Facebook, Social Nets Lead Search Terms

For the fourth year running, online consumers searched for “Facebook” more than any other term in 2012, according to new data from Experian. Even more impressive, “Facebook” queries accounted for 4.1% of all searches this year, which represented a 33% increase year-over-year.

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"Gangnam Style" first video to hit 1B YouTube views

The wildly popular "Gangnam Style" music video by Psy has gone where no YouTube video has gone before. Earlier today, the official video surged past 1 billion views, making it the first clip on the site to ever hit that mark, and the latest in a long line of feats for the popular video. Last month, "Gangnam Style" surpassed pop star Justin Bieber's "Baby" video to become the most popular YouTube upload of all time. Bieber's video, which at the time had 805 million views, was beaten in just five months.

"Gangnam Style" has also earned a Guinness World Records title as the most-liked video in YouTube history with over two million digital thumbs up.

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Magazine Launches Outpace Closures In 2012

There were 227 new magazines launched in 2012, according to Mediafinder.com, an online database of magazines owned by Oxbridge Communications. Launches significantly outpaced closures, with just 82 magazines shuttered during the year.

The number of new magazines launches was down slightly from 2011, when 239 new magazines debuted. The number of closures dropped even more dramatically, from 152 in 2011.

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20 Tech Trends That Will Define 2013

Devices on our bodies will multiply. Sensors, cameras, input methods, and displays will work their way into our clothing. They’ll listen for commands and whisper in our ears. Our environment will respond to us in new and interesting ways. The proliferation of large displays and projection technologies will relegate the small display on our phone to private or a constrained set of tasks. A new layered interaction model of touch, voice, and gesture will emerge as important as consumption: the continuous exchange of what we are doing, where we are, and who we are with. This will again work into the collective memory, attaching to our legacy--bringing in a new type of patina effect. It won’t be the same as physical degradation yet will offer fresh stimuli that allow for more meaningful navigation and recall.

Emerging tools and services will help translate our needs and desires into cloud-based automation. They will proactively work on our behalf, guided by our permission and divining our intent. Existing services such as Google’s Prediction API, which offers pattern-matching and trainable machine learning capabilities to developers, and IFTTT, which offers intuitive, user-friendly, and cloud-based rules engine expressed in simple “if this, then that” terms, are representative of the trend toward empowering more automated, if not quite yet artificial, intelligence for our digital alter-egos.

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The Internet of Everything

We are rapidly heading into a new era that will not be measured by the number of users, devices or connections. What is changing the world, profoundly, is the value those connections make possible. When we connected the first 500 million devices to the Internet, it seemed to reshape our lives. But now we are on the cusp of a transformation that connects everything to the Internet. Highways, buildings, farms, satellites, solar panels, cars, milk cartons, cows … everything.

Each of these connections brings its own unique value, and the value increases even more with the exponential growth in potential connections between everything. These connections, combined with access to the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, will empower people in ways that we never imagined. Connections between people, between people and context-aware sensors and machines, and between machines themselves will help people turn data into actionable information, resulting in richer experiences and unprecedented value for individuals, businesses, communities and countries. We’re just starting to experience the phenomenon that we call the “Internet of Everything.”

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WordPress launches version 3.5

WordPress launched version 3.5 of its popular blog management software today.

WordPress.com, the free blog service hosted by parent company Automattic, has close to 400 million monthly unique users, as measured by Quantcast, Mullenweg told me. Add in users of WordPress.org blogs, which are hosted by ISPs or by users’ own web servers, and that number nearly doubles.

In other words, blogging is far from dead, and Facebook and Twitter haven’t killed it: It may even be undergoing a bit of a renaissance.

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YouTube to Power New Media Businesses of the Future?

Life is good at YouTube. It’s already the largest video network globally and the second largest search engine — and with over half of content marketers migrating an increasing share of their $40b+ budgets to video in 2013, YouTube is now uniquely positioned to become the go-to platform for building sustainable media businesses of the future. But it’s not in the bag just yet — this is at least the fourth major social platform that has tried to capture brand mindshare in the last few years.

We’re seeing YouTube engage in many efforts to re-invent itself as a destination for premium content (including, but not limited to, its funded channel experiment) and focus on key pieces of missing infrastructure will ultimately determine the success of the media businesses built upon the platform in the years ahead.

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Study says half of media buyers will try native advertising in 2013

Native advertising — like a brand’s Tumblr blog or a sponsored tweet — is generating a lot of hype. "Native advertising” is being hailed as the ad format of the future by everyone from venture capitalist Fred Wilson to BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. Now, a survey suggests brands are ready to put down serious money to try it out. This could be good news for web publishers — as soon as people can agree on what the heck native advertising is.

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Number of jailed journalists sets global record

Worldwide tally reaches highest point since CPJ began surveys in 1990. Governments use charges of terrorism, other anti-state offenses to silence critical voices. Turkey is the world’s worst jailer. Imprisonment of journalists worldwide reached a record high in 2012, driven in part by the widespread use of charges of terrorism and other anti-state offenses against critical reporters and editors, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found. In its annual census of imprisoned journalists, CPJ identified 232 individuals behind bars on December 1, an increase of 53 over its 2011 tally.

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The ability to determine the location of a person’s gaze is opening up an enormous range of new applications

Eye tracking can do more than just help designers by revealing visual shortcomings in websites, advertisements and product prototypes. More than 9,000 paralysed people operate computers and wheelchairs using eye trackers (most survivors of spinal injuries and neuromuscular diseases retain control of their eyes). The technology is also being used to alert drowsy drivers, diagnose brain trauma, train machine operators and provide surgeons with “a third hand” to control robotic equipment. Costs are falling so quickly that mainstream consumer use of the technology may not be far off. Haier, a Chinese maker of household appliances, recently unveiled a prototype TV controlled by a viewer’s gaze. Eye tracking may also find use in desktop computers, video-games consoles and e-readers.

For the time being, the main use of eye tracking is in design and marketing. Trials involving just a few dozen viewers of an advertisement, website or product design can reveal exactly what looks good and what does not. Software sold by iMotions, a Danish firm, creates colour-coded maps that show where gazes glide, linger, or twitch back and forth in frustration. Such “heat maps” can reveal more about how well an advertisement will work than asking people to express themselves in words, says Peter Hartzbech, the firm’s boss.

The ability to use eye tracking to control a computer has obvious advantages for disabled people, but fans of the technology believe it could become a widely used input technology for the able-bodied, too. Moving an on-screen cursor with a glance is much faster than using a mouse, for example.

Another use is in e-readers. Researchers at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Kaiserslautern have created a program called Text 2.0 that uses eye tracking to analyse how a displayed text is being read. If the reader lingers on a foreign word, Text 2.0 can display its translation. Lingering on a word and then sweeping one’s gaze to the right margin calls up a definition. If the reader starts to skim, the software dims common words. The program could be used by authors to see which passages caused readers to stumble or skip ahead.

Read more at The Economist

Why journalists should explore the business side of news

BuzzFeed has drawn a lot of press this year for the success of its social advertising product. The company’s advertising wing is an agency that works with advertisers to create sponsored content in the BuzzFeed mold. These aren’t just your classic advertorials — the pages in the magazine with the slightly off typeface and the bad writing. This is content infused with the voice and sensibility of BuzzFeed itself, tailor-made for its audience.

Versions of the agency model are in place at organizations such as Forbes, Gawker, The Huffington Post and the Atlantic. I’ve also heard echoes of this model in conversations with forward-thinking sales managers, who approach companies not just to solicit advertising, but to pitch marketing expertise in a variety of domains — not just display ads, but search engine marketing, social advertising and more.

The point is that all the innovation and work we put into doing journalism may produce more value than mere space for advertising adjacencies. As we develop our ability to work with data, produce info-rich experiences for mobile devices, or experiment with distributed reporting, we may hit on tools and techniques valuable enough to help subsidize our journalism. But if we’re not attuned to those possibilities, they won’t exist.

It feels easier to just say journalists should minimize all dealings with their business-side counterparts. But that feels deeply wrong to me. Ethical behavior is not about trying to avoid situations that might challenge us to behave ethically. Ethical behavior is about regularly thinking through our values and how they should be applied, and then acting accordingly.

Read more at Poynter

Navigation technology: Using satellites to determine your position only works outside. A new approach is needed indoors

DIGITAL navigation surely ranks as one of life’s high-tech bargains. Thanks to free Global Positioning System (GPS) signals broadcast by American satellites, and free online maps from companies like Google, Nokia and Apple, all you need is a smartphone with an internet connection to pinpoint your location on the Earth’s surface and call up maps, directions and local information. Unless, that is, you are indoors. And even if you are outdoors in a built-up area, the lack of a clear view of the sky can prevent GPS working properly, because its satellite signals are easily blocked by roofs, nearby buildings or even trees. For positioning to work indoors, where people spend most of their time, new technologies are needed.

Locata, an Australian company, recently unveiled a system of powerful transmitters whose signals can penetrate walls or cover large outdoor areas such as airfields. The beacons within the network are synchronised to within a billionth of a second, and can allow a receiver to determine its position to within less than a metre.

There has also been headway in cutting through the tangle of competing standards that has discouraged investment in infrastructure. In August a group of 22 technology companies including Nokia, Samsung and CSR formed the In-Location Alliance. This trade organisation is dedicated to building indoor-location systems around two technologies, Bluetooth beacons and Wi-Fi signal mapping. It may finally give the indoor positioning industry something it currently lacks: a sense of direction.

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Online Paywalls and the Future of Media

The most realistic outcome—and one that has already been happening in many legacy newsrooms—is that online paywalls will make up some, but not all, of the revenue that's been lost on the print side. Therefore these huge media outlets will shrink somewhat, and probably demand more from each employee, but they will not disappear. In the long run, the overall number of professional journalists will probably shrink, at least until online media figures out how to monetize itself as well as print did. (Since print newspapers were for many decades small monopolies virtually capable of printing money, this is unlikely.)

This does not mean that paywalls will work for everyone. Paywalls will work for content that is worth paying for. An easy way to determine whether content is worth paying for is to ask: is content that is more or less the same freely available at a million other places online? If so, you should not put your content behind a paywall, because people will just click somewhere else for it.

Examples of media outlets that can support paywalls: high quality national newspapers (NYT, WSJ, probably the WaPo, and... ?), sites that offer quality financial news to an audience for whom a paywall's cost is negligible (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg), sites that cater to very specific niche audiences with highly specific news that can't be easily found elsewhere (Politico, trade publications of all types, small local newspapers), sites offering very high quality proprietary longform journalism published on a frequent basis. Additionally, magazines that maintain their quality should be able to offer online subscriptions to their loyal subscriber base.

Examples of media outlets than cannot support paywalls: mediocre or shitty newspapers that have decimated their newsrooms, shitty magazines with little quality content, sites full of mostly opinions and listicles and other entertaining but easily reproduced things of that nature, most blogs.

This will all work itself out in the space of a generation. Which is no comfort to all the journalists who found themselves laid off before it got worked out.

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Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed

Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month, up from 100 million in mid-September. If you run the math, that means Google+ is now growing at the same pace as Facebook when it was similarly sized.

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Governments and internet firms are wrestling with the rules for free speech online

In June Google revealed that 45 countries had asked it to block content in the last six months of 2011. Some requests were easily rejected. Officials in the Canadian passport office asked it to block a video advocating independence for Quebec, in which a citizen urinated on his passport and flushed it down the toilet.

Most firms do accept that they must follow the laws of countries in which they operate (Nazi content is banned in Germany, for example). Big internet firms can prevent users accessing content their governments consider illegal, while leaving it available to visitors from countries where no prohibition applies. Some pledge to be transparent about their actions—Twitter, like Google, releases six-monthly reports of government requests to block information. It also alerts citizens when it has censored content in their country.

Legislators in America want more firms to follow suit. In March a congressional subcommittee approved the latest revision of the Global Online Freedom Act, first drafted in 2004. This would require technology firms operating in a designated group of restrictive countries to publish annual reports showing how they deal with human-rights issues. It would waive this for firms that sign up to non-governmental associations that provide similar oversight, such as the Global Network Initiative. Founded in 2008 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and a coalition of human-rights groups, it has since stalled. Facebook joined in May but only as an observer. Twitter is absent, too.

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The Key To Social Media Marketing? Focus, Focus Focus

When it comes to social media marketing, small to medium-sized businesses often make the mistake of dedicating boundless resources trying to be all things to all people.

“Don’t overstretch yourselves trying to do everything, you’ll just get exhausted,” panelist Scott Gerber of Young Entrepreneur Council directed the crowd.

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Why 'Tweeting Like Crazy' Doesn't Always Boost The Bottom Line

“I’ve been tweeting like crazy, and my business still isn’t booming!” Heard that before? It’s a common mistake made by many small to medium-sized businesses – you tweet every hour and update Facebook every 10 minutes; you’re on LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest AND Quora. All this social media is bound to yield results, right? Wrong.

Social media is just part of the marketing equation. All three panelists agree that a business’s social media efforts must be meaningful and purposeful, or else they can become a useless and time-draining exercise.

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Social Media Breathes New Life Into Branded Content

Branded content (is) a strategy that lends itself perfectly to social media. In early August, for example, General Mills teamed up with AOL to launch its new site Live Better America. Lifestyle articles from AOL’s Huffington Post and recipes from General Mills pepper the sponsored site, which aims to create conversations about healthy living. Readers engage and spread the word through social media: tweeting, pinning and discussing things they’ve seen there. And who is most often featured somewhere in the conversation? Why, General Mills, of course. This is an example in which branded marketing has made a perfect transition into social media marketing.

If you’re thinking about diving into the creative world of branded content and social media, it might be a good idea to keep these pointers in mind:

Develop a voice. You don’t mess around with your logo, so be focused in creating a pitch-perfect social media presence.

Embrace the nuances. Consumers are smart, so branded content should be subtle.

Be seen at all the right parties. Where your content is published matters. Be sure to research the sites and outlets your customers frequent and respect.

Get it out there. This is where social media is your best friend. Get a real distribution plan for your branded content and execute it well — in some cases, you may even want to consider using a content distribution platform.

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‘Just the facts’ isn’t good enough for journalists anymore, says Tow Center’s journalism manifesto

Of the dozens of assertions in a wide-ranging “manifesto” about the altered state of journalism from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, this one stands out:

Journalists are not merely purveyors of facts.

The authors can foresee a world where 90 percent of news reports are written by computer algorithms that convert data into narrative structures and where many newsworthy events are first described by connected citizens rather than journalists.

The result:

The journalist has not been replaced but displaced, moved higher up the editorial chain from the production of initial observations to a role that emphasizes verification and interpretation.

Working between the crowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journalist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller.

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Why old media stocks are on top today

Big media companies were supposed to die outright along with the old tube TV set. At least that was the thinking a few years ago as up-and-comers Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu let you bypass commercials, and Facebook (FB) and YouTube made it possible to create and share your own material. Given that, the recent performance of old- vs. new-media stocks might surprise you. This year the legacy players have shot up 34%, more than twice the gain of the S&P 500. Yet Facebook has fallen 45% since it went public in May. Why are the old guys ahead?

In short, Americans still like to watch television, especially live sporting events and buzzed-about series. Average time in front of the TV is up since 2003, from 2.6 hours a day to 2.8, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What's more, even as more consumers watch shows online, traditional media are finding ways to earn money off that shift by creating live streaming tools and cutting deals with Netflix and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500). Social media firms, on the other hand, are still struggling to figure out a profitable business model.

To cash in on the majority of Americans who still watch TV, favor broadcasters with must-have content. Traditional broadcast networks are thought of as the industry laggards: too dependent on ads, audiences shrinking. CBS (CBS, Fortune 500), a true pure play, is off 13% since the start of a disappointing fall TV season. But therein lies an opportunity. CBS leads its peers in potential syndication deals and has nine of the top 20 shows.

"The value of broadcast is enormous," says David Bank, equity research analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

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