Ian M Rountree

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In re: Google's Synchronicity

December 19, 2009 by Ian 6 Comments

I had intended to post this as a comment on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine post about Google’s Synchronicity – but it got a bit long, so I thought I’d share here instead and, hopefully, invite the ghost of journalism’s future to comment – if he’s listening. Please, go read the original article if you’d like to know where this comes from.

I do wonder what you mean when you say “local and mobile (which will come to mean the same thing)”

I read this as a redefinition of locality to mean “whatever is swiftly accessible by reasonably affordable means.” This used to mean the store down the street. Soon it will mean getting in touch with just about anyone, just about anywhere – on the assumption that the pathway of connection (Twitter, IM, email, etc) already exists. If you’re in my contacts list, you’re local to me wherever I have my smartphone and an internet connection – which is everywhere I go, so far anyway.

Mobility is very different. By this I mean that perhaps mobility will come to mean not “what i can bring to me” as local does, but perhaps “Where I can get myself to” – telephony, video conferencing, webinars. Much of this exists in a static location, but addresses the idea of high-resolution transfer of -being- rather than simply information. None of this requires a BlackBerry or iPhone – nor is capable, yet, on these platforms in a reliable way.

Google is doing a good job of addressing the geography of information, diverting and mapping the rivers, plotting and surveying the land, finding ways to parse it back into human modes. They’re the map makers.

Local used to be your country, your city, your neighbourhood. Mobility used to mean your ability to travel, or do your work in more than one place. SinceĀ  both the advent of cellular technology and the accelerated wildfire growth of the internet, how we conceive of locality has shifted, and mobility has grown exponentially. But does this mean localĀ  and mobile as defined above come to mean the same thing?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: blackberry, email, google, im, iphone, jeffjarvis, local, mobile, news, twitter

Tearing Down the Murdoch Wall

December 5, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

photo by tinyfroglet

Let me see if I understand this correctly, because this whole business of newspapers charging for their content online kind of makes my brain spin diagonally in my skull. Rupert Murdoch is cutting Google out of the circulation of News Corp. headlines because somehow, he’s become convinced that the search giant is a thief, stealing all of his profits.

WTF?

Amateur math time. Working backward from Jeff Jarvis’ assertion in the video on Six Pixels (link batch below), a web-based news business has a running expenses margin of about 50%. Let’s assume a significant portion of a given newspaper’s revenue online comes from advertisements, we’ll call this amount 50%. This matches up cleanly with the running expenses, so we can assume from this that ad revenue covers everything that keeps the lights on, and the remainder – that 43% of other revenue – is what drives the growth, innovation and renewal of the business.

This means that just having the pages up and accessible is capable of driving a business and keeping it going. For a business run entirely on the web, that’s their entire operating budget, production to dissemination and maintenance. 57% of revenue, actually, which means a sustainable business. Not a growing one, but sustainable, which is more than most entrepreneurial enterprises enjoy.

So what happens when you mess with what is proven, in actual business and in models designed by people who know what they’re doing? You begin to slowly, inevitably fail.

Let’s say you remove Google, as Rupert Murdoch is doing with News Corp. What will happen to his ad revenues? Let’s say that, of the ads a given site has, 5% are impression-based, rather than click-based. Now assume that Google’s referrals account for 25% of your total page views. This alone means that (on even distribution) suddenly 1% of your total business revenues disappears. That may not sound like much, but in a company like News Corp with its current values and performance, that’s a staggering 7.1 million dollars. Just because one percent of your revenues disappeared. And then there are the clicking 8% of internet participants. I can’t even begin to filter those numbers.

Unless I’m missing a beat, it looks like Rupert’s sneezing away 7 million dollars with a few extra lines in a robots.txt file somewhere on a server or eighty. I desperately hope someone corrects me because that is some new breed of stupidity.

Someone tell me my math is way off here, please, because I feel a little ill.

Link Batch:

  • The Times Online: Will papers’ pay walls topple the web’s freedom to pillage news?
  • Six Pixels of Separation: How Journalism Survives New Media (By Saving Itself)
  • Buzz Machine: The Half-Life Of News, Nose, face, cut, spire: Blocking Google

Side note: As I was writing this, I was watching the presentation on Six Pixels, and TweetDeck popped out a notification with a tweet FROM Jeff Jarvis. Weird, right? Thus Follows:

@IanMRountree: Definition of trippy: Seeing a tweet pop up from @jeffjarvis WHILE watching a presentation of his on @mitchjoel‘s blog! (Sat Dec 05, 22:09)
@jeffjarvis: @ianmrountree I haunt you. (Sat Dec 05, 22:15)

How does this relate? Simple: As Jarvis says in the video, the future of the web is interactivity and contribution. And FREE. The future of the web is the future of society, much as we dislike it sometimes. Let Rupert put that in his pipe and smoke it.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: boneheaded-businesses, jeffjarvis, murdoch

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