-
Kevin: An interesting article on Advertising Age about click through rates. One thing that's important beyond the narrow focus on this article is that sometimes the easiest to measure statistics aren't necessarily the most important statistics. Indeed, it might say something just about that ease of measurement rather than its relevance. The take-away from this research: "While click-through rates showed a strong positive correlation with interaction rates and brand favorability, only a minor positive correlation could be demonstrated between CTR and purchase intent. "
-
Kevin: J.D. Lasica looks at an event at Google to look for ways to pay for journalism. It's a good post without a real conclusion other than "What's clear is that there's no single solution to the how-do-we-pay-for-journalism problem".
-
Kevin: A good list of the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. "Among the winning ideas are two easy-to-use tool sets for journalists and bloggers to illustrate raw data visually; tools to create “real time ads” that display a business’ latest Twitter or Facebook update; a place for the public to pitch and pay for stories on public radio; a mobile application that enables residents to geo-tag ideas for improving their neighborhood."
-
Kevin: John Naughton has an excellent meditation about the internet and the pervasive search for easy answers. We're living through a revolution. Get used to it. As he writes, disruption is a feature not a bug. "By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises." It's an excellent piece that looks at a number of the disruptive trends online such as how to deal with information abundance, which upends traditional economics that attempts to deal with the allocation of scrace resources.
-
Kevin: Laurie Penny writes in the New Statesmen about the continued prejudice shown by mainstream commentators towards political bloggers in the UK: "Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods.
This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne.
Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done."
-
Kevin: Martin Moore has a great post on journalism.co.uk about new developments in journalism in the US. He looks at the new round of Knight News Challenge winners and broader developments. "Much of the new development is emerging from US universities, such as MIT. At the MIT Media Lab’s Center for the Future of Civic Media, for example. It defines civic media as “any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting”.
The Click-Through That May Be Hurting Your Brand – Advertising Age – DigitalNext
Kevin: An interesting article on Advertising Age about click through rates. One thing that's important beyond the narrow focus on this article is that sometimes the easiest to measure statistics aren't necessarily the most important statistics. Indeed, it might say something just about that ease of measurement rather than its relevance. The take-away from this research: "While click-through rates showed a strong positive correlation with interaction rates and brand favorability, only a minor positive correlation could be demonstrated between CTR and purchase intent. "
MediaShift . 6 Takeaways from ‘TechDirt Saves Journalism’ Event at Google | PBS
Kevin: J.D. Lasica looks at an event at Google to look for ways to pay for journalism. It's a good post without a real conclusion other than "What's clear is that there's no single solution to the how-do-we-pay-for-journalism problem".
Knight funds 12 innovative digital news projects
Kevin: A good list of the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. "Among the winning ideas are two easy-to-use tool sets for journalists and bloggers to illustrate raw data visually; tools to create “real time ads” that display a business’ latest Twitter or Facebook update; a place for the public to pitch and pay for stories on public radio; a mobile application that enables residents to geo-tag ideas for improving their neighborhood."
Everything you need to know about the internet | Technology | The Observer
Kevin: John Naughton has an excellent meditation about the internet and the pervasive search for easy answers. We're living through a revolution. Get used to it. As he writes, disruption is a feature not a bug. "By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises." It's an excellent piece that looks at a number of the disruptive trends online such as how to deal with information abundance, which upends traditional economics that attempts to deal with the allocation of scrace resources.
New Statesman – Welcome to the fifth estate
Kevin: Laurie Penny writes in the New Statesmen about the continued prejudice shown by mainstream commentators towards political bloggers in the UK: "Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods.
This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne.
Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done."
This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne.
Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done."
Future of news innovation in the US is coming from outside of journalism | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog
Kevin: Martin Moore has a great post on journalism.co.uk about new developments in journalism in the US. He looks at the new round of Knight News Challenge winners and broader developments. "Much of the new development is emerging from US universities, such as MIT. At the MIT Media Lab’s Center for the Future of Civic Media, for example. It defines civic media as “any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting”.
links for 2010-06-23
-
Kevin: Fourwhere promises to help journalists see what is happening at a specific location. From a business standpoint, Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp all have built their business on checking in with mostly commercial locations. It makes sense from the standpoint of building a business for these services, but it doesn't necessarily build up a full view of what is happening on a location. If the location-based services started to provide other types of check-ins, it could provide a broader service. Conversely, journalism organisations could start providing more comprehensively geo-tagged content that could be sold to these services. Will they build the infrastructure to do it? Or will they miss another opportunity to develop a revenue stream and financially support journalism?
How new Fourwhere maps plotting Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla could be useful for journalists | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog
Kevin: Fourwhere promises to help journalists see what is happening at a specific location. From a business standpoint, Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp all have built their business on checking in with mostly commercial locations. It makes sense from the standpoint of building a business for these services, but it doesn't necessarily build up a full view of what is happening on a location. If the location-based services started to provide other types of check-ins, it could provide a broader service. Conversely, journalism organisations could start providing more comprehensively geo-tagged content that could be sold to these services. Will they build the infrastructure to do it? Or will they miss another opportunity to develop a revenue stream and financially support journalism?
links for 2010-06-22
-
Kevin: InsideFacebook.com looks at Facebook's international growth. (Data from April 2010) Monthly growth in Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, Argentina, and Malaysia of around 10%.
-
Kevin: Some fascinating statistics showing Twitter's international growth. Kit Eaton writes at FastCompany: "Specific events around the world sparked peaks in international growth, Sanford notes–with the February 2010 Chilean earthquake prompting a 1,200% spike in member sign-ups. A 300% spike was seen after Colombian politicians began to use the system, and speedier growth was seen in India after local politicos and Bollywood stars began to Tweet."
-
Kevin: Lots of lessons here about the new content economy. They run a very, very lean operation. They are visually led, which I think suits the content, and they have surprised advertisers in how well the advertising has performed. There is also a gem of a line in the piece about content designed for the iPad. Adam L. Penenberg, a journalism professor at New York University, said: "You’ll know a new narrative form has emerged when you have to consume a particular story on an iPad to truly understand its content, and reading it on any other platform simply wouldn’t work." (Hat tip to Mark J Davis for the recommendation on Twitter.)
-
Kevin: A group of privacy advocates, computer scientists, lawyers and other interested groups met for the 20th Annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. They produced a bill of rights for social network users. Jon Pincus, chief technology officer of Qworky, a Seattle company that makes meeting software for small businesses, and co-chairman of the 20th CFP conference, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery said it best when he said: "The underlying idea is that Facebook likes to describe itself as equivalent to the third-largest country in the world. What rights do the citizens of that country have?"
-
Kevin: Richard McManus has a good look at how to improve information consumption in the flood of real-time news. He suggests topic tracking services such as Google Alerts, PubSub, LazyFeed and Topikality. He also suggests news aggregators or creating a single feed of several sources. This is increasingly easy to do with RSS or Twitter lists. One last good piece of advice: Turn off the firehouse when you need to work.