Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any Technology in Human History? - Michael DeGusta via Technology Review

Michael DeGusta via Technology Review

[…] smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from 5 percent to 40 percent in about four years, despite a recession. In the comparison shown, the only technology that moved as quickly to the U.S. mainstream was television between 1950 and 1953.

Almost as fast as TV, which was artificially delayed by WWII.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

Special Report: Social TV and The Second Screen

I am happy to release a special report I’ve recently written, Social TV and The Second Screen, developed cooperatively by Work Talk Research and The Futures Agency. Gerd Leonhard from The Futures Agency wrote the foreward, saying

The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge opportunity for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent and many-to-many society.

The report addresses the transition from the old world of TV into a new era, changed from top to bottom by the social web and the emergence of today’s always-with-us mobile devices: the second screen.

From Old To New TV

The term TV carries many meanings.

TV is broadcast in various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a wide variety of devices have been constructed to operate around the transmission and decoding of signals in those frequencies, and so the term TV can in fact refer to that spectrum. It is the device in the corner of your living room that captures those signals, and decodes them for you, or, nowadays, is more likely to get a signal transmitted through a cable network, and from coax screwed into the back.

In general, when people talk about TV they are referring to the medium of communication that the physics of TV broadcasting makes possible. And, although our civilization might have come up with dozens of forms that medium of communication might take, principally it is a form of entertainment, showing news, sporting events, sit coms, and reality TV shows, in a swirling, kaleidoscopic hodgepodge. And on free TV — broadcast or paid — TV involves a relatively large proportion of ad minutes per hour.

We are at an inflection point, where TV becomes another corner of human civilization that has fallen into the black hole called the web. As a result, in the next few years — at least in the advanced economies of the world — the way we experience TV will be changed profoundly, and the meaning of the word will change in corresponding ways.

For more information and to download, click here.

The Rise of the Content Strategist - Cheryl Lowry via Flip the Media

futuresagency (stowe boyd):

One way to know that tectonic changes are happening in an industry is to see people’s titles change when they aren’t being promoted. Newest example? Editors are becoming Content Strategists, and there is increasing demand for this ‘new’ specialty:

The Rise of the Content Strategist - Cheryl Lowry via Flip the Media

Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web, first published in 2009, has been a big influence, as Peter notes in his post. In her book, Halvorson defines content strategy as “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.” How does this differ, though, from what professional content writers, editors and managers have been doing all along?

I see it as a question of abundance. When I began writing content, creation was the goal. Marketing copy. User guides. FAQs. Help systems. Writers and editors produced and published words, and moving up the chain meant managing an editorial calendar and other writers to produce ever greater sums of copy. As print gave way to the web, this became considerably easier and cheaper to do. Many companies employed (and still employ) a strategy that web usability expert Gerry McGovern refers to as “launch and leave:” produce a ton of content, and then leave it sitting there unmeasured and unmaintained. Clay Shirky calls this abundance a result of post-Gutenberg economics, in which “the cost of producing [content] has fallen through the floor… .and so [now] there’s no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish.”

However, several recent trends have contributed to organizations demanding more from content.. The Great Recession, the rise of web analytics, and the voice of the customer amplified by social networks have all given companies more tools and incentive to create and maintain “useful, usable content.” Organizations are now realizing that content ought to earn its keep — it should drive conversion (sales, donations), or reduce call drivers (solve frequent and actual problems customers have). If it doesn’t, it’s just polluting the relevance and searchability of content that does.

So, the content strategist is concerned with the full lifecycle of media, not just production or aggregation. I think this title will absorb the brief rise of ‘content curator’, because it sounds shinier.

Magazine Group Offers Guidelines for Tablets - Tanzina Vega via NYTimes.com

Confusion in the way publishers report readership on tablet publications is being reduced by new standards:

Tanzina Vega via NYTimes.com

On Monday, the Association of Magazine Media will announce a set of voluntary guidelines developed by representatives from the magazine publishers Bonnier, Condé Nast, Forbes, Hearst, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Meredith and Time Inc.

The guidelines will cover how magazines measure their tablet editions, the vocabulary used in those definitions and time frames for when reader data will be released. The measures include the total number of a publication’s digital issues and the number of readers by issue. They will also count the number of times a reader opens a tablet issue (called a session), how much time that reader spends reading each issue and the average number of sessions per reader per issue.

And readership is going up, so we can expect ad rates to do so as well.

‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration - Thomas Lin via NYTimes.com

A great overview of how online, communitarian, open science sites are transforming the wold of science journals, and research.

Thomas Lin via NYTimes.com

The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”

Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

The web is subversive and corrosive to established power configurations, and now is the time for the scientific journal oligopoly to crash.

Third Time’s The Charm? A New NewsCred Raises $4 Million To Reinvent The Newswire Service - Rip Empson via TechCrunch

I think Empson is mischaracterizing this as a new play on the newswire. This isn’t like AP: it’s an aggregation of many news outlets into a single stream. Is it time for a complete ‘river of news’ service?

Rip Empson via TechCrunch

We first covered NewsCred back in 2008, when they launched a credibility rating score for publishers, authors, and stories (by way of community voting plus algorithms) in an attempt to help readers filter the noise and find the highest quality news.

Early last year, NewsCred relaunched as a “Ning for newspapers”, allowing users to build custom online newspapers in minutes. Both approaches seemed to hold water, and the startup raised $750K in seed funding from FLOODGATE and IA Ventures last September in support of it new look.

However, neither model quite caught on, and the NewsCred of today has landed somewhere in the middle. Co-founder and CEO Shafqat Islam says that two years of iterating and nail-biting has led to the team deciding to ditch its consumer site, reprioritizing its focus on the simple (if not ambitious) goal of reinventing the concept of a newswire service.

To do so, NewsCred is licensing content from more than 700 premium media brands, like Bloomberg, Forbes, Guardian, WashPo, and The Economist, and charging customers to access its news API — and the premium content from those publishers.

Hopefully, the third try is the charm. And, hey, quite a few reputable investors are willing to bet that it will be. Today, the startup announced that it has landed $4 million in series A funding led by FirstMark, with participation from Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and Advancit Capital, through Shari Redstone. (FLOODGATE and IA Ventures also reinvested.)

An obvious investment for AOL Ventures, I guess. I bet this turns out to be more valuable that the money they are throwing away on Patch.

Blip.tv released the findings of the largest research initiative to date focusing on original web video.

The study, performed by Dynamic Logic, offers insights into how, when and where blip.tv audiences are consuming online video, and has strong implications for the future of televisiona and online video. The study’s results shed light on viewer attitudes towards online advertising, the extent of cord cutting, and the prime hours for original series viewing.

Key findings include:

- Viewers are cord cutting. Online video consumption is rising as TV viewership is shrinking: compared to six months ago, viewers are watching nearly 9% less cable television, and increasing online content viewing by 26%. Online programming consumption on Mobile and video game platforms is up 19% and 18%, respectively.
Original online series are being watched during prime-time hours. Findings show that 8-11 pm is the most common time period for people to watch. 6-8pm is second most common.
- Advertising is more acceptable for original online series than for television streamed online. The research showed that for blip.tv’s audiences, 43% reacted positively to pre-roll advertising on original online series, whereas only 30% reacted positively to pre-roll advertising on television content streamed online.
- The average viewer of online series is 33 years old, and college educated. And the viewers are evenly divided between men and women.

TV Execs: Blip.tv’s Online Video Study Will Scare You

(via fredericguarino)

Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan? » The New Atlantis

Alan Jacobs via The New Atlantis

In these circumstances, with so many ways to go wrong, I am tempted to suggest that McLuhan now be ignored — to argue that his greatest long-term value has been his ability to provoke people who are, if not simply smarter than he was, then more patient, methodical, and scholarly. McLuhan’s attempts to account for the general landscape of media are fragmentary and inconsistent; those of his friend Neil Postman, who in following McLuhan’s example virtually created the field of “media ecology,” are far superior in evidential detail and conceptual clarity. McLuhan’s interest in literary modernism, and especially in Joyce and Pound, yielded a few memorable apothegms; but his student and friend Hugh Kenner, inspired and directed by him, produced major, field-transforming work on both writers. McLuhan’s thoughts about oral and literate cultures, dependent largely on his reading of a few scholars of ancient oral poetry, lack historical grounding and intellectual rigor; but another of his students, Walter Ong, would make a great scholarly career specifying the lineaments of that historical transformation. The work of each of those scholars is far superior to anything that McLuhan ever wrote.

The point isn’t what he wrote, but the impact he had on the world.

Which is, of course, exactly the meaning of ‘the medium is the message’.

You can’t judge McLuhan through the lens of literary theory or the history of science: he was a hand grenade at a garden party, and no one that tried to bend their minds around his twisted and self-referential pronouncements would every be the same. He wasn’t a TV science show: he was an oracle in a cave casting runes and reading the entrails of animals.

(Source: movimentos)