Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber posts: Attention is the Real Resource.  Nice insight into how a very successful site utilizes full-content RSS feeds.

..The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

The routine argument for supplying RSS feeds has been to “drive viewers to your Web site”  -  with an underlying implication that the Web site is your “real” product, and RSS just a route into it.  That tunnel-vision gets pushed away among leading edge sites like DF, even as many media sites plow the opposite direction.

When I encounter a site that is clearly in the game for pageviews – doing stupid stuff like running photo galleries with full page reloads for every new photo, just so they can load in a more ad impressions – my tendency is to leave and not come back.  The tactic of deliberately annoying your users seems a pretty shaky path.

Tired of Web pages that plaster your reading experience with blinking ads, or worse yet, popups that dance in your way until you move your cursor and kill them?  Try out a “bookmarklet” called Readability, and choose a format for reading that suits your style, not the style of some interruptive marketer.

David Pogue chalked up the value of Readability the other day, in a post that probably didn’t thrill his ad-buyers at the New York Times.

…I don’t think advertisers should be blinking, animating and distracting in the first place. If I’m interested in the product, I’ll read the ad. But trying to pull my focus as I’m trying to read crosses some kind of line. You know what? I would never click any ad that blinks or animates in the first place. It’s obnoxious and juvenile, and I’m not about to reward them.

Readability isn’t likely to work on all online content, and there are minor glitches depending on formatting of the page you pull. Not a tool for navigating the Web, it’s designed to remove the clutter and customize text on demand. Well worth the easy install though, even if you only use it on occasion to read an article without distractions, or to print an article that won’t otherwise cooperate.

Above all, its another small shot across the bow of old-school advertising methods and “rich media gone wild” that agencies so often foist upon the Web.

In Part One of Mediashift’s Great Debate on Micropayments and Paid Content, David Carr of the New York Times goes up against Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick. And from my vantage point, Masnick wins the matchup with room to spare.

Carr’s points – in favor of putting up pay walls for content – are fairly representative of what we hear from newspaper folks nearly every day now. While pointing to iTunes and the Wall Street Journal as examples of how pay schemes will work, he also hints that the only alternative, advertising, won’t sustain the news operation. And on this, Masnick doesn’t miss the opening:

Your argument that an ad-based model won’t work is also a bit of a red herring, as it assumes that there really are only two options out there: pay wall or ads. I’d argue that’s not true — that there are many other models, including hybrids. Also, it ignores the flipside of the equation, which is that some of the new models have very different cost structures.

I come away from this Round One feeling that Mike Masnick is immersed in online culture and understands both its strengths and weaknesses. Carr sounds all too familiar, the old-school print writer who suddenly has solutions borne out of desperation and no small amount of resentment for a different medium.

A pretty reasonable prevaluation of the internet and its impacts, circa1994 – Brad Templeton at a long-lost event called the Internet World Conference. This was written right around the time I was first getting my feet wet on the Net with AOL, my trusty Macintosh Quadra and a whining phone modem. As we all came online during that era, I imagine the initial impression was roughly the same across the board:  “This is going to change freakin’ everything.”

Templeton’s graph on the matter of news starts rather imperfectly. But the rest is dead-on.

Journalists will still be important. As we’ve demonstrated at ClariNet, people will pay for quality in what they read on the net. But the control of information by the media will be gone. It will be too easy for small media, and even ordinary people, to push hidden stories out to the world. More to the point, people will expect their big media to give them hypertext pointers to the small media, so that when they want to see the other side of a story, or read other viewpoints, they can. If the big media won’t give that to them, they’ll subscribe to people who just make pointers to both the big and small media.

The emergence of aggregators is something than many in traditional media circles still haven’t fully accepted, much less embraced. As often as not, said folks are still making key decisions on how media companies are run in 2009. That is wrong. Not merely quaint. Not a matter for discussion and study and focus groups. Just wrong.

Journalism, newspapers, advertising, marketing – all are in a process of comprehensive change, in a far more wide-open, engaging and economical environment than old media could ever muster.  This transition is about progress, and as such, the focus of what I’ll be tossing around here at Rivermile.

Thanks for your time.