What blogs cost American business
Story on AdAge.com by Bradley Johnson (registration required):
U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. About 35 million workers — one in four people in the labor force — visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks — bloggers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break. Technorati, a blog search engine, now tracks 19.6 million blogs, a number that has doubled about every five months for the past three years. If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009. Imagine the work that won’t get done then.
And a week doesn’t go by that someone asks me to explain “this blogging thing.”
David Lee Roth, Adam Carolla to replace Howard Stern
After weeks of speculation as to who will inherit the microphone from Howard Stern, Infinity Broadcasting today said former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth and late-night talk show host Adam Carolla will take over the shock jock’s morning-drive broadcasts in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Mr. Stern remains on the air through December 16. [AdAge.com]
Okay, I’m not a Howard Stern fan and I’m not as smart as the guys running Infinity Broadcasting… but this just feels like they’ve thrown in the towel. Adam Carolla, maybe. But David Lee Roth?
Casual content creators
Evan Williams is one of the people that created Blogger and is now trying to do something similar for podcasting (Odeo). He explains clearly and simply why podcasting is catching on and why it is somehow more than –or at least different– than radio as I have always known it: (By way of Scripting News.)
While blogging can be about playing on a world stage to influence, gain audience, and, potentially, monetize (the same goals as most other media), there are millions of people who are happily publishing daily without those motivations. For them, it’s more about expression, self-reflection, and communication. I call these people “casual content creators.” It’s not just that they’re amateur or part of the great, unwashed, Long Tail. It’s that they’re playing a different game.
XM offers “biggest givaway” at World Series
“Touting it as the largest giveaway in the 102-year history of the World Series, XM Satellite Radio said Thursday it was giving a free satellite radio to every fan who enters U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago for Game One this Saturday between the Chicago White Sox and the Houston Astros. Fans will receive a coupon good for the new Delphi XM RoadyXT satellite radio receiver which retails for $79.99 plus a World Series commemorative pin.” — Billboard Radio Monitor