Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Be it: Media interface

Published on 30/09/07
by Zac Echola

You can find the first part of this series here. In it, we looked at what convergence really is. It is a synergy of previous media. It is how we interact with the web, either overtly through IM, email, polls, and blog comments, or implied through our usage of the Web’s technologies.

We can use the Web how we see fit. This is the key difference between the traditional (old) media and online (new) media. The technologies that combine to create the Web give the end-user as much control over the Web’s outcome as the original creator of a Web page.

Wait, what?

Think about it. New media bloggers, like those at Media 2.0 workgroup and Cluetrain fanatics, like to talk about the Web as a conversation. The Web ebbs and flows in reaction to itself. Since the we are the Web (loosely speaking the Web is a network of people as much as a network of computers), we create and build the Web every day, through our personal blogs, our Amazon wish lists, our craigslist listings and our email forwards.

The Web is full of conversations. Conversations from corporations to clients, from retailers to customers, friends to friends, bloggers to like-minded readers and insane people to anyone who will listen.

I remember watching Larry King a while back. He was talking to Rosanne Barr about the Internet. It was painful to watch. King said he wouldn’t like it, there’s “80 billion things on there.” And surprisingly, Barr hit the nail on the head. You can watch the video here.

She doesn’t know she’s talking about filters, per se, but she’s describing the single most important idea on the Web. The internet is noise. Constant noise. The ebb and flow of the Web means that it is constantly changing. And growing. If any single person tried to keep up with everything on the Web, they’d explode. Thank god smart people built robots to crawl the web, to give us the ability to search for whatever we wish. Thanks Google.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there.” King is right. But there’s also lots on books in a library. That’s why libraries are organized so that one person can dig out information relevant to their search.

The problem with libraries, though, is that we can’t easily add meta-data to the books we find in a library. All the information in a card catalog is meticulously entered by a librarian, god bless ‘em. However, that information is not extensible. We cannot add to the catalog.

Scarcity necessitates top-down control

Let’s step back and think about how we interact with “old” media.

Television, as I stated before, is locked into time. So is radio. There are only 24 hours in a day so a select few people decide what goes on air, much like librarians decide how to create filters for library catalogs. A librarian is a curator of filters, and an editor is a curator of content. But in doing their jobs, they both act as filters, leaving the the final users of the products out of the process.

And then step back even further to the technology that makes TV work. Previously, there were only a few stations over the air. Those stations are still the only few that exist on the air waves. Spectrum is a form of space, so the government had to allocate that spectrum to certain groups.

The same goes for newspapers and magazines and books, which cannot feasibly produce 80 billion page volumes every day. Economics and usefulness outweigh the value of near infinite texts. Scarcity necessitates top-down control. Someone has to make a decision as to what stays and what goes. Someone must curate.

But the Web is so insanely different it doesn’t need top-down control. The reason it doesn’t need editors or librarians is, surprisingly, because there is so much stuff. We curate our own corner of the world and we tailor it to our sensibilities.

The cost of creating a Web page is fast approaching zero. Unlike paper, it isn’t trapped in spatial dimensions. You can have one giant page full of content or a billion pages with sparse content, it doesn’t matter. The device you use to access the internet doesn’t have to also grow in size because the amount of content is growing.

Content is separate from form.

What a concept.

Infinite content

I’m reminded of a Saturday Night Live skit. Watch it here. It’s fake commercial for a bank that bought the last Web domain available: clownpenis.fart.

It’s funny because people, when using the Web, don’t seem to give a shit what the name of a site is. They’re looking for content. They’re looking for usefulness. Brand isn’t a name anymore. Brand is interface. Flickr is a dumb name. So is Twitter. So is Google. But we’re not looking for a name. We’re looking for usefulness. We’re looking for content. We’re looking for what we want.

When we search, or click on a tag link, or drill down into a site, we’re looking for something that we want, that may be something general or something specific, but we want content and we want it now. We don’t want a name. If we don’t find something closely resembling what we’re looking for, we leave the page and try somewhere else.

The key for newspaper sites is simple. Make it easy for people to scan your pages. Make it easy to search for content. Don’t tell them what to look for. Help them find whatever it is they want.

If you don’t have it, or you make it hard to find, they will leave. We will leave. We’re not loyal customers anymore. Too bad, so sad. Deal with it. This is the main foundation for my argument for putting more “crap” on the Web.

Content everywhere

The Web is tearing down some ideals that existed in the past regarding ownership. The Web is a connection between people. A youtube video can appear somewhere other than youtube, which changes the videos context. RSS makes it hard to control where your content ends up. Hell, it could end up here. Or it could end up in my gmail account, my facebook profile and elsewhere as I’ve described here. Because we’re all curating our own corners of the Web, we’re getting flack from groups like RIAA, MPAA and overzealous editors who don’t see the value of their newspaper content anywhere else on the Web but their own Web sites.

Because content is separate from form, we can distribute it everywhere. I believe wholeheartedly, that distribution extends reach and increases content longevity.

Recently in our newsroom, we received an email from a professional photographer from the Twin Cities. He had taken a whole bunch of photos in a small town that was devastated by a massive tornado. They were great photos. Amazing photos. And he was giving them to us. All he wanted was credit and a link to his Flickr page.

This caused a stir that I hadn’t dealt with before. Why would this guy give away his great photos, members of the newsroom asked. Why wouldn’t he? It’s the Web. The guy makes his living from taking pictures (of weddings and such), not reselling his photos that were licensed under Creative Commons. The photographer wanted to use our site(s) to extend his reach. To get his name out there as a photographer. The photos are secondary to his ability to take them well.

And that’s exactly what newspapers need to do. Get your content in places where people will discover it. Think beyond your Web sites. You can’t expect thousands of people to just happen across clownpenis.fart on their own. You have to put yourself out there. Let your users stick your content in every nook and cranny on the Web. And then, once you’ve increased your market share, figure out how to profit off it. But we’ll talk more about distribution later.

What to make of this

The key points to take home here:

  • Users want what they want, not necessarily what you have
  • If what users want is not easily discoverable, they will get discover it somewhere else
  • Many users want to do as they wish with your site, forcing them do anything else will only turn them away
  • One way to achieve discoverablity is through distribution

Search is so important for newspaper sites. A newspaper.com is loaded with content, content that goes back years, if not decades. Hiding that from your users does nothing to help you. Give your users familiar tools to discover new content, and related content. You also can’t lay it all out there and expect them to know where it is.

Otherwise, expect them to leave as they (and the rest of the Web) get more sophisticated.

The end. Or is it?

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