GigaOM » mathew ingram

News and the new amplification reality

Om Malik — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:33:39 +0000

A few days ago, in wake of the lively war of words between Elon Musk’s Tesla & The New York Times, my colleague Mathew Ingram pointed out that thanks to the Internet and the social web, everyone from companies to governments are acting like media entities and spreading their messages, bypassing the messengers – aka the media outlets. Given that, one might ask: who needs traditional media then?

I tried to help answer that question in my post from last year: Amplification and the changing role of media. The gist of that post was that “as more sources of news start to go direct by posting their thoughts to their blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages, a journalist’s role becomes more about deciding what to amplify and what to ignore.”

…the rise of the social web, that has changed. Blogs, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other such platforms have made it easy for news makers to go direct to their constituents. So what is the role of today’s media person? In addition to reporting news, I think picking things to amplify is also important. Back in the day, news people made a choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report.

The big media outlets still have one thing that they can leverage: attention. By leveraging that attention and highlighting things worth highlighting, they can continue to bring the news to their constituents and at the same time add veracity to it — and thereby add the kind of value that makes them worth keeping around.

Conversation site Branch launches “profile cards,” personal recommendations

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:42:35 +0000

Branch, the buzzy startup that aspires to be the dining-room table of the internet, is offering new features intended to boost the community feel of the site. These include a personalized collection of conversations on Branch’s homepage and “profile cards” that show what someone is talking about and who they know.

If you’re unfamiliar with Branch, which will be part of the startup showcase at our paidContent Live media conference in New York on April 18, the point of the site is to make online discussions feel like the ones that take place around the kitchen table. It does this by allowing you to start a chat from anywhere on the internet, or transport an existing discussion (or screaming match) taking place on Twitter or elsewhere and continue it in on Branch. By clicking “Take it to Branch,” you transform a discussion into an invite-only forum that anyone can read but that requires the moderator’s permission to join.

Branch’s new features are intended to make the site feel more social by showing what the people you are connected to online are talking about — which will, presumably, encourage people to ask to join more conversations. Likewise, the “profile cards” may serve to make the people you see on Branch feel more accessible.

“Now you can click anyone’s name and hop around between the branches they’ve participated in and people they’ve talked to. They’re intended to help you explore the pockets of communities on Branch, not represent the user’s identity,” explained Branch founder Josh Miller by email (emphasis his). As an example, here’s the Branch “card” for my colleague, Mathew Ingram:

So what will all this do for Branch’s popularity? It’s hard to say. So far, the company has received a lot of attention because of Miller’s reputation as a wunderkind (he came up with the idea while working for Senator Diane Feinstein and dropped out of Princeton to pursue it) and because Branch is backed by the founders of Twitter and by tech media star Jonah Peretti. But it’s still not clear if Branch can break through to widespread adoption; as Ingram noted this spring, “closed” conversations reduce flame wars and trolling but also lack the freewheeling feel of the internet. Without easier on-ramps to the Branch discussions, the site may find it hard to appeal to a broader base than tech and media insiders.

One area where Branch does appear to have the potential to take off is as a forum for people to discuss sports or TV. For example, here’s a Branch discussion about the show Homeland that got a lot of traction.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The little paywall that could: Tinypass gets a CEO and some money

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:15:07 +0000

A tipping point occurred last year in the debate over paywalls as publishers large and small followed the lead of the New York Times and began charging readers to view digital content. These evolving attitudes are benefiting companies like Tinypass that provide publishers with the tools to bill online readers.

On Tuesday, AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka reported that the startup has hired longtime ad vet Trevor Kaufman as CEO and pulled in $1.25 million in seed funding.

Startup Tinypass’s core customers have been hundreds of small-fry news and music publishers who use its services to provide “metered browsing” or ad-free upgrades to readers. In January, however, the company got a big boost when star blogger Andrew Sullivan said he was using the platform to charge readers for his $19.99 annual subscription service.

The new funding and Sullivan’s star power could help Tinypass nip at the heels of the big player in the paywall space – Press+, which was launched by publishing vets Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill.

Like Press+, Tinypass takes a cut of the paywall revenue (two to ten percent, depending on volume) but also differs as it does not charge a start-up fee.

Although increased competition could lower the prices that Tinypass and Press+ can charge, the good news for the companies is that the overall paywall pie is getting bigger. According to a recent report by news analyst Ken Doctor, it will soon be rare to find a news outlet in North America or northern Europe that doesn’t charge for content in one form or another. Others, like my colleague Mathew Ingram, remain skeptical that restricting reader access is a good idea (see a recent debate over the issue here).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Netflix can jump on Facebook at last — but does anyone care?

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 19:04:56 +0000

When Facebook introduced a much-hyped sharing feature in the fall of 2011, a goofy law prevented Netflix from taking part. Since then, the video company has been lobbying Congress like a kid nags his parents for permission to go to the big dance. Now, Daddy has finally said yes — but, by this time, Netflix may have missed all the fun.

The news, in case you missed it, is that Congress this week sent President Obama a bill that will update a 1988 law that prevents video companies from sharing rental histories unless a customer gives them permission to do so. This law prevents Netflix from tapping into the “frictionless sharing” feature on Facebook that can tell all your friends every time you read an article or listen to a song. For instance, my Facebook friends might see a story like “Jeff listened to the Backstreet Boys on Spotify.”

Netflix wants to share movie viewing in the same way and, this week, it finally got its wish (the news was overshadowed by an unrelated part of the bill related to email privacy). So how big a deal is it that Netflix can be on Facebook too?

The answer is that, despite Netflix’s big lobbying push, its victory in Congress may not matter much at all. This is because, in the 15 months since Facebook launched frictionless sharing, companies and users are taking a very different view of its value.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram reported this month, media outlets like the Guardian and the Washington Post are backing away from Facebook as a way to distribute their content. Likewise, Om just pointed to the Poke debacle to call BS on Facebook’s power of influence:

This quick decline in downloads raises some questions about Facebook’s ability to be kingmaker. It may have helped Zynga when social games and Facebook’s platform were brand new phenomena. Remember how their frictionless sharing was going to change everything, especially for media companies? Well, it didn’t change a lick.

Perhaps, things work differently in the movie space. Maybe, the power of Facebook will let Netflix transform the video-watching habits of tens of millions of people. And, just maybe, users will come to love spamming their friends with news that they’re watching the Princess Bride or Debbie does Dallas.

A more likely conclusion is that Netflix’s big effort to change an outdated law, while a good thing, will do little to help the company’s own business.

(Image by ollyy via Shutterstock)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

65,000 tweets in 2 minutes: Twitter officially opens your archive

Jeff John Roberts — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:28:29 +0000

The honchos at Twitter have made good on a promise to let users tap into their tweets from long ago. In a blog post Wednesday morning, the company explained that users who go to the “settings” tab will find instructions on how to download their archive.

It appears to work. My colleague and prolific tweeter, Mathew Ingram, reports that he was able to download his 65,000(!) tweets from 2007 in less than two minutes and that the archive only took up 16MB.

So, what does it mean to unlock babble from long ago? For now, the Twitter archive is a way to indulge in personal nostalgia much like Facebook’s Timeline. But in the long term, these archives will come to be indispensable tools for scholars, statisticians and cultural historians — consider how Twitter feeds have already become analogous to newspapers and diaries.

For now, the archives are available only to the respective user. But to get a feel of the cultural impact of old tweets, check out BuzzFeed’s “The Lost Tweets of the Tech Elite” which features early musings from the likes of David Pogue, Walt Mossberg and a certain Om Malik.

(Image by Gl0ck via Shutterstock)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

What we’ll see in 2013 in digital media

paidContent — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:00:15 +0000

Some big things happened in the media business this year: The government sued Apple for allegedly fixing ebook prices, odd bedfellows the New York Times and BuzzFeed joined forces to cover political conventions, and a phone hacking scandal rocked Britain.

What will next year bring? Everyone loves to look into their crystal ball, and we’re no different. So here are our collective predictions for 2013, from books and video to newspapers and advertising.

This is one of a handful of pieces over the next week that looks at what’s coming down the road next year in the various sectors we cover.

Go to page 2 (of 6) on GigaOM .

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

How to outrun a lie on the internet

Bobbie Johnson — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 16:49:16 +0000

In between lobbying for maximalist copyright laws or wasting his money on crazy printing machines, Mark Twain could be a pretty clever chap. After all, it was he who quipped that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” — an adage that seems ever-more powerful in our sped-up, sensationalized, super-connected culture.

You only have to look around you and see that the power of a lie is stronger than ever — in politics, in propaganda or anywhere else. And forget the shoes: some days it seems as if the truth hasn’t even found its pants on by the time a lie is racking up the air miles.

Just take the case of Lord McAlpine, once one of the most powerful politicians in Britain, who was taken by surprise when the internet launched a virulent — and completely misguided — campaign to label him a child rapist.

Just in case you haven’t been watching this mess exploding across the British media over the last few weeks, let me recap briefly. At the start of November, the BBC’s Newsnight program — already under fire for not running a story about allegations of pedophilia against a now-deceased BBC presenter — decided to prove its mettle by running a report claiming that a senior politician from the 1980s was, in fact, a child abuser.

While the report did not name the individual, speculation (inevitably) spilled out onto the net and the culprit hinted at in the report was widely identified: McAlpine, the man who helped finance Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power. Except it turned out the BBC had the wrong man, in a genuine case of mistaken identity that was blown up to mammoth, excruciating proportions by a series of basic journalistic failures.

Ouch.

Heads rolled: big ones. The BBC’s new boss George Entwistle (pictured) resigned, sending the corporation even deeper into turmoil and leaving some — including our own Mathew Ingram — to even question the validity of its role as a state-sanctioned broadcaster at all.

It is, as they say around these parts, a right old mess.

But how do you fix it? How can you make the truth more powerful than a falsehood?

McAlpine and his lawyers have decided to take recourse to the law and hold the internet accountable, by chasing “a very long list” of people who mentioned McAlpine’s name on Twitter and elsewhere. Here’s what they said:

“We know who you are; we know exactly the extent what you have done and it’s easier to come forward and apologise and arrange to settle us because this is cheaper’.”

I can’t fault McAlpine for wanting to recover his reputation. Who wouldn’t? But however many legal actions he launches, it is not the courts — or the threat of the courts — that will correct the wrong done against him. McAlpine — a millionaire who lives in Italy — doesn’t need the money. And the apologies don’t carry much weight really, since they come from people he has not met and never carry as far or as loud as accusations.

Not exactly free speech

British courts have found one, drastic way to try and curtail social media abuses. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a rash of court cases and even imprisonment resulting from offensive messages on social media: for racist comments about a sick sportsman, joking about a missing 5-year-old, saying soldiers should ‘go to hell’.

McAlpine’s fake accusers are unlikely to see a prison cell, since these would be civil actions — though you can never be sure the UK’s legislators won’t try and find a way to make it so: they wanted to shut down Facebook and Twitter after last year’s summer riots, after all, despite no evidence that they were used to incite violence.

In fact, however, the truth is that the fix has already been identified and deployed, because the lie has become news in and of its own right. The fact that McAlpine was wrongly implicated has, in fact, become a much bigger deal than the original report ever was. But it is only successful because of the very specific context (that it happened within the BBC, which everyone has an opinion about) and the severity of the response (that it led to the Beeb’s newly-installed boss performing a sudden act of seppuku).

The information network that so readily slandered him has stepped in to take action action because the fact the slander was wrong became more interesting. What the network taketh away, the network giveth, so to speak.

Unfortunately, while this may work for Lord McAlpine, but it won’t work for everyone. The trouble is that information is not self-correcting unless the truth is more interesting than the untruth. There are very few times that happens, and usually it’s because the lie is so big and dangerous that the blowback is violent.

The fact is, there aren’t many lessons in this mess. Perhaps if you want your indiscretions to get corrected, make them drastic enough that they can’t be ignored. Or, if you want a big lie to get skewered, make sure an international broadcaster is there to take the blame.

In the end, though, these are pretty tough conditions to replicate. And until you manage to do that, Mark Twain looks more and more right as each day passes.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Commutist podcast: War tweets, Google TV 3 and Nexus 4

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:16:44 +0000

On this week’s episode of our weekly podcast, we bring in Mathew Ingram to examine the fascinating and bizarre concept of Israel live tweeting its military actions. And then on a less serious note, we get all Google-y with Janko Roettgers about what the new Google TV 3.0 means for the future of television and Kevin Tofel talks up the Nexus 4 phone and the state of Chrome OS.

(NOTE: We are aware of the audio scratching noise you can sometimes here. We isolated it part-way through the show and it disappears halfway through the first segment. Thank you for your patience!)

(download)

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

SHOW NOTES:
Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Erica Ogg

0:00 – Israel’s social media offensive

11:37 – Google TV 3.0

26:10 – The Nexus 4 and Chromebooks

34:45 – Parting gifts:

Kevin teaches you how to take a screenshot with a Kindle Paperwhite

Erica likes the Food with Friends app from Foodily in advance of Thanksgiving

Chris wants you know if you were bugged by Skyfall’s hacking scene as much as he was. (email him at podcast at gigaom dot com)

PREVIOUS EPISODES:
Director Jay Duplass on low-fi movies through high-tech

Election Dissection, Ditching DSL and Dumping the iPad

Sandy’s Social, Infrastructure Impact and Forstall

Windows 8 Surfaces, and disruption eruption

iPad Mini, iMac gets skinny

Boxee Cloud DVR, Apple Rumors and Chromebook

Commutist interview: Joy of X author Steven Strogatz

Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Commutist podcast: Sandy’s social, infrastructure impact, and Forstall

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 23:11:00 +0000

Technology provided entirely new ways to witness the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy. Twitter, Instagram and other social media outlets provided a steady stream of information… and misinformation. Mathew Ingram walks us through the world of real-time news, where everyone is a publisher and not everything can be believed. The damage from Sandy had the potential to move beyond the physical world and into the virtual as data centers on the East Coast battened down their hatches to stay up and running. Barb Darrow explains what was at stake for the web’s infrastructure during the storm and how it all fared. And finally, the winds of change blew hard through Apple’s top executive ranks, Tom Krazit helps us break down who’s out and what that means for the company.

SHOW NOTES:

Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Erica Ogg

0:00 – 0:18 – The social media side of Sandy

0:18 – 0:19 – Watch the GigaOM RoadMap Conference livestream on Nov. 5!

0:20 – 0:27 – The infrastructure impact of Sandy

0:28 – 0:41 – Apple’s executive shuffle

0:42 – 0:44 – Parting gifts

Chris likes The Wirecutter’s guide to emergency gear

Erica orders up the Coaster drinks app

Tom like the stats on 538

PREVIOUS EPISODES:

Windows 8 Surfaces, and disruption eruption

iPad Mini, iMac gets skinny

Boxee Cloud DVR, Apple Rumors and Chromebook

Commutist interview: Joy of X author Steven Strogatz

Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Commutist podcast: Windows 8 Surfaces, and disruption eruption

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 07:01:49 +0000

It was a busy week in tech-land. We covered the iPad Mini launch earlier this week, and now we turn to Microsoft, which launched Windows 8 and its Surface tablet. Kevin Tofel stops by to give you all you need to know about the rumblings from Redmond. Then Mathew Ingram pops in from the Great White North to talk about the downsides of disruptions. Finally, it’s the most wonderful time of the quarter — earnings! Erica Ogg and Tom Krazit run down the numbers for Apple, Amazon and more.

SHOW NOTES:

Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Erica Ogg

0:00:00 – 0:10:10 – Kevin Tofel talks Windows 8 launch and Surface RT tablet

0:10:10 – 0:11:34 – This episode is brought to you by GigaOM RoadMap conference

0:11:35 – 0:25:59 – Mathew Ingram brings the disruption eruption

0:26:00 – 0:38:41 – Earnings! Apple and Amazon

0:38:42 – 0:41:05 – Parting gifts

Tom recommends Yahoo Finance