This Bloomberg graphic and its interpretation in the accompanying story is full of errors.

What would readers conclude after looking at the graph above?

1. Best Buy sales have gone up at least 10 fold in the last 2 years. (Recession, what recession?)
2. Best Buy’s monthly sales at the end of 2009 were roughly $22 million, at the peak of holiday season.
3. Newegg is the #2 electronics retailer, after Best Buy. Amazon, buy.com, Walmart and Target aren’t players in electronics.

That’s what the graph says, but all of those conclusions are wrong.

In reality, Best Buy did $8.5 billion in revenue in December. In fiscal year 2009, Best Buy did $45 billion in revenue. $22 million in revenue is a rounding error.

What the graph really shows is how useless these Mint.com data are for analyzing consumer spending by category.

The reporter apparently didn’t understand the methodology behind Mint’s data. Mint allows consumers to track their credit and debit transactions. Consumers enter their account information and mint pulls transaction data from their banks and presents it online. Here’s how that methodology leads to the above erroneous conclusions:

1. The enormous growth in the graph likely represents the growth in mint.com’s user base. Mint launched in September 2007 and has grown to 1.8 million users. (Mint was recently acquired by personal-finance software maker Intuit for $170 million.) Best Buy’s comparable store sales were down for fiscal year 2009 and up marginally for fiscal 2008.
2. Only transactions by Mint’s users are included in this number, accounting for the multibillion-dollar difference. Even then, those numbers may not be complete as not all users import all accounts.
3. Newegg is the #2 dedicated electronics player as classified by Mint. Because Mint collects transaction level data, not item level data, it doesn’t know what to do with purchases from diversified retailers like Amazon, buy.com and Walmart. (Amazon wouldn’t even show up as a leading bookseller; on my Mint account, it shows up as “Shopping”.) By Best Buy’s own definitions, consumer electronics only account for 36% of its revenue.

There’s also zero justification in the Mint data to support the chart’s caption that Best Buy generated these huge returns by “offering discounts on laptops and flat-panel televisions.”

These kind of errors are rampant in our business news because many reporters don’t understand numbers or methodology. When I was in school at the Medill School of Journalism, most classmates took the minimal math and economics classes they could and still get a journalism degree.

One of the most frequent numerical mistakes by journalists is confusing percent increases with percentage point increases. If your credit card’s interest rate goes from 10% to 15%, it’s a 5 percentage point increase, but a 50% increase.

This journalistic innumeracy hurts us all. We can’t make informed decisions about what government is doing if people don’t understand the numbers. Even basics get confused: journalists frequently confuse millions with billions (via Paul Kedrosky).

Journalists are at least partly to blame for the dot com bubble and the housing crash. Not understanding the economics, they repeated the lines of “experts,” such as investment bank analysts and real estate agents — most of whom had clear incentives to keep pumping air into the bubbles. I read many stories about how exotic mortgages were making housing more affordable. What was actually happening was that the easy availability of credit and flood of otherwise unqualified buyers in the marketplace drove up price. Basic supply and demand.

Unfortunately this problem is only going to get worse. Many of the sharpest minds I know from the journalism business have left to go on to other careers for many reasons — the difference in pay (often 2x or more), instability and constant layoffs and backward thinking management.

Additional analysis of the data also takes time, which is becoming harder to come by as newsrooms across the nation shrink. The pressure to do more “quick hits” like charts of the day will lead to more sloppiness and misinformation.

I’ll share some thoughts on how to do better in the next post.

More on: journalism, newspapers

See also:

• Best Buy Boosts Electronics Sales as Rivals Fade: Chart of Day

Snow plow in Arlington County. Creative Commons image by Ron Barber.

The snow day. Growing up in Michigan, it was always a treat. Whenever a significant amount of snow was in the forecast, I’d wake up early to see if I got the day off. I’d listen to the radio as the DJ went through the school closings or watch the crawl on the local morning news. It took some patience as they went through the list, but once in a while that patience was rewarded with a day off.

Kids today don’t have that level of suspense. As a fan of Arlington County on Facebook, my newsfeed showed that school is closed today. A quick check of the Arlington Public Schools Web site also provides that information. No more listening through “Angelus Academy, Anne Arundel Community College, Anne Arundel County Schools, Apple Montessori School, Aquinas and Old Town Montessori School…” (In a large metro area, this is killer.)

It’s yet another example of how media consumers can cut out the middle man and go directly to the source.

In much of the discussion about aggregators such as Google News and digg, what’s left out is that much of the media are themselves aggregators — compiling data from school districts, local businesses, funeral homes, police and fire agencies, etc.

Newspapers didn’t really get to play in the school closing game, but compilations of local events, lunch menus, high school sports scores, police blotters and obituaries have been a key part of the newspaper content mix. Such content is an even greater proportion of What People Care About. Many of these needs are now being better served online as easy-to-use tools such as Facebook, Twitter and flickr get adopted by these news sources.

Instead of reading about promotions and awards in the newspaper, I can get that information delivered to me through LinkedIn or Facebook status updates. Sadly, I’ve found out about the death of a high school classmate through Facebook.

And it’s a much better experience than what fits in a newspaper:

• The filter is personal. It doesn’t matter whether that person was important enough in the eyes of a newspaper’s editor. I also don’t have to read through long lists of people I’m not interested in.
• The content is richer. Clay Reid’s Facebook page is filled with photos and remembrances from friends.
• It’s interactive. With promotions and job changes, I can quickly reach out to friends and congratulate them.

In the case of a snow day, you can make plans with your other friends who suddenly have the day free right on Facebook. And then upload the video of you snow blading down the hill.

More on: newspapers, facebook

Screenshot of AP's iPhone app

As a member-owned cooperative, the AP has catered to its members, which includes newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets. Even now, if you go to AP.org, news is a footnote. Contrast that with the front page of Reuters. Instead of displaying AP content on the AP-branded site, you get AP content in obscure brands like the Lake County Record-Bee, High Desert Daily Press, Citizen-Times.com and GazetteXtra.com. AP is still hosting the content, but the strong national AP brand is subsumed by a large number of brands that have no meaning outside their region.

This might have worked if newspapers had assumed the role of the default home page and people sought out their local brands. Some papers, including the Washington Post and New York Times tried to create all purpose portals; those efforts have been abandoned.

AP also decided to license content to online media outlets. Yahoo! was an early licensee; Google struck a deal with AP more recently. Yahoo! was able to take the AP content and create a leading news destination site without employing hundreds of journalists.

Not only do Yahoo! and Google license AP content, they are doing a better job presenting it than AP. Compare this story on the AP’s site (branded oanow.com) with the same story on Yahoo! News. The Yahoo! story loads a lot faster and the layout is cleaner. On AP-hosted pages, I sometimes get pop up ads. It’s a much worse experience than Google or Yahoo! News.

The fact that AP doesn’t have a destination site presents another big problem in today’s PageRank driven environment: because the same story can be presented at hundreds of different URLs, they don’t rank highly in search results.

It’s not impossible for AP to get back in the game. But they have to play the game as it exists today, instead of trying to reset the calendar to 1995. They’ll need to focus on the things that any Web business needs to focus on today: simplicity, performance, community, analytics and search engine optimization. And they must do it under the AP brand.

One hopeful sign is AP’s Mobile News iPhone application. The app provides a solid user experience, incorporates photos and videos effectively, has acceptable levels of advertising and looks like it was designed this decade. You can even send in news tips. My only real complaint is that the AP brand is buried in favor of a generic “Mobile News Network” brand. (Probably to placate member companies.)

AP has a lot of assets that even now aren’t fully exploited by Google or Yahoo! With some creative thinking and Web-focused talent, they could use those assets to build a killer destination site. It won’t be anyone’s home page, but it can be successful nonetheless.

More on: newspapers.

Unlike medicine, law or plumbing, there is no officially recognized training program, licensing or accreditation process. Actors’ Equity has more stringent requirements for membership than the Society of Professional Journalists.

My answer is none of the above. A journalist is anyone who can report a story.

Just like the best camera is the one you have on you at the time something happens, the best journalist is the person who is there when news happens. At the same time that we have newspapers across the country drastically cutting their staffs, we have an increasing number of people with the tools to do original reporting quickly and easily. (See my earlier post on flickr vs. The Washington Post.) The cameraphone is replacing the reporters’ notebook and the printing press. Not only can it record notes, it can instantly disseminate that information across the globe.

Janis Krums was a journalist on January 15 when US Airways flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River. His tweet “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” and picture were among the lasting memories of the day. The picture has been seen more than 442,000 times on TwitPic, which is greater than the circulation of all but 20 newspapers in the country. That number would be much, much higher if you were able to include the views on sites (including mainstream media sites) that hosted the pictures on their own servers.

If he were employed by a newspaper or wire service, he’d have a decent shot at a Pulitzer for breaking news photography. A key part of winning is being in the right place at the right time.

I used to wonder what I’d do if I found myself in the middle of a big news event to get the story out. Would I call someone I know at the New York Times? Now I know what I’d do: I’d upload a picture from my cameraphone to my flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Hard-hitting investigative journalism represents a small fraction of the resources spent by news organizations.

Even there, the “professional journalists” have competition. Last week, I attended a Web 2.0 Expo session by Sunlight Labs where technologists gathered to bring more openness and accountability to government. Their mission is to get access to government data that is locked up in ancient computer systems and expose it in ways that the average citizen can consume it. Their tools are XML, parsers and databases. They are journalists, too.

More on: newspapers

Disclosure: I have a fancy degree from a top-flight journalism school. I try to write briefly (on Twitter) and more eloquently here. I used to be on staff at startribune.com and washingtonpost.com. I try to commit journalism for fun.

While those have undoubtedly had an impact, there have been structural changes that go well beyond that:

• Consolidation among key advertisers. There used to be three or four different department stores in each major city, all of whom advertised in the paper. Now they’re nearly all Macy’s, reducing the number of potential ad buyers. The same has happened in the banking industry where many regional banks have been gobbled up. Many of the ad buying decisions that were previously made at a local level are now consolidated as well.
• Demand for trackability. Advertisers and their agencies increasingly want to know how their ads are performing and newspapers don’t provide the level of tracking that online sites do. The key classified verticals — homes, autos and jobs — all have trackable online options.
• Rise of information technology. Businesses can get to know their customers much better due to advances in computer technology. The airlines, banks, hotels, department stores and grocery stores I do business with know my buying habits. They can use that data to create targeted offers that will appeal to me. Harris Teeter, a regional grocery store chain, sends out an e-circular that highlights the items customers have bought in the past. These personalized offers can be delivered for little cost.
• Competition from their own suppliers. Newspapers have long been aggregators. They get a lot of their content from other providers. Instead of relying on a newspaper for Dilbert, I can get it in my email every morning from the syndicate that distributes it. And because color is free online, I get full color seven days a week.
• Rise of user-generated content. Anyone can be a publisher these days. Twitter is stealing mindshare 140 characters at a time from newspapers. It’s not just Twitter, of course. Many of the same experts that newspapers rely on to provide the content for their stories are bloggers as well. Although the average quality of news in newspapers is likely higher than the average quality of an article in the blogosphere, there are more experts in the blogosphere than there are in newsrooms. As Fred Wilson writes, the tools for discovering this excellent content are getting better and better.
• Increasing cost of commodities. Producing and distributing a newspaper is very expensive. Subscriptions don’t cover the cost of newsprint and fuel. While these prices fluctuate, the general trend line is up. To cope with these increasing costs, newspapers have raised their subscription rates, further depressing the circulation that advertisers count on.
• Increasing environmental consciousness. Consumers are increasingly going green and newspapers are no friend of the environment. Trees are cut down, turned into giant rolls of newsprint, shipped across country where massive energy guzzling presses print on them and are then distributed every morning by trucks. Then they have to be disposed of. (See my earlier post on hotels going green and requiring opt-in to newspapers.)
• Decreasing density of newspaper subscribers. As a kid, I used to drag a pile of newspapers around in my red Radio Flyer wagon, going door-to-door delivering the paper to people’s doorsteps. With the decline in subscriptions, you really can’t do that anymore. The unit cost of distribution goes up as there are fewer subscribers. It also makes the paper less convenient: rather than getting it at your doorstep, it might be in a box at the curb. Getting to your laptop doesn’t require getting dressed and going outside.
• Inability to develop national scale. Most of the newspaper companies competitors can’t play at a national scale. This includes both online and offline media such as Google and TV networks. This makes it easier to spread out costs and easier to generate revenue. At startribune.com, we built out online yellow pages, entertainment guides, classifieds, etc. well before the vertical players existed. But because we were a regional paper, we couldn’t generate sufficient revenue to compete with the focused vertical players. The fragmentation also makes it harder for advertisers who want to buy reach. (See my related post on How the AP blew it.)

More on: newspapers

The Four Seasons in Austin requires guests to opt-in for newspapers.

This picture should send shivers down the spines of executives at USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va.

For at least as long as I’ve been traveling for business (13 years and counting), a USA Today in front of the hotel room door in the morning has been a given. It just shows up. There’s fine print in the check in folder that says that USA Today will be delivered and if I don’t want it, I can tell the front desk and get a credit of 75 cents a day. Because I do what most people do — nothing — USA Today gets to count me as paid circulation.

At least 60% of the time, the only people who see that USA Today are the person who drops it off in front of my room and the maid who throws it away. I’ve already gotten my news from my laptop and from the TV that was showing CNN while I was getting ready.

I’m surely not the only one, and hotels are catching on.

Hotels have been steadily greening their practices while cutting costs: changing sheets only between guests, changing towels only when guests leave them on the floor, providing new toiletries only when guests have used up the previous batch.

Cutting back on newspaper delivery is the next step. This year I’ve started encountering hotels that ask me at check in whether I want a newspaper. The Four Seasons in Austin has gone a step further: if you want a newspaper, you have to put a hang tag on your door before 1 a.m. And you have to remember to do this every night of your stay.

As with Web defaults, you can guess what happens. Most people do what I do: nothing. On my floor early Sunday morning, I saw three newspaper hang tags (out of about 40 rooms). Not even a free copy of the Sunday New York Times enticed people. They were easily outnumbered by the “do not disturb” hang tags.

There are a number of unknowns: how many rooms were occupied, do the hotel’s demographics shift considerably during SXSW, etc.

But the fact that an increasing number of hotels no longer consider newspapers an essential part of their service is bad news for the newspaper industry.

See also: Who needs newspapers?

More on: newspapers.

Author Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

…

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

ODP/DMOZ creator and veteran geek, Rich Skrenta, The news medium has a message: “Goodbye”:

Every so often there’s a story about about a technophobe executive so out of touch a secretary has to print out their email every morning so they can read it on paper and dictate replies.

That’s what the print newspaper is, of course. Why on earth would you print all that stuff out? Over a hundred pages, most of which you’re not going to read, with the crease down the middle of the front page photo, story jumps everywhere, a carbon-footprint disaster to produce, distribute and recycle. It’s absurd.

…

I once worked out some rough back-of-napkin estimates on the number of text bytes in the paper. It was only delivered once during the day, but if you average the bytes across the entire 24 hour period it came out to be about the rate of a 300 baud modem. The newspaper was the internet.

Both make essentially the same point: the newspaper is an accident of history whose time is just about up. Rather than try to figure out how to “fix” the newspaper problem, we should focus on what’s next.

A lot of the players in the news ecosystem have already done that. I’ve written before about how most newspapers are just repackagers of information.

Newspapers have long played to the middle, and not in a political sense. They put out essentially one product and hope that the average person finds enough of value in to subscribe. The cost of print means that you really can’t go into a lot of depth on a lot of topics. You can’t cover things that are extremely important to a few hundred people.

That worked when getting that depth was a difficult thing for readers. Now, infinite depth on just about any topic is a click away. For sports, finance and politics junkies, sites like ESPN.com, morningstar.com and huffingtonpost.com are much better ways to quench their appetites.

In the meantime, the diehards in the newspaper business will come up with stupider and stupider ideas. Consider this story (via Blake Williams) about a personalized print-at-home newspaper:

MediaNews has been working with a technology company — Mr. Vandevanter would not say which one — to develop a proprietary printer for a reader’s home. It would receive and print a subscriber’s customized newspaper — with targeted advertising.

You have to have a new printer to help cut their printing and delivery costs! Maybe you’ll even have to buy special paper and ink so you can get that full broadsheet experience and can get that genuine newspaper experience of having ink rub off on your fingers. For real authenticity, the registration will be off every once in a while so that the pictures don’t look right.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to scan a link on the printed page with your CueCat to go to a Web site you find interesting.

1. You get higher quality video. If you have an HD source, chances are the video quality on your DVR will be much better. Hulu offers a very small selection (13 full episodes last I checked) of HD programming. Note that some local TV distributors charge extra for HD service. With AT&T u-Verse, the $15 for the DVR becomes $25 when you add HD.
2. It’s designed for your living room. DVRs, despite the horrible UIs, were designed to be controlled from a distance and connected to your TV. It’s still only the geek set that will bother connecting their PCs to a TV for hulu. There’s hope though: Boxee is bringing hulu and other Internet video to a variety of platforms. A killer device would be a DVD player or game console that has boxee/hulu built in, similar to the LG blu-ray/Netflix player. (Boxee itself is based on XBMC Media Center, which runs on XBox.)
3. It’s more network efficient. This isn’t a concern for most people today. But it may become one as incumbent TV providers wake up to the threat of Internet video. With a DVR, it doesn’t matter to the cable company how many people watch a show; the more the merrier. With hulu, every stream takes incremental bandwidth. Comcast is capping monthly bandwidth at 250 GB. It’s unlikely that ordinary Internet usage would come anywhere near that, but two or three people regularly watching hulu could hit that.
4. You can record virtually anything. Although some DVRs restrict recording of some content (e.g. pay-per-view movies), the rule-of-thumb is that you can record whatever comes down the pipe. Hulu’s content comes from a select (though large) list of partners. You can’t, for example, watch ABC shows on hulu. Partners have Byzantine restrictions on when content appears. While many shows appear on hulu the day after broadcast, others appear eight days later. (House, Monk, Psych) I strongly suspect that this is because of Nielsen’s Live plus 7 TV ratings.
5. You can keep what you record as long as you like. DVRs don’t generally expire content; as long you have free space you can keep it around. Or until you move and have to give the DVR back to the cable company. Most of the recent content on hulu expires within a few weeks.
6. You can skip commercials.

I also came up with two more pluses for hulu:

1. You get bite-sized content. Many of the shows I watch, such as talk shows or variety shows, are really collections of discrete elements. With hulu, I can get to just the parts I want easily. I don’t have to fast forward through the inane comedy bits to get to an interview I want to see.
2. You get uncensored content. hulu offers content you won’t see on basic cable, such as scenes with nudity or bad language. (You must be logged in to see these.)

More on: hulu

DVRs have transformed the way I and many others watch TV. Besides breaking news and sports, I rarely watch live television.

But less than a decade after their inception (and before they’ve reached 50% penetration) they’re headed the way of the dodo, vinyl and cassette tape. The DVR’s kissing cousin — placeshifter Slingbox — will have an even shorter life.

The reason: Hulu. Here are 10 reasons why Hulu is better than a DVR:

1. It’s free. DVRs typically cost $10-$15 a month for service. For a TiVo, add $150-$600 in hardware costs. Many people can use hulu to ditch their cable TV subscription altogether and save $60-$75 a month.
2. You don’t have to program it. Sure, programming a DVR is a lot easier than programming a VCR. But it still takes work. And with 300+ channels, a lot of scrolling. Most DVR UIs are atrocious. While Web interfaces can make things easier, AT&T’s interface (powered by Yahoo! and recently redesigned) feels like Web 2004.
3. You don’t have to manage it. A lot of the UI on a DVR is devoted to managing conflicts among recordings, managing recording space, etc. Many a user forum has been devoted to identifying the logic behind what gets recorded and deleted on DVRs. I just know that on my AT&T DVR, things don’t work the way I’d expect. (e.g. deleting programs I’ve watched before deleting programs I haven’t watched.)
4. It’s infinite. You have access to thousands of TV shows and movies, way more than a DVR can hold. That’s only going to expand as programmers recognize the power of hulu and television on the Internet.
5. You don’t have to know what you want to watch beforehand. If you hear about a program you’re interested in, you can go to Hulu and watch it.
6. It has fewer ads. For many people, skipping ads is a big part of the appeal of a DVR. But it’s still a hassle. You have to pick up the remote at the right time and you usually end up watching 7-10 seconds of ads anyway because things don’t line up right. I’d rather sit through one 30 second ad. This isn’t bad for advertisers or TV networks either. (More on that later.)
7. It helps you discover. Hulu recommends shows you might be interested in. Most DVRs don’t. (TiVo is a notable exception.)
8. It’s social. You can share programs that you like with your friends on social networks.
9. Your shows won’t be screwed up due to cable system outages, storms, power outages or a football game that goes long.
10. It’s searchable. As a search geek, I’ve been impressed with the quality of Hulu’s search interface. They’ve made it easy to find content you want.

There are some advantages that DVRs have over hulu. I’ll write about those later. In the meantime, check out my list of ways to improve hulu.

If I could award an Emmy for outstanding performance in television, I’d have a clear winner: Hulu. The video site from NBC and Fox is my leading choice for product of the year. Hulu allows users to stream television shows from NBC, Fox, Comedy Central and select other networks. Most shows are available the day after they air on television. There is also a decent collection of classic television; I recently finished watching the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. A small collection of movies rounds out the offering.

I wrote about Hulu when the partnership was announced last year:

The networks have many of the assets they need to deliver a compelling product — one much better than YouTube for copyrighted content. But I wouldn’t bet on it. And  I wouldn’t hold my breath on NBC and News Corp. making the summer launch date.

Although I was right about Hulu not making its launch date, I was wrong about its inability to deliver a compelling product. Unlike the music industry, which still refuses to acknowledge the turn of the century, the television networks have responded forcefully and credibly to the threat posed by YouTube.

Over the summer, I spent at least triple the time on Hulu as I did on YouTube. That will be even more skewed when the fall TV season kicks into high gear this week. The quality of the video is much better. Searching is also easier: unlike YouTube, you won’t see the same piece of content 12 times in search results. You also don’t have to weed through content that was taken down due to DMCA claims.

To be sure, there’s nothing truly innovative in Hulu. But the execution of what they do is great. The site is visually elegant and easy-to-use. You can subscribe to your favorite shows. You can embed videos on your blog. My favorite feature is the ability to create custom clips by dragging sliders.

Hulu does a good job (perhaps too good) of helping users discover content they might be interested in. There are some feeble attempts at social networking.

The networks are using Hulu to promote the fall season. Some shows, such as Knight Rider, were made available on Hulu before their television debuts to drum up interest.

Hulu is also doing some interesting things in advertising. More on that later.

As much as I like Hulu, I have a long wishlist:

• Hulu on my TV. It’s hard to beat watching TV on a TV. A laptop display doesn’t cut it. Although my TV has a VGA input, that still means using the laptop to control playback. Hulu should seek to be on as many platforms as possible: Xbox, Tivo and Apple TV for starters.
• Hulu on the go. There are times when I want to watch Hulu on my laptop. But those are also times when I’m disconnected — on a plane or a train. NBC offers downloads of many of its shows through NBC Direct; Hulu should do the same.
• Local buffering of videos while watching. Unlike YouTube, you can’t buffer content. This deteriorates video playback quality by causing stuttering when you have inconsistent bandwidth. It also means that if you want to rewind, that video has to be restreamed. (This is more expensive for Hulu.) Even a two minute buffer would dramatically improve the experience.
• More consistent content licensing. Hulu is at the mercy of its content providers for when content is made available and has to expire. Although many shows are available next day, shows like Monk and Psych are delayed eight days.
• Fewer restrictions on embedded clips. Hulu clips expire along with the content, leaving holes in Web pages that embed videos. Although I wouldn’t expect full embeds to remain available, it would be nice to see exceptions for short clips.
• Better descriptions in search results. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thu, Sep 18, 2008″ isn’t very helpful. The guest names should be included.