The MoPR Blog

This Thursday, September 25, isn’t just National One Hit Wonder Day, National Maritime Day, or National Ataxia Awareness Day, it’s also the first-ever National Digital Media Day.

On Thursday, interactive digital media professionals in Canada and across the globe will gather to raise the profile of the digital media industry and celebrate the dynamic work taking place in this sector.

According to PricewaterhouseCooper’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2008-2012, the digital media sector is one of the fastest growing industries in today’s knowledge economy, and its double-digit growth rate will help drive the global media market up to US $2.2 trillion in the next five years.

On Thursday in Canada, thousands will gather for networking, lobbying, education sessions and celebrations. Other countries are holding celebrations and demo camps as well.

Digital media encompasses everything from cell phones and videogames to e-learning, the Internet and digital television. Needless to say, it’s a sector that touches nearly everything that we report on in this blog.

Lynda Brown-Ganzert, one of the National Digital Media Day organizers, made a plea to members of the events’ social network to get involved in any way they can, saying, “In case you missed it, in the last two weeks we have lost the TradeRoutes fund and the Canadian New Media Fund, the only two funding programs for digital media. These are critical times for our industry and your voice needs to be heard.”

The team of folks organizing National Digital Media Day has planned activities in major cities across the country.

In Canada a “Mobile Mass Mob” in cities across the country will stage Canada’s largest ever collective public kiss and upload photos of the event at the same time, creating an intimate portrait of those passionate about digital media. Event organizers are looking for kissers and photographers (or those willing to do both) to participate:

FLASH MOBBERS: Stop traffic at your city’s busiest intersection (TBA) for 2 minutes with some joyful kissing: simple peck, sloppy smooch, French kiss, full-on snog - you decide!

Here’s a great example of flash mobbing in Paris recently:

SHUTTERBUGS: Capture the Kiss moment with your iPhones, smartphones, or cameras and email/upload your pics to The Kiss website.

Kiss times:
Pacific time: 12pm
Mountain time: 1pm
Central time: 2pm
Eastern: 3pm
Atlantic: 4pm
Newfoundland: 4:30pm

Here is a link to a video which was the inspiration for this event, courtesy of BlueSponge in Montreal.

You can join The Kiss event on Facebook here.

Bloggers around the globe have signed on to report on activities as they happen.

Other events taking place across Canada include:
CHARLOTTETOWN: Industry networking event, Atlantic Technology Centre
MONTREAL: Industry networking event
TORONTO: Kensington Market block party, featuring demos of a 3D digital graffiti tagging system and a Skype megaphone, as well as a writing for digital media event at 1028 Queen Street West
WINNIPEG: Keynote by Robert L. Peters, former president of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, and networking event at the Pastry Castle Café
SASKATOON: BarCamp Saskatoon, at The Cellar, Senator Hotel
EDMONTON: DemoCamp Edmonton
CALGARY: DemoCamp Calgary
VANCOUVER: New Media BC annual general meeting and New Forms screening event
* Events are open to the public.

For more information, read the online Mediacaster Magazine story, “Canada Celebrates National Digital Media Day.”

You can join the National Digital Media Day social network hosted on Ning here.

You can join the National Digital Media Day group on Facebook here.

Lastly, here is an event in Canada hosted by New Media Manitoba (NMM), a non-profit association of professionals that advocate and provide focused training, support and guidance to the new media business and development community. Comprised of over 650-members, NMM is a common ground for people seeking to make connections and collaborate on digital interactive projects. You can register to attend their event online and the cost is $5.

Wireless has landed – many U.S. homes ditch land lines. A new study from The Nielsen Company says that more than 20 million U.S. telephone households (17 percent) are wireless substitutors, or, homes without landlines that rely solely on a mobile phone for their home telecommunications. The new research suggests that one in five U.S. households could be wireless-only by the end of 2008. The study suggested that one of the reasons for dumping landlines is the tightening economy and households looking for ways to save money. Landline phone bills average around $40 a month.

Interestingly, wireless substitution doesn’t work for everyone.  Ten percent of landline phone customers have experimented with wireless-only in their household, but then returned to landline service.  Nielsen reports that needing a landline for another service (security system, satellite TV, pay-per-view, fax machine, etc.) is the primary reason people “mend the cord.”

Mobile social networks fueled by advertising. Ad-funded social networks will provide the bulk of revenues in the mobile user-generated content (UGC) space by 2013, according to a new report from Juniper Research.

The report says that the total value of the UGC market – comprised of social networking, dating and personal content delivery (PCD) services - will rise from nearly $1.1 billion in 2008 to more than $7.3 billion in 2013, with social networking overcoming dating to become the largest revenue generating segment by 2009.

Other findings from the report include:

• The number of active users of mobile social networking sites is expected to rise from 54 million in 2008 to nearly 730 million in 2013.
• The Far East and China region will be most popular in terms of mobile user numbers for mobile social networking and PCD throughout the forecast period, but the Indian Sub Continent will become the largest region for mobile dating services by 2010
• There will be more than 9 billion downloads from PCD sites by 2013, of which 32 percent will be ad-supported.

Dig it! A new Twitter tool. Does using Twitter sometime feel like you’re posting in the dark? Tired of your genius 160-character diatribes going nowhere? You might like Dwigger, a new tool for Twitter that’s similar to Digg. It works by supplementing Twitter by putting Tweets into threaded conversations with vote buttons. By doing so, users Tweets can be voted on. So, what’s the value-add to Twitter? More exposure? Higher web search rankings? Ego boosts? We have to admit Dwigger’s site is pretty cool: top geo clouds, top Tweets and top users. Where’s the mobile app for iPhone and smartphones?

Your social networking friends are…different. Mark Dykeman of Mashable has a fascinating and enlightening piece on the five different types of social media “friends.” Here’s his lead:

“Would you trust a social media friend with your money? Your home? Your significant other? Your children? Your life? Your answer to those questions will determine whether or not you feel that friends, as used in social media, are friends like you had in school or if they’re better labeled as something else.”

He asks if adding or following someone is a tactical move or signs of genuine affection and solidarity?

Dykeman then lists the five types of social network friends: connectors; prospects; groupies; friends and family; information sources.

We’re faced with this on sites such as LinkedIn whenever we add someone. Are they a friend? A former co-worker? Or the worst, “other?” What if we mark them as former co-worker but they think of themselves as a friend?

Man, social networking is a minefield. Where’s Miss Manners when you need her?

Read Dykeman’s piece here.

iPhone’s autocorrect feature well hated. At least it kind of bugs us when we’re texting. And now, according to Mobile Industry Review, someone wants to change it. Please Let Us Disable, Steve is pleading with Apple to disable the auto correction by having users sign a petition. Here’s their plea taken from their website:

Hi Steve Jobs. We now updated to the new iPhone Firmware 2.1 and it definitely made things go much smoother! But we all still miss one feature: We’d like to be able to disable the annoying autocorrection! At the time it is really not Apple-like. Please let your developers make a simple switch button to turn autocorrection off (they probably will do that in 20 seconds, right?). Thank you very much!

Hey, since we’re asking Jobs for favors, here’s our plea: Dear Steve, please let us send SMS photos via texting. And add video.

At the beginning of August I wrote a post about the then-pending changes to the guidelines from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding the notorious Reg-FD – the set of SEC rules guiding fair disclosure of material information to the public. Six weeks later, all hell has broken loose on the stock market (for myriad reasons), and in the news today comes word that even John McCain would fire Chris Cox, the SEC chairman who until now was being credited for bringing the commission into the 21st Century.

But I want to go back to something I said in my August 1 post:

“Instead of waiting for the SEC to catch up to technology advances, social media and blogging companies may want to drive technology advances to catch up with the appropriate need for fair disclosure.”

At issue in this post was whether the SEC was going to allow publicly traded companies to issue material information via company websites and blogs. The SEC position was that at the time Reg-FD was written there were no such phenomena as social networks and blogs, and therefore regulation needed to catch up with technology.

Although a huge fan of social media and true believer in the ability to use them for dispensing news and opinions, I wanted to sound a note of caution. Unlike the wire services that likewise urged the SEC to reconsider whether material information may be distributed via blogs, Mobility PR won’t face an economic impact from the rule changes. My position comes from working in corporate communications at public companies and understanding the need for simultaneous and widespread disclosure of information that impacts stock price.

My concern in August was that while social media is the communications platform about which everyone is buzzing, it’s still very much nascent and in many instances as yet unproven. The purpose for disclosing material non-public information – that is information known only inside a company that once made public will cause a change in the stock price – is so that all investors have access to important information at the same time. Without a simultaneous and widespread release of information, some investors will have an advantage over others. The best method for simultaneous release of information, still today, is the traditional newswire service. Using the blogosphere for such a release assumes that everyone investing has caught up with technology – and perhaps more important, that technology has caught up to the purpose of this regulation.

Reg-FD is designed to protect investors. I think the past two weeks have demonstrated that investors do need protecting. Not from the violent mood swings of the stock market this week (that’s called “inherent risk”), but from incidents like the one that happened last week. The SEC commissioners should pay very close attention to what happened when a “glitch” led to a massive sell-off of United Airlines stock, resulting in a price drop so fast and so large that it forced NASDAQ to stop trading on the stock.

Here’s what I’ve discerned from the reports on the events of last week. On September 8, 2008, a Chicago Tribune online news article from December 10, 2002 about United Airlines’ then-plan to seek bankruptcy protection was inadvertently recirculated by Income Securities Advisors to a Bloomberg stock market website. Investors believed the article to be current news (because all news on these sites is supposed to be current), and the sell-off began. Before NASDAQ halted trading of United, shares had fallen from about $12 to $3.

When a mistake like this is made, everyone wants to blame someone, particularly the parties involved who want the blame to rest with someone else. So the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, laid blame at the feet of Google. A company press release issued two days after the event begins:

“Tribune Company today said the confusion surrounding a 2002 Chicago Tribune article on the Internet this past weekend started with the inability of Google’s automated search agent “Googlebot” to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the websites of its newspapers.”

Google of course disagrees and thinks the fault lies elsewhere. A Computerworld blog post by Preston Gralla I think best encapsulates the true essence of the problem, and why the SEC needs to pay close attention. Preston writes:

“So who’s at fault here? The Tribune Company, Google, and every other Web site that uses automation rather than human intelligence for determining what is news. The old story showed up as a top link in the South Florida Sun Sentinel because the story was clicked on once during a late hour when there was little traffic to the site. That made it a “top story,” and so it was automatically put near the top of the page. The Google bot saw it, and assumed it was a new story. Things spiraled out of control from there.”

That the fault ultimately lies with the automated mechanisms involved in collecting and distributing news – in this case specifically to investor news websites – should prove to everyone that the online/social media apparatus are not yet mature enough to satisfy the intent of Reg-FD.

What is exposed in this instance is not vulnerability of social media, but an opportunity for social media companies to build a better newstrap. When protecting the public trust, it’s not always a question of regulation catching up to technology. In the instance of using social media to communicate material information to investors, the question must be whether technology can catch up to regulation.

We invite your comments.