I’ll keep this one on the record. Flash is going the way of the dodo–or in the least, is going to be playing a catch-up game very soon. And while Adobe may be outwardly in denial, the fact that they’ve begun to adopt HTML5 into their development toolset should be a good indication otherwise. I’m not sure I like Apple’s ban on flash in the iOS, but it certainly seems to be having the effect that Steve Jobs was going for–the elimination of a vulnerable competing technology.
Signal to Noise
Teddy Wallingford, Rock and Roll CEO
.Tel, a new top-level domain-name, is said to offer registrants the ability to store contact information in their own domain records. This could be a good way to stay on top of things like phone number and street address changes. This way, you can tell people how to reach you via your domain, no matter how often your contact info changes. It’s not completely different from contact update services, but this is the first time we’ve seen it done using DNS. The New York Times has the story here.
One of the things I find silly about Google AdSense is that it often inappropriately matches keywords, resulting in advertisements that either explicitly bad for your web site, embarrassing, or perhaps just silly. I’ll give you a few examples. I remember a few years ago when a buddy wrote a post blasting Microsoft Exchange, religiously decrying Exchange as a bad product–and naturally Microsoft Exchange was the keyword hit for AdSense, and his story ended up getting coupled with ads for Microsoft Exchange integrators.
Another example — I was reading an online novel, a blog novel. On the sidebar was an AdSense block, and my eyes gravitated towards the AdSense before I finished reading the first chapter. The advertisement was for a woodburning fireplace. OK, I thought, there’s got to be a fireplace somewhere in this chapter. Sure enough, I got the end of the chapter, and there was a brief scene with a fireplace.
It dawned on me that the author’s click-through rate on this chapter is probably quite low, since woodburning fireplaces may not appeal to his readers as much as, say, BOOKS. And being that it was a fantasy novel, perhaps his click-throughs would’ve been better with ads for fantasy artwork, figurings, or some such.
Google would do well to improve AdSense by allowing webmasters to indicate which keywords correspond to the products or services they’d like to see advertised on their sites.
One of things I look forward to most each day is reading the paper. I don’t know if it’s the tactile nature of the paper edition or some romantic appreciation that I hold towards the old media. I mean, newspapers have been around since movable type was invented–hundreds and hundreds of years ago. So there’s a certain appeal in tradition.
With tradition comes a sense of comfort and rightness. But PC Magazine feels neither comfortable nor right about persisting with a print edition. Like the hood ornament, print zines may soon be just a luxury item.
Does this mean Time will go online-only? Almost certainly not. But the trade journals and vertical publications with a small circulation may be forced into an online-only format due to a number of reasons:
1 – There are just TOO MANY magazines out there. In any given vertical, there are 3 or 4 magazines. Penton Media here in Cleveland publishes 40 or 50 vertical rags alone, many of which overlap each other in content.
2 – Demographic information about news consumption is easier for the publisher to obtain in an online format.
3 – Social media and the democratic web create “online weather systems” around news items, prevailing concepts, and fads. It’s nearly impossible to catch a breeze from one of these online weather systems using print journalism.
4 – PCMag has already crossed over the “web revenue hump” that so many publishers struggle with even now. With 70% of their brand’s revenue coming from the web, it’s pretty hard to argue in favor of keeping a costly print edition around to satisfy the old-timers.
5 – Blogging matters. It used to be that print journalists, and in particular, newspaper folks, would dismiss bloggers as inaccurate, teeth-bearing, shit-stirring zealots. As it turns out, many in the old media were of the same ilk. Sometimes it hurts to look in the mirror.
6 – Community-based interests, be they purely cultural or geographic, are easier to satisfy using the web. Hyperlocalism in news coverage prevails on the web. It’s what separates small, promising web publications like chroniclet.com from the behemoth one-size-fits all monsters like NYT.com.
Still, I’d rather read Time magazine that read a 5000-word piece on my iPhone. I like my iPhone, but do I want to read that much on it? No.
Signal
Noise
- Alec Saunders
- Allen’s Model Building Blog
- Andy Abramson
- Aswath Rao
- Best Technology
- Bruce Bishop
- Dameon Welch-Abernathy
- Darla Mack
- Esme Vos
- Etcetera
- Jeff Pulver
- John W. Ward – Photographer
- Ken Camp
- Martin Geddes
- Nopherhole
- Original Prop
- Rich Tehrani
- The Constant Complainer
- The MediNerd
- TK1138
- TLF Blog
- Tom Evslin
- Tom Keating
- Tribal Pursuit
- Wordpress.com Star Wars Blogs
My Books
-