• The lift

    He’d never tried it. But circumstances were such that he really had no alternative. He was stuck at a party that was ending, and he didn’t have a cab. He didn’t know the hosts well enough. Hers was the last car to leave. He would attempt a pick up line, just so he’d get dropped.

    until next time, careening character

  • A rocky future ?

    The video that marked the end of Rocky Mountain News, a daily newspaper in Denver, would have a sobering effect on anyone who’s worked in the industry. The newspaper printed its final edition on Feb 27th, 55 days short of its 150th birthday. And there’s no succour when The Business Insider points out a list of 9 newspapers that are likely to fold. Newspapers in the US are still in shock at how an industry that was once really profitable seems to be on the path of extinction. Gawker is a good place to keep track. The reasons for decline are many – the rapid technological advances, changing consumption habits, newspapers not reacting early enough – to name a few. That’s a track we have walked several times, so I shall move on.

    What are newspapers doing to survive? A few examples. The Hearst Corporation, which publishes the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Albany Times Union, and has interests in an additional 43 daily and 72 non-daily newspapers, is going to charge for some of its online content. The New York Times fights on, bringing out something new on a regular basis, the latest being the version 2 of their popular iPhone app, which offers extensive support for offline reading. (via RWW) It is also starting a neighbourhood blog project, which will have content from editors as well as citizen journalists, and they are planning to target local businesses for ads. (via TechCrunch) Across the pond, FT reports that the UK’s top regional newspaper groups have banded together to negotiate with the government as they seek urgent help to save further titles from closure.  Meanwhile, The Guardian has announced its Open Platform, which will allow developers to use its content (from 1999)  in myriad ways. The more interesting part is what it states  on the Partner Program page “You can display your own ads and keep your own revenue. We will require that you join our ad network in the future.”A very innovative approach!!

    Even content reccomendation services, like Loomia, used on sites such as WSJ, are looking to get revenues for their publishers. Meanwhile, advice is pouring in, from all quarters. Social Media Explorer has an excellent post on how journalists can leverage social media. This Mashable post shows “10 ways newspapers are using social media to save the industry”. This not only includes suggestions, but also tools that are available for free. I know at least a couple of journalists here who also use Twitter for story ideas, opinions etc.

    Debates still rage on the role that newspapers play in the community, and whether its loss is something much beyond that of just a source of news. One view is that society is losing a watchdog, and that stories are reported because of full time journalists, and that in a world, where all content is free, no news gathering will happen, because there is a price to it. But there are those who think otherwise. This is a good read, on that counter view. Some recent studies would support the latter. In fact, it raises a good point about revenue, which we’ll come to in a while. But both agree that to survive, newspapers have to quickly figure out how to factor the net into their business model, whether it is too late, only time can tell.

    As this article points out, the two revenue sources of newspapers – circulation and advertising, are linked. When content becomes free (the net has forced that) people are no longer interested in paying for it offline, which essentially means that advertisers don’t get the reach that they used to, from newspapers. And projections suggest that its not just offline ad revenues that are in a free fall, online newspaper ad revenues will continue to decline in 2009. Whether the state of the online component is a function of recession, is debatable. After all, when it comes to advertising on the net, even the biggest of newspapers have a formidable foe – Google. Google, which is now putting ads in Google  News, when you search for a particular topic. Remember that Google news is only an aggregator, and as of now, there are no updates of revenue sharing arrangement with the news sources.

    Newspapers are still producing content that people want. Only, there are other sources too now.  More than the assets required to generate the content (editorial staff and related infrastructure expenses), it is the delivery platform (press, newsprint, and even the distribution) that is costing the newspaper. Now consider this, with rapid technological advances, it is becoming easier for newspapers to generate the same content, and perhaps at a lesser cost (fewer reporters combined with crowd sourcing, for example) There is still some cost involved in this, and so, it is debatable whether all the content generated should be given free online. If some thought can be applied to utilising other delivery platforms which are cheaper, a revenue model scalable with costs incurred could be achieved. In any case, newspapers never made money out of content directly. They built audiences around the content they provided, and then leveraged that audience to create a revenue model in which advertisers paid to reach that audience. Maybe it is time to rekindle that relationship with the customers and give him more options than the ‘one size fits all’ newspaper.

    The time is ripe for Indian newspapers (especially the English dailies) to do some experimenting.  I wonder if its a good idea to treat the newspaper’s web presence as a separate business unit. Rather than blindly putting all the news available in the physical paper online for free,  start from scratch on the web, have a separate news gathering process (or attribute a part of the overall cost to this unit), start figuring out the requirements of consumers, allow some customisation,  (the net allows a lot already, but its still worth a shot in India) play around with local/sub local content, (they’ve to work fast on this one, since Twitter is also working on local news updates)  work on the digital delivery platforms, deliver more targeted consumers to advertisers with customised solutions rather than broadcast style ads, and maybe a fate similar to the US counterparts can be averted.

    until next time, newspaper

  • Siddhartha

    Herman Hesse

    Somewhere in Pankaj Mishra’s ‘The Romantics’, there’s a conversation about ‘Siddhartha’ and it being a reason for a Westerner’s interest in Buddhism and India. A conversation, not my view 🙂 That, and the fact that it also finds mention in Mishra’s other book ‘An End to suffering’ is primarily what led me to the book.
    The book is best described as the story of an alternate version of the Buddha, and the Buddha features in the story too, including a conversation.
    The message is perhaps like a quote I read somewhere, which amounts to “There are many ways to the top of the mountain, but once there, the view is the same”
    The arguments are compelling, and makes you think, not just about the end, but also about the ways in which you get there. I especially liked the thoughts on the concept of time, the ‘goal vision’ obscuring everything else, and ‘the opposite of every truth is also true’.
    Forget Buddhism, it is an excellent read on life, what we strive for, and my favourite paradox – the meaningfulness and the meaninglessness of our existence.

  • One of an unkind 😐

    We met an acquaintance when we’d gone for a movie last weekend. During the interval, he bought two large  colas – one for him and his wife, and one for us. For reasons I considered valid (only one of which was that I considered the thing addictive and didn’t want to tempt myself at the beginning of the summer) I had to say no – a thanks but.. polite no at first to a curt no finally. When the movie ended, he walked out, one cola stilled clutched, and a sheepish smile thrown at us. I felt very uncomfortable, more so because I didn’t really know him and didn’t explain to him why i said no. I had, with my silence, rebuffed, what was a nice gesture from him.

    I hurried back to catch ‘Boston Legal’, and it was as though the cosmos wanted to rub it in. One of the cases under trial in the episode was that of a sorority expelling a member because she was socially awkward. The interesting part was that lawyers on both sides were essentially very nice people…. with personality disorders. Jerry, who appears on behalf of the sorority president has Asperger syndrome, and uses another personality to overcome his awkwardness and Clarence, who appears for the defendant, has multiple personalities, each of which is a defense against more aggressive people. Though I supported the member – Marcie Cooper, who I felt was wronged, I found Jerry’s closing extremely touching

    College is also about preparing students for the outside world. Last time I checked, it’s pretty tough out there. There’s the old adage, “Nice guys finish last.” There’s some truth to that. I happen to know opposing counsel is a fundamentally kind man. Sensitive. He chose to exploit my Asperger’s syndrome to win this case.

    My very best friend, a lawyer I had a case against not too long ago, he, too, exploited my Asperger’s. He’s a very good man, who opted for cruelty as a strategy.

    If Marcie Cooper comes out of this experience thinking that people can be cruel—even the kind, sensitive
    ones—if she’s learned that she will be judged not simply on merit, or the content of her character, but on how she looks and socializes with others, she’s gotten an education, one that will serve her in life. This is a free society. People get to choose their friends, clubs get to choose their members. Sometimes it’s very ugly and unfair. That’s . . . life.

    And I could imagine how the kind sensitive ones could be cruel. Perhaps its the result of a majority of humanity taking advantage of their kindness and sensitivity, or being insensitive to it, or trampling their kind acts and emotions in the races they run, or laughing at what would be deemed their idiocy.

    And I wondered- in educating children for life, will parents have enough time and patience for teaching their children the importance of being humane, while still instilling in them the smartness that would enable them to know when someone takes advantage of them? Or will they choose the easy way out and teach them to be rude, to unfairly demand, to snatch by might irrespective of right? And create a race of inhuman beings who wouldn’t spare a thought for those who are perhaps not as strong as them – physically, emotionally or in terms of social skills.

    I’m no angel, but i try to prevent my own unkindness. I usually ask myself “how would I feel in the other person’s shoes”, but there are some situations when for some reason, I cannot adhere to my own rule. I feel very guilty on such occasions, because I feel that through that act I might have started a chain. Someday soon, I hope to make it up to that acquaintance, for I am sorry. I truly am.

    until next time, transactions in kind

  • Its complicated

    ..and a bit long 🙂

    What do you do when you can’t buy a service? If you have the capability, you build it yourself. That seems to be what Facebook is up to, triggering of what would perhaps be only the first of the battles for real time supremacy. When you log in to Facebook, you can see the message right at the top “Changes to the Home Page are coming soon”, and the link gives you a preview of what to expect on Wednesday. Keeping in mind Facebook’s history of design changes, its not going to be a democratic process like the TOS incident. Change will happen, whether we need it or not.

    So, what are these changes? RWW has a good post that captures the main features. The publishing bar is extremely similar to Friendfeed – Facebook’s favourite idea shop (the newsfeed, comments on the newsfeed, the like feature are all from there), and users can now publish photos, links, videos from here without going to the application. The homepage will now have the newsfeed in the centre (with better filtering features basis their relationship with friends, groups and even applications) When I wrote about Twitter saying no to the Facebook deal, I’d asked for a twitter like ‘Follow’ feature in Facebook, and now thats happening. Thanks to the updated privacy settings, you can follow a person’s updates without being his/her friend. The cap of 5000 friends is also going to be removed. Most importantly, the newsfeed is going to be real-time. Fan pages are changing too, and can brands/personalities (or whatever you’re a fan of) will now be normal profiles and can update their status, and if you permit, your newsfeed will be updated too. So yes, Britney will tell you, on your newsfeed, that she’s having a concert wherever!! I wonder if these changes will make a difference to the existing not-so-great engagement statistics between fans and their objects of fandom. Lastly, I read on TechCrunch that apps on Facebook will now be able to use the live chat functionality, giving them the chance to make an app go viral faster.

    So that’s what Facebook’s been upto. Sometime back, I read an article which compared Twitter to Palm. To summarise, Palm, which used to be a consumer darling for a long time, lost out when it refused to overcomplicate its products, while competitors solved the issues that had made them unsatisfactory. Twitter, thankfully hasn’t been idle. It has been working on its integrated search for sometime, and is now rolling it out (on a few profiles) with a search bar and a trends button. Meanwhile, there has been some speculation about Google buying Twitter. Google should definitely be interested considering Twitter’s prowess in real time search. As this Adage article says, its way beyond the contextual search that Google offers.

    In the future, searches won’t only query what’s being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.

    (In that context, check out TwitterThoughts, its a work of art!! And if you’re the kind who misses the real time style of Twitter on google search, you will love this greasemonkey script. Amazing!!)

    While Twitter has been growing exponentially – a whopping 752% in 2008, Facebook has too – though at a relatively more normal 86%. I remember reading sometime back that Facebook was about 15 times larger than Twitter, and that if Facebook were to stop growing today, and Twitter were to add users at the best rate its shown so far, it would still take Twitter 36 years to catch up.

    Very subjectively, and from a user’s perspective, Facebook and Twitter are not competitors. My involvement with my Facebook friends is quite different from that with my Twitter friends, and I don’t have a lot of overlap. But I know a lot of users who have a huge overlap. I actually share a lot more stuff on Twitter and get a lot more stuff from there too. But I am only one user and perhaps represent a minority of typical Facebook usage patterns. For example, The Inquisitr had a good story on how tweets got more responses on Facebook than Twitter itself.

    I am always on Twitter thanks to the browser plug in, irrespective of whether i actively take part or not, I login to Facebook a few times every day. I have to wonder if real time on Facebook can change that. In Facebook, profiles/groups/chat are the bases of conversations – quite well defined spaces. In Twitter, the stream is the base, you start from anywhere. There are different clients that can be used to log into Twitter, Facebook (with a couple of exceptions) has to be accessed from its own homepage.

    Also, from a new user point of view, Facebook provides more ways to interact than the one size fits all approach of Twitter’s ‘What are you doing’?  When you log on to FB, you most likely already have friends who’re there, and you find more friends (who you know in real life), therefore the context and common interests already exist.  You have a base from where to start. Twitter perhaps works in reverse, since you have to make friends (common interests and therefore conversations) on Twitter. Maybe all this contributes to why you have to explain Twitter to people, and they still say ‘Yeah, but what do you DO there?’, and people automatically take to Facebook. Even if thats not the case, relatively, ‘learning the ropes’ is easier on Facebook than Twitter. Thats generalisation and debatable too.

    Facebook’s redesign and policy changes have sparked off user outrage in the past, Twitter (except for the whale) is smoother, perhaps it hasn’t deviated from the original approach much – even the new set of changes doesn’t affect the user much, only adds value to his usage. Is it a difference of intent – Facebook being pure social networking, and Twitter being on a meta plane – higher? Or are the differences merely a function of time in the market and user base? Interestingly, in a recent research with 200 social media leaders on which service they were willing to pay for, Facebook came first with 31.2%, Twitter was third with 21.8%, behind LinkedIn. (via TechCrunch)

    Users are one side of the story, the other side is made up of advertisers. In the survey I mentioned above, when the same social media leaders were asked which service they would reccommend businesses to pay for, Twitter topped with 39.6%, Facebook was third at 15.3%, LinkedIn separated the two again. Every week, developers bring out a new tool that augments/complements Twitter usage and helps the service cater better to users, and perhaps brands too. Meanwhile, Facebook is working on a combination of Facebook Connect and Facebook Ads, to create a social ad network. It seems quite possible that just like users, brands also will differ in their usage of the two services. Some might adopt the same practices, some might vary, and use each to complement the other. It could also be that they would cater to different kinds of advertisers altogether, just like my friends list. More on that next week.

    until next time, never the twain shall meet?