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.

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.

New Faces of the Fallen

Washingtonpost.com just launched Faces of the Fallen, another great piece of database journalism. (A few months ago they published an Alito archive and a database of congressional votes. )

The RSS is a particularly nice feature – it gives people a way to connect to the report, as opposed to coming once, and never again.

Adrian asks what he can do to improve the report. I think it’s pretty great, but I think the next step is to study YouTube – to figure out how to package and distribute the most salient pieces of the database.

It’s a micro-chunked, article-level web. My friends get their news from the clip line above their Gmail. They’re not going to spend a lot of time wandering through a database, but they should see pages like this one (things over there are only getting worse).

Serendipity & the Times Redesign

Amy Gahran argues that The Times’ redesign is too disorganized.

That doesn’t concern me. I’m not looking for organized information when I go to the Times’ home page. There’s the nav bar, search and my feed reader for that.

I go the Times homepage because I want a random, interesting read – something serendipitous. On the new homepage there’s twice as much of that.

Journalists often lament the loss of serendipity in news reports as they move online. In this otherwise excellent lecture, Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger accepts it as a foregone conclusion.

The new Times homepage is fire hose of serendipity.  Hopefully it will put an end to those laments.