Syndication, aggregation, and generation offer three ways for companies to benefit from an open approach to content rather than a proprietary model.
When Doc Searls wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, he and his co-authors opened by observing “markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.”
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At the Syndicate Conference Searls chairs, a group of presenters discussed just how companies can address those demands. And the answer isn’t behind a walled garden, either.
Pluck.com’s Dave Panos moderated the discussion for the speakers, Amy McDonough, Director of Services, Webshots.com, CNET Networks Inc; Jim Brady, VP and executive editor for WashingtonPost.com; and Andrew Eisner, president of Bayview Consulting. Dialogs again figured in the discussion as Brady repeated the need to involve readers of his site; Searls made the same point during his opening remarks earlier in the day.
McDonough acknowledged the way RSS feeds have helped WebShots meet the needs of its many users. “We use RSS as a way to update users on things they want to be updated about,” she said. “We get around 500,000 RSS views per day at WebShots.”
Brady wants more than views for the Post’s feeds. They’ve already included ads in their feeds, but for the past 18 months email ads have driven significant increases in revenue. Though RSS ads aren’t as revenue-prominent now, Brady said “I don’t see both email and RSS co-existing in the next 10 years.”
Aggregation has put PCWorld, where Eisner worked as an executive producer, in competition with McDonough’s CNet, from a vertical architecture perspective. With all the content they collect, syndication through a self-syndication vehicle like Pluck, an online RSS reader.
“The idea then is to create more verticalization of these sites,” Eisner said. Self-syndication provides the means for being able to focus on the very targeted verticals users create with those tools. WebShots has been working on an API that would let developers build applications, like targeted verticals, based on its content, but McDonough noted it isn’t publicly available yet.,
For the Washington Post, home page visits still mean more than syndication. “We are not going to take the front page of the home page and make that a personalized experience. People expect us to filter the news to a certain point,” Brady said. He wants the Post to be one of the five to ten destinations people visit each day.
User contributed content, whether it is images from WebShots users or commentors on the Post’s or PCWorld’s sites, poses different challenges. For WebShots, user content is their content, and the company spends a lot of time filtering their images. “Part automated, but highly manual,” McDonough said of the review process.
PCWorld deals with a lot of comment spam in its sites, a problem they address manually. The Post plans to launch comments on articles, starting with politics, after the first of the year. “We would love to have user profiles on our site. We are really working hard to make the WashingtonPost.com an interactive experience,” Brady said.
However content grows and evolves, don’t expect full-text RSS feeds from these sites, at least. Brady said the Post hasn’t discussed them, while Eisner is more direct in his observation: “Full text RSS feeds are not a practical business model.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
