JeffreyMarx.com

The Westchester Wordpress meetup group held its first meetup on Tuesday, January 26th at my newspaper’s (The Journal News) offices in White Plains, New York. The audience was comprised of about 10 people looking to learn more about the software. The group was started by Anthony Zeoli , who runs a local web development firm called Digital Strategy Works. We’re joining a cluster of groups that have been popping up to discuss Wordpress, an open source blogging system which is becoming more popular by the day. Meetup.com is one of my favorite sites on the internet as it’s main intent is to use the internet to organize the groups that meet off the internet. I’ll talk more about Meetup.com in a future blog post.

Zeoli did a fantastic job walking through the Wordpress installation process. He explained the basics of themes, Search Engine Optimization and plugins. The audience was very active in asking a lot of questions. I’m an assistant organizer of the group and would like to think that my experience overseeing a cluster of Wordpress Powered blogs is a big help to people who want to understand Wordpress better. I chimed in and relayed a lot of good information that the audience seemed to appreciate

Our second Meetup will be held on Tuesday February 16th, also at the Journal News office in White Plains. The agenda is not set in stone yet. Members have said they want to learn more about SEO, Theming, Permalinks and Hierarchy, and just a general discussion around blogging with Wordpress and the various opportunities blogging presents. So our plan is to take one of those general topics, and delve much deeper into it for our February meetup. In March, I’m planning on making a presentation on how bloggers can build traffic through link building, and engaging the audience.

if you are interested in attending, please join our meetup group. It is a great opportunity to learn about blogging and Wordpress from professionals who are in the field.

Here is a link to Tony’s powerpoint slides from the meeting.

Starting in 2011, the New York Times will begin to charge for access to stories on its web site. However, this paywall is not like others we have seen in that it won’t start charging users until they click through several stories. Needless to say, this plan has raised more than a few eyebrows.

Their plan is to count how many times a user reads their articles and start charging them once they exceed a certain threshold (the threshold has yet to be determined). Sounds a bit counter intuitive doesn’t it? Why punish your most loyal readers? The reason for this is to stay relevant with search engines. Closing everything off from the massive crowd of freeloaders (err … i mean users) would alienate the casual web surfer as well as piss off search engines. They assume that their most diehard loyal fans will not mind paying for their content. That theory will be put to the test quickly.

This raises a lot of questions. How many articles do you let users read before you pull the plug? What type of technology will they use to enforce this? Even inexperienced users know how to clear their cookies these days. So how do you identify unique users with a good accuracy rate? Using IP addresses? Those can easily be manipulated. Maybe there will be some kind of free registration before you hit the paywall (seems like that would defeat the purpose of a “metered” plan). There just seems to be so many ways around this plan. Hordes of people will put articles on message boards, web sites, and in the comment sections of free blogs, while the NY Times legal department tries to hunt them down with copyright suites. The NY Times wants the best of both worlds where they can have a paywall, but still give away a lot for free. That is a very tricky balance to strike.

Another big question is whether or not the Times can make enough money through online subscriptions to offset potentially massive losses in online advertising revenue. It’s hard to imagine the Times traffic not taking a big dip once they put in a paywall. They simply won’t have the same volume of people viewing their articles, which will make them less attractive to advertisers. On the other hand, some advertisers may like the fact that they have a core set of loyal users and will have a very solid handle on their demographics (I assume the paywall registration process will ask people a lot of questions about age, income etc.).

The one thing that is for certain is that many eyes will be on this project to see if this plan can save the struggling newspaper industry. Only time will tell.

My former co-worker (I.E. I drove him to the airport one time) and colleague (I’m pretty sure he still knows my name) Jeff Jarvis wrote a book called “What Would Google Do?“. I really enjoyed reading Jarvis’ thoughts on business and media today and how how to take Google’s “open source” way of thinking and apply it to the rest of the world. Jeff Jarvis is a journalist who has gone on to become a pioneer/evangelist in the online world. His blog, Buzzmachine is a tremendously popular resource for media professionals everywhere.

He went over a case study about how he raised a firestorm on his blog Buzzmachine with Dell regarding poor customer service over a product he bought. After amassing a huge group of followers, he caught Dell’s attention. His blog posts resonated with many other frustrated customers who left comment after comment about their experiences. The controversy made its way to the media and caused some public humiliation for Dell. In the end, Jarvis got restitution and actually helped Dell shift its strategy so that they pay more attention to bloggers and involve customers when making decisions. That is a victory for any person who feels like they have been given the runaround from a company that sold them a defective product, or waited hours for the cable guy to show up in a certain “window” of time. And it really illustrates how the internet has given customers more power than they have ever had. Google has embraced the customers voice and used it as a key component in their monstrous success. Google’s whole business is based around customer service, organizing information and making it easy for customers to find what they want quickly. While that service in of itself does not yield any direct revenue, they found ways to make a ton of money once they won the trust of their fans. Pay attention to your customers, and the rest will follow. That is one of the concepts stressed repeatedly throughout the book.

But this book really is not just about Google. It is about how companies not only need to pay attention to their customers, but actually use them as resources to design better products. Imagine if a restaurant’s menu included customer comments next to each dish (good and bad). On my newspaper site, we have a popular New York Yankees blog where we routinely give credit/links to competing newspapers’ good columns/stories about the Bronx Bombers. We also allow some of our more regular users to actually write posts on the blog in the “pinch hitter” series that takes place during the offseason when baseball news slows down. Could you imagine that ever happening in print (I can sense one of my former journalism professors shuddering at the thought)? Newspaper writers are used to writing stories and not having to worry about immediate reaction from readers. Now readers can post comments so they are directly attached to stories posted on the web site. This is a whole new level of accountability that companies need to get used to and embrace.

I don’t agree with all of Jarvis’ views, but he definitely gives a great overview on how the new forms of media have affected all aspects of our economy. All businesses (small and big) must understand this to be able keep their customers, or their competitors will take advantage.

Welcome to my blog. Whether you found this site through google, or if i sent you the link, or if you are just really bored … This is the online home of web developer Jeff Marx. I’ll be sharing my thoughts on web development, usability, sports, life .. and pretty much whatever pops into my head. I have been hoping to get my site off the ground for years. I figured I would just do it and see what happens. Thanks for visiting!