Monthly Archives: April 2007

Why Twitter might be just the ticket

Twitter 

I confess to being a bit baffled by Twitter. I just haven’t felt the need for minute-by-minute updates on what my friends are doing, or seen any reason to bore them with such a running commentary from me.

But Mukund Mohan reckons Twitter saved him US$102 in four minutes, and his post is entertaining as well as informative. The point, he says, is to use Twitter intelligently:

1. Don’t sign up to be followers for a bunch of “known influential twitterers” – much as I like some of them its too much information with not much value. – Keep it close to your friends and really people that can benefit from knowing “what are you doing”?

2. If I could setup folders of friends who I want to send messages to, that’s better. Beats email – which is SLOWWWWWWWW.

3. If you have a globally located team – like we do at Canvas Group, then twitter is awesome for team based collaboration. No point getting frustrated that Kalpesh is not returning calls quick enough from Bangalore because I know he’s with his friends at a bowling alley where connectivity is poor.

Video from G4TV: Will Twitter make us too connected?

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Do online readers really read more?

A few days ago I blogged about the Poynter Institute’s latest EyeTrack study, which claimed that online readers of news stories read more of each story than print edition readers. [online 77%, broadsheet 62%, tabloid 57%]

I found the analysis unconvincing and commented in this blog that there was no comparision provided of typical story lengths. I followed that up with this comment on the Poynter site:

Interesting study. I am wondering how the online stories compared in length to those in broadsheet and tabloid papers.

Perhaps they were shorter, due to the online practice of “chunking” – breaking information into more digestible pieces.

On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of online stories that were longer than their print counterparts. This can happen when a story originating in a newspaper is enhanced and updated for the online edition where space is virtually unlimited.

Could story length have affected the amount of each story that was read?

Rick Edmonds, Media Business Analyst at the Poynter Institute, has responded to my comment as follows:

Good question. During some editing/deeper digging this week, we have found that short stories were more frequent in online and that likely had some influence on the overall result.

However if you back short stories out and analyze results only for medium and long stories, those are read, once selected, as thoroughly online as in print.

So, rather than saying that online readers read more, Poynter is now saying they read as thoroughly as in print. That’s a big difference.

And describing stories as “medium” or “long” really doesn’t solve the problem. The percentage of each story read ought to be judged against the length (word count) of each story. The story-length issue isn’t just important for comparing online versus print reading patterns, but also for comparing broadsheet versus tabloid.

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Almost half of news site visitors aged 45+

Demographic data for top 10 US current events sites 

The Centre for Media Research reports on Nielsen NetRatings data for the top ten news websites in the US during February.

Almost half (47 per cent) of the sites’ readers are aged 45 and older, with about 38 per cent being baby-boomers (roughly 45-64 years of age). There is a substantial take-up in readership in the age range 35-49.

The top news sites (led by Yahoo! News, MSNBC, CNN, AOL, and NY Times) show almost-equal numbers of male and female readers.

The report also reveals that non-standard ad sizes account for a third of all ad impressions on sites in the World and Local News segment. One quarter of all impressions belong to the 180×150 rectangle and 20 per cent to the 120×90. The 468×60 rectangle, which used to dominate online advertising, is virtually dead, with only 0.7 per cent of impressions.

 More details (registration required)

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Traffic reporting for audio and video streams

Nielsen NetRatings has launched web traffic monitoring for audio and video streams. Subscribing websites will get data on:

  • Unique Viewers – total number of browsers viewing online audio and video content
  • Stream Views – consumption of streaming content
  • Average Stream Duration and Completed Streams – engagement of stream viewers
  • Geographic location of stream viewers
  • Streaming Launch URL – pages from which stream views are initiated
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Metro misses the bus

Today’s Metro newspaper

I wonder how it can be that on the day after a well-publicized public meeting about improving the Toronto transit system [one of the most talked about issues in the city these days] there is no coverage of the meeting in Metro.

Metro is a newspaper aimed at commuters and distributed freely at transit stops. And it has a transit reporter. The meeting should have been their story.

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Latest Technorati report covers … Technorati

David Sifry of Technorati promises that his somewhat overdue “quarterly report” on The State of the Blogosphere will be released later this week. and it will be an expanded document, renamed State of the Live Web.

Meantime, he’s put out something called The State of Technorati in which he does a fair bit of Technorati touting.

Mathew Ingram says don’t count out Google when it comes to blog search, while Mark Evans suggests Sifry may be trying to attract interest in his company from investors or buyers.

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Online readers last longer

Source: Poynter Institute EyeTrack07 study 

Readers of online news read much further into stories than readers of print news, according to the latest Eye Track study by the Poynter Institute. 

The 600 readers in the study, which was conducted in four US cities, were each given 15 minutes to read whatever stories they wished, while their eye movements were electronically recorded and analysed.

Researchers found that online readers read, on average, 77 per cent of the way through each story they chose to read. Readers of tabloid newspapers read 57 per cent of each story they started, and broadsheet readers 62 per cent.

[It would be helpful to know how the online stories compared in length to those in broadsheet and tabloid papers. It is possible that they were shorter, due to the online practice of chunking content – breaking it into more digestible pieces. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of online stories that were longer than their print counterparts. This can happen when a story originating in a newspaper is enhanced and updated for the online edition where space is virtually unlimited.]

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