All entries tagged: Information Valet
CircLabs’ Bill Densmore on tracking readers’ habits to build new revenue streams for news organizations
CircLabs, the hard-to-describe startup that aims to create new revenue streams for news sites, has detailed a little more about its plans. And Martin Langeveld, who’s involved in the project, has written more about it too. (You know Martin from his writings here.) Their initial product, Circulate, seems to be a browser plugin that tracks your browsing patterns and information you give it to recommend content you might like. CircLabs promises publishers a variety of potential revenue streams off that model, including the ability to use Circulate as a pay wall or a micropayments engine.
CircLabs is an offshoot of the work Bill Densmore did on what he called the Information Valet Project as a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. I talked with Bill a couple months ago about his work on IVP; the video of our conversation is above. While IVP covered a broader set of ideas than Circulate does, I think it helps explain what the new project is all about. Full transcript below. Keep reading »
Circlabs: a new entry in the options for sustaining journalism
Full disclosure right up front: I’m one of the partners launching the venture described herein.
This morning in Washington, D.C., Jeff Vander Clute and I announced the formation of CircLabs, a technology company based in Silicon Valley that’s building a new service to finance online news. CircLabs has seed funding from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
The announcement was part of a one-day conference entitled “From Gatekeeper to Information Valet: Work Plans for Sustaining Journalism,” organized by Bill Densmore, another partner in the project along with Joe Bergeron, a Silicon Valley software engineer.
CircLabs plans a suite of services, the first of which is code-named “Circulate.” Software development on Circulate is underway, and we anticipate launching the service during the second half of this year.
Circulate will address the challenges of how to increase traffic to media-affiliated websites, secure relationships with online users and enhance the value of news. The Associated Press has been cooperating with us and is supportive of the service. We anticipate including a variety of strategic partners — unique investors necessary for continued development after the launch of Circulate.
Circulate is an outgrowth of research led by Bill Densmore, who was a 2008-2009 Reynolds Fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
Circulate will provide new and convenient ways for the Web to “come to” users, including social functionality that integrates, at their option, with their social network accounts.
Building networks around news
Even though the public’s engagement with social networks is growing strongly, news enterprises have been slow to wade into the social networking waters.
Publishers, and especially editors, still tend to see themselves as curators of content: selecting, generating, massaging and presenting material for the audience they perceive, but not really networking with that audience except in rudimentary ways like comment forums that are not enormously evolved from the old channel of writing a letter to the editor.
A Bivings Group report published in December, “The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers” (which I’ve discussed previously) found that while the adoption of individual social media tools (social bookmarking, blogs, RSS, etc.) was pretty strong at the papers in 2008, only 10 percent, or 10 newspapers, had incorporated some form of social networking on their sites. (And I can’t find more than two or three of those — any hints appreciated.)
In any case, those ten newspapers, wherever they are, are still in an experimental stage, and robust social networking built around news is still something to be invented, although various pieces of it are out there. Is it feasible, or necessary? Absolutely — the rest of the web is rapidly moving to, or beyond, the “2.0″ point of socially-networked interactivity; news media are behind the curve. Among other things, by building a social network around, news media can stimulate conversations about news, certainly something that will help news media survive and grow.
One social network connecting many news sites, readers and advertisers would be better than a multiplicity of networks at individual news sites. What should it look like? That’s the problem — we’re still working on it, and not with all deliberate speed or urgency. Here are some links that touch on some aspects of what’s coming. I invite readers to contribute more:
Social networks built around news can’t happen without journalists who are adept at social networking, themselves. Among bloggers, Gina Chen of Save The Media has done a particularly useful series to help journalists get started. If you’re a journalist and haven’t read these, get over there:
