Daring Fireball Linked List: Pageview Pumping: “Pageviews, as a metric used for directly billing advertisers, are a scam. Publishers game it with sensational link-bait articles and bullshit tricks like breaking articles into multiple ‘pages’. Advertisers get stuck paying for valueless impressions. Readers get stuck with the sensational bullshit articles, the tricks (like breaking single articles into multiple ‘pages’), and suffer through too many annoying ads surrounding actual content.”
NSFW: Jimmy Wales Wants Me Dead (The Neutrality Of This Article Is Disputed): “The battle to force people to pay for general news, then, is lost. Likewise, thanks to micro-aggregators like Techmeme and macro-aggregators like Google News, the fight to maintain reader loyalty through news reporting is finished too. Sure, some people may still cling to the BBC or the New York Times out of habit, but the trend towards decentralisation – with readers choosing their news source on a story-by-story basis – is inexorable.”
I’ve been posting links to a lot of stories about the future of news publications and ads and commenting on them recently. While this article is a reply to something Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia said, with a misleading title designed for shock, the article is really about making the case that newspapers will have to “fill their pages with nothing but highly paid opinion columnists” to survive.
I don’t know if Carr (the author) is entirely correct but I do strongly believe that publications need to start thinking about adding value to what they publish. Opinion is a source of value. So is content presentation (hence the link to Viv magazine’s ipad demo at the start of the previous paragraph). But so is “commodity” (e.g. allowing downloads in PDF format, printing, instapapper friendly pages, etc) and “filtering”. The overwhelming amount of information available is just too much for anyone to keep up with without effort. Outsourcing that effort is something I believe has to happen on a much better scale. In essence, that’s what aggregators such as slashdot, digg, reddit and google news do. But they’re doing this on a highly unpersonalized way that fails to capture the difference between individual news reading habits, what interests us (which can even change if the same individual is reading during the week or the weekend).
Predictably Irrational » Blog Archive » My Take on the NY Times Pay Wall: “A few weeks ago, the New York Times announced that they would start charging readers for online content in early 2011, and since then the million-dollar question has been: will it work? Will readers fork over the cash to keep reading the Times, or will they go elsewhere?
The main problem of this approach is that over the years of free access, the New York Times has trained its readers for years that the right price (or the Anchor) is $0 – and since this is the starting point it is very hard to change it.”
Ars Technica recently pulled a publicity stunt by making their content inaccessible to those using ad-blocking software for a few hours.
They try to make an argument that ad-blocking is bad for the sites we love blah blah blah and that they try to make sure only “good ads” show up on their site.
First of all, there are no good flash ads (which ars does have). Flash ads are disrespectful to say the least. It’s not just that they are visually annoying and purposefully destroy focus which is something that’s not always easy to achieve and maintain. But the most evil thing is that, for no good reason, they trash your laptop’s battery, use up insane amounts of CPU and make your system less stable, occasionally even crashing your browser.
But even assuming you’re running flash-blocking software or removed flash altogether from your system (a good security practice), what about the rest? Any site that uses pop-ups should be banned from the internet as far as I care. It’s just wrong to open a new window without the user’s consent – and asking for it would be incredibly annoying. Than there are those bright colored, blinking GIFs saying I’ve won something or whatever. Those are just frauds and those responsible should simply be arrested. The only ads that most (many? some?) people accept are google’s text ads, both because they are occasionally (some people say often) relevant and they generally don’t disturb their reading.
Subscriptions are a tricky thing for news sites. Many of us get our news from aggregators like slashdot, reddit, digg, google news or whatever. Which means we get one story from site X and the next one from site Y. We’re constantly using different news sites thanks to the news aggregators. Thus, paying for a site take makes up only a small percentage of your total reading does not sound like a very good proposal.
That said, I could see myself paying for news, provided an excellent experience:
– fast-loading ultra-clean interface (with niceties such as allowing white text over black background)
– awesome iphone (/ipad) app and netbook-optimized version, other such as archives in PDF format
– keeping track of what I’ve read, showing me only what I haven’t read
– good suggestions (if I like story A I will probably like story B), related news, follow-ups
– integration with the services I use such as instapaper, evernote and twitter
– great content
But even with this I figure $1-2/month would be the sweet spot. In which case I would probably subscribed to 3 or so different sites. Are the economics for this possible? I have no idea. News sites get paid for merely displaying ads. How much do they get from each reader? Can that be balanced by $1-2 subscription? Ars Technica currently charges $5 for a monthly subscription to their site. That’s way too much for me (and for what I get in return from Ars).
Soon, tablets/e-book readers will become ubiquitous (or so PC manufacturers, Apple, Amazon and others expect). This will increase the consumption of media by the masses. At the same time, major news outlets are re-considering pay-walls. Greater demand vs Lower supply? Will the pay-walled news sites be once again forced to tear down the wall? Interesting times for media and media consumers.
“The US has criticised China’s policies to administer the internet, and insinuated that China restricts internet freedom,” he said in a statement posted on the foreign ministry website.
“This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations.
An article in the Communist Party’s Global Times English language news website called Mrs Clinton’s criticisms “information imperialism“.
Seriously, if you don’t know BEST Engineering Competitions, get to know them. They are incredibly fun. I’m not the “build stuff” kind of guy, my usual approach to “hardware” involves smacking stuff – the caveman approach. But I tried it for a bit and found it surprisingly fun.
The 24hours BEST Engineering competition will be held next weekend. You can participate if you’re a student @ FEUP or FCUP.
Here’s the promo video (flash)
Go to the website for more information (Portuguese)
WordPress.com (where this blog is hosted) recently started appending
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
To every blog post. These are links to other blogs hosted on wordpress.com that are (possibly) related to it. This feature can be disabled but personally I like it
You can try it by clicking for example on one of my “not so new” posts (like this one) and scrolling to the bottom.
My friend José Gaspar will be teaching an Advanced Administration Course (Curso Administração Avançada de Servidores Linux)
Some highlights/keywords:
Servers: WWW, FTP, DNS, DHCP, LDAP, E-Mail
Samba (with quotas)
Security
XEN
Location: Rua da Boavista, Porto Portugal (link)
Date: From April 22 to June 3.
Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday, 19h-23h (4h)
Duration: 72h
Price: 300 euros
Summary: Add people to your gmail chat/gtalk and you’ll be able to see their Reader’s shared items and they’ll be able to see yours. It’s a great way to not miss interesting blog posts (specially “niche posts” that don’t hit the digg frontpage) and to make sure you get the “news that matters” to you.
My contact, if you want to add me to is: luis.rei@gmail.com
My friends list is currently populated by a few fellow Prt.Sc bloggers and Robert Scoble and it’s already great! I hope I can get a few more people in.
This feature was added in a controversial manner: without informing the users that items they had shared with select people were about to be shared with all their contacts. If this happens to be a problem for you, google has posted some “fixes“.
* Amazon WebServices Architecture by Mike Culver – I learned more about S3 and I knew nothing about EC2 which is actually very interesting.
* IronPython and Dynamic Languages on .NET by Mahesh Prakriya – I missed it but a lot of people said it was brilliant.
* Building platforms by Fred Oliveira – I got to learn more about microformats, APIs and web scraping.
* Creating a game in 60 minutes (Criar jogo em 60 minutos) by Paulo Laureano – this one was inspirational the concept was mixing sample code using to create a game quickly. While actually creating a game took me between 6 and 8h that can be attributed to the lack of sample code to do certain things I wanted to do.
Later my code was converted to PHP by Celso and I went on to work on my game project (the one inspired by Paulo Laureano’s workshop) while Samuel started with the PHP and Celso went home. I only interrupted my work on my game project, Kill All Squares, to help Samuel with PHP’s DOM – Celso’s conversion of my code was a bit too literal and as Joao from the Sapo Team found out, PHP’s DOM is a bit more peculiar (strict) requiring the NS to be specified.
Sapo Boa Vida eventually won one of the prizes (the prize for the best Mashup).
People
I met a lot of people – many from prt.sc and from the Sapo Team but also others. Some caused a very good impression. I got a lot of good tips, advice and even help in the contest (from the people I already mentioned).
I probably would’ve had more time for the contest and would’ve been able to work on a 3rd project (there were other ideas) but one of the big points in going to this kind of events is talking to other people.
