Too Much Money + Too Much Time = Nothing

Pretty ridiculous to spend $66 million and still not have a Web site, right?

Before you dismiss this as just another example of Those Chaotic Italians – remember that technology projects like this happen all the time on a smaller and less comical scale. Companies are constantly developing huge, bloated specs for Web sites, for the Ultimate Billing System, for global content-management platforms, etc., all of which have a few things in common: Too many requirements from too many people, too many non-revenue-driven priorities, no real P&L manager driving the process, and total obsolescence by the time they’re half built.

If only people stopped chasing Total Solutions, and concentrated on the top few things that really get customers excited and make money, there’d be a lot fewer project sinkholes.

Note to Silvio Berlusconi: I’m available to come over for six months or so and straighten this out for you. My Italian’s pretty good.

Why Topic Pages Are a Good Idea for All News Sites

Business Week recently announced that continuously updated topical pages will be a prominent part of its Web site beginning in late September, on subjects ranging from the housing market to the Boeing 787 to Blackberry vs. iPhone. They’ll include stories and data not just from BW but from sources everywhere on the Web – including their own readers.

Every vertical magazine and local newspaper should wonder whether this isn’t a sensible way to focus Web efforts: not based on the stories you’re currently producing, but what topics your readers should expect you be the experts on. Local newspapers should “own” local real estate, land use projects, schools, shopping and local government; vertical business magazines should own the important companies, product categories, and controversial issues in their industry. Readers should be able to turn to your site for an up-to-date overview of what’s going on – not just a list of old stories – with rich background information, explainers, photography or expert commentary.

As additional benefits, topical pages like that should also do well in Google, and are a great sponsorship package for advertisers.

One of my favorite examples of how a local news site has thought of a creative way to approach such a category is WestportNow.com’s Teardown page. In a market where people are obsessed with residential real estate, here’s a clever way to be an ongoing reference for those so obsessed.

We’ll see how Business Week, not known for the Midas touch, does on the execution side. But it’s not a bad idea to take steps towards making yourself, in effect, the Wikipedia of the subject matters your brand should “own.”

NYTimes.com-LinkedIn Deal Is Less Than Meets the Eye

It was a great press release when LinkedIn announced its deal with NYTimes.com to display “customized” news on the Times site based on users’ LinkedIn profile data. You’ll see the unit on story pages inside the “Business” and “Technology” sections of the Times site (although not on the home pages for those sections.)

Great Position for LinkedIn on NYTimes.com

Trouble is, the box doesn’t really deliver anything very customized. All LinkedIn is doing is telling the Times I’m a “Media Professional” (for which I’m grateful, of course) so the stories in the box are the same ones on the “Media” page of the Times, which I already read anyway. And, of course, the stories are only from the Times. So the box, for readers, is duplicative and uninteresting.

Seems like a fabulous visibility deal for LinkedIn, maybe not such a great deal for the Times. Or am I missing something?

Building a Social Network Gets Easier (Sort Of)

Interesting piece from ReadWriteWeb about the growing social-networking capabilities of low-end content management platforms like WordPress. The barriers to entry are getting lower and lower, and the idea that there’s advertising and other revenue to be generated from vertical networks will keep media companies on the hunt.

What’s still unclear, however, is how many social networks the average person is willing to go through the hassle of registering for and staying up to date with. Some vertical networks (The Biz from Variety, for example) try to make it easy to import the data you’ve already worked to hard to create on LinkedIn. But the real answer won’t come until there are some easier open standards to share your personal/membership data across multiple networks.

Until then, every publisher who thinks starting a social network is a great idea will have to have a plan to overcome some significant barriers to registration and participation.

Online News Readers Want More Depth, Says AP

Very interesting and well written research report from the Associated Press, on how younger consumers interact with news sources across multiple media. The sample size is very small (18 people for a global study!) but it’s worth your time.

Among the key findings: Even these younger readers feel that it’s often too hard to dig deeply for more detail and background on a story that interests them. That should make editors happy, since it shows that people value what editors have traditionally done. But it can be depressing, too, since detail and background are tricky to present and more expensive to create.

It was delightful, by the way, to see a focus on content, navigation, innovative presentation, and good old e-mail. Nothing about citizen journalism, social networking, user-generated content, or other peripheral features that don’t go to the heart of what makes news valuable.

My Home Page Has No Business Model

My home page has been My Yahoo! for as long as I can remember. Once they turned it into a decent RSS reader, I’ve become even more obsessed with it and check it more often than I ever have … surely I look at it 20 times a day at least.

But I’m mystified about how this heavily personalized page can look itself in the mirror every morning, since it carries no advertising at all, much less anything even slightly targeted. Here I’ve effectively told Yahoo! all my interests, professional and personal … the industry I work in, the sports teams I follow, the stocks I watch, the kind of music I like, the cities I travel to often. With all that data to chomp on, there isn’t so much as a single text ad on the page. (There were some amazingly untargeted banners for a while, but now I don’t even get those.)

It’s hard to believe that I’m complaining about no advertising, but from a business standpoint this makes me a little crazy. I’m sure Yahoo’s current management is distracted and all, but things must be pretty bad to let a franchise product like this go along without generating a nickel. Anyone have an explanation?