MediaReview

• About two-thirds of American adults use the Internet, and more than 55 percent have access to a high-speed Internet connection at either home or work.

• More than 53 million people have contributed material online, according to a spring 2003 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

• More than 15 million have their own website.

• A new blog, or online journal, is created every 5.3 seconds, according to Technorati.com, a site that tracks the known universe of these easily updated websites. As of November 1, there were almost 4.3 million blogs, a million more than three months before. More than half of them are regularly updated by their creators, producing more than 400,000 fresh postings every day. (Full disclosure: My brother David is the founder of Technorati.)

§ A well-written blog, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, gets more than 500,000 monthly visitors--as many as the entire website of The American Prospect, the magazine where Marshall used to work, at a fraction of the cost.

• "About 11% of Internet users are inveterate blog readers."
• An estimated 4.8 million blogs now exist in cyberspace, up from just 100,000 two years ago, according to blog search engine Technorati. And bloggers are finding all kinds of ways to make money doing what they once did as mere labors of love. They're signing up with independent ad distributors, striking revenue-sharing deals with large aggregators, landing direct sponsorships by corporations, and getting hired to blog for companies.

Tidbits from the article:

• the majority of Internet traffic is generated by P2P applications
• a study suggests that 10% of P2P content is not in violation of copyright

another bush and blair performance, with a special guest

These are two bush/blair song and dance routines.

from Loic Le Meur Blog

« Le Monde launches blogs for their readers
December 03, 2004
Le Monde puts reader-bloggers at the same level as journalists

I am blogging a lot about it these days but I keep being surprised by the launch of the Le Monde blogs

"Le Monde is one of the first newspaper in the World to offer blogs to their readers, under the Le Monde brand. They have also published a ranking of the 10 top blogs, mixing their journalists blogs and their readers blogs, showing them at the same level, based on blog readers recommendations.

Martine Olivier1After only two days after launch, 4 reader blogs make it in the top ten, that is lead by journalists, the blog of the language correction team of Le Monde (1st) that everybody talks about here (five people at Le Monde do nothing but correcting the French language of the journalists to be perfect French ....

I. From New Scientist:
TV on Cellphones by 2006
From 2006, mobile phones will be offering crisp, clear TV pictures. But the pictures will not be coming over the cellphone network - they will be sent from transmitters already used for TV broadcasts. And this means a completely new breed of phones will be necessary to pick them up.

II.Indian Film 'Rok Sako To Rok Lo' to Premiere via Cellphone

From Gizmodo:
An upcoming Indian "campus caper" film called 'Rok Sako To Rok Lo' will be the first full-length feature film to premiere on a wireless cellular network. Subscribers to India's Airtel service will get to watch a streaming version on their Edge-capable phones on December 9th, in an attempt to generate buzz for the theater release which will land on the 10th. It's a gimmick, sure, but maybe the idea has legs? A lo-fi version to generate buzz for the hi-fi/high-resolution version that will have a commercial release? Smart bands have done it with their music—there is no reason movie studios couldn't do the same thing, unless they were worried that people would have ever more warning they were about to watch opening-weekend dreck.

Evolving Swarms with Swarmstreaming

By CmdrTaco on the-next-logical-step

Orasis writes "Applications like Bittorrent have broadly validated swarming technology in the real-world. Now, the inventor of swarming has released a new technology called swarmstreaming that allows smooth progressive playback of content, skipping ahead, and random access without downloading the entire file. It's an HTTP proxy, so browsers, podcasting, and RSS apps should be able to use it transparently. "

College Park, Md – J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism will launch a pioneering program to seed community news ventures around the country with a new $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Over the next two years, the “New Voices” project will help fund the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects; support them with an educational Web site, in collaboration with the Poynter Institute’s News University; and help foster their sustainability through small second-year grants.

Under the grant, J-Lab, a center of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, will call for proposals from nonprofit and education institutions with new ideas for distributing news and information. A national Advisory Board will award seed grants of $12,000 to $17,000 to help create new types of self-sustaining community media projects.

The Web site will provide training in online content creation, production and revenue generation and help spread core journalism values to the new efforts.

“Daily, we see citizens contributing in significant ways to news in the public interest,’’ said Jan Schaffer, J-Lab executive director. “They are keeping mainstream journalists and public officials honest, as well as reporting community news that falls below the radar of daily news outlets. The New Voices project will enhance this capacity and help create exciting new opportunities for participating in civic life.’’

The grant also continues the two-year-old Batten Awards and Symposium for Innovations in Journalism, which reward creative news practices that engage people in public issues with a $10,000 Grand Prize and $5,000 in other prizes.

“The newest forms of news serve us best when they honor the oldest values of good journalism,” said Eric Newton, Knight Foundation director of journalism initiatives. “We hope this experiment helps us find new ways for people to engage in an accurate, fair, contextual search for the truth.”

“The Internet has created the opportunity for alternatives to mainstream journalism,” said Dean Tom Kunkel of the Merrill College of Journalism. “New Voices will be an exciting effort to incubate a new kind of community news, and in the process encourage greater civic engagement.”

What are they watching?: Local TV News Looks Overseas According to a new study by the RTNDF, most local TV-station newspeople believe their stations do a good job of integrating international and national news into their newscasts. Senators Plan Reg Road Show Two of the most influential legislators regarding telecommunications policy will be going on the road. Activists Launch Sinclair Site A group of anti-media consolidation orgnaizations under the banner Media Matters for America and including moveon.org and MediaChannel have launched a web site, www.SinclairAction.com. NAHJ: Net News Lacks Latinos According to the just-released "Brownout" report by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the network evening newscasts' record of covering Latinos and Latino issues was up slightly in 2003 over 2002, but still "dismal." TiVo: TiVo Is Not a Verb NY Times - 12/13/04

http://www.letitblog.com/epic/

New Scientist explores CNBlog.com and all that came after:

“Blogging is a true revolution,” he wrote. “One needs zero technology training, zero institution and zero cost to become a blogger.”....Meanwhile blogging seems set to grow as a national hobby for the younger generation. Providers of China’s 300 million mobile phones are beginning to provide “moblogging” services, with which users can send text and photos directly from their phones to their blogs. For now, most blogs are personal, but their potential for building networks of people and disseminating news cannot be underestimated.

examples:
CNBlog.org (in Chinese)

Chinanewsman.com