The Daily reaches 100,000 paid subscribers on iPad →

The publication has amassed more than 100,000 paid subscribers on the iPad, making it the third top-grossing iPad app in the iTunes Store last year. Of those 100,000, about half pay The Daily‘s $0.99 per week subscription fee, and the other half are annual ($39.99 per year) subscribers, according to publisher Greg Clayman.

Pretty impressive, and the price seems about right.

(In contrast Berlingske, a major Danish news paper, just released the pricing strategy for their new iPad app: ~$60 per month. That’s just the way you think when you’re used to selling the good ol’ Sunday paper for ~$5-6, and having a yearly subscription for a daily fix of ink on pulp at ~$900.)

/via

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“Path is a monument to Path” →

Path is a monument to Path. It is no place to scribble in. I wish it longevity so that it might find shabbiness.

Read the whole post. It perfectly sums up why Path feels wrong to me. It’s too much flash, too much polish. It’s too nice.

(And it made me think about why I’ve stuck with Twitter for almost five years now while so many other social networks have come and gone. I don’t really have a clear answer to that. It might be a mixture of people I wish I could be more like, funny tweets I wish I had thought of and pointers to the best and most interesting parts of the vast masses of content spread out over the internet.)

/via

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FBI wants to do a mashup →

The FBI is seeking to develop an early-warning system based on material “scraped” from social networks.

It says the application should provide information about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps “using mash-up technology”.

They don’t have this already?

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Watching Fox News will, quite literally, make you dumber

“Study Shows Fox News Viewers Less Informed on Major Stories“:

“Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a Fairleigh Dickinson political science professor who took part in the analysis of the PublicMind data. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

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Is Twitter genuine social stimulation?

Grace Dent, How To Leave Twitter:

It puzzles me how many people still believe ‘friendship’ or at least bonhomie conducted in cyberspace isn’t a valuable form of social contact, but, say, being thrown together at an NCT group, or in halls of residence, or because your desks at work face on to each other, is. Or that anodyne small talk with a neighbour is ‘genuine social stimulation,’ whereas chatting over Twitter with someone 6,000 miles away who loves Top Gun and Jefferson Airplane as much as you do is just lonely, dysfunctional nerds clashing in cyberspace. This, to my mind, is idiotic. It’s time for us all to come out of the closet about our secret internet chums.

/via Ario.

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Twitter / @Carsten Andreasen: Broadcast tv er ikke døend …

From Carsten, regarding a new Danish report on media consumption:

Broadcast tv is not dying. The oldest Danes watch the most tv, but the 15-24-year-olds have increased their viewing 50% since 2007.

How the hell do these people find time to watch that much tv?

(Also: “How the hell do a guy like Mark find time to spend on Twitter and Google Reader?”)

via Twitter / @Carsten Andreasen: Broadcast tv er ikke døend …

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Anti-Social

Fred Stutzman, the creater of Freedom, a Mac app that turns off internet access for a preset timeframe, has just released “Anti-Social”.

In using Freedom, Fred Stutzman found that he often wanted to look up something on the internet while reading a paper etc. The only way around this was to reboot the computer or write it down on a piece of paper and look it up later. With Anti-Social, he’s made an app that closes off Twitter, Facebook, Bebo etc., but still gives access to searching on Google.

What I like in partiuclar is where Fred writes how you can get around the block (before it’s run out, that is):

When Anti-Social is running, the only way to get around the block is by rebooting your computer. As you will feel a deep sense of shame for rebooting just to waste time on Twitter, you’re unlikely to cheat.

— Anti-Social – Mac/OS X Social Networking Block Software.

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Meet the man behind @BPGlobalPR

Leroy Stick, the man behind the fantastic @BPGlobalPR:

“So what is the point of all this?  The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND.  You don’t own it because it is literally nothing.  You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it? You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand?  Have a respectable brand. ”

— Street Giant » Leroy Stick – the man behind @BPGlobalPR.

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Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008

This is very good introduction to Clay Shirky’s thoughts on the “cognitive surplus” that is currently killing television, but stimulating the user-generated web:

I especially like his thoughts on Desperate Housewives – that it’s nothing more than a “cognitive heat sink, disapating thinking that might otherwise build up and cause society to overheat”, and how people who make tv doesn’t understand where people “get the time” to edit WikiPedia.

Also, he talks about a friend of his who is sitting in the sofa, watching a movie on the tv with his 4-year-old daughter. All of a sudden, she gets up, runs behind the tv and he asks her what she’s doing. She answers, “Looking for the mouse”. The point of the story being that “4-year-olds know that a screen that ships without a mouse, ships broken. Media that is targeted at you, but doesn’t include you, may not be worth sitting still for”.

This more or less sums up why I’m thinking about not having a tv once I get home from the US to Denmark (though I think my girlfriend wouldn’t agree, so essentially we’ll keep it).

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