Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been playing around with alpha and beta versions of some content payment and donation solutions. Today I deactivated Payyattention, which added a widget at the end of article pages asking for a quick, voluntary payment if you liked what you read and want to monetarily support me. (This was a trial, and no actual money was accepted.)

The developers of Payyattention have been working on several concepts all generally revolving around the mission of identifying and funding the best online content. A tipping system, even if it’s simpler than previous ones that have come and gone over the years and containing a social-signal component, apparently isn’t the way to go, they’ve decided, so the Payyattention widget is about to expire.

According to Steve Farrell of Payyattention, he and his partners are moving in a different direction that might best be described as “emergent authority structures.”

That geeky-sounding description can be simplified. Farrell says that his team’s future direction will focus on providing or pointing online users to the highest-quality news and entertainment and bringing it to a wider audience. This will be selected by “aggregating the sum of thousands of individual decisions about who and what is worth paying attention to,” he says. (If that sounds akin to Digg, ponder that the two y’s in Payyattention were inspired by the two g’s in Digg.)

An example of this is HourlyPress, a project of Payyattention that uses the linking behavior of a selected group of influencers on a particular topic to identify, each hour, the most important stories published recently online. The first example of this is NewsAboutNews, which has been operating for a few months now and tracks the Twitter link behavior of seven thought leaders on news and media who are frequent Twitter posters.

NewsAboutNews lists the top 10 articles about news and media as determined by article links that the seven selected influencers (”editors”) have included in tweets, combined with tweets and retweets by other “sources” (people who the editors follow on Twitter). A more complete description of the process of best-story selection can be found on the HourlyPress homepage.

Farrell believes this is truly significant and points to the future of news:

“We see this approach as being the future, displacing the broadcast model that we’ve all grown up with, RSS news readers, and haphazardly finding things through your friends on social networks.”

If I’m understanding the direction that Farrell and company are heading, it’s in identifying the best content about any topic or area in realtime by using a combination of computer algorithm and the online behavior of a selected group of humans with a shared expertise or interest, and their like-minded colleagues. You might think of it as in between Google News, which selects news stories purely by machine algorithm, and a website like Digg where lists of top stories are ranked by the recommendations of a mass of self-selected online users.

In between, perhaps there’s not only opportunity, but a better way to identify the best online articles and content streaming through the vast, rapidly moving river of Internet news.

For Farrell, it’s about the belief that consumers faced with news and information overload online will begin to look for the best filtering mechanisms.

As for the financial model that can be layered on top of emergent authority networks, that’s the big thing to be tackled. You can ponder that challenge more deeply by reading this post on “retrospective news” by Lyn Headley, one of Farrell’s partners.

One of my strongest interests this year has been news and content business models, and how to pay for content that’s given away free online. As a blogger (and my professional interest as a writer, researcher, and consultant on news business models), I’m especially interested in the wave of new solutions for websites and blogs to attract money from volunteer contributors.

This weekend, Kachingle, one of the first of this new wave of voluntary-pay solutions I heard and started writing about in early 2009, debuted its service in beta. (Disclaimer.) I’m excited to finally see this concept in action, and find out if my gut instincts are correct: that some websites and blogs can make a tidy revenue stream of voluntary user donations (a.k.a., crowdfunding).

Image from Kachingle.com

It’d be great if you would “Kachingle” me, which means that you like my blog and writing enough to monetarily support it (along with your other favorite sites and blogs that will start using Kachingle). Note the Kachingle “medallion” in the upper right of all my blog pages and sign up.

Here’s the quick version of Kachingle for the first-time user:

• Via the medallion, you’d sign up for a Kachingle account
• This will entail committing to a $5/month Paypal withdrawal from your account
• That $5 will be shared each month among all sites that you like most (and are Kachingle publishers carrying the medallion)
• Whenever you encounter a Kachingle-enabled site, if it’s one you like and visit often, mouseover the Kachingle medallion so it expands, then click “Kachingle website.com”
• Your money will be distributed only among sites you’ve “Kachingled” and based on number of site visits by you

So, now as a Kachingle paying member, your money (minus Kachingle’s admin fee) will be shared by the sites you’ve “Kachingled.” No money will go to Kachingle-enabled sites that you haven’t opted to support.

I’m in touch with several other companies also looking for monetary solutions for free online content, including several operating under the crowdfunding principle, and you’ll see me test them out on this blog. Currently I have alpha versions of SurfShare and Payyattention on this blog, but both of those are still in demo mode; no money is being accepted by them yet.

I’ve tried out a couple others but took them down due to coding conflicts. As those developers get things straightened out, I’ll experiment with their services, too.

This is going to be interesting to watch, across the web. Will voluntary user/reader support represent much money for websites and blogs that try it?

I don’t think that crowdfunding is going to save the news industry, though it could become a nice extra revenue stream for web news publishers. I think that for some bloggers, crowdfunding using streamlined donation solutions like Kachingle could be significant.

So Kachingle is off and running. Let’s see the rest of you launch soon, and see what happens!

I’ve been getting some pushback on my previous blog item about Newsday’s decision to put up a subscription wall to its website content except for Newsday print subscribers and subscribers of Optimum Online cable/Internet service (same ownership). This actually is a good business model for Newsday because of its unique position, though it probably could not be duplicated elsewhere, the critics suggest.

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

Consider this: Instead of a “no trespassing, freeloaders!” subscription wall, what if Newsday.com had instead come up with a special Newsday membership program? It could include all sorts of goodies that I’ve written about before with news membership schemes: premium news content and services; free or discounted tickets, or preferred seating, to news-related public lectures or other events; free iPhone or smart-phone custom news app; and (most importantly, in my view) lots of killer discounts and free deals from participating Newsday advertisers.

The memberships are given free to Newsday print subscribers and Optimum Online customers. Others pay a fee to be a member (let’s say $5 a week, the same as the cost of a web-only subscription). The difference is that the current Newsday strategy is forced; the membership option is voluntary. That is, with voluntary memberships, anyone can view Newsday.com content in full for free. So if you live in Manhattan and want New York news online, you can find it at NYTimes.com, NYDailyNews.com, NYPost.com, or Newsday.com. With Newsday’s current strategy, most new Yorkers will stick to the other three newspaper websites.

AND, to make matters worse, the forced subscription program has cut Newsday off from Google and the traffic it can send, and reduced the paper’s influence in the world outside of Long Island.

With a voluntary membership approach, Newsday would be selling something UNIQUE: its membership program offerings. With its existing strategy, it’s trying to sell COMMODITY news content. That can’t work.

What’s wrong with this webpage I encountered the other day?

Besides the lack of wisdom of a general-interest newspaper (Newsday) putting a pay wall on its website for non-unique content (my opinion, shared by many other media experts), the worse part is that Newsday.com is leaving money behind. Double-dumb.

Here’s my experience:

1. I saw a Twitter post linking to this article; clicked through.
2. Got to Newsday.com teaser page with intro to story and a link to “VIDEO: See the Droid in action.”
3. Video seemed interesting, so I clicked.
4. Got to the page above, which gave me ONLY the options of subscribing (to the newspaper; to Optimum Online, a NY cable service; or to Newsday.com for $5 a week) in order to access the video.

Since I live in Colorado, I of course have no interest in any of those options. But if I could have paid 25 cents, or may 50, I might have done so to watch the video. Newsday.com ignores money from non-local online users who might be willing to pay a one-off fee.

In practice, I and most savvy online users probably would have clicked and searched a bit more to find a similar video about the new Droid phone elsewhere for free. But some percentage of people in my position would have paid rather than go through the hassle of searching elsewhere if there was a one-off payment option available. So Newsday.com leaves money on the table.

I believe that the kind of web pay-wall strategy that Newsday.com is deploying is certain to fail. It’s been done before by other newspaper websites in years past and it’s failed. But if the company is determined to lock down its news content, the least it could do is offer more options for viewing specific content.

Sometimes you just have to marvel at the inability of newspapers to grasp web publishing. Wow.

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Earlier today Howard Weaver tweeted the following, which I can’t answer in 140 characters (!) so I’ll respond here. …

“Why do people (@steveouting et al) keep saying ‘block level’ info is best premium opportunity? Seems *most* likely to be citizen generated.” –@howardweaver

I don’t recall saying it’s the “best” premium online content opportunity, though I think it’s important. Why? Because I don’t know what’s going on with my neighbors, other than the ones I know or who are friends. No business, media, or service has yet been able to inform me what’s going on in my little neighborhood (about 120 houses, in my case).

Sure, if a neighbor two streets over murders his family and sets his house on fire, the local media will tell me the details of that. But if that neighbor is not a loony but comes in first place in the Boulder Marathon, I’d like to be alerted that that person lives near me. If a county paving crew is coming to resurface a street in the neighborhood, I’d like to learn about that. If another neighbor’s car got scraped by a vandal last night, I want to know about that.

A lot of the pieces are waiting to be put together; they exist already. Everyblock.com can find data from my neighborhood (well, not actually MY neighborhood, but those in other cities it’s reached so far), by parsing it from public databases and mapping it; it can tell me when a house in the neighborhood is sold and the selling price; it can identify streets in my neighborhood where crimes occurred, and give me the details. I could find photos taken within my neighborhood on Flickr, for those photos that are geo-tagged (a growing number are). I could use Twitter search filters to find tweets posted from within my neighborhood (again, those that are geo-tagged, such as those posted from a GPS-enabled phone).

So to find out as much as I can about what’s happening in my little neighborhood, it’s now more possible than ever before; in time there will be even more news and data about my neighborhood or my block. It’s just not convenient or easy to find it all now.

So where there may be opportunity is in bringing all this together into a by-block or by-neighborhood information service that I might find worth paying for. It would know my address and alert me to new data (neighborhood home sales, crime reports, fires, divorces, marriages, deaths, etc.) automatically. It would identify Twitter posts that came from my neighbors and give me a list of them. It would know who my Facebook friends are (because I permitted the service to look into my account), and pull out status updates and other Facebook submissions from those in my neighborhood. It would identify bloggers who live nearby and show me their latest posts.

Of course, Google might get to this level of information granularity at some point and offer such a service for free. But it doesn’t yet. If a local media entity offered such a service for a modest price, I might pay for it. The value worth paying for is in the service of making all that micro-local and micro-personal news and data come to me in a simple personal digital information stream.

Is that a big business opportunity? I don’t know. I know I’d like to have that information available.

So, it appears that we’ve passed the point within the newspaper industry of utter panic and all the publishers will not be colluding (ahem… I mean cooperating) to put most of their websites’ content behind pay walls. At least that CEO/publisher-group insanity is over — I hope.

Image: istockphoto.com

Instead, the meme within the industry is something I’ve long supported: Let’s keep most of our news content online free, so that we don’t lose advertisers and high reader numbers, and maintain our “googlejuice,” but let’s create more “premium” content and services that we can charge for … and people will find worthy of paying.

But what is this premium content that newspaper companies can produce for the web (and mobile devices) that will get online users spending?

This is a difficult question, with so much great information and news available elsewhere on the web for free. And then there’s the little matter of many newspaper staffs having been cut so much in the last couple years. Who’s going to produce this high-value content?

I’d like to use this blog item as a starting point for a discussion about what newspapers can create that they can sell. Please use the comments feature to share your ideas!

I’ll get things started with a comment of my own. It should be first in the list unless someone beats me to it…

Some folks who attended my “Why now is the best time ever to go into journalism!” keynote talk at the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas, on Friday asked how to get a copy of my presentation. A PDF version (big file!) is here.

I’m sure this will be mainstream across many professions before long, but for now it’s mostly limited to technology and media conferences. I’m talking about how speakers now get feedback from their audience as soon as they finish talking, via tweets from audience members posted immediately to Twitter. Overall, it’s a positive development that can benefit speakers — though something to get used to, and the speaker might take a few lumps.

Friday morning I gave a keynote talk on the third day of the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. It’s been a while since I gave a presentation solo to a fairly large audience, and so the audience tweeting was focused on what I was saying for close to an hour. (Being on a panel, your part is likely to only get a small number of tweeted comments.) As long as the attendees in my session used the conference hashtag (#ncmc09) and my Twitter name (@steveouting) or real name in their tweets, I could see the reaction from lots of people in the audience once my podium time was up.

There’s also a CoverItLive feed of Twitter posts during my talk on CoPress.org.

So while this is not the first time I’ve had a speaking engagement where audience members were tweeting, this was the first one where I got a really good feel for the new world of public speaking. It’s an interesting experience of getting feedback that wasn’t possible in the past. For example, I learned:

• What points people thought were most relevant (via multiple tweets of the same thought or quote).
• What things I said were misinterpreted or misunderstood. (That’s great information for next time; I know I need to do a better job explaining a particular slide or point.)
• What I screwed up. (A dollar figure I cited that apparently was wrong.) … Etc.

One interesting insight was when I got to a part of my talk where I discussed the need for Journalism schools to expand their reach to other disciplines, so that journalism students also learn entrepreneurial and business skills, and some computer science skills (or at least enough to understand how to talk with and work with MBAs and computer scientists). Some tweeters in the audience thought I was “bashing” journalism schools, and felt offended. Without those tweets, I never would have known that some people heard something different than I thought I said (which was that for this period in journalism’s history, business and technology skills are a necessary complement for a generation of journalists charged with reinventing the news business). I’ll phrase it differently next time.

And, of course, if you don’t have the oratory skills of President Obama (I definitely do not), you might hear a bit about that, too. … Seeing one person tweet that my delivery lacked enough voice inflection, I’ll go watch a few Obama speeches and work on that.

I think that as this audience behavior becomes even more common at conferences and lectures, it will help those speakers brave enough to look on Twitter for feedback to learn how to improve their delivery and message.

And, of course, it’s pretty cool for the audience members of a speech where one person is doing all the talking to be able to watch what others are tweeting. You get a sense of what points resonated with the audience; perhaps it’s something that your mind skipped over, or you interpreted differently. After the session, you can tap the collective minds of the rest of the audience to find the best stuff that was presented, and probably find additional insights beyond the speaker’s.

For speakers, get used to lots of people not looking at you but rather at their laptops or smart-phones. Lots of heads pointing down no longer means what it used to at a speech. It can mean that you’re presenting information that people find valuable enough to share via tweeting … or that everyone has noticed the ketchup stain on your tie. You’ll know after you’ve finished talking.

A new, and very large, Barnes & Noble bookstore opened here in Boulder, Colorado, recently, replacing a smaller store half a block away. I’ve wondered since construction started how the giant bookstore chain could justify a larger store when more and more we’ll be seeing people buying and reading books on digital tablets like Amazon’s Kindle. Wouldn’t smaller bookstores be in our future, not bigger ones?

With the announcement of B&N’s Nook e-reader device to compete with the Kindle, now I understand. The Nook digital strategy supports the brick-and-mortar business — the physical stores — of B&N.

I think the Nook business model is freaking brilliant! Here’s what it looks like:

• The Nook is priced about the same as a Kindle, but advances e-reader technology a bit. It features an E-Ink screen (no color) for reading, but also has a color navigation screen below the reading area.
• It adds a lend-a-book feature; it’s limited, but a great idea — and Amazon is sure to follow with something similar.
• You can preview and buy books anywhere you have a AT&T 3G signal or a wi-fi connection.
• And the best part: B&N says it “soon” will allow Nook owners to take their devices into any B&N physical store and read any e-book for free while in the store using the free wi-fi there!

I’m in awe of whoever thought up that last item. It’s a brilliant strategy to get more people into B&N bookstores. Nook owners will come in to read more than just the samples available to them outside the stores’ wi-fi range. They’ll buy coffee and perhaps other physical merchandise. They’ll read maybe a few chapters into a new book while lounging in a comfy chair in the store, then probably decide to buy the full e-book to finish at home later.

Sure, there might be a few freeloaders who spend time inside the stores reading entire books for free on their Nooks without actually buying the e-books. But so what?! I suspect that the increased coffee shop sales and the number of people who do buy the full e-books will far outweigh the freeloading. And the physical stores will be more crowded, sending the social signal the B&N stores are the place to be.

I had expected bookstores to eventually die off in larger numbers, and for chains like B&N to have fewer stores in the future. But this Nook strategy, as I see it, ensures a bright future for its brick-and-mortar stores. It gives the Nook a big advantage over the Kindle, since Amazon doesn’t have physical stores.

As for independent bookstores, if e-readers like the Nook, Kindle, et al truly take off, I’m not sure how they’ll stay healthy over the long run. But at least they probably have a longer lifespan than printed newspapers; I sense more people willing to say goodbye to the printed newspaper than the comfy printed book.

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column has been published: “Real-time, Relevant Ads Matched With Real-time News? What a Concept!.”

This is a really interesting topic, as we’re closing in on being able to match ads in real time contextually with news events as they quickly grow popular. I interview the CEO of OneRiot, a Boulder social-search company working on this model.

Right now, news happens fast, but ads that complement news can’t be efficiently added to accompany fast-breaking, going-viral news. Get the two in sync and you have the potential for effective, high-CPM ads sold in large quantities.

Example: Tornado rips through a Dallas neighborhood, resulting in a flood of traffic to local news website. Instead of showing all those Internet visitors cheap remnant ads, site utilizes technology to match the story with relevant ads, such as contractors, builders, window replacement providers, plumbers, insurance companies, home clean-up crews, disaster relief, hotels, etc.

This isn’t an easy problem to solve, because it will take advertisers a while to alter how they operate and provide feeds of ads that can be used to match news as it happens. And of course, not every breaking news event represents appropriate contextual ad opportunities. But this is coming, and I think it could be an important growth agent for online advertising for the news industry.

As a journalist trained way back in the 1970s, it’s amusing to compare how today the online the goal is to match content and editorial for financial gain. In my early days as a newspaper copy editor, part of my job was to make sure that didn’t happen — e.g., keep the United Airlines display ad off the page about the plane crash.