• Convergence ad sales dampen growing online ad revenues | Paidcontent.org
  Quote - Those who use convergence see the web as an added-value tool and relegate online advertising to a supporting role as opposed to a separate media form.
  (tags: media publishing)

Last night’s final stop on Nickel Creek’s “Farewell (for now) Tour” at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium was upbeat and rollicking with only a slight whiff of funereal eulogy. The evening was more like a celebratory party after a funeral, than a funeral — well, except maybe at the very end. (Photo set.)

There were touches of reflection, however: Bela Fleck sitting in on a few tunes, including Texas Red from the Telluride Sessions, an album Chris Thile said he listened to endlessly when it first came out, which, despite Thile being seven years old at the time, I have no doubt he did. Likewise, Tim O’Brien sat in on several tunes. (Personal note: You know you have great seats when you have to move every time Tim O’Brien and Bela Fleck need to get up to go perform.) Scott Thile, Chris’s dad, played bass on a song — something he did when Chris, Sean and Sara were first starting out at ages 8 (Sara and Chris) and 12 (Sean). During an encore jam, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings joined in with Fleck, O’Brien and with Heartbreakers’ keyboardist Benmont Tench on a concert grand. Last group song, “I’ll Fly Away,” was as good as it gets.

Sara Watkins covering the Jackson Five’s, “I Want You Back,” was an unexpected show-stopper, but the deeply knowledgeable and long-time fan crowd (many who travelled from around the country to attend both nights of the group’s Nashville swan song) were into all musical facets of the concert’s three-hour, break-less performance.

Nickel Creek has already influenced a new generation of acoustical artists — they’ve shown how authentic, roots music can appeal to contemporary, young audiences without giving into production gimmicks or technique tricks. I’m sure few of the fans who have come to them via an alternative music pathway realize that, in some cases, they’re singing songs that stretch back centuries and continents in their origin. I wonder how many general fans realize the degree of their mastery of their instruments — the subtle dynamics Thile coaxes from a mandolin or bouzouki or Sara’s insertion of a harmonic lick in the context of a somber alt-rock song.

But really, who cares?

The home-stretch of the concert returned the group to their roots — hardcore, straight-ahead bluegrass. Gillian Welch and Tim O’Brien, Bela Fleck stepping out of a 12-year-old Sara, Sean or Chris’ Sony Walkman to play along with their young proteges.

And then, after the hymn — another bluegrass tradition — it was just Chris, Sara and Sean on the stage of the Ryman — another classic, unforgettable moment in its incredible history — singing on stage-edge like it was the front porch of a courthouse during a bluegrass festival competition. With no amplification, they sang in prayerful benedictory fashion, a few lines from the title cut of their final album, “Why Should the Fire Die?”:

You’re shining still behind the clouds,
Saying I won’t figure you out
I like it true, but let me try
And try and try for the rest of my life
I’m not scared of being alone
I’m not scared of being alone, being alone
I’m just happier being confused
Beside the fire, as long as it’s with you
Why should the fire die
My mom and dad kept theirs alive
It’s getting late, she says goodnight
I fall asleep, I’ll be all right.

Technorati Tags: nickel creek, nickelcreek

• A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff
  Quote - This horribly-titled, but hopefully useful round-up we will specifically focus on such general purpose sites that include some sort of rich media instruction (generally video).
  (tags: diy how-to guides inspiration instructions)
• The rise of the local and hyperlocal communities online | Compassion in Politics
  A survey of some platforms that can help connect local and hyperlocal communities.
  (tags: hyperlocal, maps)
• Scotland’s has a zippy new slogan | UPI.com
  After months of planning and an explosion of creativity by great marketing minds, Scotland has a new slogan. It’s, “Welcome to Scotland.”
  (tags: scotland marketing)

[Update: I've posted a few photos from the concert. Also, my review.]

15 months ago, Nickel Creek announced they were breaking up for an indefinite period after a year-long “farewell (for now) tour.” Tonight is the last stop on that tour. I’ll be there and will probably post some thoughts late tonight or in the morning. On the website, NPR.org/music, you can watch and listen to the recent Washington D.C. stop on the tour.

I’ve long felt a bitter-sweet anticipation about this concert. This young group — they’re still very, very young — has bridged generations in my household. For different reasons, each person in my family is a fan of the individuals who make up the group, and the group itself. Lots of nostalgia.

Here’s something to make some of you feel very old: It was 31 years ago (almost to the day) that the rock group known as The Band performed their last concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. (Later, the group reformed and performed for several years without Robbie Robertson.) Martin Scorsese’s documentary of that concert, The Last Waltz, is considered (by some, at least) to be the greatest rock concert movie ever made.

Coincidence? Nickel Creek recorded a song called First and Last Waltz on their album, Why Should the First Die?

[Photo: The final exit. More photos here.]

Technorati Tags: music, nashville, nickel creek

Today, CNet’s News.com reports that Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (so that’s what PDF stands for) so that “publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.”

Now flashback to last week when I pointed to this report about a patent granted to Google for “customizing content and advertisements in a publication.”

So, just to make this a little less complicated:

1. In the works, there’s a way to embed “contextually relevant” ads from Yahoo! in a PDF document.

2. Google has a just been granted a patent to do something that sounds — in theory, at least — very similar, and can even be construed to mean that the ads will not only be relevant to editorial context, but can also be relevant to the person receiving the document.

3. While PDFs are perhaps best known by consumers as something they view with a computer, the graphics and printing industries now use a version of the format called PDF/X-1a as a “standard file format specifically designed for the blind exchange of final print-ready pages.” In other words, magazine publishers and printers use a professional form of PDFs to print nearly everything these days.

4. PDFs are eBooks that can be read in eBook readers like the Kindle or the iRex iLiad.

5. Google (while its patent implies there’s something more than just collecting content and mashing-up something to a PDF file, nonetheless, has a pretty impressive model for doing just that with the Google Book Search reader. For example, look at the top, right corner of this public domain version of Edith Wharton’s novel, Summer. See that little link that says “Download PDF 6.1 M?” If you click it, Google will convert the book you can read online into a PDF with which you can print to paper or e-mail to your Kindle or (with a bit of work) some giant printer can throw it on a web press.

6. Despite people like me believing PDFs were on their way out a decade ago, apparently, they are digital cockroaches that will survive in one form or another forever — for both online and offline media.

Technorati Tags: adobe, google, pdf

• Scott & Lori’s Road Trip (a Flickr set)
  Scott Beale (laughingsquid.com) has taken some great story-telling photos over the past few days, recording a road trip from Destin, Fla. to Ohio (including a stop in Nashville).
  (tags: photography)
• RJR to drop print ads | Winston-Salem Journal
  R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. said yesterday that it will not advertise its cigarette brands in newspapers and consumer magazines next year.
  (tags: magazines advertising)

Here’s a short business book I wrote in ten minutes. Feel free to download it to your Kindle and read it later:

Alex Iskold, Read/WriteWeb writer Alex Iskold today used a long post to argue there’s “no money in the long tail of the blogosphere.” Said Iskold, “It is often forgotten that money is to be made by leveraging the collective long tail, however, making money while being part of the long tail is very difficult.”

On his personal blog, Read/Write Web writer Marshall Kirkpatrick today explained how Twitter is paying his rent. Says Kirkpatrick, “Earlier this week I was remarking (on Twitter) about how many of my recent story leads came from Twitter. I counted and at that time 5 of my last 11 stories were based on news I learned first from my friends on Twitter. It was amazing.”

On his blog today, Doc Searls explained that the economics of blogging/twittering is more related to what he calls the “because effect” — what happens when you make more money because of something like blogging or twittering, rather than with or on something like a blog or Twitter.

I’ve never made any money on this blog, a blog way-down blogging’s long tail. However, I continue to be rather astounded by the ROI I receive due to its because effect.

Technorati Tags: docsearls

I guess it’s theme week. And this week’s theme is all about magazines and the web.

Yesterday, I pointed to an interview with the business editor of Wired magazine regarding magazines and the web. Today, the Wall Street Journal has an article on the same topic, focusing primarily on the web strategy of Wired’s parent company, Conde Nast.

Quote:

“Web revenue for magazine companies is about 5% of their total revenue, says Martin Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine-consulting company. “While [online ad revenue] is growing quickly, it is not replacing lost print revenue,” he says. “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.”

While I’m sure Mr. Walker knows what he’s talking about, I sometimes think I’ve heard that statement said so many times by so many magazine industry people that it — to me, at least — has risen to the level of a tenant of faith — or an accepted myth. Again, I’m not singling out Mr. Walker — most of the people I know in the magazine world would say the same thing: Revenues from online operations are growing fast, but can only, ever be a fraction of lost print revenues because, well, magazines websites will never be able to compete on the Web for traffic (which translated, means: “with Google”).

I’ll skip the whole economics of the two different business models — economics that include the overhead of marketing, production and distribution in magazines — that make a mere comparison of top-line revenues irrelevant.

I’ll go ahead and jump to my challenge of the core belief represented in the quote: “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.” I don’t understand that theory. What does it mean, exactly? Who can Conde Nast not compete with in terms of traffic? (Again, those are rhetorical questions: The implied message is that magazine companies can never compete with Google for traffic.)

I believe a more important question to ask is this: Is traffic the the only — or the universally definitive — competitive metric of the web? Will traffic always be the metric used by advertisers to determine where they should invest their marketing dollars? Obviously, if I sell widgets online and search engines deliver me customers who are in the process of buying widgets, I’d place an extremely high value on the traffic metric. But what happens if (or, when) advertisers who aren’t driving online transactions decide “time spent” on a website is a more critical measure of engagement than unique users or pageviews? Or what about when they realize that massively-traffic’d web services and applications that are utilities and tools, rather than media one experiences — or engages with — are perhaps not the right environment for brand-building marketing?

Or what if some types of advertisers (i.e., consumer brands that aren’t using the web to drive online transactions, but to support a brand) realize that a better means of determining where to advertise is something like the Techmeme Leaderboard that ranks which websites tech-niche bloggers are pointing to. Can magazine companies compete for a top spot there? Well, one could easily dominate it if it they purchased a few properties like TechCrunch. But even today, there are plenty of print-centric brands represented on the list. Moreover, once you move outside the world of technology news, I’m sure one would find that the “leaderboards” of online media are already print-centric brands. Want one example? Here is the leaderboard for a sister “memetracker” of Techmeme, the politically-focused Memeorandum. Do print-centric brands compete there? Answer: They dominate it. (Hypothetical question: If a leaderboard of food bloggers existed, where would Epicurious rank?)

Obviously and without a doubt, Conde Nast will never compete with Google in terms of traffic. But is utility-oriented traffic what a Conde Nast’s goal should be? Google is a search engine. People use it to find what they are looking for. If Conde Nast’s web properties are what the searcher then clicks to — and engages with and blogs about and develops conversations and relationships around, isn’t that “engagement” what brand marketers want?

In the end, raw traffic will be the competitive metric of search-oriented advertising — a massive and powerful new form of advertising that leads directly to decisions and transactions. However, another form of online advertising that’s focused on brand-building and lifestyle-association will gravitate to those places on the web where people engage in their passions and loves.

And that’s an arena where magazine companies should be able to compete rather forcefully if the people who run them would get over believing in the myth that such a competition is over.

• How your creepy ex-co-workers will kill Facebook | InformationWeek
  Cory Doctorow paints a picture of Facebook’s future that looks a lot like social networking’s history. FB fan-boys are sure to meltdown over this one.
  (tags: facebook socialnetworks)
• Jackson Five ‘could tour in 2008′ | BBC
  Quote- “We owe that to the fans.” Observation: Speaking for the fans, let me respond: Really, guys, you don’t owe us anything. Honest. Let’s just call it even and ya’ll stay at home. Please. Like forever.
  (tags: weird)
• NYTimes blogger ‘happily’ blogs Wall Street Journal correction | DealBook
  NYT DealBook’s Jenny Anderson happily reports that Merrill Lynch CEO “happily tells” his employees that the Wall Street Journal issued a correction of a page 1 negative story about the firm.
  (tags: newspapers)
• Memo to Amazon.com: Open the Kindle | Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter
  Quote from David Weinberger = Amazon’s Kindle e-book may turn out to be a textbook. A textbook example, that is, of how the strengths of closed platforms can quickly turn into a weakness.
  (tags: amazon ebook kindle)
• MIT Lecture Browser
  Candidate for coolest thing ever. It searches all lectures for your query, indicates exactly at what point the word occurs in video, then plays it while a transcript appears below. Geez. (via: researchbuzz.org)
  (tags: search video amazing)

Okay, it’s already established that I’m a Google Maps “My Maps” fan-boy. For example, here is the first “My Map” I created, a trail map of a Greenway near my home. Today, the Google Maps team announced they’ve added a collaborative feature to My Maps. I’m trying out the new feature on the map embedded below. If you’d like to add something to the map, click here and see what you can do. I believe you have to have a Google ID and be logged-in to edit it. I think I set it where anyone can edit it — however that’s one of the things I’m testing.

I’ve replaced the map I originally embedded below with a community map of East Nashville that Jackson Miller started. It’s not only a cool way to see what a collaborative map can be, it is also something that could be helpful to lots of people. Cool stuff, Jackson.

As I maintain dual citizenship in both Magazineland and Internetopolis, I’m often asked what magazines must do to survive in an online era. Jason Tanz, business editor of Wired magazine, has a great answer to that question in this interview on PRWeek.com.

Quote:

“The Internet can do a lot of things really great, so focus your magazine on the things the Internet can’t do really great.”

Tanz says such things are “long stories, nice paper and beautiful layouts,” however, I disagree with Tanz on one thing: Long stories work on the web.

Here’s how I’d put it: A great magazine is something to be experienced and savored. A well designed and edited magazine is the wine of media. The web is about instantaneous and ubiquitous information, connections and transactions. It’s like the central nervous system of media. To live, you must have a central nervous system. But to live, you should experience great wine.

(Tanz quote via: Martin Stabe)

• Antismoking Activist Calls Rolling Stone Insert ‘One Great Big Cigarette Ad’ | NYTimes.com
  Quote - An insert in Rolling Stone sponsored by Camel is under fire from antismoking activists because, they say, it blurs the line between advertising and editorial content and,,,features cartoons.
  (tags: magazines advertising advertorials)
• David Carr sends love letter to The Week | New York Times
  Quote - Throughout his career, Dennis has railed against the circulationi economics of an industry built on maintaining a rate base for advertisers at whatever cost to the consumer. (Translation - soft-porn)
  (tags: magazines)
• In India, apparently people exist who still care what Tina Brown might have to say | sans serif
  Quote - People keep asking me to blog, but I’m not going to lower my standards, and why should I write for nothing? Haven’t done that since childhood. (However, she gives interviews for free.)
  (tags: magazines)
• 9 Ways to think about linking in a blog post | Penelope Trunk
  Just think of this link as a friendly response to a brazen linkbait ploy to generate some incoming links.
  (tags: blogging linkbait)
• Amazon Kindle FAQ (humor) | Jim Treacher
  Quote - I have a sink full of dirty dishes and I don’t feel like doing them. Can the Kindle help?
  (tags: humor kindle)
• Fortune.com redesigns; Magazine relaunch imminent | PaidContent.org
  Quote - Fortune.com has redesigned its site, emphasizing the magazine and the brand much more than what it was/became under the CNNMoney.com umbrella.
  (tags: magazines)
• News Corp builds online ad network | Reuters
  News Corp’s Internet division plans to launch an online network to sell advertising across Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling empire and even to other media companies as early as the first half of next year.
  (tags: advertising internet newscorp)
• Why Scott Adams will be blogging less | The Dilbert Blog
  Quote - I’ll just do it less often, especially over the holidays. It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.
  (tags: blogging)
• Whole Foods launches a customer magazine | FishbowlNY
  Quote - Whole Foods isn’t happy with just being your source of party-friendly cucumber-dill dip and organic vegetables — now they want to be your reading material of choice too.
  (tags: custom-publishing, custom-media, magazines)

As I’ve said many times, when I started blogging in 2000, I had no idea there would ever be such a thing as a hyphenated-blogger — as in tech-blogger, political-blogger, mommy-blogger, hyper-local-blogger, etc. For that matter, when I started blogging, I had no idea that someone who used a blogging-platform to maintain a website would be called “a blogger.”

However, because I live in Nashville and blog sometimes about life here, I discovered a few years ago that in addition to just blogging about whatever it is I blog about, from time-to-time, I get to be hyphenated as a Nashville-blogger. That has been a great discovery for me, as through that designation, I’ve met many great people I would have likely never encountered through, say, standing behind them in a line at the Pancake Pantry.

As I have a “Nashville” folder in my RSS newsreader, I also get a steady river of posts from other Nashville-bloggers. What I read there is refreshingly different from the stream of news I read on Techmeme. And sometimes, it is fascinating beyond description. Like a post this morning from Sharon Cobb about the 25th anniversary of a heavy-weight championship fight and her ex-husband, who got beat up for 15 rounds that evening.

Astounding stuff one learns by reading hyperlocal and other hyphenated blogs.

• Creating a ‘global micro brand’ | Hugh MacLeod
  Quote from Hugh - From now on building “the gapingvoid brand” will become my first priority.
  (tags: blogging bloggers advertising marketing branding)
• American Routes stops in Nashville (temporary link)
  Public radio program American Routes spends two-hours going ‘behind the music scenes’ in Nashville. (This is a temporary link.)
  (tags: nashville music)
• Time to write our own rules | Doc Searls
  For too long we’ve lived with “relationship management” that’s asymmetrical and one-way. Creating the grounds for symmetrical relationships cannot be the job of any big company.
  (tags: VRM privacy facebook beacon docsearls identity)

After a couple of decades of reading countless stories related to holiday sales, I can say one thing for certain: Retailers never, ever, predict they’re going to have a great holiday sales season. I’m not sure why — underpromising, I suppose — but every year I read the same teeth-gnashing stories: Holiday sales are not expected to grow significantly from the previous year.

And then, if they do see a spike in sales early on, retailers and retail analysts talk it down. Are they afraid that if we think sales are strong, we’ll not be stirred to do our patriotic duty — that we won’t drop what we’re doing to head out and buy more stuff — for the good of the country?

For example, the New York Times is reporting “that sales rose by 8.3 percent on Friday compared with last year’s day after Thanksgiving.”

That’s good, right? Apparently not. Because, according to the reporter, shoppers did not “splurge” this year. They spent only $348 each during the holiday weekend, which is down from $360 each last year.

Never mind the two statistics are not actually connected in any way except that the reporter did a mash-up of two different surveys from two different sources to come up with a creative interpretation. In the first survey, sales were up 8.3% on one day. In the second survey, per-shopper purchases were down over an entire weekend. By combining the two unrelated surveys, the reporter suggests that more people are shopping, but spending less — and then leaps to the conclusion that can only be characterized as something so obvious as to be amusing: People are looking for bargains. (Unlike, I guess, they did in the past.)

I’ve decided holiday shopping stories are about as helpful as articles appearing in the sports section during the two weeks before the Super Bowl. Lots of analyses that fill airtime and column inches, but that mean nothing.

So as a public service — so you can skip all the stories about retail over the next month — here’s all the news you’ll need:

1. People are going to spend more money this holiday season than they did last year.

2. They’re going to increase their spending by roughly whatever the growth of the economy was last year.

3. They’re going to spend more money online than they did last year. (That has nothing to do with the price of gasoline. It has to do with the fact that more people like me (those who hate to go shopping) are discovering the joy of shop-clicking.)

4. Retailers are going to slash prices earlier and more deeply than last year. (Except you’ll have no way to prove it unless you kept meticulous records of what each retailer did last year.)

5. There will be some item — a toy or gadget — that sells out and is going to is being auctioned for a ridiculous amount on eBay. (Sub-prediction: It won’t be the Kindle despite Amazon selling out its first batch.)

6. Flatscreen TVs and HD DVDs are going to do really well. (At my house.)

7. The hipster-tech gift of the season will be the One Laptop Per Child’s XO, which has extended its Give One, Get One program through December 31. (Despite the WSJ doing a number on it Saturday.)

8. Apple will sell lots of Macs and iPods and iPhones. (And on January 15, when Steve Jobs announces new stuff, people will regret they didn’t wait.)

9. The increase over the previous year in news coverage of holiday-retail sales will grow faster than the GDP.

10. Baby Jesus will grow between 2-3% more disgusted with how the annual commemoration of his birth has become tied to retail sales figures.