A beautiful illustration of all that's wrong with television news ...

Thanks to Jim for the link!

From The New York Times:

The average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses 5 to 10 apps regularly, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends. This despite the surfeit of available apps: some 140,000 and counting.

I've seen the same stat mentioned before. Heck, I referenced that stat in a piece I wrote. But what I find surprising is that anyone is surprised by this. It's the behavioral equivalent of the Long Tail: a few apps get frequent use -- the blockbusters -- while the others wane after post-installation popularity or, even worse, don't get downloaded at all.

Instead of this broad-based stuff, what I'd really like to see is data that links up people's interests/professions with their most-used apps.

Kudos to Joel Johnson for elegantly noting one of Apple's most profound strengths: it doesn't muck about in vaporware.

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers -- that when Apple actually reveals a product, it's something that they're confident enough to support for years to come.

Put another way ...

I've always wondered why I'm so obsessive about using every last bit of content. A post from Steve Forbes suggests heritage might be the culprit:

In essence my grandfather B.C. Forbes, a penniless Scottish immigrant who founded our company, was a blogger. He hated the idea of not being able to use all of the material he gathered while reporting. That was one of the reasons that propelled him to start Forbes magazine in addition to his column -- so that he could publish all of the information he compiled.

I like that. It's a far better conclusion than pure psychosis.

And since you're here, you might want to check out my Twitter feed, my FriendFeed account, my Tumblr, my Google Reader Shared Items page, and my LinkedIn group.

A phenomenal post from Jason Fry at the National Sports Journalism Center:

When I started Faith and Fear in Flushing with my friend Greg Prince in the winter of 2005, I'd been at The Wall Street Journal Online for nearly 10 years. But despite all that time as a Web guy, I'd adopted some rather unhealthy attitudes. I was studiously uninterested in knowing how many readers read my columns, and only took a passing interest in their reactions to them. I thought that my job was to be a thinker and a writer. Worrying about traffic numbers? That was somebody else's job - and a lesser calling.

This was arrogant and dumb, and a few weeks of writing Faith and Fear showed me that. On my own blog, the numbers were of immense interest to me. I pored over them every day in an effort to figure out what posts were connecting with readers and what posts weren't. I was singing for my supper, and it made me a better columnist. If a column was well written but didn't seem to connect, I wasn't happy with it. I no longer dismissed Web traffic as not my job, complained about writing promos for my stuff, or gave reader comments and emails short shrift. And I realized those folks on the business side were critical to our collective success, and could teach me things. [Emphasis added.]

I'll add this: journalism's biggest mistake was allowing business apathy/hatred among the editorial ranks. That's a far more egregious "sin" than publishing free Web content.

Anil Dash follows up his great post on Twitter's suggested user list with an equally great piece that politely challenges Twitter follower counts. As he notes, analytics and inflated self-importance are nothing new:

It's a bit like when I worked at a newspaper: Every reporter thought "Well, our circulation is a million copies, that must mean a million people read my column." Facing the reality that only 10,000 of those people read the column, or that perhaps only 1,000 of them were reading the advertisement on the opposite page, forced a useful and important reckoning into some false assumptions that were underpinning that industry's workings.

The key here -- and Dash mentions this in his post -- is to dispel overblown notions so analytics become useful. Follower counts have value, just as page views, uniques, user-session times, circulation figures and subscription numbers do. But all those numbers have to be filtered through the realities of passivity and engagement.

I'm as pro-freelance as they come, but Scott Shane makes an excellent point in his BusinessWeek piece "Beware the Freelance Economy":

What if the shift toward non-employer businesses reflects a belief that building a business with employees has become too much of a hassle? Entrepreneurs don't want to deal with issues of health insurance and managing people and all of the things that come with building an organization. So instead they are tending to start more non-employer businesses, with the result that the firms they establish are less substantial and contribute less to employment than the startups created in decades past.

I'm intrigued by his point about the hassle of health insurance. That's key. If that obstacle was reduced, would some of those non-employers consider hiring workers? And wouldn't that create opportunities for those small businesses to grow? And, extending that idea further, wouldn't a percentage of those small firms inevitably transform into large, important businesses? Luck alone would allow for that.

My parents own a small business and I've watched them engage in an annual struggle with overhead. Health insurance being the most notable expense. Bearing witness to that shaped my own entrepreneurial instincts. I have no interest in taking on what I perceive to be the "extraneous" expense of employees. But if the system was different, if it was easier to hire employees and provide them with appropriate benefits, I would absolutely reevaluate my perspective.

Sidenote: What Shane addresses in this column is the hint of an issue, and I appreciate that. There might be nothing to the rise of non-employer businesses. But there might be something to it, too. I like his approach here. It's not run-of-the-mill, hey-look-at-me punditry. He's workshopping an idea in a public forum.

Reports suggest Microsoft is courting European publishers for some sort of Bing-based news thing. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch continues to shake his fist at Google. Cory Doctorow connects the potential dots at Boing Boing:

So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

Toss in the growing idea that Twitter, Facebook and other recommendation-based results are now more important than Google traffic and we've got a very interesting set of signals.

Looks like Netflix and the movie studios are about to make piracy more enticing. Good move, guys. From TechCrunch:

Here's what this will do: It may drive sales of DVDs a bit short term. But soon, online movie piracy will pick up to new heights. If the movie studios have nightmares about piracy now, their reality will be truly terrifying with this plan in place ...

... with this new 30-day window in place, the masses would be driven online to search for more illegal content -- and more importantly, it would begin to fuel a piracy ecosystem for Hollywood content. There would be more people downloading, but also more people sharing. That's the key.

Take a look through any torrent site (looking is legal) and you'll see that most of the activity occurs around new releases. And that's happening under the current system where new releases are available for purchase or rental. Remove rental from the equation (you know, the lower priced, easier, less restrictive option) and suddenly pirates go from fringe-dwelling copyright violators to service providers. I'm guessing that's not what the studios are shooting for.

Fred Wilson discusses the effort behind good user comments and conversations:

But if the author of the news story, or opinion piece, or blog post, tends to the comments, replies to the good ones, signals the bad ones, chastises the loudmouth bullies, and generally runs the comment threads like a serious discussion group, a serious discussion will result.

It's an issue for the news industry because tending to comment threads is not part of a journalist's traditional job. But I would argue that it is now and they ought to get busy doing it. For one, the journalists that do it and do it well will be better read. And they'll be better informed. They'll get tips in the comment threads. They'll get constructive criticism that will help them do their job better. And they'll get leads on new stories before others will.

I'll add this: The tipping point for comments is when users stop talking to the author of a piece and start conversing intelligently with each other. Reaching this commenting utopia requires an inclusive mindset from the original author/writer/poster. You have to value discourse, not just top-down pontification.

Rupert Murdoch continues to bang the drum for pay walls:

"Quality journalism is not cheap," Mr Murdoch said, noting that the success of The Wall Street Journal's online subscription offering has convinced him that consumers will pay for news online that differentiates itself from the mass of information available free on the web. "A newspaper that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting."

There's a fine distinction within this excerpt: The Wall Street Journal is not a newspaper. It's a provider of targeted information that its audience uses to guide financial decisions. The value proposition is driven by the actions and outcomes the information facilitates. General news rarely offers this type of value, which means the commonalities between the WSJ and newspapers are limited to bits, print, ink and distribution.

That's not to say the WSJ doesn't provide a lesson for general news publishers. The key is to provide tangible, actionable value for the audience via content. That's what WSJ subscribers are buying (or configuring ...)

Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek just landed a future customer (me) with this comment in the New York Times:

"Piracy is essentially the consumer's wish to have everything on demand. It's not like people want to necessarily have it for free," Mr. Ek said. The problem is that there have not been commercial services "that allowed people to discover new music and easily share music with friends," he said.

Well put.

ReadWriteWeb looks at the increasing popularity of Breaking News Online, a news aggregator that's harnessing the power of Twitter and other Web platforms (and it just happens to be run by a 19-year-old). Within the piece, ReadWriteWeb hits on the central issue of aggregators: can they use original content created by other outlets to turn popularity into profit?

All of this is fascinating, but isn't BNO still just an aggregator? In traditional media outlets "aggregator" is a dirty word (unless they are the ones doing the aggregation). In fact, Breaking News Online does very little original reporting. The company is going to monetize its research flow, editorial judgment, distribution channels...and links to other peoples' content. If BNO is successful, there is a real risk of original content publishers objecting to the fact that someone else has found a way to make money off of (links sending traffic to) their content.

This aggregator antagonism needs to end. Like it or not, content creators ultimately benefit from the increased exposure and traffic aggregators supply. Creators are generally lousy at Web distribution because they can't shake the allure of lock in (you need to read my content on my site), but aggregators -- unencumbered by oldthink -- know the value of broad and diffuse distribution. Compare Breaking News Online's Twitter presence with that of most mainstream outlets and you can see the stark difference: BNO understands you have to serve the audience through the platforms where it's already congregating. Repurposing RSS feeds as tweets isn't enough.

What kills me about all this content creator chest pounding is that these organizations are missing the central point: As long as aggregators point traffic back to source sites, both sides benefit in this relationship.

Update, 7/17, 9:36PM: Ars Technica gets to the bottom of the Orwell deletions. The ebooks weren't legitimate and Amazon's system automatically deleted the copies, which is even more unsettling than a manual kill command. According to Ars, Amazon is changing the system to prevent future auto-deletion.

We already knew Amazon could reach into Kindles and disable text-to-speech functionality, but now comes word that Amazon invoked the kill switch on copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" (irony unintended, but appreciated):

... apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

Remote wipes / kill switches are fine if they're controlled by the consumer (e.g. MobileMe's remote iPhone wipe is an excellent feature), but this manufacturer overlord business is foolishness. If I buy a product -- digital or otherwise -- you do not have the right to dispatch your deletion ninjas on my file on my device.

In a mild reprimand of New York Times social media editor Jennifer Preston's inactivity on Twitter, Mashable's Stan Schroeder hits on a key difference between the beat coverage of traditional journalism and the passion coverage seen on the Web:

... you can't write for a gadget blog if the thought of a new iPhone doesn't send shivers down your spine, you can't write about cars if you couldn't care less what hunk of metal you're driving, and you cannot be a social media editor if you're not interested in sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

There are no pre-requisites of passion or even interest for traditional reporters assigned to beats, but on the Web, where opinion and energy are the norm, a half-hearted attempt simply won't do. You've got to want it.

I learned this a long time ago when I dabbled in coverage I only found mildly interesting. I executed on the assignments and I cared in a basic sense, but the creativity and desire were absent. I eventually concluded that, in situations where I have a choice and extenuating circumstances aren't paramount, dispassionate work isn't worth the effort. That's why I could never bring myself to cash in with an SEO-friendly blog about mortgages or finance. Higher CPC revenue couldn't eclipse my indifference.

Jon Bernstein wisely questions the relationship between current economic woes and the advertising slump, particularly as it applies to knee-jerk revenue ideas:

Maybe this rush to find other ways to monetise will be a passing phase and when the economy picks up so too will online advertising revenues.

After all, what's the alternative?

There's no doubt the economy gathered advertising in its arms as it dropped off the cliff, but are we now witnessing advertising's inevitable destruction, or are old-guard publishers mixing all their worries about the Internet, free distribution, audience dispersion and reduced ad margins into a cocktail of fear? My bet is that a rebound in digital advertising -- something that feels inevitable as confidence grows -- will quell talk of paywalls, subscriptions and other counterintuitive schemes.

Via Mindy McAdams' Twitter stream

Maira Kalman elevates storytelling with a beautiful collection of illustrations, photos, thoughts and history, all describing a trip she took to Monticello. The mix of simple imagery, breezy artistry and a nonchalant attention to detail is, to me, deeply impressive. This is excellent stuff.

I tend to side with Chris Anderson, Mike Masnick and other free proponents, but Malcolm Gladwell makes salient observations in his review/counter-point of Anderson's new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price." The following excerpt deflates grandiose notions of free economies revolutionizing society:

Anderson begins the second part of his book by quoting Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that "our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

Anderson wants to take "too cheap to meter" seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own "too cheap to meter" revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson's argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss's prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true. [Emphasis included in original.]

I appreciate Gladwell's perspective because he's anchoring the free discussion in reality. Free isn't a cure-all, nor does it apply to every market or product. But in my sandbox -- digital content -- it absolutely factors into the gameplan because virtually all digital material can be copied infinitely with no degradation. When you're dealing with an infinite good, you have to acknowledge the limits and opportunities of giving that material away because a certain percentage of the consumer population is going to take and copy it anyway. You can spin your wheels with DRM and lawsuits, or you can accept the reality and find ways to use freely distributed content to convert readers/viewers/users into customers who pay for related, naturally-scarce products. To me -- and to most non-utopian, normal folks -- free isn't a cultural movement, paradigm shift, or religion. It's a tool.

Never underestimate financial motivation:

The Netflix Prize contest has been hailed as prime example of "prize economics" and the crowdsourcing of innovation. Prize economics refers to running a contest to generate a new innovation at less cost than an in-house research and development effort, and crowd-sourcing refers to using the proverbial wisdom of crowds to accomplish a task. Netflix has said that $1 million would be a bargain price for an improved recommendation engine, which would increase customer satisfaction and generate more movie rental business. [Link included in original post.]

The Netflix Prize -- and similar contests -- take a much-needed, practical approach to crowdsourcing by injecting clear motivation into the process. A big fat check is bound to attract a committed corps, but other rewards, such as esteem within a specific community or job opportunities, may also work (may ... successful crowdsourcing and community creation often requires a lightning-in-a-bottle moment). What I appreciate most about the Netflix Prize is that, unlike most forms of citizen journalism and community building, it clearly answered the question: "Why would anyone do this?".

In a refreshing break from the wailing and moaning from the business side of content, Bill Mitchell offers an in-depth look at a dynamic storytelling form he calls "Next Step Journalism":

It's a process -- call it Next Step Journalism -- that will shape more and more of the news we need from around the block and around the globe.

Journalists have relied on a process approach to writing for years. The Next Step Journalism process practiced on the Neda story began with an event and is characterized by the collective sharing and enhancing of information ...

... Deconstructing the Neda story reveals seven elements of this kind of storytelling -- some more in need of professional journalism skills and values than others. In describing what's involved in each elements, I'm struck by a common thread: the importance of collaboration. [Link included in original post.]

As Mitchell illustrates later in the column, journalists can use social media tools as a starting point for deeper research and reporting. Sources are everywhere, you just have to be willing to look.