Times Select RIP

This week The New York Times quietly put an end to their ill-conceived pay wall experiment called Times Select.

Here’s my favorite line from the email sent to subscribers from Vivian Schiller, Senior Vice President & General Manager:

Why the change?

Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment.

Ummm, shouldn’t the Paper of Record know that the Web was created and is now the engine of trillions of dollars of commerce and social change because it has always been and continues to be an open environment? In fact, openness is the very essence of what makes the Web so amazingly successful and revolutionary. The only people who think it wasn’t or shouldn’t be open are the same companies, like the Times, that have unsuccessfully tried erecting boundaries and barriers to the inevitable flow of information.

The palpable angst of newspapers and other publishers in the Connected Age is well known. Walk into any press room and you can feel it, the world as they knew it is gone, they’re all convinced that they’re going out of business, if not right now, today, this minute, than in two minutes, next Tuesday. Efforts to take their off line business models and slap them up online simply don’t work, it is not the same subscriber environment — you can understand that now, or create an expensive mess like Times Select and quietly declare defeat later.

My advice to newspapers and magazines (which I’m giving away for free in this open environment!): Take a deep breath and calm down! You may have to slim down a bit, we may not passively read and agree with everything you have to say, but we need good reporting. But you need to shift from thinking of us as subscribers and start to think of us as a community of readers who can add value to the news with our opinions and networks.

Eyeballs and networks beat walls and subscriptions every time.

Barry Bonds and Democracy?

I just received an email from a friend that included this paragraph:

Fashion designer Mark Ecko bought the ball – for over $750,000 – and is now going to let the people decide what to do with it. This is a light moment, so we’re not going to talk about the other things he could’ve done with that money. If you go to his web site: http://www.vote756.com/ you can vote to take it to Cooperstown, stamp an asterisk on it an take it to Cooperstown or send it into orbit. Having been convinced by my son, I voted for the asterisk. This is a fun, democratic moment.

It is indeed a fun, particpatory idea. Imagine what Congress could look like if we used this kind of input to redraw Congressional districts?

One Web Day 2007

Saturday, September 22nd is One Web Day 2007.   The second annual day is dedicated to celebrating the wonders and transformational powers of the World Wide Web.  The brainchild of my friend the brilliant Susan Crawford,

And, in an amazing feat of persistence, Susan and the other OWD volunteers have recruited Tim Berners-Lee, often called the father of the World Wide Web, to prepare and release a video on the risks to the future of the internet to be released next week.

The premise for OWD is deceptively simple: the Web is worth celebrating.

Visit OWD’s website, join the blog or the social network, sign up for an event near you for the 22nd.  Join, express yourself, celebrate our freedom to learn, connect, be in the connected age!

A Perpetual State of Anxiety

The Overbrook Foundation yesterday released a report that I wrote entitled “Web 2.0 Assessment of The Overbrook Foundation’s Human Rights Grantees.”

You can download the report and the survey instrument that we used here on the Overbrook website’s Resource section. The primary goal of the effort was to explore the ways that Overbrooks US-based human rights grantees are adopting to the new interactive age of communication tools and network strategies, as well as better understanding the ways in which grantees are struggling, plus the ways that the Foundation can ease their burden and anxiety.

The key findings of the study include:

• Overall, the grantees are firmly entrenched in the Web 1.0 world, meaning that grantees use the web largely as a source of information rather than interactivity.

• A small handful of grantees, for instance Witness, the ACLU, Breakthrough, WYNC Public Radio, are using social media in spectacular ways to engage their constituents in conversations.

• Most grantees are not taking advantage of easy-to-use social media tools effectively. The first is the fact that only half have blogs, and that only half of these groups allow comments on their blogs.

• Survey respondents and group discussion participants often felt a “common struggle” in understanding which tools are critically important to their work and were at a loss as to where and how to get help for selecting and using new social media tools.

I’d love to hear your reactions, and, in particular, please let me know the results if you use the survey.