New Media News & Articles

When we talk about the digital media consumption of teens and young adults, from social media to the mobile web, we often wonder how the future of online media will evolve. Rarely, however, do we consider what it means for the future of education.

On Saturday, March 6, educators and technologists alike gathered for TEDxNYED, an all-day conference, examining the role of new media and technology in shaping the future of education.

Amidst our declining economy, online advertising is taking it on the nose. Fairing better than print advertisers,  these advertisers are still struggling to capture attention and follow through. Hoping to remedy the situation, VideoEgg, a new kind of rich media ad network, has announced AttentionRank, an innovative ad delivery approach to optimize the placement of brand advertising and maximize user attention and engagement. 

Colleges and universities that offer communications programs are rapidly adapting new media strategies and studying the role social media, new media and their impact on the world. The Future of Public Media and American University's Center for Social Media have come together to release Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics.

The report is based on four years of research and argues that multi-platform, participatory media will be central to democratic life in the years ahead and suggests that public broadcasting could play a central role if the medium is properly restructured and supported.

Back in October, the New York Times created and released a Campaign Finance API (Application Programming Interface). Designed to let users analyze and re-use some of the data the NYT had been looking at while reporting on the presidential campaign, the API offered overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. They also launched a movie API, which allows users to search New York Times movie reviews by keyword and get lists of NYT Critics' Picks.

Now the Times has released a new API offering every article the paper has written since 1981 -- 2.8 million articles.

In rough economic times such as these, it is important to recognize the more optimistic efforts being made to inspire change by way of new media and technology.

Thanks to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization dedicated to awarding grants to help transform journalism and communities, twenty-one innovative ideas that will help residents lead informed lives have received US$ 5 million. The projects are the first winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, a five-year, US$ 24 million initiative to help community foundations support creative ways to use new media and technology to keep communities engaged.

Political National Conventions are the unlikeliest of venues to find anything noteworthy or novel, but the Democrats’ party this time around comes with a new and quite interesting entertainment. The addition of a bunch of ‘grass-roots mobile bloggers’ will post video, pictures, opinion and coverage direct from the Convention floor to a central hub at Zannel.com called the PoliticsBlue channel. Not a groundbreaking idea, really. More an inevitable and welcome addition to the modern media landscape. But potentially a watershed event which will herald new media adoption among the technophobe proles.

The new media revolution is alive and well. Whether it be news aggregation or marketing your company’s message effectively, the quest for conquering the ways of Web 2.0 are constant. However, there’s no shortage of help to aide you in your efforts.

On Wednesday, August 28 at 1 p.m. EST, Aquent presents a webcast called The New Media Revolution: Tips for Marketers Coping With a World Where Messages Don’t Matter. Featuring award-winning writer and content marketing consultant specializing in technology and new media, Paul Gillin, the web cast aims to “sort out the chaos in new media.”

Hoping to elbow the competition out with new media, Host Color has introduced social networking components to its web hosting offerings.

When users purchase a hosting plan, they now have access to wiki tools via MediaWiki, enabling the development and management of online libraries or encyclopedia sites. Information is process and displayed with PHP from MySQL database.

The company has also begun to offer Pligg CMS, which empowers the creation of online bookmarking, knowledge-sharing platforms or reference guides. Pligg CMS and the wiki function are available via Host Color’s PowerTools package.

They have also been included in four out of its five shared hosting packages.

Atlanta welcomes the leading minds in marketing and public relations for day one of the Executing Social Media Conference, which we’ll be covering live.

Executing Social Media is a two day event with the ambitious goal of bringing together experts on the use of social media: blogging, RSS, podcasting, online video, virtual communities, and consumer generated content.

Day 1 started off with an session on how communications between company and customer/consumer have changed in recent years. Of primary interest were three major guidelines for starting a corporate blog.

From the annals of News You Already Know comes two reports that shouldn’t surprise you.

On Monday, Reuters reported that “four out of five U.S. adults” or “79 percent — about 178 million — go online” and spend an average of 11 hours a week on the Internet.

An interesting article in BusinessWeek poses an intriguing question: what is driving new media (think Web 2.0 and 3.0) — content builders or technology developers?

Because more people are blogging than are programming, BusinessWeek author Jon Fine suggests that “In the tug-of-war between the right-brain of media and the left-brain of the platform builders, the latter have the upper hand.”

No longer can blogging be considered “underground journalism,” subject only to the rules of the streets (like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause). As blogs incorporate into the landscape of professional media, so too will the policy of full disclosure be expected of bloggers.

Bloggers: your time has come!

Riding the hype of the Semantic Web (it isn’t just around the corner; it will also make you blush), which Content Wrangler says will consist of “technologies that help people ‘do stuff’,” a geeky set of musicologists give us SeeqPod.

In its own way, the concept is pretty clever. You hit SeeqPod, conduct a search for a song, and in Google speed, you get real-live playable results.

It started with a few principles then progressed to online metrics, new social networks and it looks like it’s going down in a firestorm over free content. All the while, publishers of traditional print media are frantically wondering where it all went wrong.

What tangled web are Web journalists weaving, and where is it all going?

Tuesday morning at ad:tech Chicago, big brands like YouTube and Yahoo debated the likelihood that the Holy Grail, sought after by everyone from Indiana Jones to Tom Hanks, is (and perhaps always has been) in the unlikely hands of advertisers.

With every new medium comes a wave of schizophrenic behavior in which old media titans express fear, reproach and occasional audacity at a “threat” that has seen no equal in history.