I’ve got the New Yorker archive on a set of DVDs. Now they’re releasing it on a portable hard drive. It’s a lot more expensive than the DVD version. $299.00 seems a lot to pay for the convenience of not having to swop disks.
Daily Archives: August 24, 2006
Broadband users get their news from the Net, not TV
FROM THE Pew Internet & American Life survey.
By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years.
For a group of “high-powered” online users – early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users – the internet is their primary news source on the average day. Within this group – which makes up 40% of home high-speed internet users in the United States – 71% go online for news on the average day, while 59% get news from local TV. Just over half get news from national TV and radio on the typical day and about 40% turn to local papers.
“The broadband difference is now permeating the news environment,” said John B. Horrigan, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and principal author of the report. “High-powered internet users are heavily into other media sources as well, but the preeminent place of online news suggests that it shapes their offline information choices in an important way.”
Across age groups, the impact of online news is greatest for American adults under the age of 36 with a high-speed internet connection at home. For this age group, the internet is now on par with local TV as a daily source for news, and surpasses national TV, radio, and local papers as a news source. Fully 46% of this group gets news online on the typical day, compared with 51% who turn to local TV, 41% who turn to radio, and 40% to national TV news…
Googling your TV
From Technology Review.
Google probably already knows what search terms you use, what Web pages you’re viewing, and what you write about in your e-mail — after all, that’s how it serves up the text ads targeted to the Web content on your screen.Pretty soon, Google may also know what TV programs you watch — and could use that information to send you more advertising, leavened with information pertinent to a show.
A system recently outlined by researchers at Google amounts to personalized TV without the fancy set-top equipment required by previous (and failed) attempts at interactive television. Their prototype software, detailed in a conference presentation in Europe last June, uses a computer’s built-in microphone to listen to the sounds in a room. It then filters each five-second snippet of sound to pick out audio from a TV, reduces the snippet to a digital “fingerprint,” searches an Internet server for a matching fingerprint from a pre-recorded show, and, if it finds a match, displays ads, chat rooms, or other information related to that snippet on the user’s computer…
The User Is Not Broken
My colleague Gill Needham, with whom I am working on an exciting new course called Beyond Google, sent me this, described by its (librarian) author as “a meme masquerading as a manifesto”. Excerpt
All technologies evolve and die.
Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.
You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.
You are not a format. You are a service.
The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.
The user is the sun.
The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.
The user is not broken…
Sony buys Grouper for $65 million
Very good analysis by TechCrunch of Sony’s decision to shell out $65 million for the Grouper online video outfit. Excerpt:
The Grouper acquisition price is out of whack when compared to other recent video acquisitions. US Comscore data says Grouper had about 542,000 unique visitors in July 2006, compared to YouTube’s 16 million. Viacom’s recent acquisitions of iFilm (December 2005, 3.3 million U.S. uniques) and Atom/Shockwave (August 2006, 1.3 million U.S. uniques) for $50 million and $200 million, respectively suggest a per-unique-visitor valuation of $15-$20. Grouper’s per-unique-visitor valuation, by comparision, is roughly $70 – $120, depending on whether you look at June or July 2006 data.
It’s hard to use Comscore data for meaningful analysis as it doesn’t necessarily reflect total videos uploaded or viewed, and doesn’t reflect videos embedded on third party sites. I also only have U.S. Comscore data. However, noting those issues, the $65 million valuation on Grouper suggests a YouTube valuation of around $2 billion.
Of course, it looks like Sony was most attracted to Grouper’s P2P technology for movie distribution, meaning YouTube comparisons are inappropriate. $65 million is still a lot to pay, however, and bittorent, as well as services like Red Swoosh (covered here), are proven and effective means of moving large amounts of data over the Internet.
Guitar bands strike a chord
Hmmmm…. Could this explain why there are four — or is it five — guitars in the Naughton household?
The rise of skinny-tied guitar bands such as Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs has fuelled the popularity of the instrument, with UK sales at an all-time high.Figures released yesterday show that musicians spent £110m on electric, bass and acoustic instruments last year. This was up from £102m in 2004. Sales may have also increased through the success of once little-known artists such as 19-year-old Paolo Nutini, who has been playing the guitar for just a few years and whose album has recently gone gold…
US marine corps calls up reserves
The US marine corps has been forced to call up its reserves for compulsory service in Iraq and Afghanistan because it has not been able to find enough volunteers – a reflection of the strain the two wars are putting on America’s armed forces.
The marines’ involuntary call-up, seen as a “back-door draft” by Pentagon critics, is the first since the start of the Iraq war, and will begin in a few months when a first batch of up to 2,500 reservists will be summoned back to active service for a year or more. The army has already sent 2,200 reservists back to the front, of which only about 350 went voluntarily.
[Source]