Is the beginning of MyAlltop the solution to the death of the Seattle P-I?
I thought people were kidding when they said the Seattle P-I was closing up shop. Come on how could that paper be in trouble? Well, I guess it was because the last print edition rolled off the conveyors today.
Oh, of course the Seattle P-I will live on in the virtual world. We were having this very discussion yesterday. Based on the fact that the NYT could buy every print subscriber a Kindle and make money if they stopped printing the “dead tree edition” of the paper, we figured that any paper that wants to survive better figure out how to make money from ads online. Subscription plans aren’t going to fly. The walled garden isn’t a good strategy to build traffic online.
Interesting that the same day the Seattle P-I stops printing a paper edition that Alltop launches “MyAlltop”, here you have (another) way to pick and choose what sources and headlines you’d like to see at a glance on a single page.
Hearing that MyAlltop was live I went right over to sign up and created my personalized page:
Granted, there was a bug first thing in the morning with new pages, but that was resolved without much ado. The question is, beyond “wow cool”, what does this mean? With discussions of the fate of Netvibes fresh in my head it seems that the custom homepage idea isn’t something the average person is going to latch onto.
Okay, where does that leave Alltop? Isn’t it just a custom homepage? Isn’t it really just an experiment in organizing content?
Yeah it is.
So to that end, Alltop as a start page probably won’t take off. It does, however, have implications for the semantic web.
I think anytime we can tie people’s news-information preferences together we have an opportunity to learn and grow our understanding of information. The common thread in all this (click) is something like Twine. Pulling groups of bookmarks together into our semantic groups so we can better pull the information we seek from it.
Whew.
Back to the Seattle P-I. I applaud their move. Yes, I know it will cause hardship for many, however in the long run you just can’t pummel a deceased equine ad infinitum (beat a dead horse forever). Newspapers aren’t the morning ritual they once were. Even as a news junkie, I don’t buy or read newspapers often. You have to adapt.
The Seattle P-I can try a model like NowPublic, although anything based purely on ads without other services to bring in revenue (I think there is potential for online dating). Certainly they could expand their coverage of small, local, niche events because the cost of publishing has just be reduced to near zero.
Now, the final questions, will people even notice and will they still read.
Some other posts about Alltop around the Interwebs:
