Ever since Nick Carr’s Atlantic article appeared on the web (finally), there’s been a spike in Google alerts for my name. Prior to this quote in the Atlantic, whenever I checked out a site where my name was mentioned, it almost invariably had a link back to my site — because someone was quoting me from my blog and linked back. But The Atlantic article had no link to my blog, even though Nick lifted the quote verbatim from the site. So here are all these reproduction of this citation, but no links. And I’m getting a spike in traffic from people searching for “Scott Karp blog” because they’re looking for the source.

Something is very wrong on the internet.

Take a look at the way Nick quoted me:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

It’s very similar to the way journalists have traditionally quoted sources that they actually TALKED to. Substitute “he said” for “he wrote,” and you would think that this was a phone or in person interview. Even when articles with such quotes are published on the web, the source isn’t typically linked because it doesn’t exist on the web.

But in this case, the source did exist.

The traditional practice of journalism also requires that you ask a source’s permission to quote them. Nick never asked my permission — he assumed he didn’t have to, because I had already published what he was quoting. And yet he doesn’t cite the post or even name my blog. It’s like he’s quoting me, personally, yet also citing a published source. When I first saw the quote, my gut reaction was to feel annoyed that Nick didn’t ask my permission, although technically he didn’t have to. Sources have forever complained about journalists quoting them out of context, and that’s exactly how I felt — yet if there had been a link, or a URL in print, I don’t think I would have felt that way.

It’s like Nick and The Atlantic were trying to play by the old rules and the new rules, and yet not really adhering to either.

So what does this have to do with the AP?

If The Atlantic, with its top shelf editorial standards, can do this, then why can’t a blogger quote AP — almost as if the AP were a person?

What’s happened is that the lines between quoting a person and quoting a published source have blurred.

Bloggers aren’t really reacting to the copyright issue, although that’s what everyone is taking about. It’s more like AP is giving on the record interviews to bloggers with its stories, and then when bloggers quote them, the AP turns around and claims the interview was “off the record.”

The AP found itself deeper in the hole when a blogger discovered a page where the AP was asking payment per word for citations. Yet the AP quotes from blogs and other sites — as if they were abiding by interview standards. Which has led some bloggers to turn the tables and demand payment for all the times the AP quoted them.

Geesh.

Yesterday Jay Rosen wondered on Twitter how the AP could have so distanced itself from Tom Curley’s speech in 2004. Mathew Ingram expressed what so many are of us were thinking:

@jayrosen_nyu: i’d love to explain how they got here from there — i wish i knew do you think curley has been steered wrong by others?

It just defies comprehension.

Here’s why I think this is all such a mess, why the AP is cutting off their nose to spite their face, defying comprehension, why Nick Carr thinks access to more information and more connections between information is making us dumber (also defying comprehension).

Nobody has really been able to conceptualize yet just how dramatic the change is in our traditional systems of information, media, publishing, reading, writing, relating ideas, and thinking itself. Nick Carr has come close with his recent writing, and he’s brave enough to try, but he gets too distracted by his nostalgia for a simpler age.

Nick argues that we are losing our ability to “read deeply,” e.g. read a whole book and contemplate it, without “distraction.” The problem is he’s using an antiquated yardstick to measure the quality of thought.

Maybe I don’t need 250 page books anymore because the web enables me to connect ideas and create narratives that I used to depend on book authors to do for me, because I wasn’t able to access all the information and connect all the dots myself.

Maybe the reason why Nick and so many other literati are losing their patience with long form information is that it is so fundamentally inefficient and inferior to connected bits of information.

You look at a book, read a book, and you easily perceive a coherent whole. You look at all the information on that book’s topic on the web, all connected, and you can’t see the sum of the parts — but we are starting to get our minds around it. We can’t yet recognize the superiority of this networked thinking process because we’re measuring it against our old linear thought process.

Nick romanticizes the “contemplation” that comes with reading a book. But it’s possible that the output of our old contemplation can now be had in larger measure through a new entirely non-linear process.

Just look at this post. If there’s any insight here (which still remains to be seen), it didn’t come from a linear process of A to B to C. It came from all of these seemingly random nodes connecting, and all these bits of information coming together, and then suddenly I saw the whole. If you had watched me, tracked my reading and my thoughts, you would have judged me positively scatological by traditional standards.

But even in presenting my “aha,” I’m jumping all over the place because I’m still trying to figure out how to make sense of networked thought process. The end of this post may seem completely disconnected from the beginning, but it’s all deeply connected. (Although it makes choosing a pithy title difficult.)

So what’s the lesson for the AP and every other media business? We don’t “get it” yet — none of us do. We’re starting to connect the dots, slowly but surely, but we’re looking through a glass darkly at the change we’re immersed in.

As Jon Fine observed about all the Titans of Media speaking at the All Things D conference:

It is sobering when not even the smartest guys in the room have any plausible answers. But then, no one has the answers.

What is increasingly clear is that the thought processes, assumptions, and standards that governed analogue media, information, and thought are increasingly going to get us into trouble in a digital media world.

What I’m hoping is that we’re bumbling through a “period of stupid” before we realize that we’ve actually become a lot smarter.

The next media business to connect those dots will be the next Google.

UPDATE

TheAtlantic.com is now linking to this blog in Nick’s article, which I suppose proves the squeaky wheel maxim, but there still aren’t links to other quoted blogs, e.g.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

I’ve searched for this blog, but can’t find it (for shame, Google) — so a link isn’t just about principle, it’s about real utility.

Of course, Nick actually talked to Bruce, and also quoted him the old fashioned way. Ah, well.

Take the story of flooding in Iowa, for example. The AP is covering this story extensively, as you can see in this Google News search result. But local news media in Iowa is also covering the story extensively, as you can see in this search limited to Iowa sources — the story is happening in their own backyard, giving these local sources a unique perspective and knowledge.

So if a blogger wanted to discuss the Iowa floods and needed a source to cite, they can easily find an original local source instead of the AP story. And they can think of the link and the traffic they send as a contribution to the local news outlet’s original reporting, particularly the local newspapers struggling with new economic realities.

Or let’s take a national example. Britain and the EU have announced new sanctions against Iran. The AP covered this story, but so did national news sites like the Washington Post. Link to the Post instead, to support their original reporting.

To seize this opportunity, national and local news sites could get the word out to bloggers that they want the links and the traffic, if AP doesn’t. It’s up to them whether they agree with AP’s attempt to copyright the commodity of the news event itself (via Saul Hansell):

“The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story,” said Timothy Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu said that the case is not clear-cut, but he believes that The A.P. is likely to lose a court case to assert a claim on that issue.

“It’s hard to see how the Drudge Retort ‘first few lines’ is a substitute for the story,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Kennedy argued, however, that The Associated Press believes that in some cases, the essence of an article can be encapsulated in very few words.

The problem with this argument is that, if the “essence of the article” is the fact of the event itself, e.g. floods in IA, and that is the entire value of the content, then the content is sorely lacking in value. If local and national news sites can create more value than just the commodity statement of the facts, which be “given away” in a snippet, then they can earn all of the links and traffic on the web for their original reporting. They should also look at how they allocate resources to creating original content that people want to and can link to vs. licensing content that nobody wants to or can link to (especially when that same licensed content appears on Google, Yahoo, and hundreds of other sites).

If local and national news sites really want to seize the opportunity, they won’t just leave it to bloggers to link to their original reporting — they will start linking to each other’s original reporting, and help each other capture that economic value, which they so clearly need.

Normally, you wouldn’t list a service that isn’t a partner, but in this case Google chose to list Facebook and let users know loud and clear that they can’t connect to their friends on Facebook because the feature has been DISABLED BY FACEBOOK.

This is subtle in some ways, but in others it’s as big a smack as Apple’s brilliant I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ads.

Google is betting that hell hath no fury like a user denied access.

Probably a good bet.

This time I’m going to pick on The Atlantic, which like the Washington Post is a publication I have a great deal of affection for (published by my former employer Atlantic Media), so this is not a general critique but rather a very specific example representative of a much larger industry-wide problem (i.e. I could find instances of the same problem on virtually any magazine website).

It started this past Saturday when a friend (also a former Atlantic employee) emailed me asking me why I hadn’t mentioned my quote in the Atlantic’s latest cover story by Nick Carr. I responded saying I had no idea I had been quoted.

I immediately when to TheAtlantic.com, where I discovered that the current issue was still the June issue, and that the July issue with Nick’s cover story still hadn’t been posted. This is a common practice among publishers who make early receipt of the new issue a benefit for print subscribers.

But by doing that the publisher basically thumbs their nose at web readers and violates a fundamental principle of the digital age — if a user knows your content exists, but can’t access it, the result will be frustration or worse.

The Atlantic already made a brave move by following NYTimes.com and removing their paid subscriber wall on the website.

But still in this instance the print subscriber had access to content that, despite the power of the web, I couldn’t access.

To make matter worse, I stopped by Borders on Sunday to see if they had the July issue — physically driving to a location to obtain content that already existed in digital form seemed ludicrous. But I was willing to pay for the print issue (and probably would have read more than Nick’s article once I had it in hand).

Sadly, on the rack I found the June issue, just like on the website.

I joked to my friend by email about the frustrations of being unable to access content in the digital age. He offered to fax over the article… or 8-track tape it.

So I resigned myself to waiting for it to go up online, which I knew it would shortly.

This afternoon, I saw on TechMeme a link to this CNET story about the Atlantic article. Great, I thought, it’s up online.

It’s not yet on the Web, but the July issue of The Atlantic has an exceptional and provocative article by Nick Carr, asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Being a web user on a mission, as most are, I didn’t bother to read the sentence — I just clicked on the link and found the same June issue.

This is ridiculous, I thought — here is a someone who has access to the article and wants to link to it, but can’t. And here I am, a consumer eager to read the article, and I can’t. Wall-to-wall frustration.

But guess who stepped in to save the day… can you guess?

This afternoon, I received a email from the Google alert ego feed for my name:

Another print publisher trumped by Google.

But it gets even worse.

I clicked on the link in the email which took me to the article, which is in fact online. Actually, the whole July/August issue is online.

It’s not linked on TheAtlantic.com homepage yet, as of this writing — and it’s not on the current issue page.

But Google knows it’s there. Google knows everything. And most importantly, Google gives me what I want, even when print publishers, still trying to balance demands of two entirely different modes of publishing, choose to prioritize print over web.

The web is Google’s first and only priority. That’s why they are beating the pants off of every legacy media company on the web.

But wait, there’s more.

I found the section of the article where I was quoted, unbeknown to me, because Nick lifted it from one of my blog post. In fact, it’s in a section about bloggers who have commented on the issue at hand.

But there’s no links to those posts. So readers have no opportunity to see my quote in context, which was a post called The Evolution From Linear Thought To Networked Thought.

There are other links in the online version, so additional links may be added before it goes live. But most print publishers have no editorial process in place for converting print content to web content, e.g. putting in links, which leads invariably to a frustrating web user experience.

If publishers want to maximize value on the web, they have to put the web first every time — that means you can’t just take what you create for print and dump it on the web, regardless of the cost efficiencies, because you’re destroying value for web users.

If a user can’t find what they want going straight to your site, the next time they are going to go straight to Google — and Google will capture the value of that content distribution.

But this story has one last delicious drip of irony. Nick agues in the Atlantic article, with his usual brilliance, that Google and digital media is actually changing the way we think — to our detriment.

I agree with Nick that the way we think is likely changing, which is what my post was about. But I don’t know that I agree with Nick’s pessimism that the change is for the worse. Yet the way I’m quote in the article, it leaves open the possibility that I agree with Nick that the change is negative.

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

But if you read my whole post, you’d find the following:

What I’d be most curious to know is whether online reading actually has a positive impact on cognition — through ways that we perhaps cannot measure or even understand yet, particularly if we look at it with a bias towards linear thought.

If anything is making us dumber, it’s that we’re betwixt and between old modes and new modes of both information and thought.

The irony of The Atlantic’s print article is that by bounding the reader into a box where they can’t seek more context, and worse, by being the antithesis of the digital media experience that Nick describes, it becomes irrelevant to its own thesis.

Fortunately, if you take my quote from the print article and put it into Google, you can find my post — and the missing context.

I’d say in this instance, Google actually made me smarter.

If publishers followed Google’s example, they’d be smarter, too.

UPDATE

Lot’s of people are now discussing Nick’s article — although mostly they are discussing the CNET post ABOUT the article, because the article itself is not online — I’m guess Matt Asay is a print subscriber, who couldn’t wait for the article to get up on the web to start talking about it.

It’s great to give print subscribers an advance look at the magazine — except those subscribers have blogs, and they don’t really want to keep with the print-centric program. They want to talk about it NOW, not when it finally shows up on the web. Matt even scanned in the brilliant cover:

UPDATE #2

You can find all of The Atlantic’s July/August 2008 issue content indexed by Google News here, which is how I got the Google alert.

You can embargo the newsstand, but you can’t embargo Google, which is the new newsstand.

In print, a design flaw is unlikely to cause a reader to abandon a newspaper or magazine entirely — they are a largely captive audience. But it will cause them to abandon a website.

Google understands this better than any web company, which is why they are the most successful. Google is obsessed with making sure its users never fail, no matter how “stupid” they are. Google makes users feel smart. That’s why they keep coming back.

Invariably, when I write about a negative experience with a website, e.g. Twitter or WashingtonPost.com, someone puts forth what I call the “stupid user” argument — essentially, I failed because I’m a stupid user. And if I were a better user, I would have been more successful with the site.

For example, I discovered that WashingtonPost.com has a local version of its homepage, which it displays to logged in users. Creating different versions of a site for different users is web-savvy. If I had been logged in, I would have found the content I was looking for on the homepage. That’s all good, and much to their credit.

Unfortunately, I never log in to WashingtonPost.com, although I read it frequently. Therefore, the “stupid user” argument goes, the failure to find the content I wanted was my fault.

Here’s the problem — my failure to find the information I wanted is not MY problem, because I went to Google and found it. I succeeded. The failure is the site’s problem, because I abandoned it and went instead to a site that would help me succeed without having to be smarter.

WashingtonPost.com and, to be fair, most other sites that require registration assume that users will register to help the site achieve its goals, whether customizing content or targeting advertising.

But users don’t care about the site’s goals. They care about THEIR OWN goals.

Nowhere on WashingtonPost.com’s homepage do I see clear a message that registering or logging in will help me achieve MY goals. There’s a link to the Washington version of the homepage in the upper right corner, which has the best of intentions, but because I didn’t find it, it might as well not exist.

This is why Google rules the web. In Google’s world, the user is always right. Google knows that if users fail at their task, they will abandon Google in a heartbeat. Google’s dominance is EARNED, with every search, every click.

I saw Google’s Marissa Mayer give a talk at Web 2.0 a few years back about Google page load times — the talk had a narrowly focused, OCD quality to it. It was weird on the face of it. But this is how Google wins. By obsessing over user experience above all else.

This is also why Google punishes advertisers who try to trick users or provide a poor user experience. Because it reflects poorly on Google. And users don’t come back.

A commenter argued that I should have asked the Washington Post for a comment before publishing a critiquing of their site. My response was that in an analysis of a user experience with a web site, the publisher’s intent DOESN’T MATTER. Web users are utterly unforgiving. If it doesn’t work the way I want, I’m gone in a click. There is no other side to the story.

That’s brutal and, as the commenter asserted, rude and irresponsible. It just doesn’t seem fair.

But it’s also the reality of the web. Google understands this. If publishers want to compete, they need to accept this reality, swallow their pride, and realize that the user experience is EVERYTHING. Design on the web is not about ideals — all that matters is whether the user succeeds.

Before the web, having great content was enough. The irony of my critique of WashingtonPost.com is that it wasn’t a critique of content. They had GREAT content, when I actually found it — there weren’t really any editorial shortcomings. The critique had much more to do with software design than with editorial quality or judgment. News organizations need to add software user interface design to their core competencies.

Lesson for publishers: The web is more about applications than publications.

This is why it’s so damaging for news organizations to apply the standards of print publishing for design, content, and experience — they simply don’t apply on the web. The reality is that designers didn’t necessarily know if they were successful in print, because people kept subscribing to the newspaper anyway. But on the web, success or failure is evident with every click.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that user interface and user experience design are HARD. Even the best designer can’t always anticipate what users will do — or fail to do. Sites need to create a continuous feedback loop with users and improve their design and user experience over time.

WashingtonPost.com’s homepage has a far better design than many other newspaper websites, but its relative merits didn’t matter for my specific use case.

And to be clear, helping users succeed isn’t about pandering. My goal in going to WashingtonPost.com, as it frequently is, could be to find out what’s going on in the world. How I determine whether I’ve succeeded can be much more a function of the quality of editing and content. But when I want specific information, my criteria are far more narrow, and much more unforgiving.

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, web users are actually getting MORE hyper-focused and. unforgiving

To remain relevant as a destination, news sites need to help me achieve ALL my objectives ALL of the time.

Just like Google.

UPDATE:

Google is inviting users to help them test out new features of Gmail. Can you imagine your average news site integrating users this deeply into their design process? I know that some have made meaningful efforts to test new designs, but Google keeps upping the ante on the embrace of users.

There were severe storms in the Washington area today, and the power went out in our Reston office. I wanted to find some information about the status of power outages to see whether we should go into the office tomorrow. Here’s what I found on the homepage of WashingtonPost.com:

This is the WASHINGTON Post, right? So where’s the news about Washington? We just got pounded by a nasty storm — but it’s not homepage worthy.

Fortunately, although it’s not top of mind for the homepage editors, it is top of mind for readers — I found the article about the storm in the list of most viewed articles in the far corner of the homepage. I go to the article, where I find highly useful information like this:

“We have a ton of trees down, a ton of traffic lights out,” said Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Kraig Troxell.

Great, that’s very helpful.

So what’s my next step, when I can’t find what I want on the web? Of course:

Thanks, Google, just what I was looking for:

Wow, I thought — it can’t be that bad, can it? So I went back to the WashingtonPost.com homepage. This time, I clicked on the Metro section in the main navigation. Sure enough, the storm was the lead story.

And there at the top was the link to the same useless article. But then below the photo was this tiny link: Capital Weather Gang Blog: Storm Updates

I clicked on the link, and wow:

Real-time radar, frequent storm warning updates with LINKS, and… a link to that page I had been SEARCHING for on Dominion Power about outages. (Note the link to the useless news story buried at the bottom.)

It was a brilliant web-native news and information effort — BURIED three layers deep, where I couldn’t FIND it.

Is it any wonder why Google makes $20 billion on search?

And what’s the root cause problem? The useless article with no real-time data and no links was written for the PRINT newspaper. And the homepage is edited to match what will be important in the PRINT newspaper. And the navigation assumes I think like I do when I’m reading the PRINT newspaper. Want local news? Go to the metro SECTION.

The Capital Weather Gang blog is a great example of “getting” the web — but then making it impossible to find…

Oh, and if you click on the tiny Weather link on the homepage (which I only noticed on my fourth visit), you get a page that looks like the weather page in, you guessed it, the print newspaper — all STATIC.

Again, it takes another click to get to the dynamic, web-native weather blog.

Yesterday, I saw a ranking of the top 25 “newspaper websites” — and that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it? These are newsPAPER websites, instead of WEBsites.

WashingtonPost.com ranks #5, with this comment:

The figures from the WPO 10-Q indicate that revenue for the company’s online business is relatively small and represents only a modest part of the sales for the newspaper group. That is unfortunate. If any company should be right behind The New York Times in internet revenue it is the Post.

So much potential, like the hugely innovative weather blog, crushed by the weight of tradition. And it’s not just the Post, of course (not to unfairly pick on them) — it’s every print publisher boxed in by the legacy business.

Here’s an idea for newspaper website homepages — just a search box and a list of blogs. Seriously. Instead of putting all the web-native content and publishing in the blog ghetto, like NYTimes.com does, why not make that the WHOLE site? (I mean seriously, having a blog section on the website is like having a section in the paper for 14 column inch stories.)

It’s like newspapers on the web as saying: here’s all the static stuff we produced for the paper — you want all of our dynamic web innovation? Oh, that’s downstairs, in the back room. Knock twice before you enter.

It’s a shame — so much marginalized value.

I bet I could stop going to the New York Times site entirely and just subscribe to all of their blog RSS feeds, and still get all the news, but in a web-native format, with data and LINKS.

Of course, the only way to do that is click on 50 RSS buttons one at a time. And they only publish partial feeds.

Sigh.

UPDATE:

Mark Potts had a similar frustration with the storm coverage — and it looks like he never even found the weather blog.

Another big missed opportunity — the Dominion electric site can’t tell me specifically if the power is still out in our office in Reston. But I bet Washington Post readers with offices in that area - or even in our office condo — could help me out, if someone gave them a place to do so. The Post weather blog has a ton of comments, but information is haphazard — how about a structured data form where you can post your power outage status, maybe map it on Google maps?

Lastly, at least Google knows how to make the Post’s weather blog findable:

UPDATE #2:

Jonathan Krim, the local editor from WashingtonPost.com, offers an important clarification:

As the editor for local coverage, I appreciate the comments on our coverage yesterday. But I am compelled to point out:

The page Scott uses for his example is not our home page for local users. We have one for our very large non-local audience, which is what you display in your blog post. You can change your settings, making the Washington home page your default, by clicking at the very top of the page. Had you looked at our local home page, you would have had a different experience, with very prominent display links to our capital weather gang coverage.

My response:

Jonathan,

Thanks for the comment. I had already heard that others who were logged in had a different experience. Perhaps the lesson then is about assumptions around user registration and login. I’m a dedicated reader of WashingtonPost.com, but I never login. It may be necessary to supplement the customization for logged in users with geo-targeting based on IP address, which isn’t perfect, but it might have worked for me yesterday.

I also think you should integrate the Capital Weather Gang blog into the main weather page, instead requiring another click to get to it.

I think the main lesson is the tremendous pressure that Google puts on every site to make the user experience perfect. You had the data and coverage I wanted. You had the customization for local users. But somehow I still missed it and went to Google instead.

UPDATE #3:

Several people have commented that my not finding out about the Post’s local customization for logged in users, either from the Post directly or through another source, means I didn’t have all the facts. In one sense, that’s true, but the example here is not about WashingtonPost.com as an object in a vacuum with a certain feature set, or what the WashingtonPost.com thinks about how their site works, but about MY EXPERIENCE using the site. My experience was lacking, and therefore I concluded that it would be lacking for other users like me. Some people might have clicked on the Weather link, or gone straight to the Metro section, or were logged in. But my experience represents this is not true for all users.

And the point of this post is not about the extent of WashingtonPost.com’s shortcomings, which may not be that significant, i.e. they are easily correct, but about the demands of the web as dictated by the existence of Google. Google is obsessed with not letting any users fall through the cracks. Despite having customization for local users and the right content, I still fell through the cracks as a user of WashingtonPost.com. And that is the key fact of this post.

That’s the brutal reality of the web that we all live by. We can have all these features and content and design and intent, but the user experience is the only arbiter. Google understands this better than newspapers. If newspapers understood it better, their sites would get better, which would create more economic value for them on the web.

Sue Decker, president of Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), addressed the advertising industry during a keynote this morning at the 2008 Advertising 2.0 New York conference.

“Yahoo! is helping to accelerate the transformation of how display advertising is both bought and sold,” Decker told the audience earlier this morning. “First, we are developing the technology, products and platforms that are designed to help advertisers find the right audiences and publishers find the right advertisers. Second, we are partnering with publishers to secure and monetize inventory that advertisers and agencies find desirable. And third, we are partnering with advertisers and agencies to channel demand to the right consumer.”

Yahoo! President Sue Decker Outlines Vision for Online Advertising Transformation in Advertising 2.0 New York Keynote

Over time, the company also looked beyond click-through rates to rank ads. Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads. Soon, the loading speed of a landing page will also be considered, Mr. Fox said.

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google, Mr. Fox said.

The Humans Behind the Google Money Machine

“An incentive to advertisers to improve their ads.”

Think about that for a second.

Compared to: “help advertisers find the right audiences and publishers find the right advertisers”

While Yahoo is developing systems to enable advertising online to work the same as it does offline, Google is completely reinventing how advertising works.

I gave a keynote at the MagsUniversity conference in Toronto yesterday, and I put this on slide:

Dear Advertiser,

Based on our evaluation, including feedback from our audience, we regret to inform you that your ads suck.

To improve the performance of your campaign, and to stop annoying our audience, please take immediate steps to improve the quality of your campaign creative.

Sincerely,
Your faithful publisher

P.S. Fed up with your agency? We’d be happy to help.

In the room full of publishers there was stunned laughter, and a lot of nodding heads. Publishers understand the problem of bad advertising at a deep level, and yet what do they do about it? They are stuck in the system. The advertiser gives you a crappy ad, you run it, it creates no value for your audience, and the advertiser blames you.

Google, on the other hand, has the numbers to call bullshit on bad advertising.

Social networks are running crappy traditional ads and vaporizing ad value.

When I wrote last week about why traditional advertising fails on the web, some responded that this is why an ad-supported Web 2.0 will fail.

But the problem isn’t advertising as a means of monetizing media — it’s a complete lack of new ideas.

So let’s sum up the new ideas for digital media advertising:

• Social network user data
• Video
• Mobile

Am I missing anything? I’m sure I am, but you get the point — these aren’t even ideas, they are contexts. Lot’s of social networks. Lot’s of video. Lot’s of mobile use. So we should be able to make money with advertising, right? Just slap on some banners, some pre-roll, and some text ads.

Google got to bcome Google because nobody thought search was monetizable — even Google wasn’t sure, until lightning struck.

Just think about the term “monetize” — it’ generic. It assumes that innovation is not required. Just get an audience and then “monetize.” Then flush.

But even Google, outside of pay-per-click search and contextual ads, is as stuck as everyone else. They put someone in charge of YouTube “monetization” and the result (according to Om):

My sources say that YouTube made around $80 million in 2007, a number that could grow by more than 50 percent this year to around $125 million. A Bear Stearns report estimated YouTube revenues at around $90 million for 2008.

Advertising 2.0 = FAIL (so far)

Google’s search advertising model didn’t spring forth fully formed. It was iterated, and many of the key concepts were borrowed — something many people don’t realize. But a few key market-defying decisions, and one stunning insight, made it all work. Here is a brief history to inspire, taken from John Battelle’s The Search (required reading for anyone who wants to innovate anything on the web):

In late 1999, Google began testing a program to sell ads on a CMP basis, the dominant ad model of the time.

But instead of using banner ads, the dominant ad format of the time, Google decided to sell only unobtrusive text ads. And they decided to target those ads based on search terms, and to keep the ads separate from the main search results.

Advertising first appeared on Google.com in January 2000 — text ads were sold by a sales rep on a CPM basis. (Yes, that’s right, there was no pay-per-click, no self-serve, no bidding.)

“It didn’t generate much money.” - Sergey Brin

In what would turn out to be a massive irony, based on its initial lack of success with advertising, Google had planned to give its inventory over to DoubleClick, the largest banner ad business of the time.

But then the bubble burst in Spring 2000, and the online ad banner market crashed.

In the wake of the bust, Google introduced a self-serve model for buying text ads — they got the idea from GoTo.com, although they did not then adopt GoTo’s pay-per-click model.

In October 2000, Google introduced AdWords, with this announcement on the main page, “Have a credit card and 5 minutes? Get your ad on Google today.”

This first version of AdWords still sold ads on a CPM basis — the program was successful.

In 2001, Google’s ad revenue was on pace to hit $85 million, but was outpaced by Overture (the renamed GoTo), which earned $288 million in ad revenue selling pay-per-click ads on an auction basis.

(Nobody remembers Overture because it was never a destination — it powered PPC advertising for other sites, and was later acquired by Yahoo, to become Yahoo Search Marketing — yes, more irony.)

In February 2002, Google introduced a new version of AdWords, two years after launching its first ad program and nearly a year and a half after first launching AdWords.

The new version of AdWords adopted Overture’s pay-per-click auction model, where advertisers bid on how much they will pay per click.

If Google had copied Overture entirely, the history of the web might be very different… but they didn’t.

Instead, Google introduced a breathtaking innovation.

Overture’s pay-per-click auction model allowed advertisers to buy their way to the top of the listings — highest bid gets the most exposure.

Google realized there was a problem with this approach. If an advertiser bid their way to the top of the ranking with an irrelevant ad, and no one clicked on it, then nobody made any money from the advertising.

Fortunately for Google, they understood relevance.

Google introduced clickthrough rate, as a measure of the ad’s relevance, into the ranking algorithm. So if an ad with a lower bid per click got clicked more often, it would rank higher.

The result — a lower bid ad with more clicks generated more revenue than a higher bid ad with fewer clicks.

As Battelle put it:

Google’s decision to factor clickthrough into an advertiser’s ranking forced an economy of relevance and profit into the pay-per-click model.

That “economy” turned Google into the great money-making machine that it is today.

Google had two moments of pure brilliance. The first was PageRank. The second was introducing relevance into the pay-per-click auction model.

So brilliantly obvious — yet nobody else at the time thought of it.

What’s notable is that Google didn’t invent search or auction-based pay-per-click advertising — their innovation was perfecting it.

The challenge of innovation is that we are all boxed in by what we know, by our assumptions about how things work.

Nobody at the time thought there was anything wrong with Overture’s model — it was making lots of money.

Nobody at the time thought search was a business — it was expensive and resource intensive, so most portals like Netscape, AOL, and Yahoo outsourced it — ultimately, to Google.

The next Google-like innovation is right in front of us — we just need to see past our own assumptions.

Forget what you know.

Google is the ONLY company that has succeeded in web advertising. Why? Because they perfected search advertising, an entirely web-native form of advertising, whose value proposition is perfect for the web and which has no offline analogue.

Why do traditional advertising formats fail on the web? Because people have no patience for them, as they did in traditional media, where we were habituated to looking at print ads or watching TV commercials.

Research by Jakob Nielsen puts this into sharp relief:

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.

“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Dr Nielsen.

“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

This is why pre-roll ads on online video = fail, why overlay ads on online video = fail, and why online display advertising is a commodity business, where online publishers have to shovel page views and battle for every $1 increase in CPM. Some sites can get $50-100 CPMs on some pages from certain advertisers, but $1 — even $0.10 — CPMs are common on the web.

Just ask newspapers and magazines about their ad pricing power in print vs. online. Can you imagine a print publisher getting $1 for 1,000 times an ad was seen? You’d go bankrupt after one issue.

Here’s a sobering thought: If all advertising in offline media got converted to current online media CPMs, it would probably be worth a fraction of the value, i.e. $300 billion would become $50 billion.

If 1 to 1 transfer of advertising value is at one end of the spectrum and 1 to 0 transfer of classified advertising value to Craigslist is at the other extreme, most of online media is closer to Craigslist — online publishers are vaporizing advertising value in the shift of dollars online.

Even Google has struggled with this problem, as they still make virtually all of their money from pay-per-click search and contextual ads.

But why, why is this so? Because most online advertising creates NO value for consumers.

Search advertising, because it is relevant to what users are already searching for, creates enormous value. But the search advertising is largely about helping people buy what they already know they want.

What about the objective of advertising to convince people to buy things they don’t yet know they want or need (or what never otherwise want or need)?

Consider this: What is the most successful type of advertising online advertising that convinces people to buy something they weren’t in the market to buy?

Email spam.

Spam is probably the most inefficient form of advertising every created, and it creates more hate and loathing among consumers than the worst 30 second TV ad ever created.

But it works. With millions of emails sent at virtually no cost, a 0.001% response rate can still be highly profitable.

The reason why most online advertising fails is that web users see it as little better than spam.

Display ads are ignored in the same mindset as spam is ignored — I’m trying to get something done online and your display ad is getting in my way.

As Nielsen highlights, web use is driven more and more by utility.

Despite the popular notion of viral content, e.g. viral videos, even entertainment on the web most often happens in a utilitarian context.

Sure people browse videos on YouTube, but searching YouTube is the killer app. Want to find video content? Search for it on YouTube, and chances are someone has uploaded it (legally or not). Why do you think Google acquired it?

Social networks have hit hard against the online advertising wall — I’m trying to talk to my friends and you’re showing me ads — get out of my face. I’m trying to talk to my friends and you’re shoving down my throat notifications of what my friends are buying (i.e. Facebook Beacon) — get out of my face!

Is it any surprise that most ad spending still happens offline? Most advertisers use the web themselves. They know how annoying traditional ad formats are on the web.

So what’s the solution?

We need to invent new forms of advertising on the web. But it’s more than that. Facebook introduced Beacon as a new form of advertising — but it didn’t create a lot of value for users.

Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers.

This would seem self-evident, but it has not been the case with traditional advertising, which was developed for CAPTIVE audiences, and web users are increasingly anything but captive.

Scanning the financial press this morning, readers would have seen a disturbing yet familiar burst of oil news: rising prices, aghast lawmakers and protests in Europe. But another piece of bad news topped off the fray, one that was much less familiar to close observers of the oil market:

If that’s an accurate assessment, prices are going to have to double another couple of times to bring demand into line with supply,” Kevin Drum wrote at The Washington Monthly. “$500 oil, anyone?”

Already, a financial blogger was out of the gate with a renewed call to boost domestic oil production

What prompted the new jump? It’s never an easy question to answer, as The Washington Post explained in its lead coverage today

As for today’s uptick to $135, another report from Bloomberg News blamed traders engaged in wrong-way betting. The wrong bet, by the way, was for cheaper oil.

As Milton Ezrati, senior strategist at money manager Lord Abbett, told USA Today: “It’s the next black beast.”

Wow, just look at all the third-party sources linked here: Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, USA Today, and an independent blogger! The value for the reader here is enormous — not only do they get Times blogger Mike Nizza’s framing and perspective, they get links to all of this original reporting and analysis on this issue.

It’s great to see “the newspaper of record” has so evolved on the web — gone are the days when they to claim they have the last word on a topic or issue. The Times realizes that there is a rich universe of journalism on the web, and they can best serve their readers by helping them find the best reporting, alongside the NYT’s own gold standard reporting.

Here’s an example of why this isn’t just linking, but link JOURNALISM:

The Post article didn’t mention the new estimate on the future of crude. But Bloomberg News tacked it on to the end of an article suggesting that, far from being to blame for the soaring cost of oil, OPEC was in fact powerless to control it, according to one official:

OPEC has “no magic solution’’ to the surge, Qatar’s oil minister said. Prices are “out of the hands’’ of the organization, according to Libya’s top oil official.

Nizza isn’t just lazily linking to these stories — he’s read them, compared them, identified shortcomings, extracted key facts and issues, and connected the dots.

In a traditional newspaper article, all of these facts and analysis would have been synthesized, but the reader wouldn’t have had the opportunity to read for themselves the source material. This post does what journalism is supposed to do — empower people with facts, understanding, and perspective about important issues.

And the Times has clearly gotten over the red herring fear of “sending people away.” The Lede has helped readers make sense of what they read elsewhere, helping to make the Lede more essential than those other source. In my case, the Lede actually helped me figure out what else to read on this issue — by sending me to high quality sources on a topic of interest, as Google does, the Lede has ensured that I’m going to come BACK for more.

In other words, the Times has given me a reason NOT to go to the WSJ or The Washington Post first, and instead come here first — linking to your competitors is a great way to disintermediate them.

I found this Lede post on the front page, as a supporting item to the original reporting for the print newspaper:

The print story quotes lot’s of sources, but of course it has no links, so the reader has only the information that fits in the article. Readers of Nizza’s link journalism piece, on the other hand, have the wealth of many different sources.

But I think the two pieces complement each other well — the New York Times should look for ways to integrate them more tightly.

I’m waiting for the day when NYTimes.com is bold enough to feature a blog post as a top headline on its homepage, and end the content caste system that separates its print journalism from its online journalism.

I’m curious to learn more about Mike Nizza, who did all of this great link journalism. Too bad he’s just an empty byline with no identity on NYTimes.com. Oh well, I guess the NYT still hasn’t fully evolved on the web (hint: the web is about PEOPLE — and journalists are people, too).

From Robert Scoble:

Loic Le Meur did a little test with me a couple of weeks ago. He listed his Le Web conference on both Facebook and Upcoming.org. Here’s the Facebook listing. Here’s the Upcoming.org one.

The Facebook one can’t be seen if you don’t have a Facebook account. It’s NOT open to the public Web. Google’s spiders CAN NOT REACH IT.

He put both listings up at exactly the same time and did no invites, nothing. Just let people find these listings on their own.

The Facebook one is NOT available to the Web. It has 467 people who’ve accepted it. The Upcoming.org one IS available to Google and the Web. It has 101 people on it.

From Fred Wilson:

Facebook provides an incredibly valuable service to my three children. The other day I saw my oldest daughter get an invite to a party on Facebook, she accepted it, and then went to look at her accepted invite page. It was her social calendar, every party she plans to attend in the next two months is there. She noticed she had another event that night and then switched her acceptance to tentative. She uses Facebook the way I use Outlook. Who cares if she can port her social graph out of Facebook? It’s not going to happen anytime soon because the social context and data FLOW through Facebook is providing enormous value to her and her friends.

From Marshall Kirkpatrick:

Facebook and MySpace have replaced email for a substantial number of young people. Facebook, though, appears to believe that some things are better off not discussed in conversations between its members.

We’ve found two instances of words that will get a Facebook message blocked and we presume there are others. The company says it’s spam control, but it seems creepy to us.

From Howard Lindzon (via Twitter):

Please do not send me direct messages on twitter. my email address is on my blog. Twitter rarely works and I only check once a day.

Some observations:

• Google is a gateway to the WHOLE web, while Facebook is a gateway to what’s inside Facebook
• Most people probably assume that if they can’t find something in Google, then it doesn’t exist online
• A teenager’s friends may ALL be on Facebook, but EVERYONE who uses the internet (including those teenagers) has an email address
• Your email belongs to you, but Facebook messages belong to Facebook

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

• Email delivery generally is not dependent on a single service (although a given address may be dependent on a single email server), while delivery of Twitter direct messages and Facebook messages is dependent entirely and exclusively on those services
• Google CEO Eric Schmit has wondered in the past why some companies are still “betting against the internet“

The web is made possible by open, interoperable standards for content and communication, e.g. http, HTML, hyperlink, SMTP, etc. — will the future of the web be based on closed, proprietary standards for content and communication?

No company can touch Google’s ability to monetize the use of the open web — the more people use the web, the more money Google makes. Can Facebook compete with Google by eschewing the open web and open standards? Or is Facebook betting against the internet?

Hmmmm…..

Email me if you figure it out.

Think about the applications you use on your computer — the ones that run LOCALLY on your computer. They all produce files. You’ve got your word processor files, your spreadsheet files, your presentation files, your accounting software files. You create some data with the application then save it to your drive. You can take you take those files and put them on any other computer and open them with any application that supports the file type.

Think .doc, .xls, .jpg, .mp3

Web applications are different, because they don’t run on your computer — they run on the servers of the application provider. You access the application over the web, using your web browser.

So the application isn’t on your computer. And neither is the data you create with the application. That, too, is stored on the servers of the application provider.

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are applications that run on the web. You can use them to create data, just like applications on your computer. You can enter information about yourself in your profile, and you can create connections to your friends profiles.

All the information is stored in your profile — on the Facebook’s or MySpace’s servers.

You can’t actually get at the “file” with your profile data. It’s in a big database, not separated out like the files on your computer.

Here’s “data portability” in a nutshell: I used the Facebook application to enter data. Where’s my file? I want to save it on my computer, and maybe use other applications to open it.

What the Friend Connect programs do is let other applications read SOME of your file on Facebook, MySpace, etc. But these programs don’t let you actually take your file, save it, move it, do what you want with it, like the files on your desktop. And they don’t let other applications fully open your file.

Why won’t Facebook and other web applications give you your “files”? Because you didn’t pay for the software. When you buy Microsoft Office, you get a copy of the software to keep and use as you please, so there are no limits on how you use or store the data you create with the application.

But many web applications aren’t charging for the software. Instead, they want to sell ads, i.e. they want to be media companies. That’s how Google, a software application company, got rich. So that’s what everyone else wants to do.

But to sell ads, Facebook et al need your data. And they need you to keep using the applications. And if you can take your files with you, then maybe you — and all of your friends — will start using another application. OR you’ll keep using Facebook, but you’ll create data with another application that Facebook can’t access.

That’s why Facebook created Facebook Platform for others to build applications — so it can keep all the data.

Ask Nick O’Neill puts it plainly:

While I am a fan of data portability, the reality is that true data portability kills social network sites. If we take data portability to the extreme and I was able to export all of my data and contacts from Facebook, Facebook would be nothing more than a well designed communications platform. Perhaps in the end that’s all they will be but for now, their valuations have been based on their skyrocketing user base.

Want to explain “data portability” to a non-geek Facebook user? Ask them if they’ve saved their Facebook file to their computer. Ask them if they’ve backed up their Facebook data. Ask them where their Facebook data is.

Facebook, MySpace and other social networks want to base their business models on the absence of an application feature so basic it’s been around since the earliest days of PCs.

And the reality is that you don’t have to literally save your web application files to your computer hard drive. You can keep them on the web.

But you should be able to put them on any web server you want. And use them with any compatible application. (See Dare Obasanjo for the difference between data portability and interoperability.)

If cloud computing, web applications, and the web as OS is really going to replace local computing, it needs to have more features, not fewer.

If Facebook et al want to have long-term viable businesses, they need to keep users because their applications are BETTER. Not because users have no choice but to keep using their applications, given the inability to save a file.

I received this offer in the snail mail this week from the New York Times:

As I observed previously with my critique of the Washington Post’s circulation marketing, this marketing piece gives me, an avid reader of NYtimes.com, no explanation whatsoever as to the value of also receiving the New York Times in print (with the exception of receiving free access to some premium online services, which has nothing to do with the value of the print edition itself).

It appears the objective of this marketing pieces is strictly to convert people who already read the New York Times print edition or who are predisposed to read newspapers in print — and we all know this group of people is shrinking. For the six-month period ending March 31, 2008:

The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a whopping 9.2% to 1,476,400. The paper’s daily circulation declined 3.8% to 1,077,256.

The New York Times is clear trying to bolster this declining print circulation by marketing to prospective non-local subscribers like me. The problem is that as a reader, I have little or no value to local New York City advertisers, especially classified advertisers.

This presents a quandary for “national” newspapers like the New York Times, particularly in light of the online readership of NYTimes.com.

According to Nielsen Online, NYTimes.com had 18,869,000 unique visitors in March 2008, up from 17,502,000 in October 2007, a 7.8% increase.

Nielsen’s numbers are estimates, but assuming they are directionally correct, think about the orders of magnitude we’re talking about here: 1 million vs. 18 million

You would think a media property with an audience of 18 million would be worth more than a media property with an audience of 1 million.

And yet it’s not. This is the ten percent problem.

I’m still more valuable to the New York Times as a print subscriber than and as an online reader because my advertising value is still so much higher in print — despite my not living in New York City.

Here’s the economic reality for national newspaper brands: Print readers are scarce. Online readers are a commodity.

Just look at the numbers: Washington Post Sunday print: 890,163; monthly online: 8,929,000 (almost exactly 10x); Boston Globe Sunday print: 525,959; online (boston.com): 4,184,000

But why aren’t these newspapers’ online businesses 10x larger than the print businesses instead of 10x smaller?

Here’s the bottom line business model problem: Unlike in print, newspapers create no unique value for advertisers online.

Newspapers had a monopoly over print advertising in a defined geographic area, which provided a lot pricing power for ads that were uniquely local and uniquely suited to print, e.g. classifieds.

Look carefully at the online advertising formats of most newspaper websites, and you’ll notice two things:

• Most are direct analogues of print advertising formats
• Most are the same as ad formats on thousands of other content sites

Take a look at the New York Times online ad formats. It seems like an impressive product list at first, but what it boils down to is a fancy list of display ad offerings.

And how many other places can you buy display ads on the web?

Just look at the name of their large rectangle display ad unit: Big Ad — you know, like that full page ad in the paper — you see it and think, wow, that’s a big ad. Problem is the BIG ad on the web site is a whole heck of a lot smaller than the big ad in the paper, despite being a whole heck of a lot more interactive and measurable.

Which gets to the problem of non-local readers.

In the market for local advertising on the web, newspapers are competing with other traditional local media companies, e.g. TV station, as well as with new web-native local publishers, and with search engines — this is a newly leveled and expanded competitive landscape, but still limited.

For non-local readers, on the other hand, newspapers are competing with hundreds, even thousands of other content sites.

That’s why the NYT’s 1 million print readers are more valuable than their 18 million online readers.

For example, here are the NYT print rates for the Technology category:

If you do the math, the cost of 1 page, or 126 column inches at the National Weekday rate of $1,233 is $155,358, to reach 1,077,256 weekday subscribers. That works out to a cost per thousand (CPM) of $144.

Compare that to the $15-40 CPMs that TechCrunch gets for displays. Imagine what TechCrunch’s business would look like if it could command $144 CPMs.

So given that the New York Times can charge 3-4 times as much to show me a technology-related ad in print than TechCrunch can charge online, is it any wonder that they are trying to convert me to a print subscriber?

The issue is even more acute because at least TechCrunch can prove that the ad was displayed, even if I didn’t pay attention to it. NYT can’t even prove that I didn’t throw the paper straight into the recycling bin.

It would seem this is a market anomaly that can’t last.

So what should newspapers with a national audience online do?

Well, one obvious choice is to stop trying to be both a local and national (and even global) media company. The problem is that for companies like the New York Times, the local newspaper supports the global news enterprise — but that state of affairs is in rapid decline.

Another choice is to produce a local print product that MORE people want to read, not fewer — the perceived infallibility of the current declining print product is a subject for another day.

There’s one other choice that you don’t often hear discussed: Find new ways to create value for advertisers online.

That’s what Google did. The value proposition of search advertising has no analogue in print or anywhere offline. That’s where the pricing power comes in.

Creating unique value for advertisers online could also help newspapers better compete for and better price local online advertising as well.

So how can newspapers and other news brands create unique value for advertisers on the web?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Can Facebook Build a Better Passport
It didn’t take long for Facebook to react to the announcement by MySpace Thursday that it would enable other Web sites to tap into information about its users and their friends.

Facebook’s announcement, in a blog post Friday afternoon, is a bit sketchy on the details and has all the appearance of being rushed to match MySpace. Still, what the company calls Facebook Connect offers many of the same capabilities and a few more, too.

Facebook Answers MySpace Data Availability With Facebook Connect
Yesterday, we brought you news of MySpace’s surprising Data Portability partnerships with Yahoo!, Twitter, and Ebay, which will allow MySpace users to port their public profiles, photos, videos and some friend data from one site to another. Facebook, not looking to be outdone, has announced plans to launch their new Facebook Connect platform, which has similar functionality to MySpace’s Data Availability.

Facebook announces Connect, to use your data on external sites
The Facebook developers blog has announced Facebook Connect, which “allows users to ‘connect’ their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site”.

Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’
Social network Facebook announced Friday the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites. It makes the company the latest major Web site to embrace the concept of data portability.

Facebook: Our Doors Are Just As Open As MySpace’s
Yesterday MySpace (NWS) announced Data Availability – a new service that allows you to share data with third-party sites that will launch in a couple of weeks. Today Facebook announced Facebook Connect – a new service that allows you to share data with third-party sites that will launch in a couple of weeks.

Facebook sees MySpace’s Twitter partnership and raises it Digg
We’re at the point that when either of the two social networking giants, MySpace and Facebook, does something, the other has to respond. Yesterday, MySpace unveiled its “Data Availability” initiative, allowing other sites around the Internet to utilize its users’ data to update profiles, photos, videos and other attributes. Today, according to a TechCrunch scoop, Facebook is following that up with “Facebook Connect”. Which does, wait for it — the exact same thing.

Facebook Counters MySpace; Will Let Users Port Profile Data
On the heels of yesterday’s “Data Availability” announcement from MySpace, Facebook has just announced the launch their own initiative to allow users to port their profile data to other web sites. Here’s what will be included in Facebook’s version according to a post on the company’s developer blog:

Facebook Responds To MySpace With Facebook Connect
Facebook will announce later today Facebook Connect, which has similar functionality to MySpace Data Availability, announced just yesterday. The actual product won’t be released for at least a few weeks, so the timing on this, coming immediately after MySpace, is somewhat suspicious.

Facebook follows MySpace’s lead in letting users share personal …
The popular online social hangout Facebook Inc. says it is setting up a new system that will allow its 70 million users to take their personal profiles with them as they surf other websites.

Users will be able to automatically copy pictures, personal information and other customized applications established on Facebook to other websites without extra effort once the changes that were announced Friday take effect.

Facebook Connect syncs with third-party websites
Facebook is preparing to launch Facebook Connect within the next few weeks, a service designed to compete with MySpace Data Availability. According to TechCrunch, this is Facebook’s first attempt at creating a new version of its API for third party websites, allowing users to link to their Facebook profile, friends, and privacy to a website. The website can also use features from the Facebook Platform to enhance functionality and personalization.

Has there ever in the history of niche media been so many news organizations writing about the same thing at the exact same time?

I keep thinking that the market can’t possibly support this much redundancy.

But then it isn’t entirely redundant. One of these news orgs was first to break the story. And each brings, to greater or lesser degrees, a unique perspective — in some, cases, even some original insights.

But the juxtaposition is still so striking.

It’s kind of like walking down a supermarket aisle. There are many different manufacturers of pasta sauce, potato chips, and toilet paper — which will you choose? Which brand do you prefer? Are you brand loyal? Or do you choose always what’s on sale?

Am I in the mood for marinara sauce or clam sauce or meat sauce — ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch or GigaOm?

In the tech news category, an aggregator like TechMeme does help news shoppers. I can click the top story, which is the Facebook blog that everyone is citing, i.e. go to the source first. Then I’ll click on the next lead item, which is TechCrunch of course. Then maybe I’ll click on MG Siegler’s headline at VentureBeat because it’s clever.

And then I’m probably done. Because I’m so floored by how many headlines there are about the same thing that I just have to blog about it.

And so I’ll probably add another headline to the pile — but since I don’t have the words Facebook and Connect in the title, I might actually get some attention — kind of like finding a jar of apricot jam among the pasta sauces. Just stic