Toluu

Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog

Passages: My daughter, Miss to Mrs.January 5

My second daughter, Brittany, got married this weekend here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it was a cultural experience, to say the least. The mother and grandmother of the bride were late to the rehearsal dinner Friday night, and the situation was made worse, because her mother had accidentally left her Blackberry at the Country Club, where we were all waiting.

I stood outside on the front steps with the pastor who would turn my beautiful daughter into a married lady the next day, and we were talking about the situation. “What did we ever do,” he asked, “before cell phones?” Indeed. This event was one of continuous SMS and MMS messaging between all parties, even though one might be in the next room.

We are so connected, aren’t we? What DID we do before these devices changed everything? Well, planning was more important. You couldn’t fly by the seat of your pants the way you can with a portable connection device. Things took longer, too, I think. You just had to allow time for human error, but now it’s possible for people gang up on a problem and resolve it quickly.

The pastor had to ask people to turn their devices off prior to the wedding. There are times when the physical connection beats the electronic connection, and a private ceremony like a wedding is one of them.

It’s twenty oh nine, peopleJanuary 1

So here we are into our tenth year of the new millennium, and we still can’t get it right.

I was born in nineteen forty six, not one thousand nine hundred and forty six.

It is twenty oh nine, people, not two thousand nine.

The next millennium will be twenty one hundred, not two thousand one hundred.

Why can’t we get this right? I realize that the year 2000 was a bit odd. It was hard to say twenty hundred, but that’s what she should have been saying.

Come on broadcast and cable networks. Help us out.

Why media companies are hosedDecember 31 2008

I hate to keep pounding on this, but the essential problem for media companies is that we just aren’t special anymore. The Web views every site the same, and despite efforts by media companies to express their uniqueness, it just doesn’t work.

And the problem here is that advertisers don’t need media companies anymore. Take a look at Wal-Mart’s home page:

Note the ads from Vonage and Chevrolet, but here’s where it gets really interesting. Below is data from Compete.com that shows that the Wal-Mart site crushes the New York Times and the Washington Post in terms of unique visitors.

The point is that Wal-Mart is a media site in that it sells its reach to advertisers, a reach that vastly exceeds two of the top newspaper sites in the world. This is why I keep harping on everybody that the future for local media companies lies beyond their own walled garden websites, and those who refuse to hear that (like, everybody) are sprinting to the tar pits.

The return of the pop-up ad (when will they ever learn?)December 31 2008

Behold, a rant.

I just “visited” an internal page on the website TVNewsday.com, the link of which came from the site’s newsletter. After reading the story, I decided to click on the site’s logo to navigate to the home page, rather than return to the newsletter. On its journey from the scroll bar to the logo, my mouse passed over the leaderboard ad for Sony at the top of the page. The ad was one of those time bombs that goes off with a mouseover, because some marketing guru thinks I’ve given it permission to do so by deliberately passing my mouse over the bloody ad.

So the ad expanded like the pop-ups of old, only unlike the “the good old days,” I couldn’t reduce the thing by clicking on the “close” button. Nope. It just sat there yelling at me that I needed to buy Sony broadcast gear. I did what anybody would do. I closed the browser window and growled under my breath that this is not a site I want to visit with regularity.

It’s called the price of interaction, folks, and these kinds of ads fall into the category of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” The problem here is that the Web isn’t kind to “regular” display ads, and it abhors interruptions, because people like me would

Online breaking news is the key for 2009December 30 2008

The ability of news organizations to focus on breaking news will increasingly determine their relevancy in 2009 and beyond. Just as cable news brought about the creation of the artificial news blockbuster, so will online news develop strategies and tactics that will focus on that which is breaking. I view this as a good thing.

At the time that I published “News is a Process, Not a Finished Product,” I had been thinking about the concept of what I call “Continuous News” for many months. Make no mistake — Continuous News (CN) IS the model for sustainable online news in the future. It is fresh and compelling; it meets the needs of the online audience for news (M-F 8am-5pm); and it’s sold by daypart. Nothing can compete with the concept.

Borrowing freely from my essay, the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Fifth Annual State of the News Media report captured the essence of the model:

News consumption has become continual, with news morphing from a “finished” product - a newspaper, a newscast, even a Web site - to a service that helps consumers “find what they are looking for [and] react to it.”

And what is CN, if not an ongoing series of breaking news events and stor