a few thoughts on our lives online - rikin on the web

Leaving the Newspaper Industry

September 18, 2009

A little over two years ago I graduated college and found myself working for a newspaper company in the heart of Manhattan. Truthfully, I wasn’t a newspaper reader and still find the waste of paper and pure clumsiness of reading one unnecessary. So it was only right that I ended up doing online business development instead of anything related to circulation and column inches. However, I recently decided to leave the world of media and have the opportunity to less worriedly reflect about its current position and its shaky future.

Working on digital strategies for an old media company is exactly how it sounds really; an exciting challenge that can often be frustrating. Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few years, you’ll know that newspapers aren’t really thriving and support and sympathy aren’t plentiful either. I do sympathize with their position but share in the unencouraging critique of many others.

Sympathy stems from the fact that in many ways newspapers pioneered sharing content online and built the business models and advertising formats that sustained their business. Only recently, with increased bandwidth and advancements in streaming technology, are the TV and movie industries coming into the online world. Oddly enough, platforms like Hulu are only following the same path of free content as newspapers did 10 – 15 years ago and they too will face the same problem of cannibalizing one medium for another. Newspapers entered the wild west of the internet and are definitely showing the scars to prove it.

However, I still am very critical of the steps that old-school media have taken to ensure their future. Newspapers have simply thought of their visitors as readers rather than a community. Why crowd-sourcing information and community engagement have only become recent topics for newspapers is beyond me. Moreover, if newspapers only took a moment to realize that they were technology providers they may have been able to create the Twitter and Facebook of the world well before the term web 2.0 was even coined.

I’ve noticed that while newspapers haven’t received much sympathy from critics, journalism unfortunately has. In the long fought battle of journalism vs. blogging, the outcome will inevitably be blogging. This is truly a digital renaissance and it simply is not acceptable that content creation is removed from product development, sales, and marketing.

Bloggers are the real renaissance men and women of a digital era. As bloggers, we buy our own domains and hosting, install the background CMS, design and code the site itself, do the research, create the content, optimize for search engines, edit and post it, conduct blogger outreach, create a social media following, and we sell and create the revenue and business models to make it all worth while.

A journalist, in most instances, is removed from all of this except for the content creation and this is a huge factor in the problem facing the newspaper industry.

Time will tell how this all plays out as it does with everything else but I do believe that drastic consolidation will face these corporations. Many are simply too large with too many redundancies to meet the needs of a quick and nimble digital world especially without a sustainable business model. I met and worked with some true innovators of the internet over the past two years but I will definitely sit more comfortably from the sidelines and watch as the industry salvages its future.

{ 0 comments }

Apple Should Buy Tumblr

August 24, 2009

This post is one of several speculative pieces. I think it is important to not settle for status quo and search for opportunities that might have been overlooked. They are also a way to spark discussion in hopes that one day we might come up with a diamond in the rough.

The other day I tweeted that Tumblr was beginning to feel like the Apple of social networks and microblogging platforms.

Then, I started to think about this more and got a little carried away until I arrived at “Apple should buy Tumblr”. Before you kick my teeth out let me explain my logic.

Sharing Content

Tumblr is arguably one of the easiest blogging platforms to share any form of media. Photos, videos, music, and of course text are easily uploaded via your laptop/desktop or mobile device. With Apple’s iLife platform regarded as one of the easiest ways to create, edit, and organize your media the two would compliment each other perfectly.

Yes, Apple does already have a product called iWeb, a glorified WYSIWYG editor, that allows you to upload your content and design your own site. Unfortunately iWeb, like many other WYSIWYGs, have some major pitfalls. When’s the last time you saw a site created with iWeb?

…

Exactly, you can’t remember but it’s really not your fault. iWeb’s background coding is extremely poor and coupled with its lack of a CMS, like that of Wordpress and Tumblr, its sites have awful search engine visibility and are limited in functionality and features. Tumblr’s back end; however, is user friendly and powerful. Users have the ability to create their own themes or use the ones made by the Tumblr community. The HTML markup, though not perfect, is also superior to any WYSIWYG I’ve seen.

The Community

Tumblr users and Apple fan boys are also very similar. The folks over at Tumblr told me that 40% of all traffic comes from an Apple user. Considering Apple have less than 10% market share this is a pretty impressive number. I would venture further to say that active users (as opposed to overall traffic) are even more Mac inclined while the rest are PCs passing by. These are creative individuals who want to create and share their art with the world. I’ve always believed that coupling technology and culture seemlessly can lead to many beautiful things.

Revenue

There are also revenue opportunities to be had with such a partnership. Fred Wilson recently wrote how Tumblr is quickly becoming central for music. Users are sharing songs each day and many artists have embraced the platform as well. couple this with the iTunes store and there is a good opportunity for money to be made. An app-store for themes and applications built off the Tumblr platform seems feasible as well.

A paid model might work considering that hosting an iWeb created site using MobileMe ~~(the only way to do so)~~(thanks @scottygo) costs $99 a year. If all the other MobileMe functionality is also made available then this pricing seems easier to swallow. However, I’ve longed thought that MobileMe should be an added-value considering the premium paid for an Apple computer but that’s another story.

Finally, Tumblr right now hasn’t really made their revenue models apparent so I don’t think they’d be opposed either. The problem (or the beauty) with too many social platforms these days is that the platform comes first and then at some point people start worrying about money.

The End (Product)

There has been much talk of late regarding Apple entering the social networking scene with increased social features in iTunes 9. I personally cannot see much reason to align with Facebook, Twitter and the likes other than being able to broadcast “now playing” features. However, an Apple and Tumblr combo could be a much more creative and inspiring partnership.

Is Tumblr to Mac, dare I say, as Facebook is to PC?

{ 7 comments }

TV Companies to Abolish Nielsen: Here Come The Metrics

August 14, 2009

Photo via: Grant Neufeld

The Financial Times is reporting that some of the biggest names in television broadcasting are banning together to challenge Nielsen, the leader in TV ratings, and its exorbitant fees and inaccurate metrics. Some strong brands and agencies have also joined forces with the networks to reinforce their position.

The problem with Nielsen is that they grossly underestimate the actual numbers of viewers for most programs. You could blame it upon the fact that their sample size is only 18,000 viewers which they then extrapolate data and apply it to the entire country.

Blame it on the Internet

The frustration with TV ratings is more to do with the Internet and its ability to track and report practically every metric necessary. As we all become more familiar with the lexicon of internet advertising and the benefits it provides, the more TV and other mediums such as radio appear dinosaur-like. The next step in TV ratings will be a replica of the web model most likely involving technology in all set top boxes to track viewership and impressions. The analytics that websites have been able to offer for over a decade now will finally be available to those in the television industry as well.

Are you sure you want to do this?

However, accurate reporting could actually unearth more problems than there were before. For example, today a 30 second spot during the Superbowl can cost $1m and reach an audience of about 95 million. That’s a CPM (cost per thousand) of only $10.50. Ten meager dollars to reach 1000 people for 30 seconds. Right?

No! If advanced metrics comes to the television industry, then the ball falls into the advertisers’ court. As a buyer, you’ll be able to tell exactly how many people fast-forwarded through those commercials or the average amount of time spent on the commercial before fast-forwarding. They can even tell you what kind of TV someone has and the resolution their viewing your commercial in. So if it appears that they have the latest and greatest TV there really might not be a point of touting your new latest and greatest TV.

The possibilities are endless but what they essentially do is provide an advertiser with many options to become infinitely granular with their targeting. Ad buys get smaller and advertisers demand much more from them. It’s also a slippery slope because as soon as one broadcaster offers targeted ads they all will. Eventually, the targeting gets more sophisticated in an attempt to win over more advertising.

YouTube Logo

This is exactly the reason why online video advertising, which started with lots of promise and premium (isn’t it funny how those two always go hand in hand), has seen a steady decline in its CPMs over the past few years. This is why the largest video streaming site, YouTube, isn’t yet profitable.

I’m all for pressuring Nielsen so that they either improve or are done away with completely. But… as the saying goes, “you better be careful what you wish for”.

On the other hand, I also believe that there will soon be a tipping point where people forego the old mediums (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio) and the majority of our media consumption will come from online. At that point, I believe advertising rates will see a rise again.

/rant

{ 0 comments }

The Digital Curriculum: A Few Glimpses

August 13, 2009

Photo Via: My New Raincoat

I was extremely glad to see this post on TechCrunch the other day about The New Media School. The school is an online offering for people and businesses who want to learn about the new digital economy from some of the influencers within the industry itself.

Higher-education, brick and mortar, institutions have been too slow to embrace and educate students on the changes that have swept advertising, communications, management, science, and practically every other discipline out there. In a previous post, about finding a job in the digital industry, I mentioned that one reason for the lack of progress might be due to the lack of a market for professors with the background and expertise in this field. It’s no surprise, that the first group of experts lending a hand would appear online rather in lecture halls.

As much as my undergraduate program helped ready me for a career in marketing it skimped on the swooping effects that the internet has brought over the past 15 years. Not once did I even hear the words page-impressions, visitors, CPM/CPC/PPC, revenue-shares, SEO/SEM, adservers, content management, business development, or social media.

I think NMS and a few small programs across the country will soon put pressure on all institutions to include the web as part of their curriculum. At least I hope they do.

{ 0 comments }

What Facebook Local Could Look Like

August 11, 2009

Facebook is going local, well at least its advertising revenue is. According to a recent report by Borrell Associates, 74% of Facebook’s advertising comes from local businesses. That’s a great statistic but one that makes me want to ask so many questions.

Where are the local features?

If most of Facebook’s revenue is coming in from local businesses than how come there aren’t many, if any, local features? Restaurant listings, menus, ratings and reviews seem like a perfect fit. Concerts and events are an easy next step and go hand in hand with a strong revenue opportunity via affiliate advertising. Hyper local news and information would also be welcomed and I would argue that aggregation would be a great method to provide it. The features could go on but I think small business listings and reviews, local events, and local news/information are the three key places to start.

How do you build a local salesforce across the nation?

If Facebook were to build a more localized platform it might find it difficult to assemble a sales force that could educate small businesses in each market. One solution can actually be found on the college campuses where Facebook got its start. You might recall that Facebook began as a social network for college students and quite quickly had a great footprint on almost every university campus across the nation.

College campuses are an ideal location to start local advertising. I remember my campus at Rutgers University essentially was the entire town of New Brunswick, NJ and every small business within it somehow made an attempt to cater to the college students.

So, start a sales force with the same students that turned Facebook into a household name by picking out a handful of bright kids, arm them with sales material, let them loose on local business owners, and allow them to gain real experience while earning either a cut of each sale or a fixed fee.

Photo via Flickr: Gernot Poetsch

This might sound like a crazy idea but there is a small company south of Facebook called Apple that actually supports this exact approach. The Apple Campus Representative program assembles a group of die hard fanboys/girls at campuses across the nation, hands them the latest Macbooks and iPods, and makes the responsible for events and demonstrations at student centers and other key locations to encourage other students to buy Mac.

Does Facebook need better allies?

During the last Presidential race, Facebook proved its value and ability to influence and disseminate campaign information. It was a big step for social networking and even CNN caught the bug by collaborating with Facebook to provide over 27 million viewers the chance to stream President Obama’s inauguration speech with their friends’ status updates streaming along side.

I think it’s time for Facebook to work with governments to develop some clever features and services that inform, improve, and simplify each and every one of our lives. We’re becoming smarter more socially aware citizens and it’s time for social networking to grow up a little too. Neighborhood watch groups, virtual town halls, event registration and information, town alerts… the list could go on and on.

Oh and while you’re working with governments to enhance the platform I’d take a close look at the massive education institutions whose students flocked to you and see if they need help as well. You created fan pages, news feeds, and Christian singles ads when you could have worked on classrooms, collaborative tools, and promoted worthy organizations and causes instead. Thanks alot.

What gives?

Local is an extremely strong and untapped market for all internet companies to start paying more attention to. Over the past few months, I’ve met with many smart companies like Outside.in and Hapnin that are working on ways to provide local news and information in a smarter more accessible platform. I think Facebook has and has had the opportunity to be a big part of the local movement on the web. I hope they jump onboard soon but if they don’t that’s ok too, someone else will.

So what do you think? Am I completely out of my mind for suggesting this approach for Facebook? Should Facebook go down the local route? Or maybe by some stroke of luck you might actually agree with me. I’d love to hear your thoughts either way.

{ 9 comments }

The Problem With “Best Practices”

July 29, 2009

They only bring you up to par – but today par is not good enough. You need a birdie, dammit you need an eagle, and you can only dream of a hole in one.

This life moves too fast for yesterday’s best practices to apply today and pay off tomorrow. Ignore the white papers, look for the trends, and use your head.

{ 5 comments }

Thoughts on the New Twitter Homepage

July 29, 2009

Twitter, Homepage

It’s no surprise that Twitter’s extreme growth mixed with its difficulties with user retention has brought about the need for a few changes. Recent changes include exposing twitter trends and search, quicker navigation to past tweets, and a new follower screen. Much of these changes come from the direct influence of Google’s ex Visual Design Lead, Doug Bowman (@stop), who joined the Twitter team in late March of 2009. Bowman & Co.’s latest project went live an hour ago with a freshly launched new Twitter homepage.

For those of us familiar with Twitter, and all the applications to access it, we rarely see Twitter’s homepage but for 99% of the people who aren’t tweeting yet it’s a very important entry point. It is responsible for the first impression and what may ultimately determine whether a user signs up or scurries along back to Facebook.

More Sophisticated
The new homepage shows a more sophisticated Twitter and strays away from the “playful” design of the past. The bird is smaller, the colors toned down a little bit, and the lines much cleaner. I’m a fan.

Explaining Twitter
One of the funny things about Twitter is that for the most part, save for hashtags and the various shortcuts for replies and messages, the service is extremely easy to explain. You have 140 characters including spaces to share your location, thoughts, a link, or reply to someone else’s location, thoughts, and links.

However, anyone who has a friend who loves Facebook and just doesn’t see the point in Twitter will know that it’s more difficult to explain the benefits of Twitter than how it actually works. This problem is directly related to the visitor loyalty rate being low relative to other platforms. The new design attacks this significant problem with the tag line, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”. Why they left out a period at the end of this sentence is a little strange but the message is clear, Twitter is how you find out what’s going on.

Criticisms? Not yet, no.
I was going to criticize some of the UX elements of the page but I’ve actually noticed that since launching less than an hour ago they already have made some significant changes.

Twitter New Homepage

If you look at the first image in my post you’ll notice that there are two places to sign up or join now, signified by the green button. On first glance I thought this was a bit redundant even if not too confusing… my second screenshot shows that they removed that feature pretty quickly.

If you clicked on the “Sign In” button an hour ago it took you to the old login page but that too has now been updated with a drop-down form with fields to login directly.

Also, although taglines are a nice effort to explain the benefit of Twitter showing tangible benefits is a much more powerful way to say, “Hey sign-up already!” In my second screenshot you’ll see that the top trends by hour, day, week were omitted from the first relaunch (again less than an hour ago).

So I’ll keep any other criticism to myself right now and give the folks over at Twitter like @stop time to do what they do best… keep it simple.

What are your thoughts? Do you prefer the old landing page compared to the new one? Do you even see the homepage on a daily basis?

{ 0 comments }

Do Something

July 27, 2009

The quarter life crisis is real, it’s not a fad, it’s not an excuse, it simply is something that we all plow through. We all got out of college and we all chose a path; some of us continued with school, some of us sat at home, some of us entered the workforce, and some of us set out to create something of our own.

I’ve spent the last few weeks being very quiet in my blogging to ask myself a number of questions. What do I want to blog about? What do I really want to do with the next 40 years of my life? What ideas should I work on more? What are the areas I need to improve on.

While asking myself many of the bigger questions we all have, I came across one question that really was a breakthrough.

Who are the ones that command respect and who are the ones simply demanding it?

By asking myself this question I realized that most people in the blogosphere, the twitosphere, the web-o-sphere, and all other spheres fall into one of these two buckets. There are the people out there pouring themselves into their work and their projects in an attempt to create something. These are the commanders of the world. Then there are people commenting from the sidelines, being critical of those who aren’t quite there yet or even worse “fluffing the pillows” of those who managed to make it. These are the demanders. I don’t know if one is necessarily better than the other but I do know which bucket I want to fall in.

Let’s do something and let the others talk about it.

{ 8 comments }

The (Little) Things I Hate About The iPhone

July 13, 2009

I’ve had an iPhone 3Gs for a few weeks now and absolutely love it. It has increased my productivity immensely and made the miserable experiences I’ve had with phones, both smart and well non-smart, all but forgotten. In fact, I’m writing this post using the wordpress application and have one for Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other of my networking needs (desires).

However, the iPhone is far from perfect and I thought I’d share a few pesky nuances here to see if anyone has any solutions, shared my gripe, or merely felt pity for my geeky self. This is my first iPhone so maybe others have had the same complaints, but then again maybe they haven’t.

Organizing Icons and Pages
I like to keep different pages of applications for different reasons. For example, my homescreen has my main utilities as well as social networking and blogging needs while I have seperate ones for news, games, and misc. apps like yelp. The iPhone makes it difficult to rearrange the order of pages without manually moving each app individually. Which also shows the need to move multiple icons easier.

iPhone, Apple, icons, moving

The Camera
There are a few things that I simply don’t understand about the camera functionality, for example, why aren’t PhotoBooth effects built into the iPhone? More importantly, why separate the ‘Camera’ and ‘Photos’ application? It seems quite redundant and I think combining the two intuitively is not that unfeasible since you can get to your photos via the ‘Camera’ app regardless.

Although taking photos in either landscape or protrait mode is perfectly fine, taking video is not. Taking a video in portrait mode seems quite silly given that it will leave two black bars or cut off the top and bottom of any video when played on your average widescreen TV or monitor. If you can think of a practical use of a portrait video then let me know.

Speaker and Headphones
I’ve always hated Apple headphones and unfortunately no improvements have been made in this department. My hands continuously reach up to keep the buds in my ears while walking around the city making me look like a CIA agent with an earpiece. The sound quality isn’t the best but it’s not awful if you are lucky enough to get the buds in properly. ~~The remote that comes dangling on the headphones is also pretty lousy. Sure, volume control and play/pause work fine but what about next/previous track!~~ Update: Just found out that two clicks is next track, three clicks is previous. Yes, I am an idiot.

iPhone, Apple, Headphones, Control

The iPhone’s speakerphone could definitely be louder but what bothers me more is its positioning. While holding the iPhone in widescreen/landscape mode, especially needed when playing most games, my right hand has the tendency to cover the speakerphone which literally makes it inaudible. I don’t know where else Jonathan Ive could have placed the speaker and maybe this was the best compromise but it’s still not ideal.

Texting
The other day my girlfriend texted me asking me a simple question, “When will I be picking her up?”. The answer was obviously not simple and could not be restricted to 160 characters. Also, I was driving at the time and didn’t want to text and drive which is more dangerous than talking in my opinion. So I tried tapping her name furiously to call her but nothing happened. Instead, I pressed home, went to ‘Phone’, clicked on ‘Favorites’, and tapped her name. I used to have a Samsung phone that simply let me press the call button while looking at a text to dial the person – a feature that I really hope is incorporated in the iPhone soon.

More Little Things

Shake to Shuffle is one of the stupidest features ever. Not only did it take me a few days to realize why my songs were changing while running down the subway steps but if I were to actually use it as intended an accident is guaranteed. Think Wii remote in LCD TV size accident.
Shake to Undo is quite strange too but I couldn’t come up with a better alternative.
Depending on which way you turn the iPhone to go into landscape mode the volume buttons on the side should correspond accordingly instead of being fixed.
Battery life is really a waking days worth of about 14 to 16 hours depending on your use. This probably isn’t Apple’s fault entirely – they simply built a device that makes you want to do ALOT of browsing, downloading, streaming, playing, listening, watching, typing, tapping, and other things that drain modern batteries.
I still have no idea why I can’t create or edit playlists directly on the iPhone.

{ 5 comments }

Advice On Choosing a Major

July 9, 2009

I made a big mistake. As a highschool student I knew that I wanted to be a marketer. I wasn’t a fan of medicine, science, law, and I even knew that I didn’t want to do finance or accounting. Marketing felt like a natural choice to me because it seemed to be the perfect balance of business savvy and creativity so choosing it as a major seemed like a no brainer. I then went on to take four years of courses on advertising, research, statistics, and held a number of great marketing internships. Today, two years after my graduation, I realize that my decision to major in marketing was a mistake.

Marketing came naturally to me. I had always been fascinated with molding a brands message. I would see ads on TV and instantly come up with criticisms and think of ways to make them more effective. The Internet was another area that I was extremely comfortable with and I felt this intrinsic knowledge of which sites were working and which were simply poor imitations or shots in the dark. I had a sense for navigation and UI and could easily flip the switch from talking to geeky coders to everyday users. I did very well in college and graduated with top honors in my class. Looking back now I see that success was actually a sign of a problem. Although I worked hard for my grades it may have also been that I was simply good at that subject and not challenging myself enough. I was a born marketer and didn’t need to study it – what I lacked were tangible skills to supplement my marketing skills.

My mistake was choosing to focus on something that I was good at, and could probably perfect through experience rather than textbooks, instead of honing skills that could reinforce and supplement my core passion. In retrospect, I should have studied computer science or even graphic design – I was interested in both before college as well. If you’re reading this and are in a position to start your studies fresh I suggest you take a good look at what you know you’re good at and then focus on everything else. Aspire to be a one-man powerhouse not a one-trick-pony in what ever profession you choose.

I Blame The System

Some colleges and universities are very good at allowing you the freedom and flexibility to cover different topics as you work towards graduation. Mine was not and many others simply fail to create a curriculum tailored around student interests. Instead there are asinine rules in place that waste everyone’s time, energy, and motivation. Especially motivation. Most of this wastage comes in the form of required electives like two courses in the sciences and three in liberal arts. I remember taking a class on dinosaurs one semester because I had no interest in learning physics or chemistry further than a highschool level. My time spent learning about the Mesozoic Era would have been better spent in an intro to typography or photoshop class. Steve Jobs once said that after he dropped out of college he was able to drop-in on the classes he was interested in. It was in a calligraphy class that he snuck into where he gained respect for typesetting which he eventually applied to Apple’s first operating system.

The education system is flawed and so is recruitment. These rules and exams all trickle up to companies who simply don’t know how to find the best candidates for each position without relying on standards that were based on the aformentioned asinine practices. It’s a real shame.