Consensus over accuracy is one problem. Conflict over accuracy is another. This is a well-known problem in professional journalism today. The "he said, she said" form of "objective" journalism allows for both sides of an issue to be heard, even when one side is a crock of shit. So moderating becomes an even more challenging task than merely allowing minority or fringe opinions to remain.
Rationally, I think the best way to moderate is to allow all polite discourse to continue. If someone gets combative or rude, the quality of the discussion drops, even if they are speaking the utter truth between expletives.
All the poor souls who are looking down and reading a text while the shooter stalks... How about a "heads up" policy being instituted at the school? Or a directional gunfire analysis certificate mandatory for all students? Or a "Typing Under Pressure" exam followed by a "How to Use the Illi-Alert System" for all shooting alert writers?
The Web Standards statement is the one that absolutely freaks me out the most. We don't even need to start talking about CSS. We can talk about really really simple stuff like HTML unordered lists. From what I remember in my testing, IE6 (and IE7) displayed them differently than FF, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (lining up the bullets outside the margin of paragraphs above and below). Why?
Fair enough. The project management we did on our multi-year projects was ALWAYS bogged down by non-technical, non-requirement issues like management changes and other forms of "pushback". Again, in five years, you can accomplish just about anything, even with the most complex myriad of tax laws and internal "one-off" rules about pay scales. But you can't do anything if there is A) corruption, B) willful resistance, or C) utter lack of stakeholder buy-in. Any one or all three of these seems to be at work here.
And you're totally right that no one who's been on the outside can know anything for sure./. is all about arrogant claims and wild-ass guessing isn't it?
Having said all I did about the outrageous waste of money, a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solution, even heavily modified is probably the way to go (and from other comments it sounds like this latest $12 million will go to a Peoplesoft implementation). Still some pretty sweet coin for Accenture, the consulting company that's doing the COTS implementation.
With agile methods and a multi-disciplinary team ("good coders" is an unfortunate catchall phrase I used to mean people who can gather requirements, write user stories, validate, iterate, manage a burndown list, etc.), five years would be absolutely more than enough time to do all of the steps you mention and more... like change management and getting iterations into stakeholder hands early... and on and on. I am neither a youngster nor naive about the software development life cycle (both waterfall which is what it sounds like you're used to, and agile).
That's what I was thinking. Four good coders could "do-over" a payroll system in five years no matter how complex it was... at the rates the University is apparently willing to pay and the timeline they have settled for, that is $10 million each for five years of work. Not bad.
I wasn't attracted to Shadowbane because I have found player-vs-player games to be usually ruined by ubergamers. However, team-vs-team is a different thing and in reading the farewell, it looks like guilds were a big part of the game. I probably should have taken a closer look. Oh well... too late now.
Google itself is not at all sticky. Did you know that in the early days of search, the people in charge of "portal sites" (remember them) like Excite and even Yahoo were trying to figure out ways to keep people on their site. Google took a different approach: the faster people leave our site, the better job we've done of helping them find what they are looking for.
Sometimes a counter-intuitive approach brings a sea change in an industry. But all people are suggesting is that Google will drive traffic to the site and you have to make your site useful so people will want to return. If that means creating an awesome community like/. has done... then so be it. If that means creating really good unique content (with "related" links)... then so be that too.
If you believe that Google-attracted visitors don't ever stick around, then shun Google and figure out a way to attract a stickier audience. But I think the metrics show that if you can retain just a fraction of the massive audience driven to your site from Google, then you'll be doing well.
If viral marketing can rely on cheap distribution of PDFs, and the printed version offers stuff that is simply unavailable in the PDF... maybe they would have a business model. But to make the PDF exactly the same as the printed book, then charge the same amount... it doesn't seem to make sense. In any case, D&D fans tend to be technically savvy so there will always be digital distribution, authorized or unauthorized. Better to come up with a business model that leverages this tendency instead of fighting uphill against it. M:TG cards put Wizards on the map: scarcity and added value were the cornerstones of that whole business model. Without turning D&D into a collectibles game, surely they can take a page out of their own history and add value to materials that people are willing to purchase -- while still offering the viral "word-of-mouth" benefits of a freely distributed digital medium.
Actually, as an advertiser in the 1980s and 1990s I was shocked at how poorly I was treated. Granted I was placing very small 1/8th page display ads but getting to resolutions to my problems from anyone at the big media company was distressing. I have been on the other side too (as an editor at a newspaper) so I believe that it is just OVERALL poor management that has put the newspapers where they are today. Besides, the advertisers are best served if the newspapers deliver a happy, engaged readership -- so annoying any of your "customers" (real, intended, or imagined) is just not smart business.
The president of the internet division of the newspaper conglomerate I work for actually said this in response to a manager suggesting working more closely with Google to improve SEO:
"We don't want users to search for our site. We need to focus on the users who are on our site and make it easier for them to find the content they want via our internal search."
Yeah. We don't want silly new readers. And we don't want readers to be able to find us on search engines. They should just know to come here and when they're here, they'll then learn how to use a search engine - our search engine. I bet our search algorithms are totally better than google's.
I am still laughing as I type up a response. I was going to get all articulate and give a few more examples of this same kind of attitude in other traditional media companies -- but this quote, and your illustration of how it highlights the really broken thinking behind it -- well, it was just brilliant. Thank you.
Meanwhile, the access to real information, which helps keep society free, dies off.
The Internet has done more for freedom in society than any other single force.
Newspapers are indeed the only people employing reporters currently. Although journalism will not die, newspapers certainly will if they continue to willfully avert their eyes from the writing on the wall. We don't know what the outcome of this upheaval will be. But I'm pretty sure blaming Google and calling Schmidt names isn't a way to resolve it. I will once again point to Clay Shirky's article on the subject: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
I can't see your sarcasm or irony flag, but I'll respond as if you truly meant it.
"Ultimately" is the key word that seems to be in contention. As you point out, you need to sell readers to advertisers. Therefore, annoying your readers and driving them away (which the newspaper business is doing with aplomb these days), will hit your advertiser-based business model pretty hard in the end.
I will absolutely agree that asking the news media to think of readers is usually meaningless, but that's because many don't seem to get who they "ultimately" serve.
- They care more about the almighty $$$ then they do about keeping the customer happy, and that is why they will ultimately fail.
Conversely, Google in its early days passed on clearly lucrative opportunities to ensure that their end users were better served. Here's a quote from "The Search" by John Batelle: "...one deal with DoubleClick... would probably net the company millions... But DoubleClick's ads were often gaudy and irrelevant. They represented everything Page and Brin thought was wrong with the Internet."
I'm sure things are changing, as they do whenever a company grows to the size of Google. But Eric Schmidt's words sure sound brash enough to be from an upstart.
OK, I will grant that circulation currently does pay some of the cost of producing a newspaper. To be a little ruthless though (perhaps killing the hog or at least lopping off its legs): reams of newsprint and a huge printing press are definitely not going to be needed in the future. Digital copying and distribution have a very very low cost. Value associated with content -- Consumers Reports is an excellent example -- remains even when the distribution medium is 100 percent digital. Consumers Reports can still command a pretty reasonable online subscription fee.
However, I continue to assert that newspapers are bleeding money primarily because advertisers are putting their money elsewhere. Craigslist replaces classifieds; Google replaces much of the targeted advertising. Lamenting that journalism will die without being propped up by an unsustainable business model is counterproductive. Anyone who cares about journalism (and you'd think the newspapers themselves would be leading the charge) should be experimenting and forging ahead with innovative new business models. Micropayments, subscriptions, and even banner advertising have been experimented with in recent years. The success with them has been underwhelming to mixed.
Clickthrough rates are much more measurable than CPM (cost per thousand -- the old eyeballs estimation); today advertisers on the Web know exactly what they're getting for their money. Imagine if newspapers had been the pioneers in search and clickstream analysis like Google, Overture, and others ended up being? Maybe we would not be having this debate.
I really don't think I'm missing the point. I said scarce goods "like the artist's time". The reporting is indeed a scarce resource. However, payment for that effort doesn't necessarily need to come from the copying and distribution side of the business model. In fact, my assertion is that, with zero marginal cost for copying and distributing, that part of the creative process doesn't make sense as a means of recouping the cost of reporting.
I mentioned patronage only to illustrate that the current business model is not the only possible one.
Newspapers, despite their name, have for years not been primarily about reporting "hard" news -- painstakingly gathered from "reporters on the ground". They are about building community and engaging the reader for advertising purposes. (Note how lifestyle, entertainment, reviews, editorial, and even classifieds far outweigh the news sections of most newspapers.)
Like radio, the consumers of the content in newspapers don't really pay the bills. Subscriptions fees were primarily designed as a way to measure engaged readers. The newspaper can tell their advertisers that they have X number of readers engaged enough to pay for the content. With the Web, metrics can be done far more accurately... and the content providers can tell the advertisers exactly how many people visited a specific article.
Given these two historical points -- as well as the tendency towards zero marginal cost for reproduction and distribution of digital content, I personally don't think micropayments make sense.
Economics has some fundamental principle that can't be "wished away" or deemed untrue because we view them as "unfair". What happens when something that was once scarce and difficult to produce (content printed on paper, music pressed onto vinyl or CDs) becomes abundant and cheap (digitally copied)? The inevitable change in this basic economic truth means that content producers (creative types) will come up with a different business model.
Prior to mass media, creative people had patrons to sponsor their work. That was a different business model.
There are scarce goods associated with the creative process... like the artist's time. But in the future once an item is created, the copying and distribution is NOT a place where the artist will get revenue. And sadly the companies in the copying and distibution businesses will be like the buggy whip manufacturers of yesteryear.
I believe you're both right: it is a downward spiral. Cost cutting begets poor local news coverage, which begets fewer engaged readers, which begets fewer advertising dollars, which begets more cost cutting.
It is pretty much a chicken and egg thing.
Google struggled to come up with a business model too. Now that their revenue is through the roof, people point to them and say: "Well that's obvious." Bold experimentation or visionary stubbornness is needed to latch onto a business model that WILL work in the Internet age. True, the Internet didn't creep up on them overnight, but a sea change can stretch on for years. Clay Shirky's article on this point makes sense to me: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
Slashdot Mirror
I love that the website lists OS/2 Warp 4 support then Windows. Great review; thank you.
Consensus over accuracy is one problem. Conflict over accuracy is another. This is a well-known problem in professional journalism today. The "he said, she said" form of "objective" journalism allows for both sides of an issue to be heard, even when one side is a crock of shit. So moderating becomes an even more challenging task than merely allowing minority or fringe opinions to remain.
Rationally, I think the best way to moderate is to allow all polite discourse to continue. If someone gets combative or rude, the quality of the discussion drops, even if they are speaking the utter truth between expletives.
All the poor souls who are looking down and reading a text while the shooter stalks... How about a "heads up" policy being instituted at the school? Or a directional gunfire analysis certificate mandatory for all students? Or a "Typing Under Pressure" exam followed by a "How to Use the Illi-Alert System" for all shooting alert writers?
I weep for your corporation.
The Web Standards statement is the one that absolutely freaks me out the most. We don't even need to start talking about CSS. We can talk about really really simple stuff like HTML unordered lists. From what I remember in my testing, IE6 (and IE7) displayed them differently than FF, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (lining up the bullets outside the margin of paragraphs above and below). Why?
Fair enough. The project management we did on our multi-year projects was ALWAYS bogged down by non-technical, non-requirement issues like management changes and other forms of "pushback". Again, in five years, you can accomplish just about anything, even with the most complex myriad of tax laws and internal "one-off" rules about pay scales. But you can't do anything if there is A) corruption, B) willful resistance, or C) utter lack of stakeholder buy-in. Any one or all three of these seems to be at work here.
/. is all about arrogant claims and wild-ass guessing isn't it?
And you're totally right that no one who's been on the outside can know anything for sure.
I mean CIBER, not Accenture, the losers they fired.
Having said all I did about the outrageous waste of money, a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solution, even heavily modified is probably the way to go (and from other comments it sounds like this latest $12 million will go to a Peoplesoft implementation). Still some pretty sweet coin for Accenture, the consulting company that's doing the COTS implementation.
With agile methods and a multi-disciplinary team ("good coders" is an unfortunate catchall phrase I used to mean people who can gather requirements, write user stories, validate, iterate, manage a burndown list, etc.), five years would be absolutely more than enough time to do all of the steps you mention and more... like change management and getting iterations into stakeholder hands early... and on and on. I am neither a youngster nor naive about the software development life cycle (both waterfall which is what it sounds like you're used to, and agile).
That's what I was thinking. Four good coders could "do-over" a payroll system in five years no matter how complex it was... at the rates the University is apparently willing to pay and the timeline they have settled for, that is $10 million each for five years of work. Not bad.
I wasn't attracted to Shadowbane because I have found player-vs-player games to be usually ruined by ubergamers. However, team-vs-team is a different thing and in reading the farewell, it looks like guilds were a big part of the game. I probably should have taken a closer look. Oh well... too late now.
Google itself is not at all sticky. Did you know that in the early days of search, the people in charge of "portal sites" (remember them) like Excite and even Yahoo were trying to figure out ways to keep people on their site. Google took a different approach: the faster people leave our site, the better job we've done of helping them find what they are looking for.
/. has done... then so be it. If that means creating really good unique content (with "related" links)... then so be that too.
Sometimes a counter-intuitive approach brings a sea change in an industry. But all people are suggesting is that Google will drive traffic to the site and you have to make your site useful so people will want to return. If that means creating an awesome community like
If you believe that Google-attracted visitors don't ever stick around, then shun Google and figure out a way to attract a stickier audience. But I think the metrics show that if you can retain just a fraction of the massive audience driven to your site from Google, then you'll be doing well.
No idea why my comment came out anonymously... must have drifted my mouse over the checkbox by accident. (I'm old.)
If viral marketing can rely on cheap distribution of PDFs, and the printed version offers stuff that is simply unavailable in the PDF... maybe they would have a business model. But to make the PDF exactly the same as the printed book, then charge the same amount... it doesn't seem to make sense. In any case, D&D fans tend to be technically savvy so there will always be digital distribution, authorized or unauthorized. Better to come up with a business model that leverages this tendency instead of fighting uphill against it. M:TG cards put Wizards on the map: scarcity and added value were the cornerstones of that whole business model. Without turning D&D into a collectibles game, surely they can take a page out of their own history and add value to materials that people are willing to purchase -- while still offering the viral "word-of-mouth" benefits of a freely distributed digital medium.
Actually, as an advertiser in the 1980s and 1990s I was shocked at how poorly I was treated. Granted I was placing very small 1/8th page display ads but getting to resolutions to my problems from anyone at the big media company was distressing. I have been on the other side too (as an editor at a newspaper) so I believe that it is just OVERALL poor management that has put the newspapers where they are today. Besides, the advertisers are best served if the newspapers deliver a happy, engaged readership -- so annoying any of your "customers" (real, intended, or imagined) is just not smart business.
The president of the internet division of the newspaper conglomerate I work for actually said this in response to a manager suggesting working more closely with Google to improve SEO: "We don't want users to search for our site. We need to focus on the users who are on our site and make it easier for them to find the content they want via our internal search." Yeah. We don't want silly new readers. And we don't want readers to be able to find us on search engines. They should just know to come here and when they're here, they'll then learn how to use a search engine - our search engine. I bet our search algorithms are totally better than google's.
I am still laughing as I type up a response. I was going to get all articulate and give a few more examples of this same kind of attitude in other traditional media companies -- but this quote, and your illustration of how it highlights the really broken thinking behind it -- well, it was just brilliant. Thank you.
Meanwhile, the access to real information, which helps keep society free, dies off.
The Internet has done more for freedom in society than any other single force.
Newspapers are indeed the only people employing reporters currently. Although journalism will not die, newspapers certainly will if they continue to willfully avert their eyes from the writing on the wall. We don't know what the outcome of this upheaval will be. But I'm pretty sure blaming Google and calling Schmidt names isn't a way to resolve it. I will once again point to Clay Shirky's article on the subject: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
I can't see your sarcasm or irony flag, but I'll respond as if you truly meant it.
"Ultimately" is the key word that seems to be in contention. As you point out, you need to sell readers to advertisers. Therefore, annoying your readers and driving them away (which the newspaper business is doing with aplomb these days), will hit your advertiser-based business model pretty hard in the end.
I will absolutely agree that asking the news media to think of readers is usually meaningless, but that's because many don't seem to get who they "ultimately" serve.
- They care more about the almighty $$$ then they do about keeping the customer happy, and that is why they will ultimately fail.
Conversely, Google in its early days passed on clearly lucrative opportunities to ensure that their end users were better served. Here's a quote from "The Search" by John Batelle: "...one deal with DoubleClick... would probably net the company millions... But DoubleClick's ads were often gaudy and irrelevant. They represented everything Page and Brin thought was wrong with the Internet."
I'm sure things are changing, as they do whenever a company grows to the size of Google. But Eric Schmidt's words sure sound brash enough to be from an upstart.
OK, I will grant that circulation currently does pay some of the cost of producing a newspaper. To be a little ruthless though (perhaps killing the hog or at least lopping off its legs): reams of newsprint and a huge printing press are definitely not going to be needed in the future. Digital copying and distribution have a very very low cost. Value associated with content -- Consumers Reports is an excellent example -- remains even when the distribution medium is 100 percent digital. Consumers Reports can still command a pretty reasonable online subscription fee.
However, I continue to assert that newspapers are bleeding money primarily because advertisers are putting their money elsewhere. Craigslist replaces classifieds; Google replaces much of the targeted advertising. Lamenting that journalism will die without being propped up by an unsustainable business model is counterproductive. Anyone who cares about journalism (and you'd think the newspapers themselves would be leading the charge) should be experimenting and forging ahead with innovative new business models. Micropayments, subscriptions, and even banner advertising have been experimented with in recent years. The success with them has been underwhelming to mixed.
Clickthrough rates are much more measurable than CPM (cost per thousand -- the old eyeballs estimation); today advertisers on the Web know exactly what they're getting for their money. Imagine if newspapers had been the pioneers in search and clickstream analysis like Google, Overture, and others ended up being? Maybe we would not be having this debate.
I really don't think I'm missing the point. I said scarce goods "like the artist's time". The reporting is indeed a scarce resource. However, payment for that effort doesn't necessarily need to come from the copying and distribution side of the business model. In fact, my assertion is that, with zero marginal cost for copying and distributing, that part of the creative process doesn't make sense as a means of recouping the cost of reporting.
I mentioned patronage only to illustrate that the current business model is not the only possible one.
Given these two historical points -- as well as the tendency towards zero marginal cost for reproduction and distribution of digital content, I personally don't think micropayments make sense.
Economics has some fundamental principle that can't be "wished away" or deemed untrue because we view them as "unfair". What happens when something that was once scarce and difficult to produce (content printed on paper, music pressed onto vinyl or CDs) becomes abundant and cheap (digitally copied)? The inevitable change in this basic economic truth means that content producers (creative types) will come up with a different business model.
Prior to mass media, creative people had patrons to sponsor their work. That was a different business model.
There are scarce goods associated with the creative process... like the artist's time. But in the future once an item is created, the copying and distribution is NOT a place where the artist will get revenue. And sadly the companies in the copying and distibution businesses will be like the buggy whip manufacturers of yesteryear.
I believe you're both right: it is a downward spiral. Cost cutting begets poor local news coverage, which begets fewer engaged readers, which begets fewer advertising dollars, which begets more cost cutting. It is pretty much a chicken and egg thing.
Google struggled to come up with a business model too. Now that their revenue is through the roof, people point to them and say: "Well that's obvious." Bold experimentation or visionary stubbornness is needed to latch onto a business model that WILL work in the Internet age. True, the Internet didn't creep up on them overnight, but a sea change can stretch on for years. Clay Shirky's article on this point makes sense to me: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
I'm gonna need you to go ahead and send Mike Judge some money. Oh, and if you could go ahead and move your desk to the back, that'd be great.