Category — Best Practise

El prototipo Living Stories en el que Google colabora con The New York Times y Washington Post pretende ser una nueva forma de leer noticias online:

1. poner toda la noticia en una única url permitiendo hacer un seguimiento entrando siempre al mismo sitio.

2. intenta facilitar el acceso a profundizar sobre la noticia en cuestión.

3. El sistema detecta dónde te has quedado, sabe cuándo entraste por última vez y te hace un resumen de lo que ha pasado desde entonces. Existe una contextualización de la noticia que, si ya has visitado la noticia alguna vez, desaparece por defecto, porque supone el sistema que ya conoces el contexto de la noticia. En ese caso, va directamente a las actualizaciones que te falten por leer (como Greader, que va dándote los feeds que se han actualizado desde la última vez que accediste).

Parece ser, más que nada, una reorganización de la forma de ver la noticia. Deja tener una relación directa lector-noticia (adicional, más que sustitutiva, pero ojo a esto, a la anterior relación lector-medio). Se puede suscribir un lector a una noticia por rss o a través del email, lo que nos conecta un poco con la conversión de la información en servicio y con la web en tiempo real que tan de actualidad está.

Al suscribirse el lector a una noticia concreta, el medio aparece como proveedor de la información en torno a la noticia, pero parece que cambia un poco la relación.

Por otro lado, permite una mass customization de la experiencia de lectura de las noticias por parte de la audiencia, pues cada usuario tendrá un nivel de profundidad diferente en función de su frecuencia de acceso a la noticia o de sus clics o no en materiales adicionales. Cada usuario verá una cosa distinta adaptada a su relación anterior con la noticia. Interesante avance.

Aparentemente, lo más interesante de esta herramienta es (más allá de la colaboración entre Google y dos periódicos, que ya es una señal en sí misma), el hecho de que se adapta al uso del usuario proporcionando diferentes grados de información/actualización/resumen en función de lo que haya hecho el usuario anteriormente en el site.

Esta práctica, en sí misma, puede ser considerada de muy intrusiva en un país con una LOPD como la española, pues supone el atesoramiento por parte de Google de la información de uso y acceso a noticias por personas. Pudiera incluso ser información delicada. Pongamos por caso que alguien es un empedernido seguidor de noticias sobre una religión o sobre la investigación de una enfermedad concreta, hechos que permitirían inferencias personales, aunque puedan no ser tan directas. Obviamente, sólo a efectos, se supone, de actualizar la propia experiencia de la noticia. En todo caso, un paso que sin Google de la mano, parece complicado que se atrevieran a tomar los periódicos.

Presentar la noticia siempre en su página (tipo blog, no mitifiquemos el aparato), y permitir recibir los updates por rss e email, es algo que puede ofrecer cualquier amateur utilizando wordpress. Es el equivalente a que cada noticia sea un blog. Desmitifiquemos un poco la innovación presentada. La innovación debe ser a nivel de concepto, porque, como dice el famoso artículo: IT DOESN’T MATTER. (refiriéndose IT  a la tecnología y lo que nos ocupa es el concepto, y sobre todo el ingreso, y después el coste).

Por último, en cuanto al negocio, esto no parece resolver nada a corto plazo. Es más, en el post del anuncio, invitan a que otros medios adopten el modelo y parece ser una herramienta más con un muy buen aspecto y una visión de cómo Google vería la dispensación de noticias. Google, engrosa, aportando una tecnología muy buena, su volumen de información sobre los usuarios.

Deja vu: una innovación en la experiencia de uso más a seguir, como fue fastflip, o como el nuevo buscador lanzado por el nytimes o su generador de rss, pero, en relación con la generación de ingresos, no parece aportar nada nuevo. Nytimes.com cerró Extra, otra innovación que tampoco estaba mal.

The News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, plans to hire new journalists worldwide — not to do original reporting but to rejigger copy from the company’s far-flung news outlets so it is suitable for local audiences.

News Corp. Setting Up an Internal Wire Service (nyt)

 In “Moving into multiple business models” there is a very clear concept about the multiplatform reality that basically summarizes in the need for concentrating in the content and then using it in every channel insted of producing contents for a concrete channel. Now, this movement by News Corporation shows us a way to making it a reality.

I had no hope in sustaining contents thanks to donations, and I wish I was totally wrong. Having a look to two references in donation supported models, I see that MIT OCW says to be operating at a cost of 3.6MM $ while wikimedia has an annual expenditure of nearly 6 MM $. When wikimedia reached their target, all funds collected were put into a reserve fund (if media had done this we won’t probably be where we are).  What calls my attention the most is their conservative approach to expenditures following a logic: if you do not have it, do not spend it. A second interesting point is in their budget. No content production costs (of course) and no traffic acquisition costs while technology is, by far, their main cost.

Sustaining a part, a section, a portion of contents of a traditional media by donations would need to be transparent and to give recognizement to donors. It may be possible but it would need a change in many decision makers. Converting a part of our business in a foundation could be possible and these two examples are showing how it could be done.

The gap that separates the theory from the pratice is something that we assume as business managers. We know that all those things they taught us in our business school are very difficult to implement straight away when landing in an organization. For this reason, if someone keeps on reading theory, white papers or state of the art technological developments and is not the final decision maker but just, and, at most, a “middle manager” then either it is completely frustrating or it is like watching Sci-fi movies. For the sake of our mental health , for sure the dozen of readers of this blog are middle managers at most (if not, we would probably be ”too busy” to read anything) we should adopt the latter attitude.

Reading the PDF behind this form I had again the experience of how obvious it is what is said in that white paper, and how hard is our daily life. We got resources, talent, even money to be closer to the best practice, but we are so far from it. Below, I am just going to copy my summary of ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT: Strategy, Best Practices & Technologies on Your Path to Success.

EIM (Enterprise Information Management) is the effort to build up an organizational coherent information management so that information is delivered when, how, and to the person who need it. Benefits of EIM are:

EIM is an answer to the unorganized data management that is suffered in many organizations. Middle managers are those who realize it at the beginning because they are using the systems and they are the ones being pushed by objectives. Top management is in a different battlefield. Therefore, it is a middle management responsibility to push this topic in the agenda of top management. Fortunately, some companies have a top management that is able to quickly understand the importance of adopting correct data governance; some others are not.

Before having an EIM strategy there must be a vision. EIM strategy responds to a concrete vision and objectives and change with them, it is also flexible and adpatable. In order to get EIM done it is important:

- IT/Business collaboration, understood as regular and constant communication and cooperation.

- Trusted information. If the information delivered is not trusted, EIM would just be a failure.

- Enterprise-wide standards. Everyone has to talk the same language and use the same tools.

- Data Governance, a corporate agenda for data.

Apart from that nowadays information management must be:

- SOA support. Service Oriented Architecture is a middleware becoming an standard between data and interface applications.

- Centralized data management.

- Complete functionality (it should serve all organizational goals)

- Seamless integration. For each functionality there are world class applications that are able to inter-operate through SOA.

- Easy of use

On the other hand, without data integration it is not possible to build trust.

The purpose is to get information from business processes and to load it to a master data management system. For this, ETL (extract, transform and load) process is key, together  with a data quality infrastructure that should come together with your EIM strategy. To ensure data quality it is necessary to manage metadata (data about data). At the heart of data integration is MDM (master data management) which is more than software, a system of practices policies for data collection.

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.