ZDNet Must Read:
Google's Chrome OS: Will you give up desktop apps?
Google revealed a bevy of noteworthy developments for its Chrome OS. However, the success or failure of the Chrome OS will ride on whether users will give up desktop applications.... Continued »
Category: Blogging
October 15th, 2009
IAB to FTC: Rescind blogger rules
The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s President and CEO has called on the Federal Trade Commission to rescind its new “blogger rules” because they create an unfair distinction between traditional media and online media. More specifically, they revoke from online media a First Amendment protection that’s afforded traditional media for generations.
In an open letter, Randall Rothenberg writes:
For the 400 members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, most of which are small and medium-sized enterprises struggling to build their businesses in the face of the worst decline in marketing spending since the 1930’s, the implication that online social media represent a separate class of communications channels with less Constitutional protection than corporate-owned newspapers, radio stations, or cable television networks is of particularly grave concern.
At the heart of the matter are the payments and freebies that online media - specifically bloggers - might receive in the course of their work. Consumers need to know, as the argument goes, if the author’s work has been compromised by a freebie. And then the FTC imposed new rules that specifically listed bloggers.
October 13th, 2009
Ruling: Fighting RIAA by blog is OK
Lawsuits have long been tried in the news media, with lawyers putting their spins on the case in front of news cameras and microphones. So what’s wrong with a lawyer using a blog to post court documents and otherwise discredit his legal opponents?
Apparently, nothing.
New York Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy ruled that attorney Ray Beckerman may have been “less thank forthcoming at times” but did not cross ethical bounds by posting his motions on a blog devoted to criticizing the defendant: the Recording Industry Association of America. According to a post on Wired’s Threat Level blog, the music industry’s concerns over the blog were “largely overstated.” (PDF of ruling)
Why not use a blog to help advance a legal case? In most cases, courts are open places and legal filings are made publicly available. Unless the judge has ruled otherwise, by way of a gag order, there’s nothing to stop a lawyer from talking to a news reporter or providing copies of the legal filings. Is it a conflict of interest that the lawyer and the “reporter” are the same person? Absolutely. But clearly, just in the name of the blog - called Recording Industry vs The People - there’s bound to be a spin every now and then.
You almost have to expect it
Also see:
October 6th, 2009
The FTC's guidelines raise ruckus, but are (mostly) unenforceable
The Federal Trade Commission published controversial guidelines for bloggers and Facebook and Twitter users, but they are largely unenforceable.
The FTC’s rules are an encroachment on free speech, absurd in parts and far reaching. On the surface, the FTC’s laws boil down to disclosure:
September 19th, 2009
The art of blog: credibility is in the eye of the beholder
Mark Stelzner roused some passions last week with a great blog post discussing how some traditional media are highlighting the need to regulate bloggers with possible “conflicts of interest”. For example, Workforce Magazine’s online article discusses the impact of controversial HR bloggers, such as Cheezhead’s Joel Cheesman.
At the heart of the debate are the issues surrounding which industry entities are more credible for regaling information to the marketplace. My take is that everyone has potential conflicts of interest, and blogging has leveled the playing field across industry entities (journalists, consultants, analysts / marketeers, vendors and users/practitioners).
While, in the past, analysts and journalists ruled the roost when delivering controversial and impactful information to the world, the new crowd of industry bloggers are taking their share of the spotlight, once they have successfully leveraged their industry network into a social-media setting. And while there is a real case to be concerned about the odd manipulative blogger furthering their own specific agenda, my take is that we’re in a new media world, where bloggers are earning trust and credibility over time with their respective audiences. Let’s be honest here - every corner of the industry is potentially conflicted - here are some examples:
1. Magazines which sell advertising space to vendors adjacent to favorable articles that hightlight their products and services. This has been commonplace for decades;
2. Analysts that produce case studies, or favorable write-ups, of their paying vendor clients (gasp!);
3. Consultants that take money from vendors for consulting or research work, and still run vendor-selection evaluations that involved those from whom they take money (shock! horror!);
4. Vendors which leverage compelling rose-tinted content to sell their own products (how could I dare suggest that?);
5. Users/Practitioners that have been influenced by their own past or present vendor relationships and lack a broader view of their industry (c’mon… we’ve all seen this).
Bloggers are appearing from all these five mediums, and it doesn’t matter so much what they do for a day job - what matters is the credibility and style with which they deliver their blog-talk. For example, when I began this blog, I worked for a management consultant, and since switching over to the analyst world two years’ ago, have seen very little difference with the audience regularly visiting here, or the tone of debate. If anything, working for a reputable analyst brand can sometime hold you back from far-reaching opinions, if you’re not always backed up by some sort of datapoint.
Most successful bloggers today seem to be coming out of consulting businesses (for example Deal Architect, Human Capitalist, Inflexion Point, Software Insider and SpendMatters) than any other business. The next challenge is for some of the leading minds in vendors to use the blog-platform more effectively to air industry issues, not to mention experienced practitioners. If anything, vendors are the least conflicted, as you know exactly what their agenda is. When dealing with other entities, their agendas are not always so obvious, and you just have to roll with your own trust of the writer.
All-in-all, the judgment over the credibility of a blog is tied more to that individual airing his/her views, as opposed to their day-job. If a blogger is judged to be overly-biased, or obviously conflicted, other bloggers are always quick to point this out and challenge that blogger’s credibility. Credibility is in the eye of the beholder, and bloggers who’ve earned their chops put theirs’ on the line every time they post.
May 29th, 2009
Bing vs. Bing: Pitching To Be Its Pitchman?
You had to expect it.
The personage who writes the Bing blog and column for Fortune is “moderately outraged” by Microsoft’s use of his pen name as the name of its latest search engine.
Gil Schwartz, the executive vice president and chief communications officer of CBS Corporation (which owns ZDNet), writes screeds about inanities about life at the top of American corporations. He does so under the pen name Stanley Bing. His latest book? “Executricks,” about enjoying the perks of executive live, while working only as much as absolutely essential.
So it might not be a good fit to use Stanley as a spokesman for Bing in Microsoft’s upcoming $100 million on behalf of a search engine that it hopes will set a new standard in tireless and effective pinpointing, retrieval and presentation of information.
But, hey, do you really expect this latest Microsoft campaign to show as much wit or creativity as the ongoing Mac vs. PC campaign from Apple?
May 19th, 2009
Cat Got Your Tongue: How Gossip Will Become The New Media
If you believe the profile, there is a cat that twitters. And has 512,733 followers, as of mid-afternoon May 18.
Of course, this cat – alternately known as “Sockamillion” or “Sockington” – and his voice really belongs to Jason Scott, who lives in Waltham, Mass.
Nonetheless, the fact that a cat “speaks” in 140-word chunks and has antic commentary inspires a half-million other animals with brains to follow his every utterance is a strangely profound commentary on modern media.
You have nothing to say? But, if you channel a lower species, maybe you do. And command a following that even large for-profit champion marketers would lust for. Zappos (and its CEO. Tony Hsieh) still beat out Sockington, with 621,315 followers. But Starbucks, for instance, has “just” 183,595 followers on Twitter.
Read the rest of this entry »
May 8th, 2009
From 'Payola' to 'Pay for Say': Will Metrics Aid Honesty or Abet Dishonesty in Online Conversation?
Every medium or twist on a medium seems to spawn its own version of hiding the agenda.
For decades, radio has had – and apparently continues to have – its payola problems. One way or another, music jockeys get paid off to play particular songs.
In TV, it’s a bit more honest. If you see someone drinking a can of a particular brand of soda or talking about it, you pretty much figure it’s been paid for. The practice is called product placement. There’s a reason a Cisco Systems logo appears on teleconferencing screen on “24” and Jack Bauer doesn’t headbutt anyone. It’s just part of the scenery and almost expected, now.
With trade show panels or some Webcasts, it’s often more hidden. A vendor covers the cost of the event, for the right to have one of its executives participate on the panel or be involved in the online conversation. If it’s disclosed upfront, it’s not that big a deal. The audience can use its own ears to filter out self-promotional comments. But it’s still a form of “pay to play” marketing.
Now come the social media. And it’s going to get increasingly hard to figure out when there is “pay to say” commenting going on.
With the splintering of media into ever finer pieces of output and interaction, where 140 characters becomes a commonplace cap on a comment, it will become increasingly difficult to discern “organic” comment from a paid or sponsored equivalent.
If, all of a sudden, there’s a storm of tweets about a particular product, say Beer Zero, the alert among us is going to assume that there’s some commercial incentive involved. Maybe it’s a requirement to enter some kind of giveaway contest. Maybe it’s the term of getting some kind of discount coupon. You won’t know or have the inclination to figure it out. You’ll just have to filter it out.
The (potential) problem is that marketers are marketers. They naturally want to be top of mind when people are engaging each other in thinking or talking about a particular product. That is, the one they happen to make and distribute.
Marketers are automatically inclined to figure out how to make hay of any kind of online discussion of the products they make. And, they want to buy into the twitter storm, the Facebook stream, the blog banter. Good or bad. Good if it is good. To make it good, if it is bad.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau this week, along these lines, issued its first take on a set of definitions for metrics that advertisers trying to use the social media, from blogs to Facebook and MySpace interchange to twittering, could use.
The interesting part, to these eyes, was the attempt to put some kind of benchmarking on “conversation size” and “site relevance.”
Media planners will be trying to figure out where in all these social media certain “conversation phrases” are appearing. These phrases will be built into their requests for proposals or insertion orders, for campaigns they want to execute to reach those engaged in these digital conversations.
And they will be judging these conversations on:
Number of Conversations: Relevant Sites
o The count of sites in the conversation whose content contains conversation phrases from the client’s Request for Proposal (RFP) or Insertion Order (IO).Number of Conversations: Relevant Links
o The count of links to (in-links) and from (out-links) content that contains conversation phrases from the client’s RFP or IO across all sites identified for and/or supporting the campaign plan.
Conversation Reach
o The number of unique visitors (monthly) across sites in the conversation.Density of Conversation: Relevant Posts
o The percentage for which conversation phrases from the client’s RFP or IO match Post content on the sites identified in the campaign media plan.
These online conversations will inevitably lead to new forms of what advertisers call ‘contextual advertising.’ Putting a message in where it’s relevant to the conversation.
So far there’s a lot of experimentation going on. “Everything is basically new,’’ as Jeremy Fain, Vice President of Industry Services of the IAB, puts it. And the best result comes when an advertiser “earns” attention, because of the natural strength of a product or service. That is to say: People talk about it because they like it, have paid for it and believe others should.
But inevitably there are going to be product manufacturers and service providers who try to shorten the process by paying conversationalists to talk up their product. To increase “conversation density” about what they deliver.
One site that has made peace with this is BlogHer, which aggregates and promotes the views of female bloggers, mostly in the United States.
BlogHer doesn’t preclude its bloggers from accepting freebies from manufacturers or payments of various sorts (like gift certificates) for commenting on their products. Those comments though are set off as “reviews” and the fact that compensation was involved clearly identified. And BlogHer insists on making any kind of sponsorship of commentary clear (and separate) to the visitor.
It’s really quite simple, says Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder and chief operating officer of BlogHer. Give the site visitor or the conversation participant (1) context, for the comments, (2) disclosure, of any sponsorship, giveaway or payment, and (3) separation of content that involves any giveaway or payment, from content that does not.
When its “Pinch My Salt” food blogger discusses a Greek yogurt where some kind of compensation is involved, that becomes a “review” that is clearly labeled as “a compensated review from BlogHer and Fage.”
No ads appear on that review page, so you can just evaluate the words there. But there’s a link back to the ‘conventional’ Pinch My Salt blog, that is supported by ‘conventional’ advertising. The author says what she wants, the advertiser chooses (separately) whether to put its sponsorship dollars behind the blog. The author does not tap out any comment as a result of any specific payment, freebie or inducement.
So should it be with any tweet, Facebook status update or other element of social conversation where someone has taken some form of compensation from a manufacturer or service provider.
Sure, this would consume a lot of space in a comment that is capped at 140 characters.
But what is the worth of a tweet or an update or a post if the viewer can’t honestly assess its independence?
Not much.
If “pay for say” were to become the social media equivalent of payola, every brand suffers.
Because honest praise of a product would become indistinguishable from paid praise.
IMAGE SOURCE: Experientia.com
May 5th, 2009
No Device Will Save The New York Times. Only The Times Can.
A large-screen Kindle won’t save The New York Times. Neither will a mid-sized iPad from Apple.
In fact, no electronic “platform” will save a print publication of any type. Just because a news publication first existed on a large sheet of paper does not mean that some kind of flat, rollup or foldable screen of some sort of the same size will ensure its future.
The publication has to adapt to the medium. Not the other way around.
That said, The New York Times has worked feverishly and at its usual high standards to deliver its content on the platforms that are out there, from the laptop computer to the iPhone. If you spend any time at all with the Times, you’ll find it a much richer experience on the Web, than in print, already. You see current news, stock quotes, etc. You can send clips and links instantly to friends and associates. There’s fine video, slide show and audio content. There’s all the Times, for that matter, for as far back as you can remember. Not just today’s stuff. The Web version wins hands down.
And yet, publishing a richer version of itself online does not seem like it’s going to save The Times. Not at the moment any way.
In its first quarter, online ad revenues fell 6.1 percent, to $67.6 million. That is an acceleration from a decline of 3.5 percent the previous quarter. And is down from $79 million last fall. Even About.com, born and bred on the Web, was off 4.7%, to $26.8 million.
Overall ad revenue? Down 27 percent.
And what is happening? The Times is trying to invest in what it does best. It actually generated nearly $250 million in cash from its operations in the fourth quarter. But capital spending took up about $175 million. Dividends and financing “activities” took another $67 million.
This quarter, the company actually lost $61.6 million on operations. Standard & Poor’s put the company’s senior unsecured debt on its CreditWatch with “negative implications.”
What’s happened? “All the News that’s Fit to Print” has given way to news from anyone at any time from any where. And the complete dismemberment of a business model that basically has boiled down to: We’ll watch the world for you, figure out what you really need to know, and present an aggregated but edited view of it, every day. Or, around the clock.
But if you’re a sports fan, there’s ESPN.com or Deadspin. You don’t really need a sports “section.” For business, there’s Yahoo! Finance, MarketWatch or Bloomberg. You want a Dining section, there’s Chowhound or Urbanspoon. You want Real Estate, there’s all kinds of finely sliced sites, like this one or this one.
What really sets the Times apart is its ability to dig in deeply to events and issues that really matter — and not necessarily in New York. International reporting, national reporting, business and politics. Where big decisions are made, good and bad, and the stuff that really matters only gets unearthed by an intelligent and persistent watchdog, with adequate financial resources to devote whatever time it takes to really get the story.
So maybe The Times has to throw off all the “frills” that others can provide as well or nearly as well, from Kentucky Derby coverage to fashion coverage to arts to entertainment. Or let them stand on their own, on the Web, with some kind of subscription fees for folks who want really deep and informative coverage on that particular slice of life. Maybe the Times only should cover the world, the nation, its namesake city, business and politics.
And then, it has to find a way to charge a uniform price across all electronic devices, aka platforms. If $9.99 is the right price for what remains its core product that it delivers to the e-Kindle, then that’s what it should charge for basic Web delivery as well. Or iPad.Or iPhone. Or whatever is iNext.
Because there will always be someone — lots of someones, actually — aggregating all the news out there, from Google News to Daily Radar and its “blips” to Drudge.
That’s a game an original content creator like The Times can’t win.
Let’s do an Internet-variety litmus test. Cast your vote here:
Loading ...April 29th, 2009
Signs of the Times, Redux: The World's Next Mass(ive) Medium?
In colonial times, journalism was born on broad sheets of cheap paper and the vocal chords of human marketing throats.
The long sheets delivered news to those who could read. But in the middle of most cities of any size, from Derby, England, to New York, NY, (as far back as when it was known as New Amsterdam), the best way of disseminating information to the public was to shout it out , with town criers. Not everyone could read.
These town criers gave these cities their first mass messages about what was going on in the world, providing news that could act as cultural and political glue.
March 10th, 2009
Blogging About Twittering. Twittering About Blogging.
Brian Solis over at TechCrunch says 140-character twitters are taking away authority from blogs. The post takes 8,819 characters to explain.
March 3rd, 2009
Time to put banking executives on trial?
As the sheer magnitude of the unfettered lending and borrowing that has taken place over the last few years continues to unfold, I am hearing more and more calls to put banking and government executives who failed to prevent this (or knowingly encouraged this) on trial. I am inclined to agree with them. The BBC’s Robert Peston just put out an excellent analysis of HBOS’s final earnings report as a discreet entity:
This corporate division generated losses of £6.8bn in 2008 from loans and advances to businesses of £116bn. It has had to write off an average of 47% of those loans in this area that have gone bad. Almost 12% of all its corporate loans are now classified as impaired or damaged. And as a percentage of the total corporate lending book, the impairment charge is just under 6%. On the basis of those statistics, HBOS appears to have left a big bag of money open on the pavement with a sign saying “borrow what you want”.
How can you give out over $100 billion in bad loans? In Spain, for example, their banking system, which has been one of the least affected by the crisis, operates using dynamic provisioning, where each loan mustbe underwritten with capital in the banks’ reserves.But what has transpired in the US and UK banks is tantamount to executives knowingly driving their businesses into the ground at the expensive of getting fat and happy themselves. It’s like hundreds of these executives were riding tigers without knowing when to get off. If I hear one more jingoistic anti-offshoring argument about the fact that a whole industry should be tarnished because a single service-provider was caught cooking the books… how about a whole industry cooking its books?
March 2nd, 2009
News scraping: Are bloggers doing more harm than good?
There was a piece in today’s New York Times that really hit close to home for me. It took a deeper look at “scraping,” the practice of grabbing content from the Web and re-posting it, with proper attribution, in blogs.
It’s a common practice among bloggers, myself included, and one that I’d be willing to defend, given my history of working as both a newspaper reporter and blogger.
As a newspaper reporter, it was not uncommon for me to spend a whole day chasing down a story that had already been written by the competition, just as the competition chased mine from time to time. As a blogger, I see those sorts of efforts as a waste of time - why would I chase down the same source to say the same thing when his words are already on the Internet? If there’s a news outlet or blog out there that has already done the leg work - and done it well, mind you - and it’s a topic of interest for my readers, why not just share it and move on to the next piece of news?
Of course, I’m not just going to steal the text of that story and pass it on as my own. I’ll tell you about the news at-hand, what was reported and do my best to give you a bit more insight as it relates to other topics of interest regularly posted on this blog. I’ll provide a link to that other story and, through an excerpt, offer you a “peek” at what you’ll be reading when you go there - if you choose to do so.
That last point is actually the sticking point among content providers, according to the NYT story: (Watch out. Here comes a scrape but I gave them a second link.) The Times writes:
Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information. But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content. With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.
Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, tells the NYT that news organizations are increasingly unwilling to “accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in” and think they need to be more aggressive about protecting their original content. (That was both a paraphrase and a scrape, by the way.)
In some ways, the news outlets have a point. If the link from a blogger doesn’t lead to a click, then the news outlet has basically allowed a blog (which did get the click) to gain from someone else’s work. But, it’s not like the blog post kept the reader from reading the original piece. For all I know, the readers of my blog might have never seen that original piece and, therefore, wouldn’t have clicked on it anyway. Through a link and excerpt, the blogger has now exposed that story to a larger pool of readers and has actually extended some credibility points to the original source.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the news business is under such pressure to keep readers for advertising purposes that links are inadequate and excerpts do more harm than good. So I turn to you - the readers of blogs - to offer your two cents on this topic. Are excerpts and links a form of poaching or stealing? Or are they valuable tidbits of information that provide interested readers with even more information?
Feel free to participate in the poll and/or chime in, via the Talkbacks.
Loading ...February 25th, 2009
Newser Versus The New York Times, Revisited: Who's Copying Whom?
Interesting. We made a comparison a little while back on whether Newser was competition to the New York Times in news. After all, it produces none. But reports a lot.
Now, let’s see.
This was the front page of Newser, a little while ago. It’s in its habitual form: A Hollywood Squares-like look at the top headlines of the day. Rich on images. Light on text. But basically, you scan square by square until you see a story that interests you, then you pick it, and get to a synopsis page.
That synopsis summarizes the essence of the story, reported somewhere else. And you can go to it, if you like. But Newser tries to give you all you need to know in that short summary.
Now, here is something that the New York Times has come up with. It’s a screenful of rectangles, with the highlights of a story. See one, drill in for more.
This apparently is something called an “article skimmer.” Or at least that’s what Michael Wolff is calling it, in his rant on what the Times is up to, in his blog posting on Newser today.
So, what do you think? Who’s copying whom? And even if the Times is copying Newser, what’s wrong with that?
That’s the nature of news — and news formats — on the Web.
January 20th, 2009
Google can't save newspapers; smart to dump print-ad project
A couple of days ago, I posted a link on my Facebook page to an article titled “Ten things every journalist should know in 2009.” Almost immediately, several newspaper types in my Facebook network started to post comments about the list. But it was one e-mail from a former colleague - a career newspaper journalist who, like so many others, left the industry in the last year or so - that resonated with me. He sent the e-mail because he was uncomfortable posting his thoughts on the public Facebook wall - largely because his comments might be viewed as treason by newspaper types in my network who continue to believe that newspapers will rise again.
In a nutshell, he says that we need to get over it already, that newspapers simply will not be returning to their glory days. Who killed them? Who cares? Let the historians figure that out. Instead, journalists need to take the skills they honed in an “obsolete, ink-on-paper model and apply them to something with much more potential…”
That brings me to today’s news. Google has pulled the plug on a print-ad project that started in 2006 with 50 newspaper partners and grew to more than 800. (Techmeme) The idea was that advertisers could use Google to also place print ads, thus creating a new revenue stream for newspapers and producing more relevant advertising for consumers. Nice try. But in the end, it didn’t work. In a blog post that attempts to explain why Google pulled the plug, Director of Google Print Ads Spencer Spinnell wrote:
We believe fair and accurate journalism and timely news are critical ingredients to a healthy democracy. We remain dedicated to working with publishers to develop new ways for them to earn money, distribute and aggregate content and attract new readers online. We have teams of people working with hundreds of publishers to find new and creative ways to earn money from engaging online content. AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Earth, Google News and many other products are a part of our significant investments to innovate in this space.
These important efforts won’t stop. We will continue to devote a team of people to look at how we can help newspaper companies. It is clear that the current Print Ads product is not the right solution, so we are freeing up those resources to try to come up with new and innovative online solutions that will have a meaningful impact for users, advertisers and publishers.
It’s noble of Google to be concerned about newspaper companies - but this is not Google’s problem to solve. Quite frankly, Google never belonged in the newspaper ad business to begin with. It’s an industry-wide dying business model that really doesn’t have much of a future left, thanks largely to the slow reaction of many newspaper executives out there who repeatedly snubbed the idea of news on the Internet.
That’s not to say that newspapers didn’t make attempts at online versions. But they were always a day behind (no pun intended.) Many newspaper executives insisted on keeping their print and online newsrooms separate and resisted sharing news stories that would appear in the next day’s edition, considering their online counterparts to be competitors. Even when blogs hit the scene, many newspaper executives dismissed them as gossip news sites with no credibility. Maybe that was true in the early days - but plenty of blogs have since legitimately broken stories and scooped the traditional press.
Looking forward, newspapers are now working hard to preserve their brand names by playing up the quality journalism that papers offer. Unfortunately, they keep laying off the very people who are capable of producing that content, people who find themselves changing fields to bring their skills to public relations, corporate communications or marketing positions.
Newspapers need a complete reinvention and should start by calling themselves news “outlets.” As a journalist, I don’t care if you read my words on paper, on a computer screen, on a mobile phone or even smoke signals if that’s what it takes. Quality journalism - like targeted advertising - will always be in demand. If the newspapers of the 20th Century would channel their efforts into coming up with a 21st Century model, instead of grasping at high-tech straws to preserve an outdated one, then maybe they have a chance at hanging on to their brand name equity.
Google - figuring that out pretty quickly - is right to move on.
January 20th, 2009
Breaking News On The Inauguration: Look, Don't Listen (Yet)
Former President George Bush (#41) and wife Barbara engage the Clintons, on Fox News’ live stream at 11:18 a.m.
It’s 10:37 a.m. — and the video feeds I have been watching from the Inauguration have just frozen up, for the third time.
Most viewers would call that three strikes on the Internet (or at least one’s connection) and go back to television.
But TV is not nearly as malleable or interesting.
With two computers on a desk, you can cycle quickly through live feeds from CSpan, CNN, Fox, CBS, ABC and MSNBC.
Pretty soon, though, I just decide to settle on two windows: CNN and Fox News, almost as if watching cable on side by side sets.
CNN and its live commentary from Facebook users is on the 24″ iMac. But who really needs to know who is joining the coverage and who i saying “Bye Bye Bush”? Nice interchange though between the guy that’s thankful he is unemployed, so he can watch the inauguration uninterrupted, and the fellow who checks in to say he’s watching from worth (at 10:48 a.m.).
Fox News is on the 13″ MacBook Air. It’s been offering a lot of live streams, from the mall grounds, the Blair House and the Capitol. No commentary, though. just images.
How refreshing. Its cameras act more like your eyes, as if you are wandering around Washington, D.C., without having to step into the cold.
Before the president-elect gets to Blair House, you can hear the church bells peal. But there are no pictures at all. Meanwhile, you see a Fox News reporter in a stretch hat on the mall grounds waiting for her chance to go on the air. By her side is her patient interviewee, some fellow named “Heldeman, right?” She tells Mr. “Heldeman” that it’s windier “on the riser” (surprise) so that’s why they’re waiting lower down on the grounds.
As time goes on, though, the Fox camera team is working the crowd like you would, if you were there. Is that Steven Spielberg? Definitely. Denzel Washington? Maybe. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg? For sure.
Who’s that in the wheelchair? Not Vice President Cheney. And which network reporter is looking for a green bag? Can’t see. Only hear.
In any case, this is what can really be leveraged by the Internet coverage. The quiet feed, the visuals that make you feel you’re really there. Form your own impressions. Leave the words to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robers and president-elect Barack Obama.
What matters is what he says in his Inaugural Address. Almost none of the commentary that precedes it.
But regarding the “breaking news”: The multiiple video streams cause my connection to freeze up at 9:30 a.m., 10:19 a.m and 10:37 a.m.
Rebooting the Airport Extreme base station, solves the problem each time. It’s gotten overloaded. Nevertheless, you certainly get the sense that you’re not alone trying to get onto the Internet to watch live streams. When I first call my service provider, Cablevision, its customer service line is reporting Internet outages in the Connecticut and New York towns of Westport, Beacon, Stamford, Wappingers Falsl, Katonah, Yonkers, Armonk and Lagrangeville.
Hopefully, they’ll get resolved. Now let’s go back to the live stream (click the “watch live” link), as President-elect Obama’s cabinet and agency nominees come out from behind the red curtain.
January 19th, 2009
Internet Inauguration: The Interactive Introduction of the Obama Presidency
Watching Barack Obama on television be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States seems so 1960. Particularly when the first-term Illinois senator ascended to the highest office in the land based on a masterful use of every available tool on the Internet, from raising funds to delivering updates about his thoughts and whereabouts via Twitter.
So, if you’re planning to stick with the new media consciousness of the Obama Administration and watch or listen to his inauguration online, here are some options:
Fox News: Complete coverage, plus “fresh, fair inauguration analysis.”
CBS: Live webcast with audience able to ask questions of anchor Katie Couric, via text message.
ABC News: Live coverage, plus recordings of prior swearing-in ceremonies.
C-Span: Live coverage starting at 6 a.m.
CNN: Live coverage starting at 8 a.m.
PBS’ Online Newshour with Jim Lehrer: Live coverage starting at 11 a.m.
MSNBC: Live coverage, interactive map of events, transcripts of past inaugural addresses.
Also promising live coverage: The New York Times, the Associated Press, Joost and Comcast.net
Updates from friends: CNN is working with Facebook, so you can send out your status during the inauguration and get updates from friends and other Facebook users on what they’re doing.
Tweets from the crowd:You can sign up here to see an “official” stream of tweets or watch here to see what various visitors to D.C. have to say.
Your contributions: If you want to contribute, you can of course. CBS offers a variety of video, text message, photo and other options. The Obama Adminstration is looking for “PicMobile” and text comments.
Fox News wants your reports. And YouTube has its own channel you can subscribe to. Photobucket wants your help on a book project.
Live blogging: Some commentators still will try to compete with the video. Sites that will try to add different kinds of insight: Fox News will have four views from four cities, MTV covered the Inaugural Concert, and Canada’s National Post is on the scene.
Mobile TV: Here’s how information on how to get stuff on your iPhone and the UStream app. You can also watch live TV casts on Alltell, Sprint and AT&T phones, via MobiTV and on Verizon, through its VCast service.
Past Perspective: If you want to see how inspiring Presidential predecessors have been, MSNBC has lined up prior addresses from Bush, Clinton and Reagan for playback. And you want to go all the way back to 1960,here’s the Kennedy inaugural address in black and white and a slow pace at Hulu.
Black Perspective: Comparisons between Dr. Martin Luther King, Barack Obama and other black leaders – as well as a countdown to the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president — at BET.
Inaugural quiz: You think you’re smart? The National Archives and Records Administration has this test for you.
Game on: And if you want to take a break, but get into a little bit of the President’s competitive spirit, here are a variety of online basketball games you can play during the day.
January 5th, 2009
Love or hate this post? Sound off for the eavesdroppers
It seems that those comments you leave on blogs like this one may, in fact, be reaching the intended parties - the companies behind the products, services and technologies that you love or hate. Just don’t be offended or creeped-out if the messages reach them via cyber-eavesdropping technology.
That’s the technology behind “Track the Yack,” a set of findings that stemmed from eavesdropping on blog comments, web forums and other online communities where people engage in discussions and debates on the topic of mobile computing. Basically, the technology scoured the Web to find out what you all really thought of the mobile computing experiences, whether notebook, netbook, smartphone or even GPS unit.
There’s really not many surprises in the findings. Yes, WiFi connectivity could be better. Of course we want longer battery life. We all know most laptop sound systems leave a lot to be desired. Oh yeah, and then there’s that heat thing.
Track the Yack, however, is less about the findings and more about a technology that enables efficient monitoring of public forums where people speak out because they want to be heard. Established by Fractal Analytics, the Eavesdrop technology was used as a substance-builder for a new initiative called Reinvent Mobile. As a new destination Web site, Reinvent Mobile is building a community where mobile computing enthusiasts can learn new things or share what they know about mobile - with the idea being that the community can have an impact on the future products and services that are introduced. Reinvent Mobile was established as a joint effort between the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Phoenix Technologies. In a statement, Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, said:
The efficiencies and value of online listening and sentiment tracking using spidering and agenting technology is now available to the industry and brands will have the ability to use eavesdropping for more customized, deep dives in the marketplace.
I agree. Just as blogs were a forum for people to sound off on a variety of issues, the comments sections of those blogs have become the sounding board for the readers of such blogs - or at least that segment of the readership that has an opinion and wants to be heard. This is one example of how those comments - your comments - can deliver some value to the future of technology, products and even companies.
November 5th, 2008
Election coverage sets Web record; Facebook releases data
updated: Facebook releases Election Night traffic data. (see below)
Right around the time that Barack Obama was being declared the winner of Tuesday’s historic election, an Internet usage record was being broken. At the peak, there were more than 8.5 million visitors per minute visiting news sites around the globe - with more than 7.5 million of those visits occurring from Web connections in North America, according to Akamai. Until yesterday, the busiest day for news sites was June 22, 2006, the day that the U.S. was eliminated from the World Cup by Ghana. Other events on the list include March Madness coverage, U.S. Open coverage and the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
In an unofficial Between the Lines poll, 58 percent of you said you had planned to track last night’s election results using both TV and the Internet while 26 percent of you said you would stay informed via the Web only. There were two laptops humming in my household as the TV stayed tuned to election coverage. But here’s something to ponder: I had multiple browser tabs open - the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and, for statewide coverage, the L.A. Times and San Jose Mercury News.
The bulk of my time, however, was spent on Twitter and Facebook. At one point before Obama had been declared the winner, I had DVR-paused the news coverage to explain the electoral vote process to my 10-year-old son - which meant we were a few minutes behind live coverage. Interestingly enough, my first alert that Obama has been declared the winner came from a Twitter feed, immediately followed by a friend’s Facebook status update.
I’m not saying Facebook and Twitter are replacements for actual news coverage. But as we watched the TV coverage and waited for the concession and acceptance speeches, there was plenty of virtual high-fiving happening on these two social networking sites. Just in my own network, friends were posting pictures, commenting on status updates and chiming in with great frequency. Sitting next to me, my wife was seeing the same thing happening among her network of friends.
According a friend, people have been filling the lobby of the Washington Post building, trying to get a copy of a historic front page issue. Having been a newspaper guy for years, it’s nice to know that there are still reasons to pick up a newspaper. But while newspaper Web sites were still on the radar last night, I can’t help but wonder if last night’s experience says something about the future of news and maybe offers a peek at how the news business will look during the next election - or some other major news event.
updated: Facebook has released some data points about Election Night traffic.
- Overall activity on the site on Election Day was up 20 percent over last Tuesday’s traffic, measured by page-views.
- More than 5.44 million people clicked the “I voted” button on Facebook to tell their friends they voted.
- Barack Obama is the most popular page on Facebook, with 2.5 million supporters. Michael Phelps is second with 1.6 million.
- John McCain supporters: 625,000
- Since Sept. 5, McCain has gained 330,000 fans, compared to Obama’s 750,000.
- Obama set a single-day growth record for Facebook by adding more than 40,000 supporters on Election Day. Obama added more than 25,000 on the Monday and more than 18,000 on Sunday.
- McCain lost about 300 supporters on Election Day.
There’s no doubt that Facebook was a key part of the campaign and election. The company partnered with Rock the Vote in October to register more than 50,000 people. It also posted an Election Day event within Facebook to remind and motivate people to vote. In two weeks, more than 2.4 million users RSVP’d for the event. And, in the days leading to Election Day, there was an average 200,000 wall posts per day related to the election. Obama mentions surged to 1.1 million on Election Day and McCain’s jumped went to 280,000. On Election Day, there were more than 2 million election-related Wall posts. More than 2 million election-related virtual gifts were given out.
Finaly, just after midnight on Nov. 4, about 1 million people used the Causes application to simultaneously set their Facebook status with a unified message to remind their friends to vote. Facebook is calling it one of the largest online rallies in history, with more than 1.5 million people participating. So far, 4.5 million status messages have been posted.
November 4th, 2008
Dell at Dreamforce: Brave the economy or prepare for the rebound?
Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Inc., made an interesting observation during a brief appearance on the main stage at the Dreamforce conference. Today’s headlines tell us that, around the globe, things are slowing down – the economy, IT spending, investments in new technology and so on. But not everything is slowing, he said as statistics flashed across the screen behind him. Thousands of people log on to the Internet for the first time every day. By 2011, the amount of data being transmitted is expected to reach 1.8 zettabytes (for those doing the math, that’s 1 billion terabytes.) And energy consumption is expected to grow by 76 percent by 2010.
The pressures of Wall Street can force companies to cut costs and Dell is no exception. The company has largely met the goal of reducing its workforce by 10 percent but more cuts may be coming. No, Michael Dell didn’t discuss his company’s cutbacks at Dreamforce. But he did talk about ways that Dell is also positioning itself to be ready for an economic rebound.
Companies have to do more than just look at how to trim expenses, he said. If a company is just looking for a 10 percent improvement to the bottom line, the cuts will be the same as they always have been (staffing, equipment and so on.). But, if companies call for something more drastic – a 50 percent improvement, for example – there can be no status quo. Brilliant minds will have to rethink the entire business process and figure out how they can not only operate more efficiently but also position themselves for the future.
Here’s the thing: Dell has discovered that, sometimes, the best ideas don’t necessarily come from executive or managerial ranks. Sometimes, it’s the employees, those who work on the front lines with customers every day, who come up with some the best ideas. Even further, the idea that generates a million new customers while saving a million dollars might not even come from someone on payroll – it may come from a customer, a partner or a random Joe the Developer.
Dell, like others, has jumped feet first into the world of social media and community. Last year, it launched Ideastorm, a Web-based suggestion box that was opened to the public and has received more than 10,000 ideas – about 200 of which have already been implemented. It has since segmented into Partnerstorm (a forum for Dell’s business partners) and Employeestorm. (Can you guess who gets to chime in there?) It has blogs written in 7 languages and has launched a video marketing campaign, called Digital Nomads, that is less about Dell – the brand – and more about ways that people use Dell products in everyday work and play. Launching a social network strategy – whether it be Twitter feeds, blogs in multiple languages, viral videos or Facebook fan pages – doesn’t have to be expensive. Yes, they can be labor intensive, but there’s no reason for the company to buy new software or hardware – so many of those tools are available for free (for now) on the Internet, err, in the cloud.
One of the things to remember about launching new, unconventional strategies is that it’s all still a learning game. Dell says it’s not watching competitors to see what they’re doing. Instead, they’re watching the startups, looking for ideas that are disrupting other business models. A year or so ago, Twitter was a microblogging site that allowed people to give us inside peeks into their lives. Today, it’s a platform that allows companies to announce new products or services while also serving as a forum for media outlets like CNN to gauge the reactions to news by real people, in real time.
On the economic front, a slowdown is forcing businesses to make tough decisions about cutbacks. But on the technology side, things are moving faster than ever. Companies willing to take a chance on new technologies today – whether it’s virtualization, cloud computing or social media - could very well be positioned to be leaders when the economy finally does bounce back.
Other Dreamforce coverage:
- Salesforce partners with Facebook, Amazon to spark more app development
- Dreamforce: Taking SaaS and the cloud in new (and old) directions
- SaaS battlegrounds: Salesforce v Zoho
- DreamForce clouds deluge San Francisco
- Salesforce.com ‘gets’ enterprise blogging
- Facebook, Salesforce.com aim to create common developer network
- Can Force.com help consolidate your web tier?
- Benioff launches Sites [video]
November 4th, 2008
Voting With Dollars: Online Ad Spending Only Faces Thin "Scalpel"
Overall ad spending in all types of media may shrink this year and next, as forecasts get revised and reality sets in. But online ad spending will still grow in double digits, eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey told attendees of the ad:tech NY conference today.
Online ad spending faces a “scalpel,” as forecasters revise their 2008 estimates in the face of the global economic downturn, Ramsey said. But, in the case of search and display advertising, the trimming will only be by “a percentage point or two.”
Right now, eMarketer’s amalgamation of forecasts puts the general consensus at 17.4% growth for the year. That, Ramsey said, is likely to be fairly close to the mark, even with some slicing.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, he said, reported first half growth in online ad spending at 15.2%. Microsoft’s ad revenues came in 15% up in the third quarter and Google’s came in 22% up, he said.
This compares to a current projection of 1.9% growth in ad spending on all media in 2008 and 1.1% in 2009. But Ramsey warned that those numbers could turn negative, as forecasts reflect cutbacks just starting to take place by marketers.
More than half of marketers are already beginning to institute cuts, according to one survey taken in early October, amid financial market turmoil.
That number could be as high as 85%, Ramsey said, as the economic crunch continues. eMarketer’s numbers (and strategies) for getting through the crunch can be found here.
Other indicators of the health of the digital economy, from ad:tech today:
–The average American cell phone subscriber now sends 357 text messages each month.
–The average American cell phone subscriber makes 204 voice calls each month.
–Young Americans (ages 13 to 17) send 1,742 text messages each month on their cell phones.
–Young Americans make 231 voice calls each month on their cell phones.
–175,000 blogs get created each day.
–1.6 million blog postings are made each day.
–13 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube each day.
–400 online ad networks now exist, worldwide.
–80 percent of Internet ad space goes unsold.
SOURCES: eMarketer, Prime Visibility, Augme Mobile, Nielsen Media, Rubicon Project
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld is editor-in-chief of Securities Industry News, as well as a long-time media, technology and business journalist. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Between the Lines via Email alerts or RSS.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
- VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
- Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
Recent Entries
- Smart Planet: A bright idea for wasteful office lighting
- News to know: MSFT-News Corp.; YouTube; Chrome OS; California HDTV; Oracle-Sun
- A Microsoft and News Corp. search pact? It adds up
- Who’s afraid of the big bad cloud?
- EU extends deadline for review of Oracle-Sun deal
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Verizon to AT&T: "Our ads are true and the truth hurts"
- My scareware night and how McAfee lost a customer
- Intel to pay AMD $1.25 billion as companies end litigation war; Is it a new chip era?
- Memo to AT&T: When you're in a hole, stop digging
- Android army keeps growing as Dell enlists; Will the mobile OS war follow PC history?
- Apple's app approval revolt: Will it matter? Maybe
Top Rated
- Verizon to AT&T: "Our ads are true and the truth hurts"+44 votes
- Yes, Ubuntu can absolutely be the default Windows alternative+42 votes
- L.A. votes to "Go Google"; pressure shifts to Google and the cloud+31 votes
- Intel to pay AMD $1.25 billion as companies end litigation war; Is it a new chip era?+27 votes
- My scareware night and how McAfee lost a customer+25 votes
- New York AG files antitrust charges against Intel; alleges bribery, coercion+24 votes
- Netbooks dead? Not when sales are up 264 percent+21 votes
- AT&T launches Verizon counter-punch ad, keeps digging that hole+14 votes
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- Reduce risk. Reduce complexity. Increase reliability.
-
A simplified IT environment isn't just less complex. It's also more reliable. Standardize on a single Linux platform with SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, and get the world's most interoperable Linux
- Learn more >>
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
- Save time with automated shipping solutions
-
The Business Essentials Guide provides you useful tools and templates to help grow your business and save you time with automated shipping solutions.
- Visit the UPS Business Essentials Guide
- The best support in the Linux business
-
If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd better have the best support known to business. Novell was rated the top provider of Linux technical support.
- Learn more >>
Archives
Favorite Links
Favorite Sites
- Ars Technica
- Deal Journal
- Engadget
- Enterprise Irregulars
- GigaOm
- Google Blogoscoped
- Horses for Sources
- Mac Rumors
- Mashable
- Official Google Blog
- Read/WriteWeb
- Scobleizer
- Seeking Alpha
- TechCrunch
- Techdirt
- Techmeme
- The Ponderings of Woodrow
- The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
- Valleywag
- ZDNet: Latest blogs and news
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- DB2 for the Oracle DBA Quest Software In today's tough economy, IT departments are faced with smaller budgets ... Download Now
- Recovery Manager for Exchange ScriptLogic Recovery manager for Exchange discovers and recovers business-critical ... Download Now
- CASCADIA LABS URL FILTERING AND WEB RESULTS Trend Micro More and more companies now rely on web security products to protect their ... Download Now
Popular Sanity Saver Videos
