journalism, blogging and the real-time web
DESCRIPTION
Lecture for Digital Communication Technologies classTRANSCRIPT
Journalism, Blogging and the Real-Time Web
Kathy E. Gill19 October 2010
Journalism is, in the words of James W. Carey,
“our day book, our collective diary, which
records our common life. That which goes unrecorded goes unpreserved except in
the vanishing moment of our individual lives.”
Media Consumption Timeline
A Short Internet Timeline November 1990: one web host (CERN) 1994: the U.S. Senate and House of
Representatives added web servers 1994: the San Jose Mercury News
launched the first online newspaper 1998: ~300 million web pages 2000: Google had indexed 1B web
pages July 2008: Google had indexed 1T web
pages
Abbreviated Blogging Timeline
1999: Yahoo! buys GeoCities, host to 3.5 million individual Web sites (most abandoned!)
1999: the Poynter Institute starts the “MediaNews” blog
2002: Google buys Blogger; estimate of 500,000 blogs worldwide in total
February 2002: Salon and Fox News add blogs 2003: Iraq war gives rise to war blogger 2009: 6 million blogs on Wordpress.com; >1B
monthly pageviews; Yahoo! shutters GeoCities
Real-Time Reporting
The Charlotte Observer used a blog format to report on Hurricane Bonnie in August 1998; “Dispatches from the Coast” is the first known use of blog to cover a breaking news story.
1970
1989
2009
What Changed?
Increasingly Disintermediat
ed
TransmissionNetworks
Transmission Speed
Enter: The Real-Time
Web
Twitter & Iran
Amplified voices of dissent Facilitated misinformation
(intentional and unintentional) Incomplete story Emotional Triggered MSM response
Experiments In Live Tweets
Oregonian (note date launched) Multi-organization collaboration –
Washington Floods, 2009 A Contrarian View of Twitter and Iran,
June 2009
Rise Of The SmartPhone
Mobile Data Usage Cuts Across Age GroupsApril 2009 “Mobile Technographics®”
iPhone Users Are Different
March 2008: 85% iPhone users accessed news & info v 13.1% all mobile users and 58% all smart phone users
More Working iPhone Owners Use Social MediaJune 2009 “Working iPhone Owners Tap The Mobile Internet”
Mobile Technographics: Understanding The Connected Consumer
April 2009 “Mobile Technographics®”
Positioning Mobile
First personal mass medium First always-on mass medium First always-carried mass medium First mass medium where
individuals can be identified First mass medium to facilitate
the “creative impulse”
Source: Mobile Design and Development (p39) and http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/02/mobile_the_7th_.html
Summary
Blogging is part of the web’s evolutionary path
The real time web (Twitter et al) is the next mediamorphosis
Impact on civic life will depend on media literacy efforts
License
Creative Commons, share-and-share alike, attribution, non-commercial
Kathy E. Gill@[email protected]://faculty.washington.edu/kegillhttp://wiredpen.com/
Credits
1.Kent State, photo John Paul Filo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
2.Tank Man, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/behind-the-scenes-tank-man-of-tiananmen/
3.Death of Neda Agha-Solton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan