Robot Loves Kitten

We talk the talk, but very often find it difficult to “think small” in practice. It’s very difficult to deny “important” or “key” features unless we’ve a very clear idea of the experience we’re trying to create.

If all we have to go on is some vague notion of a demographic and market segment, or a rough sketch of a prototypical customer, there’s really no end to the list of “useful” features we could add to help this person out.

But if we create a very specific, detailed picture of an experience — a single frame, composed to show a single person in a specific situation — some of those additional features begin to stand out.

If you were starting a baseball team, you might list stadium seating, lighting, vendors, uniforms, good equipments — even talented players — as keys to creating a successful experience. That’s what the pros play with, right? Yet reduce the picture to you and your son or daughter playing catch in the backyard. Maybe add a few neighbor kids and a bat. That’s baseball, too.

Now what to do with all that stuff? Add the seating and there’s no room in the backyard to play. Everyone has to go home to eat at dusk, so the lighting is useless. Mom’s bringing the snacks. Everyone knows who’s on what team. And lastly, everyone’s kind of bad, so who cares what shoes, if any, we wear?

And yet, I guarantee that you will have a better time in the backyard than in the stadium with the pros. Baseball is a game, and a game is supposed to be fun. We play because it’s fun. We watch because we associate our experiences playing.

All that other stuff, that’s there for other reasons: for TV, for revenues, for the league, for the players’ salaries, for the crowds. And it all grew out of the fact that baseball — at its core — is a fun game.

So don’t start with the business idea or a marketing plan. Start with a simple, small picture that expresses the core idea and relentlessly defend its purity from every new idea that approaches.

Sketch it out. Put a person in there doing something better or easier because of you. It could be a fun picture. It could be a dis

Many changes are afoot. I just accepted an offer for a full-time job here in Portland with Portland Monthly, Inc., a very successful up-and-coming magazine publisher. I will be heading up their Web division, building it out from scratch, actually. It’s a pretty great opportunity and I would have been completely stupid to pass it up. It’s going to mean big changes in my life, and will no doubt adversely affect several personal projects I’ve been working on. Both SMITH and Helloindie are going to have to take a back seat, at least until I get settled into things. Helloindie has definitely suffered of late, as I’ve been consumed with SMITH and the job search.

What is Portland Monthly? It’s a high-end glossy city magazine for the city of Portland, started in Oct. 2003. It’s an extremely high-quality magazine, much moreso than you’d normally expect from such a young company. PM has won several magazine awards over the past few years from the City/Regional Magazine Alliance (like the National Magazine Awards, but for city mags). In 2005, it won

So, I’m reading a recent post by Scott Karp on how content businesses don’t scale anymore, and I’m honestly wondering, when did they? The Big Media we all love to rail on are defined largely by their scale, of course, but that scale has been built up over decades or is the result of controlling distribution (the pipes). That’s entirely unsurprising, as is the fact that the vast majority of media businesses are quite small. And while many of these small media companies aren’t cash cows (think indie), quite a few make a lot of money (think B2B).

The long tail, when applied to businesses (the few large and multitude of small), isn’t especially surprising. There aren’t many bounds limiting the creation of new businesses.

I do agree with the inclusion of the “fat belly” in the middle of the long tail. There certainly is a middle in the long tail — almost anyone could identify it when asked. Figuring out where it begins and ends to measure it is a different story. But I see natural parallels between the “fat belly” and the 10% of participant/connector/remixers in the 1:10:89 rule of community creators/participants/consumers.

So why should content suddenly “scale”?

Just because the Internet brings the world to your doorstep in almost infinite detail, doesn’t mean that the Internet suddenly invented the world. It was all there yesterday and the day before, there were conversations and publications and businesses serving every niche. You just didn’t know about it.

And as these niche businesses proliferate, there are almost as many revenue-generating opportunities springing up, looking to profit on being able to reach into these tiny niches. So it seems to me that the content business is probably OK. More audience, more content, more revenue. Sure, the landscape is different, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally broken at all.

But what of the aggregators?

Since we’re all about the niches these days, and we recognize that the niche landscape changes so rapidly we need communities dedicated to keeping track of it all, the rise of the aggregator is again not surprising.

If aggregators worry some people, I’d ask whether those people have adjusted their business models to account for them. The aggregators perform an important role, and you can make them work for you, I think.

(And BTW, isn’t “aggregator” just another word for “portal”?)

But how effective (how big) can the big aggregators be?

If we’re all moving toward niches, does a “portal/aggregator” lose its ability to provide focus for the individual user, leading to the rise of smaller niche aggregators? Or does the aggregator’s scale allow it to plumb the depths of the long tail more effectively, meaning it simply works better at targeting your individual interests than a smaller company could?

Or does the commodotization of large-scale computing resources (“the grid”) democratize the concept of scale, allowing anyone with an algorithm to play?

And will the backlash (currently fueled by piracy/copyright concerns) against the aggregators perceived “free ride” continue to grow, until the aggregators prove out the benefits they contribute to the marketplace and the individual businesses they profit from? Google is at once the aggregator with the biggest target on its back, and the aggregator that (through its text ad business) arguably contributes back — albeit indirectly — the most.

Don’t you blink!

With all the excitement about the iPad and digital magazines, more and more publishers are porting their print content (with bonuses), which of course, is exactly what they shouldn’t do. Is building a “paged” app actually misguided? Look at Twitter for iPad: it seamlessly blends information about people, conversations, and all their shared urls. It’s like a limitless choose your own adventure game. You can get lost in it.

The truth is, there is NO page. The page is an analog print concept. Digital doesn’t have those limitations, and restricting your app this way is little more than knee-capping yourself before the start of the race.

And speaking of which, there’s one trick the Twitter iPad app pulled off that deserves more attention: by using an app (not to mention being more of an Internet, rather than Web, service), Twitter can fire up an instance of mobile Safari and frame every linked website with impunity.

I still think building HTML5 powered web apps is the way to go, but in this shareable remix-happy culture, being able to safely load up any web site within your app is a massive win.

Two ideas have been rattling around in my head lately. Hopefully, I will find the time to do some actual experimenting.

Programmatic design: based on ideas in Less Framework, which adjusts layout based on viewing device, and Flipboard, which incorporates several grid and article layouts when composing pages. Article layout would be dependent on factors like word length, and presence of images or other media. Page layout would be dependent on the articles and their layouts. This would freshen up the page with new layouts, while not requiring designers to individually hand-craft each layout.

Given the rich structure and metadata stored in the modern CMS, this idea can and frankly should be applied just about everywhere. I’d probably start with a simple programmatic WordPress theme to test out ideas.

Graduated or staged designs: I was just wondering this morning whether web redesigns might be better received if they were broken into stages, like an evolution — tiny changes, applied consistently over time, such that users aren’t overwhelmed with newness, but rather acclimated slowly.

This is how websites generally work anyway, there’s always changes and improvements occurring daily. I’m not sure, however, that’s it’s possible to do in practice. Perhaps if redesigns are approached atomically, where individual elements were redesigned and implemented continuously, or more unlikely, large redesigns were broken up into more atomic elements and then those elements were broken into stages.

Perhaps it’s just too much work, or maybe there’s a way to simply automate the process. For elements defined purely with CSS, you could input beginning and ending styles, along with the number of desired “keyframes”, and generate a set of transition styles. We can already do this with SASS, so building a meta-framework to manage these transitions wouldn’t be too difficult.

I’ve been downloading just about every iPad magazine app I can find, and so far, the results are disappointing. It’s early in the race, but I’m starting to wonder if print designers are simply fish out of water when it comes to digital media.

Wired’s iPad app is crisp, but it’s a 2-dimensional light-board experience. Similar to how “interactive awards” really only go to animated Flash websites, Wired’s nod to “digital magazine” doesn’t really get beyond embedded video.

Interview’s app is pretty, but frankly kind of a disaster. The “curling page” animation is so antiquated that maybe I’m supposed to think it’s retro?

I downloaded the Mac Life issue about the iPad, because I got a new iPad. It’s basic, and a little slow, but the lack of an embedded web browser is really frustrating. Despite putting together a mega-list of great apps, there’s no links, even to the app store. What exactly is the point of an app listicle beyond getting readers to buy the apps in the store? Why increase the friction?

Flipboard bills itself as a social mag, and on many levels it succeeds, but it’s just too shallow an experience. They’ve started with a comfortable balance between content and social, but I think they’re going to need to pick a direction. Though I can leave comments, it’s not a complete social interface. And having to open shared articles outside the app interrupts the Flipboard experience. All that said, I really like the Flipboard stiff page animation, it creates an interesting perspective effect as you turn, and you are in full control of the turn as your move your finger, creating a fun little game, if you will.

Lessons so far?

There’s an important concept in online media I’m calling “presence.” Presence is how readers perceive and rely on your coverage of a topic. It’s essentially a measure of your performance or effectiveness. The Economist is successful because it is perceived to have presence in global news. Local newspapers are failing in part because they don’t have presence in local communities. Presence, in the digital age, is continuous and real-time. Another way of saying this is, when I decide to read your product, I expect it to be fresh — even if we’re talking a few hours since our last interaction. How you implement presence is the real trick, but if you want avid readers, you’re gonna need to build presence into your product.

Flipboard has presence, but no depth: I have to leave to interact or read content.

Wired has depth, but no presence: There’s nothing new waiting for me in the morning. I pay for a package of articles and that’s it. No social media, no Wired.com articles. This is an opportunity missed.

Mac Life shows that your mag will suffer wIthout an integrated Web browser (this is not difficult to implement, btw). It opens up whole new worlds of possibility: every digital mag can be its own Aol (the old, portal-style Aol, that is).

Lastly, let’s talk about how many transition effects video editors have at their disposal. Like 1,000, more? Can we just bury the curly page animation, already?

In the next magazine I download, I want each page turn to be an explosion! Now that would be sweet.

Reviewing a news site in its first few days is almost unfair, given how the staff is still gearing up for business, squashing bugs, and putting out fires. But just looking at how the site decides to treat its headlines gives me, at least, some confidence that the team at TBD.com has got it going on.

TBD.com homepage headlines

There’s a lot of possible metadata you could choose to clutter up an article link. Most sites, even big sites, don’t pay attention to this minor detail, but this is exactly what sets the tone and context for readers, helping to draw them into the story. TBD.com sets a clean, clear, friendly tone by eschewing typical metadata junk with only a headline, a time, and a source.

Because it’s a news site publishing often, TBD can simply state the time the story was published, setting it in green (from their color scheme) — both the brevity and color convey freshness to the reader. Including the source under the headline seems to be a nod to the multi-source journalism you’ll find on the site, which will hopefully include lots of local blogs. This leverages the brand appeal of the larger sources (Washington Post, AP), while working as a nod of respect to their smaller contributors (who wouldn’t want their blog post next to a Washington Post column?). It also says to me that they are committed to providing as comprehensive a local “presence” as possible, regardless of source. That’s what I, as a reader, want from my news source.

So, with only two pieces of metadata accompanying their headlines, TBD conveys timeliness, reader-friendliness, trust, presence, and a nod to the participatory, community-sourced journalism that they’ll be growing in the future. Maybe I’m getting over-excited, and reading too much into it, but I’m always impressed when I see examples of less doing more. Simplicity is always harder than it looks.

With all the breathless hype of how the iPad is a “game changer,” I wanted to do a quick run-down on some of the promises and pitfalls I see.

The Revenue Split: Apple takes 30% off the top for every application sold through the App Store. It takes the same cut for all in-app purchases, so there’s no getting around the vig.

This is probably not an issue for most magazines. In meatspace, magazines continue to juggle subscriptions with the legacy of newsstand. By going digital, they’d be able to consolidate these operations, and more easily upsell new customers to subscriptions, and even downgrade customers back to newsstand-style “per issue” pricing. This would give magazines much greater leeway and intimacy in how they sell to customers. Overall, it’s a big win.

Newsstand is frankly a nightmare. The business is consolidating rapidly on the checkout line, with large retailers like Wal-Mart wielding increasing power over pricing. Newsstand sales volume is also down, pretty much across the board. This is partly because of recessionary spending cuts, but regardless the prognosis is not good for newsstand, no matter who you are.

The newsstand math, while potentially profitable, is still challenging. Generally, 35% of copies are sold, the rest destroyed. Of that 35%, you get 50% of the cover price. So, you’re looking at collecting only 17.5% of your cover price on average per copy.  70% in the App Store compares as a pretty good deal.

Subscriptions are a different story, of course, and you’ll still have to account for the associated costs with managing your customer database, along with Apple taking its cut. The bright side is no more direct mail for renewals.

Upside: The massive potential for in-app purchases. Magazines could easily adopt iPhone-friendly a la carte pricing per issue, as well as offering tiered subscription levels, a la cable TV. The question is, are publishers ready for this?

Pricing Trends: For In-App Pricing, $.99 seems to be the magic number.

Already, GQ and Esquire have apps that cost $2.99. GQ sells in-app back issues for $1.99. These prices are probably a dollar too high, but time will tell. It’s strange that there doesn’t seem to be an option for subscribers to access this content without paying for it again (new subscribers can apparently get the app for free), but it’s still early. GQ could easily make the switch to a free app, and leverage in-app purchases for non-subscribers, allowing subscribers to roam free.

As I mentioned above, $.99 ($.70 net) compares favorably to what you’d expect from the newsstand. Subscriptions are a similar story, as most large magazines offer subscriptions at $1/issue.

Again, the promise here is in-app purchases, and for magazines to create compelling premium content offerings on a monthly basis. It wouldn’t surprise me to see confused executives push for premium pricing, to recoup initial development costs, risk, etc. This is, of course, a massive mistake. Right now, consumer adoption is the key. To have any future at all, magazines need consumers to adjust to paying for digital content. How much is immaterial, what matters is that consumers get through the checkout process.

Advertising and Scale: Will They Come?

Magazines are cross-subsidized with subscriptions and advertising. As we’re in the adoption phase, subscriptions can’t be relied upon to generate revenue, which means advertisers will need to pick up most of the tab. The question is, will they be interested in an admittedly flashy platform that doesn’t have the raw audience numbers they’re used to?

You can almost see the Web playing out all over again. Advertisers want reach, magazines individually won’t be able to deliver, and so will rely on ad networks (at the insistence of advertisers), which will drive down ad revenues, and so on, and so on.

There is a movement driven largely by Ajax-enabled websites to stress “engagement” above pageviews, and magazine publishers may be able to tap into this. In addition, publishers have the opportunity to reinvent the digital magazine ad format, working with advertisers to create more engaging and consumer-friendly ads that could actually reverse the damage of the pop-up banner.

But regardless of what flashy formats win out, advertisers today are sold on metrics, and if these new digital magazines can’t deliver suitably impressive stats, advertisers will look elsewhere.

Extras: What of the Director’s Commentary?

There’s a lot of talk about multimedia extras and exclusive content. This all makes me think about DVDs. It was initially thought that the extras were what would make the sale, and in some cases of movies with rabid fan bases, they still do, but for the most part, extras became yet another pain in the ass that complicated production and drove down profits.

I don’t see anything different in store for magazines. If your extras and exclusives are that valuable, why aren’t they in the primary product? Consumers aren’t buying the trimmings, they’re buying the meat. What publishers need to do is figure out how to create products out of their magazine sections: and then tier them into free and paid versions.

Workflow & Cost of Content Extras

All of this isn’t going to be easy to create. The workflows involved require very different skill sets, some of which can be learned, some probably not. Added to the legacy operations and inherent politics involved in any company, and any new digital operation is going to have a struggle ahead.

So, it comes down to a few key questions:

• Can you retool your product for in-app purchases, creating more opportunities to sell to customers and subscribers?
• Can you grow your audience large enough to keep metrics-focused advertisers interested?
• Can you do it all profitably, while supporting legacy operations?

And I think in searching for an answer to all three questions, media companies will probably find themselves not in front of an iPhone/iPad app, but rather a mobile-friendly website built with HTML5.

There has been quite a bit of talk about Hearst’s Skiff ereader and we got a hands-on last night before the show closed. The device is about as big as a Kindle DX (11.5-inch display and a very thin bezel) but quite thin (.25-inches). They use a metal board spun-coated with e-ink instead of a glass sheet for the screen, which will definitely prevent the heartbreak of shattered ereaders for the next generation of readers. It uses Sprint’s 3G network.

However, I doubt seriously you or I will ever add a Skiff device to our arsenals this year or any year. Here’s why.