Entries by Ross Dawson

Social networks and search

Two years ago I did a four-city speaking tour of New Zealand under the auspices of SmartNet. Before my lunch presentation in Wellington, I sat out on one of the tables, and was astounded to find that the person I was chatting to was an executive of Eurekster, which was at the time a hot […]

The symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs

I read through an article on blogging in the Financial Times this morning to help me as I develop some frameworks on the changing content creation landscape. The article was clearly negative on blogging being the transformative media it is touted to be, though brought out some interesting points. The writer makes the point that […]

Newspaper headlines and search optimization

An interesting article in the New York Times on how newspapers are finding the art of writing headlines is changing. Back when you were solely trying to draw attention from readers of a broadsheet, being clever was the name of the game. But now that online content is starting to become a significant revenue stream […]

Massively multi-player sex games

Click on the image for a trial of Red Light Center, the most popular multiplayer 3D virtual sex game This is going to be big. Naughty America: The Game is a massively-multiplayer game, due out in the next few months, in which players assume the role of characters who meet, date, and have sex. Up […]

Online video heats up

YouTube, recently the belle of the ball at the Digital Hollywood conference, has just raised $8 million from Sequoia Capital in a Series B round. YouTube is currently the leader of the pack in providing online video hosting, but it still doesn’t have an evident business model. Apparently it will start putting advertising into its […]

Choosing a feed reader

For those of you out there who have not yet set yourself up with an RSS feed reader, the better to tap the best of the Internet, TechCrunch provides a brief but useful review and comparison of the major online feed readers. There are certainly other ways of tapping RSS feeds, including PC-based software applications […]

Internet video becomes true new media

We all know that television will migrate to distribution over the Internet. Broadcast and cable will certainly co-exist with the Internet as distribution channels for moving image content for the foreseeable future, however broadband access and the availability of capital for new media ventures mean that the Internet is already becoming a viable alternative for […]

Representing ourselves and creating avatars

A teenage girl’s video clip on YouTube about her breakup with her boyfriend has been viewed over 155,000 times in the last five days, primarily because she was playing with features on Logitech web cameras that allow her to change her appearance. The features available on the cameras include adding glasses to a person’s face, […]

The state of news media

A great report just out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on The State of the News Media 2006, focusing on the US news industry. It provides detailed analysis across all news media, including newspapers, online, TV, radio, alternative and more. The new major emerging trends they picked out this year are: * The […]