About Rupert, I hope he disallows Google bot – I would love to see what happens.

Dave

I don’t like Rush because he is a populist like Palin and Beck but he deserves to be referred to as much by Katie Couric as the other way around. She isn’t smarter and doesn’t create better content so she ought to quote her fellow entertainer more even just to point out that she disagrees.

Murdoch, Scaife and their old media pals on the left are all in the same boat in that they don’t deign to recognize the new thought competition…and, by deliberately staying out of the “conversation”, they make themselves more and more irrelevant.

So whoever said “When individuals only consume what they like our society becomes more polarized”…is basically saying that the elites of the old media, who only consume and link to what they agree with ahead of time, are polarizing away from the rest of us who link to everything.

Do you folks really believe stuff like that?

The holy grail of all of the tech people is to find algorithms that help individuals find what said individuals like.

The only folks trying to tell people what they will like are content creators. I’d hope that they’re doing so because they’re trying to move their inventory, but I’m willing to believe that they have less benign motives.

> * Content creators – small or large – work as slaves for a master controller of all information.

Crap again. There’s no “master controller”. In fact, there’s far less control now than there was in the past.

I wonder if this is related to the confusion that you folks have between gatekeepers and filters? In the modern world, there are far fewer gatekeepers and far more filters.

> * When individuals only consume what they like, our society, culture, and politics are more and more polarized.

Interestingly enough, the only evidence of “only consume” is among the left and elite. Case in point – Rush often cites the NYT, WashPost, etc, which drives folks to read them. The other way – almost never.

In other words, “they” know you – you’re the ones who are in a cocoon.

As for my post here: http://bit.ly/8q6rlQ I said that you took the Murdoch debate to a new level by implying that Murdoch’s success and failures are all about having balls not talent, smarts, etc.

I am a lot more interested in provoking thought about what would be better . . . not marginally better . . . game-changing better. The HBO example demonstrates that there is demand for quality content and people will pay a premium for it.

I’m glad you agree the objective is better, bold, strategic. I have looked at your business models. And they will not support it.

They are designed to make the case that an ad model is more profitable than a subscription model or a hybrid of both. They assume a 1% conversion rate to subscription. This assumes a marketing failure. Even the CJR estimates 3-5% based on what I would consider the currrent worst case “fly-by” conditions http://bit.ly/2d8dLz

The models do not indicate what the assumptions are behind the ad revenues. Based on ad spending trends and my familiarity with “formerly known as advertising” clients, counting on ad revenue is dicey.

The internet should be generating a richness of original thought and a culture of possibility. There are a few folks doing this – a Polish newspaper designer: http://bit.ly/5rirVw @TomForemski http://bit.ly/7G7woX @robinsloan http://bit.ly/7RIyFg @rushkoff http://bit.ly/7ghuZK and @xarker http://bit.ly/3nFMok have recently posted some thought provoking stuff.

Hopefully, if folks like Murdoch get serious about changing the game, the bar will be raised and there will be demand for taking these ideas to the next level.

K–

As for the changes you note, yes, these are volcanic changes in the economics of media. Roaring against them or trying to build walls after the tide has passed will do no good.That, too, is my point. The wise will find the ways to exploit these changes. There is little choice.

As for you insult in your post (as opposed to your insult in your tweet) regarding not putting forth economic models, that’s what I do here ALL the time. Just hit the link to previous posts. Read the tags NEWBIZNEW, NEWSPAPERS, GREATRESTRUCTURING, REBOOT. Also go to the project I run at CUNY in New Business Models for News at http://newsinnovation.com and http//newsinnovation.com/models.

Jeff, if you are right, what are the implications? “What is” will continue to evolve in the same direction:

* Content creators – small or large – work as slaves for a master controller of all information.

* Art and literature are cut up into bits of data so an algorithm can tell an individual what they will like.

* When individuals only consume what they like, our society, culture, and politics are more and more polarized.

How did we get here? Because pricing and marketing “ideas” is really hard:

* The “established” media world avoided the challenge by generating revenues from the derivative value of “ideas” – selling exposure to the eyeballs “ideas” attract and by selling “access”.

* “New” media has continued to avoid the elephant in the room. Follow the money: investors are not putting money in original “ideas”. Investors have been betting on taking share of existing ad$ and lowering costs by making unlimited numbers of copies of archived content. As Tom says the economic impact is deflationary: http://bit.ly/8jQ2oR

It doesn’t take “balls” to go along with other publishers or programmers (who still believe in investing serious dollars in people who produce quality content) and not enter a market where there is no way to breakeven. It is just common sense.

It doesn’t take “balls” to threaten to walk away when you are losing in a negotiation and cut your losses. This is business 101.

And it doesn’t take “balls” to insult people, reverse or others.

It takes “balls” to just do it better.

The person at Time Inc. who introduced HBO as a paid movie channel, when all the “experts” said it would fail, had the conviction to pay people to deliver a quality product that merits a premium price. The reward is being one of few media brands with increasing revenues and profits in today’s market that everyone would be proud to work for.

Katherine Warman Kern
@comradity

The implementation guide even includes some discussion of robots.txt and the relevant meta tags (such as nofollow, noindex).

As I said earlier, if you’re going to talk about things that depend on technology, you should know the technology.

What’s more interesting is that he is willing to try out different business models, and that’s the important thing: We don’t have viable media business models except at the very low -end. If Mr Murdoch suceeds with his strategy then we all win because then we have at least one viable business model to fund professional media.

I believe the future of the media industry will be a (holy) trinity: professional media, citizen media, and smart machine media (search, etc.). Get the right mix and it will do very well, get the mix wrong and it will fizzle (just like gunpowder: potassium nitrate, sulphur, and charcoal.)

I’m looking forward to seeing how Mr Murdoch does, it’s good to see people trying rather than crying

Mitas disagrees. Perhaps he’ll explain how it doesn’t stop crawlers from seeing content.

Or, does he want to argue that Murdoch can’t tell sites that show his content that they have to use the appropriate robots.txt entries?

If robots.txt does stop crawlers and Murdoch can tell sites what they can do with his content, Mitas is wrong – robots.txt is sufficient.

Lucene is open source.

The kosmix or ask folks might welcome the biz.

Many of the yandex folks used to work at Yahoo search – they’d love an opportunity to go after english-language search.

And then there are all the Yahoo search folks who won’t go to Microsoft.

Every couple of months there’s another VC funded search company.

I used to work in search. (Plus the guy who started AltaVista was a good friend.) What’s your relevant background?

Please give me an example of a good search engine that is cheap and was simple to build!