Liz Foreman
Twittering the VP debate…a few notes
Last night’s vice presidential debate was yet another example of how Twitter has become a great companion tool for live events, what few are left in this DVR-driven world. I’m usually a multiple web browser tabs kind of girl, but I didn’t even bother checking out any live blogs (non-microblogs) during the debate. That would [...]
Breaking the fake news
I’m a sucker for local news parody sites (Anyone remember KRAP4.com and Super Duper Doppler 40,000?) Now there’s a newspaper website parody that is clever in the same way, Not the L.A. Times. It has fake stories and fake banner ads and, of course, real Google ads. Here’s a blog post about the site, which [...]
Gannett’s high school sports grid, week two
The LiveNewsCameras-esque grid for high school football goes live again this Friday night. Here’s Al Tompkins’ Q&A on the project.
Think LiveNewsCameras but for HS football…
My employer, Gannett, which has invested in Mogulus, is about to embark on a fun project. Friday, we will have 12 live high school football games showing on LiveNewsCameras-esque widgets that will be posted to USAToday.com as well as many of our local broadcast and newspaper sites. The games are being produced by our broadcast and newspaper sites as well as a high school AV department. “If we can do this with a dozen games, we can do it with +100,” Kerry Oslund, the Gannett exec behind this project told me. Most of the games are single cam, laptop, aircard + Mogulus productions.
When is Friend Feed coming to my favorite news sites?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not entirely on an aggregator/RSS diet. So, given today’s news that MySpace has launched data portability, here’s something on my want list: Friend Feed functionality built in to my favorite news websites. Ideally, my favorite news sites’ “latest stuff” feed would include: 1. Newest items posted to the [...]
Lost remote? What remote?
I thought I’d get one of these for the front of One LR Plaza. The photo above is of the world’s largest LED video display, located on the side of a building in Bejing. Per the official website, “the building performs as a self-sufficient organic system, harvesting solar energy by day and using it to [...]
Add this to your feed reader: VideoIsNow.com
Freshly-hatched VideoIsNow focuses on one topic: monetizing web video. Video Is Now also includes a widget to check out video ads in action. Speaking of, it led me to something from ’07 but new-to-me: NPR theme song guy B.J. Leiderman’s video ad, which looks to be produced on the cheap.
Michael Eisner on web video
Guys like Eisner are fashioning themselves as the cable channel programmers of the future. Understanding that the web video audience will explode once more people watch web video via TV, they’re getting their creative assets ready. Right now, Eisner’s participating in the Digital Content NewFront, a web video version of the TV upfronts. The big [...]
Tribune revamping business model, websites
Check out this memo from Tribune bosses Sam Zell and Randy Michaels, detailing the planned overhaul of their business model. It starts: Instead of recapping our first quarter numbers, which you can see in our news release online, we want to get to the heart of what we’re sure all of you are focused on [...]
TiVo looking for newspaper partners
TiVo is looking for newspaper partners, so says chief executive Thomas S. Rogers in a New York Times article. For example, TiVo will soon allow subscribers to automatically record the recommendations of the Chicago Tribune’s TV critic. More details on Paid Content.
TBS tries again at ‘pause promos’
Blogger Jason Kottke has described his negative reaction to purposefully disruptive TBS promos. The promos pause the current TV show DVR-style and deliver a 10-second pitch before returning to regular programming. The “pause promos” are used sparingly, though they’re not new. Check out this LR post from July 2007, evidence that TBS has been trying [...]
You need to try Wikia Search
I’m loving Wikia Search in ways I don’t usually like non-Google search engines. Jimmy Wales’ (Wikipedia founder) relaunch of his community-edited search may be what it needs to start gaining audience traction. To understand how it works, just log in and fix your favorite search result. I’m betting the result is messed up – which [...]
YouTube’s head of revenue leaves for startup
Shashi Seth is heading to Cooliris, not Facebook, where several Google execs have recently landed. YouTube revenues have been in the spotlight lately because of remarks by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Time Warner’s internet cap is to gas prices as…
…Americans are to Europeans? My European friends laugh at our “high” gas prices. Now, they have something else to rib me about – the seeming imminence of consumption-based pricing for US web access. Time Warner is starting to test consumption-based pricing in Texas, and Comcast has been threatening to test this for a few months. [...]
Finding a news application for BrandTags
BrandTags runs off of a simple idea: users enter a keyword or phrase to help generate a tag cloud for a brand. With 600,000+ tags so far, here are some results: Fox News, NYT, Google, Oprah, NPR, ESPN. I think this would be an excellent “sticky” toy (get people to browse just a bit longer) [...]
Auto dealer remotes, YouTube style
I wanted to pass along a fun project I just completed at Cincinnati.Com: our very first video advertiser remote. The client, a group with 13 car dealerships, wanted something a little different, so we shot user-generated-style video packages for all the dealerships, then put them in a Mogulus channel which became – via embedded video [...]
The intersection of media layoffs and religion
PrayingForPapers combines newspaper layoff updates with sincere prayers for the well-being of the industry and its employees. Webmaster Mike Koehler, whose day job is deputy sports editor at the Oklahoman, told me, “I can’t get the picture out of my head of some guy and his family at the kitchen table trying to figure out [...]
Brits raise the stakes for online news archives
When putting together a data retention policy (specifically, public archives) for your website, where do you start? Where do you stop? Does the policy vary for video and database projects? What’s the presentation like? What’s the business model? There are so many questions. Now, comes word that UK publication The Times newspaper is putting up [...]
