Hyperlocal News? As long as it's professional.

CNN.com has a wonderful piece on the emergence of "hyperlocal" news organizations. Thinking about the rise of focused, local news organizations certainly makes me happy, much like thinking about the farmers market at Grand Army Plaza makes me hungry. Certainly this can be a great boon to not only local news outlets (which, lets be honest, need it), but also to general knowledge around the world. The advent of wiki's and truly mobile computing (Blackberry, iPhone, etc...) has turned everyone into a expert on everything. Many years ago when I was graduating from high school my guidance council had some trouble giving me a good recommendation for college because I was a "renaissance man" in his mind. I knew a lot about a whole lot of things, but I had no real advantage in any field. Wiki's have compunded this problem into an international issue, with a general knowledge of almost everything made available at the push of a button (at a recent night out we used Wikipedia to remember the villains from several Hanna Barbera cartoons). Of course the problem with this knowledge is that it's never completely trustworthy. Wikipedia and the like can be edited by anyone with internet access, and has been shown as a result to be easy to tamper with. History is certainly written by the winners, but facts are facts and should remain so. This is why it is still inadmissible to use a wiki as a source in a publishable paper of any kind.

So what exactly am I getting at here? While I'm excited about the possibility of an increase in hyperlocal news organizations such as chitowndailynews.org Id' like to echo the sentiments of Jane McDonnell, the executive director of the Online News Association. "...there's less journalistic oversight over what is being disseminated and distributed and created." So basically news outlets will turn into wiki's. This is the danger that these hyperlocal outlets create. Journalists go through school and training to prevent (or at least try to) the distribution of un-sourced, unreliable news. My greatest fear is that these organizations will reduce newspapers to wiki's (and who will kids quote in school papers then?).

Personally, I like aggregators like Everyblock. Sourcing established news outlets (both local and national) as well as government agencies (again, both local and national), seems to be the best and most reliable way to generate hyperlocal news. Of course that's just what I think. In the end, I fear, that this will be decided by money and if hyperlocal news organizations are the wave of the future, I can only hope that they are well staffed and well trained.

Digital Piracy or Missed Opportunities?

Today's NYTimes brings up an interesting problem facing the film industry that I had been meaning to talk about. An article titled Digital Pirates Winning Battle with Studios brings to light the challenge that at one time faced the music industry in the guise of Napster and other peer-to-peer services and is now being faced with by the film/television industry. While the music industry faltered by limiting access to digital content before allowing for legal options, the film and television industry is already making headway by posting content online (particularly television). Just look at NBC or ABC for good examples of how to share content with viewers. Or look at the tremendous job that Monty Pyton has done with posting free content on YouTube rather than pursuing expensive (and often pointless) litigation.

Digital piracy is going to happen. People are going to steal copies of movies and television programs no matter what the stuidos do, unless they stop making movies all together. So let's look at this in a fresh light. Why not take this opportunity to do some positive PR and ad some advertising revenue to the budget? Studios should provide BitTorrent sites with officially liscensed versions of their movies, but throw some advertising in before the movie. Moviegoers have obviously accepted this in the theater (just try going to a movie today without seeing an ad for Pepsi, or the National Guard), so why not extend the reach to the internet. Television studios are alredy doing this (see the above mentioned sites), and according to the article "Heroes" is being downloaded at an average of 5 million downloads per episode. So why not sell that ad space? True they can be skipped over, but the ads in the theater can be ignored and those on the DVD can be skipped completely in some instances.

It seems to me that this could be a great positive all around. Studios will see increase ad revenue and exposure, while basking in the glow of positive word of mouth. BitTorrent websites will be able to sleep at night and see increase viewership. Brands will get their message out to a new audience. And consumers will have another option for viewing.

Random thoughts on new techonologies

As new mobile communications technologies emerge, we're beginning to see the reality of real honest-to-god augmented reality (AR). Now I've never been one to go in for the VR/gamer version of AR. I'm more of an overlay/heads-up/constantly available encyclopedia kind of guy. Seeing the possibilities simply beginning to be explored with Google's Android platform and it's grab bag of GPS/accelerometers and other goodies of course brings one to think about the future of marketing and advertising. Previously sci-fi only visions of individually projected advertisements are beginning to become possible. If you can now identify landmarks and buildings via RFID tags and semantic visual searches, how long can it possibly be before there's a Pepsi advertisement plastered at the bottom of your cell? And is that really such a bad thing? From a marketing viewpoint it would be possible to truly target/segment your audience. Already in Asia and Europe purchases can be made through a cell phone via RFID, why is it improbable that you phone can/will/does store your purchase information and use that as a filter for your new AR advertisements? This would conceivably allow companies/organizations to develop even stronger engagement with their customers, even if this means seeing a Slurm ad while touring the Vatican.

SNS, kind of

NYTimes has implemented a new "service" called TimesPeople.  Not really much to see right now, but apparently you'll be allowed to "follow" readers and see what your friends are reading.  

This, to me, seems to be even more of a harbinger of saturation than the infant SNS.  Think about it this way...

There's already several ways to accomplish this end.  Hell, NYTimes itself allows you to send to individuals and post pages to Facebook, Digg, Delicious, etc...  I'm not convinced that this new application fills a need.  And I know, we've reached the point that people are now looking at applications replacing applications in the user sphere, but this NYTimes application should have a higher usability built in to it.  You can update from your e-mail server, but what about having a built in/automatic suggestion based on the entry page?  At the very least NYTimes should actually be set to initally import your "friends" based on past usage.  After all, the application is introduced to Times members, we wouldn't be too surprised to see that NYTimes has been doing some data mining now would we.

New SNS

Well it's probably about time, no? NYTimes has run a trend piece on SNS for newborns. Twittering before learning that your feet are attached to your body, if you will. Personally, I'm of the belief that kids should be involved in online networking (of course offline networking should come first). But in this instance, could it be damaging for the children to grow up later and see what their parents have said in their own voice.

""It does feel a little funny to personalize it in his voice and be connecting to other babies as him,” said Kristin Chase, 29, Cameron’s mother, who updates his page at least every other day." Indeed.

CIA's A Space Social Network

So, the ODNI is ready to launch A Space, a Facebook-like social networking site for Intelligence Analysts. It seems like a good idea on the surface. Use crowd psychology and an open network (obviously only open to those with proper clearance) to help integrate the dozen or so US intelligence networks. The only problem (other than the fact that every anarchist hacker alive will now have a giant bulls-eye on the network) is that the agency is planning on tracking usage of the network to determine that none of the users are double agents.

"We're building [a] mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they've never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen," Wertheimer said. "Same thing here. We're going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space." - see the CNN source

Note to the agency...you're doing it wrong. The reason that networks like Facebook and LinkedIn work so well for distributing information is that their users have at least the impression of freedom. While it's true that FB recently had a coding problem that had people thinking that they were tracking users, they've never come out and declared that as their intent. In fact, the official party line from FB is that the glitch didn't reveal the usage information at all. By telling their agents (who are undoubtedly used to feeling followed and tracked as only a intelligence analyst can) that their usage of the site is going to be tracked and analyzed the agency is prematurely limiting the effectiveness of what could be a very valuable tool.

Hasbro vs. Scrabulous

Well, what I never thought would happen has happened. Scrabble manufacturer Hasbro has sued the creators of the Facebook application Scrabulous for intellectual property infringement. They've also asked Facebook to remove the application. This of course follows the creation and release of a Scrabble application on Facebook by Hasbro.

This brings up a number of very touchy subjects, mainly those of IP and free/bad publicity. It's been pretty obvious from the beginning that Scrabulous was a bootlegged version of Scrabble designed for Facebook. Even the most ardent fan can attest to that. But the question is, has Hasbro shot itself in the foot with this lawsuit? Internet groupies can be pretty petty, and can hold a grudge for a long, long time. While Scrabulous has nearly 500,000 registered users Hasbros new app (created by EA) has less than 10,000. And to be honest I'd be surprised if it grows past that. Hasbro came late to the party and then kicked out its competition. I'd personally like to see Hasbros sales data over the past 12 months. I'd bet that Scrabulous has served as pretty nice free PR for Scrabble sales. Hasbro might have avoided some serious bad sentiment by simply partnering with the Agarwalla brothers and let them continue to provide this service to them.