Four incredibly useful online information resources that are most effectively searched using their own site search tools, rather than relying on general-purpose engines to surface their valuable content.

Go beyond just “Googling it.” You can do it.

dbreunig:

Pew Research’s Project for Excellence in Journalism just released “The Search for a New Business Model”, a new study “which combines detailed proprietary data from individual newspapers with in-depth interviews at more than a dozen major media companies” in order to understand how newspapers are digitally innovating or otherwise trying to stymie their rapidly disappearing print revenues.

It’s not pretty. Reading the report is like watching someone with a headwound fumble for tiny bandaids in the dark.

Here’s the narrative I walked away with:

• Digital revenues aren’t even close to covering print losses. For every $11 in print revenue, papers brought in $1 in digital revenue. Put a more depressing way: for every $1 gained in digital $7 are lost in print revenue.
• Newspapers don’t know how to sell digital advertising.Papers are barely selling targeted advertising. Instead, they choose (or only know how) to sell discrete display advertising campaigns. Such campaigns cannot scale to the scale of their audience and reduce the value of digital sales efforts by a factoror two.
• Newspapers are unable to hire digital talent. The majority of executives said it’s almost impossible to hire digitally fluent sales people, due to newspapers’ bad digital repuations. Further, even if they can hire digital talent they haven’t figured out how to integrate digital sales people with their traditional sales personnel.
• Newspapers don’t want to think about digital. A surveyed executive worries that they spend too much time working on digital, “We spend 90% of our time talking about 10% of our revenue.” A number of executives expressed concern that they have “too many people-whether it be in the newsroom, the boardroom or on the sales staff-who were too attached to the old way of doing things.”

Based on this report, I’d wager a large chunk of these businesses will die before they change.

Which would you rather be: a business with 100,000 print subscribers (which is the high-end of those surveyed) or a digital-only news startup with $100,000?

The recent study by Intelligent Positioning showed Wikipedia ranks on Google UK for 99% of searches. But the study only used one-word nouns, and as we know, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia — in large part, a repository of information about nouns. Meanwhile, most search queries are longer than one word nouns. Matt McGee explains how he’d like to see a new study conducted that uses words that mimic actual search behavior instead.

futurejournalismproject:

We’re on Tumblr. If you’re reading this you’re (probably) on Tumblr.

And if you’re on Tumblr and we’re on Tumblr we have a shared history of great times, fun people and… unfortunate downtimes.

These don’t happen as much as they used to in our neck of the woods.

And that’s because Tumblr is scaling… everywhere.

As in, it gets 15 billion page views a month, has a peak rate of 40 thousand requests per second, collects more or less three terabytes of new content a day, all running on approximately one thousand servers.

And they’re doing this with about 20 engineers.

If you’re a geek, a friend of a geek, or simply sympathetic (and/or empathetic) to geeks that build platforms and keep them running so that the rest of us can do what we do, read High Scalability’s article on Tumblr’s architecture, its goals, and the hurdles it’s facing as it tries to reach those goals.

In it, Blake Matheny, Tumblr’s Distributed Systems Engineer, guides us through stats, software, hardware, architecture and lessons learned.

It’s mesmerizing, in a geeky sort of way.

In the meantime, it’s Valentines tomorrow. Consider sending the Tumblr crew a slew of hugs and kisses.

smarterbits:

Tim Cook, speaking about the Apple TV at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference:

So, with Apple TV however, despite the barriers in that market, for those of us who use it, we’ve always thought there was something there. If we kept following our intuition and kept pulling the string, we might find something that was larger. For those people that have it right now, the customer satisfaction is off the chart. We need something that could go more main-market for it to be a serious category.

Nothing new to learn here. Indeed, my Apple TV is probably second only to my iPhone in satisfaction and enjoyment of an product I own.¹

Cook again, on preserving Apple’s culture:

We should stay extremely focused on a few things, rather than try to do so many that we did nothing well. We should only go into markets where we can make a significant contribution to society, not just sell a lot of products.

I don’t want to run wild with Apple Television (iTV?) rumours, but something stood out for me reading this article. First, it’s all too easy to read the first quote and decide that the iTV is in fact the main-market product that could turn Apple’s television business into a stool as large as iOS and the Mac. Too easy.

But reading the second quote and thinking about both together, it seems that an Apple Television set has no role in what makes the Apple TV great and has no relevance to Apple’s culture. Even in our wildest fantasies about an iTV, the revolutionary part isn’t the display or even the display in conjunction with the Apple TV software. It’s just the software.

So if I play ball with Apple’s philosophy of wanting only to make significant contributions to society through their products, it would seem that focusing on growing the Apple TV’s content library and developing relations with distributors will make much more of an impact than some expensive LED display ever could.² Access to better, cheaper and more diverse ways of enjoying their favourite content is what’s truly going to stoke the fires of the main market crowd and draw them away from cable providers.

That’s the significant part. ³

1. Though my Blue Microphone Yeti is getting up there. Is this where I’m supposed to stick an affiliate link? ↩

2. And for what it’s worth (not much), I think a $100 stone sized box you can stick on any HD capable display is the way to go to reach the broadest audience. But I’m biased because I love my $100 stone. ↩

3. I think I made it through this without making a prediction. Whew. Ok fine, the title is pure SEO. Stone me I guess. ↩