Future:Media:Change

The Internet has surpassed TV and radio as the most essential medium for Americans, a new study finds, and roughly as many people would choose to live without TV as the Internet if forced to choose. Given the usage metrics reported in the rest of the study, it’s no wonder. Here are highlights of its findings.

GoogleLabs launched Living Stories last year, as an experiment with content partners The Washington Post and The New York Times. While the experiment has now finished,  Google has open-sourced the code it and made a Wordpress plug-in to boot.
The video explains the concept but for the skim readers, Living Stories, basically brings current events into a wider context by providing a background on a current news stories, by serving up related information about the event/issue, instead of traditional search which returns information mainly about the incident itself.

Living Stories was …

Nielsen and Facebook found friend endorsement of brands through the site’s “Become a Fan” functionality increased ad recall 30%, brand awareness 13%, and purchase intent 8% with certain levels of social context

With 17,396 views on YouTube since it was posted eight days ago, this Brazilian video may have what it takes to “go viral.” Real ants actually carry protest “signs” against an insecticide. As the description says, “Real ants, real cardboards, a real motive: a protest against Baygon.”

Top prizes in journalism were shared amongst a brand new model of nonprofit news production that places investigative articles in major publications; a cartoonist who transitioned from print illustrations to 45 second flash animations; a middling paper in a small market mixing old and new, and a traditional major market paper about to be swallowed by debt and handed to creditors.

On Friday, Google announced that site speed is now part of its search ranking algorithm — that is to say your website will perform better on Google search results if it loads faster. But that’s not the only reason to pay attention to your site’s load time. Faster site performance also results in better user experience, more page views, more sales, and even lower equipment costs.

A city awash with arms and with a homicide rate higher than most of the world’s conflict zones, Rio de Janeiro is suffering from a culture of fear. Affecting everyone. Filmmakers are aiming to tell stories that make a difference.