virtualeconomics

Contra Farmville for Dummies

The appearance on Amazon of the book Farmville for Dummies - a self-consciously dummed-down how-to for Zynga's Facebook "game" that is absolutely nothing more than a time-sink without an iota of mental challenge - so depressed Umair Haque today that he declared it the end of culture.

"You know what's really cool about our culture?" he tweeted. "Oh wait. I can't think of anything."

Hyperbole is hyperbole. But since this is a cultural golden age, I do not like to see the odd bump in the road cause one of our greatest minds to write off the whole thing. Contra Farmville for Dummies, therefore, a handful of points in favour of the culture at the start of the second decade of the third millenium.

In search of lost nostalgia

If I'm reading a book, I can remember what page I'm on. It's hardly a superpower or a talent, barely even worthy of being called a trick, but I find it a slightly useful propensity - reading just before I go to sleep I wake up, pick up the book and think "ah, I stopped at page one hundred and forty seven. About halfway down". It saves a little skimming, a little re-reading, the odd accidental spoiler. And while I know that technology as basic as a bookmark - for which read absolutely any scrap of paper that happens to be lying about - would do the same job, it amuses me to be able to do it.

When I first got a Kindle at the end of last October (a kind parting gift from my lovely colleagues at Northcliffe) there was a lot about it I liked. The thing I disliked about it - and I disliked it viscerally, almost as a personal affront - was that my my utterly trivial mental trick of remembering page numbers had been rendered even less useful than it was before. The Kindle knew what page I was on. I need never remember a page number again.

New York Times experiments with perverse incentives

The New York Times paywall (don't call it a paywall? Right...) is a strategic error, and not even a very complicated one.

So there's some science behind it, and the number of articles you can see before you have to pay (20) has been calculated from actual traffic data rather than just pulled out of the air, which is a good start. And it's always good to see a news org putting in some serious R&D, which at $40 million just to develop NYT's paywall definitely counts. It's not as if there's nothing about the move to like - it's considerably more thoughtful and nuanced than TimesSelect or the other, many, failed experiments in charging for (non-porn, non-finance) content that have failed over the past decade and a half.

Reading age of Journalism.co.uk's top five journalism blogs

John Thompson at Journalism.co.uk was kind enough to include virtualeconomics.co.uk amongst his picks for top five journalism blogs of 2010 (thanks John!), so I've run another Google reading age filter over all thirteen of the blogs listed (three people got a pick, two of the blogs were picked twice) with the results you see to the left. I'm afraid both Wannabe Hacks and After Deadline return data anomalies. 

Admin: Disqus comments

I'm currently trying to install Disqus comments. "Trying" not because I have any complaint with their commenting system (it works just fine, and their tech support is conspicuously excellent) but because importing all of your old comments has yet to work to my satisfaction. So old comments are currently missing - if you're wondering where yours has gone, I haven't summarily deleted it. In positive news, Disqus includes Backtype's superb "reactions" feature, which pulls in tweets etc that link back to posts, which - since 20% of my traffic comes from Twitter and Facebook now - is at least as important to see as comments on the page.

Google's reading age tool - comparing journalism blogs

Since Google just brought out its new reading age analysis tool, I've used it to compare a pretty arbitrary selection of news and journalism blogs I happen to follow for a view as to the different reading ages of sources going into the site. I've included aggregator Mediagazer as a baseline (although like Techmeme it seems to have a higher reading age than its constituents, oddly). 

Patrick Smith's site doesn't show up properly on Google's reading age tool so the dignified prose of Alan Mutter's Newsosaur seems to come out with the highest reading age, followed by Jay Rosen and then Paidcontent UK (amusingly coming out very slightly ahead of the main US site). My own modest efforts bobble around the middle of the pile. 

Not that writing for a high reading age is necessarily anything to shout about of course - there is a great deal to be said for plain English. But since the tool is now lying around I've been using it to compare newspapers, social networks and other sources so I wanted to see how the news and journalism commentators came out. 

You can see the results for UK newspapers here, social networks here and a Techmeme-derived sample of tech blogs here. 

Google's reading age tool - comparing tech sites

Since Google just brought out its new reading age analysis tool, I've used it to compare the top thirty sources on Techmeme for a view as to the different reading ages of sources going into the site. I've inclued Techmeme.com itself as a baseline (although Google's reading age tool claims not to have any Techmeme results it does return a score). 

Unlike the results for UK newspapers and social networks, these numbers seem to be of only curiosity value really - apart from the fact that Techmeme seems to average a reading age higher than its top contributors, which is odd but meaningless given that Google's reading age tool barely acknowledges that the site is there. 

Notes on methodology: the URL in the left-hand column typed into Google Advance Search with the "annotate results with reading levels" option turned on. Different results seem to be generated by icluding the www, in some cases. Results are ordered by % of pages classed "intermediate". HT to Searchengineland for the original pointer that the tool exists.

Latest on Posettigate

Thinking about Posettigate again, the interesting thing now that the case has been effectively dropped is what it's possible to believe about Chris Mitchell's motives in bringing it in the first place.

(1) He genuinely believed that a newspaper editor suing a journalist for defamation was a sensible and positive way to protect his professional reputation, and that the consequences for his reputation would be positive.

(2) He knew what everyone else immediately spotted - that the consequences for his professional reputation would be disastrous (though perhaps not as globally disastrous as it has proved) - but for some other reason he went ahead and did it anyway.

No-one else believed (1), and everyone says the guy is neither mad nor stupid. What might reason (2) be?

Hiring more Community Publishers

My bit of DMGT - Localpeople - is hiring more Community Publishers to look after the next round of Localpeople websites that we plan to roll out, this time in London. We are once more hiring Community Publishers, this time mainly in London - if you know anyone who'd be up for covering Camden, Soho, Balham, Greenwich, Highgate or any of these places do pass them my way. Thanks.

How to talk to bloggers, how not to talk to bloggers

We love your blog!, claimed an email that dropped into my inbox some time last night. Which, sounding like a fairly unequivocally Good Thing, prompted me to open it.

"Hello" it begins. Not a good sign - not "hello Seamus" but simply "hello", the same undirected "hello" that appears at the top of junk mail addressed to Resident, only one step above the "dear friend" that seems to be the standard opening line of deposed Nigerian princes. Still. I read on.

"Hi, my name is Chris and I am a founder of LoudLaunch. I'm writing to personally invite you to join our Premium Publisher program..."

But that's not really true, is it Chris? You're not "writing to me personally". It's pretty easy to tell, really, from the fact that you've sent me a form email without bothering to do a basic mail merge to include a personalised salutation and from an address  - [email protected] - that's clearly not your personal email address but a mailbox built for this mass-marketing exercise. What you're really doing is spamming a lot of bloggers with a mass mailing and pretending it's something else. 

Fail.

So much for the "how not to". What about the "how to"?

Well, for the masterclass, the absolute creme-de-la-creme of blogger relations, I refer you to Al Duncan at Open X. Open X is an independent ad server for web publishers. That's roughly the sort of thing I talk about, so about six months ago I was interested to see they'd set up a blog and included Virtual Economics in their blogroll. That's enough to encourage me to keep an eye on them. Then a few months later Al Duncan, their Head of Communications, dropped me an email  - an actual, personal email from his email address that started "Hi Seamus" and everything (see the difference LoudLaunch? Well, just watch and learn). Just to say "hi" and "we're here if you ever want to talk to us about what we do or our industry". Just right. And then a month ago another note with their latest news. Al again, from his own email address, not sending me a press release but actually summarising the elements of Open X's latest activities that might fit the sort of things I talk about here at Virtual Economics, with an offer to chat to theie CEO if I wanted to write about Open X any time soon.

On the one hand I'd like to say this sort of thing isn't hard to do (it's an odd state of affairs when sending an email begins to look like rocket science), but somehow it must be because the Open X experience is so rare. Virtual Economics is, I have no qualms about admitting, an utterly tiny blog in the scheme of things. I haven't even been posting more than a couple of times a week for a while since the summer - just too damned busy. But I still get a constant stream of peripherally-relevant press releases in my spam folder every day; I still get people sending me form emails claiming they're personal communications; and very occasionally I get someone who knows how to do it right, who just writes to me and tells me what his company has been up to.