SO, HOW MANY WATCHED
INAUGURATION VIEWING SIDE NOTES
FROM XBOX TO ATARI
THINK GLOBALLY; ACT GLOBALLY
THE 600 POUND GORILLA
WHO DO YOU BELIEVE
FROM A KING TO A JACK
SUPER BOWL COCKTAIL CHATTER
SO, HOW MANY WATCHED: As we noted in last week’s MfM, we may never know how many people watched the inauguration. According to Nielsen Media Research, an estimated 37.8 Million Americans watched the event across the 14 broadcast and cable networks airing the coverage throughout the day. Nielsen should release the Live +7 viewing shortly. Regardless, that puts it just behind the Ronald Regan inauguration viewing in 1981 (which, if I read the numbers right, was about 41 Million). Of course that doesn’t take into account online viewing. Nielsen Online reports that visits to Current Events and Global News sites jumped significantly on Election Day, and based on my addition of just the top ten sites, that puts another 48.5 Million unique visitors into the mix. The top three sites were CNN (11 Million), MSNBC (10M) and Yahoo News (9M). After that it drops dramatically to the number four spot with Fox (4M). Further add into the mix viewing on YouTube where CSpan’s video of the inauguration and address drew 3.2 Million views and CNN’s coverage another half million. And that’s to say nothing about the record 2 Million people who actually turned out in person.
INAUGURATION SIDE NOTES: Five of the top ten videos viewed on inauguration day were directly related to the events of that day. No surprise there, but a little surprising is that his actual inauguration address came in at seventh place. The most linked-to video on inauguration day? Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream. Two of the other popular videos that day were The Presidential Pledge produced by celebrities Ashton Kucher and Demi Moore on MySpace; and on YouTube, it’s will.i.am’s Yes, We Can which has had more than 16 Million views. An oddity in the mix – even with all the political hoopla of the day, the third most linked-to video was the YouTube Street Fighter video game. The biggest beneficiaries of the Election Day coverage were the digital networks of ABC and CBS which nearly doubled their unique audience on that day. And despite all the furor surrounding the dominance of Google and the decline of Yahoo, the actual Yahoo News website drew five times the unique audience (9 Million) of Google News (1.8M).
FROM XBOX TO ATARI: That’s how White House spokesman Bill Burton described the media technology he and others in the Obama administration used to have, compared to what they found waiting for them at the White House. In an article headlined Staff Finds White House in Technological Dark Ages in The Washington Post, reporter Anne E. Kornblut says the tech-savvy “iPhone” Obama people found themselves in a rotary dial world. The Macintosh-toting Obama-ites found themselves working with Microsoft products and six year old Microsoft products at that. Of course, the reporter notes the Bush transition team arrived in 2001 to find computers with letters missing from the keyboards, and that in 2005 Bush’s Internet director didn’t get a PDA or even a computer for a week. The WhiteHouse.gov website has undergone a transformation, with a cleaner, more Web 2.0 design. In my usual anal retentive fashion, I saved the WhiteHouse.gov site as it looked under the Bush administration and compared it with the Obama administration site. (More analysis on that later.) Much more telling though is a report by WebProNews that the Obama administration has un-blocked the website, allowing access to search engine spiders such as Google. They did a test of the site Monday when it was still in Bush administration control and found the robot.txt file, allowing search engine access, was ‘disallowed’ more than 24-hundred times, even though the information was public information, not just about defense and budget issues but things like African American history and the First Lady’s initiatives. After the Obama administration took over the amount of such ‘disallows’ was basically reduced to zero.
THINK GLOBALLY; ACT GLOBALLY: And that’s what more people are doing every day as the Global Internet audience passes a milestone of sorts with more than One Billion visitors worldwide. China confirmed its position as the country with the largest online audience (179.7 Million unique visitors, comprising 17.8% of the total Worldwide Internet Audience), according to comScore World Metrix. The U.S.A. came in second (163.3 Million and 16.2%). Rounding out the top five are Japan (60 M and 6%), Germany (37 M and 3.7%) and the United Kingdom (36.6 M and 3.6%). China’s economic rival, India, came in seventh behind France, with a lowly 32 Million unique visitors comprising only 3.2% of the world internet audience. Despite its huge Internet audience, leading Chinese website Baidu.com came in 14th in the list of worldwide properties (with a worldwide reach of ‘only’ 15.1%), well behind Google (77%), Microsoft (64.2%) and Yahoo (55.8%) sites.
THE SIX HUNDRED POUND GORILLA: That’s what the print version of The New York Times is to the online version, or at least it seems that way based on an analysis of revenue projections by digital content research firm ContentNext Media. And that is not good news. In order to meet the ‘offline revenues’ projected for the fourth quarter of $300 Million, the Times would have to boost its monthly page views to – get this – 1.3 Billion a month; and it would have to get a CPM (cost per thousands) of $25. At present it averages about 173 Million page views a month, according to comScore. Do the math. That translates into a six or seven fold increase in page views. Just to confuse the mix even more, let’s add some more figures into the mix. The print product has a subscription base of about One Million people daily (1.4 Million on Sunday). BTW, the ContentNext analysis assumed a print CPM of $58. On Inauguration day, NYTimes.com scored 2.4 Million unique visitors, up from the average of 1.7 Million daily uniques. Also, remember the difference – page views versus unique visitors – a point that raises questions about online measurement metrics. And just to confuse you more, let’s do some more math. According to Nielsen Online, the average person goes online an average 57 times a month and views an average of 2,345 pages a month. So, the uniques times page views ‘might’ indicate the Billion-plus page views is do-able, and, of course, Yahoo News and AOL News both do just about that number monthly. But most analysts are not counting on it. Lastly add into the mix the fact that the Times has about $1 Billion in debt and $46 Million in assets, according to an article in The Atlantic which raises the question whether the venerable media icon may be facing a quicker and more painful online transition.
WHO DO YOU BELIEVE? Two reports with apparently contradictory conclusions raise questions about viewing. According to online video tracking site TubeMogul, the vast majority of people watch online videos for only a few seconds at the most. The folks at TubeMogul said they did their own study because many online video sites, such as YouTube, count it as a view even though it may only be a few seconds. They looked at 188,000 videos, streamed 22 Million times on six video sites (YouTube was not included.) Nine out of ten people watched a piece of video for less than ten seconds. Let me repeat that – 90% of those videos were 10 second snackables. About half (46.4%) were watched for a full minute, but only one in ten (9.4%) got a full five minutes viewing. The folks at TubeMogul say that raises serious questions about the effectiveness of post-roll ads. Meanwhile a survey by increasingly popular video website Hulu.com (which, BTW, was not included in the TubeMogul study) found that, when given the option, the vast majority of people (88%) SAY they would prefer to watch a two-minute commercial rather than four 30-second spots.
FROM A KING TO A JACK: Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve got the country song lyrics backwards, but there’s a reason. Country music has officially fallen to second place behind News/ Talk as the number one radio format in the country, albeit by a slim margin. According to insideradio.com and M Street publications, there were 2,056 news/talk stations on air at the end of last year, compared to 2,027 country stations. The next most popular format? Religion, with 1,288 stations labeled as “religion.” BUT if you add the other associated formats (Gospel, Black Gospel, Southern Gospel and Contemporary Christian), the total stations would be 2,861. In actual fact, there are 31 different formats listed, ranging from Classic Rock (483 stations) and Classic Hits (568). And how they differ from Oldies (728), I don’t know. Add to that Adult Contemporary (676) and Adult Standards (361); Alternative Rock (378) and Modern Rock (173); Classical (179) and Jazz (127). Some of the least popular formats are Easy Listening (25), Modern AC (Adult Contemporary – 22), R&B/ Adult (39) and Rhythmic AC (22). And, no, I don’t know what Rhythmic AC is.
SUPER BOWL COCKTAIL CHATTER: Last year’s face-off between the Patriots and Giants was viewed by 97.5 Million people nationwide, making it, as usual, the most watched TV event of the year and in actual fact the highest rated Super Bowl of all time and the 2nd highest rated telecast of all time (just behind the MASH special of 1983). Super Bowl Games account for 17 of the top 20 telecasts of all time. The highest rated commercial minute in last year’s game was the Victoria Secret spot, seen by 103.7 Million viewers. Last year a spot cost $2.7 Million and total spending for the game reached over $195 Million. This year the spots run $3 Million. Under NFL rules, networks carrying the Super Bowl are restricted to five minutes of air time for promotion, according to TVWeek. Super Bowl advertisers saw a 24% jump in Web traffic after the game while half-time performers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers saw sales of their album jump 196%. The Super Bowl is the 8th largest beer-selling event each year, according to the stats provided by Nielsen Media. More than 60% of the U.S. population (138 Million adults) claim to be NFL fans, and those fans are more likely to be in the higher income, higher education bracket AND (as Nielsen points out) more likely to have a “softer side” to them – buying 74% more skin products than the average American.
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Sunday, February 01, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Message from Michael - Barack Obama - Jan 20th
THE BARACK OBAMA INAUGURAL EDITION
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OVERVIEW: AdWeek says Franklin D. Roosevelt was the “radio president”, John F. Kennedy was the “television president” and Barack Obama will be the first “Internet president.” Media newsletter Cynopsis calls it, “Camelot for the digital age.” It may be “THE” media event of the year. In a paroxysm of hyperbole, some are calling it the media event of the decade and more. And it may not be hyperbole. The head of research for Horizon Media says it will be the most watched “video event ever” and is being made available on more channels than the media-saturated Olympics. Researcher Brad Adgate adds, in an article in AdWeek, that as a result, no-one will know for sure just how big it was because of its three screen delivery in home and out of home. General manager K.C. Estonson of CNN.com says he thinks it will probably be “one of the most watched events in Internet history.” It may give some indication of the size of the viewing that Obama’s victory speech in Chicago has had more than 4.3 Million views on YouTube. All that said, let’s look at some of the media implications of the Obama inauguration and presidency.
IT’S BIBLICAL IN SIZE: That’s the description used by CNN’s Washington bureau chief David Bohrman in describing the coverage plans for the inauguration. With a crowd estimated at 2 Million or more, he and other network executives say the public interest is higher than any other inauguration they’ve seen and they have to match that interest with their coverage. CBS executive producer Rick Kaplan only half jokingly told TVWeek that it seemed like the network had every camera it owned at the inauguration. Of course all four networks and the cable news channels will have extensive television coverage, but all of them are also supplementing, or complementing, it with equally extensive online coverage. CBS will have live streaming video on its recently re-formatted TV.com website but will also provide it on Joost’s Everything Obama page. NBC will, of course, live stream on MSNBC which also has a special inauguration day page with past inauguration’s footage. Fox will live stream on Hulu which has a special Obama Presidency page.
MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS: Even more interesting are the partnerships between media entities. Cnet.com writer Stephanie Condon cites the partnership between CNN and Facebook, with the network streaming its coverage on the website where viewers can also share their thoughts. In turn, the Facebook stream will be carried on the CNN site. Current TV is partnering with Twitter to add “real time tweets” to its broadcast. But then again even C-Span is getting in on the Twitter act with a partnership. Even the official websites have forged partnerships. The Presidential Inauguration Committee (yes, there is such a thing) is partnering with new (only 13 months old) blogging site Tumblr (no, I never heard of it before) to provide “a feed of content.” And if you don’t like that official site, you can go to the other official site (yes, there are two.) The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugurations will not only stream live coverage of the event, but also provides such interesting tidbits such as what not to bring to the inauguration (firearms, knives, your leatherman, bags of any sort and laser pointers) and what’s on the luncheon day menu (seafood stew followed by pheasant and duck in sour cherry chutney and a desert of apple cinnamon sponge cake.)
ESTABLISHMENT EMBRACE OF NEW MEDIA: If you want a litmus test of how the ‘establishment’ has embraced new media, there are websites on YouTube specifically provided for your elected representative to communicate with their constituencies about the inauguration and their agenda. It’s an interesting exercise to see if your Congressman or Senator is on the site. Equally interesting (again, as always, to me) it seemed that Representatives are more likely to take advantage of the YouTube site than Senators. The introduction to the YouTube inauguration site has “bi-partisan support.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi telling the youtubers that “we may not see eye to eye on everything but one thing we can agree on is the importance of utilizing technology to communicate with constituents.” House Republican leader John Boehner says “new media tools let us provide you with a level of access and transparency never seen before in government.” And there is interest in the site. When I last checked, the introductory inauguration video had 247,231 views. Of course, it says something that Nancy Pelosi’s “cat cam” video (don’t ask me – I don’t get it) on the same site had two thousand more views – 249,410.
A VERY CRITICAL TIME IN TECHNOLOGY: Those words from law professor and Common Sense Media founder James Steyer in talking about the expected appointment of Julius Genachowski to head the Federal Communications Commission. He could just as easily be talking about the incoming administration. To state the obvious, more critical than what is going on with media and technology today in Washington, D.C., is what the future holds for media and technology under the Obama administration. Some of that can be seen from the website, change.gov, mentioned in a previous MfM. (Interestingly, there are now two change sites – change.gov and change.org.) But it can also be seen in the $825 Billion stimulus bill proposed by House Democrats. The bill includes $6 Billion to expand Broadband access “so businesses in rural and other underserved areas can link up to the global economy.” Another $10 Billion is earmarked for ‘scientific research’ ranging from the National Science Foundation getting $3 Billion to expand employment opportunities in fundamental science and engineering to meet environmental changes and improve global economic competitiveness; $2 Billion for the National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research; $1.5 Billion to renovate university research facilities, also in biomedical areas. Do you begin to see a pattern here? Actually, there are several, including an emphasis on the global economy. Of course, that’s not all. The bill also calls for several measures to stimulate technology usage in small businesses. We’ll have more on this in future MfM’s.
The technology section of the government change site is a must read for anybody interested in media. It starts with a quote from Barack Obama’s 2007 Presidential announcement speech: “Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age.” Topping his agenda is the same topic that tops the Democratic stimulus bill – Broadband access. But there’s more. Here is just a partial list of the items on the President’s agenda: Support network neutrality; encourage diversity in broadcast ownership; strengthen privacy protections; use cutting-edge technology to create a new level of transparency, accountability and participation; make the R&D tax credit permanent; protect American intellectual property at home and abroad; and “restore scientific integrity to the White House. The so-called TIGR Team (Technology, Innovation and Government Reform) says it will offer citizens a “Seat at the Table.” Look for the presentation of the so-called Citizens’ Briefing Book to President Obama.
The Change.Org website lists a series of causes ranging from: global warming, global health, gay rights, animal rights, women ’s rights, ending homelessness and ending human trafficking. Interestingly there are a number of ‘side’ websites, including whitehouse2.org, where the leading issue that visitors want the new President to address is replacing the income tax with the ‘fair tax’ concept, followed by “defend the Constitution.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Despite the broad support cited by many in the media, Barack Obama only got 52% of the popular vote. And despite the high interest cited for this election cycle, more than a third (38.4%) of eligible voters didn’t cast a ballot for President, according to website factcheck.org. That’s only slightly less than the number who failed to vote in 2006 (39.9%). The list of inaugural events put together by the ConklinScott political consulting firm runs 52 pages in length and includes such events as the Hip Hop Caucus, the Georgia State Society gala (where sponsorships run from $10K to $100k), and my favorite, The Spirit of 92/ Clinton-Gore alumni reunion bash. An architectural group has created a competition with the idea of how would the symbol of American power, The White House, be built if it were designed today. You can see some of the myriad of weird and wonderful designs at whitehouseredux.org. And as a side note to this, I will be curious to look at the official White House website after the inauguration.
If you want a completely different perspective on the inauguration, website Livestation will carry inauguration coverage from around the world, including Al Jazeera, BBC, CSpan, Euronews, France24 and Russia Today.
Finally, in case you were wondering what one drinks with the pheasant and duck mentioned in the luncheon menu earlier, the wine being served was a Goldeneye 2005 Pinot Noir from Anderson Valley. The seafood stew was paired with Duckhorn Vineyards 2007 Sauvignon Blanc from Napa Valley and the desert was topped off with Korbel Natural “Special Inaugural Cuvee” California Champagne. (And if you’re truly OCD, the recipes are available on the congressional inaugural site.)
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
OVERVIEW: AdWeek says Franklin D. Roosevelt was the “radio president”, John F. Kennedy was the “television president” and Barack Obama will be the first “Internet president.” Media newsletter Cynopsis calls it, “Camelot for the digital age.” It may be “THE” media event of the year. In a paroxysm of hyperbole, some are calling it the media event of the decade and more. And it may not be hyperbole. The head of research for Horizon Media says it will be the most watched “video event ever” and is being made available on more channels than the media-saturated Olympics. Researcher Brad Adgate adds, in an article in AdWeek, that as a result, no-one will know for sure just how big it was because of its three screen delivery in home and out of home. General manager K.C. Estonson of CNN.com says he thinks it will probably be “one of the most watched events in Internet history.” It may give some indication of the size of the viewing that Obama’s victory speech in Chicago has had more than 4.3 Million views on YouTube. All that said, let’s look at some of the media implications of the Obama inauguration and presidency.
IT’S BIBLICAL IN SIZE: That’s the description used by CNN’s Washington bureau chief David Bohrman in describing the coverage plans for the inauguration. With a crowd estimated at 2 Million or more, he and other network executives say the public interest is higher than any other inauguration they’ve seen and they have to match that interest with their coverage. CBS executive producer Rick Kaplan only half jokingly told TVWeek that it seemed like the network had every camera it owned at the inauguration. Of course all four networks and the cable news channels will have extensive television coverage, but all of them are also supplementing, or complementing, it with equally extensive online coverage. CBS will have live streaming video on its recently re-formatted TV.com website but will also provide it on Joost’s Everything Obama page. NBC will, of course, live stream on MSNBC which also has a special inauguration day page with past inauguration’s footage. Fox will live stream on Hulu which has a special Obama Presidency page.
MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS: Even more interesting are the partnerships between media entities. Cnet.com writer Stephanie Condon cites the partnership between CNN and Facebook, with the network streaming its coverage on the website where viewers can also share their thoughts. In turn, the Facebook stream will be carried on the CNN site. Current TV is partnering with Twitter to add “real time tweets” to its broadcast. But then again even C-Span is getting in on the Twitter act with a partnership. Even the official websites have forged partnerships. The Presidential Inauguration Committee (yes, there is such a thing) is partnering with new (only 13 months old) blogging site Tumblr (no, I never heard of it before) to provide “a feed of content.” And if you don’t like that official site, you can go to the other official site (yes, there are two.) The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugurations will not only stream live coverage of the event, but also provides such interesting tidbits such as what not to bring to the inauguration (firearms, knives, your leatherman, bags of any sort and laser pointers) and what’s on the luncheon day menu (seafood stew followed by pheasant and duck in sour cherry chutney and a desert of apple cinnamon sponge cake.)
ESTABLISHMENT EMBRACE OF NEW MEDIA: If you want a litmus test of how the ‘establishment’ has embraced new media, there are websites on YouTube specifically provided for your elected representative to communicate with their constituencies about the inauguration and their agenda. It’s an interesting exercise to see if your Congressman or Senator is on the site. Equally interesting (again, as always, to me) it seemed that Representatives are more likely to take advantage of the YouTube site than Senators. The introduction to the YouTube inauguration site has “bi-partisan support.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi telling the youtubers that “we may not see eye to eye on everything but one thing we can agree on is the importance of utilizing technology to communicate with constituents.” House Republican leader John Boehner says “new media tools let us provide you with a level of access and transparency never seen before in government.” And there is interest in the site. When I last checked, the introductory inauguration video had 247,231 views. Of course, it says something that Nancy Pelosi’s “cat cam” video (don’t ask me – I don’t get it) on the same site had two thousand more views – 249,410.
A VERY CRITICAL TIME IN TECHNOLOGY: Those words from law professor and Common Sense Media founder James Steyer in talking about the expected appointment of Julius Genachowski to head the Federal Communications Commission. He could just as easily be talking about the incoming administration. To state the obvious, more critical than what is going on with media and technology today in Washington, D.C., is what the future holds for media and technology under the Obama administration. Some of that can be seen from the website, change.gov, mentioned in a previous MfM. (Interestingly, there are now two change sites – change.gov and change.org.) But it can also be seen in the $825 Billion stimulus bill proposed by House Democrats. The bill includes $6 Billion to expand Broadband access “so businesses in rural and other underserved areas can link up to the global economy.” Another $10 Billion is earmarked for ‘scientific research’ ranging from the National Science Foundation getting $3 Billion to expand employment opportunities in fundamental science and engineering to meet environmental changes and improve global economic competitiveness; $2 Billion for the National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research; $1.5 Billion to renovate university research facilities, also in biomedical areas. Do you begin to see a pattern here? Actually, there are several, including an emphasis on the global economy. Of course, that’s not all. The bill also calls for several measures to stimulate technology usage in small businesses. We’ll have more on this in future MfM’s.
The technology section of the government change site is a must read for anybody interested in media. It starts with a quote from Barack Obama’s 2007 Presidential announcement speech: “Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age.” Topping his agenda is the same topic that tops the Democratic stimulus bill – Broadband access. But there’s more. Here is just a partial list of the items on the President’s agenda: Support network neutrality; encourage diversity in broadcast ownership; strengthen privacy protections; use cutting-edge technology to create a new level of transparency, accountability and participation; make the R&D tax credit permanent; protect American intellectual property at home and abroad; and “restore scientific integrity to the White House. The so-called TIGR Team (Technology, Innovation and Government Reform) says it will offer citizens a “Seat at the Table.” Look for the presentation of the so-called Citizens’ Briefing Book to President Obama.
The Change.Org website lists a series of causes ranging from: global warming, global health, gay rights, animal rights, women ’s rights, ending homelessness and ending human trafficking. Interestingly there are a number of ‘side’ websites, including whitehouse2.org, where the leading issue that visitors want the new President to address is replacing the income tax with the ‘fair tax’ concept, followed by “defend the Constitution.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Despite the broad support cited by many in the media, Barack Obama only got 52% of the popular vote. And despite the high interest cited for this election cycle, more than a third (38.4%) of eligible voters didn’t cast a ballot for President, according to website factcheck.org. That’s only slightly less than the number who failed to vote in 2006 (39.9%). The list of inaugural events put together by the ConklinScott political consulting firm runs 52 pages in length and includes such events as the Hip Hop Caucus, the Georgia State Society gala (where sponsorships run from $10K to $100k), and my favorite, The Spirit of 92/ Clinton-Gore alumni reunion bash. An architectural group has created a competition with the idea of how would the symbol of American power, The White House, be built if it were designed today. You can see some of the myriad of weird and wonderful designs at whitehouseredux.org. And as a side note to this, I will be curious to look at the official White House website after the inauguration.
If you want a completely different perspective on the inauguration, website Livestation will carry inauguration coverage from around the world, including Al Jazeera, BBC, CSpan, Euronews, France24 and Russia Today.
Finally, in case you were wondering what one drinks with the pheasant and duck mentioned in the luncheon menu earlier, the wine being served was a Goldeneye 2005 Pinot Noir from Anderson Valley. The seafood stew was paired with Duckhorn Vineyards 2007 Sauvignon Blanc from Napa Valley and the desert was topped off with Korbel Natural “Special Inaugural Cuvee” California Champagne. (And if you’re truly OCD, the recipes are available on the congressional inaugural site.)
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Message from Michael -- 2009 Predictions Issue
THE HEADLINE: Let’s just get the major forecast issue out of the way at the start – 2009 will stink… stink being a relative term. If you’re in traditional media, it will stink bad. If you’re in new media, it will stink less. But, regardless, it will stink. The Television Bureau of Advertising predicts total TV spot advertising will drop anywhere from 7% to 11%. The BIA Advisory Services says radio will drop 10% and MediaWeek says 2009 will be the worst year for radio since 1954 when The Lone Ranger went off the air. Online advertising will actually grow, but at a much slower rate. Research firm eMarketer puts the growth at 9% which is a significant drop from the double digit growth of the past. And as Borrell Associates points out, online is a small part (3.5%) of radio and television revenue. Rating service Fitch Ratings has similar dire predictions for newspaper, even going so far as to say that some major cities will be without a newspaper by 2010. So, now that we’ve gotten all the depressing news out of the way, let’s move on to the rest of the predictions.
DIGITAL TV. It’s an obvious point, but it should be made anyway. The big change for many of us is the transition to digital TV scheduled for February 17, 2009… unless President-elect Barack Obama does delay it. Not surprising, the Consumer Electronics Association which is putting on its annual show as we speak, says unit shipments of digital TV’s will increase six percent in 2009 with an expected 35 Million units being shipped out. The association notes that digital TV’s are the primary revenue driver for the industry. Okay, now that we’ve gotten that other obvious point out of the way, let’s really move on to the rest of the predictions.
SOCIALIZE YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS: That seems to be the main message for 2009. Social network this… social media that… Many of the articles I read talk about social media coming of age in 2008 and growing in 2009 as a marketing and branding tool. One of the reasons for companies and marketers to focus on social networking is the growth and interest in ratings and review sites. That is why several groups recommend companies create a kind of CCO position – Chief Conversation Officer – to monitor the online conversation. Here’s a simple metric that says a lot. When I did a search with the key terms media, predictions and 2009, more than 80% of the responses came back with “social media.” However, a note of reality -- our friends at eMarketer predict that while social network spending will outpace other online advertising (10% versus 8.9%), that is down from 126% growth in 2007 and 34% growth in 2008. Several other reports noted the demise of Pownce and Values of n social networks, plus the cutbacks at LinkedIn, Hi5 and Jive. And the much bally-hooed Twitter still is not generating revenue. Be that as it may, several groups, including MediaPost and OMMA (Online Media Marketing Advertising) are planning events and offering webinars to show you how to “make money making friends.” As Marketing Daily’s Diane Mermigas so well puts it, “social media is becoming the new CRM (customer relationship management.) The new ROI is Return On Involvement.”
WHAT YOU GET IS WHAT YOU SEE: And more and more people want to get it at their convenience, which is cited as one of the main reasons for the growth in online video. Research firm Mediamark Research and Intelligence (MRI) reports that downloading TV programs posted the greatest gain in the online world with a 141% jump; but to put that in perspective, that ‘whopping’ increase amounted to a relatively insignificant 3.2% of the online users. Still, watching video online also posted a strong gain (35.4%) but even more significant, that translated into a quarter (23.3%) of all online users which was actually just one step ahead of the popular downloading of music (21.6%), according to MRI. Earlier this year, marketing and research firm Magna Insights predicted a 45% growth in online video in 2009, lower than the 67% in 2007 and the 54% in 2008, but still huge. Researcher Jack Myers goes even further, forecasting a 70% growth in 2009 in online video along with social networking and widgets, which he lumps all together. Looking even further ahead tech research firm ABI Research says the number of online video viewers will grow from the present 563 Million to 941 Million in 2013 because, as research director Michael Wolf puts it, “all stakeholders in the online video ecosystem are eyeing the living room.”
As a Side Note that probably deserves to be more than that, networked video games online is the other major category to watch in 2009. According to projections from the Consumer Electronics Show, the online video game market is expected to grow 11% this year generating a high mark of $22 Billion a year in revenue. The Magna Insights report more than doubles that estimate with a forecast of a 27.4% growth in video gaming, including off-line as well as online.
CLOUDS GET IN YOUR WAY: Despite the lyrics of the Joni Mitchell song, most people in the media technology world believe just the opposite – clouds will guide the way for future computing. Several groups are predicting that 2009 will be the year of cloud computing. Shock of shocks, most of those projections come from the major cloud computing sites, but as website cloudcomputing.sys-con.com points out, with Amazon rolling out CloudFront, Microsoft rolling out Azure, Hosting.com rolling out CloudNine and VMware rolling out vCloud, there is a lot of validity to the claim. Just as a reminder about what cloud computing is, Wikipedia callsit is a metaphor for the Internet. It means all your applications plus IT-technology infrastructure and data are hosted on-line and not on your computer. Much of the future of cloud computing will be seen when the 2nd international cloud computing conference takes place in New York City at the end of March. As the expo website puts it, “entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate.”
As a Side Note, watch for the sale of ‘netbooks’ to grow in 2009. These mini-me’s of computers are becoming mainstream with Hewlett Packard jumping into the manufacture of the devices along with Lenovo. Weighing less than three pounds and with a small solid state hard drive, their main purpose is just to get you on the Internet where cloud computing offerings will replace your maxed out home computer. (I will confess that I am looking at trying this approach.)
And as an only semi-related side note to the side note, look for the acronym OLPC to emerge this year. It stands for One Laptop Per Child. A non-profit U.S. organization funded by several major corporations has been established to provide these ‘educational devices’ to children in third world, developing nations.
BUSINESS LOOK AT TECHNOLOGY IN 2009. As much, if not more, than any of the media guru’s prognostications, the recommendation by Forbes Magazine of “dirt cheap” tech stocks to buy, may tell us more about the upcoming year. At less than six bucks a share ($5.93 at last check), Harmonic (listed as HLIT) is worth a look as the transition from SDTV to HDTV gathers momentum. The company makes and sells high-performance products designed to deliver the next generation of broadcast and on-demand services. If you have a little more money, take a look at Skyworks Solutions ($6.42 and listed as SWKS), which makes and markets high performance analog and mixed signal semi-conductors used for wireless communication. Old-line company Corning (GLW and $10) is worth a look because it is definitely not old-line in its products. It is the leading global maker of advanced glass products used in LCD’s. Forbes editors say they expect an ‘inventory correction’ and the transition from tube TV’s to LCD TV’s is far from over. Netgear (NTGR and $10.74) specializes in networking products and solutions – LAN’s – for the home and small business market. The Forbes editors cite the ongoing transition from wired to wireless markets. Another old stand-by is Western Digital (WDC and $15.35), the leading maker and supplier of hard drives used not just in personal computers but consumer electronics in general. The Forbes editors say the weakened consumer spending will put pressure on hard drive sales short-term, but long-term, the need for greater data storage will only grow and grow. Lastly a complete unknown (at least, to me) is MEMC Electronic Materials (WFR and $17.76) which is one of the world’s largest makers of wafers for the semiconductor and solar industries. The Forbes forecasters admit the semiconductor market is down and that may last a while, but they anticipate another ‘inventory correction’ with growth in markets like China and India. But more particularly, the solar application wafer business should grow.
OTHER THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR: This is my addition to the list – things I didn’t see mentioned in great detail in other reports, but which I think will be worth noting. Watch for WiMax to become more prevalent in 2009, replacing WiFix transmission in many cases. Microsoft may actually get it right, or at least closer to right, when it releases Windows v.7, replacing the clunky Vista operating system, but there will still be bugs. Google will release its new browser system, Chrome, onto an unsuspecting public as it continues its efforts to dominate the on-line world.
Last year the buzz phrase was ‘cause marketing’ – tying your product to a public service, ‘feel good’ cause. This year watch for the new buzz phrase to be ‘content marketing’ – in which relevant information is made part of your advertising message to provide value to the consumer. Also look for “personal branding” to come into the ‘buzz-ophere’ (a word I just made up) as blogging, web 2.0 and Internet Interactivity spreads people’s individual social networking needs.
But the big issue of the year, especially considering the economy situation, will be measurement and metrics. Several groups are offering differing measures for everything from the Internet to social networking to word of mouth. Stay tuned for more, as marketers and companies look to get more “bang for their buck.”
FOOTNOTE #1: We didn’t mention Mobile growth in this report although several reports predict continuing growth in this area. The reason I didn’t is that we talked about it in the previous MfM report looking back at 2008, and besides, I couldn’t beat the headline I wrote in the last MfM – Bear Bryant’s Agile, Mobile and Hostile. I would note that the Magna Insight report cited earlier, predicts that mobile will grow 42.6% in 2009 which is pretty impressive given other areas, but not as impressive as the doubling (118.2%) in 2007 and the 73.4% in 2008.
I also made a brief mention of the newspaper dilemma at the top of this report. Again, I touched on it in the previous MfM, but it too is probably one of the scarier scenarios. On the upside of this, there are several prognostications that journalists may find unexpected sources of work with corporations as marketers realize they need the natural story telling skills of journalists to tell the narrative of their particular product. Ann Handley of MarketingProfs says such writers are ‘natural’ content managers, a sentiment echoed by content management site Junta42.com. Columnist Jon Fine of BusinessWeek goes several steps further, predicting a “shadow” media industry staffed by the laid off journalists. Lastly I didn’t talk much about Widgets, but this is another area to watch as they become – in the words of one group – the new ad unit. Or as I put, the new coin of the realm.
FOOTNOTE #2: My list of subscribers (I am happy to say) has continued to grow. But that will mean I will have to look at another way to distribute this newsletter. So, in the coming year, I will be switching to ConstantContact, an email and newsletter managing service. Stay tuned as I experiment with this.
DIGITAL TV. It’s an obvious point, but it should be made anyway. The big change for many of us is the transition to digital TV scheduled for February 17, 2009… unless President-elect Barack Obama does delay it. Not surprising, the Consumer Electronics Association which is putting on its annual show as we speak, says unit shipments of digital TV’s will increase six percent in 2009 with an expected 35 Million units being shipped out. The association notes that digital TV’s are the primary revenue driver for the industry. Okay, now that we’ve gotten that other obvious point out of the way, let’s really move on to the rest of the predictions.
SOCIALIZE YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS: That seems to be the main message for 2009. Social network this… social media that… Many of the articles I read talk about social media coming of age in 2008 and growing in 2009 as a marketing and branding tool. One of the reasons for companies and marketers to focus on social networking is the growth and interest in ratings and review sites. That is why several groups recommend companies create a kind of CCO position – Chief Conversation Officer – to monitor the online conversation. Here’s a simple metric that says a lot. When I did a search with the key terms media, predictions and 2009, more than 80% of the responses came back with “social media.” However, a note of reality -- our friends at eMarketer predict that while social network spending will outpace other online advertising (10% versus 8.9%), that is down from 126% growth in 2007 and 34% growth in 2008. Several other reports noted the demise of Pownce and Values of n social networks, plus the cutbacks at LinkedIn, Hi5 and Jive. And the much bally-hooed Twitter still is not generating revenue. Be that as it may, several groups, including MediaPost and OMMA (Online Media Marketing Advertising) are planning events and offering webinars to show you how to “make money making friends.” As Marketing Daily’s Diane Mermigas so well puts it, “social media is becoming the new CRM (customer relationship management.) The new ROI is Return On Involvement.”
WHAT YOU GET IS WHAT YOU SEE: And more and more people want to get it at their convenience, which is cited as one of the main reasons for the growth in online video. Research firm Mediamark Research and Intelligence (MRI) reports that downloading TV programs posted the greatest gain in the online world with a 141% jump; but to put that in perspective, that ‘whopping’ increase amounted to a relatively insignificant 3.2% of the online users. Still, watching video online also posted a strong gain (35.4%) but even more significant, that translated into a quarter (23.3%) of all online users which was actually just one step ahead of the popular downloading of music (21.6%), according to MRI. Earlier this year, marketing and research firm Magna Insights predicted a 45% growth in online video in 2009, lower than the 67% in 2007 and the 54% in 2008, but still huge. Researcher Jack Myers goes even further, forecasting a 70% growth in 2009 in online video along with social networking and widgets, which he lumps all together. Looking even further ahead tech research firm ABI Research says the number of online video viewers will grow from the present 563 Million to 941 Million in 2013 because, as research director Michael Wolf puts it, “all stakeholders in the online video ecosystem are eyeing the living room.”
As a Side Note that probably deserves to be more than that, networked video games online is the other major category to watch in 2009. According to projections from the Consumer Electronics Show, the online video game market is expected to grow 11% this year generating a high mark of $22 Billion a year in revenue. The Magna Insights report more than doubles that estimate with a forecast of a 27.4% growth in video gaming, including off-line as well as online.
CLOUDS GET IN YOUR WAY: Despite the lyrics of the Joni Mitchell song, most people in the media technology world believe just the opposite – clouds will guide the way for future computing. Several groups are predicting that 2009 will be the year of cloud computing. Shock of shocks, most of those projections come from the major cloud computing sites, but as website cloudcomputing.sys-con.com points out, with Amazon rolling out CloudFront, Microsoft rolling out Azure, Hosting.com rolling out CloudNine and VMware rolling out vCloud, there is a lot of validity to the claim. Just as a reminder about what cloud computing is, Wikipedia callsit is a metaphor for the Internet. It means all your applications plus IT-technology infrastructure and data are hosted on-line and not on your computer. Much of the future of cloud computing will be seen when the 2nd international cloud computing conference takes place in New York City at the end of March. As the expo website puts it, “entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate.”
As a Side Note, watch for the sale of ‘netbooks’ to grow in 2009. These mini-me’s of computers are becoming mainstream with Hewlett Packard jumping into the manufacture of the devices along with Lenovo. Weighing less than three pounds and with a small solid state hard drive, their main purpose is just to get you on the Internet where cloud computing offerings will replace your maxed out home computer. (I will confess that I am looking at trying this approach.)
And as an only semi-related side note to the side note, look for the acronym OLPC to emerge this year. It stands for One Laptop Per Child. A non-profit U.S. organization funded by several major corporations has been established to provide these ‘educational devices’ to children in third world, developing nations.
BUSINESS LOOK AT TECHNOLOGY IN 2009. As much, if not more, than any of the media guru’s prognostications, the recommendation by Forbes Magazine of “dirt cheap” tech stocks to buy, may tell us more about the upcoming year. At less than six bucks a share ($5.93 at last check), Harmonic (listed as HLIT) is worth a look as the transition from SDTV to HDTV gathers momentum. The company makes and sells high-performance products designed to deliver the next generation of broadcast and on-demand services. If you have a little more money, take a look at Skyworks Solutions ($6.42 and listed as SWKS), which makes and markets high performance analog and mixed signal semi-conductors used for wireless communication. Old-line company Corning (GLW and $10) is worth a look because it is definitely not old-line in its products. It is the leading global maker of advanced glass products used in LCD’s. Forbes editors say they expect an ‘inventory correction’ and the transition from tube TV’s to LCD TV’s is far from over. Netgear (NTGR and $10.74) specializes in networking products and solutions – LAN’s – for the home and small business market. The Forbes editors cite the ongoing transition from wired to wireless markets. Another old stand-by is Western Digital (WDC and $15.35), the leading maker and supplier of hard drives used not just in personal computers but consumer electronics in general. The Forbes editors say the weakened consumer spending will put pressure on hard drive sales short-term, but long-term, the need for greater data storage will only grow and grow. Lastly a complete unknown (at least, to me) is MEMC Electronic Materials (WFR and $17.76) which is one of the world’s largest makers of wafers for the semiconductor and solar industries. The Forbes forecasters admit the semiconductor market is down and that may last a while, but they anticipate another ‘inventory correction’ with growth in markets like China and India. But more particularly, the solar application wafer business should grow.
OTHER THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR: This is my addition to the list – things I didn’t see mentioned in great detail in other reports, but which I think will be worth noting. Watch for WiMax to become more prevalent in 2009, replacing WiFix transmission in many cases. Microsoft may actually get it right, or at least closer to right, when it releases Windows v.7, replacing the clunky Vista operating system, but there will still be bugs. Google will release its new browser system, Chrome, onto an unsuspecting public as it continues its efforts to dominate the on-line world.
Last year the buzz phrase was ‘cause marketing’ – tying your product to a public service, ‘feel good’ cause. This year watch for the new buzz phrase to be ‘content marketing’ – in which relevant information is made part of your advertising message to provide value to the consumer. Also look for “personal branding” to come into the ‘buzz-ophere’ (a word I just made up) as blogging, web 2.0 and Internet Interactivity spreads people’s individual social networking needs.
But the big issue of the year, especially considering the economy situation, will be measurement and metrics. Several groups are offering differing measures for everything from the Internet to social networking to word of mouth. Stay tuned for more, as marketers and companies look to get more “bang for their buck.”
FOOTNOTE #1: We didn’t mention Mobile growth in this report although several reports predict continuing growth in this area. The reason I didn’t is that we talked about it in the previous MfM report looking back at 2008, and besides, I couldn’t beat the headline I wrote in the last MfM – Bear Bryant’s Agile, Mobile and Hostile. I would note that the Magna Insight report cited earlier, predicts that mobile will grow 42.6% in 2009 which is pretty impressive given other areas, but not as impressive as the doubling (118.2%) in 2007 and the 73.4% in 2008.
I also made a brief mention of the newspaper dilemma at the top of this report. Again, I touched on it in the previous MfM, but it too is probably one of the scarier scenarios. On the upside of this, there are several prognostications that journalists may find unexpected sources of work with corporations as marketers realize they need the natural story telling skills of journalists to tell the narrative of their particular product. Ann Handley of MarketingProfs says such writers are ‘natural’ content managers, a sentiment echoed by content management site Junta42.com. Columnist Jon Fine of BusinessWeek goes several steps further, predicting a “shadow” media industry staffed by the laid off journalists. Lastly I didn’t talk much about Widgets, but this is another area to watch as they become – in the words of one group – the new ad unit. Or as I put, the new coin of the realm.
FOOTNOTE #2: My list of subscribers (I am happy to say) has continued to grow. But that will mean I will have to look at another way to distribute this newsletter. So, in the coming year, I will be switching to ConstantContact, an email and newsletter managing service. Stay tuned as I experiment with this.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Message from Michael -- 2008 Review - Dec 30, 2008
OVERVIEW: It was the year of micro-blogging site Twitter and an attack on Mumbai, India’s financial center, in which ‘twitterers’ did much of the reporting; the rise of social networking and the rise of America’s first African-American president through the use of social networking; a surge in the use of online video and along with it a surge in video providers like Hulu. And before this gets too esoteric for all of you, a little back to planet earth moment – Yahoo’s number one search item in 2008 was the same one as a year ago in 2007 – BRITNEY SPEARS. As website TechCrunch put it, maybe it’s a train wreck kind of thing. The number two most searched item was…. WWE, and for those not familiar – that’s World Wrestling Entertainment, which, BTW, was also #2 in 2007. Barack Obama came in third. Anyway, on to this slightly longer than usual review in which we give you a snapshot of 2008.
MAN IS A SOCIAL ANIMAL: Philosopher Aristotle would have found proof of that in 2008 as social networks metastasized around the world. The poster child of social networking is the not-even-two-years-old (March, 2006) micro-blogging site Twitter which, as Technology Review put it, has “spawned an ecosystem of competitors, knock-offs, plug-ins and add-ons.” Of course the giants are Facebook and MySpace with more than 100 Million unique users each month, but there are plenty of would-be giant killers out there as well. How about badoo and bebo, which both claim a worldwide focus; fark (talking about news that isn’t news) and newsvine (talking about news that people are talking about); iambored (which, well… you can guess); gather (for the NPR crowd) and habbo (for the teenagers). As fast as the Internet audience is growing (11% a year, according to comScore), social networking sites are growing even faster (25%) with some lesser known sites (hi5, Mixx and Yelp) growing faster still, according to web analysis site ignitesocialmedia.com.
And I’ve just been talking about the English sites so far. According to Google’s end of year Zeitgeist report which looks at the fastest growing search items in the U.S., and world, three of the top ten search items were Tuenti (a Spanish social networking site), Nasza Klasa (a Polish site) and Wer Kennt Wen (a German site). That may explain that while social networking site growth in the U.S. is a modest 9%, it is nearly triple that worldwide, at 25%. Here’s the fact that says a lot -- Of the nearly 861 Million Internet cited by comScore, two thirds (581 Million) are on social networking sites. There is even a website, ning.com, where you can create your own social network. Founders Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreesen were named to Fast Company’s list of the 12 most creative minds of 2008.
As a FOOTNOTE to all this, let me apologize to the numerous people who’ve invited me to join Plaxo, Pulse, Pownce and other social networking sites. I’m already on half a dozen and I can’t keep up with them.
MAN IS A POLITICAL ANIMAL: So says our good buddy Aristotle. In fact that was the original translation, until someone decided that politikos in Greek more closely translated to social in English than political. Anyway, I digress. In its end of the year review of searches, Yahoo! said it was “politics as unusual” that dominated much of the year’s search with political debates replacing the ‘rubbernecking at the scene of celebrity train wrecks” as a prime activity. (Isn’t it interesting that the train wreck analogy was used again?) Right up there with the celebrity searches were searches for Barack Obama, and most particularly, Sara Palin who made #4 on Ask.com’s list of ‘top celebrity baby mamas of 2008’, just behind Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba and Jamie Lynn Spears. Also on the political search hit list was the Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s favorite word, ‘maverick’ which topped the Dictionary.com list of top gainers, just ahead of socialism. The word also made Google’s list of campaign ‘buzzwords’ just behind Joe the Plumber and Jeremiah Wright. As a side note, the Google list of top sources for political news included SNL… as in Saturday Night Live, for what Google called its “up-to-the-minute spoofs of the campaign.”
As a FOOTNOTE, you may recall that the Pew Research Center survey showed that the Internet had emerged this year as the leading source for political and campaign news this year. In its latest report just released, the folks at Pew say the Internet has now officially taken the lead over newspapers as the main source of national and international news with two out of five (40%) saying they get most of such news from the Internet compared to a third (35%) who cite newspapers. Television is still the dominant source of such news at 70%, but in the under-30 crowd it’s a dead heat (59% to 59%).
And as a Footnote to the Footnote, the Pew report shows that three of the top 15 news stories followed “very closely” were political stories, the same number as natural disasters (Hurricanes Ike and Gustav and flooding in the Midwest), but way behind the eight stories about the economy which dominated the top 15 selections. And dominated not just by numbers but by percentages with 70% saying they followed the U.S. economy stories ‘very closely.’
ONLINE VIDEO: No cute headline here. Just one basic fact from a previous MfM, quoting a New York Times article. YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth last year as ALL providers did in the year 2000. And from another one – founder Chad Hurley says that YouTube receives more than ten hours of video every minute on its site. And the latest figures I saw, show YouTube averaging just over 5.3 Billion video streams a month. Add to that the Hulu’s, Yahoo’s, Joost’s, Veoh’s, Blinkxx’s, Flickr’s and so on and so on… and you get the picture. As a side note, Nielsen’s Three Screen Report makes the point that the average user spends 142 hours and 29 minutes watching TV in the home compared to two hours and 31 minutes watching video on the Internet BUT while there were 282 Million people watching TV in the home, there was a substantial 120 Million people watching video on the Internet. And as a side note to the side note, I should reference TVWeek’s Daisey Whitney’s ‘experiment’ in which she relied solely on the Internet for her video needs and, in the words of Maxwell Smart, loved every minute of it.
I WANT PLAYERS WHO ARE AGILE, MOBILE AND HOSTILE. Famed Alabama coach Bear Bryant said that about his players and now media mavens are saying that may apply to mobile video. Here is the interesting factoid from the Nielsen Three Screen report. Mobile subscribers with video capability actually spent more time watching video on their mobile devices than people spent watching video online – 3 hours and 37 minutes on a mobile phone versus 2 hours and 31 minutes watching video on the Internet. Again, that applies only to mobile subscribers, but it’s still interesting. Much of that mobile interactivity can be attributed to the growth of the iPhone and its various knock-off and copy cat versions, according to those same media mavens. But, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, anyone expecting 2008, or 2009 for that matter, to be the “year of the mobile” is mistaken. Another “but” – But by the year 2020, according to its survey of Internet experts, “the combination of portability and relative affordability will turn the cell phone into the leading Internet gateway.” The report, Future of the Internet III, says there will be about 4 Billion cell phones worldwide by the end of 2008, with up to 15% of them ‘Internet enabled.’ The report’s best quote comes from Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay, who says they will no longer be ‘cell phones’ but “simply lenses on the online world.”
I WANT MY STV: Replace the M with S, for sports, and you have a better picture of the most popular one-time telecasts in 2008. In fact you could make the letter an F – for Football. Five of the top ten telecasts were the Superbowl (43% of the audience) and post bowl coverage, along with the NFC playoff and championship and the AFC divisional playoff game. Four others were the Olympics which hovered around 18%. The one ringer? Can you guess? The Academy Awards (18.7).
More interesting for what it tells you is Nielsen’s list of the top ten “timeshifted” primetime TV programs. Topping the list was NBC favorite Heroes which gained an extra 35% in viewership when the 7-day viewing was added to the live ratings. It was followed by Fringe (26%), Lost (25%), Bones (21%), Grey’s Anatomy (20%), House (18%), Survivor: Gabon (18%), American Idol – Tuesday (13%), The Mentalist (13%) and American Idol – Wednesday (12%). Even more interesting (as I always say, at least to me) only four of the programs made Nielsen’s top ten for regularly scheduled programs: both American Idols (with a 15.5 and 15.3 rating), The Mentalist with a 10 rating and Survivor with a 7.6 rating, based on Live and ‘same day timeshifted’ viewing.
As a Footnote, American viewing of television increased yet again in 2008, another four minutes per household to 8 hours and 18 minutes a day, says Nielsen.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ: At least some people seem to believe that and if it’s true the theme for 2008 is that we are all looking for a greater purpose in life. That seems to be the message looking at the top seller list of non-fiction books from Nielsen. Self-described spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle claims two of the top spots with his books A New Earth and The Power of Now, which promise to help awaken you to your life’s purpose through “transcending our ego-based state of consciousness.” Now, admittedly President-elect Barack Obama also scored two books on the non-fiction list, but when you look at the other books, there is a clear theme. The book The Secret which we’ve mentioned in previous MfM’s promises to transform your weakness and suffering into strength and health using ‘secrets’ discovered by sages and seers. The book Three Cups of Tea looks at one man’s journey to “promote peace with books, not bombs” building schools in Afghanistan. And, of course, Randy Pausch’s book The Last Lecture (also mentioned in a previous MfM) is an inspirational look at life and living by the professor who died of cancer at an early age.
Just for the record, none of the best selling books made either of the lists of best books of 2008 compiled by Time Magazine and The New York Times. But then again, only three books made both lists. In the non-fiction category, The Forever War looking at “the gaping wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan” by reporter Dexter Filkins was recommended by both sets of editors. In the fiction category, the book 2666 by Robert Bolano who died in 2003 made both lists along with Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lapiri. Her book traces the life of Bengali families finding their way in America while Bolano’s book which tells the story of the killings of hundreds of women in a seedy Mexican town is described as “baffling, maddening, difficult, violent, obscene, over-indulgent, way too long” and the best book of 2008.
GADGETS, GIZMOS AND GAMES: Inspector Gadget would have loved 2008. Okay, as much as I thought the solar panel that fit on the top of the Prius Hybrid was way cool, this is a newsletter about media things. So, forget the solar panel and the electric powered motorcycle and the meticulously engineered Embody chair. Instead, let’s talk about Fast Company’s recommendations for the Panasonic P2 HD camera (which, BTW, the Grady College has bought), the ASUS EEE 9c1000 miniature netbook, the Sony XEL incredibly flat screen TV, the FLIP Mino mini-camera that is Facebook friendly, and the Lenovo Ideapad S10 computer. Or, instead, we could look at Wired.com’s counter gadgetry, which is similar but different. For example, instead of the solar panel for the Toyota Prius Hybrid, Wired likes the Honda Insight Hybrid. Or, to get a little fancier, instead of the Canon DSLR, the folks at Wired like Nikon D90. Instead of the Flip, Wired folks like the Kodak Z16 mini-cam. Instead of the Asus, the wired editors (doesn’t that sound like an oxymoron?) like the MSI Wind. BUT… BUT… if you really want to be cool in the gadget world, you need to get yourself a Chumby which does streaming video along with streaming music along with weather and news, all in a Wi-Fi connection that sits on your bedside table. (Side note -- This is the one I was going to buy for my son-in-law for Christmas but couldn’t find.)
Despite all the hoopla about Guitar Hero, the number one mobile game is the old standby Tetris with nearly double the share of revenue (7% vs. 3.6%), according to Nielsen. The rarely mentioned Bejeweled puzzle game is #2 (at 4%) ahead of GH. In fact most of the so-called mobile games are old standbys – Wheel of Fortune, PAC-MAN, The Oregon Trail, Ms. PAC-MAN and Tetris Mania. The popular TV show, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, also made it to the top ten list as a game. Now, here’s the kicker. The #1 PC Game title in the U.S. is World of Warcraft with slightly more than 7% of the total audience. No great surprise there, BUT the average player spends 671 minutes a week playing the game. That’s more than 11 hours a week. The next highest in terms of minutes played is Runescape (451 minutes – 7 ½ hours). What may be a predictor of the future, Runescape also scored as the number five top search item in the Yahoo top ten search list for 2008. As a side note, the Japanese manga (comic or cartoon) Naruto came in at #7 on the search list. And as a footnote to all this, a study by Deloitte titled State of the Media Democracy found that video games, once frowned upon by parents, are becoming ‘family time.’
THINGS THEY MISSED: Oddly I didn’t see as much as I would have expected in all the 2008 reviews about Widgets or Cloud Computing. As a personal aside, these are major developments (IMHO – In My Humble Opinion) that seeded this year and will blossom next. A development that may have come a little late to make the year in review articles possibly, but which I have to note: the announcement by the Christian Science Monitor that it will switch from print to a purely online edition coupled with the announcement by the Detroit newspapers that they are cutting their print versions to three days a week and replacing it with a digital version. But more on all that in next week’s edition of MFM in which we will look at the predictions and prognostications for 2009.
MAN IS A SOCIAL ANIMAL: Philosopher Aristotle would have found proof of that in 2008 as social networks metastasized around the world. The poster child of social networking is the not-even-two-years-old (March, 2006) micro-blogging site Twitter which, as Technology Review put it, has “spawned an ecosystem of competitors, knock-offs, plug-ins and add-ons.” Of course the giants are Facebook and MySpace with more than 100 Million unique users each month, but there are plenty of would-be giant killers out there as well. How about badoo and bebo, which both claim a worldwide focus; fark (talking about news that isn’t news) and newsvine (talking about news that people are talking about); iambored (which, well… you can guess); gather (for the NPR crowd) and habbo (for the teenagers). As fast as the Internet audience is growing (11% a year, according to comScore), social networking sites are growing even faster (25%) with some lesser known sites (hi5, Mixx and Yelp) growing faster still, according to web analysis site ignitesocialmedia.com.
And I’ve just been talking about the English sites so far. According to Google’s end of year Zeitgeist report which looks at the fastest growing search items in the U.S., and world, three of the top ten search items were Tuenti (a Spanish social networking site), Nasza Klasa (a Polish site) and Wer Kennt Wen (a German site). That may explain that while social networking site growth in the U.S. is a modest 9%, it is nearly triple that worldwide, at 25%. Here’s the fact that says a lot -- Of the nearly 861 Million Internet cited by comScore, two thirds (581 Million) are on social networking sites. There is even a website, ning.com, where you can create your own social network. Founders Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreesen were named to Fast Company’s list of the 12 most creative minds of 2008.
As a FOOTNOTE to all this, let me apologize to the numerous people who’ve invited me to join Plaxo, Pulse, Pownce and other social networking sites. I’m already on half a dozen and I can’t keep up with them.
MAN IS A POLITICAL ANIMAL: So says our good buddy Aristotle. In fact that was the original translation, until someone decided that politikos in Greek more closely translated to social in English than political. Anyway, I digress. In its end of the year review of searches, Yahoo! said it was “politics as unusual” that dominated much of the year’s search with political debates replacing the ‘rubbernecking at the scene of celebrity train wrecks” as a prime activity. (Isn’t it interesting that the train wreck analogy was used again?) Right up there with the celebrity searches were searches for Barack Obama, and most particularly, Sara Palin who made #4 on Ask.com’s list of ‘top celebrity baby mamas of 2008’, just behind Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba and Jamie Lynn Spears. Also on the political search hit list was the Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s favorite word, ‘maverick’ which topped the Dictionary.com list of top gainers, just ahead of socialism. The word also made Google’s list of campaign ‘buzzwords’ just behind Joe the Plumber and Jeremiah Wright. As a side note, the Google list of top sources for political news included SNL… as in Saturday Night Live, for what Google called its “up-to-the-minute spoofs of the campaign.”
As a FOOTNOTE, you may recall that the Pew Research Center survey showed that the Internet had emerged this year as the leading source for political and campaign news this year. In its latest report just released, the folks at Pew say the Internet has now officially taken the lead over newspapers as the main source of national and international news with two out of five (40%) saying they get most of such news from the Internet compared to a third (35%) who cite newspapers. Television is still the dominant source of such news at 70%, but in the under-30 crowd it’s a dead heat (59% to 59%).
And as a Footnote to the Footnote, the Pew report shows that three of the top 15 news stories followed “very closely” were political stories, the same number as natural disasters (Hurricanes Ike and Gustav and flooding in the Midwest), but way behind the eight stories about the economy which dominated the top 15 selections. And dominated not just by numbers but by percentages with 70% saying they followed the U.S. economy stories ‘very closely.’
ONLINE VIDEO: No cute headline here. Just one basic fact from a previous MfM, quoting a New York Times article. YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth last year as ALL providers did in the year 2000. And from another one – founder Chad Hurley says that YouTube receives more than ten hours of video every minute on its site. And the latest figures I saw, show YouTube averaging just over 5.3 Billion video streams a month. Add to that the Hulu’s, Yahoo’s, Joost’s, Veoh’s, Blinkxx’s, Flickr’s and so on and so on… and you get the picture. As a side note, Nielsen’s Three Screen Report makes the point that the average user spends 142 hours and 29 minutes watching TV in the home compared to two hours and 31 minutes watching video on the Internet BUT while there were 282 Million people watching TV in the home, there was a substantial 120 Million people watching video on the Internet. And as a side note to the side note, I should reference TVWeek’s Daisey Whitney’s ‘experiment’ in which she relied solely on the Internet for her video needs and, in the words of Maxwell Smart, loved every minute of it.
I WANT PLAYERS WHO ARE AGILE, MOBILE AND HOSTILE. Famed Alabama coach Bear Bryant said that about his players and now media mavens are saying that may apply to mobile video. Here is the interesting factoid from the Nielsen Three Screen report. Mobile subscribers with video capability actually spent more time watching video on their mobile devices than people spent watching video online – 3 hours and 37 minutes on a mobile phone versus 2 hours and 31 minutes watching video on the Internet. Again, that applies only to mobile subscribers, but it’s still interesting. Much of that mobile interactivity can be attributed to the growth of the iPhone and its various knock-off and copy cat versions, according to those same media mavens. But, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, anyone expecting 2008, or 2009 for that matter, to be the “year of the mobile” is mistaken. Another “but” – But by the year 2020, according to its survey of Internet experts, “the combination of portability and relative affordability will turn the cell phone into the leading Internet gateway.” The report, Future of the Internet III, says there will be about 4 Billion cell phones worldwide by the end of 2008, with up to 15% of them ‘Internet enabled.’ The report’s best quote comes from Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay, who says they will no longer be ‘cell phones’ but “simply lenses on the online world.”
I WANT MY STV: Replace the M with S, for sports, and you have a better picture of the most popular one-time telecasts in 2008. In fact you could make the letter an F – for Football. Five of the top ten telecasts were the Superbowl (43% of the audience) and post bowl coverage, along with the NFC playoff and championship and the AFC divisional playoff game. Four others were the Olympics which hovered around 18%. The one ringer? Can you guess? The Academy Awards (18.7).
More interesting for what it tells you is Nielsen’s list of the top ten “timeshifted” primetime TV programs. Topping the list was NBC favorite Heroes which gained an extra 35% in viewership when the 7-day viewing was added to the live ratings. It was followed by Fringe (26%), Lost (25%), Bones (21%), Grey’s Anatomy (20%), House (18%), Survivor: Gabon (18%), American Idol – Tuesday (13%), The Mentalist (13%) and American Idol – Wednesday (12%). Even more interesting (as I always say, at least to me) only four of the programs made Nielsen’s top ten for regularly scheduled programs: both American Idols (with a 15.5 and 15.3 rating), The Mentalist with a 10 rating and Survivor with a 7.6 rating, based on Live and ‘same day timeshifted’ viewing.
As a Footnote, American viewing of television increased yet again in 2008, another four minutes per household to 8 hours and 18 minutes a day, says Nielsen.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ: At least some people seem to believe that and if it’s true the theme for 2008 is that we are all looking for a greater purpose in life. That seems to be the message looking at the top seller list of non-fiction books from Nielsen. Self-described spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle claims two of the top spots with his books A New Earth and The Power of Now, which promise to help awaken you to your life’s purpose through “transcending our ego-based state of consciousness.” Now, admittedly President-elect Barack Obama also scored two books on the non-fiction list, but when you look at the other books, there is a clear theme. The book The Secret which we’ve mentioned in previous MfM’s promises to transform your weakness and suffering into strength and health using ‘secrets’ discovered by sages and seers. The book Three Cups of Tea looks at one man’s journey to “promote peace with books, not bombs” building schools in Afghanistan. And, of course, Randy Pausch’s book The Last Lecture (also mentioned in a previous MfM) is an inspirational look at life and living by the professor who died of cancer at an early age.
Just for the record, none of the best selling books made either of the lists of best books of 2008 compiled by Time Magazine and The New York Times. But then again, only three books made both lists. In the non-fiction category, The Forever War looking at “the gaping wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan” by reporter Dexter Filkins was recommended by both sets of editors. In the fiction category, the book 2666 by Robert Bolano who died in 2003 made both lists along with Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lapiri. Her book traces the life of Bengali families finding their way in America while Bolano’s book which tells the story of the killings of hundreds of women in a seedy Mexican town is described as “baffling, maddening, difficult, violent, obscene, over-indulgent, way too long” and the best book of 2008.
GADGETS, GIZMOS AND GAMES: Inspector Gadget would have loved 2008. Okay, as much as I thought the solar panel that fit on the top of the Prius Hybrid was way cool, this is a newsletter about media things. So, forget the solar panel and the electric powered motorcycle and the meticulously engineered Embody chair. Instead, let’s talk about Fast Company’s recommendations for the Panasonic P2 HD camera (which, BTW, the Grady College has bought), the ASUS EEE 9c1000 miniature netbook, the Sony XEL incredibly flat screen TV, the FLIP Mino mini-camera that is Facebook friendly, and the Lenovo Ideapad S10 computer. Or, instead, we could look at Wired.com’s counter gadgetry, which is similar but different. For example, instead of the solar panel for the Toyota Prius Hybrid, Wired likes the Honda Insight Hybrid. Or, to get a little fancier, instead of the Canon DSLR, the folks at Wired like Nikon D90. Instead of the Flip, Wired folks like the Kodak Z16 mini-cam. Instead of the Asus, the wired editors (doesn’t that sound like an oxymoron?) like the MSI Wind. BUT… BUT… if you really want to be cool in the gadget world, you need to get yourself a Chumby which does streaming video along with streaming music along with weather and news, all in a Wi-Fi connection that sits on your bedside table. (Side note -- This is the one I was going to buy for my son-in-law for Christmas but couldn’t find.)
Despite all the hoopla about Guitar Hero, the number one mobile game is the old standby Tetris with nearly double the share of revenue (7% vs. 3.6%), according to Nielsen. The rarely mentioned Bejeweled puzzle game is #2 (at 4%) ahead of GH. In fact most of the so-called mobile games are old standbys – Wheel of Fortune, PAC-MAN, The Oregon Trail, Ms. PAC-MAN and Tetris Mania. The popular TV show, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, also made it to the top ten list as a game. Now, here’s the kicker. The #1 PC Game title in the U.S. is World of Warcraft with slightly more than 7% of the total audience. No great surprise there, BUT the average player spends 671 minutes a week playing the game. That’s more than 11 hours a week. The next highest in terms of minutes played is Runescape (451 minutes – 7 ½ hours). What may be a predictor of the future, Runescape also scored as the number five top search item in the Yahoo top ten search list for 2008. As a side note, the Japanese manga (comic or cartoon) Naruto came in at #7 on the search list. And as a footnote to all this, a study by Deloitte titled State of the Media Democracy found that video games, once frowned upon by parents, are becoming ‘family time.’
THINGS THEY MISSED: Oddly I didn’t see as much as I would have expected in all the 2008 reviews about Widgets or Cloud Computing. As a personal aside, these are major developments (IMHO – In My Humble Opinion) that seeded this year and will blossom next. A development that may have come a little late to make the year in review articles possibly, but which I have to note: the announcement by the Christian Science Monitor that it will switch from print to a purely online edition coupled with the announcement by the Detroit newspapers that they are cutting their print versions to three days a week and replacing it with a digital version. But more on all that in next week’s edition of MFM in which we will look at the predictions and prognostications for 2009.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Message From Michael - December 1, 2008
WHEN LIFE-CASTING BECOMES DEATH-CASTING
FEAR RULES THE NEWSROOM
LIVING IN SPAMALOT
LICENSE TO BE A RICH IDIOT
DO IT YOURSELF IDIOCY
COCKTAIL CHATTER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
WHEN LIFE-CASTING BECOMES DEATH-CASTING: A 19-year-old Florida college student committed suicide online while upwards of 15-hundred people watched, some reacting in horror, some ‘egging’ him on, according to a variety of media reports. Abraham Briggs Jr., who went by the name Candyjunkie on the website Bodybuilding.com and Feels Like Ecstacy on Justin.TV, had threatened suicide in the past. He took a drug over-dose and left a suicide note which was a combination of two other suicide notes from other posts. When it became apparent he was not moving, a viewer from India urged the forum moderators to do something but was initially dismissed, and then contacted other viewers living in the States. Other viewers watching reacted with either OMG (Oh My God) or LOL (Laugh Out Loud). The video of the cops breaking into his room, along with his actual suicide note are still available online. The CEO of Justin.TV issued a statement that, “we regret that this has happened and respect the privacy of the broadcaster and his family during this time.” Police in the young man’s home town of Pembroke Pines are investigating the role of the website which calls itself a “life-casting” site.
The suicide is not the first on line. A British electrical engineer hanged himself on line last year. British newspapers report at least 17 deaths in Britain since 2001 involving chatrooms that give advice on committing suicide. There have been several ‘cybersuicide’ pacts formed, most notably in Japan where more than 140 deaths have been attributed to this phenomenon since 2004. A memorial site has been established on MySpace.com by friends of the young man. If you go to the Justin.tv website and enter suicide as a search item, you will find a series of videos, mostly animes, but including one in which a young man televises his call to a suicide hotline. If you go to MySpace.com and enter suicide as a search item, you’ll get nearly 3 Million returns, including Bludgeoned to Death by Suicide Silence and a suicide prevention website. Funeral services for Briggs were held this past Saturday.
As a footnote, I know this story has been reported fairly widely, but frankly it was too important not to report it again, with hopefully a few more details for you.
FEAR RULES THE NEWSROOM. So says former CBS anchorman Dan Rather in one of the many vignettes created for the IFC Media Project. It’s the fear of being beaten on a news story, the fear of loss of ratings, and the fear for one’s job. His brief interview is one of many examining the role of the media, along with a cartoon character called the “news junkie” who gives his spin on the media. The project offers a handbook on “decoding the media” with an in-depth look at terms, resources and milestones but also a somewhat asinine media quiz, loaded with pretty obvious, expected responses to prove that you’re ‘media savvy.’ But still an interesting site. Meanwhile, in a similar vein, The New York Times recently profiled a series of web-based, independent news sites doing investigative reporting. The article points out that these sites have arisen in several cities as newspapers and television stations have cut back on staff. Some of those cited include voiceofsandiego.com, MinnPost in the Twin Cites and St. Louis Beacon. Other sites without a specific geographic focus include ProPublica, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the three-decades-old Center for Investigative Reporting. All well worth a visit.
LIVING IN SPAMALOT. It seems we all do. According to a report by the BBC, spammers are turning a profit, even though they’re only getting one response for every 12.5 Million emails they send. Quoting a study by the University of California, Berkeley, the report says spammers churn out so many messages that they are still able to turn over “millions of pounds in profit every year.” The study investigators infiltrated a spam network called Storm and found that it had One Million machines under its control. The researchers sent about 469 million junk email messages, got a response of only 0.00001%, but still this came out to $100 a day – not the vast sums some people think but when the numbers are scaled higher, the profits increase as well. On a related note, China led the way but closely followed by the U.S. as the leading source of “attack traffic” on the Internet. Of the 179 countries involved, the two accounted for nearly half (45%) of all the attack traffic worldwide, according to the quarterly report State of the Internet by Akamai.
LICENSE TO BE A RICH IDIOT. A Statesville, North Carolina, man has just won $5,000 plus a trip for two to New York City for coming up with a new catch phrase (fan-taste-ic) and setting it to music for an ad for Crest toothpaste. But that’s nothing compared to Joel Moss Levinson, a college dropout whose declared major was medieval weaponry and who has won more than $200,000 creating “digital ditties” – home-made advertisements. His consumer generated pieces have generated a viral buzz for everything from Klondike ice cream bars to Little Penguin wine, to Delta Air Lines and even an Israeli advocacy group. Levinson who admits to having held, and lost, more than 40 jobs is quoted in The New York Times as saying, “it’s great to have a license to be an idiot.” Levinson is also one of the 1,773 entrants in what is becoming an annual event for chip-maker Doritos, looking for the ‘best’ consumer generated advertising spot to run during the SuperBowl. The winner gets $1 Million. Sorry, entries have closed, but you can see the entries at website crashthesuperbowl.com. You can enter the $25,000 contest by Truth North snacks which is looking for an inspirational life story which will be played during the Oscars in February of next year.
The point of all this is a claim by Current.TV founder Joel Hyatt that his video and TV site has landed multiple million-dollar deals based on non-professional commercials created by fans. He says surveys (un-named) show that viewers prefer consumer generated ads 9-to-1 over the Madison Avenue creations, according to website ReadWriteWeb.com. Meanwhile a senior executive with advertising giant Ogilvy says that while user generated content can be difficult to ‘monetize’ because of its edgy nature, it can be done. Gina de Mendonca told Beet.TV that UGC video mash ups and contests are especially appealing. But all is not wine and roses in the consumer generated world. AOL has announced it’s dropping its consumer generated content site, uncutvideo, on December 18th and turning over operations to Motionbox.com. I should also note previous MfM reports in which consumer generated reviews and comments, on websites and in blogs, did prove to be critical to users’ decision making. On a semi-related note, eMarketer reports that two thirds (67%) of the U.S. Internet population – 145 Million people – will be reading blogs at least monthly by 2012, and that one out of every six (16%) of the people on the Internet will actually have a blog.
DO IT YOURSELF IDIOCY. In a semi-related vein, several Internet websites have popped up, that promise to show you how to do virtually anything. The granddaddy site is learn2.com which focuses on how to get the most out of your Microsoft Office and Windows software, but others are decidedly more interesting and often risqué. Website Instructables.com recently announced its winning entries which included scavenging free electronics and food while helping the environment, renewing old children’s toys and how to convert an old cell phone (Nokia 6600 to be exact) into a “super gadget microcomputer.” Website Howcast.com shows you how to do simple magic tricks, to how play iPod videos on your TV, to how to break out of prison. Website WonderHowTo.com shows you how to curse in several languages, change the PCV valve in your car and how to turn old underpants into a bra. Website Tricklife.com shows you how to get over autumn depression, how to tie a surgeon’s knife and how to be a Ninja. Website 5Min.com shows you how to pick the perfect Christmas tree, how to prevent acne and what parents should know about giving their kids a debit card. Website VideoJug.com shows you how to play the Ukulele, how many fish you should have in your aquarium and how to give the ‘perfect hug.’ I am offering this all up this week as an alternative to my weekly Cocktail Chatter (since last week’s Message was all CC), but I warn you that these sites, while having many useful tips, can also be addictive time-eaters.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
FEAR RULES THE NEWSROOM
LIVING IN SPAMALOT
LICENSE TO BE A RICH IDIOT
DO IT YOURSELF IDIOCY
COCKTAIL CHATTER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
WHEN LIFE-CASTING BECOMES DEATH-CASTING: A 19-year-old Florida college student committed suicide online while upwards of 15-hundred people watched, some reacting in horror, some ‘egging’ him on, according to a variety of media reports. Abraham Briggs Jr., who went by the name Candyjunkie on the website Bodybuilding.com and Feels Like Ecstacy on Justin.TV, had threatened suicide in the past. He took a drug over-dose and left a suicide note which was a combination of two other suicide notes from other posts. When it became apparent he was not moving, a viewer from India urged the forum moderators to do something but was initially dismissed, and then contacted other viewers living in the States. Other viewers watching reacted with either OMG (Oh My God) or LOL (Laugh Out Loud). The video of the cops breaking into his room, along with his actual suicide note are still available online. The CEO of Justin.TV issued a statement that, “we regret that this has happened and respect the privacy of the broadcaster and his family during this time.” Police in the young man’s home town of Pembroke Pines are investigating the role of the website which calls itself a “life-casting” site.
The suicide is not the first on line. A British electrical engineer hanged himself on line last year. British newspapers report at least 17 deaths in Britain since 2001 involving chatrooms that give advice on committing suicide. There have been several ‘cybersuicide’ pacts formed, most notably in Japan where more than 140 deaths have been attributed to this phenomenon since 2004. A memorial site has been established on MySpace.com by friends of the young man. If you go to the Justin.tv website and enter suicide as a search item, you will find a series of videos, mostly animes, but including one in which a young man televises his call to a suicide hotline. If you go to MySpace.com and enter suicide as a search item, you’ll get nearly 3 Million returns, including Bludgeoned to Death by Suicide Silence and a suicide prevention website. Funeral services for Briggs were held this past Saturday.
As a footnote, I know this story has been reported fairly widely, but frankly it was too important not to report it again, with hopefully a few more details for you.
FEAR RULES THE NEWSROOM. So says former CBS anchorman Dan Rather in one of the many vignettes created for the IFC Media Project. It’s the fear of being beaten on a news story, the fear of loss of ratings, and the fear for one’s job. His brief interview is one of many examining the role of the media, along with a cartoon character called the “news junkie” who gives his spin on the media. The project offers a handbook on “decoding the media” with an in-depth look at terms, resources and milestones but also a somewhat asinine media quiz, loaded with pretty obvious, expected responses to prove that you’re ‘media savvy.’ But still an interesting site. Meanwhile, in a similar vein, The New York Times recently profiled a series of web-based, independent news sites doing investigative reporting. The article points out that these sites have arisen in several cities as newspapers and television stations have cut back on staff. Some of those cited include voiceofsandiego.com, MinnPost in the Twin Cites and St. Louis Beacon. Other sites without a specific geographic focus include ProPublica, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the three-decades-old Center for Investigative Reporting. All well worth a visit.
LIVING IN SPAMALOT. It seems we all do. According to a report by the BBC, spammers are turning a profit, even though they’re only getting one response for every 12.5 Million emails they send. Quoting a study by the University of California, Berkeley, the report says spammers churn out so many messages that they are still able to turn over “millions of pounds in profit every year.” The study investigators infiltrated a spam network called Storm and found that it had One Million machines under its control. The researchers sent about 469 million junk email messages, got a response of only 0.00001%, but still this came out to $100 a day – not the vast sums some people think but when the numbers are scaled higher, the profits increase as well. On a related note, China led the way but closely followed by the U.S. as the leading source of “attack traffic” on the Internet. Of the 179 countries involved, the two accounted for nearly half (45%) of all the attack traffic worldwide, according to the quarterly report State of the Internet by Akamai.
LICENSE TO BE A RICH IDIOT. A Statesville, North Carolina, man has just won $5,000 plus a trip for two to New York City for coming up with a new catch phrase (fan-taste-ic) and setting it to music for an ad for Crest toothpaste. But that’s nothing compared to Joel Moss Levinson, a college dropout whose declared major was medieval weaponry and who has won more than $200,000 creating “digital ditties” – home-made advertisements. His consumer generated pieces have generated a viral buzz for everything from Klondike ice cream bars to Little Penguin wine, to Delta Air Lines and even an Israeli advocacy group. Levinson who admits to having held, and lost, more than 40 jobs is quoted in The New York Times as saying, “it’s great to have a license to be an idiot.” Levinson is also one of the 1,773 entrants in what is becoming an annual event for chip-maker Doritos, looking for the ‘best’ consumer generated advertising spot to run during the SuperBowl. The winner gets $1 Million. Sorry, entries have closed, but you can see the entries at website crashthesuperbowl.com. You can enter the $25,000 contest by Truth North snacks which is looking for an inspirational life story which will be played during the Oscars in February of next year.
The point of all this is a claim by Current.TV founder Joel Hyatt that his video and TV site has landed multiple million-dollar deals based on non-professional commercials created by fans. He says surveys (un-named) show that viewers prefer consumer generated ads 9-to-1 over the Madison Avenue creations, according to website ReadWriteWeb.com. Meanwhile a senior executive with advertising giant Ogilvy says that while user generated content can be difficult to ‘monetize’ because of its edgy nature, it can be done. Gina de Mendonca told Beet.TV that UGC video mash ups and contests are especially appealing. But all is not wine and roses in the consumer generated world. AOL has announced it’s dropping its consumer generated content site, uncutvideo, on December 18th and turning over operations to Motionbox.com. I should also note previous MfM reports in which consumer generated reviews and comments, on websites and in blogs, did prove to be critical to users’ decision making. On a semi-related note, eMarketer reports that two thirds (67%) of the U.S. Internet population – 145 Million people – will be reading blogs at least monthly by 2012, and that one out of every six (16%) of the people on the Internet will actually have a blog.
DO IT YOURSELF IDIOCY. In a semi-related vein, several Internet websites have popped up, that promise to show you how to do virtually anything. The granddaddy site is learn2.com which focuses on how to get the most out of your Microsoft Office and Windows software, but others are decidedly more interesting and often risqué. Website Instructables.com recently announced its winning entries which included scavenging free electronics and food while helping the environment, renewing old children’s toys and how to convert an old cell phone (Nokia 6600 to be exact) into a “super gadget microcomputer.” Website Howcast.com shows you how to do simple magic tricks, to how play iPod videos on your TV, to how to break out of prison. Website WonderHowTo.com shows you how to curse in several languages, change the PCV valve in your car and how to turn old underpants into a bra. Website Tricklife.com shows you how to get over autumn depression, how to tie a surgeon’s knife and how to be a Ninja. Website 5Min.com shows you how to pick the perfect Christmas tree, how to prevent acne and what parents should know about giving their kids a debit card. Website VideoJug.com shows you how to play the Ukulele, how many fish you should have in your aquarium and how to give the ‘perfect hug.’ I am offering this all up this week as an alternative to my weekly Cocktail Chatter (since last week’s Message was all CC), but I warn you that these sites, while having many useful tips, can also be addictive time-eaters.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Message from Michael - November 24, 2008 - Cocktail Chatter
THE COCKTAIL CHATTER EDITION
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE COCKTAIL CHATTER EDITION: Or, put another way, the catch-up edition. The last two editions of MfM focused on the President-elect and media and technology. That didn’t leave a lot of room for the various facts and factoids, bits and pieces, trivia and not-so-trivia that come across my desk every day. So, here in no particular order, is a plethora of cocktail chatter points for you to use at your next holiday party.
Conservative policy group, the Leadership Institute, based in Arlington, Virginia, is offering courses to teach would-be pundits exactly that – how to be pundits. For anywhere from $75 for a lecture to $1,500 for three-hour one-on-one sessions, the New York Times reports, the young American Idol-esque commentators learn how to give soundbites “you can expect to hear on Hannity later.” Nearly 600 people have signed up so far this year, up from 461 in 2005.
Okay, one last election related note – the two ‘hot’ items online for the Presidential transition sound like a dietary recommendation for the over-80 crowd – prunes and plums. PrunesOnline is described as a “must have” for Presidential appointees. Known as the “prune book,” the listing of presidential appointment positions has been around since 1988. In a very similar vein is “The Plum Book” which also identifies key presidential appointment positions.
You remember in Forrest Gump when Tom Hanks was somehow inserted into an old scene involving L.B.J.; or have you seen those commercials in which a modern day person is inserted into an old movie. Well, a company which creates speaking avatars, Oddcast, has created a site, mymoviemoment.com, where you can do the same thing. It’s a little late for Halloween, but Oddcast has struck a deal with Twentieth Century Fox and MGM to allow you integrate your submitted photos into clips from some old B-grade horror movies. They reportedly have cut a deal to do a similar promotion for a selection of holiday films.
At the end of the other end of the spectrum is something called rotoscoping. This time it’s the reverse, with live video images turned into comic book-like animations. As reported in Advertising Age, the CMO of Charles Schwab says she’s seen nothing like it, when it comes to viewer response. It refers to a technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate, according to Wikipedia, so it may be composited over another background. In case you want to try it, there are a couple of websites providing software, including rotofactory.com and videomaker.com.
Okay, you’ve heard about behavioral targeting and contextual targeting and… maybe.. micro-targeting in which you can narrow the focus of your online ads. But now there’s ‘nano-targeting’ in which you can create a series of ads on Facebook that are targeted at specific individuals. Writer Sam Lessin shows how he did it in an article in Advertising Age. All he had to do was target an ad to “Wall Street Journal reporters who are 25, graduated from Harvard with a history degree and live in San Francisco.” The Facebook told him there were less than 20 people who fit that… and one of those 20 was his girlfriend.
The number one video of all time on YouTube is the Evolution of Dance, according to website ReadWriteWeb.com. Comedian Judson Laipply uploaded the video in April of 2006 and it has garnered 55.8 Million views and it has been ‘favorited’ 252,082 times, making it the most viewed and most favorited video of all time. I think I mentioned the video in a previous MfM but I didn’t know it was the #1 video. This is another of my – do yourself a favor and watch it – recs. As a side note, the website notes that seven of the top ten videos are music based and five of those are professional videos.
The U.S. Military has created its own video sharing site, after blocking YouTube, MySpace and even Twitter, because (and I am not making this up) “terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the U.S. as an operation tool.” The website is called TroopTube and was created by a Seattle-based video services company, Delve Networks. Troops can send videos to families at home and families can do the same. When I checked out the site, the most popular video (and I am not making this up either) was General David Petraeus’ message to the troops.
More than two-thirds (68%) of technology companies were slapped with a lawsuit last year, according to law firm Fulbright & Jaworski which annually surveys U.S. litigation trends. Nearly a third (30%) faced six or more law suits and nearly half (47%) reported spending over $1 Million a year on business disputes.
While nearly half of iPhone owners (43%) earn in excess of $100,000 a year, the fastest growth in iPhone buying is among those earning between $25,000 and $50,000 (48% growth) and $25,000 to $75,000 (46% growth). Senior analyst Jen Wu of comScore says the reason may be that these people are using the iPhone in lieu of multiple digital devices and services, “transforming the iPhone from a luxury item to a practical communication and entertainment tool.”
Silicon Valley company Better Place has announced a plan to develop an electric-car infrastructure for Australia, which will eventually eliminate the need for Australia to import any oil. Before you dismiss this completely, publication Technology Review notes that the company has already developed such an infrastructure for Israel and Denmark. The difference is those countries are small, and Australia is the same size as the U.S. The company says it plans to sell the cars the same way mobile-phone companies sell phones, with a subsidized low cost and a monthly plan.
From the New York Times business section, the world’s largest corporation is Exxon/Mobil, worth $375 Billion – more than General Electric, Bank of America and Google combined. Quoting a Bernstein Research analyst, the report also says Exxon has the highest per barrel profit ($17) of any oil company, including Chevron ($16), Shell ($14) and BP ($12).
The Society for New Communication Research has named Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams their Innovators of the year. The Visionary of the Year award went to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, co-authors of blogging website Groundswell which claims to tell you “how people with social technologies are changing everything.” A side note, they must be changing things awfully slowly – when I visited the site, the latest posting was a week old.
Actor George Clooney has been named “distinguished journalist in residence” at American University’s School of Communication. He is hosting the Reel Journalism series, looking at how journalism is portrayed in the movies.
Quinnipiac University whose polling institute has garnered it national fame has now garnered national notoriety for attempting to curb the activities of student journalists running an independent, online newspaper. First the university imposed a gag order on administrators, coaches and athletes to keep them from talking to the online reporters. Then it threatened to ban the student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The university since backed off after several national groups and national media criticized the school.
Gossip website JuicyCampus.com is also gaining national notoriety, with its publication of detailed rumors about sex, drugs and college life with contributors naming people anonymously. The rapidly growing year-old site has such gossip about 500 campuses nationwide. It also has spawned hate groups on Facebook, is under investigation by two state’s attorney generals and been voted to be banned by several student governments. Founder Matt Ivester told a group of Georgetown University who complained that the site has caused some students to drop out of school and raised fears about their job prospects that “they’re going to have to start developing a sense of humor,” according to a recent article in the Washington Post.
A website claiming to be the blog of a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain has generated lots of juicy gossip about the campaign and politics in general. It turns out though it’s the work of two guys trying to create a buzz for a movie they want, but they managed to fool MSNBC, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and The New Republic. The fake author of the website was supposedly one Martin Eisenstadt, a fellow at the fake Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. The two would-be film-makers say yes they want to make a movie but they also want to make the point that in the 24 hour news cycle there is a lot of shoddiness in the reporting. And although The New York Times and the Associated Press both say the main “victims” (please note, that’s in quotes) were bloggers, it was also a blogger who eventually tracked down the hoax.
China’s leading video site, Youku.com, has obtained licenses from Chinese producers to stream more than 1,000 TV series on its site. That converts to more than 40,000 episodes and 50,000 hours of content. But here’s the part I love, the site is partnering with website Sina.com to produce a Chinese-language version of Sofia’s Diary, a ‘confessional type’ web show that first appeared in Portugal in 2002, well before Lonelygirl15 hit it bit in the U.S. A look at the site, BTW, and you can see it is pretty slickly produced.
From the annual “Oh My Gosh” category of news, a thirty second spot on the SuperBowl has jumped from $2.7 Million for the Fox carried game last year to $3 Million for the NBC carried game this year.
A California-based company is offering single-serve wine called Volute that can be drunk anywhere, including no-glass zones like concerts, camping grounds and beaches. According to trend watching website, Springwise, the aluminum bottle is “eco-friendlier” than traditional glass bottles, according to the makers, because it can be recycled and is actually better than glass because it blocks UV rays.
Students at Rice University in Texas are trying to create a beer with the health advantages of red wine. The six undergrads say they are engineering a yeast that produces the antiaging chemical, resveratrol, found in red wine. The so-called “BioBeer” is an entrant in the International Genetic Engineering Machine competition held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Student Taylor Stevenson says, “it’s not going to prevent you from getting a beer gut from drinking too much beer or from getting cirrhosis of the liver, but people are already drinking beer, so why not make it a little healthier.”
LASTLY: A study reported by website TV by the Numbers says happy people watch less TV—48 minutes a day less, to be exact. That’s the difference between very happy and very unhappy people, according to the study published by Springer Science and Business Media. The study also notes that very happy people had sex ten times more than unhappy people, but I digress. Sociology professor John Robinson at the University of Maryland says his analysis of General Social Survey data shows that, “TV may provide viewers with short-run pleasure, but at the expense of long-term malaise.” The professor adds the ironic note that, “what viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, the shows I saw tonight were pretty good.” I should also footnote this by saying that my hoax antenna went up when I saw the name of the author. Professor John Robinson is also the name of one of the characters in the old TV series, Lost In Space. But I double-checked and yes indeed there is a real version as well.
DISCLAIMER: This is a longer than usual MfM, and I still didn’t get all my CC tidbits in. In any case, have a happy Thanksgiving and may the consulting gods help you cook your Turkey so it’s not too dry.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE COCKTAIL CHATTER EDITION: Or, put another way, the catch-up edition. The last two editions of MfM focused on the President-elect and media and technology. That didn’t leave a lot of room for the various facts and factoids, bits and pieces, trivia and not-so-trivia that come across my desk every day. So, here in no particular order, is a plethora of cocktail chatter points for you to use at your next holiday party.
Conservative policy group, the Leadership Institute, based in Arlington, Virginia, is offering courses to teach would-be pundits exactly that – how to be pundits. For anywhere from $75 for a lecture to $1,500 for three-hour one-on-one sessions, the New York Times reports, the young American Idol-esque commentators learn how to give soundbites “you can expect to hear on Hannity later.” Nearly 600 people have signed up so far this year, up from 461 in 2005.
Okay, one last election related note – the two ‘hot’ items online for the Presidential transition sound like a dietary recommendation for the over-80 crowd – prunes and plums. PrunesOnline is described as a “must have” for Presidential appointees. Known as the “prune book,” the listing of presidential appointment positions has been around since 1988. In a very similar vein is “The Plum Book” which also identifies key presidential appointment positions.
You remember in Forrest Gump when Tom Hanks was somehow inserted into an old scene involving L.B.J.; or have you seen those commercials in which a modern day person is inserted into an old movie. Well, a company which creates speaking avatars, Oddcast, has created a site, mymoviemoment.com, where you can do the same thing. It’s a little late for Halloween, but Oddcast has struck a deal with Twentieth Century Fox and MGM to allow you integrate your submitted photos into clips from some old B-grade horror movies. They reportedly have cut a deal to do a similar promotion for a selection of holiday films.
At the end of the other end of the spectrum is something called rotoscoping. This time it’s the reverse, with live video images turned into comic book-like animations. As reported in Advertising Age, the CMO of Charles Schwab says she’s seen nothing like it, when it comes to viewer response. It refers to a technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate, according to Wikipedia, so it may be composited over another background. In case you want to try it, there are a couple of websites providing software, including rotofactory.com and videomaker.com.
Okay, you’ve heard about behavioral targeting and contextual targeting and… maybe.. micro-targeting in which you can narrow the focus of your online ads. But now there’s ‘nano-targeting’ in which you can create a series of ads on Facebook that are targeted at specific individuals. Writer Sam Lessin shows how he did it in an article in Advertising Age. All he had to do was target an ad to “Wall Street Journal reporters who are 25, graduated from Harvard with a history degree and live in San Francisco.” The Facebook told him there were less than 20 people who fit that… and one of those 20 was his girlfriend.
The number one video of all time on YouTube is the Evolution of Dance, according to website ReadWriteWeb.com. Comedian Judson Laipply uploaded the video in April of 2006 and it has garnered 55.8 Million views and it has been ‘favorited’ 252,082 times, making it the most viewed and most favorited video of all time. I think I mentioned the video in a previous MfM but I didn’t know it was the #1 video. This is another of my – do yourself a favor and watch it – recs. As a side note, the website notes that seven of the top ten videos are music based and five of those are professional videos.
The U.S. Military has created its own video sharing site, after blocking YouTube, MySpace and even Twitter, because (and I am not making this up) “terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the U.S. as an operation tool.” The website is called TroopTube and was created by a Seattle-based video services company, Delve Networks. Troops can send videos to families at home and families can do the same. When I checked out the site, the most popular video (and I am not making this up either) was General David Petraeus’ message to the troops.
More than two-thirds (68%) of technology companies were slapped with a lawsuit last year, according to law firm Fulbright & Jaworski which annually surveys U.S. litigation trends. Nearly a third (30%) faced six or more law suits and nearly half (47%) reported spending over $1 Million a year on business disputes.
While nearly half of iPhone owners (43%) earn in excess of $100,000 a year, the fastest growth in iPhone buying is among those earning between $25,000 and $50,000 (48% growth) and $25,000 to $75,000 (46% growth). Senior analyst Jen Wu of comScore says the reason may be that these people are using the iPhone in lieu of multiple digital devices and services, “transforming the iPhone from a luxury item to a practical communication and entertainment tool.”
Silicon Valley company Better Place has announced a plan to develop an electric-car infrastructure for Australia, which will eventually eliminate the need for Australia to import any oil. Before you dismiss this completely, publication Technology Review notes that the company has already developed such an infrastructure for Israel and Denmark. The difference is those countries are small, and Australia is the same size as the U.S. The company says it plans to sell the cars the same way mobile-phone companies sell phones, with a subsidized low cost and a monthly plan.
From the New York Times business section, the world’s largest corporation is Exxon/Mobil, worth $375 Billion – more than General Electric, Bank of America and Google combined. Quoting a Bernstein Research analyst, the report also says Exxon has the highest per barrel profit ($17) of any oil company, including Chevron ($16), Shell ($14) and BP ($12).
The Society for New Communication Research has named Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams their Innovators of the year. The Visionary of the Year award went to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, co-authors of blogging website Groundswell which claims to tell you “how people with social technologies are changing everything.” A side note, they must be changing things awfully slowly – when I visited the site, the latest posting was a week old.
Actor George Clooney has been named “distinguished journalist in residence” at American University’s School of Communication. He is hosting the Reel Journalism series, looking at how journalism is portrayed in the movies.
Quinnipiac University whose polling institute has garnered it national fame has now garnered national notoriety for attempting to curb the activities of student journalists running an independent, online newspaper. First the university imposed a gag order on administrators, coaches and athletes to keep them from talking to the online reporters. Then it threatened to ban the student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The university since backed off after several national groups and national media criticized the school.
Gossip website JuicyCampus.com is also gaining national notoriety, with its publication of detailed rumors about sex, drugs and college life with contributors naming people anonymously. The rapidly growing year-old site has such gossip about 500 campuses nationwide. It also has spawned hate groups on Facebook, is under investigation by two state’s attorney generals and been voted to be banned by several student governments. Founder Matt Ivester told a group of Georgetown University who complained that the site has caused some students to drop out of school and raised fears about their job prospects that “they’re going to have to start developing a sense of humor,” according to a recent article in the Washington Post.
A website claiming to be the blog of a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain has generated lots of juicy gossip about the campaign and politics in general. It turns out though it’s the work of two guys trying to create a buzz for a movie they want, but they managed to fool MSNBC, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and The New Republic. The fake author of the website was supposedly one Martin Eisenstadt, a fellow at the fake Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. The two would-be film-makers say yes they want to make a movie but they also want to make the point that in the 24 hour news cycle there is a lot of shoddiness in the reporting. And although The New York Times and the Associated Press both say the main “victims” (please note, that’s in quotes) were bloggers, it was also a blogger who eventually tracked down the hoax.
China’s leading video site, Youku.com, has obtained licenses from Chinese producers to stream more than 1,000 TV series on its site. That converts to more than 40,000 episodes and 50,000 hours of content. But here’s the part I love, the site is partnering with website Sina.com to produce a Chinese-language version of Sofia’s Diary, a ‘confessional type’ web show that first appeared in Portugal in 2002, well before Lonelygirl15 hit it bit in the U.S. A look at the site, BTW, and you can see it is pretty slickly produced.
From the annual “Oh My Gosh” category of news, a thirty second spot on the SuperBowl has jumped from $2.7 Million for the Fox carried game last year to $3 Million for the NBC carried game this year.
A California-based company is offering single-serve wine called Volute that can be drunk anywhere, including no-glass zones like concerts, camping grounds and beaches. According to trend watching website, Springwise, the aluminum bottle is “eco-friendlier” than traditional glass bottles, according to the makers, because it can be recycled and is actually better than glass because it blocks UV rays.
Students at Rice University in Texas are trying to create a beer with the health advantages of red wine. The six undergrads say they are engineering a yeast that produces the antiaging chemical, resveratrol, found in red wine. The so-called “BioBeer” is an entrant in the International Genetic Engineering Machine competition held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Student Taylor Stevenson says, “it’s not going to prevent you from getting a beer gut from drinking too much beer or from getting cirrhosis of the liver, but people are already drinking beer, so why not make it a little healthier.”
LASTLY: A study reported by website TV by the Numbers says happy people watch less TV—48 minutes a day less, to be exact. That’s the difference between very happy and very unhappy people, according to the study published by Springer Science and Business Media. The study also notes that very happy people had sex ten times more than unhappy people, but I digress. Sociology professor John Robinson at the University of Maryland says his analysis of General Social Survey data shows that, “TV may provide viewers with short-run pleasure, but at the expense of long-term malaise.” The professor adds the ironic note that, “what viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, the shows I saw tonight were pretty good.” I should also footnote this by saying that my hoax antenna went up when I saw the name of the author. Professor John Robinson is also the name of one of the characters in the old TV series, Lost In Space. But I double-checked and yes indeed there is a real version as well.
DISCLAIMER: This is a longer than usual MfM, and I still didn’t get all my CC tidbits in. In any case, have a happy Thanksgiving and may the consulting gods help you cook your Turkey so it’s not too dry.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Message From Michael - November 17,2008
THE TECHNOLOGY PRESIDENT – ANOTHER SPECIAL REPORT
THE CRACKBERRY ADDICT
THE GREATEST DIGITAL GENERATION
THE NON-DIGITAL PART OF THE EQUATION
WI-FI ON STEROIDS
COCKTAIL CHATTER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE TECHNOLOGY PRESIDENT. No doubt by now you’ve heard the description; now it’s not just a matter of how he uses technology but how he lets, or helps, others use it. After seeing so many different references, I decided to do my own research and the result is this abbreviated special report.
THE CRACKBERRY ADDICT. That’s one of the descriptions of people who can’t seem to live without their PDA. Obama had a Blackberry strapped to his belt constantly during the campaign, although as the New York Times points out, as President he may have to give it up for security reasons. His campaign e-mail database of supporters numbers more than 3 Million, a database which may end up being relinquished to the Democratic National Committee. Of course his campaign had a barackobama.com website, but it was the social networking site, mybarackobama.com, which racked up the impressive numbers. There is an obamafortechnology.com website which further enlists technology on behalf of the president-elect as well as a barack20.com site which purports to show businesses how to use the 2.0 social media lessons from Obama’s campaign to “win friends and influence millions.” As readers of MfM will remember, the number of Obama followers and subscribers on MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter far outnumbered Sen. John McCain. Just for laughs, btw, I checked Obama on LinkedIn and found that we’re only two degrees apart. How, I don’t know. Then there is the president-elect’s website, change.gov, which is focused on the transition process even though there is an ‘official’ transition site titled presidentialtransition.gov, which has such useful information as a “survivor’s guide” in case you’re asked to be part of the new government. (No, I’m not kidding.) The change website has specifics about his agenda, including technology, and that’s where it gets particularly interesting.
THE GREATEST DIGITAL GENERATION: The agenda technology page starts off with a call to “let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age.” Although the ‘change’ website drops the campaign rhetoric which noted that American students finished behind 16 developing countries in math and science scores and 20 developed countries, the site says we need to prepare our children for the 21st Century by making math and science a national priority – by recruiting math and science graduates to the teaching profession and improving science and math education in K-12.
MORE SPECIFICALLY, for those in the media business, the Obama-Biden ticket comes out as a strong supporter of net neutrality, and an equally strong supporter for “encouraging diversity in media ownership.” In previous campaign statements, the campaign has criticized the FCC for promoting “consolidation over diversity.” The ‘change’ website also says the Obama administration will push for “true broadband” in every community by reforming the Universal Service Fund (which telecommunications companies contribute to, through an assessment fee) and better use of the wireless spectrum. In previous campaign statements, the campaign criticized the FCC for defining broadband “as an astonishingly low 200 Kbps” which the campaign says distorted federal policy and hamstrung efforts to broaden access. They also call for Public Media 2.0, or in more cutesy language – the sesame street of the digital age – the next generation of public broadcasting.
LESS SPECIFICALLY, but still interesting, the technology agenda emphasizes the need to protect the First Amendment while protecting children online. Again, while the website does not have details, previous statements refer to such groups as Common Sense Media which promotes “sanity not censorship.” Also, on the technology agenda, is a call for strengthening privacy protections in the digital age, holding government and businesses accountable for violations of privacy; and a call to create a ‘transparent and connected democracy’ – opening up government to its citizens through technology. In previous campaign statements, the Obama campaign criticized the Bush Administration “as one of the most secretive, closed administrations in American history.”
THE NON-DIGITAL PART OF THE EQUATION. It’s easy for us in the media to think of technology in terms of telecommunications, IT and new media, but the technology agenda also includes a reform of the patent process, to “protect legitimate rights while not stifling innovation and collaboration”; restoring scientific integrity to the White House, so that decisions are based on “the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on ideological predispositions”; investing in climate-friendly energy development and deployment; advancing biomedical research; and advancing stem cell research.
FINALLY, as most have heard, the president-elect plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer, although as CNet.com points out, the question is whether the position will be symbolic or one with actual power. And although some people talk about Google CEO Eric Schmidt as the choice, others point to LaunchBoxDigital founder and technology transition team member Julius Genachowski as a more likely choice. More pragmatically the president-elect has to name a new Federal Communications Commission chairman, and as TVWeek points out, the inauguration takes place January 20th, just 29 days before the February 17th digital switchover.
If you want to read more about the technology agenda of the Obama-Biden administration than this very abbreviated report provides, you can go to two websites: http://www.change.gov/agenda/technology_agenda OR http://www.docstoc.com/docs/201649/Barack-Obamas-technology-policy .
WI-FI ON STEROIDS. One of the other things that seems to have dominated the e-mails and newsletters I receive is the “discovery” of Wi-Max technology. So, again, a little research was in order. Like so many other ‘discoveries,’ it turns out that Wi-Max has been around for much longer than you would expect. First off, the headline. Wi-Fi is the wireless connection to digital content that allows you to sit at Starbucks, have a cup of overly-expensive coffee and surf the Internet. Technically it transmits, usually at 2.4 Ghz, and only has a range of 120 feet to 300 feet. Wi-Max also operates in the 2 to 11 Ghz range, up to 66 Ghz, and theoretically can transmit a whopping 70 Mbps up to 30 miles. It’s for that reason that many television stations are looking at Wi-Max as an alternative to microwave live shots. The reality is that the further the distance the higher the bit rate error. Okay, I know, this is way too much 4-1-1 on technology. I’m sorry, but one last note. The other technology you hear about is 3G Technology, which stands for Third Generation of mobile phone technology. Reference site Wikipedia says that 3G provides “a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency” giving you download speeds of 14.4 Mbps. Remember, Wi-Max can theoretically provide up to 70 Mbps.
Anyway, enough of the technical. This stuff is way above my pay grade. What I found interesting that this technology of the future has been around for nearly a decade. This probably tells you something – according to Wikipedia, the country of Pakistan has the largest fully functional network in the world. Iraq’s national telecom operator is launching that nation’s first Wi-Max Network. When the tsunami of December, 2004, practically destroyed all infrastructures in Indonesia, it was Wi-Max that provided the infrastructure connections. One of the reasons we in the States may have not heard so much about Wi-Max is that we have one of the lowest deployments of Wi-Max in the world – at 14 for North America, behind Asia and the Pacific at 26, Latin America at 22, Africa at 21, Europe at 21, Eastern Europe at 18 but ahead of the Middle East at 4, according to website telegeography.com. There are numerous websites about the technology, from wimax.com, to wimax360.com and wimaxforum.org. Bottomline: as this much more powerful technology becomes implemented in everything from iphones to computers and mp3 players, you will want to know about it, and now you do.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. Online classifieds website Craigslist has announced a deal in which it will crack down on advertising by prostitutes, sex massage and ‘boudoir’ photo services offered under its erotic listings. Anti-smoking groups are protesting a move by Phillip Morris USA to sell cigarettes in its Virginia Slim line of products in pink-colored, specially designed packs, designed to appeal to young women. Environmental activist group Greenpeace has produced a digitally altered advertisement showing President John F. Kennedy supposedly making a speech about global warming. The Federal Trade Commission has launched a website aimed at children, explaining things like target marketing. If you just said, ‘you’re kidding me,’ I agree, after looking at the site. Japan has one of the highest percentages (40%) of online population visiting music entertainment sites and the highest percentage of iTunes users of any country, according to comScore.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
THE CRACKBERRY ADDICT
THE GREATEST DIGITAL GENERATION
THE NON-DIGITAL PART OF THE EQUATION
WI-FI ON STEROIDS
COCKTAIL CHATTER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE TECHNOLOGY PRESIDENT. No doubt by now you’ve heard the description; now it’s not just a matter of how he uses technology but how he lets, or helps, others use it. After seeing so many different references, I decided to do my own research and the result is this abbreviated special report.
THE CRACKBERRY ADDICT. That’s one of the descriptions of people who can’t seem to live without their PDA. Obama had a Blackberry strapped to his belt constantly during the campaign, although as the New York Times points out, as President he may have to give it up for security reasons. His campaign e-mail database of supporters numbers more than 3 Million, a database which may end up being relinquished to the Democratic National Committee. Of course his campaign had a barackobama.com website, but it was the social networking site, mybarackobama.com, which racked up the impressive numbers. There is an obamafortechnology.com website which further enlists technology on behalf of the president-elect as well as a barack20.com site which purports to show businesses how to use the 2.0 social media lessons from Obama’s campaign to “win friends and influence millions.” As readers of MfM will remember, the number of Obama followers and subscribers on MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter far outnumbered Sen. John McCain. Just for laughs, btw, I checked Obama on LinkedIn and found that we’re only two degrees apart. How, I don’t know. Then there is the president-elect’s website, change.gov, which is focused on the transition process even though there is an ‘official’ transition site titled presidentialtransition.gov, which has such useful information as a “survivor’s guide” in case you’re asked to be part of the new government. (No, I’m not kidding.) The change website has specifics about his agenda, including technology, and that’s where it gets particularly interesting.
THE GREATEST DIGITAL GENERATION: The agenda technology page starts off with a call to “let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age.” Although the ‘change’ website drops the campaign rhetoric which noted that American students finished behind 16 developing countries in math and science scores and 20 developed countries, the site says we need to prepare our children for the 21st Century by making math and science a national priority – by recruiting math and science graduates to the teaching profession and improving science and math education in K-12.
MORE SPECIFICALLY, for those in the media business, the Obama-Biden ticket comes out as a strong supporter of net neutrality, and an equally strong supporter for “encouraging diversity in media ownership.” In previous campaign statements, the campaign has criticized the FCC for promoting “consolidation over diversity.” The ‘change’ website also says the Obama administration will push for “true broadband” in every community by reforming the Universal Service Fund (which telecommunications companies contribute to, through an assessment fee) and better use of the wireless spectrum. In previous campaign statements, the campaign criticized the FCC for defining broadband “as an astonishingly low 200 Kbps” which the campaign says distorted federal policy and hamstrung efforts to broaden access. They also call for Public Media 2.0, or in more cutesy language – the sesame street of the digital age – the next generation of public broadcasting.
LESS SPECIFICALLY, but still interesting, the technology agenda emphasizes the need to protect the First Amendment while protecting children online. Again, while the website does not have details, previous statements refer to such groups as Common Sense Media which promotes “sanity not censorship.” Also, on the technology agenda, is a call for strengthening privacy protections in the digital age, holding government and businesses accountable for violations of privacy; and a call to create a ‘transparent and connected democracy’ – opening up government to its citizens through technology. In previous campaign statements, the Obama campaign criticized the Bush Administration “as one of the most secretive, closed administrations in American history.”
THE NON-DIGITAL PART OF THE EQUATION. It’s easy for us in the media to think of technology in terms of telecommunications, IT and new media, but the technology agenda also includes a reform of the patent process, to “protect legitimate rights while not stifling innovation and collaboration”; restoring scientific integrity to the White House, so that decisions are based on “the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on ideological predispositions”; investing in climate-friendly energy development and deployment; advancing biomedical research; and advancing stem cell research.
FINALLY, as most have heard, the president-elect plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer, although as CNet.com points out, the question is whether the position will be symbolic or one with actual power. And although some people talk about Google CEO Eric Schmidt as the choice, others point to LaunchBoxDigital founder and technology transition team member Julius Genachowski as a more likely choice. More pragmatically the president-elect has to name a new Federal Communications Commission chairman, and as TVWeek points out, the inauguration takes place January 20th, just 29 days before the February 17th digital switchover.
If you want to read more about the technology agenda of the Obama-Biden administration than this very abbreviated report provides, you can go to two websites: http://www.change.gov/agenda/technology_agenda OR http://www.docstoc.com/docs/201649/Barack-Obamas-technology-policy .
WI-FI ON STEROIDS. One of the other things that seems to have dominated the e-mails and newsletters I receive is the “discovery” of Wi-Max technology. So, again, a little research was in order. Like so many other ‘discoveries,’ it turns out that Wi-Max has been around for much longer than you would expect. First off, the headline. Wi-Fi is the wireless connection to digital content that allows you to sit at Starbucks, have a cup of overly-expensive coffee and surf the Internet. Technically it transmits, usually at 2.4 Ghz, and only has a range of 120 feet to 300 feet. Wi-Max also operates in the 2 to 11 Ghz range, up to 66 Ghz, and theoretically can transmit a whopping 70 Mbps up to 30 miles. It’s for that reason that many television stations are looking at Wi-Max as an alternative to microwave live shots. The reality is that the further the distance the higher the bit rate error. Okay, I know, this is way too much 4-1-1 on technology. I’m sorry, but one last note. The other technology you hear about is 3G Technology, which stands for Third Generation of mobile phone technology. Reference site Wikipedia says that 3G provides “a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency” giving you download speeds of 14.4 Mbps. Remember, Wi-Max can theoretically provide up to 70 Mbps.
Anyway, enough of the technical. This stuff is way above my pay grade. What I found interesting that this technology of the future has been around for nearly a decade. This probably tells you something – according to Wikipedia, the country of Pakistan has the largest fully functional network in the world. Iraq’s national telecom operator is launching that nation’s first Wi-Max Network. When the tsunami of December, 2004, practically destroyed all infrastructures in Indonesia, it was Wi-Max that provided the infrastructure connections. One of the reasons we in the States may have not heard so much about Wi-Max is that we have one of the lowest deployments of Wi-Max in the world – at 14 for North America, behind Asia and the Pacific at 26, Latin America at 22, Africa at 21, Europe at 21, Eastern Europe at 18 but ahead of the Middle East at 4, according to website telegeography.com. There are numerous websites about the technology, from wimax.com, to wimax360.com and wimaxforum.org. Bottomline: as this much more powerful technology becomes implemented in everything from iphones to computers and mp3 players, you will want to know about it, and now you do.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. Online classifieds website Craigslist has announced a deal in which it will crack down on advertising by prostitutes, sex massage and ‘boudoir’ photo services offered under its erotic listings. Anti-smoking groups are protesting a move by Phillip Morris USA to sell cigarettes in its Virginia Slim line of products in pink-colored, specially designed packs, designed to appeal to young women. Environmental activist group Greenpeace has produced a digitally altered advertisement showing President John F. Kennedy supposedly making a speech about global warming. The Federal Trade Commission has launched a website aimed at children, explaining things like target marketing. If you just said, ‘you’re kidding me,’ I agree, after looking at the site. Japan has one of the highest percentages (40%) of online population visiting music entertainment sites and the highest percentage of iTunes users of any country, according to comScore.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Message From Michael - November 10, 2008
THE THREE SCREEN ELECTION – A SPECIAL REPORT
THE POLITICAL INTERNET TRAFFIC JAM
THE ELECTION NEWS VICTOR
THE ELECTION NEWS FUTURE
AN MFM FOLLOW-UP AND TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE
PAID ADVERTISEMENT – NEWS DIRECTOR
COCKTAIL CHATTER – ONLINE MURDER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE THREE SCREEN ELECTION. In this special edition of Message from Michael, we’re going to sum up some of the new media and mainstream media numbers from the campaign. I know you’ve already heard about this being the year of the Internet when it comes to politics, but this is really more of what I would call the three screen election, because the out-reach and the two-way conversation between the public and the politicians did reach across the TV screen, the computer screen and the hand-held screen.
THE POLITICAL INTERNET TRAFFIC JAM. The election of Sen. Barack Obama scored the highest per minute net usage worldwide of any news event since Internet backbone firm Akamai began monitoring such usage three years ago. Nearly 8.6 Million people hit the Internet every minute starting at 11 p.m. election night. The next highest event was the elimination of the U.S. in the World Cup finals by Ghana in June of 2006 (7.2 Million). Sporting events took nine of the top 15 net usage events. Even the next day’s post-election usage scored high (# 7 in ranking) at 4,885,406 users per minute – just barely ahead of the 8th highest event – the death of Anna Nicole Smith (4,885,065). The post election day resignation of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on November 8th, 2006, came in 15th. And just in case you’re curious – the other non-sporting events that generated heavy traffic, besides Anna Nicole Smith’s death, were Cory Lidle’s plane crashing into the New York apartment building on October 11, 2006 and the deadline shootings at Virginia Tech on October 17, 2007.
Former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi who helped start the Internet political machine says the Internet in 2008 allowed both campaigns to create the “greatest get-out-the-vote campaign in U.S. History.” Although both candidates used the Internet, Obama’s campaign is credited with meshing the social networking aspects of the Internet better. For example, according to senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research, Obama had four times as many YouTube subscribers as Sen. John McCain, four times as many Facebook subscribers, four times as many MySpace subscribers and 240 times more followers on Twitter (112,474 followers compared to McCain’s 4,603). It’s also probably indicative of the youth support that the number of Facebook subscribers for Obama (2,379,102) is nearly three times the number of his MySpace subscribers (833,161). And in the same vein, and not surprisingly, in a survey by micro-blogging site Twitter, Obama out-polled McCain six to one. Interestingly, at least to me, people are still twittering on the election.twitter.com site, and for all four candidates.
And although Obama also dominated the online video (the “yes, we can” video had 10 Million views), according to website UTubeblog, it was Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin who really scored. Her first interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson scored as many viewers online as it did on TV while the Tina Fey portrayal of her actually scored more viewing on-line than it did on TV. Indicative of the Obama campaign’s multi-platform out-reach, they even placed ads in video games like Nascar 09, NHL 09, NFL Tour and Need for Speed. Not to be out-done, the McCain campaign established a campaign headquarters on the Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life where people could hang out at the – Straight Talk Café.
THE ELECTION NEWS VICTOR. Before the pundits officially declare this the Internet election, a note of reality – three quarters of the public (72%) still cite TV as their primary source for election news, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. That number is more than double the number who cite the Internet (33%). BUT – and it’s a big BUT – the percentage citing the Internet either first or second in terms of campaign news has tripled from the last presidential election when only one in ten (10%) cited the Internet. The Internet has also officially over-taken newspapers as the campaign news source. In 2004, one in four (28%) cited newspapers – a number that stayed basically flat in this presidential election year (29%), while, as I noted, the Internet has climbed past newspapers with 33%. And before television people gloat, the percentage citing TV is down four points election to election (76% to 72%). Not surprisingly, the Pew study shows younger Americans cite the Internet in much greater numbers with nearly half (49%) calling it as a main source of election. That’s three times newspapers in that group (17%) and not nearly as far behind television (61%). Even less surprising, the study says the audiences for major cable news networks are highly partisan while the audiences for network TV and the Internet are more in line with the general public.
THE ELECTION NEWS FUTURE. According to an article in MediaWeek by reporter Mike Shields, the intense interest in this election may signal a shift of people becoming “online-news junkies” for good. As support for that, he notes that MSNBC.com has added more than 13 Million unique users, pushing its site to 43.2 Million total users. Citing figures from Nielsen Online, Yahoo News is up 5.7 Million uniques to 38 Million while CNN is up 6.4 Million users to 37 Million. Left-leaning political website HuffingtonPost.com saw its user base jump 457% to 7.5 Million uniques. Shields talked to several of the website chiefs who admit that while many of the newcomers are “light users” who come aboard only during special events, but they expect their numbers to still stay high. The trick is to use some of the strategies developed in the election coverage for their non-political news stories.
AN MFM FOLLOW-UP. The Federal Communications Commission has approved the use of the so-called white spaces in the broadcast spectrum (mentioned in a previous MfM headlined “Knights in White Spaces”), despite the opposition of broadcast groups. The commission also approved Verizon’s acquisition of Alltell, making it the largest wireless carrier in the U.S., and SprintNextel was given the go-ahead to buy Clearwire. That last part all sounds like just so much business news, but the significance of this is that it clears the way for the creation of Wi-Max, a substantially more robust wireless transmission system. We’ll talk about that more in a future MfM. In a previous MfM, headlined, “Hey, You, Get On To My Cloud,” we talked about the cloud computing future. Microsoft has unveiled a new Windows program called Azure which it says is a cloud computing system for the Internet, allowing developers to build applications on line in real time using existing Windows languages. Okay, you know the real reason I did this follow-up. I just had to use those headlines again.
PAID ADVERTISEMENT – NEWS DIRECTOR. Hey, cool, my first paid advertisement on the MfM newsletter… except I had to pay for it myself. Oh, well. Anyway, here it is: WNEG-TV, the television station recently acquired by the University of Georgia, is looking for a news director. The station is one of only three university-owned commercial television operations in the country. We’re looking for someone who understands the realities of small market television (and all that implies) but also understands the vision that comes with a university-owned operation (and all that implies). Our core product is news, delivered primarily by television but eventually through multiple delivery systems. The small professional staff is supplemented by university students, but will eventually include trained citizen media and user generated content. The position will initially be based in Toccoa, Georgia, but moved to Athens within a year. An unusual opportunity and challenge for the right person. Contact Michael Castengera at mcasteng@uga.edu.
TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE: Both of these items have gotten a lot of press, but I still have to mention them. Maybe we’ll talk about them more later. The Christian Science Monitor has announced that it will stop printing a weekday paper version of the century-old newspaper in April and only publish online. The paper’s editor, John Yemma, says the newspaper has the “luxury and opportunity” to do something every newspaper will have to do in five years time. And CNN has announced that it is launching a wire service in direct competition to the Associated Press and is courting major newspapers. The A.P. has been under fire recently for a rate change, with several major newspapers dropping the service.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. According to attorney Michael C. Dorf at Findlaw.com, when Barack Obama was born in 1961, twenty-one American states still banned inter-racial marriages. A little perspective on the online video phenomenon: the head of MySpace’s TV content and marketing area says two-thirds of the videos viewed are on viewer profiles. In other words, friends telling friends about stuff they’ve put on their space. One of the princesses of those online videos is Justine Ezarik who may not be someone you want to know but someone you should know about. She may be the latest online phenomenon. Her video about ordering a cheeseburger has garnered 600,000 views while her video complaining about her iPhone bill has generated 1,336,000 views (let me put that in words – more than one million, three hundred and thirty six thousand views). And, finally, a person you probably don’t want to know –a 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher has been arrested for murdering her online husband. Let me be clear. This is her avatar husband, her virtual husband in the virtual world Maple Story, NOT a ‘real’ husband. Let me also be clear. She wasn’t arrested for murder. She was actually arrested for illegally accessing a computer. But the fact remains that she became so upset with her 33-year-old office worker avatar husband that she… well, killed him after what The Times of London called “an abrupt but messy online divorce.”
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
THE POLITICAL INTERNET TRAFFIC JAM
THE ELECTION NEWS VICTOR
THE ELECTION NEWS FUTURE
AN MFM FOLLOW-UP AND TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE
PAID ADVERTISEMENT – NEWS DIRECTOR
COCKTAIL CHATTER – ONLINE MURDER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE THREE SCREEN ELECTION. In this special edition of Message from Michael, we’re going to sum up some of the new media and mainstream media numbers from the campaign. I know you’ve already heard about this being the year of the Internet when it comes to politics, but this is really more of what I would call the three screen election, because the out-reach and the two-way conversation between the public and the politicians did reach across the TV screen, the computer screen and the hand-held screen.
THE POLITICAL INTERNET TRAFFIC JAM. The election of Sen. Barack Obama scored the highest per minute net usage worldwide of any news event since Internet backbone firm Akamai began monitoring such usage three years ago. Nearly 8.6 Million people hit the Internet every minute starting at 11 p.m. election night. The next highest event was the elimination of the U.S. in the World Cup finals by Ghana in June of 2006 (7.2 Million). Sporting events took nine of the top 15 net usage events. Even the next day’s post-election usage scored high (# 7 in ranking) at 4,885,406 users per minute – just barely ahead of the 8th highest event – the death of Anna Nicole Smith (4,885,065). The post election day resignation of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on November 8th, 2006, came in 15th. And just in case you’re curious – the other non-sporting events that generated heavy traffic, besides Anna Nicole Smith’s death, were Cory Lidle’s plane crashing into the New York apartment building on October 11, 2006 and the deadline shootings at Virginia Tech on October 17, 2007.
Former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi who helped start the Internet political machine says the Internet in 2008 allowed both campaigns to create the “greatest get-out-the-vote campaign in U.S. History.” Although both candidates used the Internet, Obama’s campaign is credited with meshing the social networking aspects of the Internet better. For example, according to senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research, Obama had four times as many YouTube subscribers as Sen. John McCain, four times as many Facebook subscribers, four times as many MySpace subscribers and 240 times more followers on Twitter (112,474 followers compared to McCain’s 4,603). It’s also probably indicative of the youth support that the number of Facebook subscribers for Obama (2,379,102) is nearly three times the number of his MySpace subscribers (833,161). And in the same vein, and not surprisingly, in a survey by micro-blogging site Twitter, Obama out-polled McCain six to one. Interestingly, at least to me, people are still twittering on the election.twitter.com site, and for all four candidates.
And although Obama also dominated the online video (the “yes, we can” video had 10 Million views), according to website UTubeblog, it was Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin who really scored. Her first interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson scored as many viewers online as it did on TV while the Tina Fey portrayal of her actually scored more viewing on-line than it did on TV. Indicative of the Obama campaign’s multi-platform out-reach, they even placed ads in video games like Nascar 09, NHL 09, NFL Tour and Need for Speed. Not to be out-done, the McCain campaign established a campaign headquarters on the Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life where people could hang out at the – Straight Talk Café.
THE ELECTION NEWS VICTOR. Before the pundits officially declare this the Internet election, a note of reality – three quarters of the public (72%) still cite TV as their primary source for election news, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. That number is more than double the number who cite the Internet (33%). BUT – and it’s a big BUT – the percentage citing the Internet either first or second in terms of campaign news has tripled from the last presidential election when only one in ten (10%) cited the Internet. The Internet has also officially over-taken newspapers as the campaign news source. In 2004, one in four (28%) cited newspapers – a number that stayed basically flat in this presidential election year (29%), while, as I noted, the Internet has climbed past newspapers with 33%. And before television people gloat, the percentage citing TV is down four points election to election (76% to 72%). Not surprisingly, the Pew study shows younger Americans cite the Internet in much greater numbers with nearly half (49%) calling it as a main source of election. That’s three times newspapers in that group (17%) and not nearly as far behind television (61%). Even less surprising, the study says the audiences for major cable news networks are highly partisan while the audiences for network TV and the Internet are more in line with the general public.
THE ELECTION NEWS FUTURE. According to an article in MediaWeek by reporter Mike Shields, the intense interest in this election may signal a shift of people becoming “online-news junkies” for good. As support for that, he notes that MSNBC.com has added more than 13 Million unique users, pushing its site to 43.2 Million total users. Citing figures from Nielsen Online, Yahoo News is up 5.7 Million uniques to 38 Million while CNN is up 6.4 Million users to 37 Million. Left-leaning political website HuffingtonPost.com saw its user base jump 457% to 7.5 Million uniques. Shields talked to several of the website chiefs who admit that while many of the newcomers are “light users” who come aboard only during special events, but they expect their numbers to still stay high. The trick is to use some of the strategies developed in the election coverage for their non-political news stories.
AN MFM FOLLOW-UP. The Federal Communications Commission has approved the use of the so-called white spaces in the broadcast spectrum (mentioned in a previous MfM headlined “Knights in White Spaces”), despite the opposition of broadcast groups. The commission also approved Verizon’s acquisition of Alltell, making it the largest wireless carrier in the U.S., and SprintNextel was given the go-ahead to buy Clearwire. That last part all sounds like just so much business news, but the significance of this is that it clears the way for the creation of Wi-Max, a substantially more robust wireless transmission system. We’ll talk about that more in a future MfM. In a previous MfM, headlined, “Hey, You, Get On To My Cloud,” we talked about the cloud computing future. Microsoft has unveiled a new Windows program called Azure which it says is a cloud computing system for the Internet, allowing developers to build applications on line in real time using existing Windows languages. Okay, you know the real reason I did this follow-up. I just had to use those headlines again.
PAID ADVERTISEMENT – NEWS DIRECTOR. Hey, cool, my first paid advertisement on the MfM newsletter… except I had to pay for it myself. Oh, well. Anyway, here it is: WNEG-TV, the television station recently acquired by the University of Georgia, is looking for a news director. The station is one of only three university-owned commercial television operations in the country. We’re looking for someone who understands the realities of small market television (and all that implies) but also understands the vision that comes with a university-owned operation (and all that implies). Our core product is news, delivered primarily by television but eventually through multiple delivery systems. The small professional staff is supplemented by university students, but will eventually include trained citizen media and user generated content. The position will initially be based in Toccoa, Georgia, but moved to Athens within a year. An unusual opportunity and challenge for the right person. Contact Michael Castengera at mcasteng@uga.edu.
TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE: Both of these items have gotten a lot of press, but I still have to mention them. Maybe we’ll talk about them more later. The Christian Science Monitor has announced that it will stop printing a weekday paper version of the century-old newspaper in April and only publish online. The paper’s editor, John Yemma, says the newspaper has the “luxury and opportunity” to do something every newspaper will have to do in five years time. And CNN has announced that it is launching a wire service in direct competition to the Associated Press and is courting major newspapers. The A.P. has been under fire recently for a rate change, with several major newspapers dropping the service.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. According to attorney Michael C. Dorf at Findlaw.com, when Barack Obama was born in 1961, twenty-one American states still banned inter-racial marriages. A little perspective on the online video phenomenon: the head of MySpace’s TV content and marketing area says two-thirds of the videos viewed are on viewer profiles. In other words, friends telling friends about stuff they’ve put on their space. One of the princesses of those online videos is Justine Ezarik who may not be someone you want to know but someone you should know about. She may be the latest online phenomenon. Her video about ordering a cheeseburger has garnered 600,000 views while her video complaining about her iPhone bill has generated 1,336,000 views (let me put that in words – more than one million, three hundred and thirty six thousand views). And, finally, a person you probably don’t want to know –a 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher has been arrested for murdering her online husband. Let me be clear. This is her avatar husband, her virtual husband in the virtual world Maple Story, NOT a ‘real’ husband. Let me also be clear. She wasn’t arrested for murder. She was actually arrested for illegally accessing a computer. But the fact remains that she became so upset with her 33-year-old office worker avatar husband that she… well, killed him after what The Times of London called “an abrupt but messy online divorce.”
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Message from Michael -- October 27, 2008
HEY, YOU, GET ONTO MY CLOUD
KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES
OUTSOURCING THE NEWS
HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS?
COCKTAIL CHATTER – FOR WRITERS
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
HEY, YOU, GET ONTO MY CLOUD: It seems that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is singing his own variation of the Mick Jagger hit, along with Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and Google’s Eric Schmidt as they all battle like World War I fighter pilots in the clouds of computing. Once known as grid computing, utility computing or distributed computing, the much sexier sounding “cloud computing” is being heralded as the biggest thing since the Internet started. We’ve talked about it in previous MfM’s, but the difference is that this week Microsoft is jumping into the fray with a vengeance at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. As usual Microsoft is late getting into the field but as always Microsoft is raising the stakes dramatically. Also, next month the first International Cloud Computing Conference will be held in San Jose. Sys-Con, which focuses on i-Technology media and actually produces a cloud computing journal, will host a cloud computing ‘boot camp.’ It probably tells you something that although there is agreement that cloud computing represents “an infrastructural paradigm shift,” there is no agreement on an exact definition. My untutored definition is that all your documents, all your storage, all your software, even all your applications are provided through a massive system of inter-connected servers so that you are no longer restricted by the size or speed of your computer. Amazon has its own version, EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which provides “resizable compute capacity in the cloud,” making web-scale computing easier for developers. Earlier this year, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Yahoo joined forces with three international research institutions to develop six data centers to test the stability and security of cloud computing. And as noted before, Google is already providing a cloud of apps online which runs on an estimated 100,000 nodes – a fancy term for servers -- although the recent 24-hour outage of Google’s Gmail system has raised questions about just how reliable cloud computing can be.
If you want to follow Microsoft’s foray into the field, go to website microsoftpdc.com; if you want to follow the computing conference, go to cloudcomputingexpo.com. And if you just want to keep up with the concept, go to cloudcomputing.sys-con.com.
KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES: Okay, I know I’m pushing my luck with these headline variations of rock and roll hits. But like the knights of olde, TV and Internet groups are jousting over what to do with the so-called “white spaces” which are the unused radio waves in the VHF and UHF band of television transmission. On this issue at least, Microsoft, Google, HP, and Intel are all on the same side. They say they can use the white space to deliver high speed wireless broadband internet access, with speeds anywhere from 10Mbytes to 50 and 100 Mbytes, which is much powerful than the Wi-Fi spectrum. On the other side are all the major networks and the National Association of Broadcasters. They say that the use of the white spaces in the signals will interfere with television broadcasts if unlicensed devices operate in the same spectrum. Both sides have formed groups with cutesy, catchy names. The broadcasters have formed The Association for Maximum Service Television while the Internet groups have formed the Wireless Innovation Alliance. The Federal Communications Commission Office of Engineering and Technology submitted a report a year ago that said the devices did not reliably detect the presence of television transmission and so therefore could not be relied upon. But this month the same office issued another report that “tentatively concludes… that… AWS-3 devices could operate at a power level of up to 23 dBm/MHz equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) and with out-of-band emissions (OOBE) attenuated… without a significant risk of harmful interference.” Don’t you love it when I talk like this? It just goes to show you the level of technical detail that goes into these arguments. It may sound esoteric, but it isn’t. This is going to be the next ‘net neutrality’ debate that you will be hearing more and more about.
Side Note: Another group that you may never have heard of, but that directly affects you (at least it does, if you listen to Internet Radio), is SoundExchange. It collects the fees for the use of the different recording labels’ music. The group had applied to the federal Copyright Royalty Board to set royalty fees at a rate that many Internet radio operations said would put them out of business. Now, Congress has stepped in, passing the Webcaster Settlement Act to allow radio webcasters to negotiate lower royalty fee.
OUTSOURCING THE NEWS: The head of a major American newspaper group, who is also chairman of the Associated Press, says newspaper publishers should look at outsourcing news, possibly overseas. The CEO of Media News Group which publishes 52 newspapers says most of the preproduction work for its newspapers in California is already done in India, but now he says the group is looking at creating one “media desk” for all its newspapers and even possibly locating it “offshore.” As reported in USA Today, CEO Dean Singleton who also chairs the A.P. says no final decision has been made about outsourcing editorial functions, but they were looking at consolidating all editing and design. Regular readers of MfM will remember that an online news operation in California, pasadenanow.com, has outsourced its news, by having people in India write stories based on webcasts of city council meetings and information provided by ‘citizen volunteers.’ The proposal is obviously a response to the troubled economic times, which the former executive editor of The Washington Post says could mean local television news will disappear as fast, or faster, than local newspapers. Talking to the Cronkite News Service, former editor Len Downie Jr. says newspapers may win out on the rapidly growing Web with their growing use of video for the simple reason that newspapers can out-gun local television. For example, the Post has around 100 reporters covering the Washington area while the largest TV station in the market has, at most, a dozen reporters. He says that while newspapers are being squeezed, local television is being squeezed even more.
HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS? Pretty bad if you believe the scoring on media website TVSpy.com. Its offspring newsletter, Shoptalk, ran an article listing the top ten schools based on a poll of its readers. They were: Columbia, Northwestern, UNC-Chapel Hill, Missouri, Syracuse, Indiana, California, Illinois, Maryland (Philip Merrill College), Ohio. Curious I went to the site to see the actual numbers. On a scale of 0 to 100, the top ranked school, Columbia, got a whopping 12. Yes, 12. Number 2, Northwestern, got a 6. Even more interesting, of the 16 schools listed, only four got positive grades; the other 12 were in the negative column. And I thought I was a tough grader! A sampling of others: Syracuse (-1), UNC and the Cronkite School at Arizona (-4), Ohio (-7), California (-8). The lowest scores: Montana (-37), Nevada (-38), and lowest scorer, Michigan (-43), which may be some consolation to football rival Michigan (-15). It’s not much consolation to us at the Grady College/ University of Georgia that football rival Florida also was in the negative column (-18), since we weren’t even on the list. I should note the grades vary daily as people vote, but the overwhelming theme remains the same – three quarters of the schools got negative grades. So, the obvious question is – why. And the reader with the best answer to that question will get a free subscription to Message from Michael. Oh, never mind, it’s already free.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. The creator of Harry Potter and the one-time single mother on welfare, J.K. Rowling, is the best paid author in the world with a ‘jaw-dropping’ $300 Million, according to Forbes magazine. The money drops dramatically for second place winner James Patterson but still isn’t too shabby at $50 Million. The ‘king of horror’ Stephen King came in third with $45 Million, followed by the master of the political thriller, Tom Clancy ($35 Million) and the doyenne of romance novels, Danielle Steel ($30 Million.) The rest of the top ten list includes John Grisham and Dean Koontz (both tied at $25 Million) followed by -- as Forbes puts it, thanks to a little Oprah magic -- Ken Follett ($20 Million), Janet Evanovich ($17 Million) and Nicholas Sparks ($16 Million). The winner of this year’s Writer’s Digest Best Writer’s Website is claudialuiz.com, so named of course for its creator, Claudia Luiz, a writer, psychoanalyst, and mother of two who does a column for her hometown newspaper in Norwood, Massachusetts. And as long as I’m on a writing kick, a reminder that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which you have one month to write a complete novel, kicks off November 1st.
Apropos of nothing in particular, except that I found it interesting… the Central Intelligence Agency took out a full-page ad in the New York Times magazine. In a special advertising section on diversity, the agency advertises for people who can “make a world of difference” working for the national clandestine service.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES
OUTSOURCING THE NEWS
HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS?
COCKTAIL CHATTER – FOR WRITERS
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HEY, YOU, GET ONTO MY CLOUD: It seems that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is singing his own variation of the Mick Jagger hit, along with Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and Google’s Eric Schmidt as they all battle like World War I fighter pilots in the clouds of computing. Once known as grid computing, utility computing or distributed computing, the much sexier sounding “cloud computing” is being heralded as the biggest thing since the Internet started. We’ve talked about it in previous MfM’s, but the difference is that this week Microsoft is jumping into the fray with a vengeance at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. As usual Microsoft is late getting into the field but as always Microsoft is raising the stakes dramatically. Also, next month the first International Cloud Computing Conference will be held in San Jose. Sys-Con, which focuses on i-Technology media and actually produces a cloud computing journal, will host a cloud computing ‘boot camp.’ It probably tells you something that although there is agreement that cloud computing represents “an infrastructural paradigm shift,” there is no agreement on an exact definition. My untutored definition is that all your documents, all your storage, all your software, even all your applications are provided through a massive system of inter-connected servers so that you are no longer restricted by the size or speed of your computer. Amazon has its own version, EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which provides “resizable compute capacity in the cloud,” making web-scale computing easier for developers. Earlier this year, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Yahoo joined forces with three international research institutions to develop six data centers to test the stability and security of cloud computing. And as noted before, Google is already providing a cloud of apps online which runs on an estimated 100,000 nodes – a fancy term for servers -- although the recent 24-hour outage of Google’s Gmail system has raised questions about just how reliable cloud computing can be.
If you want to follow Microsoft’s foray into the field, go to website microsoftpdc.com; if you want to follow the computing conference, go to cloudcomputingexpo.com. And if you just want to keep up with the concept, go to cloudcomputing.sys-con.com.
KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES: Okay, I know I’m pushing my luck with these headline variations of rock and roll hits. But like the knights of olde, TV and Internet groups are jousting over what to do with the so-called “white spaces” which are the unused radio waves in the VHF and UHF band of television transmission. On this issue at least, Microsoft, Google, HP, and Intel are all on the same side. They say they can use the white space to deliver high speed wireless broadband internet access, with speeds anywhere from 10Mbytes to 50 and 100 Mbytes, which is much powerful than the Wi-Fi spectrum. On the other side are all the major networks and the National Association of Broadcasters. They say that the use of the white spaces in the signals will interfere with television broadcasts if unlicensed devices operate in the same spectrum. Both sides have formed groups with cutesy, catchy names. The broadcasters have formed The Association for Maximum Service Television while the Internet groups have formed the Wireless Innovation Alliance. The Federal Communications Commission Office of Engineering and Technology submitted a report a year ago that said the devices did not reliably detect the presence of television transmission and so therefore could not be relied upon. But this month the same office issued another report that “tentatively concludes… that… AWS-3 devices could operate at a power level of up to 23 dBm/MHz equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) and with out-of-band emissions (OOBE) attenuated… without a significant risk of harmful interference.” Don’t you love it when I talk like this? It just goes to show you the level of technical detail that goes into these arguments. It may sound esoteric, but it isn’t. This is going to be the next ‘net neutrality’ debate that you will be hearing more and more about.
Side Note: Another group that you may never have heard of, but that directly affects you (at least it does, if you listen to Internet Radio), is SoundExchange. It collects the fees for the use of the different recording labels’ music. The group had applied to the federal Copyright Royalty Board to set royalty fees at a rate that many Internet radio operations said would put them out of business. Now, Congress has stepped in, passing the Webcaster Settlement Act to allow radio webcasters to negotiate lower royalty fee.
OUTSOURCING THE NEWS: The head of a major American newspaper group, who is also chairman of the Associated Press, says newspaper publishers should look at outsourcing news, possibly overseas. The CEO of Media News Group which publishes 52 newspapers says most of the preproduction work for its newspapers in California is already done in India, but now he says the group is looking at creating one “media desk” for all its newspapers and even possibly locating it “offshore.” As reported in USA Today, CEO Dean Singleton who also chairs the A.P. says no final decision has been made about outsourcing editorial functions, but they were looking at consolidating all editing and design. Regular readers of MfM will remember that an online news operation in California, pasadenanow.com, has outsourced its news, by having people in India write stories based on webcasts of city council meetings and information provided by ‘citizen volunteers.’ The proposal is obviously a response to the troubled economic times, which the former executive editor of The Washington Post says could mean local television news will disappear as fast, or faster, than local newspapers. Talking to the Cronkite News Service, former editor Len Downie Jr. says newspapers may win out on the rapidly growing Web with their growing use of video for the simple reason that newspapers can out-gun local television. For example, the Post has around 100 reporters covering the Washington area while the largest TV station in the market has, at most, a dozen reporters. He says that while newspapers are being squeezed, local television is being squeezed even more.
HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS? Pretty bad if you believe the scoring on media website TVSpy.com. Its offspring newsletter, Shoptalk, ran an article listing the top ten schools based on a poll of its readers. They were: Columbia, Northwestern, UNC-Chapel Hill, Missouri, Syracuse, Indiana, California, Illinois, Maryland (Philip Merrill College), Ohio. Curious I went to the site to see the actual numbers. On a scale of 0 to 100, the top ranked school, Columbia, got a whopping 12. Yes, 12. Number 2, Northwestern, got a 6. Even more interesting, of the 16 schools listed, only four got positive grades; the other 12 were in the negative column. And I thought I was a tough grader! A sampling of others: Syracuse (-1), UNC and the Cronkite School at Arizona (-4), Ohio (-7), California (-8). The lowest scores: Montana (-37), Nevada (-38), and lowest scorer, Michigan (-43), which may be some consolation to football rival Michigan (-15). It’s not much consolation to us at the Grady College/ University of Georgia that football rival Florida also was in the negative column (-18), since we weren’t even on the list. I should note the grades vary daily as people vote, but the overwhelming theme remains the same – three quarters of the schools got negative grades. So, the obvious question is – why. And the reader with the best answer to that question will get a free subscription to Message from Michael. Oh, never mind, it’s already free.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. The creator of Harry Potter and the one-time single mother on welfare, J.K. Rowling, is the best paid author in the world with a ‘jaw-dropping’ $300 Million, according to Forbes magazine. The money drops dramatically for second place winner James Patterson but still isn’t too shabby at $50 Million. The ‘king of horror’ Stephen King came in third with $45 Million, followed by the master of the political thriller, Tom Clancy ($35 Million) and the doyenne of romance novels, Danielle Steel ($30 Million.) The rest of the top ten list includes John Grisham and Dean Koontz (both tied at $25 Million) followed by -- as Forbes puts it, thanks to a little Oprah magic -- Ken Follett ($20 Million), Janet Evanovich ($17 Million) and Nicholas Sparks ($16 Million). The winner of this year’s Writer’s Digest Best Writer’s Website is claudialuiz.com, so named of course for its creator, Claudia Luiz, a writer, psychoanalyst, and mother of two who does a column for her hometown newspaper in Norwood, Massachusetts. And as long as I’m on a writing kick, a reminder that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which you have one month to write a complete novel, kicks off November 1st.
Apropos of nothing in particular, except that I found it interesting… the Central Intelligence Agency took out a full-page ad in the New York Times magazine. In a special advertising section on diversity, the agency advertises for people who can “make a world of difference” working for the national clandestine service.
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