I’ve seen it before. It happened with Twitter and with MySpace. Sometimes there’s a confluence of media attention and star power that makes a website just explode – and that is about to happen to Quora.
If you haven’t heard of this website, enjoy this moment in time. It’s probably the last moment you won’t hear or read someone talk about this great new Q&A site that’s emerged. By the end of 2011, Quora will be seen as one of the breakout hits.
Continue reading “Quora is About to Explode”
Nick Denton who has been on the forefront of blogging and online publishing for the past decade is shaking things up again. He’s redesigning the Gawker websites (Gizmodo, Deadspin, Gawker, Defamer, etc.) to be able to better showcase top stories, making video more prominent, and making articles easier to scan. It’s also interesting to hear what he’s learned over the years. His main point – scoops and exclusives dictate the winners. He writes in a statement he released on Gawker:
One law of media competition applies as strongly to web properties as it did to their predecessors: scoops drive audience growth. Gawker Media experienced that rule, painfully, as Harvey Levin’s TMZ eclipsed our overly bloggy Hollywood site, Defamer. TMZ’s growth was built upon three gigantic stories: Mel Gibson’s meltdown; Michael Richards’ racist outburst; and Michael Jackson’s death.
He goes on to argue that simply reposting stories that are elsewhere on the web is a broken strategy:
For that, let’s look at the biggest exclusive of all — early shots of the iPhone 4 — which made Gizmodo into a household name. That episode more than any other demonstrated the bankruptcy of the classic blog column. In order to keep video of the iPhone prototype at the top of the reverse chronological flow, Gizmodo actually stopped publishing for several hours. How ridiculous!
Another interesting move they are making is moving to more video. In the past, he explained, is that video is twice as hard to produce without twice the payoff. Also, they felt that this was the differentiated skill of TV networks/ However, it’s now changed for them as making videos are easier and they are finding that TV companies are just as entrenched in legacy formats and methods with video as they have been for text. As he says, “Gawker bloggers, once they’re as familiar with iMovie as with cut-and-paste, can beat them.”
The new site looks more like ESPN Sportscenter and PTI than a typical blog like Techcrunch. And that’s the point. Put the big story front and center and the rest to the side. It remains to be seen though that whether catering to the scoop and the new non-familiar user will alienate the daily reader, which is their bread and butter. Personally, I like the move. Even if it doesn’t work, I admire companies that are trying new tactics and innovating. Denton’s been right in the past and if anyone knows online publishing and readership behaviors it’s him – so I’d guess that this is the correct move.
I’ve long thought about how the newspaper industry is changing (especially because my new startup is targeted towards the publishing industry) and this past week i found something really amazing interesting.
Let me start by saying that i find my feeds (both Facebook and Twitter) way more interesting than any website I read. I typically get all my news from Google Reader where i’ve imported all the sites and feeds that i’m interested in. This is a great way to quickly process information but it doesn’t give me any information from other sites (obviously). The great part of Twitter and Facebook is that my friends provide links from all around the web.
So, while at BlogWorld last week i learned about Paper.li which creates a personal newspaper based on your Twitter feed. My personal paper is here. It looks at all the links submitted by your Twitter friends, see what those stories are and creates a paper of those stories. It also knows the categories of those links so it creates a Sports and Technology section for you. For instance, this morning my Paper.li has this Business section:
This is similar to what the company Flipboard is doing – although that’s only an iPad app. The beauty of this is that it’s taking my feed, which has all the information i want, and placing it in the format that i want – as a nice webpage where i don’t have to click through each link to consume them. It’s eliminating links and making my life prettier and easier. What a great way to start a morning
This past weekend i watched this video from Fred Wilson about what are the 10 Golden Principles of a Web application. Fred has been an investor for over 20 years and is on the board of some of this decade’s premier companies such as Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Delicous, and more.
The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.
There one more interesting point he spits out at the end about the name and brand of a company. He talks about how important it is to him that the company purchases the actual name of the company. For example, Foursquare was playfoursquare.com and they insisted that they change. He also insisted that del.icio.us become delicious.com.
The 10 principles are interesting to think about and a good checklist for any startup to have. I’ve definitely been guilty of ignoring some of these in my past work. Interesting stuff
There’s an intersting advertising network that i learned about at SXSW this week called The Deck. They do one thing differently and it substantially impacts everything else: they get rid of the CPM. Selling ads by the 1000 holdover from the days of print media and TV where companies wanted to align ads to circulation and ratings. Deck does things differenly.
If you look at the three constituents of ad sales: publishers (the web site), readers, and the advertisers. The CPM is beneficial only to the advertiser. With CPM, publishers optimize their site for page views. This results in chopping stories into 3 pages, making photo galleries, lack of ajax, or other gimicks that result in more page views at the expense of user enjoyment. Typically when sites begin to focus on monetizing, they get worse for the reader, not better.
The Deck is an ad network. They represent both publishers (Twitteriffic, Daring Fireball, etc.) and advertisers (Rackspace, Gowalla, KickApps, etc.). They subjectively vet both of them. The also have the following rules:
Does it work? Definitely. They are way oversubscribed for both advertisers and publishers. Even though advertisers get less impressions, they are more effective. Thus, 7 out of 10 advertisers return month after month. Publishers have more attractive, less cluttered sites and no longer have to worry about chasing pages. Sure they want an audience and the bigger the better but whether it’s 3 page views per user or 10, it doesn’t matter
The author of Daring Fireball has a story of when he was using Google Ads instead of Deck. For a while his most successful, in revenue terms, article was one where he compared a certain design to a man’s toupee. What he found was all the Google Ads next to his article had to do with men’s hairpieces. He also found that men’s hairpiece keywords are very highly priced and he earned 7x the amount of money on that page than other pages. This was troubling for him because he then started thinking about what words are valuable to Google when writing articles rather than what he readers want. His revenue (and interests) were properly aligned with advertisers nor readers.
Deck is an interesting example of someone innovating around ad networks. I find it fascinating as i really don’t like the CPM either. But, does it scale to other, non design/technology sectors? Maybe. I think it requires the readers to be intelligent and (somewhat)affluent. So i could see Travel or Cars having a similar ad network. But it gets harder after that.
2009 was a fun year. I traveled to 42 cities, 4 countries and logged over 100k miles. I also found time to stay at home and do stuff. Looking back on the year, some things really stand out. For instance:
Happy 2009 everyone. It’s been a fantastic year and I wish you all the best in 2010.
The value of Wikipedia is the contributors to it. As sites become easier and easier to contribute to, wikipedia remains the nerdiest, most cryptic, most confusing site to add content to. I have a degree in Computer Science and i find it incredibly difficult to find a way to add content to it. I’m not saying i didn’t figure it out, but it was nowhere near simple.
For this reason (and possibly others) wikipedia contributors are on the decline. Does this mean it will not be the dominant site it is today in the future? I wouldn’t surprised. I could see sites like Mahalo picking up the slack. What do you think?
I had no idea why Google would buy a company, reCaptcha, that does captchas. For those of you who don’t know, captchas are the little squiggly text that people enter to prove they are human. The word “captcha” actually stands for: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
With these things are all over the internet, why would Google buy this specific company? I found out a few reasons. First, they are the original gangsters – it turns out the guy who invented captchas is the founder of reCaptcha. Second, they way they do the captcha words is quite innovative. Check this out: reCAPTCHA takes scans from newsclippings, articles and old books that can’t be read by machines (because they are scans) then feeds them to humans in a captcha one at a time with other words that it knows. The user then enters both words. The word that reCAPTCHA knows is tested – if correct, it now learns an additional word to use on other challenges. This is how they build up their database of words from scans.
Google has for the past 6 years been scanning books like crazy. They have millions of books scanned. What they don’t have is text of those books available to be searched. The thought is that if you use captchas to surface all the words of those books one at a time, this will enable a massive crowdsourcing project to build a database of literature. Very interesting experiment. I never really hear of such clever business development deals. I love it.
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As the media industry consolidates and more and more people are simply linking to news – you might start to wonder where all the news is going to come from. There’s a great quote that was passed along to me by Jordan that goes:
what no one seems to understand is that “news” doesn’t just magically appear on twitter/the web/etc. Most of it is scraped off these “old dead media” sources. I’m constantly amazed by the childlike mindset of the digerati to this process. It’s like kids thinking that food comes from the grocery store. Kill off the farmers and the journalists and see how much magic food and news just “finds you” for your consumption
Lots of stuff is derivative on the web and it makes you wonder if the world is going to just become one big echo chamber. Or will journalists do more stuff on their own?
Personally, i don’t think the analogy holds. Food must be grown but news doesn’t have to be paid for by journalists at major media companies.
What the world needs is not to cut off the supply of news but to radically change the way it’s published and the economics behind it. Most news is still being produced and most of it is being delivered at very low cost or free. If it’s more expensive than that, it has to go.
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