Free-mium: a free and a premium product that people will pay for. What about le monde? Whose gonna pay? Consumers or advertisers? Banner ads are old news Pay to be a recommend follow… that’s a neat idea. Don’t want to cripple the free product, but don’t want to set the premium too high that people won’t use it.

Games are best model for free model. 5 percent become premium users. Pay to save money, pet for your penguin… How do you create that version of the product without crippling the base product?

Facebook as a twitter competitor.

Some paper adds value to the internet, beautiful photography, great integration of design, long form journalism. When you put this online, it falls apart. Online adds value with short value (printed is visual?) online is instantaneous.

Free is the best way to maximize your reach. Anyone around the world can reach it. If you believe that the physical book is the superior form, then you have to believe that people who really love the sample will buy the actual book.

Harder to monetize popularity, or build? Anderson says monetize.

Guy sees twitter at a marketing weapon. If you follow me or follow you, you’ll get a PDF for free (you’ll get tens of thousands of followers) and you’ll find a way to monetize. If I do it to someone, it’s clever marketing. If someone does it to me, it’s spam.

20th century free was a marketing trick - you’ll pay sooner or later (get the razor, but have to buy blades later). Products have real costs so you need to pay them back pretty quick. “Free”

21st century free: Economy of bits - near zero marginally cost, whatever it costs today, it’ll cost even less tomorrow. Free - really free.

5 seats free, 30 days, storage, feature, band-width, class of costumers (microsoft small biz)

China is the future of free?

Each one of our jobs is to create microcelebrate and then turn that into cash. Is that something that can be applied to news? Well, yes. People know ced and kirk and follow them. Can we do that for news, but putting more of a face on each of our reporters? Give them each their own brand? Or does that take us too far away from reporting and journalism?

Guy:

Walls Drugs: first free model?

Tony could give away shoes and make it up on replacement laces? No! Tony gives free shipping! Free has an incredible meaning… it draws our attention.
— drawback: customers feel guilty. What if it comes and i don’t like it? I’ll feel bad sending it back.

At 5, kids think everything on the internet is free.

Is there any way in which we’ll pay for digital content in the next generation? Does it save your time? Is it higher quality? You can create your own ringtone but it’s hassle. That’s why we download it.

If it’s cheap, is it not as good? You get what you pay for kind of thing?

How people feel about free derives from expectations in that space. If you’re competing with photoshop. They might test you against photoshop. If you claim to be like them but free, they’re suspicious. they import expectations from previous experiences. If you’re too similar to something
ex: Village Voice died when it when free? Whereas the onion has always been free….

It it worth the extra money?

Stitch media goes the extra mile…
Hired hot girls with water guns to get guys at comic con to put on rub on tattoos and bang! There’s clues all over the place.

Scotland crop circles triple the tourism!

Think like a gamer - it’s all about play.

How would we incorporate this at the statesman? Hiding clues around Austin? Making living in Austin a game? make *NEWS* interactive. How could would that be. Are we doing anything like this right now?

site should utilize a variety of web-based social networking and collaboration tools

site should be generalized as possible and be able to be downloaded for use by a wide variety of organizations and communities.

Base camp? twitterific? top sites?

No more than 100 hours, only freely available software can be used, all sites must be freely available, site must function on the provided shared hosting space (linux/apache/mysql)

http://cmsshowdown.com/, Drupalshowdown.com, http://wpshowdown.com/, http://joomlashowdown.com/

Joomla –> photo galleries easy to create. hardest things were, tamka. sliding navigation is pretty cool. search on side. Reading required sign in?

Droopal –>newsletter subsciptions, cool sliding navigation, no search

wordpress –>search function, navigation loads slow, doesn’t flow. blog posts have ratings, share buttons. no search. Forums

Drupal, Joomla, wp

total hours      79.25, 57.25, 90.5

hours spent on front end    21.75, 15, 36.5

HTML validation    (no, 8 errors), yes, no (8 errors)

CSS validations (no, 7 errors), No (1 error), No (21 errors)

paper weight 180k, 140k, 154k

Lines of custom php/js code    220, 30, 1808

Design evaluation:

Each team has applied the visual language across elements that i didn’t supply a design for - overall, this was a great and something i was pleased to see. it does indeed look like al the teams were not limited by their choice of cms in realising the design.

well i actually think it’s a close tie between wordpress and drupal. from a typographic standpoint, the joomla team were off slightly. am i allowed to say a tie from that standpoint?

User evaluation:

Drupal - creating custom forms found rather complicated, had trouble editing existing content. trouble finding and using site manager tools.

wordpress - found the dashboard hard to use.

She likes drupal best, then joomla, than wordpress was a distant third.

what is visual thinking? Transforming verbal/text based information into visual display so people can engage it and understand it better.

Why it’s powerful:

1. cerebral cortex is responsible for awareness and consciousness and perception. Of that part of your brain, it still dedicates half to processing visual information.

2. not just content, but source. It says in the Bible. Nearly 3/4 of the information we receive is visual with the other 1/4 from our other senses (with the second largest being auditory)

3. picture superiority effect - you don’t have to guess what people are talking about it because it’s right in front of you.

Panflute flow chart (color and visual). visual thinking can be done by everyone. “Just show me a freaking picture”

http://sunnibrown.com/

What came first - pictures or words? Pictures definitely before written words. But evolutionarily the ability to process light signals and make decisions based on that has certainly been along longer than our ability to make sounds.

Instead of a powerpoint presentation, you see how things can work together (IRA rollover timeline). You can’t do visual thinking without systems thinking. Visual thinking should be added to school right along reading, writing, rithmathic,

For example: what does a stimulus look like? The only picture we have is a number.  He downloaded the senate stimulus packet, solid text. 787 pages of bullet points, no diagram, no narrative. How can anyone possibly conceive or make a good use? Inability of people to make us understand through the use of pictures.

Social bookmarking is made to share other people’s information - diigo.com (web highlighter like delicious).

Other useful tools: tumblr. Anything something is tagged on delicious it shows up on tumblr. As new ones come on, others are pushed to the second page. Good for consuming your own content.

Scribefire - integrates into firefox, you can maximize it and it lets you go to other websites and blog directly to your website. This lets you do it all on the same page (drag and drop photos).

It’s a blog, you want it to look like a blog, not a shopping cart or flash introduction. Have nice looking elements (lots of widgets - flickr, twitter and a good masthead).

Noose?

Statesman business reporters Dan Zehr and Lilly Rockwell discuss word of mouth marketing online and viral marketing campaigns.

www.statesman.com