Entries Tagged 'Web/Tech' ↓

Hey, did you know that I have 56 videos on YouTube for you to peruse and point and laugh at. Most of them are original content, too.

My comment spam has gotten more voluminous of late, but much more entertaining.

I just bought a membership to Media Bistro’s AvantGuild, which made me realize how few websites I actually am willing to pay for. I’ve paid to be a member of DavidLynch.com, and was a TypePad customer for years. Other than those two things, and the AvantGuild, the only other premium web service I pay for is Flickr Pro. What about you? What web content or service do you pony up dough for?

Bonus question: Have you ever “tipped” a blogger using one of their presumptuous “donate here” options?

I miss Twittering, and I want to go back. I’ve been trying to log in for two days. No luck yet. The front page loads fine, but after entering my email and password, I get endless loading.

I can’t even go there anymore. I can’t look, it’s one of the slowest, bloodiest deaths I’ve ever been privy to. It hurts to look. I finally did it. I unsubscribed.

I shouldn’t be sad about that, but I am.

EDITED TO ADD: This bit from Newscoma is a good way to sum up my feelings:

What I know I experienced and that I think others did was grief.

Grief that NiT will never be what it was when folks got involved. Grief that something beloved (or in some cases with certain bloggers let’s just say not beloved) was going to be different. Grief that something that was so transparent and filled with vitality that at times it was almost too raw was going to be different. Grief has many faces, and it’s not about death, it’s about loss.

LAST UPDATE, I SWEAR: Will you local bloggers be adding yourselves to the roll of the NewNashvilleIsTalking? (cue old man voice: Back in my day, we scoured the web and wrangled blog URLs by ourselves up a hill both ways. And we liked it!)

Sorry, Andrew, but that is “the price you pay to have an alternative to the Tennessean.” If you want to continue to read their content, you’re going to have to put up with it.

What’s that? You don’t want to read their content that badly? That’s what I figured.

So, do you think the Whole Foods CEO might go to jail for anonymously attempting to influence the price of Wild Oats’ stock, only to later buy the company?

There is much discussion of the evolution of Nashville Is Talking, which looks to be going the way of the Dodo. I have no stake in the site anymore, so frankly I couldn’t care less what happens to it, so long as the archives are still available. If they take all my hard work down off the web, I’m going to be pissed off. Anyway, this local “blog coach,” who is going to get ego elbow from patting himself on the back all the time, says WKRN’s foray into the world of blogging was a failure. Well, what he’s really saying is “WKRN failed to meet my goals with their project, therefore they failed.” But the creator of the NIT project schools Bill on precisely why that blog was begun:

[W]hen NiT was created I can tell you it was launched with altruistic motives and not to make a fast buck for WKRN. I bought into Terry Heaton’s vision of using the station’s resources to create a meeting place for local bloggers that could eventually lead to an ad network that both the station and the bloggers could profit from. This is why you saw no ads on NiT to start. It was supposed to be a stand alone blog, not a promotional tool for the station and that’s why a local blogger was hired to run it and not someone in news or promotion. Her orders were simple: No ‘F Bombs’ and no porn. Otherwise write it like a blog. Her placement in the newsroom was intentional so she could see how the newsroom functions, warts and all and the newsroom benefited from having her there.

At its height there were twenty three separate blogs originating out of that newsroom and Brittney was the catalyst. There were news stories generated from blogs Brittney highlighted on NiT and eventually led to her semi-regular Friday on-air wrap ups of what Nashville’s Talking about. NiT was never about ROI’s or driving ratings to WKRN even though the latter would have been welcomed. It was about moving into the Media 2.0 world and finding ways of engaging an audience that didn’t think about watching a local newscast. We sponsored blog meet-ups where new friendships were forged and conducted classes just for bloggers on shooting and editing video. This really was the station reaching out in a unique way to the local community.

To people like Bill Hobbs, and perhaps the City Paper since they hired him, altruism and community building are “failures.” Because NIT didn’t pay for itself, it was a waste. I couldn’t disagree more. This is a myopic view, and one I think is being taken on by upper-management at WKRN, unfortunately. Good, authentic sites like NIT take time to show a monetary return, especially when pure greed isn’t the ultimate driving force.

Hobbs likes to tout his clients’ hits as something “out-of-the-box.” Frankly, I’m not sure he knows what that term means. He has a history of misprepresenting his own traffic numbers, something he at least admitted to after being called out for it. Taking a look at the City Paper’s blog stats shows nothing substantial for a site getting linked by local bloggers all over due to their debut. Those hits are sure to slack off in a big way. In fact, in addition to the inaccuracy of my job history, Bills Hobbs has overestimated the hit count of the City Paper blogs on the 6th of this month by 50%. He says, “The City Paper’s Nashville City Blogs have, combined, achieved 30 percent of the page-views of NashvilleIsTalking.com today, although the Nashville City Blogs are just a week old, and NiT is more than a year old.” This, according to publicly available stats, is a lie. Here’s the math comparing hits on 7/6:

565/3368=16.7%

Might I remind everyone that in Hobbs’ inflated percentage report he is comparing ALL of the City Paper blog hits to ONE of WKRN’s blogs hits? So, not only is the comparison completely unfair, it is completely wrong. Hobbs has yet again inaccurately reported inflated hit numbers for web sites under his supervision. This will not come as a surprise to many who have been keeping up.

The City Paper hired a spinster and a fact-fudger to consult for them on their blogs. II’ll admit, Hobbs has expertise on social networking and blogging, but he can’t stop lying long enough to let the good skills shine through. He truly has an uncanny ability to obfuscate any and all discussions so that, through paragraph after paragraph of semantics, he leaves people throwing their hands up in disgust. It’s a skill few have. He’s a master at it.

For Hobbs to pooh-pooh the genuine efforts of good men and women in order to boost his professional profile is shameful. And, sadly, par for the course.

CLARIFICATION: When I refer to hits, I am talking about unique visits.

UPDATE: These stats show the influence of the CPBlogs this early in the game as being negligible compared to NIT, despite what others would have you believe, especially considering that NIT had two separate URLs.

Nashvilleistalking.com is ranked 6,876

News2wkrn.com/nit is ranked 9,746

Nashville Ballerz is ranked 624,806

The Style Arbiter is ranked 855,142

Giant Steps is ranked 855,142

Political Animals is ranked 425,060

As you can see, suggesting that the CP Blogs have anywhere close to the amount of visitors or influence is ludicrous. I’m not saying they won’t one day, but it hasn’t even been a week since their launch. You simply cannot compete with an established site like NIT in that amount of time, no matter how hard you try to spin it.

AND ANOTHER THING: As Katherine Coble so succinctly notes, “It’s really easy to armchair quarterback all of this, though. Heaton and Sechrist didn’t really have any models to analyse before their architecture.” This point cannot be emphasized enough. While criticizing the efforts of WKRN, Hobbs is using their bravery and pioneering to his advantage. We were first, the rest are using us as a model, no doubt, whether it be “do this” or “don’t do this.” There is something to be said, hell, praised, for having the balls to put it on the line. What the CPBlogs are doing is really safe. Good for them. But this overt swipe at WKRN’s bold experiment without any recognition of their trailblazing in new media really burns me up. Especially considering the source.

The Nashville City Paper publisher comments on his newspaper’s misguided attempt at the online conversion known as an e-paper:

Our long-term plan here is to become a completely online product. When that happens depends on how quickly local advertisers shift dollars from traditional local media to online. The e-paper is an intermediary step in our plan. As a free paper, we rely on our print ads for about 99% of our revenues. Because of that we need to make sure those ads are seen, and the best way to do that–as we slowly reduce our print circulation–is through a product like the e-paper. I wish I could stop putting out a print edition tomorrow and go entirely online, but until local advertisers, who constitute about 90% of our advertiser base, wake up to the power of online advertising, I can’t. So, it has nothing at all to with a “ridiculous belief that online needs to replicate…what is in print.” We fully realize that some readers aren’t going to like the e-paper. But unfortunately, if they want to continue to read our content, they’re going to have to put up with it–at least until such time as local advertisers have online ad budgets that can support the extensive costs involved in putting out a general interest daily newspaper. In my mind it’s a very small price for some readers to pay to have an alternative to the Tennessean. And I believe as long as we keep publishing compelling content, our online readers will pay that price.

I cannot fully put into words how little Mr. Del Favero “gets it.” What we have here is a common case of old media paradigms being unnaturally forced into a new media arena. Anyone who has been a part of internet culture for any length of time knows that this line of thinking is a recipe for irrelevancy.

It’s not hard to understand why the City Paper has taken the awful e-paper route. The thinking is this: “We make our revenue off of ad sales. Advertisers are reluctant to spend money on online campaigns, but are more than happy to cough up money for our hard copy space. Let’s make the online space exactly like the hard copy version, PLUS MORE ADS SURROUNDING IT. How could we lose?”

Well, the truth of the matter is that online readers are fickle. And busy. And they know they have countless options. To think that the City Paper is going to have the market cornered on compelling local content is arrogance. The internet provides unlimited space for an unlimited amount of content, coverage and opinion. To assume that local readers will “put up with” this disaster of a format is naive. Not when their options are so vast.

I wandered over to the City Paper website and clicked on the e-paper just now. I was taken to a screen where I had to register in order to view it. Strike one, fellas. You’ve just turned off a significant number of readers. If I was looking for information on a specific story, went to the City Paper’s E-Paper only to find I had to stop and register, I would turn right around and type what I was looking for into Google News. I’d be sure to find something within seconds. If I was logging in to read the paper from cover-to-cover, then perhaps I would take the time to register. But is that how people read news these days? I don’t think that it is. Those looking for news online are looking for tailored information. And those who do wish to read the paper in its entirety are not going to want to read the content in this god-awful format. The clutter on the front page is ridiculously distracting. There is vastly more space devoted to ads and navigation than content. Unless we are talking about the headlines, you can’t even read the content. The text is too small–to make room for all the ads, I guess.

So, in exploring the City Paper’s new foray into the internet I see a story on the front that I’d like to read. It’s about my old boss, the owner of Tin Angel. Clicking on the image of my former boss on the front page of the e-paper takes me to a pop-up window of the same image, only slightly larger. No text or photo credit accompanies it. What is the point of that? I hover my mouse over the story and see that it is clickable. But once I click I do not get the story, but a pop-up window that suggests the story is on page 9. (?) Once you click the 9, you are taken to the piece itself, however the ‘9′ pop-up window remains. The piece in question is entirely too small to read, so you have to click on a portion of the e-paper to read it. What pops-up next might be the ugliest text version of a story I have ever seen. No spaces between paragraphs, the accompanying photo stuck crudely at the bottom, etc. Murder on the eyes. There is also a Q&A with the Tin Angel owner on the next page (you wouldn’t know that unless you “flipped” the page), which looks like this once enlarged. No bolded content, no line breaks, no visual distinction between question and answer. A pain in the rear to read.

In flipping through the rest of the e-paper I am taken to an e-paper “how-to”. Even after enlarging the page using the plus sign at the top to make it as big as possible, the text is still unreadable. So, I clicked on the individual elements that were highlighted, only to get the entire page in a pop-up, even smaller this time, and completely illegible. The City Paper’s “how-to” use their e-paper is entirely unreadable, even after copious amounts of clicking and pop-upping. I ask you, how dumb is that? I can’t read the e-paper so you give me instructions on how I can, which I am also unable to read. Brilliant. And the search function is shit. There have been at least three City Paper articles about me, yet in searching my name there are zero results found. Obviously, this is a mistake, as my full name has shown up many times in their paper.

Look, if Del Favero thinks people are going to click on advertising just to read the ad’s copy, he, as my mama used to say, has got another think coming. We are as a society are so bombarded with advertising that most of it goes unnoticed. To assume that anyone would click on an ad to see it enlarged is preposterous, but that is what has to happen at the e-paper in order to read any advertising copy.

Here’s what is most wrong with the City Paper’s e-paper experiment: That is not the way people read content online. It is not familiar to them. This is not the way people consume news on the web. And you cannot force them to, not matter how much you would like that. The e-paper is a mess- -an unnavigable, unintuitive mess- -that no reader, web savvy or not, will find enjoyable. It takes far too much time (read: clicking in vein) to get to the good stuff, and I’m sorry, but the CP’s “good stuff” certainly ain’t good enough for all that trouble.

Mark my words, the City Paper’s E-Paper will fail. I don’t want it to fail, but it is a clear example of old media trying to force their antiquated notions of content delivery onto an audience too smart- -and too tuned in- -to stick with a product that causes major time suckage and frustration. And we’ve seen time and time again that attempting to squeeze outdated formats onto the world’s most customizable content delivery service (The Internets) does not work. The City Paper needs to jump outside their box and rethink their strategy. Who says advertising has to be traditional? Breaking their ties to how things used to work will be the best bet for my friends at the City Paper. Otherwise, they are just spinning their wheels.

RELATED: Mesh Media Strategies, Rex Hammock

ANOTHER THOUGHT: Is the e-paper indexable by Google? If not, that is the biggest mistake of the lot.

AND ANOTHER THING: Rex Hammock jumps feet first into video blogging, and does so with dexterity. He critiques the CP’s e-paper as well, in much kinder, gentler terms. A+++++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN

How cute is this header graphic that the Google put up for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? Subtle and delightful.

UPDATE: Apparently the Gawker editor differs in opinion.