Archive for October 11th, 2006
The latest issue of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox concludes that user participation usually breaks down to the 90-9-1 rule. 90 percent are lurkers. 9 percent contribute infrequently. And just 1 percent participate frequently, which ends up accounting for most contributions. (You may remember all the recent hubbub at Digg over the same issues. And our personal experience here at Lost Remote confirms those general ratios.) So how do you overcome the participation inequality? “You can’t,” Nielsen says, but there are ways to encourage more participation overall by making participation a side effect, rewarding participants and promoting quality contributors, to name a few. “Your website’s design undoubtedly influences participation inequality for better or worse,” he writes.
October 11th, 2006
Rachael Ray, according to King World, which happens to produce her new talk show. Second on the list of the highest “Q” scores is Ty Pennington from ABC’s Extreme Makeover. Oprah finished sixth. King World’s survey covered 1,800 TV celebs.
October 11th, 2006
Sure, Tina Fey has always attracted the affection of the blogosphere, but her blogging performance tonight has elevated her to a new level of geek stardom. Fey’s new sitcom 30 Rock premiered last night on NBC, and she live-blogged through the premiere, answering questions left and right from the hundreds of comments (some of which were people who said they want to marry her). “I felt weird the last two days, because it’s not a live show. I actually have to sit back and watch it like everybody else. It’s just such a weird feeling compared to SNL,” she wrote. Fey explained the whole Rachel Dratch casting thing, revealed she’s working on a new movie, said there will be upcoming cameos from SNLers, asked GE for a new dryer and said she hopes the show will be on iTunes soon. Yep, she’s on my list. (It’s OK, Kate knows.)
October 11th, 2006
One of the learning curves for traditional TV news staffers is the fact that during breaking news, you may be streaming live on the web. It’s all part of the unbundled universe. For example, “adm” in comments posts this tidbit about today’s plane crash in NYC:
Reuters video (I think) was carrying WABC’s “NewsChopper7″ feed live via Yahoo News. The reporter’s mic was on continually for an hour or more, but she didn’t seem to know her comments were being broadcast over the internet.
She referred to her chopper’s camera as “a hunk of junk,” teased her colleagues for being “useless,” and ridiculed an eyewitness who (somehow) passed on the tip that helicopters can’t be steered after running out of fuel (”We’ll be sure to thank him for his expertise.”) And — this is the kicker — when told that LaGuardia wanted her to leave the airspace because they had “lost radar”, she said, “Well, tell them we left. They lost radar? Tell them we left. Tell them we’re in Newark.”
So when it’s breaking news, assume you’re always live — on the web. And as Joe adds in comments, “It doesn’t hurt to remind them of it right before the stream goes live. A little backup goes a long way.”
October 11th, 2006
I’m sitting at my desk at work here in Seattle when my MSN Instant Messenger pops up an alert, “WNBC reports small plane crashes into NYC building.” Almost simultaneously, my Blackberry begins to receive breaking news alerts. A couple minutes later, one of my co-workers receives a text message from his daughter in high school, “Dad, is it a terrorist attack?” Five minutes later, the Dow and NASDAQ take a sharp drop. Amazing. The web and mobile devices have become the first responders, and breaking news alerts have suddenly become critically important. Imagine, for example, if MSN had omitted the word “small” in the alert. You can picture the collective gasps from the thousands of people who would think 9/11 had returned. While TV can omit details here and there and recover quickly, breaking news alerts have a semi-permanent nature to them. They trigger a flurry of text messages, IMs, emails and phone calls which spread amazingly fast, even to kids sitting in class at school. Welcome to the new speed of breaking news.
October 11th, 2006
A Fox photog streamed the first ground video live from his cell phone back to Fox News. “These are live pictures with new Fox News technology which allows our photographers and other personnel to stream live from their own cell phone,” Shep Smith said. A conventional camera crew set up a short time later, but those initial, shaky vids are a lesson in why stations need to provide cheap & quick solutions like this. (Photo from TVNewser) Also, CNN aired a great clip provided by a user through CNN.com’s new citizen journalism section, iReports (currently linked off the home page). And the local Fox station read posts from MyFoxNY.com’s member blogs on the air. (Thanks Charles!)
October 11th, 2006
Anonymous web tips and posts on Brian Ross’ blog helped ABC News break the Rep. Mark Foley story. “This marks one of those watershed periods where you can use the Internet to cast an enormous net for people who may have information,” said Robert Thompson, professor of media at Syracuse University. In the past, Ross explains, people with anonymous tips would have been turned away by the ABC switchboard. “People may have known things but they wouldn’t have known how to communicate it and pick up the phone,” he said. Meanwhile, ABCNews.com’s traffic more than doubled after breaking the story, compared to a year earlier.
October 11th, 2006
A week after NBC.com launched a large-format video player with free streaming of its new shows — called “NBC Rewind” — the section reached 2 million streams served. The average time spent per visit clocked in at 20.2 minutes. Press release with more…
Read the full post October 11th, 2006
Had a terrific discussion on WNYC - the public radio station in New York City. Discussed the Yoogle/GooTube/Tooble deal with host Brian Lehrer and John Battelle. Not a lot of disagreement here, neither between me and Battelle nor among the listeners. Battelle made several excellent points. Among them - since Google paid stock and the stock only went down slightly, the $1.6 billion figure is overrated - Google acquired YouTube for a net loss of a tiny percent of its market cap. And it’s sure to make that up in short order. Outstanding callers, too - every one of them talked about how they use YouTube in personal and creative ways. Give a listen in their really cool embedded player:
October 11th, 2006
Ashley Wells has been promoted to creative director, and Robert Hood has moved up to director of multimedia. “Our creative director will lead a growing team of interactive information experts and designers, and our director of multimedia will lead what is already the finest team of photojournalists in online journalism,” explains Jennifer Sizemore, MSNBC.com editor in chief. More in the press release…
Read the full post October 11th, 2006
