There’s no escape. The Blackberry service outage is now impacting users on almost every planet, CNN reports. Tatooine and Coruscant appear to not have been affected yet, but users all over Geonosis, Naboo and Yavin were reportedly hit hard. Our thoughts are with their inhabitants.
(Via @dccrowley and @mpoppel, but probably first noted by @brundle_fly) → Read More
Flipboard-esque magazine-style aggregation apps are all the rage right now. Obviously Flipboard has the space nailed, and Pulse is a nice alternative as well. But one aggregation app seems to have caught the attention of a big name news publication — Zite.
The same company that once had a mailbox full of cease-and-desist notices from beastly publications like the Washington Post and AP, may now be headed toward a big payout. → Read More
CNN offers a lot of mobile apps on a lot of devices. There is CNN for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, and even Nokia phones. There are even different apps for international news. All in all, CNN’s mobile apps have been downloaded 10 million times, according to the company.
The most popular app is CNN for iPhone, which has been out the longest—since September, 2009. And on Apple devices alone, CNN apps are the No.1 and No. 3 news apps on the iPhone, as well as the No. 1 news app on the iPad. CNN would not provide a breakdown between iOS, Android, and Nokia downloads. → Read More
CNN is now broadcasting live 24 hours a day online and on mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. The live streams are available for both CNN proper and Headline News, but good luck finding them. They are definitely not front and center.
If you go to CNN’s main video page, instead of being presented with a live video stream of breaking news, it shows you canned videos from its “Collections.” These seem to be mostly human interest clips like Anderson Cooper answering viewer questions while thoughtfully looking at his iPad or a segment on the best BBQ in Texas.
To watch live video, you can click on the “Live” tab. And this does take you to some live options, including live feeds which CNN has been offering for a while. But to get the new, fully-produced, 24-hour live stream, you have to “unlock to watch.” Click on that and then it asks for your cable company user ID from Verizon, Cox, Comcast, and the like. If you are like me, you will probably have to dig that out. Go ahead, we’ll wait. → Read More
Last night, many of us learned about Osama Bin Laden’s death on Twitter. And in fact, the first credible report from Keith Urbahn, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff, was also on Twitter. And while the White House kept pushing off the official announcement for an hour to inform different parties, the news was already being analyzed and spread on Twitter.
So did Twitter supplant mainstream media as the best source of news about Bin Laden’s death? Yes and no. Yes, many people first heard about the news on Twitter, but more often than not the original source of that news could be traced back to mainstream media. Bin Laden’s death was confirmed by mainstream media (CNN, NYT, etc). Even Keith Urbahn notes that his source was not someone in the military or government, but a “connected TV news producer:” → Read More
For any of you caught up in the frenzy over the royal wedding between England’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, we’ve collected a comprehensive list of where to watch the festivities online, where to find photos, dedicated mobile apps, Twitter accounts following the Royal Wedding and more.
As opposed to the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, this Royal Wedding is particularly unique because of the web didn’t exist back then. And neither did social media. This will be one of the most publicized and watched weddings in history and thh whole world is invited to view and comment both on TV and the web. → Read More
The news from Japan is both awful and appalling. Awful: 23,000 confirmed dead or missing, and counting. Appalling: pretty much anything to do with the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear meltdown like Chernobyl! Deadly contaminated milk and radioactive tap water! Tokyo a postapocalyptic ghost town! A plume of radiation that threatens America’s West Coast!
Where do they get these morons? Again, twenty thousand people are dead, and the drooling dimwits of the media can’t stop babbling about Fukushima, where exactly one person died – a crane operator who had the misfortune to be up in the cab of his vehicle when the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history hit – and only a tiny handful have required treatment for radiation exposure.
But all the nattering nabobs can talk about is the hysteria cited above. I used to have time for CNN, but next time I visit America, it’ll be Fox News all the way. At least their idiocy is entertaining. I dare you to try to watch this CNN clip without cringing. It seems Bob Dylan was wrong, and you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows: → Read More
BanxCorp this morning announced that it has filed a federal antitrust complaint against nine firms, including Dow Jones & Co, Fox News, The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.
The company alleges (PDF) that the nine companies engage in “unlawful per se horizontal market division, customer allocation, and price fixing agreements” with its competitors in the market for bank rate websites throughout the United States. → Read More
In case you haven’t been on Twitter in the past 20 minutes, the U.S. stock market is collapsing. Well, it was collapsing (the Dow was down over 1,000 points at one point), but now it’s bouncing back. But you’d be forgiven if you have no idea what’s going on just from watching the web, because frankly, it’s struggling to keep up.
It appears that under the weight of just about everyone checking the web to see what’s happening with the market, sites are failing left and right. Google Finance keeps bringing up an error message to “please try again in 30 seconds.” Yahoo Finance, meanwhile is completely down. Trying to look for the news via Twitter, meanwhile, yields mixed results. At one point when the Dow was down about 1,000, plenty of people were still tweeting that it was down 400. Others were saying it was down 600, etc. The problem is that the “realtime” web wasn’t even fast enough for how fast things were crashing. → Read More
We’ve all had the experience. You visit cnn.com looking to catch up on the day’s news and have a total WTF!? moment when instead you’re greeted by Jessica Alba’s plans to adopt a child. Meanwhile, bombs are exploding around the world, people are dying — but wait, what’s Tiger Woods thinking right now? Also, how do you harness the power of bugs?
A new site, WTF CNN?, compliments of Breadpig, shows you exactly what world news you’re missing by clicking on CNN. The way the site works is simple: CNN.com is displayed at the top of the page, and under it, you get a choice of seeing the frontpage from one of the following global news sites: ABC (Australia), Al-Jazeera (Qatar), BBC (UK), China Daily (C → Read More
Exciting news, people who watch TV! CNN will finally go fully HD sometime this spring! This is a great day for news junkies and people who constantly need to be reading a ticker. → Read More
Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.
Still, the top two sources of news online are Yahoo News and Google News, followed by the New York Times sites and CNN (China’s QQ.com News would come in fifth with 53 million visitors a month, followed by the BBC and MSN News with about 48 million each—the Wall Street Journal Online is way down the list with only 6.8 million). Google News is the orange line in the chart. → Read More
Today, CNN has invited a number of journalists to One Time Warner Center in New York City to witness a preview of the new CNN.com homepage (they’re calling the event “The Unveiling“). The site serves as one of the Internet’s most popular news sites and is also among the most trafficked sites overall, so a major redesign is no small undertaking.
Jim walton, President of CNN Worldwide, kicked off the presentation by talking about how the last time he had taken the stage, it was during CNN’s annual all-hands meeting in January, when he kept receiving questions about layoffs. He recounted that he had said “if we have significant layoffs, I will sit on this stage, and allow all of you to throw tomatoes at me.” going on to say that today, “nobody is going to be throwing tomatoes. He said that CNN had increased its profits year over year, and that it would be ending the year with more journalists than it started with. → Read More
When it comes jumping on new trends in technology, CNN, like most other mainstream media sources is usually fairly slow to act. Sure, they’ve been hyping up Twitter non-stop for the past several months, but that was only after everyone in the tech world had already been talking about it for a long time. But one thing that hasn’t yet caught on in the tech sphere, but apparently has on CNN, is the use of “Bing” as a verb.
Check out this article about the most dangerous celebrities to search for on the web. The opening line: “Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.” Um, “Bing Jessica Biel”? Aside from it sounding oddly sexual (insert badda-bing joke here), it’s a little odd to see that on CNN.com before it has really entered the tech lexicon. Sure, Microsoft wants everyone to use it as a verb to be like Google, but there’s obviously a big difference between a company wanting something to happen for branding, and it actually happening. → Read More
In case you haven’t gotten enough of the non-stop coverage of Michael Jackson since his death last week, grab some lunch and watch his funeral, which is starting right now at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. You can watch it on TV, or on pretty much any video site on the Web. CNN.com is covering it live with the same Facebook chat integration it used for Obama’s Inauguration. You can see everyone’s comments on the side, or just your friends. I wonder which one will generate more Facebook status updates (the Obama CNN-Facebook Inauguration generated 1.5 million).
Right now five of the top ten top trending topics on Twitter search have to do with MJ (“MJ’s,” “MJ Memorial,” “Staples Center,” “RIP MJ,” and “#michaeljackson”). → Read More
If you’ve tuned your TV to CNN at all over the past week, you’ve probably witnessed a sweeping love affair. I’m not even kidding when I say that I think CNN’s anchors have used the word “Twitter” more than they have uttered “CNN” during that time. And while some people hate that, I think it’s great, because the service is providing a very, very valuable service for spreading information about what is going on in Iran right now. But none of that matters if CNN cannot use its Twitter account correctly to disseminate that news.
Look at the CNN Breaking News Twitter account right now. 8 of its last 10 tweets contain a broken link. This is a Twitter account with nearly 2 million followers, that CNN is promoting like no other on its shows, and it’s 404-ing millions of people. → Read More
http://www.hulu.com/embed/iLB11_SeXcMAAzegVz3alA/466/595 Last week Conan poked fun at Twitter. Now Jon Stewart is taking his turn by stating that CNN using Twitter and Facebook constantly is desperation. Is it? Maybe, but it is funny how mainstream media is finally embracing this Social Networking thing and encouraging everyone to use the services – once or twice. → Read More
FOX News and MySpace are partnering to launch Fox’s citizen journalism social media platform on MySpace, called uReport. MySpace members can share citizen produced content with the MySpace community, as well as have the chance to be featured on FOX News. FOX News and MySpace are both owned by News Corp.
FOX News uReport, which is nearly identical to CNN’s citizen journalism initiative iReport, is a platform through which users can upload photos and videos to FOX News from a computer or mobile device. Members of the MySpace-uReport community can become “uReporters” by uploading video and photos tagged by specific news categories, including entertainment and politics. FOX says that this content could be featured in programming on FOX News Channel and foxnews.com, with FOX News maintaining editorial control of the MySpace page. → Read More
Japan has a serious demographic problem. It’s already the world’s oldest society (22% of the population are 65 and older) and the birthrate stands at 1.34 (but a birthrate of 2.0 is needed to maintain Japan’s population).
So what does Nippon do? Answer 1: The country produces lots of robots to keep up productivity. Answer 2: The economy, in this case Canon, lets employees go home early (at 5.30 pm) to make more babies for the sake of the nation. → Read More
Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting. CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.
With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming. But live streaming failed. CNN.com kept bumping viewers into virtual waiting rooms. This happened to me in the middle of Obama’s speech. I had to keep hitting refresh, but missed half the speech. The stream on Hulu was even worse, with the video frozen and the audio coming in and out. And forget about Ustream. I couldn’t even get any audio. This seemed to be the general experience out there, based on other reports. → Read More
