This website is an initiative of J-Lab
This website is an initiative of J-Lab
Chapter 2
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An advertiser picks a keyword or search term and tells the system how much it will pay if a Google user clicks on its ads. When a user performs a search with that search term, the advertiser’s ad appears. If the user clicks on it, then Google charges the advertiser.
To extend the scale of pay-per-click advertising, Google created a system so all content publishers could run the Google ads on their sites. So instead of search terms, the Google robots (computer programs that continually “crawl” the Web, indexing the content) scan the text of a content page and display ads that are keyed to match any of the prominent
terms on the page. If a user on an affiliate site clicks on an ad, Google (again) charges the advertiser and then kicks an unspecified percentage to the publisher of that site.
In 2005, Google reported more than $6 billion in advertising revenues (source: http://investor.google.com). One year later, the company broke the $10 billion mark for 2006 ad revenue. All this without hiring a single sales rep.
Journalists also love Google Maps, which is a great example of Web 2.0, because anyone can use the code to create new services based on the maps. For example, journalist/computer programmer Adrian Holovaty took a feed from the Chicago Police Department and combined it with Google Maps to produce the award-winning site chicagocrime.org. Other Web sites have mapped cheapest gas prices, free wireless Internet hot spots, bars and restaurants with happy hours and more (see Google Maps Mania at http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/).
This openness contrasts greatly with companies such as Microsoft and AOL that dominated the age of Web 1.0, where everything was proprietary and controlled. Microsoft’s MapPoint, for example, hit the market a few years before Google Maps. But since it was developed without open access (you couldn’t use it without a Windows machine and it wasn’t free), programmers did not rush to build tools with it.
“The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it,” author Paul Graham2 wrote and was quoted in “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. “That’s why their success seems so effortless. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels.”
In 2006, MySpace became the most popular Web site on the planet in terms of page views. The site claims more than 100 million users (as of September 2006) and served nearly 39 billion page views in November, according to comScore Networks. News Corp. purchased the site in 2005 for $580 million.
By registering and filling out profiles, users create the content. They use “blurbs,” “interests” and “details” sections to present their online persona, and communicate with blogs, photos, video and comments. Teens and twenty-somethings flocked to the site almost immediately. While it gave them an easy way to communicate with one another, it also has drawn criticism as a haven for pedophiles and sexual abusers, creating fear and angst among parents and creating another area for the legal community to monitor. That said, it has also grown into an effective marketing tool for musicians, filmmakers, comedians and small businesses such as bars and nightclubs.
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YouTube was founded by three former employees of PayPal, the online banking and payment firm that powers much of the commerce on eBay. YouTube launched in February 2005 and quickly became one of the most popular sites on the Web, growing faster even than MySpace. Its slogan is “Broadcast Yourself,” which is exactly what millions of people have done, sharing home movies and amateur films with whoever will watch. Plus, video blogging (on-camera commentary) has taken off with the help of YouTube.
The downside for the site is that many people have uploaded other people’s content.
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TV networks claimed copyright infringement, and some of YouTube’s most popular clips have been removed, including a skit called “Lazy Sunday” from “Saturday Night Live.” In June of 2006, however, NBC reversed field and partnered with YouTube to establish an official channel on the site that will display promotional clips from its shows.
With hundreds of thousands of video clips on its site, YouTube’s Web 2.0 structure helps visitors find compelling content quickly. Users can choose from Most Recent, Top Rated, Most Viewed and Most Discussed, which conveniently allows someone to find the next true buzz clip.
In October 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.6 billion worth of stock.
Flickr, which launched in February 2004, was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company. One year later, Yahoo! bought the photo-sharing Web site but has done little to integrate it into its massive portal.
Flickr is more than a place to share personal photographs. It’s also a community platform that uses tags to power its organization and makes photos of specific topics easy to find. It also has slick functionality for bloggers, who can store photos on the site and display them on their blogs with a few simple clicks.
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Participants in the Web 2.0 revolution use tags to catalog content that they create or just find. Tags are informally chosen and not part of some formally defined classification scheme. This is called a folksonomy and contrasts with a taxonomy since the structure is defined by the users and is constantly changing.
Bloggers use tags that can be traced in search engines like Technorati and Ice Rocket. Photographers use tags to organize photographs on photo sites like Flickr. Web browsers use tags to share appropriate sites with others who have similar interests on del.icio.us. Even Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, allows categorization by tags.
A tag cloud is an automatic way for a Web site to display its tags, giving more prominence to popularity. Computer code generates a tag cloud and displays the more popular tags with a larger font so the audience quickly sees which tag has the most activity or content associated with it.
Web 2.0 loves the wisdom of the crowd and few sites illustrate that better than Digg. Along with the venerable geek site Slashdot and newcomers Reddit and Newsvine, these news sites rely on readers to submit and promote articles from other Web sites.
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So the sites—while widely considered to be news sources (all but Newsvine concentrate on technology)—actually publish no news. Digg users find interesting content elsewhere online, then submit the links and summaries on Digg for consideration, then other Digg users “vote” for stories they like by giving them Diggs. If a story gets enough Diggs, it ends up on the front page of the site.
The Digg effect can be seen on many mainstream news sites that have added a list of the most read, most e-mailed or most printed stories to their Web sites. While they clearly aren’t ready to surrender all news judgment to the crowd, most Web editors recognize there’s power in what others have found interesting on the site instead of solely relying on their more traditional view of what’s news.
Readers are no longer passive receivers of our messages. They create, share and comment. And they expect to do it on news Web sites, too.
Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University and author of the Press Think blog, has coined the concept of “The People Formerly Known As The Audience.” (To read more about it, Google “TPFKATA.”) This recognition of the fundamental change in how messages are received from mainstream news organizations turns on its head the lesson most of us learned the first day in Communications 101: We send, they receive.
This idea has also come to be known as “news is a conversation, not a lecture.”
It is important to recognize the change in your audience. They want to participate, so help them. Many traditional news organizations include e-mail links on news stories to make it easy for readers to contact the reporter and ask questions or comment on stories. Some have taken the next step and allow readers to comment directly on the story online for all to see.
If you have the opportunity, read the comments posted on your stories and write to those who deserve it. Be proactive in seeking feedback on stories before they are published. It can be as simple as posting a “call to readers” in the newspaper or as advanced as assembling an e-mail list of good targets. For example, if you cover education, build a list of teachers and administrators and send e-mail blasts when you need general comments for a story (more on this later).
Even if you’re not ready to collaborate with your readers on reporting and writing, you can take advantage of Web 2.0 technology. Sites that employ tagging, for example, are useful in reporting on niche topics (del.icio.us chief among them). Use them to organize your searches and to see what other tags related to your beat are popular.
Part of the difficulty for traditional journalists is that we’re not very good at moving forward when we don’t know where we’re going. No one knows how all of this is ultimately going to change what we do or what opportunities this new model presents for us. But the only way we’ll be able to take advantage is if we’re aware of the technologies and actively participate in the changing landscape.
“RSS and tagging are tools I use to track and obtain information in a more timely manner,” said John Cook, a business reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “So in that way, they are helpful to me in publishing information quickly online.”
Assignment: Take part in the revolution
To understand fully how Web 2.0 works, you need to use these sites. Open accounts at all of them and test drive the services they offer. Each of these assignments should take you less than a half hour. If you do one per day, you’ll get through all four steps in a week.
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1 Francis Pisani, “Journalism and Web 2.0,” Nieman Reports, December 2006. Francis Pisani is a freelance blogger and columnist covering information technology and new media in the San Francisco Bay area for several European and Latin American newspapers.
2 Anderson, The Long Tail, page 70. Paul Graham is a popular author and Lisp programmer who wrote “Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.”
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The Knight Community News Network is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. J-LabTM is an incubator for innovative, participatory news experiments and is a center of American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C. KCNN is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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