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February 28, 2009
Rocky Mountain News' final publisher, John Temple, broke down the challenges the newspaper was dealing with before finally closing its doors yesterday. 1. Even with subscription costs below national averages, they couldn't retain subscribers. 2. Advertisers kept leaving. Especially in...
October 16, 2008
I continue to be surprised at how many journalists continue to struggle with web publishing. Here are 25 must-knows for people publishing content to the web in 2008: 1. How to create a link. Both using a WYSIWYG publisher and...
July 5, 2008
Steve Rubel has some interesting thoughts today on whether today's eco-conciousness, which is partly driven by rising gas prices, may make people reconsider whether they really need a print newspaper delivered to their door every day. Put that together with...
June 5, 2008
The site is a community based news site where anyone can write about anything that interests them. It also has a wiki-style component so people can add additional information to stories or correct facts as new info comes to light....
March 26, 2008
Eric Alterman has penned an impressively thorough look at the state of the newspaper industry for the New Yorker, where he explains everything that's hurting newspapers, including the web. The following snippet illustrates one of the biggest challenges I have...
March 18, 2008
What is the biggest difference between web copy and print copy? Hyperlinks: What is Web Copy and How Should I Use It? Offline copy (like a billboard) isn't interactive. Web copy (like what you read on this blog) is. Web...
March 6, 2008
Because their experience with the web to date has been horrible. Scott Karp's recent post, The Only Way For Journalists To Understand The Web Is To Use It, brings to light a problem that I hadn't thought about before: If...
February 26, 2008
Last night in St Paul, Minnesota, a group of local bloggers and members of the mainstream media got together to discuss ethics in new media. The event (considering it was in Minnesota on a Monday night) was heavily covered online...
February 25, 2008
Presidential Watch 08 has a fascinating map that illustrates how online political sites interact with each other. The blue and red dots represent the left and right sides of American politics while the yellow dots represent mass media outlets including...
February 20, 2008
The Tribune Company's new owner, Sam Zell, addressed the Chicago staff about his dislike of approval signatures, the need to be more creative, try more things, fail more often, but learn from mistakes among other topics in this hour long...
February 12, 2008
Here is a common scenario among bloggers who write about their local communities: they have a variety of news sources to choose from when they're citing a local story. For example, in Minneapolis we have two large local daily newspapers,...
January 30, 2008
When was the last time you: 1. Watched a friend buy a newspaper so he could browse the classifieds? 2. Heard a land-line phone ring at a friend's house? 3. Heard a dial-up modem connect? 4. Watched someone go to...
January 23, 2008
Anyone who've following the evolution of Google Maps Mashups for a while is probably familiar with the first one to really prove what could be done with the technology: Chicago Crime. The man behind that site, Adrian Holovaty, has since...
January 16, 2008
All technology eventually dies. It doesn't happen overnight, but eventually a smaller, faster, or more powerful version comes along that does a better job solving the same problem. One piece of dying tech that caught me by surprise with...
January 13, 2008
Take a look at the front page of the Sunday, Jan 13 2008 edition of the Minneapolis StarTribune. This shot comes from the eEdition, which is an electronic version with a print layout. Lead Story: Two 80-year-old's got married....
November 29, 2007
Alex Iskold penned a post the on Read/Write Web about the revenue potential of blogs in the long tail, aka blogs with little traffic. He's found a correlation between how much traffic a blog gets and how much money it...
October 31, 2007
Minnesota Public Radio took a look at the comment moderation policies used at newspapers throughout the state of Minnesota and reported on the challenged faced by providing a forum for readers. Policies ranged from not allowing comments on one extreme...
September 18, 2007
In April 2006, I theorized that the columnists at the NY Times would push the Times drop the paid version because Select was hurting both the influence and secondary sales of columnist's book sales and speaking rates. While I'm still...
September 11, 2007
Erica M from Minneapolis Metroblogging raises an interesting point about the stupidity of offering social bookmarking options for readers on sites where bookmarked content will soon be hidden behind paid archives: Not-So-Permalinks Can somebody explain to me the point of...
August 18, 2007
I've been trying to figure out why newspapers don't make more money online, and think I stumbled across one reason that's so obvious I previously overlooked it. It's summarized well in one sentence on the Minneapolis StarTribune's advertising information page:...
August 14, 2007
I mentioned earlier this week that hyperlocal has more to do with advertising than content but didn't really explain how this can be accomplished. Luckily for me, Chris Silver Smith penned a post over at Search Engine Land that covered...
August 12, 2007
It was great to hear earlier this week that the NY Times is considering killing their Select premium program by providing open access to their top columnists. This is something I've written about before. My concern with the Select program...
August 9, 2007
It's not about hyperlocal news. It's about hyperlocal ads. Newspapers have yet to figure out how to serve relevant ads to truly hyperlocal audiences. For example, there is a family owned Mexican restaurant near my house that makes great burritos....
July 20, 2007
Howard Owns has a great post on Eight historical mistakes the newspaper industry made where he goes over newspaper's slow adoption of blogging, online communities, leveraging local blogger's talents, winning the car and real estate market, and becoming better community...
July 17, 2007
National efforts at hyperlocal media seem to consistently face the same challenge: how to find hyperlocal advertiser willing to pay enough to support the content with a few bucks left over for profit. Unfortunately, this has been a challenge for...
July 10, 2007
I recently had a chance to sit down with an editor from a local newspaper site - not a major daily, but something closer to a free weekly that ends up on your doorstep - to discuss their web strategies....
April 30, 2007
On the drive from Minneapolis to Fort Wayne, IN today, I had a short discussion with Jeremy where we discussed the declining circulation numbers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the largest daily newspaper in Minnesota. When I look at large...
March 2, 2007
The first sentence of Jeff Jarvis' post about the BBC's deal with YouTube reminded me of something: The embargo just came off a BBC announcement that they’re putting video on YouTube to reach more audience, worldwide. It reminded me that...
February 17, 2007
Welcome, Pioneer Press readers. Thanks for stopping by. For those of you not coming from the Pioneer Press this morning, Technology Evangelist was profiled in the business section today. I believe registration is required, but maybe you'll get lucky. I'd...
February 8, 2007
The Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper ran a story on the front page of startribune.com with the following headline and excerpt: Robber steals student's iPod "An armed robber stole an iPod from an Asian-languages and literature senior from the University...
January 13, 2007
The folks over at PR Web contacted us earlier this week about doing a podcast regarding "Instant Journalism" as demonstrated by the Technology Evangelist team at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Mario from PR Web had a five...
Continue reading "CES 2007 Instant Journalism Podcast" »
October 20, 2006
What's the deal with NBC Universal's new 2.0 strategy? First thing: nice job coming up with such positive spin on layoffs. $750,000,000 in cuts correlates with a lot of layoffs, but this isn't about that. It's about "reallocating resources." Apparently,...
October 17, 2006
The Technology Evangelist team recently had a chance to sit down with Nicholas Reville from the Participatory Culture Foundation, creators of Democracy Player. In the first of this three part series we get the basics behin the Democracy Platform and how it got started.
Continue reading "The Innovators - Nicholas Reville of The Participatory Culture Foundation" »
June 7, 2006
Steve Rubel posted a couple theories on his blog yesterday in response to a report by the Online Publisher's Association reporting that:
May 24, 2006
I first heard about Blogburst when Frank Gruber mentioned it on his site in February, and immediately signed up. Blogburst, a division of the feed reader company, Pluck, syndicates blog content to news sites. Bloggers register their sites with the service and news sites then pick blogs to syndicate as additional content on their sites.
May 2, 2006
The Macintosh rumor site MacOSRumors.com is reporting that the next version of Mac OS X will employ a BitTorrent driven iTunes. The story is probably buried under online advertising, so you’ll have to work to read it… You know, close the pop-up window, now close the hover window, and it’s next to the 10 Google ads. Hmmm, knowing them it’s probably under 3 more pop up advertisements.
This is just a rumor and Apple rumors are rarely correct, but this particular item is very interesting and near and dear to me. At Technology Evangelist we have dabbled in distributing high definition videos online via bit torrent and have even highlighted a key application called Democracy Player. Lets make the assumption that this rumor is true (just go with it for now) and that Apple will be releasing a torrent engine in the Mac OS X 10.5 version of iTunes. What does this mean and why?
April 25, 2006
Let's face it: Even the best columnists at the New York Times bat somewhere around the Mendoza Line when it comes to delivering newsworthy or thought provoking columns. It's simply impossible to write something remarkable in every column.
April 16, 2006
I've written recent posts explaining how newspapers hurt themselves when they lock their paper's online archives. It limits the traffic and thus revenue generated by their site, and limits the exposure and influence of their columnists.
April 14, 2006
Yesterday, I wrote about the significant web traffic costs of locking newspaper archives. To summarize, locking content keeps people from linking to it and search engines from indexing it, eliminating millions of entry pages to the site and the ad revenue that would come with it.
April 13, 2006
The New York Times ran a story on April 9th by Steve Lohr titled "This Boring Headline is Written for Google" about newspapers altering their article's headline copy to make them more search engine friendly. The story explains that search engines like Google use the terms within headlines to help determine the topic of a given web page, so creating a headline that's keyword rich rather than a creative play on words could generate additional visitors to the article through search engines.
March 16, 2006
Yesterday I posted on Democracy player, and right now it's Technology Evangelist's preferred player for techies. As we stated, it's a wee bit buggy and not for everyone yet, so how can you watch our HDTV content if you're not an uber-geek?
March 15, 2006
I ran across an application recently that will change the world. I see massive media networks like NBC, CBC, BBC and others all stand by and watch as their business models are blown to bits. Everything we know about television, radio and media in general will be re-imagined. As Jeff Jarvis recently posted quoting Rupert Murdoch, "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it." I'm throwing my hat in the ring and screaming to the world "it’s time, the revolution is here!" So what is this hot app? What will change the world?? What could make such a huge dent in the traditional media universe??? It’s simple -- Democracy.
March 9, 2006
(Via CityPages Blotter) The StarTribune, Minnesota's largest daily newspaper, has decided to stop providing free paper copies of their newspaper to their employees.
In other news, celebratory music was detected emanating from Minnesota's remaining forests.
March 4, 2006
As I complete the editing of our next episode of "The Innovators" I thought it would be fun to mention some of the nifty little things that we do inside of each video as it's posted. Since the next video will have a lot of URLs in it, I think you'll find these tips handy. Please note that the following applies to our "Watch Now" clip only and not to the clips you would download via iTunes or any other RSS feed we may have.
Progressive Start
Our Watch Now clip is authored in such a way that it should start playing immediately if you have a 1Mbps or greater connection to our server. This means no buffering time, no waiting, nothing. If you only have a 56k connection or slower broadband connection to the net, that's OK, you'll just have to wait a bit longer. Unlike traditional streaming media, you'll still be able to watch in full quality no matter what your connection speed.
Chapter Marks
In the lower right hand corner of the player you'll see a nifty drop down with a title in it. This drop down lists the chapters that are available for playback. If you have not yet downloaded a chapter yet, it will not show up in this list, only items you're able to view will be in here. This is nice if you want to jump to a specific point in the video.
URL banners
You may have noticed that we place the URL of different web sites in the video feed. Not only are they handy to reference, but they are clickable too. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Apple decided to not change your cursor to a pointing hand when you're hovering over a link, so the only way to know that you can click on it is if I tell you. Well, any time you see a black bar with a URL in it, you can click on it (and sometimes you can click on the name banners too).
Full Screen
I'll be posting an experimental full-screen mode for users that don't have QuickTime Pro. Once again Apple baffles the mind and decided to not allow full-screen playback unless the viewer purchases QuickTime Pro, or if the author puts special tags in their media to force the player full screen. Needless to say, we'll have the special tags. I'll be doing this with the 480p content, so make sure your box is able to play 480p h.264 video, otherwise it may stutter a bit.
Syndication
You can view any of our HD feeds right inside of your favorite video syndication software, such as Apple iTunes. Simply browse for our feeds directly in iTunes, or subscribe to our feed manually from this page. We offer feeds in 480p, 720p, 1080p, Video iPod, Sony PSP, MP3 and AAC formats. We'll even be posting torrent feeds soon giving you access to the all new Democracy Player.
I'm about done editing our next episode, but as I have mentioned before it takes a very long time to compress the content. As soon as I have a majority of the video ready, I'll post her online to help curb your HD addiction. Hope everyone enjoys these nifty tips!
March 3, 2006
We have covered distributing HD on the Internet and some of the challenges there, now lets cover actually acquiring HD for online distribution. The following is a list of equipment I am proposing for purchase by Technology Evangelist. Nothing is set in stone, so we may go down a completely different path, but the list below seems pretty darn good if you're in the market to acquire content in HD.
March 2, 2006
I have had MANY comments asking why we chose QuickTime to distribute "The Innovators" when we could have used Flash, Windows Media, etc. I have also had a few questions on why we chose HDV to shoot in as opposed to DVCPRO HD and whatnot. Lets start first with the equipment.
March 1, 2006
Posting the first episode of The Innovators with Derek Franklin proved to be nothing short of a huge challenge... Let me start at the beginning and go from there
February 21, 2006
I had a chance tonight to take a step back to look at how I was using RSS (through Bloglines) to aggregate news sources and came to an interesting conclusion: I prefer secondary news sources. What does that mean?
February 16, 2006
Microsoft?ǨѢs Xbox 360 and Sony?ǨѢs Playstation 3 are about more than just games. A lot more. I just recently got my Xbox 360 and have been playing around with some fun stuff involving media downloads. This whole experience makes me think about the future of television.
February 11, 2006
This week marked the end of Rocketboom's Ebay auction for a week's worth of end-roll advertising. The auction started at $500 on January 30th, climbed to $7,500 within two days, stalled at $14,999.99 on February 2nd for six days, then spiked near the auction end to close at a whopping $40,000.
February 10, 2006
Time to evangelize a bit and correct some mistakes from the original Panasonic HVX200 review.
February 8, 2006
We at Technology Evangelist have been trying to decide on what HD camera to buy. Do we go with a pro grade format such as DVCPRO HD, HDCam or D5 HD (uh, probably not D5 HD), do we go with a consumer grade format such as HDV or one of those nifty cameras that records direct to MPEG 4 HD?
February 1, 2006
Rocketboom, the tremendously popular daily videoblog starring Amanda Congdon, has decided to accept advertising within their daily news stories. They report on a wide range of topics, from news to culture. They are conducting an Ebay auction for their first week's commercials -- bids have already exceeded $10,000 with more than seven days to go!
January 7, 2006
The show keeps getting better and better. This is the second day of the 2006 Consumer Electronics show, and with it our second video update is now available. We have interesting conversations with Sanyo on their 720p handheld cameracorder, talk...
December 3, 2005
I'm not a big "technology for technology's sake" kinda guy. The biggest benefits of using technology is the convenience it brings to my life. At Technology Evangelist, we have a lot of online and offline conversations (yes, we actually talk...
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