Merrill on Multimedia

C-SPAN has constructed an interesting online tool this election season that chronicles the debates and breaks them down into easily digestable and interactive pieces. This site is a good example of how news orgs can make complex subjects and topics easier to digest. The site includes:

• Video Links
• A Debate Timeline that shows topic and time spent by each candidate
• Up-to-the-minute updates from the Twitterverse
• A tagcloud/tree of most frequently used words in the debates

Check out the site at debatehub.c-span.org. Some screenshots after the jump. Read more…

Blogging, Interactivity, Multimedia, Personalization

With all the live-blogging, tweeting and video chat taking place online during Friday’s presidential debate, who could pay attention to TV?

OK, so most folks don’t sit in front of TV with their laptops and watch other people watching television, but that’s what I did while Barack Obama and John McCain verbally sparred in Mississippi on Friday night. I wanted to see how the Internet’s live political conversation might affect my perception of the televised debate.

So while listening to the candidates talk, I was clicking around the Web, watching citizens and professional journalists use live-blogging services like CoverItLive.com, video blogging services like Seesmic and text-messaging services like Twitter to share their thoughts on what the candidates were saying.

Pictured above is Seesmic

Hardly a satisfying way to experience a big moment in American political theater, I know. But it was strangely compelling, especially the video-blogging by people in their living rooms and home offices. Even some of those annoyingly short text updates from Twitter added a new dimension to my debate experience.

I confess I’m no fan of Twitter, the real-time “micro-blogging” service that lets people write often incomprehensible text messages of up to 140 characters and zap them to anyone who “subscribes” to their updates. And on Friday, most of the political “tweets” (web jargon for Twitter’s text updates) scrolling down the service’s special election page seemed obvious and trite. For example:

stephensays one of the things that scares me about mccain: he whistles when he speaks. a sign that a man is too old: he whistles when he speaks.

SignalToNoise Obama and McCain are very catty tonight.

mimiboo McCain’s tie is giving me a headache.

But as the debate wore on, this stream-of-consciousness reaction of strangers slowly added up to more than the sum of their individual comments. I had been looking for a new view of public opinion. What I found felt more like a multimedia party–where everyone was talking and hardly anyone was listening.

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Blogging, Multimedia live-blogging, Multimedia, Twitter, video

Blogging is still like the early days of the ‘Net–mostly a good ole boys club. That much is obvious from the just-released State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which found that 66 percent of bloggers worldwide are male.

But some less obvious findings in this report from blog search engine Technorati interest me more. After all, the Internet population eventually lost its male dominance. So, too, will the blogging universe gain more women writers over time.

What surprised me about this survey of 1,209 bloggers is how much money some are making. The top 10 percent of bloggers are earning an average of $19,000 a year from their blogs, while the top one percent earn over $200,000 annually.

That doesn’t mean most blogs throw off much revenue, though. The median annual revenue for all U.S. bloggers with ads on their blogs is only $200, meaning half earn less. The higher, $19,000 average is skewed by top-tier bloggers who earn the really big bucks.

Slightly more than half of all blogs have advertising now, and most use self-serve tools from Google, Yahoo and others that automate the display of ads based on the text of their posts. Only 19 percent negotiate directly with advertisers, and six percent have a sales force.

Technorati, which monitors activity in millions of blogs, released the fifth and final chapter of its blogging report today. Overall, it shows blog growth slowing, and posting activity declining.

Read more…

Advertising, Blogging Advertising, Blogging