Daily Archives: August 30, 2007

The continued implosion of broadcast TV

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From IBM Press room – 2007-08-22…

A new IBM online survey of consumer digital media and entertainment habits shows audiences are more in control than ever and increasingly savvy about filtering marketing messages.

The global findings overwhelmingly suggest personal Internet time rivals TV time. Among consumer respondents, 19 percent stated spending six hours or more per day on personal Internet usage, versus nine percent of respondents who reported the same levels of TV viewing. 66 percent reported viewing between one to four hours of TV per day, versus 60 percent who reported the same levels of personal Internet usage.

Consumers are seeking consolidated, trustworthy content, recognition and community when it comes to mobile and Internet entertainment. Armed with PC, mobile and interactive content and tools, consumers are vying for control of attention, content and creativity. Despite natural lags among marketers, advertising revenues will follow consumers’ habits.

To effectively respond to this power shift, IBM sees advertising agencies going beyond traditional creative roles to become brokers of consumer insights; cable companies evolving to home media portals; and broadcasters and publishers racing toward new media formats. Marketers in turn are being forced to experiment and make advertising more compelling, or risk being ignored…

Blog-hating as a syndrome

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Lovely Guardian piece by Scott Rosenberg on the strange hostility evoked by blogging in conventional minds…

From the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable. Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe – who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal’s blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as “a universe of rumours”. To support this charge, he cited an inaccuracy in Wikipedia’s entry about himself. Of course the online encyclopedia is not a blog at all. But critics like Wolfe can’t be bothered making distinctions. He admitted that Wikipedia isn’t “strictly a blog” but claimed it “shares the genre’s characteristics”, and dismissed a universe of blogs on the basis of a single Wikipedia inaccuracy – which was, naturally, immediately corrected. If it’s online, apparently, it’s all the same, and all worthless.

It’s hard to take Wolfe’s assessment of blogging seriously since he admits that, “weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information’,” he doesn’t read them himself. In any case, those who obsessively review their own Wikipedia entries for errors might pause before accusing others of narcissism…