Rates Have Not Been As Low Since November 2008

Sales of Blu-ray players has increased sharply this year

Mark Ruffalo talks about taking over the role of Hulk from Ed Norton in the new Avengers film.

Have you ever wondered how hierarchical traditional media organizations are finding their place in the new media world? The Bivings Report got to find out just that about PBS’s iconic NewsHour – a program that has been on the air for more than thirty years and whose follows span many generations. This event was a meetup sponsored by DC Media Makers (DCMM) and featured NewsHour’s media coordinator Kate Gardiner.

During the course of the DCMM-sponsored discussion held at the NPR headquarters, a media-savvy audience and Gardiner talked about everything from Facebook fan pages to their preferences for comment management systems on blogs. NewsHour’s unique demographics do not lend themselves perfectly well to the internet age, since the average age of their viewer is over 55. However, this creates an opportunity for Gardiner and her team of online and broadcast journalists to focus on winning over and retaining younger viewers.  The NewsHour program is now posting a larger quantity of online-only content and story exclusives in order to continue engaging with their fan base.

Some interesting statistics about NewsHour’s online outreach:

• Between all of the show and anchors’ Twitter accounts – a tweet is able to reach over 80,000 people
• NewsHour’s Facebook fan base is 60% male, and 40% female (the mathematic opposite of Facebook’s actual gender beak down)
• During the recent BP oil spill, the NewsHour website had more simultaneous viewers than the NewsHour  television broadcast
• Only 31 percent of PBS’s news traffic comes from web referrals
• The May 2010 NewsHour Gulf Leak Meter widget allowed users to estimate how much oil has been spilled into the Gulf Coast, and resulted in millions of page views to the NewsHour site

For Kate Gardiner’s own notes and discussions on the topic, see her blog post at –  http://posterous.kategardiner.com/a-summary-of-my-social-media-engagement-stati

Below is the video we took of various parts of the speech:

Her Fearful Symmetry tells the story of twins living in London, haunted by a dead aunt.

President Obama tackles the tough questions, like, who the hell is Snooki?

Photo credit: ZardozSpeaks

• All the world's talking about Wookieleaks.
• The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media soft launches.
• Does the Internet know no "let me think about that"?
• Organizing the unemployed.
• And Alliance for a Better Minnesota joins Meg Whitman in the Facebook polling-ads vanguard.

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A man dressed as a giant air freshener is taking to the New Jersey streets in search of fellow Garden Staters who, like him, feel that the state is getting a bad rap in the latest spate of Jersey-themed reality television shows.

This is all part of web video to support an online PR push called Jersey Doesn't Stink, which is geared as a pushback against shows like "The Jersey Shore" and "Real Housewives of New Jersey" on behalf of people who feel these programs reinforce unfair stereotypes of New Jersey residents as mindless fistpumpers with fake tans or bad drivers with awful hair.

Actor Anthony DeVito roams what looks to be Hoboken and Jersey City, seeking support for the homeland of Bruce Springsteen and Frank Sinatra by way of Snooki references.

"That girl looks like a pumpkin, though, doesn't she?" he asks one man.

In a conversation with two Jersey residents on a park bench, he sums the gist of the campaign in a single line: "It's unfair to paint everyone in New Jersey with that same broad, orange brush."

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Former USDA state official Shirley Sherrod to sue Andrew Breitbart for posting a snippet of video that framed her as racist:

"He had to know that he was targeting me," Sherrod told reporters at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists in San Diego.

"He hasn't apologized. I don't want it at this point. He'll definitely hear from me," she said.

When asked if she planned to sue Breitbart, she replied, "I will definitely do it."

Breitbart said Thursday he had not been contacted by Sherrod's attorney. He had no comment on her plans to sue.

Fascinating stuff, on the facts. Seems likely that, if it were to go through, it'd be the first time that a court case would hinge upon the question of when posting video ripped from its context actually becomes a punishable offense.

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Let the onslaught begin.

Today Twitter unleashed their new “live-streaming” API, which enables users a totally new way to enjoy the micro-blogging service sweeping the world. For users who access twitter through the multi-account capable, user-friendly app Tweetdeck, there is a new API option called “User Streams” that is now in “a limited testing period”. Keep in mind: there are an estimated 3,000 tweets sent per second.

All the features of Twitter you know and love will now be streamed in real-time, including the user timeline (your main account), direct messages, retweets, new followers, favorites and even additions to lists. By taking these updates into real-time, Twitter is continuing to reach it’s full potential as an information delivery service. Now without refreshing, reloading or any action at all on the part of the user, you can watch Twitter flow like the beautiful river of information that it truly is.

Users hungry for the action can either pay $20 for a registered version of Echofon for Mac, or sign up for one of Tweetdeck’s preview releases. Until you get your hands on this to see it for yourself, there’s this blistering fast preview video  that will give you an impression of how exactly Twitter will be the newest and truest incarnation of the “real-time web”.

Turnfront is organising a conference on using the web for activism on 7th August in London.

It will have a mixture of presentations from activists and technologists, along with time for more open conversations between the participants. The talks will cover activist video, open source social media, hi-tech direct action and online democracy (to name a few).

You can register at: http://turnfront.com/dotactivist

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According to a least one source, in Yemen, the U.S. CIA is now actively pursuing the so-called "Internet imam," raising the possibility, according to the source, that the imam will be killed before going to court or otherwise facing the justice system:

Last month, a handful of lawyers in the U.S. got a series of unexpected phone calls from Yemen. They came from an accomplished Yemeni academic and former government official, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki. He is the father of al-Qaida's most famous cleric, the Internet imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to both the Fort Hood shootings and an attempted bombing on a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.

The Awlaki pere was making the calls to key U.S. attorneys, NPR has learned, to see if he could mount a case on behalf of his American-born son against the U.S. government. By his account, the Obama administration has unfairly targeted the younger Awlaki by putting him on a CIA "capture or kill" list. By doing that, the administration has essentially green-lighted Anwar al-Awlaki's assassination — without filing any charges or having a court weigh the evidence in the case.

"This is an instance where the executive branch is claiming the power to go ahead and kill Awlaki without going through anything that resembles the traditional legal process," said New York University Law professor Sam Rascoff. "It essentially amounts to going right to the death penalty phase of a case without ever bringing it to a jury — and that ought to give us pause."

Awlaki has earned the name "Internet imam" for his work connecting with Muslims, often young Muslims, online -- selling them them on the idea of a combative, extremist vision of Islam while similtantously bringing them into the al-Qaeda orbit. American intelligence figures talk about him as a "talent spotter." For some time, U.S. authorities seemed somewhat underalarmed by just how much damage a religious figure could do armed only with a laptop and an Internet hookup. Part of the switch was no doubt motivated by the fact that Army Major Nidal Hasan exchanged several emails with Awlaki before he went on a shooting spree in Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 people dead.

(Apologies for the extremely slow posting today. Chewing on something big, and it seemed worth a bit of focused attention.)

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An epic Thor trailer leaked from Comic-Con.

Steve Carell appears on Zach Galifianakis' absurdist Between Two Ferns.

Oklahoma psych-rockers freak out Letterman audience.

Written by guest blogger, MeiMei Fox, @meimeifox and cross-posted to TechSoup blog.

 

 

 

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With a terrible speech and a bad veto competition, Andrew may be on his way out the door.

Apple reminds us once again it knows what's best buyers and will brook no dissent.

How is it that Arlington National Cemetery could devolve into such a mess? So close to official Washington that you could walk there from Capitol Hill without breaking much of a sweat, it is by design and popular imagination a burial place befitting those who have given military service to the United States. And yet reporters and Army investigators have shown that Arlington National Cemetery is home to hundreds, if not thousands of unmarked graves, urns found in dirt piles, and graves that show up on now official cemetery map.

That's the subject of a Senate hearing happening at this very moment being conducted by the Government Affairs Committee's ad hoc subcommittee on contracting, chaired by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) with Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) as ranking member.

But one thing we already know is that what's happened at Arlington is, at least in part, a failure of technology. Or rather, a failure of cemetery leaders to comprehend that cobbled-together hardware and outdated software went beyond obscure, siloed "technical issues" to have the effect of dishonoring American soldiers.

According to a June report by Army investigators (pdf), for example, Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly the jewel of the national cemetery system, was running IT that would have embarrassed even other government burial places, not to mention private facilities across the country. "When asked about the cemetery's information technology (IT) posture," reads the report, "one ANC leader stated that the cemetery is at a 'one' on a scale of one to five, with five being the best." Modern cemetery practice is to use customized software systems that employ GPS to keep track of burial sites, scheduling tools to track internments and inurnments, ordering features that manage headstone production. Arlington had little of that. And it had no dedicated IT staff responsible for overseeing the system.

The alternative? "This forces Arlington to maintain its present practice of manual record-keeping as its primary means of record-keeping." There's little wonder how things turned out. It's pretty much what they were planning for.

For more background on the chaotic situation at Arlington National Cemetery, check out the on-going reporting that Salon's Mark Benjamin has been doing. And you can watch the Senate committee hearing's live-stream here.

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