OpenID – A Hard-to-Use Ease-of-Use Plan UPDATED

It’s hard to see how OpenID (recently reported on by wsj.com) is going to catch on with actual users. It solves one problem (multiple, increasingly picky UserID/password schemes on all the Web sites you use) with another (you can’t save your login and access your frequently used sites as seamlessly as you do now). In the research I do with Web users, I can’t think of a user annoyance that’s felt to be more, well, annoying than having to log in repeatedly when it shouldn’t be necessary.

It’d be great if this works, just the same way it’d be great if more sites could band together on a seamless, low-barrier way to generate usage-based content revenue other than old-fashioned monthly or annual subscriptions. But there are just as many dead pan-Web micropayment schemes as there are dead login schemes (QPass, anyone?). In both cases – passwords and micropayments – the solution needs to be carefree for both users and publishers, and no one has gotten both pieces right – yet. Amazon? Google? Please?

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Matt for pointing out that OpenID-enabled sites can, if they choose, allow you to avoid repeated logins on subsequent visits, the same way they can if you are using their own login schema. That’s a point in OpenID’s favor I had misunderstood. I did just spent an hour registering at various OpenID sites and then accessing them with my Yahoo OpenID. It works fairly well, but I still wonder if it’s enough of a convenience to drive mass acceptance.

Another Seemingly Empty Social Network – Times People

Just signed up for Times People, which intrusively appeared above my nytimes.com home page this morning. Easy enough to sign up (name and city are all that’s required), but once you do, what’s the benefit?

Like so many other wannabe networks, after you sign up there’s no sense of who else is around, who might be talking about something interesting, or what’s available to you that wasn’t before.

I know it’s hard to make a network look interesting when no one has signed up for it yet – but it’s the equivalent of having people click on a section of the online newspaper and get a page with a “no stories about this” message.

Business Exchange Has Promise and Some Bugs

I like the idea of Business Week’s new Business Exchange beta – take a look at their Online Media topic page.  It’s nice to think that some smart people at Business Week are looking around for and flagging stories from around the Web on various topics.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, you can’t get a feed of the stories that are added, so you have to remember to keep checking back if you want to track a topic. And the “News” tab seems full of irrelevant junk.

New wsj.com, old bigmoney.com

Once I got over the four horizontal navbars at the top of the page, I thought today’s new wsj.com was a long-overdue improvement. The home page looks great. And despite predictions that there’d be lots more free content, so far five of the top six stories in “What’s News” still require a paid subscription ($89).

They’ve also launched their new Journal Community, although at first glance it suffers from the same social networking “empty bar” problem I’ve ranted about before. Too bad News Corp. wasn’t able to buy LinkedIn, as was rumored a while ago before its billion-dollar valuation. That would have made more sense than starting over here from scratch.

Surprising to see no ad units above the fold on the home page, unless there are some spots that just don’t happen to be sold.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s new Big Money has little to read, and can’t even keep its home-page widgets from colliding into one another (below).

Fewer Sections – Does It Matter?

Not only has The New York Times gotten a lot narrower this year, now it’ll run in fewer sections on Monday through Wednesday. Metro coverage will run inside the main news section most days and no longer have its own section front, and sports will fold into the business section every weekday but Monday. It’s driven, of course, by cost savings.

The Times claims this won’t result in any fewer stories, but based on the newspaper readership studies I’ve done over the years, it’s clear that fewer people will be reading whatever stories remain. For better or for worse, on many days, even loyal readers often only get to the stories on the section fronts, and many sections don’t get opened at all. You have to wonder if this won’t drive measurably lower readership of the paper’s metro and sports coverage.

But then, maybe in ten years most newspapers that remain will all have moved to a tabloid format anyway.

Is Podcasting Over?

Great post from Internet radio guru Kurt Hanson claiming that podcasting is still a relatively insignificant audience phenomenon with not much money to be made from it.

He runs some interesting numbers on NPR’s extensive podcasting investment and suggests that despite well over 200 million downloads over time, it’s not very significant in terms of new reach (and new revenues) for the network. My wonderful spouse couldn’t survive without her iPod full of NPR, but maybe Kurt is right. Unless funders and sponsors are ponying up new dollars to support the podcasts, or podcast listeners end up being even more generous to the their local NPR stations, what’s the use?

I generally tell media clients that unless they’ve got a brilliant ad salesperson who can somehow get some real sponsorship dollars from podcasting, they’re better off spending their multimedia bucks on video and audio content that can live happily on their sites. As the Hanson post points out, podcasting reaches a much smaller potential audience than ordinary old Web audio and video (streamed or on-demand).

Me, I’m still frustrated that the classical-music podcasts and shows I’d love to be listening to on my iPod either aren’t available or have the music stripped out of them because of the outrageous music royalty situation.

What’s Hot, News Aggregators or Do-It-Yourself?

Reuters did an unhelpful piece last week on sites that aggregate news. Poorly written to start with (“the ability to get news on a mobile device is flourishing” – can an ability flourish?), the story tried to make a case for this “growing” trend without any data related to anyone’s audience size, traffic or revenue growth, or research data. Basically just a list of links – must have been a slow news week.

Certainly Yahoo News (with 17 million monthly users, according to Quantcast) and Google News (5.5 million) are still the critical distribution points for almost every news provider. It remains to be seen whether any of the other newer aggregators puffed in the article (Daylife, Newser, etc.) are going to have a significant impact on the news marketplace.

Meanwhile, for some actual information, check out the recent Pew study on internet news consumption, which points out that “…22% of Americans say they have a customizable web page, such as iGoogle, that includes news items. Among the heaviest web news consumers – those who go online for news daily – fully 44% say they have a customizable web page that incorporates news items.” That reinforces the point that in addition to worrying about showing up in Yahoo and Google, publishers need a solid plan for feeding their news into the do-it-yourself aggregation environments like My Yahoo (11 million monthly users, says Quantcast). Such a plan means thinking carefully about the right number of RSS feeds you’re offering, as well as the energy you should be investing in promoting their use.

By the way, it’d be great to see someone outdo My Yahoo in terms of an easy-to-read, easy-to-add-to interface for aggregating news. I’ve tried dozens of them and from a usability standpoint they’ve all left me pretty cold. I’ll buy a virtual (or real) lunch for anyone who can show me something that would make me switch.