Tag Archives: speaker

DNA09: Aggregators – friend or foe? Unfair competition, says Copiepresse

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Google’s decision to introduce advertising to the US version of Google News invalidates the companies arguments that their aggregation is fair use – the thoughts of Margaret Boribon from Copiepresse, speaking at today’s Digital News Affairs (DNA) conference.

Copiepresse won its case against the search engine giant for publishing and storing the newspaper group’s content without permission or offering payment. Google also removed the group’s content from its index – though the damages filed for (£39million) haven’t been finalised.

Boribon stands by the group’s original argument – Google News is an information portal, a filter between readers and news to the detriment of the newspapers’ own websites.

Plus – the opt-out system of Google News crawling sites is in contradiction with opt-in system of European legislation, adds Boribon.

Is she against aggregation? No – but aggregators must learn to respect content producers and their rights.

Speaker Nigel Baker from the Associated Press (AP) said the agency wants to see its content reused, but there must be control and a commercial model in place for this reuse.

“There are some aggregators out there who are helping themselves to content. It gets to a stage when they are more valuable and they have to negotiate proper deals with content providers or suffer the consequences,” said Baker.

But the age-old question rears its head:

Can news organisations afford to live without Google? What alternatives are they proposing?

Newspapers need to educate people that information has a value and producing it is a costly exercise – it can’t be given away for free, says Boribon.

But it is – and news content in particular has to be monetised quickly before, as Livestation’s Matteo Berlucchi said, ‘it dies on the vine’.

Perhaps a Creative Commons attribution/revenue share deal for news organisations content would work, adds Berlucchi, but you have to realise that the value of news is fleeting.

Lords review of media is in danger of achieving nothing

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While yesterday’s meeting of the House of Lords Communications Committee was less of a nostalgia trip than last week’s session, it seems uncertain what value the evidence given can be to the Lords’ review of media ownership.

First up was Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). Having asked Meyer to explain what the PCC does – and test this out with a few case studies – the moment was ripe for some questions on how the PCC is coping with regulating newspapers online and their video content.

Unfortunately, no such probing was done – as with previous sessions of the committee, the internet was referred to briefly and then dismissed. The review is meant to investigate trends in the ‘provision of news’, so why is little mention of online media being made?

The evidence given last week, where ex-Times editor Simon Jenkins described blogs as ‘bar room chats’ despite being a contributing blogger himself to The Huffington Post, was a case in point example of the committee’s grasp of the digital aspect of the newspaper industry. Jenkins’ comments were met with agreeing nods and laughter and a rehashing of ex-editor’s anecdotes was quickly resumed by speaker and panel.

As a current editor, hearing Rebekah Wade’s evidence was more pertinent than reviewing days gone by with previous employees, who can only offer their perspective on a paper or proprietor with whom they no longer have a connection.

In between attacking the Daily Mail’s content and recycling paragraphs from his diary, Alistair Campbell did his best to point this out to the panel. They could ask him his opinions on specific events and people, but they would remain just that – opinions, he admitted, often based on the personal likes or dislikes that are part of everyone’s character.

When the review reaches a conclusion – and there’s still some time to go – the amount of real insights presented, as opposed to historical overview and personal reflection, are likely to be scarce if the committee’s questions and subjects continue looking backwards and not forwards.

Round-up: Widgety Goodness 2007

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The overriding theme at yesterday’s Widgety Goodness conference was: if you produce enough, some are bound to stick.

Widgets were described both as ‘chaff’ by speaker Steve Bowbrick and as existing in an ‘innovate and dump’ industry by Nooked CEO Fergus Burns.

This idea was echoed by speaker Matt Trewhella, an engineer with Google, who said that of 20,000 widgets produced under Google Gadgets, half the total traffic for these is produced by only 150 applications.

Success stories of individual widgets used to promote specific events or products dominated rather than evidence of long-term benefits to site traffic.

“There’s tremendous reach, but unlike Google, high investment can’t guarantee that reach. Success is highly elusive,” the situation was explained by Chris Cunningham, vice president of ad sales at website designers Freewebs.

While compared to a marketing campaign, widgets are relatively inexpensive to produce, yesterday’s speeches suggested that online publishers should be wary about jumping on the widget bandwagon until more is known about the long-term advantages.

Predictions for widgets in 2008:

– widgets will be aware of other widgets you’re using and be able to interact with each other;

– more personalised widgets – though some warnings about how this made lead to overfamiliar advertising were also issued;

– developments in widgets for mobile – though the speakers were still scratching their heads over who would lead the way in this market.

For more thoughts on the event Steve Bowbrick has re-produced his speech, there’s a useful round-up by Roger Warner on the marketing side of the conference.

Speaking Freely

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“According to 2 speakers at this morning’s session of which speaker just stopped in to Brighton. Brahm’s(?) Awareness is no longer important and a vast amount of money and magazine advertising. How will they translate it online. Will it be translated to Widget. The messages of previously in there.”

spoken through SpinVox

Round-up: Open house event at The Telegraph on political blogging

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Debates about blogging, political or otherwise, could go on forever. Credit must go to the Telegraph team for getting this one going – it was just starting to get a bit more interesting before time ran out though.

Still, some interesting issues raised, if not too many conclusions.

  • Firstly, and this is something raised on this blog before, are journalists who write blogs the same as bloggers?

Iain Dale noted that Mail On Sunday bloggers have to submit their posts to the lawyers first. This was a common experience with one member of the audience, a blogging journalist at Telegraph.co.uk, who said the profit interests of the group’s owner would always impact upon the blogging process in this way.

Lloyd Shepherd pointed out that while legal costs are the only costs not to have gone down in the new digital age, the law is becoming more sensitive to cases where content might not have actually been seen by that many people.

  • Iain Dale downplayed the notion of a blogging elite. Yet how come everyone in the room (bar me…) were on first name terms and often didn’t have to introduce their blog first?

Mick Fealty, writer on Northern Irish political blog Slugger O’Toole and the Telegraph’s blog Brassneck, explained that ‘top blog’ lists are not intended to reinforce an elite, but ‘about trying to get people to break out of their daily online habits and go and look at something completely different’.

  • There’s a lot of cross-over between ‘traditional’ journalism and blogs (maybe this was because there were a lot of journalists in the room…): in-depth investigative coverage, face-to-face networking and contact making.

Major differences between the two discussed last night were the ability of blogs to talk to people and not at people, and their capacity to democratise. (Not a strong enouch distinction was made for me.)

One Telegraph blogging journalist pointed out that the BNP website receives more hits than all the other political parties’ sites combined – yet when blogging about this he didn’t link to the BNP’s site.

So can blogging democratise political coverage by the media, while the media adheres to an establishment view of politics as a three party system?

Lots of summaries of last night’s event have already been posted – here are a few to get you going (am I perpetuating a blogging elite by just linking to these few?):