Dec 7th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Updates from Michael Learmonth at Silicon Alley Insider and from Adam Ostrow at Mashable show that ABC’s election-coverage deal with Facebook isn’t exactly setting any records in terms of participation from members of the social network. Learmonth says that the application has just over 10,000 daily users, and Mashable says it only has a little over 8,000 — about 3 per cent of the total who signed up.
So what does this mean? It could mean nothing. Maybe the application just sucks, or maybe it doesn’t really take advantage of Facebook and how a social network operates — I took a look at it, and while it allows you to support a particular politician and read the news, it doesn’t do a whole lot other than that. The ABC Politics page is more useful, in the sense that you can join in debates (vote on issues) and follow ABC reporters. Several of the questions asked have close to 10,000 responses, which isn’t bad.
Maybe 8,000 to 10,000 people is a respectable number for signups to the ABC app (although it doesn’t look like much next to the 50 million people who are on Facebook). Or maybe it’s too early, and not enough people are aware that it’s even there. One other explanation, of course, is that the social network “is made up of kids who would rather play Xbox and “poke” each other than read the news,” as one commenter at Silicon Alley put it.
Is that true? I’m not sure it is, as I mentioned when the ABC app was first announced. Plenty of groups have gotten a fair bit of traction for political concerns and issues (although I’m not sure I would include the “Stephen Colbert for President” group in that). It’s possible that members of a social network like Facebook just aren’t looking for news from established media outlets, but would rather find it somewhere else.
Dec 7th, 2007 | Blogs, Social Media | No Comments
I know that the impulse behind it is a valuable one, but I just can’t seem to get excited about the launch of the Business Blog Council, or what should probably be called the Big Business Blog Council. In fact, my thoughts on it run pretty close to Dave Taylor’s — it sounds like a gigantic waste of time to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for businesses getting with the social-media program. But I don’t think getting a whole bunch of gigantic corporations into a room together is really going to help.
I really want to like this idea. Lionel Menchaca of Dell is a super guy — we had him on a panel at the last mesh and I really enjoyed meeting him — and he really gets what social media is all about, as his post on the Blog Council shows. But even if businesses need a secret clubhouse where they can share ideas about blogging, which I’m not sure they do, I still don’t see why it has to just be for big businesses. Why not all businesses?
I know, I know — people keep saying that businesses like Coke and Dell and Cisco have different needs because they are bigger. But I’m not sure I buy that. What difference does it make whether you have 100 employees or 10,000? Both companies will still have to think about disclosure and legalities and all those kinds of things. Much as it pains me to admit it, I think Scoble is right — just get out there and start doing it.
The biggest risk with something like the Big Business Blog Council — apart from it just reinforcing how big businesses don’t really get it, as Mark Hopkins points out at Mashable — is that it turns into something that starts with the word “cluster” and rhymes with the word “duck.”
Dec 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
So as Matt Marshall reports at VentureBeat today, the Los Angeles Times has taken a stake in Mixx — a relatively new Digg-style social-bookmarking site whose main claim to fame is that Mike Arrington recently said that people were leaving Digg to go there — and will integrate Mixx buttons into its site in the same way that the Wall Street Journal recently added Digg buttons to its news stories.
I have to admit that I don’t really get why the Times would do this (the paper has apparently bought a stake in the site as well). Don’t get me wrong — I’m in favour of having social-bookmarking tools integrated in a news site, whether it’s Digg or Mixx or Stumbleupon or del.icio.us or whatever. I think that’s a smart thing to do, because it encourages people to submit your stories to those sites, which can increase traffic and (hopefully) readership as well. But why get into bed with Mixx?
Some people — like my friend Jason at Webomatica — like Mixx, and I will admit that the site has a nice, clean look about it. But the fact is that Digg is still orders of magnitude larger. If you do a Compete.com chart of the two of them, Mixx is a flat line. The top most-recommended stories or links on Mixx have about 20 or 30 votes, while the top stories on Digg routinely get more than 2,000 votes.
Is the LA Times betting that somehow Mixx will become the next Digg? Or is it just looking for a social-bookmarking site to cozy up to because everyone else is doing it? Or maybe the paper is interested because the company includes a former USA Today exec, a former Associated Press exec and a former Yahoo exec. Either way, I don’t see what there is to be gained by picking one social tool over the others.
Dec 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
According to a piece in the New York Times today, MySpace is launching a service called Transmissions, which is aimed at bands and artists who want to use the social network to enlarge their fan base. The site says that it is offering them the opportunity to name a studio of their choice and then record whatever they want — at which point MySpace will stream the content and give users the opportunity to buy copies of the song or the video or both. The company said it sees the feature as being like MTV Live, but with more real-time delivery.
Dec 3rd, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
Several weeks ago, Amazon introduced the latest in a long line of “e-book” readers, known as the Kindle. Available for $400, it comes equipped with an easy-to-read “E Ink” screen and a wireless connection that allows users to download books that they purchase from the online retailer. Kindle users can also upload their own files to the reader by e-mailing them to a special address associated with the device, or by using a USB cable.
Could this latter feature help the Kindle do for books what MP3 players did for music — that is, provide a platform for copyright infringement on a vast scale? Mike Arrington of TechCrunch seems to think it might. In a recent post, he speculated that the Kindle could become the vehicle of choice for reading “pirated” e-books downloaded via BitTorrent.
Although it is primarily used for the swapping of music, movies and software, there are also books available using the P2P standard, including some versions of recent best-sellers such as the latest Harry Potter novel. Downloading them and emailing them to a Kindle is child’s play, Arrington says, since the device automatically translates Word documents, PDFs and other file formats.
“Users may buy a book or two on Kindle, but many users will simply steal the content they want to read. Thanks to Amazon, that’s really easy to do on their slick new device,” the TechCrunch editor writes. “Should users do this? No, and we do not encourage this. But will they? I think we all know the answer to that.”
There are some hurdles when it comes to books that music doesn’t face, of course. For one thing, books still primarily come in paper form, while music is already digitized on CD and is easy to “rip” and upload. Books either have to be scanned — which is time-consuming — or the e-book format they are in has to be cracked. And not everyone likes to read books multiple times, whereas people often keep music around on their MP3 players for months or even years.
All that said, however, it seems likely that books will be dragged kicking and screaming into the age of digital media just as everything else has, and the Kindle could be the vehicle doing the dragging.
(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)
