Krista Adkins | IMS 201

Is the book-pocalypse coming?

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:00:19 -0500

With ereaders on the rise, everyone’s wondering what the future holds for printed books. Barnes and Noble’s sales are declining, with their biggest drop at their college stores (this fall in college revenue could be a big threat). This article questions whether or not Barnes and Noble will survive “the coming book-pocalypse.”

There are three things that B&N will need to work on in order to make it. That’s ereaders, the love of paper books, and being able to survive the paperless tipping point that will come when books just aren’t available in paper form. They need to be great at all three of those things to make it to the next stage in the evolution of text.

B&N does have the Nook, and an online book store that rivals Amazon, so they’ve got those things going for them.

We know that our generation loves physical books, but will the next one? If not, this could harm B&N.

The big question we’re left with is: does this economic data point to the end of B&N stores in the next half decade or in the next year?

We’ve debated this topic in class, and while I think books will always be around, it’s hard to say how popular they actually will be in the future. Will they just become a fun artifact to collect?

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/02/whats-so-funny-about-a-tablets-love-and-a-bookless-world/

Kindle Fire having WiFi issues

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:49:26 -0500

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/17/kindle-fire-having-wifi-issues/

With the recent launch of Kindle Fire, it’s expected that there might still be some bugs to work out. Some users are reporting issues with wifi reception, and others say that the device shuts off its wireless when you turn the display off (If you’re listening to something like internet radio this is obviously a big problem).

Many commenters on Amazon’s support forums are reporting spotty connectivity, disconnections, or an inability to connect in the first place. Others report that the issue can be fixed by tweaking settings on the router.

It’s not clear how many devices are actually affected. While Amazon will probably soon be working to make this right, it’s still a pain to have these troubles at launch.

We’ve been discussing eBook readers in class, and while no one in our class actually owns one, I think with these new launches they’ll be on the rise (considering these initial problems can be fixed quickly).

New "kid-friendly" app store...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:43:25 -0500

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/kindertown-launches-educational-app-store-for-parents/

KinderTown is a newly launched app store for parents- it’s a collection of kid-friendly apps that have been deemed to have “substantial educational value” for kids three to six years old. The store’s apps are compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

In class we’ve already discussed our concerns about young kids over-using things like iPads, and how so many children these days know more about how to use iPads than real tactile things like magazines. These apps are designed for kids ages 3-6, so it doesn’t seem like this trend is slowing down. We’ve also discussed how tech-based toys that claim to be more educational can often times hinder a child’s creativity development. So I’m curious to see, down the road, if this generation of tech-rised kids are affected somehow by this.

ebook- Pride and Prejudice

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:13:05 -0500

ebook- Pride and Prejudice

An update to Google's search algorithm

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 21:25:27 -0400

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/google-changes-search-algorithm-trying-to-make-results-more-timely/?src=me&ref=technology

This article from the New York Times discusses how Google is changing their search algorithm to make results more “timely.” This is in acknowledgement that some searches were producing outdated results. It’s one of the biggest tweaks to Google’s search algorithm, affecting about 35% of all searches.

Google has recognized that services like Twitter and Facebook have trained people to expect constant updates with seconds-old news. People are using the Web more as a real-time news feed now, and Google needs to keep up with that fast pace.

Google tried once before to create real-time search, in 2009, when it introduced google.com/realtime, a service that incorporated Twitter posts that Google paid Twitter to use. But that contract expired in July and the two companies couldn’t agree on terms to renew it, so Google disabled the site.

This new algorithm improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between different kinds of searches (if you’re looking for year-old links, week-old, seconds-old, ect.) and the level of “freshness” you need. It uses a new Web indexing system called Caffeine, which crawls the Web more quickly, updating Google’s index of Web sites continuously instead of every couple of weeks. These revisions change how Google ranks those links now that it has them in its index.

In class we’ve discussed how Google functions, and how it uses algorithms to improve search results. I thought this was really interesting. I liked it when Google did have the real-time results, it was very useful so I’m glad they’re trying to improve the freshness of search results again.

YouTube takes on cable with "channels"

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:29:41 -0400

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/28/youtube-confirms-plans-to-take-on-cable-with-channels-names-dozens-of-partners/

YouTube’s announcing that it’s lined up a bunch of new content partners who will be developing shows for the site. The shows will cover everything from sports to comedy to music. Their goal in doing this is to give people more reasons to keep coming back again and again. These shows will start online next month.

What’s interesting is the comparison being made between YouTube and cable. They’re referencing the “defining channels” that were born out of cable (like MTV, ESPN, and CNN) and it’s said that the next generation of these will emerge on YouTube.

So it might not happen right away, but this could be a defining moment in the transition from cable shows to YouTube shows. It’s definitely something to keep an eye out for.

Siri, Could You Pour Me A Beer? The folks at redpepper found a...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:49:41 -0400

Siri, Could You Pour Me A Beer?

The folks at redpepper found a creative new use for Siri. It’s like the modern day version of The Breakfast Machine. Sure, it’s not the most effective way to pour beer, but it’s still pretty cool!

Colleges and Social Media

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:38:00 -0400

“For universities competing to attract top students, it’s no longer enough to have a glossy brochure and a sleek website.”

Having a strong social media campaign and web presence is essential for colleges to have these days. Many applicants have come to expect it, and the colleges that aren’t meeting expectations are loosing prospective students.

A survey found that 98% of colleges have a Facebook page and 84% have a Twitter account, though some barely update it. But just having these pages isn’t enough. Many colleges are going further and including student-produced videos and blog entries,and regularly updated Twitter feeds and Facebook posts from students and applicants.

Dean Tsouvalas has come up with a ranking system, StudentAdvisor.com’s “Top 100 Social Media Colleges,” which classifies the universities on how well they use social media. First place goes to Johns Hopkins, and among the top ten are The Ohio State University, Louisiana State University, and United States Military Academy at West Point.

“It’s not enough to be satisfied that your school is on Facebook,” Barnes said. “Students will make a judgment about the university if it is not current and responsive online. When their post doesn’t get answered, they are not interested anymore.”

“PR people should not be doing these blogs. Students have an antenna for that,” she said. “If you try to sanitize your blog, students will see right through that.”

I thought this article was really interesting. I checked out the “Top 100 Social Media College” link and while OSU made the top 4 slot, Miami University did not even make the list. Looks like we’ve got to step up our game. Our culture is changing and beginning to expect a strong web presence from these schools. It’s a whole new playing field out there now when it comes to admissions, and if a college is slow to catch on with social media, they could be losing a lot of perspective students.

YouTube evolution- helping build brands

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 23:01:45 -0400

Companies still spend 38% of advertising funds on television ads and only 1% for online video, but YouTube wants to change that. “We would love YouTube to be a much larger part of brands’ advertising budget and mix in the next year and the future than it is today,” said Lucas Watson, YouTube’s vice president of online video global sales. YouTube took the step of hiring Mr. Watson from Procter & Gamble, former head of digital business strategy, who in June became YouTube’s first vice president of online video global sales. And now YouTube has acquired expertise in consumer-packaged goods, a sector that has been slow to online video advertising. Video ads for one of Procter & Gamble’s brands, Old Spice, were a viral success online last year.

YouTube is willing to experiment with new types of advertising that could never appear on television, Mr. Palmer said, like a live-streamed ad campaign that he is working on, choose-your-own-adventure videos or user-created ads.

We’re learning more about YouTube in class and have now uploaded our own videos at this point. But it’s these kind of homemade videos that might discourage companies from spending a lot of advertising money on online videos. As Mr.Palmer put it, “It’s hard to justify spending millions of dollars running a Web spot that has helicopter shots and explosions when your ad is sitting next to something shot on a two-year-old cellphone.”

But now with things like Google TV getting more popular too, advertising has the opportunity to make some innovative changes (with Google TV, television will also be able to show personalized ads). Ad agencies are only now hiring people with expertise in online video, so online video and advertising still have yet to really grow and reach it’s full potential. Will YouTube be successful in becoming the home for professional online video ads? We’ll have to wait and see.

9 Reasons Why Online Video Advertising Has Failed to Meet Previous Forecasts

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:23:39 -0400

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/08/why-online-video-advertising-failed-forecasts/

eMarketer’s current $2.16 billion forecast for 2011 is half of what it projected four years ago (in 2007, estimates for 2011 ranged from $4.3 billion - $10 billion). While online video is huge right now, it doesn’t seem to have met the expectations. This article outlines 9 reasons why: “This isn’t about semantics,” “It starts with YouTube domination,” “User-generated content remains a major driver of volume,” “Lack of transparency,” “Wrong metrics,” “YouTube late to pre-roll party,” “Hollywood is pulling a cobra commander,” “Mobile wild card,” and “Streamlining.” It leaves us with the question of where online video revenues will be in the future.

This article is relevant to class as we continue our video project. We touched a little on user-generated content last class and this article describes how we’re seeing more monetization around user-generated content than ever before. There was an interesting statistic in the article that said it’s estimated that 100 million people will be watching a billion pieces of video content per day!

Ford's Use of Social Media

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:23:37 -0400

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ernan-roman/lessons-from-fords-brilli_b_816605.html

Ford has been recognized for their successful use of social media and how it helped them make their come back. Using social media to engage and interact with costumers make all the difference. In 2009 specifically, they spent a quarter of their marketing funds on digital and social media (unlike their competitors). This led to 11,000 posted videos, 15,000 Twitter messages, over 11 million social networking impressions for the “Fiesta Movement.” It resulted in 4.5 million YouTube views, 3.5 million Twitter impressions and 80,000 “hand raisers” who asked to be kept up to date on the launch of Ford Fiesta. There are multiple feeds that costumers use to connect to the company through.

YouTube This video explores the headquarters of YouTube....

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:55:00 -0400

YouTube

This video explores the headquarters of YouTube. It’s definitely a cool office, including features like a Tiki bar, big slides, the “Double Rainbow” conference room, viral video memorabilia, and gnomes…

As we’re creating our own viral videos that will be posted to YouTube, it’s cool to be able to take a look at the home of “the world’s biggest archive of cute cat videos (among other things).”

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/30/tc-cribs-sliding-through-youtubes-double-rainbow-gnomes/

How a video game is helping lead to an AIDS vaccine

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:40:10 -0400

This TechCrunch article, “One Up:Gamers Help Scientists Solve Molecular Puzzle That could Lead To AIDS Vaccine,” talks about how HIV/AIDS research took a huge leap forward last week with the help of gamers.

A game called FoldIt was created by a team of researchers at the University of Washington. It allows gamers to contribute to scientific research by playing with the shape and structure of proteins. Proteins are an important key to developing cures.

“Scientists have been attempting to decipher a protein called “retroviral protease” for over 15 years, as the protease is one of the key proteins that allows HIV to multiply and replicate itself in living cells. Using FoldIt, gamers were able to identify the structure of the protein — within a matter of 10 days. With the structure of retroviral protease unlocked, scientists can now begin taking the necessary steps to build a drug that could significantly slow the speed at which HIV develops.”

In class, we look at current events in the tech world to see how they’re shaping our culture, and this is a prime example of that. What a cool way to utilize gaming, and bring these two groups of people together to help find a cure for AIDS! It sounds like this could become a new trend for research, as FoldIt and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of other scientific challenges- from drug development to genetic engineering for future biofuels.

Facebook as Tastemaker

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:57:00 -0400

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/technology/facebook-makes-a-push-to-be-a-media-hub.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=technology

New features are being added to Facebook to help the site become more of a force that shapes what we watch, hear, read and buy. Facebook and its dozens of partner companies hope to influence what users and their friends consume. Its new partners include Netflix and Hulu for video, Spotify for music, The Washington Post and Yahoo for news, Ticketmaster for concert tickets and a host of food, travel and consumer brands.

A new feature called Timeline lets users post information about their past, like weddings and big vacations. On the site you can also be able to more precisely signal what you’re reading, watching, hearing, eating, etc. All this information can be used by Facebook to sell more fine-tuned advertising.

I found the final quote in this article really interesting:

“Facebook wants to be omnipresent in the Web experience by adding commerce, video and mail to their early successes with news feeds and picture tagging,” said Jodee Rich, founder of People Browsr, based in San Francisco, which analyzes data from social networks. “Trying to be all things to all people was the undoing of Microsoft and AOL. If Facebook continues to overreach, they will stumble.”

In class, we’re continually discussing the changes of Facebook and it’s attempts to compete with Google +. All of Facebook’s recent changes seem to be making most users mad and annoyed, but they keep on pushing these changes. So how far can Facebook push the line until it does go too far, as suggested by Rich? Considering the past “undoing of Microsoft and AOL,” Facebook should be careful in it’s efforts to become omnipresent.

Transitioning from Social Networks to Social Discovery

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:21:28 -0400

This article, “The New Social Network,” discusses the new direction many social networking services are taking. Many are becoming more about social discovery, and finding people who are nearby you and who you’d share interests with. This article goes through current apps like Foursquare and Gowalla and looks at the strengths and weaknesses they have as far as being a good social discovery service. Proximity-based social networks are certainly on the rise, but many of them just aren’t popular enough to fully take off.

In class we’re always discussing the successful, rising social networks and the ones on the decline. It’s really interesting to observe the ups and downs that services like Yahoo and Facebook go through, for example. So now that the concept of social discovery and proximity-based networking is being experimented with more, I’m curious to see where the trend goes. It’s hard to predict what will be the next breakthrough hit and what will flop.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/16/the-new-social-network-whos-nearby-not-who-you-know/

"British Social Discovery Site Snog.com Goes Viral"

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:50:28 -0400

This article discusses a young British startup, called Snog.com. It’s seen some serious viral adaptation in the U.K. over the last six months. The goal of the site is to become a “social discovery platform,” not another social network.

In relation to class, this article says that “the web has been home to a fair number of questionable memes and websites over the years. One among them that you’re likely familiar with is “Hot Or Not,” the site that allows visitors to vote on photos of random people based on attractiveness.” This concept is a source of inspiration for this website, Snog.com.

Snog is targeted at teenagers (average age of 17). Users can choose to “Snog, Marry or Avoid” based on another user’s photo a bio. It has social elements of following users they like, write public notes, or send private messages. The founders want to integrate users’ interest graphs into the site to allow users to search people with similar interests and demographics.

This site went viral, recording 30,000 page views in the first two hours it was up!

The article says that “Snog therefore seems to be an interesting case study for how to build a social web business, maintain early interest, and make it something more than just another updated Hot Or Not.”

This is relevant to class because we just started discussing memes and the concept of going viral. As we start our viral video project, we can look to sites like this and consider what it is that made it such a success.

Source: techcrunch.com

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/08/british-social-discovery-site-snog-com-looks-to-build-a-better-hot-or-not-goes-viral-and-mobile/

"Google Docs Stumbles, Goes Down"

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:07:00 -0400

This article from techcrunch.com is about how Google Docs was down for awhile today. Apparently it’s not the first time it has been down, but it’s usually reliable.

But “usually reliable” isn’t good enough since Google docs has became so important to businesses and students. It’s pushing everyone to move away from their native document editors. The article also says that issues are particularly bad for Chromebook users, who are relying exclusively on web apps to complete their work and don’t have local copies of their documents.

It’s important for all of us to keep this in mind when we save documents to Google Docs because things can and will go wrong sometimes. It’s always good to have back-ups!

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/07/google-docs-stumbles-goes-down/#comment-box

Sprint Sues Blackboard Over Its iPhone and iPad Applications

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 02:20:00 -0400

Sprint Sues Blackboard Over Its iPhone and iPad Applications:

This article from “The Chronicle” is about how Sprint is suing Blackboard. Last year Sprint and Blackboard made an agreement to offer a free mobile version of the course-management software that would work only over Sprint’s network. However, Blackboard’s iPhone and iPad versions of Mobile Learn were accessible over campus wireless networks.

Blackboard argues that the contract only prohibits the use of Sprint’s competitor’s cellular signals, making use of campus Wi-Fi networks allowed. While Sprint argues that a wireless network qualifies as a network in addition to a cellular network. Sprint asks the court to enjoin Blackboard from making Blackboard Mobile Learn available over Wi-Fi at no cost to schools.

This is pertinent to class because it deals with issues concerning the web technology of apps and discussing which networks should be able to use this particular one. There’s clearly disagreeing perspectives on the subject.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/sprint-sues-blackboard-over-its-iphone-and-ipad-applications/33010#disqus_thread

Viral Video Example - Grape Lady Falls!

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:21:11 -0400

Viral Video Example - Grape Lady Falls!