MediaReview

I've all but abandoned this place for my Wordpress blog,

John Battelle's Searchblog: Thinking About Google and The Turning Point: "In seven short years, Google has gone from a geeky startup with one good idea into an agenda-shaping player responsible for navigating complex relationships with world governments, the personal privacy of millions, major trade organizations, and hundreds of thousands of businesses small and large. It's an extraordinary weight to bear, it seems to me. It's the kind of position that requires a balanced mixture of leadership, will, and diplomacy. There's very little room for the go-it-alone mentality which got the company to where it stands today. Can the company shift its culture and avoid the fate which ultimately hobbled Microsoft? That, more than anything else, will define the next chapter in the company's fascinating story."

The American Enterprise: Live with TAE: Robert Kaplan: "In the early 1960s, I remember hearing my truck-driving father talk about the “Establishment”—people like Averil Harriman, John McCloy, Charles Bolin, George Tannin. Even though these people were very liberal, they saw themselves as Americans. Today’s similar figures wouldn’t see themselves in the same light, because they so often socialize and cross paths with people from other countries.



So the American elite exists less and less as an institution, while the global elite exists more and more. Today’s media elites, for example, care more about the thoughts and writings of their “esteemed” colleagues in Britain or France than their counterparts at the Chicago Tribune or the Omaha World Herald. "

Why Mexico and not the Flying Dutchman?
(Blogging the World Cup is going to be so much fun!)
World Football News Article | Reuters.co.uk: "Hosts Germany and champions Brazil were named in the top eight seeded teams for the World Cup draw on Tuesday along with England, Spain, Mexico, France, Argentina and Italy."

Dave Winer on the need to "determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship."
Scripting News: 12/2/2005: "Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn't there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?"

TCS: Tech Central Station - Game Off?: "The real case against video games, however, is more than simply a difference of opinion about a new media form pitting old against young. Since the time of Socrates, new forms of expression and art have been met with skepticism, but the skeptics have never divided neatly along age lines. With video games, the critics' case centers around three specific worries: that the games are in some sense addictive; that they retard the development of skills, particularly social skills, in the young and lead to their atrophy in the not so young; and that they encourage violence."

Vodkapundit - Challenging Stage: "Here's an interesting little blurb about a talk by Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari and basically intented video games back in the 1970's. This bit in particular caught my eye:

In 1982, he tells us, there were 44 million gamers. Today, there are 18 million. Where’d they all go? “Complexity lost the casual gamer,” he says."

Micro Persuasion: Wikipedia is the Next Google: "History is about to repeat itself. A successor to Google's throne is waiting in the wings - it's Wikipedia, King Disruptor III. Like its predecessors, Wikipedia is powerful because it provides access to largely accurate information that can be hard to find. This king, however, is unlike any other because it operates in a completely democratic way. It's run by the people, without any grand financial ambitions. This doesn't mean its rule will be perceived solely as a benevolent one, however.

Already, Wikipedia instills a deeper fear than either Google or Microsoft did when they were at such a young age. It's the emerging king."

Lost Remote: Streaming sites listen up: Firefox 1.5 out today: "Firefox accounts for about 20 percent of visits to some sites"

Kevin Drumm on how blogging and reading on the Internet affects his abilities to read and comprehend off-line:
The Washington Monthly: "It's not just that I spend less time reading books, it's that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I'll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Is this really because of blogging? I don't know for sure, but it feels like it's related to blogging, and it's a real problem. As wonderful as blogs, magazines, and newspapers are, there's simply no way to really learn about a subject except by reading a book — and the less I do that, the less I understand about the broader, deeper issues that go beyond merely the outrage of the day."

BuzzMachine: "Craig was trying to clear up some misimpressions in various stories and posts that jumped off from this Guardian report but he couldn’t say much because the company is still stealth. To help clarify:

Craig invested in the news startup I’ve been working with, which I mentioned briefly back in May. He is one of our angel investors and advisor as an individual, not on behalf of Craigslist.

We’re not ready to show or describe our service in any detail; we’re still in development. Our goal is to create a platform to organize the world’s news using the best of technology, community, and editors. We see an explosion of interest in and coverage of news from incredibly varied sources around the world and see a need around that.

We plan to have a beta in the spring. And as I’ve blogged before, we will be looking for talent in various areas; we’re not ready to take on more folks yet but I’ll let you know when we are. And of course, we’ll post the jobs on Craigslist! "

Downloading for Dollars - The future of Hollywood has arrived. By Edward Jay Epstein: "Once upon a time—two generations ago—the movie business was about making movies. Nowadays, it is about creating intellectual property that can be licensed in a raft of different markets. "

Craig's news-trust project has been whispered about for almost a year now, here he pulls back the curtain, a little bit:
craigblog: A few words on a new media venture: "A few words on a new media venture

I'm working with some folks on technologies that promise to help people find the most trusted versions of the more important stories... and this is personal, helping out another group not associated with craigslist. This kind of technology is intended to preserve the best of existing journalistic practices, and should help retain newsroom jobs.

Just to make sure... it's NOT associated with craigslist, just me, trying to help.

It's intended to complement, preserve, and grow existing media.

Remember, existing news infrastructure, including editing and fact-checking, really big deal."

Journalism Under Scrutiny: "The best filterers are in constant contact with the filterees, and also interact with them in order to become better and better selectors. To be a good filter of the news is not as easy as it sounds, because one of the first questions that arises is: what gives you the right to filter things for me?"

A new concept, as mentioned by the CEO of new photo sharing site Riya.

Recognizing Deven: "One interesting thing that came up was the 'revenge of the long tail.' It is the idea that consumers are starting to realize the value they are providing via user generated content and want a piece of it. I believe this is a mega-trend that is just begining."

In a losing race with the zeitgeist - Los Angeles Times: "Showbiz people are prone to exaggeration, but when everybody is exaggerating about the same thing, you know something bad is happening. There's a dark cloud of unease hovering over Hollywood. A top CAA agent calls it 'mayhem.' A studio marketer says 'it feels like Armageddon.' A production chief puts it this way: 'Each weekend there's more blood in the water.'

Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point.

The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close, eroded by many of the same forces that have eviscerated the music industry, decimated network TV and, yes, are clobbering the newspaper business. Put simply, an explosion of new technology — the Internet, DVDs, video games, downloading, cellphones and iPods — now offers more compelling diversion than 90% of the movies in theaters"

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Internet TV 'to boom' in Europe: "TV delivered over broadband internet connections will become increasingly popular in Europe over the next four years, new research has predicted.

The number of subscribers is set to hit 8.7 million in 2009 - up from 658,000 now - giving operators almost 9.5% of the pay-TV market, Screen Digest said."

WSJ.com - Diller's IAC, AOL to Invest In Web-TV Company: "Some of the biggest names in the Internet business, including Time Warner Inc.'s America Online and IAC/InterActiveCorp, are lining up behind Brightcove, a start-up firm that is developing technology that could accelerate the growth of television on the Internet.

Barry Diller, IAC's chairman, is joining the Brightcove board as part of a $16.2 million round of funding announced today. Other participants in the funding group include Hearst Corp. and Allen & Co LLC, an investment-banking firm that specializes in media investments. AOL, which is making Internet TV a priority, is leading the investment group and is the largest investor.

Brightcove, which sells Web services to owners of movies, TV programs and other video content, is trying to stake out a commanding position in the changes taking place in how Americans consume media. Brightcove's tools give owners of movies, TV programs and other videos a way to sell their content directly to consumers on the Internet without going through cable, satellite or phone companies. By adding to the quantity and quality of video on the Web, company executives believe they will increase the importance of the Internet as a source of TV."

EFF: Help EFF Help You!: "Here at EFF, we're fighting hard for bloggers' rights. We've created the Legal Guide for Bloggers, we're litigating the reporter's privilege for online journalists and we are working hard to defend bloggers' rights to free expression, political speech, and anonymity, just to name a few.

But we need your help to spread the word, grow our membership and keep fighting. So we're launching a special membership campaign specifically for bloggers. We've created a button for you to put in a permanent space on your blog that declares your support for bloggers' rights, and for the work EFF does to support them. The button links to our Bloggers' rights campaign, http://www.eff.org/bloggers/join/."

wow.
BBC NEWS | Business | China tops India on average wage: "China tops India on average wage
Indian share trader
Financial analysts in India earn less than their Chinese peers
Skilled workers earn more in China than in India, a new survey of pay in two of the world's fastest growing economies has revealed.

Project managers are paid twice as much in China than in India, according to human resources consultants Mercer.

Software engineers, sales staff, financial analysts and factory workers all earn more in China than India.

But average pay is rising faster in India and could surge further if demand for skilled workers outstrips supply."

tv and podcasting are getting lots of play this week

TV Extras and The Long Tail. Apple: news developments: iPod, Mac and more: "

Since the studio, not the network, owns the show, build buzz for the show before the decision is made by offering it online for $1.99. The studio could then take some sales figures into a pitch meeting with the network. Heck, they might recoup some of the losses made on producing the pilot episode."

"....Of course there are still a lot of pieces to fall into place, and the aggregators (e.g. the TV/PayTV channels) still have some time, and some plays of their own, e.g. consumers constructing their own personalised PayTV channel, from a pool of available shows, as one simple option.

There are numerous examples of listener/viewer-supported content struggling in the *broad*cast market, and at this point it seems pretty inevitable that more creative output will be delivered in a podcast-like model, itself just an evolution of the subscription concept, according to current technical limitations."

Its hard to believe that reggaeton is an ouevre that can supply enough content to a 24 hour station, but i'm glad its here.
calendarlive.com: Bilingual format boosts KXOL: "The station's explosively popular music — reggaeton, a mix of Spanish and American hip-hop with roots in Puerto Rico, Panama and Jamaica — and its advertisements run with equal-frequency flips from one language to another. Sometimes the station's back-and-forth by its disc jockeys comes much faster, even sentence-to-sentence or phrase-by-phrase. It's not unusual to hear callers intermix their languages as they tell a joke, ask a question or relate a personal story.

'It's like being at home,' said Soto, who listens to the station usually in his car. 'You get English and Spanish and you don't notice the difference. It all blends together.'

It's a blend that's produced astonishing results in the L.A. market ever since the station — owned by the Miami-based Spanish Broadcasting System Inc. — changed in late May from a Spanish-only to a bilingual format."

Rebecca MacKinnon attended the Chinese blogger convnetion and comes away with a fascinatin obersvationsRConversation: "Me&isaac-cbcI came away from this conference with a lot more than just a t-shirt.

I’m also leaving Shanghai with a realization: Web2.0 is potentially a very Chinese thing. One of the most important words in the Chinese language is “guanxi.” It means “relationship.” Whatever you think about the term “Web2.0”, the point is that social networking and relationship-building are at the core of today’s most exciting web innovations. The Chinese happen to be the most natural and skilled social networkers on earth.

The Chinese economy functions today (to the extent that it does) thanks largely to personal relationship networks: networks that enable people to get stuff done despite bone-headed regulations, politics, logistical obstacles, and everything else. You are nothing in China – and can accomplish very little – without a good “guanxi” network. Expect Chinese internet users to seize upon Web 2.0 tools as a way to expand and deepen their human relationships, enhancing both personal lives and businesses. Expect Chinese users build new tools that suit their own preferred ways of communication. The Chinese are likely to have a growing impact on the evolution of web applications."

Scobleizer loves Yahoo Maps, but says we're all playing in Google's world.
Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger � Yahoo’s new pretty maps are doomed (and so are Microsoft’s): "That it’s not about maps, it’s about the advertising platform that Google has built. It’s not about prettiness, it’s about who has the most user generated content (I still hate that term).

Huh?

First, let’s focus on the advertising platform component of how Google is disrupting Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google pays Web site owners MAJOR DOLLARS to put its advertising component (er, service) on its Web site.

Visit Zvents. Click on one of the featured events.

See the Google ad component there?

Now, tell me again why that can’t be a Yahoo or Microsoft ad component?

I’ll tell you why. Google’s ad component pays better because of its dominance in search (and, because they told all the banner advertising people and companies to screw off and die — they understood that users will click on blue underlined text and are being rewarded for that understanding)."

Comedy Central taps broadband for the MotherLoad | CNET News.com: "Cable channel Comedy Central, which is owned by media conglomerate Viacom, announced Tuesday that it will launch its first broadband-optimized video channel on Nov. 1.

Initially the site, called MotherLoad, will have five distinct channels and offer more than 450 video clips, with roughly 50 to 80 new clips added per week. The offerings on the site will include three-minute clips from original Comedy Central shows, including 'The Daily Show' and 'The Colbert Report.'"

Boing Boing: CNN's Kristie LuStout blogs on China geek culture: "China is a kingdom of geeks. There are more than 350 million mobile phone users here -- that's more than any other country. As for the Net, more than 100 million are plugged in, making China the second largest Internet market in the world."

bbc_bpv.pdf (application/pdf Object)

BBC June 04 report on its future. PDF

hackdiary: The BBC's programme catalogue (on Rails): "'The BBC plans to open up its archive to make a treasure trove of material available to everyone.' - BBC Press Release, August 2003

Ever wondered what's in that archive? Who looks after it? It turns out there's a huge database that's been carefully tended by a gang of crack BBC librarians for decades. Nearly a million programmes are catalogued, with descriptions, contributor details and annotations drawn from a wonderfully detailed controlled vocabulary.

I'm the lucky developer who gets to turn this hidden treasure into a public website. No programme downloads yet, but a massive searchable programme catalogue.

In the early part of next year, you can look forward to a public beta with extensive programme details and broadcast histories. There are 'On This Day' schedules that go back to 1933. It's got full contributor histories, and Really Good Search. I can't begin to describe the depth of this dataset - it had an entry for the one time in the 1990s when my dad was on local TV news as a spokesman for Oxfordshire County Council. The cataloguers have worked hard on this stuff for years, and it deserves a wide audience."

DriveTime: The Telecommuting Video Blog :: Street Tech :: hardware beyond the hype: "This guy, Ravi Jain, is shooting a weekly video blog from the driver's seat of his car during his daily commutes between Jamaica Plains and Allston, MA (a.k.a. 'five hours of 'studio time''). He has guests on (who are bumming rides), and when his wife commutes with him, they do a 'Regis and Kelly' type show (or at least that's how Ravi fancies it), with some 'marital banter to start the show'"

IMG News:: "Essential Facts About The Computer Game Industry
7:58 AM | Cord Kruse | Comment on this story

The Entertainment Software Assocation has released its Essential Facts About The Computer And Video Game Industry for 2005. A compilation of sales figures, demographics, and usage data, the Essential Facts provide an interesting look at the changing profile of the average gamer.

Some information from the Essential Facts:

- 75% of heads of households play computer or video games.
- The average game player is age 30.
- Women over the age of 18 represent a greater portion of the gameplaying population (28%) than boys from ages 6 to 17 (21%).
- Gamers devote more than triple the amount of time
spent playing games each week to exercising or playing sports,
volunteering in the community, religious activities, creative
endeavors, cultural activities, and reading."

M G E I T F: "MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival is the most significant event of the year for the broadcasting industry.

Founded in 1976 and now in its 31st successful year the Festival is held annually over the August bank holiday weekend (25-27 August 2006) at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Featuring prominent industry voices the Festival is packed with over 50 individual sessions covering the most pertinent issues facing the industry from policy to programme making.

The wide ranging programme involves keynote lectures, preview screenings, masterclasses, interviews and networking parties which make for a stimulating Festival weekend.

The Festival is attended by over 1600 UK and international delegates representing the diverse range of the industry. Use this website to find out more about MGEITF – the latest news, Festival Programme 2005 and how to register as a delegate."

This discussion/debate over the value of the amateur v. the need for quality production values, started with an August podcast and has included an interesting exchange on the Internet.

Technology360: Do Public Broadcasters Get It?: "Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. � 'Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.' --Jerry"

Via John Palfrey:
A market for ideas | Economist.com: "A market for ideas

Oct 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Intellectual-property protection can be good for the technology industry as well as for its customers, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here). But it requires careful handling"

TCS: Tech Central Station - The Video Future Approacheth: "Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch.



Podcasting is already big, with people producing 'radio' programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be 'huge.'



If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors."

in addition to the numbers below, Klipmart reported that viewers watch an avg of 22 secs of a 30 sec video.
Half of Internet Users Watch Video: "
More than half of Internet users watched online video in June, according to research released by ComScore Networks.

ComScore found that 94 million U.S. Internet users, or 56 percent of those online, watched streaming video. Based on the previous three months, the research firm found those watching video did so for an average of 73 minutes per month.

The research represents the first figures released by ComScore's video ratings service, based on its panel of 2 million Internet users who have their activities tracked by ComScore and extrapolated to the entire Internet audience."

blogs | AttentionTrust.org: "AttentionTrust has a three-part mission:

1) Educate people about the existence of “attention data,” i.e. metadata that reflects what we pay attention to (and what we ignore) and its potential value as a resource.

2) Empower people to exert greater control over their own attention data–our first initiative in this area is the recent release of the AttentionTrust Extension, an “attention recorder” in the form of a Firefox extension that allows users to record and share aspects of their clickstream and browsing history.

And 3) Build a community of individuals and organizations that agree to respect users’ rights to own, manage and exchange their attention data in a transparent environment that allows users to decide who has access to their data and how it’s used."

» Do Public Broadcasters Get It? (Stephen Hill) | Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter | ZDNet.com: "October 24, 2005
Do Public Broadcasters Get It? (Stephen Hill)"

gates' vision of the future
MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Gates unveils his vision of a future made of silicon: "He said the next challenge would be to take advantage of ubiquitous wireless, super-fast internet connections. Advances in computer hardware had been a 'miracle' but high-speed internet connections would accelerate the pace of change even further. Computers would become almost invisible, he said, integrated into everything that we do.

'In some ways the computer just disappears into the environment. All these devices will be hooked up to the internet and the internet will not have any speed limitations. And these devices will be a lot cheaper than they are today,' he said.

Magazines and newspapers would eventually become redundant in their existing form, with interactive, personalised content delivered to handheld devices. 'A lot of the reading that's taking place, the richness to be able to call up anything will take over,' he said."

The Shlock of the News: "While Google delivers information based on an amalgam of its users' preferences, AOL employs old-fashioned creatures called editors.

But what AOL is doing to its editors is awful: undermining its own integrity and undercutting all journalism. More than ever, AOL is driven by advertising dollars. The more times a page is viewed, the more money it makes. As an interactive medium, it's easy for them to link specific editorial content with advertising results. 'Every time you click,' writes the AOL editor, 'our page views go up we get more ad dollars then I get promoted.'

Now, in the broadest terms this is how any medium works, from movies to magazines. More people means more revenue, and so on. But between an interactive news product that targets a narrow audience, and a printed newspaper in search of a wider one, the differences are distinctive.

Interactive writers can quickly become slaves to instant ratings; while paper journalists are buffered by the relative inefficiency of print, and protected by a long tradition of willfully ignoring a newspaper's advertising."

Tube Status and Independent data on London underground delays: "Current tube status:
Bakerloo - Minor delays faulty train at Charing Cross. : Minor delays since 19:37

horse's mouth? click here for tfl's info page

London Underground delays so far today:"

Welcome to mefeedia: the first video aggregator.

oops
Guardian Unlimited | Readers editor | Seeing and believing in China: "On Thursday last week the Guardian carried the following note in its daily corrections column: 'In a report headed 'They beat him until he was lifeless': How democracy activist in China's new frontline was left for dead after a brutal attack by a uniformed mob (front page, October 10) we said that Lu Banglie [a pro-democracy activist] was so injured in the beating that 'his eye [lay] out of its socket' and 'the ligaments in his neck were broken'. Subsequent reports have made it clear that Mr Lu's injuries were not as serious as had been stated"

:: Rabble ::: "Rabble enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create. Create your channel and post location-based media - your favorite places, photos or an up-to-the-minute newsworthy event. It's like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you. Then connect with your world. Tell Rabble where you are and it will show you who is around you and the media they have created. Through bits of location-tagged media, find and interact with other people and get information you won't find in the yellow pages. Part blogging, part location-based personal networking, Rabble connects you with the world in a unique and intuitive way by turning 'users' into 'producers' and creating a marketplace for mobile user-generated content."

Glenn Reynolds' thoughts on HDTV and podcasting:
TCS: Tech Central Station - The Video Future Approacheth: "Meanwhile, technology is, as usual, passing Congress by. Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch.



Podcasting is already big, with people producing 'radio' programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be 'huge.'



If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors."