January 2010
38 posts
The TV commercial “Men without Pants,” which will debut during the game, calls men to use their mobile devices to “Shazam,” the ad. The Shazam app identifies the song in the ad and links listeners to a branded Dockers site, where they can shop for pants, download the song or enter the promotion to win a free pair. Mobile users can download the Shazam application across devices in order to participate.
— DMNews
A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people’s media use. It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information about media use among American youth.
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds - Kaiser Family Foundation
Yahoo appears to be working on combining search with social media and interaction technology in an application that looks to be on a grander scale than anything currently in the market. The company received a patent last month for a contextual mobile local search application “based on social network vitality information.”
According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office abstract, Yahoo is developing a search app which takes into account the location of the mobile device, a time of day, an event, information from the mobile user’s calendar, past behavior of the mobile user, weather, social networking data, aggregate behaviors, information about proximity of a social contact - or even the mobile user’s mode as determined by an avatar.
The effect of the pre-publication Tweets is impossible to quantify, but there is a sixth-sense among those involved that the build up to the story increased popularity for “The It Bird.” Jamie Leifer, a public relations representative for The New Yorker, explained that metrics on print stories aren’t tracked, but the Orlean video was the most streamed video the week “The It Bird” ran and number three the following week.
“I had an enormous reaction to this piece,” Orlean explained over email in January 2010, adding that she did six radio and two television interviews after the story went to print. “It was clearly talked about, passed around, noticed, commented upon, and I have no doubt that talking about it in advance on Twitter primed the pump. That may not be hard evidence but it’s certainly real in terms of the sensation of a writer experiencing an audience.”
Consider “The It Bird” as a case study in contemporary media, an example of literary and social media fostering a new engagement with narrative. Carefully cultivating her audience, Orlean pushes them to appreciate her prose. Her openness, her chickens, and her enigmatic twit-wit keeps Orlean’s feed at the top of her reader’s pecking order.
via Sin and Syntax
