All Things Digital

If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

The site officially launched on April 26, 2007, one year and two days ago.

No presents, but your presence over the next year, as we make even more improvements to our work-in-progress site.

Thanks, of course, go first to my amazing partner, Walt Mossberg, as well as our crack staff (click here to see them in all their glory), partners, designers and all the many Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones folks involved.

To mark the past year, BoomTown could spend a lot of time deeply ruminating on how blogging is so very different than mainstream journalism (much more fun, much less sleep).

Or I could ponder the agonizing quest to improve standards and accuracy in the blogosphere (”I am I, Don Quixote, the lord of La Mancha/Destroyer of evil am I/I will march to the sound of the trumpets of glory/Forever to conquer or die.”)

Or I could discuss widgets and how they have changed my life (I don’t know what I would have done had Scramble not inspired my empty soul!).

But, no!

Instead, I will just re-post here one of the very first posts I had up on that first day, about…drum roll, please…my worries about the situation at Yahoo (YHOO).

I don’t want to say I am a psychic or anything, but in this piece, called “Terry in Turnaround,” I begin my obsessive coverage of the Internet portal, which I thought a year ago could be headed for trouble.

(Interestingly, my other post that day was about Facebook trying to become more mature.)

Read more »

The annual look at the health of journalism by the Project for Excellence in Journalism was just released and the outlook is predictable: Those darn kids love the Internet even more.

In its latest report online, called the State of the News Media 2008, the PEJ cites several continuing trends: news has shifted from being a product to a service (news you can really use!); news Web sites are no longer final destinations (widgetize!); user-generated content is maybe not so valuable (I know–shocker!); newsrooms are becoming the most innovative and experimental parts of the business (by necessity); the news media agenda continues to narrow (by 2016, fyi, it will only cover Britney Spears); and Madison Avenue still has not gotten on board the online express (yet another shocker!).

More interesting, in the online news arena, while the same percentage of people go to the Web for news (71%), the percentage of those who do it on a regular basis has risen.

That might be promising for news sites, except that more of the ad dollars, whose rate of growth is slowing a bit, will be going to–guess who?–Web aggregators, most especially, Google (GOOG).

This is my third and last post about what my move from old to new media has taught me. In the first, I discussed its dynamism, in the second its amazing level of clarity.

And the third? Well, because it never stops. Ever.

Case in point, a somewhat frivolous story, which actually does have important broader implications for the Web, about the mini-tussle between blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook.

Right away, I backed up Scoble over the popular social network, after Facebook disabled his account over his violation of its policies. The voluble blogger used a software program to scrape data off his profile.

I did so mostly because I am a big proponent of data portability and find it offensive that sites like Facebook endlessly scrape everyone’s data. But then they are shocked when people want to control their own information and move into a hypocritical protective mode of data they typically abuse.

Others disagreed, like commenters on my post and the always sharp Nick Carr, who raised the notion that Scoble was a “data thief” for trying to move some data–name, contact info and birthdays–to another service.

Wrote Carr on his Rough Type blog: “Now, if you happen to be one of those ‘friends,’ would you think of your name, email address and birthday as being ‘Scoble’s data’ or as being ‘my data.’ If you’re smart, you’ll think of it as being ‘my data,’ and you’ll be very nervous about the ability of someone to easily suck it out of Facebook’s database and move it into another database without your knowledge or permission. After all, if someone has your name, email address and birthday, they pretty much have your identity–not just your online identity, but your real-world identity.”

Carr added that “members should have the right to decide whether or not their personal information can be scraped out of the Facebook database. Scoble did not give them that choice. … Until controls are in place, unauthorized scraping of other members’ personal information shouldn’t be allowed.”

To my mind, that’s a rather nanny-state stance for him to take, given that people put that data up there for their friends to presumably use. Scoble or anyone could have simply copied down that info and transferred it (everyone does this ALL the time) manually.

Scoble’s motives in doing this were obviously benign (aside from his eternal need for attention, which is also harmless). And, big surprise, there are a lot of bad actors out there who want the data for other more nefarious reasons.

But all that’s needed, I think, is to treat people like intelligent adults and make it perfectly clear to them that some may actually use the data you post publicly for friends you accept into your online circle. That way people can decide exactly how much information they want out there.

Of course, the teapot-tempest got all resolved after Scoble promised he would no longer be naughty–even though he compared himself in a deeply goofy manner to Gandhi and then the Boston Tea Party gang–and Facebook reinstated him.

But what I loved about the story and countless ones like it was the enormous range of opinions, Twitters, posts, comments and videos (from Scoble too, of course) that were generated. While some might call it piling on or even mindless, I think it represents an amazing sign of vibrancy and energy that is promising for journalism.

While print publications might be suffering, the information business is not. Although there are many more players–some better than others–in the landscape, the changes give professionals the chance to notch up their game by delivering more energetic, more informed content that is characterized by the high standards they carry with them from old media at its best.

Of course, new business models for online content are nascent and still questionable, but smart people with great offerings can always figure out a way to benefit from the obvious interest in consumers in being able to access all kinds of information, both trusted and also even silly.

Which is why I laughed out loud when I got a link to a new Facebook group being formed to “Keep Robert Scoble Off Facebook,” all with the blessing of Fake Steve Jobs.

He wrote: “Meanwhile we’re trying to figure out if we can banish Scoble from using Apple products or visiting Apple retail stores. From what I’m told others have picked up on the same idea. Google wants him off their apps. Twitter says he’s eating up too much bandwidth. Here’s a thought. Why not banish Robert Scoble from the Internet altogether? Is that even possible? Moshe says he’s looking into it.”

Namaste.

So yesterday I posted my first of three ruminations of what the leap from old media to new media has taught me.

In it, I noted that “I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career–such that it will be–publishing online only.”

And that, my friends, was a prime example of truthiness in action!

Nonetheless, the statement of that glaringly obvious fact caused a little bit of a stir around the Web, almost as if I was saying something amazingly freakish, such as: I have decided that forthwith I will bake my scribblings into delicious frosted donuts and readers can literally eat all my tasty bons mots up.

In fact, the shift I am making is perhaps one of the more normal and logical things I have done (which are acts you can count on one hand, in my case), essentially responding to a dramatic change in consumer habits by trying to provide the best offering I can in that new venue.

Which brings me to my next point about the nature of the blogosphere, which demands from its contributors a level of clarity and, dare I say, intimacy.

That is much easier to avoid in the print medium, where it is simple to distance yourself from readers and rely on on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand back and forth that leaves them with little idea of what is actually going on.

Of course, the best of journalists don’t do this–their prose is as clear as a pane of newly washed glass, through which one can see everything, even as they maintain a level of fairness and accuracy that is always required.

But I have found writing a blog that being non-opaque is necessary. You pretty much have to say what you know in much more firm terms or risk that the legions who always know more than you do will tell the story better.

Of course, that can often result in blabby and flabby online writing that comments and reacts and has no underpinnings of actual reporting and is too often simply untrue.

That was a common complaint in the early days of blogging from mainstream journalists. Of course, many of them had made their fair share of mistakes too, but they correctly felt that the Web was lacking in the kind of checks and balances that would temper this problem.

At the time, I thought that was mostly the case. But I also believed blogs would inevitably get better and better, adding on the kinds of standards and practices that are important for credibility and then combining them with the valuable immediacy of the Web, its sassy energy and, perhaps most importantly, its proclivity to tell it like it is.

Thus, while being a columnist offline or online definitely gives me more latitude, I can now offer scoops and news along with analysis and observation in what I think is a much more useful combination.

That’s what I have been trying to do, for example, in my coverage of Web companies like Facebook and Yahoo, where I break news often, as well as begin conversations about everything from their valuation to strategy or lack thereof.

And, in the Web’s ability to offer instant video, I have found it even more helpful and relevant to take the audience where I go too.

While some might not like the rawness of this approach, I feel it offers a much clearer perspective and gives people more of an ability to make their own judgments on what I am showing them.

This more transparent approach that blogging at its best can offer is not a mind-blowingly new concept, but it is a key one going forward.

When it all works right, it results in a virtuous circle of information that is created between professionals and nonprofessionals and, hopefully, where a new level of respect and credibility is achieved.

And, if that doesn’t work, there is always the donut option.

As the new year begins, it’s probably past time to assess what the jump from old media to new media has taught me.

I know what it sounds like–old lady print reporter starts a gen-you-wine blog and goes all gaga about new media or else makes a tsk-tsk list of what needs to change to make blogs as good as mainstream media.

Well, I will try my very hardest not be too navel-gazing in a series of three posts I will make this week about the key things I have learned so far.

Thus, as they say in one of mainstream journalism’s favorite cliches–let’s not bury the lede:

First, after almost eight months of daily blogging for this site, I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career–such that it will be–publishing online only.

Read more »

Speaking in London last week, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller delivered a speech that sounded suspiciously like the grumpy rants of Hollywood moguls of late, who don’t like this digital thing one little bit.

To his credit, Keller (pictured here) spent the start of the speech in honor of the late legendary Guardian columnist Hugo Young expertly dissecting the appalling attitude of the Bush administration toward the free press.

Kudos to that. But then he could not resist that tiresome tendency of many mainstream journalists to blame the explosion in the popularity of the Internet for the woes of the newspaper industry.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami” and calling much of what is out there “unreliable,” Keller pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content and do aggregate it from other media.

It’s a little odd, though, to insult such Web products for doing exactly what they do–neither Google News nor Wikipedia has ever claimed to perform the function of a news organization like the Times.

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others.

Read more »