Posted in General | June 28th, 2011 | Comments Off
For my latest article on The Next Web, I interviewed Ryan Ozimek, who oversees Joomla, about how the open source CMS amassed 23 million users:
Ozimek, president of the nonprofit that oversees Joomla, the product in question, told me that nonprofits often have less incentive to publicize such milestones. “Joomla isn’t a corporate enterprise,” he explained. “Joomla is made by developers around the world freely giving their time to something they’re passionate about and is managed and run by a leadership team and a nonprofit organization that doesn’t really have any financial stake in the game.
“They’re just doing it because they love it and they want to volunteer for it. So our efforts for marketing are going to be quite different from those venture-backed companies that have people that have invested millions of dollars who want to double or triple that investment. The investment in the Joomla world is of people’s time and passion. Not necessarily their money.”
Posted in online trends | June 27th, 2011 | Comments Off
Let me be clear… as I’ve said in previous posts, all these statistical reports are meant to inform our journalism, NOT to rule it. The new content engine we’re building calls for each full-time staffer and each contributor (all topic-specific experts) to be responsible for attracting and building an audience of repeat visitors — that is, loyal readers — around their brand name and their knowledge. Pandering for traffic is not brand building. Winning the respect of your audience is.
To achieve that, journalists and other experienced content creators need to apply their professionalism to the new ethos of digital publishing. They need to build a bridge from traditional media values to all those traffic numbers.
What seems to be happening is that Amazon’s platform is being overwhelmed by spammers who “scrape” content from websites or, in some cases, actually lift entire texts, and republish them as ebooks. And, in a neat twist, each of these ersatz “books” can be marketed under several different titles as coming from different authors. Thus a book on health insurance is available as three separate publications, priced at £2.15, £2.18 and £4.35. And an ingenious entrepreneur is marketing a training course for Kindle “authors”. “You just hand the video course to your spouse, your assistant, your brother… heck – even hand it to your 10-year-old kid! They’ll be posting 10 or even 20 new Kindle books to your account EVERY DAY!”
The books will be available exclusively through the Pottermore site, meaning that Rowling is self-e-publishing the novels. While self-publishing is, of course, nothing new, digital publishing and digital readership has helped self-publishing become more popular and, for authors, more lucrative. As we reported earlier this week, Amazon recently announced that self-published author John Locke had joined its “Kindle Million Club” after selling over one million copies of his e-books on the Kindle platform.
But Rowling’s decision here isn’t just another mark of legitimacy for self-publishing, nor is it simply yet another blow to the traditional publishing industry – although no doubt, both of those are true. Rowling’s announcement has several other ramifications here for the publishing industry.
So what is Digital Services? Public Interactive, a NPR operation housed in Boston, became NPR Digital Services about six months ago, when Bob Kempf, an alum of Boston Globe’s Boston.com, Gatehouse, and Ottoway Community digital operations. It is now staffed by 21 people. If the new initiative is fully funded, it will grow to 42 staffers and serve as the nerve center for public radio’s digital future.
It’s intended to be a full-service center, rooted in technology and branching out to wider, collective, and collaborative, deal-making. It starts with robust content management system, built on Drupal 7, and expands from there. “We’ll include research, analytics, training, product marketing, design, API development, business development, and network operations,” NPR digital head (and former USA Today editor-in-chief) Kinsey Wilson says. “It’s a complex choreography of talents.”
Posted in facebook | June 23rd, 2011 | Comments Off
Hitwise has leveraged its data sets and shown that 1 Facebook fan is apparently equal to 20 additional visits to a retailer’s website over the course of a year. So, if you have 1,000 Facebook fans, that means an extra 20,000 visits to your site.
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.
