The Internet and Old Media

I gave a presentation earlier today at the New Communications Forum conference in Santa Rosa, CA on how well traditional media (newspapers and magazines) are adapting their Internet programs based on the challenges presented by the web and social media.

During my talk, I reviewed the results of our newspaper and magazine studies that examined the Web 2.0 features these media properties include on their websites. ...

American Idol Prediction Thoughts

[This is cross-posted at The ImpactWatch blog.]

J.W.'s American Idol Twitter prediction about which contestant would end their run last night was wrong.  Brooke White did not go home despite having a disastrous restart during her song while Carly Smithson performed well this week — even garnering praise from Simon Cowell....

Update to American Idol Prediction

My predictions were absolute rubbish, it seems.  Apparently, tweets cannot be used to accurately predict who is going home from American Idol.  In fact, two of the top three positive tweet-getters were the ones that were unceremoniously in the Bottom Two.  Syesha Mercado and Carly Smithson had the least votes after their performances on Tuesday night,...

Predicting American Idol – Part 2

For the second part of my study concerning whether tweets from Twitter could be used to predict the losing contestants of American Idol, I decided to wait until noon to make sure that there were enough new tweets to equal the amount used in the analysis last week.  Fortunately, there were more than enough fresh,...

Using Tweets and ImpactWatch Tools to Predict American Idol

Once again, the Internet is abuzz with predictions and theories about who is going to win American Idol.  In the early days of the competition (back when Kelly Clarkson was still a nobody singing karaoke and we only hypothesized that we hated the British without actually knowing it through Simon Cowell),...