Chris Anderson posts a rebuttal, of sorts, to this July-August HBR article entitled Should You Invest In The Long Tail? Both the book, and the seemingly flawed HBR analysis (using percentages, not raw data), are on my summer quarter class reading list. More at the class blog.
30 June 2008
27 June 2008
UGA To Buy Local TV Station
My alma mater is buying a local CBS affiliate, WNEG-TV (Toccoa, GA), which will become part of The Center for Advanced Media operated by The Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The University of Georgia Research Foundation is buying the local station, channel 32, from its current owner, Media General, Inc., pending FCC approval, of course. Reported sales price: $1.44 million. Studio operations for the Northeast Georgia station will be moved from Toccoa to Athens; UGA-oriented programming is planned for fall 2009.
Reportedly, this makes UGA “one of a handful” of universities that hold commercial television licenses. My Google-foo isn’t good today, as I’ve not been able to identify any others yet.
WNEG has been an unappreciated asset for about 20 years. Media General (Hollywood, VA) became the station owner in 2000, when it acquired the assets of South Carolina-based Spartan Communications. In turn, after getting an exemption to the duopoly rule, Spartan acquired WNEG in 1997 and operated it as a satellite of WSPA. Then local owner Stephens County Broadcasting Company had been trying to sell the property since at least 1990, claiming competition from Turner TNT Cable Network had made the station unprofitable. The FCC designates the station as part of the Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson-Asheville Designated Market Area (”DMA”); it was launched in 1984.
26 June 2008
RNC Lifts Flickr Photo?
Political Newsline has spotted a probable copyright violation on the Republican National Committee blog, in a post made by online communications manager James Richardson. (tip)
The photo in question has a watermark (which is how PN was able to track it down) and is clearly marked “All rights reserved” on its Flickr home.
Who’s going to extract royalties for TinyFishy?
21 June 2008
17 June 2008
Student Focus: One Bottle At A Time
This is a plug for a new podcast, One Bottle At A Time, which is a Washington wine show launched by one of my students after taking my inaugural podcasting class. I realize now (oops) that I did not specifically explain to students how to get listed in iTunes or how to create an RSS feed specifically for the podcast (separate from the blog RSS feed) — although these things are in the books we used in the class. Give him a listen!
Vanity Fair On The Blogosphere
The current edition of Vanity Fair contains a map of popular “blogs” showing relative “news v opinion” content and “scurrilous” v “earnest” tone. Many of these “blogs” are media properties that have blogs (such as Salon or Slate) or are simply media properties (Pitchfork Media) or organizations that rest on blogging software (Blogcritics, Huffington Post). And then there’s Drudge, which isn’t a blog — no RSS feed, no archived entries … just a bunch of links (mostly).
The blogs I read regularly are in the upper-right-hand quadrant: “news/earnest”. No big surprise, there! In fact, I knew all but two of the blogs labeled “earnest”: Just Jared (a gossip blog on the “earnest” side of the chart?) and Apartment Therapy. But I was familiar with only one (1!) of the “blogs” in the lower-left-hand quadrant (scurrilous + opinion): Perez Hilton (courtesy of a student). [Yes, I know both Pitchfork Media and Blogcritics, where I sometimes, but not very often, syndicate my content. But neither of these are "blogs" although BC at least has RSS feeds. But it calls itself a magazine.]
It is Vanity Fair, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how many are gossip/celebrity sites.
16 June 2008
Links for Monday
- Paging George Jetson! (Or Bladerunner fans.) The Mundus Group has a “Flying Car” that it will now sell as a kit vehicle “under the experimental kit aircraft protocol.” The website describes vehicles for police and emergency crews that use Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) technology. You know, the same sort of tech that powers helicopters! (Look at the pictures!)
- Social networking early adopters should check out Flock 2.0 beta. Flock’s social networking browser is based on Firefox and the Gecko web rendering engine. The press release says that Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast on Flock 2.0.
- Primary schools and colleges in Bangladesh will receive free wireless access; the service, AlwaysOn Network Bangladesh, will also be available for “underserved rural and urban areas.”
- iDayo, a stock selector venture, has
announced a website redesign. Is this a common press release practice?
In any case, I don’t know what it looked like before, but it’s … busy
… and has a very annoying Web 1.0-type “news ticker.” - Catch-all: AMD announces a teraflop processor, the AMD FireStream 9250 … there’s a new Netflix player, from Roku, that “enables Netflix subscribers to instantly stream a growing
library of movies and TV episodes from Netflix directly to the TV” … and the Financial Services Technology Consortium is holding its annual conference this week, with topics such as RFID tagging (for money?) and, of interest to this blog, mobile payments.
15 June 2008
Phototampering Throughout History
Scientific American has a feature on digital forensics and “doctored” images as well as a slideshow of 10 political images (nine are pre-digital) that illustrate the craft. Although digital technologies may make it easier to falsify images, the SI article demonstrates that the 180-year history of photography is punctuated with manipulation. For example, photo that you probably think of when you think of Abraham Lincoln is a composite! (tip)
13 June 2008
Interface Hall of Shame
I think that this is what I’ll call all of these examples … it just makes life simple. The example this week comes from Ziff Davis Media publication PC Week:
