Thursday, 19 March 2009
Social media will be over in 2009
Craig Stoltz says that social media will cease to exist in 2009.
Back in my callow youth, in 1996, I was reporting on an “online travel” technology conference for the Washington Post. It focused on the breathtaking development that the Internet would soon let people actually purchase airline tickets and hotel visits online, without a travel agent or even a phone call!But I vividly recall one of the panelists saying something like this:
No offense to the conference organizers, but in five years there will be no “online travel.” The Internet will be fully integrated into commercial transactions and the term “online travel business” won’t mean anything different from “travel business.”I think of this often as it applies to social media. I think by the end of 2009 what we now call “social media” will start to become just “media.”
Internet Radio may now come to Canada
This is old news but I missed it back in October.
The Copyright Board of Canada has made their ruling on payments for Internet radio, and, while it is not that great, it could have been far worse. Socan, the body that collects payments for broadcasting or performing most music in Canada had asked the board for ridiculously high fees. In the absence of a ruling, however, Internet broadcasters are retroactively liable for what they broadcast – and who knew what that could be.
The fees you need to legally broadcast Internet radio (or music podcast) are: $100 per year plus 1.5% of the revenue received from each ‘page view’ that plays music or music stream. Full details are here [PDF]
Let the legal Canadian music websites begin.
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Post Post Intelligencer
This is a wonderful t-shirt made for the staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Now available to the public.)
The Stranger is doing good final day coverage As is Clark and CrossCut.
Offline Blogger
Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the “Daily News”, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn’t afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand. [Via]
Don't link to us
These newspapers have terms & conditions that bar you from linking to them:
The Sun
Daily Mirror
Daily Mail
Independent
Financial Times
The Times
On the other hand, The Guardian and Telegraph have a clue.
Print is dead, still
Newspapers still talking about free vs paid news online
Amil: The rest of the world mutters “n00bz” under their breath.
And another opinion: If you are still thinking about charging for online news in 2009, you are dead already
Saturday Morning Watchmen
It won me over with the Jem reference.
Friday, 13 March 2009
Clark Humphrey has coined the term microbrew journalism, to describe the concept that ‘like the beer biz, the news biz needs to decentralize … And it needs to expand from bland, singular, everything-to-everybody products toward more compelling tastes that consumers will actively seek out and loyally support.’
It’s an apt analogy. Ten or fifteen years ago, beer – and coffee – were the exclusive domain of national, centrally-located monoliths. The explosion of microbreweries and coffee houses did not put the old companies entirely out of business, but it did change the quality and the expectations. Even the smallest towns get good beer and coffee now. You can’t say the same about their newspapers.
Vanity Fair has the wacko story on how this tiny country scooped up the world’s top brands without any money or any particular expertise:
A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. “They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,” says a London hedge-fund manager.
Also, there is this little tidbit to file away for future use:
Iceland is less a nation than one big extended family. For instance, most Icelanders are by default members of the Lutheran Church. If they want to stop being Lutherans they must write to the government and quit; on the other hand, if they fill out a form, they can start their own cult and receive a subsidy.
[Via Kottke]
I have heard of ‘referencing’ before, where a restaurant has a high priced item on the menu so people feel better about the lower priced item they invariably choose, but these techniques are new to me:
- Complex menus with lots of sub-sections will generally sell more of those items that come first or last in any section
- Simple menus with just one list of main courses tend to sell most of whatever is third on the list, so that will be the highest margin dish.
- The wine with the highest mark-up is usually the second cheapest on the list. This is because no one wants to order the cheapest wine, so customers usually go for the second-cheapest
- The “power position” is on the inside right, just above the centre
Incidently, ‘referencing’ isn’t just for menus. The best selling Mac is the MacBook, not MacBook pro; the bestselling iPod is the Nano, not the Touch.