Media companies face a critical choice as they struggle to introduce user payment for digital content:

Should they introduce separate products for each new platform, such as iPad, or try to sell a cross-platform subscription?

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I love reading books – and I love Kindle. Not only the e-reader device Kindle, but the Kindle platform as such. And I think media companies would be wise to learn from Amazon‘s Kindle platform.

Yes, it is a device. But much more important is the great platform agnostic service targeted at book lovers. Let me use myself as example: I read digital books on three different platforms. Most often I would read them on my Kindle e-reader. Occasionally I would continue reading on iPad. And on a seldom occacion, when I have no other choice and is very into a particular book, I will read on my HTC Desire smartphone.

The huge benefit Kindle offers me, besides having the largest selection of books, is the possibility to read my purchased books on whatever platform I choose. What I buy is not a book on the Kindle device, but a book that I can read on whatever platform I choose to use.

Compare this to Apple’s book app iBook. If you buy a book here, it will only be accessible on the iPad and iPhone. If you move outside Apple’s world you have no longer an easy choice to read the book you just purchased on the device of your choice.

I think media companies should learn from services like Kindle rather than iBooks.

Let me explain why.

As media companies move into the user payment area and try to distribute their premium content on different platforms they face two alternatives:

• Introduce a separate product and subscription for each digital platform.
• Merge the different digital versions into one platform agnostic product and subscription.

Many media companies are tempted to try the first alternative. They argue that it is possible to make more money by separating the products.  It is also very natural to stay focused on one platform at the time. At the moment many companies concentrate on developing a compelling app for iPad, hoping that readers will be willing to pay a premium price for their content on this new platform.

I think for most news media companies it will be smarter to merge the different digital versions into one platform agnostic product.

Following this path readers deciding to buy a digital subscription would get access to the premium content package on all available platforms: The web, mobile, iPad, e-readers, etc.  One price gives access to all. The different versions do not need to be the same, of course. They should utilize the benefits of each platform. But for the reader it should be one subscription.

Why is this the best alternative? There are many reasons:

Most readers will consume media content on more than one digital platform

Just about everybody has a PC, the number of smart phones is exploding and experts expect that iPad and other e-readers will grow significantly as well.  For users it is not an either-or decision when it comes to media content. Rather they will read on all the platforms available to them, depending on which user situation they are in. But it will be a hard sell to try to make them pay again and again for the same content. Rather they would expect that once they have established a premium relationship with a news brand that goes for all the platforms the content is available on.

The strongest relationship of readers is to the media brands, not to the specific digital product version

Readers relate to and engage with media brands rather than the specific products. If I read The New York Times on a Kindle, for instance, I do so because that brand already gives me strong and positive associations.

These brand relationsships with large numbers of people is the greatest value many media companies possess, especially those that have relied on a subscription-based business model. In selling digital content it might be smart to think that we monetize the relationships rather than just the specific products. And the relationships of our most loyal readers are by definition platform agnostic.

Selling digital content is hard: We need to build as rich experience as possible

To sell digital content you must provide Unique Value. Unique Content is only one of several ways of doing this. The richer experience you can offer your reader, in terms of both content, convenience, usefulness, packaging and emotional attachment, the better. For many general news media companies just offering the content for sale on new platforms will not be enough.

By offering the different digital versions as one product you also provide a richer experience. Users will be reminded about the benefits of the product several times each day: As they check the news on their mobil, when they check the web site for news during office hours or when they relax in the sofa  at night. The perceived value of the product will be higher, increasing chances that people actually might decide to order a subscription.

It also gives you the chance to build premium cross-platform functionalities that are useful for readers, such as syncronization of users’ activities and the possibility to save interesting articles for later reading.

It is much easier to administer and market one product than many

A good advice is always: Make it simple!  And it is much easier to develop one main digital subscription and communicate this product than selling a number of different versions individually. You can concentrate on one marketing campaign and one simple message with an easy-to-understand pricing structure.

Also it is easier to organize. Employ one manager to be in charge of your digital offering rather than one responsible for each of the separate products.

One main product will get much higher volume than many small ones

I think most media companies will discover that each platform-specific product on its own will generate a low volume. One reason is that readers feel they are not getting value for money. Why pay a full subscription price for access to the content on one device only when you every day relate to the media company on at least two or three different platforms?

By combining the versions the total number of subscribers probably will be significantly higher than if you sum up the numbers from a number of different products. Readers will get a richer experience and be reminded about your product on many more occasions.

It is a less riskier approach in a market with frequent changes

Say you put a lot of effort into making a state-of-the-art application for iPad. What if  iPad does not prove to be a success in your market? What if your product sucks in the view of your readers? Then you are stuck as your subscribers will run away as fast as they can.

You have a better chance of keeping the customer relationship strong by including all different digital versions in one product. In fact you are reducing your risk regarding which platform will win. The main challenge is to make sure that you are available on the most popular platforms at any time.

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Is this the best approach for all media companies?

Of course not. There are a number of exceptions. For instance media companies with a single copy sale business model might very well choose otherwise. However, for many newspaper companies which traditionally have depended on subscriptions I think this is a wise strategy to follow.

A platform agnostic news media product could be composed of a number of different elements:

- The e-Paper. A PDF version of the newspaper

- An iPad app

- An epub version for e-ink based e-readers

- A premium app for iPhone and Android smartphones

- A premium level or benefits on the news site (not necessarily paywall)

To tie them together all the different elements would need to be linked to a login/payment the media company controls itself. That way the media company also is in charge of its own customer relationships.

This is how I think. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

For a few weeks I have used iPad for news consumption, daily tasks and fun. It is wonderful. And terrible. Here is why.

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iPad is my first Apple product. As my laptop I have used PCs, while my smartphones have been Nokia at first and now the Android-based HTC Desire. Kindle has been my e-reading device of choice for books. And I have had a strong interest in all the new mobile platforms, especially when it comes to media content.

This summer I became the proud owner of an iPad.  Working with digital strategy for Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, I had of course tested out iPad for a long time. But testing a device used by many colleagues is nothing near the experience of customizing it for your own personal use. Finally I had my own device that I could set up in exactly the way I wanted it for myself.

And my first discovery was just this: iPad is a personal device – and NOT a family device. Once you start purchasing many apps and customize the tablet with your accounts for mail, Facebook and Twitter it becomes very personal. Not that I have many secrets, but I soon found myself hesitating to let my family members use my iPad. The reason is very simple: Mail and an number of apps are very personal in nature.

+++ What do I love about iPad?

Convenient user situations. I just love how the iPad offers me convenience in consuming media and browsing the web.  Yes, I can bring my laptop with me to the sofa if I like. But I just don’t want to. The laptop is too bulky and too much associated with work. The iPad, however, gives completely different associations.  It is like reading a magazine: Comfortable, relaxing and efficient. Suddenly I find myself doing a lot of my web stuff in the sofa rather than at my desk. I love it.

Efficient cloud services. I love services in the cloud. They help me not to worry about where I store my stuff – and it is always available when I need it. A number of cloud services apps have made iPad a very convenient tool for me. Most important is Box.net. I syncronize all my work documents as well as important private files with Box.net – and now I have very easy access on my iPad. Need to read a report? Before I would print it out at work and bring it home to the sofa. Now I just pick it up on my Box.net app. Another very good cloud app is Kindle. I can now read my book four places: On my Kindle e-reader, on my PC, on my HTC Desire and on my iPad. And they all syncronize smoothly! For this reason alone I haven’t even considered using Apples iBooks app for reading books.

Touching the news. I love not having to use the mouse when navigating. Touching the news is a wonderful experience and a very easy way to move around. In many ways I feel it brings me closer to the content.

Rich media experiences. I love how iPad offers much richer media experiences than any other platform I use. In my opinion using iPad to consume news works just great. Unfortunately most media apps are still first generation, but I am convinced that is about to change very quickly. Already I find it a much nicer way to read news that the typical web experience.  The display of photo and videos is just great!

Efficient and portable. I love how iPad gets started in a couple of seconds after you push the on-button. Compare that to my one-minute-to-start laptop and it becomes amazingly convenient. Suddenly I can check stuff in a few seconds without having to wait for ages. That the iPad is small enough to be truly portable adds to this experience.

Extremely useful.  I love how iPad can be used to solve so many problems. There is always an app for what I need done and there seems to be no limitations of creativity among the thousands of app developers out there. Sure, many of the apps are crap. But there are also numerous apps that are really useful and which help me do my stuff in an extremely easy way. And since it is so easy to pay, I keep buying new apps.

— What do I hate about iPad?

Lack of multitasking. I keep getting irritated of all the times I am being thrown out of a task and have to backtrack through the start page. Take downloading apps, for instance. The procedure itself is simple, but once I click download I am being sent back to the start screen and I have to click on the app store tab once more to get another app. Back and forth. Back and forth. Why? I just don’t get it.  The same goes if I read my mail and click on a link to an interesting article. Safari (an inferior browser) opens – and I have to go via the home screen to get back to my mail. I guess I have been spoiled by my Android smartphone which is so much more user friendly in this regard. Why not make it simple, Apple?

Wrong display of Powerpoint. I use iPad a lot for work. As for millions of users out there, most of my work documents are in Microsoft formats. Not only do I want to read them, but I also need to make changes. But I keep getting into trouble doing this. Graphs in my Powerpoint files frequently get distorted and even working on the Word documents takes some effort to figure out how.  Given the popularity of Powerpoint this is quite a surprise. Why not make it simple, Apple?

No Flash. iPad is great for browsing. I enjoy sitting in the sofa and flip through web pages. But one big hurdle restraints my use: The lack of Flash support. I keep visiting web pages where I cannot do what I want to do. My 14 year son put it very clearly when I asked why he was not more eager to user my iPad: “Isn’t that obvious, dad? It has no Flash! I cannot watch the videos on my skate sites”.  Again: Why not make it simple, Apple?

Useless in the sunshine. I have tried to bring my iPad out in the garden. It is just not a pleasant experience. It becomes very difficult to read at all and if there is any sunshine at all the iPad only works as a mirror. Reading books on the beach? Forget iPad! Use Kindle instead!

Too heavy.  The weight takes away a number of user situations. One typical example: I like to read holding my book in one hand and a coffee cup in another. But holding the iPad in one hand only soon turns into a weighlifting exercise.

Cannot syncronize.  Yes, I know most people have no trouble syncronizing their iPad with iTunes. Yet I am among the users who have been unable to syncronize my iPad to my PC. Each time I try I am being asked to authorize the computer. I do so and iTunes responds that the computer is already authorized. Yet when i continue, I am being asked to authorize again. And so it goes in an eternal loop. Many have described the problem in support forums, yet there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer from Apple. And I keep wondering why I have to syncronize in this way. Why not do it in the cloud as with services like Box.net and Dropbox.com? Why not make it simple, Apple?

What creates the greatest value for users?  Professional editors’ careful selection of content from one source or sophisticated aggregation services picking relevant content from numerous sources?

It may sound like a rethoric question, but it is not. Rather the question goes to the core of the discussion of what provides unique value to users when it comes to news content, exemplified by the very different paths taken by the UK media houses The Times and The Guardian.

There are two trends worth noticing:

Trend 1: News are being disaggregated. In the old world news was always a part of an editorial package, be it in the newspaper, a radio show or a TV program. But in the digital world the content has been split up into its individual units. Just like music now is sold by the individual tunes, and not necessarily by the record itself, news do not depend on editorial packages to be distributed to readers. Each news story has value in itself.

Trend 2: News are also being reaggregated. After having been split up, news are being repackaged and consumed in different ways. This happens by social sharing, automatic aggregation and search services picking up content from numerous sources and presenting them according to topical or other interests.

Where do these trends leave the media companies?

There seems to be two very distinct perspectives on this question. Which you believe in has a strong bearing on how you think about the value of content.

Let us examine the two different perspectives on content:

Perspective 1: The core value proposition of a media company is to offer a carefully selected and edited package of quality content

Many media managers emphasize how news companies have always offered an edited package. One of the most important qualities of a newspaper, for instance, is the physical limitations of the product and how content has been nicely laid out within those limits to provide a unique experience to the reader.

In the newspaper world publishers controlled distribution completely, in fact much of the media power was based on a something near a monopoly position. Readers would have no other place to go for the content than to select the edited package of the newspaper.

All this has changed radically in the digital world of course as content has become abundant.

Yet most media managers still argue that the quality of editorial selection is one of the most important elements differentiating media companies from any other content provider. And there is much truth to that, as media brands have been developed on this value proposition for decades.

Many media managers, like Rupert Murdoch, take the argument even one step further: They try to stop aggregators, like Google News, from using their content, arguing that the media company itself should control all use of its content.

There has been a number of industry initiatives inspired by this line of thought, including the attempt to establish the ACAP protocol as a standard for administering copyright standards.

Professor Eric Clemmons at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania illustrates this way of thinking in his article “We need to change copyright laws to save newspapers”. He argues that copyright laws should be changed so that no part of newspaper articles, not even the lead paragraph, should be picked up by aggregators for the first 24 hours after publication.

From this perspective all aggregator services are perceived as competitors to the news media. Media companies argue that Google News and other aggregators should in fact pay a fee to the news media for the right to aggregate headlines and lead paragraphs.

The main goal is to make media sites the sole portals for their own content, increasing traffic and  opportunities for monetizing the users.

For a very strong critique of this perspective I suggest you read the Danish blogger Thomas Baekdal’s article “We Can Save Newspapers by Destroying the Web”.

Perspective 2: The core value of media companies is as a source of quality content. Stories should be shared wherever readers want them to go.

Users no longer need to go each individual media site to check for interesting content. Instead there are numerous increasingly sophisticated services around that will automatically aggregate and select content for you, often based on your personal preferences or suggestions from your friens.

A recent study from the UK showed how social networking sites now compete with news publishers as sources of breaking news and information.

Let me use myself as example: I am a dedicated user of Google Reader – and currently have about 100 RSS feeds included. Most of them are content sources specializing in topics of particular interest to me. There is no way I would have visited all these sites on a regular basis; at the most I would have dropped by 4 or 5 of them. Aggregation makes it possible to follow new content from multiple number of sources.

The same with Twitter. I use it mostly professionally, sharing interesting links about digital media trends (you can follow me at twitter.com/johnei) Through Twitter I also pick up lots of interesting articles. Only very few of them would I even know was written were it not for other professionals in my fields sharing them on Twitter.

Recently I have started using another sophisticated aggregation service called Flipboard, which has been described as  a “social magazine” built for iPad.

Are all these services thieves stealing content from media companies? Not according to those who believe in sharing and the value of links. Rather they would argue that these services indeed offer real value to users, by sifting through enormous amount of content and presenting it in a relevant context in a way no human editor would be capable of. No media company would be even near to offer this value to their readers.

Also, followers of this perspective would argue, these services bring million of visitors to media sites that would otherwise not be there. In an English language market it is not uncommon that more than half of the visitors to a news site do not go through the front page at all, but rather arrives directly at an individual article. Even in a small language market like Norway almost a third of the weekly visitors to major news sites do not drop by the front page.

Because of this, the thinking goes, the real value of media sites is as a source of quality content. That is where the media site should put its effort. The Guardian is an example of a media company following this path – trying to spread its content wherever interested readers may be.

Back to the question: What creates the greatest value for users?

That depends, of course – both on the brand, the user and the user situation. I strongly believe that editorial packaging still has value, especially when brands are strong. And many readers visit their favorite news site on a daily basis because they appreciate how stories are being selected and put together. But this can no longer be the only way publishers offer their content to readers. The reason is simple: Sophisticated aggregation offers as high value to many readers in many situations.

Aggregation and social media sharing thus should not be perceived as enemies of the media, but rather as opportunities to distribute the content further. Yes, some aggregation services make money without producing any content at all. But they also add value to the content by offering users better ways to find and consume it.

How this will play out in the long term, is difficult to say. As aggregation services and semantics technology improve, there is a fair chance that the front pages of the media sites will be less important to many users, at least in bigger markets.  This development is being accelerated by people’s dependence on friends’ recommendations in social networks in finding news and interesting content.

I believe successful media companies will both have strong enough brands to attract readers to their edited packages as well as an attitude of openness towards aggregation, linking and sharing.

What do you think?

You may also want to read:

• From Distribution To The Link Economy (baekdal.com)
• How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Paywalls (Mediashift)
• How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized Social News Stream (mashable.com)

Google’s Eric Schmidt suggests we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook has launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life?

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This article was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 20th August 2010 23.06 UTC

Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? And where did you go for breakfast this morning? What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.

From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to CCTV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically. But nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.

Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, reading, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our “social graph”, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it. Having executed the social networking business idea better than its rivals – MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5 have been left for dust – Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by July this year. That’s already one in 13 people on Earth, and Zuckerberg recently predicted it was “almost a guarantee” that his site would reach 1 billion users, with growth in relatively untapped markets such as Russia, Japan and Korea “doubling every six months”.

On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest gambit in the battle to remain top of the social networking heap with a move into geolocation services, which harness the GPS functionality of increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. Facebook Places will launch first in the US and later in the UK, allowing users, if they choose, to share their location with friends on the site by checking into public venues. Sensitive to intense public scrutiny of its privacy controls, Facebook was careful to make the service opt-in but every geolocation service – including Google’s Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare – has prompted renewed debate about the protection of personal details online.

“This is a seminal moment where we’re seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy,” says Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and member of Facebook’s safety advisory board. “The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn’t hit 30 yet, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognise that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset.”

Facebook has come under significant pressure to make its site safer for users. Incidents of serious crimes facilitated by the internet such as the murder of British teenager Ashleigh Hall by Peter Chapman earlier this year, are tragic but rare. More common is the embarrassment from a compromising tagged photo of a drunken night out.

The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google’s Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the web are worth the sacrifice of the individual’s right to privacy. Facebook users first raised their pitchforks in 2006 when the site introduced a news feed for each user, summarising their friends’ activity. More recently it came under pressure to simplify its privacy controls with some high-profile commentators and groups – organised on Facebook pages, naturally – encouraging others to remove their profiles. It responded in May with simplified privacy settings.

Richard, now Lord, Allan is a former Liberal Democrat MP and Facebook’s European policy director. “The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information. The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that’s where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook.”

Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterise privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other’s lives. The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities. “Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true. To say you’re ‘living in Facebook rather than the real world’ is a complete misreading of what’s happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology we need to get used to it.”

Our personal information can broadly be categorised as trivial data such as music preferences, behavioural information about our activity and connections, and confidential information including credit card numbers. But even seemingly innocuous information can be used against us, says security expert Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro. “In isolation, much of this data may be trivial but from a hacker’s perspective, any information is good information,” he says. “Use search engines to discover the extent of your online footprint and tailor it. Keep tabs on yourself before anyone else does.”

Balkam describes the internet’s two biggest privacy problems as reputational damage – inadvertently posting drunken photos that your boss might see, for example – and physical safety, the latter being the issue for women particularly wary of location tools. Burglary is another concern, when users of location services announce they are out of the house; in February three developers built PleaseRobMe.com to raise awareness about the implications of broadcasting location to a public audience.

Currently location games such as Foursquare, where users check in at public venues to earn points and prizes, tend to have a small, enthusiastic and largely trustworthy group of dedicated users comprised of so-called “early adopters”. For them, this period of intensive invention and opportunity is a golden age. Christian Payne – who describes himself as a “social technologist” – abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a “car crash epiphany”. Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from BT asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he’d crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialised, and its users more sceptical.

“We’ll never see it like we do now – more nefarious people will come later,” he says. “But it would be more risky for me not to take the chance of building meaningful connections with acquaintances who then become friends when one of you needs some help.”

Payne seems to put a lot of intimate information into the world, but still skillfully manages to keep his personal life, and that of his partner and son, almost completely private. It’s up to the user to decide what they want to keep private, he says, though he’s uncomfortable with the idea that he is unknowingly creating a public persona for himself. “I’d hope I’m doing this naturally and not thinking about it. But then asking me that is like taking me out of the play I’m acting in as myself – and asking me to direct it.”

Online privacy is intrinsically linked to identity. Author Peggy Orenstein wrote in the New York Times recently that her reflexive compulsion to tweet a pleasant moment with her daughter had also spoilt the moment, and mused that our online personas are elaborate constructs that we, knowingly or unknowingly, craft into an identity we want the world to see. The internet has provided a platform that seems to challenge us to present a single identity to the world, yet we struggle to balance the profiles we share with family, friends and work colleagues.

Stories of employers sacking staff for drunken Facebook photos will be replaced by an acceptance that drunken university pictures are the norm, says Dr Joss Wright, Fresnel research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He hopes sites will develop more intuitive ways to share information with the appropriate people; when his grandmother joined Facebook it “severely curtailed” what he could share with his friends.

“I’d like to believe people will learn how to guard their privacy, but we’re more likely to see societal shifts in what is seen as acceptable for privacy,” Wright adds. “Privacy has tended to be something quite intrinsic, and there hasn’t been a mechanism for privacy violation in general society until the arrival of the internet. The rise of Facebook and Foursquare show we don’t really understand privacy or what it means to preserve it, and don’t have an ability to understand the consequences of violating it either.”

Regulators struggle to keep up with the pace of technology and enforcement of what rules there are is weak, meaning the onus for education should be on the services themselves, says Wright, who doesn’t think they are closely scrutinised enough. Though sites like Facebook have a duty of care, “the economics are against that, because their entire business model is built around getting us to share as much information as possible”.

But there are upsides, too. Sharing personal information is beneficial in giving insights into different aspects of society. “If you can see the details of people’s lives, when you can see someone’s actual persona, it’s harder to be biased and bigoted,” said Wright. “But a balance has to be struck between the amount we share for the positive and negative.”

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerberg takes a different tack. “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect.

Part of Facebook’s success has been to demand people’s real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the internet where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of “trolling”, where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other. The improvement in the quality of communication and debate online is in no small part down to the trend towards using real identities. However, anonymity still has its role in whistleblowing sites such as Wikileaks, or in debates where a contributor to a discussion on rape, for example, deserves protection.

If you think the current internet landscape is frightening, don’t think too much about what’s coming next. Already served with targeted ads based on keywords in our Google email, or picked out by our age and interests on Facebook, the future is more personalised still. “Sites will get much better at filtering information and predicting our behaviour, serving us what we want to buy and finding new ways to share information, like location. Three years ago, people wouldn’t even have dreamed of sharing their location,” says Wright. While the sensitivities and sensibilities of managing our online data still need to be clarified, there will be benefits in personalisation, which promises more meaningful, relevant advertising for consumers and consequently, for advertisers, far more effective bang for their buck.

So what next? Three years ago, rival social networking site MySpace seemed invincible. Could Facebook still lose its edge? Anything is possible.

Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.

“No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users, and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behaviour. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that – and the average age at Facebook is 28.”

Where the Twitterati draw the line

Zoe Margolis, blogger

While I’m very active on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I have so far avoided all the location-based tools on my phone. Primarily, this is because I do not want to publicly announce where I am – I wish to protect my privacy and safety – but also because I don’t want to bombard people with incessant, dull, information; I’ve unfollowed people on Twitter and Facebook due to their too-frequent (and, might I say, very annoying) Foursquare updates being fed through to their timelines.I can see the point of location tools – they’re an easy way to connect people who might otherwise be unaware of their proximity to their friends – but given the amount of information we already share using social networking sites, it almost seems like overload to add yet another method of input, and it’s pretty much redundant if not all of your friends/social circle are using the same tool.

I have some major concerns with Facebook Places though and believe it is a huge threat to people’s privacy. It is already live in users’ settings(though the feature has not yet been rolled out in the UK) and while there is the option of limiting the location info to friends only, they have to de-select the automatically enabled “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” box in order to opt out of their location being included on a public list for all to see.

In addition to this, people’s friends can “check’ ” them into locations, so even if someone has limited the information about themselves that they are sharing, there might still be a breach of their privacy from others.

Most of my friends on Facebook have never heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, let alone used a location-based tool on their mobile phones; I assume the majority of people who use Facebook are similar. Given this, it concerns me that Facebook Places appears to be lacking transparency about privacy. The ability to change the settings to ensure personal information is protected seems more geared to the tech-savvy, than the lay-person; I fear many people will discover their privacy has been breached only after the event.

Privacy on any social networking site or location-sharing tool should start off being intact: 100% protection, with the chance to opt-in to less privacy, should you wish to share information with others. Facebook seems to take the opposite view, making the default position little/no privacy with the need to opt-out; I won’t be using Facebook Places any time soon.

David Nobbs

I don’t believe total privacy is possible so I never telling anybody anything on line that I wouldn’t be happy for the nation to know (if it was interested!).

I think some people are so hungry for celebrity they’re happy not to have a private life at all. I’m very careful with my tweets. People can never be quite sure whether they’re true or false, and I never reveal when I’m going to be away.

Sorry this is so short but I’m off to Portugal now for five months. Only joking.

Max Tundra, musician

I probably spend too much time online, sharing details about my life with anyone who has the remotest interest in my music. I don’t like the idea of letting people know exactly where I am right this second, but as my fans tend to be fairly sane and unstalkerish, I feel comfortable letting them know what I’m up to in a general sense.

I don’t use Foursquare or any applications which might reveal my geographical co-ordinates, although I am often easily locatable, as I play advertised concerts. I did, however, recently delete my personal Facebook profile, as that seemed to be a cluster of unnecessarily pertinent information about my life and the people I share it with, as well as being a colossal waste of time which could be better spent telling people on Twitter that I prefer the Henry vacuum cleaner to the Dyson.

Graham Linehan, comedy writer:

I always hated Facebook because it made me very uncertain about what I was and wasn’t sharing with the world. The privacy settings were, famously, a bit of a maze, and seemed subject to sudden changes that you hadn’t agreed to. I felt like one day I might open up the site to see a picture of myself in bed asleep with my wife, like in Hidden’.

Twitter is different because it forces you to be very selective with what you choose to share, and so forces social media back to a more private place. I personally don’t tweet much stuff about my home life, because I don’t want to accidentally tweet something stupid like “Holiday starts tomorrow!” along with a geotag to my home address. So my tweets are generally links to things I find funny or interesting, and my home life only gets a look-in when something truly interesting or funny happens.

Once I made a mistake and posted my home number while trying to send a direct (private) message to someone and we had to change it, but that was a valuable lesson to learn early on, because now I’m a lot more careful with what I put out there. It wasn’t too much of a problem, though. We only got two or three callers who hung up as soon as my wife said “Hello, Dreambeds”. I asked her who Dreambeds were and she said “Dunno. I suppose they sell beds.”

I think people should start to claw back as much privacy as they can. Services such as Twitter show that it’s possible to share selectively. Sharing selectively should be the default setting on every social network service. Which, again, is why you won’t see me on Facebook any time soon.

John Prescott, politician

Twitter has been a revelation. In the past if I needed to get message out I’d have to convince a paper to publish it. Now I can tweet my thoughts and, if interesting, it’ll get pick up. My Milburn tweet was running on rolling news within 10 minutes.

I share a lot of content like my blogs and vlogs along with links to stories and virals from others I like. Twitter is also great to run campaigns and organise tweetups.

We did the first pastiche of the Cameron airbrushed posters, which then inspired mMyDavidCameron.com. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were doing their own versions. It destroyed Ashcroft’s poster campaign and cost nothing.

And when the founder of the National Bullying Helpline said people were bullied in No10, someone tweeted me a link to the industrial tribunal which proved she was accused of bullying herself! It killed the story within 24 hours.

I’ve found Twitter to be a fantastic way to communicate, learn from others and show the real me, not the distorted view peddled by the media.

But I’m not convinced about geolocation applications. You have to have some privacy.

Suzanne Moore, journalist

Don’t mistake personal information for honesty. Personas are created and people play as well as tweet their hearts out. If you don’t want to bare your soul you don’t have to, but the dividing line between public and private is now generational, one that neither mainstream culture nor government appears to understand.

I don’t much care what people think of me and was wondering who some guy on MasterChef was the other day on Twitter and wondering if I had slept with him. Turns out I hadn’t which was a relief. And a joke!

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

The Times has put a wall around all its content while The Guardian invites everyone to republish their articles. It is two completely different strategies. Can both be winners?

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Every media house is struggling with the same question: Should we charge for digital content? Or is it better to leave it free online, like we have been doing for the last 15 years?

Thus it is fascinating to observe how two British news companies have chosen completely different strategies.

The Times recently closed free access to its web site. To read stories you now have to be a paid subscriber. At the same time stories are no longer available through search engines like Google.

The Guardian has chosen a strategy of distributing its content everywhere for free. Recently bloggers were invited to republish stories in full. BetaTales are among the blogs that signed up – and we have so far published an article about how social media affected the UK election and a summary of the discussion about the BBC News redesign.

Apparently we got two diametrically different perspectives.

• The Times: Everything should be paid for.
• The Guardian: Everything should be free.

So different thinking! Yet: Could both be right?

At least The Times and The Guardian are representing two extremes. Most media sites will end up with a strategy between these two companies. That very fact makes it useful to examine the two radical choices of The Times and The Guardian. What are the pros and cons for the two models?

The Times: Content has value and should be paid for

The decision to put up a paywall is consistent with the long term strategy of owner Rupert Murdoch. He has declared that all news sites within his corporation will put up a paywall. So far he has had quite big success with The Wall Street Journal.

The basic philosophy behind this way of thinking is that quality content has value and thus should be paid for. Yes, it may lead to fewer readers, but the ones that are left will be more valuable and engaged customers.  These loyal readers will also have more value to the advertisers. Also, the thinking goes, media companies need to train readers that content has indeed value and is worth paying for.

Traffic certainly has dropped since the paywall was introduced.  That should come as no surprise. Users have numerous choices and many will just go elsewhere when they are forced to pay. Especially that is true for general national news sites with a number of competitors.

Yet the financial success of a news site is not measured in the number of readers, but in how much profit the site turns. Depending only on display ads most news site makes very little money per active user. In Norway the annual ad income per unique weekly visitor will typically be less than 100 NOK per year (USD 15-16). In such a market the winner quite often gets a big advantage. The number 1 site can live comfortably from display ads alone, while the next sites in line are struggling. One way out of it, claim some publishers, is to give up on winning in the “numbers game”, and instead try to build a strong base of very loyal and paying users. If you succeed, the thinking goes,  you may be better of financially, even with a big loss in traffic. The reason, of course, is that you make much more money per user than in the free for all scenario.

But the strategy has a few great risks attached, which is why many publishers are worried about introducing a general paywall as The Times has done. One risk is of course whether the model is in fact profitable. A news site might find itself making less money than before as ad income drops faster that then increase in user payment.

While these are important considerations in the short term, there is a much bigger risk in the long term: To what extent will the strategy erode the readership base of the media company? One might actually ask whether the greatest value of a newspaper company is its content or its daily relationship with many users. Or put in another way: Should one monetize the content or the users?

Putting up a paywall also means that you are withdrawing the content from the social web. Less users will link to you and people will not find your content in search. Over time you risk becoming less relevant to the public at large. The number of people engaging with your brand every day will decrease, as will your chance to offer additional services to a large audience.

Most media companies now experience that the number of newspaper readers become fewer and older. This indeed is a long-term trend, although The Times probably hopes that its paywall will slow this development. A strategy that limits the readership online as well may lead to a less prominent role in society over time.

The Guardian: Content should be free and distributed wherever readers are

The Guardian’s strategy appears to be the exact opposite of The Times. Content is free and the media companies even encourages its use by other sites. The philosophy is that content should be distributed wherever interested readers are, be in on social media, blogs, through parthers, or on different devices.

The Guardian seems to be in the middle of a major rebranding process, going from being a newspaper for a British audience to becoming a global liberal news brand.

A very interesting part of Guardian’s strategy is its Open Platform. Rather than putting up a paywall around its content, The Guardian has put up a lot of effort in making it easy for others to distribute its content. The Open Platform consists of an API developers can use to access the content as well as tools for using the content. And contrary to almost all other media companies The Guardian does not only make available titles and lead paragraphs, but the full content. Now even amateur blogs can republish Guardian articles for free.

This strategy positions Guardian as a content provider rather than a content destination. Where content is consumed is less important than the reach of its content.

The business model is based on advertisement. This applies even when content is being republished on other sites. BetaTales has already published a few of Guardian’s digital media stories, such as how social media affected the UK election and a summary of the discussion about the BBC News redesign. To do so we have to agree not to make any changes in the content and also allow Guardian to include advertisements in the content. So far, though, most of the ads have been self-promotion.

Potentially this gives The Guardian ad income from a much larger audience than its own site. It can even categorize its partner sites into topical categories, making advertisers pay even more for targeting their ads to the right type of partner sites.

Whether this strategy will work depends on the total reach of Guardian’s content and what types of partner sites it is able to attract.

One clear benefit for The Guardian is that it is building a large global audience for its content – and it is extremely easy for this audience to interact with the contetn.  This adds to the influence of The Guardian. The big question, however, is whether The Guardian is able to monetize this audience in a sufficient way. Is the audience loyal enough, as compared to for instance The Times, and is it attractive to advertisers?

Also for these questions we need to wait for a year or two before sufficient data is made publicly available.

What should other media companies do?

There is no obvious answer to that. I all depends on the strategic position of each media company and what they try to achieve. The Times and The Guardian has chosen very different and extreme paths. I am confident that most media companies will choose a strategy somewhere between these two extremes.

In fact both the practices of  The Times and The Guardian are rare in the media landscape. Most media companies trying to move towards user payment have chosen less radical options than The Times, such as the meter model (Financial Times and soon-to-come The New York Times) And very few media sites, even though their content may be freely available on their own site, allow other to republish the full content as The Guardian is doing.

My guess is that most media sites in the  end will choose a freemium strategy. The main web site is basically free, ensuring a large digital audience for the media brand. The free site is good enough to cover people’s immediate need for the latest news. But the free site is also a marketing channel for premium digital content products. These can be access to specific content, membership in clubs, special guides, etc.

On top of the free level many media sites will try to build a paid service. This can be extra content, unlimited access (meter-model), special functionality, specific devices or distribution channels, like iPad, etc. Models will vary and in a year or two we will know much more about what models have proved to be a success – in which market.

One thing is for sure: There is not one solution here. What will work for one media company, will not necessarily work for another. Readers and target groups are different, as are how the brands are perceived and what competiion a media company is facing.

Too many media executives seem to be very confident about what is the solution. I think there is no reason to be. Making users pay for content will prove itself to be much tougher and take longer time than most media managers imagine. Yet media companies have no choice but to figure out how to do it.

Related articles from other blogs

• Rupert’s Paywall is Meant to Keep People In, Not Out (gigaom.com)
• Rupert Murdoch still likes iPad, paywall; more evidence permissive paywalls work better (teleread.com)
• Paywall vs ‘Freemium’: why Parris, Finkelstein et al may rue Rupe’s decision (libdemvoice.org)
• Time paywall: Dont write it off just yet (robweatherhead.co.uk)

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I love reading books – and when it is time for vacation it becomes a major pleasure. But rarely do I now read books in my own language: Norwegian. The reason is simple: Only a few of them are available for e-readers!

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In analyzing digital media trends, I strongly believe in the following statement: If it can be digitalized, it will.

This is true for all media formats: Films, music, games, news, radio, TV, magazines, books, etc.  The analog formats are loosing, while the digital versions are taking over. In some markets there is a revolution, in other markets we are only seeing a slow evolution – step by step. But the direction is unmistakingly the same: Physical media products, like DVD, newspapers and paper books, will eventually disappear or become irrelevant.

As the smart Danish blogger Thomas Baekdal writes: People want digital, so give them digital.

One piece of recent news exemplified this development in a symbolically strong way: Amazon announced that is is now selling 143 digital books for every 100 hardcover books. No exact numbers were given, and there was no mention of paperbacks. Yet it illustrates a paradigm shift in the book industry, which is now feeling the power of the digital wave.  In the US digital book sales this year (up to May) has quadrupled compared to last year, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Let me get back to my own book reading habits. For me e-reading on a high quality screen has been a revolution. I use a Kindle myself, but imagine I can get most of the same advantages on a number of different e-readers, including iPad. Advantages are plentiful:

• The reading quality is as high, or even higher, than in a paper book. Just the small detail of adjusting the font size is worth a lot.
• My e-reader is light and easy to carry around. Going to the beach? I just throw it in the backback.
• No need anymore to bring a number of heavy books on vacation. I have them all in my e-reader. And e-ink screens work great in the sunshine as well (sorry, iPad, on this particular vacation user situation you cannot compete yet.)
• I can buy new books anywhere, even on the beach. Several times I have impulsively bought books after having read the review in a newspaper.
• E-books are cheap. USD 12 for a novel! Great!
• I can continue reading my books on other devices if I prefer, such as my Android phone, iPad or even on my PC.

On vacation on the beautiful west coast of Norway I enjoy reading a great novel - in English - on my e-reader while my son is fishing.

These days  I am enjoying my summer vacation on the beautiful west coast of Norway.   I bring my e-reader with me everywhere, loaded with great novels I would love to read.

But the books are all in English! I don’t have a single book in my own language, Norwegian, on my e-reader.

In fact I have almost stopped reading books in Norwegian. I find reading books on a device like Kindle so convenient that I rarely bother about getting paper books anymore. And since hardly any books in the Norwegian language are available in digital formats, I have just stopped reading them.

It is a pity, of course. And not what I really want. But convenience tends to win when it comes to digital media habits. I choose among the books that are available rather than put on an extra effort to search for the other alternatives.

Actually everything is ready for Norwegian book publishers to be have their offering available on e-readers. The major book publishers have cooperated in setting up a technical solution at the Norwegian Book Data Base – and it is all fully developed. But so far the publishers have decided not to push the “start” button. The reasons are mainly political, as I understand it: A number of issues need to be sorted out in a tightly regulated small book market. One of them is the question of value-added tax. In Norway paper books are exempt for this tax, while digital versions are charged the full rate of 25 per cent.  That makes it difficult for book publishers to offer e-books at a significant discount.

The result is that I can not read most of the books in my own language on e-readers. And because of that I choose English language books instead. Not really a victory for Norwegian book publishers, I guess.

I realize of course that I may not be a typical customer. So far, that is. I am used to reading in English and perceive myself as rather internationally oriented in my thinking. Also I belong to the small minority in Norway who has actually purchased an e-reader device.

Yet I think this personal example, as well as the speed e-reading now is growing in the USA,  demonstrate the risk publishers take if they avoid making digital versions of their work. As the whole business is turning digital, customers are not just going to wait for you. They will go somewhere else instead. And people like myself may turn out not to be so marginal after all. There is a growing group of highly educated people in Norway who find it almost as easy to read in English as in Norwegian. Many of us also use English regurlarly in our work. And e-readers and tablets like iPad are gaining ground very quickly.

Convenience wins. If you want to be a winner in providing content, you need to be sure that you offer it in whatever way is considered most convenient by your users, be it on Kindle, iPad, iPhone or whatever other device is being preferred. Otherwise your customers, like myself, will make a quality tradeoff: Ideally I prefer Norwegian. Of course I do. But for the time being I don’t mind reading in English. And boy, am I surprised! There are so many great books available in that language! And they are so cheap! I love it!

The changes are radical also from the perspective of authors:

I am actually writing a book in Norwegian myself – about Cambodia. It will most probably be published as a paper book in Norwegian early next year. For the time being it is OK that way as e-reading is still uncommon in my country. But I am pretty sure that for the next book I might decide to write, everything will be different.

For this book I am thinking the paper version first, then whatever digital versions the publishing house might come up with next.

For the next book chances are that I will be thinking digital publishing first – with the paper book as only one of several versions. The role of my publishing house probably have changed – and my guess is that I, as the author, will be more in control. In fact I may not need a traditional publishing house at all, at least not for the whole value chain.

As a writer I look forward to that. Readers should too. There will be more choices, sophisticated and compelling reading experiences, lower prices and great convenience in where, when and how you read your “books”.

The debate is always black and white: put up a paywall or lose money. But the UK Daily Mail’s website is getting so big it needn’t do either.

The Mail has chosen a different road than many media companies: It doesn’t want a paywall and it shuns newsroom integration.

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This article was written by Peter Preston, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 17th July 2010 23.05 UTC

David Mitchell had some brutal alternatives on offer last week. You either build a paywall around your newspaper net site – or you don’t, he told Observer readers. You either make money online – or you lose it. You either think Mr Rupert Murdoch may have had a useful idea for his Times – or you excoriate him as per usual. But hang on a moment, because all this black and white stuff leaves out one discommoding part of the argument. Yes, it’s the Daily Mail.

Take the Mail in print. Around 1.9 million punters buying a copy every day, which means 4,881,000 readers scanning their favourite sheet each morning. And online, the growth from nothing much four years ago to 40,500,000 unique browsers a month is verging on the phenomenal: up 72% year on year. Through 2009, the Telegraph and the Guardian were two close competitors – sometimes ahead, often very near to, the Mail. Not now. Both still have good growth of their own, but Associated’s electronic baby – 16 million unique browsers in the UK, 26.3 million in the rest of the world – begins to hint at a different league.

Ah! Perhaps that’s because it is in a different league, say the snipers. Look at those yards of celebrity gossip and pictures on the site; this isn’t the Mail we know (and don’t much love). This is a different beast that somehow doesn’t count because it fights unfair.

Park that charge for a moment, however, and ask why the Mail’s online chief, Martin Clarke, is clearly (though pragmatically) opposed to paywalls. Because he doesn’t need them. Because the surge of traffic is bringing in advertising fast. Because he can see a moment, very soon, when his digital daily will make real profits of its own.

It’s relatively easy to reckon how that could happen since, unlike its rivals, the Mail shuns newsroom integration and runs online operations totally separately, which means that costings and revenue are separate, too. So (purely notionally, on the back of an envelope), the 25 people who sit at Mail online desks each day, boosted to 45 or so for round-the-week working, might cost an average of £100,000 each all in: say £4.5m a year. Add another £1m a month for buying pictures and syndicated tales: £12m. So put down £16.5m for annual costs – with maybe a million or three on top to pay for development and emergencies.

Can internet advertising alone bring in a round £20m to turn Mail red ink into deep black? Clearly it can. However rough and ready my figuring may be, there’s a reality to the audience numbers here, and to the rise within that of engaged readers who visit the online Mail much as they might pick up a print copy. Forty million unique browsers creates a tide of interest in the States as well as in Britain. Of course Clarke doesn’t need and doesn’t want paywalls. He’s building a nice little free earner of his own.

But back to the critics again: to those who don’t think the electronic Mail is a follower of the true faith. Which is where we reach a fork in the road.

There is no rule that says online papers must play print’s little brother. On the contrary, the most successful ones are more like inspired riffs on a print theme. Nor is there a rule that says big print sellers carry the same clout when they transfer to screen. The print Sun far outsells everything day by day but, with 20 million or so unique browsers, was trounced and trounced again by the Telegraph, Guardian and Mail before Mr Murdoch announced yet another paywall.

Why assume that the Telegraph – with 1.7 million print readers a day – must go head to head with the Mail and its 4.8 million? Why assume that the two online versions are really in such close competition either? The online market, like the print market, is beginning to set different rules for itself, to insist that quality and redtop and celeb can define different pitches (and appeals to advertisers) just as they do in the land of dead forests.

In short, it doesn’t necessarily matter that the Mail is different. Perhaps its success merely prompts other news sites to be different as well. Not one site covering all, but many sites offering alternative things. Not one site ruling the world, but many sites carving up the globe.

And once we’re dealing in niches and targeting – for readers, for ads – then paywalls become merely part of the debate: not Rupert’s (or David’s) last weapon of every resort.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

User payment, the tablet revolution and more clever advertising solutions. Those are some of the digital media trends that are putting their mark on 2010.

In the beginning of the year I wrote the blog post “8 digital media trends to watch in 2010″.  It has been one of the most read articles on BetaTales this year and I decided it is time to update it. This is a new version of the post, in which I have included some of the developments that have proved to put a strong mark on the year.

Here are 8 of the ditigal media trends that I think are shaping 2010:

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1. Searching for new business models: Lots of experiments with user payment are taking place

Many media houses have signalled that they will try to charge customers for content. “User payment” has become the new buzz word within the media industry, and a large number of experiments have been initiated.

The wave has been headed by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who just put the web site of The Times behind a paywall.

Most media houses probably will not dare to go as far as The Times. Rather many are trying to find solutions where the most loyal readers are paying. One example is The New York Times, which will introduce the socalled meter model in the beginning of next year.

The big challenge for media houses is of course to determine what of their offerings that really provide Unique Value. There is a good thing about these experiments, though. As 2010 draws to an end, the business model of news may have gone through some significant changes. We will know a lot more about which models may actually work and which will be doomed to fail.

One thing is for sure: Most media sites need to improve their business model. Unless you are a market leader, display ads alone normally is not sufficient to run a sustainable news business online. This is becoming even more evident as display ads have become under increasing price pressure in the market. Somehow news sites will need to find additional income sources.

2. Smart phones are revolutionizing mobile web use

We are in the middle of a revolution when it comes to connecting to the web through mobile services. The basic initiator is the iPhone, which revolutionized how people use the web through mobile devices.

This trend is now being accelerated by Google‘s open source operating system Android, which is gaining speed very quickly.

The result is a radical shift in how people use their mobile phones. The apps economy is exploding and a lot of people are now using their mobile phones for tasks previously taken care of by their laptops.

3. Media sites are connecting much more closely to popular social networks

Only a couple of years back many media sites thought they could develop huge social networks on their own. This approach has largely failed. Media sites soon discovered that developing their own social networks required consistant dedication and allocaton of resources. It proved to be very hard to compete on an every-day basis with the huge global players.

Look for instance at this Alexa graph of how the once huge popular Norwegian social network Nettby has lost visitors. Nettby is run by VG.no, the news site of Norway’s second largest newspaper.

Giving up the ambition to create their own social network, a lot of media sites now instead connect to the social networks people do indeed use:   Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.

One of many examples is Washington Post, which has introduced the concept Network News. Connecting to Facebook’s API, the news site lets its readers know of stories recommended by their friends.

We are now seeing a large number of media sites using Facebook Connect and similar tools in an effort to create engagement. The reason is simple: The the ability to create engagement and loyalty among users is a determining factor of which media sites will be the winners in the future. This is even more important as much general news have been commoditized.

The trend also forces media companies to realize that the age of one-way communication is a past. In today’s digital world media  need to be in continuous dialogue with their readers – or slowly die.

4. Geo location are becoming the basis of exciting new services

As mobile services explode, the location of users will be more important. Most new smart phones have a GPS included, and content providers will offer services which utilize where users are located at any specific time.

At the same time a number of new social networks are built around the location of its users, such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

Media sites are not necessarily prepared for this trend. Many media sites are accustomed to preparing their content primarily for print and secondarily for the web. Typically they have not added the meta data necessary to offer geo  located services. Now it is the time to do it!

5. Tablets are changing our media habits

The launch of Apple’s iPad has put high speed on the e-reading market for media companies. Media companies are running as fast as they can to come up with them most exciting news apps for the new tablet.

Apple will soon face competition from lighter tablets with even better screens, many of them based on Google’s competing Android platform.

For media companies an interesting user pattern is emerging. iPad is proving itself to be a sofa device – as many users primarily reserve it for the late night time.

And then there are Kindle and other e-ink deviced, designed to offer a very good user experience when reading books and other forms of text.

The number of e-reader devices in the market will grow significantly in 2010 – and so will also the buzz around this technology.

We are bound to see a large number of tablets and other e-reading devices launched in the market within the next year. So far iPad has taken a lead, but the landscape is still in the storm and huge changes will happen.

6. Much greater emphasis on new advertisement models

As space for display ads is abundant and prices drop, media sites are forced to spend a lot of time and money to develop more sophisticated ad models for their customers.  Advertisers demand documentation that ads actually work – and media sites are under increasing pressure to prove the effect of ads on their sites. We will probably see a lot more innovation in this area as the sites try to develop premium ad models which can offer high value both to the advertiser and the users.

7. Real-time

Delaying publishing is yesterday’s method – news and other content today is published as it happens. We are now experiencing the real-time web, driven forward by news feeds of services like Facebook and Twitter.

Users increasingly demand immediacy, a way of presenting news which is both compelling and addictive. At major news events users have increasingly sophisticated ways of following the aggregated real-time news streams from numerous eye witnesses.

This of course poses great challenges for traditional media companies as they face competition from observant amateurs at the scene of the news.

I am convinced news sites increasingly will take advantage of this real-time web and find creative ways of making their coverage evolve live and continuously as new information is being gathered. This includes making efficient use of social media and user content in the daily journalism.

8. News content continue to disaggregate

It seems to me that most editors underestimate how news content is disaggregated. Yet this trend somewhat undermines the very business model of traditional media companies with their emphasis on broad edited packages as their main product.

As a journalist it hurts me to point this out. Yet I am convinced that the content focus slowly moves from one-size-fits-all packages to the single piece of news content and associated meta data.  For many news sites today a significant portion of their users don’t even visit the front page, but go directly to a specific news article from a Google search og aggregator service.

I think there is a clear parallell to the music industry. Their basic product used to be the album, an edited package of an appropriate collection of songs. This made sense when you had to make a physical product – like a record or CD.  But as music was digitalized, the individual song took over as the popular product.

I am not saying there will not be a market for edited packages.  Certainly people will still appreciate qualified editors making a choice for them.  But content pieces will no longer only live within a broader package, but also take on a life of its own being distributed wherever users want to consume it. And media sites will be forced to make their packages much more unique and focus on specific user needs.

One of the world’s most important news sites, BBC News, has been redesigned and claims to be part of a new “global visual language”.

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This article was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 14th July 2010 09.47 UTC

BBC News has a new look from today, the first major redesign since 2003.

It has everything you might expect from a 2010 redesign: share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, better links to related stories that provide context and a crisper, less cluttered design with more white space.

There’s also more emphasis on video, with suggested video stories in a high-profile box on the top right of every page and a bigger, better quality video player.

Predictably, there have been more than a few teething problems. The new site doesn’t seem to serve up an iPhone version, which means a “rilly rilly rilly rilly” tiny page that needs a lot of zooming in to read anything. On Blackberry, the old site is still being served up.

Journalist Louise Bolotin pointed out that the fully accessible site isn’t ready yet. “Not good enough,” she tweeted, and pointed to the BBC’s explanation that it has removed the low graphics version of the site as part of the upgrade, but that a “suite of accessibility tools” would be added later this year.

That said, feedback on Twitter has been pretty balanced.

Jordon Dias: “I know: what happened to the internet generation being one of change? If people don’t like it, they go elsewhere.”

J Templar: Where previously there was simplicity, clarity and uniformity there is now a disjointed, & ugly disunity: http://bit.ly/9YuoPe

The BBC design is conventionally safe and easily navigable for its least web-savvy users, but is definitely more attractive, graphically stronger and rightly gives more prominence to video. There’s also more white space on the home page which gives the impression that there’s less on it, and much of the grumbles have been about a white gutter on the page.

As Labour candidate Luke Pollard said in response: “New look BBC website is like new look Facebook – I hate it today but will love it tomorrow.”

That’s normally the way we react to changes on sites we use the whole time, but after a few days we can’t remember what they used to look like.

Ah, it’s all part of a new ‘global visual language’

In an introductory blog post, BBC News website editor Steve Hermann explained some of the research that informed the design:

“We talked to audience groups, held one-to-one user testing sessions, and invited several thousand of you to try out a prototype version of today’s new design. With this feedback, we arrived at the design you see today,” he wrote.

“There’s also been some major behind-the-scenes work on our production system which means we’ll be able to adapt even more quickly in future, whether to the changing expectations of our users or to new technology as it emerges.”

The BBC’s Future Media and Technology director Erik Huggers added that this redesign is the first to implement the BBC’s new ‘global visual language’ that is eventually supposed to make the BBC’s services look and feel more consistent. On the back end, the redesign has improved the content management system for journalists uploading text, images and video.

The BBC couldn’t say exactly how many people worked on the project, but confirmed that the in-design team did consult external design experts.

“At the same time as the in-house team has been working on the News redesign, we have worked with Neville Brody and his team at Research Studios on establishing a new ‘global visual language‘ to establish consistency in design and interaction across all of the BBC websites,” said a spokesperson.

So… what’s your verdict?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Social media is huge in Asia, but very distinct from the Western world in several aspects. Check this video for a quick introduction.

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Thomas Crampton heads Ogilvy‘s team of social media specialists in Asia. A former correspondent for The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, he now is completely dedicated to social media and advicing businesses on how they should communicate with their customers. He is considered a leading expert on social media in Asia.

This video was produced for an internal meeting at Ogilvy and gives a very quick and efficient overview of how social media is being used in Asia. Personally I find it quite fascinating as people in Asia both love all kinds of social media at the same time as there are some very clear differences to the Western world. Did you for instance know that 88 million of the world’s estimated 242 million bloggers live in China?

Three major differences stand out:

Social media is mobile

In Japan there are no less than 75 million mobile Internet users – or 84 % of the population – while Vietnam saw a stunning 846 % growth in mobile Internet users in 2009.  Half of the population in Hong Kong owns a smartphone.

Users pay on social networks

One of the biggest networks, Cyworld, makes about 200 million USD every year in sale of virtual items. Several other local brand social networks also have a high income from virtual goods.

Several strong local brands

QQ.com is used by 376 million people in China

While Facebook is big in other parts of Asia, local brands dominate in markets like China and South Korea.

Check out the video from Thomas. You may also enjoy reading his article “Social networking habits across Asia-Pacific” for additional background.

Other blogs about social media in Asia

• 6 Things About India’s Mobile Landscape (penn-olson.com)
• Facebook scores virtual currency deal in Asia (news.cnet.com)
• Thomas Crampton: Overview: Asia’s Social Media Scene (huffingtonpost.com)