Posts from — July 2009

Happy for opening a category for best practises in this self-consumption blog, I am going to try finding and sharing more. Lets briefly talk on guardian’s open platform, another fascinating project.

It allows using their contents even for developing commercial applications, and, from my view, they are making many things right, and it is a very intelligent move:

- To use their API they have reasonable and easy to be understood Terms & conditions .

- They do not openly ask for any compensation while being quite generous to the developer who uses guardian’s contents:

You may attach third party advertising to Your Website, which includes OPG Content, without accounting to us for any share in the revenue generated by such advertising

- They allow to access and encourage to use their Data Store where they share raw data from polls, statistics, data on public services etc.

- There is a developers group

Benefits guardian would get from this are obvious mid-term for me:

1. Maximization of external resources innovating with your own contents, allowing others to build up profitable business around your contents is a great idea and exactly the opposite to locking them, and, why not, starting up mutually profitable partnerships.

2. To some extent assuming your core is contents and not technology, while demonstrating a great flexibility to understand technology.

3. the guardian will continue to be in the edge and the eye of developers, who could play with their contents, i.e. they will learn a lot from this

With the time, many so called “traditional” media that are understanding and progressing in their concepts facing digital contents management. What is going on is wonderful, and media transformation is just happening in front of us. Every day we got news, developments, and great ideas.

I am not the most optimistic when talking and judging online media, and so, it is my pleasure to find things well executed and effective as it is the case of the NYtimes – Linkedin integration announced nearly a year ago. Probably, what I found has been applied for months, but it was today when I realized it.

When surfing Nytimes (I am registered and identified) they offer me the following:

Just by clicking, they send me to linkeding and I find this:

And then, if I visit nytimes, there it is, a module of News for Media Professional, and probably I have got flagged and segmented in both databases.

It is interesting to follow the outcomes and practical applications of announced deals. In this case, this is just something very simple and being made in other cases, like widely developed with facebook connect.

The capacity to move settings, profiles and to integrate contents seems simple for the final user and easy, but for those of us who work inside media companies, it is like art. Just like a pianist has hundreds of hours of work before performing, making such simple things like this integration is a consequence of a planing and later a bright execution and it is showing that they are clear on what they are doing. It is a very positive signal, and it is this knowledge what will probably end  up setting a future barrier to entry into this business.