Disqus - Latest Comments for Tom Foremski

Re: Why the mainstream media is dying

Tom Foremski — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:32:56 -0000

I was shocked. As a former mainstream reporter at the Financial Times, I'm amazed how the New York Times missed the story so badly. What happened to the newspapers standing up for the defenceless in society. If you follow the money (telcos, social networks, online gaming, scam advertisers, top VCs, its a fantastic story that the New York Times could have used its resources to take further. Unbelievable.

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives...

Re: AccMan’s on a list

Tom Foremski — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:23:40 -0000

Congrats! You deserve it...

Re: Enterprise and the cult of the amateur

Tom Foremski — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:11:52 -0000

You should see Keen at the Stanford Summit, he completely blew himself up. Keen said that Prince is now giving away his music and that will prevent millions from getting access to Prince's music except through $125 show tickets in Las Vegas! I think that debate, in which Gilder handed Keen his head, puts an end to his nonsense.

http://alwayson.goingon.com/page/display/15568?param=session/123

Re: The disruptiveness of doing what you love

Tom Foremski — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 18:01:33 -0000

Well, I've drained several savings accounts and am working my way through emptying my pension plan because I can't stop doing what I'm doing and I don't want to take a day-job like 99.999999 per cent of the Blogosphere.

We will have a professional media that can pay for itself because otherwise everything becomes partisan and skewed. Also, the blogosphere doesn't have to get up every day and do this. Journalists do it every day.

Everybody can be their own courtroom lawyer, but we know what the punchline to that one is. Similaraly, a society that relies on bloggers for its media and decimates its media professionals is foolish. Democracy relies on the quality of its media. Society uses media to think through big problems and we have some massive ones to deal with.

Re: Techmeme and Google Shared Stuff: WTF?

Tom Foremski — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:24:11 -0000

Techmeme was acquired by GOOG secretly in January. Gabe had to cover his Las Vegas CES "expenses."

Re: Kleiner: Web 2.0 is so over, dude

Tom Foremski — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:28:34 -0000

The interesting thing about my post about funding Web 2.0 companies is that we don't have a definition of the term Web 2.0. Which doesn't really matter, because we are now in a 2.5ish transition to something new... Come to our 2.5 Web conference in SF in December :-)

Re: The iPhone is a piece of shit and so is your face

Tom Foremski — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:09:35 -0000

I've got an iPhone and I like it. Yet I get so many people coming up to me telling me why they won't get one, why their phone is better, why they are waiting for their contract to run out before getting one, what is wrong with the iPhone. Non-iPhone users are totally hung up about the iPhone, which is strange. I really don't care about their reasons for not having an iPhone. And I say that not in anyway believing I own a superior technology product (in which the phone part sucks). Why do others care so much about their cell phones? My guess is that these are the new PCs, Personal Cellphones, and they are a statement of a specific kind, about the owner, which is why there is so much emotional involvement (not on my part of course.)

Re: RocketOn’s Blerp adds a layer to the web with new widgets

Tom Foremski — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:52:04 -0000

Layers on top of someone elses' content. Another way to make money off the work of others. Why don't companies like RocketOn create something original instead of trying to "layer on" the work of others? I guess it's easier this way...

Re: Social News

Tom Foremski — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:01:48 -0000

Nice summary of the evening. An interesting point is about the value creation. These media sites don't make a heck of a lot of money, so how can newspapers and magazine make money with the current online business models? Newspaper web sites are growing in readership but that increase cannot support their costs of doing business. So how will we pay for professional journalism...?

Re: Social News

Tom Foremski — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 02:49:18 -0000

I totally agree. It seems somehow backward to give away breaking news but charge for old news(!) I think both should be given away...
As you say, newspapers have tons of material in archives and the search engines will serve it up for ever and ever. It's a shame not to let the search engines establish your brand wherever, and all over the internet.
Soon, many of these things will seem obvious, but for now, they are counter intuitive to many of the media establishment. But that is changing.

Re: 2008/09/23/tom-foremski-is-wrong/

Tom Foremski — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:15:19 -0000

Wow! Thank you for taking the time, and ten times my original piece in length to prove me wrong and failing so spectacularly. I guess Mashable doesn't care about the quality of its content.

-I quoted Valleywag because that's where I saw it first, nothing wrong with that.

-People still think of GOOG as a technology company, just because you found a reference to someone talking about blogger means nothing. Google continues to be thought of as a tech company by most people.And it thinks of itself as a tech company.

- Google profits from Google news by sending traffic to sites that use AdSense.

-Not profiting from a service doesn't mean they don't hurt the profits of other companies. It''s like saying Craigslist only makes money from job ads and therefore has no effect on the classified advertising business of newspapers.

- Yes, "heritage" media has a lot to blame for missing the boat in many ways but even if it hadn't missed the boat, even if it had been blogging etc,years before, it wouldn't help. That's because the online business model is much poorer than the "heritage" business model. "They can't get there from here" is the way I like to explain it because online advertising and other online revenue opportunities can't support the "heritage" costs of media. Google and others have helped to create very low cost online advertising and thus set the price of advertising online. Google and its ilk doesn't want editors or journalists it uses software and servers. "Heritage" media can't compete against that model.

- Yes, millions of bloggers, a veritable citizen journalist army will replace the old media! Wow, you really believe all this "emerging" media stuff don't you! Good luck.

Re: Facebook Developer Garage

Tom Foremski — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:25:53 -0000

$1 per user seems like a lot, especially since most of the applications are fun, such as the zombie one, and the cocktails, etc. I'm not sure how well those types of apps can be monetized, or their longevity. But there will certainly be some new business opportunities from Facebook apps and the sooner you can get into this the easier it will be to rise up above the white noise of thousands of other developers jumping in.

Re: Helping Journalists Thrive, Network, And Collaborate On The Web

Tom Foremski — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 23:39:01 -0000

Scott, I've been writing about this for a couple of years and I came to the conclusion that today's journalists need to have some of the skills of a software engineer. I call it a media engineer. You don't need to be a software engineer but you need to know some html, some CSS definately, how RSS works, and a few other skills.

You don't need to know all these things in great detail but you should know the basics. These are all media technologies, they help us publish and collect.

Most journalists, however can barely type, most use two-fingers. And they certainly can't spell. But they know how to craft compelling stories (at least the ones that are still employed.) Combine that skill with a few media engineering skills and you have an excellent, interesting and highly paid job. Better paid than journalism, even if you work for one of the A-list newspapers such as my alma mater the Financial Times.

Re: Reinventing the Economics of News

Tom Foremski — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:37:21 -0000

Maybe the ISPs should be paying the newspapers since without them fewer people would find the internet useful. It is a cable TV model...

Re: Google News Hosting Wire Service Stories Diminishes Value Of Duplicate Content

Tom Foremski — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 23:45:08 -0000

By putting news results on its main search page Google is already monetizing Google News. But the most interesting aspect of this move is that Google is increasingly competing directly with newspapers for pageviews.

Sending traffic to news sites running Google AdSense is risky, it is much better to make sure traffic stays on GOOG pages. After all, Google AdSense can be turned off or swapped for another network in a Silicon Valley minute.

There will be an increasing rift between news organisations and Google, IMHO. It is inevitable because both organizations are going after the same sources of money.

Re: Content Businesses Don’t Scale Anymore

Tom Foremski — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 01:01:10 -0000

There is a difference between finding a content business that has scaled and saying that content doesn't scale. Foremski's first law of new media states that content is infinitely scalable...

Re: The Only Way For Journalists To Understand The Web Is To Use It

Tom Foremski — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:38:32 -0000

I was telling my colleagues at large newspapers this very same thing three years ago. Trouble is that they don't understand it until they start doing it. It's a chicken and egg situation. More understand it now, but not enough. And I understand that sentiment because that's the way I used to think until I left the Financial Times and started Silicon Valley Watcher in mid-2004.

Re: True/Slant Tests Another Model Of Web Journalism

Tom Foremski — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:37:49 -0000

This is a blog aggregator model, nothing new here at all.

There is no way that online advertisers will stump up enough money to support first class journalists/writers, even if the advertisers have their own page (advertisers already have their own "page" it's called their web site and they try to build social networks around them. This would be extra work for them). Why would they pay more money to advertise here when they can pay a lot less and advertise next to a search engine box: it's far more effective and less expensive than advertising next to a column of journalism.

And a snazzy design won't save journalism. Money will save journalism. We need to create an effective mechanism that harvests the value created by journalists. It's certainly not online ads. But it could be virtual cash...: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives...

Re: What Happened at South By Southwest? A Google Guy Explains.

Tom Foremski — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:00:47 -0000

Blogging didn't disrupt news media, low cost online advertising disrupted news media.

Re: AP Exec: "To the Untrained Eye It Looks Like We're Stupid"

Tom Foremski — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:24:04 -0000

Google pays AP. Google could also pay the newspapers. That's better for newspapers than trying to make money off of AdSense (AdCents). Then that would give Google more incentive to monetize Google News, maybe by charging a subscription, (because they won't be able to monetize it via AdSense, they'll be in the same boat as the newspapers) and thus a virtuous cycle is born of money funding more content, which attracts more people to the Internet (Google).

If there is nothing new on the Internet then there is nothing to do. Without news, there's just web surfing e-commerce sites, and checking out people's hobby sites, not very compelling...

Re: Top Ten Reasons Bloggers Should Avoid Social Bookmarking

Tom Foremski — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:53:46 -0000

It is too much work to tag my copy and add the Digg this! stuff. I always concentrate on the content. If it is good enough it will find its way to people. All that traffic from search sites or Digg-type sites is fly-by-night. I get more than 90 per cent of my traffic through bookmarks and RSS, my readers know where I live and they come to me and that's the way it should be, imho.

Re: Publishers Are Killing Web Advertising's Potential With Misguided Pricing

Tom Foremski — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:18:58 -0000

Mr Spanfeller doesn't like the demographics revealed by the metrics therefore publishers shouldn't price according to what the metrics reveal. Unbelievable.

And rolling back to "demand creation" isn't going to happen. Why would advertisers agree to a pricing model which would cost them more money with a worse ROI.

He has written a good analysis of why ad pricing is in the dumps but he hasn't a ghost of a chance of bolting the barn door - the chickens have flown the coop (mashup metaphor #97).

Re: Publishers Are Killing Web Advertising's Potential With Misguided Pricing

Tom Foremski — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:35:53 -0000

Rick makes some excellent points when he says the agencies need to do their part. The problem is that agencies don't want to deal with 80 invoices per month buying ads at small sites. They want to make one buy and have done with it so they can go do lunch. Which makes me think there's an excellent arbitrage opportunity.

Also, when it comes to the new business model for media, I like t call it a "Heinz 57" business model. You have to manage many revenues streams. Similarly with the agencies, publishers don't want to do that.

Re: Publishers Are Killing Web Advertising's Potential With Misguided Pricing

Tom Foremski — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:10:46 -0000

I totally agree with Alastair when he says ad networks are a dumb idea for all the same reasons.

In fact, outsourcing your advertising to a third party is a bad idea too. You hand over the customer relationship to someone else.

Plus, the revenue split that ad networks take is completely out of proportion to the value they provide, imho.

Re: The Fallacy Of The Link Economy

Tom Foremski — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:51:52 -0000

AP has things backwards. Why not take advantage of the distributive power of the Internet and it's "link" economy? Why not institute a system whereby if you link and quote then also publish one or two of my accompanying text ad links. Then my advertisers get to also benefit from the distribution. I call it "adtribution." It's a model that doesn't closedown but expands the link economy. Google the word "adtribution" for more info.

Re: Some Fair and Balanced Questions for News Corp.

Tom Foremski — Wed, 02 May 2007 19:10:36 -0000

Kara, congrats on the site, it looks great! Was wondering what exactly are your questions for Mr Murdoch...?
BTW if he succeeds, it will be tougher times for the Financial Times.