| Word of the Day: Zettabyte |
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You may not know it, but you and 300 million or so of your closest friends consumed 3.6 of ‘em in 2008, according to a study by UC San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center. What this means is that 3.6 million million gigabytes of information flowed over us last year. The average ‘Mercan absorbed 34 gigs a day. Btw, this doesn’t even include work-related info usage: “Our statistics include information consumed in the home as well as outside the home for non-work-related reasons, including going to the movies, listening to the radio in the car, or talking on a cell phone. It does not include information consumed by individuals in the workplace.” I’m going home now. My eyeballs hurt. Link via NY Times. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)November 23, 2009
| Microsoft Attacks. Google Responds With Zen. |
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Microsoft has offered to pay News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, and other publishers to block their content from Google. This is an effort to make Google cough up cash for news content as well, thus reducing its profit margins. And it also fits nicely with Rupert Murdoch’s world-view, to boot. Google is unperturbed. It knows that news stories, once posted, become available everywhere, even from Twitter. As the haiku error message says: The Web site you seek |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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October 6, 2009
| I Just Want You To Know I’m Clean |
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has published a final rule regarding endorsements. Of interest to bloggers is the following: “… the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment [i.e., a freebie] to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to take this opportunity to state categorically that I’ve never received any cash or freebies for my blog posts. (Even though I begged for an iPhone once.) Which says a lot, I guess, about the quality and reach of my blog posts. Commentary by other bloggers who probably get free stuff here, here, and here. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 17, 2009
| AOL Doesn’t Want Your Pity |
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Nice article in the NY Times about the resurgence of AOL. Yes, I know they just lost their #3 Webmail position to Google’s Gmail. But they’re transforming themselves into a pretty decent media company — a la Yahoo — with 76 million unique visitors. And yes, a bit of luck had something to do with it — Time Warner decided to spin off AOL at a time when newspapers decided to shed staff: “Part of the way that AOL has been able to achieve quick credibility is by grabbing talent that is on the loose because of trouble in the rest of the industry … ‘I’m not going to deny that the availability of talent has accelerated many of our efforts,’ said Martin Moe, who is in charge of the news sites at AOL, including Politics Daily and DailyFinance. ‘Suddenly, in the last 18 months, this huge pool of talent has become available.’” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 27, 2009
| AP Has a New Business Plan To Make “Multihundred-Million” Dollars |
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And it involves keeping you from linking to its stories. Unless, of course, you pay for the privilege. Here’s the AP vision, straight from the horse’s mouth: “The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content. The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage. The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content, by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.” Techdirt calls this DRM’ing the news, and I agree. Once again, I’d like to quote my dear old mum. She’d say this was a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. (Where did that generation come up with chestnuts like that? Must have been an “old-world” thing.) |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 13, 2009
| Please Help Me By Clicking On This Blog Post |
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The Washington Post allegedly let a contract columnist go because his Web traffic had plummeted in recent months. Dan Froomkin, who authored the White House Watch blog, was fired in late June. (He’s since been hired by The Huffington Post.) According to an article in the NY Times: “The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, said in a blog post that ‘reduced traffic played a big role’ in the decision. Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of The Post, told The City Paper that ‘his traffic had gone way down.’” IMHO much of Froomkin’s problem stems from the fact that he was a one-trick pony. He made his rep by attacking the Bush Administration. In hindsight, I guess it was inevitable that his page hits would go down after the inauguration in January. But not me. I love everybody. OK, maybe not Microsoft all that much. But everybody else. So spread the love and help me with my page hits. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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June 3, 2009
| Stop Grousing About “The Media”. It Beats The Alternative. |
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Tomorrow’s the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Right now Chinese Web surfers can’t access Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and many more social networking sites. (Plus Microsoft’s Hotmail and Bing search engine. Go figure.) Coincidence? Nah. It’s the Great Firewall of China, doing what it does best. Think back to May 1990, the 20th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Was the NY Times shut down for the day? Heck no. Did they publish a story about Kent State? Heck yeah. Despite its flaws and faults, God bless free and independent media. P.S. The Times has an interesting story today about the 4 photographers who got the shot of the Tiananmen Tank Man. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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March 3, 2009
| The Lazy Man’s Guide to Web Design |
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Step 1: Go to Twitter.com and search for tweets about your trademarked term. Let’s use, oh, I don’t know, the candy called Skittles. Step 2: Redirect the Twitter search results to your domain (in this case, skittles.com). Step 3: Voila. Take a moment to savor how many tedious design meetings and focus groups you just avoided. Is this a brilliant marketing move or a total waste of time? Here’s commentary from the WSJ (sub required) and John Battelle. Or you can just read the dang tweets. BTW, here’s what Jon Stewart thinks about Twitter. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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December 8, 2008
| Tweets From Mars |
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The Discovery Channel has a short article about the Mars Phoenix Lander’s Twitter stream. NASA staffer Veronica McGregor hit on a brilliant idea: use Twitter to send short, 140 character updates about the lander’s progress to thousands of interested people. It kept people engaged and was more popular than she imagined — currently there are 39,858 people following a space probe that is now frozen and inoperative. And they’re sticking around to see what happens, too: “We’d also like to note 1300 NEW followers since Phoenix went to sleep last week. Not one of you has dropped. Best group EVAR! Thank you!” According to the article, NASA is setting up Twitter accounts for future missions. In that spirit, I’d like to take this opportunity to create HAL’s Twitter stream: Closing the pod bay doors. It’s lonely running the ship all by myself. Damn, had to kill the astronauts. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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December 1, 2008
| The Evolution of the Citizen Journalist |
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Back in the early 1990s, an amateur with a $300 video camera exposed police brutality and changed the way that news was reported. During the 2004 Asian tsunami, bloggers on the scene posted updates every few minutes with details that matched, or exceeded, those provided by the mainstream press. And this past weekend, Twitterers gave us a second-by-second running commentary on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Is this the natural evolution of the Citizen Journalist? Michael Arrington of TechCrunch (”I Can’t Believe Some People Are Still Saying Twitter Isn’t A News Source“) seems to think so: “If I didn’t hear about something important happening by watching my Twitter stream, it’s the first place I go to get an idea of what’s going on. Years ago I would have turned to the cable news channels, now it’s Twitter. It’s not just the speed of early reports either. Twitter also serves up a constant stream of updates as situations progress.” Coincidentally, this weekend Tim O’Reilly posted about “Why I Love Twitter“. While he didn’t mention Mumbai, he echoed Arrington: “… for me, Twitter is about quick hits, not about extended discussion.” Personally, I had trouble following the Mumbai Twitter stream. It may be a generational thing, but I think I prefer the hourly NPR updates I get on, say, WXPN. I get a summary of what they know is true, not a rehash (a “retweet”) of unverified rumors. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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