Disqus - Latest Comments for Tim Burden

Re: The AP mess, day 4 (Scripting News)

Tim Burden — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:17:56 -0000

Maybe you need to read this re Robert Cox:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/0...

Re: Don't boycott Kellogg (Scripting News)

Tim Burden — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:53:27 -0000

Yeah...dude...that made no sense. You want to reward them for doing the wrong thing? Why not put up ads explaining why we're NOT buying them?

Re: Folks, this is, in no way, open (Scripting News)

Tim Burden — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:44:38 -0000

Dave, you're 100% right. I would go farther and say that this new full-content API, which appears to say "go ahead and republish our full content on your sites, just include our ads" is a brutally backward step for news aggregators and for the semantic web. When the exact same content is on multiple sites, how do we determine a canonical URL? How do aggregators filter duplicates? It looks like the old AP-style print distribution model to me, but with ads instead of subscriptions.

Re: Product idea: Digg for ads (Scripting News)

Tim Burden — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 13:00:10 -0000

Dave, congrats on the non-smoking. Hugs!

A standalone site for ads - well, I can't imagine anyone going purposely to look at ads. Except maybe media people and ad people. So results would be skewed, no?

I think a natural place for the idea is on AdSense or other big ad networks. Under any ad that appears on a content provider's site, you have the thumbs.

Of course, some people will thumbs-down every single ad to see if they'll go away. But even then, they'll be forced to look at them at least!

Interesting to ponder how the ad networks would actually use that information. Don't they already have an analogue of that information based on who clicks what?

In fact, isn't there a really big difference between how nice people think the creative is and how the ad actually performs?

Re: Thoughts on new media and ethics

Tim Burden — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:50:30 -0000

Mathew, you mention the differences between online and print, and say that you were willing, when you launched the Globe's site in 2000, to be wrong sometimes because it was worth it to be first.

I wonder if it is worth much of anything to be first.

From the traffic point of view, the value of a story comes after it has been indexed. It doesn't much matter if you have the story on this afternoon or tomorrow morning, in the long run.

People - well, me, anyway - wonder "what is the Globe saying about x?" after we've heard about it from some source or another. They don't go "hmmm....who had that story first?" and then award special brownie points to the site that did.

I could be wrong - I'm wrong a lot - but I see that value of being right, and credible, as far more important than being first. Maybe it mattered in the Age of Print, when if you scooped something you had it over on the competition until at least the next day. Now, it seems to me, when you scoop something onto the Web all you're really doing is giving the competition a leg up for their print editions the next morning.

Re: Is embedding better than quoting?

Tim Burden — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:29:24 -0000

This can't work, for a few reasons, some already mentioned.
1. People's URL structures change
2. People's blogs disappear.
3. People forget to maintain their Javascript applications. Any of these three would cause a nice fat javascript error
4. It doesn't save much time.
5. It doesn't allow pulling the part of the post I want, though I'm sure we could rig that.
6. It does include things I may not want, like the comments, though I do think that's a neat idea.
7. It won't count as Google food.
8. It won't be searchable on my blog search.
9. It's yet another thing my page has to go get while it's loading, and while that's not so bad in the sidebars, it could be irritating waiting for a post to load before I can read it.
10. There is no 10, but I like lists of 10.

It did get me thinking though. What I think would be cool is if everyone's comments on a particular subject were melded together.

Take this subject as an example. Anil does the originating post over on his blog. A couple of people comment over there. Then Mathew does this post, and when he does, he clicks a box that says this is a response to a post and enters the trackback. Now this post shows up here, and as well as a comment on Anil's blog.

Now a couple people comment here, and these comments show up on Anil's post as well, and so on. And, all new comments from Anil's post show up here, too. So all the comments are all in one place.

This is one place where you might WANT to be using JS so that Google doesn't see duplicate content all over the place.

Just a thought...

Re: Blogs and the “phone-in show” effect

Tim Burden — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:02:43 -0000

Heh...violent agreement. How would that look?

"Let me agree with you or I'll stab you in the face!"

Personally I do find myself commenting on people's stuff when I disagree slightly more often than when I agree, though not overwhelmingly so. Sometimes I just want to add my two cents, or point out a different angle or related fact. Which is sort of like disagreeing, I guess, if you want to take it that way.

Never saw much point in the "Rah Rah" type comment either, as I'm sure others don't, which may skew the results.

Re: Yahoo: Will merge for food

Tim Burden — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:28:10 -0000

I think you should just let it out, and tell us what you REALLY think of AOL :)

Re: How Twitter is like soap, or Soylent Green

Tim Burden — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:14:40 -0000

I have to admit to some trouble understanding the usefulness of Twitter. Maybe I haven't built a big enough network, or maybe I don't get it on some more fundamental level.

What was wrong with email? Well, one might say, one isn't likely to email all one's friends (or casual acquaintances or people you don't even know) to tell them you are watching Battlestar right now. Well, quite frankly, I'm not that interested when I see that on Twitter, either.

To be notified of new blog posts, why wouldn't I just subscribe to someone's RSS feed rather than follow them on Twitter? And anyway, as the recent mantra goes, the news will find me. Twitter just looks like work to me.

And Jake has a good point about connecting with the non-techie non-bloggers: they're not using Twitter, they're using Facebook. You can do more stuff there, and you don't feel like you have to update every sneeze and hiccup in life to be participating "properly".

Re: How Twitter is like soap, or Soylent Green

Tim Burden — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:15:34 -0000

Or maybe I'm uber-cool, for calling it. :)

The Internet is for connecting computers together. On top of which you can build things like the Web and social networks. And?

Re: How Twitter is like soap, or Soylent Green

Tim Burden — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:37:54 -0000

Staying as informed as possible, if I had to put it as succinctly as possible.

Re: How Twitter is like soap, or Soylent Green

Tim Burden — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:13:00 -0000

Oh, for sure, and I'm not trying to crap on people for using whatever they want to use. Personally, my problem with it appears to be twofold:
1. signal/noise ratio
2. work in building a network

That last one is a bit of a Catch-22 - I don't want to put a lot of work into it until I see the value of it, and I probably won't see the value in it until I build up a network. In the meantime, I see a lot of stuff about Clinton/Obama (ahem - Dave Winer) and other stuff that doesn't interest me per se. And my friends and fellow students and journalists (except you, kind sir) don't seem to be on there.

I want services that help me sort through all the available information quickly. Twitter doesn't do that for me. It's like a big chat room. I thought chat rooms went away in the 90's :)

The difference now is that I can chat on there with my cell phone. Except I don't have a cell phone. Damn, you're right, I am NOT cool! :)

Re: What is “the news”? Good question

Tim Burden — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:43:47 -0000

I agree. This presents an opportunity for MSM. It is probably more important than ever for a news organization to maintain its credibility and reliability. How else will readers sort through the morass of comment and opinion that forms around a story? At some point in the "process", someone with an authoritative voice has to summarize, distill and contextualize the event.

Even so, I give poor marks to any news site that doesn't allow readers to comment on stories. Comments help other readers get a sense of what people are thinking about an issue, and spark thought and debate about what has happened. But I also question the motives of any outlet that gives priority to speed and "me too" and doesn't check the facts.

Re: Paying for the news: A link-a-thon

Tim Burden — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:27:25 -0000

Excellent link journalism, Mathew. Thanks for this. You should charge. I'll give you a dime when I see you at Podcamp.

Bob, that's right. Nobody wants to see newspapers go tits up, but certainly we don't want to artificially prop them up either, especially if that affects the ability of journalists to do journalism.

What this is about is the kind of web we want to live with, as well as the delivery mechanism for journalism. I want the web to be more and more useful, not a partitioned, Balkanized, uncooperative thing. I want search engines to work. I want them to have more access to content, not less. I long for the semantic web, a step forward, not the step backwards that paywalls represent.

I am not so naive as to think that because that's the way I want it, then that's the way it should be. But I also happen to believe quite strongly that paywalls are a stupid business model for the web. And I think the arguments against them are undeniably clear.

Re: GeoToolkit & StoryMaps: Bigger, Faster, Stronger…Easier

Tim Burden — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:26:23 -0000

I have to sign up with a US postal code. When is outside.in coming to Canada?

Re: The new ideal newsroom: Part 2

Tim Burden — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:21:50 -0000

You just described the blogosphere.

Re: The new ideal newsroom: Part 2

Tim Burden — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:26:20 -0000

OK, but then, why do we need MSM orgs to organize this? It's self-organizing. All kinds of people blog on topics that interest them. They are already responsible for the growth and well-being of their community. Niche sites pull all that together - like editorsweblog for example for those who blog about j-stuff. What is the SPECIFIC role of and need for the MSM here?

Re: New York Times Embraces Link Journalism

Tim Burden — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:34:33 -0000

Kudos on this and your other articles on churnalism, Scott. News outlets have got to stop repeating what others have said, especially in wire copy and PR releases, and start linking to original sources. It'll save all of us so much time. I'm starting to think of the re-publication of news releases under different brands as spam - plugs up my feed reader and Google News.

Re: Evolution of the Newswire on the Web

Tim Burden — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:17:43 -0000

Thanks for including my comment here, Scott. Yes, the web is a pretty good newswire, especially if you do some work and aggregate a bunch of RSS feeds (from major news sites but also from aggregators and search engines) together and filter them through something like Y! pipes. Even a non-programmer could make something for his org that worked pretty close to the way AP's wire works, and a programmer could make it work EXACTLY the same.

Platforms like yours will make this even easier.

I think it's a really big problem, and a disservice to the web, its users, and news companies themselves when they put copies of the same story in multiple locations on the web. It serves nobody, and in fact makes our news gathering experience harder by gumming up aggregators. Content sharing - the practice of putting the same content in many different locations - should be a crime. Yet that's the model AP works on.

Aggregators need to get better at crap-filtering, duplication-avoidance, and crediting original sources.

Re: Drudge Report: News Site That Sends Readers Away With Links Has Highest Engagement

Tim Burden — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:26:48 -0000

@Scott: "Why can’t news sites be a destination for original content AND links?"

Because they perform two essentially different functions. One is a destination, one is a starting point. You're simply not going to get the same behaviour.

People go to a story page on some news content site after having found the link on some aggregator or portal. They do not hang around on the news site's front page, refreshing the page and hoping for new links.

And while outbound links on the story page may well be useful, they're not going to hang out on that page hoping for new links on the story either. That's a job for aggregators.

Drudge is an aggregator. It links out to original content on news sites. I agree with Steve, you're comparing apples to oranges. News sites will not achieve the same levels of engagement, as measured by time-on-site and sessions-per-person, as a result of linking out. People just don't use those sites the same way.

There are still valid reasons why news sites should link out, of course. But this isn't one of them.

Re: Drudge Report: News Site That Sends Readers Away With Links Has Highest Engagement

Tim Burden — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:18:44 -0000

@Scott "Newspapers were aggregators in print — that was the business model."

How do you figure that? You mean that newspapers just contained references to other materials that you should go read, without any actual content (which is what the news aggregators we're talking about do)? or do you mean that it bundled a bunch of different stuff into a package? Don't conflate two different meanings of the word "aggregation".