Posted by
Ian Reeves
on 1 March 2006 at 16:49
Tags: Mobile Phones, Online
Undeterred by yesterday’s revenue warnings, Google is still on the march — literally, with the launch of Google News Mobile.
The company says that “You can access top headlines, browse through news categories, or search for exactly the stories you want — all in a phone-friendly format that’s easy to read and navigate. All you need is a web-enabled phone.
Posted by
Jeffrey Blyth
on 28 February 2006 at 11:06
Tags: Journalism, Mobile Phones, Sun, Television, United States
As if websites and bloggers were not enough to contend with these days, American newspapers and magazines face some new competition: news and features on cell phones.
The American television network CBS has launched a new service that will broadcast features and news clips directly to subscribers’ cell phones.
For a fee of one dollar (just over 60p) a week, subscribers will get at least five news clips a day, plus the latest gossip on top celebrities and even clips from the CBS show Entertainment Tonight. Still in the works: a sports news channel.
This comes on top of a similar news and entertainment service launched by News Corp. Called Mobizzo, it even includes gossip items from such Murdoch papers as the London Sun.
There is a prediction that within five years the number of mobile phones around the world will double to at least 4 billion. CBS and News Corp. are both bent, it’s said, on getting in on this new development on the ground floor. Within a year or two it’s predicted providing news and features on mobile phones will be a crowded field. In fact one of the other predictions is that cell-phone users on their mini-screens will be able to virtually watch news as it happens – for example a bomb going off in Baghdad within minutes of the actual explosion.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 17 February 2006 at 11:30
Tags: Guardian, Mobile Phones
The Guardian is testing a service that will allow readers to receive news from the newspaper’s web site on mobile phones.
Working with mobile applications company On2go, the Guardian will allow readers to read the full text of stories on their mobile phones and to select which stories they receive. The service will feature “click to call back” advertising.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 9 February 2006 at 11:17
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Mobile Phones, Muhammad cartoons
The Washington Post’s Kevin Sullivan has a story about the role of new media technologies in fuelling the row surrounding the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Text messages, blogs, helped spread rumour, gossip - and in some cases, misinformation - and help organise the various responses by Muslim groups.
One use the story documents is to manipulate online polls run by news organisations:
In London, Azzam Tamimi, a member of the Muslim Association of Britain, said text messages were being used to bring out the vote in opinion polls on the Internet. On Tuesday, he received a group message asking him to respond to a poll that a German newspaper was conducting about whether it should publish the cartoons. Even though the poll was aimed at readers in Germany, Tamimi said, instant global communication means “there are no barriers anymore.”
His group is helping to stage a rally Saturday in London’s Trafalgar Square. Organizers hope to attract thousands of moderate Muslims through mass e-mails and text messaging.
Abdul-Rehman Malik, a contributing editor of Q-News, a popular Muslim magazine in Britain, said he had received hundreds of e-mails and dozens of text messages about the cartoons. He said some messages were computer-generated so that thousands of phones could be reached nearly instantly, such as one telling him to reply “no” to a British TV survey about whether to broadcast the cartoons. “It’s efficient and immediate — the ultimate activists’ dream,” Malik said.
The UK Independence Party recently used similar tactics to manipulate a BBC poll into who was the most powerful person in Britain. The anti-EU party mobilised its supporters to vote for EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in order to highlight the influence of the EU on British politics.
But even without this sort of manipulation, online polls of the sort run by many news organisations on their web sites have never had any scientific validity whatsoever. The information they generate is meaningless because the sample is self-selecting. Rather than condemning political groups for attempting to manipulate such polls, we should be asking why news organsiations, which should be in the business of reporting truth, conduct and report on such pseudo-polls at all.
For commerical web sites, the answer is simple: polls — especially ones that are highlighted and rigged by activists — drive traffic to a new site. And that’s good for advertising sales. Telephone polls used by some TV broadcasters raise even more money with per-call charges. It’s a money spinner, but the outcome is inevitably also more spin than fact.
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