All posts tagged ‘online’
by David Chartier, Blogger, Ars Technica
As major TV networks in recent years have embraced the online video movement in big ways, viewers are slowly trickling in. While you generally won’t find entire libraries and back catalogs waiting for you, the major players have made serious efforts to make current content extremely accessible online. In exchange for viewing some pre-roll ads or banners in the sidebar, you can now watch a lot of prime time and cable shows online for the mere cost of a comfortable computer chair and a sufficiently high-speed broadband connection. Not all of these video destinations are created equal, however, so Ars thought it was about time to make a serious bag of popcorn and settle in to review what the largest sites had to offer.
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by Noam Cohen, Staff Writer, New York Times
For a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife … please.”
Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog–it can be done, but the frog dies.
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by Jakob Nielsen, Columnist, Alertbox
We’ve known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don’t read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eye-tracking studies further validate this finding. The only thing we’ve been missing is a mathematical formula to quantify exactly how much (or how little) people read online. Now, thanks to new data, we have this as well.
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by Lee Gomes, Columnist, The Wall Street Journal
It was another indication of the emerging paradigm shift in Internet comedy. In a San Francisco nightclub this past Wednesday evening, a noisy crowd gathered for the weekly taping of “Internet Superstar,” an online-only TV show that chronicles goofball Web celebrities. Since the people behind the program have been plowing this field longer than just about anyone, you would expect them to be unbeatable at what they do.
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by Mike Masnick, Blogger, Techdirt
There’s been a bunch of buzz this week over an Ad Age report suggesting that firms are finally realizing that no one pays attention to online banner ads. For all the hype about online advertising, this one point should have been obvious from quite early on.
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by Rafat Ali, Co-Editor, paidContent.org
Nine Inch Nails is taking cues from Radiohead’s experiment, and has launched their new album online, with record-setting options on both ends … free to very expensive. Its new instrumental album, “Ghosts I-IV” went live tonight. (The site’s very sluggish right now as fans hit the site in presumably crazy numbers).
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by Carl Bialik, Blogger, The Numbers Guy, The Wall Street Journal
Last year was a “banner year” for U.S. newspaper Web sites, an industry association announced in a recent press release, headlined, “Online Newspaper Viewership Reaches Record in 2007.” The Newspaper Association of America also noted that the fourth quarter set a record for any quarter since the group started tracking online audience, in 2004, and October set a monthly record. But placed in the context of an overall increase in Americans’ online usage, newspapers’ electronic march forward looks a lot slower. More people are spending more time loading more Web pages, lifting the boats of lots of online categories.
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by Alex Johnson, Reporter, MSNBC
An online directory that claims to provide 90 million mobile telephone numbers is raising concerns among cellphone users and privacy advocates about unwanted callers who rack up the minutes on their calling plans and the difficulty of opting out of the list.
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by Julie Ruvolo, Blogger, VentureBeat
Silicon Alley technologists and Madison Avenue advertising executives have been meeting yesterday and today at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference. Here are some of the trends people were talking about:
- Ad networks were the darling acquisition targets of 2007, but what are they worth?
- Content versus community ad-targeting is emerging as a major debate.
- The gap is widening between the proportion of people online, and the proportion of ad dollars spent online.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Contributor, The Guardian; Blogger, BuzzMachine
We natter on these days about how people are becoming social online. But we have always been social; the Internet merely provides more ways for us to connect with each other. What’s truly new is the opportunity for companies, especially media companies, to be social.
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by Andrew Wallenstein, Staff Writer, Hollywood Reporter
HBO will begin offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of its programming online to subscribers. But in an ironic twist, an HBO corporate sibling is ready to exercise portion control. Last week, Time Warner Cable disclosed its intent to experiment with a billing plan for high-speed data that charges customers based on how much bandwidth they consume. If such a model catches on in the U.S., it could have big implications for content companies trying to find traction online–like HBO.
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by Mark Glaser, Blogger, MediaShift, PBS
Major media sites have started to get the religion of audience participation, but there’s been one big hitch: How do you harness the audience’s knowledge and participation without the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires time-intensive moderation?
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by Nicholas Carr, Blogger, Rough Type
The great revolutionary activist of our day, Robert Scoble, is battling for the ideal of data freedom with the evil forces of Facebook. At issue, writes Kara Swisher in a post titled “Free the Scoble 5,000!!,” is “how much control you should have over your own information online.” Mathew Ingram chimes in, saying “there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble.” Sounds black and white. Scoble: good. Facebook: evil. But it’s not quite that simple. When Scoble broke into Facebook’s databank, he opened a Pandora’s Box, and I would argue that neither he nor Facebook is in the right.
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by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Blogger, ReadWriteWeb
It seems obvious that privacy is going to be a major point of contention in the near-term future. It’s only going to get hotter as major online services compile huge amounts of data about us, as Open Data advocates push for that data to be freed up for reuse and as more cluster[fudge] incidents like the Facebook Beacon and the AOL search data release hit the public consciousness.
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by Saul Hansell, Blogger, New York Times Bits
With Ask.com introducing the AskEraser–a switch that will stop the site from collecting information about a user–it’s worth checking in on the real state of play with the accumulation of data online.
As usual, the reality is very far from the public perception. Read the rest of this post
