All entries tagged: Facebook

 

This Week in Review: Google’s Buzz buzz, Demand Media’s plans, and turning relationships into revenue

Week in Review
By Mark Coddington
Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them.

Google Buzzes social media: For the second week in a row, the biggest story at the intersection of journalism and new media is an innovation by Google: This week, the talk was about Google Buzz, a real-time program for sharing status updates, links and media through Gmail’s platform. You can find helpful summaries of how Buzz works at The Official Google Blog, O’Reilly AnswersMashable and Search Engine Land. A theme that’s clear especially from the Google blog and Search Engine Land: Google sees Buzz as a big part of its effort to organize the “torrent” that is the web’s social information with the help of the same algorithms that gave Google its search primacy.

The most important stuff first: As for Buzz’s implications for journalism, the two best quick guides are by Will Sullivan at Poynter and Google-watcher Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Jarvis sees Buzz as a major step toward the “hyperpersonal news stream” that Google’s been visualizing and magnifies the value of voice and local news. Sullivan focuses largely on Buzz’s impact on adding the element of location to news and advertising. (The local media site Lost Remote touches on this, too.) By the way, I’m with Sullivan on this — I think Buzz’s greatest impact on journalism may be as an incremental step in the development of mobile news, a sort of early bud in the ecosystem location-based news. Keep reading »

The Newsonomics of social media optimization

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

This week’s buzz is all about Google Buzz, the search giant’s entry into the status-update world. But the humming of social media — and its implications for news media — just keeps getting louder and louder. News people are in the social web, use the social web and write about the social web — but can they can make the social web part of their digital publishing businesses? That’s a big, important question, and one just dawning on many people in the news business.

First, let’s consider a number of datapoints:

— Nielsen reports that Internet users worldwide now spend 5.35 hours a month on social networks, up from just three hours a year ago. The social web is the new home page; remember how news sites all put up “make us your home page” buttons just a decade ago. News sites, of course, are lucky to break into double digits — 10 minutes — per month in usage.

— Facebook Mobile just announced yesterday that it busted through the 100 million user mark, up from 65 million in September.

— Bit.ly, one of the top “URL shortening service providers” — sends about two billion link referrals a month, largely given its Twitter stronghold. Question, of course, is how many of those may link to news or information; try, maybe, 20 percent, according to a recent Rutgers survey of social use that shows that 20 percent of posts in the statusphere come from “informers,” those that share news and information. The other 80 percent: the what-I-ate-today people.

— A recent study I did with Outsell said that 44 percent of news readers say they use social networks to share news and information. Of those, half use Facebook to do it; one in five use Twitter.

Keep reading »

 

This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader

By Mark Coddington

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]

A gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few incremental happenings that proved to be interesting, and several of them involved Google. We’ll start with those.

— The Google story that could prove to be the biggest over the long term actually happened last week, in the midst of our iPad euphoria: Google unveiled a beta form of Social Search, which allows you to search your “social circle” in addition to the standard results served up for you by Google’s magic algorithm. (CNN has some more details.) I’m a bit surprised at how little chatter this rollout is getting (then again, given the timing, probably not), but tech pioneer Dave Winer loves the idea — not so much for its sociality but because it “puts all social services on the same open playing field”; you decide how important your contacts from Twitter or Facebook are, not Google’s algorithm.

— Also late last week, several media folks got some extended time with Google execs at Davos. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger posted his summary, focusing largely on Google’s faceoff with China. “What Would Google Do?” author Jeff Jarvis posted his summary, with lots of Google minutiae. (Jeff Sonderman also further summarized Jarvis’ summary.) Among the notable points from Jarvis: Google is “working on making news as compelling as possible” and CEO Eric Schmidt gets in a slam on the iPad in passing. Keep reading »