Curate's Egg Benedict: Mobile design; Tweetdeck as a reporting tool; Here comes google (again); Gawking at Gawker; Whaleoil hooked; Content farms

By Bernard Hickey This piece is designed to be a lot like my Top 10 at 10, but it's all about snippets of news, analysis and comment around the topics of online publishing, marketing, advertising and technology trends rather than financial issues. I welcome any comments or additions in the comments below, or email suggestions to me at bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz I'll try to put this out every Tuesday morning to show our readers, advertisers and other publishers how we operate, where we get some of our ideas from and how we're trying to improve as online publishers. We'd love your suggestions or comments about our site or any of the items mentioned here. 1. Mo mobile - Mashable is an excellent site for news on social media trends and technology. Here is Mashable's guide to Mobile Web Design Tips and Tricks, including some useful WordPress plugins. We use WordPress on this blog and it's a brilliant (and free!) content management system. We use numerous plugins on this site, including our poll. We have a mobile site m.interest.co.nz but it's hosted and built separately. There may be a better way... How would you like to read interest.co.nz on mobile? 2. Tweetdeck - I'm a heavy user of Twitter and Tweetdeck in particular. It's a a piece of software based on Adobe Air that allows me to organise the various Twitter feeds I follow in one place. Tweetdeck is the most popular of these twitter 'consolidation' tools and I've been using it since early last year. We've found Twitter is our most prolific source of 'click throughs' to articles, apart from Google. It's also a great way to get the message out to those who have 'opted in' or are interested in what we're doing. I now have over 2,000 'followers'. Twitter is also a great way to find out what other people are saying. I've found quite a few news tips there. Now this Mashable story says Rupert Murdoch's SkyNews has rolled out Tweetdeck onto the desktops of all reporters as a reporting tool. Fair enough. It's great to see the mainstream media 'getting it'. Let's see how many actually use it. Are any mainstream media newsrooms in New Zealand doing this? 3. Here comes Google (again) - I have a love/hate relationship with Google. I am continually gobsmacked by the usefulness of their search and other services. I am a heavy user because interest.co.nz uses google apps (mail and calendar) and I have a google phone. But at the same time I am wary of Google's dominance, particularly of advertising revenues. Advertisers are finding it easier and easier to spend more of their money with Google's Adwords and Adsense products. Google shares some of the revenues with publishers, but only some and only for Adsense.

We don't allow direct advertisers to use Adsense on our site because the yield is simply too low for us and we can get a higher yield via direct advertising sales. But I can see that for many publishers without connections to big advertisers the 'deal with the devil' is just too easy to pass up. It will all end in a devaluation of page impressions and an inexorable drive lower in yield to the point where page impressions are worthless, simply because there are so many of them. So I always keep a close on what Google is up to. I have a Google phone with Vodafone and lately I've noticed an increasingly useful connection between search and local services and advertisers. Whenever I search on my Google phone I get useful local links with directions and phone numbers with maps. Google no doubt sees this as the future and the likes of Yellow Pages and community newspaper owners such as Fairfax and APN should be quaking in their boots. It's all about the GPS chips quickly appearing in most phones and the ability to use Google Maps in those phones. It makes location based local search very, very useful. Why use yellow pages or an ad in the local rag when you can search, call and then drive to the nearest whatever you want? Once plumbers and vets and butchers work out they can get better value for money from google adwords and adsense then all that goodwill and infrastructure stuck in the balance sheets of yellow pages and 'free' community newspapers will be worthless. Now Google has set up something called 'Near Me Now'. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, another excellent online publishing news source (run out of Lower Hutt by Richard MacManus), has a piece looking at Near Me Now. The holy grail is a service, like one called Yelp in America, where users rate or review local services.

4. A Kiwi Pioneer - Here's a useful audio interview by Problogger's Darren Rowse (Australian based blogging guru) of New Zealand's own Richard MacManus, who tells the story of the growth of ReadWriteWeb, a blog about trends in technology and social media. Both of these guys are role models of mine in a way. They have built substantial businesses for themselves using online publishing tools. It's long, but well worth listening to if you're into this thing. 5. Couldn't resist - There is a very popular brand of toilet paper in Vietnam called 'Google', Mashable reports with this photo. 6. It ain't so bad - We have a policy here at interest.co.nz of moderating comments after they are posted. It allows a much freer flow of comments and, frankly, is the bloggy way. Newspaper based websites such as stuff.co.nz and NZHerald.co.nz are hyper-cautious about allowing comments on their stories and blogs. Both vet comments before publication and it hampers them both. I think they should lighten up a little and vet post-publication. I don't think it increases the legal or reputational  risks that much and does so much to create a vibrant community, like ours. We would have unpublished less than two dozen comments from over 55,000 comments we've had on this site in 2 years. Even the New York Times has found it has had to delete very little. It says one of its most popular blogs, CityRoom, had removed just 279 out of 82,535 comments. 7. Gawking at Gawker - I always watch what Nick Denton does closely. He is the former Financial Times journalist who created a blogging empire in the United States around Gawker and gizmodo. He scandalised 'regular' publishers with an intense focus on generating page impressions through lots of bitchy comment style pieces on other 'real' media's journalism about celebrities. Denton even went so far as to pay blog writers by the page impression. However, it seems he is changing his ways now to focus on exclusives and unique browsers (actual reader numbers) rather than page impressions, according to NiemanLab.

If a refocusing on unique users keeps Gawker on an upswing, there'll be a lot of new passengers on the unique-user bandwagon. I don't believe we've reached the "as Gawker goes, so goes the industry" inflection point, but the company is an industry trendsetter. I see Gawker's move plugging into a broader evolution where web publishers seek to attract people, not just clicks. Generating an audience is tough work. Original content and exclusives require far more time and energy than excerpting and aggregating. (That's not a shot at aggregators "” just an acknowledgement of reality.) The upside is that all that extra effort can create strong relationships with audiences and advertisers alike. Engagement leads to revenue, which leads to sustainability, which stokes hope and other things in short supply these days. A focus on uniques may or may not yield better journalism, but it could create better businesses.

This is all encouraging. Our high value advertisers also focus on the numbers of people (and types of people) actually reading our articles. It also suggests that the tyranny of a CPM (cost per thousand page impression) ad pricing system could be breaking down overseas at least. New Zealand internet publishers were relatively late in switching from tenancy based advertising pricing (ads paid for weekly) to CPM based advertising. This switch has allowed more of a commodification of online display advertising, pulling in all the impressions generated by social media to drive prices down. It accelerated a drift towards cost per click advertising, which essentially says there is no brand value in an advertisement. There may yet be hope.  Here is a piece I did last year on how we make money here at interest.co.nz 8. Email better than RSS? - I'm a heavy user of RSS feeds to monitor various bloggers and news sites. RSS is particularly useful to quickly view headlines and news. I use Google Reader to view and organise my feeds. I use the NewsRob Android application on my Google phone. But RSS hasn't really crossed over to the mainstream. This piece from Hubspot says that Business blogs find email alerts much more successful than RSS. Our blog has RSS but not email any more because we haven't found the Wordpress plugin very user friendly. We also got some complaints about too many alerts. We're redesigning our site at the moment. What you you prefer? Email alerts every time a new story is published or periodic emails? Twice a day perhaps? 9. Whaleoil hooked - I don't fancy getting into the Whaleoil name suppression debate without an awful lot of research and talking to people. Martin Hirst over at Ethical Martini has a nice summary of what's being said online.  He also has a few interesting thoughts of his own. I attended a full day conference organised by InternetNZ in Wellington last month on the issue of name suppression, contempt of court and the internet. Court officials, judges and the Law Commission were all there. Here's a great summary here from Thomas Beagle at Tech Liberty NZ of R vs Internet. It raised a lot of interesting issues around the problems of policing name suppression, contempt of court and a lack of technical nous by the courts. What is needed is a real conversation between serious bloggers and the courts. That started with the R vs Internet conference, but has jumped to a whole new level with the Whaleoil situation. That's a pity. It's now a fight rather than a conversation. The Justice system has decided to do what it knows best: to set a precedent after a public fight. Cameron Slater (Whaleoil) forced the situation, but it's not the first time he and others have done this and I can't help wondering why the Justice system chose to pick the fight now. I worry that the surprises some of the judges got at R vs Internet opened their eyes to the flouting that was going on.  They seem to have decided that enough is enough. If only Cameron Slater had been there that day he might not have pulled the trigger that looks set to wound (or worse) himself first, and maybe take out a few others along the way. 10. Content farms - This article came out in Wired before Christmas and is well worth reading by anyone interested in the future of online publishing. It portrays a new type of publisher who commissions piecemeal work for journalists writing pre-cooked answers to questions likely to be asked by readers on Google and other search engines. This is journalism driven by algorithms and search engines. It depends on Adsense for revenues. It is a profoundly depressing development on the face of it. Here's a taste of how one video producer (Christian Munoz-Donoso) works in the system run by a company called Demand Media.

In this industrial model of content creation, Muñoz-Donoso is working the conveyor belt "” being paid very little for cranking out an endless supply of material. He admits that the results are not particularly rewarding, but work is work, and Demand's is steady and pays on time. Plus, he says, "this is the future." He has shot more than 40,000 videos for Demand, filming yo-yo whizzes, pole dancers, and fly fishermen. But ask him to pick a favorite and he's stumped. "I can't really remember most of them," he says.

Here's how Richard Rosenblatt thinks about the world. He raised US$355 million from investors to back his ideas.

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It's right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database "” the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it "” perhaps an impossible proposition "” the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

Jay Rosen has a piece about these content farms over at ReadWriteWeb. Read it and weep. However, here is an example in New Zealand of a publisher who can make a living out of these type of 'how to' pieces through Google Adsense. Rob Stock at the Sunday Star Times has the story of Les Kenney's BuildEazy site. Is there a market for this sort of 'How To' material on financial issues?