Markets

Weekend Snippets: WebTrends, Twitter UK, and 12seconds

By David Weir

Updated on: July 25, 2008 / 7:52 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

There's so much media industry news these days that every now and again we'll devote a post to separating the signal from the noise. Here are a few snippets that caught my attention today:

ChinaÂ´s huge national TV site, CCTV.com, has selected the web analytics firm, WebTrends, to provide insights about its visitors across multiple web channels during the 2008 Olympic Games. CCTV.com plans to air a staggering 3,800 hours of live webcasts of the games themselves, with ~20,000 additional hours of on-demand programming within China and Macau. This deal appears to be a major coup for WebTrends, whose other clients include General Mills, Microsoft, Reuters and Ticketmaster.

The micro-blogging platform that limits your messages to 140 characters is hot, we all know that. But, who would have guessed, that Twitter would have grown its membership by 631 percent in the U.K. over the past year? Reportedly, 10 per cent of all Twitter users are based in the UK now, and even Prime Minister Gordon Brown apparently is into it. Maybe this explains why the Twitter service crashes so often? It's all those talkative Brits...

Meanwhile the sincerest form of flattery for Twitter would be the upstart 12seconds, which has a new mini-video service, where you can record and share brief moments from your life like buying shoes; or hanging out in your pajamas. The Tweet analogy is that your video clip can't be longer than 12 seconds.

Given these developments, I have a proposal: Gordon Brown should film himself hanging out in his pajamas, Tweet about it, and hire WebTrends to identify the people who view his 12seconds clip. Then, we should round up all of those people and get them real jobs.