Yahoo Moves Aggressively into Crowdsourced Local Content
Posted on 26. Aug, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry
Paid Content today reported that Yahoo is moving into producing much more local content and that it is going to be using its recently acquired AssociatedContent platform to produce the content via crowdsourcing.
Yahoo will likely have good success with the strength of its online presence and the effectiveness of the crowdsourcing model in heading into this segment. The question for other local publishers: what do you do know? Acquire your own crowdsourced platform (Associated Content cost $100M). Or maybe obtain a crowdsourced content platform / virutal newsroom though a SaaS partnership?
Forbes to go Crowdsourced
Posted on 14. Jun, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry
Today David Ewalt, an editor at Forbes, live-tweeted a company meeting. In it Louis Dvorkin, the former CEO of True/Slant, which was recently acquired by Forbes, laid out a new bold strategy for Forbes. Here are the tweets (most to least recent):
Value for contributors isn’t explicitly defined yet. My own take: there will be both financial & non-financial rewards based on yr. audienceA couple people asking if this is HuffPo model — my answer would be no, it’s more entrepreneurial, about developing wide swaths of talent
If you are interested in writing about travel, real estate, wine, food, cars, sports, health –any forbes lifestyle topic– drop me a line!
Meeting adjourned! The big takeaway: If you have something smart or unique to say to the world, we’ll make it our job to help you say it
Reorganizational details tbd – this is more about philosophical direction
Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent. We will help you develop your own brand and talent
If anyone has questions I’ll try to ask it if you hurry.
Lewis calls it “incentive based entrepreneurial journalism.” This isn’t about trying to get people to give us content with no reward.
Forbes’ original reporting and investigation not going away. We’re adding a level 2 bottom of the pyramid: 1000s of outside contributors
The big idea: We are looking to significantly expand our stable of outside contributors. A merger of Forbes brand & the True/Slant model.
New Forbes edit boss Lewis Dvorkin having meeting right now with his editors. He says it’s on the record, so I’m tweeting from it live.
Seems to be a really courageous and I think effective new path for Forbes.
Interestingly Paul Carr later in the day let loose on TechCrunch about how foolish he thinks this strategy to be:
There are almost not enough words to describe how wrong-headed this move is: Forbes’ online editorial standards are already in the toilet and Dvorkin has just yanked on the flush. Not only will this new breed of hacks add thousands of pages of self-promotional, unedited (Forbes simply doesn’t have the resources to monitor thousands of contributors) drivel to Forbes.com but, by lowering the barrier to entry to anyone with a keyboard, the publication will also scare away those top tier contributors – captains of industry, statesmen and the like – who are prepared to pen a free article for Forbes just for the kudos that comes from being asked.
The Blog: Becoming the Default Publishing Format
Posted on 27. May, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry
Today Newsweek re-launched its site with a new design. It’s great: simple & clear.
It’s funny how it’s very much a blog in its appearance, with a stream of stories. Two column.
More and more media are ditching their crazy, confusing layouts where they try to satisfy everyone in the turf-war for homepage space. Instead the simple two-column-with-stream layout pioneered by blogs will continue to take over more and more designs.
So how long until the New York Times ditches its 5-column zig-zag mess?
WaPo creates community-powered political site
Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Toby in PubSocially, The Publishing Industry
The Washington Post has launched a new site, the “Political Blog Network.” Harvard’s Nieman Lab reports that it “is packaging content written by unpaid bloggers, hoping to engage its audience, give writers a platform, and make some money selling ads.” It notes the significant shift for a major media company like WaPo to utlilize the model where “a small number of professionals are paid to curate the work of many more unpaid writers.” The article notes how the compensation for the contributors is not cash but rather distribution and exposure.
Digg and the Scale of Communities
Posted on 12. May, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry
Mike Arrington wrote on TechCrunch today about the problems facing Digg and how it is struggling to get beyond its initial success to a greater scale. His point is that Digg is captive to its community and that the best companies often have to defy community feedback to take a service to the next level.
All good points. Maybe, however, there is simply a limit to the scale of a community. Arrington identifies the “250,000 or so hard core Digg users” as the heart of the problem. 250K power users as the problem?! Most sites would kill to have that many power users.
The problem with Digg is that it is one site, one service, one brand, one set of community leaders (Digg employees), one community, one vibe / ethos for all things. Within a community dynamic, you can only have so many big contributors, so many “traffic cops,” so much inter-communication among the community, after which it is no longer worth while and effective for more users to contribute.
A counter point: Facebook , Yelp, or Twitter, for example, have met no limits in the size of their communities. But the difference there is that they are not one single entity. Facebook and Twitter are endlessly segmented by friendships and follows. Yelp is broken down by cities, types of entities being reviewed, etc. And it ultimately has some sort of focus on business reviews.
Digg strives to cover all things, with all posts filtering up to the Digg home page. That’s ultimately one community, and it has hit its maximum.
The future of media is every more niche and more diffuse. Digg however is trying to an NBC or CBS. There’s only so much content that can be fit on a single channel or conversely, that a single community can contribute. But the future is going to have tens of thousands of channels or content communities, each run by leaders with specific knowledge and connection to each topic.
And that’s the problem for Digg.
Open File Launches: Crowdsourced Local News Site
Posted on 11. May, 2010 by Toby in PubSocially, The Publishing Industry
Nieman Lab today announced the launch of OpenFile, a crowdsourced local news site covering Toronto.
As Nieman reports, OpenFile “combines the core maxims of new media: community engagement, emphasis on locality, bottom-up approaches to news.” In particular, the service is right on about using the community to produce content and to shift the role of journalist from reporter to curator. Among the services core principles are:
2. Always collaborate: The line between journalist and reader should be fluid. Apart from gatekeeping and quality control, we must be responsive to our readers. Our technology choices should be democratic, collaborative and pragmatic.
6. Curate the conversation: Shift the role of the journalist from fact-gatherer to news producer. We will shape and direct stories in concert with our readers.
The site states that its content production process begins and ends with its community and they’ve set forth a very compelling new model of its staff will collaborate with the community to produce content:
1. You come up with a great idea for a local news story.
2. You submit that great idea to OpenFile by opening a file.
3. An OpenFile editor reviews your idea, and either assigns it to a reporter or posts it to the OpenFile site to gauge community response. Members can then add to your idea and help it grow.
4. If the story is deemed a good fit, the OpenFile editor assigns it to an OpenFile reporter.
5. The reporter posts the story and publishes it to the OpenFile site.
6. The published story is viewed by the OpenFile readership community, who can supplement it with additional images, video, comments and more.
7. Local news prospers. Everybody wins. Huzzah!
OpenFile has the right formula in place. Looking forward to keeping an eye on their progress.
To Have a “Community”, Users Can’t be Second Class Citizens
Posted on 06. May, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry
Today CyberJournalist.net reported that The Nation re-launched its site. The headline: “The Nation launches new site built on Drupal, emphasizing community.” The Editor of The Nation posted too talking about how media is undergoing dramatic change and how “What we’ve decided to do is go for it.”
Now I don’t meant to belittle The Nation. They indeed are taking bolder steps into social media than most. But will this work? Let’s look at how they’re “emphasizing community.” Here’s their new site header:
Indeed you’ll see that there’s a new “community” link in the header. Here comes community, right?
Not really. Think of the big community sites: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. There’s no “community” link in the header. Community isn’t a side show. EVERYTHING is the community.
Furthermore, there aren’t different classes of users. There’s not the employees who can actually initiate and create content and then the users that can then do “community” reactive activities like liking and commenting.
If you really want user to participate, to build a “community,” then users have to be able to function at the top tier, and not just react to what the “pros” produce but produce themselves.
For media organizations to truly get going with “social media,” they need to take this next step.
Ford Motors and Crowdsourced Brand Sites
Posted on 21. Apr, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry
Earlier this month Ford Motors launched The Ford Story (http://www.thefordstory.com/), a site where its customers can share their experiences with Ford cars, their thoughts on new car concepts, etc.
The latest in brand marketing is the ability to “go direct” and interact directly with customers through Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, etc. While Ford has all of these, the launch of The Ford Story shows the need to go further, with a site that is totally dedicated to the Ford brand and where customers can have deeper interactions around it.
Look for more brands to be launching such sites. Of course running such community-powered sites is not easy, but if you start with a grog, it’ll be a snap and a huge success.
Relevance: Social vs. Topic Networks
Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized
Above is a recent post on Facebook from a friend of mine. It’s typical of the sort of posts that used to illicit a lot of skepticism when people first considered getting on to MySpace, Facebook and then Twitter. “Why would I get on ?” they would say. “I don’t care to read about what my friend is having for lunch / what clothes they are wearing / what they weather is like where they live / etc.”
Folks used to say that, but they’d still get on those services. And they might have been skeptical, but boy did they start using those services anyhow. The ability of those services to allow users “to say in touch” with friends has been phenomenal, and millions upon millions of users spend amazing amounts of time contributing and reading brief posts from their friends about meals, interesting links, runs, baby photos, you name it. (Of course there are differences between MySpace (stalking), Facebook and Twitter (asynchronous, not just social), but I’m talking broadly about the social network phenomena).
Seeing the great success of social networks among friends, many businesses sought to insert similar networks into other sectors of life. LinkedIn has been a runaway success as a “professional social network.” It, however, is primarily used as a directory of people, resumes and connections, and has not come close to Facebook’s success in terms of getting users to come back regularly to consume new content.
Ning has been the leader in “white labeled” social networks that allow users to create a social network for any interest or topic. There are numerous other white label network offerings as well. Ning launched into our industry amid a LOT of buzz–it has raised $120 million from some top flight investors. But Ning and other white label social networks have never gained much traction and just recently news has come out that Ning is really hurting (and from people we know who used to be there, it’s even worse).
So what happened? Why wasn’t the success of social networks able to translate into lots of successful, topic-focused, white label networks. The answer is that content in a social context has different relevance than content in a topic-based context.
Mark Zuckerberg has always had the genius of looking to simply model in technology what is already happening in the real world. And in the real world, communication in a friendship context is casual, it’s short-form, it’s “small talk.” Because of the context of the existing relationship you already have with a friend, you are eager to simply “catch up” and “stay in touch” and the small, pedestrian details of what is going on in that person’s life are interesting to you because that person is your friend. There’s no need for moderation: you welcome that user’s content into your feed because they are your friend.
Social networks–and Facebook most successfully–were created to enable that friendship communication. The tools set up–photo sharing, and in particular the status update–enable just that friendship interaction. The result are posts like my friends above about cleaning his kitchen floor, and millions upon millions of us find this interesting.
Now Ning and the other white-labeled networks saw the success of MySpace and Facebook and built their systems off those models (in particular they’re built off of MySpace which was the market leader at the time). But here’s the disconnect: the friendship content model was being jammed on top of the topic content dynamic.
And let’s look back to the real world. When you are communicating in a topic (not friendship) context, the communication is much different. If you are learning more about a personal passion, say gardening, or are communicating on a professional topic like human resources best practices, the remarks are much more likely to be prepared and of high quality. Often you’d be at a meeting or a convention where selected speakers present prepared remarks or speak through a moderated panel. Importantly, there is a higher bar for quality and relevance in order for the content to be meaningful to you.
If you’re interested in gardening, you don’t want to hear an update from a gardening expert saying “I just got back from walking my dog.” You’d like to hear an insightful post from them on good tips for planting in the spring. But the systems created by Ning and the other white label providers steer the content and communication into that short-form, social-network-like format. And that’s why they’ve fallen down.
But some Internet pioneers have taken another tact. These are sites like BleacherReport (sports), SeekingAlpha (finance), etc. who have looked to cover their topics through a community of contributors. But they understood that using Ning or the social network model would not provide the quality needed for “topic-focused” communication. While borrowing some social networks conventions, they took the blog post as the core content type for their sites. And then to further enhance quality, they used human editors / moderators / curators to direct and filter their communities’ contributions. The result has been great success for this new breed of “crowdsourced publisher.”
It took a lot of (venture capitalist) money for these sites to get to where they are, as existing CMS systems do not provide for this crowdsourced model and all of them had to build their own proprietary systems (BleacherReport has raised $8 million and SeekingAlpha $7 million). In order for more sites to benefit from this phenomena without having to spend the millions to build it all themselves, Grogger provides a platform where any publisher–whether media, brand or association–can easily launched a crowdsourced site.
So the riddle has been solved! The social network model works for social content. For topic-based content, it’s part social network, part blog, and part curation. And it’s all ready to go on Grogger. So start a grog!
GDGT–Crowdsourced Electronics Content
Posted on 07. Apr, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized
GDGT, a site that produces crowdsourced electronics content–closed a new round of funding today. From the WSJ:
Gdgt is one of a lengthening list of businesses built on the belief that real people can deliver better content than editors or generalist reporters. These companies, like sports site SB Nation or more general question-and-answer service Quora, are tapping the social-networking zeitgeist by relying on their users to generate content and using data like one’s social connections and targeted interests to better personalize it.
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