Kerry Webb Blog

I’d like to say that this report from the Pew Research Center clarifies the issue of the news corporations making money from the Internet - but it doesn’t.  It will though make sobering reading for Rupert Murdoch and his friends.  It sets out the overall situation and explains the various cost-recovery models being proposed, but it concludes that no particular method looks to be a winner - although the Wall Street Journal isn’t doing too badly so far.  And their survey about the efficacy of online ads isn’t too encouraging either.  Most people ignore them.

Alert readers will have picked up that while I see some real benefits in using Social Media, I don’t want to go overboard about it.  I’m writing this because of a Twitter enthusiast who derided a politican who couldn’t see the point in using Twitter.  This evangelist expressed surprise that the MP could not see the value of communicating with millions of Australians.  Now let’s see if we can spot all the errors in that observation.  First, there aren’t millions of Australians interested in hearing from their MPs via Twitter.  Second, the MP probably has already a very good capability of getting his message out to his constituents.  And then there’s the quality of the tweets going out now from politicians - thankfully most can haz no lolcat speak.  It’s time for cool heads, people.

Some people are no doubt becoming heartily sick of all the 2.0 things that are being thrown at us, but to ignore the phenomena would be unwise.  I see the current groundswell to be as significant in its way as the introduction of the Internet itself.  The challenge is though to avoid the hype and look for sensible commentary.  One item worth reading is by Andrew McAfee from the MIT Sloan School of Management, in which he offers a few general thoughts and some serious examples of organisations implementing the concepts.  But, it won’t happen overnight.  As he says: “Companies will be transformed. It will be a quiet, subtle transformation, though. “

The British Library has formally launched its Web Archive (it seems they’ve been harvesting sites since 2004) and has announced plans to greatly increase the number of websites it collects - asssuming that favourable legal deposit legislation can be passed by Parliament.

The Woolworths grocery price site has a quaint instruction on it: “The site’s URL may not be displayed on any website without Woolworths’ written permission.”  So of course I can’t tell you where it is (but it’s not too hard to find with a search).  And when I got there, it wouldn’t let me enter my postcode or suburb name.

But the strange thing about this is the wording of the admonition.  Who asks permission these days before putting a link on a site?  And then there’s the word “display”.  Is it OK to have a hyperlink as long as the text shows “Woolies’ prices” instead of …

It probably sounded like a good idea at the time.

It started with a post in James Dellow’s Blog about data curators (and these are probably not what you’d imagine them to be).  He then introduced me to the concept of “churnalism”, which is something that many of us (especially bloggers) have been doing without realising that someone has coined a name for it.

But it made me think about blogging and retweeting and all that.  Are we adding value (a term that itself can be said to add little value) or just parroting some cute thing that we saw elsewhere?  I’m not sure, but I like the word.  Churnalism. Churnalism. Churnalism.

Amazon took a few missteps at the end of January in dropping all McMillan e-books from its catalogue - without warning or explanation, and when they did try to explain what was happening they didn’t do that too well either.  The whole story (or at least the greater part of the story) is set out in this post by author John Scalzi.  Now, alert readers will know that I’m not a particular fan of e-books, but I take no delight in this debacle.  It shows that for all the excitement of new technology and new operating models, there are old-fashioned human beings and egos behind the decisions.  The best example of this is that Amazon prefer to think of themselves as “partners” rather than customers of publishers.  It’s just another example of the user not being considered in the whole equation.

Or should that be “a future …”?  I’ve posted before about the TED sessions; here’s a brilliant example of what can be done by someone with imagination and an enquiring mind.

In moving house and trying to cut down the number of books (and other impedimenta) to be hauled across town and accommodated in the new place, I’ve had to look at my own small library and consider how it fits into my life - now and in the future.  For a couple of major topics there’s no question - all the books are too important to throw away; but what about those bought on enthusiastic whims many years ago, and not read for a long time and perhaps not to be read again?  Do they earn their keep?  Sadly, the answer is often “no”, and so off they go to the Book Fair.  It’s especially true for my prized 1988 Encyclopedia Britannica, bought for a song twelve years ago and proudly displayed in my study.  I use the Micropedia often, to get a sense of a subject or person but never go to the other parts.  And so those will go too, because on those rare occasions when I need to look at a subject in detail, I know that I can find something on the Web.  And that’s a bit of a paradox - using the Web for depth of coverage - but I’ve found it to be true on many occasions.

Hashtags are those strings of text (like #haiti) that you get in Twitter to indicate some aspect of the message.  According to Chris Messina, the Twitter folks were a little slow to embrace the concept but now they’re an established part of the landscape, making it easier to keep track of issues of interest.