Monthly Archive for December, 2002
Gawker, the new ‘blog publishing’ venture has launched. Looks pretty good. Nice writing style. Quick and dirty. There’s a write-up over at Marketingfix (see link below).
But I checked out the bottom of the page where I found a link to Sitemeter. This reveals that on the day of its launch Gawker got a total of 6,304 (Wednesday), the average visit lasting just over a minute and a half, while those people viewed 11,023 pages in total (about 2 pages per visitor). This actually doesn’t matter much since nearly all of the content is on one page, as per the weblog stylee. In fact Weblogs generally adhere to the old Internet saying that it’s not about page impressions, it’s about users and audience.
On these numbers Sitemeter predicts that in a month Gawker will get around 166,000 visitors and over 287,000 page impressions a day, which is not bad going for a site edited by one person. That would equate to over eight million impressions a month. If those figures come true then Nick Denton and his crew are definitely on to something.
http://www.marketingfix.com/archives/new_adsupported_weblog_gawker_hopes_to_wow_nyc.php#000422
Matt Jones says lots of people at the BBC are signing up. Nick Denton also likes it.
What this means in practise is that MSN has deep-linked inside existing government sites to add another Public Services channel to its site. Although eGov implies this is an exclusive deal, I don’t think it will be, as other commercial operates come begging for government content.
This is all part of the government’s open ‘gateway’ project to work with public and private partners. This basically means that government will start to integrate its systems behind the scenes, while the commercial sector puts their own spin and customisation on the delivery of the channel. It’s doing this using web services technology like SOAP. The benefit with this is that the third party site can put filters on the governmental information coming in in order to tailor and contextualise the content to its audience.
The upshot could well be a mini-boom in the content industry, suddenly able to tap into vast government information at the drop of a piece of code. The BBC, which has been attacked by Azeem Azhar and Steve Bowbrick for not making it own tax-funded content available in a similar manner, may do well to watch this project.
This cautious optimism appears to be reflected in the tech sector, such as at ContractorUK which recently ran an article headlined “Ten pointers to an IT jobs market recovery”.
Me? I think it’s all rubbish. The housing market – especiailly in the UK – has gone mad, and interest rates will have to go up. People will slam the brakes on their spending. Advertising will flatline again, and it’ll be another two or perhaps even three years before we’ll see real signs of life. (But then what do I know? I’m no ‘media boss’).
Somehow I think Strand is under-estimating the influences of fashion on the mobile market. Without the vast teenage population on mobile phones that Europe has, they may not have picked up on the buzz that courses through the teenage psyche when you have the latest ringtone from the Sugerbabes on your phone.
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