MediaVidea

An age of hobbyists journalists?

Explorations into the changing landscape of 21st century journalism continue to bring in new themes - citizen journalism; everyone is a journalist, two-way conversation, web filters, web curators, the people formerly known as the audience, twitter reporting, and of course bloggers. Add 'hobbyist journalist' to the mix.

In an interview, Wired editor Chris Anderson, of the Long Tail fame says :

"Maybe the media is going to be a part-time job..."Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby,"

A let down or a leg up?

Labels: new media, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 9:29 PM 0 Comments

What is Wrong With Media?

This is the wrong question to ask to those from the media. Fear, worry, confusion, orthodoxy are no breeding grounds for imagination and introspection.

Labels: bighow, blogging. ethics, guide, new media

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:55 AM 0 Comments

The A to Z of New Media

This is a free form notes on 80 things that I have learned about New Media with a teeny weeny look into what works (and at times, what doesn't). I am sure there is a book somewhere in this short list but being a man of a woefully short attention span, I will have to say no.

I am sure I will start with New Media and get myself lost in M is for movies. Meanwhile, read on.

A

A-list
The media version of the ‘Superstar Economy’ where a few people tend to dominate the conversation.

The “Techmeme 250”, (not like the “300”) a group of ‘I will link to you, you link to me in return’ bloggers broadly working in or around San Francisco, whose posts are aggregated by default by aggregators such as Techmeme or Technorati, both of which supposedly boast of some unique ranking algorithm.

Some of these A-listers are genuine pioneers (like Dave Winer) or excellent commentators (like Nicholas Carr) who enjoy a following on merit. Other will do everything to ensure that they stay there.

The term also applies to the A-list commentators like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

Aggregation – a vital play for online news sites because distribution has always been a big play in media.

All Devices strategy – making sure that your content is available on all sorts of devices – Personal computers, handhelds, mobiles...

Adsense – Because it is there.

B

Blogging
Online publishing was never this easy.

Blog Networks
Entities which want to become the next generation of newspapers. Thanks to Google Adsense, some Blog networks are SEO savvy and exist only to rewrite existing news stories and getting on top of Search Engine results.

Bloggers
People like Robert Scoble (erstwhile Microsoft blogger), Steve Rubel (PR blogger), Hugh Mcloed (draws wonderful drawings), Seth Godin (Marketing), Guy Kawasaki (of Apple fame), Matt Cutts (Google blogger), Darren Rouse (blogging tips), Aaron Wall and Rand Fish (SEO) have built a following largely due to five reasons

1. being among the first,
2. being unique,
3. being useful,
4. being entertaining and
5. having a voice.

Business Blogging
Businesses using blogs to reach out to customers, potential customers, suppliers, media in general and other target groups.

Boards
The free from discussion forums on topics ranging from Battlestar Galactica to LOLcats on 4chan.

Business model (for news outfits)

1. Non profit trust like The Guardian,
2. Free online content with pay option for exclusive and valuable content (The Economist),
3. Fully ad supported (like most of the blogs),
4. Free daily paper for young readers plus weekly/daily editions with exclusive analysis, stories, special reports,
5. Free news supported by an ad network,
6. Citizen-funded investigative journalism (E.g. spot.us)

C

Craigslist.org
The site that Craig Newmark started and duly sent Newspapers into a deathly downward spiral.

The easy classified business is no more to be taken for granted.

Communities - News sites and other websites exist to serve existing communities – e.g communities of people who hate Obama

Citizen Journalism – start by having a prominently displayed section on your site inviting inputs from citizen reporters, aka users.

Comments for everything – start by having comments for all articles on your web site.

Crowd – another name for users of all the social media sites.

Cabal – a name for a group of users on a social media site working behind the scene, pushing up or down stories they like, mostly used for users of digg.com.

Clones – because it is so easy and cheap to come up with copies of successful web sites.

Celebrities – cover them, because the average adsense clicker is someone with too much free time (jobless?) and does not discriminate towards ads like savvy users such as yourself.

Contrarian – examples of what works are fine but occasionally do something different. If you write a column, look deeper into a story rather than merely rewriting a post.

(The) Cloud: A realm ruled by Google. It is useful in many cases to have all your data on servers elsewhere.

Remember, the machine are looking at everything you have online.

D

Del.icio.us
It made Tagging, sharing bookmarks a popular and useful online social activity.

Is your news site as fun to browse as del.icio.us?

Digg – pioneering social news site with vote feature.

Presently, decaying under the influence of a select group of smart users (read cabal above)

E

Editors
Because, Citizen Journalists need editors to polish their offerings.

Economy of scale – online vs. print, cost wise.

Earnings – Adsense, banner ads, sponsorships, ads in RSS feeds, ads from ad networks, organizing events…

Economist.com – a site that still manages to get people to pay for a freewheeling content coverage style.

What extra does the economist.com site have?

Useful, unique and entertaining analysis, for starters.

F

Free
The New York Times (nytimes.com) went free. There is money in the archives of News companies. Just tag them appropriately and make them free.

What will users pay for online?
Something that is exclusive and offers something new, something that cannot be found elsewhere.

Easier said than done.

Feeds
The new reporter has subscribed to hundreds if not thousands of feeds.

Flickr.com
For photo sharing.

Also for the fun way the founders interact with the community.

Facebook.com
For time wasting.

G

Google.com
Because, Google is God. The 10-year old wunderkid started with Search – added Adsense/Adwords – making billions of dollars- now, getting into Cloud-based computing.

Make sure your pages are indexed quickly by Google and displayed prominently for search results.

Also, make sure you use free tools from Google, including alternatives to Microsoft office.

Gawker
The #1 Blog Network.

You can build a formidable online news property if you have a unique voice and a faith in the power of pageviews and pageviews only.

Generation Y – the ‘Always On’ generation.

The Generation, which is yet to join the work force.

The eternal time wasters. The kind that can’t differentiate between Georgia and Georgia.
Go figure.

At some point of time in our lives, we were all Generation this &that.

Gadgets
Because this is where the adsense and other forms of ad money lie.

H

Huffington Post
A smart lady has just shown us how to do “celebrity + hype of the moment + aggregation” and ensuring huge pageviews without having original content to show.

Hyperlocal
Because everyone is talking about but no one has succeeded at it so far.

E.g. Backfence.com

There are empty towns online everywhere.
Some people are betting on a hybrid model of “online + offline+ events”.

However, this requires people and time.
In short, Money.

I

Investigate
Going for the tough but important stories.
Take the help of citizen reporters.

E.g. Assignment Zero
E.g. Spot.us

Established News Brands can do it posting a basic entry on story and then let citizen journalists and editors take charge.

Jeff Jarvis says –
“(in the future) there will be more news and more reporters.”

J

Journalist Brands
Journalists, who adopted New Media tools, went solo and made it big.

Rafat Ali – Paidcontent.org – sold to The Guardian Group for in excess of $30 million.

Om Malik – Has his own flourishing blog network headed by the famous gigaom.com website.

Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine.com) – one of the most brilliant minds on New Media going around.

K

Kilobytes
Because it is very important that your web page/mobile page loads AFAP (As Fast As Possible)

Kindle
The new e-reader device from Amazon ay be the best alternative to print so far and Amazon can create a Google-competitor if it gets all the major publishers on board and throws in an Ad Network.

L

Linking
Links are the currency of the New Media.

Something that the Associated Press did not understand.

The Long tail – you can cover any obscure topic and someday, yes someday, someone will indeed read that and hopefully, click on the ads.

Live blogging
Covering events as they happen.

Last.fm
Because, people like sharing their listening preferences.

Lists
Because, people like reading lists and as a result, there are too many silly lists flying around.

Linkbait
Because, social news sites like Digg.com have made it possible that you can hope to get page views if your story, and most importantly, the headline is as edgy as possible – make it controversial.

M

Microblogging
Because, most people do not have the time (and skill) to post more than 160 or so intelligent characters.

Also helps spread interesting new information and links quickly.

Main Stream Media – a term coined by bloggers for all those clueless people in TV and Print media.

Sometimes, used in pejorative sense alluding to shenanigans including ‘vested interests at play, lazy reporting…’

Movies
Because, there are far more advertisers in this category than many others.

The Dream Factory never stops working.

Meme

Imageboards like 4chan.org have made a name for themselves for being responsible for internet fads like Rick Rolling and LOLcats.

Start a meme. Now.

N

The New York Times - along with The Guardian and to a lesser extent, The Washington and some papers in the Scandinavian countries, it has understood the importance of online information.

Proof: it bought About.com way before many of us could get the importance of online advertising for reference content.

The Times has great blogs.
Love the blog by Errol Morris.

The Guardian has a web-first news publishing policy and its ‘Comment is Free’ section is a joy to read.

Network – create a network of partner websites for various topics.

Start with aggregating data from partner sites.

Glam.com may be the way to go but what if everyone starts building his or her own network?

O

Open
Open up your publishing system. Allow others to do stuff with your data.

Give out your API.

Online Politics
I see Citizen Enthusiasm gone wild.

Others see messiahs in form of Facebook groups, Obama Online, Hillaryisaman.suck and IhateSarnPalin.rant.

“Where is the promise of instant customer service/redressal?”

P

Photos – it is obvious, isn’t it?
Photo profiles/photo essays will be a big thing.

Print
We still love to read in Print. Craig of the Craigslst fame recently subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times.

Profiles – on all social networking sites.
Let your people create their profiles along with links to your domain on many sites as possible.

Let your people create groups around important/controversial stories on all the social networking sites and spread the link love.

Tip: beware of what you post online. Your future employer, girlfriend, one night stand, wife, kids…will be watching and searching.

Q

Quality
Because, Quality will out all the easily cloned data on the internet on any given day.

There is too much commoditized data on the internet.

R

Ratings
Sites such as Digg have shown that people like to rate/vote for stuff they like.

(Or what others have liked – they call it ‘homophilly’)

Rob Curley – because, he has done good things with news web sites.

S

Social
Everything is so social nowadays.

Social Media – a collective for all those websites where people share news, links, photos, videos, playing lists…start by submitting your stories to as many social news and bookmarking sites as you can – use mass submitters such as the “Share This” icon.

Social Media Marketing
Selling your message to people on all sorts of social media sites – starts with actively participating on these sites or employing people who will do.

Some call it “professionally created SPAM”.

Search Engine Marketing – making sure your site pages rank high on search engine result pages – a time consuming process - meta tags, H1 and H2 tags and so on.

Basically, make sure you come up with interesting stuff with appropriate keywords that describe the article are mentioned multiple times on the page

- starting with the headline for the story, and following that up with a summary of the story below the headline, again with the keywords included.

Essential SEO reading list:
Seomoz.org, SEObook.com, searchengineland.com, sphinn.com

SPAM – the scourge of the Internet.

On Social Media sites, Spam consists of the meaningless and mostly idiotic comments and emailing users links about supposedly Adult content.

Elsewhere, Spam also refers to blogs hosted on blogger.com and other free hosts filled with adsense-ready copied web content.

T

Tagging
Because, if used intelligently, Tags give meaning to web content.

Smart news sites are hiring people to tag all their content pages.

Technorati
A pioneering search engine for blogs – now languishing because there is no money in day-to-day blog content and hope rests on aggregating as much long tail (niche, sub-niche etc.) content as possible.

Techcrunch
Because it proves what my hostel warden used to say - given the right occasion and right location (in this case, the Silicon Valley) a smart lawyer can move in, start covering the umpteenth new web site and make it big.

U

URL
Or, clean URl, because the collective wisdom of the search experts suggests that Google (and users) understands clean URLs.

http://bighow.com/atozofnewmedia
instead of
http://bighow.com/abcd?src234=atoz

V

Video
Video is big, very very big.

Fuelled by better bandwidth and 3 G mobile networks.

The promise - Videos by citizen reporters, and more how-to do-stuff videos.

W

Wisdom of the crowd

Vs. wisdom of a few/one

Question 1. Is the crowd always smarter/better than a group of editors who supposedly have biases?

Question 2. Is a story voted onto the top of Digg.com better than a story currently on the front page of The Guardian or The New York Times? Depends on whom you are asking - It is all so subjective.

Widgets – essentially a few lines of code that help to spread your content onto other sites.

Presently, sites are suffering from a diarrhea of widgets.

Wikis – alternative to blogs where a group of people, in case of media companies, group of reporters can collaborate on a project (story).

Wikipedia – a phenomenon. Despite some controversies about vested interests editing entries, the Wikipedia is a Gem of the web.

WSJ.com
Still manages to get people to pay for content about business topics.

What extra does the Wsj.com site have?

X

X-surf
Riding on the coattails of name brands and fads.

Successful blogs and news sites ride on the success of the latest celebrity or web fad.

How? They cover the subject to death.

E.g. the hype for Twitter.com

How to X-surf?
Make sure you cover the latest sensation as often as possible. Go creative – create widgets for that Application, create photo galleries about exploit of the latest celebrity rising to the top in internet searches.

XSS exploits – most news sites are actually databases.
Hackers and all those who have time to waste are lurking out there to look for security holes in your web site. The more successful your site is, the more danger there is.

In words of the campaign for a popular brand of condoms – “Play Safe”.

Y

Youtube.com
Pioneering hassle-free Video hosting.

Fast on its way to becoming a verb.

Great tool for citizen journalists.

Yellow Journalism 2.0
More and more unverified, under-researched and biased stories are published online for the sake of pageviews.

Z

Z-list
Bloggers who are on their way up by religiously linking to the so-called A-list blogs.

Ze Frank
The man behind the “Ask a Ninja” videos – showing that funny works (after sex, perhaps) best in online video.

Your turn: what have I missed?

Here is a link to my ugly presentation on"The A to Z of New Media"

Labels: definition, enterprise web 2.0, new media, news 2.0, social media

posted by Pramit Singh @ 11:11 PM 1 Comments

Fallacy of Examples + Echo Chamber + Homophily = Noise

Fallacy of examples is more commonly referred to the over-generalization that media outlets often practice. For example - one Indian stock bucks the trend of the falling stock market and buys out a company in Europe. Some journalist, might point out and say, 'Halt!, the India Surging story has not stopped!."

Now the Echo Chamber comes into play. After that lazy media person has written about the story mentioned above, copycat bloggers get into it, posting links to the original story and in essence giving weight to an already faulty story.

Why do the bloggers post about a story they might know does not reflect the truth? Blame that on homophily. On a blog network I shall not mention, someone rewrote about the story about Jessica Simpson having the best you-know-what in business. In the ensuing comment, a 50 year old Doctor in India wrote that 'such things' should not be mentioned in public. Next, a cabal of commenters, who patrol the said site, and who are obviously young, started making fun of the old doctor.

There is something more than the power of modest autonomy of the internet and cheap online storage at work here. I may stretch out and account this to homophily as well.

What is homophily? Somewhere, some smart guy put up a theory that we tend to live and work among people who share our beliefs.

Homophilly is also a reason why some social news sites are succeeding despite having some fundamental weaknesses. They like logging on and sharing the latest batch of idiotic stories and comments for the day.

Digg thrives because the cabal of the original diggers is having a good time, never mind the silly stories.

Same goes for site like Techmeme - although not a social news site per se, but people throng to this silly aggregator because they have accepted that the people appearing on Techmeme's front page are the smartest around (at least in the technology blogosphere) and writing about a link on Techmeme and then having your own link on Techmeme, whatever the importance implies to your smartness as well. You are one of those 250 smart guys. This is Homophilly in action.

Put these three ideas together and you get noise and that ladies and gentlemen, is my humble attempt to understand modern media.

Read more about the Fallacy of examples here.

Labels: echo chamber, fallacy of examples, homophily, new media

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:42 PM 0 Comments

How (not) to create a new media empire

Having religiously covered the three Gs of blogging topics so far- namely, Gossip, Gadgets and Girls, Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker media group knows what sells in the news business. His approach to New Media Empire building is bearing good, hold on, stupendous results.

Nick has just posted a chart showing how Gawker is the fourth largest online media empire.

But, is Nick Denton's way the only way? According to the chart, Gawker is behind the New York Times, USA Today and Washington Post, ahead of Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal.

We keep reading about the trouble the newspapers are in - the layoffs are an obvious point of coverage. But, we should not forget the amount of money these news brands have invested in the best reporting talent, especially in the service reporting field - going out there and reporting the best the reader is concerned about.

It takes real money to go out in the field, say Iraq and bring out the stories.

Is Gawker Media taking the armchair route to media empire success?
This is the question for the media experts to answer.

Supporters (there are many) of Nick's scrappy approach to New Media empire building will say that the New York Times 'subsidizes' its serious reportage with earnings from its Food and Lifestyle coverage and from About.com.

By that token, shall we expect Nick Denton to fund a serious journalism kind of initiative? I won't bet my meagre collection of Sachin Tendulkar posters on that happening.

Related story: In the valley of smut: the new Valleywag story

Labels: Blog networks, blogging, gawker, new media, news 2.0, nick denton, valleywag

posted by Pramit Singh @ 7:46 PM 1 Comments

How Kevin Rose has set a bad precedent for new media moguls

In the age of old media in the year 100 BC, newspapers used to endorse presidential candidates and assorted other political wannabes. They still do.

Showing us that New Media Moguls of the 21st century have the kevlar-plated souls of Old Media moguls, Kevin Rose of Digg fame has made his choice: Ron Paul (Republican) and Barrack Obama (Democrat).

On one hand, this is nothing.

But, tell me: which newspaper owner (Digg is no newspaper, but some idiots think it is) can boast to have a rabid fan following of 1 million geeks and counting?

Labels: Digg, kevin rose, new media, obama, politics, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:13 PM 0 Comments

What kids don’t tell us about the future of news media

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in San Francisco, studies his three kids’ media diet as a micro sampling of the habits of the Always On Generation and comes out with predictable conclusions:

the net and video games rule, social networking is the new IM, people still read (case in point: you)…

If you are into Venture Capital or if you want to start a mee-too media company, then maybe, Fred’s article may interest you. After all, we all like to like to know about the likes and dislikes of that hard-to-please demographic which reside in and around San Francisco (one of the so-called Twin Capitals of the Blogosphere) – they are rich and have the time to spare to preside as the tech tastemakers for this world.

Fred notes that his kids are not much into newspapers, preferring websites for updates. This too is old hat. But, must we follow kids’ news reading preferences to predict the future for newspapers?

A future that is already taking place everywhere on the internet – free news websites, salubrious celebrity/sensation/gadget coverage are the way to go.

Even my brother is talking about starting his own spam blog network.

The average lifespan of an online news story is said to be 32 hours or something. That is more than thirty two times the attention time of an average kid. When we were kids, we scanned the front page and quickly moved to the sports pages near the end followed by bollywood startlets on the back page. As I grow older, I started reading the Op-ed pages and the syndicated columns. I am still improving the quality of my reading list for any given day.

I am 100% positive Fred's kids will have an even more extensive media diet than mine when they grow up and will eventually discover that playing video games and passing time Facebook doesn't seem so hot anymore.

The Internet pulled me out of the proverbial frog's well and I like that I am not paying for my access to the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine, but I wonder how long this free run would last. My free access to the NYT magazine is subsidized mainly by the ad-rich print version, and in a minor part by online advertising.

How long will this state of subsidy last? How long will the New York Times last in its present form?

Despite the low-cost nature of online publishing, I doubt whether anyone can start an online publication of the NYT Mag's quality from scratch and survive without long term funding strategy.

Nick Denton has come closest to creating a respectable online publishing empire with his Gawker network, but where are the long form stories ? Being Snarky doesn't cut it.

Coming back to Fred's point: A world full of adults with the attention span and habits of kids is good news for marketers of things that let us deal with our boredom.

But, we also need things that help us understand our world better. Nothing does that better than good journalism.

A study in 2007 pointed out that people do read long articles on the internet. Long pieces of investigative journalism, good feature writing (thank you New Yorker) will always have their say.

To know about the future of news, two important questions need answers:

1. Which news model must we follow?
NYT (free), WSJ? Economist (paid), Guardian (trust)

2. How do we make people pay for news?
Free paper (aggregated wire feeds, tips and tricks, and lots of ads) and the paid version (bigger stories, analysis)

Sadly, investors don’t seem interested in these tough questions. What the news business urgently needs now is investors who are willing to go beyond investing in oddities like Digg.com and work with those in the News business to create New Brands of the Internet Era.

Till now, all I have seen on this front are 101 Social News startups.
Maybe more...Come on, think hard.

Labels: new media, newspapers, trends, web 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:28 PM 0 Comments

What will happen next: Rounding up the 30 best predictions for New Media 2008

These are 30 of the best predictions about the internet business in 2008 that I have had the opportunity to read this week. As I mentioned in January 2007, a phase of consolidation is on in the web 2.0 field, this BBC story makes some interesting points about it, and I see no reasons to think otherwise.

I only wish that more people get a chance to make a better living through online publishing.
So far the internet is dominated by a few of the so-called Plantations (thank you Nick Carr).

1. Giant Blog Publishing House Takes Birth: TechCrunch + GigaOm + VentureBeat + Read/Write Web

2. Cash Rich Media buys more into successful blogs.

3. Clicks & Bricks back in vogue, in true web 2.0 style, of course.

4. Books are very much in (Lulu.com self publishing, print on, small magazines, rss subscriptions, and Kindle?).

As Bill Murray once said about computers, "we are reading more on the screen", or something to that effect.

5. "Friendiligence" will be hot: we will conduct due diligence on friend requests on Facebook, Myspace and all other me-too social networks.

6. "MicroTubing" zindabaad: More and more small publishers (mostly single person startups) using innovative video content to prosper.

7. Google Buys an Ad Agency: WPP?

8. The Wall Street Journal will follow NYT and go free online.

10. Large magazines, part of large publishing conglomerates will fold at a higher rate than 2007 and Niche, targeted titles will flourish.

11. Internationalized Domains Names become more and more popular (as sensible .com names become more scarce, expensive and crazy)

12. Someone from among the troika of News Corp, Microsoft or EBay buys Yahoo.

13. Another Twitter-like success, coded by a 20-year genius kid (no hope for us 30-somethings) will rule users' hearts, with a similarly simple interface (and hopefully better productivity and healthy monetization prospects)

14. Ajax will get serious or people will dismiss it for a time-waster.


15. Social Networking (along with gaming environment and virtual worlds) will cause serious security incidents as Malware gets another mode of distribution - "social networks +social engineering"

16. One of the trio among probable Google killers, Mobile search will finally take off by the end of 2008 (other hyped Google killers include Classifieds and Local)

17. A massive datacenter meltdown will happen when one of these energy guzzlers finally gives in to the constant barrage of worm infections.

18. Users of web 2.0 sites will revolt, demanding a better privacy deal and moving on if things don't change.

19. More Blog-led publishing media startups (including Blog Networks) take root and flourish (with hopefully less rewriting and spam)

20. Big Brands get into Web 2.0 in a big way, opting to create their own content.

21. Search Engines use more user data (user preferences, search history, etc) and customized search results become common.

22. Casual games will be the social networking of 2008.

23. "WEB TO WEDDING" will gather force. Did you know that almost 3 million adults have converted online dates into a long-term relationship including marriage?

24. In this age of blogs, twitters, Forums, Facebook, and Youtube Videos, companies become more careful with Online Branding, and hope that they are well equipped to deal with irate citizen journalists (read: customers, competitors) of the world.

25. Crowdsourcing, aka Crowdmining will continue to prosper and will have more innovative uses from some of the best companies in the world.

26. Demographical targeting becomes more difficult as age, gender, marital status are but only a few things that determine consumer behavior in the internet age.

27. While Group Lending got a leg up in 2007 via sites like prosper.com, Group Buying will be hot in 2008.

28. The Internet will slow down considerably as data centers and service providers reel under the increasing demand for multimedia content.


29. Some Asian startups get a hold in the tough U.S. market, despite the inward-looking, arrogant Silicon Valley types.


30. No one (except perhaps the Blackberry and the Google Phone/Android when it is a reality) will challenge the iPhone in 2008.

31. The opening up of the U.S. cell phone setup will create an exciting variety of new applications and cheaper service offerings, more in line with that in Asia, the leader in cellphones.

32. Google gets into the Cable Operators' Set Top Box business.

More Google predictions, all the usual ones are here.


While we are with predictions, indulge me for some predictions from the offline world:

Green IT takes a big foot forward in 2007

China and India will finally begin to emerge as strong domestic markets for solar.

Reverse knowledge migration will gather force: bright and well-educated workers (not exclusively returning prodigal sons will move from developed countries to developing courtiers creating a new class of "cyber-gypsies".

The Rich will get richer and lead more outlandish lifestyles.

The Fed will continue to cut rates and the U.S. economy will begin to pick up steam in the later half of the year.

Labels: 2008, Blog networks, blogging, google, new media, news 2.0, predictions, social networking

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:39 PM 3 Comments

News sites vs. Blogs vs. Wikis

The story goes like this: pioneering bloggers Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead made a long bet with Martin Nisenholtz, the senior VP for digital operations at the New York Times.

The bet was:

"In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

As 2007 draws to a close, Cadenhead does a count and finds out that blogs beat the Times in Google results.

However, Wikipedia beat both Blogs and News Sites on four of the top five news stories.

- Would love to see a comparison of technology stories rankings for blogs, news sites and Wikipedia, but do people go to Google News for tech stories?

- Would also love to see an annual rating of tech stories on MSM vs. Blogs.

Some bloggers are light years ahead in terms of doing tech analytical pieces but that is just an opinion.

Labels: blogging, new media, wiki

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:38 PM 2 Comments

Web 2.0 is not dead

Labels: Blog networks, blogging, new media, web 2.0, web strategy

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:10 PM 0 Comments

Media Quote of the week

"People will pay for porn, but they won't pay for Friedman"

- Brooke Gladtone after NYT opens its archives and ends TimesSelect paid service

[Note: I am not sure the Times’ change of strategy and opting for a search-driven advertising-based model means the end of paid news content model. It is too much of good thing for Google to be true in the long run]


Via Romensko

Labels: new media, news business

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:25 PM 0 Comments