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[ # ] IBS CEO Profiled in StarTribune
July 23rd, 2007 under News


If news stations make it easier to embed and share stories, I’d say this is a move in the right direction.

Agent of change

Lebow’s new emphasis is on Web 2.0, the new consumer-centric theory of Internet presentation and marketing. Instead of forcing people to use a TV station’s website, the company might provide it in snippets that consumers could import to their personal websites, such as a page on Facebook, the popular social networking service, he says.

“We want to give control to the consumer,” he says.

However, it’s not clear how much control is in the hands of IBS vs. the stations they build sites for. You can move a lot faster if you don’t have to justify every move to non-techies.

Hopefully, this has some sort of strange trickle down effect that leads to the un-truncating Jason Derusha’s blog feed. As of this writing I’m subscribed to 339 RSS feeds in Google Reader, but Derusha doesn’t make the cut. Sorry, but I can’t deal with clicking out to read stuff when 339 other sources DON’T force me do to so.

However, I do catch some of Jason’s stuff indirectly through the occasional reference on MNSpeak or other local site.

Perhaps Jason should just limit his posts to one sentence so nothing gets cropped?


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    Read the Comments

    [ # 2409 ] Comment from Jason [July 23, 2007, 7:35 am]

    The truncating does suck, doesn’t it? I see more and more websites doing it: the Strib only shows one sentence, the Daily Planet shows nothing, just the headline. I think my feed now gives about a paragraph and a half. I’m sure as long as TV stations and other media sites are playing the hit count game, the feeds will stay truncated.

    Plus, geez, I guessed where your picture was from, that should get me a slot in your feed reader.

    [ # 2416 ] Comment from kohler [July 23, 2007, 11:30 am]

    If you PROMISE me that every post you write is worth clicking to read, I’ll consider it. :-)

    This inspired a post on TE today.

    [ # 2424 ] Comment from Jason [July 23, 2007, 3:13 pm]

    We give everything away for free. Free reporting, free headlines, free weather radar… are we so conditioned to getting everything on the web for free that we won’t even click on a link to open a window? Is it that hard? Really?

    I forwarded your TE post to our assistant news director, who heads up the web stuff. I think it would make sense to do full feeds (non-truncated) of blogs and things you want to build… and a paragraph or two of news stories. Frankly, I wouldn’t want an entire NY Times story to pop up in my feed reader. I don’t mind clicking.

    [ # 2425 ] Comment from kohler [July 23, 2007, 3:48 pm]

    It’s free in the “not pay-per-view” sense of the world, but there is a cost. Clicking to view content is a cost.

    If I was the NY Times, I’d leave it up to the readers to decide how much they want to read in their RSS reader. Many have the option of truncating if that’s how they’ve prefer to consume things.

    I think a better solution would be to cross promote content within the footer of each RSS feed. WCCO has tons of feeds, but as they now exist, do little to leverage the power of the local station’s network.

    The cool thing is that there is a lot that could be done better.

    [ # 2426 ] Comment from Jason [July 23, 2007, 3:53 pm]

    Ooh… that’s a great idea. We’re awful at leverging out web stregth into television viewing. The RSS feed gives endless opportunity to really target a cross promotional message to a specific reader (at least someone reading a specific type of story).

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