Andrew Sherry and Liz Lufkin are attending an API seminar entitled Emerging Technology, Business and Policy for Senior Executives, in Palo Alto, CA, courtesy of fellowships provided by the Online News Association.
The forum brings together news directors from Yahoo! News, Wired News, Red Herring, Flickr and others.
Some early posts:
From: Lufkin, Liz <llufkin@usatoday.com>
To: Sherry, Andrew <asherry@usatoday.com>; Wilson, Kinsey S <kswilson@usatoday.com>; Czarniak, Chet <cczarnia@usatoday.com>
Sent: Wed Feb 09 11:16:13 2005
Subject: RE: day one
Good morning, I second Andrew's comments. Couple more thoughts:
- The beauty of RSS is that people will want to read things not because of where they're from: NY Times, for instance - but for what is said, and when. On some levels, this commodifies the news. But on others, it provides opportunities for people and companies who can figure out how to deliver what people want, when they want it. Voice and material that is viral will have a big impact.
- Aggregators are on the rise, apparently. (Blog Lines was just picked up by Ask Jeeves, etc.) I know we've talked about this some already - as Kinsey has pointed out, we're a de facto aggregator -- but I wonder if there's more we could be doing to leverage our experience in this area.
- Kinsey, to your comments last week, Dan Gilmor is looking for a business advisor. Perhaps we should introduce him to someone at Gannett? :) There was some lively discussion after his talk about why newspaper and broadcast companies were failing to keep pace with the fundamental changes that are rocking the media landscape. Dan blamed it on Wall St.'s insistence on high profit margins.
- Lots of talk about how search and RSS are going to merge. Not sure I see why, exactly, but will ask the question at some point.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sherry, Andrew
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 11:02 AM
To: Wilson, Kinsey S
Cc: Lufkin, Liz
Subject: day one
Kinsey,
Very good conference. Key takeaway from the first session: the publish/subscribe model has gone mass market through RSS and blogs, and there is a revenue model (embedded ads in RSS feeds and blogs).
Ideas that we could implement immediately: distribute advertising via RSS feeds (eg travel deals); pump an RSS feed out of Ben’s weblog; start migrating newsletter subscribers to RSS.
Many practical details and caveats available when time permits but scheduled from 8 am to 10 pm today.
Thanks and regards, Andrew