They never learn…
A Tory MP said Mr. Rae would be the easier opponent “because of his managing of the Ontario economy when he was premier. I think he would have been the stronger candidate if we were in good economic times, or on foreign policy issues, but Ignatieff is the stronger choice for Liberals now.”
…even after the Conservatives rub their noses in it.
One Conservative aide took pride in pointing out that his party fabricated an internal party memo suggesting their troops were most afraid of Michael Ignatieff - and most anxious to face......
There are so many people spending their lives in front of video cameras — not just on sites like YouTube but on thousands of discussion forums and chat rooms across the Internet — that the surprising thing isn’t how many people choose to die in front of their webcams, it’s how few. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee has the story of a young man who was talking to other members of a chat-room on a bodybuilding forum and said he had taken an overdose of medication, posted a suicide note and then collapsed on his bed. Several concerned viewers called police, who broke down the door and found the young man, and friends later confirmed that he was dead. A tragic end to a young life, all captured on film. It used to be that killing yourself on camera meant doing it on the evening...
I’m cross-posting this from my blog at the Globe and Mail, as part of my ongoing attempt to talk about what we’re trying to do at the newspaper when it comes to comments, blogs, forums and other ways that we interact with readers. Feel free to respond here or at the Globe blog — where (naturally) I encourage you to read the comments :-)
In my new role as the Globe’s “communities editor” (you can find more details on that in this post), I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about comments — that is, reader comments on news stories, columns, blog posts, etc. The Globe and Mail was the first major newspaper in North America to allow comments on every news story when it launched the feature in 2005, and judging by the...
It’s a long read, but there’s a thoughtful piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about what newspapers should be doing to not just survive but prosper in the current media environment, and if you’re interested in that kind of thing I highly recommend it. It isn’t the usual obituary, with details about newspaper layoffs and so on — instead, it makes the argument that the essential duty of any kind of quality media publication right now is to help people filter the vast amounts of information that they are exposed to every day, and to interpret it, provide context, etc.
The central thesis, as I see it, is that there are already enough sources of instantaneous information, whether it’s Perez Hilton and TMZ or the Drudge Report (which 37signals recently...
I love tilt-shift photography.
I love tilt-shift video even more.
Multnomah Falls in Miniature from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.
Sweet mother of Moses, Vimeo is......
It seems kind of strange to see a feature story in the Wall St. Journal entitled “Extinction Threatens Yellow-Pages Publishers”.
By strange, I mean that it’s not really a story for anyone who actively uses the Web. When was the last time you looked something up in the yellow or white pages? I would hazard to guess the answer is you can’t remember.
In my house, the Yellow Pages don’t even make it past the front porch. As soon as they’re delivered, they’re immediately thrown in the recycling bin. If I could figure out a way to stop them from being delivered, I’d gladly do it.
Of course, this new reality is terrible news for companies that publish the Yellow Pages given they’ve been high-margin entities for decades. For example, Yellow...
My kids are too old to carry around in slings — I mostly drive them everywhere now — but I can still sympathize with the mom (and some dad) bloggers who are up in arms about Motrin’s latest marketing campaign, which uses “baby-wearing” as a way of trying to appeal to moms as potential customers. The rationale seems to be that using slings and other baby-carrying paraphernalia is mostly a fad, and causes back and neck pain that requires Motrin. Instead, hundreds of moms are criticizing Motrin on Twitter — where they have helpfully tagged their comments with #motrinmoms — and on dozens of blogs as well.
If you’re one of those who believes that “any publicity is good publicity,” or that getting potential customers...
Are you fascinated not just by the media, but by all the ways in which blogs, Twitter and other forms of “social media” influence the news as it develops over time? Then Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera wants to hear from you. According to this posting on Craigslist (which I found via a Twitter link from Salon founder Scott Rosenberg), he’s looking to hire someone to fill a position that has never really existed before, and one which in many ways could never have existed before the Web came along:
“We’re not sure what to call this position. News Technician? News Analyst? Configuring Editor? The role involves interacting with an automated news-picking computer algorithm, configuring it and prodding it to ensure balanced and comprehensive coverage of important news...
So the soon-to-be new U.S. president, Barack Obama, is reportedly going to videotape regular addresses to the American people and upload them to YouTube, as well as to his new Change.gov social-media portal. All I could think of when I saw the headline from the Washington Post is “What the heck took so long?” It’s not like YouTube just appeared yesterday. It’s become a primary video source for millions of people, particularly young people — and heck, even the Queen has a royal channel with videos that people can watch about the British royal family. And she’s not the only Queen on YouTube (I’m not counting Chris Crocker). Queen Rania of Jordan also has a channel, and she uploads inspirational video messages, including the one I’ve embedded...
miss604 posted a photo:
Read the Blog...
miss604 posted a photo:
Shout outs to Miss604, a quote from Rebecca Bollwitt, and a link to sixty4media - read the blog...
According to at least one account, the big star of the NewTeeVee Live conference — put on by the gang at GigaOm — wasn’t the CEO of Hulu, or the head of Netflix, or even alterna-star Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. It was 15-year-old video artist Lucas Cruikshank, otherwise known simply as “Fred.” Lucas was a bored teen somewhere in Nebraska when he decided to parody some of the self-obsessed video bloggers on YouTube and came up with the persona of Fred, a hyperactive pre-teen who speaks in an incredibly annoying, squeaky voice. He is a bona fide YouTube superstar.
While musicians and comedians with years of training and talent are desperately trying to get more views for their videos on YouTube, the phenomenon known as Fred records a video of himself leaning...
Okay, maybe calling actress Brea Grant a social-media pioneer is a little strong. On the other hand, pretty much everyone and their aunt goes around calling themselves a social-media “expert” or “guru,” and I think Brea has as much claim to the term pioneer as anyone, at least in the acting world. She may not be a household name — except perhaps for fans of the TV show Heroes, where she plays Daphne Millbrook, the “Speedster” character — but she is doing her best to use social media to her advantage. And the best part is that she is doing it herself (with the help of a Web-savvy college friend) rather than having PR people do it for her.
Brea has a great website and blog, and she is also active on Twitter. She’s not the only actor from...
Listening to Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton’s predictions for the coming online-media apocalypse, I’m reminded of the story about the boy who cried wolf. That said, however, it’s worth remembering one thing about that story: In the end, there actually was a wolf. And as he describes in a post on his personal blog, complete with scary charts and graphs about projected advertising demand, Nick is convinced more than ever that there is a wolf at the door — and a pretty damn big one at that. How does a 40-per-cent drop in online-advertising revenue sound?
Denton has written several times over the past year or so about online advertising falling off a cliff as a result of the weakening economy. Before the recent global financial meltdown, his warnings seemed sort of...
Eagle-eyed readers looking closely at this blog post at GigaOm about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory might notice that it has my name on it. That’s because my friend Om Malik, the genius behind the ever-expanding GigaOm.com network, asked me awhile back if I would be interested in writing posts for him from time to time, and naturally I said yes. I have a huge amount of respect for Om, and what he and his team have built — and are continuing to build — at GigaOm, and I am looking forward to working with them all. I’m not giving up this blog, by any means; I will continue to write here as much or more than I always did, but will also be writing occasionally for GigaOm. If you have any story ideas or suggestions for future posts, feel free to drop me a line...
There are plenty of efforts at “citizen journalism” underway in various places, including CNN’s iReport and Vancouver-based NowPublic, but Spot.us is a little different: In this case, the citizens aren’t the ones doing the actual reporting (although they can potentially do so under Spot’s model). Instead, they’re being asked to finance the reporting, by contributing to a kind of virtual tip jar. Founder David Cohn is a tireless young journalist who has been active with several leading citizen-journalism experiments, including Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and the Off The Bus election-reporting joint venture with Huffington Post. But is “crowdfunding” really a viable model for journalism?
One potential weakness of such an approach...
I came across the news earlier today that United Feature Syndicate, which distributes about 150 comic strips to newspapers and other publications, has opened its doors and set its content free on the Web. As described by the comic blog Drawn.ca, the site run by United Feature — which has the great domain name comics.com — used to restrict access to the strips it syndicates, and even RSS feeds only included links to the panels. Now, users can sign up for a feed of their favourites and get the entire strip. The site has set free its entire archive of comics as well, which means (among other things) all 50 years of Peanuts comic strips, which Drawn says is more than 20,000 comics. Even better, they have embed codes for their strips so you can plop them into your blog or webpage....
Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV may have started getting into video and Twitter and other social media to push wine, but he has become a leading proponent of using social-media tools to build your personal brand and sell whatever it is you want to sell (including yourself). In the video clip embedded here, he takes on Howard Stern — who should probably change his name from the King of All Media to the King of Old Media — who launched into a tirade about the uselessness of blogs and Facebook on a recent episode of his satellite radio show. I think Gary is probably onto something when he says that Howard (to whom he gives a lot of props for succeeding wildly at the conventional radio game) sees social media and the Web as a threat to his empire in some sense. Howard’s...
At some point during a long night of Twitter responses to the U.S. election, Ze Frank posted a simple message saying that he was looking for people to post where and what they were doing when Obama was elected president. “Gimme snippets of your night,” he said. And about 130 people did just that, some of them just a few sentences, some of them long messages of 800 words or more. Here’s a few samples:
– “I was the girl who ran up and hugged you under the gigantic American flag. One of the most surreal moments of my life. Thank you.”
– “It was incredible. Went down to Providence to be with friends. When he won, we went through the streets of Providence in a gigantic parade and ended up filling the State House at the end. Incredible.”...
Apart from the historic nature of the U.S. election (which I will let others discuss), the coverage on CNN set new records as far as the coolness factor goes. Not only did the channel have the Magic Wall — which until recently was the height of geek-dom, with its multi-touch input and other features — but then the network whipped out a couple of holograms just to up the stakes a little. Like Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, even though part of me realized they could have done exactly the same thing with a remote camera, a much larger part of me was thinking: “Those holograms are cool.” I was less enamored of the virtual Capitol building, which looked kind of cheesy, but the Will.I.Am interview (which is embedded here) was just extremely cool. Yes, I agree that the...
As many people who have been reading this blog for awhile probably know, I work for the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper based in Toronto, where I’ve been working since 1994 or so. I’ve written about the stock market, the rise of the Internet, moved out West to write about oil and gas, and then came back in 2000 to be the Globe’s first online columnist and its first blogger (before anyone — including me — really knew what that meant). For the past year and a half or so, I’ve been the newspaper’s “new media” reporter, writing about all the ways in which the Web and social media are changing the business of online content for newspapers, magazines, authors, musicians, actors, artists and just about everyone in between.
A little while...
There’s much sturm und drang about online advertising, and whether it’s in a big hole or a *really* big hole. Judging by the graphic of a giant smoking crater he used for his post, Peter Kafka at All Things D apparently falls into the latter camp, and he also quotes Nick “The Dark Lord” Denton as saying that anyone who doesn’t expect ad rates to fall 40 per cent is an idiot (although, to his credit, Peter does note that Denton is always saying things like that). But one of the reports that everyone is using for fodder, which comes from the Rubicon Project, isn’t that bleak at all.
If anything, in fact, the Rubicon report indicates that online advertising is still growing relatively strongly despite the turmoil in credit markets and the slump in stock...
It’s one thing to turn a blind eye — as some networks do — to the uploading of pirated content that occurs daily on YouTube, MySpace and other social networks and services. To use one potential metaphor, it’s like the approach that some countries take to prostitution or marijuana: They know it’s out there, but as long as it doesn’t cause any trouble then they’re okay with it. It’s quite another thing, however, to do what MTV is proposing to do, which is to actually place ads alongside the content that is being infringed. That’s like legalizing prostitution or marijuana use and taxing it.
According to an announcement today, MTV has teamed up with MySpace and a company called Auditude to do exactly that (I mean sell ads next to...
There are a few comic strips that stand out in my mind over the years. The first is Doonesbury, for obvious reasons — brilliant social commentary and wit — followed closely by Calvin & Hobbes, and then Berke Breathed’s Bloom County. I still have a bunch of the collected Bloom County strips, and can recall many a Christmas morning spent enjoying them after getting one under the tree. The strip ended in 1998, followed by a related comic called Outland (which I didn’t like as much) and then a Sunday-only strip featuring Opus the penguin all by himself. Now Breathed has ended that one too, with a single panel showing his anti-hero snuggled in bed in the children’s book Goodnight Moon. It’s a fitting end for a true innocent like Opus, one of the great...
I’ve been doing my best to remain calm, but I have to confess that it isn’t working as well as it usually does. I’m speaking, of course, about the tsunami that is currently wreaking havoc on the traditional media business, an industry in which I happen to have spent virtually my entire working life. The earthquake that created this particular tsunami occurred ages ago, and those who were paying attention have long since headed inland to safety, but the shock waves are now starting to hit with real force, accelerated by the economic uncertainty all around us.
Bad news has been trickling in for months, or even years — newspapers cutting back staff, closing editions, companies on the ropes financially. But it’s been a thousand small cuts, mostly at smaller...
Internet Evolution is a site owned by United Business Media — the company that publishes magazines such as Information Week and Light Reading, and puts on conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo — and its goal is to create a kind of digital think-tank, where ideas and commentary can flow around some of the big issues facing technology and society. I write for them from time to time, and they asked me to mention that they are looking for some site moderators, whose job it is to keep an eye on things and to post thoughtful comments and links in order to keep the conversation going. In return, they get the chance to read some interesting and thought-provoking commentary, and they also get perks like Starbucks gift cards, T-shirts and even cash. If you’re interested, drop them a...
According to a report in Fortune, the file-sharing network LimeWire has signed a deal with Comedy Central that will make it easy for users of the peer-to-peer application to find and buy legal versions of comedy videos from Lewis Black, Mitch Hedberg (who appears in the video embedded here, a clip from the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal) and others. LimeWire opened a download store in March, but until now it has consisted primarily of content from small record labels and independent artists. The addition of licensed content will make for an interesting test: Are LimeWire users willing to pay for content that they like, provided it’s easy to do so? Or are they dedicated to pirating it no matter what?
Jack Vaughn, head of Comedy Central Records, said that the network...
Anyone who follows me on Twitter heard about this already, but there’s an interesting story behind the “sequel” video to that famous Wassup commercial that Budweiser came out with eight years ago. Much like BusinessWeek marketing writer Burt Helm, I wondered how the video had come together, and how it came to be a partisan election message for Obama rather than a Budweiser commercial. Unlike me, however, Burt Helm looked into it and discovered that director Charles Stone III (who also directed the movie Drumline) retained the rights to the concept, which he licensed to Budweiser for the original commercial. He made the sequel with some friends and colleagues from the movie business and $6500 of his own money, and in just 4 days it has been seen by 2.4 million people....
Last year, a columnist for MediaPost asked which major newspaper would be the first to turn its back on print and try to create a future as an online-only publication, and now he has his answer: the Christian Science Monitor, a 100-year-old newspaper that has won seven Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, said today that it will no longer publish a daily print edition. The paper, which is financed by the Church of Christ Scientist but has won widespread acclaim for its reporting and commentary, is launching a weekly magazine but otherwise the print side will be shut down.
I confess that despite having spent the past couple of years watching U.S. newspapers caught in a death spiral, cutting costs and laying off staff only to see their advertising revenue continue to sink, the closure of the CS...