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Category: publishing
November 2nd, 2009
Wordpress picks up college newspapers with CoPress
Drupal may be grabbing headlines by becoming the CMS of the White House, but WordPress is bound to be the CMS of a future President thanks to a deal it signed with CoPress.
CoPress, the brainchild of former University of Oregon editor Daniel Bachhuber, aims to build a vertical of college papers within the CMS market, with managed hosting and training.
(The original Oregon Duck mascot image was trademarked by The Walt Disney Co. Can you kids guess who it is?)
Bachhuber told Poynter Online that 21 colleges have already signed up, including the papers of Central Michigan, Michigan State, and Cal State Fullerton.
Papers now have a choice between rolling their own solution, joining CoPress, or working with the College Media Network, whose College Publisher is given away free in exchange for banner ad space.
This means free is battling open source directly within the college paper market. In addition to comparing features, CoPress is also arguing against CMN’s latest upgrade, and pointing out that it is building a community around contemporaries rather than delivering a top-down solution.
My own career in college journalism seems a world away from all this. During my freshman year at Rice the paper was actually set with hot type from a Linotype. They later switched to a photo-typesetting solution in which formatted type was printed and then glued to a piece of cardboard with pink plastic cut-outs showing where photos would go.
Before that, I broke away from my high school newspaper to create an opinion-based start-up, which leads to the real challenge facing college journalists in today’s online world, namely competing in their markets with every entrepreneur on campus.
If your start-up costs are nearly nothing what is the benefit of being the “official” college paper Web site?
October 13th, 2009
Wikipedia productized
Perhaps no business has been so transformed by open source as encyclopedias.
The appearance of Wikipedia, and its many cousins, rivals and inlaws, has wrecked the business. Even giant Microsoft’s Encarta has succumbed, as of the end of this month.
We all know the jokes about Wikipedia’s accuracy, but since it beat the Encyclopedia Brittanica in a blind taste test nearly four years ago attention has focused more on making it better, or creating rivals to it, than knocking the idea of open source, crowdsourced content.
And now it’s in a box. Meet the Wikireader.
It’s about the size of a portable alarm clock, with a one-color screen, a MicroSD card, and a touchscreen with three buttons, running on two AAA batteries. Update the card on the company’s Web site or they’ll send you four updates a year for $30. The retail price is $99.
The designer is Sean Moss-Pultz, last seen helming the failed OpenMoko mobile phone project. It’s cute, and it has enough marketing muscle behind it to have a chance.
Will we see it under your Christmas tree this year? Maybe you know a kid who can use it, or a know-it-all relative.
It’s also part of a general trend, specialized, mass market devices designed to access just one piece of the Web. Certainly a trend worth watching.
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of owning a really fine set of encyclopedias (my office has one from 1883) and I don’t know if you’d call Wikipedia fine. But at $99 it’s cheap as chips.
August 25th, 2009
What really happened to Wikipedia
Money happened. Success happened.
Over the last few years the Wikimedia Foundation has built a board with some serious street cred, climaxing with the appointment of venture capitalist Roger McNamee to its advisory board in January . Money has been rolling in.
Wikipedia long had to rely on the nickels and dimes of contributors to keep the servers on and the bandwidth bills paid, but now those nickels and dimes are turning into serious change, and it is becoming a darling of the philanthropic establishment.
On its own the Foundation raised $6.2 million worth in 2008. (Full disclosure. I threw in a few of them. About $50 if I recall correctly.) Such early money is indeed like yeast. It lets the dough rise. So here is $300,000 from the Ford Foundation. And $500,000 from the Hewletts.
The influx of money and talent has allowed Wikimedia to get its head up out of the day-to-day and focus on the longer term. Plus, with 3,000,000 articles and counting (just in English) the absolute growth rate is slowing.
It’s not, as The New York Times snarked, that “as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.” It’s more like a couple that owns its house and has come into some money. Out with the garage sale cabinets, let’s make a serious Ikea run.
No one is making big money here. But some digital plumbers and electricians and framers and painters are getting some work, turning the resource into something that will stand the test of time.
The first bit of renovation will come on one of the most controversial and bug-ridden parts of the house, living people. The aim is to put a process together that can end the back-and-forth between friends and enemies on your Wikipedia page.
Or mine.
I had a personal run-in with a Wikibully. Someone who didn’t care for me tore my reputation on Wikipedia to shreds. I finally rewrote the whole thing to my own liking. Recently the whole article was taken down.
But here’s the good part.
All the official actions related to the page are, for the first time, transparent and identified as to who did what. This person took the page down first, this one restored it, this one took it down again. Processes are being built by which such decisions can be managed and defended. What was arbitrary is becoming arbited.
That’s important because Wikipedia is becoming more than a source of articles on Japanese anime. As I found in rewriting my 2002 book on Moore’s Law recently, Wikipedia is our best hope of fighting link rot. It’s a source you know you can link to, an address that is unlikely to disappear, or go behind a paid firewall.
Like the Internet itself, like open source itself, Wikipedia is growing up. This is something to be celebrated. Regardless of what happens to your personal page.
August 19th, 2009
Writers who call MPAA or RIAA awful need to look in the mirror
Powerful interest groups representing musicians, movie moguls, and even TV have been fighting the copyright wars for years and losing.
(Who is reading the paper? Find out at the bottom of this post. Picture from Expedient Means.)
They win in court, and governments are aligned with them. Individuals who stand against them on grounds of principle are slapped down hard.
But that hasn’t stopped the Internet or Moore’s Law. These powerful interests have had to realign their business models to deal with the new reality.
There is a micro-payment model called advertising and if your stuff is not online and available it does not exist.
This has not stopped some writers, some agents, and some academics from tilting at Google’s windmill.
After years of negotiating with the Authors Guild and publishers, Google last year offered the authors of “orphan works,” copyrighted but no longer published or sold, free money.
For $125 million it won the right to digitize books, and while it will offer excerpts free, the whole books must be paid for, with 63% of the money (including ad money on the free looks) going to publishers and authors.
Google takes the risks, Google pays the costs, Google does all the marketing and distribution, while you get more than half the money for sitting on your rear end. Pretty sweet, huh?
Too rich, say some University of California professors. Not rich enough, say some authors, and you’re giving Google a monopoly, complain librarians. You should have negotiated with us instead, claims the William Morris Agency.
Trouble with all this is you can opt out. If you don’t like the deal for the old crap you can’t give away along I-75, say so and it will be taken down. Publishers of orphaned works, which aren’t making money, can’t opt-out en masse, because they relinquished a lot of publishing rights when they stopping publishing.
Christopher Buckley says he opted out because he’s ornery. He’s also still selling books.
This isn’t about your stuff anyway, Chris, but keeping alive such classics as pup’s God and Man at Yale.
How are tomorrow’s young conservatives going to discover what is eventually out of print? And when Google sells a copy or sells an ad next to the good parts, you get a cut. Free money.
Far from settled? Of course. A judge has to approve it. But if you expect Google to negotiate with you individually for your out of print crap you’re just being silly.
Any other e-book publisher — Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, etc. — can easily negotiate with Google to pay a share of its costs and get the same deal. If Google balks sue. This deal is non-exclusive.
I should add that my own out-of-print magnum opus The Blankenhorn Effect is presently available at Google Books, and when my update is done (later this month) I very much hope to do an Internet publishing deal for it and save a tree or two.
The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, and the message of the Internet is pretty clear. Make it available and maybe, if you’re lucky, someone will learn something from it. Don’t make it available, and it will cease to exist. (McLuhan still exists. That’s him behind the paper.)
July 22nd, 2009
Kaltura launches open source video platform
At OSCON in San Jose, Kaltura announced the public launch of its open source online video platform, called Kaltura Community Edition.
It is currently available for download at Kaltura.org under the GPL Affero license.
The software lets businesses and other organizations host their own video video collections, which can be integrated with open source community network programs like WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, MindTouch or Moodle.
The platform supports all the functions needed by an online video publisher, including easy import of videos, editing, streaming, and support for advertising. In addition its Kaltura Network includes re-mixable content under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, including 600,000 images from the New York Public Library.
Kaltura, an Israeli company, has its U.S. headquarters in New York City. The business model, as with other corporate open source projects, combines a hosted SaaS version of the software and commercial video services such support packages, streaming, hosting, and backup.
The launch follows an Open Video Conference Kaltura hosted in June in New York. The company is part of the Open Video Alliance.
July 19th, 2009
Amazon uses 1984 to free e-books
Amazon.com is not a stupid company, nor is it naive.
CEO Jeff Bezos knows that the biggest hurdle e-book readers face are DRM schemes and copyright regimes that differ from country to country.
So in letting Americans download copies of 1984 that were outside the local regime to their Kindles, then having them erased remotely, Amazon created a highly-publicized cause celebre that may finally bring reform.
Sure, Amazon was within its rights. Rights are not the issue here.
Right and wrong is the issue.
We all know that, in the global world of the Internet, a national law is a local ordinance. These ordinances are often complex, contradictory, and exist solely to protect local monopolies.
In this case the monopoly is copyright, which extends practically to infinity in the U.S., thanks to the Walt Disney Co., but is held to a reasonable length in other countries.
It’s America’s penchant of giving corporations greater rights than individuals which is at issue here, and 1984, as a book, is a great place to make that point. Author George Orwell also wrote Animal Farm, whose best-known line, “some pigs are more equal than others,” applies superbly to the case.
If the intent of copyright is to create an incentive for people to create, why should that incentive last 75 years past the life of the creator? There is no reason, except for the fact that corporations now hold copyright in the U.S., and corporations are immortal because when they die they pass their assets on to other companies.
Amazon knows that uniform rules are in everyone’s interest, especially Amazon’s. By enabling this outrage, creating this outrage, then apologizing for this outrage, and promising not to repeat it, Amazon puts pressure on both publishers and governments worldwide to create a reasonable, global copyright regime, so ebooks and books operate under identical principles.
It was definitely the computer industry play of the week.
June 23rd, 2009
Can open source police open source?
The lesson I drew from CompuTex is that open source, by its nature, limits what you can do in the channel by eliminating the marketing dollars needed to do anything.
The same may also be true in terms of the law.
When the Free Software Foundation wants to go after some deep-pocketed outfit over GPL violations they can do so, knowing victory will bring cash.
But if the party in question has no deep pockets, if they’re just doing a smash-and-grab on open source code, who becomes the cop?
I’m not certain whether LiberKey, a French outfit offering a host of applications a la Portable Apps, is engaged in such a smash and grab.
John T. Haller of Portable Apps thinks they are. He says they’ve have taken his software in violation of the GPL and are not giving users access to the source, also in violation of the GPL.
The LiberKey defense, written anonymously, reads like something from the old French Taunter sketch. It reminds me of responses I got over 20 years ago from something called Mirror, which cloned the look-and-feel of a modem program called Crosstalk and even copied its version number on their Version 1.0 release.
It’s possible nothing untoward is going on. It’s also possible there are license violations here. The question is, who will investigate and who will put any violators to the legal sword? If these French types are just grabbing code and trying to stuff support cash in their pockets, they could be gone long before a legal paper reaches them.
When a proprietary code base becomes popular, its owner brings in the cash necessary to defend their position in court. This is not automatic in the open source world, which thus remains vulnerable to small time scams.
How do we stop them? Where do we find the cash to protect open source, not from the big boys, but from the small fry?
June 18th, 2009
Where is the power in ebooks?
Amazon’s release of Kindle source code, coming alongside its complaints about Google Books’ legal agreement, brings up the interesting question of where the power lies in the ebook market.
Is it in the look-and-feel of the device? Is it in the content? Is it in the standard? (Picture by David Carnoy for CNET.)
While all these are important, I have another idea of where the power lies. I think it lies in connectivity.
As good as the Kindle is, as good as Google Books are, they are in the end books. They are mere digital representations of an analog product, complete with footnotes.
But an ebook can be more. It should be more, and before it becomes the standard reading interface it will be more.
I have a little demonstration of this future in my PC right now. It’s an updated version of my 2002 least-seller The Blankenhorn Effect. I have retitled it Moore’s Lore: How Better and Better gets Faster and Faster.
What gives this book its value? Hyperlinks.
Instead of footnotes, I’m checking references online, and changing those which disappeared since the first edition. Then I’m embedding the final links in the text as hyperlinks. The final product is an .odt file, but is easy to turn into a .html file, or a Kindle file, any other kind of file you want.
The key is I did not design this book for print. I designed it for electronic use. The ebook reader which is best for this book has an open interface to the Web, so readers can double-check anything with a click and start their own adventures with the content.
In editing the book, by the way, I found one of the biggest changes in the Web this decade has been Wikipedia, but not for the reason you think.
Wikipedia reduces the problem of disappearing links. The entries there have more stable paths than links to corporate Web sites, or even some news sites. This makes them handy as references.
Back to the reader. Amazon’s Kindle has limited Internet connectivity, designed for the downloading of books from the Kindle Store. I need more. I need to reach from the book outward toward the Web. And I need that capability to be as transparent as it is on this Web page.
The real power of an ebook lies in its connection to the Web. Hyperlinks give books that fourth dimension they have lacked for 600 years.
If we’re going to lose the great interface of a summer read, it should be for something that offers more than the feel of a good book can give you. Connectivity is the killer ebook app.
June 16th, 2009
Data and software both want to be shared
Early in my career my wife and I were privileged to spend some time with Ted Nelson (right), whose Project Xanadu pre-dates Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web paper by nearly three decades.
We met soon after his publication of Literary Machines, and he was passionate that night on the issue that hypertext should protect intellectual property rights.
As we know the Web doesn’t. Nelson wanted ownership meta-data to follow text so the provenance of ideas could always be audited. Berners-Lee essentially offered a stripped-down version of SGML, a document mark-up language, sort of the way MS-DOS was a stripped-down Unix.
Critics of the open source idea have often called it an attack on IP rights, but as Tim O’Reilly wrote over a decade ago it’s really about building a structure under which those rights can be shared, not disregarded.
On his latest podcast, O’Reilly extends this idea to data, which he says is really more important. Wikipedia, for instance, or any good wiki, may be a more important phenomenon than Linux or Open Office, because it extends the open source ownership regime to data, and in the end data is what counts.
Wikipedia, in turn, is covered by a Creative Commons license, which tries to do for collections of data what the GPL did for collections of software. That there are several types of CC licenses reflects the fact that software licensing came first, and the CC founders wanted to support both BSD-like and GPL-like data licensing, even custom licenses.
My point today is that Nelson’s original concept — the strict control of IP rights through technology — was flawed. Few men are islands. Few really ginormous undertakings — like Linux or Wikipedia — can be the creation of one person. They’re a collective endeavor, requiring a legal framework that recognizes this.
The Internet, the Web, and Creative Commons all come from the same root, the idea that we share first, then figure out a framework under which that sharing can be formalized and everyone’s contribution respected.
And this may be the key to seeing who wins the Web 2.0 wars. MySpace is laying off people because it failed to get this balance right.
As with software, people want some control over their data, but they also want to share it so it can grow into something larger. The open source concept applied to data, embodied in the Creative Commons license, may well be the key to unlocking the value of Web 2.0.
May 13th, 2009
The new Linux.com is open for business
The Linux Foundation has opened the doors on its new Linux.com, a new news, discussion and blogging site which looks a little like ZDNet.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Personally I’m flattered.
My point is that the new site goes well beyond simple discussions of Linux. It’s heavy into applications, even those which, like Firefox, are best known as Windows apps. It follows the news.
The Firefox story is actually a link from a Linux Magazine article by ZDNet’s own Joe Brockmeier. It’s a good article.
Zonker has been following the Linux.com story closely, quoting the Foundation’s promises in March to make the new site a “community resource… for the community, by the community.”
Question. Which community?
The answer can be drawn either narrowly or broadly. Narrowly, it’s about the Linux operating system and applications that run on Linux. Broadly, it’s also about open source, the community ethos arising from it, the values of those communities, and the future of the Internet.
These are questions publishers, editors and writers are constantly fussing over. The editor’s answer is it depends on what the readers want. The publisher’s answer is it depends on what the advertiser wants, what the market the site seeks to serve wants.
It will be fun to see how the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium, answers that question over the next weeks, months and years. Y’all are a publisher now.
What do the readers think should be its answer?
May 13th, 2009
Open source shrugs at EU liability plans
Open source writers who are also market players, like our Matt Asay and Infoworld’s Savio Rodrigues, are dumping on a European Commission (EC) proposal to make software sellers liable for the problems in their code, just as dishwasher makers are liable for problems.
The EC should be careful to avoid hurting the software industry, and minimizing its benefits
Is the above quote from Steve Ballmer? From Larry Ellison? Nope, it’s Matt, threatening to go Galt at the first sign of a lawyer letter.
That’s crazy talk, is his argument. Everyone knows software can’t be made foolproof. It’s in every Microsoft EULA.
(Ayn Rand was writing bad prose a generation before Dan Brown thought of it. Atlas Shrugs, from which the idea of “going Galt” originates, is available at Amazon.com.)
But there are already software makers being held liable in this way. The Clue is in my first paragraph. If the software in your dishwasher goes kerblooey and causes your home to flood, the dishwasher maker can’t just say “software problem” and walk away.
Software, embedded in hardware, is already subject to liability law.
Bruce Schneier notes that open source code, when given away, gets a pass on this. It’s only open source companies, like Red Hat (and Alfresco) that will need liability insurance. Just as CBS, which owns ZDNet, has liability insurance against what Katie Couric might say.
This does not satisfy Matt. He doesn’t like being held liable for mistakes. We’ve all gotten along very well without lawyers poking around our broken code. This is what happens “when bureaucrats, not common sense, rule.”
Maybe. But this is also happens when industries grow up, and become vital to the general economy.
Lawyers and insurance companies have been dealing with liability issues for centuries. I’m sure they’ll say that if your customer sees what they have gotten, and can fix what they have gotten, you’ve got better legal defenses than when they haven’t and can’t.
The advantage in this, in other words, goes to open source.
May 12th, 2009
The problem for open source textbooks
Authority.
Every textbook, regardless of grade level or subject matter, is the final authority in the classroom.
Every textbook is a political document. This is its strength and its weakness. Authority gives textbooks power, but it’s also why most read more like software manuals than real books.
This is the barrier faced by California and any other state seeking to create “open” textbooks. It’s not a question of what license content comes in under, or what license the textbook has when it’s done. It’s the fact that authority is dispersed as more people are allowed in on the process.
Texas has long understood the relationship of textbooks to political power. That’s what its hullaballoo over evolution was about. Control the textbook’s content and you not only control what your state’s children will learn, but what every state’s children will learn, if your state is big enough.
The idea of a single, central, controlling authority is anathema to open source. It’s the process of Texas, not just its result, that I find objectionable. It’s so very 19th century.
But it’s also the Pandora’s Box that California’s move opens. Who will be the authority on what our children will learn, on the content of an elementary or secondary education? Will there be an authority?
Near the end of The Illusionist, writer Neil Burger gives Rufus Sewell’s Prince Leopold (above) a desperate speech, in which he defends his efforts to centralize authority and complains that, without him, there will be “a thousand different voices screaming to be heard and nothing will be done. Nothing!”
History shows that is just what happened. Austria’s empire collapsed. The center could not hold.
The task before California is to create some form of moderation so that the authority of the final product is respected. A new form of political process needs to be built from the ground-up for the new technology of textbooks to take hold.
What form should it take?
May 12th, 2009
The Obama lesson to Rupert Murdoch
The Obama Administration’s renaming of its public relations office as the “Office of Public Engagement” has deep lessons for press barons like Rupert Murdoch.
While Murdoch thinks people should be made to pay for what his people say, the Obama people understand that interaction is the future.
A liaison sits on a stage and tells you, just like a news anchor or newspaper editor. A liaison controls the horizontal, the vertical, where stories will fit on the page, what page they’re on, and whether there is time for them.
Engagement is different. It’s more than a blog. It’s not one-way traffic. It’s two-way traffic between people and government, discussions that are moderated so everyone is heard and everyone feels safe.
That’s the value of open source community. It’s not how many people contribute code. It’s interaction that creates market loyalty to code, users who feel invested in the code.
Transparent, participatory, collaborative. These are the key terms in the President’s order changing the office’s mission.
They should also be at the heart of any sucessful media effort.
Since the Web was spun many companies have sought to raise the drawbridge and charge people more for less. Even those that succeeded financially failed in other ways, as their reach declined and they were cut off from Web links. This was a common experience throughout the industry.
On my personal blog I offered another way recently, a way forward that understands your role has nothing to do with readers or advertisers, but everything to do with aggregating and enabling the creation of markets.
Depth is achieved through loyalty, through the back-and-forth of readers that adds real value to what writers provide. Publishers who fail to organize as well as advocate a place, an industry or a lifestyle deserve to fail, because they’re not even doing what made them work on paper.
The lesson has been reinforced for me here, on this blog, by you. We have a much deeper engagement here than what I enjoyed as a newspaper or magazine writer. Every one of you is my editor, every one has a role to play.
Even my critics. Especially my critics. I don’t learn anything from attaboys. I learn from criticism, from questioning, from probing my arguments, from proofs of when I am wrong. Even from trolls.
As you play those roles, here and at other ZDNet blogs, your loyalty to the site increases, your value to ZDNet increases, and thus the value of the site increases. All in proportion, as it has been since the days of Ben Franklin, when citizens stopped one another to quote Poor Richard. Only the tools have changed.
Similarly I hope the folks in the new Obama office, like Kal Penn (above), understand that this change is just the start of a journey. To truly engage even a fraction of American voters will require scaled systems, a range of tools, and an underlying structure that can take new tools on as they emerge.
And in that last sentence I just described what Murdoch needs as well.
The success of any Internet endeavor, whether it’s political or a business, does not lie in how many people read a piece of copy. It lies in the reach readers themselves give that content, through Talkbacks, through links, even through uncredited mentions on social networks.
It’s the depth of loyalty a site achieves that defines its success, not the breadth of its readership. This delivers political capital in the public sphere, and market potential in the private sphere.
At some point in the future every publisher and every politician will understand this. The playing field will level, and change will slow. Now is the time of greatest opportunity, when you either open doors or shut them.
Short News Corp.
May 5th, 2009
All ebook readers must tear down this wall
ZDNet’s Jason Perlow today offers a great piece criticizing Amazon for playing proprietary games with its Kindle ebook reader.
But looking at Amazon’s own Kindle site, it’s clear there is a larger problem at work than whether Apple and Amazon devices are compatible.
That is whether any ebook reader will be compatible with the Internet.
I am currently working on the second edition of my book about Moore’s Law. A lot has changed since I first wrote it in 2002.
What hasn’t changed is I still can’t really publish it in the way I want to publish it.
My research style when writing a book is much like the one I use with blog posts. I use the Internet and reference through links.
When I wrote the first edition of this book I had to turn everything into standard footnotes, and the links in those footnotes were essentially worthless.
They still are.
This is not a technology problem. It’s a problem of corporate politics and business models.
Amazon’s Kindle only links to the Internet when its business model permits it. That is, when they can charge you for the content you download. It’s essentially a big-screen cellphone, operated on a cellular business model.
There are two reasons for this. The obvious one is that Google Books would kill Amazon in terms of free content, given an open Internet connection. The less-obvious one is that content providers won’t buy one.
All the objections being lodged against Google Books, whether from authors and publishers on the one side or privacy advocates on the other, are essentially objections to the Internet itself, and the Internet business model.
Content owners still want every access to their content monetized with cash, not ads. Privacy advocates still fear the implications of a truly interconnected society.
At the end of the day I don’t care whether my ebook reader uses a Kindle format, an iPhone format, or an open format. What I want, and what I want for my readers, is open access to the great online world beyond my book.
We’re still not getting it and until we do ebook readers will not break through in the mass market. Nor should they.
March 25th, 2009
It's a Flat World after all
Flat World Knowledge, whom we profiled last November, has closed an $8 million round of venture funding.
Hooks Johnston, General Partner at Valhalla Partners, compared Flat World’s potential to that of the MP3, but its real innovation is the same one powering this blog, a business model that works for publishers, authors, and readers.
As co-founder Eric Frank (above) explained it to me then, authors get a 20% royalty on everything students buy, but the students can download a Web version of the book text free.
It’s ancillary products that make the model go — iPod versions, Kindle versions, print-outs, study guides, and tutoring businesses built around the text and the class where it’s taught.
Current contracts offer lower royalty rates on lower-cost products, and no cut on tutoring, which is considered an independent revenue stream. Flat World offers 20% on the whole education process created by the book. Frank claims his authors actually do better than with traditional contracts.
That is vital in the college market, where total sales may be small and the authors are often professors.
It might not work in high schools, where a single state contract can be worth millions. But there are other possible solutions there, from the private sector as well as the public.
March 17th, 2009
The big question really facing newspapers
It’s no longer a question of print or online.
It’s what you’re about online.
In answering that question the choice of a Content Management System becomes critical.
The capabilities of your CMS will determine what you can offer people. Its ease-of-use will determine how quickly you can implement new features.
This is an area where open source really shines. The CMS Matrix counts dozens-and-dozens of options including some, like CampSite, that were built from the ground-up for use by online newspapers.
Personally, when it comes to this life-or-death technology decision, I would look closely at Drupal. Or more precisely at its commercial equivalent, Acquia.
The combination of Drupal and Acquia gives newspapers the best of both worlds — a vibrant community to drive the software forward, and serious professional help to make sure you get things right.
Newspapers should feel fortunate, in a way, because some of the shaking out has already happened in this space. Back when I first started poking around here, in 2003, there was far less available. Most of it was almost entirely text-based, if you wanted to scale. Newspapers must scale quickly to survive.
Now you can support all types of files, and the features of most popular social networks. It all goes into a database, to which Acquia has recently added better search capability. Not that there’s anything wrong with Google, and integrating with Google features like maps, as well as Google search, is a great way to look big before you get big.
As to all those who are complaining that we “have” to pay you for doing the same bad job you’ve been doing for years, forget it. Journalists are not doctors, we’re cooks, and no one is going to subsidize a failing restaurant. (If you’re lucky we’ll put Gordon Ramsey on your case — but that’s it.)
The point is that the newspaper business may be dying, but that’s like saying the buggy whip business is dying. The opportunity to organize and advocate a place, industry or lifestyle is not going away.
In fact it’s getting better. Now that you’re magnetic ink the sky is the limit.
March 5th, 2009
Selling a book with open source shark jumping
There are days when I fear open source is becoming nothing but a buzzword, like e-commerce was a decade ago.
It happens when authors claim to be open source projects in order to sell themselves.
I have nothing against Rick Maurer, or his views on corporate change, which he has been working on for over a decade. He’s also good at naming books – Beyond the Wall of Resistance and Change Without Migraines being among his titles.
It’s just that giving away an e-book and sending out a press release does not make you an open source project. That’s not change we can believe in. That’s marketing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
My fear is that, with “projects” like this, open source has reached its own “jump the shark” moment.
March 4th, 2009
Erickson takes charge at Acquia
Acquia, the commercial arm of Drupal, today named Thomas Erickson (right) as its new CEO.
The announcement is happening around the company’s DrupalCon show in Washington, D.C..
Erickson, a former CEO of Systinet, was already on the Acquia board.
I had a chance to chat with Erickson Monday, as he was leaving the Open Source Think Tank in Napa.
Erickson said Drupal is now positioning itself as the world’s leading social publishing system. He described future developments as aiming at both increased usability and scalability:
Our goal is that Drupal will be substantially easier to use, so with a few clicks you have a Web site. That’s what it will become. You’l l go through a set of menus. That will expand its use dramatically. We’ll also extend its scalability so we learn more about hosting higher performance sites, which are currently custom built instead of tool built.
Erickson estimated Drupal now runs over 400,000 Web sites, and that the next wave will include a lot of enterprises that will value paid support. Some are likely to be companies that used Vignette or Interwoven in the past.
He said that at the Think Tank he met the heads of other open source firms reporting great results, like JasperSoft and mySQL, and that DrupalCon itself has grown 50% year over year.
One point Erickson did emphasize was that “this is still Dries’ (Buytaert) company. We’re going to follow Dries’ strategy about making Drupal more successful. We’re going to help with contributions from the community, round out the product so it’s more complete,” even add a search capability.
“We just found out last week Intel runs their whole Intranet off Drupal,” Erickson added, illustrating one key difference between open source and proprietary management.
Proprietary managers need to find customers, while those in open source just need to convert their users.
So, Intel, when can Tom expect a check?
February 28th, 2009
Does Microsoft still need Novell?
Novell is now facing the consequences of leaving its fate in another company’s hands. (Picture from OS2Voice.org.)
Its terrible horrible, no good, very bad quarter was driven partly by its troubles in the proprietary market, partly by its failure to line up the big Linux licensing deals that came in the wake of its 2007 cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft.
Even our own Matt Asay has been surprised with how fast Novell fell after Microsoft pulled out the financial rug.
The key question becomes, does Microsoft really need Novell anymore, or is it ready to try its luck with Linux directly?
This places Thursday’s speculation on Bob Muglia into a different light. Could saying such nice things about open source be the prelude to a direct Microsoft entry into the Linux market, based on picking up Novell’s fallen flag?
Hard recessions lead to decisions which, in normal times, would look exceedingly strange. If Novell can no longer stand on its own, Microsoft’s Linux strategy would have to include picking up its pieces.
And then we could really see if the elephant can tap dance.
February 3rd, 2009
Can Everyblock find a business model in open source?
Everyblock, which sorts police reports, public records, and news by address, is going open source and looking for a business model.
The site is headlined by Adrian Holovaty (right), best-known for Django and the Chicago Crime Google Maps mashup. It was funded in 2007 by a $1.1 million Knight Foundation grant.
Like many other online news start-ups Everyblock has gone about life backward, starting with “wouldn’t it be cool if” and only later seeking a way to spin money from it.
The idea of “custom news” sounds delicious, but when you actually search a neighborhood there may be little to find. Real estate listings and police calls. Links to news stories and business reviews on other Web sites.
Obviously it’s reporters on the ground who put things into context, but can Everyblock generate enough revenue from such searches to pay reporters? No. So what else could you do? Link to blogs by address?
Where I live in Atlanta there are neighborhood associations with their own Web sites. They hold monthly meetings and exchange news. Can you really generate a lot of money integrating Everyblock into those Web sites? The answer to that question is no.
I have long believed that journalism consists of organizing and advocating a place, industry or lifestyle. Everyblock does neither. It does little more than what Google itself can do, with the addition of a few more online resources.
The idea behind Everyblock seems to be that it will be a resource to local publications that will bring their own business models to the party. But few have a model that works. Most of them don’t want partners.
The most effective way to really bring news into the 21st century is to start with the business model, not the content. Once someone does that sites like Everyblock will have a future. Not before. Making them open source doesn’t matter until that happens.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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