EcoblogIT

Just found another post that really get's into the meat of Newspaper2.0. It's by Steve Rubel over at MicroPersuasion :

"For newspapers to survive, they need to turn themselves into an online and offline platform for local readers. I don't mean a platform for contributing to the reporting process. They're doing that already (and nicely). What I am saying is that local newspapers need to use their brands and their big web sites to help local readers profit emotionally and monetarily by: selling goods peer-to-peer, expressing themselves, developing new kinds of technologies, connecting through online and offline local social networking and more. Think Google or Yahoo, not USA Today.

In short, they need to become destinations where almost all value is created by the "readers," not by the publisher or journalists. This means tearing pages right out of the Wikipedia/Second Life playbook. In both of these communities, the greatest value is created by the crowd, not the online destination itself. The community is merely the operating system that enables value creation. Newspapers need to do the same - both online and off."

Now we're not talking about surviving, so we don't, technically, have to make any crazy plays. Our model is not bust, like many publishers.

Or does being successful give us the freedom to make really crazy plays?

Tom
 

I think anything that project redstripe should do must take advantage of the incredible audience The Economist Group has.

All over the web the sites that are amazing, inspiring and succeeding depend on their users. For that reason, I think access to Econ Group content is amazing, but freedom to enable our readers will really make the project blow up.

I'll make a few points about social networks and Economist users.

i) Economist readers are opinion formers. 60% of them have engaged in opinion forming in the past twelve months. Why not give them a new platform?

ii) The 1% rule - that 1% of a site's users become contributers ( http://tinyurl.com/rl8ov) would mean Economist.com would have an extra 19 000 content creaters/month.

iii) There is no social networking site for the post-facebook, post-myspace crowd. As commented on by Robert Scoble. Where would you want to create your professional online persona, as we all will?

iv) A big threat to display advertising is search advertising, however, MySpace now gets $900 million from Google for search advertising from its site.

Hmmmmm, it makes you think.

All the best,

Tom
 

I quite like Seth Godin's take on that name. Really Stupid Syndication he calls it in a great post on names - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/being_brave_wit.html.

Tom Shelley
 

Delicious is also very interesting if you check out how people that tag E.com describe the site.

My favourite is "If The Economist was a political party, I'd vote for it. Second to "It kicks Time's and Newsweek's ass".

Tom Shelley
 

The most interesting of these is Laszlo. This Open Source goodie allows you to deploy either in Flash or AJAX (and Adobe reckon that at 98% Flash has greater penetration than AJAX-capable machines).
 

I have Sky By Broadband, I got an email a few days ago from them talking about the service pull. The funny thing is that the service is still using bandwidth. Essentially, they don't mind people watching curling and other non big time sport and news elements with it.
 

If you're interested in movie downloads then Mark Cuban over at www.blogmaverick.com has always got some interesting points of view.

He basically says that the whole thing's a no go because people don't have the broadband capacity. Compare downloading one movie overnight to getting three DVDs in the post and there's no contest.

That's without mentioning HDTV.

Tom Shelley
 

Sky reckon a 90 minute movie should take three hours to download. They are planning to roll out the facility to "order" a download so that it will be just like a DVD in the post but without the need to return the DVD or be limited to three of them.
 

I've used it more for some of the sport clips, and they come down in less than 30 minutes for around 10 to 20 minutes footage. I have an 8Mb connection but rather stupidly the wireless lan that connects the PVR computer plugged into the TV only runs at 802.11g. Which means I basically go back down to a Mb. I've been thinking about completely rearranging my living room to get the bandwidth up. But that's a bit too far to go for the lady of the house who is uninterested in internet enabled TV, even though she was laughing quite loudly at the Ricky Gervais Microsoft training video embedded in IE on AV2 last week.
 

I read a review of Zimbra about a year or so back. I think they demoed it at some big tech conference and it got lots of praise back then.

It's meant to be really neat and I think that Gmail pinched a lot of its features.

Tom Shelley
 

Go to Techcrunch (link on the right) and search for Zimbra. It's newer than Gmail (so they may have "pinched" some of Gmail's features, Tom) and is an Open Source project rather than a hosted application such as Gmail or Writely.