Short post, but this is an article worth reading if you are interested in how a legacy print magazine is trying to fit into Bloomberg, a real time data organization.
Bloomberg is in the business of selling data terminals and everything else supports that cause. They are damn successful doing this and pride themselves on being the most influential news organization in the world. True or not is up to you, but they do produce news that moves markets.
I have picked out some points from the article and will share my brief thoughts on them, as they capture some broader themes we are seeing emerge across the online publishing world namely:
Profit - News needs to have a profit motive
AND
Measurement - Everything can be measured in the news creation process
Some other points from the article:
1. News should help people make money. Whether the creator of the news or the consumer of the news, there is a profit motive. If news makes money, then everyone is happy.
This flies right in the face of everything taught in Journalism school and the Businessweek staff that did not buy into this philosophy were shown the door or remain at Bloomberg and are adapting.
2. Bloomberg operates a “speed desk”, with the sole purpose of quantifying how much news they get out first and if that news makes people money.
I think this philosophy can be taken all the way down the chain from global news providers like Bloomberg to hyperlocal news providers. If you get more content out before your competitors (speed), you will build a loyal audience for that.
3. Every Bloomberg writer has a “dashboard” where the metrics determining his compensation — any scoops, hits an article attracts — are tracked.
This is precisely the type of feedback and support that content creators need and can use to their advantage. There is a real resistance to measurement in the newsroom, but it is going mainstream and it should be embraced as a positive not a negative. Staying employed, building an audience and improving the success of your content choices seems to be a reasonable plan, real time metrics can help you do this.
4. This is an angle I had not considered… the psychological impact over time on individuals of creating content that does not make money. As put by a former Businessweek employee about his colleagues… “They really feel like writing for Businessweek is a waste of time — it’s not making money, they get nothing out it,”
People are generally happier when they are making money and if metrics and data can help you to make your content more profitable then you should embrace it.
Slowly, the winds of change are blowing into newsrooms around the globe.
20minutos.es, a popular Spanish language news website has just hired a full time home page editor “Portadista” that is responsible for the performance of the home page and tracking the most popular stories in each column, using their own software to show real time performance stats.
It may seem like a mundane role, but one that will become the most coveted job in newsrooms around the world in the next few years. The one person that is making decisions in real time about which content gets high visibility and using click data to verify those decisions.
In our discussions with newsrooms of all sizes over the past 12 months, it is clear there is a large market demand for real time data that can direct editorial choices, optimal link placement and measure real time story performance metrics.
The only thing that has been slowing adoption down is the lack of software to do this at scale (this is where our real time web analytics service buzzflow™ comes in) and hiring the proper staff to manage real time editorial management on websites. Both of these things are changing quickly.
I managed to find a fuzzy screen cap of what seems to be a one hour view of link performance on the home page of 20minutos.es. You can see the head and long tail of links and images that were clicked on and in what amount over the course of 60 minutes.
Real time data driven newsrooms are here to stay and this is going to be a very exciting space to play in for content and analytics freaks such as ourselves. Plus, who wouldn’t want the job title of “Portadista” on their business card, way cooler than mine.
The Palm Pre smartphone has been receiving stellar reviews on the whole across the web Engadget, Gizmodo, CNET.
In a recent article by The Globe and Mail Palm’s plan for Pre apps the question is posed as to how Palm intends to make this device a consumer success given it only has about a dozen or so apps available at present versus tens of thousands of apps for competing devices like the iPhone™.
On the surface it seems like the classic chicken and egg scenario for Palm.
Not enough apps, consumers don’t want the device. Not enough consumers with the device, developers won’t build apps for it. But can Palm make the Pre a legitimate contender to the iPhone™ with only modest growth in apps? I think they can and here is why.
The mobile browser.
Tons of services can now be experienced in the mobile browser with the same quality as a downloaded software app. Just the way desktop apps have given way to the browser, the same can happen on mobile devices.
In the case of @follow™, we made the decision to build a browser based service instead of native apps for each mobile platform such as iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian. It’s not to say we won’t roll out native apps over time for specific platforms, but in order to get on as many devices as possible with the same exact code base, going after the mobile web browser was the correct choice for us.
This is why I think the Palm Pre is wide open for creative web developers. Hunt through the Apple app store and pick a bunch of apps that can be recreated as a web app, build them and right away you have Palm Pre owners as an audience.
One thing that gets us going at Kontexto is building things we want to use, but can’t find anywhere else.
Our whole team surfs around all of the Social News sites on the net either using an RSS Reader or going to the actual websites, nothing special, but really repetitive.
After doing this over and over and more and more from our mobile devices, it was obvious that we needed to make it easy to follow all social news sites in a single click from any mobile browser.
We needed to make the experience real time, so that when we were dipping in and out of the social news stream on our iPhone’s and Gphone’s we were assured of the most recent stories at that moment in time.
A quick video below shows you how you can use @follow™ on your iPhone or Gphone™ to follow all the social news sites in real time.
“CPC” has been pounded into our brains to mean “Cost per Click”, an advertising format that charges the advertiser a cash amount only if someone actively clicks on an advert, typically a link.
Advertisers buy the right to show an advert for a given word or set of words. So in essence an economy of words exists that as we know Google, Yahoo, MS and dozens of other advert networks have proven to be very lucrative.
I have been giving some thought lately to the notion of moving beyond charging for words and actually charging for characters. Is there a similar marketplace that could be developed driven by purchasing a collection of characters (I know it’s a word) and pricing characters?
A fascination with characters seems to be prominent these days with services like Twitter limiting your character participation to 140 or less per post, other social networks letting you post short snips as often as you like and of course URL shortening services trying to shrink traditional http url paths to an invisible size.
Well muckrack.com beat me to the “Cost per Character” dream. In what I believe is a simple and genius service, they have created a community of journo’s on Twitter and are offering anyone the chance to post a press release with a “Cost per Character” model.
It is one dollar per character. That’s it.
You write, you pay, paypal takes a 3% cut and muckrack keeps the rest.
Now there is a $50 buck minimum, which kind of defeats the purpose in my opinion, but you have to start somewhere and I hope over time they will get it down to a true cost per character model. Imagine all the BS press releases that would be trimmed down!
Some good eye candy and chart data on iPhone™ penetration, app store growth and some comparisons of this data to the iPod™ and iTunes™ growth. Summary, iPhone™ market and app store market dwarf the growth and potential of Apple’s success with iPod™ and iTunes™.
This presentation by VC firm Kleiner Perkins captures their thoughts on the “Big Ideas” they are considering when looking to invest in iPhone related deals. They have a fund of around $100 million set aside for ‘i’ related deals.
You can jump straight to Slide 13 for these ideas… but the one we like the most?
Big Ideas to Consider - Real-Time Anywhere & Everywhere
We are back with Part 2 of The Followers Series, which explores some ideas around ‘Localized’ Following.
‘The Follower Series’ is a long term posting series that explores the emerging concept of ‘following’ on the web and the new types of web services that will spring up as a result.
@follow™ is a real time following service that builds communities of followers around specific areas of interest. Areas of interest can be centered around an event, a topic, a publication, a person, a blog or any combination of these things mashed up together into what we call a ‘bundle’.
Bundles are alive, active and constantly updating in real time so that anyone interested in following a bundle can dip in and out of the real time stream.
One particular type of bundle and following request popped up this week by a large TV brand we are working with in the Northeastern US. Their request was the catalyst for this post on ‘localized’ following.
Here is the request:
“I want to follow a real time stream of every item posted online by all of the broadcast TV networks in Chicago”
In essence, they wish to set up a real time information bundle that a community of their employees can follow that is LOCAL to them. In this case, local at the city of Chicago level.
So, we set up a localized real time bundle using @follow™ to solve the request. You can see all of the Chicago broadcast TV network content streaming in as it is posted on the web…
We then let them take localization even further using the filter in order to track one specific local story as it unfolds and is being covered by all local tv broadcasters online. In this case, it is a bizarre Cemetery story that has a Michelle Obama slant to it…
So not only were we able to solve an actual real world process problem for this publishing brand (which is always a good feeling), we also had the chance to see the flexibility of the @follow™ service and how our guiding principles of following information in real time in a single view can be applied at the local level.
In the spirit of the real time web, we have been posting as frequently as possible during the development of @follow™ our real time web following service. @follow™ lets you follow streams of content in real time on just about any type of information.
We have updated the design and navigation of @follow™ to make it easier to select and view real time information streams. Right now, there are about 16 information streams that are live, hundreds more will be added in the next few weeks.
An ‘information stream’ at this point is a collection of disparate data points that stream into a single real time view. I am including some early preview screenshots of @follow v.1 below…
This is an @follow™ I set up to follow the Real Time Web 09 conference attendees. All the attendees blogs and twitter feeds are updated in real time into this stream…
You will be able to keyword filter on an information stream to uncover specific items…
Basic directory to one click navigate real time information streams…
As you can see, we are intentionally making this a narrower ‘vertical’ type design for use on mobile web devices like the iPhone™ and Gphone™. I will get into more details in the coming days about the icons on the left and deeper functionality of @follow™.
Quick post today to share some screen caps of the @follow™ real time filter we just put in place to help our users laser in on specific items of interest.
In a nutshell, @follow™ lets you follow bundles of information in real time on any device. You can dip in and out as you like to see what is happening right now on pretty much anything you choose.
We have had a bunch of requests for a quick keyword filter that lays on top of any information bundle so @followers can keyword search in real time. It will get prettier, but the functionality to perform real time keyword search is now in place.
I am using The Guardian Twitter stream in the screencaps below. The Guardian on Twitter is now visible in one central stream on @follow™.
