Code, Camera, Action

Stories, software and strategies to help nonprofits do the social web
Eric Johnson
Eric Johnson

Startup thinking for the social sector.
Code for action.
Plus photography.
(And reading aloud.)

I'm the founder of el-studio.com, a web development firm that helps nonprofits and associations connect to the social web.

More about Eric Johnson.

             

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Post: Google Sidewiki - Danger, says Jeff Jarvis

Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value (if the real conversation about WWGD? had occurred on Google instead of at Buzzmachine, how does that help me?). On a practical level, only people who use the Google Toolbar will see the comments left using it and so it bifurcates the conversation and puts some of it behind a hedge.
via buzzmachine.com

Jeff Jarvis asks if Google has applied the "Don't be Evil" test to Sidewiki.

Announced today, Sidewiki lets folks leave comments about web pages. If you're using the Google Toolbar (or, eventually, Chrome) you can see and add these comments to any web page. Page creators or domain owners have no influence on Sidewiki comments -- though verified domain owners can place the first comment.

There is an API, and Sidewiki comments are available as RSS feeds.

I see two issues here. The first is the iFrame problem -- why I object to the Digg bar and HootSuite and any other tool that puts their nav bar across the top of pages and obscures URLs. As a site owner, I resent Google's influence on the context my posts appear in.

The other problem here is with fragmenting the conversation. Should Sidewiki take off, I will be spending time curating Yet Another Comment System -- this one at Google's instigation. And with Sidewiki, there's no recourse against spam, defamation, lies, etc. -- all of which now appear right beside my content.

That's three big strikes against what Sidewiki aims to do. Not an auspicious start.

Is it just me, or is Google starting to creep you out?

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Are we headed for an advertising bubble?

The push for share of [advertising] voice has created an arms race, where brands spend more and more to hold on their share of a slowly growing market. Like housing prices, this will sustain itself until someone — that is, the buyer — walks away from the table.

via harvardbusiness.org

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Transparency is Killing Ad Profits

Joe Hall says that while advertisers may want to know how efficient their ad spend is, these internet ad tools are cutting waste -- and publications' profits.

With Internet marketing we can use analysts tools, sophisticated tracking techniques and even user behavior analysis to nail down conversion rates to exact numbers. Couple this data with PPC and CPM ad models and we can calculate ROI to the penny–in real time–and make adjustments to ad spending instantly.  All of these exact measurements can enable the advertisers to only spend the bare minimum needed on ads.

And this is why online publishers are failing at making a profit. Traditional media companies make huge profits on wasted ad spending. In an attempt to lure big money to the Internet, companies like Google pushed tools and ad platforms that enabled advertisers to spend less. In the end the only way a company can make substantial profits in this radically transparent environment, is to monopolize the flow of information.

via marketingpilgrim.com

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Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

via ted.com

Science shows the that way businesses traditionally reward work -- salary, bonuses, etc. -- is fine for straightforward tasks. But it leads to less effective and less creative results for creative work.

Dan Pink reviews the research, and shares what he thinks we should do about it.

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Post: The Free Content Blues

  

Chris Dixon on the revenue situation between Google and the newspapers:

Newspapers, like all websites, are suppliers of content to Google.  In most markets, with genuinely competitive buyers and suppliers, the revenues are shared between buyers and suppliers in proportion to their relative bargaining power.  Their bargaining power depends on how fragmented each side of the market is – how many genuine alternatives each company has.

His point is that in the current marketplace -- with Google the dominant provider of search traffic to newspaper sites -- newspapers have no alternative. They can block Google's web crawlers so we won't find them (the internet equivalent of taking their content and going home) -- and we won't care.

Folks have written about newspapers' over-capacity and monopoly thinking. The value of the newspaper business was based on local monopolies and ad delivery, which the internet have collapsed. 

True, "there is nothing inherently un-monentzable about newspaper content," as Chris says -- once it becomes scarce.

But even if newspaper content becomes scarce (from bankruptcies, say, or collusion), can newspapers do what's needed to succeed online? Newspapers that remain may get more savvy with how they bring their content to the web (with topic hubs and the like). But until they get serious about pleasing their online audiences -- and, yes, Google -- information scarcity won't help them. 

Even these basic facts of the web seem too hard for newspapers to act upon right now:
  1. Logins, paywalls and incomplete stories in RSS discourage linking
  2. Linking fuels Google
  3. And Google is likely the biggest traffic driver for newspapers
For newspapers, only the first of these is within their control. And yet talk of paywalls persists, while the papers rail against Google.

But let's go with Chris's idea. Say that the newspapers negotiate with Google and competitors for prime search positioning, and Google tweaks its algorithm to benefit the newspapers.  

What content is valuable online?
  • Timely information -- reported faster than anybody else
  • Scarce or specialized content -- information we can't get anywhere else
  • Insight -- history and present fact brought together into a big picture
  • Aggregated content. Maybe not the fastest, but brought to a destination where we go for content discovery. Our breakfast-table overview. 
Since TV, newspapers have been aggregators, and no more. Newspapers do answer our occasional "I wonder what's on the Washington Post's front page" query -- but Google does just about everything else better. Google certainly does aggregation better. 

And what about newspapers' structure leads us to believe they would be any better at providing this value than blogs -- or specialized online news sites like politico.com? At this point, there are so many things that blogs do better. 

The problem for content lies on the supply side. There's too much of it, and the cost of producing it -- for those properly structured -- can be low enough that I don't see newspapers being able to compete.

I hope I'm wrong, but it reminds me of the old saw about attitudes in the steel business. Where Big Steel saw dumping by cheap foreign suppliers, Nucor said thank heavens steel is so heavy that it's expensive to ship across the ocean.

Which attitude would you want on your team? 

More to the point: would we notice if newspaper stories began turning up in Google searches?

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Flipping abundance and scarcity - Seth's Blog

We spent a generation believing certain parts of our business needed to be scarce and that advertising and other interruption should be abundant. Part of the pitch of free is that when advertising goes away, you need to make something else abundant in order to gain attention. Then, and only then, will you be able to sell something that's naturally scarce.
via sethgodin.typepad.com

 

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Michael Pollan says it's now Big Food vs. Big Insurance

Healthcare reform is likely to conflict with our diets, Pollan says. The CDC says three-quarters of healthcare dollars are spent on "preventable chronic diseases." Lots of those -- type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease -- are diet-related.

But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

via nytimes.com

 

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Competing beyond price

Chris Brogan comes up with a dozen ways to compete -- with great examples.

It’s a dodgy game to compete on price. It’s always a race to the bottom. It’s never fun to compete by name-calling or bragging over your competitors. Instead, really earn it with us by competing in ways that will empower both you and us.

via chrisbrogan.com

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