hits
Times Open
I have just come back from the Times Open, a day-long event held in the New York Times headquarters. The conference has completely been worth attending. It was a developer focussed conference, so right from the beginning it looked very promising to me. Of course, topics were not very technical, but an overview of what the New York Times is up to, plus a number of more general topics on the trends of the Internet.
Anyway, first things first. Here is my hat-tip to the New York guys for the great work they are doing opening up their content. In fact, it isn't just that they are going to provide API for the general public to access their content, but also that they are working hard on the technical side of things to let that happen. Kudos to them!!
Many interesting ideas were exposed during the even, but I'd like to highlight one of them over the rest. I'd summarize it with the headline "Technology more relevant than Economics". It sounds weird, but I think it's been true in this case; allow me to explain it. NYTimes is working on this effort to open its content, to provide APIs to the users, and basically to open to the world. That's absolutely great, but as you may have noticed, there was not "revenue" nor "business" in the introduction... quite yet. What is that mean? Well, it seems that they are still figuring out what the business model will be, and meanwhile the new set of APIs will start working next week.
Anyway, the thing I enjoyed the most about the event was not the presentations, nor the Tim's O'Reilly keynote, nor the stunning view of the Hudson river. Actually, it was the people. I could not tell you the number of attendees, but we were not that many people in the room. The thing is, I met quite a few people, and all of then were pretty interesting. There are not many conferences where you start a chat with a random guy and be confident that you won't reject having lost fifteen minutes with some sort of elevator talk.
Comments
The New York Times is bleeding hard as people desert newspapers in favor of online news, blogs, radio, and other media. That they still think "build it and figure out how to make money from it later" will work in their current environment is simply flabbergasting.
@Jeff: Think it of this way: Blogs comment on (and link to) trusted sources of information, 99% of the times they don't generate professional stuff. Besides, it's true that less people buy paper nowadays, and IMO that makes the NYTimes initiative even more interesting: instead of treasure their information, they are opening it up so you can in fact access it through the Internet (which is something nobody has done yet).
There's a place for in-depth reporting of the sort only dedicated news organizations can do; blogs are primarily aggregation, sifting, and distillation of both lightweight and in-depth sources, although some do go further. However, that wasn't my point. My point was that I'm astounded by their business decision to jump with this without having the foggiest about how they're going to make money off it, given their financial situation. Opening up is all fine, but it's not cost-free; they paid people to implement these things and to host this gathering. Yet, as I understand you, they don't have any idea how it will or even might pay bills, and they're not flush enough to be able to run these experiments without noticing the money spent on them. That's just irresponsible.
