As anyone who has ever had the misfortune to sit through one of my flip-chart scribble shows… Paul and Co at JEECamp, two boys from Barclays, six people at www.2gether08.com and four people in a Guardian office in Farringdon Road among them… I’m a fairly simple soul.
I do all my scribbles on the back of the nearest beer mat and/or fag packet.
And I’m still, basically, a provincial football hack at heart. The day job is www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity. And one thing I will never be is a techie.
Don’t ask me how it works; all I want to know is whether it actually makes my punters lives easier – and, ideally, keeps a roof over my head.
Hence I’ve no idea how ‘backchat’ works, particularly. All I know is that, day by day, I’m doing Ms Bell proud and engaging more and more of my community in a conversation. It’s the ‘Age of Participation’ on MFW/Norwich courtesy of the boys and girls of 4iP.
So, in short, I don’t know one end of an API from my elbow. All I’m interested in is whether it ‘fits’ into my fag packet and flip chart thinking as we look to bolt a hyper-local/niche long tail onto a hyper-national ‘water lily’ that is The Guardian, Inc. Or is the Daily Mail. Or The Telegraph. Or MSN. Or AOL.
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=17
Which brings us to The Guardian’s launch of their ‘Open Platform’ proposition yesterday, to which – for now – only certain interested parties need apply.
Clearly there have been questions raised; on both sides of the Pond. Cue Mr Viner, from Berkeley… http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/10/folksThisIsInNoWayOpen.html
But being ever glass-half-full, I’m quite encouraged – if it allows me to poke around in their drawers; to see what bits of their ‘kit’ I can bolt onto www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity or – given yesterday’s events at the MEN – www.mylocalwriter.com/stockport/sk3
And as I sift through the news… http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/10/guardian-open-platform – so one line leaps out; yeh, I’ll have a bit of that please, Alan…
‘Both the content API and the Data Store are available for free, but the Guardian has plans to create an advertising network…’
Suits me.
Cos go back to my long tail and water lily theory, that was always the idea – that as our little www.addiply.com baby was hoovering up hyper-local advertisers from the bottom of the pond, so we always fancied the idea of a water lily dropping down some of their good stuff from the surface.
Thataway I could then run a global BMW advertising campaign alongside a self-service ad placed via addiply for a BM second-hand car dealership just off the Dereham Rd…
Neither of which would cost me a penny. Some Guardian suit would be bolting my little ad inventory onto the bottom of his BMW (Global) ‘pitch’, whilst Bob Basted Motors would be placing his hyper-local ad himself – just as he would drop a postcard into the window of his local Post Office.
But Mr Viner, too had a point… that the danger could be that this is just a one-way street. A pure top-down model – The Guardian dishing out its goodies as Google does with the crumbs from its table.
‘All this begs the question, because even if they were just publishing RSS feeds (btw, they are), to be competitive in the API business, you have to enable other people to publish on your side of the API. That was the flaw of the Times model too…’
Now in the spirit of The Scott Trust, for me it would be nice to think that when a water lily met a long tail, ‘data’ swapping would be a two-way deal.
Cos while all manner of Premiership goodies might come cascading out of The Guardian’s sports desk API; you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be f*ck all on Stockport County, Bury, Wigan, Oldham, etc, etc… not now that the MEN has ripped half its journalists off its editorial floor… that whilst Manchester United and Manchester City might still service ‘mother’, she will have to go without from elsewhere.
Now, someone launches www.myfootballwriter.com/stockportcounty out of Edgeley Park and our data swapping becomes a two-way street – and in the spirit of Mr Jarvis, The Guardian links to what me and my ilk do best. Provincial football reporting.
And in the spirit of The Scott Trust, you can start to pay too… little syndication fees that stops our networked thinking from being plugged into, say, VirginMedia.com.
But we’ll also cut a deal with the local BBC, too. They’ll take County content. And they’ll pay a little bit too.
So one Guardian API later and I’ve got hyper-national advertising to elegantly mix with my addiply hyper-local advertising and I’ve got hyper-national and local syndication deals as we merrily ‘data’ swap with content partners both sideways and upwards.
Job done.
We might even be able to afford to give the MEN’s former Stockport County reporter a kitchen table living.
And, you know what, you give me OFSTED data for every school in SK3 from your centrally-sourced, post-code tagged API-enabled data bank – and I’ll give you the reaction to said report from every head-teacher and chairman of governors in SK3 via our AudioBoo’d up www.mylocalwriter.com/stockport/sk3 playground mum reporter…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=213
Easy when you know how.
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