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Kevin: Om Malik looks at the CXO mud wrestling match at MySpace. That's old news, and the FT took a deep dive into larger issues at MySpace last month. The really interesting lines in this story deal with whether News Corp is tired of the web and is going to refocus on its high margin businesses. "In many ways, News Corp and Murdoch have lost any and all interest in the web. The fire sales of Photobucket and Rotten Tomatoes are clear indicators that any-and-every digital property is up for sale. I bet if you showed up with a decent offer for say IGN or MySpace, News Corp would be willing to make a deal."
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Kevin: Good post by Robert Hardie asking what newspapers really sell in the age of digital content. Is it the content or the experience? (I might substitute service for experience, but that's largely a semantic distinction.) He says that he paid for the Guardian's iPhone app because he finds the experience superior to viewing the standard mobile site on his iPhone. However, he wonders whether the distinction holds true for regional or local news? He thinks it does.
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Kevin: An interesting bit of comment/blog roundup with some very interesting graphs looking at the costs and the operating margins at Guardian Media Group Regional Media, most of which was just sold to the Trinity Mirror Group. The sickening collapse in 2009 was a predictable result of the Great Recession, but the collapse in earnings started well before then. With the profits shrinking since 2004 while the British property bubble soared, it's hard to see how the predicted return to economic growth (albeit very anemic) will help restore the fortunes of regional newspapers in the UK.
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Kevin: The BBC's Brian Wheeler looks at Twitter and its potential role in the upcoming UK General Election. "Experts … agree: Some hapless candidate will say or do something which will make them an instant, if unwitting, internet star – bringing instant shame and embarrassment to their party." With such risk aversion amongst politicians here in the UK, I don't think it's going to deal with the trust deficit they have after the Paliamentary expenses scandal.
Everything you need to know about comments
Today’s blog post is shamelessly stolen from inspired by Adam Tinworth.
links for 2010-02-10
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Kevin: I'm a member of the Online News Association. It started in the US and still tends to get most of its entries from there, but it's made some strides in showing not only the best international English content but also beginning to highlight some non-English news sites. There is a good mix of blogging, multimedia, breaking news, investigations and technical innovation.
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Suw: Wonderful table of fonts featuring "100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today."
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Suw: Really great post about the difference between flow and stock as a metaphor for media.
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Suw: Really great post outlining four of the most popular reasons entrepreneurs give for starting their own business, and why it doesn't quite work out like that.
Report: Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2010
Edelman’s yearly Trust Barometer survey results are out, with trust in business, governments and NGOs up, whilst trust in the media continues its three year decline. However:
Although trust in business is up, the rise is tenuous. Globally, nearly 70 percent of informed publics expect business and financial companies will revert to “business as usual” after the recession.
Interestingly, trust in “credentialed experts” is up, compared to a drop in trust in “[people] like me”, perhaps because in a recession people become aware that their friends don’t have better information than they do. I don’t think this necessarily points to a decline in word-of-mouth and would expect this metric to bounce back once we’re out of recession. But then, your word-of-mouth is only as good as people’s experience of your actual product or service and businesses do need to understand that you if you put lipstick on a pig, people will still see that it’s a pig.
Edelman also found that:
A vastly different set of factors – let by trust and transparency – now influences corporate reputation and demands that companies take a multi-dimensional approach to their engagement with stakeholders.
Another good reason to use social media to engage with customers, clients and other stakeholders!
I’m slightly surprised it’s taken us this long to see this happen. People are much more aware now that businesses can act deceptively towards them. There are many examples of deception (whether deliberate or through incompetence) and subsequent climb-down that persist in the public consciousness because the story has been so efficiently transmitted via the internet. It’s hard not to view business in general with a certain level of mistrust these days.
Businesses that are deliberately transparent, on the other hand, counter this background mistrust by laying their cards on the table and emphasising that they are made up of human beings with whom we can interact, rather than corporate droids who only know how to say their equivalent of Computer Says NO! It is, after all, much harder to mistrust a real person for no reason than a faceless megacorp.
Here, Robert Phillips, UK Ceo for Edelman, talks about how trust pans out in the UK:
As usual, Edelman’s report provides us with much food for thought.
links for 2010-02-09
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Kevin: Pete Warden does a very interesting analysis of Facebook in the US and looks at who is connected to connect to whom. "Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster." He breaks the country into areas like Dixie, Stayathomia (the Mid-Atlantic, Ohio River Valley and upper Midwest), Greater Texas (Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), the Nomadic West, Pacifica (the Seattle area) and Socalistan (southern California). It's a very interesting analysis.
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Kevin: Facebook has overtaken Google News for referrals to news and media web sites. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic writes: "Facebook's page view explosion in the last months of 2009 — plus new evidence that it is becoming the major driver of news — has some analysts wondering whether the site is taking over Google News and personalized Google Reader accounts as America's leading information hub. "
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Kevin: Demand Media, which has fine tuned an approach to inexpensive text and video content online, is looking to sell its content to traditional media. They optimise content to what people are searching for online. Demand produces 4500 pieces of original content a day. Some writers are getting very anxious for the fact that Demand pays roughly $15 per 500-word piece.
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Kevin: Robert Andrews of paidContent UK gives a great list of proposed amendments to the UK Digital Economy Bill. There are some very interesting things lurking in these amendments. Conservative Lord Ralph Lucas has tabled this amendment: “Protection of the right to link to publicly available information on the internet”, which states: “The creation, aggregation, copying and publication of any link to publicly available information contained on websites on the internet shall not constitute an infringement of copyright.”
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Kevin: Dan Lewis James looks deep into Hunch at the social network design principles. This is a fascinating look at how to build social spaces based on the goals and pyschological motivations of users. While working for a content site, you wouldn't re-create Facebook, but if you look at the goals that people have in terms of finding and sharing content, you can easily see how you would build a news site different to add social elements not just around participation but also in terms of helping them find the content that they want. This is a really well done and thoughtful post.
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Kevin: Fascinating discussion from the DeSilve-Phillips Dealmakers Summit 2010. “We believe in content but we’re struggling to monetize it,” said Jeff Horing, managing director of Insight Venture Partners. Interesting discussions as well in terms of paid content versus advertising supported content. Investors see opportunities for investing in magazines that serve attractive niches, but they don't see investment opportunities in newspapers. "Newspapers have a fundamental issue where they don’t deliver as much value as their alternatives," said Richard Zannino, managing director of CCMP Capital Advisors.
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Kevin: This year's Edelman Trust Barometer. Richard Edelman says: "The events of the last 18 months have scarred people. People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It's a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."
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Kevin: "Everybody goes online, everybody has a cell phone, and kids hate blogging and Twitter, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project."
Report: Pew’s Social Media and Young Adults
Pew’s Internet & American Life Project has recently published their report Social Media and Young Adults, which looks at social media usage by teens and young adults.
Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.
The report goes on to say that whilst blogging amongst teens and young adults has dropped since 2006, down to 14% of online teens compared to 28%, it has risen amongst the over 30s from 7% in 2007 to 11% in 2009. 73% of online teens use social networks now, compared to 55% in 2006 and 65% in 2008. 47% of online adults use social networks, up from 37% in 2008. Furthermore, adults are “increasingly fragmenting their social networking experience” as 52% have two or more different profiles.
There’s lots more information, about Twitter, connectivity and gadget use. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the whole thing, but none of the above statistics should surprise anyone.
Teens never were particularly into blogging and if they were going to blog anywhere it was going to be on LiveJournal. Different blogging tools had radically different profiles in 2006, with tools like Typepad having a middle-aged, white male demographic and LiveJournal attracting mainly teens, 75% female, with a focus on cultural minorities. The blogging landscape has changed a lot since then, and the tool-specific cultures have grown or receded along with the tools themselves. LiveJournal, which had just been bought by SixApart was sold to SUP, a Russian media company and now has 11.6 million users. Movable Type/Typepad seem to have decreased in popularity. WordPress has developed is now one of the most usable and extensible platforms available. It currently has 202 million users.
Culturally, blogging has moved into the mainstream – a good enough reason for many teens to see it as ‘something old people do’ and that they should, therefore, avoid. And those teens who were on LJ in 2006 are growing up, hitting 20 and going to university or getting jobs. And I can say from experience that blogging really is easier when you’re underemployed!
The wider social media landscape has changed too. Facebook had started off as a closed, school-/university-only site, accessible only to those with an educational email address. In 2006 is opened its doors and so all of those teens/early-20-somethings who were facing having to leave their friends behind as they lost their university email address could continue their activities into the workplace. MySpace, which in 2006 was the most popular social network, became a lot less cool. In 2008, Facebook took MySpace’s crown and it is now pretty much seen as Facebook’s ugly little brother (even though MySpace is a year older).
Twitter, of course, barely existed in 2006, and whilst it’s still not hugely popular amongst teens, plain ol’ SMSing is. Teens have greater access to mobile phones now than they did, with 75% of American teens between 12 and 17 owning one. I’d suspect the pattern is the same in the UK and Europe. Text bundles are now very generous, so teens have no need of Twitter – their social circle is based on their school friends and neighbours for whom texts work well enough.(In most cases, they have yet to develop geographically scattered networks that tools such as Twitter are useful for sustaining.)
As for adults using more social networks, but fragmenting their social experience, well again, there are a lot more networks to join now than their were, and they don’t all do the same thing. I can’t do on Twitter what I do on Flickr or Dopplr. So I would expect to see usage and fragmentation continue to increase.
I love the Pew reports. We don’t have anything like this in the UK, although we desperately need this sort of research to be done. As I’ve said before, Ofcom and the Office for National Statistics do some work, but it lacks the focus and detail that business and government need if they are to base decisions on evidence instead of anecdote. However, it is important when we read these reports to remember that the digital landscape is continually shifting, and we can’t separate out the changes we see in online behaviour from the development of the web. As such, I’d say there is nothing that surprises me in this report, nothing that seems out of place within the wider context of technology change and adoption.
Time to sign up to Ada Lovelace Day 2010
Last year, over 3500 people pledged to support Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over 1200 people added their link to our map mash-up and we got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!
But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech on Wednesday 24 March. We have 197 signatories so far, we just need another 2875, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge and let all your friends know about it.
It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.
To keep up to date with what is happening:
The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda
on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=253179284089
Please, join us on Ada Lovelace Day. Together we can raise the profile of women in technology around the world!
How important is Twitter to your blog’s traffic stats?
Last Friday I wrote a blog post on my own blog about The Impenetrable Layer of Suck and did what I usually do with blog posts these days: I Tweeted it. I saw a few people reTweet it, so thought I’d check my stats. This is what I saw:
I’ve heard many a time from friends at Guardian Technology, who all regularly Tweet links to new articles and blog posts, that Twitter is a greater driver of traffic than Google News. I’ve found it to be true here as well. On days that I Tweet a link, traffic is much, much higher than days I don’t.
I rarely see links from other websites listed in my referral stats, apart from my own site where there’s a feed in the sidebar and weekly roundups. The decline of the trackback is an interesting, and sad, thing. They got so polluted by spammers that they became unworkable for most people and now I rarely see functioning trackbacks. Blogrolls have also fallen into disfavour, probably because they were such a pain to keep up to date and the technology to look after your blogroll didn’t develop much functionality beyond very basic add/delete/sort links.
This is a shame. In the early days of blogging, I felt like I really was a part of this huge network of bloggers, all passionate about the opportunities this new technology gave us, all excited about the democratisation of publishing. Now blogs feel much more isolated from each other, less connected, less like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. More like lone voices howling in the storm.
Twitter brings traffic, as sometimes does Facebook, but it doesn’t make me feel that this blog is connected into a wider network. Whilst information flows through my network, just as it did before, that flow is mostly invisible. Twitter doesn’t show me whose Tweet is sending me the traffic, it’s all just a nameless wall of http://twitter.com. The network has slipped behind a veil.
It’s great that Twitter brings readers, but I miss that sense of connection that my referrals stats used to bring me.
So, how important is Twitter to you, compared to other sources of traffic? Do you get most of your referrals from Twitter? Is Twitter now where you find most of your news?
Lessons in statistics
This week brought two really fascinating insights into the world of statistics. The first was from a most unusual source: The Daily Mail (not my usual read – the link was posted to the Bad Science forum). They had run with the story Cracked it! Woman finds six double yolk eggs in one box beating trillion-to-one odds, which was then pretty rigorously debunked by the Mail’s own Michael Hanlon.
In Eggs-actly what ARE the chances of a double-yolker? Hanlon points out that young hens tend to produce more double yolks than older hens, and that flocks tend to be of the same age, so six double-yolkers is not an unusual occurrence for a young flock. Further more, double-yolkers are heavier than single yolked eggs, so when the eggs are sorted by weight they will tend to wind up in the same box. So really, a box of six double-yolkers isn’t that much of a surprise.
The second was from WNYC’s RadioLab, a great radio show and podcast from NPR in the States which has now become a must-listen for the gym. I love RadioLab – they cover science stories in an engaging, entertaining and though provoking way. Their programme from Sept 9 last year was called Stochasticity, “a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness”. The first two sections should be compulsory listening for every journalist:
A Very Lucky Wind
Laura Buxton, an English girl just shy of ten years old, didn’t realize the strange course her life would take after her red balloon was swept away into the sky. It drifted south over England, bearing a small label that said, “Please send back to Laura Buxton.” What happened next is something you just couldn’t make up – well, you could, but you’d be accused of being absolutely, completely, appallingly unrealistic.On a journey to find out how we should think about Laura’s story, and luck and chance more generally, Jad and Robert join Deborah Nolan to perform a simple coin-toss experiment. And Jay Koehler, an expert in the role of probability and statistics in law and business, demystifies some of Jad and Robert’s miraculous misconceptions.
And then the first half especially of:
Seeking Patterns
Fine. Randomness may govern the world around us, but does it guide US?? Jonah Lehrer joins us to examine one of the most skilled basketball teams ever, the ’82 – ’83 ’76ers, and wonders whether or not the mythical “hot hand” actually exists.Then we meet Ann Klinestiver of West Virginia, an English teacher who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991. When she began to take a drug to treat her disease, her life changed completely after one fateful day at the casino. Jonah discusses the neurotransmitter dopamine and the work of Wolfram Schultz, whose experiments with monkeys in the 1970s shed light on Ann’s strange addiction and the deep desire for patterns inside us all.
Statistics is something that you constantly see journalists getting wrong. The Bad Science forums are rife with examples of statistics abuse. It’s not surprising, because it’s actually very easy to get statistics wrong: Probability in particular can be very counter-intuitive and assumptions that seem to be common sense are frequently just our brains playing silly buggers with us. Personally, I think that all journalists should have to study statistics, even the freelances, because it’s so easy to get it wrong and so useful when you get it right. But, in the meantime, I’d settle for more people listening to shows like RadioLab and reading blogs like Good Math, Bad Math, Bad Science, or Junk Charts.
links for 2010-02-05
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Kevin: How to use Google Fusion Tables (Google Spreadsheets for large files) to update a map from a large spreadsheet.
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Kevin: My takeawy from this post is Iris Chyi's comments. She finds "Her research has consistently found that even while online news use continues growing, its preference lags behind that of traditional media." And she adds: "More research, as opposed to guesswork or wishful thinking, on the perception of news products is essential."
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Kevin: paidContent panel discussing paywalls with Jacob Weisberg of Slate, Politico co-founder and Editor-in-Chief John Harris, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau and Bloomberg Chief Content Officer Norm Pearlstine. Paywalls are a practial issue not an ideological one. Bloomberg's Perlstine said: "“It’s supply and demand. If you can suspend those laws, you might as well try. But our own experience is that you can charge a lot of money from an audience that has a special need for your content. The report on where all the best football players are going to college is important to some people. But most general news is not sufficiently distinct. There are some smart people who are betting on it. It seems to me more out of desperation than from an actual business plan.”
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Kevin: Mark Glaser writes: "In the view of some traditional media execs, Google is a digital vampire or a parasite or tech tapeworm using someone else's content to profit. As that rhetoric heated up in the past year, Google has responded not with equal amounts of invective but with entreaties to help publishers." It's the text that accompanies and in-depth interview with Google's Krishna Bharat and Josh Coehn about Google News. I agree with Mark's assessment in terms of response to some pretty rough punches thrown their way by newspapers. Google is doing well so can afford to turn the other cheek. It's a good interview and well worth watching.
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Kevin: The Washington Post reports: "The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity." How Google and the NSA might cooperate isn't clear. One thing I would say from this piece and others is that Google's threat to quit China has brought attention to cyber-attacks originating from China (whether the Chinese government is involved is difficult to prove but implied by subtle details in Google's announcement).
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Kevin: A great head-to-head comparison of Data.gov and the recently launched Data.gov.uk (a launch that I covered for the Guardian). The verdict: "While Data.gov.uk was just recently launched publicly, it has many advantages over Data.gov. It's easier to use and geared towards developers, who, let's face it, are the only ones who are going to do more with the data than open it up in Excel. Data.gov has some catching up to do. Both still have a long way to go. Both are good steps in the right direction."