InternetNews: "Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution has now tallied its user base, and it's a number that on the surface would make it the largest installed base of any Linux distribution, with at least 9.5 million users and possibly as many as 10.5 million. Fedora competitor Ubuntu Linux currently claims to have 8 million users."

The vultures are circling. What was once a small trickle of layoffs at major newspapers has become a waterfall of lost jobs within the media business. One can almost picture the Poynter Institute's widely read journalism industry blog Romenesko sauntering up to Time Inc. and Conde Nast and screaming, "Bring out your dead!"

But one advertising and blogging company is seeing opportunity in the storm of bad news, devising a method to "bail out" some of these journalists and use their skills for profit. Anil Dash, vice president of Six Apart, owner of blogging platforms Moveable Type and TypePad, has watched this ticker-tape of layoff announcements with growing concern. A few weeks ago, Dash and others within Six Apart began talking about what they could do to help fellow journalists fallen on hard times. On a lark, Dash posted a somewhat tongue-in-cheek item called, "The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program" on the TypePad site.

"Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist!" he wrote. "We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you."

The idea, essentially, was to provide a net to soften the fall as journalists leapt from burning buildings. A recently unemployed journalist could apply for the program. If accepted, he would gain access to several features, most notably a TypePad Pro account, Six Apart Media's advertising program, and around-the-clock support and promotion from the company. Theoretically, he then could continue with his beat reporting, publishing his articles on his own blog rather than with a traditional news source.

"The idea had really been to just send it to a couple friends and they'll think it's clever and useful," Dash told me. "And now we have dozens of reporters that have written in asking about how to participate; the page has gotten thousands of views. Candidly, if we thought it was going to be this widely covered we probably would have been a lot less snarky. But that's the nature of the web."

The theory behind the program mirrors what Web 2.0 futurists have been saying for years -- chiefly that major news outlets are too weighed down by middlemen and that journalists should instead branch out and work under the umbrellas of ad networks. In this scenario, more money goes directly to the content maker rather than funding the over-staffed, bloated news outlet. Individual journalists could therefore work their beats while relying on an online advertising company to secure and place the ads. This way, the journalist is able to create and manage her own brand rather than being incorporated into a faceless company entity.

"It was a little bit like giving people tinker toys, saying 'Assemble this yourself'," Dash said. "And the people who had done it actually had done very well by it and had seen some success with it. And we thought that not everyone has the time to put all those pieces together, especially those who have their day job and are worried about it. They're not going to spend company time when they're chasing down stories to learn about this new [Web 2.0] world."

Dash has worked as a new media developer for The Village Voice, and today dozens of major news outlets, ranging from the Washington Post to Wired, use Six Apart products for their blogging platforms. As someone with a decade of blogging experience -- he was one of the earliest writers to experiment in the medium -- Dash has seen journalists start mini-media empires on their own as bloggers, founding online journals that would eventually account for a portion or even all of their annual income as they rose in popularity. Josh Marshall, for instance, was an editor at The American Prospect before launching Talking Points Memo, a site that now employs nearly a dozen people.

Six Apart's advertising program already represents more than 1,000 bloggers, and Dash said that it's backed by a sales team that focuses on placing CPM display ads. An individual blogger's revenue is based on various factors, including the amount of traffic coming to her site as well as her particular niche -- some topics sell for higher rates than others. As with most ad programs, the blogger receives a large percentage of the money made from the ads sold on her site.

Skepticism

But the journalist bailout program was immediately met with skepticism from some quarters, especially working journalists. Shortly after I tweeted a link to Dash's proposal, I received a message from Priya Ganapati -- a journalist for Wired who covers hardware and emerging tech -- who simply dismissed the idea as a publicity stunt to promote Six Apart's products and advertising program. In a follow-up phone conversation, she accused Six Apart of putting the cart before the horse and said that, while she enjoys its products (Wired, after all, uses TypePad), the company should focus more on convincing journalists why its platform is superior before speaking of advertising and revenues.

"You have to a build a blog, you have to build a following, you have to have a product out there before you even begin to think about revenue and a sales team," Ganapati said. "And what TypePad isn't doing is focusing on the features of the product; instead it's talking up the ad sales of it. If you're going to start a new blog, or you're an existing blogger and want to get into it full time, you have to concentrate on picking the best blogging platform that is offered and build a strong readership. And then you start thinking about ad sales. But if you start thinking about ad sales first, you probably will end up making an unsuitable choice for your means."

Many of these thoughts were echoed by Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, one of the earliest advertising companies to focus exclusively on blogs (and a competitor of Six Apart's ad network). Though Blogads has a sales team that works to secure clients and place ads, its platform allows low budget advertisers to essentially create, pay for and place ads with little or no human involvement. Copeland told me that journalists -- even good ones -- often don't adapt well to blogging. The medium requires more than good writing and reporting skills. You also have to know how to network and promote your content, something about which many journalists are clueless.

"Journalism is kind of like being a monologist, and journalists are very used to pontificating," he said. "And I know a lot of people think that's just what bloggers do, but bloggers are more like someone in an improv theater group. It's just a different skill set."

What makes a blog successful, Copeland argued, is its personality -- or rather the blogger's ability to connect that personality to his readership. Though he wouldn't go so far as to say that these laid-off journalists weren't cut out to be bloggers, he said at the very least they would need to understand that in the blogosphere you often have to become your own marketer.

"There's just an awful lot of competition, which these people have not experienced recently," Copeland said. "At a newspaper the competition is really at the corporate level, and once you've won your slot as the metro reporter for City Hall, you might have competition with one other reporter in the town, you might have zero competitors -- either way it's not very competitive. And for every 100 reporters that look for jobs online, only one of them is going to be paying the rent a year from now. And whether that's with Six Apart or Blogads or Federated [Media], that's really beside the point. The point is that only one of them will have an appreciable audience that can be monetized.

I mentioned these concerns to Dash, and he immediately asserted that "we try to be very careful to not make any promises." He argued that the entire point of the journalist bailout program is that, although it's targeted at those who may be blogging novices, it's not necessarily a sink-or-swim endeavor. For instance, journalists involved in the bailout would automatically have their content displayed through blogs.com, which he said is a heavily-trafficked aggregator owned by Six Apart.

"[Blogs.com is] a great starting point and we're actually going to get some feedback from the journalists in the program to see what they're looking to do, because I think the answer's going to be different depending on the journalist," Dash said. "We don't want to dictate what is to happen, but we have a lot of experience in promoting sites that way and I think it'll be really interesting to look at [Blogs.com] as an aggregator of all these individual journalists. And another thing is because we've been doing this for so long, we know journalists in a lot of news verticals, we know a lot of bloggers in this area."

A Grim Future For Online Ads?

Of course, the underlying business model Six Apart is touting, online advertising, could well get hit hard during the recession. In fact, Six Apart itself announced recently it would lay off close to 10% of its workforce. In a recent widely-circulated post, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton argued that the decline in online ads would be even more severe than analysts expected. And sure enough, within days of that prediction, Denton announced that he would be cutting his own staff and folding some blogs.

Given these grim warnings, would it be realistic to think that journalists-turned-bloggers will be able to sustain themselves?

"For Nick in particular, I've been friends with him for years, there's nothing I wouldn't say to his face, but I think he's always made a very good business of being the most doom-and-gloom person in the room," Dash said. "And also he ends up being right a lot of time; if you're consistently negative then half the time you end up being right. But if what he's saying is true, I think it's better for writers if they get a bigger cut for what they're doing ... And secondly, we're not trying to be a publisher, and though I think Nick is a successful publisher, there's still a middle man with Gawker just like Conde Nast or any other publisher. I think that model is inherently a little harder to sustain. The web is very efficient at routing around middlemen."

What do you think? Is the bailout program a gimmick or a real boon for laid-off journalists? Have you signed up? Share your thoughts or experience in the comments below.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

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div class="rxbodyfield"p class="ArticleBody" page="1"Seeking to bridge "the now to the next," a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/07/nokia-tube_1.html" class="regularArticleU"Nokia/a has set its sights on Internet services, next-generation wireless technology, and mobile application development./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"Among the company's efforts include the impending beta release of a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/24/HNnokiasiliconvalley_1.html" class="regularArticleU"Point amp; Find/a, a technology for finding information and services on the Internet by pointing a camera at real-world objects. The upcoming beta release lets users watch a film trailer, read a film review, or find a nearby cinema to buy tickets by pointing a camera phone at a movie poster./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"In the wireless radio technology space, the company is focused on LTE (Long Term Evolution of Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network), said Jim Harper, a Nokia senior technology marketing manager. LTE requires fewer network elements than earlier-generation networks, and it requires no circuit-switching, he said. It's being proposed as a competitor to WiMax, a technology that Sprint has begun rolling out in the U.S. this fall./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"b[ Does/b bWiMax deliver? Find out in the InfoWorld Test Center's road test: a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/29/40TC-wimax-road-test_1.html?source=fssr" class="regularArticleU""Does WiMax work in the real world?"/a ]/b/pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"In the development tools space, Nokia is positioning its Qt application development framework (pronounced "cute") as a platform for building applications to run on different types of systems. Applications also can be developed once and run across various desktop OSes, said Dilip Kenchammana, a Nokia product line manager./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"Another focus is cognitive radio, in which a device can dynamically jump between different frequency bands to increase bandwidth capacity, for purposes such as sending audio bits or data./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"Nokia has also previewed several research projects, including:/pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"* Videoconferencing pet, which features a mobile unit that can, for example, let grandparents catch a glimpse of their far-away grandchildren. It acts as a physical avatar of the caller./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"img src="" border="0" height="280" width="267" sys_contentid="118227" sys_variantid="305"//pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"* Mobile 3D video, which provides immersive video experiences and rich communication./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"* Mobile Millenium, which offers a next-generation real-time traffic data platform that uses GPS-enabled phones gather data on traffic./p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=b1d793e55ff8767f5c8b0cbbaa10bbe4p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=b1d793e55ff8767f5c8b0cbbaa10bbe4p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b1d793e55ff8767f5c8b0cbbaa10bbe4 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

Social news community Mixx is seeing healthy growth ever since they left stealth mode. They got a nice traffic spike last May after CNN integrated ‘Mixx it’ buttons in their articles, roughly doubling their number of unique monthly visitors to nearly 1 million, and it appears their new community building features aren’t hurting them either.

A screenshot from their Google Analytics account shows that the Digg-competitor is gaining traction, receiving over 5.8 million unique visitors last month. Compete (as usual) estimates lower numbers but shows a similar growth pattern, as does Google Trends. Quantcast seems to affirm the number of reported visitors as well.

So how does that compare to Digg?

While we don’t have any insight on their internal stats, we do know Comscore, Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends all show that Digg yields much more traffic than Mixx, even if growth appears to be stagnating while Mixx’s is soaring.

Mixx is also very eager to show that their user base is more diverse than Digg’s audience, citing a Hitwise report that suggests its users tend to be more female (49% vs. 33%), older (36% in the 18-24 age group vs. 45%) and wealthier (e.g. 19% makes more than $150k per year vs. 4%) than Digg users. But comScore’s U.S. demographics of both sites tells a different story. According to comScore, females make up 47% of the Mixx audience vs. 46.4% for Digg. So about the same. But when it comes to 18-24-year-olds comScore thinks Mixx skews younger, with 17% vs. only 14% for Digg. And for households earning more than $100,000, Digg wins there as well with 30% vs. 27% for Mixx.

So who’s numbers are you going to believe? It’s important to note that the Hitwise report was based on a 4-week study, which is in my opinion far from enough data to jump to any conclusions about the difference in user demographics. When you take the comScore data into account, the demographic differences seem pretty minor. Certainly they are not big enough to make any solid statements about Mixx being more mainstream than Digg.

Still a nice traffic growth pattern for a website that’s only been live for about a year and raised only $3.5 million in funding so far (Digg, for reference, has raised $40 million to date). Below are some comScore charts for the U.S.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

A Kansas jury has ordered ATT to pay almost $17 million for overcharging its California customers in passing along a federally mandated phone fee. But the jurors late Wednesday didn't find the telecommunications company guilty of conspiring with Sprint Nextel Corp. or then-competitor MCI to overcharge customers nationwide for the Universal Service Fund.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=BNnKN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=BNnKN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=yV0Kn"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=yV0Kn" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=P7c3n"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=P7c3n" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ibtimes/tech/~4/459947581" height="1" width="1"/

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that's where the newspaper business is right now. With profits slashed, unending layoffs, and online ad growth slowing, newspapers have to be open to new ideas that will help them deal with a media shift like no other. Last week I looked at the concept of crowdfunding, with people paying journalists directly for stories. This week, I heard another out-of-the-box idea: having newspapers help local businesses buy key words for Google AdWords or place Facebook ads -- acting as a local ad agency.

That idea came from Stephen Gray, the managing director of Newspaper Next, a project of the American Press Institute with one goal: to help newspapers come up with a profitable business model. Gray is a former managing publisher of the Christian Science Monitor, and was president of Monroe Publishing Co., which ran his family's newspaper in Monroe, Mich. Since 2005, he has been tasked with helping American newspapers save themselves -- a tall task, to say the least.

After a year of study in 2006, Newspaper Next released its first report, Blueprint for Transformation (a 98-page PDF file), and in early 2008 followed up with Making the Leap Beyond Newspaper Companies (a 110-page PDF with case studies). Gray has helped run more than 40 public training sessions and 30 private talks with newspapers based on his findings. While he is encouraged that newspapers are finally breaking out of their fixation on mass audiences and launching niche websites (such as mom sites and young adults sites), he feels they still don't understand how to serve local businesses.

"The difficult part is helping newspapers understand that if they want new business they need to get a new job done for businesses that they're not serving," Gray told me. "You can't just sell them the newspaper because you haven't been able to do that for 50 years. You need to have an offering to get that done."

So what kind of offering should newspapers have? Gray says they need to help local businesses connect to customers right at the point of interest in a product or service. The problem is that most newspapers are not focused on any kind of local search offering, and cede that ground to search engines such as Google or Yahoo. But Gray thinks the search engine offerings for local businesses aren't very good, and that presents an opening for newspapers.

"[Newspapers] should become the leading local Internet ad agency, which goes against ancient newspaper instinct of not ever helping anyone who is your competitor," he said. "But the fact is that audiences have split in a million directions, so here we are in a local market and our job is to help businesses in our local market succeed. If that means we are placing ads on Google and Facebook for local businesses, so what? That's what it takes to succeed and ad agencies have been making a living off doing that for some time."

I talked in-depth to Gray about what Newspaper Next has tried to accomplish, and he talked about the group's findings and its struggles in getting newspapers to change quickly enough. The following is an edited transcript of our phone conversation.

What was the mission of Newspaper Next?

Stephen Gray: It was to provide newspaper companies with a pragmatic set of tools, concepts and processes to expand and diversify their declining business model. The business model was declining three years ago when we were starting out and it's only accelerated since then. So we wanted to give them an understanding of what was happening from a very different perspective and a set of practical processes they could adopt and use at newspapers big and small to create new solutions, new revenues for new audiences.

So there was a research element of your work first and then you did training and action items?

Gray: The research element was the first year. We started in the fall of 2005 and engaged Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his consulting firm Innosite for a year. We looked at the industry, looked at what was happening, looked at initiatives people were undertaking. A fundamental part of it was the Christensen approach, he studied more than 60 disrupted industries to see what the patterns were. We took his work and adapted it to the newspaper industry and saw how they were living out the usual scenario when an established industry gets disrupted.

In the first year we were like a think tank, and recruited seven newspaper sites to become demonstration sites and worked with each of them, teaching them the materials we were developing so they could develop new products for niche audiences. That was in year one, and in September '06, I took that on the road. For the newer 2.0 report, I went back to a number of companies that had the training early and asked what they had been doing. Their projects became the case-book section of the new report, with 24 new products -- print products, websites, combination products, even a consignment store. A variety of things that were generated using the Newspaper Next approach were used as examples in the 2.0 report.

What has worked with your approach?

Gray: What has really taken hold is the concept that while newspapers are mass-market products, and many of them think in that vein about large audiences, the most dramatic success is in getting hundreds of newspapers to develop products aimed at niches. They are generating new revenue streams and have added to the mass audience they have with news. And they can sell advertising to businesses that want to reach those niches.

Recently, I've been calling publishers at newspapers of various sizes and I'm finding that to be a pattern everywhere I call. They can list three to five new products that they've created in the last year that target audiences that they weren't reaching effectively before. [These include] a publication for farmers in the agricultural community for a newspaper that is a general interest publication; websites for moms, who are usually too busy to read newspapers; sites for young adults; Spanish-language sites.

And where have you struggled?

Gray: The hardest thing is on the other side of the business. It's a business that has two customer groups: there's the consumer side and the business customer. For a business, the newspaper allows them to communicate with a customer or potential customer. In that area, it's the hardest going. People in newsrooms, reporters, editors, are quite good at visualizing a consumer's life and creating a package of content that gets at what those people need. That's being done well in a lot of places in the industry.

What's not being done is realizing that in your community -- say, a 50,000 person community, you have 1,500 or 2,000 active advertisers but there are 8,000 businesses that serve consumers in your market. So three-quarters of them are not your customer. The difficult part is helping newspapers understand that if they want new business they need to get a new job done for businesses that they're not serving.

It's not that we don't know what that is. Some of what they want is: a one-to-one relationship with customers; a way to respond to what's going on in customers' lives; make sure they hear about me when they make a choice. The traditional product built on that job is the Yellow Pages, but I just read an article saying the Yellow Pages are expected to lose 39% of revenues in the next four years. Increasingly if we want to find something, we don't go to the Yellow Pages, we go online, and Google doesn't always work well.

Google isn't doing it all that well yet, and the Yellow Pages aren't doing it that well, so we're saying, 'Look this is where you [newspapers] should be.' It's very hard for ad staffs and management at newspapers to get their minds around the fact that not everyone wants mass reach, and once you understand the needs, you take the technology available today and use them to get the job done.

You talked about a change of mindset for reporters and editors to do editorial for niche audiences. Is it the same problem for ad sales and business staff who have to rethink making big sales for print ads vs. doing things on a smaller scale?

Gray: It's not necessarily smaller. The Newspaper Association of America lately has been preaching that we have to stop selling products and start selling audiences. I think that's about one-third of the steps we need to be making. We have been selling products -- selling the newspaper or a three-column print ad. But a local business isn't looking to buy an ad; they are looking to attract a certain kind of customer. NAA started preaching that you should sell audiences, meaning you have the newspaper, the mom site, the young adult site, etc. So you go to an advertiser and say 'here are all the audiences I can reach for you.'

That's an improvement, but the business doesn't want to buy an audience, they want to get their potential customers to know that they exist. Newspapers need to find out what businesses want to do, and then pull out of our bag of tricks (which so far doesn't have much in it), ideally you'd have 10 different things you could offer, whether it's a niche website to a text message and on and on. You find out what the business is trying to do, and pull something together from your toolkit to help them do it.

When I talk to newspaper publishers and ad directors I get a very clear picture that newspapers have been slow to understand the value of the Internet to local businesses, but local businesses have been even slower to get that. There are a few who get it, and they have a great website, but mostly it's 'we have a website that my nephew did three years ago and it doesn't do much.'

That's another piece we should be offering, it's not just 'buy banner ads on my news website.' It's 'we can make your business effective on the Internet.' And that might include doing your website or buying the keywords you should have on Google AdWords for our market. It might involve the newspaper buying ads on Facebook for a pizza place so that college students in Dayton, Ohio, see your ad. Or help set up a widget so the college kid can order pizza off their desktop.

Have you looked at how editorial should shift their thinking, too?

Gray: We made a conscious decision to leave that to others, as there are enough people working on that already. But the methodology that we teach has been applied in newsrooms with fascinating results. In the 2.0 report, there is a case study about the Pocono (Pa.) Record. In the first step of our process, we tell people to go out and talk to people in their communities who you hope would be your customers.

The Pocono Record sent out 13 people from the newsroom who did 200 interviews with readers of the newspaper. They talked to all these people and came up with a list of eight or nine subject areas that people had difficulty finding in their community. People weren't getting the kind of education information they wanted, they wanted more on infrustructure, golf, traffic, [and more]. So they figured out ways to beef up coverage of these things in the newspaper and changed some sections, which rolled over into the website, where they had more topic areas.

They did this in 2007 and by the end of the year, their print circulation was up, their web traffic was up 50% and their web revenues were up about 50%. What happened was that the website became known in the community as the place you would find out about everything, so they were able to raise their web ad rates. I think that could be repeated at every newspaper in America.

What about web video? I've written about companies helping small businesses do mini-informercials online for their business, and many newspapers also do videos with pre-roll ads. The content of most newspaper videos varies a lot, but what have you found to be best practices for monetizing video?

Gray: For the 2008 report, we partnered with Borrell Associates...and their conclusion was that at most newspapers the photo staff is shooting video and doing news video and posting it on their sites. This is typical of what Christensen found out about how people react in disrupted industries: 'Uh-oh, there's a new technology so we better get ahead on that technology.' But all you're doing with news video is giving your current customers something else to look at. There's not a lot of effective sales that use the true potential of advertising on video.

Where Borrell sees the big growth is with the mini-documentaries, the short video that shows what the business looks like, the people who you should trust at that business. And that video sits there as an ad, and you click it because you are interested in what that business does. It's unlike a pre-roll, it isn't forced on you. Overlays, pre-rolls and other video ads might work nationally, but locally businesses have a story to tell and they'd like to use video and it's an opportunity for newspapers to come in at a lower price point than television.

What do you think about crowdfunding, having people pay directly for stories they want to see, with sites like Spot.us?

Gray: I haven't looked at that as part of this project. My core belief is that it will be really hard to generate sufficient revenue to do any meaningful quantity of journalism on a philanthropic basis. The NY Times had an interesting story about VoiceofSanDiego and other non-profit news sites. VoiceofSanDiego has angel funding and they are soliciting funding from people on their website. I was at the Christian Science Monitor and it could be a poster child for this problem. It was never able to generate enough income to sustain its editorial work, and has always been subsidized by the church.

When I was there, we had a "make a donation" button and put it wherever we could on the site. It turned out a small revenue stream but it was insignificant compared to the cost. The bottom line is: I wish [crowdfunding efforts] the best, and I hope they succeed, but I really doubt there's going to be much robust journalism done on that basis.

A lot of people think there will be some kind of magic answer for a new business model for newspapers online. It seems more likely that there will be a lot of small revenue streams that add up. What do you think?

Gray: We've been saying for three years that there's no silver bullet and I've been looking for three years and there's still no silver bullet. I was at a meeting of newspaper CEOs and publishers last week, and people there were saying 'there's no silver bullet.' Everyone realizes that. They wish there was something, but there's really nothing there.

The massive shift for newspaper companies to make is to stop thinking everything is news. They need to start realizing that in this watershed moment, when people stop getting information from a dropper -- once a day I get a drop from a newspaper -- we now live on the ocean and can dip in at any time and get whatever we want. So we will spend a lot less time with things that are designed for everyone like news and spend a lot more time proportionately finding solutions for me and what will help me in my life today. That is a massive change in local markets happening right now. I am preaching in the field that newspapers need to visualize themselves becoming the local information utlity.

What was the mood like at the meeting of CEOs and publishers? Was it like the economic crisis meeting recently held by President Bush? Was there anybody with positive outlooks?

Gray: I've talked to a variety of newspaper publishers, and what I'm seeing is there's a tremendous amount of focus on what we've always done and how that's shrinking. Managing that shrinkage itself is a huge and difficult proposition in itself. You cannot go from black ink to red ink and keep going. So we are seeing the industry go through this horrible round of cost-cutting and job-cutting which is unavoidable. But at the same time the requirement to create new and different offerings that bring new money in -- when is the hardest time to do that? When you're whacking your existing organization.

So everyone has two very incompatible assignments. One simple piece of advice we're hearing is that if you have to make cuts, make sure you use that cut as a tool to get you where you need to be in the future -- not just as a way to lop off costs you'll never see again. You can't cut your way to profitability.

How do you respond from the criticism of Newspaper Next from Poynter's Rick Edmonds: "I have had a reservation about Newspaper Next from the get-go that continues this round. I am not persuaded that newspaper people can simply be repurposed into 'disruptive' entrepreneurs."

Gray: Nobody said it would be easy. It's definitely true that some people cannot get out of the mindsets of the core business. And it's true that being a disruptive entrepreneur is difficult within an organization that is focused almost exclusively on carrying out its traditional functions with traditional structures, processes and products. But we've got to try! What's the alternative if we don't -- ever-smaller revenues from the existing products, and ever-smaller staffs?

Photo of Yellow Pages by Heather Powazek Champ via Flickr.

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Having long played the part of a utility that allowed users fast access to places near and far, MapQuest now seems to be taking a cue from Google’s 2007 launch of MyMaps and is making things a little more personal for regular visitors.

If you register a fresh account with the new My MapQuest service, or sign in with AOL or OpenID user information, you can save specific maps and routes for quick access on your desktop or mobile device.

Save Time and Save More Data

If you’re familiar with the standard MapQuest interface, you’ll have no trouble browsing the personal version. To gain entry, click the corresponding link in the top right corner of the window. Once you’re set up, you’ll find priority is given to essentials like driving directions and location points, while a generous supply of real estate is reserved for the graphical map directly below all text-based details. It’s not as visually simplistic as Google Maps, of course, but the actions provided more than make up for any “complications.”

A Learning Curve With Benefits

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Everything appears to function as advertised. The only hurdles you’re likely to come across are navigational. And really, no Google competitor today can claim equal points for elegance of design.

All said, touring the place may take a few minutes. Otherwise, it’s quite impressive. Note: MapQuest’s iPhone-compatible website shows no support for My MapQuest at present.

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Google announced that on December 31st they will shut down Lively, which was their 3D chat world, and somewhat of a potential competitor to Second Life. Room widgets embedded in other sites are then supposed to show an image but no more interaction, which would add Lively to the list of Google’s canceled products. Google’s post on this decision does not really give a detailed reasoning for this shut-down of a product which was just released this year, except that they’re saying “we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.” In particular, this leaves some questions unanswered as a company could theoretically embed ads in this 3D world app.

Lively was a great-looking Google product. On the other hand from the beginning on it was riddled with regular program crashes for some users, though the situation improved over time. There were other oddities as well, like a flood of sex rooms almost kidnapping the Lively rooms directory, or custom images never quite fitting the object you’d put them on (and then being disabled altogether for a while). It was still a fun experience, with a fresh and intuitive interface that I found more beginner-friendly than Second Life. Building rooms was entertaining and casual, with features like integrating YouTube videos by pasting the video URL, leading to quickly shareable results.

Now, Google say they’ve “always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives” but that they’ve also “always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.” Google apparently made up their mind that this bet will never pay off, even if the product was only given the chance to grow for 4 months; a short time to make a good judgment on potential future success. Others feel like Lively was an odd release for Google to begin with; Andy Baio in the forum comments, “I never understood this product. It never seemed to fit Google’s worldview, and even the standalone domain and branding were weird. I wonder what the story behind it was.”

Google says current users of Lively are supposed to make “videos and screenshots” of their “hard work” to preserve some of it. They also mention that current members of the Lively team will move to other projects. In 2006, Niniane Wang, who headed the then-secret project at Google, quoted from an email sent to their team:

<<i realized today during the meeting that...

- if we’re working on the best project at google, and
- we’re working at the best company on the planet, then

we’re working on the Best Project in the World.>>

 

Already, a website by Lively users has sprung up protesting against the shutdown. On the homepage of Livelyzens.com, which is accompanied by a discussion group, the following is written:

<<Livelyzens are the proud and happy residents of Google Lively. Today we are saddened by Google’s decision to shutdown lively.

We are appealing through this website to keep Lively alive and will showcase all the great things about lively and why Google MUST revisit their decision.>>

Also, people are currently coming together in – where else – a Lively room set up for the purposes. Called “KEEP LIVELY ALIVE!”, this room plays the song “Staying Alive”. An image from South Park reads “Don’t Kill Kenny.”

[Thanks Andy!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Plans to Shut Down Lively 3D World | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/salesforce_logo.jpg" width="150" /These are reflections from having spent a few days at a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_puts_on_suit_dances_with_salesforce.php"the annual Salesforce.com event/a, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12618amp;cb=12618' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12618amp;n=12618' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h21. They Are Ambitious/h2 pSalesforce wants to be the dominant cloud platform for business. Their view is that computing has seen two waves: the first was the mainframe, and then the PC client server, and now the third is cloud computing. They have been consistent about this since their inception in March 1999, so this is no recent bandwagon hopping./p h22. They Have a Good Shot at Meeting This Ambition/h2 pThey have a powerful mix of capability and relentless focus. They have the resources -- cash, cash flow, clients, track record, management team, and so on -- needed to execute on this vision. Their competitors are bigger, but Salesforce has the advantage of focus. They are pure play, and they have no legacy to protect./p h23. They Are a Marketing Machine with Flair/h2 pHaving attended a few big rah-rah events, such as Java One, I see that Dreamforce compares well on scale, details, and flair. Its messaging and visuals were consistent and powerful, and everything just worked well. This all costs a lot of money (which relates to the next point), but that money has to be well spent, and they seem to be doing that. The presentations had real flair and humor. Benioff knows how to be controversial to get press. They are a billion-dollar business that still acts like a start-up. Even the music was good./p h24. Their Biggest Issue Is Maybe Price/h2 pThere are many lower-cost competitors to their base CRM application. Now that SaaS is increasingly accepted, due in part to Salesforce's evangelical marketing, smaller competitors spending a tiny fraction of what they spend on marketing can undercut them. Their most visible competitor is Zoho, and it does not look like Zoho is going to shy away from this battle, and they have staying power. So Salesforce is fighting on two fronts. On the one hand they are competing with Oracle and SAP for big enterprise accounts. On the other hand they are fighting low-cost competitors, such as Zoho. This will require all their marketing and management skills./p h25. They See Today's Troubled Economy as Their Moment to Win Big/h2 pThey got their early big traction in the last downturn around 2001 and 2002 and have never looked back. They are greedy while others are fearful. They spend more, grow, and hire, while other firms lay off people. The basic economic advantages of cloud computing, such as lower capital expenditures and a faster time to market, resonate in a downturn to the point that they overcome the resistance of conservative buyers to cloud computing./p h26. Their Vendor Eco-System Is Making Money and Acting Bullish/h2 pSalesforce knows that this matters. This is the lesson they learned from Microsoft. Will they move into the spaces currently occupied by vendors? Of course they will. Vendors will have to be agile; that is just how the game works. But today, in these tough markets, we see vendors that are profitable, growing, hiring, and raising money. The winners in many segments are being defined now. It is a great time to be an entrepreneur in this space. Salesforce knows how to leverage all its capability to make a few winners do very well and then promote that success big time, thus inspiring others to come on board./p h27. They Believe That Good Software Design Matters to the Core Economics of Cloud Computing/h2 pThey refer constantly to their "multi-tenant kernel," which sounds very techie for a such a marketing-driven company. It does appear that they are not suffering from the scaling and reliability problems that we have seen affecting consumer Web 2.0 ventures such as Twitter and Facebook./p h28. They Also Know How to Partner with Big Companies to Make Themselves Look Bigger/h2 pThey wheeled out large companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, as partners. The message was, "We are at the center of an eco-system with big partners." This makes large conservative enterprise buyers feel comfortable./p h29. Focused Research and Development/h2 pThey have a predictable and focused RD plan, with a major theme each year. This again makes large conservative buyers feel comfortable: they know what to expect./p h210. They Will Need to be Careful About Usability Issues/h2 pThey are adding so much functionality and so many partners that they face the danger of users getting confused and going to simpler point solutions. That "hairball-of-complexity" problem bedeviled Microsoft as it grew fast, but Microsoft enjoyed a lock-in that Salesforce cannot count on. The SaaS world is naturally lock-in resistant, with low switching costs. There is no sign of this being an immediate problem for the company, but it is something they will have to look out for./p pemSee also our most recent story about Salesforce: a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/salesforcecom_says_hello_world.php"Salesforce.com Says Hello World/a./em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_things_to_know_about_salesf.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/VDwvJkdlOx5CS7d3oaKdfTeEVY4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/VDwvJkdlOx5CS7d3oaKdfTeEVY4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=2QSai9Lu"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=6qIM9dm4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=dh81zI4o"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=dh81zI4o" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=44YBFRrw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=44YBFRrw" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=wpXJu7EK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=wpXJu7EK" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=43snpZMP"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=SmnNnAuC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/rxlf0yfKnL0" height="1" width="1"/

Google was once invincible and unable to make a mistake. Well, although its share price is not what it used to be, one can argue they’re still invincible in most areas they’ve dabbled in, but the mistakes and flops are now piling up.

Google Lively, a virtual world in which users can create their own environment and avatar and communicate with each other, is about to be shut down. True, this was one of Google’s 20% projects, meaning that it was created by one of Google’s engineers in their “spare” time, but still, time and money were invested in it and it flopped badly, with hardly anyone ever using it. Competing with Second Life is obviously not something that can be done casually.

The most clear example of a Google failure, however, is Google Answers. A high profile project and a direct competitor to Yahoo Answers - which, by the way, is still operational - Google Answers was shut down back in 2006. Its model of experts answering questions (instead of just having an open model with everyone answering, like on Yahoo Answers) didn’t hold up too well, and although the service is still a valuable resource, it wasn’t meant to be.

Jaiku has not officially flopped yet. But, the fact remains that after acquiring the service back in 2007 Google has done absolutely nothing with it, while Twitter - Jaiku’s direct competitor - has grown immensely. Hell, even other competitors in the space, such as Pownce, have experienced better growth than Jaiku, which can be seen from the Compete traffic comparison below.

No innovation, no new features; in fact, after the service was acquired by Google, its official blog has had only two updates: one to say that the service is back up, and another to warn about maintenance downtime. Perhaps Google has something huge in stock for Jaiku, but from what can be seen on the surface, it’s going nowhere.

Directly related to the Jaiku-Twitter story is Dodgeball, another short messaging service that Google had acquired in 2005. Unlike other Google flops, this one wasn’t entirely wrapped in nice, apologetic words. Dennis Crowley, the founder of Dodgeball, was frustrated with his experience working with Google, and he claimed that Google simply didn’t think Dodgeball was worth investing any resources in. It’s no secret that every startup’s wet dream is getting acquired by Google, and the Dodgeball incident has so far been the only stain on Google’s near perfect resume.

Is there a lesson that can be learned from these mistakes? Perhaps it’s still too early to tell, but if you add Orkut - Google’s social network which is arguably doing well, but also hasn’t done anything revolutionary lately - to the mix, it becomes fairly obvious that Google is not good at building communities. One more reason to bet on Facebook one day being bigger than Google, if you’re the betting type.

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Totally non-Symbian but still a valid link-of-interest for many, Engadget have been evaluating the Blackberry Storm, very much a Nokia Eseries competitor, and have come up with a refreshingly honest critique of the sprung-screened Storm - I've played with one and agree that this is one technology the Symbian world should steer clear of. Comments welcome if you've tried one too... BGR has also released its Storm review on the same day - longer, but with some very pointed criticisms. Both worth a read.


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