Posted by: RFM on: December 18, 2009
Here’s a great example of what audience research in Media Studies is all about. It’s not theoretical, it’s not about generalisations. It’s about specific habits and behaviours, so that when you decide the future technology that might replace the magazine, you design something that people might enjoy in the same way that they enjoy magazines.
Worth [...]
Posted by: RFM on: December 18, 2009
He and the rest of us were, in effect, speaking before thinking, a common occurrence among friends, in the workplace or in the pub, but rare in a public arena.
It is a warning that there are dangers inherent in the instantaneous nature of digital technology. Then again, to ascribe irrational human actions to a social [...]
Posted by: RFM on: December 11, 2009
Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink. The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corporation, once [...]
Posted by: RFM on: December 2, 2009
For some reason, Google release their year-end summary of trends in search at the beginning rather than the end of December. They use the German word Zeitgeist (pronounced zeitgeist) for this, which means “sprit of the time/age”, but these search trends are hardly that, especially when you consider the ten most popular searches in the [...]
Posted by: RFM on: November 10, 2009
Just what, exactly, is Rupert Murdoch thinking? First, he announces that all of News Corp’s websites will erect paywalls like the one employed by the Wall Street Journal… Then, he announced that Google and other search engines were “plagiarists” who “rip off” Newscorp’s content, and that once the paywalls are up… he’ll be blocking Google [...]
Posted by: RFM on: October 11, 2009
Smart phones defy slowdown (Canalys press release: r2009081).
These industry-wide figures are being widely reported and they show the enormous leaps Apple have been making in the smartphone market (smartphones being the ones with extended, computer-like functions). They’ve gone from 2.1% of the global market in Q2 2008 to 13.7% of the market in the same [...]
Posted by: RFM on: October 8, 2009
Interesting article in the Guardian about Google News and how difficult it is for Google to link to news, apropos of our discussion on how Google works the other day (that link takes you to an explanation from the Google Guide).
But one returns to that problem about news sites: the rules of journalistic production are [...]
