Newspapers are Dead. Expect a Very Long Funeral.

Writing on ojr.org, Getty Storch asserts that “Papers must charge for websites to survive“. There is a lively debate in the comments that follow, most of them are in disagreement with Storch’s analysis.

This includes mine, which I reproduce here.

Anyone who thinks newspapers can survive on local content needs to spend a few weeks on Twitter. Here is a medium where news arrives in near real time, is reliable (since misinformation is rapidly corrected by others), and relevant. This applies just as well in a global environment. I have seen real reports from people on the scene of demonstrations in Thailand and Athens, and learnt about the supply of gas from Russia to Slovakia from people in cold buildings. Twitter and similar channels tell me about traffic jams on my route downtown, about power outages and emergencies in ways that no newspaper or even television station can ever dream of achieving.

Twitter has merely brought something that has been happening for a very long time into the mainstream. As a case in point, I learnt about the death of Princess Diana via an international online chat almost three hours before the local media picked it up. This is a decade ago. Times have changed.

Information is now free and it will remain so. Any attempt to charge for access to it is absolutely doomed. The only hope that news media, particularly “print” media have for survival is by adding value. This means aggregating sources, adding perspective, and performing astute analysis. Even so, most of the revenue from these activities will be derived from online advertising, and those revenues will be orders of magnitude below what the industry currently sees as normal.

The newspaper as we know it is dead. There is no model that will resuscitate it, period. Rigor mortis has set in, the patient just doesn’t fully realize it yet.

Quick Rant: Animated Favicons

For those who don’t know, a favicon is the graphic that shows up in the location bar and bookmarks of modern browsers. They’re great visual clues that help you remember what’s on a page.

It is possible to have this icon animated, at least for some browsers. DON’T DO IT.

Animated graphics are designed to catch your eye. Once your attention is caught, you’re supposed to understand a message and respond. That response takes you to a web site. If a favicon is up, then you are already on the site, so animation just catches your eye and distracts you from the site. Anyone who thinks distracting viewers from paying attention to their site should get out of the business and consider a career as a utility pole.

The other possible thought behind an animated icon is that in a sea of tabs and bookmarks, the animation calls attention to your site. That might work, but if every icon is animated, then the result is a sea of irritation, so it’s not a strategy that will work for long. As far as tabs are concerned… I just visited these sites, I can recognize your icon without having it wave at me. In fact, the second time it interferes with my attention, your tab will get closed.

Summary: Animated favicons have lots of drawbacks and little upside. Just say no.grotty animated icon

Social Media: Stripping Meaning from Connections

I’ve been hanging out in Twitter for a couple of weeks now. It’s generally amusing, and in some ways I can see it as useful. In a way, it’s simply the most interesting part of Facebook (status updates) without the lame and cloying attempts at “fun”. But one thing that’s irritating about it is the “social media experts” and the “u 2 cn get rich” crowd. I would go on about this, but Michael Pinto has done a great job already in his post Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped).

Instead I want to focus on a subset of Twitter users, the “Friend Troll”. These people post multiple tweets, encouraging everyone to connect with them on other social media sites, usually LinkedIn. Now the premise of LinkedIn is that people use it to build connections between people that they know and trust. Obviously someone who gets the bulk of his or her connections from random Twitter followers is not adhering to this principle, which debases the entire concept.

I’m pretty sure that LinkedIn introduced the “Recommendations” feature as a way to combat this, but there’s nothing to stop a savvy user from trolling for those, so it’s of limited usefulness.

So what’s required is some way to measure the level of respect that someone has for the sites that they inhabit. I have decided that, at least for sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, that the friend count / number of connections is a good metric. Unfortunately, LinkedIn generalizes the connection count, so “500+” is the best we have to work with. Let’s run with that for a moment. Assume the person is 40 years old, and has been working for 20 years. That’s just over two friends per month, for every single month. Roughly two weeks per person.

Maybe I’m a poor judge of character, but two weeks of accumulated interaction with a person is, in my experience, not enough time to build a stable trust relationship. By contrast if I take as an example a very personable fellow who I have worked with, who I trust, and who is CEO of a publicly traded software company, I see just under 100 connections.

So after surveying my connections profiles, I have developed the “LinkedIn Connection Credibility Metric”.

  • 1-10 Connections: You are either antisocial, or don’t “get” social media.
  • 11-100 Connections: You’re “regular folk” and consider your connections before making them.
  • 101-250 Connections: Difficult. If you have a customer facing job, your connections could be credible. If you don’t, then you probably include anyone you’ve met in business and thus your connections are questionable.
  • 251-500 Connections: If making connections with people is your only full time job, then this is possible, but still your connections are met with scepticism. If there are solid, meaningful recommendations to back up your connections, then maybe.
  • 500+ Connections: Give me a break. If I connected with you, either I knew you before you went over to the dark side, or for some reason I thought you might be useful as a portal to someone I want to work with. Yes, I’m using you. But then again, you probably think that’s what social media is about.

TD Bank Tries an End Run Around Site Tracking Blockers

I’m well aware of the value of site analytics. Most of my sites make extensive use of them. But at the same time I’m aware of a user’s absolute right to not be tracked, be it anonymous or not. When it comes to my personal information, I’m usually happy to let most sites drop in a statistical tracking cookie, but I almost always set the lifetime of those cookies to “session only”.

Basically, I’m happy to let someone know how I navigate their site, because that information is likely to result in improved usability. What I don’t like is disclosing how many times I visit a site over a period of time, and what my multi-visit user patterns are like.

With browsers like Firefox and now even Internet Explorer providing easy tools to manage cookie acceptance and lifetime, more and more users who don’t want to be tracked are limiting cookies. This is giving marketers a more challenging time and skewing their statistics. Poor babies.

Some marketers are fighting back. What’s not commonly known is that Adobe’s Flash Player lets sites store cookie-like information as well. Now Adobe hasn’t quite caught up with the concept of individual liberties, so the default configuration of the Flash Player is to allow local storage without any explicit user permission. Adobe pretty much has a monopoly when it come to this sort of thing, so there’s little incentive for them to change.

So now marketers who claim to seek to improve customer service have a method where they can gather data even if their customers have taken explicit steps to prevent it. News Flash: That is NOT good customer service! It’s really rather offensive customer abuse.

Some time in the past few months, TD Bank decided to join the ranks of companies who have elected to bypass their customer’s wishes. I recently connected to my online banking site, and got asked for permission to allocate local storage to an invisible bit of Flash. So I cranked open the page and found this link: https://easyweb46w.tdcanadatrust.com/dojo111/dojox/storage/Storage.swf?baseUrl=/dojo111/dojo/. At least its name reflects its purpose.

Anyone familiar with the big Canadian banks has become accustomed to dealing with these arrogant behemoths, protected from significant international competition by legislation, and reading from some version of a dictionary where the meaning of “service” is very different from the commonly accepted definition. Really the only surprising thing is that they haven’t found a way to charge me 25 cents per byte of information that they want to store on my computer.

But you don’t have to be subject to corporate whims. These things are configurable. Don’t go looking through your browser, plugins or program settings for the control panel, though. Follow this link to your Flash Player control panel. This looks like a screen shot of what a control panel might look like, but don’t be confused: it’s a live presentation of your current settings. Click on the second tab, “Global Storage Settings”. There’s a reasonably good explanation of the settings below the panel, but if you move the slider to the left until it reads “None”, then every site that tries to save data in flash will have to get your approval first. If you don’t want to be asked, set the “Never Ask Again” check box. Then go to the last tab, “Website Storage Settings” to take a look at which sites have left tracking codes on your computer. Delete all the ones you don’t trust.

Now you have control of your information again.

Malware Injection: More Fun With Skype

Skype screen capture
Skype screen capture

This one probably isn’t new, but it’s worth noting. An associate recently got this bogus “security warning”. Appropriately named “irony”, the message warns the user that “Security Center has detected Malware” and directs the user to a site where they can download a patch. Click on the image for a full sized version.

The “patch” will install malware on the user’s computer. At least they can’t forge the link as belonging to Microsoft, but this could easily fool an unsuspecting user.

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