Author: Mathew Ingram

If you looked at the recent tweaks to Facebook’s privacy controls and thought that some of your settings had been changed to expose more of your content to the outside world than ever before, you’re not alone. At least one Facebook user has filed a complaint with the Canadian government about exactly that, and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said this morning that it’s opening an investigation into the matter. According to the Commissioner’s office, the probe “focuses on a tool introduced by Facebook in mid-December 2009, which required users to review their privacy settings. The complainant alleges that the new default settings would have made his information more readily available than the settings he had previously put in place.” Assistant Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham was quoted in a statement announcing the probe that:

“The individual’s complaint mirrors some of the concerns that our Office has heard and expressed to Facebook in recent months. Some Facebook users are disappointed by certain changes being made to the site – changes that were supposed to strengthen their privacy and the protection of their personal information.”

Facebook, meanwhile, says that it went to significant effort to inform users of the changes and what was involved. “Any recommended changes to a user’s privacy settings were clearly shown to the user repeatedly and were not implemented until the user accepted these changes,” Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told Reuters. “In addition, users were required to review the final settings after any changes and pointed to where they could reverse or further customize their settings.”

Ironically, the new settings that sparked this latest complaint were in part a result of investigations like the one the Canadian Privacy Commissioner just announced. Last year, Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart led an investigation of Facebook’s privacy standards, which culminated in a report in July that found a number of issues with the way the social network handled users’ information. In August, after discussions with the company, Facebook agreed to modify its site to deal with these concerns.

Facebook has been the subject of repeated privacy complaints and investigations by a number of governments, including Canada’s, because of the way it reveals certain personal data, and in particular the way it shares that data with third-party application developers. One of the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s criticisms in the past has been that Facebook shares more personal information with app developers than it needs to, and doesn’t do a good enough job of explaining what it’s sharing with users and why.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• How Facebook Should Fix Its Privacy Problem

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Bart van de Biezen

Is the newly launched Apple tablet, the iPad, beautiful? Yes. Drool-worthy, in fact. Will Apple sell a lot of them? If the iPod and the iPhone are anything to go by, then yes — and at $499 for the basic version, they are priced to move. But does the iPad contain anything that could be seen as throwing a lifeline to the foundering ship of traditional media? Well, no.

Once you get past the hype (of which there has been a boatload), the iPad is really just a larger version of the iPod touch, with some interface and usability tweaks thrown in around things like email, games and e-books. Has the iPhone changed the traditional print media business? Not at all — unless you think selling an app for your publication (as Conde Nast has for GQ) is a game-changer.

Yes, the New York Times app looks impressive, with video that plays right inside the newspaper display (although you can do that on the NYT web site, too). But will a fancier app change the nature of the newspaper business or the magazine business? No. Is the Times going to charge for its app, or charge people for content through the app somehow? There was no mention of it in Martin Niesenholtz’s presentation as part of the Apple launch.

Theoretically, in-app sales could add to the bottom line at some newspapers and magazines, if they can convince enough users/readers to pay. But will they pay for the same content they can get online for free? Unlikely — even if they can resize the font and watch videos. Yes, advertising inside the app could bring in additional revenue, but that’s not likely to be a game-changer either.

Could the iPad be used to help create and distribute content or connect to services aimed at specific groups, through the kind of membership-based model with which The Guardian is planning to experiment? Possibly. But that again is a nut that newspapers and magazines will have to crack with or without the iPad, and the existence of the device isn’t necessarily going to make finding the right business model any easier. Could you take someone from a travel story and connect them directly to a travel site to purchase a ticket? Sure you could, but you don’t need an iPad to do that.

Another thing the iPad makes abundantly clear is that if you want to succeed in a world ruled by a giant iPod touch, you had better develop (or acquire, or partner with someone who has) some serious multimedia chops. This device is designed to do large full-color photos, full-screen video (even HD) and much more. If all you have is a traditional newspaper-like page with a few small photos and some grainy video, you are going to get left in the dust.

That might make things easier for magazines like Conde Nast, which are used to dealing with large-format, high-quality images and which understand design. But if you’re a newspaper, let’s be honest — large, high-quality images are not exactly your thing (except for the wonderful Big Picture feature at Boston.com). Many news organizations, including the New York Times, are getting better at doing video, but most of them still have a long way to go.

As many observers have noted (including Robert X. Cringley in a recent blog post), the biggest problem that traditional media entities have right now is a cost base and production system and corporate structure that was designed for one specific platform — namely, the neo-industrial process of laying out and publishing a printed product that is delivered to people’s homes. That structure and process is completely out of whack in relation to the new platform (the web), which is growing in ways the printed version is not. And it’s not just off by a little, it’s off by orders of magnitude.

Think about it this way: Have iTunes and the iPod rescued or saved the music business? Hardly. If anything, they have only accelerated the disruption in that industry, and exposed how out of touch, out of control and cost-prohibitive most of it still is when it comes to doing business online. The web has been doing the same thing to traditional media for the past decade or so, and devices like the iPad are only going to accelerate that process.

Which means that newspapers and magazines still have to figure out what they have that is unique, different and special in a way that makes people want to pay for it. That was the problem before the iPad came along, and it continues to be the central problem facing content creators of all kinds, not just newspapers and magazines. It’s just exacerbated for them because — unlike books — so much of what they traffic in is a commodity, here today and gone tomorrow.

And the iPad, whatever else it might be, is no magic bullet.

Have you ever applied for a job and wondered why you didn’t get it, even though you were qualified? According to a new survey, there’s a good chance that the person doing the hiring found something about you online that they didn’t like. The survey done by Microsoft found that 70 percent of HR professionals in the U.S. have rejected a job applicant based on what they found out about that individual by searching online (that number is lower in other countries).

As part of Data Privacy Day on Thursday, Microsoft says it conducted a survey of 2,500 people, among them consumers, HR managers and recruitment professionals in the U.S., UK, Germany, and France, with the goal of learning more about attitudes toward online reputation, including how such information can have real life consequences. The survey found that the top online factors for rejecting a job applicant are unsuitable photos/videos, concerns about a candidate’s lifestyle and inappropriate comments written by the candidate.

“Our research shows that managing your online reputation can be a significant benefit. Everyone should think critically about the image they’re digitally portraying,” Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist, said in a statement. Cullen also wrote about the survey on his blog, and there’s a video about the findings here.

The survey also found that not only are HR staffers search for information about job applicants online, most of their companies have made online screening a formal requirement of the hiring process. Recruiters and HR professionals also said that they believe the use of online-reputation information will significantly increase over the next five years. And while the survey found that most consumers manage their reputation at least to some extent, a significant percentage (between 30 and 35 percent depending on nationality) “don’t feel their online reputation affects either their personal or professional life [and] consequently, they are not taking steps to manage their reputations.”

Data Privacy Day (known as Data Protection Day in Europe) is designed to increase awareness around privacy and data protection issues, and is a joint project involving Microsoft, Intel, Google, AT&T and a number of other companies as well as an organization known as The Privacy Projects, a non-profit think tank devoted to researching and promoting privacy policies and standards.

Post photo and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Felipe Morin.

As successful as Google has been with plenty of other things — including a little thing called search-related advertising — it has struck out big-time in virtually every attempt at the social side of the web (although Orkut, the company’s version of a Friendster/Facebook-style social network, is apparently a big deal in Brazil and India). Google Friend Connect may have been launched before Facebook came out with its version, but there’s little question as to which of them has more traction. Then there’s Picasa, Google Latitude — the list of underwhelming social apps goes on.

Undeterred, Google appears to be putting together a kind of social web SWAT team to try and enhance its performance in the space. Earlier this year, the company hired well-known web designer and consultant Chris Messina as well as Joseph Smarr, the former chief technology officer at Plaxo. And in a blog post on Tuesday, programmer Will Norris announced that he was also joining the new Social Web team.

Messina, who’s worked with the Spread Firefox campaign and started the BarCamp movement, is a vocal proponent of open web standards, particularly when it comes to concepts such as OpenID and cross-platform user authorization. He started an open-source collaborative project called DiSo (short for “distributed and social”) that was aimed at allowing users to create and maintain control over their own social identities online, rather than giving control over to walled-garden networks such as Facebook or MySpace.

Norris also worked on the DiSo project, and on another open-source user authorization system he developed called Shibboleth. Smarr, meanwhile, is widely known for his support of open web standards as a member (along with Messina) of the OpenID Foundation, his seat on the OpenSocial Foundation board, and for co-authoring a “Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.” He also gave a talk at Google’s I/O event last year, which is embedded in this post Liz wrote about his move to Google.

While Google hasn’t said what the new team’s duties will be exactly, the backgrounds of these three men make clear that the company — rather than trying to out-Facebook Facebook or out-Twitter Twitter — wants to focus on the plumbing of the social web. In that sense, the search giant’s strategy appears to be an extension of its Open Social project, which was designed to help tie together a variety of social networks through a common set of programming APIs, and allow people to move data between them.

It might be unfair to describe Open Social as a bust, but it certainly hasn’t lived up to some of the early attention the launch of the project garnered a little over two years ago. Although social networks such as MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, Ning and Yahoo joined the venture, Facebook — the hottest social network around — did not, and there have been few tangible results from the partnership. The reality is that developers continue to develop for the Facebook platform, as closed as it might be, because that is where the users and the momentum are.

One risk for the company in pursuing the Open Social idea is that hiring Messina and Smarr might be perceived, as it is already by some open-web proponents (for a sample, read the comments on this post), as an attempt to somehow control that movement and divert it to Google’s purposes. A venture that might have been seen as a selfless act of public-spirited advocacy when the company was smaller could look a lot like a power grab or an attempt at co-opting a movement now that it’s a globe-spanning colossus.

So is flying the flag of the Open Web the right strategy for Google? The plumbing approach certainly fits with the company’s reputation as a home for math geeks and programming PhDs. And let’s face it, focusing on the open web had better be the right strategy, because nothing else seems to be working. If Google can get its team of social-web superheroes to produce something that gets the company noticed in the social sphere, then it might have a chance. If not, the default winner of the social web will be Facebook.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Angelina 🙂

Facebook, according to comments made by two of the social networking company’s financial backers at the DTD conference in Germany (reported in a live-blog of the conference as well as by Rafat Ali of paidContent on his Twitter stream), is not planning an IPO this year. “I am happy to announce that there will be no near-term IPO on Facebook — this means 2010,” Jim Breyer of Accel Partners reportedly told the conference, adding that “for them, it is all about getting the product and team right.” Facebook investor Yuri Milner of Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, meanwhile, was quoted as saying: “We have permanent capital, we don’t have to return money to investors, so we have unlimited patience.” Milner has expressed similar sentiments in the past.

Such a sentiment is likely to come as a disappointment to many in the investment markets, since a Facebook IPO would have been a nice boost for the somewhat moribund initial public offering market. A share issue by the social network could be worth upwards of $10 billion, depending on whose valuation methods you decide to use (some are as high as $14 billion). There also seems to be some debate among investment industry observers about whether the IPO market is coming back any time soon.

An IPO by Facebook is viewed by many as the most hotly-awaited technology stock offering since Google went public in 2004, and there have been signs that the social network is at least considering a public share issue, including a restructuring of the company’s capital structure to create two classes of stock, something that is often a prelude to an IPO. However, at the time it made the changes, Facebook made a point of saying that the move should not be “construed as a signal the company is planning to go public,” and that it “has no plans to go public at this time.”

A profile of President Barack Obama that appeared today in the Washington Post, as part of a retrospective of his first year in office, raises some interesting questions about what kind of man he is, and how he might differ from his predecessors. Among other things, the story includes the rather staggering fact that he is the first U.S. President to have Internet access at his desk, and the first to converse regularly via e-mail (his much-reported dedication to his BlackBerry was one of the first hurdles the new administration had to clear).

And what does President Obama do with that connection to the Internet? A White House source told the Post he is online “constantly,” and searches out “offbeat blogs and news stories, tracking down firsthand reporting and seeking out writers with opinions about his policies.” The President was apparently particularly interested in Atlantic Online blogger Andrew Sullivan’s tweeting of the Iranian elections last year.

White House staff took pains to note that President Obama reads a lot of magazines (including The New Yorker, The Economist, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone) and watches television. But he also regularly communicates directly with those he wants to contact — without having to go through his chief of staff — and often emails aides late at night from his BlackBerry, with questions or comments.

Joshua Michele Ross at O’Reilly Radar says that Roosevelt was the radio president, Kennedy was the TV president, and Barack Obama is clearly “the Internet president.” Radio and TV are broadcast media — one-way, centralized and autocratic in some sense. The Internet and the web, of course, are multidirectional and distributed, with a multitude of voices (speaking of broadcasting, President Obama’s first State of the Union address is on Wednesday, and Janko over at NewTeeVee has a list of places you can watch it online).

So what does it mean to have a U.S. president who is comfortable (or even familiar) with that new multi-directional, distributed reality, who seeks out his own sources of information wherever they might be, and makes connections directly and in real time, rather than always waiting for a report to be delivered or for a chief of staff to smooth the way?

Among the things you get, obviously, are appointments like Julius Genachowski to head the FCC, and former Google manager Katie Stanton as director of citizen participation, as well as tools like the Citizen’s Briefing Book and Change.gov (although both were wrapped up after President Obama took office). But what are the larger implications for the Obama years? Is a real-time connected president more likely to think for himself and look outside the usual Washington circles for ideas or input, or is being connected just a giant distraction for someone who is supposed to be leading the nation?

Food for thought. Feel free to share yours in the comments.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of the official White House Flickr photostream

Foursquare has inked a partnership with the Canadian version of Metro, the free newspaper that gets distributed on subway trains and other locations in various cities, that will give its users the ability to see local news and reviews related to a specific location they are “checking in” at using the service’s iPhone or BlackBerry app. Metro International, a Swedish company that publishes free papers in more than 100 cities around the world, says this is the first time the location-based startup has partnered with a news organization in any country.

In Canada, the paper is in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and claims circulation of some 800,000. So if a Foursquare user is near a restaurant in one of those cities for which Metro has a review, that will be displayed as a choice for the user. Although the Metro release doesn’t say whether other forms of news will be available as well, the potential is there for Metro reports on fires, break-ins, celebrity sightings or other news to be provided to users of Foursquare based on their location as well.

A similar functionality comes via Twitter, which started rolling out local “trending topics” to some of its users last week, as described by Lisa Barone in a blog post and confirmed by Twitter staffer Alex McCauley in (of course) a tweet. Local trending topics could also provide some form of real-time “crowdsourced” news based on location — although, like any “user-generated content,” it will undoubtedly provide real-time noise and confusion as well.

Mark Briggs at Lost Remote makes a good point that in the long term, location-based news would be better accomplished by way of an open API and open data-sharing rather than proprietary relationships between news services and app vendors. But at least in the short term a deal like that of Foursquare/Metro could provide some interesting evidence as to what’s possible when you blend location and news (or marketing) content.

Post image and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Hawaii.

Since being released from its Time Warner shackles, AOL has been tearing up the media landscape, hiring journalists and launching a custom content-creation service called Seed.com (run by former New York Times staffer Saul Hansell). Now the former online behemoth is adding video to the mix by acquiring StudioNow Inc. for $36.5 million in cash and stock in a deal announced today. In another significant move, the company has also added a new head of technology to its New York-based unit, a former Google employee named Jeff Raynar.

The addition of StudioNow — a 2-year-old video startup based in Nashville — will allow AOL to expand its efforts to generate custom content through its Seed service, a venture that is designed to rapidly and cheaply produce articles that conform to heavily searched terms and keywords.

This is a business that Demand Media is also going after in a big way. Demand has its own video content-generation unit, known as Demand Studio, that accomplishes the same thing StudioNow will for AOL. Liz, writing over at NewTeeVee, had some thoughts here about the Demand model, and Jeremy Reed of Demand talked about the company and video at NewTeeVee’s “Next Big Thing” event.

AOL’s CEO and chairman Tim Armstrong said in the release that:

“Premium original video creation is a fundamental part of AOL’s strategy to offer consumers world-class, stimulating content at scale and the integration of StudioNow into Seed.com will enable us to increase our video content/offerings significantly.”

StudioNow also helps companies produce their own videos and syndicates them, something it will continue to do for AOL’s “branded advertising and content partners,” in addition to AOL properties such as Engadget or AOL Sessions. The acquisition closed on Jan. 22 and some of the purchase price will be paid out over multiple years.

AOL also announced that former Google engineer Jeff Raynar will be joining the company as the head of technology at its New York technology center. Reynar is the co-founder of DBT Labs, a social search startup, but also spent four and a half years at Google, where he co-founded and led an internal team that developed Google Squared — an experimental search tool that gathers facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection — and Google Blog Search. Reynar also led the Search UI team in New York.

If all goes as expected on Wednesday, we will soon find ourselves in a world of tablets, with the Apple iTablet (or whatever it’s going to be called) joining the market-leading Kindle. The one thing everyone seems fixated on is the effect that these devices are having — or will have — on the book-publishing industry. Amazon’s Kindle is currently the leader in the e-book business, but it’s widely expected that will change soon, thanks to The Great Disruptor of Content Industries, otherwise known as Steve Jobs Inc.

In an attempt to forestall such threats, Amazon last week boosted the royalty rate it pays to authors and publishers who offer e-versions of their books for the Kindle. The new deal gives authors and publishers 70 percent of the price (provided the author/publisher meets certain criteria). That’s twice the previous rate the company was paying, and slightly above the 63-percent rate that Apple is allegedly providing.

Among other things, Amazon is clearly making a play to authors to convince them to go direct, and cut out the publisher middleman. But why stop with books? If Amazon is smart (which it clearly is), the company will use the Kindle as a distribution mechanism for all kinds of digital content — blogs, independent magazines, blooks (blog/books) and any other kind of individually-created media it can get its hands on.

In the same way an author who might have otherwise used a publisher could be tempted to cut a deal with Amazon for Kindle distribution, in return for 70 percent of the royalties, think about any other content creator and how a tablet platform could impact their business: blogger, writer, musician, artist. Just create your own app, and away you go.

If you could strike a deal with Amazon to provide access to your content on the Kindle, that would give you an opportunity to reach your readers/audience directly. Yes, you already have a website, but put your content on a different platform and you can do different things with it — maybe even something people would pay for. Conde Nast says people are buying copies of its magazines through its new iPhone app, so why not a Kindle app? And Apple is already said to be demoing iTablet apps that could do much more.

Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco has his own iPhone app, through which he distributes his Twitter feed, random thoughts and audio clips that feature him saying things like “Wassup” in English and Spanish. It’s a trivial enough application, but what’s to stop anyone from creating their own app? If your content is good enough, why shouldn’t people pay for it just as they have been paying for Conde Nast’s?

Once the iTablet launches, the fight will truly be on between Apple and Amazon: to sign up as many content creators and distributors as possible. The more exclusive relationships a tablet maker has with authors and content creators, the better platform it has to become not just the iPod of books but of all kinds of digital content. And then the disruption of the media and content industries will begin in earnest.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user kakkie, post image courtesy of Flickr user UGardener.

Why do so many journalists and traditional media outlets see social media services like Twitter and Facebook as a threat? Maybe it’s a result of too many breathless headlines about how they’re going to replace traditional journalism (headlines that mostly appear in traditional media outlets, but don’t get me started on that).

Now a group of journalists has apparently agreed to “prove” how useless these tools are by locking themselves in a farmhouse for five days and reporting only news they receive through Twitter and Facebook.

To make matters worse, the journalists in question won’t be able to use the web to follow any of the links they get through Twitter or Facebook, or verify any of the news that’s reported — they will apparently have to write based on just the information coming in through those two networks. This is like giving a journalist a phone and telling them they can only report information from incoming calls, but no dialing of their own.

The point, it seems, is to show that the information that comes through social media like Twitter is unreliable. But is that really a big news flash at this point? There are also plenty of missing details: Will these journalists be following and “friending” traditional media outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post, or will they just be randomly surveying Twitter trending topics and Facebook pages?

The reality is that no single source is ever enough, whether it’s Twitter or a phone call from a source at City Hall. Social media hasn’t changed that. And the most important aspect of new media is that it is (to use an overused word) an ecosystem. News can begin on Twitter, make its way through Facebook and other networks to blogs and then meet up and merge with reports from the traditional media.

Haiti is a perfect example: Twitter users on the ground after the earthquake became the eyes and ears of the world, and allowed people to experience firsthand what was happening. Then traditional media followed — many of whom in turn used Twitter and Facebook to tell their stories. These social media networks are just tools, like telephones and notepads and tape recorders.

Put simply, the French project is a farce and a sideshow. All it risks “proving” is that some journalists — and their masters (the experiment is being sponsored by the French public broadcasting association) — are as clueless as anyone else about Twitter or Facebook and how those services can benefit journalism. The fact is that journalism has always been a complex system with multiple inputs and multiple sources, and social media just adds to that. Excluding all but one or two of those sources proves nothing.

Thumbnail and post image courtesy of Arbroath

The New York Times announced yesterday that it’s planning to launch a “metered access” system for its web site next year, in which readers will be able to see a certain number of articles for free, but after that will have to pay a monthly subscription fee (unless they’re print subscribers, in which case there is no charge). No one yet knows how many free articles a reader will get, or how much they will have to pay per month, but there has been much written about the decision to start charging. If you want to see what I think of the move, you can read my original post, and if you want to see know what readers of the New York Times think, check out the comments on this blog post. And for additional analysis on the decision, check the links below.

– Jeff Jarvis: The journalism professor and author says the NYT is going to charge its most valuable customers, while not charging its least valuable ones, and this doesn’t make sense.

– Rick Edmonds: Poynter Media’s business analyst says the economics of the NYT’s move actually make a lot of sense, and that the paper was right to implement some form of paid access.

– Felix Salmon: Reuters’ media writer isn’t optimistic about the NYT’s chances of making metered access work, and says it is a “sad day for online journalism.”

– C.W. Anderson: Journalism professor wonders how metered access and paywalls will affect the relationship that journalists have with society as a whole.

– Ken Doctor: The news industry analyst answers nine questions that have been raised about the NYT paywall.

– Steve Yelvington: Veteran newspaperman has a list of things we won’t learn from the NYT paywall.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user itspaulkelly.

It’s hard not to be seduced by the visions of tablet-powered bliss that have been popping up all over the Intertubes lately: there’s the video of a Sports Illustrated prototype with full color and even moving images, the somewhat amusingly named Skiff tablet from Hearst and of course, the Kindle. They all look a bit like those futuristic newspapers that Popular Science magazine assured us we’d be reading each morning before hopping in our jet-cars to fly off to work.

The grandaddy of them all is the much-hyped Apple tablet, which is supposed to be unveiled later this month, and which TechCrunch writer Paul Carr wishes everyone would just stop talking about. Fat chance. If you’re in the consumer technology business or the media/content industry, the Apple tablet is the sun, the moon and the stars. And if you’re a media entity that is struggling to figure out how to make online work for you — i.e., a newspaper, magazine or book publisher — then it looks like it might just be the biggest thing since the invention of pull tabs on beer cans.

To take just one example, in a recent piece entitled “A Media Savior In The Form of A Tablet,” NYT media writer David Carr gushed that the iTablet would represent “an opportunity to renew the romance between printed material and consumer,” and that while he didn’t know what the business model would be exactly, “somewhere between the iTunes model and the iPhone app store…there may be a model for print.”

So is the iTablet, or any tablet for that matter, really going to be the savior of the traditional newspaper, magazine or book? In a word, no. In fact, rather than being the holy grail for the media industry, it could wind up being what desert wanderers used to call a “fata morgana” — a vision of a lush oasis shimmering on the horizon that turns out to be a dangerous delusion and leads travelers to their deaths.

In a smart piece responding to Carr’s love note, Slate writer Jack Schafer said tablets “can’t possibly save magazines and newspapers,” and compared the industry’s infatuation to earlier dalliances with interactive CD-ROMs and online portals such as Compuserve and AOL. In a somewhat pithier response, the former editor of Scotsman.com recently compared the iTablet to the Tooth Fairy.

The uncomfortable reality for newspapers, magazines and books — and for music, movies and television, for that matter — is that there is no holy grail, no silver bullet, no iSavior that will bring profits and happy readers by the truckload. Will more people subscribe to newspapers or magazines, or buy books and other content with a tablet? Experience with the Kindle seems to indicate that they will and the concept of “in-app sales” might help break down the barriers to paying. But will it be enough to “save” the entire business model of existing newspapers and other publishers? Not even close.

As Om noted in a post about the Kindle HD, everyone talks about the iTunes model and the iPod, but while those devices have been phenomenally successful for Apple itself, the music industry as a whole is still a complete mess. A single device, however powerful or magical, can’t change the entire cost structure of an industry. The publishing industry should spend more time thinking about how their business is changing fundamentally — regardless of what platform the content appears on — and less time thinking about how to make a Hail Mary pass to one specific platform.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user lakewentworth; in-post image courtesy of Flickr user Photo Giddy, who credits Flickr user Fotoboer.nl.

The Nook from Barnes & Noble

Does owning a Kindle or a Nook make you more likely to buy and read books? According to a new survey released today, it sure does. The study by L.E.K. Consulting shows that while e-reader owners are still a relatively small proportion of the population, almost half of them say they are reading more books. And a large number of those books are new books — in other words, books they would not otherwise have bought or read.

Survey respondents also said they’re reading more newspapers and magazines, which could fan the embers of hope that are still smoldering in the declining print media industry — embers that flared up recently with news of Apple’s much-hyped tablet, which is expected to be launched at a gala event later this month.

Of the 10 percent of consumers who own e-readers, 48 percent told L.E.K. that they were reading more books vs. just 7 percent who said their book reading decreased. E-reader owners also said they were reading more newspapers than before (59 percent) and more magazines (44 percent). According to L.E.K., 36 percent of the books read by people with e-readers are “incremental consumption,” representing new books rather than books the owner would otherwise have read in print.

The global consulting group reported the findings in its second annual “Hidden Opportunities in New Media Survey” of more than 2,000 households. The study also showed that 44 percent of e-reader owners increased their new media usage in the last year, compared with 16 percent of iPod owners and 19 per cent of Facebook users (new media was defined as watching movies or streaming video, listening to audio or playing multiplayer online video games).

“The fact that Amazon sold more Kindle books than printed books on Christmas Day 2009 speaks volumes,” L.E.K. vice president Dan Schechter said in a news release. “We’ve dubbed the 10 percent of consumers who own an e-reader as the ‘E-reader Republic,’ and think that it is a potential goldmine for content providers and advertisers alike.”

While iPod owners consumed about nine hours per week of new media, e-reader owners consumed more than 18 hours a week. L.E.K. said the survey is considered demographically representative of the U.S. population over 18 years of age.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Evolution of the e-Book Market

Thumbnail image courtesy of Amazon; in-post image is from Barnes & Noble.

After four years of watching from afar as my friend Om has built a blogging empire, I’ve finally caught up with him. As many of you may already know from reading his post about the news, I’m joining the GigaOM family as a senior writer.

If you’re wondering who I am and why you should care, you can find out more about me on my blog, on my Facebook page, through my LinkedIn profile or by following me on Twitter. For the past 15 years or so, I’ve been a writer and editor with the Globe and Mail, a daily national newspaper (and web site) based in Toronto, most recently as its first “Communities Editor.”

I’ve been a fan of Om’s ever since I discovered his blog while he was still working for Business 2.0, and came to like him even more when we had him at our very first mesh conference in Toronto in 2006. He doesn’t hesitate to shoot down popular perceptions, and when he speaks his mind it is always worth paying attention to, even if (and in fact especially when) you disagree with him.

Over the past few years, Om and his stellar team of writers and editors have put together what I think is one of the world’s premier technology blog networks, one that has a well-justified reputation for smart reporting and analysis. Adding video and GigaOM Pro to the mix has made it even more of a dominant force when it comes to solid technology perspective and context.

I’m honoured to have been asked to join this great company, and to get a chance to work with all of the terrific writers here. It feels like the first day of school and I get to sit with the cool kids 🙂

As the web has filled up with fast-food-style news hits and me-too blog posts, each more shallow than the last, I think the kind of intelligent and insightful coverage GigaOM specializes in has become even more important now, and I hope to be able to contribute to that. Thanks again to Om for the opportunity.

If you need to reach me, you can get me at [email protected] or [email protected], or through one of the social networks mentioned above. Onward!