Mashalist

How do you measure ... ? 'You Can't'

If you spend time thinking about investments in online classifieds and content, this piece by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee is worth reading.

McAffee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 a few months ago. In this piece he contrasts evaluation of traditional corporate investments (e.g., widget assembly lines) to less-tangible technology investments (e.g., wikis). I think there are parallels with evalution of investments in classifieds and harder-to-measure online content.

This particular vignette will resonate in online newsrooms:

A little while back I was presenting the concepts and structure of my MBA course to a diverse  group of my HBS colleagues.  Pretty early on one of the professors in the Finance area asked me the question I was most dreading and least prepared for:  "Andy, what do you teach students about conducting a financial analysis of proposed IT investment?  How do you build a business case for IT?"

I was about to launch into a long-winded and poorly argued answer, but Bob Kaplan spoke up first.  "You can’t," he said.

Ned Lamont & Tolerance for Crappy Content

Earlier this week Scott Karp offered the following excellent “observations and lessons”:

- Companies used to be able to get away with making crappy products and offering crappy services because they were able to mass market people into submission and because consumers didn’t have a way to make their unhappiness widely known.

- Thanks to the proliferation of content (both “professional” and “consumer-generated”) and content channels, mass media and thus mass marketing are now dead, so there is no longer an effective way to sell crappy products and services.

- Through blogs, video sharing, and other platforms for cheap content creation and distribution, individual consumers now have a powerful way to spread the word on crappy products and services on a large scale.

The Connecticut Senate race is turing into a great case in point.

I don’t have a strong opinion about Joe Lieberman and I know nothing about Ned Lamont (except what I know from YouTube). But it seems lots of folks in Connecticut are finding Lieberman’s content kinda crappy:

Percent of Likely Voters Supporting Candidates in the Democratic Senatorial Primary:
Lieberman: 47
Lamont: 51
(7/20 Quinnipiac University Poll, via NYTimes.com)

Total Funds Raised:
Lieberman: $7,128,977
Lamont: $776,880
(Opensecrets.org)

A Distribution Deal – But of What?

This piece in Business Week (via The Local Onliner) caught my eye:

Yahoo! (YHOO ) and a loose consortium of newspaper publishers are mulling a partnership that would encompass Web classifieds, local news, and content packages based on general themes, like travel …

Newspaper companies would build a network within what is one of the Web's top destinations and win a crucial concession in today's search-engine economy: getting a cut of the ads sold around search results of their content.

No question, this is good news for the companies involved. But I hope these guys don’t think distribution of content is their only problem. The quality of their content is a more serious problem.

A lot of the best local content being produced today is coming from independent sites like Westport Now and Coastsider, not local newspaper web sites.

Gotta Love Craig

Craig Newmark is great. Here’s one reason why, another and another (Part I & II).

West-Coast Mashup

Wow, look at all the people at Mashup Camp. And it’s not just hipsters from startups – lots of folks from IBM, Intel and other ... institutions.

I wasn’t able to make it, but after scanning the registration list on the wiki, I’m surprised by one thing: East-Coast media is way under-represented.

There are people from Washingtonpost.com and Salon.com, but unless other folks haven’t listed their affiliation on the wiki, that’s about it. I don’t see anybody from NYTD, Viacom, NBC/Universal, Reed or Hearst. The companies they spend all their time worrying about – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, IAC – are out in force.

Reigning In Freedom of Information Requests?

From last Wednesday's USA Today (via IRE):

The federal government will pay a Texas law school $1 million to do research aimed at rolling back the amount of sensitive data available to the press and public through freedom-of-information requests ...

Jeffrey Addicott, a professor at the law school, said he will use that research to produce a national "model statute" that state legislatures and Congress could adopt to ensure that potentially dangerous information "stays out of the hands of the bad guys."

"There's the public's right to know, but how much?" said Addicott, a former legal adviser in the Army's Special Forces.

"There's a strong feeling that the law needs to balance that with the need to protect the well-being of the nation. ... There's too much stuff that's easy to get that shouldn't be," he said.

Where’s Our Data-Driven Government?

Here’s a good one: Greenwich, Conn. First Selectman Jim Lash is facing fines from the state’s Freedom of Information Commission for allegedly withholding town GIS data (via All Points Blog).

Lash originally argued that disclosing the data would be a security risk, but the Commission disagreed with him and ordered him to turn over the data. Now he’s dragging his feet. 

This guy is like a librarian who thinks his job is to protect the books. Of course you need to deal with security and privacy issues, but the attitude is completely wrong. Local public officials should be in the business of providing their community with as much data as possible.

Actually, I think open, well-structured data is one of the most important things a town leader can do for his or her community.

As community dialogues move online to places like Coastsider, Baristanet and H2otown, it’s becoming easier to incorporate data into the discussion. This elevates the discussion and makes action easier. We know that because it’s exactly what’s happening at today’s most open, data-driven companies. So, how about data-driven government?

Mapping Farm Aid

Washingtonpost.com is running a great map comparing agricultural funding levels in counties across the U.S. (Via Derek). In each county the map lists the top recipients in 2005 as well as the amount they received. That means you can find all sorts of outrageous gems like Dublin Farms in Corcoran, CA, which got paid $1,828,994 by the federal government last year.

The Post map is not built on one of the big mapping APIs. I imagine that’s because the APIs from Google, Yahoo! and MSN are designed for mapping points, not areas. It is possible to use the APIs to map areas (here’s one example), but for most it’s not practical.

Since the GYM troika is developing their APIs with a singular focus on local advertising, and area mapping doesn't seem useful for local businesses, I doubt we’ll we see area mapping added to any of the APIs any time soon.

Of course, it would be great if I was wrong. As much as I like the Post map, it seems a little clunky. I want to zoom in and see exactly what this Dublin Farms outfit is doing with all its cash …