Internet Video Viewing Up 64%
May 13, 2008
U.S. Internet users viewed 11.5 billion online videos in March 2008, a 13-percent gain versus February and a 64-percent gain versus March 2007, according to figures from ComScore.
All Your Views Are Belong To YouTube
In March, Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property, with more than 4.3 billion videos viewed (38 percent share of all videos), gaining 2.6 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 98 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.
Other highlights:
- 73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- 84.8 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
- 47.7 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (8.4 videos per viewer).
- The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
- The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
Here are the details:
|
Top U.S. Online Video Properties* by Videos Viewed March 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Video Metrix |
||
|
Property |
Videos (000) |
Share (%) of Videos |
|
Total Internet |
11,476,886 |
100.0 |
|
Google Sites |
4,358,306 |
38.0 |
|
Fox Interactive Media |
477,621 |
4.2 |
|
Yahoo! Sites |
328,087 |
2.9 |
|
Viacom Digital |
249,285 |
2.2 |
|
Microsoft Sites |
245,453 |
2.1 |
|
Time Warner - Excl. AOL |
159,009 |
1.4 |
|
Disney Online |
108,055 |
0.9 |
|
ABC.COM |
100,051 |
0.9 |
|
AOL LLC |
100,044 |
0.9 |
|
ESPN |
89,760 |
0.8 |
*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.
(Via Podcasting News.)
Google Reader For iPhone Updated; A Taste Of The Future Web
May 12, 2008
Google Reader got an update today, but it’s more than an updated news reader - it’s a taste of the future of the Web:
We on the Reader team are heavy mobile Safari users. To make our (and your) Reader iPhone experience better, we wanted to really take advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities.
Today we’re releasing a new beta version of Reader designed for the iPhone and other mobile phones with advanced browsers. You can use it by visiting http://www.google.com/reader/i/ on your phone.
This new version is designed to offer many of the same features as the desktop, while making it quick and easy to act on items. If you’ve used list view, then it should be familiar to you. Scan the titles for an item that interests you, tap and it expands in place. Starring, sharing, and keeping unread are done in place, so you never have to leave the list view or refresh the page. We think it’s a very fast way to power through your reading list.
The overall iPhone experience is years ahead of its competition, but iPhone Web apps have lagged behind.
Google’s update brings us an important Web app that’s carefully tuned to the capabilities of the iPhone. It makes better use of the screen space, there are fewer wait times, and it’s clear that the people that designed the app are eating their own dog food.
How long will it be until mobile content creation apps catch up with this? Don’t be surprised if, within 6 months, there are iPhone blogging, podcasting and vlogging apps as sophisticated as this.
(Via Podcasting News.)
Facebook borrows $100M to build out its infrastructure
May 12, 2008
Facebook borrows $100M to build out its infrastructure
Facebook is borrowing $100 million from venture loan firm TriplePoint to finance the expansion of its server farms, and other infrastructure expenses, Business Week’s Spencer E. Ante reports. Why this additional money? Because the site is still growing really fast. It now has 109.2 million monthly users worldwide, according to comScore numbers cited in the article - which is much higher than even the 70 million number currently listed on Facebook’s own site. The company needs to build out its infrastructure to cope with its nonstop growth.
(Via Macworld UK News.)
Twitter Shows Its Strengths As Earthquake Strikes China
May 12, 2008
‘
photo credit: seektan‘
Twitter is finally coming of age, and is demonstrating why the microblogging medium is fast catching up to be the fastest news breaker in the world. Something like 7 hours back a huge earthquake struck in China. The earthquake measured 7.8 on the richter scale and thousands have been feared to be dead. The epicenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents.’
Robert Scoble a noted tech blogger and a Twitter addict first broke out the news on Twitter, even before the news could reach BBC. I was in college when I first received the alert via a text message. When I logged onto the internet the Twitterverse was completely busy with reports of the earthquake.
I won’t really go into much details as to what happened on Twitter this afternoon, but I’d like you to point you to sites that have covered this in detail.
- Online Journalism Blog has a lot more details about what happened on Twitter tonight. The Frontline blog has even more.
- Global Voices Online has links to videos and other Twitter and blog reports.
- Here’s a timeline of what first Tweets looked like.
News continues to fly in by the second, and I wonder if Twitter is slowly going mainstream. By their own admission BBC agrees that it was Robert Scoble who broke out the story first sitting thousands of miles away from China.
‘Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media,’
That moment surely came a while ago, with Californian fires, more earthquakes, explosions and many other things. This is probably the first one that is gaining mainstream attention from news outlets like BBC etc…
As Twitter continues to battle its scaling problems, incidents such as this surely put Twitter in a position wherein everyone in the world can benefit from it. I know the investors behind Twitter are looking to make money from the service, but the social value derived from the service far undermines the economic value.
I think that ‘who’s first’ is not exactly the point: ‘how fast, how many’, and ‘how open’ for the spontaneous collaboration is much more interesting than who broke the story first.
We’re are going to see more of Twitter in the Twitter in the coming days. Here’s to hoping to that things go back to normal in China and may the god help the ones in need. I’m waiting for an official channel through which I can donate for relief purposes. Please let me know if you come across it.
To see the story unfold on Twitter visit Tweetscan. Do you think Twitter is slowly going mainstream and is ready to take on traditional media outlets like Reuters, BBC etc..
For more details on the earthquake visit NYTimes.
(Via dailyApps.)
Laptop thieves nabbed with help from Mac software
May 10, 2008
Two alleged thieves were found with stolen computer and A/V gear taken from three roommates in White Plains, N.Y., because one of the victims is a Mac expert. She used the notoriously hard-to-get-working Back to My Mac feature in Leopard which allows single sign-in to .Mac for remote, secure access to all computers on which you’ve signed in. (It uses UPnP/NAT-PMP, wide-area Bonjour, dynamic DNS, and IPsec’s IKE coupled with IPv6 tunneling. Any surprise it’s wonky? It’s cool when it works, though.)
The unnamed victim in question was able to use remote screen sharing to capture a picture of one alleged burglar via the machine’s built-in iSight camera, and copied photos on the computer that apparently were of the other alleged thief.
One of the other roommates recognized the two alleged perps from a party at their apartment (they were friends of a friend), told the police, who tracked them down, and made the arrests, finding all the stolen gear in the process.
While I’ve heard of plenty of Webcams-lead-to-capture stories, this is the first story that ties in IPv6 and recovered gear that I know of.
(Via Boing Boing.)
Audacity Update
May 9, 2008
The Audacity Team has announced the release of Audacity v1.3.5 beta for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix.
Audacity is a free, open source audio editing application that is popular with podcasters.
Changes in the new version include improvements and new features for recording, import/export and the user interface.
Here are the details:
Changes in Beta version 1.3.5
Recording / Playback:
- Several bugs fixed so that latency correction should be better, and more devices work correctly.
- Problems with invalid sample rates under Linux should be much rarer.
- Newer version of Portaudio library.
- New feature to record onto the end of an existing track (hold Shift while clicking Record).
Import / Export:
- Updated versions of Libogg, Libvorbis, Libflac, Libsndfile and Twolame libraries.
- Handling of unsupported file formats more informative.
- Handling of file names with slashes on OS X improved.
- New dialog allows replacement of illegal file name characters on all platforms.
Interface:
- Improved scaling and layout for rulers and VU meters.
- Envelope fixes/improvements including full control of undo/redo.
- New keyboard shortcuts and improved menu navigation.
- Preferences:
- More intuitive tab arrangement.
- New options for mute/solo and Metadata Editor behavior.
- Language can now be changed without restart.
- Expanded Build Information tab.
Effects:
- New Vocal Remover plug-in, improvements for Generate effects.
Compilation:
- Fixes when building Audacity with libraries disabled.
- Improvements to make Mac and Solaris builds easier.
Security:
- Full fix for issue CVE-2007-6061 on systems where temporary directories can be changed by other users.
Miscellaneous:
- Updated translations for many locales.
- Several stability improvements.
(Via Podcasting News.)
eBaytoiCal 3.0.2 - Import eBay auction info into iCal. (Free)
May 9, 2008
eBaytoiCal is an AppleScript that parses the frontmost document in Safari. If it is an eBay auction, it tries to create an iCal calendar entry on the end date of that auction and sets a reminder 15 minutes before. The name of the event will be the article name, the URL will be the page of the article (i.e., the page you are currently viewing).
(Via MacUpdate - Mac OS X.)
New Media Is Now Mainstream Media
May 7, 2008
Universal McCann has published a new report that suggests that new media is rapidly becoming mainstream media around the world.
The comparative study looks at social media trends through three ‘waves’:
- Wave 1 - September 2006
- Wave 2 - June 2007
- Wave 3 - March 2008
Research highlights:
- Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.
- Asian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
- All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves: Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3
- 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos
- The widget economy - 23% of social network users have installed an application - 18% of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates
- Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) - 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog
- Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation - 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog - 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs
The report offers additional details on Internet media use:
Video Sharing:
- Brazil leads on 68%, Asian countries dominate (not including Japan)
- Significant variation in involvement (Hungary 16% < Brazil 68%).
- High frequency of involvement: 20% are uploading every day
Watching video clips:
- Growth is universal across all countries (31% to 82% global reach seen in all markets)
- Lowest difference between markets of any social media platform (Range 63% - 99%)
- Very high frequency medium: 71% weekly reach
Downloading podcasts
- Growth massive between Waves 2 and 3 (from 21% to 49% world-wide).
- China is the world’s biggest podcast market (74% use, with an estimated 45m users)
- Actively involved medium: 18% listen and download everyday
Methodology:
Universal McCann Wave 3 survey was conducted on 17,000 internet users in 29 countries and was completed in March 2008.
Source: Universal McCann (pdf)
(Podcasting News Via iTech Savannah)
Turn Your iPod Touch into an iPhone
May 7, 2008
Turn Your iPod Touch into an iPhone [Feature]: ”
The iPhone and iPod touch are almost indistinguishable devices except for one major difference—you can make calls from your iPhone, and you can’t from your iPod touch. For the privilege of making phone calls with your iPhone, you have to pay $100 more upfront to Apple for the device itself, plus a minimum of $60/month to AT&T for the next two years. Let’s say you didn’t need that kind of firepower from your iPod touch, but that you would like to use it make a phone call every now and then. You can, and today I’m going to show you how to make VoIP phone calls from your iPod touch or iPhone using a freeware application called SIP-VoIP.
Why Google Invested in Clearwire
May 7, 2008
Google wants to usher in the world of wireless broadband so much that it is willing to spend vast sums to make it happen. It bid more than $4.6 billion in the recent FCC spectrum auctions (which it ended up not having to pay because it lost to Verizon), is backing the WiFi 2.0 initiative, and today it announced that it plunked down $500 million to shore up the new Clearwire-Sprint WiMax business.
Google is very clear about why it invested—to ensure that the resulting broadband network is as open as possible and accepts Android handsets and devices. It also sounds like Google may also be the default search engine on devices connected to the network.
This morning, it explains all of this on the Official Google Blog:
In addition to our $500 million contribution as part of the investment group, we will provide search and applications to the network’s users, and will work with Clearwire to offer additional services and applications. This will include jointly creating an open Internet protocol to work with mobile broadband devices (including Android-powered devices) and implementing other open network practices and policies.
We believe that the new network will provide wireless consumers with real choices for the software applications, content and handsets that they desire. Such freedom will mirror the openness principles underlying the Internet and enable users to get the most out of their wireless broadband experience. As we’ve supported open standards for spectrum and wireless handsets, we’re especially excited that Clearwire intends to build and maintain a network that will embrace important openness features. In particular, the network will: (1) expand advanced high speed wireless Internet access in the U.S., (2) allow consumers to utilize any lawful applications, content and devices without blocking, degrading or impairing Internet traffic and (3) engage in reasonable and competitively-neutral network management.
Google desperately wants access to future wireless broadband networks of all stripes and sizes,but it wants to avoid having to build and operate its own. Deals like this show that it is willing to pay to play. If Clearwire should ever go bust, though, that’s $500 million down the drain.
(Via TechCrunch.)
