Recorded from the Sportaccord Denver 2009, Dick Ebersol shares his thoughts as: The Network is the Message… Sport As a Mainstream Entertainment.
He is one of, if not the most notable in the sports broadcasting and entertainment industry.
Enjoy!
Shared by Erik
Chris Pirillo at WordCamp 09 San Francisco. Great talk about Community. The vid is relatively long ~30 mins, but there is a synonpsis that follows. Interesting and entertaining to watch a self-labeled ‘geek’ communicate effectively. I think one of the reasons for this is that he is passionate beyond most.
Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp. My topic was “Community is already there, inside everyone”. This is something that I am passionate about. Much of my life is devoted to my community, and to the communities of others I choose to interact with.
I have been online for so many years, that I remember when the “Internet” as we know it now began. Seeing an old friend in the audience made me realize that that is what community is all about – getting to know people. The Internet is not so much a series of cables and wires as it is a connection between people.
I remember the first time I sat down in front of a computer to email someone, back in 1992. I sent an email to a person sitting not ten feet away from me. I knew at that moment that my life had just changed forever. It thrills me every day to wake up and check my email. It’s the connections that I make with people from all around the world that still amazes me to this day.
Community is already inside of you. There’s this idea of a Venn diagram out there. These are diagrams that show all hypothetically possible logical relations between a finite collection of people or things. You have these circles, and in between they cross over. I like coffee, and I also live in Seattle. And there are other people who also live in Seattle and like coffee. I also use Mac OS X. How many other people have these same interests?
At that point where everything kind of crosses over is where you find me. It’s who and what I am. I am this person – a walking Venn diagram. We all are. We’re multi-faceted. You carry these things wherever you go. That is community. It’s inside of you, and that’s why you can go from one website to a million others. It’s the experience that it helps you have.
It really bothers me when someone approaches me and informs me that they are going to create a new community, and it’s going to go “viral”. Do they really think all of this will just happen?! It doesn’t work that way, sorry to tell them.
Back in the day, I would connect with people using newsgroups and BBS’. I subscribed to lists of things to do online. It was a piece of text that was the definitive resource of what you could do on the Internet. You could only go to certain places to be able to communicate back then. It’s not that way anymore. Instead of community existing in one little pocket – it’s everywhere!
Community requires tools that can’t be built. It kills me when someone says they built a blog and no one came. Well duh! A blog is just a tool… and if you think a blog is a community, then you too are a tool! Community exists in one place – in your heart. Without that, what is community. Without passion, without connections, without a feeling of belonging – what is there? You cannot build heart. It’s either there, or it’s not. You know you have a community when it takes care of its own.
Without heart, it’s just a set of tools. Anyone can go out right now and set up a website with any number of features. There are tons of tools out there. It’s not the topic or idea that makes what you do valuable – it never is. The tools are a commodity – but you are not. You’re unique. You have your own set of morals, ideals and beliefs. You have your own heart. YOU are the asset to the community you are in, not the other way around.
A community grows its own leaders. The strong voices will be the ones who emerge as the leaders of what you are growing. Even if you don’t agree with them at all times, encourage them. Use your voice and exercise it. Make those connections. Before you know it, you’ll be a leader of sorts, whether you set out to be or not.
Community is the antithesis of ego. Community is inside of you – but it’s not about you. It’s about other’s experiences with you. The strongest voices inside of a community are devoid of ego. The first thing on their mind isn’t themselves.
Community is everywhere, and it starts inside of you.
Shared by Erik
This extends far beyond the reach of positioning. It exemplifies the new age definition of information as a function. News strives for circulation, whilst, meaning, analysis and insight drive valuable attention. The rest follows-
Dear Newspaper Magnates,
So you’re going to try and charge people for news yet again. Cart, meet horse.
Journalists didn’t make 20th century newspapers profitable — readers did. 20th century newspapers were never supernormally profitable because of what they wrote: it was the natural monopoly dynamics of classifieds that fueled massive margins.
In the 21st century, it’s time, again for newspapers to learn how to profit with stakeholders — instead of extracting profits from them. The 21st century’s great challenge isn’t selling the same old “product” better: it’s learning to make radically better stuff in the first place. Here’s how to begin building 21st century newspapers.
20th century news isn’t fit for 21st century society. Yesterday’s approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It’s time for a better kind of news.
A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry’s nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche. (Here’s a nice, timely discussion of Nichepapers by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.)
Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it.
Nichepapers aren’t a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They’re a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to 21st century business. They’re not the same old newspaper, sold a different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules, that are letting radical innovators reinvent what “news” is.
Here are eight of the most essential:
Knowledge, not news. Newspapers strive to give people the news. Next stop, commodity central. Nichepapers strive to impart meaningful, lasting knowledge instead.
Commentage, not commentary. Newspapers dictate to their reader what news and opinion are. Nichepapers co-create knowledge through “commentage.” Commentage is the kid sister of reportage: it is the art of curating comments to have a dialogue with the audience — because the audience can fill gaps, plug holes, and thicken the foundations of knowledge. Many newspapers have comments — so what? Almost none are having a dialogue with commenters — who are mostly stuck in a twilight zone where they can only talk to one another. Nichepapers, in contrast, are always having deep dialogues with readers.
Topics, not articles. That’s why Nichepapers develop topics — instead of telling quickly-forgotten stories. When Talking Points Memo exposed the Bush administration’s series of politically motivated firings, it did so in a series of posts, that let the story develop, surface, thicken, and climax. Stories are for information — topics are for knowledge.
Scarcity, not circulation. Newspapers strive for circulation, by telling the same stories in the same ways — in slightly different places. Nichepapers strive for scarcity: to develop a perspective, analytical skills, and storytelling capabilities that are inimitable by rivals.
Now, not then. Newspapers give you the news then. Nichepapers give you knowledge now. Why have weekly columns and daily articles — that then get lost in the wilderness of a vast archive? It’s an arcane, obsolete way to produce content. Nichepapers develop topics of conversation, not individual stories, and let them co-evolve with readers.
Provocation, not perfection. Newspapers seek perfection: perfect grammar, perfect ledes, perfect headlines. Nichepapers seek provocation instead. Sometimes, yes, that provocation is mere titillation. But more often than not it’s authentic provcation: nichepapers provoke us to think; they challenge us; they educate us in ways that newspapers stopped doing long ago.
Snowballs, not sell-outs. Newspapers long ago sold out to advertisers, PR flaks, powerful “sources,” and lobbyists. When was the last time the WSJ bit the hand that fed it? Why is the Post’s editorial page so predictably tepid? Nichepapers haven’t sold out — and if their economic promise delivers, they won’t have to. They “sell in” instead: they pitch topics and stories to the community, and let the best ones snowball — through contributions like tips, criticisms, and corrections.
Tasks, not tech. Nichepapers aren’t about technology. They might use a blog post, vlog post, podcast, wiki, series of tweets, or a long-form article — or all of these, all at once. They are tech-neutral, using whatever works best for a given task.
Here are four models for Nichepapers that apply these rules in different ways. Each is named after an archetypal historical newspaper — because the key to reinvention is getting back to the basics of making better stuff:
The Sentry — Talking Points Memo. The incomparable TPM is the gold standard of a Nichepaper. It’s also a very specific kind: a sentry, always patrolling the political arena for malfeasance, misbehavior, and broken promises. By combining reportage, commentage, opinion, and muckraking, TPM delivers perhaps the most hard-hitting, most persistent, and most fearless investigative political journalism in America today.
The Chronicle — Perez Hilton. Perez Hilton is the first 21st century gossip columnist. He chronicles whatever’s lewd, crude, and most likely to be viewed in the entertainment world — in such excruciating detail, the result is a paradox: the lurid becomes banal. Yet, like TPM, Perez is unafraid to challenge the status quo, persistently, chronically, and often, funnily.
The Intelligencer — Business Insider. Henry Blodget used to be an equity analyst, so it’s no surprise that his latest venture, Business Insider, crosses the line from pure news into deeper analysis — intelligence. Though BI often gets it wrong (here’s Joe Weisenthal arguing that bribes create value, for example), the analysis is what counts: it gives readers more food for thought per word than News 1.0.
The Pioneer — The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is perhaps the classic Nichepaper — and what makes it different is that it’s always pioneering new ideas, concepts, stories, and angles. The HuffPo’s perspective is politically liberal — and that’s its domain. But it is the pioneering that makes the HuffPo different. And it’s open to pioneering new ideas from nearly anyone — as long as their ideas are good enough to matter.
Those rules and models above aren’t the only ones, or the best ones. They are avenues that radical innovators are already exploring to reconceive news for the 21st century. And they suggest what the endgame of news 2.0 looks like.
The 21st century news organization is a portfolio of the different kinds of nichepapers. An Intelligencer for healthcare, a Pioneer for education, a Chronicle for finance and entertainment — that’s what the future of news looks like. Why?
Nichepapers are the future of news because their economics are superior. All the Nichepapers above are “real” enterprises, with staff, offices, and fixed and variable costs. Nichepapers offer more bang for the buck: greater benefits for far less cost. Readers get more, better, and faster content — while publishers realize lower capital intensity, lower distribution, marketing, and production costs, and less risk. What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness.
And that’s really the point.
Profitability can’t be recaptured from a commodity. Newspapers used to be yesterday’s most profitable industry. Warren Buffett made his fortune by investing in newspapers, yesterday. Yet, today, business model innovation, aka “monetization,” is the surest, quickest path to self-destruction. Charging once more for the same old “content” — as argued for by David Simon, in an impassioned CJR article — will inevitably lead newspapers exactly where it led banks investment “banks” and automakers: into economic implosion.
To reinvent the buying and selling of news, it’s necessary first to reconceive the making of news. The AP’s latest attempt at business model innovation, for example, is a heavyweight “rights management” system for the same old stuff. But protecting yesterday’s “product” is exactly what prevented the music industry and Hollywood from rediscovering the art of value creation.
Nichepapers are, above all, “M” organizations. Today’s radical innovators are confronting the truth that, because it failed the fundamental test of being meaningful, yesterday’s news is, well, yesterday’s news.
Nichepapers, in contrast, do meaningful stuff that matters the most. The great failing of 20th century news is that monopoly power became a substitute for meaningful value creation. At root, that’s the lesson that newspapers are learning the hard way.
Love,
Umair and the Edge Economy Community
Shared by Erik
Interesting stuff. Could be very effective in SEO campaigning!
When you search on Google, how much information do you collect, on the way ? Especially for SEO research, how much data can you collect apart from backlinks / indexed pages and probably a few more metrics using an SEO plugin like Quakefox. But is that all you an do ?
I believed that’s all, until I found this guy – Serp Analytics.
Its an awesome service that lets you take your SEO research to new heights with pretty much no extra effort of documenting or doing things manually. It lets you do the normal search from the site (just as closely similar to Google) and the data pops up !
- Average CPC cost for the keyword you searched.
- Number of monthly searches for the keyword.
- Number of other queries containing this keyword (broad search).
- Position dynamics on the go – Shows you recent rank changes for the domains right next to them with red and green arrows.
- Google PR for the domain.
- Number of backlinks and indexed pages.
- Keyword highlights on the serps.
- Detailed position dynamics graph for the current site changeable by time.
It has certain limitations in features to countries outside the US though. Overall, a nice tool that I’m sure SEOs will use frequently. SERP Analytics
Do more than just search, get complete search analytics on the SERPs with SERP Analytics
Shared by Erik
Tech innovation… Leave it to Google and its subsidiaries… While YouTube was in the heat for monetization much like twitter, now they are toying with even more revolutionary tech: 3D web vids. Awesome!
Pretty neat: a YouTube engineer is playing around with the addition of 3D viewing capabilities to web videos on the insanely popular video destination site, reports Search Engine Roundtable. The news site’s Barry Schwartz discovered a recent thread on the YouTube help forum and found out an employee named Pete is experimenting with the 3D viewing feature on his 20% free fiddling time:
I’m the developer working on the stereoscopic player as a 20% project. It’s currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes. A fix for this is in the works.
The current tags are provisional and may change or expand. They are:
yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode. (obviously you’ve already discovered this)
yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships. Apologies for the inconvineince (sic).Your feedback and suggestions are welcome, but as this isn’t my primary project I can’t promise a speedy turnaround with improvements.
Pete
An example video can be found here.
(Image from SE Roundtable)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Powerful trend. Note: iPhone 3GS movement-
Yesterday, we published a story entitled IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On, which analyzes HTML 5, the future of the web, and the roadblock that Internet Explorer 6 poses to web innovation. While we thought people would agree with us, we couldn’t have ever imagined the overwhelming response of the social web. Apparently a lot of you just can’t stand the 8 year old browser.
Now one Twitter user, James Lynch (@lynchjames) has seized the momentum and taken matters into his own hands. Specifically, he has used Twibbon, a service that overlays a small icon onto your profile picture, to create a Twitter petition to rally support for ending the use of IE6. Now, the Twibbon petition is gaining steam, as nearly a dozen people a minute are adding a “No to IE6″ image to their profile pictures.
We are fans of user activism through social media – it’s widely believed that a Twititon for lowering the price of iPhone 3G S upgrades was central to AT&T caving to consumer and offering $199 iPhone 3G S mobiles to its unhappy userbase.
It’s clear that campaigns like the IE6 Must Die Petition can be effective at rallying support and awareness for a cause, although as we pointed out in our original article, the people that must be convinced aren’t the leadership at Microsoft, but the managers at outdated IT departments and the websites that still put significant resources toward IE6 support (hint to developers: charge more for IE6 support!).
In other words, don’t expect a Twitition to quickly fix this Internet-wide problem, but we definitely hope companies, websites, and media take notice.
Tags: IE6, internet explorer, Microsot, Twibbon, twitition, twitter
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Unbelievable! “buying a digital form of a book isn’t the same as ownership.” I’d like to see how this precedent becomes reinforced or the rights of property tell a different story.
Ever bought a book from Barnes and Noble, then turned around to find it missing from your bookshelf and replaced with a voucher? Bizarre though it may seem, that’s exactly what’s happened to hundreds of owners of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm books, with Amazon remotely deleting copies on user’s Kindles and crediting their accounts.
While this might be understandable if the copies were distributed illegally, the cause here appears to be a publisher which decided it simply didn’t want to offer a Kindle edition any more. Amazon’s response, as posted in the forums:
The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store
All of which underscores the fact that “buying” a book in the digital realm isn’t the same as “ownership” in the real world. As David Pogue at the NYTimes explains: “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.”
Or as one of Pogue’s readers describes it, “it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”
Shared by Erik
Excellent article adoring and respecting Mays for his success and humility, as well as his incredibly important marketing staples that should be incorporated today.
Billy Mays was the king of the As Seen on TV pitch. Mock him all you want, but there’s a lot in Mays’ legacy that can be used to mold an effective search campaign that builds your brand and drives action. …
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Clarification from Google Webmaster Central on the use of meta descriptions on page-
Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team
This is a great example of technology in action to help make the world a better place. Bill Gates was among the names of recent patents to utilize electromagnetics to influence our environment for the better.
Gates Patent Figure for Hurricane Prevention
There are a series of five patents related to this application covering the Bill Gate Hurricane Solution US Patents and Trademark Office.
Essentially, the patent aims to be used on large fleets and vessels to help suppress and even prevent hurricanes. The cross utilization of mixing colder depth water with warmer ocean water (that often fuels hurricanes) will robustly interrupt the catalysis of strengthening hurricanes.
The filings were made by Searete LLC, an entity tied to Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue-based patent and invention house run by Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft chief technology officer. Myhrvold and several others are listed along with Gates as inventors.
Vessel 100 is a tub-like structure having one or more walls 110 and a bottom 115. Vessel 100 may be held buoyant in the water by one or more buoyancy tanks 120 which may be used to maintain the buoyancy of vessel 100 and further may be used to control the height of walls 110 above the water level. Vessel 100 also includes a conduit 125 whose horizontal cross section is substantially smaller than the horizontal cross section of the tub portion 130 of the vessel defined by walls 110. In an exemplary embodiment, conduit 125 extends well below the ocean surface including depths below the ocean’s thermocline.
Hurricane-Patent-Gates-explanation
In most circumstances, most of the sunlight impinging on the ocean surface is absorbed in the surface layer. The surface layer therefore heats up. Wind and waves move water in this surface layer which distributes heat within it. The temperature may therefore be reasonably uniform to depths extending a few hundred feet down from the ocean surface. Below this mixed layer, however, the temperature decreases rapidly with depth, for example, as much as 20 degrees Celsius with an additional 150 m (500 ft) of depth. This area of rapid transition is called the thermocline. Below it, the temperature continues to decrease with depth, but far more gradually. In the Earth’s oceans, approximately 90% of the mass of water is below the thermocline. This deep ocean consists of layers of substantially equal density, being poorly mixed, and may be as cold as -2 to 3.degree. C.
Therefore, the lower depths of the ocean may be used as a huge heat/energy sink which may be exploited by vessel 100. When vessel 100 is deployed at sea, waves 135 may lap over the top of walls 110 to input warm (relative to deeper waters) surface ocean water into tub 130. Tub 130 will fill to a level 140 which is above the average ocean level depicted as level 145. Because of the difference between levels 140 and 145, a pressure head is created thereby pushing warm surface ocean water in a downward direction 150 down through conduit 125 to exit into the cold ocean depths (relative to near surface waters) through one or more openings 155. In an exemplary embodiment, the depth of opening 155 may be located below the ocean’s thermocline, the approximate bottom of which is depicted as line 160. This cycle will be continuous in bringing warm surface ocean water to great depth as ocean waves continue to input water into tub 130. If many of vessel 100 are distributed throughout a region of water, the temperature of the surface of the water may be altered.
