I’d like to get around to blogging on these, I really would, but today is kicking my butt already.
Business Week has a story about how the Bakersfield Californian, and other newspapers, are experimenting with new revenue sources. Bakersfield is using grant money to help individuals produce their own magazines, which the newspaper may later print and distribute.
Of more interest to me was a heading lower down the page — the Washington Post, NBC and other companies are aggregating content tagged with a specific location, sending users to it and selling ads on the aggregated pages. They’re working with someone called Outside.In to do so. So they’re making themselves the place to go for content, even though they’re sending people elsewhere. It’s all very Newspaper Next. (Outside.In’s geolocator may need some work, btw — it sent me to Fulton.)
I don’t care for the post further down the page on specialized e-readers. I’ll say it again: for an e-reader to succeed, it needs to either (a) work with any content from anywhere OR (b) be integrated with a store that provides you one-click access to 99 percent of all the content you need, even if it’s in a proprietary format. No one’s going to buy a reader for access to just one publication.
Here’s an interesting look at why online display ads suck, and how to make them suck less.
Steve Yelvington has a reassuring post titled “We don’t have a clue where this is going … and that’s OK.” I’d like to provide an open API for our new project (more details TK).
This will drive up our Web hits.
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