Category Archives: digital media

Failbook

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Unless you’re in a cave someplace or have abandoned it for Google+, you’ve probably noticed that Facebook did an overhaul last night.  I logged in this morning and while I’ll admit I’m not the brightest guy in the world, I was thoroughly confused.  Many of the new features are clearly designed to compete with things found on Google+ and Twitter, such as circles.  For those of you struggling to make sense of the new layout, Gizmodo did a nice job color-coding everything in a cheat sheet.

I’m a believer in continuous improvement.  I’m not a believer in keeping up with the Joneses.  Here’s why. Continue reading

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The Really Really Big Living Room

There’s an interesting piece in Ad Age this week on Social TV. In my mind it adds more credence to the “everything old is new again” theory since as with many “new” tech-based things what we’re seeing is very old behaviors expressed via brand spanking new digital tools.  For those of you playing at home, our friends at Wikipedia define social TV as

“a general term for technology that supports communication and social interaction in either the context of watching television, or related to TV content. It also includes the study of television-related social behavior, devices and networks. Social television systems can for example integrate voice communication, text chat, presence and context awareness, TV recommendations, ratings, or video-conferencing with the TV content either directly on the screen or by using ancillary devices.”

Which of course, is kind of an old thing, right? Continue reading

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A Random TV Thought

This tidbit crossed the wires here at the world headquarters yesterday and I want to bring it to your attention:

A new study from Altman Vilandrie says just 1/3 of 18-34 viewers in the U.S. now watch TV during normal broadcast slots, preferring instead on-demand programming via Netflix and Hulu. The study also makes a connection between increased control over when video is watched to how it is watched with nearly 1/2 of respondents saying they prefer smartphones to TVs.

“Oh sure – another TV death story,” you think.  Probably not – a lot of the content on Nextflix and Hulu comes from the TV nets who are actually more than just distributors these days.  But it brought to mind Internet Explorer, the web browser with a 90+% market share at one point which is now down substantially thanks to the growth of Firefox and Chrome. Continue reading

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Filed under digital media