I was talking to a newsroom last week about adopting Publish2 as an editorial platform for creating news aggregation features for their website — there was a lot of excitement about sketching a big vision, thinking about all of the possibilities. But in a follow-up email, we held hands around a critical guiding principle — [...]

A post by Steve Yelvington contemplating the secret of Apple’s success got me thinking again about principles that will drive the next wave off successful digital media companies, in addition to the five principles I wrote about to kick off the year:

One of the push backs I often hear about news organizations transitioning their business center of gravity to digital is that journalists don’t want to adopt new online and digital technologies.
Well, these cycles have happened before. In 1982, Jim Fallows wrote an article for The Atlantic about his experience as one of the first journalists [...]

After I asserted several times that data is the key to the future of the web, Umair Haque gave my head a good spin by asserting that data is in fact a commodity. Umair is half right — we are increasingly overrun by data, and SOME of it is a commodity. The commodity data is [...]

As with Facebook Beacon’s implosion, the PR tailspin of Facebook itself is more interesting for what we can learn from it than why it is happening. What’s most interesting about Facebook’s downturn, as Josh Quittner observes, is that there’s nothing wrong with the technology:
The really weird part of this story is that there’s absolutely nothing [...]

A couple months ago I wrote that the mobile web sucks, based on my own user experience that didn’t seem to match the hype. Some people agreed, but a lot of people defended, passionately, the mobile web. Today the New York Times published some interesting data:
But at a recent conference, 3G was called “a failure” [...]

The most striking aspect of the reactions to my “Mobile Web Sucks” post — which was much more about my own frustrations as a USER than any kind of industry analysis — was the overt hostility that many respondents displayed towards me as a user of the mobile web, and to the many who chimed [...]

If you tried to visit Publishing 2.0 yesterday afternoon, you may have noticed it was down. And still down. And STILL down. For an hour and a half. If you tried to visit Publishing today, you may have noticed it was down AGAIN — for at least an hour.
This wasn’t the first outage with my [...]

Google may be forever denying that it is a media company (and an ad agency), but Microsoft is embracing the transformation of software into media and the overall convergence of media and technology. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president and chief advertising strategist, said in reference to denying rumors of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo [...]

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 [...]

There are many interesting similarities between widgets and RSS:

Fantastically flexible distributed technology
A boon for information junkies and power users
Difficult to explain to a non-geek
Name is complete opaque to average, mainstream users
Difficult for average, mainstream users to understand why it’s so cool
Huge technical savviness barrier for average, mainstream user adoption

Erick Schonfeld has an interview with Netvibes [...]

Has anyone noticed that the New York Times is completely dominating the tech blogosphere today? Five of the top eight stories on Techmeme today are from the NYT — and the #1 story is ABOUT the NYT:

All of the stories are indeed notable for one reason or another — here’s my .02 cents:

In Web Traffic [...]

When Nintendo was testing the new Wii game console remote, they apparently failed to anticipate that gamers would become so intensely involved in using the action imitating remote that they would lose control and cause physical damage (via The Lede). A blog has even been set up to document the cases of collateral Wii damage [...]

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 [...]

On Wednesday, I’ll be blogging The New New Internet Conference on Web 2.0 for Business in lovely Tysons Corner, Virginia for two reasons.
First and foremost: relative to coverage of Web 2.0 in the consumer space, I’ve seen much less discussion of Web 2.0 applications for business — other than endless coverage of the emergent [...]

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 [...]

Fred Wilson thinks that AOL’s lousy spam filters drove the under-18 generation to reject email and embrace instant messaging and text messaging. If Fred is right that there’s a generation coming up that will never use email, then it may slowly die off as older generations slowly die off — but that’s going to take [...]

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, [...]

Google has Microsoft squarely in its sights with the release of Google Apps for Your Domain — a bundling of Gmail and Google Talk, Calendar, and Page Creator for the enterprise, focused at this point on universities and small businesses. Here’s what jumped out at me from the press release:
Girouard underscored that the Google Apps [...]

Great technology brands — Google (search), Prius, iPod, — have one thing in common: they always work. Sometimes in the quest for best features, snazziest design, lowest price, biggest buzz, etc., technology companies lose sight of one of the most important — if not the most important — driver of customer loyalty: reliability.
Anyone who attempted [...]

Randall Stross, in a Times article, wonders who will pay for TV now that ad-skipping DVRs and on-demand broadband video have destroyed TV’s mass media advertising model. I wonder whether late 20th-century TV content production will follow the same path as early 20th-century transatlantic ocean travel, milk delivery, and buggy whip manufacturing — marginalized or [...]

It’s official — Microsoft is no longer a software company. With the launch of adCenter, Microsoft will be joining the ranks of Google and other media companies:
“Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft’s plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they [...]

Media is about conversation and participation. Consumers can create their own media. Value is being created at the edge. You’ve heard all the New Media maxims.
The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, the harder it is to navigate the sea of [...]

Thinking about the attention and information overload problem, I realized that what I want is an idea filter. Richard MacManus seconded the notion (and pointed out that, not surprisingly, he was there long before me.)
I thought it would be helpful to demonstrate what I mean by an idea filter. I read a lot of bloggers, [...]

Old Media executives have been stepping forward lately to assert their will to survive — even thrive — in a New Media world. Only time will tell whether Old Media brands can indeed survive, but there is ample evidence of forward thinking and emerging digital strategy.
From Time Inc. president Ann Moore:
We will continue to look [...]

There are two prevailing views of the evolution of online information flow — one focuses on the arc of technology, the other on what the user wants and needs. The technology-centric view focuses on issues like RSS adoption rates and RSS vs. email. The user-centric view focuses on issues like how people can find the [...]

There is a bubble in the tech industry, but it has nothing to do with the behavior of venture capital, as so many people are discussing. There’s a bubble because the tech industry is trying to be the new media industry, and very few people in the tech industry understand what’s really happening to the [...]

Tom Foremski answers “yes” to Dave Winer’s question, “is the publishing industry the new technology industry?” I think that is like saying the printing press industry is the old publishing industry. Web 2.0 applications, like the printing press, enable publishing — but they don’t define publishing. (A distinction that Tom makes.) And the current crop [...]

I’ve made the point many times that the bloggerati and Web 2.0 fan club are complete outliers when it comes to media consumption habits. To illustrate this point, I conducted a little informal survey, taking aim at the latest hype over News 2.0. The survey was partly inspired by Om Malik’s quip that “News 2.0 [...]

Will media become a commodity? Google and the search marketing industry that grew up around it think so. Creators of Web 2.0 content applications like Digg and Reddit think so. Today, we learn that eBay also thinks so — MediaPost reports that they pitched an electronic trading system for buying and selling media. And who [...]

You can almost hear the techies scrambling back to their drawing boards after an article in today’s New York Times shined a popular spotlight on problems with online recommendation systems. Of course, typical of a Times technology piece, they offer up extreme examples that make it seem like the whole system is broken:
But spewing out [...]

There may or may not be a Web 2.0 crash coming, as Steve Rubel has predicted, but there’s certainly blood in the water, with Yahoo’s earnings miss, Gather.com’s bad reviews, the demise of SearchFox, and the gathering buzz about an impending crash. Steve thinks a key factor is that “online advertising isn’t growing as [...]

Simon Dumenco’s Ad Age Column, A Blogger Is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name, misses a crucial distinction between blogging and writing — it’s technology that enables the conversation. Steve Rubel almost makes this observation by linking throughout his response to the column, but he doesn’t draw it out explicitly. Steve is absolutely right [...]

Here’s another reason why the blogosphere’s vision of the web as an open marketplace likely won’t come to pass: the BIG advertisers won’t finance it.
Let’s face it, the Googlenomics revolution has been financed by the little guys, who have profitably grown their businesses with pay-per-click ads. For small companies, brand management is secondary to driving [...]

If Rupert Murdoch has it right, old media companies need to become more like Google and Yahoo, i.e. technology companies:
MySpace, a social-networking Web site, soon will add free video downloads, revamp its instant-messaging program and eventually offer Internet calling, Mr. Murdoch told a media-investor conference sponsored by Citigroup Inc.
Murdoch has certainly drunk the koolaid –the [...]