The other day Erick Schonfeld wrote a post about how he’s feeling even more overwhelmed by new web content steams like Twitter and FriendFeed, and how he’s desperately in need of a better filter. I certainly agree with Erick’s clarion call for a better filter — that’s why I’m devoting all my time to empowering […]

Facebook has had an update feature similar to Twitter for a while. Now Facebook has a feature that lets users add feeds from other web services like Flickr and del.icio.us — just like FriendFeed. From a technology perspective, Twitter and FriendFeed are now reducable to Facebook features. Even if those two apps are currently more […]

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry is the title of a story Fred Vogelstein story in Wired. Back in June, I wrote How Apple Will Use The iPhone To Take Over The Wireless Industry:

Instead of the usual predictable predictions, I thought I would ring in the new year with five principles that I believe will guide the ongoing transformation of media companies.

The TimesSelect pay wall has officially been torn down. Does this mean newspapers should forget about paid content? Yes, if they want be part of the “conversation” and participate in the web’s link-based ecosystem and economy.

Mark Potts makes a strong argument for why newspapers shouldn’t give up on the paid content model, but it belies […]

Lots of big news today — here are the headlines:

I’ve left Atlantic Media to co-found a new venture with Robert Young — Publish2, Inc (yes, the brand associations are quite intentional) — check out Introducing Publish2: Networked News, on the Publish2 blog.
Robert will be now be blogging on Publishing […]

I’ve thought for a while that Technorati serves no purpose beyond tracking inbound links and stroking egos. Today, Technorati unveiled the culmination of its ego-stroking strategy — we’re ALL #1 on Technorati:

Check it out before they fix the bug and feel the joy of #1.

What is NXTWidget? The NXTwidget is a web widget. Readers of a publisher’s website can scroll through thumbnails of the digital edition and search inside the digital edition for keyword content. One click opens the digital edition on the page the reader has selected.
Where?It’s a web widget, designed to go on a publisher’s website. […]

As a way to kick off our sponsorship on Publishing 2.0, Scott suggested we write a “What is a digital edition?” post. Frankly, that’s a great idea because – like many new technology terms – definitions vary. In fact, every day at NXTbook we find ourselves clarifying our own definition.

Those familiar with the term “digital […]

As of this week, I have removed all ad networks from Publishing 2.0 and will be offering paid sponsorships directly to companies with products and services that are highly relevant to Publishing 2.0 readers. For a niche publication (e.g. on publishing, media, and technology), I believe there is an opportunity to create more value for […]

Newsvine launched a distributed presidential polling widget called ElectionVine, which is a very clever idea with a lot of potential — except that it won’t ever provide any insight into who is going to be elected president in 2008. I’ve worked with folks at The Hotline, Hart Research Associates (who co-runs the NBC/WSJ poll) and […]

This is the last time I will ask, I promise. Thank you all for your patience and special thanks to everyone who took the survey — I really appreciate it.

Click here to take the Publishing 2.0 Reader Survey

If you have been planning to take the Publishing 2.0 Reader Survey, please do so now if you can — you will be helping me to increase the volume of content on Publishing 2.0 and, hopefully, create more value for you. (And you’ll be helping me to take down all these survey links as soon […]

I’m running a survey to find out more about who reads Publishing 2.0.

Click here to take the survey.

Yes, the survey has some commercial intent, but I really would like to know more about you, especially all of you anonymous RSS readers. It’s only 20 quick questions, so it should only take 5-10 minutes. If […]

What do offline media journalists have in common with Made For AdSense publishers, i.e. online publishers who create sites with junk content for the sole purpose of making money off of Google’s pay-per-click ads? Quite a lot it seems — Google is destroying their business models from either end of the content quality spectrum. Compare […]

Yesterday, there was the the news about a current and a former New York Times Digital executive joining DailyCandy, the successful email newsletter company targeting young women with the “ultimate insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered.” Today, there is the news about print ad revenue at the New York Times continuing to fall, […]

When I read about the private equity buyout of the ailing Chrysler group from DaimlerChrysler, it immediately reminded me of another buyout of an ailing legacy player in a fast changing industry being driven by successful upstarts — Sam Zell’s buyout of Tribune.

Thinking about it, I realized there are many analogues between what upstarts […]

How foolish would someone sound in 2007 making a sweeping generalization about what people do with websites? Probably about as foolish as making sweeping generalizations about what people do with printing on paper — and as foolish as making sweeping generalizations about what people do with blogs.

A blog, after all, is just a content management […]

So here’s my perspective on the Calacanis/Winer/Jarvis v. Vogelstein/Wired debate on how journalist interviews should be conducted — both sides are right and also wrong.

Blogging is conversation, yeah, blah, blah, but what’s so unsatisfying about these “conversations” is that too often they turn into linked monologues. Nobody actually TALKS to each other. Everyone just […]

So much punditry on media, so many facile views, so little understanding of media’s heavy burden of responsibility. This is from an NPR interview with Dr. Joshua Sparrow a child psychiatrist and the head of outpatient psychiatry at Children’s Hospital in Boston, one of the top hospitals specializing in pediatric care, an assistant professor at […]

I’ve spent a lot of time on Publishing 2.0 talking about the impact of digital media on periodical publishing, i.e. newspapers and magazines, and about online publishing broadly defined, e.g. search results as a form of publishing, that I’ve only rarely looked at the publishing form that gave birth to modern publishing — the book. […]

For a rainy Sunday (East Coast), here are two items that had me on the floor laughing:

Google Maps directions from New York to London

My wife Cathy forwarded this to me.

1. go to Google Maps
2. click on “get directions”
3. type ” New York ” in the first box (the “from” box)
4. type ” London […]

Here are some watershed moments that mark the radical transformation of the publishing industry to a non-print-centric business:

1. New York Times becomes an aggregator

The New York Times, paper of record and one of the last great bastions of the belief that one entity can create all the content that anyone needs, has finally capitulated to […]

By now we are all quite familiar with the upside of blogging — free, easy-to-use software and the powerful network effects of the web have enable thousands of people who might never have had a voice back in the days of scarce publishing resources to have their voices heard far and wide. But you rarely, […]

There seem to be two principal reactions to the collapse of the print classified business that is destroying the print newspaper business. The first reaction is to insist, as San Francisco columnist David Lazarus does, that people should pay for the news. The second reaction is evident in the report from Tim O’Reilly about trouble […]

It has been confirmed (by Rafat) that InfoWorld will cease to publish in print. Colin Crawford at IDG foreshadowed this rapid transformation. The news about InfoWorld is extremely significant for two reasons.

First, if InfoWorld can make the transition from print publishing to online publishing without going out of business, without diminishing its value to readers, […]

It’s only a matter of time before people start to Twitter in the bathroom. If you don’t know what Twitter is (either because you don’t follow online technology or you’ve been locked in a sock drawer), that IS as bad is it sounds, but not in the way you probably think.

If you do follow online […]

In traditional newspaper publishing, errors are typically corrected the next day, in small print, in a small section inside the paper that lists such errors. Most bloggers have adopted the convention of the “update,” with has many similarities to the print publisher approach. An update is typically an addendum placed at the end of the […]

What are we to conclude from stark contrast between the (sometimes breathless) praise of USA Today’s “social media” redesign among tech/media bloggers and commentators (with some saying they didn’t go far enough), and the near universal rejection of the redesign among USA Today readers who commented on it? Could it be that it’s really the […]

A friend of mine, Sahar Sarid, posted an interesting assertion about the future of blog business models (Sahar has an elegant mind, and his new blog Conceptualist is sure to be a great read):
Newspapers - Free (or no business model) (pre 1704), Advertising (1704, The Boston News-Letter), Subscription (1893, Frank Munsey)
Radio - Free (or no […]

Sure, Dove captured everyone’s attention with its Evolution “viral” video, which, like a good old-fashioned expose, revealed the manipulation behind images of “beauty.” This trend of brands creating content for the web dates back to the short films that BMW commissioned in 2001 and 2002 (and I’m sure further back than that, depending on how […]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.

The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused […]

I got a lot of attention from the search engine optimization (SEO) community this past week for a post on “What Gives SEO A Bad Name” — the example I used, a parked domain appearing as a #2 Google search results, turns out to be Google’s fault, not the work of an unethical SEO. Or […]

The death of print publishing is coming, it’s just a matter of whether it happens in 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years. I’m betting it happens sooner than anyone expects. Colin Crawford, the SVP of online for IDG, posted some stunning figures:
Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline […]

What Gets You Worked Up Enough To Blog About It?
Writing this weekly column for the Blog Herald has been a new challenge for me — I’m not used to blogging “on demand.” On my own blog, Publishing 2.0, I just waiting until something gets me sufficiently worked up that the blog post practically writes itself. […]

Should Bloggers Create Commercial Content?

Let’s say a blogger who writes about life and family occasionally writes a post through PayPerPost and properly uses the equivalent of “Special Advertising Section” to disclose that the post is paid. In the context of the entire blog, what’s wrong with that relative to how it has worked in other […]

Today the Media 2.0 Workgroup launches as a collection of voices on the revolution in media, which for my part boils down to the observation that everything, from software to socializing to corporate branding, is now media. Organizer Chris Saad describes it thusly:
The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators […]

Forbes.com has a shameless linkbait piece, “The Web Celeb 25″ — here’s the TechMeme link if you haven’t seen it. Apparently, the editors of the piece adopted proofreading and fact checking practices typically assumed (in some cases unfairly) of bloggers, which is to say, not much — either that, or Scoble is now a political […]

Can A Big Company Really Blog

Chew on this: If No One Reads What You Write, That’s Because It Sucks

My Blog Herald column is up: Blogging Your Convictions

With the launch of its new (and very well executed) site statitistics offering, Feedburner is perfectly positioned to push forward a desperately needed evolution in web metrics — abolish the distinction between page views and feed views. From an analytic persepctive, of course I want to know how many people read my content on the […]

The much anticipated news site Daylife has launched — there has been much critique and analysis, which I won’t repeat — most of it has focused on Daylife’s functionality (including a harsh critique from investor Mike Arrington). Instead, I’m going to take a look at the content. Here are the top 10 stories:

1. Dems Take […]

Just posted my Blog Herald column on The Great Comment Debate — please feel free to comment.

The obligatory (self-indulgent) prognostications — in no particular order or degree of certainty:

Major print publication ceases publishing in print
This is inevitable, and the probability increases each year, so it’s a pretty safe prediction — the real tipping point will happen when a publisher convinces top advertisers to value ads on the web-only pub as much […]

Just posted my column at The Blog Herald on the death of the user. Enjoy.

If you spend too much time in Silicon Valley you’d think that the technology industry — with Google leading the charge — already owns the future of advertising. But don’t count out Madison Avenue just yet — they may be responsible for perpetuating the imbalance between media time spent online and ad dollars spent online […]

I posted a column over at The Blog Herald on Democratizing The Economics of Content. Check it out.

Brian Clark is indeed an effective copywriter as he knew just how to hook me into participating in this “chain blog” of “five things you didn’t know” about me:

1. For five years after college I wrote fiction and payed the bills by teaching test prep courses until I discovered that I wasn’t very good at […]

Got this in an email this morning from PayPerPost’s PR agency, SS|PR:

PayPerPost, the leading marketplace connecting marketers with bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, Is announcing the second phase of its full disclosure model, whereby participating Consumer Content Creators are required to disclose their sponsored status. The new Terms of Service will bring […]

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner pushes back on Chris Anderson’s treatise on “radical transparency” in magazine publishing:

I don’t mean to be too much of an old-media-reactionary running dog. And some of the things he says make immediate sense. In fact, I asked all my writers and editors to start blogging a few months ago. (See […]

Chris Anderson of Wired has written what may be the most sober and balanced (i.e. ideology-free) assessment I’ve ever read of the upside and downside of 2.0 openness in publishing, or what he calls “radical transparency.” Here’s a sample:

3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each […]

Has there ever been an industry that faced as much uncertainty and such low visibility as the media industry? Media executives have lately taken to throwing up their hands and declaring their uncertainty in public (all emphasis is mine):

In the next year or two the media world will begin to figure out what consumers really […]

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., […]

My friends at 8020 Publishing are offering $5 off a subscription to JPG Magazine for Publishing 2.0 readers. Derek and Paul just printed Issue 7 of JPG, the first community sourced issue, with all the photos submitted and voted on by the JPG community, and it looks fantastic!

If you’re into photography, you should definitely […]

It’s easy to embrace the New York Times hype about Web 3.0 — Web 2.0 hasn’t built that many successful businesses yet, so why not drop it already and mover on to the next big thing so that we can keep pumping up start-up valuations for bigger exits? Rapid software releases may be the new […]

Publishing 2.0 will be covering the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week — drop me a line if you want to meet up. Look for live blogging dispatches across the week.

As participatory media goes mainstream, media companies are discovering that it’s a lot easier to hop on the ideological bandwagon of participation than it is to actually do participatory media well.

Along with the upside of “crowdsourcing” its news gathering, Gannet also discovered the pitfalls of participatory news:

The [Cincinnati Enquirer] recently asked the crowd to weigh […]

Despite increasingly frequent reassurances to content creators, Google clearly wants nothing less than to own the content industry — but Google is completely earnest about not wanting to actually own or create any content. Google wants to own the BUSINESS of content.

The big news today is of course Google’s launch of customized search, which allows […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a […]

What content category benefits greatly from digital, web-based organization and distribution, but is best appreciated offline? If you said art photography, then you understand intuitively why JPG Magazine is such an interesting Publishing 2.0 play.

The idea is elegantly 2.0: give the new breed of digital-technology-enabled pro-am photographers a place to showcase their work and […]

I noticed that Engadget has ascended to the top spot of the Tecnhorati Top 100. Scanning down the Top 20, I was struck by the dominance of Tech/Geek blogs and Political blogs.

1. Engadget — TECH/GEEK
2. 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG
3. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things - TECH/GEEK
4. Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide — TECH/GEEK
5. The […]

Numerous “analysts” (including me) have been predicting that user-generated content sites like MySpace and YouTube, despite their runaway popularity, will not receive all (or even much) of the big brand ad dollars that will be poured into online advertising across the next few years. The reason — advertisers still care about the quality of the […]

I’ve advocated that media should evolve into marketing services — according to lastest Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry forecast, that’s increasingly where the money is going.

NON-ADVERTISING-BASED FORMS OF MARKETING - especially newer sectors such as branded entertainment, event marketing and experiential marketing - have emerged as the fastest growing segment of the media economy, […]

I switched the web host for Publishing 2.0 last week, and in the process, some email sent to me at scottkarp at publishing2 dot com was not received. If you emailed me and I have not responded (or you received a bounce back), please send again. I apologize for any inconvenience.

There’s more inevitable debate over “social” software, Web 2.0, and 2.0ness in general. Is it really new? Is it a passing fad? Is it just for geeks? Does it help us get things done? Does it improve our lives? Has it jumped the shark? (Great commentary from Mathew Ingram, Kent Newsome, Stowe Boyd, Rob Hyndman, […]

As further evidence that technology is turning everything into media, Universal Music announced that it would be backing SpiralFrog, a digital music site that will attempt to transform the music business into a media business by selling advertising rather than charging fees:

Universal Music, the world’s largest music company, is backing a start-up that will allow […]

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems […]

A eulogy is a speech of praise, typically — although not necessarily — for the dead, which seems fitting for a post about the lingering charms and strengths of Old Media.

According to a recent survey, New Media still has a long way to go to earn the public’s trust, at least in the UK:

Respondents were […]

Inform.com has wisely gotten out of the Web 2.0 news aggregator business and into the publisher services business. Erick Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 Blog has the scoop:

As readership declines for newspapers and online readership grows, every publisher faces the threat coming from the edge of the network. Sites like Google News, Yahoo News, […]

Jay Rosen proposes a new model for jouralism — “In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.” What jumps out at me, beyond the effort to empower “pro-am, open-source” journalism, is that it’s a nonprofit endeavor, driven by donations.

Jay empahsizes that NewAssignment.Net […]

Scott Donaton has a column in Ad Age imagining the inevitable day when the Wall Street Journal will fold its print publication:

I don’t have enough insight into The Journal’s economics to say when (or, with confidence, whether) the day will come when a print-to-digital conversion is economically feasible. Could be two years, could be 10. […]

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results from a blogger survey today, which detailed the reasons why bloggers blog. The report focuses on some notion of storytelling vs. journalism (whatever), but what jumped out at me was that 7% of bloggers said that making money is a major reason why they blog. […]

It has been well documented that Netscape users don’t like the new Digg-like Netscape. Jason Calacanis’ solution — hire away Digg’s power users, who drive 90% of Digg’s value. But even if these power users are for sale (an interesting question), it still wouldn’t help Netscape woo back its original user base of average people. […]

Jeff Jarvis and Amanda Chapel (aka Strumpette) are going at it over the Dell issue and in the process are stirring up such a heavy cloud of ideology that it’s hard to get your bearings. I thought it was worth trying to boil it down to some simpler, less ideologically-colored observations and lessons:

- Companies used […]

Two words that have been terribly abused and misused in the blogospher are “conversation” and “contrarian.” As Chris Edwards puts it:

It’s funny how apparently innocent words become insults. Lit-crit types have been thumbing their noses at each other with accusations of “Leavisite” for years. Poor old FR Leavis: you turn lit-crit into a serious subject […]

Dell launched a blog and promptly got savaged by Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel for not immediately engaging the issues of poor customers service that have tied Dell to the whipping post of the blogosphere.

In theory, Jeff and Steve are right — although, with all due respect, they were just a wee bit sanctimonious […]

Gawker’s Nick Denton has announced a restructuring, including a staff shake-up and the sale of two under-performing sites. Nick is a smart guy, and he’s clearly getting ready for the inevitable moment when the new media bubble begins to deflate — a “perversely countercyclical move” he calls it.

What I found most fascinating is the […]

This cartoon was published October 8, 2000 — it boggles the mind.

Here’s another one…

Cartoons like this made Mathew Ingram wonder whether blogging has jumped the shark. With the whole PayPerPost mess its hard to argue that it hasn’t. I start to wonder whether media itself has jumped the sharp.

Incidentally, these are courtesy of cartoonist and […]

The phenomenon called blogging has now been starkly divided into the pre-PayPerPost era and the post-PayPerPost era. I’m referring to a new service that makes an explicit business model out of what up until now has been an implicit accusation, often leveled without cause. PayPerPost enables companies to pay bloggers to say nice things about […]

I increasing believe that in order to survive and grow in a digital, networked, social, participatory world, media companies need to evolve into marketing services companies. Here’s what’s driving me to that conclusion.

Advertising took another significant step yesterday towards graduating from paid media placements (i.e. traditional ads). Ironically, it starts with a paid media placement […]

Never, it seems, has an issue been so neck-deep in BS on both sides as “net neutrality.” Andy Kessler has a great piece in The Weekly Standard where he rips the disingenuousness of both sides and proposes what I’ve advocated for in the past: government usurpation of the networks to create a competitive marketplace by […]

There’s another Techmeme frenzy about a blogger’s departure from an institution, but Om Malik’s departure from Business 2.0 does represent an important macrotrend — individual talent as media brand.

Traditional media brands are built around institutions — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CNN. The blogging phenomenon has made it possible for […]

Ah, the glories of spam:

Ulcerative Colitis Surgery anyone? And how nice for Accenture, whose ad appears next to this mess.

I generally don’t do politics here, but this is media-related. The headline for Newsweek’s June 12, 2006 issue reads:

The Haditha Question
For U.S. Soldiers on the Front Lines in Iraq, Where Is the Line Between Self-Defense and Shame?

Shame?

Shame is using a photo of massacred civilians on your cover and not having the courage to use the […]

Q: What is the sound of a house of cards collapsing?

A: Upfront

The NYT has an article on digital book publishing, which already has responses from Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis. These got me thinking about an idea for book publishing 2.0, based on the following:

1. Ideas, markets, and technology are changing so rapidly that a static book is quickly outdated.
2. Books with long-term value have always […]

In a pro-”net neutrality” piece in the Times, Adam Cohen invokes the old saw about freedom of press belonging only to those who own one — he declares that the Web is the most democratic medium ever — but it’s really an illusion.

The problem with the democratic web ideal is that no one really owns […]

Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis are engaged in an ontological debate about what constitutes “the edge” and what will ultimately be the winning business strategy at the edge. What struck me about their debate is how little clarity there is on how money will actually be made at the edge — and this despite Umair […]

In media 2.0, everything social, interactive, linked, comment-enabled, etc. is GOOD, and everything static, one-way, unlinked, and solitary is BAD. Take Jeff Jarvis’ critique of books:

The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They […]

Marc Cuban’s rant about blogging vs. traditional media doesn’t really break any new ground, but this observation did get me thinking:

99pct of blogs are about what someone has to say. 99 pct of traditional media is about making money. Which is exactly what leads to the resentment between bloggers and traditional media and why blogging […]

There are only two plausible reasons to publish a “digital edition” of a print publication, as the New York Times is now doing in partnership with Microsoft:

1. To prop up print advertising revenue by artificially increasing the “print” circulation through “digital distribution”

2. To make a bucket of content, i.e. the print edition, available for “browsing” […]

Web 1.0 gave us “i