Mediaboss Marketing

Social-networking sites grew from 9 percent to 19 percent as a source for news in the last two years, but only 3 percent of respondents say they regularly get news from Twitter.

The Internet is continuing to erode TV, radio, and newspapers as the source of news for Americans. According to thelatest Pew Research Center surveycovering the changing news landscape,the proliferation of mobile devices and social networks is accelerating the shift to online news consumption.In the survey, 39 percent said that they got their news online, up from 33 percent two years ago.

Only TV surpasses online as a news source today. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, one-third watched some TV news, down from 49 percent in 2006.Among those under 30, only 13 percent read a digital or print newspaper, while 33 percent viewed news on a social network and 34 percent saw some news on TV.

A majority of those surveyed (64 percent) said they preferred news sources that didn't espouse a specific point of view, while 26 percent wanted news from sources sharing their political viewpoint.Yahoo, Google, CNN, local news, and MSN were the top five online news sources named among the respondents.

Social-networking sites as a source for news grew from 9 percent to 19 percent in the last two years. Among the social-networking sites, 13 percent of respondents got some news from Twitter, and Twitter users are avid consumers of news.Only 9 percent of the Twitter users said they tweeted or retweeted regularly, which was a similar active user percentage to other social-networking sites.

However, only 3 percent of those surveyed overall said that they regularly get news from Twitter, up from 2 percent in 2010. The percentage of the public that sees news on social-networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, or Twitter increased from 29 percent in 2010 to 47 percent in 2012.

The 18- to 24-year-old demographic consumes the least amount of news, which is not unexpected, with e-mailing, texting, and using social networks ranking as their top activities, according to the survey. Overall, 41 percent of those surveyed use social-networking sites.

News coming out of the nation's capitol was not among the top news subjects among younger people. Just 43 percent said they followed news from Washington, D.C., very or fairly closely, and 57 percent said they don't follow it too closely or not at all.

Pew Research Center's biennial news consumption survey was fielded May 9 through June 3, 2012, among 3,003 adults.

Read the original post:
Pew study: News consumption up via mobile, social media

27-09-2012 05:36 British Prime Minister David Cameron's appearance on Late Show with David Letterman is making waves back at home, after Cameron struggled in Letterman's surprise British history quiz. (Sept. 27)

Continue reading here:
Letterman British History Quiz Stumps Cameron - Video

ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2012) Federal law ought to play a stronger role in regulating social networking sites by allowing users to determine what happens to their "digital afterlives," says a recently published paper by a University of Illinois expert in intellectual property law.

Allowing social networking sites to set their own policies regarding the content associated with the accounts of deceased users does not adequately protect individual and collective interests, especially with people spending an increasing part of their lives online using social networking sites, says Jason Mazzone, a professor of law.

"Virtually no law regulates what happens to a person's online existence after his or her death," he said. "This is true even though individuals have privacy and copyright interests in materials they post to social networking sites."

Mazzone says in the absence of legal regulation, social networking sites are unlikely to adopt user-friendly policies for the disposition of copyright materials from the accounts of the deceased.

"The current situation is that there's very little law involved," said Mazzone, the Lynn H. Murray Faculty Scholar at Illinois. "Social networking sites determine on their own what, if anything, to do with a deceased user's account and the materials the user posted to the site. And their policies are not likely to reflect the collective interests that exist with respect to copyright law. It's a little bit like letting the bank decide what to do with your money after you die."

According to the paper, a federal statute could impose some requirements upon social networking sites to give users a degree of control over what happens to their accounts.

"You only want the federal government involved if there's some failure on the part of the states," Mazzone said. "But it would be very difficult for any particular state to set up a legal regime that would adequately regulate Facebook, which not only operates all across the U.S. but also all over the world. Some states have enacted legislation in an effort to protect their own citizens, but it's not at all clear how it would affect Facebook as a whole.

"In order for this type of law to be effective, we have to turn to the federal government."

There are also broader societal interests for preserving content for historical purposes, said Mazzone, the author of "Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law," published by Stanford University Press in 2011.

"It's becoming increasingly common for people to have digital assets, and some of them do actually have value," he said. "Not only are such sites repositories of intellectual property, they also are important to family members and friends. Historians of the future will likely depend upon digital archives to reconstruct the past, which creates a real problem, particularly in an age when we don't leave diaries, and, increasingly, people don't write books."

Here is the original post:
Federal law needed to safeguard 'digital afterlives', expert argues

26-09-2012 11:52 Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he has a vision of a new world order that would be absent of the "hegemony of arrogance." (Sept. 26)

Read more:
Ahmadinejad Calls for a New World Order - Video

Published: Sept. 26, 2012 at 4:19 PM

CHAMPAIGN, Ill., Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Federal laws are needed to regulate social networking sites to give users the right to determine what happens to their "digital afterlives," a U.S. expert says.

Jason Mazzone, a University of Illinois expert in intellectual property law, says allowing social networking sites to set policy regarding the content of accounts of deceased users does not adequately protect individual and collective interests, especially with people spending an increasing part of their lives online using social networking sites.

"Virtually no law regulates what happens to a person's online existence after his or her death," he said in a university release Wednesday. "This is true even though individuals have privacy and copyright interests in materials they post to social networking sites.

"Social networking sites determine on their own what, if anything, to do with a deceased user's account and the materials the user posted to the site.

"It's a little bit like letting the bank decide what to do with your money after you die."

A federal statute could impose some requirements on social networking sites to give users a degree of control over what happens to their accounts, he said.

"It's really pretty astonishing that there is no way for individual users to say, 'When I die, this is what happens to my account,'" he said. "Instead, it comes under the control of Facebook."

The rest is here:
Protection of 'digital afterlives' needed?