quality control while still succeeding? I don’t get it.

Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a great interview with technologist/journalist (and all-around smart guy) Adrian Holovaty of Washingtonpost.com. Good reading.

A favorite exchange from the Niles-Holovaty interview:

OJR: “Journalism’s always been a competitive business. But what technical initiatives should news organizations be cooperating on? What opportunities, if any, is the industry missing when companies don’t work together?”

Holovaty: “I think news organizations should cooperate on removing mandatory Web-site registration walls, which are severely reader-unfriendly. It’s embarrassing to be associated with an industry that treats its customers with such disdain.”

Exactly right, Adrian!