Stuff I write. Things that happen to me.
{ Category Archives }
It still chokes on ‘large’ files due to causing massive blooms of memory consumption. The XML parser implementation used insists on loading the whole file at once. This is a recipe for PHP choking a modest VPS.
A WXR splitter (there are several) is pretty much required. Why doesn’t WordPress perform this task itself?
It’d also be nice if it did even very basic duplicate checking.
A lot of folks on Facebook have been sending me links for a new website called “Menzies House”. According to the blurb, it’s the “leading Australian blog for conservative, centre-right and libertarian thinkers and activists”, which must come as news to the mob at Catallaxy (which is still in technical exile).
A perfunctory investigation reveals that the domain name is registered to one Henry Marsh on behalf of the Dallan Investment Trust. Who they are, Google doesn’t know. The Australian Business Register says they’re in SA.
I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down a good initiative, but nevertheless I will wait to see how it pans out. I dislike inorganic ventures, website-wise, and pre-emptively declaring yourself “the leading” anything before you even launch is suspiciously marketer-esque. Not my favourite profession.
Update: Tim Andrew spills the beans.
A cat named Hartigan has apparently put himself amongst the blogging pigeons. A generous amount of fur and feathers has flown as a result.
For example, Hartigan has defended traditional media reporting and newsroom methods; bloggers say that News Ltd don’t “get it”, or are already giving in, or their content sucks, or some combination of these.
As I pointed out about a month ago, what the content-producers for News Ltd and bloggers do is a total sideshow. This purely tribal confrontation between hacks, flacks and new jacks is just that: tribal. The internet is strangling News Ltd’s money supply, which is what counts.
It’s a mistake so common that even wise economists are missing the money.
News Ltd — ignoring the movies, music and games parts — is not a media company. They manufacture and sell advertising and classifieds inventory. That’s their core, actual business. That inventory is manufactured by journalists churning out the stuff which fills the gaps between the inventory and convinces the general public to pick it up. The problem for News Ltd isn’t that bloggers are somehow magically better at doing that, it’s that due to the internet there are no more expensive barriers to entering the advertising inventory market.
A similar mistake people make is thinking that Google is a technology company. They are not. Google’s real business is manufacturing and selling advertising inventory. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s the business News Ltd are in. On the surface these companies are chalk & cheese: one is a traditional media conglomerate with roots going back generations; the other is an upstart firm that sprung to world prominence with a vastly superior search engine offering.
But the thing that makes them money — the thing that people actually pay them to do — is to manufacture and sell advertising inventory.
Companies are usually categorised by what they market or what they spend R&D money on. This is just silly: just as economists care more about people actually do rather than what they say they will do, we should categorise companies by what people pay them for, not what they started off doing or what turns up in their marketing material.
If the term’s not taken, we could call this Revealed Industry, analogously to the concept of Revealed Preference. The revealed industry of both News Ltd and Google is selling advertising inventory. All else is, I regret to say, mere fluff. And right now Google is cleaning News Ltd’s clock. The horse has bolted from the barn, and all News Ltd and its critics seem to care about is arguing about the colour of the barn walls.
Disclosure: I was a classifieds department employee at a small News Ltd newspaper for 3 years.
With all of today’s sturm und drang in Canberra, it perhaps slipped by Troppo readers that our own Nicholas Gruen has been tapped to head up a government taskforce on Government 2.0.
As I understand it, the taskforce is essentially being run out of AGIMO. Long time readers of Troppo will know that I’ve become a bit of an AGIMO fan over the years due to the good work they do. In this capacity Dave Bath deserves a hat-tip for championing their good work – and the work of the National Archives – on the fundamentals of good IT and information management.
The taskforce have set up a new blog. They’ve decided to walk the talk by setting up shop outside the traditional .gov.au box, with a blog hosted on Wordpress.com.
It has been interesting to see reactions so far. Even some of the angry responses have nuggets of useful insight. Hopefully some of the suggestions will be taken on board – a lot of them seem to be in line with Nicholas’s remarks about ‘engineering for serendipity’.
One of the nice things about Government 2.0 chatter is that it introduces a new pressure to get the fundamentals right. Citizen users should demand reliability, transparency, searchability, automation etc etc from the new interfaces and contact points. In turn this puts the onus on each and every department to get its IT and info-management house in order. Personally I think that the folks at AGIMO and the NAA have been prophets in the wilderness on this for some time, so hopefully the new taskforce will give these issues the attention and high-level champions they deserve.
In terms of what governments do today, the gathering, transformation, storage, querying, studying of information; as well as acting on its meaning, is the core of almost every process. Smart systems can reduce that overhead and make it possible to improve the tooth-to-tail ratio of public spending. Ultimately, as a taxpayer and as a libertarian, I want to be government to be as efficient and effective as possible. Modern IT, judiciously applied on a government-wide basis, is one means to that end.
I hope that this taskforce is more than window-dressing, but at least I know it’s in good hands. Congratulations, Nicholas. I look forward to hearing more.
In the last few months, the discussion of the future of newspapers has become a recurring topic in the media and online. Several common themes and arguments have emerged. The most common gripes are either that newspapers are being killed by bloggers, or that newspapers are being killed by failing to get their own news, relying on wire services instead.
The truth has little to do with quality, reporting or bloggers. It’s all about money.
You see, a newspaper has three sources of income:
If you ask most people how a newspaper makes its money, most would tell you circulation, many would tell you advertising, and some would mention classifieds.
But the order is actually backwards. In most papers, classifieds are the biggest earner, followed by advertising, followed by circulation. In fact, for many papers, the cover price doesn’t fully cover printing and distribution. All the journalistic institutions of the 20th century were subsidised not by readers, but by the “rivers of gold” — the regular flow of classified ads, lodged week in, week out with nary an interruption.
But the rivers of gold are drying up. In the USA, the free classifieds website Craigslist is busily sucking the money out of the local markets newspapers have traditionally relied on. And although the big newspapers and conglomerates have online versions of classifieds, it’s much harder to enjoy the kind of exclusivity they used to get in most towns. To start a daily newspaper takes years and costs millions of dollars, and is very risky into the bargain. To start a website costs perhaps $20 and a bit of time installing software. The barriers to competition are very low.
Advertising is losing its punch too. Newspapers have tried to import the “display advertising” model into the online space, with limited success. Again, the problem is that anyone can set up a website and sell advertising space. This space — called “inventory” by the industry — is expanding extremely rapidly. It has expanded more rapidly than the number of people online. At the same time, demand for all forms of advertising is slumping. The iron laws of supply and demand are driving down the money that can be earned from online advertising, and it simply cannot replace the profitability of print advertising.
In some ways, circulation is unimportant. A newspaper that isn’t printed is a smaller loss to make up. But of course advertisers and classifieds customers rely on circulation to get their value for money. This is one area where free alternatives, like bloggers, does affect the long term shape of the industry — by gutting circulation, it makes newspapers less attractive than free or cheaper online alternatives.
It’s all about money, folks. The newspaper business has had more than a century of stable income. That period is suddenly coming to an end. The invisible hand is slapping the newspaper business, and slapping it hard.
Where to from here? Some newspapers are reportedly planning to simultaneously introduce ‘paywalls’ to their content. Online distribution of content is expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as physically printing and distributing newspapers — you might say that the haulage on photons and electrons is cheaper than the haulage on atoms.
So, the reasoning goes, if you charge a low price for access to the content, then circulation could take up the slack because it would be profitable in itself.
But they’ve already sussed out the problem with this model: you need to form a cartel for it to work. Putting aside the legal niceties of antitrust and competition laws, there’s the plain economics of the matter. If any one reputable newspaper or group breaks ranks, they will clean up the “eyeballs” and so be able to earn more. Cartels do sometimes succeed, but usually don’t because of the incentive to cheat. And with everyone in a panicky mood, how long would it take for somebody to break ranks?
So there you have it: a quick summary of why newspapers are withering.
Disclosure: Before moving to Perth, I was employed as a classifieds salesperson. I am also working on a startup which I hope will upend this dreary economic situation. I have a truly marvelous scheme which this margin is too narrow to describe (and may be looking for investors and directors soon).