Bing, Yahoo! ads on Michael Jackson results on Google. Click to see full version.

Seen over the weekend: ads for bing and Yahoo! on Google search results for “Michael Jackson”.

The bing ad led to bing’s xRank page for Michael Jackson. The Yahoo! ad bizarrely led to a Yahoo! shopping results page for Michael posters, most of which had nothing to do with Jackson.

The bing ad appeared every time I reloaded the page. The other ads were much less frequent.

Update: AOL has joined the fray with ads for AOL Music, including a pitch to download a “Michael Jackson tribute toolbar” on the landing page.

Coming back from Berlin yesterday, I decided to take public transit. I took BART from SFO to Embarcadero station, where I had to switch to Muni to get home. The fare was $1.25 (after a paper BART to Muni transfer discount) and I had a $20 bill and a $1 bill. I also had about $40 on my BART ticket, but that doesn’t work on Muni. Here are the parameters:

• There’s a staffed booth, but the staff can’t make change and you can’t just hand them money.
• You can’t buy a pass with a credit card.
• The turnstiles take only coins.
• There’s a change machine that will give you $1 coins for $5 and $10 bills.
• There’s another machine (marked for BART) that will make change for $20 bills and give you $5 bills.
• There’s a BART ticket machine that has an option to get change for $1 bills.

It worked out to be a 4-step process using 4 different machines (not counting the machine that issues the BART to Muni transfers):

1. Put the $20 bill in the BART bill change machine and get 4 $5 bills.
2. Put the $1 bill in the BART ticket machine to get 4 quarters.
3. Walk across the hall and put one of the $5 bills into the Muni change machine to get 5 $1 coins. Whoops, it won’t take it. Turns out it doesn’t take the new $5 bills. Fortunately, I had gotten one of the old ones.
4. Put the $1 coin and a quarter into the turnstile and hand the paper slip to the agent to let me through.

No wonder people hate using public transit.

I’ve written before about how the Associated Press blew it in the early days of the Web by choosing to not play in the online news space. More than a decade later, AP still has tremendous assets that it can use to become a great news source. Rather than fight expensive legal battles that it will almost surely lose, it can try to build a great product:

• Unlock the content vault — AP content has typically been available online for no more than 30 days, which means that links to AP content goes bad quickly. AP could provide exclusive access to all of the content that it has. Not only does this provide a great service to users, it’s also great for search engine rankings.
• Exploit the photos –- One of my favorite things when I was working in a newsroom was to look through the AP LeafDesk. AP employs some of the world’s most talented photographers and the LeafDesk was my window to the world. From there, I would choose which photos would appear in our products. In the online world with infinite space, there is no reason to have editors limit the availability of pictures to what they can fit in print. Online access to AP’s photos would be a pageview goldmine; slideshows are incredibly popular. At the New York Times, 11 million of the 49 million pageviews on the day after the inauguration went to slideshows. (Bonus tip: talk to the folks at Cooliris.)
• Geotag the content — AP journalists are in the best position to include relevant geographic information in articles and photos. Geotagging would provide users new ways to explore AP’s content. Imagine browsing through a map with the latest photos and news. Or using geotags combined with archived content to explore a region in time. Google News tries to do this using algorithms, but often misses or adds irrelevant geotagging.
• Organize the AP’s information and make it universally accessible – Instead of letting Google organize the AP’s information, the AP should do it. This may be hard to do given the AP’s DNA, but it needs to move from generating disposable news stories to creating longterm news resources. There is a lot of information and judgment that goes into the newsmaking process that doesn’t make it into the final story. If embedded in a database, that information could be used to automatically generate timelines of the major stories of significant news events. AP’s obit file could become a reference source about newsmakers.
• Talk to NPR – NPR faces channel conflict similar to AP’s, yet they’ve managed to build one of the best news sites and they’ve done it under the NPR brand. NPR.org is frequently a leader when it comes to adopting new technologies, including open APIs, social media and search. Learn from their experts.

AP needs to do this under the AP brand instead of obscure local brands. It needs to focus on page performance, usability and searchability.

If AP does all of the above, it will have built an unparalleled news product. Maybe one that consumers would pay for.

More on: newspapers, geotagging

See also:

• AP is in the Classic Strategic Investor Trap (marksonland)

• Google News starts hosting wire service content

• Taking newspapers beyond tonight’s fishwrap

With every new medium comes changes in the way we communicate and new social norms for behavior. I’ve written before about how technology changes the way we write. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the norms for Twitter.

How much is too much Tweeting?

My tweeting patterns vary dramatically based on what’s going on. Some days I can have a dozen tweets and other days I’ll have none. I try to tweet only what’s interesting, but that’s highly subjective. I typically don’t retweet @Techmeme, @Techcrunch or @CNNbrk — not because I don’t respect the work, but because many people who follow me already follow them and I don’t need to add to the echo chamber unless I’m adding unique value.

I tweet less frequently than I’d like because I know Twitter doesn’t offer followers any tools for filtering tweets. Filtering based on location or topic would increase how much I contribute to Twitter, plus allow me to follow more people. (See my earlier post on improving Facebook filtering; much of that would apply to Twitter.)

How much self promotion is OK?

In a way, every tweet is a bit of self promotion. What I’m referring to here is explicit promotion of blog posts or companies you have an interest in. I refuse to follow people whose feeds consist entirely of promotions for their blog. Tacking on “also see foo.alltop.com” to every tweet is also over my line.

When Gerry Campbell asked about this earlier, I half-jokingly said that if your good friends stop following you, you’ve crossed the line. (It would be nice if Twitter showed a “recently departed” followers list.) If half or fewer of your tweets are self promotion, that’s probably OK.

How do you edit retweets?

With only 140 characters, spreading memes can be tough. If I’m retweeting longer tweets, I start by cutting out as many filler words as I can. If it’s been previously retweeted, I will then edit out intermediate retweeters. (I usually credit the person who brought it to my attention, unless an intermediate tweeter has significant relevance.) Losing that data is a shame because the path tweets take could be useful for analyzing people’s reputations as well as the importance of a piece of content.

I typically don’t re-shorten a link and replace it with my own trackable link, but some people do. Ideally the shorteners would credit back to previous retweeters automatically on a regenerated link.

On the question of “RT” vs. “via”: I use “RT” when I’m quoting someone else’s tweet. I use “via” when someone brought a story to my attention but the comment is mine.

Some of the above goes out the window when I’m mobile and laziness rules. e.g. I use “via” for everything because that’s what Tweetie puts in and it’s too difficult to change it.

If I’m posting something that I think has a high likelihood of being retweeted, I deliberately leave an extra 18 characters for “RT @rakeshlobster “.

How do you decide whom to follow back?

Because Twitter allows asynchronous relationships the rules here are different than on Facebook. Many of my new followers are just follow spammers and they’re easy to ignore. People who I know personally (and like) get an automatic follow.

For people who I don’t know, I’ll take a quick look at their profile and recent tweets to see if their content is likely to be interesting to me. It’d be nice if Twitter prompted new followers to send an @reply introducing themselves. Aside from the spammers, I’m curious to know what random people who follow me find interesting.

Is it OK to tweet during dinner or when out with friends?

This will vary with your group of friends, but for me the answer is a resounding “NO!” When I’m out with friends or colleagues I try hard to give them my full attention. Tweeting, emailing, texting, taking phone calls are for emergencies.

More on: twitter, social networking

I tried inflight WiFi last week aboard Virgin America. The day I flew happened to be the same day Virgin became the first U.S. airline to offer Internet access across its entire fleet. I live tweeted and uploaded pictures to flickr inflight.

Virgin uses GoGo, which is also available on select Delta, AirTran and American flights. United will be adding it on its p.s. flights between JFK and San Francisco/Los Angeles this summer.

The system worked as advertised: easy to use and reasonably fast. Set up was similar to signing up for a paid hotspot on the ground; I entered my credit card and was online in a minute or so. It costs $9.95 for flights under 3 hours and $12.95 for longer flights.

Speed was equivalent to a lower-tier U.S. home broadband connection. At 903 Kb/s down and 337 Kb/s up, it easily outperformed my 3G iPhone, both on speed and service availability.

From a technology standpoint it’s great. But do I really want it?

I’m really torn on that. I loved being able to chat with friends, check mail and update Twitter on my flight. The answer will really depend on what it does to the social contract we have with our fellow passengers and employers.

On the passenger front, will Internet access serve as a great adult pacifier or introduce more obnoxiousness? It’s easy to see people getting wrapped up in online activities and complaining less. The opposite is equally likely: a friend complained that a passenger near him on a transcontinental redeye was playing a voice-based game with others online. (Virgin policies prohibit using voice services; I didn’t get a chance to see how many of them, if any, are actually blocked.)

On the employer front, what will expecations be for inflight WiFi? I’ve used my flight time to work on presentations, edit pictures, write blog posts (this post was written on a United non-WiFi flight), stare out the window and contemplate life. Having a big block of time without a lot of distractions can be very productive; some of my best product ideas have been formulated on a plane. Having the option to connect is great, but I don’t think I’d like being required to be online the whole time.

It’s rare these days that a company impresses with customer service. It’s even rarer when that company is an airline, especially an American airline. That’s the experience I had last week when I was flying home from New Orleans on United Airlines.

It started out pretty awful. A few hours before my flight I received a text message that my flight was delayed. Then another. By the time I arrived at the airport, my originating flight had been delayed more than two hours, ensuring that I’d miss my connecting flight in Denver. As it got close to the new departure time, we were told that there was a mechanical issue. After a string of “we’re waiting for an update” announcements, we finally boarded three hours later when a new plane arrived.

Based on experience, I was braced for the worst when I arrived in Denver: a 90 minute wait for a harried customer service rep who would look for every excuse to not put me up for the night. Before leaving New Orleans, I’d tweeted “United already knows who will misconnect. What are the odds they’ll be proactive and have hotel vouchers waiting?” I would’ve placed them at 1000:1, best case.

But that’s exactly what happened. After we landed the gate agent came on board and announced that they had prepared packets with hotel and meal vouchers for everyone who was stranded. Three people were staffing the desk, despite the fact that we arrived around 2 a.m. They were polite and directed us to the hotel shuttles.

Within 20 minutes of landing in San Francisco the next day, there was an apology in my email box for the inconvenience. A link in the email invited me to select from a list of appreciation items, including a $250 travel certificate.

The immediacy and the proactive nature of the response made a very positive impression. It’s great to see companies using IT in this way.

In the most recent round of AP getting in a huff about search engines and aggregators stealing traffic that they feel rightly belongs to them, there’s a fundamental problem they’re ignoring: AP chose not be in the online news business. More than a decade ago, AP made two crucial decisions: to not create a destination site and to license its content to news portals. Either of these decisions on their own would have been damaging, but the combination of the two has been nearly deadly.

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.

As any designer knows, making a big change to a site with as many users as Facebook has is going to cause a lot of complaining. With that in mind, I’ve tried to get used to the new feed over the last few weeks — and I still hate it.

The new news feed is like watching CNN during a breaking news event: you can watch for hours and hours and only get two or three bits of interesting information amid the endless blather.

It’s a giant step backward and as more people get on Facebook and become more active it’s going to become worse.

Among the issues I have with it:

• Feed items from frequent users drown out feed items from infrequent users.
• Friends seem to be treated equally.
• It rewards spammy applications, such as the quiz applications that seem to pop up every day and apps like PicDoodle.
• It doesn’t eliminate duplicate items. If 10 people post the same item, it’ll be inserted multiple times. As much as I love the Twitter parody by current.tv, I don’t need to see it anymore. This is made worse by the use of URL shorteners that obfuscate the item you’re clicking on.

One of my design philosophies is that you shouldn’t make users do work that computers can do better. Filtering and priortizing is high on that list. The old Facebook news feed algorithm and the current highlights section provided some level of this.

Here are some of the factors to consider when prioritizing:

• Degree of interaction. Items from people I interact with regularly should be prioritized higher.
• Number of friends involved. The greater the number of friends involved, the higher the priority.
• Number of times shared. The more of my friends that have shared it, the more likely it is to be of interest.
• Location. I’m more interested in things happening near me than on the other side of the country. Facebook will need to become aware of locations that are being embedded by applications such as Brightkite.
• Posting frequency. If someone rarely posts on Facebook, the odds are good that when they do post, it’s something important.
• Application usage. If I use the same app, I’m more likely to be interested in the content that the app generates.
• Topic similarity. If the item is about a topic that I frequently post about, it should get a boost.
• Been there, done that. If I’ve seen it already, it should be downweighted.

The ideal feed would adapt to visit frequency. Someone who visits every five minutes would see a feed very similar to today’s feed. Someone who visits once a week, would see a “best of” from the week.

Some of these things are harder to do than others, but any sort of this filtering is better than what I see today.Any algorithm will undoubtedly miss something that I care about, but the current endless river of unfiltered content ensures that.

Besides, there’s a trick I use when I want to bring someone’s attention to something: instead of hoping that they see it on my feed, I message them directly.

More on: Facebook

In conversations with people in the news business, I regularly hear about the need for “professional journalists.” Ask them what makes a professional journalist and the answers get wishy-washy. Is it someone who is on staff at a newspaper? What about TV anchors? What about commentators? Do you have to have a fancy degree from a top-flight journalism school? Do you have to be able to write eloquently or briefly? (I know people who work for newspapers that can’t do either.)

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.