The Bee Blog

Technorati

We announced today that Technorati has acquired The Personal Bee!  All of the Bee services will continue to operate on a stand alone basis, and we will be integrating Bee technology into Technorati over the coming months.

My favorite news source to have picked up the story:

http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070412-082531-4353r

But also good stories here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/12/technorati_personal_bee_purchase/

and here:

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625559

Official press release:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/4/prweb518447.htm

Also commentary by Technorati CEO, Dave Sifry:

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000496.html

And my own personal blog:

http://tedshelton.blogspot.com

GooTube vs. Viacom

Trust the mainstream media to pile on the attacks once Viacom announced its lawsuit against Google.  But I would have expected a little but better coverage from Dan Farber and ZDNet... As one of the comments to "You Tube's end game nears" points out:

If Google does indeed lose this suit, then the DMCA's Safe Harbor provisions are essentially worthless. This means that every single ISP, every search engine, every website that lets users submit content are now wide open for huge lawsuits. You can hear the lawyers now, sharpening their knives.

And this is the ridiculous part of the suit -- if Viacom doesn't like the mechanism that the federal government has established for protecting content owners, they should lobby for a change to the law, not sue law-abiding companies.  Their complaint (as quoted in Computerworld from a Viacom statement) that YouTube's system is

shifting the entire burden -- and high cost -- of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement

flies directly in the face of the one welcome effect of DMCA -- that enforcement of copyright actually has a cost.  That is, if you are going to benefit from the (ever extending) protections of copyright, then there is a cost associated with reaping those benefits.

That is not to say that companies should willfully engage in copyright infringement -- but rather that innovations like YouTube should not be stifled with the unfair burden that Viacom seemingly wishes -- that they be responsible for the way in which millions of consumers use their products.  Content rights aggregators like Viacom have, throughout the history of technology, tried to create legal barriers to consumer's use of this technology -- cassette tapes, video tapes, mp3 players...

The fundamental business of rights aggregation is at risk.  Suing Google for YouTube "infringement" is  the content industry's equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic...

Tools of Change

Kudos to Tim and O'Reilly for the launch of their "Tools of Change for Publishing" conference which we will definitely find a way to attend... but I have to believe that Tim is going to take some grief for this comment:

We're holding the conference in San Jose rather than New York, because we believe that the future of publishing is being shaped in Silicon Valley.

Truth to power? Or a mistake that will cost O'Reilly attendees and $$ ? Or both?

As a silicon valley entrepreneur building a company that is challenging some of the assumptions about how publishing should work, I have to agree with Tim that I see more innovation in Silicon Valley then "back east." But on the other hand, that is normal -- we don't have an existing entrenched industry and business model to protect. Take the PC instead, and ask how much thinking is going on in Redmond about the future of the PC? If Vista is the yardstick, not much is the answer.

I spent much of last summer speaking with publishers about the Personal Bee and a vision of reader inclusion in the editorial process. These are smart capable people, and they understand where this future leads. But they are also bound by the chains of their existing businesses and find it hard to make changes to products that still, today, produce profits.

But the bigger issue for our nascent industry is that there are a group of people with ideas (here) and a group of people with money and audience (east coast). Having the conference here may mean that fewer of those people with money and audience will bring those assets to the people with ideas. And that would be a loss for the whole industry.

Citizen Media Report

J-Lab, the institute for interactive media, has produced a fascinating report on citizen media:

Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News

Here are their key takeaways:

* Citizen media is emerging as a form of bridge media, linking traditional media with forms of civic participation.
* No one size fits all; there are many models.
* Instead of being comprehensive sources of news, sites are forming as fusions of news and schmooze.
* Most citizen sites don’t use traditional metrics - unique visitors, page views or revenues - to measure their success.
* Success is often defined as impact on their community.
* Half of our respondents said their sites don’t need to make money to continue.
* Yet there are new kinds of media companies starting to emerge.
* There is a high degree of optimism that citizen news sites are here to stay.
* Finding ways to attract more contributors and some operating support are major challenges.'

The entire report is worth reading.

Berkeley Buzz

One of the biggest challenges for an aggregation engine, like The Personal Bee, is having sufficient content within a given vertical category to make for an interesting enough aggregated product. We have taken a big step forward this week in implementing feed level filtering -- so now, within a given Beehive, you can add feeds that might have only a little content of interest to your subject and make sure that you get only that content...

Local news aggregation has been one of the big problems for us -- either we have to choose too few blogs and we don't get enough of interest, or we expand the sources and get a lot of extraneous material. Filters solve this, by allowing us to define specifically the town we care about as a filter.

We have applied this idea to a first example -- Berkeley California (since that is where we are):

http://www.personalbee.com/berkeley%20buzz

Let us know what you think of the Berkeley Buzz!

The New Digital Divide

While reading (and writing) about the idea of the press release, and re-invention which some call the "social media press release", over the past few days I was also having an email exchange with Chris Shipley of Guidewire fame about their planned "Guidewire Report" and I was struck by an interesting connection between these two conversations.

I had written to Chris (with an admittedly snarky set of comments) but because I like the Guidewire group and the things they are doing and was frankly horrified by the sample "Guidewire Report" that they had sent out, for 3 reasons:

1. Like Stowe Boyd I felt that the format was very "old Media" -- PDF?  Too hard to read!  So I have to kill a tree to read the newsletter? 
2. I felt that the content was poor - I sent Chris a couple of examples where their coverage was, at best, incomplete on the companies they chose to highlight and at worst made me question how they were picking companies
3. I couldn't believe that in this day and age that they would try to charge $3,000 for a newsletter that had worse content than I could get for free from a quick web search...

Chris and I exchanged a few emails and, with permission, here is a quote from one of the emails:

Thanks for taking the time and providing your considered feedback.  We'll certainly take this in along with all the comments - pro (mostly) and con - we're receiving.  It's clear to me in these comments that there are those, such as yourself, who have embraced blogs as a primary source of information, and others (our likely subscribers) who find a lot of value in (and are willing to pay for) having a trusted source distill all that information into one document that is quick and easy to read.  Clearly, two different audiences. (emphasis mine)

I think the point that Chris is making is equally applicable to the debate about the press release as it is to the debate about the PDF subscription newsletter -- there are two audiences out there.  One "isn't going to take it anymore!" and wants the press release and the subscription newsletter  to both die.  The other doesn't know any better and can still effectively be marketed to with the press release and sold a newsletter.

In my view, this latter audience will shrink over the coming decade and at some point cease to be interesting.  But sure, it might be worth mining for awhile.  Newspapers, after all, are still profitable today.  The trick is to turn the lights out before you start losing money -- but keep bringing it in for as long as possible. 

I believe that the technology industry is the place where this will play out first -- if you look at the people railing against the press release it is largely technology industry insiders.  In my view, this is the early adopter group that other industries can learn from and see what will happen to media, public relations, and subscription based newsletters...

The divide will close though.  I give it 10 years.  That is still a lot of subscription revenue!

www.guidewireconnection.com

PR: Back to the future

Shel Israel offers a great analysis of how he sees the PR profession coming full circle, back to the days when he was learning from Regis McKenna in his latest post, The new PR practitioner.  Shel writes:

At Regis we were taught to be trusted sources of information for the press and analysts who could most influence our clients relationships with customers and prospects. The press loved speaking to us, because were industry insiders.  We knew what was going on in this new place called Silicon Valley.  We were active particpants in conversations. We were facilitators for our clients. We knew which editor wanted what story and we helped them get it, sometimes pointing them to companies that were not agency clients.

Ah, those were the days, my friend, as the song goes.  I think Shel is right - we are coming full circle.  Although I would suggest that the tools have changed.  Folks like Andy Abramson are going about this the right way -- he has established himself as a domain expert through his blog, which enormously benefits his clients.  He has made himself into someone that is a "trusted source of information" because he is (a) smart; (b) knowledgable; and (c) discloses his conflicts.

Does Andy use the hated press release as a tool? Sure!  But he doesn't spam people with it.  He builds relationships with people and he uses those relationships sparingly so that you know when Andy contacts you, it is worth paying attention. 

Here are Andy's thoughts (albeit from awhile ago) on what is wrong with the relationship between PR and the media -- Ted's Right And I Have The Answer... OK so it is always nice when people tell you that you are right... and I don't know that the answer Andy proposes is going to win anyone over... but it is another great data point and description of what is wrong right now that needs fixing.  And the press release is just one symptom...

Newspapers are dying, but the news is thriving.

I was doing some work on a new widget builder for the Bee (cool stuff on the way) and I happened to notice an article now 6 months old that I had tagged by Jack Shafer on Slate:

Newspapers are dying, but the news is thriving

Its a useful meme as we continue to discuss the way in which the world keeps changing out from under us... I have been exchanging emails with Shel Holz on the press release after his response to my post here:

http://personalbee.blogs.com/beeblog/2007/01/why_a_press_rel.html#comments

Press releases are dying, but information from companies about their products and services is thriving...

Why a PRESS release?

It is so fun to be snarky, and it is good for traffic... but unfortunately for all sides of a discussion the snarkiness can get in the way of listening to each other (and thus understanding each other).

I have run PR for companies, and I have been a journalist. And now-a-days I am a snarky blogger :-) So to some degree anyway I can see both sides of this debate.

The part of Stowe and company's complaint the rings true for me is that the press release is a shallow substitute for engaging in a conversation.

The part that makes sense about Phil's observations is that, with or without a conversation, there needs to be a mechanism for communicating information about anything being announced.

Here is my favorite latest example of solving the latter point:

http://www.apple.com/iphone

Did Apple need a press release to tell us all about the iphone?  Would it have been effective?  Did they need to blog about it?  Would that have been effective?  No to both.

What they needed was an in-depth multi-media website that talked about every aspect of their new product.  That way customers, bloggers, and the press would all have a reliable resource to go to in trying to get answers about the new device.

So to restate the problem, why have a PRESS release?  As a company, why not talk to EVERYONE -- customers, bloggers, press -- with the same voice?  Why not make this voice a website that has as much depth as the announcement justifies?  Then have a number of different channels for talking to customers, bloggers, and press about the announcement so that there can be clarifications, corrections, answers to unforseen questions, etc.

New Communications Forum

I will be speaking on March 9th at the Society for New Communications Research annual event, New Communications Forum in Las Vegas. Let me know if you will be at the event!