Voices » Publishing 2.0

Why Not Writing a Story Is Innovation

Josh Korr — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:03:34 +0000

By Josh Korr, Editor, Publish 2.0

Discussions about journalism innovation usually focus on technology: Twitter, RSS, Flash, Django, data visualization, and all the other cool stuff that’s making online news so rich.

But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation. Newsrooms have to rethink the kinds of stories they cover and the way they tell those stories or all the new technologies could be wasted on news that readers don’t find relevant or interesting.

To do this, they have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

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Why Isn’t Facebook Making More Money?

Scott Karp — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:00:03 +0000

By Scott Karp, Editor and Publisher, Publishing 2.0

I happened to visit Facebook’s Business Solutions page, and was struck by how, at least on the surface, these advertising formats seem like exactly the kind of innovation that should be helping Facebook achieve Google-style revenue–which is, of course, what Facebook’s $15 billion valuation assumes will happen. And yet with 100 MILLION users, Facebook’s 2008 revenue was only projected to be $300 million.

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What Newspapers Still Don't Understand About the Web

Scott Karp — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:02:16 +0000

By Scott Karp, Creator, Editor, Publishing 2.0

Why is Google making more money everyday while newspapers are making less? I’m going to pick on the Washington Post again only because it’s my local paper and this is a local example.

There were severe storms in the Washington area today, and the power went out in our Reston, Va., office. I wanted to find some information about the status of power outages to see whether we should go into the office tomorrow. Here’s what I found on the homepage of WashingtonPost.com:

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Dear Web Applications: Where Are My Files?

Scott Karp — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:04:54 +0000

By Scott Karp, Creator, Editor, Publishing 2.0

What’s wrong with the “friends connection” programs announced by Facebook, MySpace, and Google? Many people have been trying to explain the principle of data portability as if it were a new concept, but it’s actually not. It’s been on our PCs for years.

Think about the applications you use on your computer–the ones that run LOCALLY on your computer. They all produce files. You’ve got your word processor files, your spreadsheet files, your presentation files, your accounting software files. You create some data with the application, then save it to your drive. You can take those files and put them on any other computer and open them with any application that supports the file type.