In response to my public putdown of tomorrow's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, conference organizer Tim O'Reilly's publicist gave me a press pass to the three-day event. This is becoming like the plot of Dune — tricks within tricks within tricks! Look for my fawning, co-opted coverage at Rupert Murdoch's feet, starting 8 a.m. Wednesday morning.(Photo courtesy of Read/WriteWeb)
Discovery Communications, owners of popular cable networks like the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, and the Travel Channel, hopes purchasing popular web property HowStuffWorks for $250 million will help it transition to the Web. On the surface, the topical match between the cable net and the website looks like a marriage made in heaven. But while it's true that established media companies have mostly failed at building their own Web sites, there's no guarantee that buying will work out any better. The plan will begin by integrating Discovery video segments into the HowStuffWorks site, followed by producing television content using HowStuffWorks's library of articles. Right, sure, sounds good — but really, how do you mesh "Shark Week" and "Mythbuster" video into HowStuffWorks' wonkery?
New York Times gadget reviewer David Pogue got into an email back-and-forth with Valleywag after he was tricked into writing an article by advance misinformation on a pre-launch product. In theory, it's good for reviewers to test and write up products before release day, so consumers can make informed choices. In practice, Pogue and we wish the industry standard would change.
Reader comments have been added to the front page of NYTimes.com. Disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget writes that "it will definitely help increase the site's popularity." Hank, this is the New York Times. Having reader comments next to top headlines won't increase their popularity. It will dilute the brand. I guess the Times really is just a fancy blog.
For the record, j'adore le Peter Kafka, managing editor of Silicon Alley Insider, the New York-based tech blog from disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget. But seriously, girlfriend needs to loosen up. First of all, last time I was in town, the former Forbes writer totally ditched a little cocktail hour I threw in an East Village bar. Now, he freely admits to missing out the drunken, gossip-laden "debauchery" at a party thrown by TiVo and RealNetworks. I wasn't even there, and I got a story out of the party. I hear Blodget is a taskmaster. Hank, baby, for your readers' sakes: Let this guy roll into the office a little later. (Photo of Kafka by Glen Davis)
Want to read a review of a gadget you first heard about three months ago? Why, then, turn to the back of just about any print magazine. There you'll find the obligatory page or two covering gear. The ostensible reason? So-called "reader service," of course, the notion that electronics are part of the full spectrum of readers' interests, and editors would be remiss in not filling that need. The real reason, of course, is that ad salespeople need to show pages covering gizmos in order to attract tech advertisers. But the painfully slow publication cycle of monthly magazines is crashing into the ever-faster world of gadgets — with embarrassing results, as seen in the October issue of Entrepreneur.
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera's new WeSmirch Leaderboard repurposes the software that runs his technology A-list to track the top 100 celebrity gossip sites. WeSmirch replaces boring TechCrunch and The New York Times with the far more salacious TMZ and New York Post. Skimming for Britney videos turns out to be a lot like surfing geek blogs. You remember she used to get you all excited; now you only stick around for the next trainwreck.
Yahoo executives keep touting the company's deal with a "consortium" of newspapers. But from what we hear from insiders, the "consortium" is just a bunch of paper, with no real technology designed to power Yahoo president Sue Decker's grand vision. Newspaper partners are growing increasingly skeptical that Yahoo will ever deliver. No wonder doubts are growing regarding Yahoo's grand alliance. Aside from HotJobs, the job-listings site Yahoo bought which has long partnered with newspapers, what substance is there? An insider's views, after the jump:
Monty Mullig, the head of Web technologies at Time Warner's Turner division, which runs CNN and TBS, among others. Despite CNN's efforts to burnish Mullig's profile by featuring him as a talking head, touting CNN's ability to serve up millions of pageviews in crises like the contested 2000 presidential election and 9/11, you've likely never heard of him. But nonetheless, his departure now is instructive. Turner, you see, is rumored to be planning layoffs in Mullig's department. It may seem odd that Turner, whose CNN.com is a runaway success in online news, would be plotting cuts as everyone else is scrambling to staff up with Web developers. But Mullig, and his long, prolific website-building tenure, may have a lot to do with that.
Portfolio, a bit late, takes note of the great blog rollup, where the selling of blog advertising increasingly becomes the province of big media companies. But blogger Felix Salmon's ignorance of the online-advertising landscape shows. Reuters, far from being the pacesetter as Salmon suggests, is behind the competition. "But it's clear that sooner or later, Big Media's online salesforces are going to be selling ad inventory on third-party blogs," he writes. Really? You don't say?
What took NBC so long? That's the only question that came to mind when I saw that Geraldine Laybourne, at long last, had sold her struggling women's cable-TV channel to NBC Universal for $925 million. The fact that I'm describing it as, yes, a "cable-TV channel" speaks to Oxygen's failure. Conceived in 2000 as a multimedia empire that would bridge the Web and TV, Oxygen failed to thrive in either medium. Backer Oprah Winfrey, Laybourne disclosed to Advertising Age, quietly backed out of the venture some time ago. For NBC, Oxygen is a natural add-on, a minor expansion of its cable lineup. As for Oxygen.com, it, too, is far smaller than NBC's iVillage, which NBC has struggled to integrate. Eventually, the Peacock may figure out how to merge its disparate networks — broadcast, cable, and Web, But if it was hoping to buy a recipe for doing so from Laybourne, NBC will just be cooking up disaster.
"When I got a prominent link from a TechCrunch piece on September 30, it generated 228 hits." — Scripting News blogger Dave Winer disputes the clout of the latest A-list, Techmeme Leaderboard. (TechCrunch is No. 1 on the list, Winer No. 35.) For context, Winer once counted over 100,000 hits to Scripting News from one of Valleywag writer Paul Boutin's articles for Slate.
Nitpickers have noticed that today's New York Times writeup on Boing Boing TV refers to "sci-fi themes in shows like ... Pushing Up Daisies." The show's called Pushing Daisies. A minor point, but anyone who's survived an NYT fact-checking call has to wonder if there's a Sliding Scale of Accuracy at the paper that lets media writers off easy. This same article claims "Xeni Jardin serves as a screen-saver for fanboys everywhere." Ever seen that?
Newsvine, the Seattle-based headline aggregator — think Digg, but without the heartthrob cofounder — has sold to MSNBC.com for an undisclosed amount. The company had raised a small amount of venture capital, $1.5 million, which has led some industry insiders to peg the price at more than $15 million, less than $35 million. Newsvine, like Digg and the rest, encourages users to discuss news headlines, but it adds a twist: So-called "citizen journalism," where users also write their own articles. To a cynic, allowing that just spells more loser-generated content. But for MSNBC, which has, since its birth over a decade ago, been struggling to embrace the Web, the prospect of viewers contributing reporting has double appeal. First, it potentially cuts costs, and secondly, it adds a much-needed appearance of hipness, as upstarts like Current.tv threaten to garner a more youthful audience.
Read/WriteWeb complains about being forced to register to view content on NYTimes.com. Oh, shut up and register, already. The newspaper releases almost all of its articles for free and you're still not happy? If you're that opposed to giving the Gray Lady your name and email address, try BugMeNot. [Read/WriteWeb]
