Daily Archives: January 11, 2007

If you’re not using LinkedIn, you’re not really serving your professional life very well.

Guy Kawasaki offers ten tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn. I think I’ve used every tip to some degree at one time or another. LinkedIn proved especially useful during my most recent job search, and I realized if I had put it to better use a year earlier, I would have been better off all the way around.

But LinkedIn isn’t just for finding jobs or finding potential hires. It’s also for keeping abreast of colleagues and your industry. For example, I always find it interesting to read new connections of other newspaper executives — they’re often to non-newspaper people I’ve never heard of before working at interesting companies, which might give a clue about new ideas about to surface.

My LinkedIn profile is linked under “pages” in the right nav. Continue reading →

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My previous post on boring slideshows generated a fair amount of comment and a good deal of disagreement.  In this Poynter interview with Joe Weiss, the inventor of SoundSlides, Weiss seems to imply that yes, there are a lot of boring slideshows on newspaper sites, and he offers an antidote.

The most important thing is not your photojournalism. The most important thing is not your audio journalism. The most important thing, overall, above anything else, amen, to the end of it, is the story and how well you communicate that to the human being who’s on the other side of that computer.

Of course, if you’re thinking of the best way to tell the story, the best way to make it meaningful for a site visitor, you’re knee-jerk reaction won’t necessarily be an audio slideshow. If you’re thinking about all of the options, you will also consider video. Continue reading →

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All of you journalists at big, unstable metros hoping for a multi-billionaire to save your ass, please read this Michael Wolff column. It should scare the crap out of you.

(via Frank Barnako) Continue reading →

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A couple of interesting thoughts on hyperlocal community.

First, Susan Mernit:

One thing it’s hard not to mention when we get into this hyperlocal, sustainable business question is the issue of scale. Most of the really good–and viable–hyperlocal sites–are small businesses that serve a focused audience, with decent ad revenues but nothing like the big numbers VCs need for their $5 to $13 MM investments. Sites like Jonathan Weber’s New West Network, George Johnson’s Buffalo Rising, Jarah Euston’s recently sold Fresno Famous and Deb Galant’s Baristanet–as well as Lisa William’s H20town–work because they are small and focused, because they have the same focus and value as hand-crafted cigars–they’re not meant to be big networks creating tons of shareholder value–they’re services for a specific time and place–built by a participant.

Fred Wilson:

We believe the big opportunity in user generated content is aggregation. My blog will only generate $30k per year in revenue. But Techmeme, which occasionally links to my blog, can generate a lot more. Because they aggregate the content of hundreds, maybe thousands of blogs.

So where does this leave newspaper sites? I still believe that there is a place for newspapers to provide a community platform for participation, but newspaper.coms cannot forget their roles as aggregators and deeply involved participation leaders. Continue reading →

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Eat the Press has a few theories about why the media is fascinated with Second Life, and none of them have anything to do with the business value of SL.

I still say SL is a nice toy, a fun place to play (or looks like it, as I’ve never done it), but makes is a horrible place to spend R&D resouces, no matter how liberal your R&D policy or how innovative you think you are. Continue reading →

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Jeremy Mayes participated in a test of Google print ads and found the results less than impressive, and concludes:

I will say that based on the results form the test the newspaper ads would have to be pretty inexpensive for this model to work in certain markets, and, tracking results at the level in which PPC managers are accustomed too isn’t there – or it least it wasn’t there for me.

I think overall there is potential for this program – pricing, trackability and ease of setup/scheduling will be three of the biggest issues from what I can tell.

(Via The Praized Blog) Continue reading →

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