No-one doubts the quantity of information available online, but what about its quality?

In ancient times wars were fought over access to knowledge repositories.

Would our ancestors fight the same wars to access the net? Probably.

But that’s mainly our ancestors liked a good scrap. While the Internet might be chock-a-block with information, it’s often light on knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

Regular readers may notice this web site has reverted to its previous minimalist look and feel. I’ve switched back for two reasons.

First, I wanted to cut down on the size of my pages – this format is quicker to download and displays better in a wider range of browsers – include those on mobile phones. It’s also easy to read.

Second, I plan to customise the site’s look and feel in coming weeks. This is a much easier basis to work from.

Wordpress aficionados will recognise the theme here is The Journalist by Lucian E Marin.

Regular readers will notice this site has changed a bit in recent days. There’s a new look – or theme in Wordpress‘ private language – and a handful of new features. This is because I’ve just moved from a wordpress.com site to a self-hosted version of the site at billbennett.co.nz. Once things settle down – and a week after the move things still aren’t right -I may comment more on the switch.

There are however a couple of pressing issues to worry about. First, I’ve arranged things so anyone visiting my old site is automatically transferred to the new one. The automatic redirection is largely working, but it isn’t perfect. There are a few information pages here with different URLs. It’s not that important, but for a while I was using a redirection plug-in to route people looking for the old pages to the new replacements. This had to go as the plug-in was causing problems elsewhere.

My other problem is my online identity is closely tied to my old Wordpress address. I’m registered with dozens of other sites as billbennettnz with pointers to the old site. While the redirection from wordpress.com to here is in operation this won’t matter. I’ve paid for a year in advance and could go on paying for subsequent years. But I’d prefer to either retire the old wordpress.com identity and create a new one or, even better, update that identity to reflect the new reality.

OK you’re saying, why don’t you Google for an answer to this? Or perhaps look for information on how to do this at the Wordpress support site. Fair enough. But my need is so obscure that I don’t have a clue about the terms to search for.

Short snappy pieces work best online for a number of reasons.

First, people are less prepared to read long pieces online than short articles. I wrote about this previously in Why people read less online than with print.

Second, people read online material about 25 percent slower than print. Jakob Nielsen explains why in In defence of print. Nielsen’s article was written in 1996, but things haven’t changed substantially.

Third,  people get distracted easily online. There are advertisements and links to other web sites as well as bleeping notification of incoming emails, tweets and instant messages. If you write a brief article there’s a much better chance readers will get to the end before skipping off elsewhere.

Fourth, skilled writers aim for brevity because good, vigourous English is concise. Your goal should be to get your message to your reader as swiftly and as accurately as possible. Get on. Say what needs to be said. Get off. Leave the fancy, flowery stuff to poets and fiction writers.

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People spend less time reading online news than reading printed newspapers is because online reading can be more mentally and physically taxing.

I’ve no hard and fast evidence to offer. This is just my observation. It would make a great research project for someone.

People certainly do read less online than in print. I discovered this today in a different context at Newspapers online – the real dilemma.

Here, Australian online media expert Ben Shepherd was examining why online newspapers earn proportionately less money than print newspapers. He says it comes down to engagement. A typical online consumer of Rupert Murdoch’s products spends just 12.6 minutes a month reading News Corporation web sites. In comparison the average newspaper reader spends 2.8 hours a week with their printed copy.

There are other factors. But I’d argue, the technology behind online reading is part of the problem:

• Newspapers and magazines are typically printed at about 600 dots per inch.
• Computer screens typically display text and pictures at 72 pixels per inch. Some display at 96 dots per inch.
• The contrast is usually far better on paper than on screen.
• Screens often include distracting elements. This can be particularly bad where online news sites have video or audio advertising on the same page as news stories.

Lower resolution means it takes more effort for a human brain to convert text into meaningful information. The bottom line is that screens are fine for relatively small amounts of text, but over the long haul your eyes and your brain will get tired faster. You’ll find it harder to concentrate and your comprehension will suffer.

I’m a reader who can stay up all night with a decent novel, but I found it hard to stick with most eBook readers for more than ten minutes.

It’s also worth noting here that many sub-editors and proof readers will find more errors on a printed page than on a screen.

What does this mean?

• The online reading revolution is going ahead without anyone worrying about readability, but it’ll be better when improved screen technology arrives.
• In the back of my mind I suspect this is one reason why the 140 word Twitter is so successful. Again, I’ll leave the research project to someone else.

Dan Conover at Xark has written a great piece arguing against the newspaper publishers’ campaign to charge readers for on-line news.

Conover describes the move as a suicide pact. While describing the idea that readers should pay for the professionally created content they consume as reasonable, he says attempts to force them to pay are “post-rational”.

He points out some of the main flaws, including the fact that consumers don’t want to pay for news and that previous attempts to make them pay have failed. But Conver points out newspaper publishers are no longer listening to reason and are determined to plough ahead with paid content.

Speaking as someone who has spent more than 30 years working as a journalist – most of that time on newspapers – I’d love to see publishers find a way to make on-line news profitable.  But it’s a fantasy.

If Fairfax can only convince a handful of Australian business people to stump up cash to read the highly-targeted and immensely useful Australian Financial Review on-line, what chance to other newspaper publishers have?

You need nerves of steel to bet against Rupert Murdoch, but this time, he and the other newspaper owners are going in the wrong direction – readers are not going to pay to read news. And they definitely will not do so while there are free alternatives.

Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact.

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There’s a major debate in publishing circles about whether consumers can be made to pay for online content. Rupert Murdoch recently moved from the free content camp to thinking out loud about charging readers micropayments to view news content (see Will readers pay for Murdoch’s web content?)

Now Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has announced it will be pressing ahead with a micropayment scheme in addition to more conventional subscriptions.

Reuters columnist Eric Auchard looked at some possible newspaper business models for The Guardian in Pay a small toll to read this news story.  He concludes; “the newspaper industry must find a way to make work one or several of these proposals to make consumers pay for online news. The alternative is to accept that newspapers have had their day.”

Why micropayments?

In theory the subscription model should be a perfect way for delivering digital content. In practice only a handful of businesses have managed to succeed in persuading consumers to pay an upfront fee for pure online content – the best known examples are the adult sites.

There have been famous failures to attract subscription revenue. Slate magazine started out free, then attempted to move to the subscription model. Less than five percent of readers were willing to pay even a modest fee to read the magazine. It has since returned to the ad supported free online newspaper business model. This five percent figure crops up a lot in the context of online subscriptions, but few publishers have ever reached such giddy heights.

Buy print subscription, get digital free

There are some interesting variations on the subscription theme, for example The Economist a British weekly newspaper-magazine has an excellent web site. Initially only subscribers to the print edition had full access to the entire site. Today, The Economist also offers a digital only subscription, it’s about 20 percent of the price of a print subscription. The New Scientist has similar offers.

Another variation is where Internet users can trade their personal information for a subscription. The New York Times allows access to a basic set of pages, but for full access you have to fill out a questionnaire. Fairfax Media’s Stuff site in New Zealand allows registered users to customise pages and news feeds. Fairfax’s Australian sites let registered users take part in competitions and receive custom alerts. In some cases the data from these schemes is used for simple information gathering, in other cases once you’ve signed up you’ll see a never-ending stream of spam.

One reason why many content publishers haven’t yet managed to sell subscriptions is that online payment is still based on credit cards. Although many companies have attempted to introduce micropayment systems, none have taken off. Credit card transactions are simply not economically viable below, say, $10.

Rocky road to micropayments

Although as a journalist and ex-publisher I’d love to find ways of turning my skills into a reliable income once more, I see three big problems with getting readers to pay for online content.

First, for readers to pay money, content has to be valuable and consistently good. The Economist and the New Scientist offer consistently good reading and are reliable, credible information sources.

The same cannot be said for all newspapers. The most popular news stories online tend to be trashy tabloid pieces about celebrities – often hinting at sex or with vaguely sexy pictures. These drag in the punters for online advertising, but few people would pay money for this material.

Second, micropayment schemes would send price signals to journalists. While an economist would argue this is a good thing, it may kill the news business. Newspapers earn their credibility with their markets by the breadth, depth and independence of their coverage. If the easy micropayment dollars all accrue to the trash stories, then quality journalism will be quickly eliminated or relegated to backwaters.

Micropayments will provide newspaper managers with instant financial feedback on the profitability of stories, genres, beats and individual journalists. Journalist will quickly learn to write for salability. Tech Dirt has an interesting perspective on this in Wait… Wouldn’t Micropayments Be Bad For Journalism?

Third, readers may need to set up multiple accounts with multiple publishers. It may be helpful if there was an iTunes style clearing house for online news, but I can’t see a realistic way this could be made to work.

Lastly, the whole idea of charging readers to access news adds considerable friction to the process. Stories behind pay content walls become invisible to search engines. The mere process of a reader stopping and thinking ‘do I have enough credit?’ or ‘is this worth paying for?’ will erode numbers. Regardless of their willingness to pay, the frictionless, free content sites will win the traffic everyday.

What do you think?

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According to Halfdone, New Zealand has roughly 200 blogs of note. When I analysed these for my New Zealand’s top Wordpress.com sites list, Google’s Blogspot accounted for 50 percent of the total, Wordpress.com was a shade under 20 percent, Typepad had only a four percent share and the remainder were not immediately obvious.

It’s not immediately obvious why Blogspot (also known as Blogger) dominates. To me the technology appears dated and the Blogspot sites look inferior to Wordpress.com sites. As far as beginners are concerned, Wordpress is slightly more intimidating to use, but far more flexible and, once mastered, it is in fact easier. It makes better use of graphics and  has many useful built-in features.

So why does Blogspot dominate?

At first, I assumed it was because Blogspot, being owned by Google has a higher profile. It’s easier to find and the Blogspot name is more descriptive of what it does. These things matter for raw beginners. This visibility is probably a factor in its success.

Safety may also be a factor. People know who and what Google is, so they feel comfortable. Wordpress is obscure by comparison and something of an unknown.

There could be a mercenary reason. Blogspot allows users to place Google Ads on their blogs, which, theoretically at least, means they can earn money. Not much. In fact, I doubt if anyone below the top ten New Zealand blogs has seen as much as a dollar from Google’s advertising. Wordpress doesn’t allow Google ads on its hosted blogs. Occasionally Wordpress may put one of its own ads on a Wordpress.com blog.

Scrubone, who runs Halfdone, suggested the reason for Blogspot’s success is that it’s been around a lot longer than Wordpress. This is true and it is likely to be a major reason, even though many of the Blogspot sites in the list were created fairly recently. Being the incumbent player in a technology market is often enough to ensure some degree of success.

Can anyone suggest any other reasons for Blogspot’s continuing popularity in New Zealand?

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