I had a much longer description of this prepared, but a server error ate it.

So make some pretty stickers and you can turn real-world objects into links.

If I were a company that sold travel information or organized tours, I would start claiming my locations. Or if I had hundreds of reviews of restaurants sitting in a database waiting to show up in someone’s search results. Or maybe I would simply collate the best of the best reviews of one location, make my own “Tag” for the list and ask the location owner where my sticker can go.

Or maybe I’ll get a tattoo on my forehead that links to my site. At least I’ll make a sticker for my cell phone. That device likes to get lost.

Extrapolating, I imagine objects drowning in tags; the question then becomes one of finding the most relevant information connected to a particular thing. No doubt Google already has plans to build a search engine for individual objects.

Connecting the real world to the virtual is not a new idea, as this article about QR codes explains. And RFID, anyone?

I signed up with Tag and it took all of three seconds to make my masterpiece. Unfortunately, I can’t test it. I need a U.S. cell phone in order to download Microsoft’s Tag Reader.

Then again, doing  a search for “QR code” led me to this site, which seemingly allows one to do what Tag does. And what is this?

These efforts seem to be leading toward a real world that is completely represented in a virtual world, and entirely interactive and searchable as a result.

Of course, at some point, the idea of taking the time to make a “Tag” will be outmoded, and everything will come with one preinstalled. In that case, a “Tag” will function more like a gateway; everyone will be able to use an object’s unique ID as a hook upon which they can hang their own relevant information. And this is where Google steps in to make sense of the data.

Whoever designs the user interface allowing the first cyborg to seamlessly and quickly bridge the real and virtual worlds faces quite a challenge.

No need to wear a seat belt for this video, but if you’re curious, watch a QR code in action:

My conclusions after studying a whopping 14 examples:

1. Providing context or opinion on the news, or informing people about what may impact their personal well-being, will win the attention-capturing award.
2. By the time I finished this exercise, many of the lists had changed. I also had to use Google to find a story on the BBC that had completely fallen off the rankings. This reminded me of the occasionally frustrating speed of information churn on the Web.
3. If software can’t already do the analysis that I did here, it should and likely soon will. It will also be running inside the metal skullcomputer of an android that does the dishes, drives the car, walks the dog, has access to every bit of information on the planet and speaks every language.
4. I intentionally avoided delving into a discussion of what “most e-mailed” actually represents when it comes to judging the needs and desires of an audience.

Here’s a bit more detail on what I found around 3 p.m. Hong Kong time on Dec. 18:

• 3 pieces that added context to the news (on various topics) or opined upon it.
• 3 stories about well-being, health and happiness.
• 2 profiles of fascinating people.
• 2 how-to stories (er, recipes).
• 2 WTF stories that made me think, “How can people do that?”
• 2 finance stories.

Here are the headlines and ledes:

Context / opinion (3):

1. Washington Post — Destroying What the UAW Built

   In 1949, a pamphlet was published that argued that the American auto industry should pursue a different direction.

2. Chicago Tribune — Man behind curtain is wizard of Rod, Rahm

   When it comes to being the guy behind the guy, there is no one more conspicuous than Rahm Emanuel.

3. The Guardian — Scott Ritter: Dick Cheney refuses to admit that Saddam Hussein was not a threat

   In yet another attempt at revisionist history by the outgoing Bush administration, vice-president Dick Cheney, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, took exception to former presidential adviser Karl Rove’s contention that the US would not have gone to war if available intelligence before the invasion had shown Iraq not to possess weapons of mass destruction.

Health and happiness (3)

1. New York Times — Colonoscopies Miss Many Cancers, Study Finds

   For years, many doctors and patients thought colonoscopies, the popular screening test for colorectal cancer, were all but infallible.

2. BBC — Rom-coms ’spoil your love life’

   Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.

3. Yahoo — “Death map” shows heat a big hazard to Americans (Reuters)

   Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more than hurricanes do, according to a “death map” published on Tuesday.

Profiles (2)

1. Time — Obama: The College Years - Photo Essays - TIME

   A 1980 photo shoot reveals a playful side of the President-elect

2. Los Angeles Times — A gay Muslim, tested by faith and family

   All she has left of the person she used to be is contained in a 5-by-7 photo album with “Aliyah Bacchus” written in blue pen on its cover, each picture inside tucked beneath a slip of clear plastic.

How-to (2)

1. ABC News — Recipe: Emeril’s Spaghetti Pie

   With everyone’s increasingly busy schedule, whipping up a fast, yet delicious, meal is atop many people’s list — especially during a weeknight when time is most precious.

2. National Public Radio — Chemist Divulges How To Bake The Perfect Cookie

   The holidays mean high baking season.

WTF (2)

1. CNN — Children forced into cell-like school seclusion rooms

   A few weeks before 13-year-old Jonathan King killed himself, he told his parents that his teachers had put him in “time-out.”

2. USA Today — Cake request for Adolf Hitler, 3, denied

   The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance.

Finance (2)

1. The Wall Street Journal  — Risky, Ill-Timed Land Deals Hit Calpers
   
   At the height of the property bubble, California’s giant pension fund, Calpers, made a fateful decision: It aggressively poured money into real estate.
2. The Globe and Mail — Buy Canada, Goldman Sachs says

   Now is a good time to buy Canadian dollars because the country’s economic picture is less dire than in other Group of 10 nations, Goldman Sachs said Wednesday.

Imagine:

1. Go to any Web site.
2. Click the “Filter this information for me” button that instantly scours the site and presents tidbits that will excite or enrage me.
3. Go to 1.

It’s instant, machine-driven punditry, with a touch of human.

So how would this business work? Maybe like this:

• Media companies create a brand that represents this service; here’s a dull example (come on, I just got off a 11-hour flight from Hong Kong): The Associated Press Information Validation Service (APIVS);
• This service is a clearly described method that can help determine the accuracy and quality of information.
• Customers who represent the brand undergo a certification process
• These customers provide the service either split revenue from their earnings with APIVS or pay a subscription (or a combination of both)
• There is a system (and incentives) to check the validity of the validators

What was getting me caught up in the past was trying to think of a (media) business that could accommodate the (seemingly) infinitely scaling market that the Internet is. The approach I considered was, “Oh, hire 10 / 100 / whatever number of people, and provide a service.” But the problem there is you have to charge too much to pay all those people, and it seems Mr. Web’s advantage is in collecting 1 million dollar bills instead of a single $1 million check.

So why not package a journalistic process as a service delivered by people certified as able to perform that process?

1. Often, the who-what-where-when-why-how (and “what’s next”) get blended together in a way that is aesthetically pleasing (in terms of logic, musicality and pacing), but fail to offer easy scannability that Web reading behavior calls for.
2. As a reader, I have to run my eyes up and down a story to find facts that interest me at that moment, and though news stories often use the pyramid writing style, the pyramid is a subjective approach that may or may not be useful to me.
3. For example, if I want to find all the people involved in a story, I may have to scan 30 paragraphs. What if I could just go to a “who” subhead or tab? This would create a logical, predictable pattern of story organization, whereas now a story’s organization is entirely dependent upon idiosyncratic interpretations (by writers and editors) of aesthetics and the importance of one piece of information over another (which is actually a valuable service, but one being offered in a one-size-fits-all manner at the moment).

Solution

1. Despite the aesthetic brutality of it, it might make more sense on the Web to provide the components of a story as clearly labeled sections. Think of a single pane  with tabs (or subheads) for each component. The “Who” tab, the “What” tab, the “Why” tab and so on.

Inspiration for this post

1. The Associated Press report on a new model for news said, as I mentioned in the post below this one, that young news consumers gobble up news in the form of Facts, Updates, Back Stories and Future Stores.
2. However, they felt overwhelmed by Facts and wanted more Back Stories and Future Stories, but had trouble finding these more in-depth components.
3. I felt that all four of those components were often present in stories, but organization by paragraph often made it difficult to quickly find such info in the order one might want it.
4. And Facts, Updates, Back Stories and Future Stores sounded like information that could be tabs or subheads.

MO to extract

1. In a world drowning in information, everyone needs to become an expert at providing information (visually and conceptually) about their information in order to make it more useful.
2. Wait a minute; this is what many blogs, aggregation sites, social media tools and more are already doing…

p. 53: Youngsters’ (18-34) news diet is made up four dishes on 2 sides of the news, eh, dinner table

1. On the “breaking news/headlines/what happened” side of the equation, there are: Facts (basic info) and Updates (more, newer, better, cleaner, fresher info!).
2. On the “depth and breadth” side of the equation, there are: Back Stories (background; what does the story mean? explaining the “why” of stories) and Future Stories (what happens next in a story; resolution to a story).

p. 52: There are far more Facts and Updates than Back Stories and Future Stories, but young media eaters want more, er, BS and FS.

1. Young news consumers feel overwhelmed with the barrage of these snippets of Facts and Updates delivered across a multitude of devices and digital delivery options (e-mail, text message, video clips, IM, RSS and more).
2. They’re having trouble finding deeper, reflective stories that provide the “why” and a resolution to a story.
3. Web users are creating their own BS (p. 38).

p. 52 continued: Uh, oh, somebody used the vegetable metaphor

1. Due to the barrage of info snacks, “…the subjects’ news diets were therefore out of balance. They were eating too many chips and not enough vegetables.”
2. Potato chips threaten society? What is meant by “threaten”? Here’s the passage on p. 52: “The over-consumption of facts and updates…led them (anthropologists) to conclude that informed societies would be threatened - let alone the news business - if this snacking habit were allowed to persist.” Eh…what? And that seemingly patronizing word “allowed” (shortly after “vegetable”!) makes me think of parents scolding their children. So listen, you makers of this cool report, what gives you the right to be talking down — hang on, grabbing a bite to eat…What was I talking about?

p. 56: 2 things, 1 of ‘em a doozy that sounds like what Scott Karp calls link journalism, that news folks can do to produce more value

1. I’m guessing most journalists are doing this all the time: Create more appealing content for entry points into stories (an entry point can be a Fact, Update, Back Story or Future Story).
2. The doozy: “…build the connections that will transport consumers to that content across both media platform and brand.” So different media outlets will work together on each story? Well, the revenue model will have to change radically, first. And then organizing thousands of brains…wait a minute, did the Borg write this report?

More on the Borg:

1. p. 64 “Where online consumers once surfed and bookmarked news sites, users now wonder why a logical trail through the news can’t simply unfold, link by link, across a multitude of sources.”
2. p. 62: “Unless many — indeed, most — news providers adopt a standard set of digital tags, content will not be automatically linkable across both brand and platform.”
3. p. 64: “For its part, AP is offering to apply its metadata tags to the content of its member newspapers in the United States so that related news can be linked across provider.”

p. 58: Are we all going to be wire services?

1. The AP’s 3-stage approach to creating news in this fragmented, always-on news environment: 1-2-3 Filing: 1) Headline; 2) Short, present-tense story with vital details; 3) Story that takes whatever form is most appropriate for audience and platform.
   

p. 65: Sweet! Show me the money!

1. “Still to come are the business models that will drive this news distribution system of entry points and links.”
2. Oh.

Questions:

1. So are people spending so little time on news Web sites because there are too many Facts/Updates and not enough Back Stories/Future Stories, or because people just don’t spend a lot of time on Web sites? What does “time spent” mean anyway?
2. When we are one, gigantic interconnected brain separated from one another only by a Google search or lack of awareness of what we should be searching for to bridge any perceived or non-perceived gap in awareness, will there be less concern about capturing attention and more concern about assisting the efficient application of attention toward completing whatever task our Borg body must undertake in order to survive the material world?

1. To demonstrate the way distribution works on the Web.
2. Though it’s nothing new, to show how embeddability of content can greatly increase its reach.
3. To raise questions about how to monetize content as it moves across the Web:
   • Make the tripod (and other objects) in the video linkable (I wrote about Ooyala doing this). Clicking takes me to a review/buy site.
   • Or slice up the revenue as it changes according to the attention paid to content harnessing the attention? Is Attributor working?

Below is the digital path to the video (which is at the bottom):

1. I found a video about getting crane and dolly shots, without a crane or dolly, via CamcorderInfo
2. Camcorder info got it via FilmFlap
3. FilmFlap got it via ProLost
4. ProLost got it via tslesicki
5. And tslesicki is where I paused in my hunt due to a forum requiring registration. I registered, but had to wait an incredibly long 200 seconds or so to complete the process.
6. But I learned tslesicki found the video via Eugenia’s
7. Eugenia’s found it after getting an e-mail from a Vimeo user named kingofpunk, whose blog is here.
8. And after searching MetaCafe, I found brusspup, the person who, I think, actually made the video.

And here’s the video:

Video Cam Super Trick! - video powered by Metacafe

• On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Why I’m interested:

1. There is still a lot of room for the evolution of how text is presented on a news site, as well as how stories are written. Nielsen broaches this.
2. I wonder what’s after the pyramid.
3. I like CNN’s bullet-point summary at the top of its articles, about which Pat Thornton has written.

I have not read the study (here, but you need a membership for download) cited by Nielsen, so there may be questions about the methodology, such as:

1. Did it look at news sites?
2. Did it consider the reader’s goal when using a site?

Other interesting work from Nielsen on how people read on the Web:

1. How Users Read on the Web (They don’t), which also offers tips on presenting text on the Web
2. Eyetracking Research

Here’s a piece I wrote about writing for the Web.

And a video that effectively critiques videos on financial news sites while making me laugh:

It’s not necessarily creating communities, but creating the awareness of the possibility of a community.

The same principle can be applied to almost any activity. For example, if you have a database of users on your news site, each story can list who has viewed it and how many times, if this doesn’t violate privacy expectations/agreements.

What strikes me about Xoost is the passive nature of the creation of the connection; machines watch you, then connect you to like-minded folks. That’s handy. That’s scary. Make it optional and maybe most people will be OK with it.

No doubt this kind of service will become a standard layer of information experience on the Web. I suppose it is already is with Google (and others) tracking your information habits, though I don’t think Mr. G offers a list of other Googlers who are searching for the same things you are.

Distraction provided by wooden spoons and human skulls: