Emerging Technology Conference: New Media Sticking It to Old Media. But How's the Food?

We managed our first ride on the Baby Bullet, which is definitely better than the old local service, on which we think they're still delivering milk door-to-door. This is going to become a recurring theme in the piece, but this was the first point at which we thought "Man, what does a guy have to do to get some wireless access around here?" You'd think it wouldn't be so hard to offer on the train. Since we were out of The City for the first time in a while, we arranged a rendevous with SFist Emily on campus at Stanford. Even there we were shut out, as guests have to be "sponsored" by a Stanford user to gain access. Come on!

The official invitation pointed out that: "You need to arrive at the building by 7:00 p.m. as the campus is closed down for the night and once the event starts the outside doors automatically lock." Rather ominous, don't you think? But we managed to make it in just behind the bus ferrying out-of-town attendees from the hotel. Luckily, the event was being held in Yahoo's Building C, which houses their cafeteria and gym, so we were able to take a smoke-break after dinner and slide in behind an employee.

As for the food -- it was "casual buffet dinner," which means steamed vegetables, baked red potatoes and chicken breasts in a Campbell's Mushroom based sauce adorned with French's Fried Onions. Okay, it probably wasn't Campbell's and French's, but it was the wholesale-for-the-industry equivalent, and we know from experience that the Yahoo cafeteria offers better vittles daily to employees. Don't they know they're supposed to starve their workers while feeding press like royalty?

Luckily we did catch Bill, and got his card this time, but not until after seeing a nametag with "Topix.net" on it and introducing ourselves to Rich Skrenta, who turned out to be the President and CEO. Topix.net is a newsfeed aggregator based in Palo Alto, and through their partnerships you can find stories by SFist on sites like CitySearch (see, there we are!). We had to thank him for lumping us in with feeds from, like, reputable news organizations. He pointed out that we're one of the few locally-focused media outlets in the Bay Area at the forefront of online content delivery, which was news to us, but still pretty sweet to hear.

After dinner and a smoke, we cracked the laptop and pinged for wireless. Lots of great three-bar coverage, and lots of heavy WEP protection. So yeah, the deeper into Silicon Valley we got, the harder it was to get some online love. Who knew? Anyway, we would have blogged it live, but we had to settle for taking notes.

The main event was a presentation and QA hosted by Red Herring Editor-in-chief Joel Dreyfuss. It featured Craig Forman, Yahoo's Vice President of Information and Finance; Neil Budde, Yahoo News Director; and Scott Gatz, Yahoo's Senior Director of Personalization Products. Craig started off by introducing Yahoo as "an Internet Startup in Silicon Valley." Har har. What's funny, though, is that Yahoo is ancient in internet time, and while they make Hewlett-Packard look like a dinosaur, they definitely can't pretend to be the small and agile company they once were.

There were lots of slides about Yahoo's traffic -- 350 million individual sessions a month, 165 million of which are from registered users (for comparison, SFist had, um, a lot less than that). It got a little creepy when Craig pointed out that those registered users have given them lots of information about what they like. Did he mean willingly, like people writing them lots of emails? Or was he implying that "we aggregate your browsing habits and profile information and give it to our marketers and advertisers?"

The 'takeaway' for the day of presentations and meetings Craig reported to be "using new lightweight applications...to allow almost anybody to become a journalism organization or a news organization." News director Neil Budde pointed out that Yahoo, unlike "certain other new sites" (read: Google), had human hands steering the ship of content through editorial control over the links to stories and sources. Offered as proof of the success of their model was their leadership in traffic amongst online news sites -- 20 million unique visitors in December according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, just ahead of CNN, with MSNBC, AOL News, the New York Times, ABC News and Google News trailing in that order. He said the most important thing to users was "accurate information that respected their intelligence," and that through personalizable services like MyYahoo users were becoming their own news programmers.

Between January of 2004, when Yahoo News started offering RSS feeds for coverage topics, and December of 2004, the feeds grew to account for one percent of traffic to Yahoo News. Extrapolating from the previous numbers regarding traffic to Yahoo News compared to other online news aggregators, that works out to about 200,000 in a month. Not to toot our own horn, but SFist gets around half our traffic from people reading news feeds, meaning Yahoo is only getting four or five times more traffic to their news site from their RSS feeds as we are, and less than the entire Gothamist family combined. Score one for the bloggers.

Scott Gatz showed off some of the features of the new MyYahoo RSS technology, and pointed out that MyYahoo was now the largest online RSS feed aggregator. When the technology started, the most popular feed was Slashdot. Now it's the BBC, with Gizmodo in fourth and local publishers CNET and Wired at ninth and tenth. Over 10,000 feeds are available on MyYahoo, and we thought Dave Pell of Electablog and Craig Newmark of Craigslist would be happy to know that of the assortment of logos used as examples of feed sources, their were included on the PowerPoint slide.

Scott then explained some of the difficulties in getting folks to add their favorite site feeds to MyYahoo -- offering for example that most sites will put a link to their index.rdf file on the homepage, but if a user clicks through they get a page of XML (here is SFist's, for example). "My browser is broken!" he quipped. He plugged the "Add to MyYahoo" button to any site administrators in the audience. Of course SFist's first thought was, "What's in it for us?"

Well, traffic, for starters. He suggested a number of tips to make your site more available to MyYahoo users. First, add your own feed to your MyYahoo account, and it will automatically be added to the database of MyYahoo feeds; title your feeds well, so that users using Yahoo's "Feed Finder" search service can find your content; set up your software to ping Yahoo when new content is posted (which we're setting up right now); and convince folks to add the "RSS Autodiscovery" Yahoo button to their Firefox browsers.

Regarding feed titling, he picked on SFGate (who are not one of Yahoo News' affiliates), pointing out that all of their feeds are titled "SFGate." As SFist readers will know, the 'Gate added feeds just a few days ago, and are still getting the hang of it, so it was kind of odd to hear them getting harshed -- we had pointed out to Bill earlier (as part of a shameless attempt to get the 'Fist added to their list of local news sources for their Get Local news page) that the only local coverage for the Bay Area on offer was the Mercury-News, which requires registration. Not so useful to bloggers looking to link to articles or people who don't live in San Jose.

Where we were confused was when Google News was brought up to stress the importance of the classic Yahoo model of humans choosing the stories offered on Yahoo. The example given was of "cryptic sources" like the Yale student newspaper floating up to the Google News homepage on a topic, because Google's site relies more heavily on automation. This is where we got confused as to what Yahoo wants. Supposedly, "users want accurate information that respects their intelligence," but small publications like student newspapers and, we assume, blogs are "cryptic sources" which will be weeded out by Yahoo's staff of news editors for their front page. They were pointing up the smart guidance of their editorial staff to highlight news from established sources, while at the same time pointing up a user's ability to automate the aggregation of news from any source with an RSS feed.

All this came to a head during the question and answer session, when a couple of folks in the audience began to take the Yahoo presenters to task. One questioner, who pointed out how MyYahoo was not only a convenient tool for users, but also for advertisers to more accurately target those users, said that while MyYahoo was great for a single user at a terminal who wanted to personalize their content, it did not make any attempt to connect users interested in similar topics. For instance, Bloglines listings for a blog show the number of Bloglines users who also subscribe to that feed, and will even list them for you (SFist vainly checks this list regularly). According to Scott Gatz, short of checking your server logs for the summary left by Yahoo's bot, there's no way of getting this information from MyYahoo.

Susan then asked, "How can Yahoo help bloggers and smaller providers make money?" (Now do you see why we love Susan?) The point is, MyYahoo is selling all this new functionality to users, and their user base to advertisers, but they're getting all the content for free from small publishers. The response was less than heartening -- Scott Gatz suggested it was all about making your content easier to find and said he had anecdotal stories of sites growing after being pointed out to Yahoo users by Yahoo's editors. It didn't sound like Yahoo had really considered that they would ever have to pay for feeds, or that people might see Yahoo targetting ads based on a user's blog choices as taking advantage. When Susan pressed them, asking "Can you help them monetize their feeds," Scott replied "Not right now."

Another interesting questioned posed was about the subscription model being considered by traditional news sources. There have been rumors now for ages that the New York Times is going to put their foot down and start charging for current online content. Already the entire online news world is a maze of registration-only sites, and more and more publications are beginning to charge for access to their archives. Which leaves a news aggregator like Yahoo in an interesting position, since as access to "accurate" sources diminishes, they'll have to turn to, well, unpaid bloggers for content.

Chatting after the panel with Greg Aarons and Bruce Koon, we were told that the Tribune company actually has a web bot that cruises bugmenot.com for pre-registered logins posted there and automatically disables the accounts. And people get on our case for linking to SFGate too often. Would you rather we linked to subscription-based and required-registration sites? Greg pointed out that in the past, papers could depend on classified ads accounting for up to 35% of their revenue. Now they're lucky if it represents 15%. And Susan's friend Bob, who was nice enough to give us a ride back up 101, noted that 93% of businesses in San Francisco have fifty or fewer employees, and that as print publications increase their ad rates to account for revenue shortfalls, small, local businesses are being shut out of much needed publicity, which opens the door for chains and franchises who can subsidize the increased media costs.

Old media is scared s**tless and are making a lot of clumsy moves that may provide short-term solutions to their problems while at the same time exacerbating the problems with their long-term prospects. Advertisers are looking to people like Yahoo for creative advertising solutions, but need all sorts of private information about their users to target those ads effectively. And bloggers are helping to foment the change because, as Greg pointed out, "They have nothing to lose." Well, our job, but that would be focusing on the short-term, wouldn't it? In the end, the geeks shall inherit the earth.

SFist would like to thank Mediacenter for the invitation, Yahoo for the refreshments and lively discussion, Susan for taking us seriously, Rich for adding us to Topix, Bill for recognizing us, Bob for reading the site and everyone else we talked to for being friendly and interesting.