Touchy News Stories

Today Techcrunch has a post that a source in the Apple supply chain has told them Apple has increased it’s ordering  of $10 video camera assemblies. The source for the article say this can only mean that the cameras will be installed in Apple’s iPod Touch based on the number ordered and the sales rate of iPhones currently.

If this rumor turns into fact it would be a game changer in a lot of leagues.  The existing features of iPod Touch with the added video camera makes the iPod Touch a direct threat to The Flip which is only a video camera.

Considering the owner base of iPods and their replacement cycle of the portable media device this means that more video equipment would roaming the earth. The byproduct of that would be more active content sharing users to video sharing websites like YouTube.

For journalist the video camera addition possibly mean that breaking news along with video can be shared as soon as they are on the scene. There is already a small army of reporters already using the iPhone in their news gathering workflow.  The Missouri University School of Journalism is now requiring students entering the program to purchase an Apple iPod Touch or iPhone. The reason is so students can fact check and write stories while still in the field. Not a bad idea, I use my iPod Touch to blog from once or twice a week. The schools logic for this requirement is that if the device was made a requirement then federal student would cover the cost of the player/Internet appliance. When I went off J school The Associated Press Stylebook was the only required item, a typewriter was suggested.

My son will be starting college in about a month and is considering journalism (I think it’s now called communication/electronic media/or some other buzzword) and I’m considering sending him off the iPhone or iPod Touch. Even though it’s not required I think he should start out with the understanding that he is entering a field that will always be evolving.

Revisiting Judge Richard Posner

On the 29^th of June I had story about Richard Posner‘s blog where he wrote that a stricter copyright law can keep the newspaper industry afloat. Under the Posner plan a news aggregator would have to ask for and receive permission to link to an article or they would be in violation of the copyright law. Posner is the Chief Judge for the Seventh Circuit in the federal court system and a blogger.

Simon Owens at Bloggams also found the Posner plan flawed. He cited that a link on the Huffington Post will bring more traffic than search engines, social bookmarks and backlink traffic. His blog received 37739 visitors from a link on The HoPo. That was 3.5 times more traffic than the next nearest traffic source, which was from the search engine Google.

This debunks Posner’s belief that aggrerators are robbing (news) websites of traffic. If the consent to link scheme were in effect at the time Simon may not have been linked to or seen that burst of traffic.

Not all traffic is gold. Raw traffic it is more akin to hard rock gold mining. Once you the traffic arrives at the site there is going to some that pop-in/pop-out viewers that will never to return and there will some visitors that will not interact with the advertising on the site. Once all the rock traffic shakes loose from the vein of ore, the gold comes out when it returns often to the site and clicks the advertising.

The burning question is how well does the Huffington (or other aggregated) traffic monetize?