Monday's Media Grab Bag

Jupiter Research predicts that 25 percent of the world's population, or 1.8 billion people, will be online within the next four years. The hottest growth markets are China, India, Brazil and Russia.
Friendfeed has quickly arisen to challenge Twitter by exploiting a glitch whereby the "reply" feature has been missing on Twitter.
A startup named Apture has a new multimedia linking technology that allows users to view pop-up windows without leaving a publisher's site. (An example of how this works can be seen in a long article at the Washington Post site.)

These three developments may at first seem random and unconnected, but they tie together three major themes of this blog.

The media market is global and only getting more so. Either find a way to extend your media brand worldwide or get run over by the herd.
Most users worldwide access the Internet on mobile devices, not computers. This trend is accelerating. Familiarizing yourself with mobile programs like Twitter and Friendfeed will be critical to your company's ability to adapt.
As long as there have been websites, there have been debates about links to off-site content, because publishers naturally want to retain users on their site, not send them off, possibly to never return. Apture's platform offers one solution to that dilemma. The link referenced above presents a particularly elegant solution for media sites.

So, you see, these items were not so random after all!

David Weir

David Weir is a veteran journalist who has worked at Rolling Stone, California, Mother Jones, Business 2.0, SunDance, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, MyWire, 7x7, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which he cofounded in 1977. He’s also been a content executive at KQED, Wired Digital, Salon.com, and Excite@Home. David has published hundreds of articles and three books,including "Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets Its Story," and has been teaching journalism for more than 20 years at U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and Stanford.

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