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Live 8 – The Long Walk To Justice

Live 8 is a series of concerts and events across the world which are being staged to highlight the problem of global poverty. It’s a chance for ordinary people to call on world leaders at this year’s G8 summit and tell them to put a stop to the needless deaths of 30,000 children every single day.

On 6th July 2005, the leaders of Great Britain, the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia will meet at Gleneagles in Scotland to talk about world affairs, including Africa. They will be presented with a workable plan to double aid, drop the debt and make trade laws fair.

Saturday July 2nd will be the day the world demands justice. Thousands will gather in Edinburgh to spearhead the call to make poverty history in a passionate, peaceful protest. Later the same day, millions will echo that call as they take part in LIVE 8 – concerts in London, Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Philadelphia, Barrie, Tokyo, Moscow and Johannesburg, more than 130 bands and pop-rock artists will make their voices heard across the world, making it the biggest music event in history. Among the artists Pink Floyd will re-unite in London’s Hyde Park for the first time in 24 years, along with Annie Lennox, Bob Geldof, Coldplay, Sir Elton John, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Sir Paul McCartney, REM, Sting, U2 and UB40, with many more playing in the other locations. More than 5,5 billion people (85% of planet population) will be able to see the event live or on TV networks worldwide.

In Romania the show can be followed in an 11 hours live coverage on TV K Lumea music station.

More info on the event:
We Want Your Voice
AOL Music
Technorati Live 8
Live8Live

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Yahoo!Mail – new version in limited beta

Yahoo! is about to launch a limited (for now) beta version of its popular mail client.

On the upside, this is the first webmail client that doesn’t feel like it’s on the web. It has the look of Outlook (with Yahoo branding and an ad box), slick drag & drop across 3 panes, real keyboard shortcuts and right click menu, and wicked fast autocomplete and caching that lets you scan through folders with thousand of message even faster than Mail.app and other desktop clients. Some of it will be familiar to Oddpost users, but now it works across platforms (including Firefox for the Mac!) and with Yahoo hosting, storage, search and spam protection it’s simply of a different grade.

Via argumente.ro

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Journalism – online vs. offline

Latest Nielsen/NetRatings study cited by Reuters, claims that more than one-fifth of web users who read newspapers prefer online to offline editions. The study, conducted for the first time, found that 21 percent of those web users now prefer online versions of newspapers, 72 percent choose the print editions, and 7 percent split their time between the two. Visits to Yahoo News and Google News or other aggregators were not counted in the study.

NYTimes.com is the most visited U.S. newspaper site, with an audience of 11.3 million in May, up 25 percent from a year earlier, according to Nielsen. USATODAY.com was second, with an audience of 9.2 million in May, up 15 percent. Third was washingtonpost.com; its audience in May grew 10 percent year over year, to 7.4 million.

On the other hand, a separate study shows that 51 percent of the journalists use blogs regularly, with 28 percent relying on them to help in their day-to-day reporting. According to one of the pollsters, the study “demonstrates that blogs have an enormous potential to not only influence the general public, but to influence the influencers – journalists and the media.” Journalists mostly used blogs for finding story ideas (53 percent), researching and referencing facts (43 percent) and finding sources (36 percent); 33 percent said they used blogs to uncover breaking news or scandals.

Now, getting back on Earth, or more likey said, getting back to Romania, I’m really expecting that at least some of the trendy young journalists in Romania will jump in this wagon, giving the Romanian blogsphere some authority. Or what about the young journalism students?

As far as I know (and I hope I’m wrong) the only two weblogs somehow related with offline journalism are George’s Strangers on the Net and Cristi’s Netzoom (which to be honest is not actually a blog). If you guys know some more, feel free to promote them in the comments. And also another challenge: who’s blog would you like to read among romanian journalists?

And for the romanian readers also here is an interesting article on the topic, published by Lucian Mandruta in Dilema Veche, a couple of weeks ago: Freedom of the press or freedom of the public?

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Layers of Citizen Journalism

Since blogging and, so called, citizen journalism is on the wave here is an interesting classification of this kind of new media, which is suppose to help understand it and also help news organizations can employ the citizen-journalism concept:

1. The first step: Opening up to public comment
For some publishers skittish about allowing anyone to publish under their brand name, enabling readers to attach comments to articles on the Web represents a start. At its simplest level, user comments offer the opportunity for readers to react to, criticize, praise or add to what’s published by professional journalists.

2. Second step: The citizen add-on reporter
Recruit citizen add-on contributions for stories written by professional journalists. I mean more than just adding a “User Comments” link. I mean that with selected stories, solicit information and experiences from members of the public, and add them to the main story to enhance it.

3. Now we’re getting serious: Open-source reporting
Collaboration between a professional journalist and his/her readers on a story, where readers who are knowledgeable on the topic are asked to contribute their expertise, ask questions to provide guidance to the reporter, or even do actual reporting which will be included in the final journalistic product.

4. The citizen bloghouse
A great way to get citizens involved in a news Web site is to simply invite them to blog for it. A number of news sites do this now, and some citizen blogs are consistently interesting reads.

5. Newsroom citizen ‘transparency’ blogs
This involves inviting a reader or readers to blog with public complaints, criticism, or praise for the news organization’s ongoing work. A reader panel can be empowered via a publicly accessible blog to serve as citizen ombudsmen, of a sort, offering public commentary on how the news organization is performing. A milder form of this is the editor’s blog — typically written by a paper’s top editor and explaining the inner workings of the newsroom and discussing how specific editorial decisions are made — along with reader comments, so that the editor has a public dialog with his/her blog readers.

6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version
This next step involves establishing a stand-alone citizen-journalism Web site that is separate from the core news brand. It means establishing a news-oriented Web site that is comprised entirely or nearly entirely of contributions from the community.

7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version
This model is identical to No. 6 above, except that citizen submissions are not edited. What people write goes on the site: blemishes, misspellings and all.

8. Add a print edition
For this model, take either No. 6 or No. 7 above (stand-alone citizen-journalism Web site, either with edited submissions or a hands-off editing approach) and add a print edition. A number of newspapers have tried this, using a print edition distributed freely once a week as an insert into a traditional daily or weekly paper, or as a stand-alone print product.

9. The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism
A news organization that combines citizen journalism with the work of professionals.

10. Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof
Imagine a news Web site comprised of reports by professional journalists directly alongside submissions from everyday citizens. This is slightly different than No. 9, above, because on any one page there will be a mix of professionally written (paid) and citizen-submitted (free) content — labeled appropriately so that the reader knows what he/she is getting.

11. Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors
Finally, in the “way out there” category, comes wiki news. The most well known example is the WikiNews site, a spin-off of the famed Wikipedia public encyclopedia, which allows anyone to write and post a news story, and anyone to edit any story that’s been posted. It’s an experimental concept operating on the theory that the knowledge and intelligence of the group can produce credible, well-balanced news accounts.

Read full 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

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Click fraud threat

Well there are of course bumps in the way of online advertising towards its bright future.

And Google has reasons to be nervous. Paid-search advertising generates about 98 percent of its revenues. Red-hot demand for cost-per-click advertising doubled Google revenues in the first three quarters of this year and paved the way for the company’s blockbuster IPO in August.

Google CFO sounded the alarm today, on click fraud issue, calling it the “biggest threat” to the Internet economy.

“I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model”

The paid-search model is now the fastest-growing form of Internet advertising, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. But analysts, fraud experts and now Google are openly fretting about the rise of click fraud.

The main perpetrators appear to be competitors of advertisers and also scam sites set up for the sole purpose of hosting ad links provided by Google, through its AdSense unit, or Yahoo!, through its Overture service. Humans or specially designed software then click on those ad links in order to “steal” revenue from advertisers.

Government watchdogs, primarily focused on pursuing Internet scams that harm consumers, have only recently taken action.

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The Past of Online Advertising

In order to finish (at least for now) the subject of online advertising I just found a report of doubleclick.com about the 1995-2004 Decade in Online Advertising (1MB, PDF file).

Online advertising has come a long way since those first ad banners on HotWired in 1994. The
many forms of marketing and advertising it enables—permission email, keywordtargeted search engine advertising, floating animated page takeovers, interactive onpage rich media ads, streaming audio and video, consumer-fueled “viral marketing”, to name a few—have excited early adopters and now mainstream marketers in ways that traditional advertising has not seen the likes of since the early days of color television.

The findings in this report can be summed up in three key conclusions:

  • A seller’s market is emerging in online advertising.
  • Marketers are demanding more accountability.
  • Consumers are demanding more control.
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The present of online advertising

Talking earlier about advertisers finding new ways for spending their dollars and about 57 percent of them thinking already about RSS as one of the new channels of online ads, it seems that Google jumped on the opportunity and begun testing the inclusion of text ads in Web content distributed through syndication technologies such as RSS or Atom.

Google’s program, an extension of its AdSense network, will include in the feeds text ads that are relevant to the content being distributed. When readers click on the ads, Google will split with the publishers the fees it charges to advertisers. You can apply here: http://www.google.com/adsenseforfeeds

Even more, it looks like the folks at USWeb.com, a leading Internet marketing firm, have taken the idea of shilling one step further and could very well be in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Their offer sounds like this: Get paid for blogging… We will pay you to post to your blog. We pay $5 via PayPal per blog posting. To start earning cash, email me with your name and blog URL. We are looking for people to pay today. If you don’t have a PayPal account, we can also send you a gift certificate for iTunes if you like.

You can find more comments about the matter and its legallity here: Blogging for dollars

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The future of Online advertising

It seems that recent NYTimes.com decision to offer paid content to subscribers has created a lot of buzz around the blogsphere. And even though, from the freedom-of-information-point-of-view, I dislike their decision, I wonder if this will help their business in the long run.

Considering the latest Forrester Research study about online advertising they shouldn’t worry in the next couple of years, and here are some excerpts from this study:

  • 2005 growth in online advertising spending, represents a 23 percent increase from 2004, up to $14.7 billion and it’s estimated to $26 billion by 2010
  • This is not the return of “The Bubble“?. The growth is coming from marketers having to make tough decisions about allocating scarce advertising dollars – in many cases, funding online channels from traditional channels. Back in 1999/2000, spending often came from exuberant spending, fueled by venture money.
  • It’s more than just about search. Search is great, it’s growing, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, I anticipate that search will become much more integrated into traditional brand advertising
  • Marketers will shift channels away from traditional channels to fund online marketing

On the other hand the more and more popular Firefox and Opera browsers (and who knows, maybe IE7.0 will do it to) are giving the users the opportunity to block most of the ads in the webpages they are visiting (and I’m thinking here about the popular AdBlock Firefox extension as well as the powerfull Greasemonkey scripts, and why not Opera’s new features on this).

As such, for advertisers to keep the trend, they have to find new ways of spending their dollars, the same way they moved beyond pop-up’s as soon as most of the browsers gave the users the chance to get rid of them. And it seems they are already considering alternatives, according to the study mentioned before, new advertising channels will draw interest and spending from marketers. Sixty-four percent of respondents are interested in advertising on blogs, 57 percent through RSS and 52 percent on mobile devices, including phones and PDAs.

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New York Times to charge for content

The New York Times announced yesterday that it will begin charging for Op-Ed and news columns on NYTimes.com as part of a new online subscription called TimesSelect. For $49.95 a year or free for print subscribers, TimesSelect members will also get access to The Times archives, exclusive online multimedia (audio and photo essays, video and podcasts), a first look at some articles, and “TimesFile,” a new tool that helps readers tag and organize articles from The Times.

That seems to me to be against the wave as the trend seems to be quite different with latimes.com‘s recently deciding to end its subscription for calendarlive.com or CNN.com that will make its existing online video offerings available for free beginning June 20.

All these are happening with the statistics in mind, I suppose, as starting with January the number of NYTimes online visitors, 1.4 millions was for the first time bigger than its daily print circulation wich averaged 1,124,000 in 2004. The Times probably considered that the advertising revenues generated by the online trafic will decline less than they get from charging users.

Searchengineblog is giving an advice on this: Look, no one is going to link to summaries that you then have to pay to read further. Learn the lesson of Google – give it away! It’s the *traffic* you want. Once you have the traffic, then you can show them advertising, which in turn pays for the content.

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Traditional media about blogsphere

The new Romanian economic weekly, Saptamana Financiara is taking up the challenge (or the trend 🙂 ) in commenting a little bit about the blog-phenomenon. Media alternative explosion in the cyberspace (Romanian only) is the title of the article commenting that “the online space is becoming more and more attractive for romanians that want to be informed quickly and efficient from independent sources and take in consideration well informed opinions on daily events”.

More than that, “in .ro world as alternative information sources, the most common are the ones in IT and business communities” and mentions Daniel Neamu Weblog as one of the most active economic weblogs, next to www.argumente.ro and business-romania.blogspot.com.