As the first president-elect with a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, Barack Obama is poised to use the Internet to communicate directly with Americans in a way unknown to previous presidents. Judging by Obama’s savvy use of social-networking sites during his campaign and the interactive nature of his transition team’s Web site, Americans can expect a president who bypasses the traditional media’s filters while reaching out to citizens for input, observers say.
The young are learning to multitask at an early age thanks to the TV. A study conducted by Grunwald Associates on kids’ use of social networks found that 64 percent of people between the ages of nine and 17 aren’t just glued to the couch while the TV is on—they’re going online at the same time. In fact, the TV is what’s driving them to go online while watching their favorite shows, sometimes by offering interactive activities to go along with what they’re watching.
Is blogging just the end result of someone’s input into a content management system? Of course it is. So what? You could point a URL to a daily post in a discussion forum. It would have far better interactivity than a blog, and would be just as easy to post as often as the author would like. Does that make the output purely a forum post?
Google has always had a love-hate relationship with advertising. Its power and wealth come from the $16 billion a year of advertising that it sells. Yet on its most important pages, the results from its Web search engine, it has limited ads to nothing more garish than a dozen words of text. That is about to change. On Thursday, Google started testing video ads on some pages of search results. And it is developing ad formats with images, interactive maps and other more elaborate features.
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