Musings on Media

A few random thoughts from the last few days...

1) "With Facebook zooming to 200 million users, what happened to My Space? I can't remember the last time I checked my MySpace account." Nicholas Kristoff tweet 4/8/09 Yup, me too. Sorry Rupert.

2) Spoke with a former exec with Gannett yesterday. The business model of tying information to advertising... newspapers, phone directories... (even google?) has broken down. Few healthy papers in US. Rising literacy in BOP is helping some papers in India, etc. She tells me of study showing that more individually selected news (via feeds) increases polarization (people select what they want to see, and lose out on diversity of opinion).

3) Luci, who used to write for the CSU newspaper, tells me she needs to promote the Rotary Ambassadorial scholarship for students. "It is so hard to get the word out to students," she says. I suggest facebook instead of the student paper or posters, but then found that CSU doesn't have a very big fb group yet. She mentions that students don't seem to use email much anymore.

4) I have noted groups of students walking across campus "together" but all talking on their cellphones. I wonder if they are talking to each other, by phone?

5) An article in Washington Post on proper manners when someone you are talking with starts working their PDA. I say walk away! I also walk out of businesses who answer the phone in the midst of "serving" me.

Overall, I find that the data torrents can still largely be tamed, and it is good to be able to connect with so many interesting ideas and people. I still read a paper, to keep me busy while I have a coffee. But the paper comes after a quick scan of my home tabs: iGoogle (for blogs, weather, news), facebook (friends) and twitter (random eavesdropping on the sustainability and entrepreneurship space). And I don't interupt conversations to take phone calls or emails.