Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Ads coming to Guardian podcasts
Via Journalism.co.uk, the Guardian is looking to monetise its podcasts:
The Guardian is planning to launch adverts in its podcasts later this year. Speaking at a Radio Academyevent on podcasting, Matt Wells, head of audio for Guardian Unlimited, said the media group was developing software to allow the sale of ’spot ads’ in Guardian podcasts.
Some Guardian podcast stats from the report:
Last month the site recorded 1.5 million downloads across all of its podcasts, Wells said, with 15-20,000 downloads of the Media Talk podcast over a week and 80-100,000 weekly downloads of its Football Weekly show.
The rise of the ’super advocate’
Via Experian Integrated Marketing (report available for download):
2008 will herald the arrival of the Web 2.0 ‘super advocate’ and the rise of the Web 2.0 ‘Gated Community’
Highly influential figures, outspoken and with loyal following, super advocates will have the power in the 2.0 world to make or break a brand’s reputation at will.
The super advocate will represent one of the biggest challenges facing companies trying to tap into social media as an advertising and marketing channel. They need to be quickly identified and then kept on side, avoiding commercialism at all costs.
Blogs are a regular source for journalists
US data, but interesting data from TakingTheBlogosphereSeriously.com:
A survey of U.S. journalists by Brodeur, a unit of Omnicom Group (NYSE: OMC), suggests that blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability of news, but also influence the tone and editorial direction of reporting.
Key findings of the report (taken from the site):
Blogs are a regular source for journalists. Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.
Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.
The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.
More: http://takingtheblogosphereseriously.com/category/results/
Hector: the power of 12,000 desktop computers
Via (JP-owned) Scotsman.com, news of the UK’s shiny new super computer, including a short video tour to give you some idea of the scale involved in this project:
Meet Hector, the most advanced supercomputer in the United Kingdom and a machine that can perform no fewer than 63 trillion calculations every second. Based at Edinburgh University’s Advanced Computing Facility, Hector, which stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resources, will be used by researchers at the cutting edge of their fields.
Professor Arthur Trew, director of the computing centre where Hector is beavering away, said:
“Hector has a performance of around 50 to 60 million million calculations per second. It’s necessary to have that speed because many of the problems it will investigate are very complex – from trying to study the earth’s climate, to better aircraft, to new drugs. The current UK national facility is called HPCX and is run by Edinburgh. Hector is four times faster.”
More: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Inside-the-lifesaving-60m-supercomputer.3671386.jp
Dennis picks up thefirstpost.co.uk
Via Mad.co.uk comes news of Dennis Publishing’s acquisition of current affairs pure play thefirstpost.co.uk
Dennis Publishing cheif exec James Tye said:
“An online current affairs property is the perfect complement to The Week for our advertisers and the www.thefirstpost.co.uk will also be invaluable for widening the subscription audience of the title, both here and in the US. It also underlines our commitment to be a true 21st century publisher, reaching audiences whatever the platform.”
Digital integration creates inventive journalists
Great story by The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade about digital integration at The Telgraph, Times and Financial Times.
Includes an appropriate nod to the regionals:
“Regional newspapers, as so often, have been in the forefront of this cultural change. Their reporters and subeditors have been embracing multi-platform journalism for several years. The nationals have been slower off the mark, but – as you can see from the following examples – they are forging ahead now.”
And one for those who are still reluctant to embrace the web:
“…it is also clear that integration has stimulated journalists to become inventive. Once it was the journalist geeks among us who had to goad reluctant colleagues to change their attitudes, to learn the new way of doing things. Now journalists are realising that integration is not only proving much less painless than expected, it is releasing them from the straitjacket of the single 24-hour deadline.”
Full story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/07/pressandpublishing.digitalmedia
An Android in your pocket
If you think your smartphone is hot stuff today, just wait until Google, $10 million and an army of open source key bashers make their mark.
Google today announced a contest with a total prize pool of $10 million to try to encourage developers to build mobile applications based on the Android technology. Android will provide an operating system, a user interface, middleware and applications for use in future smart phones.
And hardware companies are already getting in on the action:
High Tech Computer (HTC) [...] plans to launch 2-3 Android-based mobile phones in the coming year, according to the Chinese-language Commercial Times which quoted remarks made by HTC CEO Peter Chou last week at a meeting with analysts from foreign investment firms in Taiwan.
Text mad Brits
Nimble fingered Brits are making the most of basic text messaging.
Britons are now sending more than one billion text messages per week according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA).
The figure is 25% higher than a year ago and is set to shatter forecasts for how many text messages have been sent to and from handsets this year.
From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7075005.stm
Most important for media companies:
Many people were also happy to get news and updates about topics or teams they follow via text messaging.
And looking to the future:
“The UK text volumes show no real signs of abating and the UK sits within the top six of the global league of countries sending text messages…while the trend towards operators offering ‘all-you-can-eat’ tariffs increases, this will act as a catalyst for consumers’ passion for all things mobile.”
