Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Aardvark Founders. Pic: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

I have written here often of how technology only shortens the distance between people on the social web. In other words, using social web tools to communicate with friends and family is an extension of our social activities offline. As I write this on July 5th, I recall yesterday seeing tens of thousands gathered on bridges in downtown Portland, alongside the lake in Lake Oswego and milling around in Tigard, Or, to watch the firework displays commemorating Independence Day. Families with kids, couples and teens all very comfortable with each other for a few hours; it is very natural for us to gather with strangers and witness a familiar event.

Opening a browser on a computer or a mobile device today means participation in the social web. Not just because of one’s involvement in social networks but also by letting your friends or family know of your geo-location by allowing a mobile device app to broadcast your whereabouts for instance. Emailing and texting friends, tweeting and updating your Facebook status all let those following you know of your involvement on the social web every day.

This is of course very familiar to us, we surf the web in our own familiar ways using social networking tools, yet companies that wish to harness the power to advertise to this web of millions of people have been stymied for some time, stuck in social media channels wondering how to budge these masses even a quarter of an inch closer to their products. The web and those using it don’t ever stop moving but you can’t simply plant a billboard alongside this viral highway – the billboard’s message will remain right there where it was positioned, as we all go about our daily electronic sojourns.

Rob Glazer of Real. Pic: Kevin P. Casey for the The New York Times

I recently discovered two articles in the Business section of the June 28th 09 edition of the New York Times. The articles cover two companies and their products – one is RealNetworks, a familiar face in technology, the other a new company called Aardvark. Real is featured for launching new technology for hardware devices and Aardvark for creating a social web service that helps you reach hundreds of your online friends and peer group for answers to any of your questions. Real brings us technology based on the premise that the company thinks we need their product and Aardvark brings us technology that embraces the social web by connecting us easily with people we trust to answer our questions. [I used Aardvark yesterday to ask a question of my followers - "who uses online music subscriptions, which one is better and why?" and I received 6 great responses, even one from a friend in Sweden who urged me to use a service called Spotify.] It works.

Aardvark doesn’t bother all of my 1700+ Facebook friends either. As the NYT article points out –
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[*NB: The idea of the collapse of newspapers is moving at the speed of light across the 'net. In the hour since I posted this opinion I came across multiple arguments, all very succinct. Here's one from David Eaves - Newspapers' Decline is a Sign of Democracy's Health not a Symptom of its Death. I will attempt to keep this piece updated as the conversation rolls out.]

Jay Rosen on the Huffington Post Investigative fund.

[Latest edit March 29th 12:17PM PST]

Having spent the last decade [at least] discussing the major label recording industry’s supreme mishandling of how its customers embraced the digital music file and how they quickly became savvy internet users sharing those files with millions of other users – basically penalizing the industry for scrapping the single and charging too much for an inferior product, the CD – my interest now turns to the fate of the newspaper industry.

There are some parallels across each of these industry’s woes but it is worth pointing out that the newspaper industry is not being penalized by its customers [readers] for doing anything wrong ala the music industry [weak overpriced product, suing its customers,] rather newspapers are victims of circumstance; technology, shifting reader habits and ubiquitous access in an increasingly mobile world. Unlike the music industry they were not late to the online game even though their initial foot-dragging suggested that like the music industry they would much rather wish the internet would go away.

I must give credit to the labels as I sense that they are beginning to find new routes to profits from music sales. At a recent music industry conference in Nashville I listened to Rio Caraeff, EVP eLabs at Universal Music Group, give the keynote speech. He lamented the loss of the experiential, tactile nature of recorded music when it came in its vinyl form [his father was a famous album sleeve director.] The digital file, he argued, had stripped the experience from the music – listening to music was now a flat and unemotional activity compared with holding a well-designed sleeve filled with images, lyrics and artwork. Because of this flat experience he predicted that there was no future for selling recorded music directly to music fans.

He mentioned one area of success for Universal; the advent of the video game. An all-encompassing experiential medium that included more than just the games – the games came with a community of like-minded people and music. They also generate millions of dollars especially through the subscription fees that are required for online gaming activity.

He also said “the browser is the new iPod.”

So, how does the newspaper industry embrace the browser, what does its “video game” look like?

Umair Haque

The first thing that they must do is abandon the old business models as an idea. Those models can not be re-created for the web. As Umair Haque writes on the Harvard Business blog – “companies and investors focused on business models are simply applying yesterday’s obsolete logic to today’s novel problems.” He goes on to point out that nowadays it is about “making something valuable” – “When we can make valuable stuff, there are a plethora of business models to choose from, some old, some new, some untested, some tried and true. When we can’t, no amount of business model innovation can save us from implosion.”

Referring to Caraeff’s contention that the experience around music is what we relate to the most, why is it that newspapers, that are experiential and tactile, are struggling to maintain readership offline while attracting millions of readers online? Maybe it is just that news is not sexy. Or as Haque points out do they need to just keep providing “valuable stuff” and scrap old business models?

Here’s the quandary – newspapers have to shoulder the enormous burden of overhead required to run a newsroom that collects the news in the first place. What is clear is that the online advertising dollars for newspapers are not filling the gap in the loss of revenue that occurred in print editions – just as digital music sales are not replacing the sales of CDs. So should newspapers start to charge for access to their websites?

Clay Shirky

I have been following the thought leader and writer Clay Shirky via his web site and Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, via Twitter. Both of these men have strong opinions about the future of news media, note news media not necessarily newspapers. At the recent SXSW Interactive conference that I attended, Shirky showed the audience a slide that read – the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…. A simple and very accurate statement. We have ubiquitous and easy access to more text now than ever; it just needs to be filtered. Which is what newspapers always did for us – as the New York Times masthead proclaims still ‘All the news that’s fit to print.’

Should newspapers be allowed to die? What would replace them?
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The NY Times First Look blog has a post about the new prototype article skimmer. Its a discussion about spreading out the Sunday Times across the computer screen -

“Instead, our focus was on the fundamentals of the experience. It is empowering to spread so much information out on a table, so we spread as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen. It is easier and more relaxing to scan a surface of information than flip through a stack, so information is laid out in a rigid two-dimensional grid. The sections do not flip into place; instead, they slide up and down. If you want to imagine the whole of the content as a giant uncut scroll of paper, don’t let us stop you.”

Check it out.

Found on Twitter from @Marshallk

NYT Geek Team. Pic New Yorker Mag – Mike McGregor

For the newspapers it all comes down to a simple equation – online advertising is not covering the losses of print advertising as circulation drops. This is eerily reminiscent of the recording industry’s woes where digital sales are nowhere near covering the slump of CD sales. [NB: The LA Times says that online ad revenue covers the cost of its online and print editorial teams.]

Let’s not be hasty though. At The New York Times which has been taking a battering lately – its stock is down 60% and it announced plans to mortgage its buildings to raise cash – there is hope, something is stirring. As an article by Emily Nussbaum in New York Magazine points out -

“…. even as the financial pages wrote the paper’s obit, deep within that fancy Renzo Piano palace across from the Port Authority, something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution. Each day, peculiar wings and gills poke up on the Times’ website—video, audio, “drillable” graphics. Beneath Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column, there’s a link to his blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube videos. Coverage of Gaza features a time line linking to earlier reporting, video coverage, and an encyclopedic entry on Hamas. Throughout the election, glittering interactive maps let readers plumb voting results. There were 360-degree panoramas of the Democratic convention; audio “back story” with reporters like Adam Nagourney; searchable video of the debates. It was a radical reinvention of the Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.”

As an example of how to raise revenue online, David Carr in the NYT argues that there’s a need for an iTunes For News where readers can pay for the news content they want. In response Jack Shafer at Slate says -

“Actually, a flawed iTunes for news already exists: It delivers content through Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle can download paid subscriptions to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and 12 other dailies via built-in EVDO reception. Newspaper subscriptions run between $5.99 and $13.99 a month.”

He goes on to say that publishers have been promising customers lightweight tablet readers for decades but didn’t deliver so he now suggests that the newspaper owners should jump quickly and produce a Kindle-like device so they can control their own content. Remind you of the music industry anybody?

In the meantime the winds of change seem to be thrashing print media:

Chicago Tribune Goes Tabloid for Single Copy Editions

Web startup to offer foreign news as newspapers cut foreign desks

And magazine’s aren’t immune to the new, new thing either – Really, what is wrong with Vogue?

The printed press continues to suffer. Losses at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have been mounting year over year since 2000 and last year reached $14 million according to Yahoo Finance. Its owners the Hearst Corporation have put the paper up for sale and, if no buyer is found in 60 days, will close it down.

I feel conflicted over the news of its presumed demise. Newspapers such as the P.I. have long been the backbone of their communities and were the glue that often held those same communities together during the constant ups and downs of civic life. Unfortunately their publishers, journalists and columnists were slow to embrace the realities of the internet and its long reach further down into the zip codes of these newspapers’ former readers. Hyper-local news delivered by web sites such as Yelp and Outside.in, as well as Twitter, may well be the final nail in the coffin for big city newspapers.

The ‘Old Grey Lady,’ the New York Times still trundles along all the while looking over its shoulder. The Times has done a great job of laying out “All the news that’s fit to print” on its website but unfortunately the content is too often weak. As Ana Andjelic points out on her blog i [love] marketing the Times’ regular columnists in Design, Advertising and Fashion seem to be missing the target these days. She uses as an example the Design Observer blog’s response to a recent article by the Times’ Michael Cannell entitled Design Loves a Depression. The design community comes down hard on him – not so much for his article’s premise but for the sin of re-hashing old news – “Design loves a depression? I can assure you that design, along with painting, sculpture, photography, music, dance, fashion, the culinary arts, architecture, and theatre, loves a depression no more than it loves a war, a flood, or a plague. Michael Cannell’s article is regressive and mean-spirited, and it demands a response.”

Bono. Pic Diedre O’Callaghan

And then there’s preaching to the choir. In today’s Times that elder statesman of rock, U2 singer Bono, writes about working with Frank Sinatra. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the Times’ editors’ attempt at appealing to a younger demographic. It’s apparent that Bono has a soft spot for the great man but there’s something inauthentic about how he links the lack of sentimentality in Sinatra’s voice singing ‘My Way’ to the New Year celebrations he witnesses in Dublin – “Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability. A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.” That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.” Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.”

It appears that the multi-millionaire prankster Bono has found the answer to the current climate of economic fear in his own life through the lyrics of ‘My Way.’ Yes its true that Frank sang “I did it My Way” without resorting to nostalgia and fawning sentimentality. He swaggered through the song with a streak of West Coast North American libertarianism, with the can-do spirit of the rugged individual as played in the Westerns of the day by John Wayne. This same ‘can-do’ spirit pervaded the White House during the last 8 years, and that macho spirit didn’t go unnoticed on Wall Street or amongst the banks who were happy to dish out mortgages to people who had no ability to repay them.

“My Way,” that “ode to defiance [that] is four decades old this year,” may thrill Bono but it simply reminds me now of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush et al as they poisoned the well of America’s goodwill abroad and helped to set up the massive losses in our financial industries that have already caused pain to millions of Americans here at home.

U2 release their new album, ‘No Line On The Horizon’, in March and I’m confident it will help to line the pockets of the Irish foursome rather handsomely. Unfortunately the refrain for many thousands of displaced Americans, as the fall out from sub-prime mortgage lending continues to take its toll, will be ‘No Home On The Horizon’.

Bono’s rambling, incoherent op-ed piece will be of no use to them. They chose to do it ‘My Way,’ to reach for the American dream, but were blindsided by greed and corrupt practices. And there will be no government bail out for them.

Ironically Twitter had the last word. User @stevenjayl summed up Bono’s op-ed piece rather neatly in a 130 character tweet today -
“Bono has a way with a tune, a presence on the stage, and an embarrassing inability to write a coherent op-ed. NYT: get him an editor!”

Red is the new black? Nope – less is the new black

Everywhere one looked recently on the blogosphere, especially social media blogs, the ever-so-informed pundits were banging out their year end lists around mid-December and by today the 2009 predictions/trends/forecasts lists were rapidly turning from a flurry to a blizzard. [US-based bloggers, especially on the East coast, are panicking as the clock ticks down to Midnight.] So I give thanks for two forecast contrarians – Ana Andjelic and Fred Wilson.

Ana Andjelic runs the I Love Marketing blog where she posted ‘The Problem With Forecasts.’ When a post begins like this: “The end of the year is known for releasing “best of” / “worst of” lists, forecasts, & trends that will “shape” the next year. While I heart lists, it’s the trends that I found real dumb. And no, I am not alone in this. Predictions usually go from plain ridiculous to rather obvious and to those that are there for shock value – “blogging is dead”, “podcasting is dead” that no one but Armano really takes seriously.” You know you’re in for a fun read. She’s spot on.

From there I linked to Fred Wilson’s A VC blog where he posted not a forecast list but a wish list of what he’d like to see happen in 2009. Two interesting wishes are 1. a $1.50 gas tax which I agree with and 2. a request of Apple – “I just want Apple to come out with an aggressively priced touch screen mobile computer that can be used to read books, blogs, watch movies, listen to music, and work as a home remote too. This is a huge opportunity for them and others too.”

And by the way, I found both these blogs via Twitter which I have been using more and more as a business tool lately – finding I can’t live without it these days..

So, having written the above I will now throw caution to the wind and present you with a 2009 forecast that is only marginally tongue in cheek. Here’s my baker’s dozen:

Malcolm is thinking about a new book

01. Malcolm Gladwell will publish another book.
02. The New York Times print edition will continue to arrive on my doorstep.
03. It will be cold and wet when I arrive at the Oregon Coast tomorrow.
04. “Feels free” will take a hold. [I've been waiting for this since my time at Intel in 2000.]
05. The CD business will continue to shrink but the music business will grow.
06. Art will be smaller, leaner, cleaner.
07. Consumer products will be simpler – see the Flip.
08. Socially conscious projects such as public housing will thrive under Obama.
09. Blogs will not die.
10. Twitter will see a huge growth spurt and continue to have growing pains.
11. U2’s new album will be as boring as the last 3 or 4 have been but will sell millions.
12. The rich will continue to cut back on their mistresses.
13. And finally, less is the new black.

Got your own 2009 trends, forecasts or wishes list? Post it in the comments section…