WhozAround: Twitter For Your Calendar

This summer I've had the pleasure of watching a new tech company be born right in my back yard. It's called Peoples' Software, and it's the brain child of two of the smartest community-minded entrepreneurs I know: Susan Mernit and Lisa Williams.

People's Software is one of the latest projects of TechStars, a venture capital and mentoring program in Boulder, Colorado that's generating some very interesting and cutting-edge startups. Among them is the social network aggregator service SocialThing, which was just acquired by AOL.

Lisa Williams provides a sneak peak of their company's first Facebook app, WhozAround, on the People's Software blog. She calls it "Twitter for your calendar," and it's all about making it easy to organize events without requiring people to sign up for another service. The events come to you through the social network or platform you use most -- initially Facebook, but eventually also Twitter, e-mail and your mobile device. This makes a ton of sense, especially the mobile component, for which eVite -- the service I use for invitations -- is a disaster.

I haven't seen the full service yet, but based on the track record of these two smart, accomplished women, I think it's worth following. Tomorrow I'll be hearing more about People's Software and other TechStars programs at a presentation in Boulder.

Full disclosure: Susan is running next year's Knight News Challenge, for which I'm a screener, and Lisa is a News Challenge winner from the previous year for PlaceBlogger. I also briefly worked with Susan at AOL years ago. I initially learned about their project because I know them, but it's not why I'm talking about it. I really think they're onto something with the idea of leveraging social services people are already using instead of creating yet another destination.

whozaround, techstars, peoplessoftware

Individuated News Conference Video

Peter Vandevanter just sent me this video summary of presentations and discussions at MediaNews Group's Individuated News conference, which I was fortunate to attend this year:



I think my favorite quote is from commercial printer Oce's Duncan Newton, who noted that the phone bill is the most personalized print product in existence today:

You guys [newspapers] are talking about individuation. Old hat -- we've been doing that for 20 or 30 years ... I can do this kind of stuff in my sleep. And you guys are saying, 'Oh my God, the sky is falling.' No it's not. We know how to do it ...

I remember him saying that, and that's when I stopped thinking that personalized print products, and mass printing and delivery of niche publications (like those we'll create with Printcasting), is something that may one day happen in the future.

Get that thought out of your mind. It's happening today -- but just not with news. Companies like Océ, HP and Kodak now have printers that are focused exclusively on news and magazines. Over the next few years, I think our perceptions of print are going to change drastically as we begin to see more and more personalized content showing up in our mailboxes, on street corners and even on our home printers.

Printcasting's Advertising Implications

Online media pioneer and chronicler Steve Outing has a post about Printcasting and Classifieds on his personal blog, as well as his new venture: Reinventing Classifieds.

I ran into Steve at the Individuated News conference in Denver, Colorado in June, after giving a presentation about Printcasting. He asked me how our tools could be used by businesses, and if there were any implications for classified advertising. I told him that while classifieds per se aren't a focus of Printcasting, self-serve advertising is, and I see a lot of parallels between the two. The posts above are the result of our conversation.

How does Printcasting dove-tail with Classifieds? They both help small businesses market their products and services. A large percentage of newspaper Classified ad revenue comes from commercial customers (basically auto dealers, real estate agents and employers). These businesses are accustomed to writing text ads that are formatted to look good in print. The better tools on the market eliminate most of the design work for the advertisers, and simply accept feeds which are then automatically formatted into nice-looking Classified ads.

At a high level, this is how Printcasting will work, with feeds of variable content flowing into pre-fab publication templates. We want advertising to work the same way. A small business will only have to type in a compelling message about a product or service, optionally upload an image, and choose which publications they want their ad to appear in. After that, we will automatically generate display ads with different dimensions and fonts. They'll be able to see what their ads will look like in different sizes, but they won't have to worry about finding a designer for every ad.

If our advertising approach is successful for small businesses, I can imagine it being applied to larger commercial customers, as well as consumers. Forget about how things work in newspapers now, and instead think about the fundamental need for everyone at one time or another to get the word out about something. That applies to everything from garage sales to white sales, and everything in between.

Newspapers have a lot of different tools and terminology for different types of ads, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing: "Will you buy my apples?"

printcasting, steve outing, classifieds, advertising, small business marketing

In Search of Creative Revenue Ideas

My post on PBS Idea Lab this week is titled, It's Time for a Revenue Revolution. It puts the upcoming Printcasting advertising tools in a context that hopefully everyone can relate to: how can we help local record and book stores more effectively reach local customers, hold their own with online competitors and Wal-Mart, and stay in business?

Thinking back to my journalism school days, I remember professors telling me that I should try to block advertising sales and business development out of my mind because it would taint my reporting.

But here's what they missed. Local businesses are just as much a part of your community as the consumers who live there, and in fact business owners are often some of the most active, participating members of any community. It's possible to serve the interests of the community, and also the interests of local business, and harness that to pay for services that help the entire community.

As newsrooms lay off reporters because the advertising side could no longer bring in enough to pay the bills, everyone at every level of a news organization has an obligation to think about how to fund the great work they do. If you continue to assume that someone else is going to step in and solve this problem, you may find yourself with a pink slip instead of a savior. Now is the time -- and for some, the last opportunity -- to make your ideas heard. Trust me: it won't soil your hands, it won't influence your reporting, and it may even be fun.

As far as I'm aware, Printcasting is one of only three Knight News Challenge projects that has any sort of revenue / sustainability plan at all. The other two are David Cohn's Spot Us, and Richard Anderson's Village Soup. I don't say that to toot our collective horns, but rather to encourage more people to incorporate revenue into their plans for the next Knight News Challenge round.

Speaking of which, if you have such an idea you can use the new News Challenge Garage to start fleshing it out with the help of others who can tell you how to make it better -- including all 26 existing news challenge winners (which means also me!) By the time the News Challenge officially opens on September 2, you'll have a better proposal that will stand out against the thousands of others that didn't benefit from such advice.

knight news challenge, revenue

Aggregating Local Conversations With Twitter

Last night I went to Andrew Hyde's Startup Drinks, an informal gathering of people who work at startups, or are interested in startups or the startup culture, in the Boulder, Colorado area.

While talking to a fellow innovator there about something I'd posted in my Twitter feed, he surprised me.

"Oh, was that you? I saw that."

Really, I asked? At first I assumed he was following me in Twitter, which of course made me feel cool. But alas, it turned out that wasn't the case. I delved further and learned that he found me through a Twitter Local search.

There are dozens of sites that now let you search for conversations that are happening in Twitter near you. The social geek I was chatting with bookmarks one of these local searches for Boulder and regularly follows what people are saying. I have to say that this is one of the most interesting things I've seen around community aggregation in a long time, and the possibilities for how it could be used are endless.

One easy way to do this is with Summize, a search engine that indexes conversations in Twitter (and which Twitter is rumored to possibly buy, too). To localize it, all you do is type the word "near:" followed by a city name or zip code. For example, I enter "near:80020" for areas around Broomfield, Colorado where I live.

You might be tempted to say, "So what? I use local message boards like that. This is nothing new." But you start to see how new and powerful this is when you use a Twitter local search to research a local problem that a lot of other local people are having.

Today I think we saw this on a global level with the iPhone 3G release. Like people all over the world, I shelled out a few hundred bucks for an upgraded iPhone only to find out that Apple's iTunes servers had crashed due to too many people trying to activate their phones. I wanted to know if I was the only one experiencing this, so I typed "iphone near:80020" in Summize and got a list of geographically targeted conversations from people near me who were having the same problem. (If you click that link now, you'll see posts from happy iPhone owners who were finally able to complete activation and are now surfing the web at high speeds from their handhelds).

A more practical, meaningful example might be a local disaster such as a flood or tornado. The next time we get a tornado warning in my area, I'm typing "tornado near:80020" into Summize to see what comes up. And when the Democratic National Convention is happening in Denver, you can see what local Denverites think about Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco Field by typing in "obama near:Denver".

But Summize doesn't stop there. Just as it pulls content from Twitter, it makes it easy for you to put its content elsewhere using search RSS feeds. I can think of several uses for local conversation RSS feeds for news organizations, but one is creating locally aggregated topical searches and embedding them throughout a news site. And this can be a lot easier than you may think.

For our Printcasting project, I've already been experimenting with Drupal, which has some very nice built-in feed aggregation features. Today, in about 10 minutes, I was able to feed local Summize results for my area of conversations about Barack Obama, John McCain and the iPhone. They update every 15 minutes, so if you go back a little later you should see new conversations about those topics that get pulled in from Summize. Then, I'm able to feed all three of them into a Conversations category container.

Remember: I'm not a programmer, and I was able to do this. So if you're one of those people who learns enough just to be dangerous, trust me, you can do this too. If you don't want to mess around with Drupal, you can do something similar with RSS feeds in Ning, which is free and easier to use for novices.

Tools like Twitter and Summize that make it easy to aggregate local conversations are something every newsroom should be making use of. As I've said before, journalism is not work that is done for its own sake, but because it has relevance to a community -- and most often that means a local community. Or as Steve Yelvington says, building community should be job #1 for newspapers.

I also believe that the business of local news organizations is fundamentally about connecting local people with shared interests and goals to each other, and then connecting businesses to those targeted audiences that community exposes. Not every newspaper is able to create a rich social networking experience like we have in Bakersfield, but they can tap into existing social tools like Summize. I think there's a case to be made for an "editor" devoted to nothing but finding the best current local conversations searches.

What local conversation search tools do you use? Post a comment and let me and others know.

Technorati Tags: TAG, TAG, TAG

Pimp My Newspaper!

I thought Medill student Brian Boyer was supposed to be a programmer-journalist. That's true, but apparently he's also into muscle cars and MTV's Pimp My Ride.

In response to my Media Shift IdeaLab post about Brian's insightful comparison of Printcasting to Moo Cards, he's expanded on the idea. Printcasting, he says, is like the custom El Camino, with each one looking a little different. The vanilla newspaper is more like a beige Toyota Camry.

I like this analogy because the truth is that everyone has an opinion about the car they drive. Some people really love Camrys, while others won't be caught dead outside of a gas-electric hybrid. Still others require a little extra fender here, a little more chrome there. It's like the "Dude, Where's My Car?" media model. I want my car, not yours.

The analogy I often use to describe the Californian's admittedly strange local media model is built around boats rather than cars. Think of every daily newspaper as a big, beautiful cruise ship cutting through the deep blue sea. The people on that ship have been floating out there for decades, content with whatever the chefs have on the menu and the 5 activity choices the captain has chosen for them for that evening. Some are fine with that, but others want more.

One day as the cruise ship is approaching an island, someone spots something different. A group of fun-loving natives comes out in hundreds of little boats to greet them. The native on one boat is selling fruit and tie-dye clothing. Another is a music boat, with the pilot strumming a totally new kind of instrument nobody has ever seen before. And still another offers rides in his little boat for a few U.S. dollars.

That night at dinner, the captain realizes that 10% of the cruise population is missing. No problem, it turns out they're out having fun with the natives on the little boats. The next day, that number increases to 20%. And the next, 40%. What's happening? Is it the end of the world!

To the captain and his cruise ship, maybe it is the end. He can choose to stay out there in the same old ship operating the same old type cruise in the same old way. Eventually he will have no more customers and he'll need to shut down his business. But there is another way.

He can start throwing out some life rafts so his customers can more easily float around in the little boat world they prefer. Instead of being in the cruise ship business, the captain may discover he's in the flotilla business. Some people may move between boats in the flotilla and the cruise ship, and some may choose to float in the same little boat forever. And yes, some will never leave the comfort and convenience of the cruise ship.

But one thing is clear. If newspapers are going to have a long, bright future, we need to operate more like the flotilla and less like The Love Boat.

printcasting, newspaper industry

Accident or Innovation? It Depends.

At a time when everyone is doubling down to find new ways to engage audiences and grow revenues, it's good to remember that some of the biggest innovations in history were either accidents, or discovered while working on something completely different.

Robert Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan of The Wall Street Journal interviewed innovators in fields from manufacturing and fine art and came up with these recommendations for how to encourage accidents that may lead to future innovations. Their prescription includes periodically mixing things up between seemingly unrelated projects, making experimentation (and resulting accidents) cheaper, and my favorite, encouraging people to collect what appears to be random junk if they find it interesting.

If something interests you, they say, squirrel it away into your messy filing cabinet of random ideas and periodically stumble through it. You never know when it may pop into your mind at the right moment, and even change the world. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Edward Jenner, who remembered a milkmaid telling him that she would never get smallpox because she had cowpox. That simple idea lead him to discover a vaccine for smallpox.

innovation