Day: February 16, 2007

Blogs don’t (always) threaten traditional media — they prop it up

Rex Hammock2 Comments

I started the day with a post about the impact of DVRs on the viewership of commercials. A comment on that post alerted me that I could do a little hack on my DVRs remote control and skip through commericals rather than scan through them. Blogging has just changed the way I watch TV. Frankly, my blogging and TV watching are overlapping activities as most of my posts are written in the evening while I watch TV — or at least while the TV on in the same room. From my vantage point, it has become very obvious that blogging and other conversational media are changing the way many people interact with TV, but I’m not talking here about YouTube blowing up the medium, or “self-expression-video” tearing it down. I’m talking about ways blogs are reinforcing the most traditional of traditional media: network prime-time programming.

For three very different reasons, in the past 24 hours, I’ve run across three incredible blogs that are related to popular network TV programs. Two are among the most creative blogs I’ve run across — ever. The other contains one post made 24 hours ago that has attracted more comments than any blog posting I’ve ever seen or heard of.

Here they are:

1. Grey Matter, the weblog of writers of the show, Grey’s Anatomy.

A link from Nashville is Talking this evening led me to a post on the weblog, Grey Matter, that is maintained by writers of the ABC program Greys Anatomy. I recommend not clicking over to it as I thought it was going to crash my browser. However, it was merely grinding away loading what has to be the most massive blog post and comments I’ve ever encountered. How massive? At about 8:30 P.M., CST, approximately 20 hours after the original post, the page was the equivalent of an 807-page Word document containing 360,000 words in what I estimate to be about 2,919 comments.

While it didn’t even make it onto the front page of the Digg entertainment site, the Grey’s Anatomy writers’ blog post generated in comments what are about half the words in “War and Peace.” No telling how many words on blogs the episode generated.

2. The numb3rs blog, a weblog maintained by a Northeastern University math professor.

If you watch the CBS drama Numb3rs, you know that a math professor is the key to solving the crimes being investigated by the FBI agents in their hip LA office. This blog from a math professor at Northeastern University in Boston breaks down the math used in each episode. (How I found this blog: My wife and I watch Numb3rs via DVR and I’ve grown envious of Professor Epps collection of whiteboards — especially his glass one. I was looking for the brand of this board, but have decided it must be built by the show’s prop department. Didn’t find any blogs devoted to Numb3rs product placements, but math blogging is bigger than I suspected.)

3. “That’s What She Said,”, an employment and labor law blog devoted to analyzing the legal implications of Michael’s antics in each episode of the NBC comedy, “The Office.”

Via Stephen Baker, I learned about this amazing blog maintained by Julie Elgar, a labor and employment attorney at an Atlanta law firm. I can’t think of a better way for a lawyer to effectively “market” her services than this creatively fun, yet insightfully educational blog. Her day-job is providing managers with training on how to comply with various state and federal employment laws. She uses this experience on her blog to predict how much a judge would award an employee plaintiff who filed a lawsuit against Michael for his actions in each episode. The result is entertaining to show viewers — especially business owners who are looking for an employment and labor attorney. Side note: The blog is associated with a Nashville publishing company, M Lee Smith, and its HR newsletter called HR Hero.

Neil Patel goes to all time low by revealing 5 easy steps to increase your blog traffic within one week by improving your headlines following Guy Kawasaki’s ultimate guide to attracting incoming links

Rex Hammock1 Comment

In my last post, I suggested some headline writing techniques that may help you communicate better with those who read headlines in a newsreader. However, if everyone starts writing all their headlines like this, I think I’ll give up reading blogs.

Tips for writing headlines and articles that people may read in an RSS news reader

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Google has posted some Tips for Publishers that include suggestions for writing newsreader-friendly articles (posts) and headlines. It includes some thoughtful ideas that work in all newsreaders, not just Google’s.

My general advice: Remember, people who use newsreaders can choose to display the headlines only. In other words, the article/post you write is not always displayed with the headline. That’s a tough concept to grasp for bloggers who only view their posts on their blogs, and never on a newsreader. The headline must stand alone and sometimes serves primarily as a “link” to your article or post. In other words, if your post headline says only, “I agree with this guy”, I doubt I’ll click through to it. Also, I rarely click through to a link within a post that says, “I don’t know about you, but I think what this guy says is awesome.” As funny as he is, I don’t read Dave Barry’s blog for this reason. The click-through punch line doesn’t fit with my scan-by reading technique. (Fortunately, someone who does read Dave’s blog knows when I must see something there and pings me — that’s the ultimate personalization technique.)

(via: Robert Scoble)

The NY Times imitates The Onion with a story on how people watch TV using DVRs

Rex Hammock7 Comments

There’s something almost parody-like in this story on how viewers who use digital video recorders, DVRs (like TiVo), don’t always fast-foward through commercials. It seems like the story could appear in The Onion, as writers for that parody newspaper are at their best when they mock our self-obsession with discovering the obvious. Their brilliance shines when they produce breaking news about some teenager in Ohio realizing something about his acne. The New York Times story — with its photo of a couple from Knoxville sitting on their sofa with their dog watching TV — is a classic Onion story.

The story rounds up some experts and TV viewers to explain what the reporter and editors apparently think readers believe is an amazing and inexplicable phenomenon: People who record TV shows don’t always skip the commercials.

The quotes would work wonderfully in a parody story in The Onion as they are clichés of obviousness:

“People are buying DVRs not because they want to time-shift all of their viewing and skip all commercials, but because they want to time-shift some of their viewing.”

“But sometimes I do watch (commercials) — only if they capture me.”

“My son doesn’t understand why other people cannot pause their TV when they need to go to the bathroom…”

“When you talk to an advertiser it is like ‘Oh god, I’ve got to go on to the Internet because on television these people are fast-forwarding through the commercials…”

All this makes me wonder why those who create advertising don’t go out and purchase a TiVo and subject themselves to a few hundred hours of watching the types of programs on which their advertising appears. They would discover how it changes ones viewing patterns and how advertising can work within the context of a world in which DVRs are the norm.

I have a few theories of obviousness on the topic, myself:

1. People who are holding the remote control in their hand are extremely aware of the commercials being zoomed through. They must be to learn the visual cues that alert them that the commercial block is about to finish. Often, the person with the control is being judged by a second party for their finesse in stopping the fast-forwarding at the precise time it needs to stop, so, therefore a second party is also engaged in looking at the sped up commercials.

2. As a hardcore DVR user, I’ve come to the conclusion that one-location, continuous-scene ads are more likely to cause me to stop and view them. Those who create Apple advertising understand this — or are lucky. Both the iPod and “I’m a Mac” campaigns have visual cues that hold together for the entire 30 seconds of the commercial. The scenic context of the ad remains the same for the entire 30 seconds. The first time I see a new commercial that appears within that context, I’ll stop and view it. Sometimes, I’ll stop and view it again. Subsequently, everytime I see it as I fast-forward, I recall it.

3. Even though I’ve used a DVR for over a year — and use it a lot — I still sometimes forget that I can fast-forward through a commercial as, even with a DVR, the TV is on in the background of something else I’m doing — most likely, on my computer. Which begs the other obvious question to advertisers: Do you really think people are sitting there watching your commercials even if they don’t have the ability to fast-forward through them. No, they use that time to focus on the other two or three things they are doing while they watch the programs.

4. Once you use a DVR to watch any type of program that has commercials embedded in it, you realize how much advertising you are subjected to in the typical one-hour of network TV. You grow queazy at the thought.

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