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Posts Tagged ‘cnn’

The Shorty Awards were handed out last night in New York amid incredible controversy. The awards, if you’ve never heard of them before, are handed out to Twitter users who exemplify Twitter’s potential “to create the best real-time short form content.” It’s sorta cute I guess, just recognizing people who tweet interesting things.

Read more from the original source: 
Twitter controversy mars Shorty Awards ceremony

I’m from a relatively small city in Ohio called Pepper Pike. If I want to find out news about it, the easiest thing for me to do is Google “Pepper Pike News.” The number one result is quite useful: Topix.

In fact, Topix is the number one result for a ton of small towns across the country. That’s what happens when you’ve been aggregating local news for six years. But the site has never garnered much attention in the startup scene because back in 2005 (before TechCrunch even existed — our initial coverage was in 2007), it took a majority equity investment from three of the largest media firms in the U.S., Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett. Since then, the focus has been all about getting the business to work.

And while Topix has been through some permutations throughout the years, the focus has always been on local and yes, topics. Aggregation was the key to all of this for a while, but in recent years, the community that uses the site has been largely responsible for a lot of the content. And that’s more clear than ever as the site is about to cross 100 million posts (comments).

The milestone should be hit at some point today, as the site is getting about 125,000 comments a day now. That’s on top of 120 million average monthly pageviews from 8.8 million unique visitors. All huge numbers for a site that hardly anyone talks about.

But that’s the thing, people are talking about it, you just may not realize it unless you’re in one of these smaller towns. For these people, Topix is a gathering spot to discuss the local news. Many of these cities (like Pepper Pike) may not have a daily local newspaper or website that makes it easy to discuss issues. That’s exactly what Topix does. And perhaps even a little too easy as the site has to remove some 45,000 comments a month due to things like hate speech, CEO and co-founder Chris Tolles tells us.

Not just that, Topix gets about 10 subpoenas a week due to comments, Tolles says. That’s a pain, but it’s the price you pay for having such an active community.

Why not ban anonymous commenting? Tolles has thought about this a lot, and done internal studies. But all conclude that it wouldn’t be good for the site. For example, while you’re 50% more likely to get a crappy comment from anonymous commenter, you’re also going to get five times the number of comments when you allow for anonymous ones. And if there’s a situation where a person feels the need to call out a local official, doing so anonymously allows them to feel protected, Tolles says.

So, Topix has all these comments, and all this content — but the challenge has been how to monetize it. While Topix has deals with seveal big players, including CNN, the real money remains in advertising. So Tolles has spent much of the past year building up an ad sales team. And following the ad collapse last year, it’s finally starting to pay off. Topix is seeing $4 eCPMs, Tolles says. If that keeps up, he thinks the site can turn a profit relatively soon.

Something else interesting about Topix: mobile usage is huge. While the service has had (what Tolles considers to be currently a sub-par) iPhone app for a while, it’s the mobile web that people seem to be taking to to use the site. And something like 75% of the people who are actively commenting on a mobile device are visiting from an iPhone. That may seem somewhat surprising given Topix’s focus on small towns and communities, but it seems to speak to the iPhone’s appeal to the masses. The big time commenting numbers also apparently speak to Topix’s appeal to the masses.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz continued the to talk about Yahoo’s regrouping strategy at an advertising industry conference earlier this week.

She touched on the topics we covered in our post last week, The Steady, Efficient Decline Of Yahoo. Specifically, she’s counting on an improvement in the economy to drive Yahoo growth, and she claims to have made significant advances in display advertising tools, targeting and analytics. “People still have to display their brand in a more descriptive way than just keywords,” she told Advertising Age.

When asked if Yahoo was any different from AOL, she responded “Generally it’s not different, we’re just a lot bigger. The fact of the matter is, what they’re trying to do at AOL — and I shouldn’t speak for AOL, they’re very capable of speaking for themselves — but I think it’s like a mini Yahoo.”

AOL draws 110 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, says Comscore, compared to 164 million for Yahoo (January 2010).

Bartz also says Yahoo will be making acquisitions to drive content. “This year it’s about what technologies: Do we need to fill in the blanks, what analytics, what tools?” she said.

She added “Well just imagine whether it’s acquiring an audience — a group of female bloggers, or whether it’s acquiring some better analytics tools that help us guide campaigns with our partners, or whether it’s technology.”

And “social” says Bartz, doesn’t begin and end with Facebook: “You know, social is a word that has almost become too narrow. And I think with Facebook’s immense success, all of the sudden that’s the only definition of social. But if you think back to the finance chat rooms, [those] were the beginning of social and people could actually interact. … As we look at social we want people to be on the Yahoo site and have tweets come in and have their Facebook postings come in, so that it’s a very personal place to be that helps them understand what’s going on in their social world.”

In Bartz’s social world, it seems, people are reading Twitter and Facebook messages on Yahoo. But this patchwork strategy of taking a little of this, a little of that isn’t going to excite users and encourage them to spend much time on Yahoo. Despite their massive reach, time on site isn’t going anywhere.

But at least we know where Yahoo stands on things. Little or no product innovation, little or no risk taking. And like I said before, a long, slow, steady decline. And despite Bartz’s last words in the interview, copied below, there is nothing exciting or crazy going on at Yahoo.

For an industry that’s based on creativity and inspiring people, I don’t know why it’s so afraid. I don’t think it should be afraid to just try some crazy new stuff. But when I talk to people about online marketing, they just seem to freeze. … I thought this was going to be a much racier industry that wore black and got out there and rock and rolled and I see it being a little shier. I mean, I’m the crazy lady.

President Obama is going to debate the Republican detractors of his healthcare reform proposals at the big healthcare summit in Washington today. (Democratic Congressional leaders will be in attendance as well). This is not a closed-door meeting. Far from it, Obama wants to put the opponents of his healthcare plans on display in front of the American people?

But who is going to be watching C-Span or CNN or Fox at 10 AM (Eastern Standard Time) in the morning. We’re all supposed to be working. And frankly, healthcare debates put most people to sleep. But if you want to secretly slack off and even throw some questions to the politicians at the healthcare summit, you can watch it live from your computer on YouTube’s CitiizenTube

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will answer select questions submitted via Google Moderator at the end of the summit. No, Obama won’t be answering questions from CitizenTubers. He already did that after his State of the Union. This time, he’s got to get back to work.

We all know that Ashton Kutcher is a fan of Twitter. Last year, Kutcher raced CNN to a million Twitter followers (Kutcher won). Kutcher hosted Saturday Night Live yesterday night, and as a web exclusive, SNL released this bit Kutcher did about Tooter, which Twitter-like network that broadcasts Kutcher’s flatulence emissions, or “gissions.” It’s up to you to decide how funny the sketch is, but it’s certainly an entertaining poke at the celeb’s love for the microblogging network and social media.

Everyone with eyes in their head can see the bright future of multi-touch displays, but the huge variety of technologies out there makes it hard to place a bet. Will capacitive film rule? Or will it be the IR overlay? Or will Microsoft’s foresight in nurturing the Surface project pay off once they reveal their new, flatter display? Well, there’s one more competitor joining the already-crowded field, and they’re coming in heavy with $18 million in funding.

There is some question of whether FlatFrog will be able to create a product that’s truly distinct from the competition, but this money should go a long way toward getting their name out there and their tech up to spec.

Continue reading at CrunchGear…

There’s no doubt that President Obama’s White House has been using technology more than any other previous administration. The President has a Twitter account, is using YouTube in innovative ways and has even developed an iPhone app. The White House is releasing some impressive engagement numbers from this week’s State of the Union address.

The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event.

After the speech, over 50,000 people engaged in a live chat on Facebook. It was just the latest in our Open for Questions series where you can ask questions directly to the officials who work here at the White House. And the President will be holding a live video event next week on CitizenTube to answer questions that people submitted following this week’s address. So far, over 40,000 people have submitted 472,000 votes and 9,926 questions.

On the TV side of things, the President’s speech drew 48 million viewers. Of course, the live stream of the President’s inauguration drew a much greater audience, with 3.8 million viewers on the Ustream live feed. MSNBC reported over 18 million streams and CNN delivered over 25 million streams for the inauguration.

New York ( CNN ) — We were right all along. It’s called the Apple iPad, and it’s a smallish, $499 computer (for the entry-level model, that is) that can best be described as a big iPhone or iPod touch

Read more:
Get Nicholas’s take on the iPad’s over on CNN.com — seriously, CNN

Okay, so it exists . What do your favorite tech personalities, the CrunchGear team, have to say about Apple’s latest opus?

Original post: 
The iPad: our take

With the events that took place in Iran last year, the Mumbai bombings and even the plane crash on the Hudson River, there’s no doubt of the power of citizen journalism in today’s media age. Whether it be through social media sites, such as Twitter or through news sites catered towards citizen journalism, the active voice of the eyewitness is now a significant part of any story taking place in the world. Citizen journalism platform AllVoices is seeing significant use traction and is giving its rivals ( many of which are similar sites started by traditional media companies, such as CNN’s iReport) a run for their money. AllVoices also recently closed a $3 million round of funding from VantagePoint Partners, bringing the startup’s total funding to $9 million.

AllVoices allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news. The site’s proprietary technology (AllVoices has filed for three patents) will tag, rank and sort news based on a global, regional, country and city pages and will determine what is breaking news and popular (in terms of phases of a news cycle). The system will also filter for spam, police the site, fact check each user report for credibility and assign a credibility rating to each news report. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phone via MMS and SMS, which is helpful to users in countries where computer usage is low but mobile device usage is high. The end goal is to provide a 360 degree view of reported news that also has a multimedia view of what’s happening in the world.

The brainchild of Amra Tareen, AllVoices was launched by Tareen and her co-founders in 2008. A former VC at Sevin Rosen Funds, Tareen recognized the importance of the citizen voice in everyday news in 2005 when she was an aid worker in Pakistan following the catastrophic earthquakes that caused massive damage and deaths in the country.

Tareen may be onto to something with AllVoices. The site currently has a community of 275,000 citizen reporters and is seeing close to 5 million unique visitors per month, which is fast growth for a recently launched media startup. Half of AllVoices’ traffic and visitors are from outside the U.S. and U.K, with citizens reporting from over 160 different countries. Tareen emphasizes that the site is as much a community as a news platform. Contributors can collaborate on stories and discuss news with other users and readers on the site.

While AllVoices may be seeing steady growth, the citizen journalism platform may be close to overtaking CNN’s iReport, which seems to be the site’s main rival in terms of traffic. Tareen says that as of late 2008, iReport had 118,000 registered users and is “fully confident that AllVoices is the largest citizen reporting cite in the world.” Another competitor in the space, NowPublic was acquired by the Examiner.com last year for $25 million.

So what’s next for the site? Tareen says that she wants to focus on expanding the hyper-local coverage on the news site in the U.S. I can;t help but think that AllVoices may be a possible acquisition target for a media company that doesn’t have a popular citizen journalism portal. One things for sure; we’ll be hearing more from AllVoices in the future.