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Via Rubel:
Infoworld's Matt McAlister: "The day InfoWorld's top news RSS feed received more requests than our home page, I started thinking a frightening thought - RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years. We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again."
We've decided to launch a blog directly from NewsGator's web site, that will talk about things related specifically to NewsGator as well as the broader industry. The NewsGator Daily is its working title ... look for a totally cool announcement there about the richest RSS-based jobs feature in the universe ... ...
Many of us associated with NewsGator blog in parallel and while we'll keep those going, we decided that it was important to blog directly under the brand and banner of the firm itself. Simply put, it's a clearer channel than other media...
There are some industry icons whose blogs are synonymous with their companies (Sifry, Mena, Greg R, Nick) They are analogues ... kinda... for what we'll do with the NewsGator blog, but in our case we'll have multiple authors. Interesting tension between the brand clarity possible with an individuals' blog, vs. the output possible with multiple contributors...
... all of which is really just a segue to a comment, on Mena's post, written in response to Jason Kottke's riff about the industry going up...
I loved Mena's post -- complete, articulate, honest, immediate. And, as a serial entrepreneur, I found it a very compelling expression of the natural tensions involved in moving a start-up to something more...
We released the news officially this morning.
The Q&A pretty well describes our thinking, to which I'd emphasize the addition of Nick Bradbury to the NewsGator team. Nick is a serially-successful product designer and developer with an innate sense of how software should just work. An example (he's too modest to boast himself); Nick offered tabbed IE browsing in FeedDemon from day one...
Nick and Greg Reinacker, NewsGator's founder and CTO, combined with the development team we've been assembling, give NewsGator unparalleled RSS technical leadership... ...
More generally, we've positioned NewsGator as the RSS platform company -- as Fred Wilson kindly points out, this accelerates that...
Best of all to hear happy customers on this, though...
Every medium will include custom RSS content … and more … by year-end;
Big city blogger
: The Philadelphia Inquirer has assigned reporter Daniel Rubin to the blog beat but he's going to do far more than write about blogs: He has started a new blog at the paper as a gathering place for local blogs and blog news; he will bring the voice of bloggers into the paper every way he can imagine; he will try to turn the newspaper into a conversation; and he will cover news via blog (he's making the Personal Democracy Forum Monday his maiden voyage).Dan's a good guy. I've spent long conversations with him on various media and blog stories. He is a topnotch reporter and in the process of covering these worlds he was bitten by the blog bug, bad. I expect great things from him. In his intro post, Dan says:
For those fretting about the death of serious journalism, know that we at the Brontosaurus on Broad Street care, and are working hard for those who share our values.
Jarvis on search engines and the decay of old media (excerpted) ;
There are no free searches
: There is no free lunch. There are no free searches. At least not for media, there aren't.Media depend on Google. Without the search engine, no one would be found. Without GoogleNews, they'd all get less traffic. Without the ad programs, advertisers wouldn't be advertising on plain old home pages; bloggers owe gratitude to Google for taking the cooties off citizens' media. With the ad programs, big media sites and bloggers alike are getting checks from Google. All that is wonderful.
So is heroin. At first.
Now cautionary notes are being heard here and there:
: Ad Age reports this week (not online, damnit) that Google is beating the big boys:
:Yahoo and Google's total ad revenues this year could rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC -- a stunning achievement for the companies and a watershed moment [read: tipping point -ed] for the Internet as an advertising medium.
In terms of revenue, Google's estimated $3 billion and Yahoo's $2.9 billion compare with $6.2 billion for the big nets' prime time. And their market cap is up with the big boys: Google is No. 2 behind Time Warner; Yahoo is No. five behind Disney and News Corp. as well.
"The results from Google and Yahoo combined with softeness in traditional media, offer the strongest evidence yet of the dramatic changes occurring in the media and marketing landscape," Tony Mastin, analyst at William Blair & Co. wrote.
In terms of measured media spending, the Internet was already bigger than outdoor, TV syndication and national newspapers, according to TNS Media Intelligence…..
…Most every Web publisher these days has signed on to AdSense because it offers real additional revenue with virtually no effort. But these new initiatives would turn Google into a full-fledged interactive media buying agency -- and enable advertisers to go through Google to place pretty much the same kinds of ads that they now would have to buy directly from a site or from ad networks such as Doubleclick or 24/7 Real Media…..
….Will Google maximize your value? Will Google undersell you? Is Google being transparent with you and revealing what the ads on your pages are selling for and what share you're getting? Will Google compete with you? Can Google put the stranglehold of a monopoly on you? Should you be making Google bigger or helping to create competitors to Google? Can you afford to? Can you afford not to?
Just asking.
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