Will paid content work?
But can we learn anything from paid content attempts in the past? After all, this has been tried at varying levels before. Until The New York Times opens the books on its mothballed Times Select service, which kept certain content — mainly columnists and archives — behind the pay wall, these two examples, from 2003-2005, will have to serve as examples
Here’s one more. A long, long time ago in a Galaxy far away, one of my first jobs in Silicon Valley was with a startup (see footnote 1) doing interactive services for cable TV. We’re talking almost 30 freaking years ago, folks, and teletext-type technology, which was state of the art then. And the goal of all of this was — ta da — value added services. Online banking, news tickers, weather, etc etc. And of course cable companies wanted customers to pay for them.
But every pilot test failed miserably. 100,000 people in Ohio were given the services free for six months, and surveys showed very positive responses to it. They liked what they saw. And when they were asked to pay even a nominal fee for it (a couple of bucks a month), about 2% signed up for it.
Nothing new under the sun.
This long predates the “consumers have gotten used to things being free on the net” problem. Hell, for the most part, it predates the net (at the time, I think it’d just been renamed the Internet from Arpanet, but USENET was still modem-based.
Thinking about it, the reasons for this problem go deeper than “we expect it for free”.
One is that both television and radio have made people think this stuff is free. Yes, there are commercials — advertising subsidizing the cost so the consumer doesn’t have to pay anything. That’s likely one of the strongest reasons there’s resistance to paying for things, a multi-decade history of things being “free”.
And with cable? well, consumers are already paying for cable. Any surprise people resist paying for things that come on the thing they’re already paying for?
Advertising long subsidized the true cost of that newspaper or magazine, making them artificially cheaper to the end consumer.
Circle those ideas back to to the internet today — and people pay for their internet connection, so are we surprised they resist paying for stuff they get off of what they already pay for? Those of us on the distribution side of the equation understand the details of how this all works, but should we be surprised that the consumer only sees it as a double-dip? And we’ve seen this resistance to this pay-again mentality going back decades. Look at the resistance we see today to the airline’s tacking on fees for things like checking bags. Consumers see this stuff as bait and switch (and in some cases, I’m not sure they’re wrong). Perhaps one problem we’ve had here is we’ve done a bad job of teacing the general consumer how all this works and why the ISP charges don’t pay for things.
But the bigger issue is that issue of “free”; and that goes back to the early days of commercial radio. 80 years, mulitple generations of “this is free”. It’s really not — the cost is watching/listening_to commercials as part of the programming. And now advertising isn’t paying the freight, we’re trying to shift the burden on the consumer after decades of subsidizing content (long before the internet!) — and the consumer resists it.
Surprise.
Just a thought: I’ll bet, and I have no data to back this up — that if you do a study of people who primarily watch network television and compare that to people who contribute to PBS or NPR, that the PBS/NPR crowd is a lot less resistant to paying for content online, because they’ve already made the decision to pay for content rather than sit back and take what the advertisers are willing to pay for and have them watch “for free”. And amybe down that road lies some answers, not in technology or micropayments or nag walls or whatever, but in working to educate users why what they (and their parents, and grandparents) were used to: free content, with commercials they used to go to the bathroom during…
(footnote 1: the startup was founded by Paul Baran, one of the people who invented packet switching networks. Which is the underpinning allowing you to read what I’m typing. It didn’t make it — but in the back room was another startup called Telebit, which invented the first modems that did data compression and error correction, and which ended up playing a key part in the growth and success of USENET and Email back in the days before everyone was hooked up to the net, and basically allowed for the growth to critical mass that eventually made the internet mainstream. This just reinforces my view that Silicon Valley is really just six people, but they all moonlight….)
3G Wireless Routers
Following up on my post the other day on three technologies I’m hoping mature this year, one of the commenters noted that Netgear announced a product at CES that does what I’m looking for. You can see the product details here. That’s pretty much what I was thinking of, and it’s available via Amazon (Product Page here) for about $120.
Now, I’m going to need to decide which network I want to use; do I do this with AT&T on my current account, or someone else? Some more research to do, but this seems to be the solution I was looking for; only real question is when I’ll feel comfortable that the network will be reliable and fast enough to warrant turning off the DSL and the landline.
Three technologies I’m hoping mature this year.
There are three technologies I hope get to the point where I’m willing to buy into them this year. They’re all things I’ve been watching and wanting to buy, but every time I look, they’re not quite where I want.
First — the eBook reality. the first Kindle intrigued me, but I’ve seen the “future of electronic books” before, and so I decided to wait and see. the Kindle actually surpassed my expectations, and now Amazon has introduced Kindle 2, and it’s much better. My primary interest here is to have a good, easy to use/read electronic library, especially of technical stuff, that I can carry around. Reading for recreation on an eReader is less insteresting to me, but couldn’t hurt.
Unfortunately, even thought the new Kindle comes closer, at its current price point, it doesn’t make the cut. I’ll keep waiting. Maybe the rumored Kindle software on mobile phones? We’ll see. but we’re nearing a tipping point where electronic books will make sense, which three years ago, I wasn’t sure we’d ever see. Kindle at half the price? I’d buy it. Today? I am staying on the sidelines.
Second — the convergence of electronics in the living room. I keep waiting for Apple to upgrade the Apple TV to be a real living room dominator. And I guess I’ll keep waiting a while. They’re doing a survey on possible features to a limited audience right now, which indicates to me that they’re now trying to figure that device out and get serious about a “non hobby” product — and I honestly expected to see that product at the last Macworld. So Apple’s product timelines and my expectatons are still in sync. The big limiter here is availability of content, still; for netflix streaming to my Xbox, only about 10% of the items in my queue are avaialble for online delivery. A quick look at iTunes shows that’s not any better. That makes this convenient — but not an option. Yet. And whatever Apple does needs to have 5.1 built in so I don’t need a separate home theater box to drive the speakers…
Something tells me this year is the year companies dive in and seriously try to own the living room. My short list: Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo. One of them will get it right in the next couple of years. If someone else wants to come in and distrupt the market, the window is closing.
Third — For the last few years, we’ve had internet in the house via DSL. This is our third generation of network in the house, going back to 1998 or so when that means leased lines and expensive routers, so it’s amazing how far it’s come. But now, I’m starting to look at what comes next. And what I want is a home network based on EVDO or 3G, a dongle I can carry iwth me when I travel and plug into a device at home to drive the wireless network, with real broadband speeds and reliability. This would allow me to finally dump the landline/DSL (and their monthly payments), and carry my network with me, since when we’re not home, do we really need the netowrk there? Not really. Unfortunately, I’m just not convinced this is ready for prime time — the dongles are there, but the home network interfaces aren’t yet. Unless you know something I don’t know, of course.. I mean, seriously. We use (and are really happy with) DirecTV. The idea of installing cable just to get a modem and fast cable modem speeds instead of DSL irritates me — but that my mom’s home network is faster than mine annoys me. Even though, in reality, I rarely notice my network’s speed, which implies it really isn’t “slow” as much as I’m realizing it’s been a few years since I upgraded….But isn’t that part of being a geek? Oh, and I’d love to do the portable dongle, but I just don’t want to add one more monthly charge to my budget. Unless I can remove one I don’t need, and the logical one seems to be the DSL line, no?
Honestly, I’ve been waiting for Wimax for a while, but the rollout is — problematic, painful and slow. So maybe I’ll stop waiting.
MobileMe Notes — Matt Mullenweg
First, the notes application on the iPhone is handy, but please sync this to a quickie app on Me.com so I can put stuff in and out of notes easily. Second, and this is a stretch, I know you don’t like to-do applications, but I also have an inkling you could do something that would make me stop using paper and pen for to-dos. And synchronize it.
Yes, please.
My MobileMe is going to need renewing soon. I’ve been taking some serious looks at whether to move everything to google/gmail or MobileMe. Optimally, I want ONE personal email and ONE work email, but right now, I have three personal accounts that mix and merge, and I hven’t decided the best way to fix that. There are things about both that I like, and both that I don’t like — and to be honest, there are things about what Yahoo is doing with their mail I like, too, but I need to be comfortable that Yahoo’s bottomed out, so I’m holding off.
For now, I’m doing to go with MobileMe and the tight integration with the iPhone. A year from now, I don’t know. Lots can change between now and then… But Matt’s noted a couple of significant weaknesses with that approach. Another is a good bookmarking tool that ALSO works with firefox on the desktop, not just safari. Not there yet.
Does Google Friend Connect have a point?
Yet – and I’m sorry if I seem ignorant, but I really do want to know – I still ask: What’s the point of it? Why would I want to be part of Google Friend connect on someone’s blog, or someone join it on my blog? Once we all do that, then what?
via Does Google Friend Connect have a point? — NevilleHobson.com.
I’m glad it’s not just me. When I set up the new blog, I installed both Google Connect and MyBloglog widgets, mostly to experiment with them and see hwo they work and what people use them for.
As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of these things is to give you a way to show the universe just how popular you are. Which, if you’re into counting numbers and telling people how popular you are can be a really useful thing. Probably also useful if you’re trying to convince folks you’re an A-lister.
But honestly, that’s not me, so last night, as I was tweaking the sidebar and navigation based on watching the first couple of weeks of use of chuqui.com, I pulled both of them. I considered putting them on the About page for a while, but to be honest, I just couldn’t see any real advantage to me to having them.
Your mileage may well vary. But since I’m more interested in whether people find my writing interesting and not crowing about how many people “connect” to me, I don’t see a lot of use to either setup — for now. I am, however, going to see how Google enhances it down the road, because there’s still a need for a good, centralized common profile technology. This, however, isn’t it yet.
(MyBlogLog? well, it’s pretty much what it was when Yahoo! bought it. I’m not sure what plans, if any, Yahoo! has for it — and what I’m looking for these things to be seems to be something Yahoo! is trying to build into it’s account profiling and email platform. We’ll see. But the real story here, like Feedburner, is that being bought may pay off the founders and VCers, but it’s also almost a guarantee that a site will grind to a halt, because, of course, the first priority after being bought is revamping everything to fit the new corporate standards and migrate to their data center, technologies and servers. And that, the way the internet goes, is almost a guarantee to being irrelevant once you surface and try to figure out how to innovate the technology again…)
40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
Smart brands use Twitter in meaningful ways, and most of them use their brand name as a way to make sure customers can find and recognize them. This piece, and the knowledge I learned from the incessant hours invested, demonstrate why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quiet like Twitter.
via 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them.
I’ve been having this discussion on and off with some folks over the last week or so as we try to figure out things like how Twitter fits into a larger strategy with blogs, facebook, friendfeed, etc (the list can go on forever…).
To me, Twitter is conversation; it’s effectively the latest reinvention of instant messaging. It’s also transient; it’s the literal lifesteram that you dip into when you can, and which flows past when you don’t — and it shouldn’t be something you need to or want to save for later or archive for the future. That’s just not what it’s about, or should be.
The key word, though, is conversation. If all a company or a person plans to do is dump pointers to blog entries in it, then don’t bother; it’s not just an alternative to RSS. When I find someone doing that in the list of people I follow, I drop them. Ditto, if someone comments at you, you should be chatting back. Companies that see twitter as just another one-way communications feed are going to lose out and be disappointed.
And as we were talking about this, I had this really strange thought: beating on Apple for not blogging, for not twittering, for overtly refusing to get into conversation with its customers in any real way isn’t a new concept, by any means, and people know my view of that from way back.
But — I realized yesterday that so many “mainstream” companies have — Ford and GM, the NHL, Burger King, Pepsi — these companies have all stepped into this new conversations marketing world and are exploring how to use it to connect to customers and grow their business.
And as of this week, so has the White House and the President of the United States.
And where’s Apple? Still basically marketing the way they did a decade ago, hiding behind the firewall and pushing a one-way conversation. When do we say that companies aren’t just not playing “bleeding edge” about this stuff, but starting to fall behind the power curve completely?
This is going to sound funny, but while I’ve been on the Internet since, well, we used banging rocks together to make modem sounds — and yet I remember the day when I realized that the internet had “made it” and was now part of larger society. I was working in my garden turning soil and adding steer manure in large quanties to what was going to be a vegetable garden. and I realized, all of a sudden, that the bag a FREAKING URL TO A WEB PAGE on a bag of cow crap.
Ford blogs. GM blogs. The president of the united states has reached out and started that conversation with the people.
So where’s Apple? And when does it’s refusal to join this conversation stop being amusing and start impacting business?
(actually, that’s a big part of the answer: as long as Apple can look at its business and say “what’s broken?” the motivation to make significant changes is limited. It doesn’t have to. Nor can you really blame it, because it’s working. But when that changes? If you don’t invest in these things now, they won’t be there when you need them. That was a lesson Apple should have learned from the MobileMe rollout disaster. Businesses fighting to improve or fix themselves are more wiling to take risks and do new things — but all companies need to make these strategic investments).
I can’t see how any company can look at what’s happened this week with whitehouse.gov and Obama’s embrace of the online communications environment and NOT have to have a long discussion with itself about whether it can afford to NOT be involved in these conversations any more. It is going to be increasingly a competitive disadavantage to companies that don’t.
Sony Expects $3 Billion Loss for the Year
Sony, the Japanese electronics company, said Thursday that it expected to post a record annual operating loss of nearly $3 billion because of the rapid deterioration of the global economy.
via Sony Expects $3 Billion Loss for the Year – NYTimes.com.
That’s an awful lot of zeros
– Gil Amelio, when Apple had it’s first billion dollar loss quarter
It should be noted that way back when, Apple was expected to be (and close to being) sold to both Sun and Sony. And today, the Mac is celebrating it’s 25th birthday and Apple is doing quite well, while Sony is, well, not. Neither is Microsoft, who back in the day was the evil nemesis Mike Spindler tried to take on head to head and almost killed the company doing so — and if you look at the numbers, Apple could buy Sun outright from the profit from this last quarter.
If nothing else, this is a good reminder that EVERYTHING is cyclical. Apple, too, will some day slip or someone else will sneak around them and take the lead in the race for a while. Companies we now think of as dead or fading will — some of them — revitalize themselves and move forward again.
None of this is forever. And that’s a good thing. Apple is one of those rare companies that has really put it all together and continued to push an innovate, but other companies innovate, too, so it’ll be fascinating to see what we’re saying about all of this in another five years, no?
(via daringfireball)
Open Source Communities – Push cx
Open source projects should be judged as much by their community as by their technological achievements. The code tells you what it’s good for, but the community tells you what its future is.
Communities need to be active to continue improving the project, deal with bugs and changes to their ecosystem. If no one is interested enough to talk about the project, none of that will happen. Newcomers need to meet experienced users to be sold on why to use the software, to get help as they learn their way around, to maybe be drawn into contributing to the project itself.
I nice view of the dynamics of communities by Peter Harkins. One of the aspects of this, I think, is that from the communities I’ve been involved in over the years, the smaller the set of people actively involved in the decision process, design and implementation, the more sensitive that project is to fading or falling apart if the life or motivation of a key member changes. For that reason alone, communities really need to foster new members into the project and ways to recognize and enable the most effective and capable into the “inner circle” where they’re ready and able to step up and move a project forward. If you don’t do this kind of “succesion planning” from the start, when you need it, it won’t be there.
Geeks tend to think you don’t need marketing, but they’re wrong. Marketing, even of an open source project, is key to enable adoption and convince people to evaluate it and join the project. projects really should consider community growth as a key metric in he success of a community, and communities really need to look at outreach, evangelism, and recruitment to be tasked out the same way bugs, features and documentation are, and those members should be part of the “core team” whether or not they actually code.
One reason it looks to me that Rails has taken off faster than django is simple: the rails guys did a lot of talking and promoting and evangelizing of rails, where the django folks have been quieter and less self-promoting of themselves and the technology.
A technology nobody knowss about may be great, but it won’t change the world.
A really nice resource guide
Here’s a very nicely done, concise set of resources by a web designer. I really like the concept and the implementation; I believe I’ll come up with something similar for this site. Well done!
(hat tip: Ajaxian)
Of categories and tags, and why they matter
Chris asked
What are the odds of getting an “Everything Else” feed that includes everything BUT the Two For Elbowing stuff, for those of us who liked how we had our RSS configured before? I like reading your stuff, but at the same time it would be annoying to manage six different Chuq feeds in my Personal folder where I only had the one before. (And the 24E bits I had going to my Sports folder.)
Which is a legitmate question. My answer was that it was unlikely to happen. With tools like Yahoo Pipes, though, it’s easy to set up a pipe that you can customize to your heart’s content (Chris wrote back, not having touched Pipes before, that it took him five minutes. Pipes is one of those tools you should have in your toolbelt, folks).
I took a look at just how granular I wanted to make the categorization and feeds. It gets really complicated really fast if you aren’t careful. Hell, even if you are careful. My original design for the categorization was two levels with tags (sports/hockey, tech/apple, tech/yahoo, etc), and mixing and matching categories, sub-categories and tags went to chaos really fast.
So I ended up doing a single level of categories, and everything else as tags. Each top level category has its own rss feed (see the sidebar on each page for them), and was set up as one of the core content areas I expect to talk about over time:
- About Chuq: My life as a series of random blog posts.
- Birdwatching: Birding and Birdwatching: things feathery.
- Living in Silicon Valley: Living in Silicon Valley; stuff to do, places to be, companies to start up….
- Photography: All things photography and digital imaging.
- The Offline Life: Things that make shutting down and unplugging part of your life: food, wine, books, movies and the great outdoors. Remember when your mom told you to go ouside and play? She was right..
- The Online Life: The tools, technologies, people companies and techniques that make the online life possible and interesting.
- Two for Elbowing – Hockey and Sports: Hockey and other sports, how the media and sports deal with each other, and the business realities of sports.
Two for Elbowing is what was on my sports blog, now integrated. Birdwatching and Photography are my two great lusts, where I’m focussing most of my “me” time these days, and in 2009, I plan on starting to move photography into a semi-pro or pro state. More on that later. Birdwatching is going to carry the content that was originally targetted for my now-parked siliconvalleybirders.org site, and which will at some point move back to that domain in some way (more on that later, too)
The Online Life is the area for talking about all of this “online stuff”, the work-geek-tech universe.
The Offline Life and Living in Silicon Valley are the core pieces of what was originally my “Dare2Thrive” project, which I was working heavily on when I left StrongMail, and which (story of my life the last couple of years) never launched. That’s another “more later”, yeah. Lots of that right now. The core for both of those is life balance, a growing focus of mine since I decided to leave Apple. Living in Silicon Valley is about the region and what makes it such a fun and interesting place to be (if you ever leave your cube and go outside!), while the Offline Stuff will be about all of those things you can (and should) do when you get away from that damn computer and that dumpy cube and take some time off.
Some discussion of the categories is on the postings page. I’m going to also put it in the sidebar one of these days.
One note for those wondering, there’s no top-level category about Apple. My writings about Apple will be in the Online Life, or perhaps in my “about me” category, as appropriate. You shouldn’t assume I’ll be writing less about Apple based on this, but that my writing about Apple will be more in balance with writing about the larger industry and about life in general. Of course, if that’s all you really care about, you can always grab an RSS feed of the Apple tag, but honestly, if your interest is that narrow, I feel sorry for you… You need to get outside more.
Tags will be used to define the content into narrow content areas. My goal is for most articles to live in only one top level category, but to use lots of tags to define what’s in each message. All of the defined tags are visible on the tags page, and there’s a tag cloud of the most common tags in use in the sidebar.
As long as I’m careful with tagging, that should really help with findability down the road, and minimize content duplication and search problems. At least, I hope so. It definitely solves the categorization problems I had on the old blogs, where the category system just didn’t fit well with where my writing went over time. This new setup should be more flexible as time and interests change, and require less re-architecting to stay clean and current. At least, that’s the ope.
Hmm. write one blog entry, promise three more. That’s probably a bad trend, no?
and any purchases you made will be treated as referrals by us.
