On The Turning Away

In the tradition of Samuel Johnson, who wisely said that people more often need to be reminded than informed, we’d like to remind you of a recent interview with the Blog Reader, on the little red book, our obsession with blogging, and above all, on the turning away.

This is not so much our Blog Manifesto as a close-up on what’s behind the scenes.
(more…)

Today’s news from NYT about three major newspapers’ decision to link content from sources other than their own to their websites put Inform.com on the spotlight.

As an online news aggregator, the Inform service will scan hundreds of news and blog sites and deliver content related to articles appearing on the Web sites of Washingtonpost, the New York Sun, and The Daily Oklahoman. If you ever blogged, you’d know that to put a link within a story, you’d have to manually insert the link. With Inform’s technology, however, this process is automated. The Inform system scans each story from your Web site as well as other content from the Web, then automatically inserts links on your site. The company also “updates the links continuously to point readers to more recent content.”
(more…)

Interbrand, in partnership with BusinessWeek, just released its annual survey of global brands. Mass appeal and technology brands rule - top six remain unchanged from last year: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, Intel, and Nokia. There’re two automakers among the top ten: Toyota at No.7 and Mercedes-Benz at No.10; one fast food chain: McDonald’s at No.9; one media/entertainment company: Disney at No.8.

Jumped from No.38 last year to its current spot at No.24, Google affirms its leading position in the online space, beating Yahoo (No.55), eBay (No.47) and Amazon (No.65). Perhaps more significant, Google is pulling ahead of established consumer electronics and media powerhouse Sony (No.26), top PC seller Dell (No.25) and database juggernaut Oracle (No.29), and “this bud is for you” Budweiser (No.30).
(more…)

While News are no longer the star at CNN, you may have a chance to compete with Anderson Cooper. According to Reuters, CNN is moving fast on citizen journalism by creating a new program to “let users send in digital audio and video from breaking news events in their region”. Dubbed “I-Reports”, they can be e-mailed or uploaded directly to CNN Exchange.

When it comes to breaking news, eye witness submitted content has long been used. Back in the notorious 1991 beatings of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department, amateurs videotaped by witnesses were widely shown on TV. Last year, the first “grainy images” of the aftermath of the London bombings came from cellphone camera images long before professional photo journalists hit the scene.
(more…)

In Web 2.0 era, videos, blogs and Web pages populate social networks and viral websites such as MySpace and YouTube. Enabled by these new channels, unknown directors, writers and producers are being catapulted into positions of enormous influence, thus remaking the entertainment landscape, enthuses a WSJ headline, Moguls of New Media.

Among the power list is Christine Dolce, “a ruler of MySpace”, whose widely reported tale of popularity makes her arguably one of the most connected people on the Internet. Her path to new media stardom is nothing if not breathtaking. Timing and her shrewd realization of MySpace’s potential of reaching millions mark her success.
(more…)

YouTube has just reached another milestone: it overtakes MySpace as the most popular website, according to Alexa, the Guardian reported today.

In the past three months, YouTube’s reach - defined as the number of users per million that visit a particular site - has increased by 155% vs 9% for MySpace. Alexa data show that YouTube has taken a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace. Seperately, Nielsen/NetRatings reports that YouTube’s US user base grew by 297% in the first half of the year. The average visitor spends 28 minutes on YouTube, with men 20% more likely to visit the site than women.

Elsewhere, speculations about the possible alliance with YouTube run amok . ZDNet votes for Yahoo.

NYT just reported that Jared Kushner, a 25-year-old law student at NYU law school and son of a disgraced NJ developer, has bought the New York Observer.

Peter W. Kaplan, the editor of the paper, told NYT that Mr. Kushner had three objectives: to market the brand name of The Observer; to build its Internet traffic; and to provide resources for more news beats to make it “a stronger paper with more constituencies and more advertising. Kaplan gushed, Kushner’s “25-ness is a huge asset. He is not weighed down by the debris of conventional wisdom.” Fair enough, but whether “Mr. Kushner represented the 21st century in the newspaper industry” is an open question.

Last we checked, there seemed to be a long way before we’d come lose to the top blog on Technorati. We’re in dire need of (hyper)links to enable us to social-climb, Web 2.0 style.

Courtesy of Hebig.com, via gapingvoid.com.

One thing we learned at B-school is to pepper our speech with buzzword du jour. Of late it’s the long tail. If you recovered from amnesia, then you would recall our preoccupation with it. Slate calls it the “wrong tail”, but we’d prefer the “short tail”.

Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
- courtesy of gapingvoid.com.

Business 2.0’s August 1 issue runs a story on Cyworld, a Korean sensation in the social networking space, to launch in the US next month.

In South Korea, Cyworld rules. Less than four years after its launch, there are 18 million Cyworld members or Cyholics, as they’re affectionately called - that’s more than a third of the country’s entire population. Better still, 90% of all Koreans in their 20s have signed up, according to BusinessWeek. That makes Cyworld’s per capita penetration in their home turf greater than that of MySpace in the US. On the business side, the bulk of Cyworld revenue comes from the sale of virtual items, which translates into more than $7 per user. By comparison, MySpace makes an estimated $2 per “friend”.
(more…)