Reputations, Trust, and Atomic Publishing

It seems like the question comes up at every conference, interview, or personal publishing powwow: Can you trust bloggers as much as you can trust journalists?

I always answer the question the same way: If you look at it in terms of “averages”, then no, you cannot trust bloggers as much as you can trust journalists. Looking at the averages, however, is the wrong way to answer the question. That would be like trying to answer the question of whether Italy or France makes better wine by dumping all the wine from each country into a vat, stirring it up, and then taking a sip from each.

Who cares about averages? What I really want is a few bottles of the best from each country plus maybe a sample of what one would consider “good table wine”. Armed with the best and the “typically good”, I can make a judgement as to who makes the better wine.

The same is true in the world of blogging vs. journalism. Since no one is going to settle for reading average journalism or average blogging once aggregation gets more intelligent, the real question to answer is “are the really good bloggers as trustable as the really good journalists?”

To answer this question, I always use three examples:

Om Malik

Om is a blogger and a journalist. The journalistic standards he upholds while writing for Business 2.0 are no different than those he applies to his blog, GigaOm. The man was a journalist before WordPress was even an apple in Matt Mullenweg’s eye. Om’s style varies a bit between his online and offline writings, and it is up to you to decide which you like better, but the unit you are deciding whether or not to trust in both cases is an atomic one: Om himself.

Walt Mossberg

Walt is a longtime personal technology writer for the Wall Street Journal and his column is often a catalyst for new products entering the mainstream. He doesn’t have a blog but the opinions and research he pens for the Journal are entirely his. The question to answer with Walt is “Would you trust him any less if he were to quit the Journal and start his own blog?” I believe most people would say no.

Rafat Ali

Rafat is the founder of PaidContent.org, MocoNews, and the ContentNext network which acts as parent to these and other emerging properties. I’ve been reading PaidContent since before they had a proper RSS feed and I’ve found they break more stories than almost any traditional media outlet. Rafat is an example of someone who could quite easily have a plum job as a journalist for the New York Times but chooses not to because he prefers the rapid-fire format of blogging.

So in all of these cases, we have writers who are perfectly trained in the art and science of journalism but would (and in some cases do) succeed by being great bloggers instead. This is not to say that what Om and Rafat do is not journalism… it is. It just follows the format of blogging a lot closer. It’s much more atomic, and much more timely.
Read more…

Netscape Now!

(This article cross-posted on the Newsvine Blog)

You remember 1996. You had e-mail. Your friends didn’t. You could Yahoo. Your friends couldn’t. It was a time when most of the world spent less time online than they did eating breakfast. Two of the standout successes during this early stage of internet adoption were America Online and Netscape Communications. America Online’s strategy was to sell dial-up internet access for a monthly fee and provide users with a walled garden of content they couldn’t get anywhere else at the time. Netscape’s strategy was to own the piece of software that sat between the consumer and the internet and ultimately make money from both sales of that software and other endeavors created by “browser lock-in”.

Both companies saw tremendous initial success only to eventually see their fortunes turn sour as they were beaten down by competitors and the general move towards openness on the internet.

It is with curious anticipation then that we watch today the relaunch of the Netscape brand by parent company AOL as a “new generation of news portal” (beta site is here). Comparisons have already been made to Newsvine and Digg by media outlets like Red Herring and InformationWeek, but I’m not going to call them copycats as many others will. Everything’s been done before in one fashion or another and to accuse a new player of just ripping off an existing idea is to discount any and all creativity they may bring to the table.

Developing a new genre of news site is all about creativity, and as much as don’t always find myself agreeing with Netscape’s leader Jason Calacanis, I certainly respect his prowess as a dealmaker and his ability to get creative with the tools he’s given. Regardless of what you think of the guy, he’s good for AOL and he’s probably good for this particular product.

So the big question everyone’s going to be asking is, how does this affect Newsvine, Digg, or any of the other sites in this same general movement to modernize the news? If you ask me, I’d say it helps and helps a lot. The fact of the matter is that probably less than 1 out of 100 people in the world have ever even heard of Digg and even less have heard of Newsvine. This axiom is supported by common sense as well as observations like Ethan Kaplan’s in which he found that only 5 college students (all male) out of 100 in a particular lecture hall had heard of Digg. And these are college students! It’s really easy to get sucked into the trap of thinking the rest of the world is even 50% as tech-savvy as you are, but the reality is the exact opposite.

So what’s the point here? The point is that most of the world is completely unaware that they are beginning to have power over the news. We see this every day at Newsvine. People use the site to read the news just like they would at, say, CNN.com, and not until they *really* dig in do they find out they can write, seed, and influence the news mix by interacting with it. Part of this is that our interface is probably a little too subtle and demure for newcomers, but the other part is that people just aren’t expecting it.

With Netscape and AOL helping to spread the word about the democratized news movement, it increases the amount of people who are even ready for a site like Netscape, Digg, or Newsvine. It gets people thinking about getting more from their news and we like that very, very much.

In the end, there will be multiple successful news-writing, news-gathering, and news-sharing communities on the web. Most people will be members of more than one. The community which endears itself most to you is the one you’ll probably spend the most time in. And with that, I gladly welcome Netscape to the “social news” fold. Just for kicks, I’m going to fire up a copy of Communicator 4.72 and see if the site renders. :)

(Sorry, I had to get at least one retro-Netscape snark in)

Picking On Yahoo, Part Two

I rarely fill out surveys online, but given the ridiculous new password-prompting policy on Yahoo, I jumped at the chance to help them out when I saw their prominent “Help Us Improve Yahoo” ad on my Yahoo Finance page. Sweet fennel! A way for me to quickly and constructively voice my displeasure about Yahoo without having to interrupt Dustin from his Tetris experiment.

Clicking on the survey link, however, led to one of the worst designed surveys I’ve ever tried to participate in. Here’s the screenshot:

So what’s wrong here? In order of importance:

1. This is not even a survey about Yahoo Finance. It’s about Yahoo Mail.
2. I count 9 questions on the screen and I’m only “10% complete”. I extrapolate from this that in order to complete the survey, I will need to answer ALMOST 100 QUESTIONS. This was the point that they lost me… and I *wanted* to fill out a survey.
3. Each question has 10 choices. Is that *really* necessary? How about just “poor, neutral, excellent”? The amount of brainpower required to make such granular judgements is prohibitive in surveys like this.
4. Once I decided that I didn’t want to fill out every single item on this survey and maybe just check if there was anything related to Yahoo Finance or the password-prompting thing, I clicked “Continue” to quickly skip to other screens. Sorry, no go. It’s all or nothing. Unless I’m willing to fill out every single radio button in this survey (in order!) I cannot even participate. I want to give Yahoo *some* data and they won’t take it unless I give them *all* data.

This is really bad practice, Yahoo. You have presented a survey that will not only receive much less participation than it should, but the data you *do* get will not even be representative of your user base. The only people who will fill this out are people who are extremely patient, extremely concerned about you, and in possession of a lot of free time. Is that really representative of your user base? Cut this thing down to one page and you’ll learn a lot more.

* On a humorous note, I just noticed two links in the upper right side of the screen: “Yahoo Privacy Policy” and “Decipher Privacy Policy”. I thought it was an attempt by Yahoo to be funny about how long and indecipherable their privacy policy is. Nope. Turns out the company who provides the survey goes by the name of “Decipher”. Ha!

Back from Syndicate and IMC 2006

Two conferences, two vastly different crowds of people, and only two people I knew at both events combined. That’s the one sentence summary of my five days in New York and Las Vegas last week. It was a fun week, and definitely a personal highlight sitting next to Roger Black on stage, but I couldn’t help but notice how dissimilar the situations of the attendees at both conferences were.

On the one hand, there was the Syndicate crowd — a group of people pretty well ahead of the curve on the technology side, but well behind on the business side. The types of people who preach giving up all control of your content and basically letting any business issues just work themselves out. “RSS” was mentioned hundreds of times. “Web 2.0” almost as often. The focus here seemed to be — not surprisingly — on syndication, but there was very little talk about business models, products, creativity, or really anything outside the scope of “delivering information”. There were a few interesting exceptions which rounded the event out a bit, but that was the gist of things.

On the other hand, there was the Interactive Media Conference crowd — a group of people squarely on the other side of the equation. People working at traditionally profitable businesses (mainly newspapers) whose companies are quite obviously threatened by many of the concepts discussed at the Syndicate conference as well as plenty of other emerging forces. There were a number of visionaries there doing great things at their respective organizations, but this conference was all about established media.

So what was the more fun conference? For me it was the second, by quite a bit. For all the time I spend researching, using, and sometimes creating technology, I just don’t like talking or hearing about it when it’s not coupled with interesting, tangible products. I don’t want to hear about RSS. I want to hear about a product that is 1000 times better because of RSS. I don’t want to hear about Web 2.0. I want to hear about a service that, via its Web 2.0 approach to things, improves the lives of thousands of people.

I felt the Interactive Media Conference Crowd was much more interested how to use technology to improve their product, whereas the Syndicate crowd was looking for products with which to use their technology. Two honorable quests I suppose, but hey, how long can you really talk about RSS? For me, it’s about an hour until I eventually fall asleep.

Both talks went very well. Everyone on the Syndicate panel was mostly of like mind until we closed the session with a cursory discussion about full-text vs. excerpts in feeds. I’m an excerpt guy for now until certain rights, monetization, and content theft issues work themselves out, and someone else on the panel was for full-text. Judging from the reaction of the crowd afterwards, the world seems equally undecided. The full-text vs. excerpt debate is one that deserves its own blog entry — and will probably get one — but for now, my opinion is that people should do whatever makes the most business sense for them. At least one person at the conference mistakenly thought I meant that full-text feeds were evil and no one should use them. I can only attribute that to a bit of what I will now call The Jason Fried Effect (anybody want to do a Wikipedia entry on that?) — that is, when confident words are mistaken for unconditional advice.

The Interactive Media Conference panel was more interesting and touched on subjects ranging from typography on the web, to redesign strategies, to new distribution methods, to branding, to inverted pyramids. I was thrilled that Roger loved Newsvine and so did many others at the conference. That day I also learned that Forbes Magazine gave Newsvine their “Best of the Web” designation for user generated news sites. I don’t mention every time we get an award or recognition somewhere and I don’t spend any time entering us into competitions, but it’s always gratifying seeing the company get a step closer to the mainstream.

All in all, it was an interesting week, but I’m glad to be back in the office working on Newsvine. We’re launching some great new things in a couple of days.