August 2007 Archives

Mark Glaser, writing in MediaShift, takes companies such as Interactive Advertising, Nielsen, and others, over the wide range of methods for measuring traffic and the flaws associated with the varied methods. Part of the issue is what do you want to measure: page views, unique visitors, time on site, all of which can be manipulated to make numbers better. How do you measure: IP address, cookies (making users like me 3 or 4 unique visitors per day). He makes a mention of a new company Quantcast, which has different ways to measure.

The deciding factor will be which measurement the advertisers trust. Glaser's piece was in two parts (1, 2 )

NY Times: Twin Cities Editor Planning Online Daily. A non-profit news organization is starting in Minneapolis/St. Paul staff with top former executives from daily metro papers.

Non-profit status, would let readers support it as the local NPR TV and radio stations are supported. It would also let contributors write off contributions on taxes. Article also mentions Voice of San Diego, a 2 1/2 year-old group. Twin Cities group is looking to raise $850,000. Voice of San Diego has nine full-time employees and an annual operating budget of $560,000.

Compared with metro dailies, a staff of nine is minuscule.

Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal also had story Friday: Former Strib staffer to launch online newspaper

Smashingmagazine: Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. Especially the tools and services section at the end with timelines, pie charts and histograms and links to Charts and Diagrams Tools.

Some organizations are calling for a code of conduct for bloggers, according to NY Times piece A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs - New York Times, especially after some vicious online battles and the harassing of women bloggers.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Another major newspaper group has tried outsourcing the editorial operaions NZ papers outsource editorial production. By the end of the year, the company, Pagemasters New Zealand will have 45 editing staff working on seven papers, which will be 30 fewer folks than doing the job now.

No surprise here, there are enough downtime and inefficiencies in individual shops. This just looks like a way to cut some costs. There will be bugs and glitches but most readers won't notice. Story says other newspaper groups will be watching this. I bet they will.

Wall Street Journal looks at a man who is married in real life and married in Second Life -- though not to the same woman.

Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?: Alexandra Alter on the toll one man's virtual marriage is taking on his real one and what researchers are discovering about the surprising power of synthetic identity is the story of one man who has found new ways to complicate his wife. His real-life wife is just annoyed with him spending so much time on the computer and his virtual marriage at this time, but if she decided to divorce him, I think most judges would rule in favor of her. One question the story didn't cover was if he could be charged with bigamy?

Family-law experts and marital counselors say they're seeing a growing number of marriages dissolve over virtual infidelity. Cyber affairs don't legally count as adultery unless they cross over into the real world, but they may be cited as grounds for divorce and could be a factor in determining alimony and child custody in some states, according to several legal experts, including Jeff Atkinson, professor at the DePaul University College of Law and author of the American Bar Association's "Guide to Marriage, Divorce and Families."

Michael Wolff's "Burn Rate" epitomized the dot-com of the late-1990s. Now he's started a news aggregation business newser.com. NY Times: Burned Once, but Starting Up Again.

Newser, which is in a test version and will not be finished until October, uses a proprietary algorithm to select “the day’s most important and most talked about stories from the 100 top news sources,” as the site puts it.

Big media may not like him, but they do need him.

Matt Drudge, of the Drudge Report, has become important to major media's news operations. A link from Drudge can rocket traffic that day. The LA Times profiles the media-shy Drudge in Hot links served up daily: Internet pioneer Matt Drudge sifts the news online and sends millions here and there. In the article several admit that while the criticism him publicly, they also alert him to items hoping for a link.

Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they'll have something that catches Drudge's fancy — or, as he has put it, "raises my whiskers." Most keep their fingers crossed that he'll discover their articles on his own and link to them. Others are more proactive, sending anonymous e-mails or placing calls to him or his behind-the-scenes assistant.

Gone is the cramped Hollywood apartment and the little Geo Metro that Drudge used to drive around town. He now lives and works in a $1-million-plus condominium in Miami's super-sleek Four Seasons hotel, "where civilized living reaches its highest form of expression," according to a sales pitch for the residences.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the Drudge Report received 3 million unique visits in June, with visitors spending an average of 1 hour and 6 minutes on the site. That's a lot of time clicking around, giving advertisers more opportunities to be seen. Nielsen/NetRating's measurements also show that visitors return an average of 20 times a month. Most newspaper websites would be fortunate to draw a quarter as many return visits.

Latest study says 45% of Americans are not saving enough for retirement meaning they will not be able to have the same lifestyle as they currently have. Study was made by Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. The "retirement risk" has grown since 1983 when the risk was 31% of adults. Study was funded by a grant from Nationwide, according to the press release.

Here's the chart of how retirement risk has changed:

The Silicon Valley is a different place that other parts of America. You be worth millions, but feel "modest" according to article in NY Times: In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich

One reason is that it costs a lot more in Silicon Valley to live modestly than in the rest of the world. Small houses in the rest of the country can easily top a half million in San Jose.
Part of their angst is the comparison to their neighbors:

“People around here, if they have 2 or 3 million dollars, they don’t feel secure,” said David W. Hettig, an estate planner based in Menlo Park who has advised Silicon Valley’s wealthy for two decades.

Another factor could be the memories of what they were worth before the dot-com bubble and now. It could have been so much bigger:

Yet like other working-class millionaires of Silicon Valley, she harbors anxieties about her financial future. Ms. Baranski — who was briefly worth as much as $200 million in 2000 but cashed out only $1 million before the collapse of the tech bubble — returned to work in March.

Feeling wealthy may be more about you life style and your surroundings rather than money.

Fortune (through CNN web site: Can the Washington Post survive?) looks at the Washington Post's drive to be successful in print. With motivation like director Warren Buffet saying that print won't work, it's a valiant effort that many newspapers hope will work. There is a question if other paper will make the transition.

Here's some interesting take-outs from the article:

Cost cutting won't be enough:

Operating income for the Post Co.'s newspaper division fell from $125.4 million in 2005 to $63.4 million in 2006. (Most of the decline was caused by a $47.1 million expense for early-retirement buyouts.) In the first quarter of 2007, operating income for the newspaper unit fell by another 53 percent.

The best evidence of the difference is the fact that advertisers paid about $573 million last year to reach readers of the company's newspapers, predominantly the 673,900 daily and 937,700 Sunday subscribers to the Post. Advertisers paid only about $103 million to reach the eight million unique visitors to the Post's Web sites each month.

The Post's daily circulation peaked at 832,000 in 1993. It has dropped by nearly 20 percent since then, while the region's population has grown by about 20 percent. Says Buffett: "Per capita readership really is falling rapidly." Even so, the Post retains the highest penetration of any paper in a top-ten market

It's a lengthy piece full of facts and sidebar graphics and illustrative anecdotes about the Washington Post, but I can boil it down to one simple truth: If your business model is predicated on scarcity and you're suddenly operating in a world of surplus, you're in deep doo-doo. Time to come up with a Plan B.

Boing Boing: Weekly World News dies after 28 years of awesum, Bat Boy bummed

This isn't in the U.S. yet, but when it is I know of a few who'll be watching Eastenders this way. NY Times: BBC Launches Free Internet TV Service -- The BBC launched an online service on Friday that allows people living in Britain to download many programs from the last week.