Media

Ads with a personal touch

by Martin · Aug 27, 2006

BBC News has interesting article about the future of advertising and some of the new technologies that could be used to create “personal” and “interactive” experiences. One example is the use of facial recognition software to determine whether the person staring at an outdoor/subway ad space is male or female, which would lead to different ads being served up. More on the BBC website.

I’d be interested to read more about the future of online advertising, too. I can still count on one hand the number of times I have clicked on a Google or MSN ad in the last three years.

The Internet and the way we spend our time

by Martin · Aug 2, 2006

Statscan today realeased the findings of a survey on “The Internet and the way we spend our time”. Most of the findings aren’t really surprising. But I found it interesting that heavy users watch about the same amount of television as non-users. So the Internet isn’t really replacing television as a favourite past time. I must be an exception.

(via The Star)

Want to build an online community? Start the printing press

by Martin · Mar 26, 2006

I like what my German hometown paper NGZ is doing. They have embraced blogging and are taking it a step further in a back-to-the-future kind of way. NGZ and sister publication Rheinische Post launched a “reader-to-reader” portal called Opinio in early 2005. Readers can post their own articles about a broad range of topics. More than a year later, they have contributed 14,000 articles.

The kicker is that editors select the best articles and publish them once a week in the print edition of the newspapers and every two weeks in a dedicated magazine supplement. The prospect of having their own words and photos appear in print seems to appeal to many people, and is an additional incentive to join the Opinio online community.

Opinio was developed by Boogie Medien for Rheinische Post. If you know of other newspapers with similar ideas let me know. Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post all do something or other with blogs on their sites now, and all three employ journalists who have started personal weblogs related to their beat. But it would be interesting to see a Canadian newspaper launch a blog-to-print portal like Opinio.

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