I canceled my subscription to my morning paper, the San Francisco Chronicle today. This was a serious decision for me as I have read the paper every morning of my adult life and for much of my childhood. I started out with the comics of course as soon as I could read. But soon migrated to the sports and then other content. These days, I get up, grab the paper, head for the bathroom (a guy thing) and finish the paper over breakfast.
I got a Kindle 2 last spring. I quickly began carrying it with me everywhere. I love to read and consume a lot of books. The books I was interested in were generally available and usually at lower prices than in hard cover or paperback version. I got my wife one too. Turns out we can share back and forth if both are under my name. Which we do. We really saved weight on a recent trip to Asia and she was surprised that it was easier for her to read more.
On the road, I quickly succumbed to paying $.50 for my Chronicle on the Kindle. I know it is not the best paper in the world but it is my home town news and sports. It usually downloads quicker than I can get back to the menu to read it. It impressed me how easy this was to do. And that I had it when I needed it. But even then I did not predict what would come next.
I have been getting up earlier than the paper comes at least a couple of times a week of late. Doing a lot of work with both NY and Europe. And the paper person (today, there is not the relationship that there used to be with the “paper boy”) is very inconsistent. Some days they miss me all together. Other days, I find myself searching for it. They are very creative in where they throw it.
So, increasingly, whether it is too early or I just cannot find the paper, I download it on the Kindle. And every day when I download it I see the “14 day free trial, $5.99 monthly” which is about 25% of the home delivery price. In the end though, it did not come down to cost. It came down to convenience. The only thing I’ll not get is the comics (I still read 5 of them) and box scores. But we get a copy at the office so I can look them up there.
So, even though I love the physical aspects of newspapers and magazines, I have begun the to go down the slippery slope of all digital. And it all came down to convenience. It is easier to read and there when I want it. At an affordable price. The publishing community needs to pay attention to this. I could be on the leading edge of a trend.
The web is an amazing communication channel. Empowered by tools like Twitter, it is even more incredible. You no doubt have read about how Twitter, Facebook and YouTube represent some of the only channels for communication for those in Iran to get the word out about what is really going on. If you want to follow this, use Twitter search which is very powerful. Twitter is apparently fearful of search overpowering it, so it "hides" the search button for many of us on the bottom of the page. You do not have to join Twitter to use their search. Just go to www.twitter.com. On the bottom of the page in "mice type" alongside the typical links for "about" and "contact us" is a link called search. Click on it and then click on "advanced search". One can immediately see the power of finding out what people are saying all over the world right now. If you want to limit yourself to a specific geography such as Tehran, type that in the space "Show Tweets Near" and you will get all tweets coming out of Tehran. With the other boxes, you can limit or expand your search as much as you want.
I find this amazing. In December, I typed in Tel Aviv and limited it to 150 miles. I watched the Palestinians and the Israeli's trash talking each other about the missle strikes. Once again, the world will never be the same. Thanks, Twitter!
A couple of other points about this. Twitter was scheduled to be dark for an hour last Monday for maintenance. A groundswell happened, asking them to stay up while the crisis continued and they complied.
I wrote this blog three hours ago. Since then, there have been 27,000 entries from Tehran!
The flow of information has always interested me. In high school and college, I studied journalism, which in turn introduced me to advertising. I quickly migrated to the media side of the ad market as I lovedthe study of media patterns, demographics, sociographics and trends.Trends seem to be coming at us faster and faster these days, as exemplified by the growth of the Web site, followed by blogs, followed by social networks and now social news. Twitter is a great example of social news, that of individuals getting raw data and distributing it rather than have reporters filter and write about it for them. Thomas Baekdal recently published a long view of the history of information with a pretty good educated guess as to where the flow is going.
As can be seen from the chart below or by viewing the original article in the link above, he traces the history of information from “over the fence” and the local marketplace to newspapers/magazines, radio, television, web, blogs (already outmoded?) through to the newer and upcoming dominance of the social media. While the past is a given, the future is obviously harder to predict. Yet his observations are logical with social media being the dominant force over the next decade. A worthwhile read.
According to John Battelle, it's a really big deal. Others are comparing it to a LinkedIn or Facebook killer. Whatever you call it, Google Profiles are here to stay and they can give you a lot more splash for your personal brand. They've been toying with this for a while but it finally launched officially yesterday. The net result is that a customized listing of your info comes up on the bottom of the search page when you type in your name. You can see an example by typing in my name in Google, David Smith, going to the bottom of the page and clicking on my free listing. I like the fact that you can distinguish me from all the other David Smiths in that my picture, company and title are prominently featured.
If you want to set one up for yourself, it's amazingly easy. Just type "me" into the Google search box and you should get a Google self promotion that links you to profiles. This is so new it is not even on their list of beta apps on Google. BTW-you must have a Google account to go any further. You fill out the profile much as you would LinkedIn, Facebook or any other social app. But, like many things Google, you get a few extras that are very impressive. At the bottom, Google shows some various links of your involvement. In this case, it showed my personal and professional blogs, my company url and after a little bit of trundling, came up with this blog and a number of other places where I am on the web. I found it quite easy to include these links in my profile, change the order and then add a few others like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. They do all the heavy lifting of pulling up the appropriate logo too.
Where will Google go with this? Hard to say. Will my ranking go up the page as more people search for me and click on the entry? Will they somehow leverage this through adwords or other monetization? Hard to say. But I am impressed. I don't have anything here that you can't already find on the Web. But now, all my links and connections are in one place. Very cool.
I've written before in this space about the power of Twitter for those in the news industry and those wanting to get the news first. Now there is a "pitch engine" called MediaOnTwitter which makes contact with the press even easier, using Twitter as the connective tissue. This is yet another great application of technology and media or should I say technology for the media?
Using this engine/database, one can submit a story or make contact with a writer through a Web form and find news contacts you want to follow on Twitter and easily add them to your follow list. In logical db format, the data is sortable and even can be filtered by country.
There are over 2,000 applications that now leverage the Twitter API. And at last count, Twitter ws growing at over 1,000 percent a year. This story continues to be hot. If you are a fan of using Twitter to get the news first, spend a few minutes with this database and add the reporters you want to follow to your Twitter collection.
There are a number of interesting two way communications situations happening in media today. It represents the integration of the social media such as Facebook and Twitter into the "mainstream" web edit sites. This is facilitated by these and other social networks having open APIs combined with critical mass from a consumer standpoint. Facebook is now the largest social network and Twitter, while much smaller, has a reported 11% penetration of internet users in the U.S. and is growing at 700% a year.
My first experience with this new integration was at the inaguration of President Obama. I logged onto CNN early that morning from home to find Facebook Connect in a column alongside the CNN video feed. Facebook Connect is an instant messaging service that automatically connects you with all of your Facebook friends (connections) seamlessly. The open API facilitated CNN putting Facebook Connect onto their site for the day. As a result, I was looking at people from all over the world and what they were saying about the historic day. It was easy for me to log in to Facebook from CNN and parse the dialogue for my Facebook friends which number over 800. These are mostly business contacts with a personal friends and relatives added in. In moments, I was communicating with my own friends around the world. South Korean, the UK, Australia, India etc. This was amazing.
I kept this up as I went into work where we left my friend list up alongside the video as we watched in the conference room. The result was a personal connection to this momentous event.
Fast forward to last Sunday night where a number of sites put Facebook Connect feeds along side their Academy Award news. The best implementation of this was by Glam, the women's fashion site. They took in a Twitter feed, parsed for Oscar news and then edited by their editors for "appropriateness" The result was elegant.
This sets the bar for all future events. From now on, we can expect major sites to include consumer comments and facilitate two way communication with people in general or with your specific friends while reading or viewing an event. This is a game changer in the media world.
The Super Bowl was great football. And some of the spots were really good. But pretty much across the board, the chance for tech to shine or cross promotion to really work failed.
Some examples from this Monday morning quarterback:
The Jack-In-The-Box agency "didn't tell the web guys". Sure, they had a url posted directing us to Hangintherejack.com. But is was jammed almost immediately. It took quite a long time to get into the site and see the pretty good follow up video.
Intel had to have spent $12-15MM on their 3D spots with co-op partners Sobe (Pepsi), NBC (Chuck) and Dreamworks (Monsters vs. Aliens). Maybe they got a break from NBC due to the Chuck promo, but it was still a lot of money. If you were following Twitter, too large a percentage of people did not realize that they needed 3D glasses until about 1/2 hour before the spots aired. I figured it out on Friday but did not determine until this morning (too late) that the glasses were at Target and Best Buy. Where do you go before Super Bowl? The grocery store. Why didn't Pepsi make sure that Intel made glasses available there. Or better yet, pack them onto Pepsi packaging starting in December?
I'm sure that Intel got it's value. "You mean you can do 3D on TV?" They proved their point with technology. But Pepsi has to sell Sobe today to make this pay. And they could have done a much better job with the promotional aspects of this co-op spot.
Also, according to one Nielsen observer, only 20% of the Super Bowl ads had related search terms up the week before. What's the secret? Don't they want to get their monies' worth?
Lastly, Kara Swisher of the WSJ is promoting today to vote for your favorite Super Bowl spot. The meaningful voting was done yesterday, on Twitter and other social nets. All could have learned from CNN's brilliant integration with Facebook for the inauguration. No reason in this day and age not to do something like this voting in real time. Given the Jack-In-The-Box experience, plenty of people were online while watching the game.
Looking forward to the future integration of social media and event viewing on TV. The inauguration gave me a taste and I want more. And looking for technology, promotion and advertising to work more closely together in future Super Bowls and other big events. Let's use the media and social interaction fully.
Last night, as is usual on Monday night, I could not wait to see 24. I've followed this series through thick and thin since the start. It's actually gotten a good story line reboot and is quite entertaining this year.
As I was waiting, i got to thinking. Why do I have to wait for it to come on. I'm tired, would like to go to bed early and don't really want to stay up to watch it from 9 to 10. I'm in California on Pacific time. And I really wondered, why in this day of on-demand and TV technologies, I cannot choose to view it after it has started on the east coast. They do sports events in real time. Many cable networks have a dual feed so you can see it in either time zone.
Now I am not suggesting that they start prime time on the west coast at 5PM, depriving many of the opportunity to watch after dinner as well as depriving the local stations of their news revenues.
But, I fail to understand why a show that is already on somewhere could not be made available to me through on demand for free or on an alternative channel. Just like HBO gives me my feed plus the feeds from the other parts of the nation, taking up multiple cable channels.
The west coast is different than the east from a time standpoint anyway. We eat dinner earlier, go to bed earlier (in my experience) and get in to work earlier. It is not unusual for a California knowledge or service worker to be in to work well before 9. It's the rare person, at least in my industry who is in at work before 9 on the east coast.
So, what about it networks? The word is that you are struggling to survive. Maybe you have not read that the consumer is in control. How about some flexibility and some consideration to the different internal clocks of west coast viewers? You just might add some people to the ratings. It certainly could not hurt.
(written but somehow not posted the day after the election)
Last Tuesday was a banner day for America, the world and also for social media. Not only did more people apparently watch the inauguration of President Obama on TV, they broke records on the web, especially with the news sites and the social networks. Chief among the winners in the social arena were Twitter and Facebook. Facebook and CNN did an amazing integration. You could see all of your Facebook friends (or everyone on Facebook worldwide) at the same time as the streaming video. I started out in the morning exchanging comments with friends from overseas, former co-workers and many other friends. It was a great experience. At the peak, Facebook had over 8,000 new status updates and over 1.5MM Obama related posts in total yesterday.
Twitter reported on its' blog a record spike in traffic of 5x normal. (I killed two birds with one stone by figuring out how to make my Twitter updates also update my Facebook status.)
What's amazing is not just the numbers. It is the two way interaction in the media that will now become the standard. No leaning back and just watching any more. The new administration built on this through the launch of a new Whitehouse.gov site yesterday with an actual government blog where there can be RSS updates and two way communication with the white house from constituents.
In a final note on technology for the inauguration for now, check out Microsoft's new technology, photosynth (bested viewed with internet explorer) and the stitching together of many photos from many different angles and individuals into an overall quilt. Quite amazing. I have been experimenting with this technology for some time and love it.
The convergence of media and technology continues. Great to see it applied in a way that it puts the whole world into communication.
In a perfect convergence of media and technology, Yahoo! is now using Twitter to filter news according to Technology Review. I've written before in this blog about the impact of Twitter in reporting news first. And as reported in FastCompany.com, twitterers (tweeters) were among the first to report on the "Miracle on the Hudson" plane crash. But Yahoo! has taken it one step further. They have used BOSS, their open-source search engine to assist in developing TweetNews to mine Twitter for the most recent posts on a given story. According to the Tech Review piece, Yahoo researcher Vik Siing reported that the breakthrough was in ranking by recency rather than number of links ala Google. Number of links appears to favor older articles and posts and does not serve up the most recent updates on a story.
Google News has become an important service for many trying to monitor articles and news about their own company, competitors or topics of interest. But it has been proven to have flaws,with very old article popping to the top and appearing to be recent news.
It appears that Yahoo! has come up with a silver bullet that one-ups Google in the searching, filtering and reporting on news. All facilitated by the tiny company Twitter, with 25 employees and no apparent business revenue.
