A new report on tablet usage found that more than half of those surveyed use their devices to read the news, and they are reading more than they used to — but many of the sources they are using are non-traditional, and few are willing to … Read More »
Bio:Mathew is a senior writer with GigaOM, where he covers media in all its forms — social and otherwise — as well as web culture and related issues. He is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past 15 years writing about business, technology and new media as a reporter, columnist and blogger. Prior to joining GigaOM, he was a blogger and technology writer for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, and was also the paper’s first online Communities Editor. Mathew is also one of the founders of mesh, Canada’s leading web conference. You can find more about him here.
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- @kcarruthers @engochick @greenj: agreed -- there's so much else we could have talked about
- @kcarruthers @engochick @greenj: it was fun -- thanks for having me on
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Recent Posts
The amount of time that university students spend online during class is directly proportional to the quality of their teachers, argues an editorial writer for the Harvard Crimson, in part because the web has disrupted the traditional gatekeeper role that professors used to hold in education. Read More »
Reports that Google will include social features in its new music service reinforce what the rise of Spotify and other services have already made obvious — namely, that Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company. Read More »
A new biography of Steve Jobs quotes Bill Gates as saying that the Apple co-founder “never really understood much about technology.” While the Microsoft billionaire likely saw that as a put-down, technology is arguably the least important thing about Apple’s most successful products. Read More »
Many newspapers still think of themselves as delivering content in a specific format, but some forward-thinking outlets — including USA Today and The Guardian in Britain — are thinking of themselves more as platforms, and opening up their content for use by others via their APIs. Read More »
James Erwin had a writer’s dream come true when a story he wrote in response to a question on a Reddit forum was optioned by Warner Brothers for a movie. But who owns the rights to the idea that Erwin just sold to the studio? Read More »
Yahoo is in turmoil, as vulture funds circle the company. Co-founder Jerry Yang says he doesn’t want to sell, and there are reports he is looking at taking the company private — which might be the best thing to happen to Yahoo in a long time. Read More »
More Must Reads
Researchers are busy trying to use Twitter to predict everything from disease outbreaks and financial markets to elections and even revolutions. New research from Topsy Labs shows that Twitter can provide a window into events like the Arab Spring. But can it predict what will happen? Read More »
Google has already disrupted plenty of markets — search and online advertising being just two of them — and is trying hard to disrupt many others, including mobile. So why is the company so backward when it comes to the way it treats the online news … Read More »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo talked about the company’s recent growth during an interview at the Web 2.0 conference, but he also made some strong statements about Twitter’s commitment to free speech and to defending the rights of its users against governments in Britain and the U.S. Read More »
In an interview with GigaOM, UberMedia CEO Bill Gross — who is launching his new content-based social network, Chime.in, today — says existing social networks like Facebook and Google+ suffer from a signal-to-noise problem and a monetization problem, and that Chime was designed to help with … Read More »
Entrepreneur Bill Gross is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete with Twitter, Facebook and Google+, as well as link-sharing sites like Digg. He says there is a need for a better way of filtering content, but the odds are stacked against him. Read More »
Just as it did with book retailing, Amazon has its sights set on lowering the barriers between authors and readers, both via the Kindle and through its own publishing deals — and in many cases, the biggest barrier between authors and readers is a traditional … Read More »
Google has taken the axe to several of its previous social efforts, including Buzz and Jaiku, in order to focus all of its energies on its new Google+ network. But has the web giant really learned that much from its earlier failed social projects? Read More »
While the number of newspapers and other media entities that are erecting paywalls or launching subscription-based apps continues to grow, other content publishers such as The New Yorker are looking at different ways of monetizing their existing content, including e-books and one-off feature packages. Read More »
Despite recent reports about a dramatic decline, Google+ still appears to be growing relatively strongly. But the network still has a substantial mountain to climb in terms of gaining a broad user base, and it’s not clear what Google has to offer that’s radically different. Read More »
The Guardian says it’s now going to experiment with allowing readers to help decide what news to cover. The paper announced Monday that it’s going to make its “newslist” public, following the idea that if readers are part of the process, they’ll be more engaged. Read More »
Amazon is continuing to disrupt the publishing industry by signing deals with popular authors, and the latest is thriller writer Barry Eisler. After turning down a $500,000 advance from a traditional publisher, he says Amazon offered him a deal that was “the best of both worlds.” Read More »
A presentation at the recent Society for News Design conference imagined a future in which real-time updates about a news event would be shown in heads-up displays on picture frames, windshields and even eyeglasses. But would this make our information-overload problem better or worse? Read More »
Facebook has made some changes to the analytics it offers to brands, to try and get them to focus more on engagement with their users and customers instead of just looking at clickthrough rates. It’s a message that suits Facebook’s interests, but will advertisers bite? Read More »
AOL has said it remains committed to rolling out its Patch.com network of a thousand hyperlocal news outlets across the U.S., but reports about cost-cutting efforts raise the question of how long the troubled former web giant can maintain that commitment to its money-losing hyperlocal project. Read More »
The products created by Apple and its founder Steve Jobs have revolutionized a host of different industries in the past couple of decades, from personal computing to mobile telephony. But they have also had a substantial impact on the way we consume media of all kinds. Read More »
Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief visionary of Apple, passed away on Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, and the web — and social media such as Twitter — turned into a real-time expression of sorrow and gratitude. We’ve collected some of those thoughts here. Read More »
In addition to launching its new color tablet the Kindle Fire last week, Amazon also announced another price drop for the original Kindle, which is now just $79. Could the e-reader eventually become free, and if it did, what would that mean for the e-book industry? Read More »
The government’s case against Google will have to grapple with some fundamental questions. What does the word “monopoly” mean when applied to a web-based entity like Google? And are network effects a barrier to entry, or are online monopolies inherently more fragile than their real-world cousins? Read More »
Yahoo and ABC announced a partnership that will see the two combine their news assets. Although it isn’t being described as a merger, it might as well be one — but is it going to work any online magic for either entity? It’s difficult to see … Read More »
One argument likely to play a role in the federal government’s antitrust case against Google is that the company’s market position is unassailable thanks to network effects and a number of other factors, and therefore it is literally unkillable. But is this really true? Read More »
It’s been obvious for awhile now that Google has a lot riding on the success of its new social network, Google+. But some comments from senior exec Brad Horowitz make it clear that Google’s new platform will become part of everything the web giant touches. Read More »
Facebook’s recent launch of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” has caused a lot of controversy over whether the feature is an invasion of privacy. But the reality is that Facebook is simply adapting to the increasingly social way we are living our lives online. Read More »
Creating a Facebook app for your newspaper — or an iPhone app, or an app for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet — is a nice project, but real innovation consists of rethinking how a media company functions in a digital age on a more fundamental level. Read More »
At Google’s recent Zeitgeist symposium, legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel suggested that it is somehow Google’s duty to “fix” the news, and CEO Larry Page seemed to agree. But relying on Google to choose what news we should read is a very slippery slope. Read More »
It’s nice for media companies to have a strong alternative like Amazon’s Kindle Fire when it comes to the tablet market, but the bottom line is the same as with Apple: They provide the content, but the platform owner is in control of the relationship. Read More »
It may be difficult to describe what exactly the phrase “an internet of things” means, but the pieces of the puzzle that are required for that to develop are all here today, ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco. Read More »
Less than a year after it launched its photo-sharing app, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference that new users are signing up at a rate of 78 per minute, and 26 photos are being uploaded to the service every second. Read More »
Flipboard was created out of a desire to reinvent media consumption for a digital and tablet age, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help existing publications repair their damaged business models, editorial director Josh Quittner told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco on Monday. Read More »
The success of Tumblr — which has raised $85 million in funding and sees 13 billion pageviews a month — contains lessons for media companies, and the main one is that social sharing can be an incredibly powerful force if you make it as easy as … Read More »
The changes that Facebook launched this week have clearly upped the ante for Google, which desperately needs the signals that come from social activity to feed into its search and advertising algorithms. But Twitter is playing a somewhat different game than either Facebook or Google. Read More »
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social-reading apps the network launched with The Washington Post and other outlets would change the “way the news industry works,” but it feels more like those outlets have signed over a big part of their destiny to an AOL-style portal. Read More »
Being a monopoly may be irritating to competitors, but it’s not illegal. The problem with applying antitrust law to Google is that even if you assume it has a monopoly and is being anticompetitive, it’s not at all clear how that is bad for consumers. Read More »
Amazon has launched a program that allows Kindle users to borrow e-books from 11,000 libraries across the U.S. This and the recent news that it plans to launch a “Netflix for books” service make it clear Amazon is stepping up its disruption of the book industry. Read More »
Facebook has launched a new “personal newspaper”-style news feed, while both Digg and Klout are using their internal ranking systems to try and create topic pages. But will any of these solve the growing problem of information overload, or will they just add to the noise? … Read More »
After years of finger-pointing by competitors, Google is finally coming under the scrutiny of federal antitrust regulators. But just like a similar investigation into Microsoft a decade ago, a federal inquiry into whether Google’s behavior is illegal is likely to be a giant waste of time. Read More »
The Wall Street Journal has launched a new “social reading” app for Facebook that allows users to share articles from the newspaper with their social graph, and also be chosen as editors for other users. But how will these social attempts mesh with the paper’s paywall? Read More »
A new study from the University of Maryland’s business school claims that Facebook’s “app economy” has created almost a quarter of a million new jobs and over $15 billion in spinoff benefits for the U.S. economy. But do those estimates really stand up to scrutiny? Read More »
What kinds of lessons can newspapers and other print publishers draw from the experience of Netflix, which has come under fire from users for trying to make the transition from its legacy DVD-rental business to online streaming? Here’s a hint: they’re not good. Read More »
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