Walt Mossberg today reviewed a couple of new technologies that allow you to beam video from a PC to a TV wirelessly. Pretty cool, but IMHO there is not a big demand for this.

More interesting is the discussion about whether we are at the tipping point between TV and the internet, where more and more people will get their video from the Internet.

In the video below Walt is a sceptic, but his colleague makes the point that the big TV companies have much to lose if we are close to that point, namely subscriber fees from Cable and Satellite.

Worth Viewing

Glam hired a new guy today. Techcrunch, VentureBeat and PaidContent all posted about it.

All of the reporting on this hire focus on Glam’s coup in getting their man, and on their profitability heading into Q4. There is little in the way of analysis, which is probably quite reasonable on a news-filled Monday morning here on the West Coast..

As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports:

Glam Media has scored a major senior hire, landing Josh Jacobs, Yahoo’s Vice President & GM Advertising Technology Platforms who currently runs Yahoo’s entire display ad platform and previously ran the portal’s publisher network. Jacobs will be joining Glam as Senior Vice President of Brand Advertising Products & Marketing, where he’ll run all of Glam’s brand advertising products, as well as marketing and communications. This is a major win for Glam, which has shown strong growth through the economic downturn as it eats away marketshare from the likes of Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

However, there is a more strategic conclusion to draw from Glam’s recent trajectory and from this hire in particular. Glam is unique in having successfully built a new model that is far more focused on the evolving landscape of publishing and reading habits than any of its competitors. Samir Arora – Glam’s CEO – grasped very early that the growth in the number of publishers on the Internet would lead to a changing landscape for advertisers. By grasping the trend early he has succeeded in building a most impressive business. A woman’s content site, with virtually no original content, where the majority of the traffic is not on glam.com, but is on the several hundred publisher sites that make up the Glam network. By realizing that the audience is already there, and that the business is to take advertising to it, rather than to seek to capture it for a destination portal, Arora has figured out how to grow a large business, even in hard times.

I wrote about deportalization quite some time ago, and spelled out its implications. As we move from the era of deportalization into the new era characterized by the real time stream, Glam are positioned to continue to grow. Display advertising is a major element in Glam’s strategy and rightly so. High value audiences are found clustered around all major topics. Ad networks typically fail to realize the value of those audiences, or adequately facilitate a brand from engaging with them. Glam is simply a small indication of the potential for passion-focused distributed advertising.

John Borthwick has captured in words what many have been grappling with in a less articulate way for about 18 months. The new paradigm we need to think about the internet has finally emerged.

This snippet outlines the broad trend:

Start with this constant, real time, flowing stream of data getting published, republished, annotated and co-opt’d across a myriad of sites and tools. The social component is complex — consider where its happening. The facile view is to say its Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or FriendFeed — pick your favorite service. But its much more than that because all these sites are, to varying degrees, becoming open and distributed. Its blogs, media storage sites (ie: twitpic) comment boards or moderation tools (ie: disqus) — a whole site can emerge around an issue — become relevant for week and then resubmerge into the morass of the data stream, even publishers are jumping in, only this week the Times pushed out the Times Wire. The now web — or real time web — is still very much under construction but we are back in the dark room trying to understand the dimensions and contours of something new, or even to how to map and outline its borders. Its exciting stuff

John draws a single, and important, conclusion from this:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages.

With this insight I believe John has just moved the needle to a place where we can begin to talk about the third phase of the internet.

The first phase of the internet was about portalization. It was the age of Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek. This was the era in which DoubleClick came into its own as an advertising platform, with lots of big accounts on both the advertiser and the publisher side.

The second phase was what Fred Wilson characterized as deportalization. This was the era of the rise of user generated content – blogs, social portals like MySpace and Facebook, aggregators like Digg and an ad network built for lots of small advertisers and millions of web sites – Google AdSense.

The third, and new phase, is about real time data streams that emanate from the users and the myriad publishers. Blogs and rss remain important (sorry Steve) but added into the mix are Twitter, Friendfeed, and other forms of messaging. This third phase has a number of big consequences:

1. Search changes. Searching static pages remains important. Indexing and parsing the stream becomes a must have addition.

2. SEO takes on new meanings also. Having your URL’s in the stream means that those who attempt to index and classify the stream will find you. Using RDFa or Microformats to enable your data to be understood will also become important as semantics meets the stream.

3. Advertising changes too – in ways we cannot see, but it clearly involves the sources within the stream and the stream itself being made available to an advertiser who wants to target an audience.

4. Aggregation moves from a simple combination of sources created by users (DIGG) or by algorithm (Techmeme) into the need to parse and filter the stream into meaningful buckets. In this world bit.ly and other URL shortening services are simply adding a new signal to the pool that allows a filter to distinguish between an important and a less important URL. Managing and understanding the content they carry is the big challenge. (see http://www.seriouslywine.com and http://twitter.com/seriouslywine for an example of how John Merrells and his team are thinking about this. seriouslymedia is an experimental and as yet un-launched service in which I am a founder).

Erick Schonfeld has a great post on TechCrunch about this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

Columnist Henry Porter is generally considered to be a wise observer of the human condition. Today, in an article in the UK Guardian owned Sunday, The Observer, he blew it ….. badly. As a newspaper man he ought to have been aware of his almost certain bias and perhaps counted to ten before pushing “send”. And, given that he didn’t,  his editor should have saved him from himself after the fact, perhaps by asking “are you sure?” But then I would have nothing to say… and neither would others.

Mr Porter’s key contention is one that is being heard more and more from the seriously wounded media industry:

“Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.”

Let’s take this apart:

“Google is … a parasite” – Well, clearly Google has a dependency on the existence of content…. it is, after all, a search engine. So, no content, no Google. But is this parasitic, or is Google more like a librarian… an essential organizer, making discovery of content within a vast mass of it, possible. Do I need to answer?

” Google ….creates nothing” – Nothing? What is the vast index and the algorithms that make the index produce search results. Is it nothing? Again… no answer required.

” Google is … merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.” – “little aggregation”; “lists”; “ordering of information”. Mr Porter has clearly never attempted to crawl, index, and scale a search interface for hundreds of millions of people. He thinks it is trivial. Sadly it is not. And Google does it better than anybody else. How many of Mr Potters readers come via Google’s lists and ordering? Please tell us…. (hint, it is a lot).

“…On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues” – This takes the biscuit. What work did any Mr Porter do to make his content discoverable by a vast and growing army of readers? The labour is all Googles. It places ads on top of its own canvas, the Google search engine. It also offers advertising to 3rd parties and according to its earnings reports, shares more than 75% back with the sites who use its advertising engine. The vast sums of advertising money flooding to the Internet are coming because of Google – because Google gave a way for an advertiser to spend its money effectively and measurably. Google makes advertising revenues for the entire ecosystem.

So.. what is Mr Porter really saying. Is it a cry for help? I don’t think so. He is way past help. Bitter, angry and lost in a new media world he finds unfamiliar.

At the root of it is the fact that the role of a media company, and its ability to serve its 3 audiences – readers, creators and advertisers, now rests almost entirely on technology. Specific technology at that… the ability to find, organize and understand data (content). Distribution and monetization are all about technology. Mr Porter’s employers – the Observer – (perhaps parasites on his writing, simply adding paper and print to his efforts) are not a contender to provide these services.

Google represents a company typical of the future of media. It brings technology to scale and serves consumers, creators and advertisers. If you want to be in the game, you need to grasp that content can not stand alone. It needs help to be discovered, distributed and monetized. Googles only fault is that it is better than anybody else at these tasks. Can it be bettered, absolutely! But not by clinging to the past. My advice – read Jeff Jarvis and his book What Would Google Do Mr Porter, you will learn a thing ot two.

Update:

Here is the TechCrunch take on the story. Here is the updated techmeme discussion

Forrester released a report today ($279 download if you want it). Titled “What’s holding RSS back?” it claims that only 11% of Internet consumers use RSS and that those who have not don’t understand it.

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion responds that :

“..while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehichles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you’re total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.”

Whilst Steve is right about the adoption of technologies like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, that really misses the point about RSS.

RSS is simply a form of XML, designed for allowing applications to syndicate, and others to aggregate. It is not a “consumer application. It is an enabling technology for consumer applications.

Somebody who reads a classified ad on Oodle.com is doing so because, in the background, RSS is being used to get the Ad from its source, onto Oodle. If you read the same ad on one of Oodle’s network partners like Yell, it may have gotten there via an RSS feed. Similarly, a Techmeme article arrives, partly due to RSS.

In other words, RSS is widely adopted and makes possible a wide range of applications that rely on aggregation (inbound data) or syndication (outbound data). Is the movement of data around the network, by applications, using RSS, going to stall. I don’t think so. Are the number of consumers who see data on the web, data that is only there because of the existence of RSS, going to grow? Hell yes!

It feels like Forrester may have been asking the wrong question. Not, how many consumers want RSS? But, how many Internet users want applications that can save them browsing and discovery time by aggregating their preferred content into one or more places? The former may stall (although I doubt that is true) but the latter will certainly not.

Having said that, the report does have a point. Giving consumers places to read about their passions, drawing on the work of many, via aggregation, has to be a priority for Internet publishers. But just as high a priority is hiding the complexities that go along with today’s “blog readers” and simply giving people the content they want. No argument there.

Nicolas Popp – a leading advocate of Open Identity and data solutions – posted on his VeriSign blog today following the rather heated discussions that have ensued since Google announced its Friend Connect product recently.

Nico’s employer – VeriSign – along with Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL and others, is a member of the board of the OpenID foundation.Nico’s primary argument (emphasis mine) is that:

Undoubtedly, data portability is the natural child of federated identity (more on that in a future post). Personal and social data are an important part of any consumer identity’. Like identifiers, credentials and profile attributes, social graphs, activity streams belong to the end user who created them in the first place. In the long run, consumers will require full control, privacy, security and portability over such personal information. Therefore, the identity technical community must engineer a new and comprehensive identity portability layer. The new layer needs to broaden the tradition notion of identity federation beyond names, passwords and profile to encompass the full gamet of personal and social data. Furthermore, this new layer must support a plurality of identity service providers who can compete and distinguish themselves by the quality of their service and the user experience that they provide. Freeing our data off Web portals and social networks by creating a new service layer dominated by one single service provider is hardly trading one master for another.

I am in full agreement with this approach. And .. as coincidence would have it, last week I registered the domain name – itsmygraph.com – with a view to beginning to participate in this discussion. I have an early draft of my thoughts. They are at sites.itsmygraph.com. But as a teaser – here is my high level view of the evolution of Internet Users:

I would love to get feedback on your thoughts about the future of data portability and its relationship to OpenID and OAuth.

My personal view is that Michael Arrington had it right when he said recently:

I’ll say what the OpenID Foundation cannot, for political reasons – It’s time for these companies to do what’s right for the users and fully adopt OpenID as relying parties. That doesn’t fit in with their strategy of owning the identity of as many Internet users as possible, but it certainly fits in with the Internet’s very serious need for an open, distributed and secure single log in system (OpenID is all three). If and when the Big Four become relying parties, the floodgates will truly open and there will be no looking back. And until they do that, I’m not buying that they really support what OpenID is trying to accomplish.

The Conversation:

Techmeme TechCrunch ReadWriteWeb

Over the long labor day weekend Google announced a serious change in the way Google News will relate to the various wire services and the newspaper industry. The change could have a dramatic impact on the traffic Google News sends to newspaper web sites. There have been several commentaries on the developments and Techmeme has been a great source tracking them.

The New York Times, ironically carrying a Reuters syndicated article, said

                “Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News.

            The news agencies — the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. — now have their articles featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.
            The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together.”

The impact of the decision was also well understood by the Reuters writer:

            “Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.”

It is worth viewing this incredible serious news in context. Newspapers are reeling from a very recent and sudden drop in classified advertising revenues. Many of the top publications saw falls of more than 20% in Q2 alone. Last week the Washington Post’s Sam Diaz published a story covering the most recent trends. Techmeme’s gathering together of the conversation is here. The Washington Post piece is here. The conclusion, which Don Dodge articulates well is that:

    “The Next Big Thing – Online classified ads, local search, and mobile search are huge markets, with no dominant leader, and lots of opportunity for innovation. New business models will emerge and a new set of leaders will reap billions in profits…pennies at a time.”

Or, to put the same thing another way, newspaper classified revenues are likely to continue to decline as online classifieds revenue grows. If true this will represent a blow to the newspapers to compound the impact of the Google News decision.

My own research – and as ceo of edgeio I have a strong stake in the game so I have done a lot – suggests that these trends are both strong and relatively irreversible. But it also suggests that online classified revenues are not yet growing sufficiently to stem the decline in print classified revenues.

Here is the entire US advertising spend since 2001. It has grown every year.

The newspapers share of this spend has declined.

More graphically:

Now, within that decline there has been a growth of online revenues for the newspapers as the following chart shows:

But, this growth has been too small to make a big difference. If the newspapers are to survive they need to attract more traffic and more advertisers than they have so far been capable of. Dodge suggests that this will be achieved by becoming more “local”, even “hyper-local”. I have to say that I believe he may prove to be right, but not for many years. There is no current evidence that individuals are adopting a strong local mindset when using the Internet. Rather the contrary. The growth of blogs like Techcrunch (disclosure: i am a shareholder) GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, PaidContent.org and many others suggest that online behavior is shaped more by ones work/interests/hobbies/passions than where one lives. Vertical editorial content is growing in traffic. Local editorial is not growing so fast.

Google has benefitted most from the growth of vertically focused traffic, as the following chart shows. Search advertising – including that embedded in hundreds of thousands of publishers sites, has grown whilst classified advertising has stayed flat as a share of Internet Advertising over the 2001-2006 period.

Classifieds are of course not only local. Magazines have perfected the ability to target ads at vertical interests for many years. Boat ads in boating magazine, job ads in almost every vertically focused publication, car ads in classic car magazines, furniture ads in House and Home publications and so on.

Beyond all of this there is still a big opportunity for newspapers to grow revenue.

As the chart alongside shows, the newspapers still command a giant number of absolute dollars. There is time to figure out how to do classifieds online. The stand-alone classified sites (eBay, Craigslist, Monster, Careerbuilder) have built awesome businesses that mirror offline publications like Autotrader in the US and Exchange and Mart in the UK. They are stand-alone, classified-only environments.  Together they accounted for only $3.1 billion in revenues in 2006.

There is a much larger pie to be figured in discovering how to embed classified advertising in editorialized environments in a manner that is targeted at the readers of those publications.  In other words, to do online what the magazine industry has done so well offline. This may well be an opportunity greater than $15 billion a year in new revenues.

So… it is still all to be played for, and it will be fun being involved. The online classified players, the newspapers and the magazines are all likely to be involved as this plays out. And all stand to grow revenues.