This story was written and published in TheGuardian on my return from Vienna, Austria.
THERE has been a wake-up call on online publishers to allow the public speak more on their web pages. Mr. Robert Cauthorn, the chief executive officer of City Tools, USA, the keynote speaker, made this call on Thursday at a 2-day digital conference titled 'Beyond the printed Word' organised by IFRA in Vienna, Austria.
Cauthorn, creator of the first profitable newspaper website, said this is the third-greatest news period ever, the others being World War 11, the 1960s and now. He urged web publishers not to be afraid of loosing, rather they should share stories. He said with 43.7 million blogs, 44,000 new videos posted on Google Video each day, and 50 million MySpace members are now sharing stories.
In his presentation titled:" The new Web 2.0 players: MySpace, YouTube, Flickr -- What can we learn,'' he said the communication model has been that the papers talk and the audience listen. That has changed to the paper talking, the reader listening, then the reader talking, the paper listening, then everyone talking and listening. The best move is to participate, not dominate. Cauthorn urges participation and not dominate.
Cauthorn believes in the new Internet world: "Newspapers used to throw out letters to the editor. They'd publish two and throw out the rest. The audience got used to the idea, therefore, that media is there to silence the crowd. Now they're saying that 'we're going to go somewhere else'. The meaning of authority has changed and smart organisations share that authoritative voice -- the best move is to participate, not dominate."
He also urges publishers to let community tag content. "Think about it: If you get 500 people to look at your content and say what they feel the category, the tag, should be, don't you think you'd get interesting results? Why not let the community organise and tag your content?" asks keynote speaker Robert Cauthorn. "The notion of the Web as platform should lead to the notion of the story as an application...Consider the deep poetry in this sharing among our readers, the desire to build communities. People are finding each other, they're telling stories and learning new responsibilities. It's a great time to participate; it's a great time to be a journalist."
Cauthorn cited Digg as a means by which users decide the news agenda and noted that it has passed the New York Times in user numbers. He also pointed out that the sharing process requires a 'folksonomy' - a means of organising material like a taxonomy but in the sense of folk wisdom - the way people themselves decide on what is of interest and priority.
Cauthorn implored papers to turn their content and their archives into Wikis and let the users loose on it, so as not to have to do the 'heavy lifting' of sifting and prioritising. He pointed to City Tools' home page, with the ability to link and click so that lists of top-10 topics can be discussed, challenged, pooled, and aggregated - then dropped onto an iPod with one click.
In conclusion, he exhorts newspapers to go back to their content and consider:
How much of it is telling stories?
Have you distributed authority?
Share everything.
Make documents come alive.
Grant prestige to others.
Participate in community.
Let many people create context and content.
Encourage discovery.
In his presentation titled Traditional media and the blogosphere, Colin Daniels, acting director, New Media Lab, Rhodes University, South Africa said the blogging search engine Technorati currently tracks more than 60 million blogs, with one blog created every two seconds, leading to a blogging landscape 100 times bigger now than in 2003.
Comparing the online viewing figures of mainstream media and personal blogs, Daniels made it clear that giants like the New York Times clearly dominate the top spots. However, borrowing the 'long tail' argument, he showed that moving further down the graph, blogs become more numerous, and if you take into account the full length of this tail, they actually draw a cumulative readership greater than the mainstream media.
Daniels then considered why newspaper-run blog sites and their reasons for success:
Blogs attract a higher quality of feedback and interaction than forums.
Bloggers can cover niches ignored by the paper's regular news beats.
Blogs increase the community coverage of newspapers.
His conclusions are that:
Blogs are a bottom-up social movement forming the bulk of the media long tail.
They're updated constantly and generate site traffic.
Bloggers are great media watchdogs and symbiotic relationships form between them and the journalists.
Journalists use them increasingly for leads.
Staff blogs alone, while safe, are not enough.
They're a bottom-up social movement that forms the bulk of the long tail.
Conversations and commentary cluster around posts.
They have advertising potential.
They serve niches better than reporters can.
They're not going away.
No fewer than 13 papers were presented at the conference which attracted over 500 participants from 43 countries around the world.
THERE has been a wake-up call on online publishers to allow the public speak more on their web pages. Mr. Robert Cauthorn, the chief executive officer of City Tools, USA, the keynote speaker, made this call on Thursday at a 2-day digital conference titled 'Beyond the printed Word' organised by IFRA in Vienna, Austria.
Cauthorn, creator of the first profitable newspaper website, said this is the third-greatest news period ever, the others being World War 11, the 1960s and now. He urged web publishers not to be afraid of loosing, rather they should share stories. He said with 43.7 million blogs, 44,000 new videos posted on Google Video each day, and 50 million MySpace members are now sharing stories.
In his presentation titled:" The new Web 2.0 players: MySpace, YouTube, Flickr -- What can we learn,'' he said the communication model has been that the papers talk and the audience listen. That has changed to the paper talking, the reader listening, then the reader talking, the paper listening, then everyone talking and listening. The best move is to participate, not dominate. Cauthorn urges participation and not dominate.
Cauthorn believes in the new Internet world: "Newspapers used to throw out letters to the editor. They'd publish two and throw out the rest. The audience got used to the idea, therefore, that media is there to silence the crowd. Now they're saying that 'we're going to go somewhere else'. The meaning of authority has changed and smart organisations share that authoritative voice -- the best move is to participate, not dominate."
He also urges publishers to let community tag content. "Think about it: If you get 500 people to look at your content and say what they feel the category, the tag, should be, don't you think you'd get interesting results? Why not let the community organise and tag your content?" asks keynote speaker Robert Cauthorn. "The notion of the Web as platform should lead to the notion of the story as an application...Consider the deep poetry in this sharing among our readers, the desire to build communities. People are finding each other, they're telling stories and learning new responsibilities. It's a great time to participate; it's a great time to be a journalist."
Cauthorn cited Digg as a means by which users decide the news agenda and noted that it has passed the New York Times in user numbers. He also pointed out that the sharing process requires a 'folksonomy' - a means of organising material like a taxonomy but in the sense of folk wisdom - the way people themselves decide on what is of interest and priority.
Cauthorn implored papers to turn their content and their archives into Wikis and let the users loose on it, so as not to have to do the 'heavy lifting' of sifting and prioritising. He pointed to City Tools' home page, with the ability to link and click so that lists of top-10 topics can be discussed, challenged, pooled, and aggregated - then dropped onto an iPod with one click.
In conclusion, he exhorts newspapers to go back to their content and consider:
How much of it is telling stories?
Have you distributed authority?
Share everything.
Make documents come alive.
Grant prestige to others.
Participate in community.
Let many people create context and content.
Encourage discovery.
In his presentation titled Traditional media and the blogosphere, Colin Daniels, acting director, New Media Lab, Rhodes University, South Africa said the blogging search engine Technorati currently tracks more than 60 million blogs, with one blog created every two seconds, leading to a blogging landscape 100 times bigger now than in 2003.
Comparing the online viewing figures of mainstream media and personal blogs, Daniels made it clear that giants like the New York Times clearly dominate the top spots. However, borrowing the 'long tail' argument, he showed that moving further down the graph, blogs become more numerous, and if you take into account the full length of this tail, they actually draw a cumulative readership greater than the mainstream media.
Daniels then considered why newspaper-run blog sites and their reasons for success:
Blogs attract a higher quality of feedback and interaction than forums.
Bloggers can cover niches ignored by the paper's regular news beats.
Blogs increase the community coverage of newspapers.
His conclusions are that:
Blogs are a bottom-up social movement forming the bulk of the media long tail.
They're updated constantly and generate site traffic.
Bloggers are great media watchdogs and symbiotic relationships form between them and the journalists.
Journalists use them increasingly for leads.
Staff blogs alone, while safe, are not enough.
They're a bottom-up social movement that forms the bulk of the long tail.
Conversations and commentary cluster around posts.
They have advertising potential.
They serve niches better than reporters can.
They're not going away.
No fewer than 13 papers were presented at the conference which attracted over 500 participants from 43 countries around the world.
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