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April 13, 2006
Old Gray Lady for Hire
Tim Spalding, a prolific web presence who has helped to make a lot of material related to classical literature and history available on the web (and much more), runs one of my favorite sites on the internet, LibraryThing. It's a great site for cataloguing and keeping track of your books (I have over a thousand, and I'm nowhere near the top). It's fun, useful, affordable (free up to 200 books, $25 unlimited for life), it's easy to use, connected to the Library of Congress and dozens of major libraries around the world. There's also a great community of users. Now why would I post this free advertisement? Because Tim has recently voiced his frustration over lack of media coverage at his LibraryThing blog. The issue is deeper than simply a lack of coverage. It touches upon a fundamental problem with the way news is created. Tim was spurred on this time (he's seen it before) by a glowing story in the New York Times of a site which functions similarly (swapping rather than cataloguing) but that has had no real success: It seems so terribly unfair. Press should follow success, not create it. LibraryThing's traffic currently outranks booksellers Biblio and Booksense, all trading sites except Peerflix (eg., PaperbackSwap, Lendmonkey, FrugalReader, Bookins, SwapandSave, etc.), Amazon's AllConsuming, the much-heralded Basecamp.com, and on and on. And yet LibraryThing's press coverage has been largely restricted to The Christian Science Monitor's electronic edition and a piece in my home-town paper. Everything has been on word-of-mouth alone. While some may see this as sour grapes, check the chart on Tim's post, and consider how often pre-packaged PR is passed off as news (slick video productions on the local news broadcast, press releases with a verb tense altered here and there in the local paper). I understand his frustration, and I honestly enjoy his product, but most importantly I think he's right about the way media hype works. I guess we can always have recourse to 'new media' hype. posted by Dennis on 04.13.06 at 10:18 AM
Comments
I agree with word-of-mouth being very important. Most of the users we have that are active traders heard about the site from us directly or through one of their friends. The few blog mentions we've gotten have barely increased users at all. And the users we did get from different places on the internet are mostly inactive. People seem much more likely to give things a chance if someone they trust tells them it's cool. Bryan Wood · April 19, 2006 07:12 PM |
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Hey. Thanks for picking that up. It is sour grapes, but I figured I'd indulge. Besides, they're not a competitor...
It really has surprised me. I would have thought that blogs and the instant availability of everything would have reduced the importance of PR, that PR is to reporters what travel agents are to travellers or realtors to home buyers—increasingly irrelevant middle-men.
Take the press release, for example. Before the internet, I could see why a press release about a product was a useful thing for Business reporters. If somebody in New Hampshire had a book-trading mailing list, a press release was an important starting-point. But other reporters didn't wait for press releases; they reported on the thing—the protest, the vote, the riot—straight from the thing itself. Now everything is like that—instantly accessible and in-your-face. Why would anyone want to read a press release about a site, when they could GO to the site?