Targeting and online newspapers

Steve Outing at Poynter Online suggests that online newspapers should put carefully selected, targeted classified ads on to their article pages.

It's the same concept as Google's AdSense, which puts Google text ads on websites, with the ads complementing article content. Those bicycle classifieds might show up on sports and recreation stories, for example. Classified-ad buyers could even bid on placement, a la the models of Google AdWords and Overture.

It's surprising newspapers aren't doing this more already.

Readers aren't coming to newspapers just through the front page. Web feeds and deep linking means that readers are often coming directly to article pages.

When they come, it's a perfect time to show them a bunch of interesting and relevant other content. "Here's the article you want. Want to know more? Here's a few related articles and links to related areas of our site. And here's a few of our classifieds and local businesses that might be useful."

The article page could be like a mini-front page, but focused around the article. It could be a selected view into the newspaper, surfacing parts of the newspaper relevant to the article, hiding parts that are not. It could help readers learn more, draw them in, and show them what the paper has to offer.

Delicious Library, Delicious Monster

Leander Kahney at Wired interviews Delicious Monster, the team behind the clever Delicious Library application. It creates a gorgeous virtual bookshelf of the books you own.

From the article:

Delicious Library ... generated $250,000 worth of sales in its first month .... [and] won an "innovators award" from O'Reilly & Associates.

One of the niftiest features is the ability to use a video camera to read a product's barcode, which is used to fetch its details from the net.

Amazon web services are what made it all possible. Remarkable.

Interesting to see they're up here in Seattle.

[via Library Stuff]

Update: A year later, Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI takes a look at how Delicious Monster is doing.

Update: Sixteen months later, Amazon.com launches a web-based Delicious Library knock-off called "Your Media Library". While not quite as pretty as Delicious Library, Amazon's version does have the advantages of being web-based and building your bookshelf automatically from your Amazon.com purchases.

Will Technorati die?

Andrew Chen gives us "5 Reasons Why Feedster and Technorati will Die". Brutal, but the post makes some good points and is worth reading.

The biggest issue I see with Technorati and Feedster is that they seem to have no competitive advantage over the search giants. Technorati is a weblog search engine. It's a web search restricted to weblogs.

What would it take for Google to offer the same product? Identify weblogs in their crawl, crawl them more frequently, and then put up a version of their search index that only contains weblogs. I've got weblog search and trackbacks. Looks like I'm done. Frankly, I'd be really surprised if Google didn't already have this available internally.

It's unfortunate. I like Technorati. I'd love to see them thrive and succeed.

What should Technorati do? Andrew Chen suggests they should focus on helping people read the news, a version of Google News for weblogs. This would be entering the same space as My Yahoo, My MSN, and Bloglines though, a space that has its own issues.

Nevertheless, Feedster definitely appears to be moving in this direction with My Feedster. And Technorati is including more and more news on its home page.

But I think the answer lies in what appears to be a comment from Dave Sifry (CEO, Technorati) at the bottom of Andrew Chen's post. Dave says:

... I think you're missing out the huge 90% of Technorati that is "under the surface" ...

And there it is. Technorati has huge amounts of oh-so-tasty data. They're swimming in an ocean of information. If they can surface the right data to the right people, bubble up the news people need, then they'd have something truly unusual.

And Technorati is moving in this direction. For example, some of the clever uses of Technorati from the Technorati developers contest surface otherwise hidden tidbits of data in some quite interesting ways.

But they'll have to move quickly to avoid the search giants. Right now, Technorati is underfoot. That's not a good place to be.

XML is for geeks

Danny Sullivan summarizes a blog discussion between Jeremy Zawodny, Dave Winer, and others on "more consistency in how people can find and subscribe to RSS, Atom and other feed content."

When you boil all of this down, the problem really is that the XML shouldn't be exposed in the first place. Dan Isaacs nails it in his post:

What the hell is the point of making the XML simply link to the .rss page? Are there really more than 5 people on the planet that would be interested in the actual RSS?

RSS is a data format. No one but us geeks cares about XML feeds. People just want to read news.

See also "Getting your grandmother to use RSS".

My MSN vs. My Yahoo

John Battelle has a tease about some new features coming out of My MSN including "the ability to discover, read and search through blog and RSS content."

Sounds like we're about to get another web-based blog reader to compete with My Yahoo and Bloglines.

See also "Bloglines and feed readers" and "All new My Yahoo".

Update: More details from SiliconBeat and CNet.

Update: Brady Forrest announces the My MSN RSS Reader on the official MSN Search weblog.

Yahoo desktop search

Yahoo Desktop Search (a rebranded version of X1) has launched.

Yes, Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, and others already have free desktop search downloads. Here's another to throw on the pile.

In an excellent and detailed review of Yahoo Desktop Search, Chris Sherman makes the interesting point that "missing from YDS is one of the most useful features of Google's desktop search -- —the automatic indexing and caching of web pages you've viewed with Internet Explorer."

Without search over your browse history, desktop search is merely a fix for the dismally slow file search built into Windows.

But search over the browsing history moves desktop search toward Memex, the memory extender. It would allow you to recall anything you've seen on your computer before with the touch of a button. That's where Google is headed.

See also my comments on personalized desktop search (Blinkx, Dashboard) in my earlier post, "MSN desktop search", and my comments on the limited business prospects for desktop search in "Mamma buys Copernic".

Defining the long tail

Chris Anderson posts reader-submitted definitions of the term "The Long Tail".

I particularly liked Eric Akawie's contribution:

The Long Tail is what you get when the obscure becomes ubiquitous.

Another of the submissions -- "An embarrassment of niches" (by kpk) -- reminds me of an amusing story from a while back.

Jeff Bezos, during a presentation to hundreds of people, showed his Amazon.com recommendations. His top recommendation was the DVD "Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity".

Turns out he had just bought the DVD of "Barbarella", so the recommendation was fairly accurate. But still an embarrassment of niches.

MSN Search results as RSS

Gary Price discovers that the MSN Search beta allows you to get your search results as an RSS feed.

For example, here's a search for "Findory" as an RSS feed from MSN Search.

Aside from the geeky cool factor, this might a useful alternative to Google Alerts and other services that monitor for changes in web search results.

Update: Brady Forrest announces and promotes the new feature on the official MSN Search blog.

Subscriptions and the New York Times

The cover story of BusinessWeek is "The Future of the New York Times".

Apparently, the online version of the New York Times is quite profitable ($17.3M net on $53.1M of revenue in Q1 & Q2 2004). Despite this success, the paper is considering requiring online subscriptions.

It's a little curious. Only a few months ago, the Wall Street Journal experimented with allowing unrestricted access to its content to see the impact on its traffic. Now the New York Times is considering restricting access to its content to paid subscribers.

The BusinessWeek article spends a fair amount of time on the distinction between subscription and "free" news websites. It's isn't really correct to say the New York Times is free for users. It isn't uncompensated; it is supported by advertising. Readers pay for the content by viewing advertising.

Google is compensated and compensated quite well by users of its "free" search engine. On average, Google makes 54 cents per click on an advertisement and nearly 17% of searches end in a click on an advertisement.

Rather than destroying their traffic by restricting access to their content, perhaps newspapers should improve the relevance and usefulness of their online advertising.

[BusinessWeek article via Steve Klein]

Update: As Maarten pointed out (in the comments), I made a couple mistakes in my original post. They have been corrected.

Zen and the art of Amazon recommendations

Chris Anderson at Wired interviews Jeff Bezos. Jeff had some interesting comments on Amazon's personalization:

We not only help readers find books, we also help books find readers, with personalized recommendations based on the patterns we see.

I remember one of the first times this struck me. The main book on the page was on Zen. There were other suggestions for Zen books, and in the middle of those was a book on how to have a clutter-free desk.

That's not something that a human editor would have ever picked. But statistically, the people who were interested in the Zen books also wanted clutter-free desks. The computer is blind to the fact that these things are dissimilar in some way that's important to humans. It looks right through that and says yes, try this. And it works.

What makes the recommendations so effective is that they're non-obvious but still relevant. Recommending other books with Zen in the title is obvious and not particularly useful. Readers could easily find those books themselves.

Recommending a book on simplifying your work environment is surprising and interesting. It's a book that would have been difficult to discover on your own.

But Jeff's comments might overemphasize the difference between humans selecting the recommendations and a computer selecting the recommendations. The computer merely does an analysis of what humans are doing. It's going out to the community and saying, "What other books do you like?"

It's as if everyone who bought that Zen book e-mailed you recommendations on other books to buy, but all the wisdom of this crowd is gathered automatically and with no effort from the community. It's easy to use. It requires no effort. It just works.

Tyranny of choice and the long tail

Chris Anderson writes about the "tyranny of choice":

Studies showed that people actually felt worse about their purchases when they had more to choose from (did I make the right decision?), and often even bought less because of it.

It's information overload. Lack of easy ways to differentiate and filter the options leads to paralysis.

Chris continues:

What was missing ... [is] "data" about products, and "metadata" about information itself. For the physical goods, this can take the form of something as simple as Amazon's "rank by bestselling" lists to more complex background information such as reviews, price comparisons, version histories and manufacturing details.

As Amazon's Jeff Bezos explains it, for a product that a potential purchaser has a great deal of interest in, no amount of information is too much: from reader and trade reviews to service records, the more they can learn about a product the more comfortable they are buying it. But for products that they just don't care much about, even something as simple as knowing what most other people bought can make the difference between being frozen by overwhelming choice and purchasing with confidence.

Jeff always has said that no amount of information is too much, but I think this misses the key point with tyranny of choice.

We don't just need more information. We need the right information.

Specifically, we need information that allows us to easily and quickly differentiate between the products. Flooding me with tons of information isn't useful if the information I need is lost in the clutter.

See also my earlier post, "Froogle adds product reviews", about how reviews transform Froogle from a mere price comparison engine to a service that gives "users the information they need to differentiate between products, helping them find the right product at the right price."

Getting your grandmother to use RSS

Citing the Pew Internet Life & American Life Project report, "The State Of Blogging", Charlene Li says:

5% or 6 million online consumers currently use RSS.

I knew that the number was getting up there, especially with the push from media heavies like Yahoo!, WSJ.com, and nytimes.com, but it’s still amazing that it’s gotten so much traction while being still so kludgy to find and add content.

Current RSS readers are clunky and difficult to use. Readers have to manually hunt down and add web feeds. These kinds of tools are only suitable for early adopters, people who see the vision and are willing to endure this level of suffering.

What will it take for RSS to get into the mainstream? What would it take to get your grandmother to use RSS?

Some say that integration into existing applications like web browsers and mail readers will lead to mainstream adoption. While this makes it easier to install an RSS reader, it does nothing to reduce the amount of work of configuring and using an RSS reader.

Some say it might be sufficient to recommend additional feeds to add to your weblog reader. Bloglines and My Yahoo have taken some early steps here. While useful for discovering new feeds, finding and reading the feeds you want is still a long and labor intensive process.

Stepping back a second, why are we exposing things called RSS, Atom, and XML to readers at all? Do they care what these data formats are? No, only geeks like us care. Mainstream readers just want to read news.

Next generation RSS readers will get past exposing RSS feeds. Readers will just read news. All the magic of locating the content will be appropriately hidden. It will all just work.

What will this future look like? We're trying to build it.

We see Findory as the next-generation of RSS reader. RSS feeds are hidden. Discovering new content is automatic. Readers just read news. That's it. Just read news.

We recognize what is necessary to bring RSS to the mainstream. We're building a next-generation RSS reader today.

Bill Gates on search

Michael Kanellos at CNet interviews Bill Gates. Some interesting excerpts on search:

The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board. And if you look at the Microsoft Research things that we've had breakthroughs in -- natural language, document analysis, personalization, image analysis, language translation -- our research agenda will allow us to take today's search from ourselves and Google, and make what we have today look like a joke.

Just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn't do that well today. Search is really crummy today -- it's just that it used to be really crummy, and now it's better, and there never was anything like this before. So most of the results people get back today are irrelevant results. Deep analysis can take us much further, and that's why we're investing a lot, and you'll see us more very rapidly.

There is a lot of great work going on at Microsoft Research. The trick at Microsoft has always been to get this work into their products. At Google, the research teams are so integrated into the product teams that you can't tell them apart.

See also my earlier post, "The secret weapon: An army of PhDs".

[CNet interview via Search Engine Watch Blog]

Personalized search RSS feeds

Findory just launched RSS feeds for our personalized search for news and blogs.

Execute a news or blog search on Findory and, at the bottom of the search results, you'll see links to RSS feeds for those searches. The personalized version of the RSS feed (visible only if you are signed in) highlights recommended articles from the search results.

It's true that many others offer RSS feeds for searches over news or blogs. What makes Findory's RSS feeds so different is our personalization.

Normal RSS feeds are generic. Ever subscriber sees the same content. Findory's personalized RSS feeds are one-to-one. The feeds are built just for you with your recommended news and blog articles.

Any article you read through the RSS feed is included in your reading history, teaches Findory more about your interests, changes any personalized RSS feeds you use, and further personalizes the Findory front page.

Most uses of RSS out there view it as a static, generic channel, the same content doled out to tens of thousands of subscribers. We at Findory expect more from RSS. We think RSS should be dynamic, customized, and personalized. We think every RSS feed can be different, unique, and targeted. We're pushing RSS beyond what it has done before.

Battelle's BlogPlasma

John Battelle writes about his new idea, BlogPlasma, a visualization tool for seeing the relationship between blogs. He imagines it would work like MusicPlasma does for music artists.

If you haven't seen MusicPlasma, by the way, definitely check it out. It's a clever and fun visualization tool for viewing Amazon.com's similar artist data.

Although it's not as flashy as MusicPlasma, Findory does have a pretty cool way of viewing relationships between blogs. Our source pages show all related blogs and articles from related blogs.

For example, here's the page for this blog, Geeking with Greg, on Findory. It's related to Search Engine Watch Blog, Inside Google, and several other search related blogs.

It's fun to surf from blog to blog, following the relationships and seeing where they lead. The page itself has articles and related articles on it already, so it's an easy way to keep track of your favorite blogs and discover other blogs.

Findory's all about keeping it simple, but I can see the appeal of putting a flashy MusicPlasma-like UI on top of this kind of data. What a fun way to browse the relationships in the blogging community!

Six Apart buying Live Journal?

Om Malik reports that Six Apart is about to acquire Live Journal.

Om says that the deal "gives the company a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces."

[via Niall Kennedy]

Update: SiliconBeat posts some good background on the companies. Danah Boyd thinks there may be a culture mismatch.

Update: It's official. Xeni Jardin posts the news and links out to announcements from LiveJournal and SixApart.

Local search lacking local ads

Rob McGann reports that the top local search queries on Google only generate ads for local businesses 5% of the time.

Google, with its advertising base in the hundreds of thousands, has, "barely scratched the surface of what's out there in terms of reaching a critical mass of advertisers that could be relevant to local search. Yahoo! has the same problem," [TACODA Systems CEO Dave] Morgan [said].

"Google has loads of technology, but this is one marketplace it cannot automate its way into," [SiteLab International EVP Dana] Todd said. "In order for them to monetize local search with locally based advertisers, they are going to have to have people walking down the streets, knocking on doors explaining AdWords to local dry cleaners. That's not going to happen anytime soon, because they don't have the people to do that."

This is exactly the problem with local search. Local search is hard because there's many tiny little local businesses and advertisers, all being created, changing, and dying rapidly.

See also my previous post, "Down on local search".

[via Danny Sullivan]

Personalized news in 2005

Rick Edmonds at Poynter Online sees heavy competition for newspapers from Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft in 2005.

Google and Yahoo go first among the new forces in news for three reasons. They have boatloads of capital to invest in new ventures and acquisitions. They have strong existing news aggregation products, increasingly able to become the personalized "Daily Me," so long a staple of thinking about the-newspaper-of-the-future. Their principal revenue base is advertising, the lifeblood of newspapers' income.

Until now RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, the standard means for compiling your own news report from multiple sources, required a degree of user sophistication and have displayed content choices in uninviting, super-abridged list form. Neither issue is disappearing overnight, but [Morgan Stanley analyst Mary] Meeker contends that My Yahoo gets a lot closer to real simplicity and also serves a menu of special interests from the content-rich blogosphere.

Look for 2005 to be the year the heat gets turned up on newspapers to get better, and innovate faster online as credible rival versions of the "Daily Me" emerge in the marketplace.

Personalized news (the "Daily Me") will be big in 2005, Rick says, with Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft charging on in.

See also "Daily Me is here", "Making sense of the chaos", and "Turning noise to knowledge".

Answers.com launches

Gary Price reports on the launch of Answers.com, a new service from GuruNet.

It's interesting. It's a metasearch engine that hits a series of specialized databases to try to answer your question. From their about page:

We've collected authoritative facts in Answers.com by licensing top-quality reference work to give you concise, relevant information on each of over a million topics. We handpicked reference from publishers such as Houghton Mifflin, Columbia University Press, Merriam Webster, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, Inlumen, Investopedia and Who2 (just to name a few)...

It's more focused than a web search engine and sometimes more useful.

Try some searches on it. For example, ask Answers.com, "What is a blog?" "What is a tsunami?" "Who is Jeff Bezos?"

At a time when some are talking about how big they can make their search index, it's interesting to see the opposite approach, focusing on a few, specialized, high quality data sources. Sometimes less is more.

Update: Apparently, Google is experimenting with using Answers.com instead of Dictionary.com for word definitions.

Update: Google has switched over to Answers.com for all word definitions.

Update: Walter Mossberg at the WSJ has an interesting and well-written review of Answers.com.

Answers.com is ... a start toward a new search paradigm where the object is to provide real instant information, not just links to pages where that information may, or may not, be found.

[via Emergic and David Jackson]

Reading news should be easy

Simon Waldman (Director, UK Guardian) sees everyone reading news from a feed aggregator in the future:

Over time, you develop a rich cocktail of sources and you develop a new habit for browsing information. Some things you look at hourly, some daily, and some you deliberately save till Friday pm for a catch up. This is light years away from sitting down at the table in the morning looking at your paper, or even your paper’s website.

In this new environment, no single organisation gives shape to the world in this way - there is no single front page, or lead story.

It's an interesting vision, but it sounds too time consuming for all but dedicated news junkies.

Most people don't want to spend hours hunting down good sources, setting up RSS readers, and skimming tens or even hundreds of web feeds every day. Most people just want to read news.

Simon needs to look beyond the current generation of aggregators. They're designed for early adopters, not the mainstream. There's no prioritization, no filtering, no sorting. Almost all of the work of hunting down quality sources and good information is put on the reader.

We at Findory have a different vision. We think news shouldn't require any effort to read. We think your newspaper should adapt to you and help you find the news you need. We think a newspaper should help readers discover important articles and sources buried deep in the long tail of news.

People need information. People need to know the news that impacts their lives. We should help them.