Business Week weighs in with a take on the flap between The Associated Press and the blogosphere with a clearly argued take on how big media might soon expect a chunk of small media if the little guys use the big guys' material.
The presence of software like Attributor (familiar to some of us in newsrooms) makes it rather simple to find out who is squeezing the grape once more on content generated elsewhere.
Is it only a matter of time before transactions occur for the use of content?
Patrick Goldstein's column in The Los Angeles Times, The Big Picture, has been a fixture for following the film industry. Now he's starting a blog, and his introductory column about the blog indicates how important it is now to be creating content all the time --- not just weekly.
"My guess is that someday our blogs will be the backbone of the paper," he wrote. He's likely not wrong. If the personalities of the newsroom can find their blog voices, there's no reason to doubt they'll be the engine of any digital newsroom.
While blog traffic is relatively small (frightfully so on the surface of it), it is growing and finding communities of interest. Goldstein will be a new fixture in this sphere.
Since its earlier warning to Drudge Retort, and since the pushback from the blogging community, little has been heard from The Associated Press about its demands that bloggers not crib its reports for their reports.
The closest anyone seems to be getting to an understanding of the situation in this media blackout is the New York Times, which has interviewed (and been refused interviews by) the interested parties in the dispute.
Essentially it appears The AP wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its reports (these also being significant traffic drivers because Google and other search engines tend to crawl the headlines and the first words more aggressively). The battle is, it seems, not just about fair use, but about the traffic those words can drive in search.
But it's also clear (in The AP's non-comment) that there is much more to come in this dispute. And, as goes The AP, so could go many other media.
Technorati Media is the latest addition to the blog advertising networks. The launch today is the latest in a smallish field of blog networks that reflect the real and loyal traffic in that sphere.
Advertising is sold on a CPM basis and the revenue split is seemingly negotiable. Using Technorati's technology should assist in targeting ads quite well, so the premiums for ad sales ought to be high --- at least, that's the theory.
Conventional media are by now used to blogs hauling in large parts of stories and using them as source material for postings. It's called the "fair use" provision, and frankly, without it all sorts of journalism big and small wouldn't be committed.
But a recent scuffle in the U.S. involving The Associated Press is an indication of some new testiness in this area. Last week The AP warned The Drudge Retort (not to be confused with The Drudge Report) that it was overstepping AP's copyright (in one case, by using 79 words) on seven of its posts.
The move sent a lot of bloggers into a new sphere of outrage and indignation, and this weekend The AP backed down (although it still wants the seven postings changed) and suggested it's going to get to work on a policy to govern the ground.
This is a significant move, in that it could start to establish boundaries upon which conventional organizations (and, they would hope, the courts) define the legal protection of their copyrighted material. In turn, that could create new guides for permissible use of content by others.
Business Week has taken a look back at its first major take on blogs three years ago and examined the new terrain. What a difference a thousand days makes.
All in all, a very good look at the contribution blogs make to the public sphere, albeit with their economic challenges.
The blogosphere is often called the Wild West, largely because the freedom to express is at times used as a licence to defame. Intellectual property is often swiped. And at their worst bloggers and posters assume immunity from the laws that ensure fair comment and intent. Like any irresponsible media, the worst of the bloggers give the great bloggers a bad reputation.
A new British poll has found some backing for a code of conduct for bloggers. (Which, of course, would be different than it is for some conventional, old-style media, which operates at times without a clear code.)
The poll found that nearly three-quarters of those who have posted comments were oblivious to their legal obligations --- hardly surprising, but important as a consideration, and perhaps indicative of the need to educate those who participate.
Among bloggers themselves, there was an even divide of opinion on the need for such a code. But among Internet users, there was a stronger belief in the need for one. That, too, isn't surprising: Conventional media have often been less concerned than the audience about standards and practices.
A code wouldn't shield anyone, but it would serve to inform creators.
We are far enough along into Web 2.0 that it ought to be adopting some of the familiar traits of conventional media --- as in circulation figures, readership figures, single-copy figures, overnight ratings, and the like. Ought to, as in starting to, not should be.
Sites themselves are judged by their unique visitors, by the number of pages those visitors view, and by the time they spend there. And it's relatively easy to translate that data into a popularity rating for particular online creators (such ratings are far less precise for either print or broadcast media).
Recently a Gawker site memo surfaced that indicated it gave bonuses depending on page views. Even though the site acknowledged that such measurement is crude and often distorted, it paid more or less to writers whose works were better or lesser read. Essentially, for every 400,000 views, you got $2,000 --- or $5 per 1,000 views, more likely.
PBS' Mark Glaser recently chimed in with an interview with CBSSports.com and how it values loyalty more than anything else. It's at work with Omniture, the company with the powerful Site Catalyst software, to find out how many unique visitors look at individual writers' work. Glaser also suggests organizations should want to gauge interaction with the audience, how much news is broken,
This debate is at an early stage, but somehow in the new environment of fledgling digital business models, something empirical is likely to replace the more subjective determinant of what someone's work is worth.
The Center for Media Research has caught up to some BIGResearch data from February on who is blogging, and while the data is getting a little stale (as these things do about every week or two), its analysis is worth examining.
They're younger, more Democrat than Republican, more African-American and Hispanic than not, and more often male than female. They're a little lower-incomed and higher-educated. Even though they're content creators, they lean on articles and other sources for their posts.
What's more to the point is that bloggers seem to be everyone. The data suggests some 26 per cent of adults say they blog. Well, that's a figure I'd be a little suspicious about, but at even half that level, it's a general function and no longer a niche. The center's analysis is here.
Embedding links in stories is a years-old practice for many news media, but the problem is that it usually takes a user off the site to never return. It's as if someone reading the sidebar to a main story in the newspaper put the paper down and left the rest of it unread.
The Washington Post is starting to tinker with that. It'll put links on its stories that can display whatever is at the destination when the cursor rolls over the link, and inside or adjacent to that preview box will be a paid ad.
The Post is introducing this through two of its blogs, The Fix and Celebritology, and is using Apture as the technical supplier. But it's an experiment many will watch.
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