« April 2005 | Main | June 2005 »
May 31, 2005
Does the U.S. Crave Luxury Light Beer?
Is it really so wise to exceed the desires of your customers? Isn't that the lesson of New Coke, among others?
Heineken USA Introduces Luxury Light Beer
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., May 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Heineken USA confirms today that it will continue its pioneering leadership in the beer market with the introduction of its Luxury Light beer, Heineken Premium Light Lager, in the US. Heineken Premium Light Lager will be tested in four select US markets beginning in June 2005: Phoenix, Arizona; Dallas, Texas; Tampa, Florida; and Providence, Rhode Island.
I just love the image this conjures up, of hoardes of media folks jamming microphones into the face of Andy Glaser, Brand Director, and shouting, "Andy, over here. Andy, please. Can you confirm that Heineken will continue its pioneering leadership in the beer market?"
The introduction of Heineken Premium Light Lager is consistent with Heineken's strategy to expand and optimize its product portfolio and to capture an ever-growing share of the premium import specialty segment of the US beer market. The new luxury light beer will be supported in test markets with a comprehensive marketing program, including TV, print, radio, online, in-store and on-premise promotions.
"No light beer currently offers consumers the high quality drinkability coupled with the prestige and cachet of Heineken Premium Light Lager," said Andy Glaser, Brand Director, Heineken USA. "Heineken Premium Light Lager combines a lighter taste with subtle flavor cues of regular Heineken. With the introduction of Heineken Premium Light Lager, we are exceeding US consumers' desire for a higher quality, premium light beer."
But not exceeding my desire. I really, really need some high-quality drinkability after three hours of market research for a friend. Waiter?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2005
When Greed Partners With Stupidity
White Collar Crime offers up a classic tale of greed gone wrong: "Blick was a principal and one-third owner of a consulting firm, with the responsibility for managing its business affairs. Over the course of about a year, he embezzled approximately $1.4 million, transferring the money overseas. Eventually, the embezzlement caught up with him, and he informed the other owners of the firm and was eventually indicted on wire fraud charges. He repaid about $750,000 of the money he took, and was sentenced for defrauding the firm of $655,000. Why did Blick embezzle all that money? It turns out that he was 'assisting' a person in Nigeria to remove $20.5 million from that country into a safe account in Europe."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Why Travel Matters
"Travel is a good reminder of what options there are: languages, food, lifestyles, ways of being. Growing up, I accepted the notion that the only right and true and happiest way to live was the way we live in the U.S. Now, while grateful for all that I have here, I appreciate the alternatives." My friend Peggy Newell, ace quilter and crackerjack traveler, gets it exactly right.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 28, 2005
Five Facts About Robbie Branscum
My mother died eight years ago today, a few weeks shy of her sixty-third birthday. (When she was close to forty, mom decided to cut three years off her age so I had a funny conversation with the kind New York Time reporter who wrote her obituary. I hadn't realized mom had fudged her birthday, while he was surprised to discover a reference book on authors had the wrong date.) Eight years ago my grief was so fresh and sharp I felt nearly blinded but the pain has eased into a dull throb. I think of my mother nearly every day. It's hard not to feel cheated but at least mom had the luxury of dying at home during a nap, perhaps dreaming of a luscious meal since she drifted off to sleep during one of KQED's Saturday cooking shows.
At mom's funeral, one of her friends thought I was disrespectful by highlighting the fact that she had never finished eighth grade. He didn't understand that I was amazed and proud of the self-described hillbilly from the sticks, a self-taught single mother on welfare who transformed a powerful storytelling talent into twenty-one published novels. That's a fact to be proud of, not hide.
Here are five facts about Robbie Branscum.
1. She was a kick-ass mom. My mother loved me fiercely and did what she could to meet my needs even though we were poor. Here's one example: When I was 13, my plastic glasses were the opposite of fashionable. All the cool kids--hell, all the kids--had groovy wire rims but we were welfare trash with no money, and the state would only pay for new glasses if there was something wrong with the ones I had. Gotta say, that seems like a reasonable policy to me now that I'm a middle-aged taxpayer. At the time, though, I was convinced my outsider status would worsen. So one day after school I sat on mom's bed in the living room to explain the problem, then wallowed in a teary hole of self-pity.
"Let me have your glasses," mom said. I gave her my glasses. She put them on the floor, stepped down hard, then handed me the pieces. "Let's go get you some new ones," she said. My mother became my hero that afternoon. I am a good girl: I color inside the lines, I stop at red lights, I keep the mattress tag intact. It would never, ever occur to me to stage an eyewear accident. But my mother had suffered from a childhood of poverty herself, a much more damaging poverty in the Arkansas hills where she was raised by a resentful grandmother who preferred other grandkids and gave mom ugly dark granny boots instead of the dreamy white majorette boots she craved for so long. This was mom's chance to rewrite that story. (Thanks, mom.)
2. She had a generous heart and was deeply religious. My mom would give people practically everything she had (and sometimes stuff that I had, which I didn't much appreciate at the time) if they were needier than we were. As a young married couple, my parents used to pick up hobos, bring them home for a good meal, then send them off with a camp quilt to keep them warm during the cold winter months. Mom befriended fans and would-be writers and lavished them with support and attention. And mom was thoughtful. When she had a stroke just before the birth of my daughter, who happens to be adopted, mom kept it a secret and made my sisters and other family members promise not to tell me so my husband and I could concentrate on our new baby instead of worrying about her health.
3. Mom was funny and laughed hard and often. She was happy to be the butt of her own jokes. "Remember, beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes clear to the bone," she would say and then burst into laughter. After the stroke impaired her short-term memory mom told me, "it's been a real money-saver. I read the same book over and over again and enjoy it every time."
4. Elevators, escalators, didn't matter: mom was afraid of anything that went up. As a country gal who grew up barefoot, she was never comfortable in cities, formal clothing, or places more than two floors high. Once she traveled to San Francisco for a meeting with an editor on one of the top floors of a downtown skyscraper but never made it. She fled the elevator on the second or third floor and the editor had to come down and meet with her in the ladies room.
5. She was a kick-ass writer. Mom never forgot how it felt to be a child. She remembered every slight, every insult, every joy, and every pleasure and communicated all of it so vividly that her books are like a direct flight back to childhood. Also, it's impossible to read one of mom's books and not get hungry. The rich descriptions of the food in her books makes your mouth water, even if you've never ever craved pinto beans and corn bread in buttermilk.
A few critics thought her prose too purple but not the folks who gave her awards, not the kids who eagerly read her books, and not the teachers who still recommend them. (I just found this from a 1990 review of a different author: "At its best, Grove's tale calls to mind the poignant, pithy novels of Robbie Branscum and Zilpha Keatley Snyder.")
Here's the preface to "The Girl." This autobiographical novel, about an abused and nameless eleven-year-old girl, is her finest work:
"The sun beat down hot orange, turning the red dirt clay blood color. The hollow was a bowl of steam where sweat ran down you day and night, your clothes in the day wet and clinging, the nights you'd be naked. Frogs croaked in unceasing supplication for rain. Trees rustled dryly, dust floating in little lazy puffs from their dusty leaves.
"From the knee-high, thirsty dead grass came the rattle of an angry snake. Other snakes, water moccasin and diamondback, dripped poison, blindly striking at all who came near them. Dogs dug deep in the earth to find coolness, tongues red, dripping, sides heaving, and sometimes they went mad from rabies or the heat. Fat hens made dust beds in the yard with their wings. Roosters halfheartedly looked for worms. Two black tumblebugs rolled a ball of cow shit between them, one pulling, the other pushing. Inside the small ball were their eggs, and they'd roll the ball until the eggs were hatched.
"Old women with arthritic knees knelt stiffly to pray. Men with skins burned to whang leather lifted red-rimmed eyes worriedly to the sky. It wasn't hell, just another dog-days August summer in Arkansas."
Want to read more? Nearly all of her books are out of print but many can still be found in school and public libraries all across the country. (Of course, you can also buy used copies online.) Happy reading!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005
Note to NYT: We're All Self-Appointed Journalists
"The collision between the Internet and Chinese authorities is one of the grand wrestling matches of history, visible in part at www.yuluncn.com. That's the Web site of a self-appointed journalist named Li Xinde," writes Nicholas Kristof in today's New York Times. Then he goes on to write about the guy's amazing reportorial accomplishments under the near-constant threat of arrest.
Last I checked, Nicholas Kristof was also a self-appointed journalist. So was every other hack on the planet, including each and every reporter and editor employed by the New York Times. Journalism is not brain surgery and in the U.S., at least, doesn't require a license, an examination, or being touched by the right hand of God. It simply requires that you decide to become a journalist (that would be the self-selection part) and then go out and practice journalism.
Naturally it's easier to be taken seriously if you are published or employed by a commercial media organization (started to type credible then thought of Fox) but that doesn't make you any more of a journalist than the newbie reporter in China. Yes, he's a newbie. No, he's not on anybody's staff and no, he's not working for money. But he's producing journalism of the most valuable sort. The sort that actually makes a difference. Perhaps Kristof was merely highlighting the guy's outsider status in China and I misread his intention. Maybe.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2005
Digital Life New Ad Vehicle for MSNBC
"MSNBC.com, a leader in breaking news and original journalism on the Internet, announces the launch of Digital Life, found within the site's Tech & Science section. This new, interactive lifestyle technology subsection allows users to enter a digital representation of various living spaces in the home and quickly discover the way technology has transformed each." The living room, anyway.
Dear reader, do we suppose Digital Life was created because actually expecting MSNBC readers to rise from their computers and walk into their own kitchens or bathrooms or bedrooms to note the vast and sweeping, if largely imaginary, technological changes they will find there is simply too much work? Do we imagine the birth of Digital Life was prompted by MSNBC's confusing organization of technology coverage until this very announcement, which signals a new an exciting trend in consumer responsiveness? Or do we believe that the most effective way for MSNBC to get Best Buy to sign up for an 11-month sponsorship and brand marketing campaign was to unveil Digital Life and, with it, spanking new sponsorship opportunities?
Need a few moments to ponder that? Didn't think so. " 'Through ingenuity and great collaboration we have created a product that has yielded the single largest sponsorship of any feature in the history of MSNBC.com,' said Kyoo Kim, Vice President of Sales of MSNBC.com, 'proof once again that advertisers understand the power of the Internet and are using online leaders like MSNBC.com to reach their key consumers.' "
Fine by me and I hope Best Buy is very happy with its purchase. I know who pays the content bills in this world. Michael Rogers, a columnist for the new section, is a real sweetie but the conceit is a stinker. In a world of podcasts and videocasts and streaming video (not that I necessarily approve) was interactive floorplans the best sponsorship fig leaf they could muster? A scary thought. Folks at Ziff Davis and MIT are bound to be pleased about MSNBC using that name but we don't care: media folks flatter each other all the time with this very special type of tribute. I'd swipe a good headline in a heartbeat.
Speaking of heartbeats, my pulse went up a notch or two after discovering this sexy branding expert, who's waiting for an opportunity to raise your pulse as well. Just how sexy is he? "His high energy and brain power are truly infectious. You will be roused into action by his stimulating presentations." Triple XXX marketing action: Who knew?
In related news the Times of London announced today that "scientists in Israel have cracked the complicated cognitive code that determines whether individuals are able to understand sarcasm. Yeah, right. No, really. The findings, published today by the American Psychological Association, could provide vital clues to the best way of helping people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, as well as those with some forms of brain damage, to improve their communication skills."
So hey, there's hope for me yet. You too.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 21, 2005
Video Journalists: Promise or Threat?
An interview with video journalist advocate Michael Rosenblum has kicked off a lively debate at Lost Remote. Commented one reader, "I've been a one-man band, and it was absurd. Cover a press conference? No problem. Try to cover a big fire? Do I shoot or find interviews? Can't do both at the same time." Here's an excerpt from the interview:
LOST REMOTE: What is a video journalist?
ROSENBLUM: A Videojournalist is a television reporter who works alone with a small digital camera and laptop edit the way a print journalist works with a pad and pencil or a laptop. This is about reporting and authorship. As anyone can pick up a pencil and paper and try to write (or a typewriter or a wordprocessor), so we also encourage anyone with the urge and a vision to pick up a camera and an edit system and see that they can make. This is, after all, how most writers get started. TV should be the same.
LR: For a TV newsroom, what are the advantages of VJs?
ROSENBLUM: In a typical TV newsroom, there may be 70-100 employees while fielding 5-6 Betacams. This is as insane as having a newspaper with 70 reporters but only owning 5 pencils. The cameras are the pencils -- they are the thing we make TV with. The thing that is actually on the air. When you only field 5 camera crews every day, every story must make air. It makes people very conservative. Very nervous. We can't take risks. We can't ever fail. Good journalism requires the ability to take a risk and fail from time to time. Creativity requires the ability to take a risk and fail. Maybe there's a story here. Maybe not. Let me try. With 5 crews, you can never do this. When you field 50 cameras a day, not unusual, in fact, more the norm, you cast television journalism in a whole new light -- the abiilty to take a risk. What we do now is just make TV. In the future, we will be able to be journalists. Not just regurgitate stories from the newspaper and the wires.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 20, 2005
Google's Terms of Service for RSS Ads
Dave Taylor examines Google's Terms of Service for AdSense for Feeds. "Here's how you mess with someone now: grab their RSS feed, strip out the AdSense for RSS data, present the rest on a Web page or in a new 'clean' feed, and blamo, they'll have their account terminated.
"The Terms of Service continues: You agree you will be responsible and liable for any and all use of the AFF Ads by any feed user and will indemnify Google for any lawsuit or proceeding (a) relating to or arising from any feed user's use of AFF..."
There's lots of interesting, vaguely alarming stuff for wannabe publishers.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
RSS Feed Frenzy, Note-Sharing Journalist,
Don't be late to the RSS party warns Rebecca Lieb over at ClickZ: "Are you an advertiser, marketer, or publisher? Then it's time to get serious about this whole RSS thing. ... All signs point to the fact RSS is on the brink of mainstream adoption. Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are developing strategies to encourage subscribers to feed at their feeds and to monetize those feeds with ads. Major agencies, such as Carat Interactive, have launched practices around blogs and feeds. Venture capitalist funds are flowing to firms such as NewsGator and FeedBurner. Acquisitions and rollups have begun in earnest: AskJeeves bought Bloglines; NewsGator snapped up FeedDemon this week."
Not so fast, sez the fine folks at Marketing Sherpa. "Given RSS's increasing popularity among online publishers, bloggers and marketers, there's a lot of buzz on its potential to reach millions of interested consumers directly through opt-in feeds to consumers' RSS readers of choice. However, 'potential' is the key word. RSS lacks hard numbers of almost any kind, making it impossible to base a business case for relying on it as a publishing or marketing tool... at this time. And yet otherwise sensible marketers and publishers are talking about replacing email with RSS offerings (asking readers to choose format which they'd like to get info in) -- and hundreds of bloggers have chosen to *only* offer RSS feeds instead of an accompanying email alert."
The marketers I've been interviewing would probably disagree that RSS lacks hard numbers of almost any kind, but none of them would be daft enough to say marketers should put all their eggs in the RSS basket--or any other single marketing technique. That's just plain dumb.
BusinessWeek.com's Blogspotting columnist Stephen Baker is letting readers download notes from his interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher. (Thanks to Frank Barnako for the link.) These are very sketchy notes, not the kind that lead to Pulitzer prizes (those don't get shared), but I was still surprised to find them. It's not what journalists do. It's part of our intellectual capital and no, I'm not joking. It's an interesting exercise but don't look to me to emulate it.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:37 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 19, 2005
Offers That Just Ain't Relevant
Yesterday I got the following request: "At the moment we are in the process of creating reciprocal link partnerships. Since both of our sites are automotive related exchanging links will increase both of our search engine rankings and we will each benefit from greater targeted traffic." I don't think so. Stuffola covers a lot of topics but guess what? Autos is not one of them. In a similar vein, I've been researching RSS-based advertising for a future article but haven't noticed an ad in Bloglines until yesterday. It came courtesy of the justly popular Boing Boing.
This ad for scalp-related products below an item about a treatment for depression is like a poster kid for the limitations of keyword buys. Click on the ad link and you get to a page with very hip, very high-tech, very relevant products. Did Boing Boing readers actually buy any of this stuff? I am skeptical but have no idea. If you've got the scoop, spill it!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2005
Global Warming Slugfest
My friend Richard Reynolds points out that the New Yorker is hardly alone in covering the global warming story: Mother Jones' May/June issue has a terrific (if depressing) cover package on the topic. I started to type "issue" but it's only an issue in a political sense. Unfortunately, American journalists have contributed to the idea that global warming is a wacky, unproven theory. As veteran journalist Ross Gelbspan points out in Mother Jones, "A prime tactic of the fossil fuel lobby centered on a clever manipulation of the ethic of journalistic balance. Any time reporters wrote stories about global warming, industry-funded naysayers demanded equal time in the name of balance. As a result, the press accorded the same weight to the industry-funded skeptics as it did to mainstream scientists, creating an enduring confusion in the public mind. To this day, many people are unsure whether global warming is real."
That's the result of the kind of journalism that substitutes a supposed objectivity for actual analysis and that achieves "balance" by volume. Most of the time reporting is just the filler between the ads that keep the mainstream media machine humming. That's okay. That's the system. But now and again there are topics of enormous importance that beg for serious, thoughtful and appropriate and sustained coverage. The U.S. media have fallen down on the job, says Gelbspan: According to one study, the U.K. media have devoted about three times as much coverage to global warming as their Yankee counterparts.
Gelbspan does not suggest critics of global warming should be ignored. "There are a few credentialed scientists who still claim climate change to be inconsequential. To give them their due, a reporter should learn where the weight of scientific opinion falls -- and reflect that balance in his or her reporting. That would give mainstream scientists 95 percent of the story, with the skeptics getting a paragraph or two at the end. But because most reporters don't have the time, curiosity, or professionalism to check out the science, they write equivocal stories with counterposing quotes that play directly into the hands of the oil and coal industries by keeping the public confused."
Newspaper columnist Bill Steigerwald was so troubled by the lack of balance in reporting by the MoJo crew that he called up Professor Fred Singer, a critic of the global warming theory, to help redress the problem. But as Gelbspan puts it, "When the subject is a matter of fact, the concept of balance is irrelevant. What we know about the climate comes from the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history—the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s conclusions, that the burning of fossil fuels is indeed causing significant shifts in the earth’s climate, have been corroborated by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. D. James Baker, former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, echoed many scientists when he said, 'There is a better scientific consensus on this than on any other issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.' "
Scientific consensus sucks if you're an SUV-loving, energy-hogging, first-world consumer of the highest order, as many of us are. (Don't you touch my remote, bucko, and I'm not kidding.) It's not so surprising that people (including government officials, corporate executives and just plain Joes) would prefer not to think about the ramifications of the extraordinarily broad support for the existence of global warming among the science set. Especially if the existence of global warming puts a damper on a professional career or chosen industry. That does not excuse the many U.S. media types who have been weenies on this topic and it does not excuse Steigerwald for prizing "balance" over smarts.
Writer George Monbiot has made some interesting global-warming-related discoveries on the media front. "For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, 'are not shrinking but in fact are growing. ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.' " This seemed odd to Monbiot, so he called the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read Bellamy's letter over the phone. A hasty response ("complete bullshit") and further investigation determined that Bellamy had somehow channeled Pierre Salinger and picked up the info off a crackpot web site run by a guy with a fondness for Lyndon Larouche-sponsored publications. Which leads us back to Professor Singer.
It turns out the statistics published by the Larouche magazine "were first published online by Professor Fred Singer, one of the very few climate change deniers who has a vaguely relevant qualification (he is, or was, an environmental scientist). He posted them on his web site www.sepp.org, and they were then reproduced by the appropriately named junkscience.com, by the Cooler Heads Coalition, the National Center for Public Policy Research and countless others. They have even found their way into The Washington Post. They are constantly quoted as evidence that manmade climate change is not happening. But where did they come from? Singer cites half a source: 'a paper published in Science in 1989.' Well, the paper might be 16 years old, but at least, and at last, there is one. Surely? I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures; throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat."
Nobody's perfect. Maybe Singer was simply wrong about the year. Maybe the paper actually exists. And maybe the New Yorker is staffed soley by commies and Mother Jones employs angry radicals out to destroy America. Assume it's all true. That still doesn't make more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries wrong about global warming. Or as Bill Moyers put it last Sunday, "A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 17, 2005
AdSense for Feeds Now in Beta
UPDATE: The best practices for AdSense for Feeds includes these recommendations: "Don't include more than one ad unit per article" and "Place the ad unit at the end of articles." I thought, based on the conversation below, that Google alone determined ad frequency but apparently not. If you know better, let me know. Also, just noticed that Adam Stiles called for the creation of AdSense for Feeds last November. Looks like he got what he wanted.
***
Right about now word is out at the Syndicate conference (and soon on Google’s blog) that the company’s no-comment trials with news-feed advertising are over, replaced by a public beta called AdSense for Feeds. The ever-patient Shuman Ghosemajumder (business product manager) and way chipper Barry Schnitt (PR pro) briefed me yesterday (a lucky accident of my research) about this bit of news.
Quick facts about AdSense for Feeds:
*The ads are targeted off web articles or postings via their permalinks, not the feed itself, “so we make sure we have the full context to give our technology the most benefits to produce relevent ads.”
*The ads are rendered as images. “We have to conduct a real-time auction so that our advertisers are accurately represented in terms of their budgets and the current state of our advertising network. So rendering the ads as an image allows us to not only serve that function but also gives us the maximum amount of compatibility with feed readers."
*AdSense for Feeds fits into Google’s existing advertising framework so it uses the same technology and the same terms and conditions. “You need to be an approved AdSense publisher in order to use AdSense for Feeds.” In other words, wannabe AdSense publishing partners must check all porno and most profanity at the door. Darn.
*News feed ad frequency is predetermined by Google. And what has Google predetermined, exactly? “We're experimenting with it right now. There are different options that we have, there are many different levers that we have in the way of being able to tweak [and] enhance our targeting.”
*Flexibility is limited. Folks who want to buy advertising from Google’s network can do so. If I understood it correctly, you must buy Google search results (natch). Your ads will also run on web sites across Google’s Network, in news feeds, in Gmail (ideally on purpose and not by accident) and, if you choose, on Google’s Content Network, which has a site-targeting option. You don’t have to run ads across the entire network but you can’t choose to advertise in feeds only, for example.
The surprising bit to me was Google’s ostensible reason for the move: to make the web a better place. OK, I’m paraphrasing but how would *you* translate this quote?
“By actually giving a wide set of popular feeds access to Google's advertising network, one of the things that we want to do is encourage them to put more high-quality content in there so that it's not just interesting to those most technologically sophisticated users but also to mainstream users.
“And I think that's one of the things that's been missing for mainstream users, because a lot of their favorite publications don't have a lot of high-quality content in their feeds right now. Just because they haven't been able to be compensated for that. ...They are viewing feeds...as primarily a promotional mechanism, to bring people back to their web site, which is where monetization actually occurs.
“And what we want to do is encourage a shift in that thinking. So that publishers realize that users use RSS feeds and Atom feeds because it's convenient for them. And by making it as positive an experience as possible for those users by putting as much high-quality content in their feeds that publishers are going to attract more users who are interested in consuming their content. ...And they'll have the opportunity for monetization from our advertising.”
So does that mean Google will require full-text feeds from advertisers?
“It's part of our guidelines that we want as much high-quality content in the feed as possible. What we're encouraging publishers to do is have full-text syndication of their articles. But in many cases publishers aren't willing to be that bold immediately. So what we're asking for then is as rich a snippet as possible on the article."
And does Google define that in some way?
“It's something more than a single sentence. We don't specifically bar people because there are different ways of looking at the issue and one of the ways ... is that if someone is just putting out a headline-based feed but users are actually subscribing to it, then even though it contains advertising then maybe that trade-off is working well.”
I asked Ghosemajumder to explain one more time why Google wanted to encourage full-text feeds.
“You’re familiar with Google’s overall mission statement, to organize the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful.”
(Well, no, but I didn’t admit it. Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me about IDG’s ten corporate values? At least I remember the action-oriented, let's try it attitude.)
“One thing which is consistent with that is just being able to make sure that the world’s information is continuing to grow and that we're not being short-sighted when it comes to any of our business opportunities."
What a relief. It’s not just about making the web a better place. It’s also about making the web a better place for Google’s business. Alarmed shareholders, you may now exhale.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft and MessageCast
I'm researching RSS advertising and hoped to post excerpts from my interview with Royal Farros on the topic but an old war wound (well, an old typing injury) got in the way. To recap, Microsoft bought real-time alert and messaging service MessageCast Wednesday. When I spoke to cofounder Farros the following day, he framed the sale as a tribute, in its way, to Microsoft's innovation. Microsoft?? Yup.
"Microsoft needs to get credit for being the innovators here because they are. It's amazing that even internally they might not recognize it as much but as a third-party, we staked our business on it," he said. "They have this beautiful big network built out. Essentially, what are we adding to it? We're adding a fast on-ramp. ... We looked around and we said, this is what we want to do. We don’t want to build a network. Who’s farthest in front? That’s why we’ve been working with Microsoft for a year and a half. "
When MessageCast was founded, RSS wasn't in the picture. At that time, "we were a broadcast mechanism over an alternative channel. And that, in and of itself, was interesting because it solved some problems. It was better performing. It was completely opt-in and customer controlled. You could detect presence. It was non-spam. Good things. But the interesting twist came when you apply that with what’s exploded: RSS and relevant advertising. RSS becomes a universal data trigger for all of this information. And relevant advertising, hey, that becomes a way to pay for it all."
But exactly how will advertising pay for it all? To find out, you'll have to read the published article in a few months (ah, the world of paper publishing). Stay tuned.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 14, 2005
Baffling PR: Novel or Nonfiction?
I understand that a certain flexibility, let's call it, has crept into the definition of nonfiction. There was one author, for example, who explained to students, although not her readers, that she had tweaked various things in her memoir. (For flow? To improve the narrative? Don't recall and don't actually object to the practice if it is disclosed to readers.) But what are we to make of this newly processed chunk o' marketing communications?
"The Book That’s Sending Shock Waves Across the Nation
"Author Janice Scott-Blanton releases her debut non-fiction novel 'My Husband Is On the Down Low and I Know About It,' published by JaRon Publishing Group.
"(PRWEB) May 14, 2005 -- On March 20, 2005, Janice Scott-Blanton’s released her debut novel with a celebration at the Zanzibar on the Waterfront in Washington, DC. Scott-Blanton has written a true to life novel that is taking readers on a journey into the life of Annette Hawkins (alias), who is confronted with her military husband’s lifestyle of living on the 'down low.' ... Scott-Blanton has conducted dozens of face-to-face and telephone interviews with Annette, reviewed a video tape and read journals that Annette and Lieutenant Colonel James Hawkins maintained over the years." Gotta wonder about that videotape. Was she watching home movies of a family BBQ or something considerably hotter?
Perhaps this book is nonfiction, with names changed to protect real individuals. Maybe it's a novel that was inspired, as the movie folks like to say, by true events. Fine either way. But a nonfiction novel? Get outta Dodge. Stop scaring the horses and confusing the pitifully few readers left in our great country.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 12, 2005
God No Fan of Extreme Capitalism, Author Claims
Maybe the author doesn't say it directly but that is the implication of this press release:
"As Americans weve all been taught to believe that Christianity and Capitalism go hand-in-hand. Free to choose, Free to be all we can be, and just about any other freedom seems to somehow be wrapped up in the phrase 'Democratic, free-market capitalism.' But the books author, James A. McCune, suggests our current system doesnt quite have it right: 'Make no mistake, the Bible favors free markets, but it also requires very important safeguards to make the system work for everybody, safeguards that arent a part of our system today.' McCune continues, 'Not only is capitalism as its practiced today not Biblical, it only works well when three important conditions are present: (1) There must be reasonable prosperity, (2) There must be a reasonable balance between the supply and demand for labor, and (3) There must be a reasonable balance of power between the major global players.'
So where *is* the Bible verse on free markets? I spend years in Sunday school only to miss that crucial teaching.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
MSN Buys MessageCast...And All I Got Was This Lousy Post
Update: Since the entry below, I was able to interview Royal Farros as agreed (many thanks to Farros and Renee Deger for keeping their promise). "I really think Microsoft needs to get the credit for innovation here," he told me. Why? Find out tomorrow when I post excerpts from our interview.
I've been trying to interview Royal Farros of MessageCast for ten days to no avail. Finally I find out the source of my bad luck: the company has been snapped up by MSN. So much for partnering with AOL and Yahoo. As I detailed in earlier interviews with Farros, MesageCast created a real-time alert system that MSN has used for a couple of years now. According to eWeek, "Earlier this year, news also began to spread that MessageCast was developing a keyword-based ad network for RSS." Yes it did. Via this blog. (Thanks so very much for the link, she typed bitterly.) So apparently MSN plans to take this whole alert thing seriously. But will anyone at MSN explain it to me? We shall see. (But not before the story I'm writing comes out.)
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
Check Out Swedish Band Pineforest Crunch
While looking for office space last fall I met Åsa Eklund. It was strictly hit-and-run. I'd seen her ad for sharing office space, quickly realized the groovy-but-dark space would probably not work for me and rushed out. But not before she loaded me up with a bunch of CDs from her band, Pineforest Crunch, and a few others. Turned out that she ran a small music company. (I moved in elsewhere. It didn't work out. So much for my instincts.)
Once I got home and started listening, I realized Ms. Eklund was not only a mini-music moghul but also a wonderful singer. (And no, her voice is *not* an icy cold embrace, what bullshit.) I'm listening to Panamarenko, from 2001 (I especially like the first song, Situation Endless). Others like the CD too. So check it out. You know, before the planet gets too warm to enjoy Pineforest Crunch or anybody else.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2005
Global Warming Ate My Homework
I need to focus on upcoming interviews about RSS, marketing and how best to use the former for the latter. This is difficult to do because I made the mistake of reading part 2 of Elizabeth Kolbert's series of articles on global warming in the New Yorker. I only just got the May 2nd issue (the wages of living in Europe) and innocently thought I'd skim it over lunch and then forget about it. Forget about it? Not damn likely. There's a Q&A with Kolbert at the New Yorker web site that nicely sums up the reasons for my new-found anxiety:
"One disturbing thing about your article is just how alarmed many seemingly sober-minded scientists are. What sort of a gap is there between expert and lay opinion on climate change?
"That’s a good question. I think there is a surprisingly large—you might even say frighteningly large—gap between the scientific community and the lay community’s opinions on global warming. As you point out, I spoke to many very sober-minded, coolly analytical scientists who, in essence, warned of the end of the world as we know it. I think there are a few reasons why their message hasn’t really got out. One is that scientists tend, as a group, to interact more with each other than with the general public.
"Another is that there has been a very well-financed disinformation campaign designed to convince people that there is still scientific disagreement about the problem, when, as I mentioned before, there really is quite broad agreement.
"And third, the climate operates on its own timetable. It will take several decades for the warming that is already inevitable to be felt. People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes."
So here's the problem: I'll probably be dead before the globe is hit with a deadly drought (the likes of which we've seen before, and it's way ugly, according to Kolbert's reporting). But my daughter may not be. Exactly what advice should I give her on accessorizing for catastrophic climate change? I'm thinking an organic hemp iPod case shouldn't make the cut, no matter how environmentally friendly.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2005
Wanted Man Found in Closet
"A Lee's Summit man, who prosecutors have accused of stealing pickup trucks taken for test drives, was found hiding inside his mother's closet this week." Mom was apparently out of town, poor dear. Link from the Kansas City Star, free registration required.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 06, 2005
Ten Random Top Ten Lists
1. Top Ten Urinals (No. 7, International Space Station).
2. Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School (No. 2: "95 percent of any creative profession is shit work").
3. Tim's Top Ten Bowling Tips.
4. Top Ten Things Guys With Testicular Cancer Have to Be Thankful For (includes "Protective radiation 'cup' doubles as a decorative soap holder.").
5. Top Ten Flirting Tips (No. 7: "Never leave home without a prop." That's why I take my husband everywhere.)
6. Top Ten Telemarketing Scams, 1998 edition.
7. Top Ten Most Outrageous Statements of 2004 (from the pinkos at Media Matters).
8. Top Ten Non-English Language Horror Films.
9. Top Ten College Pranks of All Time (remember Bonsai Kittens?).
10. Last and least, Top Ten Reasons Why Home-Made Rations Are Not Good for Pets (No. 10: "Owners and breeders often think their pet's ration is good because it's coat, behaviour and other external signs of 'health' appear to be normal. However this is not necessarily true." )
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 05, 2005
Tween Marketers Go After Boys
"Riotweb.com, the new online destination for tween boys, is now live!" gushes the announcement. "Areas of the site include MuSick, where boys can create a uniquely gross song in minutes; the Chimp-o-Matic, where RIOT the Chimp can be added to any photo; and the wonders of Monkey Pee, Monkey Do. ... GLOB, the mysterious and opinionated RIOT blog-master, keeps boys totally up to date on sports, games and entertainment." This gift to boys comes courtesy of Riot Media, "a media company and lifestyle brand dedicated to serving the lucrative tween boy market."
A fart-centric site is way overdue and I for one welcome it. But can a single monkey and lots of fart jokes fuel a new publishing empire? Dave Pilkey pulled it off with Captain Underpants--and he didn't even need the monkey. That doesn't mean it's easy to do.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 04, 2005
Deodorant for Seven-Year-Olds
In Ad Age (reg. required), Jack Neff reports on a new campaign for kiddy deodorant using an iPod sweepstakes, samples, animated TV ads and "the brand's first blog marketing." If you read the entire piece, it's clear that kiddy deodorant is a gateway product designed to create loyal customers for other Secret products--and it's working. Can toddler deodorant be far behind? Eventually a market will be manufactured for fragrance products that bridge the now yawning gap between the baby-powder age of infancy and the body-spray generation of elementary-school consumers. (Next stop for tweener marketing people: hell.)
“ 'Girls have started using deodorant younger and younger,' said Dave Knox, assistant brand manager at P&G overseeing the body-spray launch. 'It used to be 12 or 13 was kind of the entry point, and that’s slowly ratcheted down each year. ... If you don’t target the consumer in her formative years, you’re not going to be relevant through the rest of her life.'
"Limited Too, with its target ages of 7 to 14, became a perfect fit. Having tested sampling last summer at the chain with the Secret Sparkle roll-on antiperspirant line, Mr. Knox decided it would work better still in a promotion for a body-spray product for which the onset of puberty is no requirement. ... P&G last week launched Secret’s first blog-marketing program at SparkleBody-Spray.com. ... Mr. Knox sees the body sprays as a 'safe entry into the beauty category' for girls that won’t rankle parents the way giveaways of lipstick or 'heavy perfume' might."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:27 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Surrender to Smooth and Creamy Galaxy: Ad Speak Gets Its Own Database
Thanks to Rhizome.org for this news: "The chipper, poignant and irksome imperatives launched from all corners of daily routine by competing companies permeate our commutes, grocery lists, and vernaculars. Current mantras like 'Laugh More. Cry More. Experience More.' (Blockbuster), 'Try Being More Of A Woman!' (Coty Perfume) and 'Get the Most Incredible Memory Ever.' (Dell) make big demands or promises to their targets! The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, based in and out of Boston, endeavors to compile authoritative research on this topic, comprising a project called The International Database of Corporate Commands."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 03, 2005
Reporters Don't Read Their Mail
The ever-helpful Tom Murphy points to a survey of 50 newspaper reporters. Among the findings: "26% of those surveyed open less than 50% of press releases they receive via e-mail" and "76% don't believe that blogs provide a useful research tool." The latter fact might incense Dave Winer (happy belated b-day!) and it may make those reporters look like dinosaurs but it makes sense considering the small amount of original reporting in Blogville. After all, who has the time or money for original reporting? Few bloggers. Hell, there are actual newspapers that seemingly run nothing but wire service reports and rewritten press releases. When original reporting does surface, sometimes the amateurs get it wrong (just like professionals do at times). A few blogs reported on an explosion at Harvard that went unreported by Big Media. Did a meth lab explode? Nah, it something less dramatic: a car fire. Maybe you'd put that in the paper. Not me. I suspect a fair number of blogs are great sources for article ideas. But for research? Not just yet.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Multitasking Makes Us Stupid (But We Knew That)
This may not be news to you but it's news to me. Not the stupidity part, which I recognize from my own experience. I mean the research part from New Scientist. "Eighty volunteers were asked to carry out problem solving tasks, firstly in a quiet environment and then while being bombarded with new emails and phone calls. Although they were told not to respond to any messages, researchers found that their attention was significantly disturbed. Alarmingly, the average IQ was reduced by 10 points - double the amount seen in studies involving cannabis users. But not everyone was affected by to the same extent - men were twice as distracted as women."
Thanks to Sean Carton for the link.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Happy Birthday Pirate Publishing
Today Dagens Nyheter profiles Piratförlaget (Pirate Publishing), an upstart book publisher that rocked the staid world of the Swedish book industry when it published its first book at the end of April five years ago. Pirate was founded when Sigge Sigfridsson, Liza Marklund and Jan Guillou--three best-selling genre novelists--abandoned their publishers to start their own publishing house with the help of Guillou's wife, Ann-Marie Skarp, who became head of the company.
The publisher Guillou left was spitting mad and called the action a declaration of war. He also said, according to DN, that the Swedish book industry was facing something entirely new: a pirate publisher. The cheeky authors adopted that as the company name and established better terms for themselves and the other authors eventually added to the roster. Those better terms included a 50-50 split on book revenues (after expenses) and a willingness to market books more aggressively than the competition. Sigfridsson eventually left to start another publishing house but Pirate has defied all predictions of failute. While other Swedish publishing houses are making an 8-percent profit margin at most (5 to 6 percent is common), Pirate has racked up a 20-percent margin this year, according to DN. (The company publishes 12 to 15 books annually, most of them crime fiction.)
Pirate's marketing moxie must be heartening for their writers. A TV commercial for Liza Marklund's fourth crime novel pushed sales up by 50 percent, according to an executive. Marklund (an attractive blonde) appears on the covers of all her books. Here's what she says about the marketing (my translation): "We have crazy ideas and do them. 'Should we blanket the entire Åhlens department store with my face?' "Sure, let's do it.' "Should we put up ads for the book at every bus stop in Sweden?' 'Sure, let's do it.' " An advertising campaign for Guillou's latest book won a prize from the national advertising industry.
I understand why the other publishers were pissed when Pirate was founded five years ago. They muttered darkly about Pirate "skimming off the cream," about the potential loss of development costs for unknown writers (the successful-authors-subsidize-new-authors theory of crappy royalty structures) and so forth. But these writers were making huge chunks of cash for the publishers; why shouldn't they get at least half?
One of Pirate's authors, Leif GW Persson, claims that "writers are the most exploited group that exists." Sigge Stark, one of the ten best-selling Swedish authors of all time, earned a mere 30,000 swedish crowns over her lifetime, he claims, while her publisher made millions. Guess the Pirate folks just wanted to even the score a little. Dunno if they anticipated the eventual competition. A couple of newer upstarts supposedly have offered Persson a 60-40 split and even better deals. So far he's stayed with Pirate. "Pirate is going to taste the same medicine it gave to others," he says. Goodness, more money for authors? Sounds like a fine idea to me.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 02, 2005
Book Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats
"The Men Who Stare at Goats" is a book by British documentary filmmaker and journalist Jon Ronson that was prompted when Uri Geller told him he was a psychic spy for U.S. intelligence services. Ronson's willingness to actually investigate Geller's assertion rather than simply dismiss it (as Ronson claims other journalists did) led him to a once-secret U.S. Army unit and a collection of government and military New Age wackos (my description, not his) that helped establish a theoretical basis for an army of peace-lovin' psychic warrior monks. According to Ronson the concept of the warrior monk was corrupted over time and ideas meant to strengthen a peaceful, New Age force instead helped inspire the alledged murder of a CIA scientist (Frank Olsen in 1953) by the CIA itself and, much later, the torture of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib. The torture was not an abberation on the part of low-ranking soldiers, according to Ronson, but the result of deliberate efforts by intelligence officers to experiment with new (painful, nightmarish) ways to extract information from prisoners. (Ronson and former prisoners aren't the only ones making that claim. A high-level military investigation apparently agrees that was the case for some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to the New York Times.)
A glowing review by Janet Maslin prompted me to snag a copy while in New York last month (the Boston Globe liked it too). Last week I sat down and practically mainlined the volume over the course of a single day. It's a relatively short (259 pages), compelling, often funny read that made me laugh out loud several times. The goats of the title refers to 100 "debleated" animals originally used for training army surgeons but later used in a program that was supposed to teach an elite group within the Army how to kill a goat by staring at it. Presumably the group would work its way up to enemy soliders after getting the hang of goat slaughter.
My spousal unit read the book and agreed it was compelling but said he couldn't suspend his disbelief. Ronson's stated worry when a supposed pyschic predicts disaster in his neighborhood and his later relief when it seems the disaster will happen elsewhere (but then doesn't happen at all) is too much of a stretch, he said. "How can he pretend to believe these people?" hubby asked. "How can he describe someone as a level-headed pyschic? That's an oxymoron."
I don't think so. I understood what Ronson means, even if his practiced naivete gets wearing at times. For me, at least, it's easy enough to believe that U.S. military and intelligence agencies include people with a fierce belief in mind power, psychic networks, remote viewing and other formerly extreme ideas. Those ideas have been adopted by plenty of folks across the country. I'm probably related to some and I certainly am acquainted with others. So the thing that struck me about Ronson's book wasn't the adoption of psychic tactics by the Army, however bizarre that might be. What struck me was the apparent unwillingness of journalists (American and otherwise) to pursue potential stories that make us uncomfortable. Time and again Ronson points to reporters who dismiss leads rather than investigate them (or investigate them fully) because, he suggests, we don't want to challenge our beliefs about our government and military.
As Ronson explains early in the book, "It was Uri Geller who set me on the trail that led to the goats. ...There had long been rumors (circulated on the whole, it must be said, by Uri himself) that back in the early 1970s he had been a psychic spy working secretly for U.S. intelligence. Many people have doubted his story--The Sunday Tims once called it 'a bizarre claim,' arguing that Uri Geller is nuts whereas the intelligence establishment is not."
It's not easy to determine who is nuts and who is sane these days. Ronson makes an attempt, and I'm willing to believe his nonfiction book is just that. Thing is, readers do have to take it on faith because it's a he-said, she-said volume, without footnotes, an index or an appendix. That sucks because if this book is true, it should be covered in the news pages and not merely in the book review sections of newspapers and web sites. eSkeptic's review bolsters some of Ronson's work, which is a relief. Next time, Jon, make your evidence more obvious, okay?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack