Out With A Bang

First things very much first. And I need to formally say a big ‘Thank you!’ to both Richard Koci-Hernandez and Paul Grabowicz at the University of California at Berkeley for their ready willingness to try a little experiment with three, likely lads from Norfolk.

It is a very long way from The Artichoke at Brome where www.addiply.com was pretty much born and raised between me, Ian and Neil to the San Francisco suburbs of Oakland (North), but there we go… we’re there now.

Amazing where you can get with one comment, two e-mails and a great trans-Atlantic phone call early one Friday evening.

So, the J-School Grad kids of Berkeley are now the proud owners of the very first $-version of Addiply.

There it is, up and running on www.oaklandnorth.net. MissionLocal – winner of the recent Student Webby awards – is due to follow shortly.

So Richard’s students can now wander into Joe’s Pizza Parlour on the corner of 18th/Main and start to source their own hyper-local advertising revenue – they are empowered, rather than enfeebled.

Equally, of course, Joe’s Pizza Parlour on the corner of 18th/Main can now go out and find Richard’s students and their award-winning local news site and place a text ad himself – this is the point; we take out third party intervention.

Establish a simple, one-to-one relationship between hyper-local/niche publisher and their hyper-local/niche advertisers.

Hopefully, we’ve found an individual solution that ‘fits’ with the West Coast way of thinking; it chimes with California Inc and, perhaps, offers a different view of the world from that in the East…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=251

They are, like the rest of us, just at the start of a steep, learning curve.

At the start of the same process that James has embarked upon at www.london-se1.co.uk – fiddling around, seeing what works. He’s got two ‘windows’ filled at £25 per week… now can I tweak it again…

It’s the same with Craig at www.thisfrenchlife.com; with the good people at www.peoplesrepublicofsouthdevon.co.uk

‘Nothing works, but everything might… now is the time for thousands of little experiments…’ to quote Mr Shirky. And today another little experiment duly starts on the streets of Oakland.

But the beauty, for me, of working with a J-School is that this can be a work in progress; they can now twiddle and tweak with Addiply to their hearts content…

‘This semester, people, let’s try Pay-Per-Month, at 50 bucks… See how we get on… Next semester, maybe we look at running a CPM model… We’ll have a word with the business school, gets some input from those guys…’

Run a competition; who can earn the most ad bucks out of a block; slap it on your cv when you go to talk to your next new media employer.. I picked up this great story and this great customer…

These are the conversations that Richard, the Ford Foundation Multi-Media Fellow at Berkeley, can now initiate and develop. He has a tool at his disposal to play with -as much, for me, a teaching tool as a commercial revenue device.

For out here on the web, one size will never fit all; from my kitchen table in Loddon, Norfolk, I can’t impose an ad price and revenue model on the streets of Oakland (North); just as Old Media can’t impose a diktat on its former audience – that you will watch our local TV news at 6.30pm, you will only buy your news from the newsagents in the neighbouring village…

All I can do is empower the kids to be able to walk the streets of those ‘EveryBlocks’ and find both hyper-local stories and hyper-local ad dollars; that whilst they are sat in their storefront coffee shops, they can be as much eyeing the next potential, hyper-local advertiser as seeking the next hyper-local story.

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We’re re-tooling them for a multi-skilled future – where becoming the Ad Department via Addiply is just as much a part of their journalistic tradecraft as being the Photographic Dept via Flickr.

We have, ideally, given them a street-level soultion to their advertising needs as opposed to holding our hands out in the hope that a top-down provider of You-Know-Who’s ilk will offer the kind of revenue streams that we need to build a sustainable, hyper-local community news site.

Will it work? We’ll see.

If only out of our experiences with www.MyFootballWriter.com/norwichcity the chances of earning someone a full-time living off one of Adrian’s ‘EveryBlock’ could well be beyond us; for me, the answer remains in an elegant network of ‘EveryBlocks’ – now with the cherry of a part-time, hyper-local journalist on top.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=83

Build in elegance, coherence, shape and structure to that network of EveryBlocks and once you’ve armed yourself with a street-level solution to your advertising needs – the chance for Joe’s Pizzas to place a postcard in the window of the local hardware store – then you can look to complement that bottom-up revenue stream from one that comes from the top down…

Central or regional Government advertising, corporate-based ad networks or, indeed, access to the advertising opportunities that the Guardian’s ‘Open Platform’ is apparently due to offer – wherever the dollars are from above, grab with both hands.

But now, hopefully, we’ve got a simple, robust and transparent way of finding those street-level ad dollars.

Time to launch the Era of Pixelisation on the streets of Oakland (North).

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=249

And right under You-Know-Who’s nose….