February 2009

After enduring controversy over a new Terms of Service, Facebook has released another new version – this time with a whole new vision for its implementation. The new TOS is open for feedback, in the spirit of being transparent.

There are two documents being released. One is “Facebook Principles,” which defines the rights of members. The second is a “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” which replaces the Terms of Service. Facebook also says their users will be notified of and get to vote on changes made to the documents.

When testing occurs on the social network, it will not be subject to notification or voting.

With today’s announcement, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg assured users that his social network doesn’t own data, the users do.

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Back in May 2005, Linda Rutherford sent me an email with the subject line: “Demise of the fourth estate.” Linda is now the Vice President of Communications and Strategic Outreach at Southwest Airlines, but she is a former a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald newspaper.

In her email, Linda wrote, “If you have a few moments, please take a look at this short video. It’s an interesting short movie from the Museum of Media History predicting the demise of the fourth estate.

“The scenario is entertaining, a bit frightening and not too far-fetched.

“It hints at the monumental changes afoot in how consumers will learn about news and form opinions about brands.

“Thought given your role you would enjoy this creative prediction of what’s to come.”

Linda was right. The 8-minute video by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson is a bit frightening. And the scenario it depicted was not too far fetched: “In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news?”

The same day that Linda sent her email, The New York Times Company announced a “targeted staff reduction program that will include approximately 190 employees at The New York Times and the New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe.”

While the staff reduction represented less than 2% of the New York Times Company’s total workforce back in 2005, the cuts didn’t end there.

In its report on The State of the News Media 2006, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, asked, “Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?”

In December 2007, I wrote an article for Search Engine Watch entitled, “Blogs are the new trade press.” I observed, “In many industries, the trade press has imploded.” In our industry, I reported that online publications and group blogs generated close to 88 percent of the coverage of SES Chicago and PubCon. (The remaining 11 percent was – you guessed it – press releases.)

A year later, I reported on the battery of online video crews interviewing speakers between sessions at SES Chicago 2008. I also interviewed Abby Johnson of WebProNews about this trend. Abby is a pioneer in the field and has been producing videos for the WebProNews Video Blog for years.

Abby Johnson, WebProNews, discusses the top trends at SES Chicago

We’re now halfway between 2004, the year that Museum of Media History made its predection, and 2014, the date when it predicted the demise of the fourth estate.
So, I think it’s time to declare: The fourth estate is dead; long live the fourth estate!”

Yes, print journalism continues to implode. The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, is publishing its last edition today. The Chicago Tribune and LA Times have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Christian Science Monitor is going “all digital.” US News & World Report is now published every other week. PC Magazine is going “all digital.”

Even in my home town, The Boston Globe is cutting 50 jobs in its newsroom, fifth newsroom staff reduction since 2001. At its peak in 2000, the Globe newsroom had 552 full-time jobs. When the latest cuts are complete, there will be about 300 full-time newsroom and editorial employees, plus another 29 news employees at Boston.com.

At the same time that print media are imploding, blogs are exploding into a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. According to eMarketer, there were 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12 percent of Internet users) and 94.1 million US blog readers (50 percent).

And comScore Video Metrix reports that Nearly 150 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 96 videos per viewer in December 2008, or a record 14.3 billion online videos during the month. This means 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in December. The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes. So, the average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.

Now, this doesn’t mean that all of the predictions in the Museum of Media History video turned out to be right. For example, it predicted that Google would acquire TiVo. It didn’t. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion instead.

Still, I predict that you’ll be able to see the new fourth estate for yourself at SES New York 2009. There will be lots of bloggers and a bunch of videographers. And, who knows, we might even see a print reporter or two — attending sessions like “Publishers & Agencies: New Business Models for Changing Times”, “Video Search Engine Optimization: 2009 and Beyond” and “News Search SEO.”

I’ll be at all three of these sessions, so I’ll let you know if my prediction comes true.

Google launched an Apps Status Dashboard this week, following the problems they had with Gmail, AdSense and other products.

Given many businesses now rely on these services, it was a smart move to give people an area they can go to check whether the outage or problems are local to them or something Google is experiencing on their end.

As they stated in their Enterprise blog:

“The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it’s also relevant to users of our consumer products. The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for information on service availability for Google Apps anywhere in the world. In my role on the sales team, I regularly talk with customers to make sure that they’re getting the most out of Google Apps and I think that you will find this tool indispensable in managing your Google Apps deployment.”

TechCrunch mentioned the dashboard in terms of “Gfail” – funny how we all seem to be using the new Twitter-speak (the Fail Whale has become an icon).

While I am sure Google does not want to have an association with the up and down swing of Twitter – the fact that they launched this app was a smart way to take away the impact of their recent outages.

They also offered a 15 day credit to all enterprise level users of Gmail following the problems earlier this week. But given these users are paying $50 a year (per user) – the discount amounts to about $2 per person. If my dedicated server goes down for more than an hour I get a month credit as part of the contract.

It’s been rumored for a week, and now is making it official in her first post on Yodel Anecdotal: Yahoo! is reorganizing. Bartz says she wants to make things run smoother and simpler. She says the “notorious silos” are gone.

Bartz also announced the creation of a Customer Advisory group. She says she’s frustrated with how many customers call up and are angry. Bartz wants Yahoo! to do a better job of listening to customers.

This is very good to hear. Their primary competitor, Google, has always presented a customer-oriented business model. Yahoo! at times has presented themselves as “Look what we’re doing.”

I hope these goals that Bartz is pushing for with the reorganization work. It would be great to see Yahoo! emerge as a stronger competitor to Google. Competition is driven through innovation, and the beneficiaries will be the customers.

But reorganization has its not-so-pretty side. Yahoo!’s CFO Blake Jorgensen will be leaving his post once his replacement is found. Expect more exits to follow as the reorganization is implemented.

By the way, Wall Street reacted positively to the news. Yahoo! stocks went up after the announcement.

Related Reading:
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