Currents | Q&A: Geoff Manaugh, the New Editor of Gizmodo, on Adding Design to the Tech Blog

Those opportunities and others have been the fruits of BldgBlog, the Web site Mr. Manaugh created nine years ago as a way to explore his interest in the built environment. From a military base in the California desert designed to look like a town in Afghanistan to a tribute to Lebbeus Woods to a post about the video game Parallax, the blog’s subjects are wide ranging and its tone an academic geek-out.

Last week, Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, announced that Mr. Manaugh was taking his curiosity and high-minded approach to Gizmodo, the popular tech blog known for its focus on digital gadgets and scatological tone. As its new editor, beginning in September, Mr. Manaugh will focus more on design, architecture and urbanism, along with technology.

He spoke with a reporter this week about the new role.

Q. How will Gizmodo be revamped under your editorship?

A. We want to push what technology means. It’s not just about gadgets you carry around in your pocket. The city itself is the largest gadget that humans have made. You can talk about the ways cities are managed, the way governments function.

We’ll be focusing a lot more on athletic technology, including gear in emerging sports like wilderness hiking. We’ll be looking at military technology, everything from biofuels to stealth materials, not just how iPhones are made.

Q. Gizmodo readers appear to like the coverage of Apple and new gadgets.

A. You might come to Gizmodo expecting to read about an Apple conference, and we will still cover that sort of thing. But if you see a compelling article about 3-D printing or elevator design, I think you’ll be interested in that.

It’s taking all of the things Gizmodo is good at and has an audience for, but it’s adding urbanism and architecture and design. You’ll see interviews with architects, coverage of building projects around the world. It’s treating gadgets as design objects.

Q. How do design and technology fit together as subjects?

A. They’re always related. Most technical innovators or inventors are pretty explicitly aware of design. People are constantly encountering design, whether it’s the newest laptop or clothing or all the weird new cooking gear that’s coming out and turning kitchens into chemistry sets. It goes back to showing people how technology and design work together.

Q. With BldgBlog, you can cover any subject that interests you. How will you respond to Gawker Media’s more page-view-driven approach?

A. It’s an exciting challenge. But my experience with BldgBlog is that following your voice and the things you find interesting actually does work and does find an audience. It underestimates audiences to say you have to dumb everything down or make it sarcastic. You can share off-kilter ideas with tens of thousands, if not millions, of people.

Q. What things won’t you cover in the remade Gizmodo?

A. We’ll be doing fewer gear-intensive reviews of consumer gadgetry. That coverage is being done by so many people today. The idea will be to talk more about the culture of that technology.

We’ll also be spinning off the more gossipy stuff about Silicon Valley to another blog, Valleywag.

And we’ll create a tone that will not be as juvenile as previous iterations of Gizmodo.

Q. Why do you think Mr. Denton wanted to shake things up?

A. If Nick wants to reinvent Gizmodo, in a way he’s more ambitious and wants to reinvent how technology is written about online. Tech blogging is at a bit of a lull right now. People are looking for something that isn’t just more reviews or sarcastic posts written from technology conferences in San Francisco. Something that shows a more wide-ranging approach.

Bits: Sticker Apps, Adding More Variety to the Emoticon World

When a friend recently told me that she was sick, I replied with a cartoon row of steaming bowls of soup and a flexing bicep — my way of wishing her a speedy recovery.

I insert all kinds of visual images into messages, including GIFs — those short, looping animated clips — to emphasize a point. When my friend Ray got an iPhone, for example, I texted him a GIF of the singer Rihanna jumping up and down to convey my own enthusiasm for his purchase.

Using emoji, emoticons and GIFs in a texted conversation instantly signals the difference between sincerity and a joke or sarcasm. And it takes less effort. It’s easier to smooth over hurt feelings with an impish cat face than to hastily type a long and winding explanation of why you’re 20 minutes late to your dinner date, or to let a friend know that you are sending your love her way with an animated GIF of two pandas hugging.

Path's new messaging app.

Typically, these mobile phone features have not been big businesses in the United States. But a few young American start-up businesses, including a private social networking service called Path and messaging services called Lango and MessageMe, are trying to change that. Path and MessageMe have released souped-up versions of emoji and emoticons called “stickers” that can be inserted into messages; Lango’s will be introduced on Tuesday. Compared with emoji, stickers are elaborate, artsy creations. On Path, for example, the sticker that’s intended to convey an upset mood shows a frowning face surrounded by a storm cloud and lightning bolts.

“People have always been typing ‘LOL,’ or putting in a YouTube link while communicating,” said Arjun Sethi, one of the founders of MessageMe. “This is a faster and more intuitive way to communicate; it’s about more ways to be expressive in this medium.”

It is an opportunity that has sharp-eyed entrepreneurs and venture capitalists eager to cash in.

“Messaging as a category will evolve to be more commerce-oriented,” says Chi-Hua Chien, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, which has invested in Path and several other messaging applications.

Lango's Super Bowl stickers.

THE sticker apps are free to download. But for a few dollars, users can buy extra packs that include premium items like hand-drawn caricatures of snacks — a dancing slice of pizza, for example — or cartoon characters from the trippy children’s show “Adventure Time.” For the Super Bowl, Lango released a theme pack containing cartoon caricatures of the San Francisco 49ers.

Like emoticons and emoji, these sticker applications have been popular for quite some time in other parts of the world. Line, an app that lets people send stickers, drawings and messages to one another, has enjoyed commercial success in South Korea and Japan. The service, developed by Naver, a South Korean company, says it has more than 100 million users. The company recently opened an office in San Francisco to drum up a big audience for Line in the United States.

Line’s popularity was part of what motivated Lango and MessageMe to bring their own versions of sticker-type messaging to the United States.

The translation might not be as easy as it sounds. Even though I’m in the target audience for these sticker apps — always looking for new ways to spice up my text messages — I have found some of the stickers a bit too gimmicky, at least when compared with their less fussy, emoji predecessors. I found it hard to imagine the images gaining conversational traction among my friends, which is half the fun of using visual icons in the first place.

David Lee, one of the founders of SV Angel, an angel investment venture capital firm, has invested in MessageMe. But he does have one niggling question, which is whether “user behavior and cultural norms in Asia and other countries are so different that they don’t translate well to the U.S.”

Cellphone users in Asia quickly adopted text messaging and found creative ways to express themselves within those messages’ character limits. But many Americans became familiar with emoji only when the iPhone released a software update that included an emoji keyboard a few years ago.

Those who study digital media and culture say the United States is still developing its mobile habits and behavior, so other countries’ trends may not be a good metric for what will work at home.

Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Asia and the United States, says it may be too late for these visual stickers to catch on.

“Many users in this country,” she says, “missed many of the kinds of mobile use practices that characterized early mobile texting culture.”

Unlike emoji, the sticker apps do not function on the default texting program, which makes using them more of an effort. And figuring out how to satisfy the American mobile consumer has frustrated companies like Zynga and Facebook, which have struggled to translate Web success to mobile.

Nonetheless, Mr. Lee says he is confident that Americans will embrace visual texting methods. He also says the applications fit well into what he sees as the future of social networking, where friend groups are built around phone address books and texting, rather than a Web site.

Mr. Sethi of MessageMe agrees that my cohort just needs time to adapt to these new visual communication markers.

“People are just now starting to use what’s available technologically on phones,” he said. “We just have to get people used to it.”

Other forms of visual-based communication are catching on here, so maybe there is hope for the mobile stickers. Big audiences have already been gained by video-chatting services, like Skype, as well as by Instagram, the photo-sharing service, and Snapchat, a tool that lets people send photos and videos that self-destruct after a few seconds.

“The U.S. has clearly jumped onto the visual mobile communication bandwagon,” Ms. Ito says. “But in a way that is different from the emoji orientation of the earlier adopters.”

As for me, I’ll stick with my simple emoji vocabulary of hearts, blushing women and half-hatched chicken — for the time being.

YouTube to Serve Niche Tastes by Adding Channels

The oddball videos of gurgling babies, teenagers crashing their skateboards and synchronized wedding dances are still there. But they have been increasingly buried under what YouTube calls original channels — polished, highly produced videos financed by YouTube. It is part of YouTube’s strategy, started a year ago, to lure television viewers and advertisers by helping to produce high-quality videos that cater to niche interests.

Now Google, which owns YouTube, is stepping up that effort. On Monday, it plans to announce that it is adding more than 50 original channels to the 100 it has introduced in the last year and expanding original channels to France, Germany and Britain.

Other online video platforms — including Amazon.com, Netflix and Hulu — are also trying to compete for viewers by creating original content. But transforming from platform to producer has been challenging for all, including Google. And it is hard to argue that YouTube, or any other video platform, is on a path to soon replace television — whether for viewers, content makers or advertisers.

“There are not any successes you can point to and say, this happened because of Google’s investment,” said James L. McQuivey, who studies digital video and television at Forrester. “What they’ve learned is that they haven’t invested enough.”

As part of the new effort, Google is investing a fresh $200 million to market the shows. It is also investing an additional, undisclosed amount -- on top of the $100 million it invested last year -- to pay for production equipment and, in some cases, pay the full production costs.

The new channels, which will carry advertising and be available free, include producers with major media experience. ESPN has a sports channel, Grantland; Sarah Silverman and Michael Cera have a comedy channel, Jash; and Everyday Health has a beauty and health channel, Daily Glow. There are also smaller, online-only producers, like Tastemade and PopSugar.

“I believe that every interest will, at some point, have a channel serving that interest,” said Robert Kyncl, global head of content at YouTube. “People are building channels and creating audiences, which is something they couldn’t do before in such numbers.”

YouTube says that its push in this area has already created successes.

The top 25 original channels average more than a million views a week, according to the company, and in the year since original channels were introduced, people have increased the hours they spend watching YouTube each month to four billion from three billion.

Several YouTube video producers, including AwesomenessTV, StyleHaul and Blip.tv, have received venture capital financing. Some have been acquired by big entertainment companies, including Nerdist Industries by Legendary Entertainment and Revision3 by Discovery Communications. And YouTube-financed channels have attracted prominent advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Toyota and American Express, though it did not give specific ad revenues.

Even so, YouTube is nowhere close to being the default home for high-quality video, analysts say.

Video producers, Mr. McQuivey said, “are interested in this, but they’re not about to risk giving up a pilot on NBC in order to do a new YouTube channel.”

Advertisers, meanwhile, “still hold the 30-second spot on a pedestal, and the idea you would put that creative content into that inferior channel still bothers a lot of them.”

Though advertisers will increase their spending on digital video ads 46.5 percent to $2.9 billion this year, that is a small fraction of the $64.5 billion they will spend on television, according to eMarketer.

And viewers who have spent decades in front of their televisions are not about to throw them out in favor of YouTube, he said.

YouTube has learned the same thing, so it is going after younger people who have grown up online.

“The thing we learned is it’s certainly best to fish where the fish are,” Mr. Kyncl said. “In terms of making investment decisions and putting dollars at risk, we’re going to focus on audiences of 35 and below, who are already on YouTube.”

As a result, much of YouTube’s original programming may seem foreign to older audiences, like casual comedy skits full of Internet references. But other programming has attracted critical acclaim and Hollywood stars. WIGS, for example, shows TV-quality dramas aimed at women that star actresses like Julia Stiles and writers and directors like Marta Kauffman, a creator of “Friends.”

In addition to financing production, YouTube sells ads for the video producers. It takes its initial investment out of the ad revenue.

“That’s their secret sauce, a huge sales force all over the world,” said Jim Louderback, chief executive of Revision3, which will have a new tech channel on YouTube. “We’re pretty excited that huge sales force is going to be spending time finding revenue opportunities for the stuff we’re doing.”

Video producers say that in addition to financial support, YouTube offers a way to bypass television’s frustratingly slow production schedule.

Nerdist Industries recently decided to make a music video with the Fraggle Muppets. Three weeks later, a music video was on YouTube, made with the band Ben Folds Five, the actors Anna Kendrick and Rob Corddry, the Jim Henson Company and Chris Hardwick, the television actor and founder of Nerdist.

“What we found amazing about the opportunity was to go from ideation to production and having content in front of our fan base in a ridiculously short amount of time, and content that’s produced at television-level quality,” said Peter Levin, chief executive of Nerdist Industries.

Another contrast with traditional television is that it is much easier for video creators to get a start and gain a following. YouTube says that minorities who have historically been underserved by network television, for instance, have popular channels on the site, like Michelle Phan’s Fawn and NuevOn, a Spanish-language Hispanic pop culture channel.

“There’s a giant pot of money that is controlled by the broadcast and cable television industries, and it’s because there’s comfort and scale and predictability,” said David Grant, president of PopSugar Studios and a former president of Fox TV Studios. “There’s a fair amount of ways to go — years — before the online video industry has enough scale to move those dollars over. But it is inevitable.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 8, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to Google’s plans to invest in original YouTube channels. Google will invest $200 million this year to market the channels, and an undisclosed amount for production on top of the $100 million it invested last year for production and marketing.

Minecraft Adding New Block

While more experimental players have been adding in numerous blocks via Minecraft mods, the rest have to wait until the Mojang team makes an official release. Today's news, announced via Minecraft developer Jens "Jeb" Bergensten's Twitter feed, shows off a new block targeted exclusively at server admins.

The block in question.

The block doesn't have an official name -- though the working name Bergensten has is "Adventure Mode Control block" -- or release date, but it essentially allows server admins to program scripts exclusive to their adventure mode. For instance they could write it so doing a certain action rewards the player with experience. Bergensten says the block runs commands "on red stone signals," and adds that "with proper commands, many things can be scripted." The block is not craftable, and Bergensten, answering questions from the community, insinuated that you could program it to do any number of activities, even possibly using it to change the game's difficulty.

For more on Minecraft, including a number of articles calling out really awesome mods, check out our exhaustive coverage.