Edgeio Write Up

So Mike Arrington’s startup (along with Keith Teare, formerly of RealName) has been leaked and reported on by Rob Hof. I had some inside dope on that, but was sworn to secrecy. It looks like we are going to see an insidious dribble campaign over the next few weeks, leading up to the planned end of Feb launch.

Here’s what Rob says:

[from Edgeio Edges Toward Launch—and a Clash with E-Commerce Giants? by Rob Hof]

Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering “listings from the edge”—classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.

The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.

Also, Edgeio sends a trackback to the blog, providing a way for the blogger to go to Edgeio and modify the listing, adding other tags such as “autos” and other data that will further help the listing appeal to potential buyers.

Buyers get some interesting tools on Edgeio, too. You can search by geography, naturally. In fact, there’s a cool slider that lets you zero in on a particular city. If there aren’t enough listings, you can move the slider to a wider geographic area. Buyers also can filter listings by tag and see information on the blogger or publisher of the listing. Ultimately, buyers—if they choose to register as Edgeio members—can contact the seller directly by email.

Ad listing in blogs? Who does that? Today, almost nobody. And that’s why this idea could work at all: Teare said the tag “listing” is found only about 10 times a day on millions of blogs, so it’s an ideal, clean tag with which to create a unique index of “listings from the edge.”

Edgeio also plans a reputation system.

Wild. So this is the realization of the microformats/structured blogging idea: people can create posts, indicate — by a tag, or other microformat gesture — that the post includes a classified listing, and a service like Edgeio can scoop up that information and place it in a directory.

For example, I could tag a post with these markers — “Reston+VA+20194” “Edgeio” “Listing” “Leather+Couch” “$500+or+best+offer” — and an Edgeio-like system could do what you might expect with that metadata. [Note: I have not had a demo of Edgeio, specifically, yet, so this may not be the exact way that it works.]

Buyers could shop through these tags, and following the trackbacks to the original posts, although Edgeio obviously wants to control the sale, which is actually easier for all parties anyway.

So, a sweet idea, and one that should further erode the classified ads revenue stream for newspapers everywhere. The real competition is for Web 1.0 contraptions like eBay and Craig’s List. The newspapers have already lost, and just keep on doing the same old nonsense, like a chicken’s body running around the barnyard after the head has been cut off. Edgeio is just going to accelerate that death.

9 February 2006 Permalink

Jack Shafer on The Future of Newspapers

Shafer argues that newspapers can’t survive by retreat: just cutting costs and trimming the stock quotes won’t win when bloggers are doing so much. Newspapers have to decide to excel in a way that bloggers can’t, or else:

[Not Just Another Column About Blogging - What newspaper history says about newspaper future By Jack Shafer]

[…]

The newspaper guild (again, reporters, editors, publishers) can’t compete by adding a few blogs here, blogging up coverage over there, and setting up “comment” sections. If newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters don’t produce spectacular news coverage no blogger can match, they have no right to survive.

But instead of improving their product by deploying technology bloggers can’t afford (yet), newspapers are devolving. Many are cutting staff. Daily newspapers are growing smaller and uglier, with no paper looking anywhere near as lovely as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World from the late 1800s. Comic strips have gotten so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read them. I’m fine with newspapers cutting back on stock tables, but they aren’t adding something new to the package. Most newspapers claim they’ve shrunk their dimensions to combat steep increases in newsprint prices, but that’s a lie.

What else do I want? I want a daily newspaper that looks as good as Vogue but smells like a cinnamon bun instead of perfume. I want smarter newspaper headlines. I want a Mike Royko in every daily newspaper. I want editorials signed by people, so I know who to yell at. I want newspapers to restore editorial cartoonists to their place of honor instead of eliminating them. To broaden the answer, I want the newsmagazines to give me a better reason to read them than remixes of the last four days’ news cycle, and I want them to look like Harry N. Abrams’ coffee-table books.

In fact, while newspapers are failing, magazines are still doing well, so his general thrust — turning upmarket on production — might be smart. A weekly, regional news magazine? That might be the future for The Washington Post, the LA Times, and other smaller players.

30 January 2006 Permalink

More Gloom-and-Doom For Newspapers

I was embroiled in a discussion (argument) with Chris Nolan earlier this week regarding my apocalyptic pronouncements about the imminent collapse of traditional journalism, especially newspapers. She asked me (more or less) whether I really thought the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other premier sources of news and opinion would really be pushed aside by lunatic-fringe bloggers.

My stance is that the economics of newspapers is a mess, based on an odd assortment of junk printed, stuck into the plastic bag, and thrown out of a car window onto your driveway every morning. I said that basically that won’t be happening in a year or two. Chris believes it will be like 30 years.

So, today there is more bad news for the newspaper industry:

[from WSJ.com - Auto Ads Veer Off Newspaper Pages, Head to Web by Joseph Hallinan]

Last week, Tribune Co. said auto-classified revenue at its newspapers plunged 16% in December. Also last week, Lee Enterprises Inc., publisher of papers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reported a 15.2% drop in auto advertising for the fourth quarter. On Wednesday, McClatchy Co. reported a 20% decline for December, saying the downturn in car ads had finally reached its West Coast papers, the biggest of which is the Sacramento Bee, in the heart of California’s car culture.

[…]

The decline adds to the woes of the newspaper industry, already losing circulation to the Internet. For years, fat sections of car ads were a dependable source of business for newspaper publishers, accounting for 30% of the industry’s total classified ad revenue of $16.6 billion in 2004, the last full year for which figures are available. Even as a migration of job ads to the Internet took a big bite out of newspaper employment classifieds from 2000 to 2003, auto ads held up.

That began to change in 2004. While employment ads began to stabilize, a combination of Web competition and changes in the auto industry led to a drop in spending on newspaper auto classifieds. Revenue from auto classifieds has now fallen for seven straight quarters, to $1.01 billion in the third quarter of 2005 from $1.16 billion in the second quarter of 2004, according to the Newspaper Association of America, a Vienna, Va., industry trade group. Fourth-quarter figures for 2005 aren’t yet available. In a report published last week Deutsche Bank analyst Paul Ginocchio, citing discussions with industry managers, said auto ad revenue was “trending down significantly” in the first quarter of this year as well.

The economics are inexorable, and the advertisers are going online fast. Expect even more layoffs, reformatting to eliminate expenses, foreign bureaus closed, management reshuffles, downsizing, and outright closures.

Some papers — the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal — will survive in some form, but I don’t see them being delivered to your house. You will have to buy them at Starbucks, or the airport. But the great majority of regional papers will just be dead.

27 January 2006 Permalink