StupidFliter

Via Gruber at DaringFireball, I found myself laughing aloud at this:

Open source natural language processor that attempts to identify idiotic comments on the web — like a spam filter for stupidity.

UPDATE: Their server seems to be struggling to handle the traffic, at the moment.

The market for real journalism will continue to change; What’s coming will be better

Jeri Cartwright posted this at the Media Relations blog (excerpted here) regarding a recent stretch of layoffs in Utah — her home turf. Many interesting things to think about in a few short passages.

Content is still king. Talk all you want about new media, but someone has to write the content, and someone has to like the content so that advertisers will spend money to cozy up to the content. Yes, I know there’s plenty of content online. Does it serve the community and world? Or does it serve the ego of the writer?

True and true. We are in an ad-subsidized world. It would be royally great if subscription content services could compete in news distribution, but they simply do not scale.

That said, current research indicates that the burgeoning online ad sales game is taking off in spades. JupiterResearch (via CNET) recently reported that 2008 will boast 20% growth in the online advertising space while offline advertising does the Shrinky-Dink. Of course, when you look at raw numbers, there is still room to grow. Online ads represent only about 9% of total ad spending in the US, forecasted to hit 14.3% by 2013. Lots of headroom there — one could say, so much headroom that the downside is the very, very large, gaping maw of a gap between that 14.3% and the other 86% that’s in the air out there to be claimed.

And that really is the story here, more than anything else…

Granted, the Internet has given some very talented people their 15 minutes of fame. They may write well, and have enormous talent with video and audio. But do they have a compass? Can they be bought with a freebie, a pat on the back or the neighbors’ praise?

The Internet is in the process of giving rise to a new breed of journalist thanks to all these layoffs in mainstream media. This is an important shift, because it centers on the people who report the news, not the ego-bloggers and serial editorialists.

For example, take a look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Josh started the site as a personal platform for his political views. The site has turned into a news portal for political journalism supplied by a network of journalists. He’s still got the leftist blog, but the site is a destination for millions each year to keep up with left-bent political action.

Even more robust: The Huffington Post. As strange as I think Arianna Huffington is, she is openly working to create a network of solid reportage that rivals mainstream media. She’s built a network of citizen reporters around the world who are able to cover breaking news with speed and accuracy that rivals all but the biggest networks — and on that point, not for long.

If America’s great experiment in democracy is to survive, a free press (broadcast, etc), one that doggedly tracks the actions of government and the powerful, is the only protection we have from those who could evenutally undermine freedom as we have known it.

Outlets will continue to close, to re-org, to downsize. That’s the fundamental nature of change. But journalists will always be journalists, whether they are working for CNN or Arianna Huffington. They report the news. This will not change.

What will change is our base habit around news consumption, for a while. See, convergence is happening on more fronts that will impact media than just changing business models that throw a wrench in mainstream media dominance. Luckily, the end result may be more transparent than we think.

The first is technology. Right now, we can look at what is happening with media delivery systems like YouTube, Vimeo, BitTorrent and the like and build a personal broadcast system where consumption takes place more on your computer than your TV. And once it’s on your computer, it’s on your iPhone, your Blackberry, wherever. The pendulum will swing back as more and more cable and telecom operators penetrate the suburbs with their high-speed data, pulling coax in favor of fiber to the home and making those computer media streams ubiquitous across screens. The changing media hegemony is not about the decline of one TV screen in the living room. It’s about the virulent increase in the number of screens all around us, all the time.

And with more screens, comes more content. I should say, the need for more content. This should sound familiar to anyone who switched from rabbit ears to cable in the 90’s. As our technical capacity to shove signal into our homes increased exponentially, so did our need for more content to fill that signal. And so was born about 1,000 channels of nonsense to supplement the 3 channels of value on our cable bills. Those being Comedy Central, Sci-Fi, and Porn, of course, in no particular order.

What this increase in signal has done for news junkies is massive. Think about it this way…

The first Gulf War ushered in the era of 24-hour, round-the-clock cable news and catapulted the news channels from kitschy obscurity to mainstream competitor in about 48 hours. The viewing habits of your average news junky were pretty predictable: turn it on, keep it on, glue yourself to it.

New media journalism offers the same benefit to news junkies on a virtually unlimited content spectrum. Streaming news video from multiple sites, multiple freelance journalists, multiple war zones, all delivered in high def wherever your screens may be.

But the new media business model is even more interesting. A smart outlet with a good network of stringers can start subsidizing news production with direct ad contracts much more efficiently than the current model.

Things will change. Things will likely get worse before they get better. But there is a model in the offing that will at once upset the current system and offer something even better for consumers with every bit of the investigative and research talent that the best houses support today.

As it happens, as I’m writing this I’m catching up on This Week in Tech since I’ve been on vacation for the last few weeks. In TWiT 150, Leo Laporte and guests Jason Calacanis, Tom Merritt and Dwight Silverman have a fantastic discussion on just this issue — old media embracing and extending the new in reportage — it’s worth a good listen.

Deloitte says Branded Social Networks are a Bomb

Courtesy of ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, “Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds“, original post at the WSJ here.

In summary, Ed Moran at Deloitte did a survey of 100 major brands that have online communities. They all suck. What does “suck” mean in this case?

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.

This tells me a few things. First, these companies have spent WAY too much money on their community software. Part of the magic of building a community network lies in using tool that are familiar and easy to use for the largest number of people. Since the vast majority of successful communities use similar forum and photo sharing tools that are largely open source, rolling your own makes less sense, particularly for a million bucks. That is to say, go where the people are.

Second, they don’t actually have anything worth talking about. That’s not to say that they don’t have great brands, or great products. But they might not have great brands or products that inspire conversation. For example, the Purina hard-to-classify-as-”network” network has only four paltry pages of user comments. It’s just hard to talk about odor control at any length.

In contrast, Mercedes-Benz has an incredibly successful community at BenzWorld.org, offering a place for user support and discussion on the cars — even premium membership for the high-dollar owners.

The Mercedes example gets to one of the key points in the survey: offer a community only when it provides a service to the community — not to you.

Third, the survey ignores companies making great use of existing tools. Back on my first point, if you are really going where the people are, then a network on Facebook or MySpace allows you to tap into known quantities, vast numbers of connected users, on an (arguably) stable platform.

The upshot is this: in spite of the doom and gloom from Deloitte, don’t shake down the social networks just yet. We’re entering an era of connectedness unlike any we’ve yet experienced. If you know your customers — if you truly understand them — a community might be your next best home run.