MediaFlect

check out mediaflect.blogspot.com for MediaFlect’s coverage of Streaming Media East.

Wow: Yahoo’s teaching us about usability and releasing code so we can do it. (Yes, this is from a blog I oversee at mediabistro.com)

Was over at the Digital Magazine Forum in New York yesterday, covering it for PaidContent.org, and Corante’s Rebuilding Media, where I’ll post today.

I think the B2B magazines are getting it, figuring out how to take an exisitng product and move it online, perhaps enhanced (Women’s Wear Daily - full disclosure: I helped relaunch their Web site), or sell info in newly envigorated ways (McGraw Hill Construction), or create Web sites that make plenty of money, especially in the tech space (PC World). But I fear for the consumer mags.

Don’t misunderstand. I have infinite admiration for how people at places like Conde Nast and Meredith and Rodale can make their publications such successes, selling millions in print and getting advertisers to pay big amounts to reach those audiences. But folks even at those companies acknowledge how much of a crap shoot it can be — witness the number of magazines that launch, then fold, every year, even at those companies (Vitals and Suede come to mind, and Mr. Magazine can give you plenty more).

At the same time, if they’re thinking of the Web in terms of purely selling print subscriptions, and overly worried about protecting print rather than getting as much from digital media as possible, they’re ultimately protecting a flank when their frontline troops are facing a juggernaut.

Newspapers have seen their classified ad revenue decline some $2 billion since jobs and cars and other classified sites came along, and Web sites are now getting traction in the kinds of mainstream consumer ads the magazines survive on. Eventually those products’ marketers, too, will start to demand the kinds of performance and metrics and reach and frequency and leads the Web can provide, rather than relying on ad exec promises of GRP. Those who have the right audience in the digital sphere, and can get the message of marketers out to them, will be in a better position to survive.

The old new way of looking at a Web site used to be that the homepage wasn’t king, that every page was now the homepage. Meaning, with Google and Yahoo and a lot of other ways to get someone to look at your content on your site, you had to be mindful that someone could come in on any page, and every page had to have the things you wanted folks to see – and navigate to. Maybe top stories, or “best-of” or the latest Special Report or e-commerce applications. Whatever.

Now, a newer way of looking at the world is that folks will be viewing your content without even having to come to your site. Syndication technologies, most notably RSS –which sends some chunk of your material out to whoever takes the feed – mean folks essentially scrape a portion of your site into their reader and may or may not click back in. The good news is that you get your stuff in front of them. The difficult part for traditional media operators to swallow is that your content could appear in any number of configurations next to any mix of content over which you have no control.

Try to control it, and in the long run you’ll probably lose. Very little content is so compelling time after time that folks will go through hassle to get it over something else that’s easier. Or they’ll find a way to get it the way they want, anyway (witness TiVO).

And now, the syndication model is, it seems, moving to video, as well. A sizeable chunk of seed money is going for a new video venture called Brightcove, with a lot of big names like Jeremy Allaire and Barry Diller involved. Brightcove plans to let people – most likely independents rather than Hollywood types — syndicate their content to the many minions, supported by advertising.

This is a little different than JD Lasica’s Ourmedia http://ourmedia.org/ , which is providing hosting space in a non-profit forum for people to place their videos online. Maybe there’s room for both models.

Taking a break from posting over at Rebuilding Media, I come across some laments over the death of newspapers, and interesting discussion: everything from “good riddance” to how TV covered 9/11 very well, to the role of newsmagazines to blogs being a sorry substitute and that they rely on newspapers.

And find myself thinking how, in aggregate, these various and sundry posts add up to the arguments one would read in a typical newspaper or short magazine piece about whether the newspaper is dead, has a future, etc.

Meanwhile, I’m reminded of this video of the death of The New York Times, which is worth a look if you haven’t already.

Walking over to the Hilton Hotel for the 2005 Online News Association conference in New York today, I grabbed my copies of free tabloids “AM New York” and “metro.” It occurred to me that I pay more for my digital media than print.

And that makes sense: The online versions are worth more – I can see today’s and yesterday’s and weeks-ago news, search headlines or words, email to a friend, easily save stories with a few clicks, sort things into folders, and all without having to stuff a file drawer or two or three. Some sites let me use their functionality to sift and sort and get feeds of what I want, or check how a company’s stock price has moved in relation to a story. I can see what people are commenting about related to a story, and set up or access a tag cloud to see what’s going on in the blog-sphere. I can get RSS feeds of many of the subject areas I’m interested in, including for paid products. In print, I can’t do very much of that at all.

So here’s a rough version of the financials of it: I pay $99 per year for The Wall Street Journal online, about $15 for Avantgo, I get subscriptions to Factiva and Thomson and Reuters through business school (which I have paid for if you count the $60,000 exec MBA tuition). I get access to Time-Warner publications for my family’s $15 or so monthly AOL subscription, and a few things (including WSJ.com ) through T-Mobile Hotspots and a few others through Verizon’s DSL service. In print, I pay for the weekend New York Times, in part because the coupons in there repay that price of about $19/month, and a couple of magazine subscriptions at between $5 and $20/year. One of those magazines, Business2.0, I paid for just to get full access online (though maybe I could’ve achieved the same thing through AOL).

I almost never buy a single copy of a newspaper or magazine, except maybe 25 or 50 cents for a tabloid or when I’m at an airport.

That’s a long, maybe boring, and incomplete litany, but the basic message is that I pay for digital, and not as much for print. I also could desperately use a consolidator, someone who would come to me and say “You can have it all for $25 or $50 or $75 per month.” Or even some way of charging me on a per-use basis.

Regardless: Isn’t media in a digital format to you, the user, worth more than in ink-on-paper format?

By now it’s oldish news that blog creator and aggregator Weblogs Inc., run by the irrepressible Jason Calacanis, is being bought by AOL, after flirtations with a lot of the other big players.

How did Calacanis’s network, home to leading tech-blog Engadget, and other blog powerhouses, get so big so fast, so he’s able to cash out only two years after creating it? One way is through careful and constant use, care and feeding of Google’s Ad Sense ads to maximize revenue. So good, in fact, that Google has done a case study to talk about how Calacanis did it. (Here’s a short piece on the study.) Another way, according to this piece, is by “gaming” blog-rating service Technorati by having all the blogs link and cross-link. Look in the lower right column of any of the Weblogs Inc. blogs, like Engadget, to see the list. But if that’s a crime, there are a LOT of guilty people, from pornographers to B2B sites and major media. (Perhaps it’s more incumbent on the folks writing the blog-crawling algorithms to correct for that, as search engines have corrected as best they can for “keyword packing.” It’s a constant challenge. But can we blame Weblogs for pointing us to its other properties?)

And, when I met Calacanis at the “We Media” conference a couple weeks ago, he told me the secret to his success, and how he’s managed in some instances to leapfrog rival Gawker Media run by Nick Denton: hire good bloggers and keep them. If they do well, and traffic is going up, keep giving them more money, so they’ll stay with Weblogs. Meaning, get good people, and treat them well. Comforting to hear a publisher say the way to gain audience that leads to financial success is by finding and rewarding talented journalists.

While we’re on the topic of blog networks: By way, Glam.com, a fashion blog network pointed out to me by TopButton.com, which I do work for, is being hailed as a sign that the VC money is back for real: Many are calling it the first “vertical” aggregation — a group of properties on a single topic area (fashion) — with serious money behind it since the go-go days.

Lots of people talking about the announcement of the new browser Flock, which aggregates a lot of the latest new-new things — RSS, blogs, search — in one place.

While you’re looking at the story, here’s something that’s just as cool. Look at the big (336X336?) box below the ad, showing the story you’re looking at and stories related to it, in schematic form. Very cool. Will see what more I might find out about this new search, from LivePlasma.

Given “hot off the presses” copy of a new Yahoo! study done with Ipsos Insight whose headline conclusion is that 27 percent of the people use RSS but don’t know that they’re using it. That’s another sign the medium is arriving. We all use telephones. Few of us wonder about, or care about, the technology behind it. I can’t give you a link to the study, because so far there’s only a white paper, in print (no kidding), headlined “RSS – Crossing Into the Mainstream.”

Other findings: 12 of people are aware of RSS. 31 percent use RSS (but 27 percent unknowingly). My Yahoo, Firefox and My MSN are the top three providers of RSS to the “RSS Aware” public. For the “unaware” it’s My Yahoo at a whopping 72%, My MSN at 41% and Google’s personalized page at 10%. Bloglines is in fourth at 2%.

See coverage of the We Media conference at Rebuilding Media.

CORRECTED from an earlier version to clarify that 27% figure is of all Internet users.

Craig is reading the previous post, says ‘thanks” but that he couldn’t post a comment because it required registration. I think I’ve fixed that.