When you read comments such as don’t just read The Times – listen to it, watch it, shape it, be part of it and Question our journalists in The Hot Seat in the context of a Murdoch publication that will be switching to some sort of subscription model then a degree of excitement is legitimate.

You can read more about the above here: www.timesplus.co.uk/welcome/index.htm

Pressure is on to deliver…

So the pressure is on to deliver on the promise of an online newspaper that engages beyond reader comments and the occasional video clip to justify readers parting with their hard earned cash.

In a previous post I argued that online newspapers need their own economy where users can earn, spend, invest and speculate as part of the experience.

In its most basic form this means rewarding those who contribute. Extend that by introducing a currency and you will allow all sorts of interactions.

Reward readers that contribute

Perhaps this is a bit far fetched and not quite in tune with an online newspaper’s core offer. But unless a paper like The Times rewards those who contribute they risk pissing them off. They need to do what YouTube did a while ago and ‘reward creativity’ via a revenue sharing scheme — the Partner program.

The new version of The Times will be live some time in May. It will be interesting to see if it sets a benchmark in terms of innovation and whether it will be good enough to justify paying for it.

I’ve just read Luke Fretwell’s post titled Why Gov 2.0 means the U.S. Government must centralize its Web operations and couldn’t agree with him more: it’s easier and cheaper to manage a single, well executed website than multiple ones ranging from very crappy to very good.

Cost is a major factor in this line of thought. Just think about how much it must be costing Governments to maintain multiple web teams doing the same thing 1,000 different ways and using god only knows how many different content management systems. Luke is spot on when he describes the end result as as ‘disjointed’, ‘inconsistent’ and ‘outdated’.

The Facebook model and why it’s good for Government

No doubt Facebook’s user experience has contributed to its success. It’s unobtrusive, clear and usable. Adverts are out of the way and the Facebook brand has a subtle presence.

Facebook has been designed to allow users to get things done, much like an operating system. Facebook is as much an office application (eg. a spreadsheet as it is a social network connecting friends.

So why is this a good model for a centralized Government website? Here are some of my thoughts:

1. It could be a single destination where all things Government (agencies, projects, news, data, profiles, etc…) are presented in a clear and consistent way
2. Citizen’s could voice their opinion as individuals or in groups. Voices could be heard, counted, aggregated and re-proposed as measurable data
3. The opposition would use the same platform, whether a traditional party or groups forming around shared thoughts
4. It would allow instant feedback on issues and, at some point in a more connected future, voting and referendums
5. It would offer useful applications (eg. to pay your fines online) and resources for anyone to develop and share their own. For example, an application could be developed to filter out spin from any Government communication
6. Government data could be shared raw or processed and presented via an application. Private companies could feed their own data into the system too.
7. It would be much cheaper to manage. No need to sack web professionals either — they could be re-trained to help people find information, moderate discussions, identify trends and report back on people’s sentiments
8. Closed areas would act as intranets offering the level of collaboration and knowledge sharing many Government agencies dream of today
9. Poke your elected representative functionality

Anything else?

No doubt there are cons to this line of thought. Security may be one of those as a single system may be harder to keep safe than many.

Earlier this month thousands of email accounts from providers such as Hotmail, Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail were compromised. If you haven’t heard about that you can read up about it on the The Times Online.

Microsoft blamed phishing schemes rather than breaches in their own system — We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were acquired illegally by a phishing scheme and exposed on a website

Google’s statement started on a similar note — This is not a breach of Gmail security, but rather a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers.

Facebook should take some of the blame

And so should MySpace, Friendster and other social networks out there that feature email harvesting functions that require users to submit their email account’s login details. Such as Facebook’s Friend Finder function – Step 2 of the sign up process:

The system works like this. You enter your Yahoo! Mail login details, for example, and a Facebook script will extract email addresses from your contacts list and fire off an email inviting them to join Facebook too.

It is a useful tool, I admit, but a risky one for 2 reasons:

• Are we 100% sure that log in details are not being recorded? Perhaps some criminally minded engineer is recording all this info on a USB stick…
• If Facebook and Myspace are doing this people will think that it’s a standard feature for social networks and that it’s OK to share their login details. Would you do the same on some obscure site?

Ironically, Facebook’s prohibits this kind of thing

Point 4.6 of their terms states:

You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.

I posed this question to Mozelle Thompson, a former TC Commissioner and a legal consultant at Facebook the other day (he was in town for a IAPP conference and gave a talk where I work) and his reply was that it is a very useful tool and that, ultimately, it’s user has a choice to use it or not. Not much of an answer.

Less marketing, more security

I doubt that social networks will want to give up such a viral tool so I’m wondering whether email providers can put a stop at this practice. Surely they’re unhappy about it?

Google has just confirmed that it is working on a micropayment system for Newspaper Association of America based on Google Checkout. This is good news for the industry and not-so-bad news for consumers if pricing will indeed be ‘micro’.

How about ‘micro earnings?’ If user generated content becomes core content publishers may well start reward schemes enabling people to gain from their efforts. For example, a reader that posts 100 insightful comments may premium access for a month.

I know little about economy but these seem to be the basic ingredients of how markets work. So why not make things a little bit more interesting and allow that economy to develop? Here are a few ideas that may or may not work for an online newspaper:

• Establish a currency (eg. the New York Times dollars – $NYT) can be bought and sold and perhaps even tied to the value of the newspaper in terms of real $$$
• Allow members to earn $NYT by contributing content and posting comments (different rates would apply) and spend them buying access to content, features, games, etc… or even exchange $NYT between themselves
• Allow members to pool together and invest in the production of special reports and earn a % of the revenue the reports generate
• Establish affiliate schemes members can earn from
• Prize giveaways

This doesn’t sound too far-fetched if you’ve tried Second Life. If you haven’t, have a look at their market data.

Newspapers would generate revenue from selling content as well as taking a small % of every transaction. I wonder if this scenario would help create a stronger bond between the brand and the user too.

So what is Building43?

To quote their About us page again…

The goal is simple – make it easier for businesses to use the new Internet to improve their business results.

It’s a Rackspace owned website with a celebrity blogger at the helm of it — Robert Scoble. The ultimate purpose is to sell hosting, which is perfectly fine.

Scoble calls it a community too on his About page:

I work at Rackspace and am building a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building43.

Don’t call it a community, please

Call me old fashioned by to me an online community still means a forum or chatroom where one can sign up and initiate discussion or participate in existing discourse, where your role is defined by what, how and how often you say things.

At Building43, instead, your role has been determined from the start:

But building43’s foundation and future is its community — people like you who contribute valuable content, through video, blog posts, podcasts, Friendfeed comments, Tweets or by simply dropping us an email to tell us about the latest or next great thing. Participate now. We can’t do it without you.

In other words, to participate you have to contribute content via the latest web 2.0 cleverness (eg. Twitter, FriendFeed). Which is more about social marketing that than giving users space to express themselves.

Building43 is a blog

It looks like one, reads like one and behaves like one.

And it would be great if they added a forum of some sort.

Now that I’ve made that clear I’ll go ahead and bookmark it because it promises to be a pretty useful resource.

A few years ago I signed up with IndexTools, a web analytics service similar to Google Analytics, and paid for a plan for up to 1,000,000 page views each month.

I wasn’t sure which plan to go with, though, as I didn’t know how much traffic was generating.

In the end traffic level averaged around 300,000 page views per month with the occasional spike. I never went over my quota.

I remember asking one of their sales reps why their pricing couldn’t be based on usage. The answer was that it was technically harder to do so. Hard to believe given measuring traffic is their business.

I’ve got the same issue now with a web agency I work with. We have an agreement for 6 hours of maintenance and support each month. The price is discounted and it guarantees specific turnaround times. Extra hours are more expensive and there is no agreement on turnaround times. Of course this could have been negotiated before signing on the dotted line, but certain agencies are not particularly flexible.

Selling ‘blocks’ of things is convenient if you are a supplier as you may well end up not providing 100% of what is offered. But not such a good deal for the client.

Pricing that scales based on the amount of service provided is much more fair. Think about this next time you’re negotiating with a service provider.

Online there are no bibliographies. We use links instead. However, I think there is a case for using them as an expanded function that goes beyond providing reference facts and acknowledgements.

Articles online aren’t so much different from the printed versions. This is also due to publisher’s clever use of resources to re-propose content in different formats. But apart from complementing content with links, commenting and the occasional widget there is little difference between what is published online and on paper.

Telling the story behind the story

This does not need to be the case as online, given the very nature of the medium, gives us the opportunity to tell the stories behind the story. For every polished article there are all sorts of scraps of information that originally provided the author with inspiration and material. This, along with the author’s own thinking and emotion contributes to the messy process of articulating an article.

So why not provide a bibliography of all the bits of information, thoughts and emotions that helped shape it? These could be inter-linked web pages, images, social network connections, twitters, statistical facts, video clips, emoticons, ecc… presented over some kind of timeline narrating giving the article a lot more context. Sharing and linking of these elements would provide an alternative route to navigate articles across a website.

Capturing inspiration

For this to work there would have to be some kind of software and / or gadget to allow authors to capture their inspiration. But the extra effort would mean creating additional content that could be, dare I say, monetised on. Could such bibliographies be what publishers charge for after offering the article for free?