The Uncharted Backwaters of the Unfashionable

Our pride could impede progress

I get a little silly over a good web service. If there’s an API involved, all the better. Programmableweb has a prominent place in my feed reader, and I try to keep fairly abreast of what the rest of the online world is cooking up and how best I can use it.

What worries me is how little of it is allowed to translate into my industry. Even more depressing, I think, is the reasons so little of it is allowed to take root. I think they can be boiled down to a simple character flaw: Pride.

Maybe the best example of this is Yelp. Yelp is a great site, which, at its least advanced, is basically a phone book.  But on top of that, it adds a layer of user reviews and social networking, powerful features that have made it the peer-review go-to source on the Internet.

About a year ago Yelp released an API that allows pretty much anyone to bring the site’s reviews, ratings, neighborhood searches, etc. into any other Website.

To me, that’s an application that begs for a newspaper.com to take advantage:

• Few news orgs have truly worthwhile dining/entertainment/calendar sites.
• Almost all, though, make an attempt.
• With resources being what they are, it seems like a natural fit to take what Yelp is offering and use it to cut down the jobs to be done. The cost is zero, and meanwhile, you’ve added a great feature to your site.

In return for having access to Yelp’s data, all a news site has to do is slap a Yelp logo on the results.

And that, unfortunately, is where the wheels fall off the bus. I’ve heard publishers say things like, “If we do this, we’ll legitimize Yelp. And they are the competition.”

Maybe it’s a sign of ow far to the Dark Side I’ve come, but I don’t see it that way. In fact, I see it much the opposite. showing that we are willing to use free data from a “competitor,” when offered, will make us seem that much closer to getting this whole Web thing. Using their data, I think, legitimizes us to the early adopters that have already embraced the useful tool.

To be sure, Yelp is probably the most controversial example of this. Other services based more on functionality than content would probably be an easier sell within a newsroom. But even then, I don’t think we’re taking advantage as much as we could and should.

Take Twitter. Totally, 100 percent free. Great functionality, out-of-the-box SMS support, solid and growing base of users, etc. Those are things any news site could use. Slowly, I think, we’re coming around to that. We tweet blog posts. But there has to be more there, more that’s available to us because, again, they’ve given us the keys.

It seems like a simple script could turn the Twitter API into something much like OhDontforget. Does that have a place on your newspaper’s entertainment site?

There’s another argument to be made here, but I’m late for work. More to come.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Innovation, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.