December 2006 Archives
Jim Smith over WATE noticed I, too, had taken the Super Heroes test and said: "What about the Super Villians" test.
Below are the results.
Interestingly, both he and I are Spider-man as "hero" and Lex Luthor as "villian."
For the villian, I do know I answered two of questions the exact opposite of his answers. He said he does wear skin tight clothes and I said no. He said he did answer "are you bald" yes and I said no. Of course in the movies, Lex wasn't always bald.
Course, as a bad guy, there's a lot to like in Lex Luthor:
Clearly, Lex has evolved considerably from his initial design as the stereotypical mad scientist. He has proven that he can hold his own against one of the most powerful men in the universe, despite having no actual powers of his own. His ability to exist above the law often makes things very difficult for Superman, and while Lex can't beat Supes physically, he more than makes up for it with his intelligence and cunning. Though Hackman's Luthor may have been the only one to spell it out, Lex certainly is one of the greatest criminal minds of his or any other time. Superman has thrown punches with the best of them, but in the end, it's Lex's brains that make him a match for the Man of Steel's brawn, and continue to make him such an intriguing character that fans sometimes can't help but root for the bad guy.
-- Russ Dimino
If I was a bad guy, that's the bad guy I would be.
Play yourself: Super Hero and Super Villian.
Your results:
You are Lex Luthor
| A brilliant businessman on a quest for world domination and the self-proclaimed greatest criminal mind of our time! |
Tags: viral | super heros | super villians
It's kind of a funny best-and-worst list (at least the best 10), but I couldn't agree more on who is the No. 1 Worst Communicator of 2006.
(via Guy Kawasaki)
Tags: communicators
Another viral ...
Your results:
You are Spider-Man
| You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
The NAA's 2007 Digital Edge (Edgie) Awards finalists were announced late last week and the full list was posted this week. The winners will be announced in late January at the Connections Conference in Las Vegas.
Knoxnews is a finalist in three categories in the daily print circulation group of 75,000 – 250,000:
- Best Overall News Site; knoxnews.com
- Best Classified Innovation: KnoxJobs.tv
- Best Use of Interactive Media: RandomThis
There's a lot of excellent entries in the contest. The judging in this contest is tough in that the top sites are usually very close in meeting the judging criteria. It's nice to be recognized as a finalist and best of luck to all finalists!
Tags: NAA | Digital Edge Awards | Newspaper Association of America
A collection of what appears to be handy Web-based video tools are here.
What are the best tools out there?
Tags: video tools
Bloggers are all geeks?
Tags: geeks | bloggers | online media
The latest issue of Barron's -- out just in time for Christmas -- has an article about my employer, E.W. Scripps, that is getting a lot of buzz on investing Web forums.
The article is behind Barron's pay subscription wall, but here's a Reuters story on the story.
A couple of big name analysts are forecasting a $60 to $62 share price over the next year. Friday's close was $49.23.
Fav graph:
Scripps looks like a million bucks, and it's just warming up," Larry Haverty, media specialist and co-portfolio manager at Gabelli Global Multimedia Trust fund, told Barron's.
So not all the news about newspaper stocks is bad. Course, Scripps is often considered a newspaper stock, but newspapers -- still a big chunk of the company -- are not its largest business segment these days. The biggest piece of the pie is Scripps Networks (HGTV, the Food Network, GAC and others).
Tags: SSP | E.W. Scripps
Tom Abate writes about a presentation on the Ventura Counmty Star's groundbrekaing video efforts.
His takeaway on that presentation and some others at UC Berkeley’s New Media program:
The key to cross-training print journalists as videographers was to get comfortable with the notion that they would make mistakes. Not errors in fact. Not telling viewers there was a fire when it was obviously a flood. But camera shots may be shaky and audio may be “too hot” (loud?) because multimedia storytelling is a learning process — and one that plays out in front of an audience and often on deadline.
Good point!
Tags: video | ventura county star
Get "free stuff" from knoxnews' very twisted "re-gifting" department. Listen to the end of this audio, Wednesday's Big Dog Audio Update, for details on how to get the free stuff in time.
For the curious, the Big Dog Audio archives are here.
Tags: free stuff
Surely one of the big developments in 2007 will be the integration of community-generated video onto established publishing platforms from CNET to the Washington Post. I bet it's going to happen fast.
-- Andy Plesser, Beet.TV
Tags: video
That crafty Mocktech espied me yesterday on my way to the fabled "Gold Room."
Geez, I'm it. Thanks, Jay. That's viral. Jay Small posted his five things you don't know about me and has passed it on. He'd been tagged by Greg Sterling, who'd been tagged by ... well, you get it.
I notice Susan Mernit is playing, too. She has a link to a bit of history on blog tag.
It's one of those "aw, what the heck" things that burn through the Internet from time-to-time.
So, aw what the heck, here's five from me:
1) The only thing I was first at in high school was in the first class to graduate from the high school (South West Randolph which had just opened).
2) I actually have been to WhyNot and back, as well as Erect and Climax.
3) Lail is a German surname for most people of European descent, but it also is the Arabic word for "night." A chapter of the Koran is Al-Lail, or The Night.
4) Until adulthood, I was known by the nickname of Jackie. My family still calls me by that name -- sometimes.
5) Much to my baseball card collecting son's amazement, I blithely used all sort of now valuable baseball cards as noisemakers in the spokes of my bicycle. First lost fortune, no doubt.
My fire line: The viral stops here.
Tags: blog tag
I noticed a few "unwritten rules" posts today and decided to have some fun with it. Actually what got me going was this post ValleyWag on the unpublished rental rates of Wi-Fi in cafes. Interesting new social problem and it could have been the "unwritten rules of Wi-Fi in cafes."
Unwritten rules can be well, enigmatic. I did run across all the unwritten rules below.
What's you favorite or craziest unwritten rule (or is it against the rules to ask)?
Camping Outdoors Behavior - Unwritten Rules
12 Unwritten Rules of Cell Phone Etiquette
Bill Swanson's 25 Unwritten Rules of Management
Resumes: The Unwritten Rules of The Game.
The Unwritten Rules of Online Dating Revealed
The Unwritten Rules of Gift-Giving
The Unwritten Rules of Movie Watching
10 unwritten rules of soap opera
The Book of Unwritten Baseball Rules
7 unwritten rules for professional women
Tags: unwritten rules
Chuck Fadely recently created a blog about newspaper video as well as an email list. Hopefully, it'll develop into a great resource.
Tags: newspapers | video
Shopzilla besting consumer brand names in audience with strong growth, notes Mark Ippolito.
Is it brands or deals or just deals on brands?
A Christmas video special from the KnoxNews producers ... They're fab! More here.
Tags: RandomThis | Video | Santa Baby
Good move by the New York Times to add bookmarking links to their stories!
On a related topic, Digg is certainly having its trouble with gaming and frnt page manipulation,b ut how long do think it will be before a newspaper adopts a "digg-like" Web site as its primary site?
Tags: Digg | New York Times
Linking illegal (via Lost Remote)?
If the link is to material that violates someone else's copyright, it seems you're in a gray area.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann notes there is a great incentive for sites to remove the links instead of trying to fight the battle.
These leaves a lot of room for lawyers in a Web 2.0 world where content (or data) is coming from many sources.
Tags: copyright
The generalional divide is IM/E-Mail -- at least according to this AP Poll.
We've been trying rather unsuccessfully to get a group of newsroom managers to use IM as a speedier way to communicate about breaking news internally. We're in a business where minutes matter. Maybe this explains it. All the recalcitrants are over-40. IM is too far across their generational divide? Early onset of old-fartitis, perhaps.
An AP-AOL poll released Friday says:
- Almost three-fourths of adults who do use instant messages still communicate with e-mail more often. Almost three-fourths of teens send instant messages more than e-mail.
- More than half of the teens who use instant messages send more than 25 a day, and one in five send more than 100. Three-fourths of adult users send fewer than 25 instant messages a day.
- Teen users (30 percent) are almost twice as likely as adults (17 percent) to say they can't imagine life without instant messaging.
- When keeping up with a friend who is far away, teens are most likely to use instant messaging, while adults turn first to e-mail.
- About a fifth of teen IM users have used IM to ask for or accept a date. Almost that many, 16 percent, have used it to break up with someone.
Current status:
Tags: instant messaging | IM
Howard Weaver, vice president for news for McClatchy, writes here he finds "continued refreshment in the words of E.W. Scripps." Writiing in 1903, Scripps advised an editor ...
Don’t be afraid of trying experiments. Whatever you feel right hard about, that do . . . Better an enthusiastic damn fool than perfectly correct and prosy . .
Tags: E.W. Scripps | newspapers | leadership
Another self-promotion item: We started doing something in October that's become one of the smartest and funniest regular pieces on our Web site.
It's our Big Dog Audio updates. We decided just this week to create an archive of these mid-day promos and updates here. Take the time to listen to a few and send us feedback, rants and raves..
The audio updates are done Monday through Friday. They are posted on the front of the Web site just beside the traffic map around noon. The link is removed late in the afternoon.
Regular hosts Lauren Spuhler and Erin Chapin, with guest appearances from "across the pond" Online Editor Jigsha Desai, really have a chemistry working here. I if you listen to a few, you'll be hooked on checking in around noonish to see what shrikes that crazy pair's fancy today.
Listen for the "Gateway of Morality" moments and the occasional "hey, mom did you hear this" story.
Tags: online media | podcasts | audio
It seems most everybody is saying newspapers should drop registration on their Web sites. Everybuddy is. The Bivings Report from August was (this one was circulating through our email system this week). And Mark Potts is. A legion of others are in one way or another.
The value of having a good database of customers is a business no-brainer. It's very difficult to develop relationships with customers you don't know. But for anyone but regular users of a site, registration is a bail out barrier. And some number of customers who actually want to use our sites always seem to have problems making it work, get frustrated and give up.
But it's not like users are not signing into Web sites. On a typical day, I log into about 10 or more sites that require a login and password and no two are using the same user name/password combo. How many are you logging into? On top of those forced logins, there are other registration sites that I am bypassing the login screen due to the site's "cookie check."
I certainly wouldn't be the first to say it's time to move to smarter registration. E.W. Scripps took a step in that direction by softening its registration wall for our site (KnoxNews) and others. But it would make sense to provide features and services in which the user can see how registration is a necessary tradeoff for the time pain and private info.
There's much work to be done here instead of abandoning efforts to collect information about users that could be used in one-to-one marketing. It is fair to say we haven't nailed it.
And despite registration's critics, I doubt newspapers that dropped registration would see substantial audience growth in their core geographic market area (where they most want to gain users). Anecdotically, most of our webmaster mail with registration objections are coming from people who are out of market (and most do identify themselves quite well).
Anyone have any evidence to the contrary?
Tags: newspapers | online media | registration
Like I said before, Mavs owner Mark Cuban would make an interesting newspaper owner.
The link above deals with the advertising/revenue model for newspapers. On Saturday, he delves into newsgathering, the newsroom and RSS feeds.
Reporters have recorders for interviews (every one i do these days). Some interviews could easily be expanded to include video. Should the reporters be required to not only write a story, but also edit the audio and even video of an interview ? ABsolutely. I recommend that EVERY reporter or columnist spend a morning with a disc jockey in a radio station. Watch how quickly and easily they edit together audio into a package they turnaround in seconds and put on air. Take a look at how easy it is to use basic video editing equipment.
It's the worth the read ... and it takes him a while to actually get to the subject promised in the title, but it's fun getting there.
Tags: online media | newspapers | Mark Cuban
Om Malik's new blog NewTeeVee will be must reading.
I've already discovered "praying mantis girl" and Kent Nichols' Ask a Ninja.
Maybe, NewTeeVee will discover the Randoms, whose weekly video features are gems on KnoxNews.com. They rock -- every week.
Or maybe our use of $99 cameras from Target to do news videos like this
Good luck to Om and his editorial team on the new blog. It'll be one of my daily reads.
Dan Gillmor has an interesting and vivid snapshot on "The Demise of the Photojournalist."
The photojournalist’s job may be history before long. But photojournalism has never been more important, or more widespread.
Citizen journalism evangelist Gillmor says professional photojournalists will not be able to compete because they can't be everywhere news happens, and the tools are cheap enough that someone on the scene will have a camera and will take the shot or video. This will leave the ranks of the professional photojournalist to dwindle down much as the ranks of portrait painters
dwindled.
I'm not quite sure the displacement is as airtight as he suggests. How much of the photojournalism you see in newspapers and magazines is breaking news? Breaking news photojournalism is often truly compelling photos, but what makes up most of the "art" in a daily newspaper or magazine? Hint: It's not the breaking news used in Gillmore's examples.
But he's right. We may soon come to see the most compelling photojournalism coming not from professional journalists, but from people who happened to be there and captured life as it unfolded in the moment. The disruption of traditional Media (aka "Big Media") continues at every level from business model to the photographer on assignment.
Tags: photojournalism
A Washington, DC, PR firm has done a study that finds that newspapers do better than magazines in terms of new fangled web functionality.
In many other core categories, such as video, podcasts, and comments on articles, magazines persistently under-perform compared to the websites of newspapers.
The firm studied various features it refers to as Web 2.0 features (kind of a stretch in some cases) that include RSS, forums, blogs, podcasting, video, bookmarking, article comments, tags and user registration policies.
But there's a catch (at least for newspapers)
... it is evident that newspapers use a larger number of Web tools in a more effective manner than magazines. However, the general strategy of newspaper websites, which aims to replicate the content provided in print editions, falls short of the strategies employed by online magazines, which are more tailored to people who read online news.
Magazine Web sites are more supplemental to their print titles than the strategy of newspapers of replicating their content online, the study says. (That's an effective Web 2.0 strategy?)
The full study is here.
I tend to think of blogs as the new magazines, the place to find sharp writing (present company excluded) and insightful analysis. I do use magazine Web sites (Forbes and Fast Company are two that I use and have subscribed to the print versions), but I rarely find myself at Time or Newsweek's Web presences. I dropped my PC Magazine subscription years ago.
I think the study misses the target when it says: "Due to differences in the inherent structure of the magazine and newspaper industry, the Internet appears to be less of a threat to magazines than it is to newspapers."
The business models of both are being effectively disrupted.
Tags: magazines | newspapers | Web 2.0
Scripps-owned Shopzilla is in the news in a New York Times piece on a trio of upstarts who hope to challenge the current big players in comparison shopping sites (Shopzilla, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber).
The article boils down to a business model discussion of pay-per-click advertising vs. pay-per-performance advertising.
Meanwhile Nielsen//Netratings said Shopzilla was the No. 9 shopping destination on CyberMonday at U.S. Workplaces and was the first comparison shopping site on the list (via Center for Media Research).
Tags: eday | newspapers | CyberMonday | online advertising
The news about newspapers is so bad that now the industry looks like the fish wrapper for what not to do.
Pat Coyle, director of Database Marketing & E Commerce for the Indianapolis Colts, suggests the NFL learn from the lessons taught to newspapers rather than taking that course itself.
While they were #1, they coulda woulda shoulda been re-inventing themselves to compete in the new media landscape. Likewise, I think the NFL teams could benefit from aggregating our on-line audiences, but we should do it now while we’re strong.
He likes the Yahoo-newspaper classified deal, that includes The Knoxville News Sentinel where I work, but says:
Newspapers could have invented on-line classified. But they waited. Now they’re forced to get in bed with on-line publishers.
Coyle does see some business models in newspapers he'd like to see those in the NFL develop: the ability to do buisness with thousands of advertisers and have continuing relationships with those advertisers that generate volume.
What could newspapers learn from the NFL?
Tags: NFL | newspapers
In case you're wondering, we are past the tipping point ...
In the U.S., between 2000 and 2005, around 18% of all broadband households terminated their newspaper subscriptions.
Early U.S. data through the first three quarters of 2006 suggest that, by 2010, 35% of all broadband households will have terminated their newspaper subscriptions.
That's from a new report by William Bird, a market-moving analyst for Citigroup. See coverage in Business Week, Barron's Tech Trader Daily and The Houston Chronicle.
Not even the trends he finds that ought to be positive for print circulation are helping: the fastest gorwing age group is 55-plus and the slowing rates of broadband adotption (because the percentage already is high).
The only conclusion we can draw from these data is that the pace of Internet substitution is accelerating so fast that it is overwhelming two positive underlying trends: older demographics and slowing broadband adoption.
The changing economics and demographics could mean newspapers as a category won't see bottom line growth for five years.
Tags: newspapers | broadband | William Bird
