Saturday, April 7
Young people just aren’t that into cars these days
Young people just aren’t that into cars these days. For many Millennials, getting a license and buying a car—once considered rites of passage—have taken a backseat to “buying the latest smartphone or gaming console.
Read more here
Which tongues work best for microblogs?
Though Twitter, with 140m active users the world’s best-known microblogging service, is blocked in China, Sina Weibo, a local variant, has over 250m users. Chinese is so succinct that most messages never reach that limit, says Shuo Tang, who studies social media at the University of Indiana.
Japanese is concise too: fans of haiku, poems in 17 syllables, can tweet them readily. Though Korean and Arabic require a little more space, tweeters routinely omit syllables in Korean words; written Arabic routinely omits vowels anyway. Arabic tweets mushroomed last year, though thanks to the uprisings across the Middle East rather than any linguistic features. It is now the eighth most-used language on Twitter with over 2m public tweets every day, according to Semiocast, a Paris-based company that analyses social-media trends.
Romance tongues, among others, generally tend to be more verbose. So Spanish and Portuguese, the two most frequent European languages in the Twitterverse after English, have tricks to reduce the number of characters.
Though ubiquity and flexibility may give English hegemony, Twitter is also helping smaller and struggling languages. Basque- and Gaelic-speakers tweet to connect with other far-flung speakers. Kevin Scannell, a professor at St Louis University, Missouri, has found 500 languages in use on Twitter and has set up a website to track them. Gamilaraay, an indigenous Australian language, is thought to have only three living speakers. One of them is tweeting—handy for revivalists.
Read more here
Japanese is concise too: fans of haiku, poems in 17 syllables, can tweet them readily. Though Korean and Arabic require a little more space, tweeters routinely omit syllables in Korean words; written Arabic routinely omits vowels anyway. Arabic tweets mushroomed last year, though thanks to the uprisings across the Middle East rather than any linguistic features. It is now the eighth most-used language on Twitter with over 2m public tweets every day, according to Semiocast, a Paris-based company that analyses social-media trends.
Romance tongues, among others, generally tend to be more verbose. So Spanish and Portuguese, the two most frequent European languages in the Twitterverse after English, have tricks to reduce the number of characters.
Though ubiquity and flexibility may give English hegemony, Twitter is also helping smaller and struggling languages. Basque- and Gaelic-speakers tweet to connect with other far-flung speakers. Kevin Scannell, a professor at St Louis University, Missouri, has found 500 languages in use on Twitter and has set up a website to track them. Gamilaraay, an indigenous Australian language, is thought to have only three living speakers. One of them is tweeting—handy for revivalists.
Read more here
Is Pinterest the next Facebook?
Pinterest (is) the fastest-growing website of all time. In March the site registered 17.8 million users, according to Comscore, a 52% jump in just one month -- and it isn't even open to everyone (would-be "pinners" must still request an invitation to join).
Pinterest, for the uninitiated, is a deceptively simple-sounding, insanely addictive social media site that lets users collect and share images on digital pinboards. Most social-networking sites have first become popular among tech's early adopters along the country's coasts. But Pinterest found its most passionate users among the Midwestern scrapbooking set -- a mostly female group -- who have turned to it to plan weddings, save recipes, and post ideas for kitchen renovations.
Essentially, Pinterest excels at something that's very hard to do on the web -- help people discover new things. If you can name what you want, after all, Amazon (AMZN) and Google are pretty good tools for helping you find it. But what if you don't know what you want? Social-networking sites have helped businesses influence people, but they are imperfect. People use Facebook and Twitter to talk to each other, not necessarily to discuss things they might want to buy. In contrast, Pinterest users are more often in a shopping mindset when they are using the service. If you're keeping a pinboard called "Spring handbags I'm considering," there's a good chance you'll click through and make a purchase.
Read more here
Pinterest, for the uninitiated, is a deceptively simple-sounding, insanely addictive social media site that lets users collect and share images on digital pinboards. Most social-networking sites have first become popular among tech's early adopters along the country's coasts. But Pinterest found its most passionate users among the Midwestern scrapbooking set -- a mostly female group -- who have turned to it to plan weddings, save recipes, and post ideas for kitchen renovations.
Essentially, Pinterest excels at something that's very hard to do on the web -- help people discover new things. If you can name what you want, after all, Amazon (AMZN) and Google are pretty good tools for helping you find it. But what if you don't know what you want? Social-networking sites have helped businesses influence people, but they are imperfect. People use Facebook and Twitter to talk to each other, not necessarily to discuss things they might want to buy. In contrast, Pinterest users are more often in a shopping mindset when they are using the service. If you're keeping a pinboard called "Spring handbags I'm considering," there's a good chance you'll click through and make a purchase.
Read more here
Wednesday, April 4
Many Magazines Racing to Capitalize on Pinterest
Pinterest, the social site that lets users post images from the web to their personal "pinboards," has been around since 2010. But brands and publishers' notice of it has been increasing, partly because every image "pinned" links back to its source, offering new traffic to anyone who can capitalize.
Pinterest is now being hailed as one of the fastest-growing platforms, reaching 10 million monthly visitors more quickly than Facebook or Twitter did. It ranks among the top 30 U.S. sites by total page views.
Read more at AdAge
Pinterest is now being hailed as one of the fastest-growing platforms, reaching 10 million monthly visitors more quickly than Facebook or Twitter did. It ranks among the top 30 U.S. sites by total page views.
Read more at AdAge
Seeing a Future in Tablets, Magazines Unveil the Digital Newsstand
After more than two years of preparation, a consortium of magazine publishers will release the full version of its digital newsstand, which gives readers the chance to purchase magazines for a monthly flat rate.
Next Issue Media, a group of publishers including Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and News Corporation, will announce the latest version of its tablet application, which will include 32 magazines like The New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, Better Homes and Gardens, Elle, Esquire, Wired, Fortune, People, Real Simple and Sports Illustrated.
The group has good reason to want to put its digital editions on tablets and make them available to readers. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, digital circulation of magazines — on tablets, paid Web sites and mobile phones — has doubled in the past year. A total of 223 magazines reported more than 3.1 million digital copies of their publications in the second half of 2011, compared with 195 magazines that reported 1.5 million copies in 2010.
Read more at the NY Times
Next Issue Media, a group of publishers including Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and News Corporation, will announce the latest version of its tablet application, which will include 32 magazines like The New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, Better Homes and Gardens, Elle, Esquire, Wired, Fortune, People, Real Simple and Sports Illustrated.
The group has good reason to want to put its digital editions on tablets and make them available to readers. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, digital circulation of magazines — on tablets, paid Web sites and mobile phones — has doubled in the past year. A total of 223 magazines reported more than 3.1 million digital copies of their publications in the second half of 2011, compared with 195 magazines that reported 1.5 million copies in 2010.
Read more at the NY Times
Sunday, April 1
IPad: The PC Killer
For the the PC industry, however, the tablet age could prove catastrophic. In recent years, PC makers have relied heavily on corporate consumers to hold on to their shrinking market share. Now even that’s under pressure.
Owners of the iPad know how the device reduces the number of sit-down sessions at the PC. With the growth of cloud computing—where music and pictures are stored on servers out on the Net—the tablet could well end the PC’s run as consumer tech’s center of gravity.
Read more here
Owners of the iPad know how the device reduces the number of sit-down sessions at the PC. With the growth of cloud computing—where music and pictures are stored on servers out on the Net—the tablet could well end the PC’s run as consumer tech’s center of gravity.
Read more here
Will the iPad kill the PC?
Your personal computer is headed for the recycling bin, said Dan Farber in CNET.com.
With the unveiling of Apple’s latest iPad last week, it’s clear that
tablets will soon replace the “desktops and clunky laptops that were the
face of computing for decades.” Nearly 120 million tablets are expected to be sold worldwide this year.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, said John Naughton in the London Observer. Tablets may be flying off the shelves, but consumers, not businesses, are buying them.
Read more here
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, said John Naughton in the London Observer. Tablets may be flying off the shelves, but consumers, not businesses, are buying them.
Read more here
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