Colin's Corner

Google Base

The WSJ (subscription required) has caught up on the rumors swirling around  the web - (see Tech Crunch, John Battelle's Searchblog , Google Bolgoscoped, Search Engine Watch that Google is on the verge of launching a service that could eventually be competitive with eBay / craigslist and other classified local services.
 
According to information that was available termprarily at base.google.com  Google Base is a service into which you can add all types of content. Google will host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.”

Google is expected to provide additional details at a multi-day summit called Google Zeitgeist at its headquarters in Mountain View. Invites were limited to 400 of Google premier worldwide partners and the attendees will no doubt have to sign confidentiality agreements but I'm sure most of information provided by Google will find its way onto the web.

John Battelle makes the astute observation:

A final thought on GoogleBase. If Google is really, really serious about this - that instead of going the Google News route with listings, it plans instead to get folks to post their stuff to GoogleBase - it marks a significant departure for the company: It will become a publisher, a competitor in the content creation and management game, which places it in direct competition with the multitudes who feed and feed off the main Google search engine. Watch. This. Space.

Web 2.0 Workgroup

The Web 2.0 Workgroup, a network of weblogs that cover the latest evolution of the Web has recently launched.  The network currently consists of TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and WeBreakStuff. A good resourse for trends around community participation and collaboration plus the integration of web services - the core components of the current iteration of the web.

Business Week's Best of Web

Excellent special report on the current evolution of the Web. The audience participatory trends have been evident for the last couple of years but are now reaching a critical mass. Although driven more by the consumer market the B2B environment needs to wake up and look to the consumer markets for some inspiration. How many business sites still lack the tools and features to allow their communities to truly interact with their  brands. The fear of ceding some control to users still permeates traditional media. The traditionalists ignore these trends at their peril !

Cyworld  (owned by South Korea's SK Communications) is reminiscent of the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson's  cyberpunk cult  science fiction novel Snow Crash . (Cy means relationship in Korean). It claims almost of third of South Korea's 48 million people as members - with reports of 90% of active web users 24-29 years old participating. An interview with Rick Kim of Cyworld is available here and a WIRED article here.

My Space, recently sold to News Corp for $580 million has some 21 social networking million monthly users

It's a fascinating time but just make sure you have on your staff those who REALLY understand and participate in the current online trends.

The threat of disintermediation

Writing for AdAdge, (it is ironic given some of the points in the article that the site requires you to register), John Battelle, founder and chairman of Federated Media has an excellent perspective on the potential impact of disintermediation on mainstream publishers.

Print and online publishers fear disintermediation by the consumer-driven technologies of blogs, syndication and search. TV networks fear disintermediation by the rapid uptake of digital video recorders and Internet-based video.

But the truth is, the products that are threatened by disintermediation are not imperiled because of technology; they are imperiled because they are based on models that offer less value to the customer than competing alternatives. 

What we have grown to call disintermediation is, at the end of the day, simply the cold reality of someone doing our job better than we are. If you sense the cold breath of “disintermediation” on your back, more likely than not a bunch of upstarts are delivering your business’ core value proposition for less cost and in a better fashion than you are.

As John succinctly points out, publishers and marketers are in the communications business.

Publishers are born connectors, they bring like-minded people together. They are also conversationalists of the first order. They foster the interaction between the three key parties in commercial media: the audience, the author/creator and the marketer. This facilitation is still very much needed.  Figure out a way to be part of the conversation, and you will always prosper.

I could not agree more. IDG brands have focused communities, trusted original content and the ability to facilitate communications and conversation

   We’ve always regarded ourselves as trusted providers of information services but now we also need to recognize that some of the most valuable information comes from outside our traditional content generation mechanism , from our users.

   We need to be about the creation of strong branded communities where people converse together and share experiences and look for advice and information.

   We need to focus not only on the distribution of information, but also, and more importantly, on allowing the community to share information while providing the opportunity to interact with editors and vendors.

  As publishers, we need to view ourselves as managers of content, delivering the right content and tools to our users when and where they want to consume the information

If we don't provide our communities with the ability to communicate we will lose them and only have ourselves to blame

Wake up call to MSM

This speech by Rupert Murdoch hits all the right notes and it is refreshing to see the head of a media conglomerate being so forthcoming. A lot of his content is taken from the Carnegie Reporter report Abandoning the News.

What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.

The theme that Main Stream Media (MSM) needs to embrace, involve and better understand the needs and desires of their readership is well articulated in this speech to the of American Society of Newspaper Editors.  MSM needs to  appropriately find ways to integrate user content alongside traditional editorial content - whether it be forums/discussion groups, blogs, vlogs (video), mologs (mobile), podcasts (audio) , wicks, user tagging systems and bookmarking, user ratings, and feedback etc.

The story in today's New York Post Weakened Journal noted that: Earnings plunged by 54 percent at Wall Street Journal's newspaper's parent Dow Jones & Co., with its fledgling online operations earning more money for the first time than the flagship Journal and the weekly Barron's. Print publishing is not a profitable business for Dow Jones anymore and the company hopes long-range growth will come from online publishing, which has profit margins at least 20-fold higher than print.

This should be a final wake up call to any MSM company that is not rapidly reallocating resources from low or negative margin print operations to online.

BtoB on online revenue trends

Cover story from BtoB  containing plenty of insight from IDG's online experts

Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Web
Internet finally fulfilling its promise

Get over the print metaphor

An interesting perspective at: Rexblog
Get over the print metaphor for your magazine's online presence: Here's a suggestion for magazine people who are supposed to "get it." Download a desktop newsreader (not even an online one like bloglines.com will give you the real deal) and subscribe to just one RSS feed from the NY Times. I suggest the Circuits feed (warning: it will just be headlines and a story synopsis, but you'll catch the drift after a while). Look at how the stories come into the reader outside the context of the visual cues of a website or print version. That is the correct metaphor for how people want to access your "content" -- to use your news. Stop trying to make your website "look" like a print product. Try to understand how people use the web to organize information -- not surf to your site to see how pretty it may be, or to follow what you think is "above the fold" today. Here, use kottke.org as a guide for what your publication's website will look like in about 2-3 years when your awareness catches up with the reality of where the metaphors of news "using" is heading.