Pop-Bestseller Black Eyed Peas: "Klar, die Plattenfirmen ha. It’s Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Ha. In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim).
But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm. Once a fan page is set up (here’s ours), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above. The categories Facebook fan pages fall into are remarkably evenly distributed. So-called celebrities only make up 7 percent of all fan pages. And that’s just like it is in the real world. Circling the Drain. Big whoop.
After several statistical triple back-flips, we now know that 96 percent of newspaper reading is done in the printed product. That's like talking about modern transportation by pointing out that 96 percent of buggy drivers use buggy whips. Hello? We switched to cars 100 years ago. Writing on the Nieman Journalism Lab Web site, Martin Langveld made some valid statistical conclusions about newspaper readership.
In case you haven't noticed, printed newspapers became irrelevant to the average person years ago. And as they go, they are tearing at the core values of the news business. Content has been chopped, lightened and dumbed down repeatedly. Failing newspapers are the festering wounds of journalism. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former chairman of Dow Jones Peter Kann, writing in The Wall Street Journal, blames free online editions for the demise of their parent publications. Circulation and readership figures are ridiculous.
The San Francisco Chronicle is terrified. Independent musicians set for windfall after YouTube deal. Dizzee Rascal, Travis, Speech Debelle and a host of other artists are set to enjoy windfalls after a landmark deal between independent record labels and YouTube.
The PIAS Entertainment Group, which represents 200 independent labels, has signed a global licensing and marketing deal with the online video giant that will mean artists and their record companies get a share of revenues from adverts shown alongside their works. The deal covers both official audio and video releases as well as user-generated content.
PIAS says it will also work with YouTube to try to drive up traffic to artist pages and develop partnerships with brands, such as channel sponsorship. "Some of the world's most iconic artists will now be able to engage with their existing fans and win new ones," said YouTube video partnership director Patrick Walker. The deal with independent labels comes just weeks after an agreement between Google-owned YouTube and Warner Music. European Papers Find Creative Ways to Thrive. User Privacy Settings By Geography: A Flickr Study. Academia.edu: A Geni For Researchers. Collaboration has long been one of the most fundamental components of science.
From handwritten letters and essays to professional publications like Science and Nature, scientists rely on each other to test their theories and to help formulate new ones. Given this inherently social nature of science, it’s surprising that no website has emerged as the de facto meeting place for academics online. Academia.edu, a San Francisco-based startup that launches today to the public, is looking to fill this role. At first glance the site bears a strong resemblance to Geni, the genealogical site that visually maps relationships between people. Professors, post docs, and graduate students are displayed according to their department and the professors they work under, as well as their specific fields of study. While this map may prove useful once in a while, Academia.edu’s real draw is its news feed, which allows users to stay up to date on current events in their field.
MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And. MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary.
The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet. A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth. The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites.