Do you dare to cannibalize big revenues?
One of three big revenues for the newspapers and the media companies was from classifieds. During the last 10 years classifieds has moved from print to online, but the newspapers underestimated the impact of the web and did not see the transformation. Robert Weisman has a great article titled ‘What went wrong?’ where he describes how (and why) The Boston Globe was a victim of its enormous success. They had the opportunity to put their lucrative classified advertising business on the Web, but cannibalization of their huge classified advertising revenues was out of the question. What they “kicked” out of office got picked up by TMP Worldwide and later expanded into Monster.com.

One of the most difficult processes inside an organization is developing something that cannibalize itself. Schibsted, the larges media company in Norway made a strategic move setting up a new organization outside of the newspapers (FINN.no) late in the 90th’s with the goal of building up the largest online classified site in the country. The development from the print business into a multi-media environment for classified business have been a huge success moving revenue from print to online. Today FINN.no (still owned by Schibsted) is the (one) by far dominant classified player in Norway and has almost no competition at all.

Online presence for many years
Most media have been positioned on the web for many years but the challenge is that the revenue is not big enough and the companies do not manage to replace the lost revenue on paper with revenue online. From an end-user perspective it is fascinating to see the lack of innovation at online newspapers. For almost 15 years the news online has just been a copy of the print edition. When looking at the newspapers online today my impression is that newspapers are at the same stage as classified was back in 1996 (classifieds online was just merely a copy of 3 liners from print). Of course there has been some product development and product innovations. The newspapers today are trying out Twitter integration, opening up for comments and debate and to some extent starting to actually link out from articles. But as I see this no huge step has been taken. As an end-user I would like to follow topics that I find interesting inside the articles, I would like to follow persons and places. I would like the information about it to be aggregated and presented in an easy and intuitive context. I would like to look at all the photo’s taken not only the one that the author finds to fit best. I would like to buy or license the photos.

In a great post (in Norwegian) Ragnhild Kr. Olsen describes how much better suited the web is to deliver news with depth, perspective and context than print. Rich user experience built up by linking opportunities and the combination of text, images, audio, video and graphics, dialogue and interaction with the audience gives newspapers a powerful way to convey information. But as she points out the opportunities to do this is exploited in a very modest degree – or not at all.

The web is social, distributed and linked
The media landscape is changing and it’s changing a lot. Breaking news hits social platforms like Twitter with stories and pictures, big exclusives stories goes online first and getting distributed all over the web (look at Guardian), you and I have the ability to produce and distribute higher quality videos than traditional broadcasters and so on. Some weeks ago, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt delivered a closing keynote at the Newspaper Assn. of America annual conference in San Diego. Some of his advise to newspapers is that they have to get used to the idea that they are not just generators of trusted, professional content, but also aggregators of the new kinds of information the Web has enabled (the collectively edited knowledge structures like Wikipedia, and user-generated information like blogs, images and online video). Jeff Jarvis the author of What would Google do?, describes the shift from content economy towards a link economy in which content only acquires value if others link to it. One interesting thing about this shift is that today the linking is all about linking documents or web pages.

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange (the semantic web) will reinforce this trend and the possibilities and changes deriving out of this is hard to imagine. Here is a great Video of TBL where he talks about the semantic web or open and linked data.

Anders Brenna from Teknisk Ukeblad has written an excellent article (in Norwegian) titled: How is the future of journalism. In his article he discussed the role of journalism in a media landscape in dramatic change, argues that news must be free and discusses how it still is possible to make money.

Know your user and advertising will follow
Online advertising is huge and the spend will increase during the next years (as I have blogged about here). But one of the problems is that the online newspapers are not set up to take advantage of this trend. I believe that in the coming years there will be a lot of innovation in this field. Focus will be on behavioral targeting and social media to get more precise targeting and effect. To take advantage of this you need to fulfill at least a couple of things; First of all you must know your user. How the user is actually using your site is important and also in what mode the user are in at the time of the visit. It is surprisingly few online newspapers that actually know much about their user. How often are you able to actually register or log in to your favorite newspaper online? And then if we look at the mode what is the primary goal of the users visiting the newspapers? Is this mode a good match with more demanding advertisers looking for more effect? Probably not.

The development and innovation in display ads has been next to zero. It’s amazing that I still go into websites being presented with boring banners. It’s about time someone starts to innovate the formats. A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how Google is changing the Yellow Pages Industry They know advertising business better than all of us. Looking at how they manage to erase the differences between the ads and other content is something to transform to other areas. That means you must erase the differences between editorial content and ads.

The lack of innovation should be met by pushing the limit
When I look at online newspapers I often think about the mobile industry. For 15 years the mobile industry as in producers of mobile phone had the ability to innovate. Year after year they produced new phones that was just a copy of older phones. But along came Apple. The interesting thing about Apple’s appearance in the mobile industry is not solely the iPhone as a product. The phone clearly innovated the phone as a product in ways that Nokia, Siemens, SonyEricsson among others was not able to do. But Apple actually turned the mobile industry upside-down by innovating the phone, innovating the business model, innovate packaging, distribution and partnerships. They actually focused on several main areas, looked at how this fit together and combined this with great user experience.

The New York Times article In Europe, Possible Survival Lessons for U.S. Papers highlights the Norgwegian web site VG Nett. VG Nett has a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway. They have really been innovative, pushing the limits for what a newspaper online could do. They develop new products and services not solely focusing on purely news, and experiments with and engage end-users in clever ways. VG has developed Nettby the second largest Internet-based community in Norway (after Facebook) with more than 980,000 users and profiles (as of January 3, 2009). That a newspaper is behind the largest community online in Norway (besides Facebook) is impressive. VG was the first newspaper to publish photo from the tsunami in 2004. The photo was taken from a phone and sent as a MMS. This seems to have started a strategic move towards embracing user-participation in the Newspaper.

Innovation is not a free lunch
A lot of writers and blogs are saying that newspapers need to innovate. But I hardly read any that tells how they can do it, or writes anything about how to find a healthy business model. Innovation is not an easy task that you just do. It’s difficult. For the last couple of years I’ve been working a lot with innovation. My opinion is that for an organization to be innovative you must have processes and culture that enables ideas and creativity. You must have systems that captures ideas, figuring out what ideas to work on and an organization that has the ability to conceptualize and implement them. Innovation must be a central part of how you work and internal innovation processes and idea management tools must be natural and integrated part of the business.

Tough times must be met by tough decisions
Putting a closed door in front of your business is a dead end. The shift from the content economy towards the link economy will affect distribution strategies. Content need to be distributed and you need to be the best provider of it (look to what Guardian is doing). Pushing the limits for what a newspaper online could do as VG does is probably necessary to lay the foundation for making money in the new media landscape. Everyone doing business on the web, should ensure that they know their users. What is their interests and modes? The lack of information about the users is probably on a collision course with future advertising requirements. To be innovative, innovation must be a strategic and systematic part of your business. Working with culture, idea management, capacity and impact is important.

The key resources in not any longer solely based on the high quality articles and story’s written by journalists but also how it’s packaged, distributed, related to other information and the value added information that the users will contribute with. That is the paradigm shift that newspapers must see!

Thanks to Erlend Schei for great feedback to this blog post and pushing me forward to actually go through and write it.

Real-Time
A lot of attention is given Twitter in Media and the blogosphere. Read Write Web wrote and article back in January titled Sorry Google You Missed The Real-Time Web. They focus on the fact that Twitter is taking a place in the breaking news area, and that Google always will be late due to the nature of the indexing.

Jeffrey Mann discusses why Twitter should not work hard to find a business model One of his key points is that Twitter’s value is in its content. He like many others focus on the real-time value of the content seeing this as the real value; Peoples comments, opinions and news;

I believe that the real-time element of Twitter is an interesting thing to discuss in relation to how online news will evolve. But I think that the key value of Twitter is not founded on the real-time tweets but the power of the information that you can extract about the users.

Online advertising
Online advertising is huge and the spend will increase during the next years (even if we are in the middle of a financial crisis). Targeted advertising through Adwords and Adsense has been a great success for Google, but it is clearly that they need to innovate. My opinion is that in the coming years there will be a lot of innovation in this field. Focus will be on behavioral targeting and social media to get more precise targeting and effect (this also goes for display ads).

Interest based advertising
Google is clearly seeing this and their focus on interest based advertising gives some glimpse into how they see this evolve. As I see this the information that is created inside Twitter is a powerful element in Google’s development of the advertising technology. Today they have the search history, they have the keywords, they analyze the context inside a document. If they also can get their hands on the users and what users are saying about products and brands among everything else they will be able to make some really huge step forward in innovating the online advertising model.

Heads up: You’re using an older version of Internet Explorer.
In order to get the most out of our website, you can get a free update of Internet Explorer. If you’re using a work computer, you should contact your IT administrator.

Actually The register seems to have copied this translation from a blog post by Christian Johansen

At the same time as we put out this message, we released a post on FINN labs (our public feedback and experimental area) which described in detail why we are showing this information to our IE6 users and also gave a list of alternative browsers. The code to display the message was also available.

The background
Before I continue let me say a couple of words about the background for this. FINN labs launched in September 2008 and we have published monthly browser statistics and focused on how the figures are for IE6. In January 2009 IE6 had about 17,1% share. So we discussed if it was possible to give our IE6 users a message to increase the speed of upgrades from this 9 year old browser. So on February 11th, my colleague at FINN labs Erlend Schei put out this message on Twitter:

To everyone with control of mayor Norwegian sites: What about a spring cleaning to get rid of IE6? One week of encouragement on our homepages?

Anders Brenna at Teknisk Ukeblad got this tweet and wrote an article (in Norwegian) where he focused on the problem with IE6 and challenged the websites to do something pointing to the tweet by Erlend.

6 days later we initiated the campaign and Schei put out another tweet:

We have now put out a big green “upgrade IE6″ box on FINN.no frontpage. Dagbladet, VG, AP are you willing to join us in this?

This message was pointing to the biggest news-sites in Norway.

One minute later I also put out this tweet:
#IE6 – We are following up our initiative and actually give all the users with IE6 at #finn.no a message on the front page!

The initiative got massive support
Late on the 17th I got this message on Twitter:

I’ll do my best to get it on vg.no as well

VG.no is the biggest website in Norway, and the next morning (18th) vg.no had put a green box on the top of it’s front page. We used Twitter to tell about VG and the reaction was amazing and perhaps scary. One hour earlier A-pressen a big Media Company with over 50 local newspapers gave me a message that they joined and they also blogged about it (in Norwegian). This was actually the breakthrough and it happened in just a few hours, with Twitter as the communication medium. FINN, VG and all the local newspapers has an enormous reach among the population and that means every person in Norway with IE6 will see the upgrade signal. During the 18th more of the biggest websites in Norway joined the campaign and late that day FINN.no sent a press release.

One day later the initiative had spread to more sites and in the evening of 19th it spread to Sweden when Aftonbladet.se – one of the biggest news site in Europe joined in. Late on the 19th when we saw that our initiative had started to spread outside Norway we sent a new press release – this time in English for the international press. Microsoft Norway also sent out a press release where they gave their support to the campaign (MS Sweden has done the same)

During the week people blogged about this and a wiki was established for the campaign where it’s possible to follow the initiative and how it is spreading world wide. Most of the newspapers in Norway was writing about this, and we got a lot of international publicity (for example in Wired)

How is it possible to get a whole Country to unite in just a few hours?
Anders Brenna has blogged about how this could be possible (in Norwegian), and he focus on the following:

• latent need
• Debate across the websites (news) and blogs
• Generous linking and crediting of those who contribute

I really agree upon this, all these elements seem to have been present. In his article he gives thorough description of it. What I would like to point out in this blog post, is how much more momentum and spread this initiative has had in Europe (Norway, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands) than in USA. First of all I think that when FINN.no as one of the biggest players first did this, it was much easier for other to join. The hardest part is actually to get one big player to just start this kind of initiative. Second I think Twitter has had a huge impact in the fast and widely adoption of the campaign. Norway and Sweden is small countries and when big websites initiates this kind of action it spreads rapidly to the national twitter-sphere. It’s easy to get in contact with the right persons on Twitter they encourage it by re-tweeting the information.

Europe vs USA
If we look at the spread we can see that Sweden, France and Germany has some momentum, but in USA nothing happens. Why? I think it is at least two causes. One the twitter-sphere in the US is different from Scandinavia and Europe. That some weird country are starting some campaign is not that interesting in US. If you follow the campaign on twitter (without #) you will see that most of the tweets is from outside the US.

I think this is strange, because this campaign and the huge and massive success of it in Norway and its spread to Europe has been covered a lot (at one time Friday it was on the front page of Wired, Slashdot and Digg at the same time). Also blogs/sites have been covering it (Christopher Blizzard, Ajaxian.com among others.

I think that it’s a big difference in how the Scandinavian (and maybe European) twitter-sphere and the US is working. The twitter-sphere in Scandinavia is quite small so it interesting things get spread rapidly. And of course the people that has the most followers do not have 100k + followers. This means they actually follow the tweets that is directed to them. Maybe the Americans are only looking to San Francisco? Everything outside that area is not worth mention – at least not on Twitter. But the viral effect is powerful and I think this will continue to spread world wide. Feel free to follow me on twitter – @larre

Update, 26th of february 2009: Teknisk Ukeblad have just received an email from Steve Ballmer supporting this campaign. Her it is (inside the article): Email from Steve Ballmer If you are not willing to scan through the Norwegian article here is the actual message from Steve Ballmer:

Microsoft recommends end users that are browsing the web with Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade today to benefit from numerous improvements including security features and usability enhancements.

Hope that helps

Personalized view of relevant content
Google OneBox (pictured) provides a personalized view of relevant content of various types that match your query. The product is developed for several categories, including maps, travel and directory (Local businesses). In recent years, Google has entered into agreements with local directory publishers or players for access to quality content. This is packaged with content that is retrieved (or crawled) from many different sources on the web, in order to provide a richer search results for end users.

Local Business Ads increases opportunities for advertisers in the directory
The result of the Google directory is ideal for AdWords, the keyword-based advertising system that is the main source of income for the company. It gives advertisers the ability to link ads to place and industry (Local Business Ads). Most of the links from a OneBox result in directory leads to the map. The page is divided into two main modules; The map and a list of text-links that match the result. Int the list is a space for paid content (sponsored links). The paid content (ads) is placed both in the list and on the specific map, so that it receives exactly the same distribution and relevance as the rest of the content. In this way Google builds up a business for the directory listing that is identical to what they have in advertising in general.

The differences between the ads and other content erased
On January 13th Google launched a development of the Local Business Ads, so that it virtually is identical to the rest of the directory contents. This development is erasing the difference between traditional directory content, promotional ads and regular information. This also makes the end users look at the paid content as very relevant.

If you for example search for hotels all functionality in the map is now also available in hotels that have purchased placement. The difference between the paid content and the rest of the content is minimized – especially when the ad is built up with the same type of landing page as a directory entry (see Map). If you want to click on a hotel it opens up an “information bubble” that contains all the functionality that you are getting up if you click on a hotel that has not come through Adwords.

This makes it extremely attractive to advertisers, and also provides a good user experience for end users looking for a restaurant or a hotel.

Game Changer?
As far as I see it, Google changes the rules for the catalog market by entering into local agreements on access to content and to develop products and services around it. Local Business Ads match this perfect and makes it difficult to compete for established directory services players.

What is Amazon S3, and Jungle Disk
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. I use it to backup all my digital contents (music, photo, video). Amazon S3 does not offer any type of clients to typically access the service just a set of API’s. I first started out with implementing my own client but found out that writing my own client is just too geeky. I use Jungle Disk as a client to access my S3 account. This combination works perfect and I’m really happy with both S3 and Jungle Disk.

The problem with Content.IE5
I have not set up automatic backup but make a backup manually by copying folders from my network drive and over to my S3 account. Jungle Disk maps a drive to my Amazon S3 account for seamless integration. And here is where the problem or issue comes into action. What happens is that for each file that I copy from my local storage (read network drive) to my S3 area the file is temporarily stored at my local PC at:

C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5

This folder is actually a hidden one (system folder) and not easy accessible for non-tech persons. I found out about this because my local drive almost got out of free space. This hidden temporarily folder was eating up my local Gigabytes.

The solution to the problem with Content.IE5
The solution to this problem is of course to delete the directories and files that are stored in this temporarily directory. This can be done manually or you could write a batch file that is executed after you have backed up files. This is what I have done.

Another solution is looking more into what is causing the local storage (caching). The problem is that Jungle Disk is running in the environment of the Local Service user. The files will be stored until the Local Service user reaches the cache limit. Her is a nice thread describing some of this issues. The solution is to ensure a cache limit that is small (or not extremely large) so that the system will clean up nicely. If we look at the solution described in the thread it describes where to set this limit in the registry. Using regedit I checked what the CacheLimit on my PC was: 256 MB. This is way lower than the 15 GB I had to delete the first time I found out of the the Content.IE5 folder issue.

I do not think this solution will work. I think that the Local Service is running under some other user (WindowsNT user?). But this is just a wild guess. Another issue is that to change the registry for the Local Service all processes by that user must be shut down. This could be a bit tricky, but most of all, it’s time consuming trying to find out what will work or not.

So I still run a manual clean of the Content.IE5 folder…

Log in with your preferred identity on the web
If you are active and comment much on articles, blogs etc, the problem is to appear with one single identity. Lately both Facebook and Google has launched technologies (among others like MySpace)  that enables us to take our identity with us around the web for all sites implementing this functionality. This is a great step forward for social data portability.  My blog now supports both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. What does this mean? First of all this means that you have the ability to log in to my site with your preferred identity. This could be Facebook account, Google account, OpenID account, Yahoo account, or AIM account. If you leave a comment on one of my post you will be identified with this account.  Her is a great video from the guys at Facebook showing how to implement Facebook Connect on your blog or site.

Critical mass
For me as a user it is great to be able to hook my identity (for example my OpenID account) on to websites where I leave a comment. The ability to log in to a new site or register as a new user and only use a button like Facebook Connect is fantastic. It is easy, convenient and lays the foundation for new social services. TripAdvisor did not manage to success with their restaurant reviews until they hooked up with Facebook. The problem for them relates to critical mass. They created a Facebook Application (LocalPick) and experienced a tremendous success

What is the long term implications?
If we look beyond blogs all sites that utilizes user generated content like reviews, ratings and so forth should be able to make use of the ongoing social data portability trend. In fact this trend should be perfect in the critical mass perspective. When I look at TripAdvisor today, they have not yet implemented the ability for users to log in with their preferred identity and use that ID to interact with the site.

For the companies that wins the battle over your identity this should give enormous opportunities. Who will win this race? Facebook, Google, MySpace? I don’t know. Imagine that on 90% of all sites (blogs, magazines, news, classifieds…) all the user generated content, like reviews, ratings, comments or listings comes through Facebook or Googles identity. This should give them a possibility to among other things further develop their ad-systems. They may utilize all the information and statistics that the users give them through their use of the web! Here is a great article at TechCrunch that reflects some of this thoughts.

Remark about Google Friend Connect
At the end; Just one reflection about the Google Friend Connect. If you are logged in to your Google account and try the friend connect on a site, you will not be given the possibility to choose other accounts. Log out of your Google account first and try the join button and see the difference.

The 3D maps give a birds eye perspective with a great end-user control. It’s like sitting in a small plane flying over the great city of Oslo. The 3D-player (it’s a plugin) is developed by the Norwegian company myVR Software. An early version of this technology has been tested out at http://www.hitta.se but the quality and further development since then gives us a product and service in a completely different league. Google Street View got a lot of attention when launched, but I think this functionality is even more spectacular.

Schibsted will use this technology for the biggest websites in Norway! FINN, Sesam, VG and Aftenposten

Read more about the FINN/Sesam 3D map revolution at FINN labs in this blog post

Rådhuset Oslo – Sesam 3D kart from Morten Jacobsen on Vimeo

Recommendation engine
First of all the presentation gave us some insight into why they have developed their recommendation engine. The use of statistics and data to provide a better user experience and increase the value on own content through leveraging the use of the service is not something new. This is a trend that Tim O’Reilly described as one of the core principles of the Web 2.0 era. The basic behind the Digg recommendation engine is similar users, and since the release in July (Upcoming) they have had pretty impressive results with for example an increase in digging activity by 40%.

Show your impact
I think that one really innovative use of the graph is to let the user know what kind of effect they actually make up for other users within their activity. More specifically, it means that if I do not like an article and votes it down (bury), I will be told how many people I made sure did not get to look at that article (as in not recommended to by the recommendation engine). This is a great and fundamental part of the networking effect, and takes the effect of direct user interaction to the next level. I hope they will succeed in implementing this innovative thoughts.

Recommendation as a service
Digg is seeing the recommendation engine as part of a more sophisticated network where the engine will act as a service for publishers to help them expose other data within their site. This means that a user visiting BBC may be exposed to articles that is recommended by Diggs recommendation engine. I think Kevin Rose and the rest of his team has some way to go before publishers will team up with this kind of business models, but it is not very difficult to see that from Diggs perspective this would be like a home run.

Targeted advertising – that’s what digg should focus on
I think that a more interesting perspective is looking at advertising. If Digg could use the recommendation engine, all the user activity and the graph (similar users) as a basis for an ad engine that will give more targeted ads to the users, and form the basis for a more effective advertising they will have something that is extremely interesting for others. In its simplest form this could be like this: If I as a user choose to click on an ad, then this ad should be targeted as relevant for all my similar users and therefor be displayed to them. My opinion is that advertising is something they should look more into related to the recommendation engine that they now are implementing.

How well is the user interface when the user has 55 apps (as I have at the time this post is written)?. There are some factors to take into account:

• Native iPhone apps
• Third party apps
• Your own apps (could go as third party)
• Native apps in regular use
• Third party apps in regular use
• Third party apps for testing purpose
• Different categories like games, travel, office etc
• … (and more)

My experience is that if you put 16 applications in one page it’s a mess everytime you are looking for one; It’s impossible to find it. And if the application is not on the front page… where is it? On page 4…5? By using some of the factores above I have organized my iPhone to some extent, but sure would like to see Apple develop some great and innovative user interface that will work better than it does today. After organizing all my applications I found my self often slide over to the last page. Suddenly I was using the games more regular than first thought. If you know how to move an entire page at a time, please let me know (without using the jailbreaked Categories app). This is actually an extremely time-consuming process.

So, here is how I organized my iPhone:

1. What I did was to put Native and third party applications that I use often on my front page limiting them to 12.
2. On my second page I put all the native and third party apps that I use by regular basis.
3. On my third page is all my applications that supports me when I’m out traveling.
4. On my forth page is all my games.
5. On my fifth page I have the applications rarely in use
6. And the last one is for temporarily testing purpose.

UPDATE:Today I came over this nice post that is digging more into the issues in this post. Also.. 9 pages maximum?? I still have 2 pages until I will have trouble: http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/21/the-need-for-iphone-app-folders-and-search-is-quickly-approaching/

Testing it for the Norwegian language with my own blog was cool and it seems that the translation module is very good. Try out the following (if you understand my natural language) : One of my posts in norwegian

The new languages supported are:

• Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hindi, Polish
• Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish

But, it seems that it is not so easy to see the translation module integrated within the Google search result. If your google search is set up with local language you will get the [translate this] for each result in the search page (if the language is within the translate package). At the Google front page just click on the Preferences link. There it is possible to choose your desired language. Doing so you will have the translating tool integrated smoothly within the search result. By the way; I am not able to get this translation function to work with IE 6.0 (29) !

A couple of weeks ago Google launched their javascript-based API, enabling the translation of block of text within web pages on the fly, making it easy to develop some pretty nice and elegant user-friendly functionality related to text translation.