On our network blog last100, Daniel Langendorf writes:
"The Internet is not just a place to get the latest scores and follow your favorite team in the standings. The Web has evolved so well that it has displaced traditional media as the first-stop source for all your major-sports needs.
Except for local coverage, there‚Äôs no need to watch TV sportscasts anymore. Pardon the sports pun, but the Internet has all the bases covered — from providing the usual scores, standings, and statistics to rich, always-available highlights, interviews, streaming games, downloadable games, podcasts, extensive season and historical archives, and a host of mobile solutions from wallpapers and ringtones to live GameCasts with Audio. Best of all, there are no timetables.
The Big 4 professional sports leagues in the U.S. — the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL — have leveraged existing footage (usually developed through their ‚Äúofficial‚Äù networks) to create their own unique content. The leagues flood their Web sites with an overwhelming array of branded digital content so fans can stream games, download ones they missed, and watch clips packaged in so many ways the head spins."
It's a bold hypothesis - that the Internet has replaced television for sports coverage. But check out the table compiled by last100 to support it:
Earlier this year game designer Kyle Gabler put up a just-for-fun side project called Human Brain Cloud - a massively multiplayer word association game that started with a single word ("volcano") and has since taken on a life of its own. Players are given a word, which is culled from the database of previously entered words, and asked to enter the first thing that comes to mind. As people interact with the game it collects data about word associations that can be formed into a giant network (the cloud).
As Gabler explains, "For instance given the word 'volcano', a common word people might submit would be 'lava', and this would result in a very strong connection between 'volcano' and 'lava'. On the other hand, given the word 'volcano', fewer people might associate it with something like 'birthday party', resulting in a very weak connection or no connection at all. Over time and with many players, I hope the cloud will gradually grow to represent words and phrases people tend to associate with other words and phrases, assuming it doesn't get inundated with spam."
Since the site's launch, over a third of a million people have made 5.6 million connections between half a million words. It would appear that Gabler got his wish of many players and a large map of word associations.
Call me a purist, call me stubborn, call me antediluvian, but I cringe whenever I see Internet chat, emails, or text messages that contain more acronyms, numbers, and symbols than actual words. Certainly some web acronyms have made there way into my regular online vernacular (brb and lol come to mind), and I'm am a closet fan of the smiley face emoticon, but by and large I have avoided the trend toward replacing our language with a series of sometimes incomprehensible strings of letters and numbers. I'll even admit that the title for this post is hyperbole (or at least a gross over generalization), but something I read on Gizmodo yesterday made me wince.
Keitai shousetsu are novels composed for and on mobile phones, and they're big in Japan right now. I mean, really big. Of the 10 best selling novels in Japan over the first half of 2007, 5 were originally composed on cellular phones and they sold an average of 400,000 copies each. One of the best selling was "Koizora" (Love Sky), by a woman whose nom-de-plume is Mika. Koizora follows the rather twisted story of a high school girl who is raped and becomes pregnant, has sold 1.2 million copies in the past 14 months, and was recently made into a movie.
To put that in perspective, US Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's book "Leadership," for which he received a $3 million advance, has sold just 836,000 copies since 2002.
In a statement that directly contradicts an earlier position from the famous Grokster case - RIAA lawyers in Arizona told the defendant in the case Atlantic v. Howell yesterday that he violated copyright law when he put music from CDs he had purchased onto his computer in MP3 format.
"Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format," the RIAA said, "and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs."
Update: A number of people have told me I'm unfairly characterizing what was said. Perhaps someone can explain to me how the location of the file changes its legal status. I can understand changing the format being an issue, but that's passed the test in the past. Perhaps it's really just the sharing that's being objected to, in which case there's nothing new here - but the way the legal statement reads certainly looks like there are objections to putting the files on the computer at all. Otherwise why mention that part?
The blog Recording Industry vs. The People, origin of this and many related stories, pulls the corresponding quote out of the US Supreme Court case MGM v. Grokster:
"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their Website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."
Is the industry's newest position one of a paradigm on the brink of implosion or an indication of a coming era of greater control than ever before? Is all of this being overstated? Perhaps we can look to our wise leader for an indication. (Hint: The Beatles aren't available on iTunes, so in all likelihood...)
In 2004 it was blog. In 2005 it was integrity. Last year it was truthiness. This year, among the twenty words competing for Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word of the Year contest, are seven words that aren't quite dictionary material just yet. MW culls the list each year from among the most frequently requested words on its online dictionary, and throws in a few of the most requested and suggested words from the Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary -- where users can submit definitions for new words not contained in the pages of the official book (it's something like the Urban Dictionary).
Of the seven new words to make this year's short list, four owe their etymology to the web. Leading the pack: facebook. We just named Facebook as this year's Best Web BigCo for their undeniable landscape changing impact over the past 12 months. One thing we didn't factor, though, was their potential impact on the English language. Is it possible that Facebook could enter our lexicon the way Google has?
Web traffic analysts Hitwise released a report this morning claiming that Google's search market share has continued to grow and is now 65.1%, up 5% from November of last year. Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com were reported to be at 21%, 7% and 4% respectively, all down from last year and last month.
At least as interesting are the Hitwise numbers about percentage of traffic driven by search to sites in various categories. Health and Medical sites get 44% of their traffic from search engines, 29% from Google alone, says Hitwise. The lowest category for search traffic is Business and Financial sites, where only 17% of traffic is from search, 10% from Google. That category, though, is also the one seeing the biggest growth in search traffic - up 21% year over year, with Google's search traffic to these sites up a whopping 30%.
Entertainment and Travel both saw big growth in search traffic over the last year as well (see chart, click for full chart with additional columns), while Health and Medical and Shopping and Classifieds saw search traffic grow the least.
Take-aways for me are that the world of Business search optimization and ad buying must be going strong and Health and Medical are probably search-saturated. How else would you read this chart?
I love The Economist magazine. 164 years old, intelligent reporting, objective to the point where the writers aren't even allowed to display their names (poor bastards). This is serious journalism. It's almost the opposite of what blogging and social media in general is about, because there are no personalities and trivial topics don't get covered. Yet I love it! The appeal is, simply put: The Economist is an institution and a source of in-depth analysis and news. What it does have in common with the best blogs is that it makes you think.
So when I received an email today entitled '164 year old pub embraces social media tomorrow', followed by an almost apologetic pitch by The Economist's PR agency, I had to check it out. The pitch started: "Since you’re into social media, I thought this tidbit would tickle your funny bone: The Economist, a 164 year old publication is embracing social media." I don't mean to embarrass the PR person, but I'm a fan of The Economist and so I am happy they're embracing social media. I wouldn't dare laugh at The Economist!
The venerable magazine recently launched an Audio Video edition, which is available to subscribers for free and others for $8-10 a show. It will also be "embracing iTunes and Podcasts" in the next few weeks.
Tomorrow (Tue US) The Economist launches a new online debate product called The Economist Debate Series. It's being styled as an "online Oxford-style debate". This is explained in the About page:
Fred Wilson recently wrote a post on his blog in which he argues that the rapid adoption of Twitter and Tumblr were not accidents. Fred sees these microblogging platforms as a direct evolution of blogging and social networks. Recently, I've been mulling over similar thoughts. Clearly, the success of these sites was not accidental; because they took off in a crowded market, these were things that people obviously needed.
The image above is by Fred Wilson.
In this post, we will argue that each category - blogs, social networks and microblogs - forms a separate vertical. Each vertical is focused on a different type of user and serves to fill a different purpose in the bigger landscape of social publishing.
Fourth-ranked US search engine Ask.com is tonight releasing a new feature, AskEraser, that will let users control the destiny of their search data. When enabled, AskEraser will automatically delete any user data created during future searches from Ask's servers. That includes IP address, user and session IDs, and the text of the specific search queries. Once on, AskEraser works across any of Ask.com's vertical search engines, as well as consumer applications such as Maps & Directions.
Earlier this year Ask.com implemented a new data retention policy in which search queries are disassociated from IP address and user IDs after 18 months. AskEraser, though, puts users in the driver's seat regarding whether their data is stored at all. AskEraser was first announced in July and goes live today in the US and the UK, and will be rolled out globally in 2008.
"Anonymized search data provides online companies with important information to optimize the overall search experience," said Doug Leeds, senior vice president at Ask.com, in a press release. "At Ask.com, that aggregate information is already guided by strong privacy standards and policies. But for those who place greater importance on protecting their search data and their online privacy, AskEraser takes care of their concerns by putting consumers in charge."
Every year in December Read/WriteWeb does a Best Web Companies round-up. This is the 4th time and, like last year, we're splitting it over two posts. In this post we'll announce the Best Web BigCo of 2007 and later in the week we'll announce Best Web LittleCo and Most Promising Web Company or Innovator. These will be selected by the Read/WriteWeb writers, but at the end of this post we'll be asking for your input for the LittleCo awards.
Last year's Best BigCo was Google, an honor it also won in 2004. In between, in 2005, Yahoo was adjudged Best Bigco. So can Google win the title for a third year - and become the Internet equivalent of the Chicago Bulls in the 1990's? Or will one of Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Facebook or another BigCo take the silverware (metaphorically speaking)? Read on to find out...
The Read/WriteWeb authors were unanimous in our decision, but it was a close contest between two BigCos. You can probably guess that one was Google, because it's been another bumper year of innovation and acquisitions at the Googleplex. All through the year we've been delivering the Weekly Wrapup of Web tech news, reviews and analysis - and seemingly every week there was something new about Google. But there was another company that really came of age this year; and more importantly it was the catalyst for some important Web trends. Last year this Silicon Valley based company was not among our BigCo list - it was shortlisted for Best LittleCo! In 2007 that all changed though. And by the end of the year, it had done enough to even trump Google as a big influential Internet company. The winner is:
