Criticism against Instagram and what it says about the future of media

instagram

Most criticism toward Instagram borders on hatred.

Instagram is a simple service that lets people share their photos with others from a mobile device.  They get a lot of criticism, bordering on hate. And it’s not just because the tiny startup is being acquired by Facebook recently for $1 billion, which will make all of its employees exceedingly rich — it’s because some people seem to believe that the ease with which amateur photographers can post photos to the service, and the filters Instagram provides in order to add special effects to them, are ruining photography. This isn’t really that surprising: it’s the same kind of criticism that has been made about blogging, citizen journalism and Twitter, among other things — and in each case the critics have been somewhat right, but mostly wrong.

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Is Kickstarter a crowdfunding platform or just another form of entertainment?

crowdfunding

The fact that OUYA raised so much money so fast speaks more to our fantasies than the market reality.

OUYA is the latest Kickstarter darling. It is “a new kind of video game console” that connects to your HDTV like an XBox but allows anyone to publish games like the Android Marketplace. The company behind the device raised their $1 million target in eight hours, and have reached $5 million with more than three weeks left in their campaign. Proponents of Kickstarter’s populist commercialism see OUYA as an unmitigated success.

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A dozen big-name universities join Coursera to offer free online classes

MOOCS

In the last week, more universities signed on with Coursera.

Free online courses from prestigious universities were a rarity a few months ago. Now, they are the cause for announcements every few weeks, as a field suddenly studded with big-name colleges and competing software platforms evolves with astonishing speed.

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More colleges taking online education to a new level

Coursera

Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses.

There is a shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education.  Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce  that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.

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Most trusted source of info is still traditional media

televisions

TV most trusted source of information.

Digital has caused some traditional media to suffer in terms of consumer time and attention—notably, print and radio—TV still takes up the bulk of US adults’ time with media. And Triton Digital research, a digital service provider for online and traditional radio, shows the medium also garners the most trust from consumers.

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Pinterest traffic beats Google referral, Bing, Twitter and StumbleUpon

pinterest

Pinterest is now beating out Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google in referral traffic (not Google organic, of course) according to new data just released by the online sharing service Shareaholic.  The study is based on Shareoholic’s network of over 200,000 publishers, which reaches more than 270 million people monthly.

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Young tablet users more willing to pay for online news

digital news

People who pay for online news are still the minority – but participation may be growing thanks to tablet computers.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s new Digital News Report 2012 those who have paid for digital news ranges from 12 percent in Denmark to four percent in the UK. And only six percent of survey respondents said they would be willing, in future, to pay for news from sources they liked.

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Big retailers luring online shoppers offline

shipping

Walmart began allowing shoppers to order merchandise online and pay for it with cash at a store when they picked it up.

Online shopping has surged. Traditional retailers have lost millions in sales to so-called showrooming.  Showrooming is when shoppers check out products in stores that they then buy from Web sites like Amazon. It has gotten so bad that Best Buy even replaces standard bar codes with special Best Buy-only codes on big ticket items so they cannot be scanned and compared online.

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When big data meets broadband

sites_centers

Scientists want to build a telescope capable of taking roughly 1,400 photos of the night sky consisting of 6 gigabytes of information each somewhere in the mountains in Chile. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope would result in several hundreds of petabytes of processed data each year. This month the National Science Board will decide if it should fund the next phase of LSST to build that data-generating telescope.

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