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An amazing piece of data visualization showing the traffic to the website of the New York Times on the day Michael Jackson died. Look for the eruption in traffic from 5.20pm onwards when TMZ first broke the news.

The New York Times site traffic, US, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

Posted by Ed Cotton Interesting to see The Atlantic write such a flattering article about The Economist and the current state of the newsweekly business. The discussion revolves around the recent changes and re-designs at Time and Newsweek, who are both hoping to drag their publications to new found success in an otherwise dying print market.
The Economist is the one shining ray of light that everyone now wants to emulate, but The Atlantic does not believe this is possible because The Economist possess one thing these other titles lack.

"The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface. The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist. "

In the end, it's all about the brand.


Posted by Ed Cotton From the panel I ran in New Orleans for the AAAA's media conference, the group of twentysomethings I interviewed were pretty clear that news is headline based and something to be skimmed and probably something that should be free.

It's as if it's part of the ambient information; a news feed from a news organization or a friend on Facebook.

The challenge for newspapers is obviously to work out a business model that works, but it's clear the value of their work in the world is being undermined by the ubiquity of the feed.

The future is not about skimming, it shouldn't JUST be like this.

It's clear the world would be a much worse off without journalism, but we won't know that until it's gone for ever.

Perhaps newspaper associations and journalist unions need to band together to tell their story.


Posted by Ed Cotton Data from Akamai shows that Obama become the new number 1 new story in internet traffic volume since records began (2005).

Obama beat out a mix of celebrity deaths and sporting events to claim the number one spot.




Posted by Ed Cotton Cool story about the Movable Type art piece in the new New York Times building in New York.

The concept is all about breaking the original content down into small elements and finding connections between the pieces.




Posted by Ed Cotton It often seems like the robots science fiction promised never materialized.

Sometimes we see glimpses of something in Japan, but then we hear nothing.

What if the robots don't look like we expect them to?

What if the robots are already here?

Imagine trading on Wall Street, you would like to feel that you have an intuitive edge over the computer-based trading systems. That you have your ears to the ground in a way they couldn't hope to have. You have access to news in real-time, when they are just looking at trends in historic data.

Obviously, the news wire services believe that their news has a fiscal value well beyond the money they get paid by big media for their services and the classic ticker tape information that goes to trader's desks. They needed to find a way to provide services for the automated trading systems and it looks like Dow Jones has done just that.

"Dow Jones News Analytics Developers Kit, an application programming interface that allows financial institutions to integrate real-time news and data into their automated trading systems. The program fuses the capabilities and data of Dow Jones real-time news and RavenPack’s sentiment data, thereby creating a program that converts news into data trading systems can react to. However, users can also ask to use historical data too."

Surely, with the level of data brands now have access to, they must be close to building models of their markets as rich, complex and sophisticated as their Wall Street counterparts.

If not, it's just a matter of time before we all find ourselves servants responding to the predictions of the all seeing, all knowing black boxes.

When that happens, the robots will be with us, but we just won't notice them.




Posted by Ed Cotton