Changing Way

I noticed that a got a trickle of traffic from a URI @nytimes.com. It turns out that I provide one of their “Headlines around the web” for Massachusetts.

Perhaps I should change the post title to “the headline heard around the web.” Or perhaps I should click on the banner ad, since this blog is certainly not a profitable business.

Every now and again, I see something about how old physical media, such as paper, will outlast newer media, such as the disc that this post will be stored on. There was such an article in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

The confusing thing is that digital memory offers the illusion of permanence. Even when people would like to see a file disappear, for instance, delete just doesn’t seem to last forever - whether it is on social networks like Facebook, or e-mails or text messages that surface years later.

The article refers to services to convert analog music to digital. I shed my last vinyl records the last time I moved, a few years ago. Next time I move, it’ll be time to shed my cassette tapes.

The ones I took care to keep during the last move are the tapes of Richard Thompson live shows. Perhaps I should convert them to digital. But I haven’t played them in years, and I can probably find the same or similar stuff on the web.

By the way, I read the Globe article on paper, and I paid money for it. And some of you were thinking that owning cassette tapes marked me as a dinosaur…

The Economist’s recent article on social networks is worth a read. It draws many connections between social networking and email.

If you suspect that there will be little in the article that you haven’t seen elsewhere before, you’re probably right. But an article that brings things together, makes good points, and makes them well is a pleasure to read, and may be a good introduction for people wondering what the fuss is about. Talking of making points well, here’s one about how deals such as Microsoft/Hotmail and AOL/Bebo are sometimes viewed.

The correct half is that a next big thing—web-mail then, social networking now—can indeed quickly become something that consumers expect from their favourite web portal. The non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an article on The Best Kind of Traffic for Web Sites. Here’s the bottom line.

That honor goes to the people who arrive at a site by typing its Web address directly into their browsers or clicking on a bookmark. Such visitors, who tend to be repeat customers, linger the longest, spend the most money, and are the most likely to “convert” to buyers, doing so on 3.3 percent of their visits. On average, their visits are worth $5.69 apiece.

So some of these best web customers are people too dumb to bookmark? Apparently so, according to Engine Ready. I’ve linked to the firm’s site, since the NY Times can’t be bothered to.

Engine Ready was founded in 1998 as a Search Engine Optimization firm, and has had a blog since… 2008? So I have to refer you to the post entitled Why are there still boundaries between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0?

A Business Week cover story in May 2005 argued that “blogs will change your business.” This week, authors Stephen Baker and Heather Green took the interesting step of annotating the article with updates.

For example, the 2005 article remarked that: “Six Apart, a four-year-old San Francisco company, leads in blog software.” A 2008 annotation adds that: “We also should have mentioned WordPress, a highly influential open-source blog platform.”

The article has a new title: Social Media Will Change Your Business. The last three years have seen the rise of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

It’s interesting to see Business Week using the web to update a much-downloaded and frequently-linked article from a few years ago. Good for BW, and for Stephen and Heather, for having the nerve to admit the ways in which the original article has dated. To say that it’s dated isn’t to look down on it. In 2005, I didn’t see Twitter coming (although I would have mentioned WordPress).

If you’re interested in contrasting media coverage, horrific late-night bloodbaths, or reasons to read the Boston Herald, take a look at Universal Adam’s case for a two-newspaper town. Adams’ contrast between the Globe and the Herald is as vivid as… the Herald’s coverage of a bar where “it’s always past midnight.”

If you want to see a clumsier contrast involving two newspapers, go to New York: If Facebook is the New York Times, then myspace is the NY Post. Facebook is less like the NYT than it is like… I don’t know, a gooseberry. At least a gooseberry is bubble-shaped. (By the way, Fred Wilson usually writes rather well; that was his brain on Murdoch.)

If you want to write a really compelling article, try combining story, statistics, and quotes. If you want an example, take a look at Donovan Slack’s piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe. Here’s the story.

William Hayhurst III’s dream of joining the Boston Fire Department and carrying on a family tradition… appeared to be dashed when he received relatively dismal scores on the civil service exam all three times he took it.

Then, in what critics call an example of the patronage and favoritism lingering in Massachusetts government, the Hayhursts’ political connections turned things around.

A special state law passed this year for the benefit of the Hayhurst family vaulted William III from 623d place to the pinnacle of the hiring list.

Here’s the statistic: “A Globe review found that 40 of the 218 state laws passed in 2007 provide benefits to specific individuals by name.”

Here’s the quote. It’s from one of our representatives who cosponsored the bill.

The reason I signed on is, as a new legislator, I’m not really familiar about the process… So I looked to some reps who are friends of mine who had some easy things that weren’t going to be controversial, and I just signed on to provide assistance to them and learn more about the process.

I wonder what he’s learned.

If you want to learn about deadpan humor, you’d do well to study the article. Donovan drops in that quote toward the end of the article, with the journalistic equivalent of a straight face (straight typewriter)? Even so, his article doesn’t quite match last month’s classic by Andrea Estes.

Today’s Boston Globe includes its critic’s picks of 2007. I went straight to the albums of the year lists. There’s a list by each critic. Unfortunately, one the web each list is presented as a slideshow, rather than as a page I can just cast an eye down.

This is silly, in exactly the same way that the Business Week Online books of the year list is silly. When old media uses the web like this, it reminds me of how my students sometimes want to use PowerPoint: it’s more about “cool” features than it is about clear communication.

This isn’t just me being grumpy. If it was, I’d criticize the Globe for using CD rather than, say, album: one of the best albums of 2007 won’t be out on CD until 2008. And I’d be inclined to complain about the omission of my album of the year: but since the format of the Globe’s lists doesn’t allow me a quick scan, that inclination is rather slight.

To use the expression Freedom of the Press is to raise a lot of questions. Since we’ve recently been reading a book set in and around Whoville, I’ll focus here on some of the Who? questions.

One such question is: who constitutes the press? One answer is that: We’re All Journalists Now. That’s the argument made by Tom Keane in the Boston Globe a week ago.

Freedom of the press now seems like a special privilege that applies not to us but to distant, powerful, and impenetrable corporations.

Admittedly, the growth of big media… makes this thinking easy. Yet technology is changing that. Anyone with an Internet connection can now not only be a reporter, but a publisher as well (blogs… being obvious examples). Increasingly, media are becoming more democratized - and more like what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

That is, of course, a very American way of casting the argument, referring as it does to the Founding Fathers and, elsewhere in the article, to the First Amendment. I’d like to think that freedom of speech for all, including “the media” isn’t a specifically American value.

Which leads me to cast an international net, and to pose the second question. Who cares about freedom of the press? A study conducted for the BBC suggests that the answer varies greatly from county to country.

Of those interviewed, 56% thought that freedom of the press was very important to ensure a free society.

But 40% said it was more important to maintain social harmony and peace, even if it meant curbing the press’s freedom to report news truthfully.

For the holiday season, and for the new year, I wish you freedom of speech and of the press.

I bought a magazine on Saturday, for the first time in many a month. The magazine in question was Business Week. I used to subscribe to the dead trees edition, and have sometimes regretted letting my subscription lapse. Although I can read BW Online, longer articles read better on paper, at least in my ancient eyes.

My purchase was prompted by two main things: I was about to go on a longish flight, and I saw Bruce Nussbaum’s post on the redesign of BW.

I’ve been part of a secret process of reinventing the magazine medium that will be unveiled on Friday when a new kind of Business Week hits the stands… We wanted to go beyond a redesign and do a rethink of how people get information and analysis today, given the web and the way we live and work.

The result, as I look on the wall and see it take life, is a new kind of print medium that I think will be the model for magazines to copy in the years ahead.

I find that post rather more impressive than the reinvented magazine it persauded me to buy. My main comment is that BW is trying too hard to “brief” its readers in the print edition. But I read paper because it is a good medium for articles, books, and other longer stuff. If I want brief, I’d rather read it on the screen, probably via the web.

As I typed in the above on the plane for later posting, I was sure that I wouldn’t be alone in this reaction. Sure enough, Joe Wickert’s remarks are similar to mine, although more extensively and vigorously expressed.