Blogging

Is this a local news site or a celebrity gossip blog? I can't quite tell.

(Credit: AOL)

Maybe it’s just because it’s Monday morning and I’ve only had one cup of coffee, but I’m not quite comprehending DigitalCity.com, the latest in a parade of bloggy new sites from AOL.

A press release describes Digital City, which gets its name from a very vintage AOL brand, as “a new approach to geo-blogging by showcasing original content with a local slant, but global appeal.” In other words, it’s stuff about nightclubs in Vegas, concerts in Portland, and New York vs. Boston rivalries that are written so that you don’t have to actually live in one of those cities to get what’s going on. I suppose it’s supposed to be in contrast to the insidery SFist or New York magazine–more like Gawker, which is New York-centric but pulls in traffic from around the world.

Unfortunately, it’s disjointed, and that’s something that advertisers will likely note in addition to readers. A post about great grilled cheese restaurants (one in Colorado, one in L.A.) precedes one about John McCain’s ties to the gambling industry and then one about Segways. And the most recent post right now informs us all that it’s Zachary Levi’s birthday. We all heart Zachary Levi (he’s the title character on sitcom Chuck, not Bristol Palin’s fiancé, FYI–that’s Levi Johnston), but this blog still doesn’t exactly have a clear vision.

AOL can back it up with a ton of non-blog content, like its city directory and local news sites, but I can’t really see how that would fit into DigitalCity.

Oh, well. Better luck next time, AOL.

Source:
AOL’s DigitalCity goes after Gawker crowd

Join us now for our weekly review of Web Technology news and reviews. This week we reported on the launch of Apple’s iTunes 8, analyzed AOL’s move to bring RSS and lifestreaming to the mainstream, and covered some of the best web apps to come out of DEMOfall08. On the trends side, we looked into what User Experience pros can teach us. Also we delved further into the impact of Google Chrome on the browser market. Listen to our podcast featuring a member of the Chrome team and other guests, and check out the results from our prediction question this week: which browsers will lose the most market share due to Chrome? Last but not least, we bring you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

Web Products

Apple Introduces iTunes 8 and New iPods

At Apple’s “Let’s Rock” special event this week, Steve Jobs introduced a new version of iTunes, the availability of HD TV shows for the American market, a new design for the iPod Nano and iPod touch, as well as a major update for the iPhone/iPod touch firmware. According to Jobs, Apple has sold 160 million iPods worldwide and now holds 73.4% of the market in the US. Check our post for more data points.

ITunes 8: The Genius in the Box

Music discovery services are definitely a hot topic right now, with Pandora, Last.fm, imeem, and others vying for users. This week, Apple joined the fray when it released iTunes 8 and its ‘Genius’ recommendation engine. After examining your iTunes library, iTunes uploads data about your library to Apple’s servers and returns back a set of information about how the songs in your library correlate to each other. Based on this, iTunes can now build playlists of similar songs and display shopping recommendations.

AOL May Try to Bring RSS and Lifestreaming Mainstream

RSS and centralized integration of activity data from multiple social networks are the kinds of technologies that only early adopters are interested in, right? AOL has the exact opposite kind of audience, does it not? Those assumptions appear to be facing serious challenge, because AOL is planning to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people, so check out our analysis.

Also this week Yahoo! told the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. Could the era of the walled garden is over? See our post for more details.

DEMOfall 08 Coverage

Not too long ago, there were some grumblings about the state of the tech blogosphere and the industry in general. By spending so much time reading Techmeme, Twitter, FriendFeed, and the like it’s easy to get the impression that some of the most influential people in our industry today were less interested in the technology they were reviewing than they were in making a name for themselves as some sort of navel-gazing superstar. Not only that, the apps that people were fawning over were often not the kind of apps that had mainstream appeal or were solving real problems. It was as if the whole crowd was shouting at each other, trying to be heard over the noise and patting each other on the back for being so hip with all our shiny, social media-flavored toys.

Was this what the tech industry had come to, we wondered? No, that was just what the tech blogosphere had come to. This year’s DEMO conference proved to our reporter Sarah Perez that technology innovation is still alive and well.

Here is our full coverage from DEMO:

• Giftag: Social Wishlists Using Open Standards
• SpinSpotter, A New Browser Plugin To Help Spot Media Bias
• Have The News Come To You With Alerts.com
• FFWD: A Remote Control For Internet Video
• iKnow! Launches Adaptive Learning System
• SkyData Integrates Everything, Puts It On Your Smartphone
• HeyCosmo: Automate Your Life Via Your Mobile
• Invision.tv: Like A TV Guide For Internet Video
• Web 1.0 Job Sites Have New Competition: PaidInterviews
• Better Photo Management for Mac? iLovePhotos Hopes So
• Talk To Your iPhone With New Voice-Recognition App, Say Where
• Qtask: Web-Based Team Collaboration

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

User Experience: Learning from the Pros

There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.

What’s a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. In this post are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

RWW Live: Chrome & Its Impact on The Browser Market

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of Google’s new open source browser Chrome and its potential impact in the browser market. We had 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Aaron Boodman from Google, a Software Engineer on the Chrome team; Chris Messina from Vidoop (formally of Firefox and Flock); and Alex Russell from The Dojo Toolkit.

Download MP3

RWW Predictions: Browser Wars 2.0

This week we ran a prediction challenge, on the topic of browsers. Google’s new browser, Chrome (our coverage), is sure to take market share from the existing players. So we asked: which of the following browsers will lose the most share (in percentage terms) between August 2008 and December 2008? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or a tie or other? The results are on RWW Predictions and IE was most peoples pick to suffer, although many voted for Firefox too:

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

What do CIOs Think About Social Media?

The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.

Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The rest is here:
Weekly Wrapup, 8-12 September 2008

AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to media reports.

Kevin Conroy

(Credit: AOL)

Among those to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive, a general-purpose online storage service; and AOL Pictures, where users could store and share photos, according to a July 14 memo from Kevin Conroy, AOL’s executive vice president of products and marketing published at TechCrunch.

“These consumer storage products haven’t gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation,” he said in the memo. Also to be closed is MyMobile which repackages various AOL services for use on mobile devices.

AOL also is paring back some of the blogs it hosts, according to PaidContent.org. The DIYLife blog is being shut down, according to that report, and bloggers there and at The Unofficial Apple Weblog and DownloadSquad, who are paid by the post, have been told to stop posting until July 31 to cut costs.

It’s not unusual for companies to cut products to improve finances, but AOL has a particular incentive: corporate owners Time Warner is trying to prepare the once-powerful subsidiary for sale or other strategic alternatives.

AOL will push several other products harder in an attempt to revenue growth, too. Those products include AOL’s browser toolbar, its desktop software, its e-mail service, and its Truveo video search site, according to the memo.

AOL didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

See the rest here:
Reports: AOL cuts XDrive, Pictures, some blogs

AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to internal memos.

Among those products to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive, a general-purpose online storage service; and AOL Pictures, where people could store and share photos, according to a July 14 memo from Kevin Conroy, AOL’s executive vice president of products and marketing. The memo was published Thursday by TechCrunch.

Kevin Conroy

(Credit: AOL)

“These consumer storage products haven’t gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation,” Conroy said in the memo. Also to be closed is MyMobile which repackages various AOL services for use on mobile devices.

AOL is likewise paring back some of the blogs it hosts, according to a different memo obtained by PaidContent.org. The DIYLife blog is being shut down, according to that report, and bloggers there and at the Unofficial Apple Weblog and DownloadSquad, who are paid by the post, have been told to stop posting until July 31 to cut costs.

It’s not unusual for companies to cut products to improve finances, but AOL has a particular incentive: corporate owner Time Warner is trying to prepare the once-powerful subsidiary for sale or other strategic alternatives.

AOL will push several other products harder in an attempt to boost revenue. Those products include AOL’s browser toolbar, its desktop software, its e-mail service, and its Truveo video search site, according to the July 14 memo.

Update 8:41 a.m. PDT: A source within AOL has confirmed the authenticity of the memos and a plan Conroy mentioned to sell the Xdrive division.

The source characterized the cuts as part of AOL’s standard procedures to maintain profitability. Last year, the company cut 50 online properties, including its video download service. As with that change, AOL will provide users options such as partnerships with competitors or archival CDs and DVDs to preserve their data, the source said.

Packaging for sale
Time Warner is separating AOL’s two components, audience and access, the former being its online properties and the latter its dial-up Internet access business. The company is doing so “to increase the accountability and operational focus of each of those businesses, and…to enhance our strategic flexibility,” said Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes earlier this year.

Splitting off the dial-up business is important. With broadband increasingly ordinary, dial-up is going nowhere but down, and selling access to the Internet is an operation most content and advertising companies would be loath to absorb.

Some of the cuts at AOL are of divisions that are aligned with the old dial-up business. For example, Xdrive is offered as one of the perks of premium subscription plans. And AOL Pictures was an early online photo option for subscribers.

So AOL is trying to transform itself into a modern Internet company, with high-traffic properties and online advertising. The question is who might be up for a deal with AOL?

There are two obvious candidates: Yahoo and Microsoft. Both have significant cash, significant online operations, and significant troubles keeping up with Google’s rise to prominence. They would love the extra Web site traffic: each page viewed is an opportunity to sell advertisements, and adding all that extra ad inventory expands the clout of the companies’ ad networks during a time of consolidation.

It should be noted that AOL’s ad network, Platform-A, delivers advertisements to a larger fraction of U.S. Internet users than any of its competitors, according to ComScore’s latest statistics. Its reach of 90 percent is ahead of Yahoo, at 83 percent, and Google, at 81 percent.

Online ad growth
Here’s why, even with the current economic troubles, AOL is potentially desirable, despite its troubles: U.S. spending on online ads will increase from $25.9 billion this year to $41 billion in 2011, analysis firm eMarketer projects.

But AOL specializes in display ads, the graphical variety that cost advertisers when they’re put on Web pages. Google minted its billions of dollars in revenue chiefly on textual search ads, which are paid only when users click on them, a structure that makes it easier for advertisers to measure performance and justify the expense of ad campaigns.

With the economy gone sour, it’s these display ads that are under more pressure.

Cowen analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman on Friday lowered their forecast for display ad spending in the United States, saying that search ad spending is stronger. “We believe paid search spending is much less exposed to ad budget cuts than other media, based on our previously published analysis of the historical spending patterns on direct mail during recessions,” the analysts said.

And display is a smaller part of online ad spending: eMarketer projects that U.S. display ad revenue will increase from $5.5 billion in 2008 to $7.9 billion in 2011, while search ads will increase from $10.4 billion to $16 billion.

For search ads, AOL relies on Google’s technology and shares the resulting revenue. Yahoo and Microsoft, though, could swap out the Google ads with their own, adding significant heft to their search ad operations.

Other buyers?
Who else might be interested? Google is showing more signs of interest in diversifying to traditional Internet portal activities such as e-mail, news, finance, and shopping, but it also appears to have the patience to build its own properties using its staggering cash flow. It’s got its troubles, but it completely lacks the odor of urgency that emanates from Yahoo and Microsoft.

Another possibility is IAC/InterActiveCorp, a conglomerate of many online properties. However, while IAC wants to expand its advertising network, it also looks not to be in the mood for consolidation. It’s seeking to spin off operations such as LendingTree, Ticketmaster, and HSN.

Probably more likely would be a more traditional media company such as The New York Times Co. or News Corp., both of which have shown interest in hitching their carts to the online bandwagon.

The New York Times’ advertising revenue decreased 17.8 percent in its most recent quarter, the company said Wednesday, “because of weakness in print advertising,” so online advertising could help even if it’s not a miracle cure. The Times also announced a partnership with online contacts management site LinkedIn and runs the About.com site.

News Corp., meanwhile, operates MySpace and has an investment in online video site Hulu and has a strong interest in online advertising.

Excerpt from:
AOL to sell Xdrive, close photo and mobile sites

Gannett Co., which operates 23 television stations and 85 newspapers in the U.S. including USA Today, has signed on AOL’s Platform-A as its digital advertising partner. More specifically, it’ll be using Platform-A’s Adtech, marking the U.S. debut of the formerly Europe-only division.

When the deal has rolled out completely, it’ll encompass all of Gannett’s local news markets for both print and broadcast, USAToday.com, and other Web properties that the company owns. No target date was provided. But it’s a big deal for AOL, considering the reach of USA Today as well as the opportunities for local ad targeting. According to Nielsen, Gannett’s Web properties have 25 million unique visitors per month.

“We selected Adtech because their top tier technology will allow us to seamlessly execute and deliver for advertisers at both a local and national level,” Chris Saridakis, Gannett’s chief digital officer, said in a release from the two companies. “With the Adtech platform, advertisers of all sizes will be able to easily reach our affluent, active online audience, whether it’s through broad national campaigns, audience segmentation, or locally targeted campaigns.”

AOL acquired the Germany-based Adtech last year. The company has been doing business in Europe for about a decade.

Here is the original:
AOL to serve digital ads for ‘USA Today’ parent company