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CompuSchmooze™ Newspaper Columns: A Monthly Guide to Jewish Resources in Cyberspace

CompuSchmooze

The CompuSchmoozeTM name is a trademark owned bySteven L. Lubetkin, and is the name of a series of columns published monthly in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey. These articles and associated podcasts are Copyright © 1996-2010 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, November 08, 2006

 

CompuSchmooze Podcast #18: Amy Webb Goes on a "digital diet," Interview with Amy Webb of DragonFire.com, 11/8/2006

In epsiode #18 of the CompuSchmooze podcast, we have a conversation with Amy Webb, a journalist and editor of the DragonFire culture webzine at Drexel University. Earlier this year, Webb stopped reading printed books, magazines, and newspapers, and avoided watching broadcast TV for a month. During that time, she only read what she could obtain over the Internet.


Two Faces of Amy Webb




Download the podcast file here (31.8 mb stereo MP3 file, 00:23:07 length).



Here's the text of the related "CompuSchmoozeTM" column as it appears in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey in July.


CompuSchmooze November 2006: Amy Webb Goes All Digital, News to Follow
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2006 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

A few months ago, Philadelphia journalist and website editor Amy Webb decided to go on a digital diet, giving up printed news media in an experiment to see if she could survive without newspapers and magazines.

Webb's experience going without daily newspapers was just reinforcing a trend thats been accelerating for a long time. Younger people simply dont read newspapers that involve pressing ink on paper.

The Audit Bureau of Circulation, the newspaper industry's numbers cruncher, reported last week that a lot less people are reading newspapers around the country. Some newspapers, like the Philadelphia Inquirer, have reported a drop in readers of the printed newspaper of more than seven percent.

Webb, a web publishing consultant who today blogs at www.mydigimedia.com, was writing about technology in the early 1990s when the Internet was first becoming widespread, she recalled.

"One of the hallmarks of American journalism is that we tend to be the first people to report on something and the last to actually implement it," said Webb, who also edits a news and culture web journal, Dragonfire, for Drexel University.

"We work with journalists from all over the world who do multimedia reporting," she explained. The stories are made interactive by Drexel students who understand how best to deliver the content in an online environment, she said.

In June, she decided to see if she could forego looking at print and traditional broadcast media for a full month. She described the rules of her experiment in her blog. Basically, it was no printed newspapers, no books (except those that could be downloaded), and no television or radio, unless it could be streamed over the Internet.

Webb was surprised to find that, rather than being deprived, she found she was better informed.

"I had to draw information from a variety of sources," she explained. "We've become very reliant on newspapers and other media to feed us information passively. What I did miss was holding a newspaper or book while taking a bath."

Webb said one negative reaction was her sister's complaint that Webbs attention span had become even shorter than previously.

Webb thinks newspapers in the US should look at the BBC's website as a guide to how they should restructure theirnews operations. The BBC site amplifies traditional reporting with photo albums, audio and video content, tables, charts, maps, and almost never links to sites outside the BBC, she points out.

"They have so much reporting information that they are able to have little electronic files within the site that allow users to click page to page, and that's something that newspapers could be doing here in the US," she said.

Newspapers are slowly beginning to recognize that the Internet is going to transform the way they deliver news and supplemental content to their readers.

For example, Gannett Corporation, which owns many of the major newspapers in New Jersey, is holding workshops for its newspaper reporters to teach them how to shoot and edit digital video and audio programs for posting on the newspaper websites.

After conducting a recent press event for a client, I had a call from a Gannett newspaper that asked us to provide digital audio of the press event for posting on the newspaper's website.

Webb confirms this trend by noting that both the New York Times and the Washington Post have increased the number of multimedia web content producers on their staffs. "Of 74 people on the staff of the online Washington Post, only four are traditional journalists," Webb contends. The rest, she says, are content producers.

To survive, newspapers will reduce the physical size of the newspaper and invest resources online, because "that is where the advertising money is," Webb said.


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Friday, November 03, 2006

 

CompuSchmooze Podcast #17: Ipsos Face of the Web Survey, Interview with Adam Wright of Ipsos Insight, 11/2/2006

In epsiode #17 of the CompuSchmooze podcast, we have a conversation with Adam Wright, senior research manager at Ipsos Insight, the Canadian market research firm that conducts "The Face of the Web" Survey about worldwide Internet usage.


Adam Wright



Download the podcast file here (26.9 mb stereo MP3 file, 00:19:10 length).



Here's the text of the related "CompuSchmoozeTM" column as it appears in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey in July.


CompuSchmoozeTM July 2006: Face of the WebSurvey Shows Web Increasingly Facing the Far East

By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2006 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

The most interesting nugget of information in a recent survey about worldwide use of the Internet is not the dramatic slowdown in Internet adoption n 2005 vs. 2004.

It's the surprising fact that Internet users in China are spending more time online than users in other countries -- 17.9 hours each week, compared with just 11.4 hours in the US.

Internet adoption in developed countries only grew about five percent in 2005, a significant slowdown from the 20 percent growth achieved in 2004, according to the "Face of the Web" study conducted by Ipsos Insight, a Canadian market research company (www.ipsos-na.com).

Ipsos has conducted the Face of the Web survey each year since 1999. Today, the survey focuses on responses from among 6,500 adults (3,462 of whom are described as "active Internet users") in 12 key global markets.

Ipsos isn't quite sure why Chinese web-surfers dominated online usage, but survey author Adam Wright of Ipsos thinks that the difficulty of scaling the survey to less urban parts of China may have something to do with the results.

Because most of the respondents in China are in developed urban area are in developed urban areas, they probably
have more time and opportunity to go online, he said in an interview over the Skype Internet telephony network.

"As to why they're spending so much time online, there probably isnt one silver bullet or simple answer to this," Wright said. "It's partly a question of how much downtime do consumers have in China, and how are they filling that downtime."

Businesses seeking to grow in online economies need to figure out how to reach Asian consumers, and that can mean developing Internet applications tailored to use via cell phones, Wright added.

Asia is much more skewed toward using a cell phone or handset to go online, he said. The mobile phone could very well beat the PC or rival it from a prevalence standpoint as an Internet platform.

Although Chinese users spend more hours online, it was Japanthat dominated the survey's results for online usage growth. Ipsos estimates more than 75 million Japanese now use the Internet, representing 89% who said they had used the Internet in the past month.

That compared with a 71% usage rate in the US, and 72% in Canada. Internet usage in North America appears to be plateauing, because these numbers remained essentially unchanged from the 2004 survey.

Some other key trends reported in the survey:

North American laptop computer ownership is driving demand for wireless Internet access, as more than a third of the survey respondents in North America said they accessed the 'Netwirelessly in the last month. Also, two-fifths of those who said they heard of wireless technology said they had used it.

- Europeans are more readily adopting mobile phones as an Internet access device.

- China's Internet market still has room to grow significantly, with only about half those surveyed indicating they used the 'Net in the last 30 days.

Ipsos expects continued increases in the use of wireless devices worldwide, often in unexpected ways.

"The trends we're seeing in Wireless PC usage, ownership of peripheral devices such as MP3 players and mobile phones, and the presumed rising levels of awareness of and comfort using the Internet globally, really set the stage for a tipping point in the near future for this medium,"said Brian Cruikshank, Ipsos Senior Vice President & Managing Director of the company's Technology & Communications practice. "We anticipate continued growth in consumer adoption of the digital lifestyle globally particularly as consumers become to expect access to the Internet in an anytime/anywhere paradigm for communication, gathering and sharing information, and accessing digital content and entertainment."

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