Revival of the webmaster key to newspapers’ future

Published at 2:29 pm on February 20, 2010
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Tim Burden
I'm one of the founders of NewsFIX and its current webmaster...

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This is part two of a two-part post which started here. To recap, we said news companies should get better at predicting web trends. One way to do that is to watch what Google is aiming at and try to figure out its plan. One of those things is IPv6. Google wants to build apps that push information to your devices. Let’s look at some more Google trends, and at the end we’ll make some suggestions about what news companies should plan for.

HTML5

I talked earlier about how Google is pushing for HTML5, and web standards in general. I suggested a reason: Google wants you to be able to use its web-based applications from whatever device you happen to be on. It wants to replace your desktop (or your mobile interface, etc.) with a browser. You’ll do everything, in Google’s vision, on the open web, rather than in walled-off applications on various devices that may or may not talk to each other.

Advertising against web content (especially search results) is where Google makes almost all of its money, so it stands to reason it wants more web on more devices.

Faster Internet

Google’s announcement last week that it will enter the high-speed ISP arena with tests of one gigabit per second (1 gbps) connections to tens or hundreds of thousands of American homes is actually not a sign that it wants to get into the ISP business, any more than its WiFi network in Mountain View was a sign.

It says instead that it wants to demonstrate new and creative ways for the FCC to reach the goals of its National Broadband Plan. They want to show the world how to get high speed. Why?

This refrain should look familiar by now:

Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive killer apps and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine. (Link)

And what would these killer apps be? I have two ideas for you, and one of them is TV. Also known as live or real-time video, which, presumably, you will watch on the web through a browser app built in HTML5 on your Google-powered desktop in your Google-powered device connected via high speed Internet over IPv6.

The other concept here is cloud computing. If you’re expected to do everything you used to do on your desktop over a web app, there can’t be delays or lag. Especially if you’re doing something that involves a lot of data transfer, such as editing video.

Geotagging

First Google beat up on Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps with a better mapping product in 2005 (it seems like it’s been around much longer). Then it added satellite view, a route finder, and StreetView. Then it started consuming user-generated KLM files and letting map users annotate the geo-web. Businesses can locate themselves on maps in Google Local. People using mobile devices can geolocate themselves in Google’s new Buzz social media service (more about that later). And just last Thursday they announced Google Maps Labs.

Mapping and geolocation is important to Google, and the reason should be obvious. They want to connect you with information that’s important to you. And they reckon things happening close to you are more important to you than things happening far away. And whenever Google can connect you with important content, they realize an advertising opportunity.

As a side note, here at NewsFIX we’ve had geotagging baked in right from the beginning. In fact, at one time our unofficial slogan was Pins on Maps! Almost all our stories have GeoRSS tags on them, which could be consumed by new aggregation services that we expected to pop up. We have since downplayed the maps in our UI, but we still put the pins on the maps hoping that some aggregator or social media service will someday arrive that can use it.

When I saw little maps next to some posts in Google’s new Buzz service, I was elated. They were using geolocation data to differentiate people’s buzzes when they came in from GPS-enabled smartphones. Maybe they would do the same in Buzz? I asked Google’s Chris Messina about it, participated in the Buzz API bug system, the Reader bug system, and made a suggestion on Google Moderator’s How to Fix Google Buzz thread. We’ll see how it turns out. It looks promising.

Smartphones

Google started off the year with their very own smartphone, the Nexus One, which runs their own mobile operating system, Android. People love it, such as Linux operating system creator Linus Torvalds who said he’s a “happy camper” and the phone is a “winner”.

My feeling is that Google no more wants to get into the smartphone business than it does into the ISP business. I think it really just wants a platform to show what can be done on that platform, hoping that others will follow suit. Oh, and maybe they want to disrupt Apple a little bit, and disrupt the way cellphones are currently sold (i.e. contracts).

But the main point is that Google knows that smartphones are a big deal. They know that if smartphones come down in price (through competition and the demise of the contract), and 4G wireless gets going, there will cease to be any such thing as the cellphone and SMS. People will talk on their mobile phones over IP telephony, instead of expensive texting they will e-mail, and the full power of the web will be on every mobile phone in the land. Give it two or three years.

Social media

Last week Google announced Buzz, its foray into the land of the social. A Twitter-killer, some say, and a challenger to Facebook. One day there it was, a Twitter in my inbox. I’m using it, and I like it, though I won’t bother going into its positives and negatives. You can find that all over the web at this point in time.

Why is the social web important to Google? Here’s a hint. Here’s another. Google is mighty concerned about the walled garden of Facebook becoming the new web. Remember, Google wants everything out on the open web for you to find using its search tool, and to get an advertising opportunity in the process. It can’t do that if everybody’s sharing drunk party photos and tending cattle where its spiders can’t reach.

Summary

Let’s recap the trends we’ve looked at so far.

There’s IPv6, which will allow every device to have an IP address and Google to push information to those devices.

There’s HTML5, which will provide a standardized application platform and allow Google to challenge the traditional desktop model and have you do all your computing out on the web.

There’s faster Internet, which will enable live video streaming and cloud computing.

There’s geotagging, which will connect people using location-aware devices to nearby news.

Smartphones will replace cellphones within a few short years, ending cellphone telephony and SMS text messages, and putting everything back on the web.

And social media will enable us to connect to relevant content more easily through our social graphs.

More devices, connected directly to a high-speed Internet consuming content, made more relevant via social connections and location awareness - and all delivered on the web through regular old web pages.

Did you get that last part?

All these advances in technology, all pointing one thing: more of the same. Web pages. The web of links. More devices, faster and more relevant connections, but still pulling down one primal content format: web pages. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Only more of it. More web.

So what does this mean for news publishers?

Don’t bother investing in fancy new technologies, developing mobile applications or Flash applications. Focus instead on making mobile-ready web themes. Keep or re-hire your good HTML layout people, your web programmers, and your database guys. Keep your geeks. You’ll need them more than ever.
Video will be more and more important. Although I would still recommend, as I did years ago, that newspapers do what they’re good at and TV stations do what they’re good at. If you don’t have particular expertise in video, leave it to someone who does.
Never mind a web-first strategy. Think mobile first. I’m not the first guy to say this, but I hope I’m one of the last. What this means in practice is on the editorial side, get smaller bits of information out on the web (which is where, after all, you’ll be getting the news on your phone) as fast as possible. Continually update it and flesh it out on the web, and pick the better bits to flesh out even more for the paper. On the technical side, make sure your website works well on small screens. That’s not just a layout issue. Make sure it’s optimized for fast download times. Make sure it comes with geolocation data where relevant.
Social media services, aggregators, bloggers, mobile and search from a web ecosystem. All the parts are important. They all play a part in driving traffic to news sites and forming community with and around news content. It’s time to revive an old-fashioned concept: a webmaster. A person that ensures all these parts are working smoothly together. The webmaster is technically-minded, but doesn’t necessarily do the programming. Instead he figures out what programming needs to be done. He sits between the programmers and the editorial staff and the salespeople and makes sure that what is done on the website is what’s best for the website. I’ll have more to say about this mythical creature in a future post.