Archive for April 18th, 2007
I spied the link over at fimoculous and had to scope it out. Part of the “fuller spectrum of news,” newsbreaker is a ye olde paddle controller brickbreaker game harkening the days of Atari 2600 yore. Resplendent with the new “spectrum” color swatch branding, the twist is that as you pop swatches by bouncing the ball around, headlines fall out and as they are caught, they get decked in a rail on the right so you can read them. Ok, yes, I’ve been talking about media companies getting serious about games for a while, but I’ve been talking about serious games. I’m certainly not slighting casual games or even novelty interfaces that gank old skool arcade style such as newsbreaker, but the idea is applying solid factual information and journalistic principles to the power of interactive, virtual space for telling stories in a whole new way. That being said, newsbreaker is something brave, something new, and something worth commenting on after you’ve toyed with it. There’s also a screensaver thing there, but I admit, I’m not ready to commit: Active Desktop Channels and Pointcast burned me so badly I am still not ready for such a relationship, even after all these years.
April 18th, 2007
Nashville, TN
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New York, NY
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New York, NY
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In a surprising development, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package with photos, 27 Quicktime video files and a 1800-word manifesto. MSNBC.com is posting some of the videos and photos. NBC News President Steve Capus said the network received the package Tuesday but didn’t open it until today. And it appears that Cho may have sent it after the first shooting.
The cover on MSNBC.com as of now — the most compelling cover I’ve ever seen on the site. (Thanks, Corey for the tip! I’m blogging from the airport.)
Update: NBC is sharing the video and photos with other news organizations, but with the “NBC News” logo burned in. As of this writing, CBSNews.com, ABCNews.com and CNN.com are all showing the photo — with the NBC News logo — prominently in the top story position. More coverage on TVNewser.
Adds Max in comments: “I’d be curious to see a discussion of what people thought about NBC airing this. To me, giving these rantings air time lends an air of legitimacy to them, something we don’t want to be doing. I also suspect that it may encourage other deranged people who would want their manifestos to reach a global audience.”
April 18th, 2007
While traditional broadcasters have been in Vegas, the distruptors and next-genners have been confabbing in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Expo with the likes of John Battelle, Jeff Bezos and Tim O’Reilly. Of course it’s being liveblogged, and CNET is covering it here.
April 18th, 2007
We’ve been blogging about Joost for a while here at lostremote. A site and service that promises to do nothing short of changing the way people watch television is something our readers should definitely be tracking. Here’s a nice big article to dive into that gives a good look at the background and the future plans for Joost’s impending launch later this year.
April 18th, 2007
You’ve heard it here at LR for a long time: pageviews are a lousy metric. Web readership is distributed via RSS, and with the way pages are designed and updated now with AJAX and other technologies, websites are no longer about the pageviews. We mentioned this as recently as yesterday at the LR panel at RTNDA@NAB. In the Wall Street Journal today (paid sub. req.) we learn that Nielsen/NetRatings is dropping pageviews as a metric for ranking sites and will go with time spent on a site instead. Still, this isn’t the right metric, as my partner Terry Heaton points out in the AR&D newsletter:
Nielsen’s assertion that time spent is a better metric is also going to be a problem, and I think what we’ll eventually wind up with will some sort of regular visitor count, and that advertisers will buy visitors in the same way they now buy ratings. Time spent is unreliable, because it assumes people open and close sites as they browse along the web. This is not necessarily the case anymore, because people can move content to their own browser via RSS. Also, not everybody closes out a session when they’re done, and that means it will appear people are “on site” when actually they’re not.
Just when we think we understand the dynamics of the web, everything changes. The metrics of sales have changed, and that’s a difficult concept to wrap your head around. It’s even more difficult for advertisers to understand because we’ve trained them in “the large number.” We need to understand the specific visitors to our niche sites to maximize our revenue instead.
April 18th, 2007
Broadcasting & Cable has a short write-up on our Lost Remote panel session yesterday with the headline, “Tear up your website.” Well, it didn’t seem like we were so rebellious at the time, but we didn’t pull any punches. Our major points:
1. The web is not TV, so stopping treating it like TV. Put smart web people in charge of your websites and online strategies.
2. Expand beyond news, weather and traffic to local information niches with new sites and new brands. Do it fast before the pure plays beat you to it.
3. Start producing original video that’s tailored to the web. Repurposing video from TV is only the first of many steps.
4. Aggregate, don’t just produce content. Reach out to bloggers in your market, aggregate them and empower them.
5. Launch small. Expand it if it’s successful, and pull it down if it’s not working. Don’t fear failure. Foster experimentation.
We’ll be posting some examples from the presentation over the next several days.
April 18th, 2007
In a new direction, MTV says it’s aiming to become a multitasking hub for teens with an emphasis on user-created content. “We can either stay in the mass business,” said MTV group president Brian Graden, “or we can be in the hyper-specialty business where the shows may not have broad appeal but in the Digital Age would better engage our viewers.” TRL will get a complete overhaul this summer with user participation, and “a good number of the videos in rotation” will have the viewers’ thumbprints on them (but he doesn’t reveal how). “It’s all kind of radical,” he says.
April 18th, 2007
The Collegiate Times, the student newspaper at Virginia Tech, has been covering the shootings using the very model of online reporting. It has blog-style reports as confusion still reigns amid false alarms, video of the scene on campus, a Flash picture gallery, opinion and many other features. These are students - in the middle of the story, who could be forgiven for putting all student projects on hold. Yet there they are - creating professional-quality journalism.
April 18th, 2007
I was wondering why the time stamp on all my Blackberry emails were funky this morning, and it turns out that Blackberry service crashed overnight.
April 18th, 2007
Media executives who participated in an Accenture study revealed that user-created content is “one of the biggest threats to their business.” More than half of the respondents (57 percent) call it one of the top three challenges they face today, but 68 percent say they believe they’ll be making money off user content within three years. (I would suggest, of course, that media executives look to user content as an opportunity, not a threat.) Press release with a few more stats…
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