New York Times Ends TimesSelect
Reuters reports that the New York Times is taking its TimesSelect service free. This comes as no suprise because it was reported several weeks ago that it might happen. There will be no more monthly or annual fees from TimesSelect starting on Wednesday. The Times is also making its archives free dating back to 1987. The New York Times’ motivation behind freeing up these sections and archives is simply to increase traffic so they can sell more ads. “Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it’s understandable why they would want to do that,” said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur. “The more page views you have, the more you can sell,” he said. “In the immediate moment it’s a perfectly good idea.” The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper. Most U.S. news Web sites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is The Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based Web site. TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors. The Times will have a $10 million annual revenue drop from ending TimesSelect to contend with but they should be able to make it up if they receive a big enough traffic boost from the freed content. Reuters said that Times said in a statement that they are expecting a “substantially increased number of unique users referred to and accessing the site.” Paid Content reports that TimesSelect closed with “787,400 active subscribers: approximately 471,200 home delivery subscribers, 227,000 online-only paid subs, and 89,200 free academic subscriptions.” Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine says that TimesSelect “represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media.” That is likely true. How far away can a free Wall Street Journal and Financial Times be? Here is the story about TimesSelect’s termination from the Times itself. The newspaper also published a letter to readers about the end of TimesSelect. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Feedjit Live Web Traffic Widget
Feedjit is offering a widget that provides information about who is visiting your blog or website. An entry is posted to the widget everytime a person arrives at your website and again when the person leaves. Feedjit entries list both the webpage your visitors came from (the referring website) and where they live in the world. Feedjit also posts a little flag again to indicate what country each visitor is from. Feedjit also offers a seperate map widget that shows the locations of the last 100 visitors to your website. Feedjit says they launched less than 1 month ago and they now already serve more than 3 million widget impressions per week. We added the Feedjit traffic widget to our homepage and it appears to load very quickly. Startup Squad has more details about Feedjit and the people behind it. Posted in Widgets Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com Ad: Watchers Watch is a movie and tv news blog. Feed: Bloglines | Google | Netvibes | Other Readers
President Bush Meets With Bloggers
The Washington Post reports that President Bush met with bloggers following his recent Iraq speech. Still, the hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely. “More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following,” said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief. Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote. The Washington Post said the bloggers talking to Bush were the “generally pro-Bush and pro-military, and the ensuing reports were highly sympathetic to the president.” Some of the bloggers that met with Bush (in person or via teleconference) include Argghhh!, The Victory Caucus, Blackfive, The Long War Journal, INDCJournal and Mudville Gazette. Ward Carroll was also in attendance representing Military.com and DefenseTech. Is there much point to speaking with bloggers that are already very supportive? Maybe it was just a way to reward bloggers that have blogged kindly about the Bush administration and the Iraq War. If President Bush ever wanted to talk to bloggers that have a very negative view of the Iraq War they certainly aren’t hard to find. Ward Carroll said, “It was a conversation and an opportunity for the president to demonstrate that he was aware of what the milbloggisphere is capable of.” A couple more reports on the Bush blogger meeting can be found here, here and here. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
The Incredible Embeddable Web
Steve Rubel, the blogger at Micropersuasion, has an article in Ad Age today that talks about the trend towards bite-sized nuggets of information and bite-sized applications. He says the web is “increasingly becoming decentralized” and marketers and web publishers need to make use of this trend. If you have been witnessing the explosion of widgets and microblogging tools you are no doubt already aware of this trend. In the article Rubel tells marketers to make everything portable. Make everything portable. The next version of the Macintosh operating system, due out in October, has a small feature called Web Clip that turns any part of a site into a widget that lives on the consumer’s desktop. This is a big sign of things to come. In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don’t wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site. Apple’s Web Clip feature sounds fine providing they have the publisher’s permission to snag anything it wants from a publisher’s website. Rubel is right about the current trend. Marketers and publishers that don’t take advantage of widgets and RSS technologies may eventually be ignored by web users actively using tools like NetVibes and iGoogle. It’s the old “get on board or get left behind” thing happening on the Internet once again. This doesn’t mean that content producers necessarily have to come up with their own widgets. A lot of the current applications (and future applications) make great use of RSS feeds so just publishing an RSS feed will make your site’s content available to users. Another example is that publishers creating video content can use YouTube or other video sharing technologies that make it easy for people to embed their videos. There are a lot of great tools out there that publishers can take advantage of. Posted in Widgets Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Facebook Makes Faces Viewable to Public
Facebook is making its millions of users’ faces available to the public. They have added a search on the Facebook.com homepage. A post on GigaOm explains Facebook’s Public Search Listings. If you thought the news feed was a threat to your privacy, be warned: Facebook is announcing Public Search Listings today, meaning profiles will be searchable through Facebook, and soon turn up on Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. As of tomorrow, search will be available through Facebook; users will then have one month to change their privacy settings before profiles get indexed by the major search engines. These results will include, at most, your name and profile picture. Obviously that’s a move that could scare some users, and there are some restrictions: you must have your profile set to viewable by “everyone” in order to appear, and only your limited profile will be public. Mashable says Facebook users will have about a month to change their privacy settings before Facebook user faces and names start showing up in the major search engines. Some Facebook users that want their privacy may complain that Facebook should have made this opt-in instead of opt-out. Providing the majority of Facebook users don’t change their privacy setting it will allow Facebook to compete more with some of the popular people search tools. It will also allow Facebook profiles to become more indexed in the major search engines resulting in increased traffic for Facebook.com. Posted in Facebook Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Ads Start Appearing on Some YouTube Videos
YouTube blogs that they have started running YouTube InVideo ads on some of the YouTube videos for “select partners.” Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that we’ve been working with select partners to improve YouTube’s presentation of advertising on their videos in a manner that brings you creative, compelling content and should also increase revenue flow to artists and content owners. So what’s new? Today we’re offering select partners the ability to incorporate YouTube InVideo ads into their content. These are animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you’re interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you’re in full control of your YouTube experience. Google spent a long time trying to come up with this ad concept and it seems like they went for a concept that is fairly unobtrusive. The ads can easily be turned off and appear at the bottom of videos. A last100 post which says the YouTube ads “are not that bad” has screenshots of a few of the ads including an ad for The Simpsons movie that shows Homer chasing after a donut. The Homer donut ad can be seen on Madina Lake’s “House of Cards” music video. The Crime Mob - Rock Yo Hips music video contains an ad from Warner Brothers. The YouTube ads start up 15 seconds into the video and take up the bottom 20% of the screen. The San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times have more details about the YouTube ad concept. The comments on YouTube’s post about the ads range from those grudgingly accepting the ads to outright annoyance. Some people will tolerate the ads: jernov: “i personally don’t like it that much, but it’s better than an advertisement movie playing in front of the video you want to see, making you wait for the whole thing to start. i don’t like it, but it could be worse.” 123woow: “i think its a good idea people will see the advertisements more often and they cant really complain about it annoying them or being intrusive to the video because you can manually click it away easily. Good job YouTube” randiicom: “I’m okay with this, but eventually it would get boring. I wouldn’t subscribe to anyone who does this, but it wouldn’t stop me from watching one of their videos. It’d be great though to get money for the videos you’ve made.” The negative comments indicate some YouTube users may even unsubscribe from videos that contain the ads. johnbrouwer1: “It wrecks your youtube video! Terrible TERRIBLE idea!” sjmaerz: “I knew the team at Google would find a way to screw this up. Goodbye, YouTube, it was fun while it lasted.” splitforces: “gawd advertising is in everything now. first it wuz comerrcials in the middle of my shows and now the middle of my fav online videos. i shall unsubscribe to any1 who would do that.” losereligionrem: “sounds dumb… if i wanted to see advertisement… i’d just watch tv…” Updates: CNET says Matt Harding from the popular “Where the Hell is Matt?” videos doesn’t like the new YouTube ads. And a post on Wired’s Epicenter blog says the Chief Marketing Officer from VideoEgg says Google’s new YouTube video ads are just like theirs. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com Advertisement: Keep up with the greeting card industry. Click here to add the greeting cards blog to your favorite news reader.
Blogger Adds Video Uploads Feature
InfoWorld has an article that discusses Google’s latest round of Blogger bugs. In addition to pointing out the need for “professional-grade uptime” from Blogger the article also talks about Blogger now allowing video uploads. This post on Blogger Buzz also discusses Blogger’s video upload feature. Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading. When you go to the Blogger post editor, you’ll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila! Now when you visit your blog, you will see something like this (of course without Tomo, the Blogger Akita): The Blogger Buzz example features an uploaded video of the Blogger dog Tomo. Videos uploaded with Blogger are hosted by Google Video. However, Google says videos uploaded to Blogger are kept private and are not part of the Google Video search. Blogger also provides a video upload resource and a video uploading faq. Posted in Blogging Tools Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Boing Boing Launches Gadget Blog
The people behind the popular Boing Boing blog have decided to take on blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo and the other gadget blogs. You can see a longer list of gadget blogs here on HowToWeb.com. Boing Boing’s gadget blog is called Boing Boing Gadgets or bbGadgets for short. Boing Boing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder announced the launch of the new blog and says Joel Johnson, a former Gizmodo editor and Dethroner founder, will be editing Boing Boing’s gadget blog. Our third major change is the launch of a brand new blog: Gadgets.boingboing.net. While Boing Boing has always covered personal technology, the four of us (Cory, David, Xeni, and I) believed a critical, intelligent, optimistic, and selective blog about personal technology and consumer electronics would be a fine addition to Boing Boing. But who could we trust to oversee a tech blog that the four of us would want to read? Actually, it wasn’t hard to find that person. We went straight to Joel Johnson, a former Gizmodo editor and founder of Dethroner. Joel is smart, funny, knowledgeable, and curious about technology. He was our first, and unanimous, choice to run Gadgets.boingboing.net. And we’re grateful he agreed to come on board. Other changes on Boing Boing include a cleaner look and the return of comments. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who has a blog called Making Light, will be managing Boing Boing’s comments and community. Posted in Gadget Blogs Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Web Searchers Know YouTube’s Videos Are Funny
Here’s a great example about how YouTube is becoming the top choice when people search for videos - at least funny ones. A Hitwise entry shows that searches for “funny videos” have been falling while search for “youtube” have become more frequent. Muhammad Saleem notes that while we can’t forget the “correlation doesn’t imply causation” rule from statistics class there does seem to be a correlation in this case. Note: This data is UK specific so it may not correlate with search trends in the U.S. and other countries. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
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