How location and positioning will become game changers in the local media market as Google and Facebook proceed with their offensive plans.

As they watch the wave of change hitting the media business, chief executives of local media brands usually have been able to cling to one last resort: At least their strong position in the local market is fairly safe.

No more.

There is a global digital revolution entering local media markets.

It is called location. And positioning. It is the tool of global players like Google and Facebook as they try to attract local small advertisers.

Let us start with formulating two basic postulates:

1. What can become digital, will become digital
2. “Global equals local” in the digital world

Why do I mean by this?

The first postulate should be pretty obvious. We are in the middle of a major digital transformation. The changes are inevitable, the only point left arguing about is the speed. Everything that can become digital, will eventually become digital.

That includes all types of local ads.

The second postulate probably needs a little bit more explanation.  In the analog world local market places and services in most cases were controlled by players with a strong local presence. The reason for this was obvious: Physical restraints, like distribution or storage needs, gave huge advantages to companies geographically based in the local area.  In this type of market many areas of business, like running a newspaper, required a huge initial investment, primarily in buildings and production equipment.

In the digital world there are no longer physical restraints to entering a local business. In fact local needs can be served as well by a global player as by local businesses. No longer do you need local expertise in every area where you do business. More important is the platform you have built for your business.

In short: Global equals local.

What does this mean for local media sites?

The major competitors are no longer necessarily other local players. Instead you are competing with global giants in your own small and local market.

And here comes the most important point: Global players are now preparing a major offensive to grab the lion’s share of local ad markets around the world.

The reason for this development is obvious: The rise of the smart phone. People no longer want a phone just to call with. They also like to surf, search, look for additional offers, etc. This includes services that register your physical location at any time. And basically all smart phones today offer geographic positioning as a major feature.

Both Google and Facebook now seem to go after the local markets around the world – although from different perspectives.

Let us start with Google

Google’s ingenious idea in ads was to automatically connect the content of a web page with the message of an advertisement. In addition the pricing and display of ads would be dynamic, depending on the efficiency in collecting users for the advertiser.

Google Adwords has been the major revenue stream for Google with its smart way of combining commercial ads with whatever content is on any specific web page.

Now Google obviously is refocusing its resources from Adwords to location based coupons.

“The Holy Grail for local advertising is location-targeted coupons, and we’re building Google Offers to enable that, as well as click-to-call functionality for nearby businesses,” said Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms at Google in a recent interview.

Google has announced that one third of all mobile searches are based on where people are at any given moment.

And Mike Steib notices how that is an enormous opportunity for a company like Google:

“When we see that a third of the search queries on a mobile device are local in nature, but a smaller percentage of ads that are local in nature, that’s a recipe for an opportunity for advertisers and agencies.”

We should also mention Google Places, which essentially is a free global catalogue service enabling any small business to get correctly tagged on Google Maps. In many countries Google has purchased data from catalogue companies to make sure all businesses – large and small – are placed on the map.

There is no more telling example of Google’s refocus than the fact that the well-know search boss Marissa Mayer has been given the new role of managing the geo/local business.  That means she is moving away from the area that has represented 90 % of Google’s income to a new area said to be “crucial to our users and to the future of Google”.

Geo/local is crucial to the future of Google? Think about that! If it is crucial to the world’s largest search gigant, what about the many thousands of local media sites?

So tell me, executives of local media sites around the world: What have you done in the area of geolocated ads recently? Not so much? You better pay attention!

What will Google do?

Fast Company in a recent blog post exemplified how Google already is already betting on geo location being an essential of the future. Look for instance at this example of changes in Google’s search result:

You may also try to search for the word “restaurant” on an Android powered mobile phone – and you will get a glimpse of how Google hopes to include location based search results whenever possible.

The direction Google is moving is quite obvious: From being the best in the class to connect ads with content on web pages, Google now hopes to have a similar position in serving ads based on where you are at any given time.

That is bad news for local media sites!

What about Facebook?

Fecebook seems determined to compete in the same area as Google, namely in utilizing where people are at any given moment.

The last effort is Facebook Places. This encourages people to report where they are at any given time. Facebook wants to connect people to friends who happens to be nearby – and the company wants to offer lucrative deals.

Several services, like Foursquare and Gowalla, are already based on people “checking in” at where they are. Both have become quite popular, and have inspired a number of creative uses, like how you can check which bars in New York and San Francisco have the highest female to male ratio right now.

Still, Facebook, with its 500 million users, have a much bigger potential of becoming the de facto location service of people around the world.

I suggest you read this article from ReadWriteWeb that explains the Facebook strategy in this regard. Most important is how Facebook has decided to open up it Places API.

“In other words, Facebook Places has positioned itself as the central hub for all check-in apps”, concludes ReadWriteWeb.

Not only has Facebook Places been introduced. The huge social network at the same time has launched Facebook Deals. The service gives businesses a chance to offer users special deals as soon as they check in to their business on Facebook Places.

So far this is only available in USA – and it is still in an early phase. But imagine just for a moment that Facebook indeed succeeds in making its many users check wherever they are and also builds a successful location-based ad business on top of this.

Who stands to loose from this?

You are right! Local media sites. Suddenly a global giant offers a whole new opportunity for your local advertisers to pinpoint just the people who are close to their physical store.

To conclude so far:

Two global giants are moving into the local ad scene – attacking from different directions. Google’s approach is through search. Using your mobile phone to find information, you are better served with links that are relevant to your physical position. Facebook’s approach is through your social network. It has the potential of making huges masses of people voluntarily tell others where they are at any time – and then monetize this information.

While being strong in offering local content and keeping a close relationship to the population, many local media sites will still find themselves at disadvantage in this area compared to both Google and Facebook.

And that is not enough: There are other players as well!

Please write down the words “social shopping”! It is a whole new group of sites utilizing people’s need to make shopping a social experience.

Maybe the best known example is Groupon.com, a site offering daily deals to its users and rewarding members who invite friends to take part in the deals.

In my own small country (Norway), Groupon has in a very short time been able to offer deals in no less than 20 different cities.   It is not a huge success yet, but still indicates strongly how foreign services move into what has been considered very local markets.

To conclude: My advice to local media sites

Please, please: Pay attention to what is happening to location-based commercial offerings in your market! Your competitors are no longer local players. They are global!

As a first step: Make sure all your content – be it editorial or ads – has the correct meta data so that it can be utilized in a location-based service. For a starter: All ads and local stories should have geo coordinates associated with it.

In my experience most local media sites unfortunately will fail already at this step. While they have plenty of local content, it is not structured.

Secondly: Think carefully through how you can utilize your unique relationship with the local population to offer unique services to people. What can you do that is not possible for Google and Facebook?

Thirdly: Look for ways you can use the location-based services of global giants like Google and Facebook to make money in your own market. If Facebook becomes the de facto “check in” service for location: Use their API to offer local services on top of it. If Google proves to have success in location based search: Make sure your content and commercial partners are right in the middle of the search results!

And most important: Do not assume that because you have controlled your local market for decades you cannot be put out of business by competition from global players.

Stay alert! You are in for a tough fight!

(Thanks to Espen Grimmert, founder of social media consultancy Klokere.no for contributing suggestions for this article)

Related articles

• Is Google Prepping a Local Mobile Coupon Offering? (marketingvox.com)
• Adwords Is Dying and Google Knows It (and they are doing something about it) (fastcompany.com)
• Local Search Engine Optimization An Investment In Your Company (webmanmarketing.com)
• Google taps Marissa Mayer for location, local services (intomobile.com)
• Localization, Unique Data Sets & the Future of Search (seobook.com)

Google’s Eric Schmidt suggests we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook has launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life?

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This article titled “Does technology pose a threat to our private life?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Friday 20th August 2010 23.06 UTC

Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? And where did you go for breakfast this morning? What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.

From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to CCTV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically. But nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.

Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, reading, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our “social graph”, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it. Having executed the social networking business idea better than its rivals – MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5 have been left for dust – Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by July this year. That’s already one in 13 people on Earth, and Zuckerberg recently predicted it was “almost a guarantee” that his site would reach 1 billion users, with growth in relatively untapped markets such as Russia, Japan and Korea “doubling every six months”.

On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest gambit in the battle to remain top of the social networking heap with a move into geolocation services, which harness the GPS functionality of increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. Facebook Places will launch first in the US and later in the UK, allowing users, if they choose, to share their location with friends on the site by checking into public venues. Sensitive to intense public scrutiny of its privacy controls, Facebook was careful to make the service opt-in but every geolocation service – including Google’s Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare – has prompted renewed debate about the protection of personal details online.

“This is a seminal moment where we’re seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy,” says Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and member of Facebook’s safety advisory board. “The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn’t hit 30 yet, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognise that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset.”

Facebook has come under significant pressure to make its site safer for users. Incidents of serious crimes facilitated by the internet such as the murder of British teenager Ashleigh Hall by Peter Chapman earlier this year, are tragic but rare. More common is the embarrassment from a compromising tagged photo of a drunken night out.

The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google’s Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the web are worth the sacrifice of the individual’s right to privacy. Facebook users first raised their pitchforks in 2006 when the site introduced a news feed for each user, summarising their friends’ activity. More recently it came under pressure to simplify its privacy controls with some high-profile commentators and groups – organised on Facebook pages, naturally – encouraging others to remove their profiles. It responded in May with simplified privacy settings.

Richard, now Lord, Allan is a former Liberal Democrat MP and Facebook’s European policy director. “The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information. The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that’s where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook.”

Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterise privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other’s lives. The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities. “Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true. To say you’re ‘living in Facebook rather than the real world’ is a complete misreading of what’s happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology we need to get used to it.”

Our personal information can broadly be categorised as trivial data such as music preferences, behavioural information about our activity and connections, and confidential information including credit card numbers. But even seemingly innocuous information can be used against us, says security expert Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro. “In isolation, much of this data may be trivial but from a hacker’s perspective, any information is good information,” he says. “Use search engines to discover the extent of your online footprint and tailor it. Keep tabs on yourself before anyone else does.”

Balkam describes the internet’s two biggest privacy problems as reputational damage – inadvertently posting drunken photos that your boss might see, for example – and physical safety, the latter being the issue for women particularly wary of location tools. Burglary is another concern, when users of location services announce they are out of the house; in February three developers built PleaseRobMe.com to raise awareness about the implications of broadcasting location to a public audience.

Currently location games such as Foursquare, where users check in at public venues to earn points and prizes, tend to have a small, enthusiastic and largely trustworthy group of dedicated users comprised of so-called “early adopters”. For them, this period of intensive invention and opportunity is a golden age. Christian Payne – who describes himself as a “social technologist” – abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a “car crash epiphany”. Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from BT asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he’d crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialised, and its users more sceptical.

“We’ll never see it like we do now – more nefarious people will come later,” he says. “But it would be more risky for me not to take the chance of building meaningful connections with acquaintances who then become friends when one of you needs some help.”

Payne seems to put a lot of intimate information into the world, but still skillfully manages to keep his personal life, and that of his partner and son, almost completely private. It’s up to the user to decide what they want to keep private, he says, though he’s uncomfortable with the idea that he is unknowingly creating a public persona for himself. “I’d hope I’m doing this naturally and not thinking about it. But then asking me that is like taking me out of the play I’m acting in as myself – and asking me to direct it.”

Online privacy is intrinsically linked to identity. Author Peggy Orenstein wrote in the New York Times recently that her reflexive compulsion to tweet a pleasant moment with her daughter had also spoilt the moment, and mused that our online personas are elaborate constructs that we, knowingly or unknowingly, craft into an identity we want the world to see. The internet has provided a platform that seems to challenge us to present a single identity to the world, yet we struggle to balance the profiles we share with family, friends and work colleagues.

Stories of employers sacking staff for drunken Facebook photos will be replaced by an acceptance that drunken university pictures are the norm, says Dr Joss Wright, Fresnel research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He hopes sites will develop more intuitive ways to share information with the appropriate people; when his grandmother joined Facebook it “severely curtailed” what he could share with his friends.

“I’d like to believe people will learn how to guard their privacy, but we’re more likely to see societal shifts in what is seen as acceptable for privacy,” Wright adds. “Privacy has tended to be something quite intrinsic, and there hasn’t been a mechanism for privacy violation in general society until the arrival of the internet. The rise of Facebook and Foursquare show we don’t really understand privacy or what it means to preserve it, and don’t have an ability to understand the consequences of violating it either.”

Regulators struggle to keep up with the pace of technology and enforcement of what rules there are is weak, meaning the onus for education should be on the services themselves, says Wright, who doesn’t think they are closely scrutinised enough. Though sites like Facebook have a duty of care, “the economics are against that, because their entire business model is built around getting us to share as much information as possible”.

But there are upsides, too. Sharing personal information is beneficial in giving insights into different aspects of society. “If you can see the details of people’s lives, when you can see someone’s actual persona, it’s harder to be biased and bigoted,” said Wright. “But a balance has to be struck between the amount we share for the positive and negative.”

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerberg takes a different tack. “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect.

Part of Facebook’s success has been to demand people’s real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the internet where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of “trolling”, where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other. The improvement in the quality of communication and debate online is in no small part down to the trend towards using real identities. However, anonymity still has its role in whistleblowing sites such as Wikileaks, or in debates where a contributor to a discussion on rape, for example, deserves protection.

If you think the current internet landscape is frightening, don’t think too much about what’s coming next. Already served with targeted ads based on keywords in our Google email, or picked out by our age and interests on Facebook, the future is more personalised still. “Sites will get much better at filtering information and predicting our behaviour, serving us what we want to buy and finding new ways to share information, like location. Three years ago, people wouldn’t even have dreamed of sharing their location,” says Wright. While the sensitivities and sensibilities of managing our online data still need to be clarified, there will be benefits in personalisation, which promises more meaningful, relevant advertising for consumers and consequently, for advertisers, far more effective bang for their buck.

So what next? Three years ago, rival social networking site MySpace seemed invincible. Could Facebook still lose its edge? Anything is possible.

Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.

“No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users, and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behaviour. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that – and the average age at Facebook is 28.”

Where the Twitterati draw the line

Zoe Margolis, blogger

While I’m very active on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I have so far avoided all the location-based tools on my phone. Primarily, this is because I do not want to publicly announce where I am – I wish to protect my privacy and safety – but also because I don’t want to bombard people with incessant, dull, information; I’ve unfollowed people on Twitter and Facebook due to their too-frequent (and, might I say, very annoying) Foursquare updates being fed through to their timelines.I can see the point of location tools – they’re an easy way to connect people who might otherwise be unaware of their proximity to their friends – but given the amount of information we already share using social networking sites, it almost seems like overload to add yet another method of input, and it’s pretty much redundant if not all of your friends/social circle are using the same tool.

I have some major concerns with Facebook Places though and believe it is a huge threat to people’s privacy. It is already live in users’ settings(though the feature has not yet been rolled out in the UK) and while there is the option of limiting the location info to friends only, they have to de-select the automatically enabled “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” box in order to opt out of their location being included on a public list for all to see.

In addition to this, people’s friends can “check’ ” them into locations, so even if someone has limited the information about themselves that they are sharing, there might still be a breach of their privacy from others.

Most of my friends on Facebook have never heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, let alone used a location-based tool on their mobile phones; I assume the majority of people who use Facebook are similar. Given this, it concerns me that Facebook Places appears to be lacking transparency about privacy. The ability to change the settings to ensure personal information is protected seems more geared to the tech-savvy, than the lay-person; I fear many people will discover their privacy has been breached only after the event.

Privacy on any social networking site or location-sharing tool should start off being intact: 100% protection, with the chance to opt-in to less privacy, should you wish to share information with others. Facebook seems to take the opposite view, making the default position little/no privacy with the need to opt-out; I won’t be using Facebook Places any time soon.

David Nobbs

I don’t believe total privacy is possible so I never telling anybody anything on line that I wouldn’t be happy for the nation to know (if it was interested!).

I think some people are so hungry for celebrity they’re happy not to have a private life at all. I’m very careful with my tweets. People can never be quite sure whether they’re true or false, and I never reveal when I’m going to be away.

Sorry this is so short but I’m off to Portugal now for five months. Only joking.

Max Tundra, musician

I probably spend too much time online, sharing details about my life with anyone who has the remotest interest in my music. I don’t like the idea of letting people know exactly where I am right this second, but as my fans tend to be fairly sane and unstalkerish, I feel comfortable letting them know what I’m up to in a general sense.

I don’t use Foursquare or any applications which might reveal my geographical co-ordinates, although I am often easily locatable, as I play advertised concerts. I did, however, recently delete my personal Facebook profile, as that seemed to be a cluster of unnecessarily pertinent information about my life and the people I share it with, as well as being a colossal waste of time which could be better spent telling people on Twitter that I prefer the Henry vacuum cleaner to the Dyson.

Graham Linehan, comedy writer:

I always hated Facebook because it made me very uncertain about what I was and wasn’t sharing with the world. The privacy settings were, famously, a bit of a maze, and seemed subject to sudden changes that you hadn’t agreed to. I felt like one day I might open up the site to see a picture of myself in bed asleep with my wife, like in Hidden’.

Twitter is different because it forces you to be very selective with what you choose to share, and so forces social media back to a more private place. I personally don’t tweet much stuff about my home life, because I don’t want to accidentally tweet something stupid like “Holiday starts tomorrow!” along with a geotag to my home address. So my tweets are generally links to things I find funny or interesting, and my home life only gets a look-in when something truly interesting or funny happens.

Once I made a mistake and posted my home number while trying to send a direct (private) message to someone and we had to change it, but that was a valuable lesson to learn early on, because now I’m a lot more careful with what I put out there. It wasn’t too much of a problem, though. We only got two or three callers who hung up as soon as my wife said “Hello, Dreambeds”. I asked her who Dreambeds were and she said “Dunno. I suppose they sell beds.”

I think people should start to claw back as much privacy as they can. Services such as Twitter show that it’s possible to share selectively. Sharing selectively should be the default setting on every social network service. Which, again, is why you won’t see me on Facebook any time soon.

John Prescott, politician

Twitter has been a revelation. In the past if I needed to get message out I’d have to convince a paper to publish it. Now I can tweet my thoughts and, if interesting, it’ll get pick up. My Milburn tweet was running on rolling news within 10 minutes.

I share a lot of content like my blogs and vlogs along with links to stories and virals from others I like. Twitter is also great to run campaigns and organise tweetups.

We did the first pastiche of the Cameron airbrushed posters, which then inspired mMyDavidCameron.com. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were doing their own versions. It destroyed Ashcroft’s poster campaign and cost nothing.

And when the founder of the National Bullying Helpline said people were bullied in No10, someone tweeted me a link to the industrial tribunal which proved she was accused of bullying herself! It killed the story within 24 hours.

I’ve found Twitter to be a fantastic way to communicate, learn from others and show the real me, not the distorted view peddled by the media.

But I’m not convinced about geolocation applications. You have to have some privacy.

Suzanne Moore, journalist

Don’t mistake personal information for honesty. Personas are created and people play as well as tweet their hearts out. If you don’t want to bare your soul you don’t have to, but the dividing line between public and private is now generational, one that neither mainstream culture nor government appears to understand.

I don’t much care what people think of me and was wondering who some guy on MasterChef was the other day on Twitter and wondering if I had slept with him. Turns out I hadn’t which was a relief. And a joke!

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

The social media situation in Asia is very different from Europe and USA. Here are some very interesting facts and figures giving a good overview of who are the big players.

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The material in this blog posting should all be credited to Thomas Crampton, who is a former New York Times correspondent and now the Asia-Pacific director of digital influence at Ogilvy. He has been so kind to allow me to reuse this material.

Being based in Hong Kong, Thomas is one of the biggest experts on the social media scene in Asia. And it is indeed very interesting to see how different players have been able to build very strong positions in that part of the world.

Here is a presentation Thomas recently made about the social media in Asia. Click through it and I promise that you will get a quite good overview.

Some of the facts that I found interesting:

• Among China’s 338 million Internet users, only 400.000 use Facebook. 183 million use the Chinese social network site Qzone. In search the scene is dominated by Baidu – with twice as many users as Google.
• Facebook is strong in some countries, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Cambodia, while losing to other networks in other countries. For instance Friendster is very strong in the Philippines and Orkut dominates in India.
• Sale of digital goods is very important source of revenue for sites like Qzone

For some more elaboration I recommend that you look through this interview with Thomas Crampton, recorded by the blogger Robert Scoble:

For an in-depth look at how Google look at what is happening in the online world: Here is an excellent interview with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt.

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Eric Schmidt was interviewed for 45 minutes at the Gartner Symposium  in Orlando.  Here is the interview in full:

You can find a summary of the most important comments in this article on ReadWriteWeb.

The service of Alexa.com frequently is used to get an indication of which sites are most popular in different countries. Here are two top 20 lists for Norway, registered three years apart. Check the differences.

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My colleague Espen Grimmert, digital marketing director and SEO expert at the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, checked the Alexa list for Norway three years ago when he gave a presentation for managers about the latest web trends in our country. His point at the time was to make the newspaper managers aware of how they faced online competition from a number of international brands. In Aftenposten he would show how the relatively unknown piczo.no – a social media site for children – seemed to attract more traffic than our own news site.

This weekend he copied the list again, exactly three years after the first one. And although Alexa for sure doesn’t give exact data for a small market like Norway, there are some interesting changes to be noted:

• Social media sites are rising. Facebook was not even on the list three years ago and is now the second most visited site in Norway. Other social media sites on the rise include Youtube, Wikipedia and blogging platforms like Google’s blogger.com and the local blogg.no. Also note number 10, Nettby, a social network run by the VG news site. Nettby is extremely popular among teenagers in Norway. Twitter, however, is not on the list. But it should be there soon: The microblog site is now number 21!
• Newspaper sites are still strong, but falling slightly.  These include vg.no, dagbladet.no and aftenposten.no. Another, the online newspaper Nettavisen.no, has dropped out of the list. Still, there is hardly any country in the world where local newspaper sites are used as much as in Norway.
• Portal and catalogue sites are also falling. These include Startsiden.no, sol.no and gulesider.no. Also Norway’s version of Craigslist, the highly successful Finn.no, has dropped a few places.
• Google remains on the top as the most used web site in Norway.
• All in all, despite competition from international players, locally owned sites remain very strong in this market.

As I already have pointed out, Alexa data should be taken as a tough estimate rather than an exact list. The official measurements from TNS would be much more accurate for the local sites. But I still think these three-year changes may reflect some trends that are noteworthy.

Media leaders want to take steps to “protect news content online”.  It is a fight against the wall.   Media’s former monopoly role as gate keepers is gone long time ago.  Now is the time to open up.

It has been very interesting to follow the blog discussions after Associated Press this week announced its initiative to rein in sites using its content.  In its press release AP said it would “pursue legal and legislative actions” against those who do not use its content properly.

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I believe it is a fight against the wall. And it is an approach which runs counter to what media companies need to do today.

Newspapers and other mass media used to enjoy the benefits of what was in practical terms an information monopoly. They were gate keepers of news, deciding what was important and what was not. People would go to the mass media to be advised about what news and topics they should have an opinion about.

The media still has an important function as gate keepers, but it is no longer a monopoly and this role of the media is diminishing quickly. Instead numerous new sources of information have become available – and many other sites, such as search engines and news aggregators, have taken on the role as gate keepers as well.

Having been a journalist for the last 25 years I could of course choose to observer this trend with a sense of sadness. It runs counter to everything I learned in journalism school at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington, USA. We were taught about the important gate keeper role.  As journalists it was our job to select stories on behalf of the public and present them to our readers in order of importance. We had been given a sacred task to sort through a complex reality and balance everything in the right manner.

At that time, in the 1980s, no other institutions had the resources and competence to compete with the mass media and the journalists. We pretty much had a monopoly in defining reality for the broad masses.

Not any more.

Today there are numerous information sources. Everybody can produce and distribute content for free. And many more than journalists are doing this in a very professional manner. In fact, of among 80 RSS feeds I follow in Google Reader,  I think less than 20 are produced by professional journalists.

Does that mean I trust the other sources less? Not necessarily. The reason that I follow them is that they have demonstrated a high level of competence in a niche field I like to follow. Most of them are in areas of expertise which are too specialized for most mass media companies.

Also Google Reader has become my gate keeper. That is where I browse content from a large number of sources.

Would I visit all of these 80 web sites daily if I did not use an aggregator service like Google Reader? Of course not. Probably I would only visit 5 or 6 of them.  For the rest of the sites, Google Reader makes it possible for me as a reader to keep an eye on their content, and occasionally visit their web sites when an information item caches my interest. Both for me as a reader and the web sites as information providers this is pure bonus as compared to the old days. The same goes with the books I buy on Amazon:  These are mainly purchases in addition to what I used to buy from Norwegian book stores 10 or 20 years ago.

To sum up so far: Technological improvements have made it possible for everybody to produce content and it has given me as a user access to numerous more information sources.

• What will happen to newspapers: 10 predictions
• Crisis advice for newspaper executives
• The state of the Mediasphere

What does this mean to media companies?

First of all the media must realize that they no longer enjoy the benefits of having a monopoly as information providers and gate keepers. And readers today have numerous ways to access your content.

You only need to look at traffic statistics for major news sites and you will see that a significant portion of the traffic are users who don’t even visit the front page. Take my own country, Norway, as an example. Norway’s largest news site is VG.  Last week (week 14, 2009) it had 3,23 million unique visitors. But 27 per cent of these visitors did not visit VG.no’s front page. The same goes for the other main news sites:  One quarter of Dagbladet.no‘s visitors did not visit the front page and 35  per cent of the visitors to site of my own employer, Aftenposten.no.

Second: Online news has become a free commodity for users.  There seem to be no viable business model charging for news content on the web. Instead media companies need to find other ways to monetize this content. Charging for more specialized content may still be an option, though.

Third: Users expect their news to be available to them wherever they find it convenient. Rather than forcing their users to visit their sites to get the main news headlines, media companies must push their content to wherever their users choose to be.

Fourth: Media companies still have great credibility as trusted news sources. With unlimited sources of information users become even more dependent on the few trusted ones to guide them. Many media companies still have brands associated with trust and credibility. This is their biggest advantage, and also means that many users still will entrust the gate keeper role to the media sites.

So what should the media companies do?

My approach would be the opposite of Associated Press: Rather than build a wall around your content, you should open up and make it easily accessible wherever your users are. Not necessarily the full content, of course, but headlines, leads and thumbnail photos. Your first priority should be to make it easy for your end users to find your content.

That means you should be happy that Google and aggregators index your content. It only brings extra traffic to your site. So be it that some of the users may find that the headline and lead paragraph is enough. In total you will still get many more visitors than if all of them had to visit your site first.

The alternative, not being indexed by Google and news aggregators, only would bring less income.

Associated Press raises one extremely question: How to monetize news content? That’s a tricky one and obviously media companies are struggling these days to find the right answers. As a journalist I am very concerned about this question: Who should pay for good journalism in the future?

The answers are still not clear and viable business models are yet to be developed. Advertisements clearly is not enought. But looking to the past models instead of the future will not help us answer this difficult question.

As Ariana Huffington points out:

“The key question is whether those of us working in the media (old and new) embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”

Fellow journalists: Let’s bet on the future!

Some of the blog postings from this week:

• Online journalism review: No one owns the news
• The Big Money: Death a la Carte: It’s not Google that’s killing the media
• TechCrunch: That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze of Newspapers
• Daggle: Google’s Love For Newspapers & and How Little They Appreciate It
• paidContent: A Solution To The Newspaper Industry’s Battle With Google
• Media Futurist: 8 key trends and some foresights for the next 5 years
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Five tips on charging for content

News sites need to communicate with their readers. Here are 5 great tools that will help you cover the news in a much more dynamic way. All of them have one thing in common: They are extremely easy to implement – even if you have no skills in programming.

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Just using text and photos is no longer sufficient in modern web journalism. Readers expect immediacy and interactivity – and new ways of telling stories are developing.

Here are a few tools that I think can be particularly helpful for news sites.

Coveritlive.com – live blogging

This is a free service to add live blogging to your site. It has already been used by a number of big news media, such as Newsweek and Los Angeles Times.  Several persons can participate at the same time and messages are updated live on the site. Readers can participate as well – and their comments can be fully moderated before added to the blog. The service allows you to include Twitter feeds as well as photos and videos (for instance by using Qik, see below).

It really is a great tool for any live event you may decide to stage.

At the Norwegian news site Aftenposten we used Coveritlive for the first couple of hours of the Josef Fritzl court hearings in Austria. The live blog consisted of messages from our reporters in Austria, questions from readers, Twitter messages from other journalists, photos from the news wires, background information and also a video report using the service of Qik.

Qik.com - video streaming through the mobile phone

Every news site wants to include video. Yet to do so has been pretty complicated, at least if you are not technical savvy. That was before qik.com. This service is extremely easy to use and allows you to stream video live to your web site through the mobile phone.

Here is what you do: Download the Qik application to your mobile phone and adjust the settings to match your own account at Qik.  After you have done this every video you record automatically will be published to your Qik  page.
You will also be given an embed code to insert on your own web site. In this way you can include your own video in the article and ensure that the video is published immediately after it was recorded.

I don’t think it is possible to make it much easier than this. Through this system you can have a video published on your web site 30 seconds after it was recorded. The tool is particularly useful when covering live news events.

Twitter.com – micro blogging

Twitter is a very useful tool for journalists. I have explained earlier how it can be used as by journalists in four different ways.

You may also have a look at the following posts:

• How journalists can use Twitter
• 5 great Twitter tools for journalists

You can follow me on Twitter at JohnEi.  My Twitter messages are usually about online media or related to my other blog Cambodia Tales.

Publish2 – link journalism

This is a tool specifically made for journalists to save, organize and publish links to other articles. A bookmarklet makes it very quick to add new links as you browse the web to find information in your field of expertise.

BetaTales is using this tool to produce the “Betatales reading” list you find in the right column of our pages.  Every time I come across an article I want to share with my blog readers, I click the “Link with Publish2″ bookmarklet in my browser.  Sometimes I add a small comment. As soon as I hit “Save” the story is included in the listing.

The people behind Publish2 use the term “link journalism” to describe this way of adding links to news articles. One benefit is that several journalists can add links to the same list.

Google maps – add interactive maps to your stories

I would think this is a familiar tool for most of our readers and I will not spend much time describing it here. Google offers an API developers can use to develop their own mashup applications. But even if you are not a programmer, you can easily make your own map at Google maps and then embed it into your article. Using maps really adds great value to many news stories.

Other places to find tools:

• Tips and tools – CyberJournalist.net
• 12 useful online tools for journalists
• 30 important tools for online journalists (in German)
• Essential online tools for journalists

I have only mentioned 5 tools. Many more could have been added. Do you have any suggestions? Please add them in a comment below.

Here are some of the social media trends that are taking place in 2009.

Illustration: Matt Hamm

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What will happen in the social media during this year? A number of bloggers have tried to identify the most important trends. This is an attempt to summarize some of them. Many more could – and probably should – have been mentioned.

1. Social networks are integrating with each other

Users are getting tired of registering for and maintaining profiles on numerous social communities.  They want to migrate their profile from one network unto another.  And they are right: Why should we need to upload the same profile photo again and again?

We have seen a number of efforts to bring the social networks together, including OpenID, Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook Connect.  In addition there are services like FriendFind aggregating all your activities on different platforms.

This trend will be much stronger in 2009.  Large as well as small players will realize they cannot operate in isolation from other social networks. Rather they will join the efforts to connect the networks to make it easier for the users, creating a portable social graph.

2. More people build their online personal brand

The size and quality of your social network matters – and is an integrated part of building a personal brand. Social communities offer users tools to create a powerful network. More people will invest time in building this network, both in number and quality of connections. This will largely take place independently from employers; in fact many will develop a professional authority through blogging and twittering which will offer them new opportunities with competing employers.

3. Social networks will gain momentum as marketing tool

In fact, consumers will demand corporate social media presence.  Successful companies will Twitter, keep professional blogs, maintain fan pages on Facebook, upload videos of their products on YouTube or otherwise use viral marketing to reach out their customers wherever they decide to spend their time.

4. More tools will help users to avoid information overload

You are following 1378 people on Twitter, have 356 friends on Facebook and connect to 76 other people on Flickr.  So how do you keep up with it? The information flow is just overwhelming. We need help! And we will get it. We will see a number of news tools making it easier to manage all the information.

ReadWriteWeb gives some examples of tools: Google Reader Add-inn, auto-categorization tools, more friend synchronization tools and friend lists sanitizers.

5. More social networking will go mobile

Most large social networks provide a mobile version. Yet 2009 might be the first year using the mobile phone for social networking really take hold.  Probably we will see some popular and neat applications spreading quickly.

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Additional reading:

• “Social Media Trends 2009″ from TrendsSpotting
• “5 Meta Trends Shaping 2009 Social Media Predictions” from Criskenton
• “Six Social Media Predictions for 2009″ from Spinfield.
• “7 Social Media Predictions” from Socialnomics
• “Yet Another 2009 Social Media Trends List” from Speak Media Blog
• “5 International Social Networks to Keep an Eye on” from CNET

It is web historic: In November YouTube had more searches from U.S. users than Yahoo.

We told you one month ago that YouTube was about to pass Yahoo as the second largest “search engine”.  Now it has happened. According to the November rankings from Comscore the former dominant search engine, Yahoo, now receives fewer searches than video site YouTube.

In November a total of 18,06 million searches were registered in the American market. Of these, Google received 7,98 million, YouTube 2,79million and Yahoo 2,59 million.

That is the first time YouTube receives more searches than Yahoo.

One might now ask whether YouTube may in fact become the next Google.

- Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense, ReadWriteWeb points out.

New roles will be necessary in editorial organizations. Here are 10 of them, provided by the Swedish media blog Mindpark.

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Since the original posting is written in Swedish, I have decided to reblog the whole list from Mindpark in English for international readers.

Their main point is that tougher competition for media companies will force journalists to work in new ways. Here are the possible new roles editors should consider introducing in the editorial staff:

1. Search editor. An increasing portion of a site’s traffic comes from Google and other search engines. You need a person to follow this traffic closely.
2. Statistics editor. The web provides numerous opportunities to follow users behavior on your site closely.
3. Project editor. Many media companies seem to be much quicker to launch new project on paper than on the web. Why is that?
4. Link editor. Whoever links the most, will win in the end. But someone has to be responsible for the linking policy and activities.
5. Community editor. Being present in reader’s activities on our sites as well as outreaching to communities on other sites.
6. Network editor/ conversation editor. Picking up and responding to discussions about your brand on other sites.
7. Tag editor. Developing and maintaining tag structure. Most media companies are not very sophisticated in this regard.
8. Mashup editor. Including widgets and mashups on your site.
9. Web quality editor. Making sure the media site lives up to the new quality requirements on the web as well as incorporating new trends.
10. Internet editor. Covering what is happening on the web. Even local papers should do this!

That’s the list.  I think Mindpark has done a great job in identifying some of the new roles of editors and journalists.

Do you have any suggestions for other roles which should be on the list?