Archive | 2010

America’s broadband access issue

By Laura Creekmore on April 28, 2010 in Legal/Regs

If you’re reading this right now in America, chances are high you’re on a broadband Internet connection provided by a company like https://www.eatel.com/. You’re likely to have a decent amount of disposable income. And, if you’re like me, and you’ve had broadband for more than 10 years, it’s probably difficult for you to imagine how you might navigate the world today without it. Businesses nowadays have become reliant on broadband as a way to run their businesses online, this blog post explains broadband internet. However, not everyone is running their business through broadband.

More than 100 million people in America today don’t have broadband. For many, it’s available, but not affordable, If your broadband costs more than you think it should then usave’s broadband deals might be just what you need. Unfortunately for some, especially in rural areas nationwide, it’s not even available yet.

I’m having a hard time figuring out how people who can’t access the Internet can really participate in the modern economy effectively. How they can access an education. Train for any jobs but the most manual of labor. Provide opportunities for their children to learn.

It’s not to say it can’t be done. But I’m so far removed from the pre-Internet world that I can only imagine how difficult it is.

There’s a nationalistic strain in our politics that likes to say America’s the best — whatever the measure. But here’s a place where we were the best, and we’ve rapidly fallen behind.

We’ve got a lot of challenges, particularly when it comes to rural access. Our nation is physically large and physically diverse. But we’ve gotten electricity and telephone service practically everywhere. This must be no different if we plan to remain competitive against nations that don’t have our resources — but that can hope to best us with better communications and technology access.

Here’s a great overview of the broadband situation.

Paying for stories is a bad business

By Laura Creekmore on April 27, 2010 in Legal/Regs

Apparently this idea still hasn’t gotten all around in the journalism world — but paying for stories is a bad business that doesn’t end well for anyone, except those who walk away with cash in hand.

If Gizmodo hadn’t paid for the lost 4G iPhone, it seems likely we wouldn’t be talking about the criminal investigation now underway. For the same reasons we don’t pay a witness to a crime for testimony, we can more easily trust news stories where no cash changes hands. In today’s world, it’s hard enough to trust journalism….paying for stories complicates things a lot.

Now, I will say this is a weird situation. I suspect some would say it’s analogous to Consumer Reports’ daily business — they purchase all the products they review, in order to remain objective. Yet in this case, with the product in question clearly NOT available on the market, I can’t figure out why Gawker would OK the payment [beyond the desire for the massive publicity it’s gotten….and perhaps that’s enough?]. Though it’s after the fact, it seems ethically similar to paying someone to steal the device, and I think we can all agree that that’s outside the bounds of propriety. Isn’t this just accessory after the fact?

The only way to win the fight for attention

By Laura Creekmore on April 26, 2010 in Customer service

Even in today’s still-uncertain economic times, I would argue that most marketers’ biggest problem is getting the necessary share of time, not share of wallet. In my working life, the time clutter problem has gotten to be the biggest issue for people in the modern economy, across industries.

And nonetheless, we’ve got products and services to sell to businesses and consumers who are just like us — suffering from calendar and inbox overload.

You can cut through the clutter momentarily with a media sensation — the right ad, the right YouTube video — or with PR, good or bad, surrounding something that catches public interest. But if you’re not making your customer’s life better and simpler, you’re not going to win in the long run.

Creating real value: The art of content strategy

By Laura Creekmore on April 23, 2010 in Strategy

I’ve mentioned the cult of action here before. I don’t know if it’s a uniquely modern challenge, but I do know that today’s technology makes it easy to fall into: Your phone syncs with your calendar with your email with your note program with your SharePoint with your brain. You put a task into the system at any point, and it will bedevil you until you complete it. Once you’ve made the decision to “task” something, you’re almost guaranteed to complete it. And in the current business mindset, this is all for the good.

So it is with trepidation that I bring up the particular way that my own profession is damaged by the cult of action. Over the past 2-3 years, digital media has really begun to recognize content strategy and management as a discipline as significant as programming and design. It’s not universally recognized yet, but it’s getting more than lip service in many quarters today.

I think the positive side to this is huge. The mental shift we’re making in thinking about “content strategy and management” instead of about “copy” means that we’re focusing on the business goals of the web property. We’re naming the metrics by which we’ll measure our efforts. We’re making success more likely.

But I think we have not yet escaped the mindset that content is a box to check off of our to-do list. If one piece of content is just as good as another, we aren’t yet employing a strategic mindset.

To make truly strategic decisions — and to take truly strategic actions — about content, we have to view content as a cornerstone in building relationships with our customers. There’s a lot about it that we can measure, and even complete and check off the list. But we can’t transform a human relationship into a series of checkboxes. There’s still an art to content, and as we continue to develop the discipline of content strategy, we must value the art as well as the action.

Go read this column on net neutrality

By Laura Creekmore on April 7, 2010 in Legal/Regs

I was going to spend a little time writing a post on yesterday’s net neutrality ruling [PDF] by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. But Newsweek’s Nick Summers saved me the time. Just go read his post on why this ruling is so bad, and why there’s still hope for innovation and neutrality online.

h/t: My friend mnbryan.

RIP Content Management

By Laura Creekmore on March 15, 2010 in Uncategorized

Session with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal.

Going to be a good counterpoint to the last session, it seems.

Couple of problems all businesses face:

Webmasters don’t scale.

Your proprietary CMS is slow to innovate.

Your users are your content creators.

Trying to control content is daunting.

Choosing a closed-source vendor is risky, depending on the vendor. What happens when they go away?

So Buytaert recommends open source software [surprise!]. It allows you infinite control, and it’s cheaper. Another key advantage is the level of innovation that happens with open-source.

OMG. He’s showing a really hysterical slideshow of crazy ways that people demonstrate their love for Drupal. Naked bike riding is involved.

OK, so how does Drupal address your problems?

Redefines the role of the web developer. It’s now often more about assembly, instead of writing code from scratch every time you need to do something.

Also helps your website scale. Some large websites running Drupal:

Emmys.com
Grammys.com
Verizon’s intranet
MyLifetime.com
Official Michael Jackson website [by Sony Music, which has more than 150 sites on Drupal]
And of course, the one that everyone knows, WhiteHouse.gov.

CMS can be slow to innovate. Buytaert gives a funny example of AOL, which was negotiating with a commercial CMS vendor, and while talks dragged on, AOL developers built a site in Drupal and so they went with that.

Users provide your content. Drupal makes it easy to build communities. My question: I have found Drupal sites to be powerful but not always intuitive to your average user. I need to check out some more of the sites that Buytaert recommends. Perhaps it’s just the implementations I’ve seen?

Great question from audience: If we choose Drupal now, how do we know that the developers will be there to support us? Buytaert’s answer is OK, but doesn’t go beyond, we have to train more people.

Another question: How will you stay flexible with your install base growing so rapidly? Buytaert: We don’t maintain backwards compatibility. Yowza. He acknowledges this is a good thing and a bad thing.

Managing Your Content Management System

By Laura Creekmore on March 15, 2010 in Content management

Alex Will and Henry Erskine Crum of Spoonfed Media. They run a web/mobile guide to live events in London.

This is a total geek-out topic. They’re going to discuss when and how to build your own content management system. As they and all of us will know, understanding content management systems with a high level of proficiency and confidence is a big part of mastering all of the digital content you have at your disposal. They publish 30,000 event listings a month and generate revenue from ads, sponsorships, and ticket sales. But a small team to manage all of that.

Will: Content exists in a lot of different forms and places. But today we’re talking about websites that have editorial content, not just user-generated content or aggregation.

W: You have to understand your production process before you can build your CMS. How do you collect data or create articles? How do you make the process of assigning tasks as efficiently as possible? How do you use the CMS to create task lists for each person? As a business owner, are you producing content as efficiently as possible? Do you need a review process? What about when you publish? Do you need SEO or to link in with social media sites?

W: UGC works incredibly well when you’re writing around venues — sites like Yelp. The problem with an event is that if you take the time to review it, then it’s gone [after the event is over]. So we needed an editorial voice.

EC: Why they chose to build a custom CMS:

Factors that didn’t matter:

Amount of data
Size of website
Complexity of idea

What did make them need custom CMS:

Data aggregation from multiple sources
Workflow management between editors
Reducing research time per event
Search engine optimization
Lead generation and contact management needs

A challenge they encountered: How to scrub the data you’re aggregating to eliminate duplicates and tasks.

Workflow management. How do you divide tasks, segment them, and prioritize them? What automated steps can you include? How do you reduce or eliminate time humans have to spend doing rote tasks?

W: Huge part of this is reducing research time. What they did: Give editors tools like Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter, Google News inside the CMS. Spent a lot of time thinking about each step in the process and figuring out how to automate/improve/gain efficiency.

W: Added tool to aid editors in doing keyword research and suggest inlinking within the site.

EC: The Open Table model — allows company to generate leads and information about restaurants and patrons so they can use info to sell restaurants on providing reservations on their own websites through Open Table. Spoonfed leverages the event and venue knowledge they are collating to develop lead generation in a similar way. They create leads from data and use Highrise CRM to manage it.

Can also automatically alert members when they create content they may be interested in.

Future development planned: More work on prioritization of editors’ queues based on searches and other trend data.

Also more analytics work, reviewing what worked and determining how to leverage it in the CMS.

W: You have to continue to iterate your backend just like you do on the front of your website.

I found this to be a great panel. There was some negative chatter on the backchannel, but that seems mostly to have been from people who wanted to here a Drupal/Wordpress/enterprise product smackdown.

Context Is Always Critical

By Laura Creekmore on March 14, 2010 in Information management

Got into an interesting back-channel discussion today in the South by Southwest session called “Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web.”

I did write another post on the panel, so I won’t go into the details here, except to say that I found the backchannel more thought-provoking than the panel itself.

So when I got into the session, I realized I had left my power cord in the hotel room and I was running on reserve power. I sent a tweet to ask if anyone in the rather large ballroom had a Mac power cord I could borrow.

I quickly heard back from Tim Bentley, who was generous to share his power cord with me for the session. And so it was coincidental, certainly, when I noticed he’d come from Aardvark, a social search engine.

I think it was during the part of the panel where they were discussing how standard search engines don’t really know if they’ve answered your question, and Bentley tweeted to say this:

#beyondalgorithms panel is basically talking about how to do algorithmically what Aardvark is doing now socially

So a few minutes later, I started wondering about Bentley’s perspective on Wolfram|Alpha, which bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine” and promotes the fact that its information is curated by experts. I have a long-standing bias against people who purport to be “experts” — it’s a knee-jerk sort of reaction and I can acknowledge that.

On the panel, a tangential discussion cropped up about how much context matters in search. It was the sort of conversation that I was far more interested in than the topics they actually intended to discuss. So it got me thinking that it’s not expert curation or knowledge that I dispute — it’s so-called expert knowledge applied without regard to context.

There are so few questions in this world with a black and white answer. Once you go beyond 2+2=4, you need to know the context to answer. And then most expert opinion can sound downright asinine when it ignores context.

So that’s the kind of question I’d like to see explored deeply: How do we apply context to computer inputs [searches, using the computer, applications, whatever] in order to more accurately and efficiently reach solutions for users?

Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web

By Laura Creekmore on March 14, 2010 in Information management, SEO

Wow. There are a lot of speakers here, and they aren’t all listed in the program….and there’s no way I’ll get them all straight. I’ll see what I can do.

Gil Elbaz, founder/CEO of Factual. They simplify access to clean, reliable data for publishers. Structure and clean data.

Danny Sullivan, Searchengineland

Carla Thompson, Guidewire Group. Search and semantic analyst.

Dag Kittlaus, Siri

Barak Berkowitz, has been at Wolfram Alpha for 10 days.

Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri and Twine

Nova Spivack, founder of Twine, now at LiveMatrix.

Barney Pell, Microsoft Bing team.

Haha, first real question is, what does semantics mean? We’re going to discuss the semantics of semantics.

Someone [Pell, I think] says, it’s about meaning, figuring out which words match with other words. Also about the abstractions that tie words together. It’s a middle layer that connects the underlying layer to the higher intent.

So Google and Bing are already semantic search engines? Yes.

Thompson says, no that doesn’t clear it up. You lost the consumer after the word abstraction. I think we should get rid of the term.

Pell: I think it’s not a consumer term. It’s a technology term.

Kittlaus says, I’ve been in the Valley less than 3 years and I’m amazed at how little creativity is there in the search field. People argue about who has the biggest database and not about how to solve user’s problems.

Panel is arguing about whether or not today’s search results are adequate or should be replaced with something yet-to-be-conceived. Total geek amusement is all you can say about this.

Good point: Panelist says we have a scalability issue. There’s so much accessible data today, that a solution that could handle a million pieces of data isn’t the best solution for a trillion pieces of data.

Right now, search is good at answering single question. When you need to handle a complex task, you may have to make several searches. Need to better understand the user to better handle complexity.

Spivack: OK are we all just debating Google’s next feature? Or is there room for others?

Pell contends that many search engines [albeit not Google and Bing] are already working together.

Some discussion about the importance/desirability of including social and context info in search results — no discussion of privacy. All about how much better it will make search results.

Spivack comments on WA using expert curation, instead of community curation. Would love to hear more discussion on that point.

Now discussion on how does the engine know if they’ve answered you. And point made that many searches are refined over time…you search for info on getting a mortgage, you ask different things over time, and two months later you buy a house. At what point was your question “answered”?

The backchannel on this panel is pretty negative. I think it’s because there are too many people on the panel. And perhaps could have used a little more planning.

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