Archive for April, 2008

• Clay Shirky| Great read… Love this notion:

“The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity”. 

And I love the idea of a cognitive surplus.  People constantly ask me how I find time for social media – easy, I tap my cognitive surplus through reprioritization:

“And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.”

No big surprises but circ is declining for the most part as folks head online.  If nothing else the industry needs to define a new metric for readership.

1. USA Today, 2,284,219, up 0.3%
2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,069,463, up 0.4%
3. The New York Times, 1,077,256, down 3.9%
4. Los Angeles Times, 773,884, down 5.1%
5. New York Daily News, 703,137, down 2.1%
6. New York Post, 702,488, down 3.1%
7. The Washington Post, 673,180, down 3.6%
8. Chicago Tribune, 541,663, down 4.4%
9. Houston Chronicle, 494,131, down 1.8%
10. The Arizona Republic, 413,332, down 4.7%

Opaqueness was always going to be a problem in the blogosphere.  Seems the UK is moving to make it a crime:

The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while “falsely representing oneself as a consumer.” They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.

“If advertisers and their agencies ignore the ethics of responsible advertising, the damage to the advertising and marketing industry generally will be considerable,” said Marina Palomba, legal director at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the U.K.’s agency association.

Thanks to Steve for the pointer…

• NYT on Newscorp’s head of content
• Capital Times goes offline… “We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”
• Good read – reflects many of Covey’s 7 Habits thinking…
• Killer Text Tricks…
• Interesting data on Green on the Web…