Eubie's notes

Telegraph.co.uk reports in today’s issue about an experiment where people were asked to watch a tape of people playing with basketballs and count the number of times the balls are passed.

After the tape is over, the scientists (article did not mention their fields of study) asked viewers if they saw the woman in the gorilla suit? Story says half reported not seeing a gorilla. For a group that were asked to just watch the tape, the gorilla was easily seen.

The experiment is used to help explain traffic accidents “when a driver ‘looked but failed to see’, and other examples of mayhem and mishap in everyday life.” The explanation is that the brain processes only so many messages and the focus on the passing basketballs causes it to ignore the visual messages of the woman in the gorilla suit. The experiment is not new; it’s been around awhile.

Tip: Crooked Timber. Here’s a link to the tape. I saw the gorilla, but, then I knew what to look for didn’t I?

N.Y. Times: The Elements of Common Sense. When The Times opts for CD’s rather than CDs, it’s considered house style. But if a shopkeeper mislays an apostrophe, the kind of people who worry about whether anal-retentive has a hyphen are quick to criticize.

The Business Journal of Minneapolis/St. Paul: General Mills Inc. is considering launching a cable food channel, with the Pillsbury Bake-Off as its centerpiece.

From New Media Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau: keyword search accounted for 35 percent of all online advertising in 2003, up 15 percent from 2002. Two biggest categories in 2002 — banner ads and sponsorships — were down as a percentage, though actual dollars spent in each category grew. Overall online ads were up 21 percent to 7.3 billion More details at Center for Media Research.

Another big area of growth was ads sold based on performance-based pricing. Ads sold on hybrid prices fell significantly and CPM/Impression pricing fell slightly in 2003 from 2002.

Jonah Bloom, executive editor of Advertising Age writes about online ad-budget growth: “It might be a 3% or 4% ad medium by share of budget today, but it’s at a tipping point and there’s every reason to think it will be a 10% medium within the next two years.”

Wired News: Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

As RSS feeds proliferate (almost every major American newspaper site and blog has one) and as more and more Internet users adopt readers, websites and bloggers are starting to feel the weight of thousands of hourly pings.

Bloglines tries to be a nice aggregator, hitting sites only once an hour and then serving the feeds to readers through its computers, says Mark Fletcher, chief executive of Bloglines in the article. The potential problem is from RSS readers residing on individual computers hitting sites at the same time.

Next time I need ideas for books to read: Pulitzer Prize for Letters and Newbery Award winners.

The curtain has been lifted on Google with its planned IPO.

Now we see that Google has been very successful selling ads targeted to readers’ searches. It sold $658 million in advertising last year, passing Yahoo!, which sold $638 million and was the previous leaders in online sales.

“(T)he striking success of its Internet advertising business poses perhaps an even greater threat to Madison Avenue” is the lead to today’s N.Y. Times article: “Google Poses a Challenge for Usual Ad Outlets.”

“(A)dvertisers are finding they can attract buyers relatively cheaply without a blaring message and an expensive Madison Avenue agency to create it.”

It sounds so simple: Readers come to Google looking for something specific and are ready to look at ads about those things.

Google’s success further explains why search ads are hot. Ad revenues of Google and Yahoo! together are about 18% of the $7.3 billion online ad market estimated by New Media Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Ron Rosenbaum says management-theory gurus have helped create the type of editors that allowed the Jason Blair and Jack Kelley scandals at the N.Y. Times and US Today.

“There seemed to be no understanding that calling a newspaper a ‘brand’ moves things backwards to precisely the thinking that allowed Jack Kelley to thrive — protected because he was the public face of a ‘brand,’ not a newspaperman whose facts are subject to review.” Rosenbaum writes for The New York Observer.

“Who is going to be the editor brave enough to sic some reporters on the corporate consultants who ar jargonizing the integrity of newspaper culture away?”

I don’t think Rosenbaum would care much for the next Notes item: What’s going to be hot next?

Previous Notes on US Today and N.Y. Times: here and here.

MediaPost looks at four new ad models on the internet: social networking (both work and play), local search, blogging, and broadband video.

Interesting that RSS (webfeeds) didn’t make the list. I’ve noticed that the ads inserted in the RSS feeds of InfoWorld have disappeared, at least for now. Finding ways to financially support RSS feeds is crucial for publishers.

MediaPost article also looks at what used to be hot: online communities, push, pay-to-surf (paying users to view ads); and ad-supported access. Tip from E-Media Tidbits.

The blog Holvaty says Google News deserved being a finalist in this year’s ESpy Awards.

“Please note my bias as a professional programmer, but I’d say a news application developed by computer scientists is just as deserving of journalism awards as a collection of news stories produced by traditional journalists,” he writes.

The list of this year’s finalists is here and winners will be announced May 12.

If Google is a finalist this year, will Topix be a finalist next year?

Both sites should worry local newspapers and TV stations. Google News and Topix give traffic and take traffic from local sites. They drive traffic when people click from a link, but reduce the need to go as many individual local sites. Long-term, I think will siphon away most site’s traffic.