Bill Trippe comes not to praise Google’s Shakespeare project: I may have praised it, but Bill displays how shoddy the project is (especially the poor quality of the book-scanning work). He also points to better examples by others. “Lots of people do far better work than Google at this kind of thing,” he says.

Technorati Tags: google

Perception vs. Reality: In a Tennessean story about why the readership of the bi-weekly magazine with the misnomer, Country Weekly, has fallen to 450,000 from 700,000, comes the following stellar reporting:

“Several factors appear to be changing the business environment to support a mass-audience print publication for country music fans. For starters, there’s the Internet. Chet Flippo, a longtime music journalist and the editorial director of CMT and CMT.com, said he’s seen traffic at the network’s Web site increase from about 150,000 hits per day several years ago to an average of about 2 million per day recently.

“And when there’s something like CMA happening, then you’re talking 10 million hits a day,” Flippo said, adding that a full 60 percent of those page views come from pictures alone. I don’t think country music fans these days are looking for something like Country Weekly that’s feature driven and comes out once every two weeks,” he said. “Everything’s old by the time they get it.”

I hate to burst Chet Flippo’s bubble with a fisk point to Alexa.com’s data regarding CMT.com. I don’t question that CMT.com has “2 million” somethings  a day, but the trend chart doesn’t reveal CMT.com being the breakaway, magazine-crushing factor that’s changing the business environment to support a mass-audience print publication.

For the record, as a whole (and as a sign of the coming apocalypse) the celebrity magazine category has been one of the most robust segments of the magazine industry for several years. “Comfort food,” my friend Samir Husni calls it. Indeed the success of the category has been followed by a proliferation in new title launches in the category (bubble?). While individual titles in the category have come and gone (killer competition does that), I think one would be hard-pressed to prove with statistics that the Internet is the reason that a specific magazine title has lost readership during an era when easily-available data shows that the category in which the magazine competes has grown during the same era.

As I’ve repeatedly said here on the rexblog, I am not a fan of the celebrity magazine genre — nor, for that matter, am I fan of the pop-suburban crap with the misnomer, country music. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m  a fan of Nashville music — just not the kind you’d read about in Country Weekly or hear on country music radio.) Perhaps the reason the magazine has lost circulation is quite simple. My theory without ever reading a copy is this: It probably sucks.

nashville
<p><strong>Perception vs. Reality:</strong> In a <a href=”http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060615/BUSINESS01/606150377/-1/RSS05″>Tennessean story</a> about why the readership of the bi-weekly magazine with the misnomer name, Country Weekly, has fallen to 450,000 from 700,000, comes the following stellar reporting:</p>
<blockquote><em><p>”Several factors appear to be changing the business environment to support a mass-audience print publication for country music fans. For starters, there’s the Internet. Chet Flippo, a longtime music journalist and the editorial director of CMT and CMT.com, said he’s seen traffic at the network’s Web site increase from about 150,000 hits per day several years ago to an average of about 2 million per day recently.</p>
<p>”And when there’s something like CMA happening, then you’re talking 10 million hits a day,” Flippo said, adding that a full 60 percent of those page views come from pictures alone. I don’t think country music fans these days are looking for something like Country Weekly that’s feature driven and comes out once every two weeks,” he said. “Everything’s old by the time they get it.”</p></blockquote></em>
<p><img src=”http://idisk.mac.com/rexhammock/Public/cmtalexa.jpg” alt=”" width=”389″ height=”225″ hspace=”5″ vspace=”0″ align=”left”>I hate to burst Chet Flippo’s bubble with a <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking”>fisk</a> point to <a href=”<a href=”http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&#38;compare_sites=&y=p&q=&size=medium&range=max&url=cmt.com/”>Alexa.com’s data regarding CMT.com</a>. I don’t question that CMT.com has “2 million” <i>somethings</I> a day, but the trend chart doesn’t reveal CMT.com being the breakaway, magazine-crushing factor that’s changing the business environment to support a mass-audience print publication.</p>
<p>For the record, as a whole (and as a sign of the coming apocalypse) the celebrity magazine category has been one of the most robust segments of the magazine industry for several years. “Comfort food,” my friend Samir Husni calls it. The category has been so successful, that there has been an explosion in new titles in it. While individual titles in the category have come and gone (killer competition does that), I think one would be hard-pressed to prove with statistics that the Internet is the reason one specific magazine title has lost readership during an era when the magazine’s category has grown.</p>
As I’ve repeatedly said here on the rexblog, I am not a fan of the whole celebrity magazine genre — nor, for that matter, am I fan of the pop-suburban crap with the misnomer name, country music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Nashville music — just not the kind you’d read about in Country Weekly or hear on country music radio. Perhaps the reason the magazine has lost circulation is quite simple. My theory without ever reading a copy is this: It probably sucks.</p>

Coincidence? First, Robert Scoble leaves and now this!

(For the humor-challenged, I don’t actually believe these two events have anything to do with one-another.)

Stranger than fiction: (From AdWeek.com) “NEW YORK WPP Group said it bought word-of-mouth marketing firm M80, a continuation of the holding company’s efforts to diversify into new channels.”

Yesterday, in a comment on this post, Hudge did an amazing job of connecting Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Cat’s Cradle, to Jeff Jarvis’ daughter (and every other member) being kicked out of the “American Girl” Club. I have an old copy and read most of the novella last night and, as usual, Hudge is correct.

Now, upon reading the news that WPP has purchased a “word-of-mouth” firm, I can’t help but mentioning once more the William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition that includes a character named Hubertus Bigend, a London advertising mogul obsessed with creating and selling hipness that is spread via the buzz of an elite class of cool people.

(rexblog Flashback: “rexblog library of accidental blog books,” 12.13.2004)

Technorati Tags: womma

More search and knock-off news: As I seem to be developing a theme for today, here’s another item about search engines and “knock-offs.” Google has launched a “U.S. Government Search” page at the URL, http://www.google.com/ig/usgov, which is, in effect, a pre-configured version of their personalized, customizable portal page. Wow. Think about this a minute: With a room full of interns, they could roll out hundreds of pre-configured versions of this page for every type of interest, lifestyle, hobby, location. Heck, they could even let people start sharing their personalized page. Yikes, those Google people could take over the world.

What will be next: http://www.google.com/ig/?????

But I digress. In this case, the federal government actually has a product superior to Google’s (I never thought I’d write that sentence), Firstgov.gov. Granted, the government’s site won’t give you all those cool Adsense ads. Other sites knocked off in the preparation of the Google page include:

Govspot.com

Searchgov.com

Govengine.com

(via: Washington Post)

Technorati Tags: google, search

New search interfaces: A couple new search “interfaces” hit my in-box this morning. In this case, “interface” means the search tool is (metaphorically, speaking) a skin or veneer sitting on top of other search engines. The interface is intended to provide the user a different experience with the same search results. (I made up that definition and it likely makes no sense to anyone but me.):

Huckabuck.com seems to me to be like a Dogpile that lets you “tune up” the volume on which search source delivers the most results. For example, if you want Yahoo! search results more than Google results, you can do that with a clever little tool that looks like an equalizer. (Sidenote: The following factoid gained Huckabuck an instant shout-out: it’s from a New Orleans “company that is alive and thriving, and (wants) to inspire other companies to follow (its) lead.” )

big.com is an interface for the far-sighted. Or, to borrow a phrase from Nashville radio host Gerry House, this is a search tool for those of us who have “tested positive for foggie.”

(via: John Battelle.)

Technorati Tags: search

Anchors away? It’s sometimes a good thing to not be “anchored” by success. That way, you can throw everything out and start all over again. Netscape (the URL owned by AOL) is knocking off Digg which knocked off /. which…(I could go on with the knocking off list but it goes back through CompuServ and ends somewhere with drawing pictures on cave walls). Like lots of others this morning, I’m very impressed with the Web 2.0iness of the Netscape re-beta*. I think I’ll be using it for at least a week or two, until someone else comes up with the shinier toy. (I would have said next next thing, but that is an such an oblique reference to Netscape that only Web 1.0 foggies would get.) By the way, if you want to create your own knock-off of Digg, here’s an open-source project, Pligg, that can help you do-it-yourself. Happy knock-offing. (Mediapost has a good background story on the diggy Netscape.)

*I don’t think the weasel word Beta should be applied to a relaunch. It’s bad enough to launch the first time using the term “beta,” but after ten years, it’s no longer applicable: “New & Improved” — “Now With Vitamin C” — something like that, but Beta has left the building long ago. Let’s make this clear once more: Using the term Beta is about as lame as saying, “under construction.” As Mary Hodder says, we’ve all been trained that Beta doesn’t really mean anything.

Technorati Tags: digg, netscape