Atlanta Media Bloggers

Net Neutrality on PBS

For people who spend a lot of time online, "network neutrality" is one of the most important issues pending in Washington. But the question of whether to create a "premium lane" on the information superhighway also has a lot of bearing on TV, too. This Wednesday, Rick Karr will examine the future of the Internet for PBS’ Moyers on America.

Check out http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/index.html

NOTE: This will air tonight on Channel 30 at 10pm too.

Hyper That Video

Notes on the future from The Economist: "From hypertext to hypervideo." It seems I'm not the only one who runs around saying, "If I was considering a new career, I'd be a copyright lawyer."

Story here.

Should interactive media be doing a better job of managing expectations?

First, this article just struck me as counter-intuitive, because all the numbers have been running high precisely in the opposite direction.

Then, I wondered if it is linked to the expectations game, the land-rush mentality that turned the Internet into Oklahoma in the late 1990s, with ripe money poised at the border, wanting to be a Sooner.

The money rushes in, the money rushes out, all because interactive media won't immediately transform itself into a push-button marketing free cash bonanza? Like with old media companies, will a slower than 28% growth spawn a shareholder exodus?

That sounds too easy, tho, given the massive Ford cutbacks announced recently.

And why is there a decline in financial advert money? Mortgage market slump? Too soon, or is it? Why would one of the most profitable industries in U.S history (credit industry) back off? I know there's a mortgage adjustment going on, but could there be a trimming back on consumer credit too? Larger economic trends that capital gains and investment machinations of the super-rich can't disguise?

Hey, don't ask me. I'm not a broker. I just know Yahoo! has had an aggressive and intensely creative year, and it surprised me more often than once in the past year, with interesting content and interactivity plays. Generally, I'd consider that a good thing. I dunno. Maybe Yahoo! was sucking in some more traditional old media investors, and they got cold feet quick.

Link: Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives - New York Times.

Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: September 19, 2006

Shares of  Yahoo fell more than 11 percent today after the company disclosed that it had sold less advertising in the last few weeks than it expected, largely because of a slowdown in automobile and financial advertising.

Speaking to a conference held in New York by  Goldman Sachs, Terry S. Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive, said that while advertising continued to grow from these industries, “they’re not growing as quickly as we might have hoped at this point in time.”

Yahoo said that it would still meet its financial targets for the third quarter, but that its profit and revenue will be toward the bottom of the range it had estimated.

[...]

The bottom of that range represents a 20 percent growth in revenue and a 16 percent growth on operating cash flow.

That would represent a further slowing of Yahoo’s growth. In the second quarter its revenue grew by 28 percent. And that result was lower than analysts expected, causing the company’s shares to slide. Over the summer, Yahoo’s stock had regained all of that loss until today’s disclosure.

[...]

Still, Wall Street analysts said it appeared that Yahoo’s problems were  not widespread in the industry.

“Not everything is hunky-dory in Yahoo land,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “Yahoo’s audience is not growing as fast as it once did.” Mr. Rohan added that Yahoo appeared to have unusual turnover among its executives and that this might have hurt its ability to sell advertising.

Susan Decker, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, told the investors that the advertising slowdown affected both text-based search advertising and graphical display advertising, an area in which Yahoo is the leader.

[...]

Meeting Announcements and a New Blog

Hi Everyone,

Reminder that the Atlanta Media Blogger's Group will be meeting this THURSDAY, August 17 at 7:00 PM at The Loop Pizza Grill and not on Wednesday. Dan Greenfield of Earthlink will be leading the discussion. I will get there earlier in the day to try put a fan in the loft in the attempt to ensure that it is usable.

Also, please mark your calendars for the Atlanta Electronic Commerce Forum lunch meeting at the Cobb Galeria. The discussion is on Intellectual Property Rights on an Open Web. Steve Wigmore, an Attorney from King & Spalding will be presenting. We could use some enlightened questions from this group.

Finally, I just launched the Atlanta Electronic Commerce Forum blog. The online forum for Fortune 1000 companies and other organizations to discuss best practices for electronically conducting business with their customers, suppliers and distributors. Check it out and please help me in building this community. Thanks

Colbert's New Word: Wikiality

Heh. As of August 1, 2006 at 9:34pm, "wikiality" receives NO Google hits. It receives 3 from Google news, including this article from CNET. I wonder how that will change over the next few weeks. Stephen Colbert featured it as his "Word" of the night on July 31, 2006.

I like this term, since we've needed something catchy to fully describe the organism that is humanity assembling information collectively. Wikipedia features a completely different way of assembling information than in the past.

Or...thinking aloud, IS it that different? Is Wikipedia merely a hyperversion of how "truth" or "knowledge" is constructed? I will obviously admit that experts with time and resources, coupled with fact-checking and peer review, assemble more reliable information than the masses collaborating together. Yet, I've noted in the past that Wikipedia fills a void for obscure topics. Whereas any encyclopedia would ignore cult TV shows and video games, Wikipedia covers them in such detail as to be relatively awe-inspiring. Its level of detail about the series of Final Fantasy games, for example, is stunning.

I think Wikipedia is merely a phenomenon - another addition to the way people create and share knowledge. But remember...it IS "wikiality" - not necessarily facts, truth or definitive information on a subject.

Speaking of media cluelessness in regard to Web 2.0....

I wrote something by accident on my blog today that I've reflected on and gotten attached to, a way of explaining, sort of, what's really happening with old media, new media, and the folks who ride about in "horseless carriages" in between the two worlds.

Because I've grown so fond of my accidental metaphor as the day wore on, I decided to share it with you, to see what folks here think of it.

Chris

Link: Chris Boese's Weblog: Nick Denton decides to run away from "stupid money".

Nick Denton decides to run away from "stupid money"

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

While I am certainly NOT one to think that Nick Denton is the online equivalent of Warren Buffett (heavens, no!), nor do I necessarily think he "gets" interactivity and grassroots media in a real sense (I'd still put him firmly in the "horseless carriage" category), I do have a great deal of interest in the article below.

First, holding my finger up into the wind, I am interested to hear that the "party" is back on. I wasn't too fond of the dot.com bubble "party" of the late 1990s, and my biggest complaint about it was how "stupid money" went around chasing after other "stupid money" in the form of venture capital and angels who didn't read business plans, dispensed with P/E ratios, and worst of all, had NO understanding of the larger concepts governing Internet communities and online interactive spaces.

They were carpet-baggers, in other words, and dumb carpet-baggers at that. And they were so full of themselves, they threw a big party of excess and actually believed it would never end, oblivious that the world of real people online went happily on without them.

[...]

Think about what Web 2.0 means.

What does it mean for me? Maybe I'm half a bubble off here, but Web 2.0 for me means one major step closer to the Semantic Web (the Semantic Web, in my mind's eye, will be driven by AI), with XML- and tag-driven meta-information creating spaces for higher-level "smart content," or content that knows its own name, knows things about itself, can parse itself, and knows how to fit itself into larger contexts. Oh, and all these relationships are formed by many-to-many communication links or conversations, forming and reforming dynamically, on the fly. It's been called an "ecosystem."

[...]

Just think about ways to visualize cyberspace, and think about how relationships can be represented so that items don't exist in space, all by their lonesome, but rather, are defined by their relationships to each other in a vast web of ongoing dialogues and conversations.

Or better yet, visualize a busy parlor with people clustered around, talking here and there in groups. Some of the people there are related, even second cousins twice removed. Some are married. Some are friends. Some are having secret affairs no one knows about. And most importantly, SOME drove in on horseless carriages from this big auditorium a few blocks away, where the only folks allowed to talk had to wait for a turn to get up on stage and hold forth with a microphone and a PA system.

You can tell the ones who drove in their horseless carriages over to our parlor here, because they walk into the room and ignore everyone else, and they just START TALKING IN VERY LOUD VOICES.

Some of the small conversations are disrupted by these obnoxious people, but others are not. This does not daunt the loud-talkers. They raise their voices more. They want everyone to pay attention to them exclusively, even if they kill off the party in the parlor in the meantime. That really doesn't bother them, because enough of the disrupted conversations will be lured into the loud-talkers' orbits, and those people (sheep) can be persuaded that what the parlor really NEEDS is a stage, and maybe, oh, you know, a PA system...

Got that image in your head? OK, now go read about Nick Denton below, and remember, he's no Warren Buffett, and not even a Tarot card reader.

Web 2.0 lives in the parlor, and turning the parlor into an auditorium is NOT Web 2.0. IMHO. The people who have this compelling need to turn it into an auditorium will just take a powder when their audience goes away, jump in their horseless carriages, and ride off in search of another busy parlor to disrupt.

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

[...]

Mainstream Media Cluelessness, Arrogance, etc.

Here's a study in corporate cluelessness and arrogance from the mighty television network suits, who seem to think THEY invented the Internet. You bloggers will love some of the absurdities found in this Morning Edition story from last week titled: NBC Takes Web Programming a Step Further.

This piece is a wonderful peek into the window of the current MSM/corporate media mindset - straight from the horses' mouths! Enjoy.

Grayson D. at www.truegritz.com

Poynter Online on 2006 Online Eyeball Studies from Nielsen-Norman

Link: Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits Pt 1.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Posted by Laura  Ruel 7:25:08 AM

Text Ads Get the Most Looks

Here at the Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week in San Francisco, Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne yesterday presented results from their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

Similar to the results in Poynter's Eyetrack III study, their research on ads shows that people do not look at static ads with graphic treatment.

Users seem to "zone out" (with their peripheral vision) ads and other site elements that have clearly distinguishable ad features such as graphics and colors that make the ads look different from the rest of the site, or animated ads.

Nielsen/Norman's study found that people spend, on average, less than one second viewing display/graphical treatment ads. Users did look at animated ads when they preceded content and were forced. However, in these cases the user had nothing else to view.

[...]

When users DO look at ads with graphics, those ads usually have:

• Heavy use of large, clear text
• A color scheme that matches the site's style
• Attention-grabbing proprieties such as black text on a white background, words such as "free" and interactive (UI) elements.

Here's a follow up of what came out of the conference...

Link: Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits Pt 2.

Friday, June 23, 2006
Posted by Laura  Ruel 11:25:09 AM

What Makes Web Images Attractive

More from the Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week in San Francisco. (Previous coverage) Yesterday Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne presented the results of their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

They offered one interesting and much-discussed observation: Task-oriented users really don't pay attention to images on Web pages.

[...]

Both Eyetrack III and the NNG study found that faces in images tend to attract users' focus. NNG mentioned to the dangers of using images as "an obstacle course." Images that appear unnecessary, at least peripherally, can be erroneously tuned out.

According to NNG, images that do NOT attract attention share these traits:

• Generic/stock art
• Off-putting, cold, fake, too polished or "set up"
• Not related to content
• Look like advertisements
• Low contrast in terms of color -- not crisp

Meanwhile, images that DO get attention share these traits:

• Related to page content
• Clearly composed and appropriately cropped
• Contain "approachable" people who are smiling, looking at the camera, not models
• Show areas of personal/private anatomy (Men tended to fixate on these areas more than women -- really!)
• Items a user may want to buy.