Thinking on the Edge

Digital marketing technology

The Importance of Great Design (and Why Tumblr is Outperforming Posterous)

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via businessinsider.com

Micro-blogging service Tumblr has been seriously beating up on its smaller competitor Posterous. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry postulates on the Business Insider (part of Silicon Alley Insider) that the biggest reason has little to do with features or fundamental support, but rather is due to Tumblr's superior design.

Gobry writes:

"Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user."

Gobry also makes the point that "design focus" is more typical of New York-based companies than Silicon Valley-based companies, but I'll leave that argument to others. For me, the more important point he makes is that, "for consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology."

7 Vital Questions to Ask Your Web Designer

Michael Estrin quoted me extensively in an article for iMedia Connection entitled, "7 Vital Questions to Ask Your Web Designer". Estrin gets into significantly more depth, but the questions he examines include:

  1. How would you solve our problems?
  2. Who's doing the technical work?
  3. What about content?
  4. What about the users?
  5. Who's in charge?
  6. What if we fire you?
  7. Should we use free code?

I wish Michael had written "open source code" rather than "free code", but really there is little to disagree with here.

Long Form Journalism Doesn't Work Online

So says Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of Time.com.

Josh's message is that long-form journalism does great in a magazine where the reader has made a commitment to tune out the world for at least several minutes to read through an article, but not so well online where attention is in much shorter supply and the majority of readers are trying to squeeze in their news fix during a short lunch break at work. As a result, roughly 95% of all content on Time.com is exclusive to the web.

The lesson for publishers is to realize that the web is a different medium than print, with different opportunities. Perhaps print isn't dead after all - it's just more specialized.

Reuters vs. AP (or Free vs. Closed and the Future of Journalism)

Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, blogged about his view on the Associated Press' move to start charging $2.50 per word if you want to quote five or more words from one of their articles. This is partially in response to the Ian Shapira article at the Washington Post about how Gawker ripped him off and how that's causing the "death of journalism." Mr. Shapira's view is, it seems, fairly widespread in the journalism world. Last week I watched a debate on Twitter started by Bart Hubbuch, the Mets beat writer for the New York Post, who was supporting Mr. Shapira.

The money quote from Mr. Ahearn's blog post (which Reuters will not charge me for):

"Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions."

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is going to start charging online for ALL of News Corp-owned content fairly soon.

Now, I'm going to quote from an AP article, but only four words... "would bring liberal bias". Whew, I don't owe them any money for that. If I had used just one more word though...

What do you think? Will it work to charge online for content? Is there a way to make it work?

Yahoo! Getting Out of the Search Business

Pepsi

It appears that Yahoo!, one of the earliest pioneers of search, is getting out of the search business. No, they are not exactly conceding the race to Google. Rather, they decided that they needed to combine with Microsoft in order to become Pepsi to Google's Coke. Basically, Yahoo! is dumping their own search engine and integrating Bing as a substitute.

http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=399702

Agencies Have to Take Their Own Medicine - Small Agency Diary - Advertising Age

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via adage.com

Peter Madden is correct when he posits that agencies (especially small ones) don't do enough to promote themselves - and certainly not at the level of work they do for their clients. We frequently find ourselves in this predicament, but I think the major culprit is simply the old "shoe cobbler's children" syndrome. We always put ourselves last. We always wish we had more time to do great work for our clients, so the last thing we're going to do is steal from our most limited resource - time - to promote ourselves.

That said, at some point it has to be done.