online media

Undoubtedly, the nature of news is changing with the advent and immense popularity of social media. Media is painfully aware it needs to be involved with the new social order to keep audiences engaged. Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, provide people with additional channels to not only get news about the world, but to involve their community and immediate sphere of influence. So social media enhances mainstream news by taking it to additional channels, but also fills ...

A Question and Answer session at Johannesburg's first Tech4Africa conference featured developers from some of the world’s best known tech companies, and revealed insights on everything from startups vs corporations, San Francisco’s tech community, mobile/web development to making browser upgrades a global warming issue. The panel was chaired by Andy Budd, UI guru and MD of Clearleft, who posed questions to Dustin Diaz, a Twitter user interface engineer, Joe Stump, the SimpleGEO founder and former Digg lead architect, John Resig, who ...

Major drum roll from the guys at Amazon.com for their announcement that "Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books (eBooks) than hardcover books." The group went on to claim that for every 100 hardcover books sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books, and also announced that Stieg Larsson, author of the Millenium Trilogy, has sold one million Kindle books. The statistics given out by the giant online retailer don't look quite so amazing when put in proper context. In fact, quite ...

Newspaper paywalls have been criticised by many people in geek communities across the world and also by popular journalism bloggers such as Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen -- but they follow the best practices of "Freemium" business models used by thousands of tech startups. Freemium has been a successful strategy used by many tech companies. Please see: Emergence Capital: Profitable Lessons From Freemium Business Models - SVW. And: Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp Freemium is ...

Google has been quietly testing a new paywall system for publishers it is calling “Newspass”. According to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Google has been piloting the service with publishers in Italy. The search giant will apparently launch "an integrated payment system" allowing users to buy news content with just "one click". Newspass would allow publishers to use a single infrastructure for Web, mobile and tablet computers to monetise their content. Importantly, La Repubblica reports that consumers will have a single log-in across ...

The London-based Financial Times, a leading global newspaper specialising in financial and business news, has commissioned a South African company to help it crowdsource ideas on how to increase the number of new subscriptions to its online offering, FT.com. The financial broadsheet approached the Cape Town-based Idea Bounty with the task -- a local community site that allows brands to tap the collective intelligence of creatives all over the world. While crowdsourcing ideas is not a new concept, Idea Bounty claims it ...

Putting soccer fans at the heart of its 2010 FIFA World Cup coverage, CNN has checked in with location-based social network Foursquare to connect fans all over the world throughout the month-long tournament. This is the first time Foursquare has teamed up with a media company for a multi-country initiative, with this one stretching across all 32 countries represented in the World Cup. Starting Friday, World Cup fans who follow CNN at www.foursquare.com/cnn can check in at more than 100 venues ...

CNN.com has launched site-wide integrations of Facebook Connect and new social plugins that allow the news site's users to recommend, share or comment on content with their friends on Facebook. The social enhancements also allow users to see when their friends have recommended, shared or commented on CNN.com content. “It's possible that people may be more connected with their friends on Facebook than they are to the people they see every day, and sharing what interests you most with your friends ...

The local Times launched their elections play today. It's pretty basic (although I'm lead to believe this is just phase I), but here's what I think is really clever and innovative about it: 1. They've launched it on a completely new domain called "SA elections". That says, "we own election coverage", not to mention the fabulous SEO this will create for them. It's nice positioning and marketing. 2. They're aggregating. They're aggregating their competitors and themselves. They're putting themselves, one step back, ...

Just got word from Elan Lohman, distant cousin of Lindsay Lohan, that Wheels24 has relaunched. I think their design still needs a bit more work and there are still a few gaps here and there, but its a great effort. I like the overall navigation and the site is well structured. More significantly, however, it is the first 24.com site to be launched on the company's new global content management system (CMS) that they built in-house... no small task for ...