Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times:
When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.
Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.
That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.
That’s cause for concern by itself, but I wonder if this was one of the factors that led people to move to online news consumption in the first place. Think about it – haven’t we all heard these? “Oh, I read only the sports page”. “I wish newspapers had bigger business sections”. “I love the Op-Ed pages in the Guardian!”
That’s what online is about – you can read only sports, only business, only politics, only gossip, only high-brow opinion pieces – whatever agrees with you – or whatever you agree with.
Tencent, a Chinese social network, has annual revenues of $1.2billion, and for every $2 in advertising revenue, makes $17 from “other revenue streams”.This is a striking contrast with Facebook /Myspace /Orkut, all of which are struggling to monetize their users. Bill Gurley outlines how Tencent makes money:
[Pony Ma, Tencent founder was] selling virtual clothes and accessories for digital avatars that represented his users online. Think about it; this is a beautifully high gross margin business with very low marginal costs. He even told me he thought digital shirts should deteriorate over time like real ones. Pure genius. …most U.S. executives have trouble conceiving and believing in the digital item model. For starters, they simply think it’s strange. “Why would someone buy clothes for their virtual avatar? That’s weird.”
But I think we have a point here. We already have a precedent for commercial virtual goods. For-pay WordPress themes, for instance, are an example of a purely virtual good for self-expression and self-promotion that buyers as willling to pay real money for.
In fact, you could argue that the entire SEO industry is another example of a digital good: paying to drive visitors to a virtual property of self-expression. So if the Google/website ecosystem was the Web 1.0 generation of digital good commerce, could social networks/ social profiles be the Web 2.0 equivalent?
GigaOM announces the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
So far [Microsoft] has been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more.
So true, except that none of it matters to Microsoft. If it cared about “simplicity, security and speed”, it’d install Firefox + extensions with every copy of Windows.
It’s become pretty clear that the only way you can make money off a browser is by driving traffic from it to a search engine results page with advertisements. That’s how Mozilla makes over 80% of its revenue – driving traffic to Google from its search box and its default home page.
Earning revenue from ads on Microsoft Live Search pages through IE traffic is the only imperative driving IE development. And its getting costlier by the day to keep up with the competition.