The uses of tagging

Just talking to Phil about why tagging differs from conventional filing.

Size of the UK 'creative industries' sector

The Creative Industries account for more than eight per cent GDP; more than four per cent of our export income and provide jobs for two million people.

Source: Department for Culture, Media and Sport

Falling TV audiences among young people

From the BBC: Building Public Value paper...

"Recent BBC research shows that in 2004, children aged 10–14 are consuming over 20% less television
per week than children of the same age a decade earlier44. One reason is that many children now have a wider range of media devices in their bedrooms than their parents have in the living room"

Graph of growth in blogging

Pew data on broadband penetration in the US

"Surveys fielded in 2006 show that internet penetration among adults in the U.S. has hit an all-time high. While the percentage of Americans who say they use the internet has continued to fluctuate slightly, our latest survey, fielded February 15 – April 6, 2006 shows that fully 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults) are internet users, up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in our January 2005 survey. And the share of Americans who have broadband connections at home has now reached 42% (about 84 million), up from 29% (about 59 million) in January 2005."

[Report]

Steve Shapin on coffee houses

In April 20, 2006 edition of LRB. [Link.]

Broadband is killing TV

A sign in the BBC foyer, photographed by Tom Coates, and included in a perceptive post entitled "Is the pace of change really such a shock?".

New York Times on MySpace

The NYT had an interesting long article on the problems Murdoch faces in making MySpace profitable. I've kept a pdf version in the Ecology folder.

So who says the Net doesn't matter?

Latest research report from the Pew Internet Survey.

The internet has become increasingly important to users in their everyday lives. The proportion of Americans online on a typical day grew from 36% of the entire adult population in January 2002 to 44% in December 2005. The number of adults who said they logged on at least once a day from home rose from 27% of American adults in January 2002 to 35% in late 2005.

And for many of those users, the internet has become a crucial source of information - surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that fully 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.

To explore this phenomenon, we fielded the Major Moments Survey in March 2005 that repeated elements of an earlier January 2002 survey. Comparison of the two surveys revealed striking increases in the number of Americans who report that the internet played a crucial or important role in various aspects of their lives. Specifically, we found that over the three-year period, internet use grew by:

54% in the number of adults who said the internet played a major role as they helped another person cope with a major illness.

40% among those who said the internet played a major role as they coped themselves with a major illness.

50% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they pursued more training for their careers.

45% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they made major investment or financial decisions.

43% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they looked for a new place to live.

42% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they decided about a school or a college for themselves or their children.

23% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they bought a car.

14% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they switched jobs.

Photos to Send: film based on Dorothea Lange's 1954 trip to Clare

IMDB Plot Summary for Photos to Send (2002)

In 1954 celebrated photographer Dorothea Lange traveled to rural County Claire in Western Ireland on an assignment for Life Magazine. The photos she took there captured a way of life fast vanishing and a people hardened, but not broken, by poverty and grueling labor. 44 years later filmmaker Dierdre Lynch returned to Lange's subjects and found that the world of Lynch's photographs had changed, but that the people, more fragile now and weathered by age, still maintained their vitality and spirit. This loving and sensitive portrait of humanity, by times tragic and bittersweet, yet life affirming, took four years to edit, and the final cut is worth the effort.

Source

Presentation on the media future

Lovely, clever presentation.

Good example of how to use presentation software.

pdf filed in Media Ecology.

Beyond Broadcast White Paper

Relevant to the Ofcom essay.

Link.

Part 3 -- due for release on July 1, deals with the regulatory issues.

pdf filed in Media Ecology folder on PB.

Statistics on Internet access and use through the EU

AP reports that a European Union report released yesterday shows wide differences in the level of Internet use among EU nations, with Benelux and Nordic countries leading the way and eastern and southeastern Europe generally lagging behind.

In the Netherlands, 78 percent of households are connected to the Net, compared to just 16 percent in Lithuania, according to the report from the Eurostat statistics agency, based on data gathered in early 2005.

The Dutch also lead the way in domestic broadband access, with 54 percent of homes linked up compared to 1 percent in Greece, 4 percent in Cyprus and 5 percent in the Czech Republic.

In Greece, 73 percent of the population say they have never used the Internet, the survey said, well above the EU average of 43 percent. More than half the citizens of the Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Portugal have never logged on to the Net.

Among students, only 7 percent across the EU have never used the Internet.

Overall, the survey showed a rise in Internet connections since 2004. Domestic connections in the EU rose from 43 percent to 48 percent. The number of homes connected to broadband rose from 15 percent to 23 percent.

For EU businesses, Internet access rose from 89 percent to 91 percent, while broadband connections increased from 53 percent to 63 percent.

At least 90 percent of businesses are linked to the Internet in all nations included in the survey, except Latvia, Hungary, Cyprus, Lithuania and Poland. In Sweden, Denmark and Finland over 80 percent of firms have broadband access, compared with less than 45 percent in Cyprus, Poland and Greece.

The survey did not include France, which declined to take part.

Full report here.

Blogging is...

"The most powerful two-way internet communications tool yet developed".

Naked Conversations, page 28.

Another take on 'endism'

John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends, replying to someone who said that "everything has changed" after 9/11.

"Everything never changes. Something has changed and it impacts everything else. Your life is the same. People go to the same jobs in the same places. They go home to the same families and watch the same TV programs. Everything never changes. Something has changed and that something will impact a great deal. But life as we know it will continue".

Quoted in Naked Conversations, page 23.

The broadcast model in a nutshell

"We talk, you listen".

From Naked Conversations, page 6.

For some Americans, the Net is now their primary news source

From the PEW Project...

"By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years. For a group of “high-powered” online users – early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users – the internet is their primary news source on the average day."

Link

Jeff Jarvis on how the NYT still doesn't get it

Great rant.

<snip>
The Times — like many people in power — seems to have trouble grasping the full impact of the internet handing control over to the people. They have real trouble turning their personal prisms around to look at the world from the bottom up instead of their usual top down. Or to put it another way, they can’t figure out anymore who’s the dog, who’s the tail, and who’s wagging whom.
Today’s quaintly late story about the internet changing politics is exhibit A; another story that’s just shocked at big things not coming from big corporations is exhibit B; and throw in there the story about the shrinking digital divide, which I wrote about below, and the paper’s amazement that the internet is growing on its own.
The problem is that they still think the internet is something the powerful use to affect the rest of us. Wrong. It’s what the rest of us use to affect the powerful.
</snip>

TV viewership statistics

Justin says that the IPA did an interesting "touchstone" survey with fine-grain detail which found that people watch TV for an average of 4.2 hours a day. That's 29.4 hours a week, which is almost exactly half of the 58 hours I estimate they have available for leisure activities.

He also intimated that the overall figures (which suggest that viewership is holding up well) may mask important changes in the detail. For example, we have an ageing population with more people in older age groups. Older people in general watch more television. Younger people are watching less.

We also have to be careful to distinguish between (a) watching broadcast TV live and (b) viewing televisual material in a variety of ways (e.g. time-shifted, IPtv, etc)

Video games and movies

Quentin made an interesting point today -- he says that in some cases Hollywood makes more from computer games derived from movies than it makes from DVD sales (which in turn exceed cinema sales). Justin followed this up by telling how his son had derived great pleasure from the games based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which -- Justin claimed -- he had explored a lot of stuff closer to the spirit of the book. There was even the possibility of rescuing Augustus Gloop!

If this is true, then it adds another twist to scriptwriting -- perhaps one has to devise plots which will play well not just on the big screen, but also on the computer screen.

MySpace kicks off 200,000 users for inappropriate material

By Joshua Chaffin and Aline van Duyn in New York
Published: Financial Times, March 30 2006 20:26 | Last updated: March 30 2006 20:26

MySpace.com, the fast-growing community website hugely popular with American teens, has removed 200,000 “objectionable” profiles from its site as it steps up efforts to calm fears about the safety of the network for young users.

The site, which allows users to create their own profiles with details of their interests that can be viewed and linked to by other MySpace.com “friends”, was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp last year and its phenomenal growth has placed it at the centre of the media company’s internet strategy.
Ross Levinsohn, head of News Corp’s internet division, said some of the material taken down contained “hate speech”. Some of it, he said, was “too risqué”.
“It’s a problem that’s endemic to the internet – not just MySpace,” Mr Levinsohn said. “The site, in the last two months, I think has become safer.”
With 66m users, and 250,000 new users signing up every day, MySpace has become one of the top internet destinations.
Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of News Corp, told the Financial Times that, although he and Mr Murdoch were very optimistic about its prospects when they acquired it last year, MySpace had exceeded their expectations.
“MySpace is more potent and powerful than even we knew,” Mr Chernin says. “And it is becoming a more integrated part of people’s lives.” However, as efforts grow to attract more advertisers to the site, News Corp is facing two challenges. Young users have to keep wanting to use the site, rather than switch to a “cooler” alternative.
Also, advertisers have to feel confident their reputation will not be tainted by “inappropriate” content. Teachers and parents are concerned that, because information on MySpace is publicly available, it might put teenagers in contact with predatory adults. In terms of retaining its appeal, Mr Chernin said users had to keep feeling the site was theirs. “We don’t want to change the fundamental look and feel of the site,” he said. “We do not want users to have any sense that it is corporatised.”

Blogging, journalism and credibility: the Berkman Conference

"Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility: Battleground and Common Ground" was a conference held in late January at Harvard, at which a group of 50 journalists, bloggers, news executives, media scholars, and librarians sat down to try and make sense of the new emerging media environment. Since the conference, the resignation of CNN's Eason Jordan and the Jeff Gannon White House incident have shown how powerful weblogs can be as a new form of citizens' media.   We are entering a new era in which professionals have lost control over information – not just the reporting of it, but also the framing of what's important for the public to know. To what extent have blogs chipped away at the credibility of mainstream media? Is credibility a zero-sum game – in which credibility gained by blogs is lost by mainstream media and vice versa?
 
Conference participants believed the answer, ultimately, is no. Bloggers and professional journalists alike share a common goal: a better informed public and a stronger democracy. So now what? 
 
By the end of a day and a half of discussion, the following "take-aways" emerged:
 
        •        The new emerging media ecosystem has room for citizens' media like blogs as well as professional news organizations. There will be tensions, but they'll complement and feed off each other, often working together.  (See Session 1 and Jay Rosen's essay in Appendix A1)
 
        •        The acts of "blogging" and "journalism" are different, although they do intersect.  While some blogging is journalism, much of it isn’t and doesn’t aim to be. Both serve different and valuable functions within the new evolving media ecosystem. (This theme recurred and was reinforced in all sessions.)
 
        •        Ethics and credibility are key, but extremely hard to define. There are no clear answers about how credibility is won, lost, or retained – for mainstream media or bloggers. It's impossible and undesirable for anybody to set "ethical standards" for bloggers, but it's also clear that certain principles will make a blogger or journalist more likely to achieve high credibility. Transparency is key but isn't enough. Credibility also depends on a relationship of trust that is cultivated between the media organization or blog and the people it aims to serve.  (See Session 3 and Bill Mitchell's paper in Appendix A2)
 
        •        Many media organizations now see blogging – or the use of some form of participatory citizens’ media – as a way to build loyalty, trust, and preserve credibility. They are still experimenting with ways to do that. Examples include:
 
o       Relationships between local newspapers and local blogger communities One example is the close relationship between the Greensboro News & Record and community blogging site, "Greensboro 101" (See Session 1)
 
o       News organizations such as MSNBC are starting their own blogs within their own websites, some written by their own journalists and some by guest bloggers. (See sessions 3 and 4)
 
o       Some news organizations such as Minnesota Public Radio are working to build databases and communication systems in order to tap the expertise of audience members who do not blog, but who would like to help with stories.
 
        •        New experiments in citizens' journalism are emerging. They include:
 
o       Wikinews: an all-volunteer, distributed effort to build a new site. (See Session 7)
 
o       Dan Gillmor's grassroots journalism project: an effort – still under development – to harness the best of citizens' efforts with quality editing and reporting by experienced journalists. (See Session 7)
 
o       Jeff Jarvis' hyper-local citizens' media project: a news project that uses weblogs to target very specific local niche audiences.  (See Session 4)
 
        •        Opening up online archives of news stories for free public access may make business sense in addition to bolstering credibility and audience loyalty. Right now, most newspapers and news agencies only make their content free on the web for a couple of weeks, and then it goes behind a paid firewall, lost to bloggers for linking. The predominant view at the conference was that by making archived content free, not only will news companies provide a tremendous social benefit and thus gain credibility, but the traffic they will receive through links to their archived material – and the ability to place advertising on that content – will likely make up for the lost archive access fees. (See Sessions 4, 7, and 8)
 
A number of questions remained unanswered, including:
 
        •        Are blogs (or wikis) the best way to distill and help people make sense of the grassroots conversation bubbling up or do we need to create new and better tools?
 
        •        What will the new business model be? Nobody knows yet. It's likely to emerge organically by media path breakers.
 
        •        How can we make the conversation more inclusive of socioeconomic groups that are not currently involved in blogging, have little internet access, or whose lives do not involve much internet use?
 
        •        How much of this conversation is relevant only to the US, and how much is relevant to the entire world?
 
 
 [link]