Somehow this sort of thing, which I see everywhere, doesn’t entirely work for me. Maybe I’m fussy.

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So what’s the plan with these sorts of sites? I can see how they can (and do) climb to the top of Google. But you’d only visit them once, wouldn’t you? I guess there’s three possibilities:

1. They run adwords-style advertising and guess that “readers”, having been lured in, will click on anything, even an adwords banner to get out again. Since they cost nothing to make, pumping out a few dozen could potential result in incomes of ermm… pennies.
2. They’re desperate to ‘win’ on particular keywords. The only way their boss/client measures the success of the site is in page impressions and search position.
3. They went on a really bad course about SEO. I think this is more common than you might think: I read this sort of keyword-infatuated garbage on a lot of sites that genuinely well-meaning.

But I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether I like it or not, or whether it really works, because the content farms and idiots are already winning. Conducting a search for product advice is likely to yield dozens of rubbish reviews on the first page. The web starts closing down again, whereby learning the name of a decent source of information becomes a matter of word-of-mouth. Thank goodness, we now have the social web etc. to help us find those things. It’s something I’ve historically been a great fan of, and still am, theoretically. But, when push comes to shove, and I want to know which telly to buy, it becomes very clear how basic those things still are.

image credit: freezelight

RSS is a wonderful invention. But what it often means is that you try to read ten times the content that you used to. Because, of course, it’s so easy to slip through feeds in your RSS reader, and so whenever you find a new website with an interesting article you hit the orange button. (By the way, if you haven’t already, do hit the orange button).

And Google Reader is a great product. It really is. But then you wake up one morning, hit the link and there are 11,000 unread items. Plus Google has been a bit naughty recently with its interface design. What once looked cool and clean is now a bit of a mess.

I present, m’lord, item one:

What is all that stuff? I quite liked it when sharing came along, but now – ugh too much.

Solution 1: It’s Not a List; It’s a Magazine

So I was delighted to discover Feedly last year (via. Drew Benvie). It distils your web feeds, does some magic sorting and displays the stuff you should read on a single page.

I like this a lot. It doesn’t tell you that you’ve got 11,000 unread items; it doesn’t have a ton of possibly important but inscrutable menu links. Like Reader, the content is lazy-loaded in the background, so you can click on links and read the item’s content without reloading the site.

It also doesn’t show you everything. You won’t ‘get-through’ all your feeds this way. But that’s kind of the point. Once you’ve stopped enjoying reading updates, you can move away without feeling guilty.

In case you do feel guilty about this approach to reading RSS feeds, I’d suggest that it’s close to the original ‘river of news’ idea that Dave Winer suggested, except there’s been some clever manipulation of the items so you’re less likely to miss popular news.

Solution 2: Health and Efficiency and Helvetica

So what if you are a bit more conscientious or hard-working? Find that whole magazine idea a bit strange. Or have a keen sense of design offended by so-called web friendly fonts? The solution for you, my benighted friend, is Helvetireader.

Helvetireader is a CSS rework of Google reader that hides extraneous elements and makes the rest look plainer and more beautiful. It’s a two-step installation process. You need to install Greasemonkey for Firefox or Chrome. It’s a scripting add-on that you’ll find lots of other uses for if you look into it.

Then go over to the Helvetireader website, where you can install it from the button. Version 2 has just been released, which is prettier than Version 1, which was awesome. The next time you visit Google Reader, it will be beautified. And minified – the plugin hides a lot of stuff, so you won’t like it if you are addicted to features.

Helvetireader can be used in exactly the same way as normal Google Reader, but works as its best if you know the short-cut keys. There are loads of these. The important ones are:

• j/k – next / previous item
• space – scroll down / next folder
• s – star this item
• shift+s – share this item

It seems as though ‘n’ and ‘p’ do something similar to ‘j’ and ‘k’, but I couldn’t work out the difference.

Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington believes that the era of trying to manage one’s online reputation is almost over:

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

I can kind of see what he means. Yes, it’s quite likely that bad reviews of you, your business and your dog will appear on the Web, and there won’t be very much that you are able to do to prevent or correct that. Indeed, we will need to become thicker skinned and more forgiving of people’s indiscretions.

However, there are multiple flaws in the argument.

Pretty much the show-stopper for me is the total confusion between ‘online reputation’ and ‘bad things some people say on the Web’.

What is (for example) TV chef Jamie Oliver’s reputation?

His food and restaurants tend to get fairly good reviews. He’s campaigned to improve the nutritional value of children’s school dinners, a popular move in the eyes of pretty much everyone except pie manufacturers. His shows keep getting commissioned, so are presumably popular. Recently, he’s apparently been having a hard time convincing the US of the virtues of healthy eating, but got sympathetic stories and an appearance on Oprah as a result.

But then… it took me about two seconds to find this, this and this (sweary, not-so-positive websites about JO). And quite a lot more where they came from.

So what to make of that? Chirpy chap or mockney tw**?

The main way we gauge someone or something’s reputation online is by Googling them. As Clive Thompson wrote ages ago in Wired:

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

So, if you’ll allow me to take Google as the arbiter of reputation, when you search for Oliver then the top result, after the news, is his own site, followed by his restaurant’s sites, followed by his other brands. There are no negative references on the first four pages of the Google search for his name. And having discovered that, if you then bump into one of the bad sites, then you’ll take what they say with a pinch of salt. They still exist, but it is the mix and sum of the data we can acquire, their provenance, their credibility and how Google sorts them which goes to form an online reputation.

What Oliver is doing by creating all these sites and content is called managing your online reputation*. And it quite clearly still works.

picture credit: tommatsch

*Oliver’s been blogging since 2003, which is pretty impressive by any measure.

The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and Search during the Super Bowl comes from two hot-spots of media attention:

1. Google Search is continually used as the prime example of the power of word-of-mouth over traditional forms of marketing: ‘…and they never spent a dollar on advertising it!’ says the social media guru.
2. The slots between segments of the Super Bowl are famously the most expensive and sought-after TV ad-spots of the year. (On the official site, linked above, a link to a video of the commercial slots was the top item when I looked!)

The Internet and the Super Bowl last intersected so heavily ten years ago, in 2000, called — at the time — ‘dotcom bowl’, when ten heavily-funded, but mostly impractical internet start-ups spanked $40mn in venture capital in order to secure the slots, at an average of $2.2mn for 30 seconds. Twelve months later, all but two of those start-ups had gone bust. Internet companies have tended to avoid the Super Bowl since then for obvious reasons.

So you might take this appearance as an indication that either Google has given in to Old Media; or conversely that the value of old media has dropped so low that even the biggest advertiser on the Internet will give it a go.

Personally, I take it as a sign of changed understandings of old and new media and of how persuasion through advertising works. Hell freezes over indeed.

Firstly, dividing old and new media into two separate, enemy camps that will have nothing to do with each other is nonsense. You aren’t a Luddite if you use TV; you aren’t progressive if you use the Web. This false dichotomy has held both sides back for too long. Old media still have massive reach compared to the Web: and telling more people about your stuff is mostly good, especially if you have a consumer product, like a new web browser, to give them. To give an example: the highly favoured Compare the Meerkat campaign — created by VCCP – had digital end-locations but depended on a massive TV, newspaper and outdoor campaign to create its success (400% increase in traffic and 80% more quotations given for client Compare the Market).

Second, Internet advertising isn’t a very good platform for persuasion. Sorry. You have one five-or-so-word opportunity and (maybe) a graphic that has to fit into a fairly small space. Most people ignore you. The people that click on your ad are stupid, bored and poor. Or are your competitors and their agents. What’s good about it is that it’s so cheap that you can throw a small amount of money at it (compared to traditional media) and create a lot of clicks, it generates great CPA information and, if correctly targeted at long-tail keywords, then yes, it sells.

It won’t change people’s minds, though. You need longer periods of time and richer engagement to do that. I read today that cinema advertising revenues went up 5% [PDF] last year. What’s that about – apart from creative agencies loving them? It’s about the realisation that advertising-as-experience (and therefore, ‘something that might influence someone’s opinion’) still doesn’t happen very often, predictably or inexpensively on the Web.

This is the truth. We live our lives not offline or online, but inline. We’re continually in both spaces and don’t draw much distinction between them, contrary to what a lot of commentators would have us believe. This is especially true of younger people, who’ve grown up with the Net at their side. We don’t ‘jack-in’, as Neuromancer and countless successors imagined, we accommodate.

[PS. Throwing irony upon irony, this is also the year that Pepsi, long a Superbowl standard, decided not to bother and devote the money to social media *cough* philanthropy instead.]

[PPS. What I wonder about is why Google cares so much about Chrome? It’s given none of its other products, consumer or business, remotely the same funding or attention…]

Life just got better. At the end of last week, Google announced that its personalised search had now become available to ‘signed-out’ users.

What does that mean?

Well, personalised search means that Google uses its history of what you have searched for before to provide more relevant results for subsequent search queries. It records everything you’ve searched for and every result you’ve clicked. This allows it to profile you and produce results that are more likely to be about what you’re interested in. If you live in Birmingham, UK, for example, and often click on results for places in that city, then you’ll be less likely to get results relating to Birmingham, Alabama.

Signed-out users are people who don’t log into a Google account prior to conducting a search. That would include people who haven’t opted in to have their search results saved. This is done through a cookie file saved on your computer. Unless your Internet privacy settings are set very high, this will happen without you noticing.

So, whoever you are, your search history is saved and analysed. Without your permission.

In a similar vein, the rollout of real-time search means that Twitter comments are instantly catalogued. And don’t worry – you don’t need to change any account settings or opt-in to anything. They’re doing it anyway. There really is no ‘undo’ button on the web.

Any lily-livered liberals clinging to outmoded ideas like a right to privacy need to move on. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC last week:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t. Or maybe I just don’t think it’s any of your business. Or that you should ask me first.

Oh wait – you are allowed to delete your history and opt out. But you’ll need to explicitly opt-out of survei personalisation on every computer you use.

I really wish Bing produced better results.

Postscript: I notice Alan beat me to the punch on this and is typically incisive.

I mentioned this a couple of posts back. Delete discusses ‘The Virtues of Forgetting in the Digital Age’. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend but the RSA has — as always — made the audio of the talk available to everyone. See the link below for details.

Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyber-space for future employers to see. The written word made it possible for us to remember across generations and time, yet now digital technology is overriding our natural ability to forget. Should the past be ever-present, ready to be on-screen at the click of a mouse?
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, director of the information and innovation policy research centre at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, explains why current information rights and privacy fixes can’t help us, and proposes a simple solution - expiration dates on information.

RSA Event Page Here

1. Send it to everyone you know.

2. Make a Google Maps mash-up out of the data.

Much of socialmedialand was rubbing its hands with glee this morning at the news that the British National Party’s membership list had been leaked on the Internet and was freely available for anyone to download. A lot of people were fairly unsympathetic, to say the least. One respected journalist said:

Oh look — there’s one down my road — I might go round for a punch-up [I’ll spare the author’s blushes. update: I was scanning and failed to recognise the irony in Scott’s remark. however, this was indicative of many other comments I’ve seen — use the search link for proof — I hesitate to name and shame for obvious reasons.]

The BNP is a Nationalist party which supports the repatriation of immigrants to the UK, especially ones that don’t have white skin. They are typically poor, ill-educated racists, in other words.

Revealing the names of members could have serious implications for their work, relationships and safety. There are apparently a number of police officers on the list, for example, and there are already calls for their dismissal. [I am not saying that is a bad thing].

Before long, one ingenious soul had created a Google Maps mash-up to show the locations of everyone on the list. (It’s now been taken down, since the author realised that though he’d made the locations imprecise, people were reading the map as pinpointing exact locations.)

I’ve got no truck with the BNP or any of its policies, but this is quite clearly a terrible idea.

Why?

Imagine if the boot was on the other foot. Imagine if one of the dozens of CD-ROMs routinely lost by the government was found and posted onto the Internet. Maybe including, say, your wage or any criminal convictions. You would be outraged and very worried (especially if you did have a conviction).

One definition of ethical behaviour, a very good one I think, is that when you legislate, you should do so as if you were legislating for everybody. If you say it’s OK to publish the names and addresses of people you disagree with or hate onto the Internet, you should recognise that you’re saying that that it would be OK for someone else to do the same thing to you. If you were behaving ethically.

I think most of us agree with the general principle that people have a right to privacy. We become very angry when CD-ROMs are lost or advertising networks are found to be collecting data about our browsing habits without permission.

It’s a good principle. So let’s stick to it.

Gabe Rivera, the creator of Techmeme, is either a PR genius or so nice that I am flummoxed. After my last post, trashing his service, he tweeted:

Techmeme readers overlooking TheReg & Guardian’s homepages should know what they’re missing, says @iandelaney: http://bit.ly/19rsap I agree.

And I guess that this is why I owe a not-quite retraction. Techmeme is what it is. It gathers the memes (and in this case, that simply means ‘talking points’) on technology-related blogs.

Things it is not:

• A news source;
• A journalistic endeavour of any kind.

It’s an algorithm, partially hand-tinkered, I believe, that catches what tech bloggers are talking about. If some nonsense happens to excite that portion of the blogosphere then it will show up. That isn’t the site’s fault. It’s our fault. Techmeme, for tech bloggers, is a mirror. And if we don’t like what we see in the mirror, we shouldn’t blame that piece of silvered glass.

When I said that Techmeme was a ‘useless clusterfuck’, what I really should have said was that the bulk of tech blogging, as perceived through Techmeme, is a useless clusterfuck. If I were Gabe, I would despair.

But at the same time, I get it. It’s frankly easier for bloggers to get worked up and mouth-off about some not-yet-confirmed yet-possibly-possible feature on Google than it is for them to comment on the implications of SAP’s agreement with P&G, the complexities of which are immense.

I can understand that.

Don’t expect the original, the useful, the important or the unpopular news to appear on Techmeme. Expect the ‘talking points’. A bit like when you walk into the office wanting to discuss the great documentary that was on last night, but all anyone wants to talk about is the X-Factor.

From the Merriam Webster entry:

Main Entry: re·cid·i·vist
Pronunciation: –vist
Function: noun
Etymology: French récidiviste, from récidiver to relapse, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin recidivare, from Latin recidivus recurring, from recidere to fall back, from re– + cadere to fall

Earlier this evening, I made what some might describe as an immoderate comment on Twitter. To whit, when my friend and colleague Mike Butcher said he’d finally been listed on Techmeme, I twitted:

techmeme is a useless clusterfuck. full stop. I say this with my work hat OFF.

I later elaborated, in response to a request for a better alternative from Mike:

@mbites yep — the grdn and times’ media pages. NMA, brandrepublic and (I hope) NMK. Real money; real business; real issues. Fuck that shit

Some other people asked me to explain. So what I meant was ‘fuck that shit’. And when I say ‘fuck that shit’, I mean this. I am taking a random sample of techmeme versus two regular IT titles — the first two that popped into my head — that I don’t care about one way or another. These are screen grabs at the time of writing:

Compared to this:

or even this:

Top stories:

(a) Proctor and Gamble signing with SAP (computing)

(b) Exclusive interview about UK security leaks (register)

© Google possibly maybe interested in OpenID (techmeme)

Here’s a quiz:

- Which of those stories will have most impact on the UK’s economy, and its ability to employ people? (hint: not c)

- Which of these stories is of the greatest interest and importance to UK citizens (hint: not c)

- Which of these stories is based on PR-spin from the company that originated it, and doesn’t actually contain any facts (hint: it’s c)

QED

That’s hardly an exhaustive analysis. But that’s the state of affairs as I write this and almost anytime I look at those three sites.

Oh, I forget, the reason I made the comment in the first place was in response to Mike’s comment that he’d hit Techmeme for the first time. Mike writes the best tech startup blog in the UK. He has done since April 2007 — and has been writing about digital in the UK since forever. But not ‘important’ enough for techmeme, evidently.

Also, the reason for my expression ‘clusterfuck’. Look at this advice from arch-self-promoter Jason Calacanis:

1. Blog intelligently. Think about your post for a day before you hit publish. Do research–do primary research in the real work. Write something with insight, and include links to other folks ideas.

2. Go to 2–3 events or conferences a week.

3. Get a great domain name that is easy to remember and spell (i.e. buzzmachine.com).

4. Go to TechMeme and write an insightful piece daily about one of the top stories.

5. Start emailing other bloggers with feedback on their stories. (don’t beg for links)

6. Be smart.

7. Don’t be an idiot.

That’s it… you’re now A-List.

That’s very good advice, it seems. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Forget about your own identity. Except the way it works out is that any idiot can be an A-lister (as far as techmeme is concerned) by hanging on as many coat-tails as you need to.

Algorithms can only go so far, eh.

I’ve been thinking about the future of newspapers a fair bit over the last few weeks, because we’ve been preparing a panel event on just that topic. It’s involved a range of reading and on-record and off-record conversations with a load of people involved with newspapers — readers, editors, pundits and the man on the Clapham Omnibus.

Newspapers, particularly quality papers, look screwed at first view. Only the Sun and the free-sheets did remotely well in the latest ABCs.

[ABC — the Audit Bureau of Circulation creates readership ‘charts’ for newspapers and magazines. Its sister operation ABCe’s work in the online world, but their cost means they’re only used by a minority of online publications, such as newspapers. While they provide a reliable measure of an individual site’s readership, the lack of competitor data might be perceived as a weakness. National newspapers all subscribe to the ABCe scheme, though.]

While online figures continue to soar for the quality papers, those figures are not, sadly, indicative of revenues. Internet advertising costs less than print advertising, by a long way. In other terms, a drop of 5000 on the printed publication might require a hike upwards of 500,000 readers online to make up the same amount of contribution.

And those online readers aren’t especially useful, sometimes. If you have a UK advertising campaign, then the 75% of your readers who come from outside the UK, in the case of many Nationals’ websites, are not contributing. Their ‘hits’ on those websites aren’t helping to fulfil any advertising deals — they’re simply a ‘hit’ on the paper’s resources. Most advertising agencies don’t have any international briefs, just for UK people, so when they buy a million impressions, they don’t mean any old million, they mean a million UK users.

I talk to digital professionals, and all they use is Google and RSS — they haven’t bought newspapers in years, except when they take a flight or a train ride with no wireless. They’re also the most likely people to bring up points about newspapers’ effect on the environment (short version: v.bad; but maybe not as bad as you think).

All doom and gloom, so far. But then I talk to my step-mother, and she’s not having it. She doesn’t want to read a frickin’ screen. I talk to my sister and she says the same thing. I ask my mum, and it turns out she still gets a daily delivery. Once you look outside this digital world of RSS and Google, the demand for mainstream, normal stuff is actually pretty high. I’m pretty fond of papers myself, and if I, as a digital media person and every member of my family I asked, want newspapers (as newspapers), then surely that means a future.

I like to think about the many predictions that have been made over the years about the death of cinema. Televisions, VHS videos, DVDs, wide-screen televisions and now Blu-Ray have all allegedly spelled the end of the cinema age. Yet, surprise, box-office takings were at an all-time high in 2007.

Media don’t die upon the arrival of a new alternative: they adapt and survive. The arrival of urban freesheets in the past few years is evidence of that in the newspaper space. They may not be the model that we’d necessarily hope for as journalists or news consumers, but they’re certainly evidence of innovation and adaptation. Let’s hope that examples more conducive to quality reporting also bear fruit. The appearance of ShortList this year, offering decent-quality content at a freesheet price may be one indication.

What I hope comes out of our debate on the 28th October is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the future of newspapers, but some ideas about the type and extent of change and adaptation that is likely to be needed to ensure the future existence of quality journalism and, dare I say it, quality newspapers.

Do join us.