Twitter Responsible For Very Little Visits To News and Media
March 19, 2010
The latest post from Hitwise discusses where users travel after leaving Twitter. The post further breaks down the various news and media sites which receive the greatest traffic from Twitter.
- Twitter.com accounted for 0.14% of upstream visits to News and Media sites last week. (Note that we are measuring website visits from Twitter.com only.) This compares to 3.64% from Facebook and 1.27% from Google News.
- Facebook was the #3 source of visits to News and Media websites last week. Google News was the #11 site and Twitter.com ranked #39.
- Upstream visits from Twitter.com to News and Media sites have grown by 54% over the past year.
How the Crowd is Changing the News (SXSW)
March 15, 2010
Here at SXSW, we attended the session "CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?" At the end, one of the speakers asked the crowd, which they thought it was. Almost everybody responded with the former, while maybe one or two raised their hand for hype.
I think it's pretty clear that citizen journalism, the real topic of this discussion, is changing and has already changed the face of media. There are varying opinions on if that is for better or for worse, but the very fact that these opinions are able to be voiced is a testament to the stength of the crowd.
On the panel were Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook, Lila King from CNN.com, Jason Rzepka from MTV, and Joseph Kingsbury of Text100 Public relations.
Much of the conversation was centered around trust. Who can you trust? How do you know you can trust them? How do you know these citizen reporters don't have an agenda? Things of this nature.
Cashmore says brand still plays a role in trust, and that you should have some level of skepticism when a story comes from something like Twitter (assuming you are unfamiliar with the source). His point is accentuated by the fact that here at at SXSW, a massive Twitter hoax regarding Conan O'Brien was perpetrated from Digg's SXSW party the other night.
"People need to become more educated consumers of news" and "learn what you can trust and what you can't," says Cashmore. That is probably easier said than done, and possibly asking a lot of the average person that doesn't reside inside the news industry, but he's right. If people don't want to be misled or misinformed, they need to not only consider the source, but acknowledge multiple sources before totally abandoning the grain of salt.
This actually reminds me of something Andrew Lih said in another session I attended this past weekend about Wikipedia. His advice to journalists (as well as students) was that there is "no better starting point" than Wikipedia, and "no worse ending point."
Cashmore made a point about Wikipedia in that it is controlled by a few people, so it's not exactly the crowd like Twitter is the crowd, or like the Blogosphere is the crowd, but I think the point runs parallel. A tweet may be a great starting point for a piece of news, but it should not be the ending point in acceptance of fact.
The crowd is there for balance. The more viewpoints that are available, the more a reader is able to take away from a story. When points are debated, more info is revealed, and even if some of that doesn't sit well with you, you can use your own judgment to assess where you come down on the subject at hand. This comes back to Cashmore's statement about becoming a more educated consumer of news. Perhaps we only need to strive for a better educated public in general, and the quality of so-called citizen journalism will grow.
That should be easy.
For more from SXSW, check out our exclusive interviews at live.webpronews.com.
Americans Favor Online News Over Newspapers
March 1, 2010
The Internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio, according to a new survey out today.
The survey of 2,259 U.S. adults, conducted jointly by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, found 59 percent of respondents gets news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.
The Internet and mobile technologies are at the center of how people's relationship to news is changing. One-third (33%) of cell phone owners now access news on their mobile phones and more than a quarter (28%) of Internet users have customized their homepage to include news from sources and topics that are of interest to them.
Nearly forty percent (37%) of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or shared it via postings on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
In addition, people use their social networks to filter, assess, and react to news. They use traditional email and other tools to exchange stories and comment on them. Among those who get news online, 75 percent get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52 percent share links to news the same way.
The survey also found the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites and does not have a particular favorite. Overall, Americans have mixed feelings about this "new" news environment. Over half (55%) say it is easier to keep up with news and information today than it was five years ago, but 70 percent feel the amount of news and information available from different sources is overwhelming.
"Americans have become news grazers both on and offline - but within limits," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
"They generally don't have one favorite website but also don't search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites."
Google Buzz Draws New Content-Scraping Controversy
March 1, 2010
Update 2: Google offered the following statement: "Buzz can only expand to show whatever was in the underlying feed. For example, if an item is truncated in the feed to only include 200 characters, then Buzz will only show 200 characters."
So, in other words, Bloggers can prevent their full content from showing in Buzz just like in a reader, depending on how they set up their feed.
Update: So far, Google has referred me to the same response they gave Stay, but I've inquired further. We'll keep you posted.
Original Article: If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we've mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They've also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we're hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.
One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn't be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.
Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would "have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week." That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn't change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google's part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers' content.
That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay's story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We've contacted Google for comment on this (we'll post when we receive it).
One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author's control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this...again, we'll post a response when we receive it).
