Message From Michael --March 12, 2007

TAKE A BYTE OUT OF TIME
CITIZEN JOURNALISM ADDS TO THE MIX
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW; IT’S WHO YOU KNOW
MORE SOCIALIZING AND NICHE NETWORKING
R.E.M. TO THE RESCUE
COCKTAIL CHATTER – BIG BYTES

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TAKE A BYTE OUT OF TIME: The amount of digital information generated in the world last year alone was equal to 3 million times the amount of information in all the books ever written, according to research firm IDC. An article in MIT’s Technology Review says that’s like 12 stack of books that each reach from the Earth to the Sun. In tech talk, that’s 161 exabytes of data. (An Exabyte is a billion gigabytes.) A study three years earlier in 2003 by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley totaled the global information production that year at 5 exabytes. That’s the equivalent of 37,000 libraries of Congress. By the year 2010, three years from now, there will be more data generated than there will be places to put it. Technically speaking. A report by research firm IDC says last year the world had 185 exabytes of storage available and by 2010 it will have 601 exabytes. But the amount of ‘stuff’ generated will jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes in 2010. (And if you want another techie word to throw around in cocktail conversation, 1,000 exabytes equal one zettabyte.) Luckily, the report cited in MIT’s Technology Review notes that much of the data does get deleted and the methods of storage continue to improve. Even so, the article notes that the amount of information being generated will put pressure on developing better technologies to find, sort and secure the material. One last interesting factoid in this age of YouTube and MySpace from the report – by the year 2010, 70% of the world’s digital data will be created by individuals not corporations.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM ADDS TO THE MIX: Starting this week, several broadcast groups are joining in the citizen journalism movement. Television stations owned by Fisher Communications, Journal Broadcast Group and Granite Broadcasting will invite citizen journalists’ to produce anything from online news footage to complete reports. The groups plan to start airing pieces later this month in the different markets under the umbrella name of YouNewsTV. Regular readers of MfM know that several national and international news organizations, including MSNBC, Reuters and The Weather Channel, have already started similar programs. And although the Broadcasting and Cable magazine article emphasizes that this is a local effort, I should note it is not the first. Pappas Telecasting has its own citizen journalism website called communitycorrespondent.com. The president and CEO of Broadcast Interactive Media which put together the three group plan emphasized that it is a “revenue-driving initiative (and) if the video is not suitable to have advertising or is copyrighted material, it is not going up.”In a very much related note, BusinessWeek’s Jackie Coyle reports that TV networks and advertisers are increasingly adopting the YouTube model of viewer created content for a simple reason – they know a good trend when they see it. She makes the interesting point that those people creating videos for the web want to be on TV because it’s “the big leagues.” On the flip side, with traditional media in something of a free-fall, executives are looking for anything to stop it. Coyle scores the quote of the week, from Current TV co-creator Joel Hyatt who says, “this is not a genie that’s going back in the bottle.”

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW; IT’S WHO YOU KNOW: Remember that old saw? Well, here are some people you should know. It’s PC World’s list of the most important people on the web. Now, some you know, or at least know of – Larry Page, Sergey Brin who founded Google and Eric Schmidt who runs it; Steve Jobs whose name is synonymous with Apple; Bram Cohen, co-founder of BitTorrent; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, co-founders of YouTube; Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, co-founders of Skype and KaZaA. What I liked about the PC World article is the semi debunking note that Time magazine’s Person of the Year – You – would not be making all those viral videos and doing all that social networking without these people. What I found particularly interesting was the people I don’t know but would like to know. People like John Doerr, a Venture Capitalist with the firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, whose investing in tech businesses, the magazine says, puts him at “the center of gravity in the Internet.” Or how about Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris and Jessica Livingston, co-founders of Y-Combinator, which the magazine says doles out smaller amounts of money, instead of huge chunks, to ‘potential mini-Googles.’ Then there’s the people I vaguely know but would like to know. For example, if you want to understand the war in Iraq, Mohammed and Omar Fadhill are Iraqis living in Baghdad whose blog, Iraq the Model, shows you the war from the citizen journalist power of view. If you really want to keep up with the best of the best in news, you have to keep up with Gabe Rivera, who created website Techmeme, which, as the magazine puts it, harnesses the blogosphere’s investigative power. After writing a news story headlined, “Anna Nicole Smith’s condition downgraded to dead,” how could you not want to read about Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com where current news is dissected. And if you want to know if you’re in with the in crowd, then you need to know Tila Tequila. The singer/ model/ actress has redefined the word ‘friend’ with – count them – 1.6 Million MySpace user-friends, 56 million page views and 1,734,374 comments

MORE SOCIALIZING: You may remember a previous MfM talked about the social networking or social media revolution (which is the word all the studies used) coming to the digital and business world. Well, as further proof, add all these companies to the list. – Reuters, Netscape, Cisco, USA Today, Royal Dutch Airlines and Velvet Puffin. Now, if you just went, “huh?” on that last name, I understand. Velvet Puffin is a Singapore-based firm that has joined the long list of companies jumping on the social networking bandwagon, with networking software for use on mobile devices. Reuters is building a social networking site for fund managers and traders; Royal Dutch Airlines is building a social networking site for entrepreneurs with special interests in China and Africa; Cisco which is better known for development of the Internet technical backbone has bought Tribe.net, an also-ran in social networking websites overshadowed by YouTube and MySpace; and USA Today has revamped its website to add in social networking features. All of which seems to confirm the prediction by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen in an article in The New York Times that social networks will be everywhere, becoming more specialized and personalized niche websites. His Ning.com website is designed to provide the interface and bandwidth for people interested in starting their own social networks. Marketing website Marketingprofs.com says social networks are part of a “democratization of content creation.”

NICHE NETWORKING: A sort of variation on the specialized social networking movement noted in the previous article is the announcement that startup webcompany Next New Networks plans to launch 101 ‘micro-networks’ over the next five years. The websites will target small, different communities and brands. For example, the first ones to launch include channelfederator.com which are cartoons sent in by users, pulpsecret.com which focuses on comic book news, and threadbanger.com which looks at fashion designers.

R.E.M. TO THE RESCUE: Athens-based band R.E.M. will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight. Now, aside from the fact that I live in Athens, why is this worth noting? The event tonight (March 12th) will be carried Live – not just on television (on VH1) but also on-line (on AOL). Remember the worldwide on-line live presentation of the Live Concert? The move marks another milestone in the merging, converging, diverging digital and analog world.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: Presidential candidate John Edwards opened up a campaign headquarters on virtual world Second Life. Okay, that’s weird enough, but what’s even weirder is a group of “anarchist hippies” attacked his virtual world headquarters. On a semi-related note, Sony has announced it is planning to launch virtual worlds as part of its Game 3.0 push. China has launched a successful anti-satellite weapons test, knocking out one of its own weather satellites with a ballistic missile. Okay, that’s bad enough because it raises concerns the Chinese could do the same to an American or other nation’s satellite; but what’s been missed is that this is the largest debris-generating event in earth orbit ever recorded, with 917 pieces of debris recorded – debris which can hit other satellites.

SELF-SERVING PLUG: But a good one nevertheless. We here at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication are offering an all-day Bluejeans Workshop which is “short on philosophy but long on helpful, practical information.” The workshop is actually four concurrent workshops on reporting, shooting and editing but all with one theme – good storytelling. Presenters include Wayne Freedman, storyteller extraordinaire from KGO-TV and author of the book – It Takes More Than Good Looks; WYFF-TV photographer John Hendon who has won more videography awards than just about anybody; former NBC editor and NPPA video editing instructor James ‘Butch” Townsley; and CNN ‘digital news gatherer’ Bryan Pearson. The workshop on Saturday, March 31, costs all of $25, (and that includes lunch) thanks in part to corporate partner, CNN. For more info, go to http://www.grady.uga.edu/Bluejeans/.

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