The media world is changing fast. The latest anecdotal evidence of that: TV star Keith Olbermann left his post at MSNBC this weekend with zero explanation, yet he hasn't lost his access to the public's ear. Olbermann just Tweeted to his 200,000 fans on Twitter.
Specifically, he Tweeted that he's going to Tweet. At 8 PM EST tonight. Presumably about why he left his show so abruptly. Was it because of the Comcast/NBC merger the day before? Was it not that at all, but rather longer-running tensions between the star and management? We'll be able to hear it directly from the horse's mouth in just over 5 hours. In 140 character chunks.
Is a post-TV future becoming easier to imagine, because of the Internet? That's one question raised by the news that SpongeBob SquarePants, the undersea mega-star of stage and screen, will premier his newest show first to his 16 million fans on Facebook and then only later on the old-fashioned boob-tube.
On Thursday January 27th, SpongeBob (or his people) will post a five episode anthology of episodes to his Facebook page, facebook.com/spongebob. The content will be simulcast on Nickelodeon's mobile platform. Facebook is the perfect place to broadcast new content to a large audience, considering its combination of market penetration, dizzying time-on-site, the newsfeed subscription model and the social notifications upon each subscription.
In early April of 1990, I was a contestant on Jeopardy. If you were watching back then, I was the "Supercomputer Programmer from Aloha, Oregon" who won three games and $38,000 and then lost - badly - in the fourth. So there's quite a bit of personal history tied in with the news last week that a supercomputer from IBM, called Watson, had beaten two all-time Jeopardy! winners, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, in a practice round for the three-day charity competition on Feb. 14, 15 and 16.
A few weeks ago, I predicted that Jennings would win, Watson would place a close second and Rutter would place third in the overall contest, and I'm sticking with that prediction in spite of Watson's first-place finish in the practice round last week. When I put on my handicapper's hat, the scores of the practice round - $4,400 for Watson, $3,400 for Jennings and $1,200 for Rutter - are consistent with my assessment that Jennings and Watson are evenly matched and that Rutter is unlikely to win.
Despite the booming interest in the service, Q&A site invite-only model outside of the U.S. and a few select countries. This may be an attempt to control the growth of the community, similar to the early days of Facebook. This cautious approach is not only limited to its community. The service only opened up to search engines last August. Access via RSS feeds is limited. Recently it released a very limited API, coupled with the arrival of the first Chrome and Firefox extensions.
The Federal Trade Commission has approved the controversial sale of a majority share of NBC Universal by General Electric to Comcast, leaving only Justice Department approval for a deal that could define the changing landscape of national power. (Update, it's all approved now, by the Justice Dept. as well.) Critics used to call into question the relationship between NBC, a leading provider of news and analysis regarding current events, and its owners General Electric, a leading provider of big weapons that made those current events go boom.
Now we live in a different world, a post-Cold War information age. Power used to hinge in large part over who had the biggest bomb stockpile. In the future it may be a question of whose voice and content gets delivered through the tubes. If this deal goes through, the many tubes that belong to Comcast will have a vested interest in getting NBC content to customers fast. Other content, not as much. Into that breach may come legislation. The openness of the Web will be hotly debated.
What new things could we discover if social network analysis took time and space into account, in addition to the raw connections between people? In most cases, social network analysis today is limited to discovering friend connections, community leaders and outlines, influential people and personal friend recommendations - in a static or snap-shot kind of way. If new factors could be taken into consideration, specifically changes over time and space, then social network analysis could discover things like emergence or decay of leadership, changes in trust over time, migration and mobility within particular communities online. That's very valuable information that the social web has barely begun to tackle capturing.
That's the topic of discussion in a new paper by Shashi Shekhar and research assistant Dev Oliver, spatial data scientists at the University of Minnesota, titled Computational Modeling of Spatio-temporal Social Networks: A Time-Aggregated Graph Approach (PDF). The paper was highlighted on the blog GIS and Science today. We've excerpted and put in context key points below.
When an internal announcement leaked out of Yahoo last month that it was "sunsetting" popular social bookmarking service Delicious, that service's users flew into a panic. Yahoo quickly backtracked on the plans and the service remains up and running, if minimally supported.
Would Flickr survive the hemorrhaging at its parent company Yahoo? That was the next logical question. Today Flickr power user Thomas Hawk did a little investigation of how many $25/year paid Pro accounts and thus how much annual revenue he estimates Flickr contributes to Yahoo. Hawk's methodology seems reasonable, if generous, and led to the conclusion that Flickr probably brings in around $50 million in annual revenue. Minus expenses, the profit it brings Yahoo is probably negligible. In other words, Yahoo has little economic incentive to support, maintain or grow one of the biggest photo sharing sites on the web and the place many of us pay to store our photos online. That's cause for concern. Note: Former Flickr chief software architect Cal Henderson responds in comments below, saying that Hawk's methodology is "deeply flawed" and that advertising makes up a large amount of Flickr's revenue. So take the following with a grain of salt now that we've heard that from a former insider.
The time we used to spend sitting on the train on our way to work in the morning, reading the trusty local rag, has changed. Now, we whip out the iPhone, Android or iPad and catch up on all the blogs and online articles we found but didn't have time to read the day before. On the way home, we do the same for those bits we found at work.
According to Read It Later, the app that lets users tag content on their computer to be, well, read later, mobile devices are helping people avoid the constant barrage of information and relegate reading back to the most comfortable time slots and locations of the day.
Privacy policies are dead, says Fran Maier, President of privacy auditing firm TrustE, and it's time for the web to move into an era of "just in time" notifications whenever new types of data are being collected or when our data is being used in new ways.
At a time when online data about individuals and our actions is growing exponentially, when the potential for that data to drive innovation and monetization is just beginning to be understood, when users are wrestling to take control over new forms of communication and when government is looking to take action to protect the complex interests of its citizens - Maier's forward looking statements, well informed by the history of online privacy practices, are well worth paying attention to.
As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) kicks into high gear this week in Las Vegas, we're again seeing a number of 3D-enabled products from TVs to tablets to mobile devices. It's the second (or is it third?) coming of 3D, it seems, and this time around it's often glasses-free.
Much of the development around the technology is concerned with bringing 3D to your living room, such as is the case with the 3D-enabled TVs from LG and Toshiba, for example, Samsung's 3D LED monitors, or the addition of 3D movies to the streaming service VUDU, which can pipe Hollywood entertainment directly into your living room. But 3D is showing up on other screens, too - mobile phones and tablets, gaming devices and mobile 3D DTV devices - although still in early forms.
But before you go all in, early-adopting this new craze, there's a little tidbit of not-inconsequential data you need to know first.
