Entries for month: March 2010
Does “cool” beat “free” for younger audience?
30 March 2010 · By Steve Nilan
We sure didn't see this coming: younger potential iPad owners are more willing to pay for newspapers, books, and magazines than older people.
A fresh Comscore survey reveals that 68% of potential iPad owners aged 25-34 and 59% of 35- to 44-year-olds would be willing to pay for content.
Really?
Isn't this the same generation that believes that free content is a birthright?! What changed? Could it be really be just because of the emergence of tablets?
I have a theory. It's the "call of the cool." There is a constant craving to be first with the next. It's about exclusivity and the lure of the VIP Room. In this cool new club the bouncer is Steve Jobs guarding the entrance with brains instead of brawn. Using iTunes, Apple has trained us well to stay in line behind the velvet ropes. Before iTunes, music on the Web was a crazy free-for-all. Apple went against the tide and came up with a model that worked for music and all manner of content. (There is still a free-for-all out there, but Apple delivered the only sanity that stuck.)
...[more]Blogging in the Middle Ages: what’s old is news again
11 March 2010 · By Joel Van Valin
I admit I was not giddy with expectation when the blog craze hit in the mid-1990s. Web logs — their name shortened to the nifty-sounding “blog” — seemed to me just a different type of web page, one with periodic news updates, like a diary. What I failed to grasp was that the blog was not a new technology, but a new do-it-yourself model for news dissemination. It was new, at least, for the internet. For the print world, the blog is a very old concept — one that led to the birth of newspapers themselves.
A print equivalent of blogs can be found in the pamphlets and broadsides of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, which contained news of recent events (battles, coronations, new laws). By the early 17th century, individuals and mercantile companies had begun publishing a regular series of such news summaries; for example the Mercurius Gallobelgicus of Cologne, appearing in Latin yearly from 1595 to 1635. In England, translations of Dutch corantos (“currents of news”) were appearing by 1621. States also had their news outlets, such as the fogli d'avvisi put out by the Venetian government during a war with Turkey in 1563. These newssheets were read aloud in public, and the cost for a reading was a gazeta (about ¾ a penny), from which the modern term “gazette” derives. (This was arguably the first paid content strategy!)
...[more]Newspapers should get personal because it pays
02 March 2010 · By Richard Hall
The past: My mother-in law died recently. She was a wise old lady who was always cheerful and had enjoyed life – even though she had lived through the terrifying bombing of London during World War II, and lost to the blitz several members of her close family.
Shortly before she died I asked what was the greatest change that she had seen during her lifetime. Guess what she said. Air travel? Television? Radio? The motorcar?
Surprisingly, it was none of these.
It was “electricity” – the ability to flick a switch in her home and have instant light. No more candles or gas lamps. Can you image what that Eureka! moment must have been like for a young girl – and it was only a short lifetime away.
Change in our lives continues to accelerate. Mobile phones used not to be very mobile. My first mobile cost then more than £1,000, and the battery seemed to weigh nearly as much!
...[more]
