Earlier today I and a lot of other folks got an email from Vikki Porter, who's leading a Knight Digital Media Center conference for editorial page editors. "We are urging them to build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info when they can't meet the need. As expected they are appalled. They want hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea."
Mark Potts runs through the details of Philly.com's reborn commenting system, which takes a good-enough approach to the complex problem of encouraging conversation in a world where an unfortunate percentage of us are idiots. As I've said previously, pseudonymity is a reasonable Middle Way.
"Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain" is the headline on today's New York Times piece smashing yet another set of assumptions about who really does what on the Internet. "Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of 'The X Files.' On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls."
Newsosaur Alan Mutter asks some worthwhile questions about newspapers losing the battle for audience retention despite doing some things right. He says the decline in stickiness is "puzzling in light of the energy most publishers in the last year have put into building traffic with such features as 24-hour news, video, blogs, podcasts, slide shows, interactive commentary and user-generated, hyper-local content."
I generally don't regard Alexa to be a reliable source of traffic data for local websites due to sampling methodology and size issues, but when applied to the presidential race, it may provide a fairly accurate indication of enthusiasm about the candidates. Here's a snapshot of the last month's traffic for the Obama, Clinton and McCain campaign websites. It certainly doesn't look good for Clinton.
There are two kinds of people in this world. There are those who implement Internet filtering. And there are those who hate Internet filtering. Sam Zell's memo putting an end to filtering at the Tribune Company is getting cheers from the victim side of that line. On2 recalls:
Aaron Smith at Pew muses about the effect YouTube is having in the presidential primary race as Barack Obama's powerful Iowa caucuses speech is relayed around the Internet:
