Writing about the Four Fundamental Traits of New-Media, I mentioned in 1998 that...

"Distance Disappears. Geography ceases to be a factor, except for language and culture."

Several months ago, Thurman was kind enough to send me a draft copy of his report, which I'll write about later this month. However, The Times (of London) Media Analyst Rhys Blakely yesterday published an interesting story about foreign readership and how recent Nielsen//NetRatings data from the UK that confirms much of this research.

According to the latest figures from Nielsen//NetRatings, the media researcher, Guardian Unlimited and TimesOnline, the UK's two largest 'quality'newspaper websites in terms of users, have more American than British readers. The Daily Telegraph's online offering is approaching a similar tipping point. The Independent is nearly twice as popular in the US as on its home turf. Perhaps most strikingly, the Daily Mail, commonly regarded as speaking to Middle England, has more than three times as many US readers online as British ones.

This is not a new phenomenon. At least 1,375 US daily newspapers are on the web. And yet, as long ago as 2005 (which counts as another age on the internet), the Evening Standard [of London] was the 31st most popular online source of news for Americans. London's local paper punched well above its weight in a field dominated by the American broadcast networks NBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and Fox News.

As I mentioned in 1998, the first of The Four Fundamental Traits of New-Media is, as Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, put it, "Bits, not Atoms."

Unfortunately, most countries' advertising industries are based on delivering gazillions of atoms of printed paper or radiating a radio or TV signal across their country's physical geography, not necessarily delivering electronic bits of information across entire languages or cultures. These legacy industries need to change.

If Americans make up an average of 36 per cent of the readership of news websites based in Britain, then it seems clear that those sites had best advertise to them or else waste over one-third of the sites advertising potential.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In 30 years working in news media, I've never encountered a more beneficial cause than the Media Loan Development Fund. So, I'vebeen volunteering some of my consulrting time to it.

The idea behind the MDLF arose during the late 1980s when Yugoslavian broadcaster Sasa Vucinic watched freedom of the press almost evaporate in his country. He worked for B92, which was the independent radio station in Serbia and a thorn in the side of dictator Slobodan Milošević's regime. Unable to find a legal pretext to silence B92, the regime began threatening the radio station's advertisers. B92 began running out of money and Vucinic was unable to find any bank, inside or outside of Serbia, that was willing to loan B92 money to keep operating.

Vucinic never forgot that experience (he gave an videotaped talk about it at the 2005 TED conference). In 1995, he approached billionaire George Soros, who himself grew up under a Communist regime in Hungary, about the idea of creating a foundation to loan money to independent media in countries that have repressive regimes. Soros agreed to setup the Media Development Loan Fund, which is based in Prague.

Vucinic's first MDLF project was a newspaper that during the late 1990s was being forced by the Slovakian government to travel 400 kilometres to print the paper. The newspaper wanted to purchase a printing press, so MDLF loaned it the money. MDLF has since financed 135 projects for 58 independent media companies in 18 countries. When MDLF began, Soros didn't think the foundation would ever see its loans repaid, but 97 percent of the 58 projects have repaid their loans on time.

In 1998, MDLF established the Center for Advanced Media-Prague (CAMP) in 1998 to introduce new-media concepts and solutions to independent media in the post-communist and developing countries. Earlier this year, Patrice Schneider, MDLF's director of development and formerly the Managing Director of Netscape Europe and Deputy Managing Director of Hachette Filipacchi Media, asked several other international new media experts and I to advise MDLF and CAMP about coming changes in new media and new media technologies..

If you have a chance to help MDLF's worthwhile cause, please do so.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My hearty thanks to the staff of the Dagbladet in Oslo, Norway, for having me as the featured speaker at their seminar Thursday for online advertisers.

Dagbladet also invited me to their corporation's winter holiday party – where I was easily identifiable as the sole person among the 300 there who didn't speak Norwegian! I particularly want to commend the hospitality of, among others, my new friends Dagbladet MediaLab Editor and CEO Rune Røsten, Dagbladet.no Editor Esten Sæter, and Svein-Erik Klemetsen who chose and invited me.

Every country seems to think that someone else is ahead of it in practical application of online media. I'm often asked which country is the best. The answer since the late nineties has clearly been the four Scandinavian counties, though South Korea and Estonia have joined them in the top rank during the past four years. The Finns, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, South Koreans, and Estonians have pulled well ahead of the Americans, Canadians, British, Irish, Dutch, Germans, and Singaporeans in online media usage and application.

Before putting Norwegian online usage into perspective, allow me to first tell you about Norwegian printed media usage. Until Japan surpassed it last year, Norway for years had the world's strongest readership of daily newspapers – 0.626 copies sold daily per adult, compared to 0.33 in the US). At the beginning of 2006, the national tabloids Dagbladet and Verdens Gang Verdens Gang and Dagbladet were selling 343,703 and 252,716 copies per day respectively in a nation of only 4,610,000 people. Imagine the equivalent daily circulations in America, which adjusted for population would be 22,366,789 and 16,445,726, far above the actual circulations of 2,269,509 for USA Today or 1,086,798 for The New York Times. DB and VG are very successful printed newspapers.

Despite that strong readership, print circulation is rapidly declining in Norway. The state agency Medianorway reports that VG's circulation dropped 6.2 percent and DB's 13 percent during 2005. Several DB staffers told me that the as yet unreported 2006 circulation changes were be similar. [Update: Audit Bureaux of Circulation figures released Febuary 12th showed that VG's daily circulaiton during 2006 had dropped by 28,000 copies to 315,500. I don't yet have the ABC figure for Dagbladet.]

As in most other countries, many print edition executives are blaming their companies' free online editions for cannibalizing printed edition circulation sales. These print edition executives want either (a) access to the online editions to be sold for a subscription fee equivalent to print or else (b) that the online editions not provide full news and instead encourage online readers to get that by purchasing a printed copy.

That first option is philistine and regressive In a world where the only growing sector of daily newspaper circulation is free papers – up more than 137 percent during the past five years, from 12 million to 28 million copies worldwide. The second option is like insisting that each automobile one hundred years ago have a horse in front of it, a really dumb idea.

Almost all Norwegian adults and teenagers are online, far higher percentages than in America, Canada, or the UK. The average bandwidth into Norwegian homes and offices is 1.5 megabytes per second. And the strong newspaper readership and advanced online infrastructure shouldn't lead to any mystery that Norway produces what may be the world's best online editions (so too do several of the dailies in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland).

VG.no receives 950 000 unique users per day and Dagbladet.no 750,000. The weekly unique user numbers are 2,240,000 and 1,820,000 respectively, almost entirely domestic traffic. The equivalent number in the US would be 61,822,124 and 48,806,940 unique users daily, or 145,770,060 and 118,438,174 per week. Compare those numbers to to NYTimes.com's 13,372,00 unique users per month. Online editions are pervasive in Norway.

Dagbladet.no's EBITA earnings climbed from 8.5 million to 22 million Kroner (1.3 million to 3.3 million US dollars) between 2004 and 2005. The 2006 increase was at least 40 percent more and forecast to be the same during 2007. The Economist magazine last year reported that VG's publisher Shibsted earned nearly 40 percent of its revenues from new-media. Dagbladet AS reportedly earned about a third of its that way. New-media will probably contribute more than 40 percent of each companies earnings this year.

Whenever I asked Dagbladet staffers whether they or VG had the best online edition, they answered with typical Scandinavian humility that VG did. Their answer was like the student who scores 98/100 saying the student who scored 99/100 is better. A tiny difference.

My role last week was to explain to approximately 90 dagabladet.no's advertisers what the future of digital media will be. No one, including me, truly knows the answer to that. I chose not to tell them the trends — indicators that have too often been wrong during the past 15 years of public access to the Internet. I instead explained the underlying dynamics that are driving change and, in particularly, what this will mean to not only dagbladet.no but the company's social networking site, blink.no. (I plan to put my Dagbladet presentation online later this season.) More than 350,000 Norwegians – including 42 percent of norwegians between ages 16 and 18 and 75 percent of those younger than 26 years– belong to it.

I was surprised to discover that the Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, which has long been involved in online media, produces a good website, but its online, mobile, and interactive/digital TV developments and strategies seem behind the British Broadcasting Corporation and other Western broadcasters, and well behind the South Korean broadcasters. Is the problem lack commercial competition that could make NRK change more quickly? I don't know.

While in Oslo, I talk to several people about the idea of holding an online news publishing conference in Scandinavia. But the World Association of Newspapers beat me to the idea, announcing yesterday that one will be held there on March 8-9. Relatively short notice. (Plus, WAN's website unfortunately was down today.)

My apologies to my Norwegian old friends Gard Jenssen, of Startspin.com and Iignitas.com, and Bent Nordbø, formerly of Aftenposten, both of whom I had hoped to contact while I was Oslo. I hadn't time in lieu of Dagbladet. (Bent: I've lost track of you. Please let me know your current contact info?)

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll be in Singapore from July 11 to 13 and Kuala Lumpur from July 14 to 21. If anyone there who reads this blog wants to meet, please don't hesitate to let me know. — Vin Crosbie

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the UK and Ireland reports that it and the members of JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards) yesterday agreed to exclude RSS User-Agents from member websites' user traffic statistics, thus excluding RSS from the measurement of Page Impressions.

The member then asked the ABC's Internet Technical Group to review and suggest ways of measuring the 'reading' of RSS.

JICWEBS' members include the:

• Interactive Advertising Bureau (IABUK) of the UK.
  
• Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).
  
• Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA).
  
• Newspaper Society (NS).
  
• Association of Online Publishers (AOP).
  
• Digital Media Group (DMG) .
  
• Newspaper Publishers' Association (NPA).

In other words, the organizations that include just about every online publisher in the U.K.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In today's Media Guardian from London, Danny Meadows-Klue, CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. and former chief of new media at the Daily Telegraph, writes an excellent overview of how CraigsList is savaging old media's classified advertising revenues in a "...the collision of the new economy and traditional business models."

By the way, did you know that the money being spent on Internet advertising in the United Kingdom has now surpassed that spent on radio advertising? During 2004, advertisers spent £653.3 million online, an increase of 60% over 2003.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Netimperative yesterday reported that there are now more broadband Internet users than dial-up Internet users in the United Kingdom. It reported that new figures released by BT Group show that, there are now more than 7.4 million broadband customers (including those of BT's competitors) in the UK and that broadband connections are now accessible to 99.6% of the UK population.

The UK joins South Korea as redominately broadband nations.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has launched an initiative, i2010: European Information Society 2010, that hopes to foster growth and jobs in Europe's information society and media industries. The Commission is in particular keen to promote high-speed and secure broadband networks offering rich and diverse content in Europe, reports EU Business.

To support technological convergence with 'policy convergence', the Commission will propose: an efficient spectrum management policy in Europe (2005); a modernisation of the rules on audiovisual media services (end 2005); an updating of the regulatory framework for electronic communications (2006); a strategy for a secure information society (2006); and a comprehensive approach for effective and interoperable digital rights management (2006/2007).

Critics often rap the European Commission as bureaucratic, but these initiatives seem to be more than the U.S. Federal Communication Commission is doing.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Merger talks between two of the world's largest newspaper associations have broke off. For the past months, the World Association of Newspapers and Ifra had been discussing merger, but this morning WAN announced that talks had ceased, at least for the foreseeable future. Neither WAN nor Ifra said why. "Both associations agreed to continue close cooperation and expressed the hope that circumstances would allow them to re-open discussions on a merger at a future date," wrote WAN spokesman Larry Kilman.

WAN, based in Paris, represents 72 national newspaper associations, plus 13 national news agencies, nine regional press organizations, individual newspaper executives from 102 nations. IFRA, based in Darmstadt, Germany, represents more than 3,000 publishing companies and suppliers worldwide. .

In November, I'd written that a WAN/IFRA merger would have greatly benefited the newspaper industry and have brought greater coordination new media efforts worldwide. WAN's "Shaping the Newspaper of the Future" project is among the world's most conceptually advanced about what newspapers must do to survive in the 21st Century. IFRA is the world's leader at newspaper printing technologies and has been pioneering the multimedia newsroom of the future at its Newsplex research facility in South Carolina.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Japan has 102 daily newspapers. Here is a snapshot of their new-media activities:

83 operate website
26 also provide video on those websites
39 have e-mail editions
39 syndicate contents others companies' sites
36 provide services (such a teletext) on cable television
16 provide teletext service to mobile phone
 4 provide digital editions online

(My thanks to the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association for this information)

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past weekend, most of the stories about the online news industry focused on Associated Press President & CEO Tom Curley's keynote speech at the annual conference of the Online News Association. Though it was good to hear that the AP has finally realized that there's a seismic environmental change underway in media, Curley's speech was about AP intentions, not AP accomplishments. The American wire service has accomplished little with new media during the past ten years.

A story that was under-reported weekend was Reuters' postponed deployment of NewsML. The British wire service (disclaimer: where I worked during most of 1989 to 1993) is approximately half a decade ahead of the AP in new media. Reuters began serving online news site in 1994, years before AP did. Reuters has migrated its worldwide communications network from its proprietary satellites and cables system onto the Internet. And Reuters has been instrumental in developing the worldwide news communications standard known as NewsML, an Open Standard version of XML for news organizations.

Agence France Press> (AFP), the Italian news agency ANSA, the Belgian news agency Belga, the Swiss news agency SDA/ATS, United Press International (UPI), the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association, The Irish Times of Dublin, The Wall Street Journal Online, PR Newswire, and Business Wire have also been instrumental in developing NewsML

Unfortunately, Reuters has announced that it's postponing deployment of its own NewsML front-end system, called News2Web, by two years, until 2006. As The Guardian reported on Friday

David Schlesinger, global managing editor of Reuters' news operation, told staff in an email that the News2Web project would be delayed. He said progress had been made on the web-based product, but acknowledged that the group's news staff were aware of technical hitches with the project. Staff trials of the new product, designed to make the entire editorial process web-based, are understood to have been negative.

"As many in editorial know too well, we have had significantly less success getting the front end of the system right; we don't yet have the new desktop in a state ready to roll out to journalists," said Mr Schlesinger.

News2Web was targeted for launch at the end of this year and was seen as a flag bearer for Reuters' strategy of putting its entire business online.

A Reuters spokeswoman said delays in the development of News2Web meant it would not be available in the group's main product for City professionals, 3000 Xtra. While Reuters is much more than a news service, its news feed is still an important component of the trading and financial information screens it sells to banks and brokerages.

"It makes no sense to roll it out in the newsroom until it's in the main product," said the spokeswoman.

She would not disclose the cost of the News2Web programme but some Reuters staff believe the project is significantly over budget. There are fears among news staff that deeper job cuts will be made before Christmas to ensure that Fast Forward stays on track and cost savings targets are not affected by the budget overrun of News2Web.

Though the AP's Curley talked about "atomized" news and "My Personalized News", a wire service must output such content in a structured XML protocol, namely NewsML. Despite this delay, Reuters is far ahead of the AP in actually implementing that.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You don't you read Welsh? If not, how will you know the Diweddaraf Newyddion o'r Cymru (Latest News from Wales)? It's hard to use y we (the Web) if you don't understand the language.

The BBC understands, so its New Media Department in Wales has created Vocab, an open source website tool that offers English-language popup translations of Welsh words. Try it yourself on the BBC's Welsh-language news page. I may not let you fluently read Welsh (for that, you'll need the BBC's Learn Welsh pages), but at least you won't be uninformed while strolling through Cardiff.

BBC New Media there is considering development of a Welsh-Spanish popup translation version to help the Welsh community resident in Argentina's Patagonia region.

Journalist Robert Andrews' blog provides more details about Vocab.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a October 2002 lower court Target_blank>ruling that the World Wide Web is not a 'place of public accommodation' under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. At least for now, this means that online news publishers in America aren't legally required to provide full Web site access for the disabled.

The appealed case arose when Robert Gumson, a blind man who uses software that converts online text into synthesized speech couldn't purchase Southwest Airlines tickets online because unlabeled graphics, inadequately labeled data tables, and purely graphical navigation links made that airline's Web site all but impossible for visually-impaired people to use. Gumson is one of 1.5 million Americans with vision impairments who use the Internet. He and an advocacy group for disabled people sued Southwest, which meanwhile redesigned its site for better ADA access.

In 2002, a federal court in Florida ruled for the airline, finding that the ADA applies only to "physical, concrete places of public accommodation." But Gumson and the advocacy group appealed, now claiming that his difficulties accessing Southwest's site prevented him from using the airline's physical flights themselves.

Continue reading "Internet Not a "Place of Public Accomodation"" »

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Between 1999 and 2003, the time Britons spent online increased by eightfold, according to a report today in netimperative. Text messaging has increased fifteen-fold. People in the UK now spend more money on mobile phones than fixed-line telephony.

By contrast, the growth of traditional media has been paltry. UK television viewing increased by only 2 percent and radio listening by 6 percent

The report details how there are now almost 50,000 new broadband subscribers every week (DSL and cable), up from around 40,000 additions a week in late 2003. The total number of UK broadband subscribers is on par with the number in France and Germany. More than one-third of Internet households now have a broadband connection.

More than 85 percent of UK households now own at least one mobile phone. more than 20 percent of consumers now regard their mobile phone as their main device for making and receiving calls.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My American compatriots still won't believe me when I say that the best online publications are European. I've been telling them that for years, but their their national pride makes them think that whatever was invented in America is still made there. (Oh, yeah? Just try finding an American manufacturer of television sets, radio sets, disc drives, or cameras.)

The superiority of European online publications is nothing new to me. Back in November 2000, the French newspaper Libération quoted me
saying that the cutting edge in online publishing was no longer in America but in Europe. [The English translation of my answer to Libération's third question is, "Alas! the majority of the good ideas do not come from France. Partly because the French adopted the Internet on late. On the other hand, the media in Scandinavia launched sites very early. The Irish and the Spaniards integrated the video and audio and it on their sites whereas the Americans still do not do it, or almost not. On Dagbladet of Stockholm you can read the text of an article with audio and video segment turned in by the reporters on the ground. I believe that Europeans learned quickly that it was necessary to break news on their sites. The Spaniards are remarkable: I think that El Pais and El Mundo are among the best online newspapers in the world."]

And as recently as last month, UK.Journalism.com paraphrased me saying that Europe's online news publications are more advanced than those in the US, particularly in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and Spanish and UK sites are leading the way in charging for web newspapers.

But today there's more background to back up my apatriotic opinion.

A survey by International Business Machines and the intelligence unit of British magazine The Economist says that the Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom have pushed the U.S. out of the top five ranking of most Web-savvy nation, Reuters reports. Denmark was number one, followed by the U.K., Sweden, Norway, and Finland. "Scandinavia is remarkable for the way in which citizens have incorporated Internet technology into their daily lives, completely altering how they work, shop, and communicate with officials," the report said.

The U.S. dropped to sixth place. Despite the fast growth in use of broadband connections in America, the U.S. was still falling behind other nations' population with broadband connections, the report said. "It is not a case of decline, but rather of stagnation or slow development compared with more aggressive e-leaders," the report said.

During the 1990s, Europeans visited America to learn about the state-of-the-art about the wired Internet. But Americans nowadays visit Europe to learn that, plus learn about the state-of-the-art in wireless technologies. According to dictionary.com, the word for the American condiment ketchup can also be spelled catchup. Pour it on!

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

eMarketer today has a good, short article about which countries have the highest percentages of their adult populations online.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On the front page of The New York Times (registration site) today, there is an excellent report about how average people in China are beginning to use the Internet as a means to demand — and sometimes get — justice from their legal system. The Peoples Republic of China nowadays has the world's second largest population of online users (the US has the largest).

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 01:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

     Tech for tech's sake
      does not a market make.

The world can have as many waves of new technologies as serendipty, venture capital, or the right combination of both can muster. But the technologies that are accepted by, and make a difference in, society are those that satisfy needs. Not the technies' needs, but the needs of the average (fair to middling) educated persons'.

Moreover, indigenous culture can play a major role in which new technologies actually get used. Several articles that read today reminded us of all this:

The ROAR consortium (The Guardian and Observer, Emap Advertising, Channel 4, and OMD UK) last month released some research on over a thousand 15-29 year-old Britons. Although this research primarily was about whether or not young Britons will purchase 3rd Generatoin mobile phones (the research's answer: not initially), there were a few other interesting conclusions:

"Today's generation is demanding of technology and hard to impress. In their formative years, radical steps forward – such as making mobile phone calls, surfing the web and sending email, have been the norm. Today's youth wants personalised media and expects products and services to be totally tailored around them. Older generations may remember having to adapt themselves to imperfect and faltering technology but highly consumerised youth have grown up with ease and standardisation of Windows/Nokia. They simply disregard hard to work, irritating technology."

"This presents technology companies with a new challenge. In order to engage young people, technology companies need to develop solutions based on a richer understanding of needs and not just base innovations on a tacit assumption that 'young people love technology.' Instead of simply being first to market with new functionality, companies should concentrate on adding to, rather that compromising basic functionality."

Meanwhile, Anil de Mello, who has been writing some perceptive articles about mobile telephony, examined why i-Mode — so successful in Japan — hasn't done well in Europe.

Taking de Mello's article as a cue, Daniel Scuka of Mobiliser.org and the co-founder of the Wireless Watch Japan media project, examines why Europe is different than Japan when it comes to mobile technology. Some of his conclusions:

• "Pricing of SMS vs. mobile email is one major differentiator between Europe and Japan.
  
• In Japan, mobile email is key for mobile marketing and the unofficial webs
  
• And on Japan i-mode, lots of people love to get those opt-in mail marketing messages."

From their articles, blog from Japan, offers a different perspective on this same articles:

• "Some of Japanese are not familiar to PC. Cell phone is major way for mail and web.
  
• "Almost of cell phones in stores has camera, it's commonsence for consumers. Lots of People take a shot and mail it on a daily basis, they use it like a chat. This situation has produced new bussinesses and services. "
  
• Some of cell phones has Video Messaging funciton, but consumers are not as keen as carriers expect. There are difference in speed within consumers as compared to carries or technologies".

We believe that the next wave of online journalism will wireless. An era of pervasive, untethered, 'always-on' and 'always at' access to information. (We don't mean people tethered to the invisible 100-meter leash of 802.11b or 802.11g WiFi. We instead mean constant, live access wherever your roam, which occassionally might include WiFi but certainly includes GPRS, EDGE, 3G, etc.) We've been studying behavior in Japan and Europe, so that we might predict what will happen when that wireless waves crashes onto North America.

New technology that doesn't satisfy a need of the average educated North America and that doesn't fit into the established infrastructure isn't going to work, no matter how much the technies who invented it might like or dream.

Once the North American telcos switch to WCDMA2000, the successor to GSM that most telcos outside of North America already plan to switch, will North Americans use mobile telephony (and particularly SMS) as much as people outside of North America already do. Or are North Americans somehow culturally unique from other human beings? We don't think so.

Thanks to Emily Turrettini of Textually.org for leading us to those articles.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

At the beginning of this month, the European Union's 'ban on spam' directive (PDF format) took effect:

Two weeks ago, we noted PaidContent.org's report that UK Internet Advertising Bureau Chairman Richard Eyre's speech to the UK Association of Online Publishers Association's annual awards banquet was practically a cry for merger between the IAB and the AOP.

Mike Butcher, deputy editor of MediaWeek Online, though otherwise and has written a story about the U.K. turf battle between those two associations. He quotes AOP Chairman Bill Murray, "Advertising is an important element in the publishing mix and we are keen to work closely with the IAB in this area, but it is not the only one... Richard Eyre’s opinion that the AOP and IAB should be merged is one opinion; but AOP would not have been created in the first place had publishers needs been adequately represented by existing bodies."

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Newspapers that provide blogs to a few readers are merely creating a few amateur guest columnists. That's not 'participatory journalism'. What is will be unveiled next Monday by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Called iCAN, the BBC Interactive's participatory journalism program lets any resident of a UK community raise issues, promote grassroot campaigns, find people with the same public concerns, and change things within their community or the nation. iCAN provides the hosting, advice, and the online tools and resource, and consists of two main components: self-service public forums that help people raise concerns and find others who share those concerns, and what the BBCi calls a 'democracy database' designed to provide the public with a wealth of information on grassroots campaigns and legislative processes.

For example, if a city council plans to close a local school, iCAN can help concerned citizens find each other, facilitate organization of anti-closing public meetings and protests, and learn how citizens of other cities have successfully stopped schools from closing. BBCi architected iCAN after an ethnographic study of real-world grassroots political campaigns. iCAN benefits the BBC by giving it fertile grounds for story leads; six BBC reporters, assigned to different regions of the UK, will watch iCAN for potential stories.

Matt Jones, one of iCAN's lead developers (who is now leaving BBCi to join Nokia in Helskinki) provides some background theory.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Newsstand.com has begun distributing a digital edition of New Scientist magazines. That's a bit of a coup for two reasons.

"This is a great leap forward for New Scientist. It will bring the magazine to a whole new audience, many of whom wouldn't have access to the print copy," said Natasha Ward, publisher of New Scientist. "I think it's quite fitting for the title that it should be one of the first in the U.K. to publish using this technology."

As she mentions, the first reason why it's a coup is that New Scientist is the first UK magazine digital edition that Newsstand.com has begun to distribute. The second reason is simply that New Scientist is a distinguished magazines. Established in 1956, owned by Reed Business Information, and published in print editions weekly to 650,000 readers worldwide, New Scientist is one of the world's leading magazines about science.

Its digital edition version from Newsstand.com will cost USD51 for an annual subscription or USD4.95 afor a single copy. It's odd that Newsstand.com isn't yet accepting funds in Pounds Sterling for digital editions of British publications.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PaidContent.org features a transcript of the speech that Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, gave on Monday to the Royal Television Society:

"What we are witnessing at the moment in the UK is, I believe, a tipping point. As more people have digital TV in the UK than don't, and as more homes are already connected to the Net than are not, so the rate of take-up may actually increase, aided by a number of social and technological forces coming together. This critical phase for digital TV will take us through to analog switch off which the government is aiming for in around seven year's time. The successful media companies in this context will be those that realize the landscape has changed and that viewers want to consume their media in fundamentally different ways to the traditional image of a family, gathered around the TV box, watching with rapt attention."

Highfield belives that:

At the simplest level -- audiences will want to organize and re-order content the way they want it. They'll add comments to our programmes,programmes, vote on them and generally mess about with them. But at another level, audiences will want to create these streams of video themselves from scratch, with or without our help. At this end of the spectrum, the traditional "monologue broadcaster" to "grateful viewer" relationship will break down, and traditional advertising and subscription models will no longer be viable. Digital TV has, until this point, been led by the commercial sector, but the next phase will see public sector services playing a far greater role. As the creative R&D for the nation, the BBC has a distinctive role to play in creating the content, services and tools which audiences want for this future TV world and which the market at the moment cannot risk providing.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone who is following the controversy over whether or not the BBC should be allowed to compete online with commercial UK news organizations should find useful the UK government's Department of Culture, Media, and Sport web page that offers downloadable (PDF format) copies of the independent review of BBC Online's Market Impact Assessment, provided by KMPG consulting to the BCC.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

eMarketer, in a story about RedSheriff's report about the top Australian Web sites by traffic, presents this interesting bar chart displaying both the sheer numbers of consumers online in major countries plus the percentage those users represent of their national population. [One of the reasons we subscribe to eMarketer's daily newsletter is that company's excellent charts.]

RedSheriff's "report on Internet usage in Australia says that the majority of Internet users (84%) there have been using the Internet for more than two years, with almost half having used the Internet for over 5 years. Aussies are logging on more often and for longer, with the mean number of hours per week increasing from 5.6 to 6.5 in 2003 and those with a broadband connection using the Internet for a still greater length of time, on average 9.3 hours per week.

The average Australian receives 17 e-mails daily (a 48% increase from last year) but and 7 percent of online Australians receive more than 60 e-mails daily. An estimated 24 percent of all e-mails received in Australia are spams. Despite the large differences in the numbers of emails received, there is not such a great differentiation in the proportion of emails read: an average 64% of emails (including spams) received by Australians are read.

There was but one publishing or broadcasting company among the ten most trafficked Australian Web sites, according to RedSheriff. It's SMH.com.au, the Sydney Morning Herald.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Who gets the rights to offer downloads of a major American sport? The that sports' league itself. Major League Baseball is offering downloads of this year's US baseball quarterfinal and semifinal games, plus video clip of highlights from regular season games. Each quarterfinal or semifinal game clip costs US$3.95, is approximately 400-megabytes to 600-megabytes in size, and is in RealOne format for Windows PCs. MLB.com permits purchase only for personal use, but allows people to cut thsee files onto CDs.

For years, various sport sites have lobbied MLB (and other sports' leagues) for rights to stream live games and to offer video downloads of finished games. In an era when sports leagues insist that they themselves own the rights to all images of their games, it shouldn't be surprising that that Major League Baseball keeps those rights, directly offers those videos online to consumers, and keeps the revenues. It's simply another case of disintermediation between events and the people.

Will FIFA, NASCAR, the NFL, NHL, NBA, the Formula One management, and the UK Premiership follow the NBA's lead? We think so.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are Nielsen//Netratings figures for US average consumer home usage of the Internet last month:

Number of Sessions/Visits per Month: 31 Number of Domains Visited per Month: 53 Time Spent per Month: 26 hrs. 15 mins. 23 sec. Average Time Spent per Usage of Web: 32 mins. 58 secs. Average Time Spent per Domain Visited: only 55 seconds!

Using basic math, we can see that the average American user of the Internet Web surfed on the average of daily, spending about 42 minutes per day. He visited almost two domains per Web surfing session, spending about 32 minutes on each site (a time figure that doesn't jibe with the 42 minutes he spends daily visiting those nearly two sites) and he spends less than a minute on each Web page.

We also examined Nielsen//Netratings' data from other major countries and found it rather consistent with US results. The only real difference was that in countries where users are charged by their telephone companies for every dialup minute online, users kept their overall Web surfing session times much shorter, although they saw roughly the same numbers of domains and spent almost exactly the same amount of time (less than a minute) on each Web page as their American brethern.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The growth of i-mode, increased services utilizing general packet radio service (GPRS) networks and the introduction of 3G are changing the user experience for Western European mobile phone users, according to a report available to eMarketer subscribers:

"The migration from 2G mobile services to 3G in Europe has been somewhat slower than many anticipated after the exuberance displayed by wireless operators in 1999 and 2000, but mobile handsets with digital cameras, multimedia messaging (MMS) and premium content portals offering the latest games and polyphonic ring tones, are beginning to drive Europeans to more advanced mobile services."

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How did the UK's smallest national daily newspaper create the most successful UK newspaper Web site? Read this interview with Guardian Editor-in-Chief Emily Bell.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just how ill did the Sobig virus make the world's personal computers and which region were worst affected? McAfee.com, manufacture of the world's most popular anti-virus software, reports that 6.1% of the world's personal computers it scanned had been infected during the past 30 days of this writing, 4.1% during the past 7 days, and less than 2% during the past 24 hours.

South America was worst hit: 12.1% during the past 30 days and 7% during the past 7 days. North America suffered second worst: 8.1% during the past 30 days and 5.3% during the past 7 days. Asia suffered the least: only 0.9% of computers during the past 30 days and less than 0.6% during the past 7 days. Sobig isn't prevalent anywhere today, according to McAfee's tracking.

Though Sobig was the most prevalent virus that McAfee tracked during the past 30 days and was the fourth most during the past 7 days. By the way, the most prevalent virus reported by McAfee during these periods was JS/NoClose, a javascript trojan that opens a browser window that cannot easily be closed. According to McAfee, JS/NoClose is "usually associated with advertisement and banner ad programs. Especially affiliated with pornographic sites and sites which pay commissions to others for displaying banner ads." It won't kill a Windows PC, as Sobig will, but will aggravate you.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In case you haven't counted them all lately, slightly more than half of all Internet domains are commercial. According to SecuritySpace.com's September 1st Survey:

The Germans handily beat the English when the subject is registered domains: 769,553 .de domains versus 377,745 .uk domains or 6.7% vs 3.3%. Even factoring Germany's larger population of people (82.3 million versus 60 million), Deutschland dominates Europe. The Poles come in third, closely followed by the Russians, Japanese, and Dutch (each of those countries with between 229,000 and 226,000 domains).

If you think that an average of one domain for every 71 Dutch means the Netherlands has a large number of domains per capital, consider the popularity of domains registered on Third World islands that have lax laws governing business and low or no taxes:

Those three Pacific Ocean islands — known online as .cc, .nu, and .cx — have a combined population of 3,208 people, or an average of 36 domains per person. Christmas Island (pop. 433) has the highest per capita average, 69. However, Niue offers the benefit of free WiFi access throughout its 260 square kilometers of land (equal to about 1.5 times the size of Washington, DC).

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some details from the Economists' story about Italian mobile phone use:

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've long thought that European online advertising shows greater flair than its American cousins. For examples, Creative Showcase displays the best of UK online advertising. Launched in association with Media Guardian, it highlights the UK’s monthly award for the best online campaign, as judged by the creative directors of the ten agencies. Here's a winner.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're watching with increasing alarm the European Commission's 'Rome II' proposal to harmonise laws relating to non-contractual obligations across Europe. Its ramifications for libel, defamation, and privacy laws, could have a startling effect upon European publishers, including online publishers.

Under its latest draft, the country where an alleged defamation or libel occurs is the country whose laws would be used, but the court case would take place in the publication's home country. That's fine is both the plaintiff and the publisher are in the same country. But, for example, if a resident of Madrid claims that a German publication has defamed him, the proposal would mean that the German courts must use Spanish libel laws. Although there is an exception to this rule if the 'applicable law' is contrary to the 'fundamental principles' of the court's host country, the draft is cause for concern among European publishers.

We can image what fun Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi could have with 'Rome II' jurisdictions as plaintiff or defendent.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 20% of the Welsh population who actually speak their national language finally have their own online weekly newspaper. Y-Cymro, the weekly newspaper for North Wales, has launched a Web site, an e-mail edition, and a digital edition. "We decided to introduced the service to attract new readers, but there has been a demand for the service from people all around the world," Y-Cymro Deputy Editor Myfanwi Griffiths told Journalism.co.uk. Y-Cymro's print edition has a readership of around 4,500, but the publishers expect many new subscriptions for the digital edition from Welsh readers based overseas.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nielsen/Netratings reports that Hong Kong, with more than one million of its 2.4 million Internet users on broadband connections, is the city with the highest per capital broadband use, according to a story (paid-access web site) in the South China Morning Post. Broadband connections can be had for as little as HK$198 (US$25) per month in Hong Kong. The newspaper reports that the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union predicts that nearly all Internet connections in the city will be broadband within two years.

South Korea, with 73% of its population on broadband, is the country with the highest per capital broadband penetration.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Only two of the 10 British national dailies gained circulation during the past 12 months.

The Times dropped by over 10% to 631,653. The Daily Telegraph's circulation fell 8.8% to 915,206. The Guardian dropped 2.94% to 387,188. And the Financial Times lost 2.37% to 463,160 compared. the Independent's circulation fell 2.13 to 220,112. The Sunday publication Business was the only broadsheet daily to gain circulation, rising by a seemingly impressive 14%, although this was dimmed somewhat by the high number of foreign sales and the fact that nearly 30,000 of the paper's UK sales were bulk giveaways.

Among the tabloids, the Daily Star was one of only two climbers, soaring once again by 29.26% to 869,884. The Daily Mirror's circulation fell by 7.93% to 1,948,870. The Sun fell by only 0.44% to 3,509,100. The Daily Mail remained relatively stable, up 0.01% to 2,412,619. And the Daily Express slipping 0.16% to 940,305.

In Scotland, the Scotsman fell nearly 8% to 69,841 and Daily Record declined 8.49% to 604,498 over the same period.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Leading figures from the world's online journalism community gathered in Barcelona this week for the ninth annual NetMedia conference on digital journalism," Journalism.co.uk reported about last week's NetMedia 2003 Conference in Barcelona.

Around 200 journalists, students and publishing professionals from across Europe and the U.S. met at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra on July 3rd for the one-day conference. Its them this year was Making Online Digital Media Pay Its Way.

Marilo Ruiz de Elvira of El Pais; Mary Mangan, formerly of Ireland.com; Tracy Corrigan of FT.com; Peter Vandermeersch of De Standaard of Brussels; Gumersindo Lafuente of El Mundo; and Eduard Ramos of Lavanguardia Digital, spoke about their online newspapers' conversion from free-access to partial or totally paid-access content business models. Which model works better? See our ClickZ column this month for our opinion.

Steve Yelvington, vice president of strategy and content for Morris DigitalWorks, and Neil Budde, founder and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal Online, gave presentations about how to increase the numbers of users or subscribers to online newspaper sites.

Then, according to Journalism.co.uk, "Digital media veteran Vin Crosbie delivered a lively presentation on understanding the economics of the web, sparking some debate with his controversial statements on the problems of generating revenue online." This was basically a sequal to my NetMedia 2001 speech about why periodical will fail to profit on the Web.

"Comparing the economics of web advertising with that of broadcast and print, Mr Crosbie also suggested that web advertising causes a problem for publishers. A print publication has a finite pagination, so as circulation increases the advertising space becomes more valuable and the publisher is able to increase advertising rates. A similar situation exists for broadcasters. But on the web, traffic increases do not increase the value of advertising space. In fact, because online space is sold on a per-view rate basis, the publisher actually has to sell more space, putting pressure on them to decrease their advertising rates," reported Journalism.co.uk.

Dan Gillmor gave a presentation about how new technologies are letting consumers themselves publish news online as easily as traditional publishers can. And Luis Angel Fernández Hermana, editor-in-chief of En.red.ando, talked about the new ethical problems of online reporting, specifically how to resist corrupting journalistic values when there is pressure to make a publication's Web site profitable.

Richard Foan, managing director ABC Electronic in the UK; Danny Meadows-Klue, managing director of the Internet Advertising Bureau of the UK & Ireland; Journalism Professor Joan Sabaté Salazar of Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona; and David Day, senior vice president of Nielsen//NetRatings in the UK, gave some fascinating presentations about counting and auditing Web site traffic.

Now in its ninth year, the NetMedia 2003 Conference had always been held in London, but moved to Barcelona this year because Catalan and Spanish journalism organizations showed it more support. Conference founder and organizer Milverton Wallace likes the idea of meeting in a different European city each years, and plans to hold the 2004 conference in Amsterdam (the NetMedia Seminars will continue to be held in Vilanova i la Gentrú, on the coast south of Barcelona).

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BBC News Online won eight of 21 awards presented at the NetMedia 2003 Online Journalism Awards in Barcelona last week. Among the BBC's awards was Lifetime Achievement to Mike Smartt, editor-in-chief of BCC News Online. Vincent Landon, science correspondent for Swiss Radio International, won the Internet Journalist of the Year award for his story of how malaria continues to devastate children in the third world. LaMalla.net, a Spanish news portal, won the Best Overall Journalism Service award. In a first for student journalists, two from the Danish School of Journalism won the Best Use of Multimedia award. Transitions Online from Prague won the Best Innovation in the Online Journalism category. There were more than 1,000 prize entries this year, from 20 European countries. The judges were 118 online publishing professionals from European media organizations and journalism schools in 20 countries.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although the words Bush and Technology seem incompatible in so many ways, members of the illiterate, hunter-gatherer society known as the San Bushmen of Africa's Kalahari Desert have begun using handheld Personal Digital Assistants equipped with Global Position System cards to map animal tracks and droppings. When these 21st Century aborigines find tracks or spoor, they punch an animal's icon on their PDA, which records and maps the find. For millennia, the San Bushmen have been renown for their abilities to track animals, which is one of the longest continuous traditions of systematic human knowledge in existence today. But this is the first year in which they've done it digitally.