Category: Uncategorized

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.

We all commit this crime every day of our lives: answering a question without knowing, for sure, the answer. I don’t mean knowing in any existential sense. I simply mean that, given time, a good library and/or search engine, you could find a citable reference for answering with the information you provide, or a close fascimile… rather than the mix of knowledge, blather, and everything in between that we all just live with. I do it myself plenty. My wife has taken to asking me if I really know the answer, or I’m just doing my “answer-boldly-and-confidently-and-see-if-that-works” routine. I’ll admit that there are times I’ve earned that suspicion, despite actually knowing quite a few things (often without really knowing why… trivia fills the memory!). Still, everyone once in a while you just want to be trusted as an all-knowing source.

The problem is, I have someone who does trust me as an all-knowing source, my son, and I want to give him the real answer every time. He’s a sponge, like any young child, and I cringe every time I elide my response or otherwise provide him with bad information. Today, he read the numbers on his cousin’s door right-to-left, and I explained to him that we read left-to-right. He, like most three-year-olds, asked “Why?”

I don’t know. So I told him “I don’t know. It’s an accident of history.” Which seemed to satisfy him, but left me itching to know the answer. I can’t really judge whether this source is definitive, but supposedly I was right. The Greeks found it easier (because more people are right-handed? easier to write left to right, and reading just followed?), and here we are. If anyone knows more details, I’m all ears. The boy doesn’t care anymore, but I do.

Wonder how many wrong answers I gave him today?

I really only do anything, to date, with pencoyd.com, but I own three others, and I’ve let a previous one or two go. Back in the boom days (1999), I was actively working on iventing.com… a one-time business idea much akin to what planetfeedback.com was doing, before they were bought by Intelliseek. I ask the question because I’m curious about how long before we all have our own home server and the idea of hiring/finding hosting goes away for all but the largest commercial websites. I do know, from direct experience, that no one really wants to run their own webserver, but as the software and hardware and bandwidth all improve to the home, how long can it be before we all have a server at the home? 10 years? Maybe IPv6 needs to be a full-fledged reality, but all these pieces will converge… although by the time they do, no one will bother to think about the server, any more than they think about the cable box (one candidate for the home server, of course!).

Returning to the present, I need to figure out the right mix of low-hassle, low-price hosting services. I’ve got low price going for the almost dormant domains, and I’ve got low-hassle going for pencoyd.com. I haven’t found the combo yet, although I haven’t stretched myself to look yet. Hard enough to find time to keep pencoyd.com mildly vibrant.

A few weeks ago, I finished the third volume of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Four months ago, I noted that I had never heard of this author or the books, despite their presence in the final 21 books in the BBC’s Big Read. Turns out Lord of the Rings ended up #1, but His Dark Materials ended up third, right behind Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And, if I’m reading the copyright correctly, the series wasn’t even finished until 2000. Maybe Pullman benefited from being fresh in people’s minds, rather than overshadowed by history?

Anyway, knock one more off the life list, with umpteen millions left to go. My mother was kind enough to give me the boxed set for Christmas. I read all three in January: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.

The biggest surprise to me, who knew nothing of author or novels, was that these are books written for young adults. The heroes are adolescents, and the mix of fantasy and science and coming-of-age moments opens up in vivid, clear terms intended for young eyes. For all that, these are very good reads even for an adult. I preferred the first two volumes to the third, but I was turning pages late at night even for the last book. These are written for young adults in the same way that the Narnia series or Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles… which means that while they may resonate more fully with an adolescent, everyone can find something to latch on to in the story.

I don’t know if the first book, The Golden Compass, was the best read because it was the best story or because it’s the introduction to most of the characters who will carry us through the trilogy. I just know that thinking back through all three, I was most captivated by this one. Iorek Byrnison, one of the armored bears of Svalbard, is certainly my favorite soul spinning through these tales, and he’s most prominent in this first volume. Yes, I did write armored bear. That’s hardly the oddest visual in these books, but one that I enjoyed the most.

Note: throughout the books, there is a lot of talk about daemons, an incarnation, it seems, of the soul/conscience/inner voice we all have. In the books, the soul often has an animal shape: that’s your daemon. However, every time I saw that word, all I could think of was the computer science definition, which is certainly not the intended reference. If you read a list of definitions, you’ll find “One’s genius; a tutelary spirit or internal voice” somewhere in the list, and you’ll see that this is commonly a British spelling of demon. Being American, though, I was distracted by the odd use of a Unix term in the middle of a novel not written by Neal Stephenson.

Back to the to-be-read pile for what’s next…

OK, terrible Dora the Explorer reference there, but… well, I have a three year old boy. Anyway, the map in question is the ACME Mapper. I grew up here. I now live here. You do the math.

Many geeks (and I mean that term as a compliment) are focused on the burgeoning world of RSS, aggregration, blogs, and the swirling flux in the center of these phenomena. The question I have — and I really want to answer this — is whether the geeks are right to focus so much on this intersection. Will all of this interest, attention, and energy spread to a more general audience, beyond the parties involved? Beyond those who not only know what a newsreader is, but have a favorite? I’m in the niche. I want to know if/when/how this clustering of interests and technology will break through to an audience that does not subscribe to 71 feeds in a dedicated client. An audience that doesn’t feel obsessed with keeping up with the flow of information, an impossible task. I think the search for another name for RSS misses the point. It’s not about the format, it’s about the data. Yes, I’m paraphrasing Willison, who was borrowing from Ruby while commenting on Zawodny’s mention that My Yahoo support Atom right alongside RSS (“it took 30 minutes”).

Readers care about reading. Publishers care about reaching those readers. The technical linkage between publishers and readers should be invisible to the readers, at the least — and most publishers don’t care to spend much time on the mechanics, either. So what does all the technical blather boil down to? That’s what matters… and I think we’re still waiting for the dust to settle.