A walled garden often serves as a safe haven to rapidly grow a business. In the 90s and early 2000s, we saw AOL expand to near synonymity with the Internet using a walled garden approach. When it stopped working, they faced a choice: Struggle to hold on, or open it up. They chose to keep the walls up, and now AOL is sailing into obscurity, to be quaintly remembered in VH1 specials about the 90s. The new champions of the tech industry now rally behind openness, or at least reluctantly accept it as the only path.

We’re now seeing an attempt at reversing the trend, with efforts spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch to build new walls around a garden that they deem to be too open: The news. They’ve seen walls crumble in the past and they don’t care.  It’s not just posturing; they’re serious. They want to build walls (with payment-based entry) around the news.

The damnedest thing is: It just might work.

If enough credible news sources get on board, paying for news online could become the new way we consume news. Naturally there would be holdouts among consumers, but there have always been those who just pick up a used newspaper and read that. Social media and the Internet makes the news age faster, but let’s not forget that it already aged pretty fast through telephones and word of mouth. The biggest problem is getting enough sources under the banner of payment. Unlike AOL’s low quality, keyword-powered knockoff of the Internet, there’s real value in what Murdoch and co. supply.

Is it enough value to hold together a walled garden? I guess we’ll see. If they attain some small measure of success, they could recruit more news sources to their cause, eventually seeing even more success. The snowball could grow large enough to make paying for the news a smart choice for the consumer.

If it saves investigative journalism and the other services that well-paid journalism provides a society, then it just might be worth the price.

Except, of course, for the part where everyone seemed to miss the most important snippet of the guidelines: Bloggers must clearly and conspicuously disclose any compensation. To me, the entire argument has completely overshot its landing. The consumer, the one to be protected by these rules, is being left out. Terrible assumptions are being made. No guidelines are being put forth.

What ‘clearly and conspicuously’ shouldn’t mean

There’s a certain gestalt to other forms of media that makes disclosure incredibly easy. This is the fine print at the bottom of a magazine ad or the “Paid Actor” notification in a TV commercial. It’s a package deal with the message right there at the bottom. Even if the consumer doesn’t read it, he or she is aware it’s there.

Blog posts, meanwhile, are like the black guy in a horror movie. Shortly after making an appearance, they’re brutally chopped up. After that, most people just see the head, or maybe the head and a trail of blood, then scream and run away.

There’s no gestalt to blog posts, and especially not to blogs as a whole.

• Disclosures at the bottom of posts mean nothing to most users. It’s not like a television ad with extremely small text. Disclosures at the bottom of posts (and especially those that are below the fold) just don’t (and won’t) get read. Much of the time, they won’t be seen.
• Disclosures on another page on the blog are simply ludicrous. Any blog with a bounce rate of less than 50% is doing well on attracting users to other parts of the site. Fedorable’s bounce rate is usually around 60%. That means only 40% make it to another page on Fedorable before leaving, and most of those aren’t going to the About page. In the end, only about 3-6% of Fedorable readers click to get there. This is equivalent to TV commercials only having to disclose 1 out of every 20 times they aired.

Sadly, a lot of bloggers are simply planning on putting two sentences on the end of their thirty-page, boring-as-hell About page. The less people who read it, the better. That’s just unfair to the consumer.

Blogging (and the Internet in general) is a different beast. If we’re going to put forth disclosure guidelines, let’s get it right. Here’s my take on ethical disclosure– not so  much the when or why, but the how.

Guidelines for ethical disclosure in blogging: The abbreviated disclosure message (v1)

Placement within the blog

• Disclosures should be placed after the headline/subheadline but before the content of the post.
• Related disclosures must be on the same page as the content of the post. Abbreviated posting (such as listings in a ‘Related Posts’ widgets) do not need to carry a disclosure. The actual text of the disclosure must be on the page, not linked from elsewhere.

Disclosing for the semantic web

• Disclosures should be placed within <em> or <strong> tags to signify their importance in the document.
• Semantic placement within an article should follow the visual placement (noted above). Disclosures must be part of the page source, and not added with javascript. This is to ensure that users with screen readers or users foregoing javascript have access to a standard method of disclosure.

Abbreviating disclosures

• To retain stylistic flow in their blog posts, bloggers may hide disclosure statements with javascript.
• In place of the message, a standard, short notification of “There is a disclosure associated with this post” with a Read More link can be used.
• The Read More link should reveal the entire notification, which is already semantically part of the document (and not added content from javascript).
• The message should be both hidden and displayed with javascript. Messages should not be hidden by default, unless a suitable alternative means of accessing the disclosure is available for non-javascript users.

Style considerations

• Disclosure statements should maintain the same readability as the body copy of the article including relative font size and background contrast. Disclosures may be plain, bolded or italicized.

Let’s aim for v2

I think my guidelines work pretty well. They make for the same “grain of salt” effect generated by the fine print in TV commercials. The abbreviated disclosure message as a standard would quickly inform consumers that there’s something else to know, without messing up the overall flow of a blog post. It also covers screen reader users or people who are quickly scanning through the blogosphere to find info about a product.

Of course, I might be forgetting certain situations. I do want to fight for the consumer here, but I also don’t want to leave the bloggers out in the cold. What do you think? What would you change or add?

But nope, look elsewhere: It’s farming, of all things.

A succession of popular farming games has hit Facebook this year, starting with myFarm, with the crowds seemingly then jumping to Farm Town, and now pouring into the mega-hit FarmVille. Despite (or because of) its popularity, Farmville has caught some flak for not being an original idea

I’d argue that farming games are clearly now a genre, but that point’s moot anyway, because in my eyes they’re all following in Harvest Moon’s footsteps.

The predecessor

Harvest Moon, developed by Natsume, was released for the Super Nintendo around the time AOL got the idea to start charging a flat monthly rate. Yes, it’s that old but it was truly a great game for its time.  The player managed his or her own farm, growing crops and taking care of animals. There was no social aspect to it at all, of course. In 1996, multiplayer for console games still meant huddling around a TV together with controllers, a feature which Harvest Moon still lacked.

The game was a hit in Japan. There’s been an iteration of the title on every major Nintendo console since then.  It didn’t see as much success in the states, a point which gaming publications attributed to a difference in culture. The Japanese public lived an ultra-urbanized life; Americans didn’t, or at least not to the same degree. Therefore, Americans didn’t want to sit around playing a farming game.

Clearly, they were wrong. Or maybe things have changed that much in the past 13 years. Regardless, the Harvest Moon experience lives on, and not just in the latest installment on the Wii. You have to wonder if Natsume looks at something like Farmville and asks, “Why aren’t we doing that?”

Farming in games

Farming plays a part in a lot of games— not just those with crops, tractors and chickens. Gamers have used the term farming for years to refer to any in-game action which can be repeated over and over to acquire items in a game. In any big online game, you can farm for experience points for your character,  new shiny weapons, and gold too. Gold farmers do this as a full-time job and earn real money for it. Farming will usually fill a large portion of a player’s in-game time— even in a game that, on the surface, deals with fire balls and acid-breathing dragons.

It’s curious then, that farming games, games that make no effort to hide the farming behind a fantasy gameplay mechanic, are such a hit. It could be that farming games offer the simplest analogy to the non-gamer. They simply say, “In this game, you farm for stuff. Like a real farm.” It’s an easier concept to swallow than “In this game, you kill ogres, which give you a mix of items, gold and character experience which you can collect over time.”

They’re both farming in the gaming sense. Just one is literal. Sort of.

Are farming games pulling in casual gamers? Yes. Are they educating them about gaming in general? Certainly. Will these players get tired of the basic analogy and move on to different games? Well, I hope so.  That’d be great for gaming.

Looking elsewhere

Farmville isn’t the only mega-hit farming game, nor is the farming game trend limited to Japan and the United States. Happy Farms, a Chinese online farming game, is seeing exactly two million sign-ups a day.

Why “exactly”? Well, because they had to limit their sign-ups to avoid drowning in a sea of new players. You can read all about it in this interesting article. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: People are going crazy over this game. It seems to play like Farmville or the others, but with a feature that lets you steal crops from other players. Players remain logged in for hours and hours to drive away potential thieves.

It will be interesting to see if any of the American games copy the stealing mechanic. People are already addicted to facebook; I can’t imagine how bad it could get with virtual eggplants at stake.

We decided not to use the IvyLees theme (that would be trite, right?), instead opting for something a bit more plain and clean-cut. So we went to the Release Style tool in our social media newsroom and changed it to the “IvyLees Lite” preset, with the “Plastic” column style.

And here’s what the release looks like after the change:

Looks great! Since the colors are customizable, you can get any look you want. Here, we see a softer side of IvyLees:

Your release styles are local to a newsroom, so when you change it once, it applies to all of your releases: past, present and future. Changing it again is just as easy. It’s also one of our free features. Isn’t that neat? Have fun customizing!

It’s conversation vomit. It’s when an aggregator eats everything around the Internet about a blog post, comes back to the blog post, and pukes it all over the real, actual conversation happening there.

When it comes to comments on the Internet, context is everything. Hacker News will give you a certain type of comment. Digg will net you other types. Twitter will get you a bunch of retweets that are, for the most part, duplicates of one message. And of course Youtube comments will slowly chip away at your faith in humanity. Don’t subject your blog readers to that.

Leave these comments where they belong: in their communities, the places that provide context.

Disqus is a great example of a product that separates the comments after aggregation. If you really need to include your Twitter mentions, it’s a must-have. For an example, see how Chris Brogan uses it effectively on his blog.

And now, today, at this moment, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them.

From the PR side of things, they seem pretty pointless. If you boneheadedly send them out to enough people, your pitches will probably get you the wrong type of coverage. Mediocre press releases also won’t make for good portfolio material. Usually, the writing style employed in these types of releases doesn’t even leave room for any creative Oomph.

On the management side of things, however, the ever-so-boring “Vice President of _____ hired to re-energize _____” releases start making a lot of sense. They’re good for morale. They make the new hire feel like part of the team while letting all the non-newbies get a feel for who the new guy (or gal) is. Finally, they’re a piece of the company’s history.

One of the wonders of social media is that it molds to so many uses. With a social media release, we can share our company news with pretty much the exact people (and amount of people) who would be interested in it, without personally alienating the rest. Easy online newsroom technology takes care of the chronicling, so we can easily look back and see what happened when.

This concept is not limited to public relations. On the Tonight Show, Conan O’ Brien has been running a great segment called Twitter Tracker (see it on Hulu) where he makes fun of how mundane and boring a lot of the “best” tweets are.

One of the tweets “tracked” and read for the benefit of the Tonight Show viewership is Ashton Kutcher tweeting about getting groceries. As mundane as it is, it works in social media simply because somebody will be interested. And most of those somebodies are the people subscribed to Ashton Kutcher. I won’t report the number here, because by the time you read this it will be off by tens of thousands. That’s a lot of mediocre.

So go ahead and publish that news release in a social media setting. Some might make fun of you “getting groceries” but they’re probably missing the point– and also probably not subscribed to your newsroom.

Fedorable: First off, who are you?

John: We can go with John. I’m a student at Penn State.

Fedorable: How did you get started writing hilarious e-mails?

John: It all started maybe a year ago, when I was trying to buy a car. I was looking through ads, and saw this ridiculous post in the “for sale” section where a woman was asking for a Ford Explorer for $1500. She even put a picture of herself up. I thought she was an idiot, and couldn’t let it go without messing with her. I tried selling her a piece of shit car, and she got very upset. It really amused me, and I started doing it to a lot of people whenever I was bored at class or work. I’ve always loved screwing with people though. I remember once when I was nine years old, I got my family kicked off of AOL for pissing off old people in a chat room.

Fedorable: Any e-mails gone horribly wrong?

John: A lot of people don’t actually read what I sent them. Some will respond to the most ridiculous shit with “that sounds good!” I remember once I sent a guy a picture of a BMW that was completely totaled, and he asked me when he could come check it out. Some people are too dumb to even realize that I am fucking with them. One woman was looking for a hot tub repair, and I told her how I would rig the hot tub with a hose hooked up to her sink faucet so she could add hot water. She told me that sounded good.

Sometimes, the people I am e-mailing are amused and it just turns into a regular conversation. Other times they will just completely curse me out and it is too unoriginal to post on the website. A lot of the responses I get are simply “fuck off!”

Fedorable: What kind of success has the site seen so far?

John: I’ve been really surprised at how popular it became. It really happened overnight. The first day, the site had 65,000 hits. Now it has been about a week and I am up to 800,000 hits from all around the world. I saw it was mentioned on comedycentral.com, which was pretty cool. Other sites like Digg and Reddit gave me a lot of traffic, as well. It is crazy to see how my e-mails are being posted on hundreds of message boards. Also, I’m actually getting a decent amount of money from ads and donations…I wasn’t expecting that, but it is nice to get money for doing something I love.

Fedorable: What efforts did you put into promotion? Or was it 100% viral?

John: Well, I posted the e-mails on a message board and showed my friends for a while and people thought they were hilarious. A lot of people suggested that I make a website. I really wasn’t planning on doing anything with them, but when I saw that people would actually go to a website, I made one. I posted the website on a few message boards, and it just blew up from there. Next thing I knew, people were posting it on tons of popular sites. I really didn’t do anything else to promote it. I told a couple friends, but I really don’t even tell my friends for the sake of getting hits anymore.

Fedorable: Lots of content creators and Internet marketers struggle daily to get this kind of exposure. Any tips for them?

John: My only tip would be to have good, entertaining content. I mean, look at my website. It is coded like shit, I probably only put like two hours of effort into actually coding it. It can be the best looking website out there, but if the content isn’t something that keeps people interested, nobody will tell anyone about it.

Fedorable: You’ve been doing it for a year. Does that mean you have a backlog of posts ready to go up? Do you plan to update the site regularly with new e-mails?

John: I had a backlog, but I posted a lot of those when I launched the site. I started with about 35 e-mails on the site. I am saving a few in case I run out of material, but I am still doing new e-mails. I plan on updating the site a few times every week. I do have a lot of e-mails that I probably won’t post just because I don’t find them as funny as others.

Fedorable: I’m sure people are excited to hear you’ll regularly update the site. Do you think the site’s success will hurt your efforts at creating new content, because of people becoming increasingly wary of online ads, either from your own e-mails or those of copycats?

John: I think it may have a minor impact on my efforts, but there are so many people out there, that I don’t think it will be that much of a problem. I try to single out ads that look like stupid, gullible people wrote them. A lot of people don’t even reply to my e-mails already, and they are the smart ones. I guess I feel that there will always be stupid people out there and they will always fall for my shit.

Fedorable: How about user submissions?

John: I don’t think I am going to accept user submissions. I’m sure some are funny, but I don’t want to have to pick and choose. Plus I am very lazy, and do not feel like programming anything that would handle user submissions. Maybe if the site gets really big, I would implement something like that.

Fedorable: You created a website because there were rumblings for a website. I’ve seen a few posts asking about a book. Do you think the format would make for a good book, and is it something you’d like to do?

John: I would like to make a book. I think it could be a good coffee table book or something. I am going to wait a while before I look into doing that, however. Even if it doesn’t sell, it would be cool to say I have a book. I’d like to think my life would be like David Duchovny’s in Californication, with bitches all over me because I wrote a book.

Fedorable: Since this was over e-mail, I was a bit worried that you would just mess with me for the entire interview. Did the thought ever cross your mind?

John: It did, but this is my first interview and I didn’t want to come off as an asshole. If someone I don’t like interviews me, I will probably just mess with them.

Fedorable: How should fans go about getting updates?

John: A lot of people are asking for an RSS feed, so I’ll probably set that up this weekend if I have time. I guess fans can just check the main page of my site for updates; they happen at random throughout the week.

—

Thanks to John for taking time out of his Internet trolling to give us some insight.

A mission

We want to make it easier for journalists, bloggers and PR people to connect. We felt one of the biggest places they did that was in the online newsroom. So our first step was easy: Make it so PR people can easily create a newsroom where they can connect with journalists, and vice versa.

Inspiration

We looked at a lot of different places for inspiration on the NewsRoom. The biggest so far has been the Social Media Newsroom Template by Todd Defren and the good folks at SHIFT Communication.

Todd’s three column layout was a great start for organizing all the info in an online newsroom. He covered all the bases. We still have a bunch of his elements written in the margins of our drawing boards.

We were also helped by the Richter 10.2 Social Media Press Room, which is very visual, with big, bright buttons and a feature video. The Richter Press Room inspired us to feature the latest release, to get that initial hook that snags the reader.

These tools really helped us along. Thanks to those that contributed to the cause.

Clarity

Our first instinct was to visit some of the press rooms of our favorite companies to see what they did. What we found wasn’t very impressive. Online newsrooms are downright jumbled most of the time. They’re also usually hidden away, three or four clicks away from the homepage.

We’re not naming names. Just look up some of your favorite companies and you may see for yourself. Or, if you’re a journalist, then you’re probably already familiar with this feeling.

We wanted to make something better than what was out there.

Social backbone

The mmph behind our newsrooms is the social media backbone. The biggest “Web 2.0″ feature is the one you see everywhere: The RSS feed. In 2009, it seems like such a basic feature, yet it’s lacking in most online newsrooms. Why would anyone want a newsroom that made it easy for a journalist to find the information once?

We also thought: People use social websites that aren’t IvyLees. So we link to those. Not just for the organization, but for each individual contact listed on the release.

The three Ss

Social, simple, smart. We found that “simple” and “smart” often went hand-in-hand.

The simple route was letting users add contacts with one click. It also turned out to be pretty smart, utilizing the magical technology that IvyLees runs on. We also narrowed down the release building process to just a few text fields, letting users get right to the important part: writing. Image cropping, captioning and smart video embedding round out the package.

We’re dedicated to bringing you the best online newsroom. Get involved: Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and what you want to see added. We’re open to feedback.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t– One thing is for sure: Lots of news releases are dead.

They’re sitting on harddrives of PR pros who are too busy to worry about them. They’ll continue to sit until they’re wiped to make space,  left on the curb, or forgotten in some network folder.

This is a bad thing.

We could make the argument that news is disposable and doesn’t matter as soon as it’s consumed. After all, newspaper is printed on the cheapest stuff available and tossed immediately after consumption, right?

But if we walk into a library, there’s the microfiche. All of that fragile, disposable newspaper news is kept alive, and made part of history, however big or small. Where is this role in our fast-moving, social media-frenzied PR world?

Companies have histories too. Your company’s history, your clients histories, are being recorded even now, as Google caches and the Internet archives do their thing.

So why are your news releases locked away on a dusty network drive in your office’s closet?

Get your news releases online and keep them there. Archiving is important in preserving your company’s history. Use IvyLees to do it. Or hire a web guy. Heck, use an Angelfire account if you have to– just don’t let them end up on a dusty harddrive. Have a say in your own history.

Now, fast is measured in milliseconds.

To keep up with our recent traffic increase, I’ve been taking steps to make the site continue to load as fast as possible. Yahoo has developed a firefox extension called YSlow. It analyzes all of the traffic from a website and gives a score on a few categories where improvements can be made.

I decided to start with making the style sheets and javascript files load faster since they are an easy target for optimization. The framework that we use for IvyLees is django and a few people have created an application that we can plug in to help us compress some files.

After setting up django-compress, a website will have css and js files that are minified (excess white space and characters are removed to reduce file size). The application will also give the files version numbers so that they can be cached by the web browser and won’t need to be downloaded again until a change is made and a new version of the file is created.

For the site, this means faster general usage. For news releases, it means they’ll load even faster– but every one after the first will be even faster than that.

We’ve also upgraded and installed some things on the server to increase performance. I’ve written about the technical details of setting up nginx, memcached, and using gzip compression over at Code Spatter, so take a look over there more tech-heavy info.