Bloggers VS. Traditional Journalists

I was watching Costas this weekend and featured on the show was a sports blogger and a "traditional" journalist. Both guests reported on sports but had different outlets for their information. The question was asked if blogging is going to replace traditional journalism?

The blogger, claimed that his style of reporting was better based on the ability of his readers to provide feedback. He also claimed that he isn't swayed by the locker rooms, press box, the glamor and other intimate settings and therefore can be more unbiased in his reporting of the news as it relates to the teams and players.

The traditional journalist, a certain Buzz Bissinger, was obviously incensed by the bloggers presence on the show. His body language, attitude, and tone made it glaringly evident that he has no love for bloggers, or at least this one in particular. He went on to say that for over 40 years he has been perfecting his craft and how bloggers have bastardized the business. He continued to lambaste bloggers and their horrible writing skills and lack of involvement in the business. The sports writer claimed that sports bloggers don't have to do any real work, they can just sit in their office chair and provide inaccurate reports. The funny thing about his tirade was that I don't think he knew the difference between a blog post and a blog comment.

There was a third guest on the show, a professional athlete. I think that it was Braylon Edwards but I am not sure, I am not a very "sporty" person. When asked if he ever read the blogs, he said yes. In fact that was his primary source of information. He went on to say that most, if not all, pro athletes read the blogs to find out what the fans and the reporters are saying. And if they say they don't, they are lying.

The blogger claimed that his blog had grown to sufficient size that he can and has been granted press credentials. Since the average age of newspaper readers is now 55 and rising, I think the roll of blogs as viable news sources is gaining momentum at an amazing rate. I also think if traditional journalists aren't willing to embrace the new mass media, maybe it's time to hang up your pad and pen.

Sports arena aside, I do think that blogs are seen as the number 1 source of information when it comes to tech information and most consumer electronics. I know I turn exclusively to the Internet when I am looking for information about SEO, web design, and industry trend news.

Where do you turn when you look for news? What information type of news do you seek on the internet?

 

No More Domain Tasting

Domain tasting is NO MOE! YES!

I have always wondered why ICANN allowed this "try before you buy" policy in the first place.

What is domain tasting you ask? It is the process of registering (temporarily) a domain to determine it's "financial viability". Basically, you monetize the heck of it to see how well it does. If the domain didn't pass the test, the owner had a 5 day grace period in which he could get a refund. The ones that do good, are retained by the registrant.

Now, you all have seen these "financial viability test sites" pop up in searches. You are searching for your favorite whatever and perhaps you misspell the word or maybe you don't. Either way, included in your results page is a link to a page that has absolutely nothing to do what what you are looking for except that it may have your keyword on there as a link to something else.

Wikipedia states, "In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. By February 2007, the CEO of GoDaddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept."

According to ICANN, this whole process was initially designed to help people out who made a typo in the registration of their domain. Of course, as you can tell from the above numbers, people soon began to exploit this clause of generosity.

DotSauce.com reports that a unanimous vote of 13-0 turned the once flexible rule into a thing of the past.

"The discussion was sparked in response to the scandalous practice of Network Solutions hijacking domain searches in recent weeks. Oddly enough, the industry can be thankful to Net Sol for getting the snowball rolling on the end of domain tasting."

So what does this mean for regular Joe Surfer? Better quality results? I hope so but we will have to wait and see. One thing is for sure, there may be glut of "bad tasting" domain names that will soon come up for sale on the secondary market. And I bet that it will dramatically cut down on the amount of "typo squatting." (FYI - That anchor text is going to www.budwiser.com, an obvious typo.)

 

Looks Like BlueRay Wins!

Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses!

You heard it right. For those of you who can remember the Beta vs. VHS battle, it looks like the second battle of video format is going to be won by BluRay.

I just got this in an email from a friend of mine who happens to be an electronics junkie:

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- "Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.

"We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop," said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. "While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality."

Toshiba will continue to lead innovation, in a wide range of technologies that will drive mass market access to high definition content. These include high capacity NAND flash memory, small form factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies. The company expects to make forthcoming announcements around strategic progress in these convergence technologies.

Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.

This decision will not impact on Toshiba's commitment to standard DVD, and the company will continue to market conventional DVD players and recorders. Toshiba intends to continue to contribute to the development of the DVD industry, as a member of the DVD Forum, an international organization with some 200 member companies, committed to the discussion and defining of optimum optical disc formats for the consumer and the related industries.

Toshiba also intends to maintain collaborative relations with the companies who joined with Toshiba in working to build up the HD DVD market, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation and major Japanese and European content providers on the entertainment side, as well as leaders in the IT industry, including Microsoft, Intel, and HP. Toshiba will study possible collaboration with these companies for future business opportunities, utilizing the many assets generated through the development of HD DVD."

Well, there you have it. We will have to see what happens. Will the rest of the manufacturers follow suit?

I just thought of something. What ever happened to those really BIG "laser disks?"

 

Finally - Spammers Get What They Deserve!

The Associated Press reports that, Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice California, and James Schaffer, also 41, of Paradise Alley, Arizona, were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, fined $100,000 and were ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. They also were ordered to forfeit over $1.1 million in commissions they made spamming inboxes with pornographic emails.

They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails, prosecutors said. During nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages advertising pornographic Web sites, according to court documents. Even after Congress passed the law called the CAN-SPAM act, the 2 perps continued sending email via remote servers in Amsterdam. The authorities were able to track the spam back to the individuals in Phoenix.

To prove that there is no honor in spamming, 3 other individuals that were involved, turned on Kilbride and Schaffer and testified against them in court to in order to avoid prosecution themselves.

YES! I love to hear stories like this. Obviously there is some big money to be made in spam, I have always wondered how much people make spamming and why they do it. Now that those 2 are going to be in a prison cell for quite some time, someone needs to go to the door of their cell every 5 minutes and scream at the top of their lung, "Click here to see the hottest girls on the net."

 

Faster Internet For All - The Fiber Way

I was going to title this post, "More Fiber For Regular Traffic" but I didn't think that would catch someones attention if they were only an RSS subscriber. Anyway, back to the news at hand.

According to the Fiber to Home Council, in 2006, 1 million U.S. homes had direct access to the Internet from their homes with fiber. NOW, just a year later, 2.14 million homes have the fiber to home access. With the number over doubling in the last year it is apparent that "...American consumers want what only fiber can deliver – and that is a pipe big enough to handle the high-bandwidth Internet and video applications of the future,” said Joe Savage, President of the FTTH Council."

"Now in its seventh year, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council is a non-profit organization established to help its members plan, market, implement and manage FTTH solutions. Council membership includes municipalities, utilities, developers, and traditional and non-traditional service providers, creating a cohesive group to share knowledge and build industry consensus on key issues surrounding fiber to the home. Communities and organizations interested in exploring FTTH options may find information on the FTTH Council web site at www.ftthcouncil.org."

This is a great thing they are doing. It's too bad that we had to leave it up to a non-profit to further the interests of the U.S. people. After all the BIG Telcos did get a HUGE take break to the tune of 200 million that was supposed to be earmarked for this very thing. Where did that money go? Oh yeah, in their pockets. I think that those same companies that realized the tax breaks should have to give a certain percent of their sales to organizations like the FTTH council.

 

Chinese Censorship V2

Reported by Ars Technica, the Chinese Government has started blocking certain sites like Blogspot and Word press. For "the Great Firewall of China, there are certainly many interpretations of what is and isn't allowed through the country's cyber connection."

" Savvy Internet fans in the people's republic have known for a long time, however, that there have been simple ways to get forbidden information. One of those ways was the magical gift of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. The Great Firewall can block specific web sites all it wants, but as long as there's an RSS feed, many Chinese surfers can use feeds to access otherwise forbidden information."

The Chinese Government eventually got wise to this and started banning all forms of RSS feeds. Any URL that started with "feeds", "rss", and "blog" are now on the blacklist. Basically with the blanket RSS ban in effect, they have eliminated all, approve and non-approved, site syndication.

This is just like when the "Great Firewall" came in and shut down an entire data center because it was hosting one blog that contained some "non-approved" information.

China - HA. They must be doing something right. We buy so much product from them through their official intermediary - WalMart.

 

The Impact Of The Internet On Newspaper Advertising

How the Internet has hurt newspaper sales and advertising revenue continues to pepper the press. Back in May I wrote an article about the decline in newspaper advertising dollars and again just a few weeks ago I referenced the falling percentages of newspaper advertising revenue in a post called "Rate Card Woes."

A very interesting study was released this month from Harvard. Funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, this new report contained information that describes the increase in website traffic for major brand newspapers and other major online news sources. The report also studies small to mid-sized city newspaper websites. Findings indicate that online news seekers are neglecting the local newspaper websites in favor of major newspaper and television websites.

Nationally known newspaper Web sites such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today are attracting a larger audience. On average large newspaper site traffic increased by 10 percent over the past year. In comparison Web sites of most other newspapers of large, medium and small cities are losing their audiences. This isn't the most interesting finding though. The biggest traffic gains are being seen by non-traditional news sources. It was found that Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN had significant increases in traffic over the past year with social media sites and news aggregators seeing an 800% gain in site traffic.

The study also found that the Internet is a bigger threat to local news organizations because it decreases the influence of geography on user's choice of a news source.

For me, the biggest surprise in the report were the findings for commercial radio station web traffic. Large commercial radio station saw a huge increase in web traffic and mid-size radio station saw a slight increase during the term of the study.

At the bottom of the heap was national and local public radio with their stats plummeting sharply over the last year. NPR alone lost 20% or 400,000 of their unique visitor from April 2006 to April 2007.

Brand name, large market and local television websites all saw increase traffic from people seeking new during the study.

So what does this study tell us?

• First and foremost - People are seeking news on the internet
• People are seeking news on large, brand name websites
• People are getting their news from non-traditional and social media outlets

Does this mean that people are caring less about local news? Not at all. You can get your local news from an aggregated feed on Yahoo Local News can't you?

The most significant quote from the study:

"The Internet is redistributing the news audience in ways that is threatening some
traditional news organizations. Local newspapers have been the outlets that are most at risk, and they are likely to remain so. If our trend analysis is borne out, many newspapers are going to have difficulty even holding onto their online readers. Brand-name newspapers’ sites, as well as some others are growing, but a significant proportion of newspaper sites are stagnant or losing visitors. This development was perhaps inevitable. The problem of newspapers is compounded by the fact that they cannot succeed simply by replacing their hard-copy readers with online readers. On a person-by-person basis, the sale of hard-copy newspapers is vastly more profitable than drawing people to the paper’s website. It is estimated that a newspaper needs to attract two or three dozen online readers to make up for—in terms of advertising revenue—the loss of a single hard-copy reader. When people go to the Internet for news, they can just as easily navigate to a source outside their community as one within it, bypassing a local site in favor of a known site elsewhere. Therein is a primary reason why brand-name news organizations, like CNN and the New York Times, have large Web audiences."

That being said, could it be possible that we will witness the death of a media in our generation?
I still have a few 8 track tapes, I think.


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So I'm NOT The Only One Tired Of Paris

Finally someone else that is tired of Paris Hilton. Between Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton, you'd think that there was nothing more newsworthy in the US. But what do I know?


Paris Hilton Is Not News - Watch more free videos

WAY TO GO MIKA!