John Bracken

Yesterday I looked at what The Shorenstein Center’s (pdf) Creative Destruction: An Explanatory Look at News on the Internet found for public radio, today I want to highlight what it found in terms of public television website traffic. For my purposes, report author Thomas Patterson buries the lead: PBS.org traffic, though falling, is higher than that of other TV networks– excluding CNN, which is the sector leader. (See page 9.) The study does not explore how PBS.org’s appeal to children and parents impacts the data.

The report also emphasizes the growth in traffic at non-traditional news sites such as Google and Yahoo and the boom in aggregators and community sites– particularly Digg, where growth (measured as the difference in traffic in April 2007 from April 2006) was literally off the study’s chart.

Lastly, Patterson also looks at the emergence of lobbying groups as news generators: “the internet makes it simple for non-media actors…to become news providers, which does threaten the vitality of America’s news organizations.”

Newspapers, particularly those without national profiles, are portrayed as in trouble.

Squash digs into AtariBoy and his ascenion to the WordPress throne:

AtariBoy is 21-year-old Andrew Nesbitt, a robotics student studing at Plymouth University in the UK. He has been blogging for less than 3 months and only made a commitment to post daily in January. That’s right, after about a month of regular blogging, he’s climbed to the top of the blogging ladder…

It might pay to consider for a moment, how many A-List bloggers would have considered AtariBoy’s MySpace and BitTorrent post’s as genuinely useful. Probably none. Because for the most part, the blog establishment are just a bunch of old farts. They don’t really understand the next wave of Internet phenomena, which will ubdoubtedly be driven by the ‘Y generation’ of Internet users, largely because they’re too busy trying to theorise the current iteration. You only have to look at the explosion in traffic experienced by Y-generation service like MySpace over the last couple of years to realise that the next evolution of the Internet is all about these guys and gals. And old dudes aren’t invited to the party.