MN-DOT has finally released the video from last week’s collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River. The video appears to be from camera 628.
Unfortunately, the camera was turned the other direction at the moment the bridge collapsed. You can see the last car come across the bridge and traffic toward the bridge coming to a halt. Someone then notices the unusual activity and turns the camera around; you can then see cars slam on their brakes and make U-turns.
The New York Post is reporting that rival The New York Times is about to set its TimesSelect content free. TimesSelect has kept key parts of nytimes.com behind a subscription firewall since 2005. The pay content includes Times op-ed columnists, including the high-profile Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd. The Times hasn’t confirmed the move.
TimesSelect also includes additional multimedia content, a way to bookmark articles you like, personalized email alerts, early access to the Sunday Times and up to 100 articles a month from the Times archive. I would expect that all but the archive access would be made free.
I’ve always thought that locking the most link-worthy content behind a pay wall was a bad idea. If the Times hadn’t locked up its content and had created tools to let users interact with each other, it might have captured much of the traffic that is now going to political blogs. Ironically, at the same time that the Times is keeping people from linking to their op-ed content, they are buying AdWords to drive traffic.
It’s never easy for a company to turn away from an existing revenue stream, but it’s the right thing to do. Accountants can always see the short-term impact of turning off a revenue stream. Pricing varies from $7.95 a month to $49.95 a year. (TimesSelect is free for subscribers to the print edition.) Depending on the mix of annual and monthly subscriptions and retention rate, that’s between $11 million and $21 million in revenue.
It’s much harder to calculate the value of lost traffic and link love. As I wrote in April, links from other sites are extremely important traffic drivers for newspapers. By freeing its content, the Times can capture more of that.
The AP reports on a study of 63 poor children that found the kids preferred food in McDonald’s wrappers over identical unmarked food. The golden arches cast a golden halo over even healthy items such as carrots and milk. The research also tested reactions to hamburgers, chicken nuggets and french fries.
Study author Dr. Tom Robinson said the kids’ perception of taste was “physically altered by the branding.” The Stanford University researcher said it was remarkable how children so young were already so influenced by advertising.
The study involved 63 low-income children ages 3 to 5 from Head Start centers in San Mateo County, Calif. Robinson believes the results would be similar for children from wealthier families.
The full article is available at the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.
The food item for which the brand had the least effect: the hamburger. 48% preferred the McDonald’s branded hamburger, 37% preferred the unbranded (but also McDonald’s) burger and 15% had no preference or didn’t answer. The biggest difference was in french fries, with 76.7% preferring the McDonald’s branded fries.
Aside from the headline grabber, I found this note in the results interesting: “Children needed to be told which food was from McDonald’s for 20.6%, 30.2%, 22.2%, 33.3%, and 27.0% of the hamburger, chicken nuggets, french fries, milk/apple juice, and carrot comparisons, respectively.” The marketing couldn’t have been all that effective if 1/5 to 1/3 of the time the kids didn’t recognize the McDonald’s branding. (These children were significantly more likely to have come from Spanish-speaking households.)
The study found that preferences for McDonald’s branded food was greater among children who ate more frequently at McDonald’s and those who came from households with more televisions.
The New York Times killed the fake Steve Jobs. Brad Stone identified Daniel Lyons as the blogger who has been writing the fake Secret Diary of Steve “Dude, I friggin invented the iPhone” Jobs.
Lyons is himself an old media veteran, currently serving as senior editor of Forbes magazine.
“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long,” said Mr. Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.”
It’s a bit ironic when you consider this quote from Lyons in a story he wrote in 2005 (via How to Split an Atom) about anonymous bloggers:
Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is.
Lyons was busted by publicity for a forthcoming book in the character of Steve Jobs.
Last year, his agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine. The New York Times found Mr. Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of “Fake Steve” to a blog Mr. Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point (floatingpoint.wordpress.com).
The Secret Diary will soon be moving under Forbes.com. It’s dead before it gets there. Now that you know who is writing it, it isn’t interesting.
During weeks like this, I’m reminded that wireless and long distance networks that we take for granted aren’t designed for major emergencies. They’re engineered for average peak usage and can quickly become overloaded when tragedy strikes.
After this week’s 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, I found out about the status of some of my friends on Facebook:
Tools like Facebook, Twitter, IM and email can be great ways to communicate in emergencies. You can quickly let a lot of people know what’s going on. I found out about the the bridge collapse when a friend IMed me.
My friend Sree has some great advice on how to best use technology to prepare for emergencies. I would add one thing to Sree’s list: scan important documents and have them available online. I keep scans of the data page of my passport, contact lens prescription and other key information in my email account. You can also use an online file storage service.
Update: The Pioneer Press has story about Twin Cities residents using blogs, Flickr and Twitter to communicate during the crisis.
Update 2: Bonds hit 756 on Aug. 7 off the Washington Nationals’ Mike Bacsik to right-center field. The ball was caught by a 22 year old from Queens, New York named Matt Murphy. He just walked up and bought a ticket tonight. I suspect that the prices for tomorrow’s game will be plummeting rapidly.
How much would you pay for a chance to catch the ball that breaks Hank Aaron’s career home run record?
I’m going to be in San Francisco next week and thought I’d find out. Sections 145-149 in right field offer some of the best chances to get a Bonds home run ball. Those seats are sold out, but the Giants offer a DoublePlay window on their Web site, where ticket holders can resell their tickets online. Tickets in those sections range from $88-$335 each for next Wednesday’s game. (The face value is $29.) Tickets in other parts of the stadium for the same game are selling for about face value.
Sellers pitch the likelihood for each set of tickets offered: “Great Seats in the Arcade! Barry Bonds home run #750 landed 6 seats to the left.” “Great seats in HR territory right in front of the Cove.” “Row 2! Catch Bonds 755 or 756!”
If you were to catch the ball and were willing to part with it, you could be in for a big payday. The home run ball which broke Babe Ruth’s record and put Bonds at #2 went for $220,100 at auction.
That’s of course assuming that Bonds doesn’t hit 755 or 756 before then. And you don’t get trampled by the mob going for the ball.
I fall somewhere between my friends who hope that Bonds has a permanently debilitating injury in the next few days and those who are eagerly rooting for him to break the record. I’ll probably be at the game next Wednesday, but sitting elsewhere.
Update: According to AccuScore simulations, there’s about a 5.5% chance that Bonds will break the record during the Aug. 8 game. That increases to 7.5% in Thursday’s game.
Every couple of months, U.S. Airways sends out an email describing the progress on their computer systems. As with most large-scale systems projects, they’re behind. The self-effacing emails try to reassure customers that the airline really cares. Here’s an excerpt from June:
Welcome again to the latest edition of the Merger Update, where we provide the plain English scoop on issues important to you, our frequent travelers. No corporate double speak; just a rundown of details on the most pressing questions of the day.
So, first things first. You may be weary of us apologizing for the tough times we had this spring due to the migration of our reservations system, but here it is: We sincerely apologize for the numerous failures. After a pretty nice start to the merger we’ve learned some tough lessons through all this and received some very helpful advice from many of you, some of which we’re applying already and some of which is unprintable. So thank you for sticking with us as we climb back on the horse.
OK, enough groveling, here’s what we’ve got…
I hadn’t really paid much attention to the emails. But they stuck in my head last night. As I mentioned earlier, I spent seven hours at National Airport on Sunday, partly because of U.S. Airways ill-considered policy of not allowing phone agents to help with day-of-flight issues. Last night I called U.S. Airways to rebook my trip.
When I explained what I wanted to do, the agent replied “You were a no show.” This despite the fact that I twice had my boarding pass scanned and actually sat on the plane. While she offered to waive the $100 change fee, she wanted to charge an extra $100 for the difference in fare. When I said that I wanted a refund because my flight was canceled, she put me on hold while she contacted a supervisor. (Airlines try to hide the fact that you are entitled to a refund if they cancel your flight.)
Her supervisor comes on the line and tells me that she can’t find any record of my flight being canceled and that my record said that I was a no show. So she couldn’t do anything for me.
How does an airline not know that they didn’t operate a flight? That the plane sat on the tarmac for 6 hours? That they canceled a good portion of their schedule that day? Fortunately I had thought ahead about the possibility and printed the Web flight status showing the cancellation when I got home on Sunday. I faxed that to her while still on the phone.
A few minutes later she comes back on the line slurping her drink and grumpily proceeds to rebook my flight for free. No apologies.
Next week, I’ll be taking pictures every time I sit on one of their planes.
After the crash of ComAir Flight 5191, about a year ago, I wrote a piece criticizing the lackluster way news sites use Web resources in covering breaking news. When the news broke of the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis last night, I set out to see how many Web resources I could find. I found traffic cameras, “before” pictures of the bridge, the pre-collapse Wikipedia page, MN-DOT construction reports and satellite views.
All of these great resources were available for the asking. But few were asking.
News sites did do a better job of soliciting and using user-generated content. CNN’s I-Report, which turns 1 today, featured some of the first pictures I saw. Wolf Blitzer interviewed several of those who submitted photos by phone. (I’m sure one day soon we’ll see see CNN air someone’s live Webcam of breaking news.)
startribune.com featured about a half-dozen photos submitted by users as well as a comment board. The Strib started with a homemade map and later switched to the more useful Google map. Oddly, the Strib kept its registration firewall up during this time, requiring people to sign up to see more than a few pages of content.
Wikipedia has been on top of the story. The Wikipedia page for the bridge has been edited about 1,000 times since the bridge collapse, with the first reference to the bridge collapse 24 minutes after it happened. The current article is well-sourced and includes numerous pictures and maps. Wikipedians did the best job at using Web resources, with numerous links to original documents, including documents from MN-DOT, the MN Historical Society and the MN library. They even did a better job of finding archived content from the Star Tribune than the Star Tribune. According to startribune.com, it only beat Wikipedia by 2 minutes.
I was a little surprised at how slowly the flickr coverage picked up. I searched throughout the evening and got no results. But when I woke up this morning the same search returned nearly 900 pictures. You can see many pictures plotted on a map of the area.
As a news consumer, I had a plethora of choices. At one point I was watching video streams from two of the Minneapolis TV stations on my laptop while watching CNN on TV.
Disclosure: I used to work at startribune.com and still have a few friends there.
The bridge that carries Interstate 35W over the Mississippi river collapsed tonight during rush hour. The picture at right was taken by a nearby resident who submitted it to CNN. They are reporting 7 4 deaths.
Some good Web resources:
I used to live in Minneapolis and would occasionally drive across the bridge. My thoughts go out to those affected.
Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a great two-part series on measuring Web traffic. It’s well worth reading for publishers, advertisers and anyone else who cares about how traffic is measured.
There are a number of different ways firms measure traffic:
This quote from the Internet Advertising Bureau SVP Sheryl Draizen sums up my view:
There’s this philosophy in the entire media industry that it’s always better to use independent third-party numbers, because they’re independent and don’t have a vested interest. I would argue that that’s not the case, because no one’s independent and everyone has a vested interest. We also have to change our thinking because we have a unique medium that could give us more accurate numbers than we have ever had before…I would challenge the agencies and marketers to stop thinking that the only numbers that are valid are coming from a third party. It’s just not the case in our industry. If there’s a certification process against those numbers, there’s no reason those numbers can’t stand.
If direct measurement offerings such as Omniture, Google Analytics, WebTrends and Quantcast could agree on definitions for visitors, page views, sessions, time on site and other key metrics as well as what bots/spiders/other junk traffic to ignore, they could give panel-based measurement firms a run for their money. That’s not to say they shouldn’t go beyond to offer custom metrics, but advertisers want apples to compare.
Rakesh Agrawal's blog 