The shape of things to come - a UK university lecturer says he will no longer deliver lectures to students and instead will offer them as podcasts: [...] Dr Bill Ashraf, a senior lecturer in microbiology at Bradford University, says the move will free up time for more small group teaching. He told The Times Higher Education Supplement that first year biochemistry students would watch or listen to virtual lectures in their own time. Students will access the podcasts via their MP3 player, … [Read more...] about No more lectures, just podcasts
Trends
The shift in trust
The BBC and Reuters published Trust in The Media (PDF) today: A major 10-nation public opinion poll exploring Trust in the Media has found that even though the media is more trusted than the national government in half the countries surveyed, significant numbers of people are switching news sources because they do not trust the information they receive. Fully 28 percent of the people polled report abandoning a news source in the past year because of lack of trust in its content. While … [Read more...] about The shift in trust
The multilingual blogosphere
Everyone knows that the blogosphere continues to grow, still doubling in size every six months or so, maintaining a consistent three-year growth trend. But figures so far tend to relate to English-language blogs only. So it's good to see some stats today from Dave Sifry at Technorati that indicate the scope of the blogosphere in languages other than English. There's no better way to illustrate this than with this graph (click for bigger image): The top three languages - … [Read more...] about The multilingual blogosphere
Podcasts growing at 15% a month – FeedBurner report
In a report on podcasting to be published today, RSS feed management company FeedBurner say that their service is now managing just under 45,000 podcast feeds. Contrast this number with the 6,000 podcast feeds the company was managing at the time of its last report in May 2005. According to FeedBurner's data, this remarkable latest figure represents an average growth rate of 15% month over month, and exceeds the total number of radio stations worldwide. Rich media feeds … [Read more...] about Podcasts growing at 15% a month – FeedBurner report
The blogosphere continues to grow
The latest stats on the English-language blogosphere from Technorati show continued growth, maintaining the doubling in size that has been consistent for the past few years: Summary: Technorati now tracks over 35.3 million blogs (English language) The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 … [Read more...] about The blogosphere continues to grow
Getting my interactive kettle online
I had dinner last night with an old friend who's in town for a few days on a business visit. Much of our conversation centered on social media, technology and the results of some of the developments we're likely to be seeing in the next few years in areas such as reading, consuming and interacting with news and information. That part of our conversation wasn't so much about the obvious things like newspapers and other dead-trees media (which we did discuss: we thought the interesting newspaper … [Read more...] about Getting my interactive kettle online
First paper-less daily newspaper
De Tijd newspaper of Antwerp, Belgium, will soon become the world's first newspaper to publish a digital version on 'electronic paper' which is automatically updated during the day. From a report in Tech M&C: [...] Instead of buying your daily paper, from April 2006, 200 subscribers will be able to start the day by connecting a portable electronic device supplied by De Tijd to the internet and start downloading their daily paper. Updates will be automatic during the day, if subscribers have … [Read more...] about First paper-less daily newspaper