Making Sense of Twitter in Newspaper Industry

A lot of us and many other out there are still trying to figure out what twitter is and how we can use such a huge amount of information that constantly gets updated and repeated in real-time. If you are following a few hundred people who are very active and tweet very frequently, your twitter stream just becomes a (vertically) rolling news ticker and it becomes frustrating to follow what's going on.

Many start-ups and entrepreneurs are trying to make sense of that information and put it together in a way that can be useful to everyone using the tool, not only to the marketers and self-promoters.

One such effort is http://paper.li

paper.li is a user-created online newspaper that gathers news from the topics or people one follows in twitter. It takes into consideration who is tweeting which story and the popularity of each story and the person who is tweeting it.

While trying to create my own newspaper, I tried to follow Professor Venkat and the website generated this: http://paper.li/nvenkatraman . Check this one out.

Now, it's not a complete newspaper and may not comparable to some other big real newspapers. But this definitely is a step towards how things are changing in the newspaper industry in ways no one ever thought of.

rise of porn in eBooks

A bestselling book on The Kindle is called "Compromising Positions," and it's about an uptight businessman getting tangled up with a wild woman who introduces him to all sorts of interesting workouts (Sorry, I'm trying to keep this post relatively PG).

Anyway, you won't find the title on the NYT bestsellers list or Publisher's Weekly, but it's a topseller on Kindle. Why? It might have something to do with the fact that the book is available for free and it’s instantly downloadable. The publisher is doing this with hopes that readers will pay for future titles.

This article in Slate brings up many interesting points about the "Compromising Positions" phenomenon -- about the giveaway tactic, about the new genre of romance novel targeting men, etc. -- but what I found most interesting is the move of porn into this relatively new medium:

"Like the Kindle itself, the marriage of porn and e-reader is relatively new; much of this digital erotica has been added to the Kindle library in the last 18 months or so. From a technology standpoint, anyone who's seen Boogie Nights or Middle Men could predict this development. Every time a major new content platform—print, film, cable, VHS, DVD, the Internet, mobile phones—has experienced massive growth, it has either been driven by a porn boom or at least brought the porn industry along for the ride. (The biggest exception is probably radio.)"

This seems to support what my team learned while doing our IS-SI project on DivX. Not only is porn one of the most frequently watched type of content -- the industry has historically been among the first to use and support new technologies. It would be interesting to see what role (if any) adult fiction plays as eReaders become increasingly mainstream.

Which also makes one wonder, what does Netflix have against adult content?

Social Ads Soon to Revolutionize the Advertising Industry

How annoying are the ads that suddenly come up when we are engrossed in a thrilling scene of a movie or popup when we are reading something important. But still, there are ads that we just love to watch again and again. YouTube has thousands of those. But companies never had a way to know if the customers loved their ads till they had drained down huge sums of money in advertising.

I just saw this post on Google's blog, where the author talks about the future of display advertising. Even though there are many interesting forecasts in this post, the one that I really struck me was that 75 percent of ads on the web will be social in nature. People will be able to share ads and comment on them. I think that this will completely change the game in the advertising industry.

Today, so many companies run advertisement campaigns and have to wait for a certain period of time to measure the performance of these campaigns and see the results. Even then they hardly come to know what people who watch the ads like or dislike about the ads. If ads go social, the companies will receive one more level, but a very important one, of insight. Companies will start knowing what did people who watch the ads and purchase the product, like in the ads. Companies will know real time what their target audience doesn't like about the ads and will be able to change the ads on the fly. It will also change the business models of the advertising companies. Companies will start paying advertising agencies money based on the real-time performance and customer feedbacks. This will not only apply to the internet based ads. With Google TV, Apple TV and probably many more in the pipeline, social ads will have a huge impact in the TV industry too.

White space for content discovery

I found IBM's framework for defining the new business models in the media industry is quite insightful, and reading the complete report made me ponder the changing media stack.



Here's the traditional stack as I've drawn it out. In the traditional world of the lower left quadrant, we've seen that content discovery is a function fulfilled by the content distribution layer. Publishers, movie studios and game developers spend millions to make sure you know about the latest Harry Potter or Grand Theft Auto.







But I'm curious about the content discovery process would work in the other quadrants, and in the "New platform aggregation" section in particular, as we move into the future. My sense is that content discovery will develop into a full-fledged layer of the stack, which will look like this.

And while companies like Google, Facebook and YouTube are already playing a role in content discovery, I think there's still plenty of white space there. Google and YouTube can help me search for content - but I have to be looking for something. Facebook can help me find something even if I'm not looking, but I'm dependent on the tastes of people in my network who post links to content. There's definitely scope for something that will know what I like (or learn, like Pandora does) and trawl the "out there" for user generated content that I will enjoy. Does anybody know of something like this that already exists?