VVM Sites Now Get 40 Percent Of Traffic From Blogs

This is actually quite a transition. Those involved in traditional media can understand the challenges of transforming 1 news organization around… print staff becoming web savvy, retail finding and shifting to new forms of revenue, IT staff gearing up for a complete digital transition… now try that times 15. We have a dedicated organization driven to succeed in this new arena. Thank you techcrunch.com for giving us a little pimpin’

techcrunch.com – The future of the weekly city paper is the daily blog. Hints of this future can already be seen at Village Voice Media, which owns and operates 15 of the top weeklies in the country, including the Village Voice, SF Weekly, and LA Weekly. Bill Jensen, the director of new media who oversees all the Village Voice Media sites tells me that 40 percent of pageviews comes from the blogs on the sites, up from 20 percent a year ago. Some of the more popular ones include columnist Michael Musto’s blog, Nikki Finke’s Deadline Holywood Daily, and Topless Robot.

Of course, the sites feature music listings, restaurant reviews, and articles from the print editions as well, but the blogs are driving an increasing portion of the traffic. The online and print newsrooms are combined and everyone is expected to post on the Web. Long gone are the days when a music reviewer could attend a rock show and turn in his copy three days later. “I don’t care how drunk you are,” says Jensen, “you post by 9 AM.”

Read the rest of the article at: techcrunch.com

Craig Wants an Apology… Good Luck.

Craig Craig Craig… This was a real glimmer of weakness from an .org that seemed untouchable. Of all the responses to a statement by a redneck/right-wing hillbilly complaining about online porn, you use classified competitors as an example? Huh? What about imgonnadoyourmominthebutt.com? Jeesh Craig, I expected more from a beatnik SF hippie.

bizjournals.com – Jim Buckmaster, CEO of classified ad business Craigslist, asked for an apology from South Carolina’s attorney general, who threatened to prosecute him because of sex ads on the site.

In a blog entry on Monday, Buckmaster said Henry McMaster’s threats of “criminal investigation and potential prosecution” were unwarranted and also unconstitutional.

McMaster, who is considering a possible run for governor in his state, made his threats against both Buckmaster and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, as well as other employees of the San Francisco business. He said in a letter to Craigslist that the ads constituted prostitution and were therefore illegal.

Read the rest of the story at bizjournals.com.

Microformats on the horizon…

Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called “rich snippets” that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites such as LinkedIn). They will be adding more sites and categories over time.

Reviews include the average star rating and and number of reviews for things like restaurants and products.

Google is also showcasing reviews in other ways. They’re using sentiment analysis to pull review information from pages and display that as the description below a result (even in cases where rich snippets aren’t used). This comes into play particularly with the new search options feature. You can choose to see only reviews and those descriptions based on Google’s new sentiment analysis are notated by quotes. This feature works better for some searches than others. For this search on [smx advanced], for instance, when you choose the reviews option, the fourth result is the first one that pulls a review into a snippet.

People search provides disambiguation, such as a person’s location and job title so searchers have a better sense of which result matches the person they’re looking for.

It makes sense that people search is the other topic Google has chosen to launch first, as they’ve been focusing on profiles for a while including the evolved Google Profiles and people search OneBox. In addition, Google’s internal search logs likely confirm what a PEW/Internet stuty found in late 2007: over 50% of searchers have searched for people.

Site owners have been asking for support of microformats for some time, so this should come as welcome news both for them and for searchers who will benefit from the increased set of information in the search results. Google has been testing this new results format for a while, and the reviews topic in particular has been in action for a while in Google Local [although when I talked to a search engineer after the event, he said that the technology behind revies inlocal results and rich snippets is different, although the UI looks similiar. He agreed that it may make sense in the future to find some way to integrate the two, but that’s not being done at this point.

On first glance, Google’s rich snippets appear very similar to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey. However, there are some differences, the key one being that site owners don’t have to do anything other than make the metadata available. With SearchMonkey, on the other hand, enhanced listings are based on SearchMonkey applications that outside developers build. This coincides with Google’s overall aim to algorithmically determine relevance, with little manual input from content owners required. While many site owners want to be able to provide more input, Google is dealing with the scale of the entire web and wants to build features in such a way that all content can be included, even if the content owner doesn’t know anything about Google.

The other announcements at Searchology, such as Google Squared, illustrate Google’s intent to algorithmically structure the web with little outside input.

This announcement may help SearchMonkey adoption, however, as Yahoo is encouraging use of these formats. And while Yahoo may not have enough market share to compel past the tipping point, Google may be able to spur adoption.
Read the rest of this entry »

NFL and Social Media

brandweek.com – Each April, the National Football League holds the spring Draft, an annual event during which it recruits new players (mainly from colleges) to join its teams. In the past, this selection process was an “institutional event,” where football fans knew the drill and creating buzz around the event was not as necessary. In the age of Twitter, Facebook and mobile technology, however, the NFL is changing up its game. This year, the League is aggressively using social media to promote the two-day Draft, which takes place April 25-26. NFL Online general manager Laura Goldberg spoke with Brandweek about the shift online, how it’s able to better engage fans, and what the NFL is doing differently with this year’s Draft. Excerpts from her conversation are below:

Brandweek: The NFL is leveraging social media—perhaps more so than ever—in its 74th Draft. Why so?
Laura Goldberg: I would call it fan engagement. The fans are incredibly engaged in the Draft and all things NFL. Frankly, they want more and more information. They want to know immediately which [team] is picking which player—whether they are sitting in front of their TV on a Saturday afternoon or taking their kids to the park or need to go to a baseball game, they want to be there. The fans are so passionate about the NFL and about their teams and what’s going on that they want to be able to talk about it. They want to be able to interact with personnel and players and that conversation is happening all around the Web, and a lot of that also happens [outside of] NFL.com, but the idea of engaging with social media is to broaden that conversation.
Read the rest of this entry »

MySpace CEO to Step Down

pcworld.com – Chris DeWolfe will hand over his CEO title at MySpace, whose growth has stagnated over the past year while the popularity of rival Facebook booms.

In addition, President Tom Anderson is in discussions to take “a new role” in MySpace, parent company News Corp. announced Wednesday.

News Corp. didn’t announce a replacement for DeWolfe, who will remain on the board of MySpace China and act as a strategic advisor to the company.

The announcements come weeks after News Corp. tapped former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller to lead the unit in charge of its Web properties, including MySpace, as the chairman and CEO of News Corp.’s Digital Media Group, as well the company’s chief digital officer.

MySpace, once by far the largest social-networking site in the world, has seen its popularity cool off, while Facebook’s user base grows at a frenetic pace.

In March 2008, the Fox Interactive Media sites, including MySpace, had 88.3 million U.S. unique visitors, a figure that dropped to 85.1 million last month, according to comScore. In that same time period, Facebook’s U.S. unique visitors grew from 36 million to 61.2 million.

Globally, Facebook sped past MySpace last year. In December, Facebook attracted 108.3 million unique visitors worldwide, while MySpace had 81 million, according to Nielsen Online.
Read the rest of this entry »

Zack de la Rocha Returns to Phoenix

Phoenix New Times – The folks that put thousands in Phoenix’s streets February 28 to protest Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the 287(g) program are ready to do it again May 2, with Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha slated to participate as he did before.

The difference this time is that the anti-Arpaio march will start at the Wells Fargo Building downtown, where the sheriff keeps two pricey floors of executive offices. It will end with stops at Joe’s Estrella and Durango jails.

“It’s to highlight the 287(g) agreement,” explained Phoenix civil rights leader Salvador Reza of the decision to march to Joe’s gulags. “And how 287(g) is being used in the jails. It’s not good in the jails or in the streets. It’s also to highlight all the abuses that are going on in there, like with the broken arm lady, the broken jaw lady, and anyone else who as been abused in there.”

Reza’s referring to the fact that the 287(g) program has deputized 160 of Arpaio’s men to enforce federal immigration law. Arpaio not only uses these men in his anti-immigrant hunting sweeps and in his worksite raids, but also in the jails, where they often coerce and sometimes physically injure undocumented immigrants who are being held pending their transfer to ICE custody.
Read the rest of this entry »