Felt wisdom

Why is it that the pundits making the most sense these days are either fake or puppets?

RE: The stolen iPhone prototype, Mosspuppet says:

"My question to you various idiots is: What the hell did you expect them to do? If someone steals your stuff, you call the cops.

"Imagine for a moment that someone broke into your house and stole your television. Would you be guilty of manipulating the system if you phoned the police and reported them? No, of course not, you’d be doing the only reasonable thing you could do. Would you be benevolent if you let it slide and didn’t file an official report? No, you’d be a colossal idiot!"

Sam Phillips rewrites the music business model. And plays guitar. And sings

Sam Phillips is not just a singer-songwriter, she's a mogul.

Well, okay. A mini-mogul. And she'd probably bristle at even that. But through her year-long "Longplay" experiment in making music in semi-public for a paying audience, she's set herself up as a fascinating amalgam of record company exec and free-wheeling artist.

And what's really neat about it, it's allowed average fans to become patrons of her art. Well, mini-patrons. For a dollar a week, anyone can buy into the experiment, directly supporting her work and getting early access to the music as it is recorded and made available to paying members (if you come in late, you still get access to all the music already released).

I'm reminded of this because her latest EP, Old Tin Pan, just came out and, once again, I'm getting to enjoy new music and she and her band are able to (I'm assuming here) keep the food on the table. Or buy some nice shoes. Whatever. And it's really not about the money, but about the support: I pay because I want her to keep at it. There are lots of other performers I'd gladly support similarly, if they'd only ask.

Think of this the next time someone says people won't pay for anything online. They will. We will. We just won't pay for crap or commodity. I'll pay for Sam's music, or Evernote's service or great iPad apps like Appigo's ToDo or the amazingly useful Digging Into WordPress e-book.

There's a business model for you: Make things people want to pay for.

Do pay walls create new opportunities?

The New York Times, as expected, seems to have settled on a date for the paywall to go live: January, 2011.

There's no point in hashing out, again, whether or not this is a good idea for the New York Times and the many other major metro papers considering such a move. The one good thing about paywalls going live is that the theoretical questions will finally be answered in the real world.

No, what's interesting is whether this is a good idea for other sites serving those same markets. If, for instance, The Chicago Tribune eventually opts for a paywall of any kind, do the people in the newsroom of WLS and other local media bliss out over the potential for reaching more news consumers? What about the rapidly growing ecosystem of micro-local news and information sites serving communities and towns? If your local newspaper walls up, will you pay, or find other sources?

By stepping back from a 100% free model -- no matter how carefully (and slowly - we've been talking about this for years) -- the large news sites can't help but create some amount of vacuum into which the smaller sites -- and audience -- will flow.

But that's where this all gets very interesting. Because if we've learned nothing else in the past decade, it's that gathering a large audience -- "eyeballs," as the ad guys used to say -- is no longer enough. Large publishers and tiny publishers need to cover their costs and make a little profit in the bargain if they're going to continue publishing. So flowing into the vacuum isn't enough for the upstarts -- they need real business plans.

Recently in the NY Times Magazine, there was a long look at the business models of the non-traditional publishers that have emerged in recent years. It strikes more of an elegiac tone than I think is entirely appropriate, implying that the task is Sisyphean, but it's essential reading for anyone trying to understand the struggles the journalism business model is facing and will continue to face.

The overriding theme: The future is much, much leaner for journalism, and that business models will need to change, radically, to accommodate that fact:

...the new world could end up looking a lot like the old one, albeit with smaller newsrooms and new players. Politico replaces the Washington correspondent, TMZ is the gossip page and you can get coverage of your baseball team directly from MLB.com, which employs professional sportswriters. In cities like San Diego, New York and Washington, online start-ups are taking on metro news coverage, hoping to tap local ad markets. All of these publications have been hiring real, full-time employees — as have nontraditional providers like Yahoo, which is constructing a new political news site.

If you're a journalist or a publisher, whether you read that passage and weep or rub your hands with anticipation and hope is a good indicator of what the next few years hold in store for you.

Photo: Creative Commons license, flickr user Shawn Econo.

Parkour: The Internet sensation of 2004

I'm reminded of what Jim Halpert said:

"This is Parkour, the Internet sensation of 2004. The goal is to get from Point A to Point B as creatively as possible. So, technically, they are doing Parkour, as long as Point A is delusion and Point B is the hospital."

Now that's targeted advertising

A great ad guy knows his target audience better than they know themselves.

So, when copywriter Alec Brownstein went looking for a new gig, he bought Google ad keywords that were the names of prominent agency creative directors. Why? Because he knew Google-assisted narcissism would eventually come to his aid. Watch:



Total cost to Brownstein: $6.00

What is iPad?

"It's already a revolution. And it's only just begun."

And it's also shards of glass and aluminum if that's how you insist on carrying it around.

Great ad. Great product demo. Lousy example of how to protect your new precious.

(Interesting side note I hadn't noticed before: iPad, like Pink Floyd and Google, takes no definite article, at least according to this ad.)

We're all hyper-retailers now

It feels like something big just happened with the launch of Square, the personal credit-card swiping system that's integrated with iPhone and iPad. Suddenly, anybody can be a retailer that takes plastic.

Sure, you could sell your stuff previously on eBay, Etsy or any number of online marketplaces using the insufferable PayPal, but when it came to the real world, unless you had a merchant account with a credit card company, it was a cash-only experience.

That just changed with a little white cube with a magnetic strip reader that plugs into the iPhone or iPad. After a painless sign-up process, your iPhone now accepts VISA.

Micro-retailers will no doubt rejoice, but I'm thinking the interesting action just might occur in the private sphere. Did I loan you $20 last week? You can pay me back with plastic now. Do you have a side-business walking dogs? No need to collect (and worry about) checks from the customers -- just swipe their card.

There's a great commercial for the product here, with You Look Nice Today's Adam Lisagor playing it about as straight as I imagine he can. And as long as you have an iPhone or an iPad, you can sign up for free and the company will mail you a scanner-dongle, just as soon as they get through the backlog.

Brilliant.