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Posts Tagged ‘San Francisco Chronicle’

Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators

I remember way back before the Internet when I got most of my daily news via the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. If it wasn’t reported by either of those outlets, there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear that news at all.

Those days are over.

The problem is that most of the people running legacy news sites today are way older than I am, and still can’t get their arms around the fact that the world has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Today I get my non tech news via scores of sources. I’m led there via social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and from aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum. Most of my tech news comes, of course, via my phone and email inbox.

It’s ok that the legacy guys don’t understand that, because when they erect paywalls it just stokes TechCrunch, which isn’t behind a paywall. Live and let live, I say. Far be it from me to talk them off the ledge. Paywalls kill social links and aggregators unless they are specially designed to allow them via a set number of free views. But even then there’s enough friction that most people won’t bother.

But when Mark Cuban starts saying aggregators are bad, that’s something new. He’s one of the guys that gets it. He’s not supposed to be on the losing team:

Outspoken billionaire cum provocateur Mark Cuban charged Google and other content aggregators Tuesday of being freeloaders — or worse. “The word that comes to mind is vampires,” he said. “When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood.”

Telling the world that you don’t want them to do you the favor of visiting your site is just ridiculous.

Let me repeat that. When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around.

And when an aggregator puts up a link to your site, they are doing you a favor by sending you traffic. Not the other way around.

As I’ve written before, “We throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction.”

The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all. When you erect a paywall, you’re just encouraging this behavior. It’s less anyone will notice.

What About The Users?

But forget all that navel gazing for a minute while I jump back up to my first paragraph. Aggregators are popular because they help users find the news they’re interested in. They serve a very real purpose and add value to the system. Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites.

I don’t want to jump back to 1993. I want to live in the present where each piece of news lives and dies by its own merit as it spreads virally around the Internet. That means I spend less time finding better content.

Mark Cuban knows all this, and he agrees. Which is why I don’t understand his lash out against aggregators. If news sites block aggregators, as Cuban urges, they lose and the users lose. No one wins. Except the sites that remain free. And those sites are here to stay.

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Nokia offering free turn-by-turn navigation on smartphones globally
Man, you thought Garmin and TomTom were in trouble when Google announced its free Navigation service… wait until investors hear Nokia’s news. Reuters is reporting that Nokia will offer free navigation on its smartphones. However, instead of just the US (the current Google limitation sans hacking), Nokia will be demonstrating its reach by offering free turn-by-turn directions in 74 countries in 46 languages — a move that should cover 20 million smartphones globally with Ovi Maps available in over 180 countries. Damn.

Update: The original San Francisco Chronicle report has been pulled but Google cache caught a bit more saying that Nokia’s navigation service is “capable of operating completely offline” unlike Google Navigation which requires data connectivity.

[Thanks, Jussi]

Nokia offering free turn-by-turn navigation on smartphones globally originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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5 O’Clock Roundup: Up rounds,

Some positive news in the land of VC – A survey by law firm Fenwick & West found that 41% percent of new financing in the third quarter was for up rounds, which means the company’s valuation was raised from the previous round. OK, that still leaves 59% of non-up rounds, but it’s a change from the we’re-all-doomed early days of 2009. As one lawyer puts it,“There’s the feeling that the world just didn’t fall off a cliff.”

John Doerr not up to run for governor – After San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom withdrew from the race for California’s top job, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article examining Doerr’s potential to pull the state’s Democrats together. Doerr, one of the star speakers at our upcoming GreenBeat conference, has put the word out that it’s no No NO.

But it’s yes yes yes that you can still get tickets for GreenBeat.

Obama’s people promise to speed up $7.2 billion in broadband grants – Officials at the Commerce and Agriculture Departments are working to “get the funds out the do0r faster” and create jobs. They’re also considering paying for rural lines that could be shared by multiple companies, rather than allowing mini-monopolies on those lines.

Finding flu vaccine information in one easy Googly place – google.com/flushot is your one-stop shop for finding vaccination locations and other information. Thanks again, 20 Percent Time.

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