Day: February 16, 2004

Mary Hodder shared, in her report from day two of the Digital Media Summit, this tiny tidbit.

I chatted with Craig Calder of NYT Digital, who told me that their archives generate around $1 million a year in revenue, but it’s declining. He said mostly what’s accessed is less than 90 days old, but the revenue is still revenue.

This kind of revenue figure is always interesting to see. I’ll take it on face value because I have no other choice. I’m also going to assume that this is direct archive revenue, not via Lexis-Nexis, Factiva, etc. I expect those sources remain much higher revenue streams for the larger NYTimes company, if not the digital division.

Several questions come to mind. Is their revenue declining because their archive is less accessible than most, due to registration? Is it declining because there are alternate ways to retrieve similar information that bring them less revenue? (Factiva, Highbeam, etc.) Is it declining because no links to their archives (back to the accessibility)? Is it declining because the newshounds of the world know how to use the NYTimes link generator to create a link that will remain free to all as long the NYTimes continues to quietly support the blog links? I’d be amazed if this kind of linking has really an impact of note, but the more people that read the NYTimes.com information via blogs/aggregators, the more these free links spread.

I wouldn’t turn down $1 million in revenue, but strategically, for NYTD, I can imagine that they don’t spend much time worrying about this. As long as they can control their archive (whether or not it’s profitable), they can work on ways to make their business generate more cash.

Friend of a friend (FOAF) is for representing your social network in an XML file. Some people are doing interesting things with this, but for now, I’ll just save a link to a FOAF generator. Maybe in the future, as the social networking craze turns into something useful, rather than simply like collecting baseball cards.

I found the generator via Stephen Downes’ article The Semantic Social Network.

That is Jeff Jarvis‘s phrase from his commentary on Nisenholtz’s speech at SIIA. Jarvis is saying that citizen’s media is the Pong for digital media. Blogs are just the first step, but — despite Nisenholtz’s cautiousness — the future is here. I wrote my thoughts on the speech on the same day. I found it important, but not necessarily visionary. But I need to read Jarvis’s entire essay. He has more experience with media than me. I still believe that counts for something. 😉 [found Jarvis essay via napsterization.org]

Well, not really, but Doc Searls is providing some pointers from Demo. I’m sure there are lots of other Demo blogs out there. I’m curious to see which items are more than a flash in the pan.

Update: Technorati method for following the buzz about Demo.

That’s my hope. Napsterization.org thinks it does. Just added this feed to NNW.