Article by: Pete Cashmore, Written: November 4, 2009, Found on CNN Web site

The Twitter community is abuzz this week about the site's new "Lists" feature, which allows users to create collections of interesting people to follow on the micro-messaging service.

From lists of sports stars to comedians to political pundits, Twitter has provided its members with the tools required to splice a torrent of updates into a series of relevant, topic-based streams. In doing so, the social networking startup may have hit upon the long-overdue cure to information overload and birthed a new breed of editor: the real-time Web curator.

Drowning in data

Approximately 25 million Tweets are posted every day; more than 5 billion have been created since Twitter's launch. Facebook users are even more prolific in aggregate: Forty-five million updates are posted there daily. In May, the last date for which we have data, YouTube announced that 20 hours of video is uploaded to its servers every minute. That's more than three years of content being uploaded to YouTube daily. As the barriers to media production fall -- cameras in virtually every cell phone, video cameras in iPods, text messaging as a publishing platform -- this content tsunami is growing ever taller.

The friend filter

An obvious antidote: use your friends as a filter. Google's new Social Search allows users to add their social networking profiles to a Google account and see search results filtered and prioritized based on their circle of friends. Through integration with Facebook, meanwhile, Web sites are allowing users to create personalized experiences. Connect your Facebook account with social news site Digg.com, for instance, and your existing friends become a filter for the most interesting web links.

From personal to professional

Much like blogging, however, link-sharing on the Web has evolved beyond the personal. While most Twitter users stick to the standard "What Are You Doing?" fare, a growing number spend much of their time collating links and pointing their followers to relevant, timely, topic-based information. Tracking the pulse of PR in the digital age? You'll probably want to follow Edelman Digital's Steve Rubel, who scours the Web for topical links and shares his findings on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Seeking insights into the mainstream media's transition to the Web? Follow Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor, podcaster and media pundit. Want to know what venture capitalists are reading these days? Try Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, who shares links and insights daily with his 35,000 Twitter followers. See a list of CNN's anchors on Twitter

Next up: collate dozens of these experts into a topic-based list, and -- voila! -- your hand-picked editorial team extracts the signal from a wall of noise. Most of these link gatherers have "real" jobs, you'll notice; I see no reason why that should remain the case. In the attention economy, wherein the scarce resource is time and the abundant one is content, those who effectively allocate our attention create value. Where value is created, it follows that money can be made. The inevitable outcome: Web curators are not just real-time but full-time.

The rise of real-time journalism

Possibly we don't need a new breed, however, just an adaptation. Journalists, it would seem, are well-placed to capitalize on the trend, since directing an audience's attention via links is not materially different to editing a newspaper or magazine. Perhaps media companies already see this emergent future: The New York Times has created a Twitter list of all its staff, and the Los Angeles Times has set about categorizing Twitter celebrities. See CNN International's Twitter list

The Web-centric Huffington Post has gone a step further by embedding Twitter Lists on its Web site to create hubs of real-time updates. For those cast adrift in a sea of content, good news: A "curation" economy is beginning to take shape, tweet by tweet, list by list.

Casey Says: Although I'm not a Twitter user, I know what it's about and how it works. I came across this article describing Twitter's new list feature which I thought was a good new feature for this social networking site. I do use Facebook and Facebook's main page operates a lot like Twitter (showing your friends constant updates of "what they are doing" at every moment) so I understand how this new lists feature would be helpful/useful when separating news content that seems like information overload. Even the world of journalism is finding this new feature on Twitter useful, allowing these news companies to separate their content into necessary categories of news/people.

Link to Article: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/04/twitter.lists/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Article written by: Dan Sweeney, December 19, 2008, on Web site: The Huffington Post

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It's no secret that the entire industry is going through a sort of self-flagellating introspection over its future these days. Newspaper readership is on the decline, magazines are folding right and left, the evening news has lost most of its prominence, and so on. Throughout the industry, companies have desperately been trying to figure out how to turn back the tide.

The company that cuts my checks, Tribune Company, even has a C-level executive whose sole purpose is figuring out how to reinvent news media. Tribune's Chief Innovation Officer, Lee Abrams, sends out wild-eyed, company-wide memos about once a week, each detailing the latest newspaper redesign or brainstormed idea.

Like most journalists, I've given the future a lot of thought. And I think the problem is more systemic than we've previously realized. It's the Internet. Sure, that's been said before, but I don't think people realize just how large a problem we're talking about here. Granted, Craigslist and similar sites have all but destroyed the need for classified advertising. And Google can get you any news story you want with the tap of a few keys. But look at the total, bigger picture. What is it that journalists do? Essentially, the journalism industry sells information.

And, sure, people have said that before as well, but they've usually used it as a justification for why journalism will be so important in the coming years -- there's so much information out there now, goes the argument, that we need an entire industry to filter it and find the stuff that news consumers need to know. To that, I say, horseshit. It's a simple problem of supply and demand. Information has become so commonplace, so readily available, that its value as a commodity has bottomed out. That is the essential problem of the journalism industry today. We are trying to sell something to which everyone already has ready access. It's the equivalent of trying to sell people air... or water.

Despite almost everyone in the United States having easy access to water from their taps, a huge portion of people buy their water instead. In many cases, they buy water even to stock it in their homes, right next to faucets that would pour the stuff for free. Why? I can think of two reasons. First, bottled water can be taken with you when tap water must be left at home. Second, the marketers of bottled water have convinced many people that their product is far superior to the stuff that comes out of your faucet. Therein lies the future of journalism.

If news professionals wish to thrive in the coming years, they need to make sure that the industry produces a product that can be taken places in which people have no access to cheap, easily obtainable information (i.e. the Internet). With portable Internet access becoming more and more common, this gets more and more difficult, but it's still possible, and has been done in some cases. (Note the relative success of commuter papers to traditional dailies. If we acknowledge that portability is one of the key issues to the future, then broadsheet newspapers should immediately be retired in favor of tabloid, three- or four-page jumps should be ended, and so on. Most editors and designers that read this probably already know the fixes.)

The second issue is the more important one in light of the fact that, eventually, the Internet will be accessible just about everywhere. If newspapers, magazines and even certain segments of broadcast journalism are to have a viable future, people need to be convinced that the information they get in those products is superior to the information they get on the Internet. And that means that newsroom cutbacks, especially in investigative journalism and other areas of exclusive content, have been precisely the wrong thing to do. The focus of marketers should be to convince readership of the ridiculousness of information that comes up at a quick Google search and intelligent people's preference for the alternative. (At the very least, that alternative should be the newspaper's Web site.) Editorial needs to back that up by offering readers content that is both exclusive and superior to other products. In many cases, that doesn't mean that a paper needs to be the first one to report something -- after all, the basic facts of a big story will be available a thousand times over on sites across the Net within minutes of one news organization breaking the story. Indeed, we may need just the opposite -- slow, deliberative work that explains a story better than anyone else can.

But, taking all this into account, there lies a further basic problem: Is bottled water really that much better than the stuff that comes out of the tap? Both are just a couple hydrogen atoms mixed with an oxygen atom, multiplied a mind-bogglingly huge amount of times. Both are drinkable. Both are water. Recently, several cities across the country, including Miami in my own back yard, have started a campaign against bottled water as part of the green movement, encouraging people to use tap water. Bottled water really isn't much better than tap water, and in some ways, it's worse. In that sense, the future of journalism may be nothing but a cheap con game.

Casey Says: I liked this article's comparison of tap/bottled water to the news. I thought that it was kind of interesting/true how bottled water and news are alike. The news is something that really must be accessible from anywhere and must be credible. Newspapers are holding on to its' readers because of these reasons.

Link to Article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-sweeney/journalism-is-the-new-bot_b_152365.html

Article By: Maggie Astor, October 21, 2009, on Web site: Columbia Spectator

Artible By: Anthony Massuci, written Sep 22nd 2009, on Web site Daily Finance

Recently, I noticed I'm using fewer cell phone minutes as I spend more time on Twitter and Facebook. It has me wondering, is social media making me less social?

How about President Barack Obama? Will he be less likely to speak his mind in public after ABC News reporters used Twitter to spread his off-the-record comment about Kanye West acting like a "jackass" on MTV's video music awards show? TMZ.com, owned by DailyFinance's parent company AOL, then published audio and video of those comments. Will such incidents cause celebrities and non-celebrities to be more on guard for fear that their every move may be made public via social media?

It seems plausible, especially as more of us walk around with cell phones equipped with cameras, voice and video recorders. Fact is, we're all in danger of having embarrassing behavior broadcast to the world.

And it's only going to get worse. The number of cell phones offering such features are multiplying, says Ilja Laurs, CEO of San Mateo, California-based GetJar Inc., which helps develop cell phone applications. According to GetJar, mobile phones are reaching audiences that other media can't and the number of people getting information from the mobile internet will triple by 2014. Already, the company says that 72 percent of consumers report that they now use mobile internet more than PC-based internet.

So imagine yelling at the manager at your local grocery store for a worthwhile reason. Now imagine having that discourse posted on YouTube and having it seen by your grandmother and countless people half-a-world away - in a very different context. You might get the 15-minutes of fame you've always, or never, wanted. Would you have been better off swallowing your pride and avoiding the altercation?

Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of Boston-based Media Psychology Research Center, says fears caused by social media are no different than those sparked by other technology changes seen in history. Socrates didn't like it when people started writing, she says, because he thought it would take away our ability to remember. Some people, such as Rutledge's grandmother, worried after the telephone was invented that people would no longer visit her.

"People don't like change much," Rutledge says. "Biologically, we're wired to worry about change. We like things to stay the same because that's how we find stability." No wonder, then, that people now fear that social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook will actually make us less social.

But maybe those people have it wrong. Jeff Pulver, who co-founded Vonage and hosts Twitter conferences in cities including Los Angeles, New York and Tel Aviv, argues that social media should be celebrated, not feared. "Social media helps increase self-expression," he says. "It provides a platform for everyone's voice to be heard. People who are not confident about their voice, discover that their voice matters."

Pulver argues that President Obama's "jackass" comment may have been shared over CompuServe or AOL's AIM instant-messaging service even a decade ago. So don't blame Twitter. It just happens to be the forum used in 2009. In some ways, Twitter has had a transformative power the way the telephone or radio did when they were introduced.

"No one at Twitter envisioned that it would be a change-agent for politics or that it would be a platform allowing celebrities to talk to their fans or that Hollywood producers would live in fear each time a movie opens.," Pulver says. That's because folks on Twitter can quickly praise or condemn a new release to thousands of people, possibly leading to the film's success or demise.

Perhaps a better question is whether social media is actually making society more social? Laurs, Rutledge and Pulver think that's the case - and they may be right. Even so, the next time you think you may flip your lid in public, be aware that there may be a camera or microphone pointed your way.

Now, excuse me while I update my Facebook status.

Casey Says: I liked this article because I thought it brought up some very true points. It's no argument that social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, can make people less social. People can spend less time having conversations through face-to-face interaction or through cell phones because they can chat whenever online. However, social media can make people more social in the fact that it gives people a bigger platform to speak their minds. It will be interesting to see how communication is affected with technology in the future.

Link to article: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/22/massucis-take-is-social-media-making-us-less-social/

Using a campaign of limited showings, social media and word-of-mouth fan buzz, the film has managed to become a breakout hit without the aid of a glitzy marketing campaign -- or even a traditional movie trailer.

According to Variety, the very low-budget film (it reportedly cost $11,000), which played in fewer than 200 theaters, raked in $7.1 million over the weekend -- a record for a limited-release film. The film had an impressive $44,163 per-screen average and placement in the top five of the box office ratings over the weekend.

"We think it's exciting that they are taking this grassroots approach to independent film because sometimes independent films do get lost in the shuffle," said Kevin Carr, a writer/reviewer for the site Film School Rejects. "It's a unique test to see if people can demand things outside of standard marketing campaigns."

"Paranormal Activity" bills itself as "the first-ever major film release demanded by you." The movie, which was an audience favorite at the alternative Slamdance festival in early 2008, was acquired by Dreamworks (then a part of Paramount Pictures) two years ago. The studio initially planned to remake it using better-known actors. But after studio executives, including Steven Spielberg, viewed it, they decided the film could stand more or less as it was (though director Oren Peli did shorten the film and shoot a new ending).

The movie gained buzz after Paramount began late-night screenings in college towns, and fans took to Twitter and other sites to hail the scary flick, which centers on a young couple who believe their house may be haunted. Paramount increased the interest by urging fans to sign on to ParanormalMovie.com and demand theaters in their locations show the film.Peli posted a video on YouTube expressing gratitude to the fans and urging them to continue rooting for the movie.

"I just wanted to take this opportunity to speak directly to the fans and thank you all for the amazing support," Peli said on the video. "It's just been overwhelming especially considering the long road this film had for three years and the studio wanting to do a remake."More than a million people have heeded the call. The result has been a groundswell of interest rivaling that of big-budget films.Megan Colligan, co-president of marketing for Paramount, said the studio had a limited budget for advertising the film, so its marketing had to be tightly targeted.

Moreover, condensing its atmosphere into a 30-second TV spot was a challenge, so executives opted to produce a trailer showing fans waiting in line for the movie and their reaction to the film, said Josh Greenstein, who also serves as co-president of marketing for Paramount.

"It was very important that we sold this as an experience and rather than just a movie," he said. "When people saw the movie they loved it so much and there is such a slow build of terror that you have to sit through to experience the full effect of the movie, so we changed the marketing techniques in advertising and online to make it more experiential." The unique marketing campaign appears to have paid off. "The fans have really made this their film and they are doing the bulk of the work [to market the film]," Colligan said. "The film is selling itself," Greenstein added.

Critics have also taken notice, and have showered the film with good reviews. In giving the movie an A-minus grade, Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote "With its this-is-really-happening vibe, 'Paranormal Activity' scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you."Overall, the film has earned a strong 85 percent approval rating at review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Moviegoers agree. Rajiim Gross, an iReporter who posted a review of the film, said he found "Paranormal Activity" to be much better than "Blair Witch Project," another indie-horror film to which it is being compared. Check out Rajiim Gross' iReport

"It actually scared the hell out of me," Gross said. "I saw it during the day and I would hate to be someone who went home after seeing it late at night." Gross said he believed the studio was smart to leverage the Internet to spread the word. "The best advertising is word of mouth," Gross said. "People tell 10 friends, they go see it and they tell 10 more friends and soon you have an entire community who wants to see it."Carr, whose Film School Rejects site has been following the frenzy, said the movie "gets inside of your head" and benefits from the traditional fan support that horror films often enjoy.

That, coupled with the big cinema thrills and chills, should add up to continued box office success, Carr said."Watching it with 250 strangers in a movie theater and getting everybody to jump at the same time definitely has an effect," he said. "It's the event film right now of the year, which is something that needs to be experienced."

Casey Says: This just shows how social media can really have a huge impact on lives. This movie shows that it's possible to make a low-budget film, spend less money on advertising, and still make a lot of money at the box office. By using social media such as Twitter and Youtube, this movie was able to promote itself in a quick, efficient, and cheap manner. This just shows that expensive advertising really isn't always needed when you can utilize social media sites to get people's attention.

On Monday, October 12^th, I attended the ESC Communication’s Week and listened to the featured speaker, John Stossel , speak at the Hughes Metropolitan Complex. John Stossel is an award-winning news correspondent and was a co-anchor of “20/20”. Stossel is best known for his recurring segments on “20/20” called “Give Me a Break” and “Family Fix”. In the near future, Stossel will be moving to the FOX Business Network where he hopes to begin having more creative and opinionated segments.On Monday night, Stossel spoke mostly on the government and different issues surrounding government spending and health care. He expressed his fears on how the government is spending Americans’ money. One thing that he mentioned was that American innovation is being stifled because of government regulation.

Another segment that he took time to discuss were the different ways that Americans die and that journalists report on. I found this kind of interesting. He provided different graphs showing these different statistics. One of the things that Americans are most afraid of are dying in a plane crash or in a terrorism act, but according to his statistics, these are some of the least common ways of dying. The most common way that American’s are dying are due to poverty. He explained that “wealthier” is “healthier” and that people in poverty are dying at higher rates because they can’t afford things such as fresh food, healthcare, and proper tires.

Stossel also spoke about his experience in journalism which is relevant for this last segment of class. He explained that after graduating, he had no idea what career he would pursue. He said that he just had to try something, take a leap of faith. Since then, he has had one of the most successful journalism careers, working alongside such journalists like Barbara Walters. Although not everyone may agree with his views on politics, I enjoyed listening to him speak.

Article written by: Hanah Cho, September 26, 2009, on the Chicago Tribune Web site

Baltimore money manager T. Rowe Price Group is one of two new investors in social micro-blogging site Twitter Inc., which has lined up new financing.

Twitter's founders seem determined to raise it without a corporate parent. Twitter has lined up $100 million to finance its operations while founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone plot ways to make money off one of the Internet's most popular communications tools.

The investment values the 3-year-old company at $1 billion, even though it has yet to generate any meaningful revenue, let alone profits.

Twitter itself didn't provide specifics about the investment, saying only it involved a significant sum. A person with knowledge of the negotiations confirmed the amounts to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the parties had agreed not to announce the details.

Williams and Stone declined an interview request.

The latest stakes were sold to three of Twitter's earlier investors - Benchmark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Spark Capital - and two new shareholders, Insight Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price.

Price spokeswoman Heather McDonald said the asset manager made the investment on behalf of its clients through its mutual funds and related accounts. The amount was not disclosed.

San Francisco-based Twitter had previously raised $55 million, with the latest infusion of $35 million coming just seven months ago.

With so much money in the bank, Twitter now has the means to buy more computers and keep improving the reliability of its outage-prone service. It can expand its work force of 60 employees without feeling pressure to sell to a larger company.

Twitter has more than 54 million worldwide users who share their thoughts, activities, Web links and other information in messages no longer than 140 characters. Just a year ago, only 4 million people were "tweeting" - the term commonly used to describe the messages on Twitter. By 2013, Twitter hopes to have 1 billion users, making its service "the pulse of the planet," according to internal company documents leaked on the Internet this summer.

Casey says: I'm not sure if I believe Twitter should be valued at $ 1 billion, but what do I know. I think this is a rather high amount for a web site like Twitter. These high hopes for Twitter, such as having 1 billion users by 2013, are a little unrealistic in my opinion. Sure Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites for today's society, but whose to say that another social networking site won't come along in the next year or so and become even more popular. Twitter has been around for what 3 years? In my own personal opinion, I think that there will probably be another phenomenon to come along which will probably decrease Twitter's popularity making it not worth a $1 billion investment.

Link to article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/bal-bz.twitter26sep26,0,6265040.story?obref=obnetwork

Article written by: Richard Harris, October 6, 2009, Article on npr.org

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics will be shared by three scientists who created revolutionary technologies decades ago that have changed our world today. Half of the $1.4 million prize will go to a man who invented fiber optics, which transmit data using light. The other half goes to two engineers who came up with the technology at the heart of digital cameras.

Charge-Coupled Device

In the autumn of 1969, Willard Boyle and George Smith stood at a blackboard at Bell Labs in New Jersey. They were trying to brainstorm a new type of computer memory. What they came up with was an invention called a charge-coupled device, or CCD. Immediately, they realized the device they invented could be used to capture images digitally, instead of on film.

In fact, CCDs never took off for data storage, but now they are everywhere. The technology was eagerly adopted by the military, which was interested in beaming pictures back to Earth from spy satellites. And today, CCDs are inside interplanetary probes, medical devices and digital cameras, from the one on your cell phone to the one on Hubble.

Boyle, 85, and Smith, 79, have been honored several times for their invention of the CCD. Most recently, they were awarded the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

When Smith was contacted at his home in New Jersey on Tuesday morning, he said that he wasn't totally shocked to receive the Nobel after the list of other prizes the pair has been awarded for the CCD. Of the partnership with Boyle, he said the two were friends as well as award-winning research partners.

"We were just good friends and frequently got together to kick ideas around, just the two of us, for the heck of it. We established several other patents together as well," Smith said.

Fiber Optics

The other half of the prize will go to Shanghai-born scientist Charles Kao, 75. In 1966, he developed fiber-optic cables — glass fibers that carry huge amounts of information in the form of light rather than electricity.

Today, we depend on fiber-optic cables as phone lines and the backbone of the Internet. Fiber optics are so widely used that, according to the Nobel committee, there's enough fiber-optic cable on the planet to wrap around the Earth 25,000 times.

A statement released by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Kao served as vice chancellor, detailed his response to receiving the Nobel.

"I am absolutely speechless and never expected such an honor," said Kao. "Fiber optics has changed the world of information so much in these last 40 years. It certainly is due to the fiber optical networks that the news has traveled so fast."

Casey Says: I thought that this article was was worth posting because of it's relevance in technological advances. I had no idea that both the digital photo and fiber optic concepts were developed back in the 60's. These three men changed the way in which our world works in so many ways. It's hard to imagine what our lives would be like without technological inventions such as these. Also, I thought it was interesting how there's so much fiber optic cable laid on the planet that it could wrap around the world 25,000 times.

Link to article: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113527362&ft=1&f=1003