media - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

12 Oct 09

05 Oct 09

Transmedia storytelling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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media newmedia qualitative idea

06 Aug 09

Tracking News Life Cycles With Systems Like Media Cloud - NYTimes.com

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essential information memes media internet

but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.
The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered
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- The findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage. Users get to “do the fun part, which is analyzing the data,” Mr. Zuckerman said, “while we do the hard part of this, which is collecting it.”
- For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”
- There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources.
- Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director of Pew’s journalism project, said Media Cloud “offers the public a great opportunity to play around with looking at a wide swath of media at more of a surface level.” But, she added, it cannot really capture the nuances of the news agenda of the news media. “There are certain things that computer algorithms cannot do that individuals can,” she said.
- What Media Cloud offers that no one else does is a tool anyone can use to answer all sorts of questions about the media landscape. One topic that Mr. Benkler and Mr. Zuckerman have long been debating is whether the Internet has helped open up the public sphere to more voices, or whether it just serves as an echo chamber, simply repeating information and views that the mainstream media already circulate.
- Mr. Benkler is using Media Cloud to test his theory that digital media is widening the circle of voices somewhat.
- Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.
- Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, first raised the idea in September 2008, but it was a cluster of influential economic and political bloggers like Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias who kept the idea alive.
- “If you’re actually trying to map where an idea starts and how it moves through the public sphere, you need a database like we’re developing, with time-stamped data,” Mr. Benkler said, explaining that services like Google and Lexis/Nexis are not as comprehensive or do not provide that level of detailed information. Media Cloud also enables more fine-grained analyses by examining language and context. “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?” Mr. Zuckerman asked.
- Some of his colleagues, for example, have been tracking the frequency of the words bailout and stimulus to pinpoint when one term overtook the other. Media Cloud mapped the results to show how the term bailout, used constantly in the news in the fall, eventually gave way to the word stimulus after President Obama took office. The results were graphed, illustrating precisely when the two lines crossed — where, as Mr. Zuckerman would say, “one meme took over from the other.”

05 Aug 09

Media Cloud

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web2.0 media visualization cloud research apps

09 Jun 09

User-generated content is only the beginning | Media | The Guardian

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trends media advertising

he collaborative news site Digg, for example, on which users submit and vote for their favourite stories - editing by the crowd - has just introduced a new form of advertising that enables users to also vote on adverts. Here's the twist: the ads that get the most votes will cost less and those without votes will cost more, eventually being priced out of the system.
Google takes those clicks as a measure of the ads' relevance. Google also charges for clicks - for performance or success - rather than for space.
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- Thus Google and Digg begin to reverse the economics and power of advertising: customers end up setting prices - implicitly on Google, explicitly on Digg. The better the advertisers' relationship with customers and the more relevant their message, the less marketing costs them. That is as it should be. But ad agencies are not always built for such an equation; they are often motivated to get clients to spend more.
- Bild, the giant red-top newspaper in Germany, has just introduced what it calls user-generated advertising. It invited its audience to make commercials for the paper. The results are astounding because the readers took charge of the brand. The winning adverts are cheeky and a bit blue
- Bild's experiment in reversing the tables with readers comes after its editor, Kai Diekmann, turned Germany into a nation of paparazzi by soliciting and - unlike most news organisations - paying for mobile photos of news and celebrities.
- Bild's partnering with readers is part of a trend that this paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, is calling the "mutualisation of news".

23 Apr 09

How to Save Newspapers (Or, Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter) - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org

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16 Apr 09

Boston Review — Joshua Cohen: Reflections on Information Technology and Democracy

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information technology liberalism democracy politics media

Democracy is a political system in which elections and other devices are intended to hold officials accountable to the people. But while elections and other institutions of accountability are essential to democracy, they are just part of the story. Their efficacy arguably depends on a complicated, dispersed, ongoing, relatively unstructured public discussion: communication in what Jürgen Habermas calls the “informal public sphere.” Elections focus the conversation, but public discussion enjoys a life outside the rhythms of formal politics: at work, in churches and parks, in families and at school.
while elections and other institutions of accountability are essential to democracy, they are just part of the story. Their efficacy arguably depends on a complicated, dispersed, ongoing, relatively unstructured public discussion: communication in what Jürgen Habermas calls the “informal public sphere.” Elections focus the conversation, but public discussion enjoys a life outside the rhythms of formal politics: at work, in churches and parks, in families and at school.
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- If you asked me to summarize everything that can be said with confidence on this subject, I would be done now: the technologies are changing too fast (Facebook and Twitter are too recent to have generated serious analysis of causal consequences, as distinct from illuminating descriptions of usage patterns), the phenomena are too amorphous, and the historical benchmarks for measuring improvement are too often lacking. Addressing this question is like asking an epidemiologist about the impact of a medical intervention on diseases of unknown etiology, in a migrant population with no medical records, living in an environment with a high rate of viral mutation.
- I want to distinguish four dimensions of concern that should occupy our attention when we think about information technology and public discourse.
- it would be deliberative (reasoned); it would ensure equal and low–cost access to information; it would provide equal opportunities for public influence, to present arguments to others; and it would be founded on information of high quality. My judgment, in a nutshell, is that the jury on deliberativeness is still out; that on opportunities for access to information and for public influence, things look pretty good, though with some concerns; and on high–quality information, we have serious reasons to worry because of the Internet’s impact on newspapers (in particular, on investigative journalism).
- First, deliberativeness: an interesting debate has emerged about whether the Internet generally and the blogosphere in particular fosters deliberation—mutual engagement and argument across differences of view—or instead invites people to cloister themselves by filtering information and opinions that do not ratify preconceptions.
- Focusing on the blogosphere, what are the basic facts about cloistering and polarization? First, that the likeminded talk much more to each other than they talk to people they disagree with: only 10–15 percent of links on a conservative blog will point to a liberal blog, and vice versa. But, second, it is not at all clear that this represents greater self–cloistering than we find elsewhere in informal discussion (as Diana Mutz and others have argued, the workplace is the big exception). Third, the reason for the self–cloistering is arguably that bloggers are a select community of strong partisans, not that blogging polarizes. And fourth, there is no evidence (not yet, anyway) of increasing self–cloistering and polarization. So on this first dimension, no reason to go out and celebrate, but not much to fear.
- Second, on access to information, the story looks good. The essential point is that costs of acquiring all sorts of information relevant to making public judgments have markedly diminished. Three more specific points: first, I am emphasizing access to information and measuring access by costs. I am not saying that there is equal access (work by Henry Brady, Kay Schlozman, and Sid Verba describes the degree of inequality), but that the costs of access have diminished for all. Second, opportunity to acquire information is not the same as being informed, and there is no evidence for the proposition that the Internet treatment has produced, on average, better–informed citizens. Still, greater opportunity is important. Third, some analysts wonder about the reality of improved access to information because they observe that Web and blog traffic follow a power–law distribution, with a small number of sites drawing the lion’s share of the traffic—from which one might conclude that this world is not really so different from the pre–Web world of a few dominant, relatively inexpensive sources of information (radio, television, newsprint). We should resist that inference: the power–law distribution matters, in a way that I will describe in a moment, but does not defeat the point about greater access.
- On the third area of concern, greater opportunity for public influence, the results seem not bad, but more mixed. The basic idea was nicely captured in an article that Mitch Kapor wrote for Wired and Boston Review in the early 1990s about the prospect of a Jeffersonian new information highway: “Ideally, any user of any network should be able to originate programming from the home. . . . it should be as easy to provide a service as it is to use one.”
- we have not arrived at Kapor’s Jeffersonian world, where it is as easy to provide a service as to use one. But we are closer, as the tens of millions of blogs indicate. That said, when we are thinking about chances for influence, the power–law distribution is important: although one–many communication is much easier, most of us languish in the long tail, with a high probability of being swamped. Still, there is a large difference between a world in which the costs of one–many messaging are relatively small and in which the costs are prohibitive, even if the audience distribution looks like a power law.
- it is true that with income from classifieds cratering, huge difficulties getting people to pay for newspaper content, and limits on online advertising income, newspapers lack a business model. That is not good news. Simply stated, we cannot have a successfully democratic public sphere without the kinds of information that newspapers have supplied. I am not thinking of weather reports, but of investigative journalism, local, national, and international. Here, the Internet treatment has been damaging, the damage is growing, and the consequences are potentially severe.
- Of course investigative journalism is not married to newsprint, but that is how it has been presented, and there is not yet a viable alternative: 15,000 journalists lost jobs last year, cuts at large newspaper are running at 20 percent. The blogosphere is no alternative in terms of investigative resources, access, legal–defense capacity, or training and mentoring. It lives parasitically off investigative journalism. Call me old–fashioned, but poetry, philosophy, physics, and investigative journalism cannot be blogged and crowd–sourced.
- There is a growing debate about the best successor model to commercial newspapers, with many contending proposals. I will mention three, each of which assigns a large role to an electronic public sphere: (1) private foundations or donors either provide endowment for newspapers or for nonprofits that employ political journalists (Propublica is the leading example, with editors and twenty-eight journalists who provide content to print and online media); (2) a public system that would extend the public broadcasting model to print media; and (3) a national endowment for journalism, with support tied to audience size (proposed by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres).
  This is not the time or place to explore these alternatives. But in this fourth arena, cyber–utopianism—a celebration of the dispersed, decentralized, egalitarian, Jeffersonian, participatory, deliberative electronic public sphere—is not only misplaced but dangerous.

11 Apr 09

Teens Love Aggregation and 'Free', Newspaper Study Finds | Epicenter from Wired.com

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design youth usability free media

Teenagers aren't likely to pay for news and love aggregation sites, according to a new study. This is especially bad news for online newspapers since two of the big industry ideas right now are a) charge for content, and b) put the aggregators out of business.
Don't overload them. Less is more: Reduce the volume of
information. The teens in the study's focus groups craved a "top
headlines" approach and "a simplified overview of the news they often find at Yahoo, Google, AOL and their e-mail providers."
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- Create home pages that satisfy. It should provide "an
  adequate sense of the news" on its own — No click-baiting. Include a brief summary with each headline; One
  sentence can be enough. Get rid of clutter, like little video boxes, small ads and tabs.
- Avoid pages that require too much scrolling or clicking. "Web
  usability has long emphasized limiting the number of clicks to reach
  information, but the degree to which teens want to avoid clicking
  it noteworthy."
- Break up information into management chunks. Categories on the home page, interrupted text on story pages.

10 Apr 09

Six ways to make Web 2.0 work - The McKinsey Quarterly - Six ways Web 2.0 work - Business Technology - Application Management

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SSRN-The Fifth Estate: Democratic Social Accountability Through the Emerging Network of Networks by William Dutton

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internet governance future media networks

The rise of the press, radio, television and other mass media has enabled the development of an independent institution: the 'Fourth Estate', central to pluralist democratic processes. The growing use of the Internet and related digital technologies is creating a space for networking individuals in ways that enable a new source of accountability in government, politics and other sectors. This chapter explains how this emerging 'Fifth Estate' is being established and why this could challenge the influence of other more established bases of institutional authority. It discusses approaches to the governance of this new social and political phenomenon that could nurture the Fifth Estate's potential for supporting the vitality of liberal democratic societies.

30 Mar 09

Emily Bell: Digital media cannot be contained by the analogue rulebook | Media | The Guardian

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media free internet socialmedia web2.0 trends

In the struggle to find new terminology that accurately describes concepts we don't fully understand, sometimes language fails us. "New media" is one such term that fails to describe seismic structural change, and insultingly foists the moniker of "old media" on to vibrant formats such as broadcast television and newspapers. What we mean when we say "new media" is most often "digital".
One key, defining principle of things that are "digital" is that they can be very easily copied, compressed and transmitted. In other words, "digital" and "free" (in every sense, not just the monetary sense) go together
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- once something is digitised, the ability over time to control it, charge for it, regulate it or contain it exponentially decreases.
- the way digitised content can be disaggregated from platform and advertising, or, in the music industry's case, from a paywall, presents a real challenge to funding content businesses.
- The New York University professor Clay Shirky blogged earlier this month that what digital brings us is a revolutionary state in media delivery and, as with revolutions, there will be a period of chaos where everything breaks, rather than a smooth transition from one model to the next.

12 Mar 09

Digital Ethnography: Smartpen as a digital ethnography tool

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web2.0 culture ethnography education media

In short, it records audio as you write and links what you are writing to the audio (by recording what you write through a small infrared camera near the tip of the pen). When you are done recording you can actually tap the pen anywhere on your page and the pen will play the audio that was recorded at the time you were making that specific pen stroke. Students are already sharing lecture notes in the community section of livescribe.com.

07 Mar 09

Reflections of a Newsosaur: How to charge for online content

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media journalism internet free business economics

If we are going to save the tradition of professional journalism, it is vital for publishers to begin producing content that is sufficiently unique, authoritative and valuable to motivate consumers to pay for it.
People will pay for all manner of content on the web, it if it is thoughtfully conceived and marketed.
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- The Wall Street Journal, which claims more than 1 million paid subscribers to its website, is the most notable among newspapers in charging for access to some of its content. How does it get away with charging, when so much business information is available for free from places like Yahoo Finance and 24/7 Wall St.?
  
  The answer is: Original, authoritative reporting and the power of its brand.
- The Journal’s generally reliable and insightful reporting – which is flashed immediately across a variety of interactive and mobile platforms – provides critical and actionable information to executives, investors and policy makers. To steal an old tag line from Forbes, it is an indispensable capitalist tool.
- By aggregating an audience of business people willing and able to pay to view its contnent, the Journal also has created a premium audience for advertisers, who pay top dollar to reach it. Thus, selling content reaps the additional benefit of boosting ad revenees.
- Paid content doesn’t have to be business-oriented. It simply has to scratch the itch of a large enough niche of readers to make it worthwhile to produce the content.

04 Mar 09

Why iTunes is not a workable model for the newspaper business « Clay Shirky

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IPR journalism media newmedia

Why iTunes is not a workable model for the newspaper business
The first characteristic concerns music itself: people like to hear the same song more than once.
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- but there are not many newspaper articles you’d read twice.
- if I let you read something I write, and then try to charge you for it, I will fail, even if you liked it, because you don’t want to read it again. If I let you listen to a song I recorded, and then try to charge you for it, I may succeed, especially if you liked it, because you do want to listen to it again.
- desire to hear the same song more than once helps keep music from being interchangeable, or fungible, as Nick Carr points out.
- Most forms of superdistribution have been rendered illegal
- With these two models rendered illegal, the labels have been able to insist on fee-per-song fees free of competition from alternatives.
- Third, most popular music, and especially the back catalog, is owned by just four companies — Sony, EMI, Universal, and Warner. Like the major airlines, the business models and pricing of these companies move in synch. (This is not the same as formal collusion; with so few firms and their interests so similar, they can align their interests without acting in concert.) Because the music they control is not fungible, because they prefer to charge direct user fees, and because the alternative models have been limited or forbidden by legal or regulatory means, they have significant control of the music market as a whole.
- Mainstream music is tied to fee-per-track. iTunes Music Store competes with other fee-per-track services like Amazon, but faces little significant competition from other kinds of services.
- Whether you like or loathe the major music labels, they are in a situation where they can sharply restrict distribution models they don’t like. Whatever you think of that in normative terms, it doesn’t describe any strategy available to newspapers, because the main source of value for newspapers is reporting on events in the real world, and since those events can’t be copyrighted, news online will always be a competitive business in a way music is not.

27 Feb 09

Measurementcamp: Tools For Measurement

The list of free measurement sites from MeasurementCamp II is on Delicious, using the tags "measurementcamp08" and "snapshot". The idea being that we collect a list of sites which can be used for free to create a snapshot of the activity levels of a piece

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