Once Upon has their answer. I love the spirit of their project, but I believe the truth is much simpler, and it’s called AOL. Circa 1997.
Speaking of which:
Beck in 1997
I literally cannot watch that video for fear of the uncontrollable mourning that might pour forth. Not a longing for my teenage years as such, but a sadness at how the Beckthos just didn’t stick.
MTV in 1997
That song is as good now as ever.
Eagle-eyed reader Joey the C sent me a link with the news that the Picasa and Blogger brands are going bye-byes. I said the other day that Google+ is a great way to make Picasa relevant, and the shift to Google Photo and Google Blogs makes total sense as Google positions itself for the widespread rollout of Google+. They need a unified front, afterall. And before we compare them too much to the old AOL fishbowl (which Facebook is trying to become), the seams between Google’s products feel…nimbler…to me. With Google+ and the overall Google account experience, I still feel like I’m out on the web, whereas with Facebook, I feel very much like I’m on one site or in one social network. Thoughts?
I, for one, will be glad to see the Blogger name retired. We’re all bloggers, and most of us use WordPress =).
If you’re not regular Huffington Post reader, you might not notice the changes in the masthead design evident below. The AOL-HuffPost merger became official official this week (they’re, like, totally listed as “married” on Facebook), and the changes are rolling out.
A few days ago, Andrew Breitbart ran a piece on Huffington about the the liberal bias of NPR and the MSM (that’s mainstream media, in case your blogging IQ remains fixed in the pre-Swift Boat-era) with regards to the Tea Party. I’ve said all along that HuffPo has been positioning itself as a “beyond left and right” general interest portal/magazine for some time now, and that the AOL purchase wouldn’t mean the watering down of some hard-left new media beacon. But even I didn’t expect to see a piece like Brietbart’s just yet. Eventually, yes. Just not yet. But the more I think about it, the more sense it seems to make to make these changes sooner rather than later.
Speaking of changes, the first thing regular Huff readers will notice is the change in font, style, and organization of the section (vertical) links in the banners of the home page and each vertical. The entire presentation is streamlined, and some verticals have been bumped off the main masthead’s real-estate and issued a spot on drop-down menus. (Religion, for example, is now a drop-down under “Living.”) You’ll also note that some of the drop-down items link directly to other AOL properties. While I understand the need for integration, this aspect does feel rather patchworked (no pun intended). As a placeholder for some sort of unified branding across platforms and sites, I suppose it’s fine. It achieves goal #1 for AOL in this stage of the merger: show Huffington readers links to AOL’s other content sources. But loading TechCrunch via a drop-down link from the HuffPost Tech box is clunky, and the style disparities between sites could be jarring for people expecting to stay on huffingtonpost.com.
I’m sure, in time, AOL and the newly-formed Huffington Post Media Group therein will iron these things out. But for right now, this first phase of integration feels less like an upgrade of the “The Internet Newspaper” and more like its portalization. I don’t mean to be down on you, AOL-Huff (that is, I sure do want you to hire me for full-time winning analysis), and I want you to know that I’ve been pulling for you, AOL, ever since the mid-90s when all my techie friends were total ISP snobs. Where are their precious BBSes now, old friend? Exactly.
I’ll be honest. When I logged onto The Huffington Post around 1 am this morning, my jaw just about hit the floor (the dog was in the way). I’m still thinking about what AOL’s acquisition of Huffington and the installation of Arianna Huffington as editor-in-chief of most (all?) of AOL’s online editorial content is going to mean for everyone involved. A few things it won’t mean, as far as I can tell:
TechCrunch, Engadget, Movifone, PopEater, Patch etc. are going to become repositories for a particular political agenda. No, they won’t.
The Huffington Post is going to, like, change so much, and in all the wrong ways. It might change a lot, and in some ways, I hope it does. But it’s not going to cease being what it’s been branding itself as for sometime now, a “beyond left and right” (Arianna’s words, not mine) general interest destination with a distinctive point of view and activist spirit. Will it continue to lean “liberal”? Of course. Has that been its main focus for the last year? On political and social matters, sure, but HuffPost has grown in that time to include 21 separate verticals, four of which focus on local news in urban areas. Like I said yesterday, it’s just not the case that the corporatization of the Huffington properties means that Ms. Huffington’s priorities have shifted. They’ve been clear for some time, and were made even more explicit by the merger. The Huffington Post, as a company, wants to cover a wider range of topics and engage a wider audience. It’s been doing that for at least the past two years, and the AOL deal means it can go on doing it in bigger, better ways. If you’re interested in seeing a hot media property complete its evolution from political niche to top-of-mind general interest, news, and information, keep your eyes on Huffington. If you’re looking for the Daily Kos, well, there’s always…the Daily Kos.
I wrote a new post for the media vertical right after reading the merge announcement last night. The editors put it up this morning, and I want to thank them for their quick turnaround. Disclosure: like most of the people creating HuffPost’s content, I don’t get paid for what I do there. I don’t have an agenda, though as a content creator, I obviously do want the venture to succeed. More thoughts on all of this as I have them.
And so we meet again, AOL. I remember when you were just a Version 3.0 running on my best friend’s Windows 3 PC. I remember your ubiquitous free disks, first floppy, then compact, the sting of still not having you and the joy of my parents’ new subscription. As Alice Munro might say, you were a friend of my youth.
So much has changed for both of us since we last spent time together. The aughts were a strange decade, weren’t they? Remember adult contemporary radio? I want to say, old friend, that I think your current content strategy makes a lot more sense than your famous move into Old Media did. These are the kinds of deals it would have been perfect for you to make back then, had content streams like The Huffington Post and many of the other sites you’ve since acquired existed circa 1999. Back then, DiaryLand and LiveJournal did not look the forerunners of the world we live in now, but 2o11 means you can party like Time Warner never happened. Great internet New Media properties are everywhere and you’re gobbling them up like Pac-Man on a ghost binge.
I really do think your strategy here makes sense, and I’ll write more about this later. For now, though, I’m going to refer to you in the third person if you don’t mind (AOL, remember Norm MacDonald? Remember me trying to load Oasis videos? You just kept right on buffering!) and share a few thoughts with my readers. Thanks, AOL. You’re the best. I want to close this part of my note to you with some clever mid-90’s farewell construction, but I can’t remember any. I do remember most of the words to “Standing Outside a Broken Telephone Booth (With Change In My Hand),” though, and most of the words to its title.
For all of you non-AOL entities reading this post, I’m curious about three aspects of the acquisition:
I’ve written a few blog posts over the years about how after everyone stopped using AOL (that is, after people my age went to college and had cable modems and started really roaming the web, only using AOL for email and AIM, and eventually not even those things), we had this sense that we didn’t want our online experience (here comes 2011’s media buzzword) curated by AOL or anyone else. We wanted to get out from under AOL’s channels and interface and boldly surf the web. A few years later, Facebook came along and eventually became a new kind of AOL: it is, for many people, a portal to the rest of the internet. It’s a starting point as much as AOL’s old startup screen, and certainly just as much of a collection of curated media. The key difference, of course, is that this curation is 1) customizable and 2) aggregated by our friends. In a sense, Mark Zuckerberg re-invented the wheel.
Now that AOL is primarily a content company focusing on intelligent, agenda-setting media, it’s recapturing a bit of its old time portal chutzpah. No longer simply a desktop service or even just one extremely useful website, AOL is looking to become, once more, a community where people want to be. Fifteen years ago, AOL was the most successful online Third Place because the nascent social web was about instant messaging in a safe, intuitive environment. With a new focus on bringing together the best digital content and discussion, AOL is reapplying for the job of world’s biggest internet brand. As a communications tool and packaged online experience, AOL was once the place to be. Can its new focus on content, content, content, make it that again? AOL is betting that it can, and betting big. It’s not a bad position. After all, without compelling things to share, what’s the fun of social networks? I don’t care (that much) about what you had for breakfast. I do care, though, about good stories, cogent insight, and the frenetic cycling of news, and I’m not alone.
Whether the generation raised on AOL: ISP as internet aquarium will bite at AOL: content king remains to be seen, but the acquisition of The Huffington Post and the creation of The Huffington Post Media group alongside an ever growing constellation of online properties certainly brings the company closer to its long-lost users than it has been for a while. Even as companies like MySpace, the soon-to-be-jettisoned clunker at Fox Digital Media, also see content and curation as the key to internet survival, AOL seems uniquely positioned to make their version of the model work. Stay tuned, America. You’ll certainly be online.
Chris Cocca 