ICH MARKE DU JANE

I’ve been thinking a lot about the second last question in the video from Eric Schmidt’s speech at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America (webcast here). In my personal opinion, the questions sums up a lot of problems and disconnect between publishers and the web as well as its readers:

The querist asks Schmidt on his opinion on readers beingmore and more satisfied with the combination of a headline and an extract / summary instead of reading the full story. However, the way he phrases the question he very precisely and knowingly questions the rationality of his own audience (consumers). He describes Google as an aggregator driving this trend, a trend we are currently seeing in its purest form on Twitter.

To me personally the entire thought is just odd. How can you (a) question your audience how its uses your product and (b) have the arrogance to even question the people that pay your bills. more »

One of the topics I’ve been following over the recent weeks and months is the change and challenges google, twitter, blogs etc are creating for the traditional newspaper and journalism industry. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, took a stand last week and gave a speech along with a brief Q&A session at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America (available as a webcast here). In his speech he gives an overview of his believes and predictions on how information sharing and the newspaper industry will evolve.

Schmidt sees a significant change to the existing concept of the newspaper of record, the traditional close connection of a paper to it’s constant (e.g. daily) readers. The concept of newspaper of record will have a hard time to withstand the innovation currently taking place as people are less tied to one source of information – instead looking for information valuable to them from trusted sources. more »

A couple weeks back, during my morning caffeine fix cum Reader blog headline scroll, I read about Google Latitude. And thought: „woo hoo – finally!“ Followed up by more joy: Google was enabling the service across 26 countries, it would work on the mobile or the desktop and there would be the ability to specify privacy preferences at multiple levels and in multiple ways. Sounding good. In the past, I’ve been excited to read about services like Dodgeball (recently killed by Google) and Loopt (only available in the US), similar services tying geo targetting capabilities to social networks. A couple German near-equivalents have sparked a lot of interest for me as well – Qiro and Aka-Aki. But because of the walled-garden approach, more »