« February 2007 | Home | December 2006 »

Archive for January 2007

New feature: fortnightly link roundup

Posted on Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 6:49 PM by Andrew Chadwick

From now on I'll be adding a fortnightly link roundup. There are many interesting developments in the world of Internet Politics that I simply don't have time to blog about. It's worth recording these, even if it's only in the form of a link. My normal blog posting frequency will remain the same at around six posts a month. These roundups are made possible through my Del.icio.us account.

Link roundup for January 26, 2007:

U.K. police: We're overwhelmed by e-crime
Cyber criminals move focus to web
Privacy Board Won't Share Documents
Widgetbox › Directory of web widgets for WordPress, TypePad, MySpace and other blogs and web pages
Some Bling for Your Blog
Time Inc. Cutting Almost 300 Magazine Jobs to Focus More on Web Sites
Big Media’s Crush on Social Networking
I.B.M. to Introduce Workers’ Networking Software
Eugene Robinson - Throwing Their Blogs into the Ring - washingtonpost.com
AVAAZ.org
Pew Internet: Politics and the internet 2006 elections report
Research on the Internet and Society: Update at William H. Dutton
Want to tell a lie? Put it in an e-mail
Davos Conversation
Belgian copyright group warns Yahoo | CNET News.com
U.S.: No Net governance changes expected | CNET News.com
Attorney general: NSA spy program to be reformed
Sunlight Foundation
UK Data plan 'not like Big Brother'
Anytown, Online
Documents Borne by Winds of Free Speech - New York Times
Unsigned band make chart history
Tech Politics Podcast: Net neutrality back in new Congress | CNET News.com
UK Government looks at data shake-up
Study: eBay sellers gaming the reputation system?
House Seat Hangs by a Byte
RootsCamp - The password has been reset.
Unsigned band set to crash charts
Congress to Take Up Net’s Future - New York Times
Proposal for porn domain revived
Public can purchase $100 laptop
UK Government to close 551 websites

Clinton missing the point about online video?

Posted on Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 6:19 PM by Andrew Chadwick

Curiously staged announcement from Hillary Clinton - and on the official site rather than YouTube, though within a few hours somebody got hold of a copy and uploaded it. My hunch: that it's been done like this deliberately to distance Clinton from the 'ragged' netroots approach of Obama and Edwards. It says: 'I'm a safe, old-fashioned candidate'.

Update: the campaign is obviously shrewder than I thought.

Edited on: Fri, Jan 26, 2007 5:57 PM

New Pew report: Net more important for campaign news for young

Posted on Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 5:57 PM by Andrew Chadwick

Another excellent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington, DC. The major findings:

"The number of Americans using the internet as their main source of political news doubled since the last mid-term election.
31% of Americans used the internet during the 2006 campaign to get political news and information and discuss the raced through email. We call them campaign internet users.
Relatively young broadband users say the internet is a more important political news source than newspapers.
A new online political elite is emerging as 23% of campaign internet users became online political activists.
While mainstream news sources still dominate the online news and information gathering by campaign internet users, a majority of them now get political material from blogs, comedy sites, government websites, candidate sites or alternative sites.
While most campaign internet users say convenience is a major reason they use the internet, more than half cite the internet’s breadth of information and perspectives as a major reason for their online activity.
Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to rely on the internet – but there were partisan trends in usage of other political news sources."

Most surprising are the findings relating to growth in the numbers producing and distributing content:

"8% of campaign internet users posted their own political commentary to a newsgroup, website or blog.
13% of them forwarded or posted someone else’s political commentary.
1% of them created political audio or video recordings.
8% of them forwarded or posted someone else’s political audio or video recordings.
Altogether, 23% of campaign internet users (or 11% of internet users and 7% of the entire U.S. population) had done at least one of those things. That translates into about 14
million people."

Also, while TV is still the dominant source of campaign news, for those under the age of 36 with broadband, the Internet was second only to TV (and double the score for newspapers) in terms of where people got most of their election news.

13 minutes of fame?

Posted on Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 12:53 PM by Andrew Chadwick

I'll be talking about the book on BBC Radio Four's Thinking Allowed this Wednesday at 4pm GMT. It's recorded live. You can listen live here, and an archive version is available after the show. My bit came in the second half - it starts around the 14 minute mark.

Edited on: Fri, Jan 26, 2007 5:39 PM

Ministerial whirl

Posted on Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 7:10 PM by Andrew Chadwick

This is quite brilliant.

A promising new model of news - Daylife

Posted on Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 2:24 PM by Andrew Chadwick

In the scholarly literature on contemporary news media, one of the biggest themes is that they devalue context - the 'how did we get here' questions. This is especially acute in the realm of TV news, where soundbite slots and 15-second stories prevail. But it can also characteristic of online news, where the flow of stories is so much more voluminous and quick.

Daylife, a new news service/portal launched today, attempts to get around some of these problems. Most interesting to me are the devices that allow you to see various contexts for a particular story, such as photo feeds, key quotations and an ingenious timeline feature.The images are high quality licensed ones from Getty. In this era of fragmentation and endlessly customisable content (see Netvibes), I also like the idea of editors picking the front page, as well as automating the integration of good sources to produce something high quality, coherent yet still pluralistic.It's way ahead of Google News in that regard.

I can see Daylife becoming very popular among students and teachers, but will it gain a wider user base? Is it going to put a dent in the dominant modes of news production and consumption, offline or online?

US primary campaign season kicks off... on Youtube

Posted on Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 11:38 PM by Andrew Chadwick

A caustic but informative post from Jeff Jarvis about the recent launch of John Edwards' campaign.

We'll have to wait and see how recycled TV slots versus DIY video plays out during the forthcoming campaign, but already I'm beginning to rethink one of the themes of Chapter Seven - that online video will increasingly favour wealthy candidates. If the video is going to look like this...

...cost will make little difference.

Oh, and Edwards currently has 7500 friends on MySpace.

« February 2007 | Top | December 2006 »