Google is no newspaper vampire

Or at least that’s according to Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO in a long interview with Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com. In a week when Rupert Murdoch seems to have slightly eased his attacks on  ‘Internet News Thieves’ Schmidt claims that Google actually helps newspapers by pointing its visitors to ‘sources of quality content’. He further claims that only existing mainstream news institutions have the resources and established trust to do deep journalism. Surprisingly although he acknowledges that new online publications have emerged and that there are journalists working independently of large companies, his faith, according to Sullivan is ‘still with the old school, so to speak’.

Schmidt also claims in the interiew that critics often target Google, when their real target is the internet:

“I think in this case Google is a proxy for the internet as a whole. So the people would make the same statements about the Internet as they do about Google. Substitute the internet for Google and you get that idea. And because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything. In some cases people don’t understand that we’re a conduit to other people doing things. They think Google did it when in fact somebody else did it and made it available.”

In terms of solutions, one that he suggests is Google Fast Flip. Readers can try it here.

BBC Trust to journalists: ‘Don’t Blog what you wouldn’t say’

One of the lesser known aspects of the new BBC draft editorial guidelines appears to take their definition of impartiality even further than previously understood, in their new advice that “Nothing should be written by [BBC] journalists and presenters that would not be said on-air.”

According to the guidance: “Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal prejudices of our journalists and presenters on such matters.” .

“This applies as much to online content as it does to news bulletins”.

This is an issue that is sure to result in comment during the consultation on the guidelines as while this point of view will be what some viewers will want others may  question  whether this is taking the guidelines too far in that the audience are able to tell the difference between personal opinion – when it is served up as personal opinion – and ‘impartial’ news reports broadcast on behalf of the BBC by these individual journalists in their capacity as newsreaders or reporters.

Meanwhile the Government continues to support it’s own guidelines on departmental use of Twitter – guidelines which  at a word count of almost 5,500, would be equivalent to more than 250 tweets. Suggesting that departmental users should tweet no less than two times per day, with a maximum of ten daily tweets, it suggests that departments should steer clear of ‘self-promotion’.  In supporting Departments to follow usual Twitter etiquette that ‘followers’ should be ‘followed back’ it cautions that at all costs however, it is necessary to avoid the image of ‘big brother’ following people for the wrong reasons. And we know what the Daily Mail would say about that.

Strictly come Social Networking

According to Anthony Rose, the BBC’s controller of Vision and on-line, speaking at the launch of the Media Guardian’s Innovation awards, this weekend will see the addition of unspecified ‘social media’ applications to Strictly Come Dancing as part of a radical re-launch of all their on-line services. This radical re-launch is planned for March, and will be based on ‘what the next generation in social media will be’. Amongst the innovations will be the development of an open version of iPlayer which will allow third-party platforms to embed BBC content while it remains on the BBC site. This is seen as one element in BBC management’s attempts to prevent top-slicing the licence fee – by working in collaboration with commercial organisations they argue there is value going to the commercial sector – without the need for a funding cut to BBC resourcing.

There are also

Not drowning but Waving

Google Wave – a browser based tool combining email, instant messaging and real time interaction – launched for beta testing 1 hour 24 minutes ago. If you’re one of the lucky testers – and you can apply here then you can be in at the beginning of what they claim can be a way of working which can transform journalism. According to the story in the Media Guardian here, “Google Wave could speed up the collaborative journalistic process from research to writing, including quotes, enriching articles with pictures and videos. Stories could be corrected by subeditors using Google Wave, while readers could suggest changes and use the tool to discuss the article”

Some drawbacks may be that till present it runs on most browsers except Internet Explorer – users of IE will have to download a plug-in called Chrome Frame to use the application.

I’ve applied to be a beta tester – so will let you know if I’m one of the lucky ones to be enrolled to try it out.

Here’s a 10 minute video which tries to explain its benefits:

Shift happens……..

Two useful new You Tube videos out make varying claims for the impact of social networking on our lives. The first Did you Know 4.0 is an update from their previous Shift Happens video of July 2007 – comparing both shows how quickly things have moved on. Meanwhile AllMediaScotland have done us all a favour of drawing our attention to this latest video from the socialnomics website – essentially advertising their latest book on socialnomics. This makes a number of interesting claims as to the growing importance of social media – at a time of decline for traditional news outlets like the press.

Very professionally produced, the videos hit us with a relentless stream of facts (in the case of Did You Know, sometimes too fast to really grasp), and show some of the changes multimedia journalists have to grapple with. Like any presentation of this type however, little time is given to context, and although it is essentially making large claims for Web 2.0 – the type of web we can interact with, the format of this You Tube presentation is of course one which makes us, the viewer, very much a passive receiver of claims, unable to question or interact at all. Here’s the socionomics video which will give you some flavour of the claims being made:

By 2010, Gen Y (born between the mid 1970s and late 1990s) will outnumber Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and 96 per cent of them have joined a social network.Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web.
One in eight married couples in the U.S. last year met via social media.
It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet four years and the iPod three years.
Facebook (www.facebook.com) added 100 million users in less than nine months. iPod Application downloads hit one billion in nine months. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world, behind China, India and the USA, but ahead of Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. Yet, China’s QZone (www.qzone.qq.com) is larger, with over 300 million users.
The fastest-growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc) are shared on Facebook, daily.
The US Department of Education has found that, on average, online students out-performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. And the same study had found that one in six higher education students had enrolled in online education.
80 per cent of companies are using LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) as their primary tool to find employees.
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter (www.twitter.com) followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. 80 per cent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices.
Generation Y and Z (born since the mid 1990s) consider email passé; in 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen.
YouTube (www.youtube.com) is the second-largest  search engine in the world: 100 million videos.
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) has over 13 million articles; 78 per cent of these articles are non-English. 156 articles are posted every hour.
There are over 200 million blogs; 54 per cent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
25 per cent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are linked to user-generated content. 34 per cent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google (www.google.co.uk) ranks them.
78 per cent of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14 per cent trust advertisements. Only 18 per cent of traditional TV campaigns receive a positive ROI (return on investment). 90 per cent who are able to skip TV ads, on their digital video recorders, do.
US-based TV catch-up website, hulu (www.hulu.com), has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
70 per cent 18-to-34 year-olds have watched TV on the web. Only 33 per cent have ever viewed a show on digital video recorders, such as TiVo. 25 per cent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
35 per cent of book sales on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) are for the wireless reading device, Kindle (here).

Are all these stats accurate? Again journalists should not take slick videos just at face value, but follow up the basis of their claims. You can see how the stats are put together (some in a more robust manner than others) on the socialnomics site.

Thanks to AllmediaScotland for doing the work to extract these stats. You can subscribe to AllMediaScotlands RSS feed here