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Conference Day - Northern Voice Day 2

1:00pm - Room C100
The Changing Face of Journalism
with Mark Schneider, Robert Ouimet, Michael Tippett
Link: Mark Schneider - UBC Faculty of Journalism
Link: Robert Ouimet - At Large Media
Link: Michael Tippett - NowPublic

We're seeing a fundamental shift in the way news is being produced, consumed.
The audience is becoming a supplier.

Does it really make sense to get readers to produce? They don't get paid. Why would they do it? Because they're there. Because readers want to participate.

Citizen journalism trend is happening faster than anyone expected. 3 major events definitely provided impetus for the phenomenon to gain steam. Tsunami, London bombing, Katrina.
Within 15 minutes of the bombs going off in London, the very first photo of the event was posted on a blog, not a major news organization.

The ownership of the news is now in the hands of the public. There isn't much big news organizations can do about this.

Ouimet joked that he created programming at the CBC for years and forced people to watch it.

Journalism has a capital 'J' and it's very important! (laughs, rolls eyes)

Consumption of content has been forever altered.
News gathering, and the transmission of news was where big media 'had' the advantage. They also had the audience.

All of that has changed. Thanks to blogging etc., the masses can have it all. They can gather, they can transmit, and they can gain a wide audience. And best of all, all of it can be done faster than big media.

He shows the media fragmentation chart reflecting today's media landscape. It's crazy. Nothing occupies more than 2-3% of the chart. The news marketplace is completely fragmented. That's why big media is so scared.

Journalism.org is a good resource for checking on the pulse of where the news media is at. Bottom line: the perception of big news organizations has not surprisingly become quite negative. The public sees big media as biased, slow, and not trustworthy.

Mark Schneider admits he was a snobby journalist. Mark says there is a toxic quality to what we are consuming now. We can't stop the flow of news. We can't stop our kids from getting access to it. But there is a basic human instinct that wants to be frightened. We live in a age where we can constantly pander to that instinct.

What's good about mainstream media?
Your mistakes show up in big neon glare. Instant feedback on the slightest error. ie. You learn to cover your ass.
The best thing about mainstream media are the resources. A big media company can spend the cash to put an experienced journalist at the right place at the right time and get the story. We don't want to kill that or underestimate the importance of that.

Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Journalists have a hunger to 'get' the story. Citizens may not have that naturally.

News organizations have been tainted. But journalists aren't corrupt. To some degree, I'd say journalists are getting the squeeze.

The media has become so sensationalized. To the point where a dulling of the narrative is actually a good thing. Michael Tippett gives a great example of this. He was living in New York when an Earthquake hit Vancouver. He turned on CNN and saw a video clip of falling bricks from a building. His first thought was "Oh my, my parents must be dead!". Of course, bloggers etc. were all saying it was nothing. Maybe a bed shook, that's it. In some ways, the public while not trained journalists, while not trained to parse a story, can offer a narrative that is actually far closer to the truth. I think of Aaron Brown's recent comment where he said there's no more truth left in cable news. Maybe he's a bitter ex-employee, but that statement may be more right than wrong. Citizen journalism isn't sexy, but it is closer to the truth.

What a great session. I only wish I wasn't crammed into the back of the room sitting on the floor. There were multiple sessions going on at once and for some reason, they didn't put this one in the Main Theatre. That was a mistake. This room is jammed wall to wall with people.

I would also like to add that it's a pleasure to listen to Tippett. This guy 'gets' it. If I had to guess, the NowPublilc today will barely resemble what the NowPublic of say, 12 months from now will look and feel like. That's just my guess because I think they have a lot of refinements they can and I'm sure will make. But the NP team led by Tippett/Brody is a force. NP is one to watch.

10:30am - Main Theatre
I'm Too Sexy For My Blog
Blog Design For Everyone
with Susie Gardner
Link: Buzz Marketing With Blogs
Link: Hop Studios

It would be really nice if your blog could reflect you visually.
Most blog software sucks at setting design. Templates are ok, but they are not personal.

A lot of bloggers are wordsmiths, but not creative types and thus design is often neglected.

Susie asked the audience to raise hands of those who use templates, those who tweaked the templates design, those who custom designed from scratch etc. Bottom line: most are using templates. Most want more customization. But those who raised hands (myself included) who completely custom designed blogs usually come from a graphic design background or tech background. The time investment is rather large for customization.

Why customize design?
Branding
Reputation
Identity
Tone
Credibility
Personality

Every design is focused on three areas:
Content - Functionality - Design

Most websites focus on 2 of them, and usually there is one element that is missing or lacking. You've got to balance all three.

Susie will run through about 10 blogs on the screen. Show of hands for whether the blog design works for you.

Kottke, Barefoot, Candyblog (Susie designed this one), all received good response from the audience.

Nobody liked Bayosphere even though it's a widely read blog. Not many liked this one either, Radiant Marketing Blog Consulting - people find it to be too corporate. Not many liked this one either Hot Sauce Blog (I actually thought it wasn't bad).

Some very heavily trafficked blogs get most of their readers on their RSS feed and thus they never actually see the blog design. Interesting point.

There is some consistency with blogs. Most blogs have some common elements, so ultimately these are the elements that most bloggers have control over:

Colors
Text
Quotes
Titles
Links
Columns
Headers
Dividers
Search
Graphics & Photos
Background Images
Comments
Trackbacks

Robert Scoble from the audience says he gravitates to blogs that don't look too corporate. Business casual - Susie says.
Anti-corporate is good.

The primary focus needs to be on readability. Don't forget you have an audience who needs to read it. Also, navigation is also paramount. If readers can't find their way around your blog with ease, you've screwed up. Also, resist the temptation to use small-sized text.

An example of fascinating design that's rather horrible is Humble Pie Co.. Great company. Great service. But completely over-designed. Darren says that he uses the service, but he couldn't find the online order button (even though it's there) so he had to call. Not good.

Header/Masthead really gives your site it's personality. That's where the heart of visual impact is on a blog. More on mastheads: What's in a masthead?

FYI: Yellow is bad color online. Very hard to get yellow to work well.

Here's an example of a blog design that's been completely customized. Susie's husband Travis Smith's blog. Link: Unvarnished

If you use a blog designer, make sure you have a good idea of what you want. It's not good enough to just know what you don't want. It could take a long, long time to find something you want if you don't have a solid vision. Be specific. Designers aren't mindreaders. Use other blogs you like as a reference point.

Think about what elements you want on your blog before you design; ie, Flickr feed, news aggregator, Feedburner button, podcasting, search, email, newsletter signup etc.

Anything you can give a designer that shows what you like, helps. Colors, textures, magazine clippings, carpet, candy wrappers etc. Anything can help and provide inspiration.

When choosing a designer think; Experience, references (portfolio) and style. Don't hire a web designer who hasn't designed a blog before and/or doesn't blog him/herself. So true. Designing a blog and designing a traditional website are two different animals. I can attest to that first-hand as having personally designed extensively for both.

Make sure you hammer out deliverables and for what price.

Don't hire the 14-year old neighbour who's a hack. You'll save money, but the process may take a long, long time. They may be a wiz at computers, but design?

Bottom line: blog design is really worthwhile. If you can't do it now, do it later. But at some point it should garner your attention if you're serious about building and evolving your blog.

9:15am - Main Theatre
The State of the Blogosphere
with Dave Sifry - Founder, CEO of Technorati.com & Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems
Link: Tim Bray

Dave is talking about why he started Technorati. The problem was the way search engines worked. The web is the world's biggest library. It's about information retrieval. When Yahoo got started, they built a directory. When we talk about the web, we talk about documents, pages, indexes - it's the language of the library. Dave wanted something more immediate, more in tune with the instant conversation that was going on in the blogosphere. Fundamentally, none of the search engines understood the context of time.

What if instead we started building something that understood the blog as remnants of a persons attention stream over time. Who you link to, who you respect. The people who link to you, help you understand even more who the blogger is. Stop thinking about pages, pagerank etc., start thinking about people.

Dave built Technorati because he wanted to know who was talking about him. If you understand a little something about people and a little something about time, then you are looking at the web as a the world live web instead of the world wide web. (that's awesome!)

Technorati is tracking about 26.6 million blogs. The blogosphere is growing by about 75,000 blogs a day. About a new weblog every single second, every single day. How many are blogging after 3 months? Just over 50% of all bloggers are blogging after 3 months. 11% of all bloggers blog once a week or more, about 2.8 million people. Just under a million blog every single day. Technorati is tracking about 50,000 posts every single hour.

Change the way we look at the news cycle. Stop thinking about it in hours. Start thinking about it in terms of megahertz.

The blogosphere is a many to many medium. That's the beauty of it. The bigger you get, the closer you get to the one to many relationship of big media. You're not as accesible. But once you get further away from the 'top bloggers' there's about 115,000 in the 'magic middle'. People who are influential or authoritative in areas that are a bit more niche. Dave loves the magic middle because they're authoritative enough but not big enough that they've lost that many to many relationship. Technorati launched Blog Finder to help expose the magic middle. Blog Finder is tracking over 800,000 blogs. Just over 2,500 tags in Blog Finder.

Tagging is sloppy. It's not like a librarian. Each person will have their own words to describe stuff. I may tag my post automobile, car - someone else may tag bus, motor etc. But the neat thing is, that while there is no universal tag system or words to describe certain things, all it takes is one person who can bridge the gap and tag something with all of the words and then a relationship is formed. The system itself is greater than the sum of its parts. It becomes smarter because it only takes a few people to create tagging relationships.

The number of blogs Technorati is tracking is doubling every 5.5 months. Tim says that by 2009 everybody will have one (he's joking, sorta). It can't continue to grow at this rate, but at the same time, we're just at the beginning.

All healthy ecosystems have parasites. The good news is that in the end it all resolves back to a web page somewhere. There is accountability. That's the reason why there is a fairly high signal to noise ratio in the blogosphere. That won't change.

Net neutrality is a major problem. Most dangerous threat to the net. There has been a collapsing number of network providers that are providing access to the web. Now these providers are getting greedy. These providers are going to start charging for all kinds of tiered services. They may also sign deals with certain retailers, track your packet data, so if you type in Amazon.com and the provider has a deal with BarnesandNoble, you'll get served a pop-up giving you an offer to go to BarnesandNoble instead. Very, very bad. They'll sign backroom deals with Google etc.

Thoughts on blog networks as publishing businesses? It's a natural outgrowth in the shift in publishing economics. The beauty of blog networks is that it affords some bloggers the opportunity to be involved in a community/guild/network and then together they can potentially make more money on their blogs. Also, depending on the people running them, the people running the network can do some of the nitty gritty work that most bloggers don't want to deal with. ie, ad servers, ad sales, promotion etc.

People are spending 7-8% of their leisure time online. Only 4% of ad budgets are spent online. There's a huge disparity. A huge opportunity. Lots of room for growth!

Coffee break. I need one!

9:00am - Main Theatre
Storytelling With Blogs
with Julie Leung
Link: Julie Leung's Blog

Conference actually started a bit early. So I'm about 7 minutes late and frantically getting set up here. I'll just start mid-presentation...

Empathy is the ultimate virtual reality.
Carry paper around with you. Take notes.
Let your mind think about blog posts when you're out there interacting with the world.

Hide some of your story at the beginning. That's part of life. Keep it exciting. Keep it fresh. Try different styles.

It's good admire other bloggers. But you've got your own voice, your own fingerprint. Try as you might, you're always better off finding your own unique style.

It's the raw and the imperfect that speaks to us the most. Post, don't polish.
Linking and commenting make stories come alive.

Blogging is tranforming storytelling. Removing geographic barriers.

Be generous with links.

Blogging is a great way to encourage children to get interested in technology. Julia's entire family blogs. It's a great way to stitch together family life.

mysonnicholas.blogspot.com
evelynrodriguez.typepad.com
ferrytale.blogspot.com
postsecret.blogspot.com
unkemptwomen.blogspot.com

Start with fire, start with heat, start with passion, truth. Go to the place where you know who you are and start from there. Truth is always subversive.

TAGS: northern voice
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