Technology360

Advertising hasn't delivered for digital media

...says Frédéric Filloux.  He writes:

... In the news business, we have a rule of thumb: an electronic reader brings 15 to 20 times less in advertising revenue than a print reader does. I’ll stop short of saying this dire state of affairs is only attributable to advertising. Between inadequate interfaces, poor marketing, and the certainty that, just by itself, intellectual superiority entitles to success, medias carry their share of responsibility in this situation. But, for the most part, it is the advertising community who missed the digital target. ...

But wait, you say, there's Google.  True, though as usual, Filloux is compelling.

Link:  Monday Note.  --Dennis

Death of the open web

Check out Virginia Heffernan's essay with this title in yesterday's New York Times Magazine. I'm in the UK reading on my Kindle, so no link, but this is important enough to look it up.

Update 25 May 2010:
I'm back.  Here's the link.  --Dennis

Will the Internet kill traditional car radio?

As I posted here back in January, user-customized audio stations like Pandora, et al. are being added to automobile sound systems.  Here is more on it from John R. Quain, who writes,

… But using … a service [like Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm] on a phone in the car usually meant looking away from the road to switch channels or skip a song on the phone — a major distraction. So companies are marrying these services to existing in-car controls, essentially making it no different than switching between 1010 WINS and Q104.3.  ¶  Alpine, a car stereo maker, for example, offers the $400 Alpine iDA-X305S Digital Media Receiver with Pandora Link. Using a special iPhone-compatible cable, the in-dash receiver lets listeners skip through their customized stations and even give songs a thumbs up or thumbs down by pushing in and turning the receiver’s front dial. …

Link:  New York Times.  Thanks to Lyle Logan for the tip.  --Dennis

The Death of Joe Average

Frédéric Filloux shares some fascinating data in a Monday Note post from awhile back (just discovered it in my blogging tool’s open drafts area).   Look at the scary paragraph on the shifts in advertising spending.  He writes:

Forget Joe Average, he’s dead. Ten or twenty years ago, analyzing audiences was much easier. Medias enjoyed well-defined and relatively unchanging target groups. For television, networks had a precise idea on who was watching what, and specialized cable outlets knew their viewers pretty well. Newspapers had their content structure sliced to fit various audiences by center of interests, age groups and opinions. At the time, contents were bundled together, delivered on a unique platform for a flat fee, on a per copy or subscription basis: the popular sport section, or classifieds did subsidize the expensive but more elitist foreign section, all for a dollar or the equivalent of a euro.  ¶  In today’s marketplace, every single piece of information lies the open, naked, stripped of a set value. People don’t buy contents by the bulk, they peck at it, leaving to a third party (the unstable advertising market), the burden of financing it. As the content scatters on the internet, so does the audience. … ¶ … Coming back to the title of this column, analyzing trends has become more complicated: audiences are no longer monolithic, their breakdowns are hard to ascertain. This uncertainty makes an average a less and less relevant notion. For an online newspaper, what is an average reader? Consider two readers and focus on their different level of engagement. One is glued to the New York Times, Le Monde or Aftonbladet on his/her iPhone during a 30 minutes daily commute. The other, at 7 pm, casually glances at headlines while sipping a glass of chardonnay with TV providing the ambient noise. In this particular example, the level of engagement makes a crucial difference to the value of a reader. …

Link:  Monday Note.  --Dennis

If Facebook was a real human conversation

Jeff Jarvis on Leo LaPorte’s This Week in Google show, pointed to the great Facebook in Reality video on YouTube, originally from Idiots of Ants.  It’s a couple of years old, but it sure nails the extreme stretching of notion of relationships involved in Facebook’s “friending” process.  Highly recommended.

For a more serious treatment of this topic, see Umair Haque’s March post on thin relationships.  --Dennis

Digital archiving for indigenous peoples

Not all media efforts need large audiences for success.  Indigenous cultures are at risk throughout the world (UNESCO says ten languages die out each year) and the spread of mass media and digital connectivity has arguably accelerated it.  Dr. Kimberly Christen, a professor at Washington State University, however, is working to help indigenous peoples archive their own cultures using digital archiving.  See Aboriginal archive offers new DRM at BBC News and Digital archiving tool to give voice to indigenous peoples at WSU Today.  Thanks to Television Archiving for the tip.  --Dennis

Video search needs to improve exponentially

So says an IDG News Service article by Joab Jackson in Computerworld:

While text-based search services such as Google's and Microsoft Bing now come pretty close to consistently serving up what users seek, video search services remain inexact at best, said video archiving experts who spoke on a panel at last week's WWW2010 conference.  ¶  Yet the panelists agreed that video searching techniques must improve exponentially if people are to use the growing amount of video footage now stored on the Internet and elsewhere. …

Link:  Computerworld.

FeedBlitz subs to Technology360 need to be re-entered

For reasons I don't fully understand, FeedBlitz dumped the email feed of this blog and there doesn't seem to be a way to recover the subscriber list.  If you were one of these and are now reading this via Twitter link or RSS feed, please go to the upper right box on Technology360.com and re-subscribe.  Thanks.  --Dennis

Mobile DTV “consumer trial” underway

TV Technology reports that the Open Mobile Video Coalition “launched its ‘Consumer Showcase’ program, which is designed to build public awareness about the potential of Mobile DTV service.”  The trial is in Washington, DC, a location no doubt chosen for its access to Congress and the executive branch of government.  A search for “Mobile DTV” on the Washington Post web site produced a “We’re sorry” message, so guess they didn’t think it was newsworthy.  In fact, while a Google News search of the same terms produced lots of hits, all from U.S. locations were in specialized magazines and blogs, not consumer-oriented news media. 

There are good reasons why new technologies tend to be rolled out in Washington and Las Vegas, but we've got a long way to go to make this a consumer product.  --Dennis

Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV

Back in February, at a conference in Munich, I saw a fascinating short presentation on HbbTV, an recent initiative by European broadcasters and CE partners.  It’s a mash-up between broadcast and internet technology that capitalizes on the advantages of each.  Here is Wikipedia’s entry.  The links above provide descriptive information and a block diagram, but you really need to see it demo’d.  I went looking for them on YouTube.  Unfortunately, the best one I could find isn’t that good, this video of a video showing Wedison’s HbbTV Project.  --Dennis