Finance Geek

When retail expert and all-around economy watcher Howard Davidowitz appeared on Tech Ticker in February declaring the worst was yet to come for the U.S. economy and that Americans’ standard of living has changed permanently, our comment boards lit up. …

More…

This presentation from design consultant Joshua Porter has a lot of great tips/reminders for maximising the efficacy of your site from the point of first contact with a new customer through to maintaining and increasing engagement over time.  I particularly like the pointers on registration processes.  Like me you may have noticed that for many sites registration is getting simpler and shorter and on slide 36 Joshua provides some AB testing data which tells us why – users have signup fatigue and often won’t be bothered unless they know it will be quick (and note the know).

As aside Joshua is practising a freemium model as a consultant. He gives away a lot of content for free and makes clear on his blog the extra stuff you get when you get him in person.  All consultants do this to a greater or lesser extent, but few make it as explicit as Joshua.

More…

Retail maven Howard Davidowitz paid another visit to Tech Ticker this week. And despite signs of improvement in consumer confidence and retail stocks rising, Davidowitz is steadfast in his belief the consumer is dead.Rather than summarize, let me ju

More…

WASHINGTON-Much in America has changed since Woodstock, the pot-smoking outdoors pop concert that took place in New York State 40 years ago this month. The Soviet Union is no more, laptop computers and smart phones are ubiquitous, and co-ed college dorms are the norm.
In the 1960s, federal budget deficits remained relatively low-most years below one percent of GDP-without benefit of mind-altering substances. No more. This week’s publication of the administration’s mid-session budget review shows that even without the stimulants that were overused at Woodstock, hallucinations still…

More…

During speculative bubbles, those who buy and hold are left holding the bag. But the only way to survive the inevitable busts is to hang on long enough to outlast them.

More…

How investors think often gets in the way of their results. Be sure to get these common missteps and misconceptions out of the way.

More…

Even if you owe the money in question, you do not have to put up with harassment. Here’s how to make the calls stop — and fight a claim if it’s a mistake.

More…

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

More…

It’s fashionable these days to criticize social networking sites for their inability to connect with teens (NYT on Twitter), potential to ruin friendships (WSJ on Facebook) and lack of profitability (all). …

More…

After the heady rally off the March lows, Todd Harrison, CEO of Minynaville.com, now believes the risk-reward favors shorting the market vs. being long. “This is a Splenda market - because there’s so much artificial sweetener involved,” Harrison

More…

MOLINE, Ill. — Contract talks between Deere & Co. and the United Auto Workers are under way.

More…

$9 trillion. That’s the estimated size of the U.S. deficit for the next decade. It’s also nearly $2 trillion more than the Obama administration projected back in February.The New York Times says that figure represents, “5.1 percent of the economy’s e

More…

Add today’s durable goods number to the growing list of “better-than-expected” economic reports that have convinced many market players, economists and regulators the worst is behind us. …

More…

After months, or maybe years, of doom and gloom, are you feeling strangely optimistic about the economy? Think buying that house isn’t such a bad idea after all? You’re not alone.Tuesday brought us more positive news on the housing and consumer
front.

More…

There has been a big wave of interest in remnant inventory on the web in recent years, most notably with the acquisition of Advertising.com by AOL for $475m (a deal we backed when I was at Reuters Venture Capital) and RightMedia by Yahoo in an $850m deal.

The thesis behind these companies and their exits is that there is almost limitless inventory on the web and finding a way to monetise even just some of it and at low rates could generate a lot of cash.  And generate a lot of cash it has.  I’m not privy to much information about RightMedia, but I do know that AOL have been very pleased with the Advertising.com acquisition.

However, just because a lot of money has been spent through these networks doesn’t mean that they are necessarily delivering good value for publishers, and this is what Jim Spanfeller was saying in his post on paidcontent earlier this week.  The simplified version of his argument is that selling remnant inventory doesn’t generate much extra revenue and drives down prices across the board.

And, if anyone should know, it’s Jim.  He is the outgoing president and CEO of Forbes.com, he is the treasurer of the Online Publishers Association and chairman emeritus of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

His argument exactly matches our experiences at WAYN where we have recently cut the inventory we are putting through RightMedia to focus on driving premium ad sales.  Our logic was that despite being a reasonable percentage of the inventory the revenue we were getting from remnant was a low percentage of total ad sales and that removing them would enhance both the experience on the site and the money we can make from premium deals.  The greater potential for premium deals comes from removing the option for advertisers to get access to WAYN on the cheap and because the remnant ads often detracted from the premium feel of the site (e.g. despite our best efforts they occasionally served ads for debt reconsolidation services).

I’m not going to publish numbers from WAYN, but Jim cites data from an IAB and Bain Consulting survey of seven member sites which found that the 30% of their inventory they were selling via ad networks was only generating 2% of their ad revenue.

I like to try and keep my posts to around this length, so I’m going to stop here, but if this topic is of interest to you then you should read Jim’s post as his full argument is much richer and nuanced than the short version I have produced here.  It’s full title is Publishers are killing web advertising’s potential with misguided pricing.

More…