Publishers can’t get enough revenue from ads to support their efforts, so some of them are turning to paywalls as a solution. The logic is “we are losing money so you have to pay us,” as if the publisher’s business model is the consumer’s problem.

I think it’s misguided, and so does Ashley Friedlein in this interesting interview. (HT @epubsforum.)

Some content can be sold, some can’t. Regular news can’t.

Had an interesting chat with some folks from PointAbout yesterday about iPhone development and the future of mobile.

They say that if you want to go mobile, you should focus on the iPod/iPhone for now. Blackberry is too fragmented, with each different type of device using a different operating system or browser. And since the iPad can run iPod/iPhone apps, focusing on the iPhone is the closest thing to one size fits all.

In app purchase sounds like the way to go for ecommerce. It sends a payment through the person’s iTunes account, and can be used for on-going purchases — like monthly or annual subscriptions.

The down side is that Apple takes 30% of every sale. The up side is that it’s incredibly easy on the user. He already has all his billing information set up with iTunes, so there’s no (additional) concern about security. I don’t know if the publisher gets the purchaser’s information. If not, that would be a big strike against it.

Appmakr.com is a simple way to create apps for the iPhone from any RSS feed. It costs $300 / app and looks very easy.

I have a hard time believing that magazines will do very well on mobile — at least not in their current form. The interface is going to have to change. I don’t suspect people will want to page through an online magazine the way they do in print.

I suspect the best place for content providers to get into mobile is in tools, reports and calculators.

Nobody polices the internet, which means that it’s a cesspool, full of porn, scams and flagrant copyright violations.

I can’t let my kids have unfiltered access, and even “filtered” access is very questionable.

For some odd reason the Internet lives in a world apart. It’s okay to have laws that regulate the sale and positioning of Playboy magazine, but anybody can create a web page with garbage that would shock Hugh Hefner, and the suggestion that it should be regulated is met with scorn and derision.

We hear things like, “If parents don’t want that in their house, they should monitor their kids’ internet use.”

Yeah, right. And if parents don’t want their kids to smoke, they shoud follow them around all the time, so there’s no need for age restrictions on sales. And if parents don’t want their kids to drink, or drive cars, or take prescription drugs, or …. You get the point.

Where did we get the idea that the Internet is subject to completely different rules than everything else in life? It’s crazy. Somewhere along the way, libertarian geeks have staked their claim, and everybody else has just gone along.

It’s time to create a new internet with on an entirely different protocol. Rather than http://, we need safe://.

This would allow the wild-west libertarian geeks to keep their porn on http. Nobody would be “sensored.” But it would allow responsible people who believe in decency and property rights to have something they can allow in the home.

Anyone who wanted to participate in the safe protocol would need to follow certain rules related to content, copyright and security.

The wild-west radicals have won the battle for the internet. Fine. Let them have it. But it’s time for a new, responsible internet that is designed by grown ups.

I’ve been in professional publishing since God was a lad, so I have a particular perspective on copyright and the rules for accessing content on the web.

As you might suspect, the “if I can get your copyrighted material off the web for free that’s okay” attitude that many people have really bugs me. I don’t pretend to be neutral about this. These people are stealing my paycheck.

I recently found a site that was giving away some of the stuff I sell at work. This particular site has a “report abuse” page, so I clicked through and found a lengthy set of requirements they expect you to fulfill before they’ll even consider your complaint.

This one was particularly amusing.

State that the information in the notice is accurate, under penalty of perjury.

So … these bastards steal our content and then they have the gall to require us to submit our request for them to stop “under penalty of perjury.”

There is no practical way for copyright owners to police all this nonsense, or to submit each site’s silly forms, or to file lawsuits, or whatever. Even if you get one site to stop, they’d just set up business under a different name and do it again. Or somebody else would.

What’s necessary is an appropriate market-driven way to punish them, and I know how that could be done. (I’ve posted something like this before, but it’s on my mind today so I’m at it again.)

Somebody with substantial market power on the web — like Google — should set up a copyright registry for legitimate publishers. The publisher would submit its copyrighted material to the registry along with a list of the sites authorized to display it.

If a site violated those terms and displayed copyrighted content without the owners’ permission, (1) it would disappear from the Google search listing, along with any ads that link to that site, (2) the authorized contact at the copyright owner would be notified, and (3) the company that controls that site’s DNS entry would be notified with a recommendation to redirect any traffic to a copyright violation page.

We don’t have to rely on the FCC or some other bloated and inefficient government agency to police these things. There is echnological solution, and I don’t think it would be that difficult.

Google, are you listening?

Here’s a helpful little video the good folk at ExpertClick have prepared that shows how you can automatically have content from an RSS feed show up in your twitter account.

The video is specifically about their news wire service, but you’ll easily figure out how to use the same technique for any RSS feed.

If you want people to read your articles online, most of your visitors are going to find you through search, so you need to use words people are going to be searching on. Especially in the headline.

For example, I was writing a post on my home brewing blog and my marketing hat suddenly slipped onto my head. I thought, “Hey, optimization boy, take some of your own medicine.”

So I started to use various online tools to make sure I was picking the right words for the title of my homebrewing blog post. Then I realized I should blog about that process over here.

I was writing two posts at the same time. One on homebrewing and one (for this blog) on how I picked the right words for my homebrewing blog. I was going to title this post “Before you write that blog post,” and then — again — I realized I wasn’t following the right seo principles.

“Before you write that blog post” would sound good enough for a pre-qualified audience — i.e., people who are already interested in how to write a blog post to get maximum traffic. So if you’re writing a newsletter to people who want to know about that, fine.

That’s not the way blogs work. (Who searches on “before you write”?)

So off I went to google again to see which words to use for this post (on how to pick words for blog posts).

The first thing to do is dream up a couple options. I wondered if “article” or “headline” got more traffic, so I typed them into Google trends and found that “article” gets a lot more search.

But … what about “blog”? I tried that, and it’s no contest. “Blog” gets way more search than “article” or “headline.”

What other words should I use? Should my title be “blog headline” or “optimize blog” or … hey, what about “blog seo”?

That was killer. “Blog seo” creams “blog headline” and “optimize blog.”

I would like to be able to test “blog seo tricks, blog seo ideas, blog seo how to,” but google trends doesn’t show any results for those phrases, so I just did “tricks, ideas, how to” — and “how to” takes the field.

Now there’s no guarantee that “blog seo how to” is the best phrase, but it’s sure likely to be better than “Before you write that blog post,” and it only took me about a minute to figure that out.

The lesson is — before you write an article for the web, do some research to see what words and phrases work best!

Now then, back to homebrewing, which is what got me over here in the first place.

I was about to blog about my son’s new porter recipe, which I am enjoying as I type.

I write a weekly post on homebrewbeer.biz about home brewing.

So then. What words work best for an article about a porter recipe?

There isn’t a synonym for “porter,” so I’m kinda stuck with that word.

I do have to decide between “home brew” and “homebrew.” Consulting google trends, “homebrew” wins.

Now this is where the editor and the marketer have to come to terms, because from time to time the editor will say that X is better, and the marketer will say that Y gets more search.

You’re going to have to make up your mind. Do you want to be the lonely little correct guy in the corner who’s ever-so proud of his grammar, or do you want people to find and read what you’ve written?

I thought so.

Now — as you experiment on google trends you come up with some odd ideas. For example, my first thought for a headline was something like “Ben’s Home Brew Porter — an intermediate homebrew recipe.”

(Note that I slipped “home brew” and “homebrew” into the same title to cover my bases.)

But what about “how to”? It killed on blog optimization. So I tested “homebrew recipe” against “homebrew how to,” and … “how to” killed again.

People seem to search on “how to” quite a lot. There might be a lesson in that.

Anyway, are the people who search on that phrase the right people for my article? Are people who are searching on stuff like “homebrew how to” looking for beer recipes?

(It turns out there’s this Nintendo “homebrew” thing that has absolutely nothing to do with making beer at home.)

But the good old wonder wheel guided me on this one. When I typed in “homebrew how to” it was clear that most of the sub-topics are related to making beer at home. That’s all good.

So I settled on Homebrew how to — Ben’s Mild Porter Recipe.

I could have spent some more time on this and tweaked it a bit more, but … hey, home brewing is just a hobby of mine.

Nevertheless, it’s always worth five minutes of your time in the google tools to pick the right words. And “right” (in this context) means words people actually care about and search on.

Consumer product marketing isn’t my thing, so don’t expect any great insights here, but I thought I’d post a quick note about a campaign I saw this morning on the streets of D.C.

Nescafe is firing back at Starbucks’ new instant coffee. Reps were handing out samples outside the metro this morning.

The package says “Nescafe, the smart choice” on one side. On the other are two opposing cups of coffee. One says “a lot of hype” on a mocked-up Starbucks cup; the other says “a lot of flavor” on a Nescafe cup. It looks somewhat like this web page.

The bottom of the package says “taste for yourself” and inside is a collection of various Nescafe versions of instant coffee.

I’ve tried them both (Starbucks and Nescafe), and I think they’re both good. The Starbucks version has that characteristic burnt, strong flavor, and the Nescafe version is milder.

All other things (like price) being equal, I’d pick one or the other based on what grabbed my fancy at the time. Sometimes I like that burnt, strong Starbucks flavor and sometimes I don’t.

Nescafe seems to be capitalizing on the down economy.

“Why pay extra for hype?”
“Get a lot of flavor for less.”
“It’s the smart choice.”

And that seems like smart marketing to me.