Goodbye shredder, hello 41pounds.org

This could just be the most useful – and environmentally-friendly – service I’ve come across in a long time: 41pounds.org claims to stop 80-95% of junk mail and unwanted catologs per household. 41 pounds? Yeah, that’s the weight each individual receives in junk mail per year.

Technorati Tags: Earth Day, 41 pounds.org, junk mail

Return of the Industry Standard

Hot on the heels of the news of Business 2.0’s demise comes strong rumor of the re-birth of the Industry Standard – poster child of the dotcom bubble and famed for its rooftop parties.

Brad Stone reports the details here, including the hunt for an editor-in-chief. Check out this interesting comment from a former European editor, Mike Butcher:

“As a former European editor with The Standard (and blogger, during their abortive blogging experiment after the mag closed) I’d be amazed they make this work. What IDG should have done was to keep the brand going online during the Nuclear Winter when the market tanked. They didn’t and others have taken the Standard’s place. One thing they could do, however, is concentrate on investigative reporting. There is a lot of chatter these days but very few real dirt-digging scoops.”

 

Technorati Tags: Industry Standard, Business 2.0, publishing

Blog Buying Spree?

It’s been clear for a while that the most popular blogs are faring much better than their traditional media counterparts when it comes to growing readership and pulling in ad revenue. Today, Henry Blodget (he of the Amazon $400 stock prediction) put his finger in the wind and came up with the valution of $100m+ for TechCrunch. Michael Arrington was, unsurprisingly, delighted.

Perhaps the figure is a little over the top, but the point still stands – TechCrunch et al must be looking mighty attractive to quite a few of the mainstream media who have not hit it out of the park online. As Douglas A. McIntyre (who started the discussion in the first place) points out, AOL is already the proud owner of Weblogs Inc (home to Engadget, among others), plus:

“…with the internet operations at newspapers and some other tradition media companies making very little headway, the big blogs take on a very significant attraction. They reach audiences in great numbers. They have credibility. They are not expensive to run. And, they make money.”

McIntyre makes a good case that the New York Times or Washington Post should snap up the Huffington Post for $100m or more, that the Times or Dow Jones should look at popular stock blog Seeking Alpha, and cnet should go for TechCrunch.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Henry Blodget, TechCrunch, Huffington Post

New Google right to reply feature sparks controversy

On Tuesday, Google announced that it was trialling a new feature that gives people in the news a right to reply to a particular story. Here’s an example. Unlike existing comments sections on many news sites, the identity of the commenter is verified by Google and that person must either be mentioned in the article or affiliated with an organization mentioned in the article. Many are welcoming it as an opportunity to have their say that has been denied by the evil mainstream media or to correct glaring inaccuracies. Of course I have no problem with the concept of right to reply, but in my experience as a PR professional, it’s far more common that companies just don’t like an article than it is that the facts are wrong or a person is actually misquoted. It strikes me that the service could be misused as another way to present an organization’s point of view to the world without submitting to any kind of critical filter.

Some people also see the move as the first step towards Google’s creating its own news content. And TechCrunch alleges hypocrisy because Google is not allowing other news organizations to crawl that content or republish it, even though that’s exactly how Google News gets its news. It means that not even the originator of a news article could display the responses to that article. And that doesn’t really seem fair, does it?

I hope that Google will change its policy in this regard, and that people and organizations will use the service responsibly as a right to reply, not a platform for propaganda.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google News, mainstream media

Fake Steve Jobs revealed; Forbes takes over

Yes, the guessing is over. Revealed by the New York Times, Fake Steve, author of the mock diary of Steve Jobs, is none other than Dan Lyons, a Forbes reporter. Dan claims to have had no inside knowledge of Apple before starting the blog more than a year ago. Fans will be pleased to hear that Fake Steve will live on – but now under the Forbes banner.

Technorati Tags: Fake Steve, Dan Lyons, Forbes

Will Murdoch change his spots?

News Corp’s acquisition of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is finally confirmed. The WSJ promises its readers that “the same standards of accuracy, fairness and authority will apply to this publication, regardless of ownership” and there are plans to set up a committee that will have power of veto over News Corp’s editorial decisions.

But will Murdoch really leave editorial alone? History suggests not. Andrew Neil, former editor of News Corp’s Sunday Times, tells how Murdoch would regularly send him clips from – ironically – the Wall Street Journal in a not-so-subtle attempt to influence editorial direction. In his highly entertaining book, The Insider, Piers Morgan (now of America’s Got Talent fame) reports that when he was editor of UK Sunday tabloid News of the World, Murdoch would call every week to check on the front page story and insist it be changed if he didn’t like it.

Murdoch is notorious for using his newspapers to further his own personal and political ends. Under his direction, The Sun changed its political allegiance from Conservative to Labour for Britain’s 1997 election, claimed to have “swung” the election for Tony Blair and then used the Sun’s huge public influence to put pressure on Blair. According to Piers Morgan, Blair was paranoid that the Sun would do to him what it did to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock.

Of course, we all hope it will be different this time and that the leopard will change its spots…

Technorati Tags: WSJ, Murdoch, News Corp, Andrew Neil, Piers Morgan

The GigaOm empire expands

Kara Swisher broke the news today that blogger extraordinaire Om Malik is launching a new TV show tomorrow. Om is teaming up with Revision3, the new venture of Diggers Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, now led by Jim Louderback, formerly editor-in-chief of PC Magazine and an architect of TechTV. Imaginatively titled The GigaOm Show, it will feature 10-minute chats with tech luminaries and will also run on GigaOm. Valleywag sniffs conflicts of interest with NewTeeVee, but looks forward to some good TV.

Technorati Tags: GigaOm, Revision3, Om Malik

The downside of corporate transparency

Ars Technica chronicles Google’s recent employee blogging snafus (Google vs Sicko, its alleged promotion of spam) and explores the tension that can arise between the desire to be democratic and transparent and the need to protect a company’s image:

“Google’s current approach of using blogs as both a means of casual communication and a formal channel for announcing products and events, while laudably democratic, paints a large (and constantly growing) target for reporters and other Google watchers who are looking for evidence of Evil—whether real or manufactured—within Google’s corporate structure and business plans.”

The company is undoubtedly experiencing the downside of transparency, but I hope the experience doesn’t cause it to change its approach. Most corporate blogging policies that I’ve seen advise employees to use their best judgment and consider the consequences before posting (here‘s Sun’s). I can’t help thinking that had the authors of these two posts exercised just a little bit more common sense and judgment, these ‘crises’ could have been averted.

Technorati Tags: Google, blogging, transparency

InfoWorld: the beginning of the end?

Wow. I have to say that I was a little shocked when I heard the news that venerable, 29-year old trade publication InfoWorld is closing its print edition. To be clear: “InfoWorld is not dead. We’re not going anywhere. We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism –the Web — at InfoWorld.com.”

Why? Because advertisers prefer the more immediate results, deeper targeting and better tracking of the online publication. It seems that many print editions these days are just storefronts for their online counterparts – or as Owen Thomas puts it, “on life support, on the theory that the print edition adds brand awareness and gravitas to the websites.” Owen also has a theory about why, out of the IDG stable, InfoWorld’s print title was chosen for the chop: “Computerworld, InfoWorld’s longtime internal rival, is IDG founder and chairman Pat McGovern’s baby, the original title on which he built his tech-publishing empire.”

Perhaps this is a sad but inevitable day. Especially in the tech world, many readers prefer to consume news online, and many of them probably streamline their reading by using Google alerts or keyword searches to find the stuff they’re interested in. All very efficient, but, as Seth Grimes puts it, it eliminates “the opportunity for accidental discovery” that flicking through a physical publication provides. And I’ve got to agree with InfoWorld editor-in-chief Steve Fox that “it’s hard to beat a magazine for its tactility and visceral thrill.” That said, I do a lot of reading in my job, and the only magazine I subscribe to is Vanity Fair. I can’t imagine ever reading those 5000-word articles online, but maybe I’m wrong…

Rumor of Infoworld’s folding caused a flurry of debate over the future of the mainstream media this weekend. For a summary, check out Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim.

Technorati Tags: InfoWorld, mainstream media

What’s the verdict on USA Today’s revamp?

It’s been a few days now since USA Today introduced its pretty radical site redesign that includes social networking features such as reader comments on all articles, digg-like reader recommendations and the opportunity for readers to write their own reviews.

Judging by the comments on the editors’ note (319 of them at the time of writing), it’s one big flop – the ones I read were universally negative and most people claimed to be moving their home pages to CNN. Nevertheless, these people had bothered to create a profile on the site and leave a comment, which is the whole point after all. I suspect many of them were just miffed at losing their familiar home page.

BusinessWeek immediately pointed out the dangers of unmoderated comments. Steve Rubel felt it didn’t go far enough in its use of social networking technologies. TechCruch said bravo! and there’s lots of interesting discussion in the comments. For a more in-depth analysis of the site’s features, take a look at Steve O’Hear’s blog.

I have to say that I like it – albeit that I am not overly familiar with its previous look. I applaud the paper for taking such a bold move. It has done what I’m sure a bunch of other mainstream media are considering. No doubt it hasn’t got everything right, but I hope it doesn’t end up as the pioneer with arrows in its back…

Technorati Tags: USA Today, mainstream media