MEGO site update

You've probably already noticed that there's a fresh coat of paint on the site. Figured that it's about time to break out of the auto-template mold the site originated in. Also, I've gone back and painstakingly tagged every entry on the site, so you can now access various bits of writing by categories instead of simply chronology. Thanks for paying attention.

It's official: Someone's started the New York Times deathwatch

And that someone is none other than Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen (who, come to think of it would know something about deathwatches). He does a good job of charting the story up until now, and leaves readers with a very good question that nobody seems to be asking:

given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company's business, I'm sure that by now they've stocked their board with noted Internet experts.

He goes on to list all the board members, which include the former CEO of Nabisco and the current CEO of Sara Lee, both of whom seem like odd choices even in the best of days.

CNN's broken news alerts

For those that signed up for CNN's e-mail alerts to get instant updates on Super Tuesday's election results, it's clear that the cable news channel's definition of "instant" is a bit different than the rest of us.

Here's the entirety of CNN's announcements I received tonight:

CNN Breaking News to TEXTBREAKINGNE.
8:29 PM (2 hours ago)
-- CNN projects Huckabee winner of Georgia GOP primary.

CNN Breaking News to TEXTBREAKINGNE.
6:47 PM (3 hours ago)
-- CNN projects that Clinton will win Massachusetts Democratic primary.

CNN Breaking News to TEXTBREAKINGNE.
5:01 PM (5 hours ago)
-- CNN projects: Romney wins Mass.; McCain wins Conn. and Illinois; Obama wins Illinois; Clinton wins Okla.

CNN Breaking News to TEXTBREAKINGNE.
5:11 PM (5 hours ago)
-- CNN projects McCain as the winner of the GOP primary in New Jersey.

CNN Breaking News to TEXTBREAKINGNE.
4:01 PM (6 hours ago)
-- Sen. Barack Obama has won the Democratic primary in Georgia, CNN projects; Republicans in tight three-way race.

That's it. Eight states. According to CNN's Text Breaking News, this race ain't even close to over. Odd that their website seems to think differently.

UPDATE: They were much quicker this morning with this one:

CNN Breaking News to TEXTBREAKINGNE.
7:30 AM (1 hour ago)
-- The NYC medical examiner's office has ruled that Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

Is there a designer in the house?

The New York Times could not have come up with a less interesting way of presenting the photos they're pulling in from their citizen journalism experiment, the Polling Place Photo Project? It's possibly the least inspired design I've seen on the Internet since the end of GeoCities:

What's the incentive to click on any given image? What's the logic in the order? Or the overarching narrative in the design (seemingly the only place to find a narrative in the project)? The AIGA, the leading design trade group country, was involved in this project--were they brought in to cater?

Compare this with a truly dynamic photo project, The Whale Hunt, which dealt with a similarly formalist challenge of presenting a huge number of photos in a compelling way, but broke out of the table structure the Times chose:

Sure, photos of polling places are kind of boring, but there are hundreds of photos in the Whale Hunt that are just as boring as many of the polling place photos are--if not more so. But the way Jonathan Harris chose to present them simply demands a user click on them, ponder them, and think about the story they tell, both individually and collectively.

With the Polling Place Photo Project, the Times had a chance to tell a new kind of story about an overlooked institution. But in choosing the least creative way possible to display the images, they end up telling no story at all. It's worse than a missed opportunity--it's a blown one.

Google's old-media envy

“We need to find ways to target people of particular demographics that are comparable to the people you might find in The New York Times or a particular publication that you may be familiar with.”

That's a senior VP from Google interviewed in the Times (dug up by Rough Type's Nick Carr), talking about the search giant's shortcomings in selling ads on social networks. That's the trick about turning your ad sales over to an algorithm--there's no good way to target demographics and, as a result, for every spot-on ad that gets placed, there are plenty of total misses (like the ones in the sidebar on this page, which are currently advertising get-rich-quick schemes because a few posts on the front page deal with the challenges of making money with online publications). In the social networking space, where most pages aren't going to return easily computed subjects (how do you come up with an ad for a page filled with people commenting "thanks for the add"?) the challenges are even more daunting.

One wonders if that's part of the driving force behind Google's new initiative to create a semantic social web: Once you can define relationships between users across sites, you're starting to create a machine-definable demographic.

Until then, though, Google will be looking back fondly at the ease of how a publication could define its readers and then sell them to high-value advertisers. Ironic then, that those very same publications now look to Google to bail them out of web advertising.

100 years ain't what it used to be

"Once every hundred years media changes" announced Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg last November at a press event for it's (now basically aborted) Beacon ad-spying program. It was, of course, a ridicule-worthy statement back then but now, with new numbers showing that the public interest in social networking is fading, it's becoming clear that they just don't make centuries like they used to.

While the news isn't all bad (Facebook's still up, just trending back down to earth), it certainly doesn't spell good news for the long-term viability of social networks.

The problem is that while social networks are fun and addictive, they're not actually all that useful most of the time. For most users of general-interest sites like Facebook and MySpace, it's a video game: collect as many friends as you can, add as many applications as you can, bite a few zombies, and... and... and... suddenly it becomes a bit boring. After all, after a few hundred friends it becomes apparent that you're reaching ("Sure, I guess I can add that friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend"). Eventually, you move on. After all, an infinite number of options are just a click away and I'm sure there's a zombie bite waiting for you somewhere out there. Or, as The Register puts it:

We're not suggesting that social networking sites are totally useless or are going to disappear anytime soon (Friends Reunited is still around? Who knew!) - they're a boon for prying journalists and recruiters for sure, and damn it, Scrabble is a good game. But today's shocking confirmation that their "phenomenal" growth isn't impervious to human nature does make the $15bn valuation Microsoft slapped on Facebook when it paid $240m for 1.6 per cent equity seem even more preposterous, if it were possible.

Add to that coverage of Facebook's announcement that they plan to have a cashflow of negative $150 million this year, and you begin to wonder how it is that the VC's of the world are still holding strong on tossing money down the monetization drain while continuing to insist that companies that are actually making things (*cough*newspapers*cough*) are doomed when they say things like the “perceived value of content is approaching zero" (dig for the quote here). Maybe when you strip away the due diligence and competitive analysis reports, the venture capitalists are really just as faddish as the Friendster users that fled to MySpace that fled to Facebook: the grass is always greener on the other side. Turns out, however, that the money may not be.

So here's to the end of Facebook's hundred years, 99 years premature. May the hundred years that came before last another thousand.

Don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

Part of the problem affecting news organizations right now isn't simply the notion that giving away their news for free is killing them, it's that there are so many new ways of interacting with information that can lessen the need to go to a traditional news site.

Take, for instance, the current (as I write this) top 50 Google Trends listing:



Anyone want to guess what the biggest story touching people's lives is right this instant? Clearly there's a massive snow storm pummeling Chicago. People have woken up and want to know if the schools are open. I know this not because I've gone to one of the dozen or so news sites that are being queried on Google, but because the aggregate data of Chicago news organization searches and snow closing searches clearly point to only one logical conclusion.

One silver lining: Clearly when there's an emergency, people still turn to news!

One not-so-silver lining: Bad news for print--apparently nobody thinks of it as a breaking-news medium, as every single search is for TV and radio.

One bonus lining: I love that enough people have gotten sick of the Midwest winter at the same time that they've queried "Groundhog Day" enough to spike it into #28: