kNow Media

Via Tech Crunch

Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.

In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.

Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.

The complete breakdown is below.

Via ARS Technica

By John Timmer | Published: November 20, 2008 - 08:55PM CT

Via Tech Crunch

Via Tech Crunch

A new site called TweetStalk is in private beta. It allows you to “follow” Twitter users without them knowing you are doing it (Twitter tells you when someone new has subscribed to your data). It’s all through a Firefox Add-On and appears to modify the Twitter page itself via Greasemonkey or otherwise. You are then able to follow the person without them knowing, and the service provides a RSS feed as well.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds. Twitter pages are public by default so all the content is there for everyone to see anyway. Twitter should probably just implement a private follow feature of some sort to allow this anyway. But until they do, you’ve got TweetStalk.

Via Mashable

Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy.com.

Tim Ferriss’ relationships with bloggers helped him reach the New York Times bestseller list with his book, The Four Hour Work Week. I recently called Tim to ask him how to market to bloggers. Here’s what he taught me:

Start before you need something

“I reached out to certain bloggers as far as a year in advance of the book being published,” Tim told me. By building his connections ahead of time, he never had to start a relationship with a blogger by asking for a favor.

Meet bloggers in person

Tim started building his relationships face to face. “The least crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person,” Tim said. “Email is the most difficult, the most crowded… I’m a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don’t even see because my assistant declines them.”

Don’t be a promoter

Nobody wants to get to know a guy who does nothing but promote himself. “Your job is to convince them of the messenger, not the message,” he told me. “Don’t try to push your message until you establish yourself as someone they’re willing to listen to.”

Don’t join the crowd

Top bloggers can be mobbed at events. Instead of joining the crowds, Tim got to know the people behind the top bloggers. The first time he met Robert Scoble, Tim said, “You know what man, everyone wants to talk to you. I don’t have a really good question for you, so I’m not going to hassle you.” And he got to know Robert’s wife and coworkers instead.

Be part of something bigger

Instead of pitching his book, Tim talked to bloggers about a trend that his book related to: outsourcing as a way to save time. When he called them, he’d say, “Here’s a concept or phenomenon that I think would be fun to talk about with your readers.” He told me that bloggers would often give him credit for the idea, and when they mentioned the name Tim Ferriss, they “inevitably linked to my page or my Amazon book page.”

Do you know any other tips for promoting to bloggers? Add them to the comments.

Andrew Warner’s last internet company was a big stinking failure and he had to shut it down. To keep from having a company collapse again, he’s interviewing as many Internet successes as he can. You can hear his interviews on Mixergy.

Via Media Shift

by Bryan Murley, November 19, 2008

With the swift pace of change in the media landscape, it’s easy to overlook how far college news media has come in a short time. There has been some great innovation in college media, even as some lag behind.

I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas, editor of the Vassar Miscellany News.

Farkas writes:

With our new Web site, http://miscellanynews.com/, we have now entered into the next generation of online journalism. And, for better or worse, we have become one of the few colleges in the country to do so. On our new site, reporters can contribute live blogs, attach videos and other multimedia to their articles, and display high-resolution photography in a way that our print publication never could. Best of all, The Miscellany’s site is flexible, no longer burdened with the stagnant design so common among news sites in the 1990s. We have become one of only a handful of college newspapers in the country, along with The Yale Daily News and The Swarthmore Phoenix, to adopt a Web 2.0 approach and craft our site using up-to-date CSS and XML standards.

Farkas’ description is overly pessimistic. Despite his negative outlook, college newspapers across the country are still moving forward with online content. Their innovations have been visible over the past few years — especially when you consider how difficult it is for them to change.

Resistance to Change

When I first began blogging about online college media three years ago, most websites were little more than shovelware, with print editors and some advisers reluctant to invest time and energy in developing a robust web presence.

Some of that resistance was based in tradition: It’s hard to steer a 100-year-old institution in a new direction. Production workflows had developed and been set like clockwork. Each new generation of editors and reporters walked in the footsteps of the previous generation, and learned their ways. The website was appended to the end of the workflow, after pages were sent to the press. Blowing up that workflow is not easy.

Still more resistance was cultural. Print journalists saw themselves as newspaper journalists first. The battles over whether blogging could be journalism were still being fought. Copy editor Greg Finley of the Orion at California State-Chico argued in 2006 that newspapers should keep their content offline, saying “No other medium can match newspapers’ depth.”

And another hurdle was technological: Inexpensive, easy-to-use tools for online storytelling were just coming into widespread use, and broadband Internet access was not nearly as widespread as it is today.

That resistance has faded over time, especially as the news industry has struggled to reinvent itself.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Even now, I find community college newspapers that still have no web presence. Bob Bergland, a professor at Missouri Western State University, found that 36% of a random sample of college newspapers had no web presence at all. (Bergland’s findings are not yet available online, but I’ll update this post as soon as they are available.)

Large daily university papers struggle to make money from their websites, and campus readership of the printed product remains high compared to industry standards, which leads to a conundrum: whether to devote resources to a website when the print product is still so popular.

And online efforts ebb and flow with staff changes as student journalists graduate and new ones take their place. One year, a paper hires a whiz-bang web designer who beefs up their online offerings. The next year, that designer is gone, and a less-savvy replacement can’t keep up the pace. One year’s multimedia journalist gives way to the next year’s more traditional print journalist.

Blazing New Trails

Despite all these obstacles, many college newspapers have moved forward with innovative online offerings. Here are a few examples of sites that have paved the way in blogging, video, audio slideshows, and other forms of interactivity:

Xpress Flash-based map of campus

San Francisco State University Xpress — Former SFSU journalism professor Andrew DeVigal, now multimedia editor for the New York Times, helped lead the Xpress staff in producing a multimedia-rich web site using Movable Type blogging software. Flash-based maps and audio slideshows (like this package that illustrates favorite student hangouts at SFSU) began on the Xpress site in 2006.

Vanderbilt University InsideVandy — Chris Carroll, Vanderbilt student media adviser and co-founder of the Center for Innovation in College Media, led InsideVandy student journalists in an effort to create a “mothership” approach to student media, akin to Steve Yelvington’s BlufftonToday in 2006. The idea was to bring all student media — TV, radio, newspaper, and magazines — into one online presence that would allow anyone in the community to contribute content.

Virginia Tech Collegiate Times — The Collegiate Times became an example of both breaking news and multimedia usage in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007, massacre on campus. Student journalists posted breaking news updates, a blog, audio slideshows and video (see the CT archives here). More than that, other school newspapers also used online media to report on the shootings, posting video reports from their campuses and posting blog updates from Virginia (see continuing ICM coverage here).

University of Washington Daily — Just days before the VT shootings, UW’s student journalists covered the death of a student on campus, using video and live updates to tell the story (archived story here). The Daily began shooting video news on campus in the 2006-07 school year.

Spartan Daily slideshow for a boxing story

San Jose State University Spartan Daily — With Ryan Sholin as web editor, the Spartan Daily plunged into multimedia early. See this example, a 2006 story about SJSU boxing club members traveling to Berkeley to compete in a regional boxing tournament. In addition to text, the article features video and audio slideshows. The paper has continued to push the envelope, in March 2008 experimenting with live streaming TV and live blogging.

Boise State University Arbiter — The Arbiter dove headfirst into web-first publishing when the Broncos went to the Fiesta Bowl in 2006. Since the Arbiter wasn’t publishing during the Christmas break, they made the most of their online presence. Staffers from the student newspaper published web-only content from Arizona, including podcasts, video and audio slideshows (see their coverage here). They have continued to produce podcasts and other multimedia coverage since then.

Eastern Illinois University Daily Eastern News — Long before I was hired at Eastern, the DEN was producing audio slideshows using Soundslides that rivaled the best in the business. Check out this audio slideshow from the 2006 Greek Week Tugs competition. They were also early to experiment with podcasts and, in 2006, revamped their sports coverage by introducing a widget that could automatically update football scores and schedule information for readers.

This is just a small sampling of the ways that students have taken advantage of online tools since late 2005. There are numerous other schools that have also moved into multimedia and online publishing with gusto, including the Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Daily Collegian at Penn State, the Daily Pennsylvanian at Penn, the GW Hatchet at George Washington U., the Miami Hurricane, the Independent Florida Alligator at the University of Florida, the Corsair at Pensacola Junior College, the Gargoyle at Flagler College, the Daily Mississippian at Ole Miss, and numerous others. For more examples of student journalists’ multimedia, see this database.

Recently, we saw clear evidence of this movement into online journalism on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, when student journalists across the country used tools like Mogulus, Twitter and CoverItLive to cover the historic election night. (For a sampling of coverage, see here).

To borrow a phrase, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

Via the New York Times

Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

The study, conducted from 2005 to last summer, describes new-media usage but does not measure its effects.

“It certainly rings true that new media are inextricably woven into young people’s lives,” said Vicki Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of its program for the study of media and health. “Ethnographic studies like this are good at describing how young people fit social media into their lives. What they can’t do is document effects. This highlights the need for larger, nationally representative studies.”

Ms. Ito, a research scientist in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, said that some parental concern about the dangers of Internet socializing might result from a misperception.

“Those concerns about predators and stranger danger have been overblown,” she said. “There’s been some confusion about what kids are actually doing online. Mostly, they’re socializing with their friends, people they’ve met at school or camp or sports.”

The study, part of a $50 million project on digital and media learning, used several teams of researchers to interview more than 800 young people and their parents and to observe teenagers online for more than 5,000 hours. Because of the adult sense that socializing on the Internet is a waste of time, the study said, teenagers reported many rules and restrictions on their electronic hanging out, but most found ways to work around such barriers that let them stay in touch with their friends steadily throughout the day.

“Teens usually have a ‘full-time intimate community’ with whom they communicate in an always-on mode via mobile phones and instant messaging,” the study said.

This is not news to a cluster of Bronx teenagers, gathered after school on Wednesday to tell a reporter about their social routines. All of them used MySpace and instant messaging to stay in touch with a dozen or two of their closest friends every evening. “As soon as I get home, I turn on my computer,” said a 15-year-old boy who started his MySpace page four years ago. “My MySpace is always on, and when I get a message on MySpace, it sends a text message to my phone. It’s not an obsession; it’s a necessity.” (School rules did not permit using students’ names without written parental permission, which could not be immediately obtained.)

Only one student, a 14-year-old girl, had ever opted out — and she lasted only a week.

“It didn’t work,” she said. “You become addicted. You can’t live without it.”

In a situation familiar to many parents, the study describes two 17-year-olds, dating for more than a year, who wake up and log on to their computers between taking showers and doing their hair, talk on their cellphones as they travel to school, exchange text messages through the school day, then get together after school to do homework — during which time they also play a video game — talk on the phone during the evening, perhaps ending the night with a text-messaged “I love you.”

Teenagers also use new media to explore new romantic relationships, through interactions casual enough to ensure no loss of face if the other party is not interested.

The study describes two early Facebook messages, or “wall posts,” by teenagers who eventually started dating. First, the girl posted a message saying, “hey … hm. wut to say? iono lol/well I left you a comment … u sud feel SPECIAL haha.” (Translation: Hmm … what to say? I don’t know. Laugh out loud. Well I left you a comment … You should feel special.)

A day later, the boy replied, “hello there … umm I don’t know what to say, but at least I wrote something …”

While online socializing is ubiquitous, many young people move on to a period of tinkering and exploration, as they look for information online, customize games or experiment with digital media production, the study found.

For example, a Brooklyn teenager did a Google image search to look at a video card and find out where in a computer such cards are, then installed his own.

What the study calls “geeking out” is the most intense Internet use, in which young people delve deeply into a particular area of interest, often through a connection to an online interest group.

“New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting,” the study said. “Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults.”

Via ARS Technica

By Matthew Lasar | Published: November 19, 2008 - 11:14PM CT

Stuck in the Netscape era

As Ars Technica readers know, the blogosphere is now saturated with guesses as to who President-elect Barack Obama will select as the next chair of the Federal Communications Commission. And there’s no shortage of input about what the FCC’s priorities should be over the next several years: net neutrality, improving U.S. broadband penetration, fixing the Universal Service Fund—everybody’s weighing in with free advice.

Here’s mine: somebody’s got to do something about the FCC’s web site: www.fcc.gov.

Nota bene: the following should not be construed as a dig at the FCC’s dedicated personnel, many of whom I have the pleasure of communicating with on a regular basis. Clearly an enormous amount of work has been put into the site. But this effort has not been accompanied by coordinated planning or design. That’s the fault of management, not staff.

Remember the Internet in the Netscape 3 era? The FCC sure does

Let’s face it, fcc.gov still looks like it was thrown together six weeks after Netscape went public over a decade ago. The result: the only people who can really access it are telecom lawyers, public interest groups with their autoforms, and wonks like me who have dedicated years to exploring its mysteries. The tens of thousands of Americans who want to intelligently participate in the FCC’s many proceedings are almost instantly stymied by the Byzantine nature of the site. Except, of course, if they want to make an indecency complaint.

Clearly, the next FCC needs to blue pencil into its upcoming Congressional budget a request for funding for a serious overhaul of the portal. It’s time to bring in a team of designers, database programmers, and scripting grunts to transfer its data to a good content management system. Short of that, here are four suggestions for making fcc.gov more usable and accessible.

1. Make it easier for the public to comment on proceedings

Want to comment on an important issue facing the FCC like net neutrality or product placement? No problem, just go to this link and upload a statement. Oops. You’ve already been stopped dead in your tracks by field one, right? Field one requires a number for the proceeding associated with the issue. You have no idea what this number is, and, absurdly, when you click the proceeding search link, it requires you to input a proceeding number to look up the proceeding!

Most people who, often for the first time, want to give the FCC some individual feedback on an issue don’t know that every major subject has a docket number. For example, the docket number for net neutrality is 07-52. Without that, you can’t use the FCC’s comment page to file a comment. To be fair, the agency has thrown up a page of popular dockets with quick links, but it’s hard to find, contains only about 20 of the Commission’s proceedings (some of which have expired), and only allows you to send a brief statement.

Would it really be so difficult to attach a link to the main comment form that leads to a page that explains docket numbers and offers a wiki with all current dockets? The FCC should post a link to that form at the top of every proceeding- or order-related news release it publishes in pdf, word, or html. And fcc.gov should post that link prominently at its top left hand corner, right under the search form.

And speaking of which…

2. Make it easier to search for comments on proceedings

Maybe you’ve heard that Clear Channel or the FBI or some public interest group has filed something interesting with the FCC? Maybe you want to look up the latest comments on a hot proceeding? So you went to the Commission’s search field on the top left of the site and entered the appropriate data, right?

Forget it, you’re lost already. That search engine only ferrets out what the FCC publishes about its activities, not the comments and statements that the agency receives from interested parties. What you really want is here, safely hidden three links away from the main page. And if you try to search that engine for a proceeding—again, you need the docket number.

Good luck finding this on your own. At least it was updated this century

In the long run, the FCC needs to modernize its comment database. It needs to grab some open source program like Lucene and make the millions of PDFs stored in its tables searchable by text (or at least as many as possible). In the short run, it needs to add that same link mentioned in suggestion one—a wiki of dockets so people can make informed use of the right search form. And again, the site should link to the form from the top left of the main page, not three clicks inside.

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