Goodbye News, Hello "USASpace"

OK, so it's not as facile as all that, but it's interesting how USAToday online has relaunched itself as more or less a social networking site, where you're invited to interact with the news stories, rather than be the passive audience for the news. You can leave comments and recommendations on individual stories, and it also is replete with video and blogs.

I'm not sure whether this is a bad thing. I'm used to my news sources being authoritative, and this has the feel of a blog, which I do not deem as being authoritative. After all, if just anyone can go in and add content, how can you vouch for the quality of it?

One thing I don't like, for sure -- it's laid out very poorly. The various areas don't appear properly sectioned off, and it's hard for the eye to track through it very efficiently.

YouTube vs. Big Content: Who Needs Whom?

Story in BizReport tells us that despite Viacom pulling hundreds of thousands of its copyrighted ivdeos off its site, traffic to YouTube has actually gone up since the first of the year, and in fact, the top-rated video site gets more traffic than all TV, cable and broadcast network web sites combined.

The lesson for Big Content is that people are probably not coming to YouTube and other video sites primarily for content produced by big studios. If it's there, great -- if not there's plenty of other things to watch. That seems to be the message video site users are sending to Big Content. Question is, are Big Content smart enough to hear the message?

You know, this YouTube thingy might work out after all.

Consumer Reviews on Ecommerce Websites

Great article in CIO-Today about how more websites, even those that sell products, are allowing consumers to provide reviews and feedback about the products, and even the website and shopping experience itself, right on their sites, despite previous fears of negative feedback appearing. They've found that it actually increased sales in tests they ran, and that more sites are offering them ("By the end of 2006, 43% of e-commerce sites offered customer reviews and ratings, almost double the 23% figure at the end of 2005, according to New York research firm MarketingSherpa"), and people are taking advantage of the opportunity to speak ("In a survey of more than 1,300 people, MarketingSherpa also found that as much as 50% of customers aged 18 to 34 have posted a comment or a review on products they have bought or used.").

In my early days at CoolSavings, around 1999, we talked about launching a similar community-type function where folks could share shopping and coupon tips and become more involved with the site. We didn't in part because of the technical challenge (and costs), and partly because of inability to control for content. We, too, didn't want numerous posts bad-mouthing the site and service. That is the chance you take, of course, but it doesn't seem to be happening that way too often. Plus, two immediate advantages of soliciting customer feedback in a forum setting that leap to mind are (1) It provides invaluable real-world feedback that you can gather very inexpensively and incorporate into your process quickly; and (2) it puts pressure on the business to improve the product and experience in order to decrease the number of negative reviews. Both these advantages should lead to improved sites and experiences for consumers, which is a win for both sides.