iCatholicism?

Showing a remarkable ability to keep up with the times, the Catholic Church has finally decided to acknowledge that the internet may, in fact, be important. The Vatican is hosting a conference on Internet and youth culture featuring executive from Wikipedia, Facebook, and Google. The five-day symposium will cover topics such as copyright and hacking, but will focus on giving the church a new means to reach out to potential young followers.

 

The Near Future?

Pope Benedict had tried to bring the Vatican up to speed earlier by launching a YouTube channel, but this was meaningless compared to the churches former online blunders. After bringing back an ex-communicated bishop into the fold, bloggers quickly discovered that the bishop had been posting online deniles of the Holocaust, and other shocking statements.

 

Attempting to put past errors behind them, the Vatican’s head of communications, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli recently appeared on Vatican Radio with a new mission statement:

Our dream in this global village created by new technologies is that the church and Jesus’ disciples can have their tent — Jesus’ tent — so that the attention of men and women who walk the streets of the world is turned toward it

Now the world can only wait to see if Pope Benedict can match the progress that Pope John Paul II made when launching the Vatican’s official website in 1995, when internet 2.0 was still in its infancy.

A Worm in the Apple

Steve Jobs has been using cute packaging and the gangly Justin Long to create the super-cool vibe associate with Apple products over the past few years, but it seems that the business giant has finally showed its true colors. The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently made public a new advertising scheme that Apple has hatched.

The new technology could invasively insert advertising into virtually everything with a viewing screen, from television sets, to phone, to computers, and even those precious ipods and other media players. But the most interesting (and frustrating) feature of this new system is that it would demand the complete attention of a viewer. The new technology can actually freeze content from any of these devices until the viewer performs a task or answers a question to prove that they have absorbed the message of the advertisement. The program would be hard-wired into devices, theoretically enabling access to viewers regardless of what they are doing.

Mein Jobs

It seems hard to believe that Jobs would risk the cool, almost rebellious, nature of his company on an authoritarian advertising format, but his name is one of the first five on the patent, which includes these malicious details:

These tests can be made progressively more aggressive if the user has failed a previous test. One option makes the response box smaller and smaller, requiring more concentration to find and banish. Or the system can require that the user press varying keyboard combinations, the current date, or the name of the advertiser upon command, again demonstrating the presence of an attentive user.

Even Microsoft seems to be shocked by the aggressiveness of this technology. Their similar new product simply places the ad in an easy to ignore corner of the screen.

Seriously, Apple? When Microsoft thinks you’re being a little uptight, it’s probably time to back off.

Free: the Ultimate Price to Pay?

There is a lot of hype over whether or not Online-Capable Television will threaten the standard viewing experience when popularity grows, but many households already have devices connecting the TV to the web. From the Xbox, to laptops, to the sometimes overlooked Blu-Ray player, viewers can already access online content through the tube. After getting his new Blu-Ray player, writer Nicholas Carr discovered it could access the internet, and now claims:

I’ve been using the device more to transmit Internet content than to play discs. I stream TV shows and movies from Netflix, music from Pandora and videos from YouTube. Beyond my existing $11-a-month Netflix subscription, I haven’t forked out a penny for any of this programming. It comes flowing out of the Web, whenever I summon it, free.

When you can use your television to view otherwise unavailable online content, as well as the same premium programming streamed online for free, why keep paying? Premium cable stations such as Showtime even stream most of their biggest hits (Dexter, Weeds, the Tudors, and reruns of House) only moments after they air on TV, prompting Carr – and many other former viewers – to cancel his expensive subscription to the channel.

This movement of the audience could explain all the hubbub over Comcast attempting to control both content and distribution by purchasing NBC. Any viewers lost during the regularily scheduled airing could be made up for through a new online-system spearheaded by Comcast, or they could throttle the online content to try and deter viewers from skipping out: a very dangerous decision.

Even if organizations like Comcast figure out a way to slow their losses through acquisitions and online charges, it seems that web-enabled devices will allow viewers to watch content on their terms, for less money. But as Spider-Man tells us, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

The most creative programming, such as Mad Men, Community, 30 Rock, and the Office are usually the most expensive to produce: featuring star-studded casts. If we continue to bypass the system and reduce studio paychecks, these  shows could be hard pressed to prove themselves irreplacable.

We may be responsible for the future takeover of reality TV.

Social Networking Job Postings

This past Wednesday, November 11, Tavia Grant wrote an article for the Globe and Mail entitled Employers sidestep recruiters to tap social media. It explains the new pricess of advertising job postings for some companies. The article focuses mainly on what Future Shop is doing to recruit new employees.

The Burnaby, B.C.-based company is planning to hire 5,000 people for the holiday season and, this year, is relying much more on Facebook, Twitter and its own community website to do so. It has advertised the jobs on its Facebook page, which has more than 17,000 followers, and also put the word out on its website and Twitter page.

This is one effective way to get new employees, and some spokespeople are very pleased with the responses they are receiving. This advertising is also much more cost effective, it costs close to nothing to advertise on social networking sites versus the newspaper or on television, it also reaches many more people versus in-store advertising.

The big online job boards that charge for ads, meanwhile, have seen a steep slide in postings. Workopolis job ads fell 36 per cent in October from the same month last year. At Monster Canada, online postings were 26 per cent lower in the third quarter than last year.

Obviously, social networking isn’t the ideal medium for advertising all jobs. Certain jobs require a different approach to hiring. But experts are saying that social networking job postings are here to stay. Since so many people are using these sites and the amount of time these people spend on these sites is also attractive to companies. Maybe Facebook will be the new place to get a job after graduation…

Online Streaming and Commercials: How Far Can Networks Push It?

Jeffry Scott’s article  Will fans of Web TV sit still for just as many ads? (November 10, 2009, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) reports, “Americans watch about 150 hours of television a month containing about 14 hours of commercials.” As the current trend of online television viewing continues to grow, Scott questions whether online viewers are willing to watch commercials in the same portions as they do on television.

Will they refuse to watch, for instance, as many commercials on an episode of TNT’s “The Closer” — about 20 — when the show airs a week later on the Internet?”

According to Scott, Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System and its parent Time Warner are currently trying to figure out how many commercials viewers are willing to watch on these non-traditional mediums, such as online viewing, mobiles and other hand held devices. Networks are debating how far they can push advertising onto online viewers.

David Porter, Cox Communications’ vice president of advertising product development states, “Viewers tell us they’re very happy to be able to see [an episode] of ‘The Office’ they would otherwise have missed, and they don’t see the difference in watching the ads.”

According to Scott’s article,

For TV networks and programmers, the Internet is barely tapped as a way to distribute programs to viewers and generate millions in advertising revenues. Right now, Americans only watch about three hours of video a month on the Internet. That audience is 1/50th the size of the TV audience.”

Scott’s article states that many are mistaken when they assume people will not watch commercials online. A world of no commercials, he states, is simply archaic. However, the article goes on to say that 38% of current online streamers watch shows on the Internet simply to avoid commercials.

Booming Online Advertising?

Few weeks ago, I wrote about the diminishing rate in online advertising for my previous post. But today, I’m posting about a booming online advertising – the video attached pre-roll advertising.

An article ‘Online Ads Are Booming, if They’re Attached to a Video’ from the New York Times on November 10, 2009, tells us that majority news Web sites have decided to start or expand featuring news in video format. Why? Writer Brian Stelter says, “A major reason is commercial. At a time when other categories of advertising dollars are shrinking, video ads are booming. News sites are adding more video inventory to keep pace with the demands of advertisers.”

Since digital video is the only fast-growing segment of advertising market – “Digital video amounted to $477 million in revenue in the first half of 2009, up 38 percent from the same time period in 2008, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. With an estimated $5 billion in revenue in the first half of 2009, search remains the dominant segment of online advertising, but it is expected to grow only marginally this year“ – there seems no way to stop Web sites implementing the pre-roll advertisements; whether or not the viewers hate them.

The vice president and general manager of digital ad sales for The Journal’s digital network, Brian Quinn, says the pre-roll ads really work well by showing a 15-second pre-roll ad “followed by two to five minutes of high-quality content is a fair-value exchange.” However, viewers including me (have to) watch the pre-roll ads because there is no way to skip them. Some generous advertisers provide skip buttons, but usually we are forced to watch them.

Also, to complement the boredom of pre-roll ads, advertisers started to make TV-like commercials and now the news Web sites are uplifted with their increased streaming rates – for example of Fox’s average of 35,000 streams per weekday between 9AM to 5PM.

Thus statistically online advertising through video really has an impact on online advertising market, but I wonder how many actual “clicks” are there through the video advertising. Is there a comparable difference between the streamed views and clicks? Or are they quite close to each other? We first need to find out this if we do not want to make this boom remain in bubbles.

A Peek at Your Personal Data

In a November 5 article from The New York Times, Miguel Helft describes the new program that Google is offering its users. Google offers users a peek at stored data examines the new Google Dashboard, that has just been announced in Spain. The Google Dashboard “summarizes the data that Google collects in users’ accounts for products like Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Web History, Checkout, Reader and YouTube”.

Users can log on and adjust their privacy settings. Dashboard makes all this information available in one place, instead of having to search for it in many different places.

Dahsboard provides information only about users’ Google accounts for products that require them to log in or for products in which the log-in is optional. It does not address the search records of people who are not logged into Google or the cookie data that Google uses to aim ads at people. Many advocates say the collection and storage of such data may raise the biggest privacy concerns. They also say that while such data, which typically includes a computer’s Internet Protocol, or IP, address, is not associated with personally identifiable information like names and addresses, it can often be linked with individuals.

This raises questions about our privacy, even if we know this information is being published there is nothing we can do to take it down. Many say that Google isn’t letting you protect that information until the individual themselves controls what companies know about them and what they can use this information for. Even though I know Google knows what I do online and I can see what they know, it does not make me feel any better that I can’t take this information down or what they are doing with this information.

Molson’s Social Networking

A recent article from the Financial Post, of the Ottawa Citizen by Hollie Shaw explains the new route that some companies are taking in the pursute of more consumers. Marketing embraces social media sites examines the new options that companies are considering for advertising. Many companies are now questioning their spending on television or radio advertising, and if Internet ads are new way to go.

The company that is specified in the article is Molson Coors Canada who has been “working the social media front for years and now promotes its brand through 19 web sites, a community blog, numerous Facebook sites, and Twitter feeds?”

The brewers decided on social networking website advertising because they wanted to make their conversation straight to the point.

While marketers are interested in what brand influence and consumer engagement mean in terms of consumers buying merchandise, the biggest challenge these days, he said, is building loyalty.

For the recent launch of Molson 67, a new ultra-low calorie light beer, Molson’s integrated advertising effort had a heavy social media component.

Molson invited some individuals who signed up on their social networking sites to a private launch party for the new Molson 67 beer. Then the individuals were asked to write about their experiences.

The surge in corporate social media efforts comes after decades of so-called “push” marketing — where consumers were viewed largely as passive sponges of brand marketing. Marketers have been trying to adjust to the new reality of mastering the complicated and ever-expanding art of listening to consumers. And, while direct quantification of social media efforts into sales may be elusive, listening could go a long way towards building brand goodwill.

Obviously, social networking sites are a new medium that many companies are seriously considering using as a form of advertising or they already are. Will Facebook and Twitter be the new forms of advertising? Only time will tell but with the popularity of these types of sites I think it is quite possible.

The Internet isn’t to Blame…

Dan Reisinger of Cnet News reported in the article Study: Internet use won’t cause social isolation (November 5, 2009) that contrary to the popular belief, the Internet in fact does not limit people’s social interactions.

According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society.”

The study states that not much has changed in terms of social behaviour since 1985. The Pew study states, “6 percent of the entire population currently has no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be especially significant in their life.”

Pew found that Americans’ “discussion networks” have shrunk by about a third, but it is by no means the fault of the Internet. In fact, the study found that mobile phone users and active Web users often result in greater and more “diverse core discussion networks.”

Social media websites like Twitter, Facecbook and Myspace, according to the article, are helping society expand social interaction. “According to Pew, those who use the Internet frequently “are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race.” Users who share photos online are more likely to discuss political topics with someone of a different party, the organization found.”

The article goes on to list interesting statistics, which demonstrate that Internet users are:

• 45 percent more likely to visit a cafe,
• 52 percent more likely to visit a library,
• 34 percent more likely to visit a fast-food restaurant,
• 69 percent more likely to visit other restaurants,
• 42 percent more likely to visit a public park,
• However, Internet users are 36 percent less likely to visit a religious institution

“She Was Clearly Distracted.”

A 22-year-old woman has killed another similar aged woman while texting-driving reported by the New York Times on November 1, 2009. Phillipa Curtis, the criminal, was texting around 2 dozen messages while she was driving and was too distracted to find out that she was hitting another car and eventually put herself in a criminal jail.

“Although most European countries and a minority of American states now ban the use of hand-held cellphones while driving, Britain has become one of the more aggressive countries in attacking the problem, according to Ellen Townsend, policy director for the European Transit Safety Council, which advises the European Commission. Britain’s new guidelines state that using a hand-held phone when causing a death will “always make the offense more serious” in terms of punishment and lead to prison time. Texting is given special treatment.”

In order to prevent causing these tragic accidents, the law should not only punish those “already-committed” persons, but also catch the “almost committing” persons (i.e. catch the texting-driving drivers on the roads). However, the reality is even if we set a law to prevent accidents, it is hard to inspect every road or look at each driver’s behaviours. This is why people should put a high priority on self-awareness in driving safety and cell phone using manner. These conducts are acknowledged by heart and behaved rightly; ignorances will pay the price harshly in the future.

The victim’s cousin Ms. Pancoust warns people by saying “It’s sad as you have people out there who think they are invincible and things like that don’t happen to them. But it does.”