Imagine publicly discussing an emerging IT service and having a competitor lift and launch that idea ahead of you.  That is a nightmare and something that might have once caused lawyers to line up.  In the end, though, you would possibly been better served by keeping your mouth shut, which is probably what the folks at Justin.tv wish they had done about 10 days ago.  Here are the details.

So now the genie is out of the bottle and in the wild.  Livestream pillages the idea from and then launches Twitcam ahead of CamTweet by Justin.tv.  The central hub to all of this hub-bub is, of course, Twitter. 

My take-aways from this:
- you are better off investing your time implementing a potentially good idea than hyping it  (for the record, Justin.tv will always be the proverbial second guy to invent the wheel)
- once again, the power of modular, open API technology causes traditional thought to take a step back (remember we are only talking a matter of days from hearing an idea to launching ahead of the guys who put forth the idea – wow!)

I was sparked to throw this together after getting a short message from Tom Altman about a tweet he spotted from @mattyoungblut.  Here is the text of the message:

Never really used Twitter for my news until today. Been following the Parkersburg tragedy. Awful.

In case you are not locally tuned in to Iowa news, a storied football coach, mentor and community pillar, Ed Thomas, was murdered this morning in the high school weight room.  Let’s just say it has left the collective community of those who knew him or knew of him utterly stunned.  So, it is basically big news around here today.  Everyone media outlet from here to about a 300 miles radius has descended on the story and, in many cases, the town of Parkersburg, leaving no shortage of coverage outlets.  It is interesting that a relatively new user to Twitter is using it to follow what will probably be one of the dominant stories for the week.  Roll back just a few weeks and remember how Twitter was employed as a information tool inside and outside of Iran.  All the way from the international stage to regional/local news, it seems Twitter has overcome some nay-saying “experts” and their dismissal of it as just a toy or a fad.  It appears possible it might not have been Twitter that needed to grow up, but us as a community of users.

It is eerily similar to the debate that existed in the early 90’s about that silly “www” stuff and commentary about home computers.  Yeah, remember how that stuff has turned out so far?

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp

“But what… is it good for?”
- IBM executive Robert Lloyd, speaking in 1968 about the microprocessor

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
- Editor in charge of business books, Prentice Hall, 1957

I bumped into a nice article about Tim O’Reilly, the man behind the series of  zoo-ish themed books on technology topics.  These are generally familiar to the  die-hard geeks or terminally techno-deficient folks and have been one of favorite sources for comprehensive studies into very discrete aspects of computing.  They are definitely NOT competitors for the “Dummies” crowd…you really want to read, learn and apply your knowledge if you are picking up an O’Reilly publication, as opposed to being spoon-fed.  Okay, so I like their books – I’ll cease my accolades for them.  (for now)

Pulling back to the article, I keyed in on several items.  O’Reilly noted that being successful in new media is about serving a community first and making money second.  I know everyone here at Gazette Communications can related to that (although making money is vital to the health of the company).  Steve Buttry, our C3 Coach, lays out a detailed blueprint for community connection.  O’Reilly also notes some interesting observations on Twitter and what I see as his maturation in use of the capability:

“On Twitter, I’m an aggregator and a distribution conduit. I’m trying to built a community.  I cannot cover every topic I’m interested in.  Now I use a text file to write the tweet and then decide later whether I’m going to tweet it.”

I find that interesting because this is a person who has a more than normal amount of experience doing crowdsearch (research by way of collaboration with a loosely defined crowd).  He is mapping his successful tactics in compiling extremely useful technology publications by way of crowdsearch to new tools and new participants in the arena.  I can only take it as an unintended endorsement of the C3 concept for news.

Rupert Murdoch put forth an interesting prediction during a recent conference call.  CNN has a nice rollup to read.  Murdoch’s hypothesis is that “online advertising revenues are not enough on their own” and the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.  The translation is that Murdoch and the empire that is News Corporation is eye-balling some form of a model that charges for newspaper websit content.

Rupert Murdoch I am not…so says I with vastly more joy than disappointment, by the way.  I do boldly contend, however, his approach is flawed by way of myopia.  Specifically, a gaping hole exists in the net they might cast and it is simply this: there are other choices for news on the internet.  To be fair, I am confining that judgment to just news – not feature and opinion piece work.  Without delving deeply into nauseating detail, just consider several categories: international news, national news, sports, weather and business.

While the following list is far from inclusive, it is thrown together quickly to demonstrate that in a space of a few minutes a consumer could easily identify numerous sources for content: CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC, Bloomberg.com, ESPN, SportingNews, Weather.com, Accuweather, and the list goes on.  Oh, there’s even gocomics.com for the lover of comics.  Again, none of these are what would fit the definition of a “newspaper website.”  An interesting argument might center around content of a local nature since, after all, newspapers have long represented a majority voice in covering local news and events.  That’s a tangent worth exploring, even though local and hyper-local content is of relatively minimal bearing on Murdoch’s specific plan.  It is, of course, of great bearing to us. 

Take the Gazette here in eastern Iowa.  Gazetteonline.com is no-fee today and we connect daily with an ever-growing piece of the community.  Our value to the community is largely embodied in the local content, local context and convenience of delivery to the customer.  In short, they have access to content of a local nature in local perspective in one spot.  So, let’s assume we go “Murdoch” on our community and only provide our content on a subscription basis.  What is the average area resident going to do when faced with such a choice.  They do have a choice and it is more than either pay and get the content or don’t pay and go without.  There are local television stations and local radio stations in the area that already provide online content ranging from international to local.  Let’s also not forget the groundswell that is social networking.  If you don’t think venues such as Facebook, Twitter and others to be conduits for news and developing events, you might want to reconsider.  In short, most local newspapers web sites are not positioned such that they can view the community as hostages to paying for content.  I freely concede there is some content such as features and opinion pieces that are lock, stock and barrel proprietary to a newspaper.  Is that enough?  No.  This may be Iowa (and some are pretty convinced it is at least heaven on earth), but newspapers charging for the online content is like plowing your corn under and building a baseball field.  Remember Field of Dreams?

They’ll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it and arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.
“Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,” you’ll say.  “It’s only $20 per person.”
And they’ll pass over the money without even looking at it.

Good luck with that, Mr. Murdoch.

Sorry…I just had to pile on to my last post and, yes, this one is related.

I mentioned FeedReader and a few questions arose about why not iGoogle and what about this one and that one. While I would love to quell things by saying it was just a convenient name of one tool, but I can’t. iGoogle? Yeah, I’ve tried and it is okay. As if often the case, I judge many products and services by how far I can get under the hood and what I find when I get there. iGoogle has a plethora of garbage widgets and, for those that work, the lack of customization beyond the little boundaries of that widget are simply weak. How about some particulars? Blogs and RSS feeds – let’s start there. Pick an RSS reader – you have “thin” ones, “tabbed” one, “striped” ones, blah, blah, blah. That’s nice…nicely boring and generally useless. How many feeds can you have? Well, if you use one of those tabbed widgets that actually works (that would be about 1 of 3), you are limited to 5-7 feeds. Oh, stack the same widget up multiple times and, yes, the sky is the limit, but that’s hardly an elegant solution. For anyone wondering what else there might be, how about Twitter. Oh sure, iGoogle has a widget – in a box, by itself, not itegrated with any of the other who-knows-how-many widget boxes you have lumped together in iGoogle. Sorry…no passing grade on that one, but thanks for playing.

Why is it that tools such as FeedReader will be the default choice for the true RSS-junkie power user vice the iGoogles of the world?
1. Pick your own feeds from the very start – no defaults, no assumptions, no one-size-fits-all mentality
2. Set your own preferred update frequency
3. Categorization and nesting of feed categories
4. Ability to “star” or “flag” any content for later use
5. Extensible XML-coded opensearch capabilities
6. Semantic custom searches
7. Text, pics, vids, etc…it’s all just content and it’s all welcome
8. Twitter plays here and BIG TIME. How about the ability to “follow” somebody without actually following them? FeedReader can. How about listening in on a specific topic (semantics required), but you don’t know all the people involved and thus can’t “follow” them all? FeedReader can. Yeah, chew on that bone for a few…talk about some interesting possibilities.
9. Automatically logs/stores the content – even if an original post is changed or deleted, you still have it.
10. Share your OMPL file.
11. Free with no signup, no email address to give away…just free.

Double digits already?! Ah, that’s enough for now. Anyway, if you haven’t seen fit to break out into the free and clear and run unencumbered across the vast XML landscape, you really should.

If you have never seen Feedreader, here is a screen capture of one of my installs.  Note the current content: a Twitter message being automatically fed from a breaking news RSS feed from Gazetteonline.com. 

Feedreader screen capture

Who today doesn’t find themselves swimming in an ocean of information dotted with established islands reached by only some of the waves of content? We all find ourselves being swamped by the waves of email, websites, RSS feeds, tweets, nugdes, pokes, invites, etc.. My own personal routine involves an overly customized fat-client RSS reader, Facebook, Twhirl, Yammer, Outlook, Blackbird and WordPress (freebie version)…each day, often all day long. If that environment doesn’t make me ADD, nothing will. I’m always on the lookout for ways to aggregate content/information/sources. I’ve enjoyed the convenience of some the Facebook integration. I’ve enjoyed more the ability to take my FeedReader client and ingest all my favorite RSS feeds (news, blogs, etc.) and also add in semantic search feeds from a host of sources to include a custom .osrc file for Twitter that allows me to filter through public Twitter to pull tweets from select people or tweets on defined search parameters. That is quickly becoming one of my vital cowhands in wrangling up the electronic herd.

Today, our team began the work for piping our online news RSS feeds through TwitterFeed to custom-created bots on Twitter. Don’t yell at me…I’m not creating spam engines. Twitter users already know they have to follow somebody to get any tweets, so a person would have to make the choice of following one of the Gazette Communications Twitter bots.

I have to end with a great, but not entirely unrelated quote from our High Priest of Webism, the Earl of Electrons, the Duke of WWW, Mr. Tom Altman, “I get really dumb when the Internet goes down.” Thanks, Tom.