EMOTIONAL TECHNOLOGY — … humanity translated through 1s and 0s. Artfully crafted technology has the potential to touch us like any other art form. The web takes cinema and turns it into a two-way conversation with the viewer. We are at the inception point of a brand new art form that will provide us with the great canons of the next century. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out what to make with it.
We’ve moved from an era in which a reporter writes a story and goes home and that’s the story written. I think that we’re living in the world at the moment where the moment you press send on your story, the responses start coming in. And so I think journalists have to work out what to do about those responses: How do you incorporate those responses? And in this world, in which as a news reporter you’re going to — if you go along with open journalism — you’re going to be open to other sources, other than what can be created in your own newsroom, you’re going to incorporate those responses. The Three Little Pigs was an attempt at explaining the benefits of open journalism to the reader — that you get a more complete version of the truth — and to explain to them this idea of a newspaper company is changing very, very fast.
Self-expression is the new entertainment” Arianna Huffington
Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company, said… “Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.
Four years ago, its traditional-to-digital-audience metrics were at a one-to-one basis, meaning for every traditional reader there was a digital one, according to Justin Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company. Now, he says, on average, its digital audience is 25 times higher than the print audience. According to ComScore, The Atlantic got 3.6 million uniques in April 2012. On the advertising side, more than 50 percent of its revenue will come from digital
the number of mobile gamers in the US has grown from 75 million to 101 million, of which 69% plays on smartphones and 21% on tablets… The number of paying players has grown 35% to 37 million Americans, or 36% of all mobile gamers
Today, most owners of mobile devices read news and features on publishers’ websites, which have often been coded to detect and adapt themselves to smaller screens; or, if they do use apps, the apps are glorified RSS readers such as Amazon Kindle, Google Reader, Flipboard, and the apps of newspapers like the Guardian, which grab editorial from the publishers’ sites. A recent Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users had paid for any of them. The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead… We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad… We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development.
Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
I think journalism is being replaced… We used to peruse the entertainment section of our favorite magazine for movie reviews and recommendations. Now most of us use IMDB or the recommendation engines behind Amazon and Netflix. Same thing for music: people still find new music through Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, but services like Spotify and Rdio actually replace music journalism for many… Quora looks like a simple Q&A site, but it’s also a reinvention of the ask-an-expert column you can find in almost any newspaper and magazine… Wikipedia has, for pretty much everyone, replaced news organizations as the place where you go to get in-depth information about anything that didn’t happen today or yesterday…
The Conversation is an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector — written by acknowledged experts and delivered directly to the public. Our team of professional editors work with more than 2,700 academic authors to make this wealth of knowledge and expertise accessible to all.
— About The Conversation - interesting approach - I like the notion of encouraging academic experts to write in a journalistic style about important issues, rather than relying on journalists to translate it.
There was a time, not that long ago, when games lived in the game cabinet. The canon included Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, a deck of cards and a backgammon set. Over the last 25 years, the game cabinet has been slowly replaced with the game console, the computer, the smartphone and now the tablet. Games became ubiquitous, but they were still mostly for fun. Now games are trying to make another big leap, from the world of recreation to the world of deadly serious. A rash of new games seeks to help you lose weight, save energy, cope with your chemo or cut back your drinking.
If, as essayist Paul Ford wrote, the fundamental question animating the Web is “Why wasn’t I consulted?” then Huffington Post could be fairly credited with succeeding at making a great many people feel that, in fact, they were being consulted, and better still, that HuffPost was grateful for their thoughts. A quarter million comments land in HuffPost’s assorted in-boxes every day
