The Praized Blog

I’ve been thinking about Robert Scoble’s post on Facebook since I blogged about it yesterday. In it, he invites people to become “friend” with him on Facebook (and he does it again in his last post yesterday night). Intuitively, I knew he was unto something and I asked the Praized blog readers to do the same thing (you can do it by clicking here).

Now, I’ve been “friends” with Robert ever since I met him at Google Zeitgeist 2005. We were sitting at the same dinner table and had the occasion to exchange a few words (he’s a great guy BTW!). For those who don’t know him, Robert was one of Microsoft’s technical evangelists. He was part of the Channel 9 MSDN Video team, walking around the Microsoft campus and shooting very informal new product videos. He became extremely popular by having a more balanced view about his employer (more balanced than traditional PR people), sometimes congratulating and sometimes criticizing Microsoft. More info can be found on his Wikipedia profile

Since meeting Robert, he’s been part of my LinkedIn network, and recently I added him in my Pownce network. I obviously added Robert to my Facebook network yesterday afternoon after reading his post (and he accepted it quickly).

Now, if you look in his Pownce public feed, you’ll see that Robert has been micro-blogging about stuff he’s doing. He currently has 1253 “friends”, all early adopters as Pownce is still in beta. In Facebook, he now has 2702 “friends”. Yesterday night, I got a message in my Facebook news feed section. Robert had uploaded a video and
I got an alert about it because he’s in my friends list.

It made me wonder: why would Robert Scoble accept “friends” invitation from people he does not know? Why do you want to be connected to people you don’t know and alert them to stuff you’re doing? And then it hit me! Robert Scoble is media. He’s building his own broadcast network. He understands that media is completely fragmented and, by participating in all these new social communication vehicles (blogging, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook), he’s aggregating readers and viewers,
thereby increasing his penetration and his worth as a media. I’m convinced Robert reaches close to 100% of all early adopters in Silicon Valley (and a good chunk in North America). He now has tremendous influence on “influencers”.

Now, I finally understood why I invited people yesterday to connect to me in Facebook. I am media as well. By writing the Praized blog every day since October 2006, I have become media. And if you are media, you want to build up your “circulation” to increase your influence and by extension, your value. But be aware: you have to accept the reciprocal conversations though. Robert Scoble receives updates from 1253 Pownce friends and 2702 Facebook friends. The noise level is very high. This conversation is not unidirectional.

I have seen the future of media and it’s Robert Scoble.

A new TLA is born this morning: FOG, Fear of Google.

Coined by Geoff Ramsey from eMarketer (and reported by Robert Scoble) at the Forbes Internet Leadership Forum in Cancun, it crystallizes the constant fear under which traditional media firms live ever since Google has become an advertising juggernaut.

Scoble reports on three examples he heard this weekend:

• What will happen when Google’s growth slows down? Will they use their lock on the marketplace to increase prices?
• The fact that Google is changing the expectations of advertisers, especially in regards to performance-based vs. branding advertising
• People are starting to cheer for Microsoft to acquire Yahoo, to make sure Google is kept in check.

What it means: take a deep breath… Feeling better now? Now, if you’re Big Media, Google is clearly your frienemy. But that happens a lot online (read about the Google & eBay relationship). To a certain extent, Google is after the same ad dollars as you, but they also offer tremendous opportunities.

1) Google (and other search engines) is the entry door to most of the web’s content. Make sure your content is well-indexed. At the same time, you need to make sure you’re investing in your destination sites to make them as relevant as possible. Aggregate content in your vertical (including competitors!) to make your site the one-stop shop for users. Launch social features and applications to increase your site’s stickiness. You also need to continue investing in your brand(s).

2) SMEs are looking for leads. If you’re managing a sales team that talks with these guys, make sure you offer them search engine advertising as part of your portfolio of products.

“Key to the development of a local online ad market is the identification of the local web, and this offers a remarkable opportunity for those willing to explore this territory today. In the not-too-distant future, everyone will have access to the local web, but this access is unavailable today, because the database hasn’t been created. It exists in bits and pieces, but no technology can replace the human research necessary to build the initial database. This is a task that will pay huge dividends to the one who creates it, market-by-market, and there’s no reason this can’t be done by a local media company.”

“The local web is where the web itself will find its real value propositions, and that’s enough to make a guy want to stick around for awhile.”

Exactly my thoughts!!! Have a nice weekend!

From Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog, a beautiful article!

Meta-Praized is a collection of links & stories we’ve “dugg” on Digg.com in the last few weeks. By clicking on that link, you can always follow what’s currently on our mind:

• “Google plans street advertising presence” via Engadget
• “Google Talk to Interoperate with AIM This Year” via the Google Operating System blog
• “Microsoft Hits 100 Million IE7 Installs” via BetaNews
• “Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn’t about piracy” via Ars Technica
• “Small Town News Station Heads to YouTube” via SplashCast Media
• “MTV to buy RateMyProfessors.com” in News.com
• “Asterisk: The Future of Telephony” via linux.inet.hr
• “Google (Google Checkout) breaks ceasefire with eBay” via Valleywag
• “Big Media’s Crush on Social Networking” in the New York Times
• “Google Inc. is currently in negotiations to purchase Adscape Media (videogame advertising)” in CNN Money
• “Traffic to newspaper blogs soars” via MarketWatch

Federated Media’s John Batelle has begun a multi-part post on Searchblog on how traditional media companies have come to terms with their maturing, ever-more-profitable interactive business units. The telegraphic summary; dump the seasoned interactive “cowboys” that started these interactive businesses and parachute in the serious revenue posse, senior executives that can turn these businesses around so that they can realize their full revenue potential! They’ve gone from “lab” to just another unit with an aggressive scorecard. No surprise there. Ah, but Batelle’s point is that interactive is not like any other traditional media business, it’s Packaged Goods Media (old media) vs. Conversational Media (interactive). The post is peppered with good insight and real world examples, it’s worth the read. However, the crux is that it is about economics (ad revenue) vs. relevance (interactivity/user content). How much interactivity are these media conglomerates willing to let through the filters, and would they do it all if it’s “at the expense” of advertisers and advertising revenue. We now know that relevance has value with users/ consumers (Web 2.0), the question is, is there enough net margin at the rendez-vous for traditional media companies that potentially have a lot to lose vs. start-ups that have way less to lose…

Alex Padalka reports on the NewAssignment.net site about the latest issue of JPG Magazine. Issue seven of the magazine relies completely on photos submitted by their online community.

“Instead of starting in print and building a community, you start online. Then when you launch your first copy, you have supporters there,” said Derek Powazek (one of the co-founders). JPG was, in part, an expansion of a working idea called Photo Club – a service that delivered an original photo once a month to subscribers. The Powazeks went online and named their endeavor JPG Magazine, “to honor all the fantastic work being put online that never saw the light of day in print.” They accepted digital submissions from anyone using all the digital tools at their disposal (gmail, flickr, lulu), selected the best and produced six issues over the next two years.”

“Issue seven had more than 1,400 submissions and issue eight has already received over 5,000 submissions. And while editors still have final say, the community now votes on what photos they would like to see in the magazine. Think American Idol for magazines. One thing JPG discovered early on is that while an open submission and voting policy is best for the health of the online community, it requires moderation from an editor to produce the highest quality magazine.”

JPG pays each photographer who gets published $100 and a free year subscription.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says: “More print magazines should be doing similar things to embrace an online community instead of just copying their print content to their website. Periodic news magazines have no chance over the long run against their own online competitors. But magazines like JPG Mag, which people want to keep and display over the long run, can be successful. If they come up with the right way to bridge the online and offline worlds.”

What it means: I think the key learning there is the importance of the editor. This is definitely a model that should be embraced by any company operating in both the offline and online space. Do you have content in your online properties that could be valuable offline, in the printed, TV or radio world? Can a local social site become a print directory? Yes, see InsiderPages.com’s efforts. Can a podcast become a radio show? Can something posted on a video site become a TV show?

Read with interest this analysis from Dave McClure on VentureBeat.com. In reference to all the noise that happened around the Peanut Butter Manifesto, he contends that Yahoo’s main problem currently is monetization.

“While Yahoo substantially outpaces Google in page views, Google does a much better job of converting traffic into dollars than Yahoo and is kicking their butt in revenue per search and revenue per page. As long as Google keeps monetizing traffic at a far better rate than Yahoo, they can always afford to pay more for acquisition or partnership deals”

He suggests three things to improve Yahoo:

1. Ship the new Panama advertising engine platform asap
2. Figure out a way to implement CPA-based (Cost Per Action) advertising
3. As monetization improves, accelerate acquisition activity (both large & small)

On the acquisition side, he suggests: “they should be doing small acquisitions ($25-50M) every month, larger deals ($100-500M) every quarter, and betting big ($1-2B+) once a year on a deal like Facebook or YouTube. So far, Yahoo has only done a good job on the small stuff — they’ve whiffed on most other big deals since Overture. In summary: buy LOTS of stuff, do it FASTER, then distribute it across your worldwide audience and monetize using your advertising engine.”

What it means: This reminds me of multiple conversations I’ve had around monetization of traditional media companies’ web properties. Most industry analysts asserts that one of the risks traditional media companies like newspapers, radio, TV or directory publishers face is the fact that they do not monetize their online traffic as well as their offline one. But after reading this article, I wonder if anyone except Google is monetizing properly their online traffic? Has anyone calculated the eCPM of the whole Yahoo network? It’d be interesting to compare with some sites well-monetized offline media sites like the Wall Street Journal or Pages Jaunes in France.

Harry adds: It boils down to the ad engine and overall execution. Yahoo is a media company, Google is an advertising company, it’s all about Adwords and Adsense and have done a terrific job of optimizing both. How many SME’s rave about “Yahoo! Search Marketing Products”?

My day job is design blogger, so I get lots of email related to design resources. This week I got an email from Ryan (thx!) about craigslist and listpic. craigslist is a popular network for urban classified ads on the web, listpic (not affiliated with craigslist) allows you to navigate craigslist classifieds using images. Check out furniture in San Francisco here. As you can see, it’s a fast and easy way to navigate through stuff for sale.

What it means: Lots of things on many levels, 1) craigslist has an ecosystem, people building applications to enhance the craigslist experience (a bit like PayPal and Ebay in the early days), 2) selling and buying stuff online just got easier yet again, 3) classified ads are being reinvented by the minute, there’s still room for innovation in a space that’s already well served.

The Kelsey Blog posted an item today on blog-like website Modern Mom going local. They’re going to launch their first 12 city guides tomorrow, each with a local editor - but not a local sales force. National advertisers will be the first sponsors for the new sites. In “YP-speak” the trademark advertisers first, the SMEs later. Note to Modern Mom, why wait? Just put up some Adsense or Overture and get the SMEs right away, the ads will probably be more relevant/ useful to local readers than TIVO.

What it means: The next frontier for the next tier of destination sites (after Yahoo, Google et al) is local.

Newspaper journalist and blogger Mark Evans has some interesting insights for the newspaper publishers and the media conglomerates that own them; lower ROI’s are now the norm, get used to it, “reposition your newsrooms to cover less news” and “focus on providing analysis, perspective, context”. In other words, newspapers are now a niche business, no longer the mass media they once were - or least that’s what they’re rapidly becoming. Which begs the next question, what about convergence? Wasn’t the concentration of all that billion dollar traditional media (cable/broadcast/newspapers/radio) supposed to stave off the global media onslaught? Paradoxically, the focus of that battle was other media-laden 800-pound gorillas (Newscorp, anyone?) when in reality the true menacing hordes are the thousands of citizen journalists that report, however erroneously, what’s happening in their small part of the world. In fact, right now, the real scoop is that Mark Evans himself is the “next generation newspaper”, as evidenced when Om Malik pulled a Business 3.0 on Business 2.0, and that media behemoths are ill-equipped to battle anything less than other media behemoths.

What it means: Media fragmentation will continue and those that can harness the of power citizen journos may win, but they’re a wily bunch as are their readers. A new local media paradigm will eventually emerge.