Not all that long ago all of our news would come from the media. Whether it was the morning newspaper, radio or television, accessing the latest stories was pretty much a standardised formality. However, the rise of the Internet and, more particularly, the blogging community has all but put paid to traditional media sources.
Internet bloggers have a number of advantages over their offline counterparts. First and foremost is the immediacy of the online platform. As soon as a blogger receives a lead they can get started on a post and have it live within seconds. There’s no red tape, no editorial to pass through and no restrictions on content. Almost anything goes on the Internet, something the media can and probably never will be able to replicate.
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According to a new study conducted by Cornell University, highlighted by Search Engine Watch, traditional media sources are still first with the news; surprisingly beating blogs by an average of 2.5 hours. So whilst the immediacy of Twitter has caused serious groundswells in the halls of the major news outlets, it appears that speed isn’t being translated to blogs as yet.
Journalists may be restricted to reporting news that they can unequivocally confirm; however, due to the breadth of their research and reporting power they are still able to get to the stories first. Whilst the newswire may be slowly fading out, it clearly maintains a high level of importance in how soon and how accurate our news is.
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Wikipedia rarely escapes the ire of academics or journalists for its purporting of truth in a user-generated environment. Whilst the level of accuracy is usually reasonably good, there are occasional aberrations that highlight the potential misuse of the site.
Earlier in the week Michael Jackson fans became embroiled in a mad scramble to edit and update his status based upon the developing news story surrounding his death. Even before it was confirmed, the singer’s page announced he had passed away, moving some to change it in order to reflect this. Confusion reigned though when fans refused to accept the unofficial news and removed all references to it. This ultimately caused Wikipedia to halt all editing on Jackson’s page until the news could be verified.
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Google have just announced that their Google Ad Planner is now available to users within the UK.
This is ideal for anyone wishing to expand their online marketing activities and will be a useful addition for media planners and buyers.
Like most of the Google family of free tools, it is still marked as a Beta but if you have a Google account, you can now log in and use it to identify sites that your target audience may visit and fit with your overall marketing plan.
It will show websites that accept advertising by default but you can refine this further by just selecting sites that are in the Google Content Network (Adsense). With this option, media planners can refine their criteria further by selecting different ad formats, e.g. text, image or video and by ad size.
Google Ad Planner doesn’t show every site but will certainly be a useful asset for anyone involved in advertising planning and online marketing.
